Spy’s wife guilty

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33046, 13 October 1972, Page 13

Spy’s wife guilty

(N.Z PA.-Reuter —Copi/ripht> WINCHESTER. October 12. A woman who had been described as almost incapable of telling the truth was convicted in the Winchester Crown Court yesterday on a charge under the Official Secrets Act.

The mother of four children, Margaret Bingham, aged 35. the wife of a former Royal Navy sub-lieutenant now serving a 21-year prison sentence for spying, was found guilty of contacting the Soviet Union Embassy in London to suggest the sale to the Russians of confidential information. She was acquitted, however, on two charges of herself disclosing secrets. The Court was told that Mrs Bingham had led her husband into a life of espionage to pay off their household bills; that he had betrayed information which was “almost beyond price” about secret underwater weapons. In his summing-up, Mr Justice Sebag Shaw told the jury that the phenomenon of having the same person on both sides of the case pointed to self-interest, loyalty to her husband, or eccentricity of character. “With her, the truth flits about like a will-o'-the-wisp, and never stays in one place long enough to be recognised,” he said.

“Detestable offences’ “The offences which you are trying—those of spying against one’s own country—are detestable ones, and even more detestable when done with the sordid object of gain. But you must not allow any hostile feeling for this affect your deliberations. Until you can say with assurance that she is guilty, she is entitled to be protected. “. . . it has been said that Mrs Bingham is a woman almost incapable of telling the truth,” Mr Justice Shaw went on. “To her, a lie comes easily and elaborately, and if a lie appears more attractive than the truth, then she will lie. “Mrs Bingham was not charged with her husband, and she was not charged until a long time after her husband had been found guilty. “Then there emerged a flood of press and television interviews, statements, and stories which might well form the basis for a novel, a fairy tale, or a mild thriller of some kind—l think I might say, perhaps the basis of half a dozen such books, because they don’t fit each other in ahy way. “And when Mrs Bingham was asked which of them she would like the jury to look at as the one nearest the truth, she replied, in effect ‘not any one'.” The maximum penalty for Mrs Bingham’s offence is 14 years in prison, but the Judge said after her conviction: “I have not got in mind to impose on her anything like the sentence which her husband justly received. I want something to enable me to make a gap as big as is proper and just.” He added that he would withhold sentence, pending a medical report on Mrs Bingham.