a crime involving the secret gathering or stealing of information (including economic information) that constitutes state secrets with the intent of turning the information over to another state to the detriment of the state from which the information was taken. Espionage is treated as a crime by the legal systems of all countries. It is one type of subversive activity used by imperialist intelligence services against the USSR and other countries of the socialist camp.

Under Soviet criminal law, espionage is defined as an especially dangerous state crime involving the transmission, or the stealing or gathering with the intent to transmit, of military or state secrets to a foreign state or organization or to agents thereof. It may also include the transmission of other information to be used against the interests of the USSR or the collection of such information on commission from a foreign intelligence agency.

Espionage is considered to have been committed from the moment that the information is obtained, regardless of whether or not it has been transmitted. An unsuccessful attempt to obtain espionage information—for example, an attempt to buy a state secret from a person who legally possesses it—constitutes attempted espionage. If classified state or military information has been obtained and transmitted, the actions of the guilty person are defined as espionage, whether he acted on his own initiative or on commission from a foreign state or organization or from agents thereof. Obtaining and transmitting other information is defined as espionage if these actions are performed on commission from foreign intelligence bodies and if the information is obtained or transmitted for use against the interests of the USSR.

Espionage committed by a citizen of the USSR is treason against the homeland. It carries a sentence of ten to 15 years’ deprivation of freedom with confiscation of property, with or without additional exile for a term of two to five years, or execution with confiscation of property (art. 64 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR and the corresponding articles of the criminal codes of the other Union republics). Espionage committed by a foreigner or person without citizenship is punishable by deprivation of freedom for seven to 15 years with confiscation of property, with or without additional exile for a term of two to five years, or by execution with confiscation of property (art. 65 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR and the corresponding articles of the criminal codes of the other Union republics).

Espionage is used extensively by the bourgeois states. The USA, for example, has a special intelligence agency known as the Central Intelligence Agency. Intelligence divisions within other departments and ministries also perform espionage and intelligence-gathering activities. At the same time, every capitalist state maintains extremely harsh punishments for espionage committed against it. In accordance with the criminal code of France, espionage is punished by execution. The penalty under British law is execution or hard labor.

Liability for military espionage—that is, secretly and under false pretenses collecting information about the enemy in a zone of military action for the purpose of transmitting the information to one’s own command—is regulated by international law under the Statute on the Laws and Customs of Land Warfare, which is appended to the Hague Convention of 1907. A state that has arrested a spy has the right to punish him according to the state’s discretion, after a legal trial.