Torpedo expert David Bingham told investigators his wife, Maureen, had suggested selling the classified documents to meet their mounting debts and overdue mortgage payments.
Seven months later, she occupied the same dock to face similar charges under the Official Secrets Act, claiming she was only there because she had been determined to stand by her husband “right to the end,” telling jurors “I would say anything to help my husband.”
But she had sown the seeds of their downfall.
In a remarkable interview, the mother-of-four, euphemistically described as “a comfort shopper” but also a gambling addict, detailed how she had conceived the plan which they initially dismissed as a “humorous suggestion” and then put into action.
“Well, it was so simple, it was stupid,” she confessed to a news agency.
“When I went ahead to do this, I went out on a Saturday to the Russian embassy. I knocked and this Russian gentleman opened the door, but he only opened it about six inches. I said I would like to see someone and he said ‘I’m sorry the Embassy is closed for the week-end. All the staff, there’s no staff here.’
“So I went ahead and thought, ‘Well, I was stupid. I should have bought a letter.’ So I went home and wrote a letter and came back on the Sunday morning. When I returned, there was this big Soviet Jew demonstration going on outside with quite a few policemen and that. I indicated I wanted to go to the Russian embassy and they actually held up traffic and kept it apart. I had David’s naval pass on the front of the car. I again went up to the door and knocked on it. This time I had the letter in my hand.
“They let me in immediately, but I think he thought I was coming from the demonstration. He read the letter and walked away and brought back this naval attache who spoke to me and said ‘You know what’s in the letter?’ I said ‘yes.’ He said ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be hearing from us shortly.”
And so the treachery began.
Bingham, who had been serving as a weapons electronics officer on HMS Rothesay, a modified Type 12 Anti-Air Frigate, received payments totalling £1,100 to cover their debts and £100 for the purchase of a camera to photograph anything of interest but in particular information about SONAR, the anti-submarine detection equipment.
After Bingham, 31, had pleaded guilty to six offences, prosecutor Sir Peter Rawlinson QC commented: “You will appreciate the importance of the Russians wanting details of the United Kingdom defences. It certainly would be of great use and interest to the Russian navy. Those secrets had a value to a potential enemy almost beyond price. This officer, over a period of 18 months, deliberately and methodically recorded secret naval information of ship movements, naval manoeuvres, anti-submarine devices and other details.”
The information was left at a series of dropping points – dead letter boxes, secret places agreed in advance including under a tree and an old rusted car which had been left in a ditch – to be collected by the agent who in turn left messages and often money.
Eventually, Bingham’s conscience made him confess to his senior officer that for several years he had been a Russian agent. “The excuse for this conduct was his debts.”
Bingham’s story, said James Conwyn QC defending, was “one of incredible folly. He had betrayed his service, himself, and his country. After taking the first film, he had been consumed with fear. He tells me he sought to give as little as possible and in some cases invented information, and in others gave information that was common knowledge.”
Jailing him for 21 years at Winchester Crown Court in 1972, Mr Justice Bridge did not hold back on his condemnation. “A man of your intelligence does not need any explanation from me of the reason why your monstrous betrayal of your country’s interests attracts a punishment of great severity. The damage you may have done to those interests is incalculable.”
His 35-year-old wife, who sat at the back of the court, collapsed when he was sentenced.
After the case, she accompanied the press to the Russian embassy, declaring “it’s all my fault. The Russians were always very concerned about myself and my four children. They treated us better than the Royal Navy did.”
She was subsequently arrested and also charged. The series of interviews she gave to a Fleet Street news agency trapped her. In it, she claimed: “In 11 months, David and I took the Russians for a ride for £1,500.”
But the reality was that she played an integral role in the communications with a Russian agent by encouraging and supporting her husband in what prosecutor Sir Joseph Maloney describe as grave breaches of the Official Secrets Act. “They were doing this for money and they got a lot.”
Asked what had prompted her to make such statements, she replied that she never believed he would plead guilty: “Oh, no, never. I was not going to let my husband spend 21 years in jail and the only way I could help him was by getting myself arrested.”
A consultant psychiatrist concluded from a three-hour interview she was a hysterical exhibitionist and pathological liar. “In slang terms, she is showing off. She had achieved maximum publicity and that was what she wanted.”
During the trial, Mr Justice Sebag Shaw remarked she had “opened the door” to her husband’s spying, and was “a lady of almost disastrous loquacity.”
Jailing her for 30 months after she had been convicted of one offence, he accepted from his own observations and medical reports she had been totally unaware of the “wickedness” of her crimes. “You still seek to put on it, and on your husband’s, a gloss which makes it innocent.”
She had failed to discourage her husband and had even helped him, knowing what it meant.
“You have to a very large extent punished yourself and it may well be, in passing this sentence that after a short period of time, your attitude and outlook will have changed sufficiently to make it more hopeful that you will comport yourself properly.”
Following the hearing, her solicitor David Jonas revealed she intended to divorce her husband. “She feels she will institute proceedings and will be discussing the matter with me in due course.”
David Bingham was released from jail after serving seven years. Having changed his name, he first ran a small hotel in Bournemouth and later opened an alternative healing centre in Stratford. He was killed in 1997 when his car careered off the road in a storm and crashed into a tree. He was 56.
