Britain Thrown Out

An embarrassing spy case

At 119 days from opening argument to final verdict, the espionage trial was the longest in British history. From the viewpoint of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, it was also a disaster. After more than a week of deliberation, a London jury last week acquitted two British servicemen accused of leading a Mediterranean spy operation that supposedly passed British and NATO military secrets to the Soviet Union. A week earlier, the same jury had acquitted five others charged with membership in the same purported ring. Both times, the panel spurned a prosecution case based largely on confessions that were, according...

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