Prime’s appeal request refused

Press, 23 April 1983, Page 11

Prime’s appeal request refused

NZPA London Geoffrey Prime, the British translator and Soviet spy rated the most damaging Western traitor since World War 11, was yesterday refused leave to appeal against his 38-year jail term. Three Appeal Court judges rejected a plea by Prime’s lawyer that it was a sentence without hope, and said that in war-time the Russian linguist’s treachery against Britain and its Western allies would have merited execution. “He accepted the Queen’s shilling and sold her, her subjects and her allies to a potential enemy,” said Judge Lord Lawton. Prime, aged 44, a former translator at Britain’s top-secret electronic intelligence-gathering facility at Cheltenham, was sentenced last November after confessing that for 14 years he had fed Western secrets to K.G.B. agents. He got 35 years on seven counts under Britain’s 1911 Official Secrets Act, and an extra three-year sentence on three counts of child molesting. Prime resigned from the Cheltenham Government communications headquarters in 1977, explaining later that he was unable to take the strain of his double life. He became a cab driver and was arrested by chance in a 1981 routine police investigation into sexual attacks on young girls. He was not in court for the hearing, but his second wife, Rhona, aged 37, listened to the ruling flanked by her husband’s lawyers. It was his wife who’ found espionage equipment in their Cheltenham home after his arrest for child molesting, and told the police of her discovery.