A Snag in the Net

For 15 months, U.S. Attorney Joseph Hoey and a team of assistants had worked to prepare the Government's case against accused Soviet Spy Aleksandr Sokolov and his mysterious female accomplice (TIME, July 12, 1963). In Brooklyn Federal Court last week everything was ready. The jurors had taken their seats and been sworn in. Within minutes Hoey would begin his opening remarks.

But Hoey was summoned to the telephone; at the other end of the line was Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach in Washington. As Hoey listened, his face clouded. When he hung up, there was a hurried conference in the chambers of Judge John F. Dooling Jr. Then Hoey, still visibly shaken, appeared before the court, announced that Katzenbach had ordered him to drop the prosecution "in the interests of national security." Said Hoey: "The Government moves to dismiss the indictment against both the defendants."

Names & Addresses. Sokolov and his accomplice, known variously as "Joy Ann Garber" and "Joy Ann Baltch," were nabbed by FBI agents in Washington in July 1963, charged with passing on to Moscow information about U.S. missile bases, troop movements and harbor defenses. In the $90-a-month Washington apartment where Sokolov and the woman lived, agents found the tools of the trade -- short-wave radio equipment, cameras, film and electronic listening devices. Sokolov and Joy Ann faced a possible death penalty.

In the same net, FBI men in New York had snared Ivan D. Egorov, 41, a member of the United Nations Secretariat, and his wife Aleksandra. They too were charged with espionage but were later swapped for the return of two Americans held by the Soviets -- Jesuit Priest Walter Ciszek and Marvin W. Makinen, a Fulbright scholar from Asburnham, Mass. Was there another swap in the wind?

The Justice Department was keeping a guarded silence. But the circumstances surrounding the Sokolov trial offered another more plausible, and far more bizarre, explanation. At least 75 U.S. counterintelligence agents had done undercover work to help crack the Sokolov operation. Their testimony would be the core of the Government's case. Then, early last week, Attorney Edward Brodsky, appointed by the court to defend Sokolov and Joy Ann, dusted off a U.S. statute passed in 1795, which provides that the Government must reveal the "abode" of any witness in the federal trial of persons charged with a capital offense. Brodsky demanded and got a list of the names and home addresses of all 75 agents. The dilemma was obvious. Was the conviction of Sokolov and Joy Ann worth making public the identity of dozens of U.S. cloak-and-dagger men, thereby ending their usefulness? The Justice Department thought not.

"Mystification & Futility." At week's end Sokolov and Joy Ann were still being held by U.S. authorities, but this time they were awaiting deportation proceedings. Said Judge Dooling as he dismissed the jury: "Your first sense of this must be a mixture of mystification and the futility of our week's work together. Neither you nor I can know with what complexities our Government has had to deal, and deal responsibly."

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