INTERVIEW WITH WALTER KARP ON THE SAMUEL MORISON CASE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403280003-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 14
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: October 25, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
The Diane Rehm Show STATION WAMU-FM
October 25, 1985 10:05 A.M.
Washington, D.C.
Interview with Walter Karp on the Samuel Morison
Case
DIANE REHM: A federal district court's decision last
week in an espionage trial could have a major impact on First
Amendment rights in this country. The case involves Samuel
Morison. He was a former Navy intelligence analyst who leaked
classified photographs of a Soviet aircraft carrier to a British
magazine. The photographs were taken from a U.S. spy satellite
several hundred miles away. The U.S. Government argues that the
technology demonstrated by the photograph threatened the national
security.
Mr. Morison was convicted on four counts of espionage
and theft and faces up to 40 years in prison. Mr. Morison's
attorneys are planning to appeal the court's decision.
In the studio with me this morning is Walter Karp (?), a
contributing editor to Harper's magazine. He's the author of an
article entitled "Liberty at Siege," which appears in the
November issue of Harper's, now on the stands. He says the
Morison case is part of a broader and systematic assault on the
habits of freedom in this country.
Good morning to you. It's nice to have you here.
WALTER KARP: Good morning.
REHM: It's always nice to react as promptly as this to
a listener request. While the publisher and president of
Harper's magazine, John Rick MacArthur, was on the show the other
day, a listener called and said he had read your article and
found it absolutely fascinating, and wondered whether we could
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get you down. So it's good to have you here.
The Morison case
has
received comparatively little
attention from the media.
But
the ACLU, which assisted Morison
in his defense, says the
case
represents a serious assault on the
First Amendment. Do you
share
that view?
WALKER KARP: I not only share the view, I'd even extend
the view. I think it's a serious assault on the rights of a
democratic people, their ability to hold the government
accountable, to know what the government does, to be able to make
some sense out of what happens in the public world. The Morison
conviction is ushering in a system of secret government and
irresponsible power that we've never had before in this country.
REHM: Let's go over some of the basic facts in the
case. Mr. Morison's trial revolved around three photographs of a
Soviet vessel under construction.
KARP: I think the main fact is that Morison is not a
spy. The Administration, the Justice Department never said he
was a spy, in the classic espionage sense. "Classic espionage"
being their own phrase. In other words, he didn't secretly hand
over vital secrets to a foreign power.
What Morison is -- and that's the reason we are talking
about it right now -- Morison is the first person ever convicted
under the Espionage Act for giving classified information to the
press. And you have to hold your breath to understand the
magnitude of that fact. It means that this is an act, giving
classified information to the media -- that is, to the American
people. That's what you're talking about. People read
newspapers, so it's giving it to the readers of newspapers.
This is done probably a hundred times a day. We are
talking about a deed that has been done ten thousand times in the
last 20 years, while America flourished in freedom, which has
overnight become a heinous felony. That is what the Morison
conviction means.
REHM: Why was the case brought in the first place,
KARP: The case was brought because the Administration,
the White House was looking for some way to use the Espionage Act
as a weapon to shut down leaks of classified information. They
have a memorandum about it circulating as far back as 1982. I
guess Morison looked like an ideal case.
When he was arrested on October 1st, 1984, I mean there
was no question, no serious question about Morison disclosing
damaging information. The three satellite photographs -- the
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Soviet Union had seen photographs of that satellite before.
They'd already been out. Photographs taken from that satellite
had already been published before Morison.
REHM: So you're saying that the publication could not
in any way have in fact affected the national security.
KARP: Yes. The Administration never -- the Justice
Department could not deny that, either. They just said that they
were not authorized disclosures. But anyway, the Soviet Union
knew about it.
The Soviet Union owns a tech -- possesses a technical
manual of the operations of that satellite. So it knows the
satellite in the greatest detail.
There wasn't even a question of surreptitious transfer
of the photographs. Morison is an editor of Jane's Defense
Weekly, and he gave them these three photographs, which they duly
published. I mean a child could figure out where they came from.
REHM: On the cover of their magazine.
KARP: Right.
So, the only question was whether the Administration
could find a judge sufficiently lacking in judicial restraint --
judicial restraint is a virtue which the White House preaches the
way Tartuffe preached virtue. They wanted a judge sufficiently
lacking in judicial restraint to become the first judge to rule
that the Espionage Act applies to disclosing classified
information to the press. A judge so ruled on March 12th, 1985.
