ESPIONAGE: Spy’s Penalty

Sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment, plus $3,000 in fines, by a federal court in New York City: stony-faced Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, 55, who, posing as an artist, served for nine years as one of the top Red spies in the U.S., until federal agents searched his Brooklyn studio and found an array of such spy-novel devices as hollowed-out coins and cuff1 links (TIME, Aug. 19 et seg.). Under the law, Abel could have been sentenced to death, but Judge Mortimer W. Byers apparently heeded the defense attorney’s arguments that Abel might talk later on, and that the U.S. might some day want to trade him for a captured U.S. spy.