An Official Secrets Act?

And then there is the disturbing case of Samuel Loring Morison, a 40-year-old civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy who stands accused of espionage for giving a British publication classified satellite photographs of a Soviet aircraft carrier under construction. Last week U.S. District Judge Joseph H. Young ruled in Baltimore that Morison must stand trial--the first time that a judge has ever held that the country’s espionage laws apply to unauthorized disclosures to the press.

The judge did what Congress has consistently declined to do, and his action threatens to give the United States the equivalent of an Official Secrets Act, which would stifle vital public debate on important national-security issues. If Young is correct, anyone who gives classified information to the press can be prosecuted as a spy. In 1982 the Reagan Administration asserted that the espionage laws could also be used to prosecute a journalist who received such information and the newspaper that published it, although the government hasn’t done that in this case.

Morison, the grandson of naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, was working part time, with the Navy’s knowledge and permission, as an editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships, the authoritative British publication on the world’s navies. It is worth asking why the U.S. Navy allowed such an arrangement with its inherent potential for conflict of interest. In any case Morison had access to the satellite pictures of the Soviet aircraft carrier, and he made them available to Jane’s Defense Weekly, a sister publication, which in turn gave them to the Associated Press and, through the AP, to newspapers around the world.

Morison did something wrong, but was it espionage--a crime for which he could go to prison for 40 years?

What could the Russians have learned from the publication of the picture? They already knew that they were building the aircraft carrier, so that couldn’t be it. The U.S. government might argue that the photographs disclosed the capabilities of American satellite reconnaissance. There might be something to that, except that the government has already disclosed as much on its own. For example, the brouhaha last fall over suspected MIG-21s in Central America was touched off by satellite photographs of boxes, normally used to transport MIGs, sitting on a Soviet wharf waiting to be loaded onto a ship.

To be sure, Morison violated the secrecy agreement that he signed when he went to work for the Navy. But there are many remedies available to the government to punish him for that. Charging him with espionage is the most heavy-handed and excessive step that the government could have taken. It is overkill. But it is consistent with the Reagan Administration’s goal of clamping down on thousands of government officials, maintaining as much secrecy as possible and restricting what the public knows. If the Administration had its way, it alone would have the information needed to analyze defense programs.

Only once before has the government brought a charge of espionage against someone who gave information to the press. That was in the case of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, who were accused of leaking the Pentagon papers more than a decade ago. The case was dismissed because of government misconduct before the judge ruled on whether espionage was a proper charge against them. Now a different administration has revived the expanded theory of espionage, and a federal judge is going along. If the judge’s ruling stands, the public and the democratic process will be the losers. Congress should make clear that the espionage laws are not intended for this purpose, and the espionage prosecution of Morison should be abandoned.