THE ABC CAPER

...A major in Signals Intelligence, Berry's old outfit, was forbidden to describe in open court the task of the Ninth Signals Regiment in eastern Cyprus...

...The forty-two-day trial had its own elements of farce...

...The pair arranged to interview Berry at his flat and spent three hours with him on the night of February 18,1977...

...exploded in a fury...' Hitchens...

...This performance did not endear Campbell to MI-5...

...Again, this procedure is perfectly lawful in Britain, where judges are instructed that the needs of police to inquire override a suspect's right to see counsel...

...The next morning, The Guardian readied that its defense correspondent had reported four years earlier that Ninth Signals is "a key listening and surveillance post" for British and NATO intelligence...

...Aubrey, in turn, called his friend Campbell, now something of an authority on these matters and a writer for the New Statesman...

...Silkin agreed...

...Both were expelled from Britain without ever learning the nature of the complaint against them, a splendidly arbitrary but perfectly lawful process where aliens are involved...

...The ABC caper A secrecy trial leaves MI-5 with soot on its face Bernard D. Nossiter Britain's secret services recently took British justice for a bumpy ride in a security trial that left everybody in power a little bit car sick...

...Another New Statesman writer, Christopher Hitchens, began revealing this astonishing business on a television program...

...After all, the state had openly acknowledged that no spying, only journalism, was involved...

...In time, all three — Aubrey, Berry, and Campbell, or ABC as they became known — were charged under the infamous Official Secrets Act passed in 1911, after a few hours' consideration, at the height of a German spy scare...

...One of Hosenball's apparent misdeeds was to collaborate on an article describing Government Communications Headquarters, Britain's electronic eavesBernardD...

...So he ordered the jury to find Berry guilty...

...The Act has become a model to preserve irresponsible government...

...It would be astonishing, however, if some bureaucratic heads did not roll after their clownish performance...

...Berry, the former corporal, was also charged under the Section 2 ban on giving information...

...So he called Crispin Aubrey, a writer for Time Out, the successful weekly entertainment guide that features radical political articles before its listings of rock concerts, demonstrations, films, and the rest...

...The judge, instead of bringing his wrath down on the foreman's head and questioning whether the services had rigged the jury, exploded in a fury against Hitchens...

...No reporter can say what happened in the closed sessions, and Silkin insists they dealt with matters transmitted by Berry and hitherto unrevealed...

...The new judge firmly advised Attorney General Silkin that the Section 1 charges designed for real spies should be dropped...

...Mars-Jones thought that placing the burden of proof on defendants was too hard in a case like this...

...His explosion, however, left Willis with a stroke...

...The three were held for forty hours before they were allowed to see a lawyer and another twenty before they were charged in magistrate's court...

...A new jury and new foreman were found...

...As for the services, particularly MI-5, the internal anti-espionage force, they maintained their usual discreet silence...

...His book, "Britain — A Future that Works," was published recently by Houghton Mifflin...

...Sir John Willis virtually urged that Hitchens be punished for contempt...

...dropping network in Cheltenham...

...Even more remarkable, the defense learned that the man who had volunteered to serve as foreman had been a former commando with the Special Air Services, the military's dirty tricks department which is believed to assassinate IRA suspects and other inconvenient persons in Ulster...

...But the judge, in his summation, concluded that everything Berry had passed on to his interviewers was "stale and of a comparatively low level...

...Hosenball's co-author was Duncan Campbell, twenty-six, a brilliant physics graduate from Oxford with an impish sense of humor, and the key defendant in the embarrassing secrets trial concluded in November...

...That was enough to justify their champagne party...

...In the end, the bumpy ride may have backfired badly, blowing soot all over the face of MI- 5...

...Unsurprisingly, the commando-foreman had been urging his fellow jurors to convict the trio before a word of defense had been uttered...

...Unlike American justice, British law does not allow lawyers to examine prospective jurors to detect bias...

...For the record, Silkin is unrepentant...

...Before they were thrown out, Hosenball and Agee went before an Alice-in-Wonderland hearing behind closed doors...

...The major presumably confirmed as much in the trial's closed sessions, another peculiar British practice in security cases and unknown to U.S...

...Rees's embarrassment is a measure of how little control an elected British government has over its secret services...

...The language is so loose it can be used to cover anything, and, to rub things in, a subsection reverses the normal order and requires an accused to prove his innocence instead of demanding that the prosecution prove guilt...