And the result is the conviction.
In other words, what you have is virtually a new
judge-made law. And let me say very clearly what this law is.
The law means that it is now a crime punishable by ten years in
prison to inform -- to give the American people information about
national defense which the government wants to conceal from the
American people. It's as broad as that.
REHM: Did the publication of the photographs cause much
of a stir at the time?
KARP: No. No stir at all. I think the Justice
Department said, "Ah-ha. Here is something we can do something
about."
But the idea of using the Espionage Act, an effort to
find some way to stretch it to cover ordinary leaks of informa-
tion to the press -- that's routine activity, mind you. I can't
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impress on you more -- people in Washington usually do know that
very well. You could hardly talk about national defense without
disclosing something. And that's because 15 million documents
every year are classified. We're not talking about the secret
codes of the United States. We're not talking about the Norden
bomb site. That was my childhood idea of a secret. We're not
talking about vital secrets held in a safe. You're talking about
things stamped "classified" by someone in the Executive Branch.
And that is an enormous -- that is now a crime to reveal any of
that information.
REHM: Well, the other rather troubling part about what
you're saying, Mr. Karp, and certainly what you include in your
article, is that espionage now becomes -- what is released as
information in this country to the press becomes equated with the
release of very secret documents to a foreign country.
REHM: In other words, we, the American public, become
the forbidden audience.
KARP: Yes. Under this new judge-made Espionage Act,
because it's a new law, under this new law, the American people
are a foreign government. And people who -- men of honor, very
often men of honor -- I don't say Morison is one -- but men of
honor who try very hard in the Pentagon to inform the people --
that is often patriotic men who see waste and corruption in the
Pentagon...
REHM: You're talking about Ernie Fitzgerald.
KARP: Yes. But he's protected because he's famous. A
lot of other people are not so famous. Whistle-blowers I'm
talking about. Right. Honorable men, not time-servers,
honorable men can now be treated as spies. That's the bitterest
irony of this whole case.
And I would like to go on further to say, you know, when
organizations, civil rights organizations talk about the First
Amendment, chilling effects, and official secrecies acts, that's
the kind of language or jargon of the civil liberties profession,
if I may say so. But it comes -- what's happening, I think,
comes home to people more clearly when you realize part of what's
intended here, what the Administration has in mind to conceal.
It's not just an idle love of secrecy, although they do have a
passion for secrecy in general.
It is now a crime to give to the American people
information about national defense, a crime punishable by ten
years in prison, information about national defense which the
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Executive chooses to conceal, as I said. Okay. Now, what do
they choose to conceal? What's new?
In 1982, the White House made very clear the kind of
information they would like to have concealed which was not
concealed before. The President signed an executive order in
April 1982 which added a whole new category of concealable,
classified information. In other words, they ordered the
bureaucracy to conceal -- I will now read to you -- to conceal
information about, I quote, vulnerabilities or capabilities of
systems, installations, projects or plans relating to the
national security.
Now, the first thing about that vast category is, as
Congressman Glenn English said, you can classify a U.S. road map,
under that category. What was also pointed out at
congressional hearings is that vulnerabilities or capabilities is
a wonderful phrase for concealing bad weapons, fraudulent
weapons, overly -- in fact, the whole scandal-ridden trillion
dollar buildup.
Now, the problem -- it's one thing to put a secrecy
stamp on that kind of information. It's quite another thing to
keep it secret. There are people, time-servers, there are
time-servers in the Pentagon. They see waste flying by them,
tens of billions of dollars flying out the window. I'm using the
figures of Senator Grassley, a conservative Republican from Iowa.
They see that and they shrug their shoulders. They don't care.
But there are men of honor, as I said, who go to Congress, who go
to the press and go to the people with the sordid evidence of
profligate waste that's been going on for four years.
Now -- and that, I think, is the reason, the real and
most fundamental driving reason why the Administration has sought
to find some way to use the Espionage Act. They needed a threat
of ten years in prison to silence men who would not be silenced
any other way.
REHM: So, as far as you are concerned, the kind of
judgment applied to Walter -- in the Walter Morison case could in
fact be extended to apply to whistle-blowers who inform the press
about classified information which they think is hurting the
American public.
REHM: Walter Karp is with me. He is a contributing
editor of Harper's magazine and author in the November issue of
an article called "Liberty under Siege."
