ABC trial & jury fixing 1977-9

[TonyGosling]

The ABC Trial was a trial of charges under sections 1 and 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 trial in United Kingdom. It took place in 1978 and is named after the three defendants: Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and Duncan Campbell. Aubrey was a journalist for Time Out, John Berry was a former corporal in signals intelligence (SIGINT), and Duncan Campbell was an investigative journalist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_trial

Timeline
18 February 1977: Aubrey and Campbell (the two journalists) interviewed Berry
20 February 1977: All three men were arrested and charged under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 (Berry was charged with "communicating classified information to unauthorised persons", and Campbell and Aubrey with "unauthorised receipt of classified information")
24 May 1977: Further charges were added under section 1 of the Official Secrets Act
9 August 1977: Additional charge under section 1 against Duncan Campbell, for collecting information
November 1977: Committal hearing at Tottenham Magistrates Court. First appearance of Colonel B as a prosecution witness.
5 September 1978: Trial opens at the Old Bailey in front of Mr Justice Willis
18 September 1978: Trial stopped after jury foreman exposed as a former SAS officer



Britain's largest spy network organisation is not MI5 or MI6 but an electronic intelligence network controlled from a country town ill {lie Cotswords. With the huge US National Security Agency as partner, it intercepts and decodes communications throughout the world.

Freelance writer Duncan Campbell and Mark Ilosenball trace the rise to power of the electronic eavesdroppers, RAF Chicksands, between Bedford and Hitchin, could be a pleasant day trip from London. The sixteenth century priory is open, and you won't be disturbed
by overflying aircraft. Instead Chicksands is dominated by a giant hilltop
monolith, a steel circle a quarter mile wide. Not far off, in a long low building, 200 operators of the United States Air Force Security Service sit
over radios monitoring the ether from their giant 'Steelhenge'.
Chicksands is the largest listening post in Britain of the US National
Security Agency. NSA is responsible for directing American intelligence from satellites to spy ships. Last summer, former CIA director William Colby told a US Senate Committee that NSA monitorcd all phone calls to and from the US, intercepted commercial communications and raided embassies for codebooks.
No one is immune, not even America's closest allies. Former NSA analyst
Winslow Peck (below) worked in the late sixties at the US Air Force installation near Istanbul, another station in the chain of 12 key NSA sites that includes Chicksands. On a recent visit to Britain he described to Time Out top secret lists of monitored UK commercial cornmunications
kept at the Turkish site.
Called TEXT A, these lists revealed that the UK business communications were apparently being intercepted from Eastern England.
Another ex·NSA serviceman, who served three years in Chicksands recently, described how British representatives were effectively excluded from checking on NSA work-and how one of two key monitoring controllers were responsible for intercepting communications from
France!
NSA is partnercd in a worldwide electronic intelligence pact by four
other powers: Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. By a 1947
secret agreement, UKUSA, these five English speaking nations have divided the monitoring of the world's communications between them, Each country's signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency has authority to monitor communications in one area. Europe west of the Urals and Africa come under Britain's representative in the UKUSA pact.
Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ.
From two modern office blocks on the outskirts of Cheltenham, the directors of GCHQ manage a world-wide network of listening posts. They have directed aircraft and ships into foreign air and sea space to obtain information on their communications and defences
The listening posts are often found if the most remote places-Cyprus, Hong Kong. Singapore, Oman.Belize, St Helena, the Ascension Islands. and Botswana among others. Another base was recently identified in Australia when after a typhoon hit Darwin; large numbers of RAF personnel were discovered on a nearby off-shore island.
The GCHQ network comprises an estimated 50 stations. In 1963 it won a
secret battle to take control of all army, air force, and navy monitoring and clandestine radio stations.
GCHQ's director Bill Bonsall, although nominally responsible to the
Foreign Office, sits on the Joint Intelligence Committee and probably works for Cabinet intelligence chiefs. His predecessor, Sir Leonard Hooper, KCMG, now works in the" Cabinet Office after 32 years with GCHQ-a clear indication of the modern pre-emnincnce of SIGINT.
But since the Labour government took power in 1974, GCHQ's secret budget has been reduced, and its listening post East of Suez considered for closure.
The worldwide intelligence collection by GCHQ provides Britain with
considerable power. At Francistown in Botswana, the RAF operates an
electronic intelligence base on behalf of GCHQ, which, with powerful
antennae, can monitor the signals of guerilla movements and government
forces from its strategic position in the centre of Southern Africa. They are
much better placed than the NSA, who, according to Winslow Peck, have to use a Pueblo type Spy ship on patrol off Mozambique to monitor the Frelimo guerillas. (Information on the signals and positions of Frelimo transmitters was then passed on to the Portuguese via NATO.)
In Cyprus ten years earlier, Foreign Office radio teams were also found to be operating in interesting proximity to the monitoring station and the BBC there.
After the abortive Suez operation the Foreign Office-furious with the BBC's
calm objectivity-took over a British '."SIS undercover anti-Nasser station to run the 'Voice Of Britain', which relayed the Foreign Office view in opposition to the BBC. The radio side of Britain s dirty. tricks agencies are
apparently run by the Composite Signals Organisation (CSO), which is
run by the ubiquitous GCHQ.
In the early '60s, according to Peck, two RAF aircraft equipped with electronic intelligence equipment took off from a base on the Caspian seacoast of Iran. The planes and their crew didn't
return, they had been flying a 'provocative' mission into the Soviet Caspian Sea Special Missile Test Range and on to test the Soviet air defences.
Deliberate intrusion into foreign territory is not new. In 1958, two
Oxford University students exposed some of Britain's clandestine intelligence gathering in an article in the University magazine, lsis: They described a fleet of spy boats manned by Germans and captained by Britons, sailing under Swedish colours. These made regular patrols in Russian territorial waters. On one occasion, a British captain took his boat into Leningrad harbour, The authors, who had worked in a Royal Navy monitoring station in Germany, were sentenced to six months imprisonment shortly afterwards for breaking the Official Secrets Act.
Their article also identified a 'chain of monitoring stations from Iraq to the
Baltic is a flagrant breach of the Geneva convention'.

etc....
http://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/journalism/timeout/Eavesdroppers.pd f