What the FBI Heard

It was the FBI's turn to squirm on the witness stand.

By week's end, 77 G-men had testified in Manhattan's federal courthouse or submitted affidavits. All of them were busy trying to answer Federal Judge Sylvester Ryan's pertinent question: How much of the Government's espionage case against Government Girl Judy Coplon and Russia's suspended U.N. employee, Valentin Gubichev, was based on wiretapping evidence gathered illegally by the FBI?

The evidence was still far from complete, but it was enough to sketch a strange picture of the FBI at work.

Listening In. Agent T. Scott Miller testified that in May he did not know that the telephones of Judy and Gubichev were being tapped, then admitted later that as early as February he had personally seen and destroyed records of the intercepted talks. The monitors, Miller admitted, had even listened in on conversations between Judy Coplon and her lawyer, Archie Palmer. They also had heard the FBI described in burning four-letter words.

Agent Miller, a lawyer himself, said that he had sat through Judy's Washington trial last spring, where she was convicted of espionage and sentenced to prison, and heard other FBI agents testify that they had no knowledge wire tapping was used. Was he not aware, Judge Ryan asked Miller sharply, that those FBI statements were evasions? Miller's answer: at the time, he had "no personal knowledge" of wire tapping in the case.

Agent Robert J. Wirth, also a lawyer, admitted he had destroyed some wire-tap memoranda although Judy's lawyer was trying to raise the wire-tap question at Judy's first trial. At the time, explained Lawyer Wirth, he was "not familiar" with the details of the 12-year-old Supreme Court decision forbidding wiretapping evidence in federal trials.

Agent John T. O'Shaughnessy said in an affidavit that he had monitored both Judy's and Gubichev's phones in New York in one three-month period, swore later on the stand that he had never listened in on Gubichev's phone in that period. Agent James J. Lynch disclosed that he had spent six months--five days a week,' eight hours a day--glued to Gubichev's phone and had heard only five conversations, some involving Gubichev's wife. Did she speak English or Russian? asked Abraham Pomerantz, Gubichev's skillful attorney. Agent Lynch said he could not recall. A Russian-speaking FBI agent said that he tapped Gubichev's phone for eight months without knowing that it was being tapped at the same time by another FBI Russian-speaking monitor in another place.

Buffoonery or Eccentricity? The FBI's records showed that at least one prime piece of evidence--Judith Coplon's plan to go to New York on the day she was arrested there with Gubichev--had come through a tap on the Coplons' Brooklyn telephone.

While Lawyer Pomerantz did his best to convince the court that the Government had used, then destroyed or concealed data that would prove the whole case was based on inadmissible evidence, his fellow counsel, noisy little Archie Palmer, bounced around the courtroom in his familiar court jester's manner. "I don't know whether your unorthodox tactics are the result of contemptuous buffoonery or personal eccentricity," the judge finally exploded at one point, "but I want them stopped."

Archie, pleased at the way things were going, didn't seem to mind the dressing-down at all.

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