Canadian professor had admitted spying

Press, 30 June 1982, Page 9

Canadian professor had admitted spying

NZPA-Reuter London A Canadian economist who had admitted to Canadian journalists that he had passed information to. the Soviet Union has been arrested during' a - visit to Britain and charged with spying. Professor Hugh George Hambleton,, aged 60. of Laval University in Quebec City, appeared’in a London magistrate's court yesterday charged under section one o’f the Official Secrets Act, the law against espionage. - The charge related to the time more than 20 years ago when he worked for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. His contacts with the Soviet Union were widely publicised in Canada several years ago, but the Canadian Government said there was no ground for prosecution. Questioned about the case in Canada's Parliament, the then Solicitor-General, Bob Kaplan, said in May. 1980.

that Professor Hambleton’s activities had been investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “The Department of Justice officials and law officers ■looked at all the matters that were uncovered by the R.C.M.P. that were made known to me, and there was nothing there that would form an adequate basis, in the opinion of justice officials, for a successful > prosecution under the Official Secrets Act." he told the Canadian House of Commons. After reports in the Canadian news media, Professor Hambleton had told several newspapers there that he had been an unpaid agent of the Soviet Union for 30 years, but that the information he had passed along was not secret. . "I had no access to secret documents,” he said in an interview published by the “Globe and Mail" of Toronto in January. 1980. “True, the - Russians are

interested in general economic information, scholarly analyses, but I had no information that they couldn’t have got in a dozen other places," the paper quoted him as saying. >- Professor Hambleton was. arrested at the week-end soon after arriving in London for a holiday. The charge made in Court accused him of communicating information calculated or intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy, between 1956 and 1961. Prosecutors did not say who was alleged to have received the information. Professor Hambleton did not. apply for bail. According to the “Canadian Who’s Who," Professor Hambleton worked for the economic directorate of N.A.T.O. from 1956 to 1961.

A specialist in Spanish and Latin American economics, he has been at Laval since 1964. He has also acted as an adviser, to the governments of Peru and Haiti.