President Nixon had defied an earlier court order to hand over the tapes

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The United States Supreme Court has ordered President Nixon to surrender tape recordings of White House conversations about the Watergate affair.

Giving the judgement to a packed and hushed courtroom, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said the court rejected Mr Nixon's claims of executive privilege.

Instead, he said they "must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial".

The president said he was "disappointed" by the decision, but would comply with the ruling.

The White House has already released edited transcripts of the tapes, which cover 64 conversations made between June 1972 and April of this year.

But President Nixon has until now refused to comply with a court order awarded to Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation, requiring him to produce the tapes themselves.

Mr Jaworski alleges the tapes implicate the president himself in covering up a break-in at the Watergate hotel headquarters of the Democratic National Committee during the election campaign in 1972.

The burglars were caught rifling through confidential papers and bugging the office of President Nixon's political opponents.

The tapes will now be available for use as evidence in the trial of some of the president's closest aides, due to take place in September.

It is likely to take several weeks to produce transcripts of the tapes, so they will not be available in time to be used during the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee debate on impeachment, which began this evening.

However, the timing of the Supreme Court decision just hours before the debate began, as well as the fact that all eight judges voted unanimously, is likely to have a strong influence on the impeachment process.

If the committee decides to recommend impeaching the president, the matter goes to the full House for debate.

If the House agrees, President Nixon could face an impeachment trial before the Senate - the first such trial in over a century.

Mr Brooke has been exchanged for two Soviet spies

Mr Brooke, 31, was arrested by the Russian secret service, the KGB, in April 1965 for smuggling anti-Soviet leaflets.

The Russian teacher was sentenced to five years' detention, one year in prison, four years in labour camps, for "subversiveanti-Soviet activity on the territory of the Soviet Union" at Moscow City Court three months later.

Speaking at Heathrow airport, where he arrived at 1117 BST, Mr Brooke revealed the Russian authorities only told him he was being sent home 24 hours ago.

His release, nearly a year early, came after negotiations between the British and Russian Governments.

Harold Wilson's Labour Government has been criticised by the opposition for jeopardising British security by agreeing to release Soviet agents Peter and Helen Kroger in exchange for Gerald Brooke.

Looking pale and thin as he stepped off his plane, an Aeroflot Ilyushin 62 jet, wearing his old school tie - Firth Park Grammar in Sheffield - Mr Brooke was startled by the phalanx of media waiting for him.

He explained he had been suffering from an inflamed colon, aggravated by prison food, and he was not used to speaking English or seeing so many people.

His 29-year-old wife Barbara, a librarian, greeted him with his mother Marion, 74.

They prevented him from answering too many questions about his ordeal.

All he said about prison conditions is "they were not particularly soft".

Mr Brooke is looking forward to relaxing at home in Finchley this evening.

Mr and Mrs Kroger will be released from prisons in Britain in October after serving just nine years of their 20-year sentence for their part in the Portland Spy case.

British intelligence services discovered the couple had seriously damaged national security by passing secret details about the country's submarine activities to the USSR.

subversive :Intended or serving to subvert, especially intended to overthrow or undermine an established government（顛覆性的）