46 • BERRY, JOHN
larly at the director level to coordinate operations and agree on
strategy.BERRY, JOHN. A formerIntelligence Corpscorporal who had
served on radio intercept work on Iraqi traffic with 9 Signal Regiment
atAyios Nikolaosin Cyprus six years earlier, John Berry approached
two journalists in 1976 and their discussion over three hours
prompted an article published in London’s radical weekly journal
Time Outentitled ‘‘The Eavesdroppers,’’ an account ofGCHQ’s
role. Berry was arrested and charged under theOfficial Secrets Act.
He was convicted along with the two authors, one of whom, Mark
Hosenball, was an American who was deported. Berry was given a
suspended prison sentence of six months and returned to his job as a
social worker. The case proved to be a landmark because the judge
dismissed all the espionage charges and was critical of the ‘‘catch-
all’’ nature of Section 2 of the Officials Secrets Act, which made it
an offense to pass on any information to an unauthorized person,
even though the authors demonstrated that everything they printed
had come from open sources.
BESSEDOVSKY, GRIGORI.A Parisian gendarme on duty outside
the Soviet embassy in the rue de Grenelle was surprised in early Oc-
tober 1929 by the sudden appearance of a tall young Russian who
had climbed over the wall armed with a loaded automatic. He intro-
duced himself to the astonished policeman as the temporary Soviet
charge ́d’affaires and demanded political asylum, claiming that his
wife and son were being held byOGPUthugs in the embassy. He
was escorted to the Quai d’Orsay where Bessedovsky and his family,
who were removed from the embassy by a squad of gendarmes, were
promised protection.
Of Ukrainian Jewish extraction from Poltava, Bessedovsky re-
vealed that he had been active in the Social Revolutionary movement
and had become a diplomat in 1922, serving in Vienna, Warsaw, and
Tokyo. At the time of hisdefection, he was 32 years old and held the
rank of counselor. According to the Soviets, he was an embezzler
who had failed to return to Moscow as instructed; Bessedovsky in-
sisted he was an ideological convert who had been singled out for
assassination by the OGPU. Under intensive interrogation by the