Briton accused of passing top secret data to Soviets

A British translator of Russian, arrested last July on charges of spying for the Soviet Union, was responsible for one of the longest and possibly most damaging penetrations of Western intelligence since World War II, the New York Times said.

The Times reported that unnamed American intelligence officials said British intelligence had determined that the accused man, Geoffrey Arthur Prime, supplied Moscow with a stream of highly sensitive information about American and British interception of Soviet communications. Prime obtained the information while working as a translator of Russian at Britain's main electronic intelligence center in Cheltenham from 1968 to 1977. Washington and the British government declined immediate comment on the report.