...Time Out had published the Hosenball-Campbell piece on the eavesdroppers...

...Perhaps...

...He notes that judges have, in the past, stretched Section 1 to cover cases that did not involve espionage...

...Like Berry, Aubrey and Campbell were also found guilty under Section 2. Mars-Jones gave the writers a conditional discharge — no penalty if they commit no offense for up to three years...

...So all three had the burden of defending themselves against both sections...

...The expulsion of Agee and Hosenball aroused John Berry, a thirty-four-year-old social worker living in North London...

...He awarded Berry a suspended sentence of six months...

...Anyway, "the law will not tolerate defectors or whistle-blowers from our intelligence services...

...Silkin's supporters imply that if he had known then what he knows now, the case would never have been brought...

...In private, Silkin's friends say bluntly that the Attorney General was misled by the services, which wildly exaggerated both the importance of Berry's information and the extent to which it was genuinely secret...

...The affair grew out of the proceedings last year against two Americans — Philip Agee, the former CIA officer who now makes a career of exposing the agency, and Mark Hosenball, a young journalist who had been working in Britain...

...Nevertheless, Mars-Jones insisted that it might somehow endanger the lives of Berry's former colleagues...

...They were allowed to present anything they wanted in their defense — a generous offer complicated by the fact that they had no notion of what they were defending themselves against...

...The services, of course, had a double objective — to punish Campbell for making a mockery of Hosenball's hearing, and to warn all journalists here against imitating their American cousins by inquiring too closely into British cloaks and daggers...

...whatever their motives...

...It provides that anyone giving or receiving any unreleased government information shall be jailed...

...When the dust settled, two left-wing journalists and a social worker they had interviewed were convicted of breaching the notorious Official Secrets Act — but they nevertheless celebrated their token sentences with champagne...

...The jurors wrestled for sixty-eight hours, but could hardly acquit the two writers if their informant had committed a crime...

...Quite literally, a civil servant who hands over and a reporter who accepts an unpublished survey of tea drinking habits in Whitehall can both be put away for as long as two years...

...Just a few months before the arrest of ABC, Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, the nominal boss of MI-5 and national overseer of Scotland Yard, solemnly promised the House of Commons that the government would never again bring a prosecution for merely receiving information under Section 2. Nevertheless, both writers, Aubrey and Campbell, were charged with precisely this, too...

...Both prosecution and defense have a limited number of challenges, but they must exercise them on the basis of a prospective juror's appearance or simple intuition...

...A mistrial was declared...

...As the two writers emerged into the street, all three were arrested by waiting police of the Special Branch, Scotland Yard's political wing, which makes the pinches for MI-5...

...Eight years ago, Berry served as a corporal in Signals Intelligence, the army branch that listens to transmissions at home and abroad, and Berry was eager to tell what he knew of his old outfit...

...As for Section 2, he is not bound by Rees's pledge...

...Given the judgments of the Gazette, Economist, and Sunday Times, the services may well have succeeded in arousing rather than curbing Fleet Street efforts to shed light in dark corners...

...No action was brought against '...the judge...

...That agency, still smarting from Campbell's testimony for Hosenball, had evidently been tapping the young physicist's telephone...

...Attorney General Sam Silkin insisted that the guilty verdicts constituted a triumph — but it is evidently an experience he is in no hurry to repeat...

...That left ABC facing only the charges under the infamous Section 2 — the section Rees had promised would not be used against the likes of Campbell and Aubrey...

...Among other things, Hosenball presented his collaborator, Campbell, who was able to demonstrate that virtually everything the pair had written about the electronic eavesdroppers could be found in telephone books and other public documents...

...Once again, as he had done for Hosenball, Campbell demonstrated that virtually all the material from Berry discussed in open court could be found in some public record...

...Section 2 is the provision typically brought against over-inquisitive journalists, and it has inspired demands for reform from conservatives and liberals alike...

...The services evidently failed in the first...

...Nossiter has just completed a tour as London correspondent of The Washington Post...

...Its Section 1 is ostensibly aimed at genuine spies and provides up to fourteen years in jail for anyone obtaining or receiving "information" even "indirectly useful to the enemy...

...A more sober judge, William Mars-Jones, was selected...

...ABC were put on trial in the Old Bailey last September and it was soon evident how determined the services were to make an example of them...

...It was not long, however, before the defense learned that the security services had taken the precaution of inquiring into the "loyalty" of every prospective juror, and thus knew far more about them than the lawyers for ABC...