Mr. Karp, I remember Caspar Weinberger talking to the
scientists of the country about the publication of what he
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believes is technological information that the Soviets could make
use of. Is this another aspect of this problem, as you see it?
KARP: Certainly. Absolutely. The Defense Department
issued regulations in December 1984 which said that any
information in the Pentagon about, quote, contractor performance
evaluation -- that means cost overruns, probably -- and tests of
military hardware -- I'm quoting the regulation -- must be
withheld, kept inside the Pentagon -- now, this is not even
classifiable stuff, actually -- if they are, quote, likely to be
dessiminated outside the Department of Defense.
Now, the plain English of that is, if it's someone which
the American people would like to read about, then, for that very
reason, it must be concealed from them. And what is the
regulation based on? The Export Control Act of 1979. The
American people are now -- to give them information about cost
overruns is exporting technical data to the American people.
REHM: It would be funny if it weren't so serious.
KARP: It's very serious.
REHM: Where is the press in all this? Do you see the
press cowering in the face of the close-down of information?
KARP: Well, the Washington Post carried the Morison
conviction on the front page. The New York Times tomorrow is
going to carry a hard-hitting story about the Morison conviction
by me. So -- but I would say, in general, that the press has
been very, very feeble.
I have a line in my article, which is perhaps too harsh.
I said, "Tyranny is not news. That is the journalistic principle
of the day." It's certainly not front-page news. Why that
should be the case, I think, may carry us afield.
The press has no power. The press simply conveys what
politicians talk about. When politicians, public men, elected
officials, congressmen, congressional committees, subcommittees
don't hold hearings, don't hold press conferences, don't make
noise, the press has nothing to report. You cannot cover -- the
Morison conviction, even the Morison conviction, cannot be made a
major issue in the press if nobody, if no congressman says a word
about it. And there's a limit to how often you can cite civil
libertarians.
REHM: The only other espionage prosecution involving a
disclosure to the press was that of Daniel Ellsberg. And in that
case involving the Pentagon Papers, the case was thrown out of
court because of prosecutorial misconduct.
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How often do members of the press receive classified
information from government sources? And is this conviction in
the Morison case going to put a clamp on that?
KARP: Well, you have a transaction which is so common
that the New York Times, in an editorial, estimated it to be
about a hundred times a day leaks are given to the press. Every
single leak like that regarding national defense, which of course
is enormous, regarding national defense is now a crime, under the
new judge-made Espionage Act. And if you think that people are
going to risk ten years in prison to do it, you're mistaken. Of
course, the Administration expects them not to.
REHM: What about the appeals process? How likely are
we to see a reversal of this?
KARP: There, I have no idea. I have no idea at all.
I would say this: The Justice Department was saying,
actually almost as if it were a matter of boasting, that they
haven't prosecuted a newspaperman. That's what the prosecutor
said. He said, "We haven't prosecuted a newspaper, so we're
really wonderful friends of liberty." See.
The fact of the matter is that the press is now open to
terrific harassment. I mean that's speculating. I can't say
that they will be. But every time a leak appears in a newspaper,
the FBI can walk in and say they're investigating an espionage
crime. And then what's a newspaper going to do?
REHM: In your article, which is in the November issue
of Harper's, you really present a chronicle and you say, "What we
are witnessing," you're quoting the American Civil Liberties
Union in November 1982, "is a, quote, systematic assault on the
concept of government accountability and deterrence of illegal
government conduct."
Then you begin, in 1981, moving up to the present,
showing -- and I gather you were very careful about the examples
that you chose.
KARP: Well, I wrote a report, really, a chronicle in
chronological order describing actions of the Administration,
executive orders issued, laws proposed, regulations enacted or
proposed. And so that the whole article, which is very, very
long, is an effort to show men acting. See, it puts -- every
single item in there has actually been in a newspaper at one time
or another. I don't think any well-informed person has ever --
has found anything in there that he didn't know about. But all
came out vaguely. It all came out as some sort of a vague,
shadowy miscellany.
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REHM: And disjointed.
KARP: And very disjointed. And I just put it together
in chronological order. And the reason I was very careful to put
it together in that careful way is that in the country nowadays,
it's very easy to dismiss almost any criticism by saying it's
conspiratorial or paranoia. I mean anytime you want to say that
anybody has an intention, any powerful person has any intention,
besides the ones he admits in public, you're liable to be damned
as a screwball. So I took very good care that this chronicle of
the Administration's effort to get the people off the back of the
government, because that's what we're dealing with now -- exactly
the opposite of the Administration's slogan, their campaign for
four years -- is to get the people off the back of the
government, to liberate the government from the government.
