Spies on Trial

October 21, 2019
Attorney Kuhne (Sherlock Holmes for Lawyers) recounts 16 spy trials in fascinating detail. He begins with the 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the first U.S. citizens to be tried, convicted, and executed for espionage during peacetime. More recent trials include that of Greg Chung, a Boeing engineer accused of funneling secret documents pertaining to the space shuttle to China in 2006, and the ACLU trial against the U.S. government over the telephone metadata collections leaked by Edward Snowden. One of the most unusual trials is that of “Jane” and “John Doe,” foreign spies for the CIA who retired to America with the promise of financial and personal security for life. But when the husband was laid off from his American job in 1997, the CIA wouldn’t pay them. The court ruled against the couple, citing that the contract was secret and therefore could not be used as evidence in court. Six appendices cite the U.S. espionage laws that define and complicate these cases. Readers interested in the legal aspects of prosecuting spies will be rewarded.

November 1, 2019
Illustrating times when the dark shadows of the clandestine backroom are suddenly exchanged for the bright lights of the open courtroom, this collection by lawyer and author Kuhne (Sherlock Holmes for Lawyers, 2016) features cases spanning from WWII to the present. Some are well known: Edward Snowden leaking classified documents about the NSA's global surveillance program, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sending top-secret intelligence about the U.S. atomic-bomb program to the Soviet Union. Other cases will be new and interesting to most readers, like a Soviet agent getting caught after his dry cleaner found papers containing information about espionage activities in his coat pocket. The author inserts helpful supplemental documents throughout, including excerpts of Supreme Court opinions, the Espionage Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and other legislation related to the cases featured in the book. Kuhne's straightforward, just-the-facts prose can be dry at times, but it manages to distill sprawling and often dense legal proceedings into plain English that fans of geopolitical intrigue will enjoy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)