Judith Coplon
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Judith Coplon (born 1922) was one of the first major figures tried in the United States for spying for the Soviet Union; problems in her trials had a profound influence on espionage prosecutions during the McCarthy era. Her disclosures to the Soviet intelligence agencies were the first information to alert them to the size of the U.S. counter-intelligence operation against them.
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[edit] Career and arrest
Coplon got a job in the Department of Justice shortly after she graduated from Barnard College in 1943. She transferred to the Foreign Agents Registration section in 1944, where she had access to counter-intelligence information. She was recruited as a spy by the NKGB at the end of 1944.
She was first brought to the attention of the FBI as a result of a Venona message in late 1948. Coplon was known in both Soviet intelligence and the Venona files as "SIMA". She was the first person tried as a result of the Venona project—although, for reasons of security, the Venona information was not revealed at her trial. FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere testified at her trial that suspicion had fallen on Coplon because of information from a reliable "confidential informant" that was not a wiretap.
An extensive counter-intelligence operation planted secret documents for her to purloin. FBI agents detained Coplon in March, 1949 as she met with Valentin Gubitchev, a KGB official employed by the United Nations, while carrying secret U.S. government documents in her purse.
[edit] Trials and appeals
Coplon was convicted in two separate trials, one for espionage in 1949, and another for conspiracy along with Gubitchev in 1950; both convictions were later overturned on technicalities in 1950 and 1951, respectively. The second reversal was for reasons related to the arrest—which had been based on probable cause, as she was observed meeting her Soviet contact, not as a result of an arrest warrant—and because records of FBI wiretaps had been destroyed. The first conviction was overturned because conversations with her attorney had been heard by the FBI wiretap, although that appeal ruled, contradictorily, that the arrest had been valid.
Due to the very confused legal situation, she was never retried, even though the United States Court of Appeals had said "her guilt is plain", and after a long delay the government dropped the case in 1967. Her complicity in espionage was corroborated by information found within the NKVD archives in the 1990s, and further confirmed by an explicit statement by retired KGB officer Oleg Tsarev.
[edit] References
- Marcia Mitchell and Thomas Mitchell, The Spy Who Seduced America: Lies and Betrayal in the Heat of the Cold War - The Judith Coplon Story (Invisible Cities Press, Montpelier, 2002) ISBN 1-931229-22-8
- Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story (Random House, New York, 1986) pp. 97-124 ISBN 0-86554-477-8
- John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999) pp. 157-160 ISBN 0-300-08462-5
- Alexander Vassiliev and Allen Weinstein, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era (Random House, New York, 1999) pp. 277-279, 298 ISBN 0-375-75536-5
