Fifteen Years Of Spying

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29200, 10 May 1960, Page 15

Fifteen Years Of Spying

(Rec. 10 p.m.) LONDON, May 8. Since World War 11, scores of people on both sides of the Iron Curtain have been alleged to be involved in spying for the other side. These were some of the more prominent cases: London, March, 1950: Dr. Klaus Fuchs, aged 38, was sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment for passing secret atomic information to Russia. He was released in June, 1959, and is now working at the East German Institute for Nuclear Research in Dresden. London, May, 1946: Dr. Allan Nunn May, aged 36, a British atom scientist, was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for communicating atomic secrets to Russia.

New York, April, 1951: Julius Bosenberg, aged 32, and his wife Ethel, aged 35, were sentenced to death for giving secrets to Russia in war time. They were electrocuted in June, 1953. At the same trial Morton Sobell, aged 34, a radar engineer, was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment and David Greenglass, aged 29, brother of Ethel Rosenberg, got 15 years. In January, 1950, Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was sentenced to five years’ gaol for perjury in denying he had passed State Department secrets to Whitaker Chambers, a selfadmitted one-time courier for a pre-war Soviet spy ring. In New York in 1957, a Russian. Colonel Rudolf Abel, was sentenced to 30 years’ gaol for conspiring to steal American military secrets.

In Canberra, in April, 1954. Vladimir Petrov, aged 46, head of the Soviet MVD (secret police) in Australia, was granted political asylum and brought documents detailing two spy rings which operated in the country since 1943 under the cloak of the Soviet Embassy.

The Petrov case paralleled that of Igor Gouzenko, cipher clerk in the Russian Embassy at Ottawa, who sought Canadian asylum in 1956 with information that led to the uncovering of a Soviet spy fing (n Canada.

In August, 1953, Hungary pardoned and expelled Edgar Sanders, a 49-year-old Russian-

born British businessman, after he had served three and a half years of a 13-year sentence for spying. Robert Voegler, an American tried and sentenced with Sanders, was released in April, 1951, after 14 months’ imprisonment. On April 29, 1956. a noted British frogman. Commander Lionel Crabb, disappeared while diving under the Soviet cruiser Ordjonikidze, which brought Mr Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin on an official visit to Britain. The Government expressed its regret to Russia at the incident. William Oatis, an American Associated Press correspondent in Prague, was convicted in 1951 of spying for the United States. He was pardoned and released in 1953 after serving 25 months. Last March, a Communist Chinese court in Shanghai sentenced an American Roman Catholic, Bishop James Walsh, aged 68, to 20 years’ imprisonment as a spy. He joined four other American civilians currently serving long prison terms in China for espionage.