Geoffrey Prime was a British spy for the Soviet Union while working for Government Communications Headquarters, the British cryptography agency, during the late 1950s and early '60s. He was eventually convicted for espionage as well as for child sexual abuse. Espionage (spying) is a practice of obtaining information about an organization or a society that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. ... The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is a British intelligence agency responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance. ... The German Lorenz cipher machine, used in World War II for encryption of very high-level general staff messages Cryptography (or cryptology; derived from Greek κρυπτός kryptós hidden, and the verb γράφω gráfo write) is the study of message secrecy. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ...

Prime was first detected when he participated in the Paedophile Information Exchange, a pedophile activism group being watched by the British government. Members of the group used secret codes to communicate. He was subsequently identified as supplying information to the Soviets, and was tried convicted, and imprisoned in the late 1970s. He was sentenced to 38 years for espionage and 3 for sex offences against children. Publicly, his information was represented as having been damaging to the UK, and beneficial to the Soviets, but details were not released and remain unknown. His position at GCHQ certainly made him privy to information which would have been damaging had he turned it all over to the Soviets. An 1980 PIEs sticker. ... The pedophile activist movement, referred to by some supporters as the childlove movement, is a social movement that encompasses a wide variety of views. ...

In the late 1970s Prime was sentenced to 38 years, three for sex offences against children. The judge at his trial said that if Britain was at war with the Soviet Union, his crimes would make him eligible for the death penalty and that he would have no compunction to use it. His release was controversial and has caused public outcry. He currently lives quietly in an undisclosed area, though The Daily Mail disclosed his whereabouts in an article, and is still on the sex offenders register. Sexual abuse is physical or psychological abuse that involves crimes in most countries. ... Capital punishment, or the death penalty, is the execution of a convicted criminal by the state as punishment for crimes known as capital crimes or capital offences. ... The Daily Mail and its Sunday edition the Mail on Sunday are British newspapers, first published in 1896. ...

References

• Cole, D. J. Geoffrey Prime: The Imperfect Spy.