Gulping nervously, the prisoners stare into the video camera, spilling tales of intrigue, betrayal and paid espionage on behalf of the United States.
Gotein said that as well as being much more severe that the punishment received by previous government leakers, the sentence was "similar to the sentences that have been handed down for paid espionage on behalf of enemy countries".
On Sunday, Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi, the prosecutor of Tehran's Revolutionary Court, said at a news conference that Ms. Shourd would be freed once the bail was paid, but that the espionage trial of all three Americans would go forward, Iran's semiofficial ILNA news agency reported.
The Hungarian government sent 18,000 Jews to German-occupied Ukraine because they were unable to prove they were Hungarian citizens; 14,000 16,000 of them were shot by the SS. Brand paid a Hungarian counter-espionage officer to bring his wife's relatives back safely.
In reality paid covert action and professional espionage are two sides of the same coin of what nations in conflict do to one another.
Last year, the government and five news organizations, including The Times, paid Wen Ho Lee, an atomic scientist once suspected of espionage, $1,645,000 to settle what Judge Walton, in his decision yesterday, called a "strikingly similar" case.
In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.
Throughout the book, Wise, the author of "Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America," pays tribute to Chinese espionage skills.
Ironically, with its exposure, the program may have paid off beyond its sponsors' wildest dreams: Russia again looks like an elite espionage empire.
And over the weekend, Chinese state media claimed that Rio's espionage had cost China 700 billion yuan ($102.4 billion) by allowing Rio Tinto to manipulate the prices China paid for iron ore over at least six years.
An Egyptian-American was even arrested on charges of espionage and, on state television, made a transparently false confession to inciting the protests and to being paid 100 Egyptian pounds ($17) for each photo he took.
