Ex-Navy Employee Found Guilty of Espionage, Theft

BALTIMORE —  A former civilian Navy intelligence analyst who gave three U.S. spy photographs to a British military journal was convicted by a federal jury Thursday of espionage and theft of government property.

Samuel Loring Morison, 40, was convicted of two counts of espionage and two counts of theft of government property, each count carrying a possible 10-year term and $10,000 fine. Morison, who remains free on $100,000 bond, left the courthouse without comment.

U.S. District Judge Joseph H. Young set sentencing for Nov. 25. Morison’s lawyers said they would appeal the conviction.

Morison, the grandson of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison, was accused of endangering national security by giving a British military journal, Jane’s Defence Weekly, three photographs of the Soviet Union’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier under construction at a Black Sea shipyard.

Satellite Photographs

The photographs were taken on three days in July, 1984, by a U.S. spy satellite.

He also was accused of theft of the photos and theft of government documents that described a May, 1984, explosion at Severomorsk, the main ammunition depot for the Soviet Union’s Northern Fleet.

Morison admitted giving three photographs to the magazine, but maintained he was innocent of spying and theft of the photos, which were taken from a co-worker’s desk.

Morison’s defense attorneys, including Mark Lynch of the American Civil Liberties Union, had argued that prosecution of Morison endangered the First Amendment rights of both government officials and the news media.

Defense Arguments

With Morison’s case as a precedent, high-level officials could unjustly control the flow of government information to the public, Lynch argued. He said low-level government officials would be threatened with espionage and theft prosecution if they leaked embarrassing information, so only information favorable to the U.S. government would be released.

Young rejected Lynch’s First Amendment argument in a pretrial motion to dismiss the indictment, and in the trial, prosecutors said the argument did not apply to the Morison case.

The jury reached its verdict after six hours and 15 minutes of deliberations that began Wednesday.