REHM: All right. Let's open the phones....
Good morning.
MAN: I was wondering if your guest had mentioned the
method which Mr. Morison had used to obtain his photographs.
KARP: No, I didn't.
MAN: Well, would you like to mention that?
KARP: I don't know.
MAN: You don't know.
KARP: I assume they came across his desk, as a naval
researcher.
MAN: Well, obviously, he has been stretching his rights
as a naval researcher to obtain these photographs. And I was
wondering if you really seriously felt that the American media
should decide what is classified and what is not classified and
release it to the American people, which means the Soviets will
receive it.
KARP: Well, the American media doesn't decide, decide
it. But we're not talking about -- we're not really talking
about the rights or non-rights of employees or the media. We're
talking about the American people and their ancient sovereign
right to hold the government accountable to them. We have a
system of classification which is based on executive orders and
nothing but executive orders, which is arbitrary, which is
capricious, which has been expanded over the years. And if you
are the kind of person who trusts the government to judge for
itself what secures or endangers your freedom, then I'm afraid
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that you fly in the face of 200 years of constitutional history
of the United States.
REHM: All right, sir. Thanks for calling.
That question of how those photographs came into the
possession of Mr. Morison, how much was that an issue at the
trial?
KARP: It's not an issue at all. It's not an issue at
all, because he -- the issue is simply whether or not the
Espionage Act applies to giving information that is classified to
the press. It doesn't matter if Morison went next door and
filched it from somebody's desk or he got it over his own -- if
it came to him. He still is not authorized to give it to the
press, whether it came over his transom for whether he took it
out of his friend's desk. That was not an issue in the case.
The issue in the case is whether, however he -- whether or not
his giving it to a publication qualifies as an act of espionage.
And for the first time in history, it was ruled to count that
way, after 68 years.
Shall I go on?
KARP: What you have is, we have a country in which we
have an enormous, colossal, and very, very peculiar
classification system built on executive order. The way in which
national security and liberty will balance out was by a kind of
unspoken agreement that they'll classify everything and they'll
leak a lot of it. See, that's how the people's right to know and
the government's ability to conceal important matters were
somehow balanced.
This Espionage Act by the judge, this effort by the
Administration destroys that balance. It's like taking a hand
and smashing it over a scale and just knocking it aside.
REHM: Good morning.
MAN: I've been waiting for a conversation like this for
some time. As a former nuclear submariner and a person who has
had access to high levels of classification, let me just state
that it's fortunate that there are a vast majority of people who
do not seek to line their pockets a little more fully by releas-
ing information which they have access to [unintelligible] and
people like your guest, who, you know, are trying to basically
take the law into their own hands in regard to classified
information. There are many people who could release information
to the press that would, you know, basically blow the socks off
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of anything you've ever read or published because it's very
highly classified. Fortunately, they guard that information with
great care.
To take your guest's premise to a ridiculous extreme,
because I do not like the prices of certain products in stores,
that, taking your guests premise to the extreme, would mean that
I could go in and say, "Well, that's unfair." I will take the
item and not pay for it because it's not worth it, and I'll walk
out of the store.
He's been citing the public's right to know. This
counteracts directly with the Defense Depatment's premise on
classified information, which is need to know. And I wonder how
he feels about the public's need to know the information which he
thinks is important...
REHM: All right. Thanks for calling.
KARP: Well, it's never been the case in the country
that we regarded the government as the sole judge of what it
thinks the American people should know. That's why you have a
First Amendment.
You know, back in the Constitutional Convention days,
the people who had -- a lot of people contended that we didn't
need a Bill of Rights because the government was perfectly
balanced. The Congress checks the President, the President
checks Congress, and we shouldn't have a Bill of Rights. Well,
there were people, and they triumphed and they said, "Balance the
government. It may be checked. It may be -- but we would like
to make sure that the ultimate arbiters, the sovereign people
have their rights spelled out."
So, when I hear somebody talking about the need by the
government -- that is, the Executive Branch judging for itself
everything about what it considers the country is entitled to
know, you're conceding what no one has ever wanted to concede in
this country.
REHM: Fascinating.
KARP: And also, you're talking about -- you're talking
about -- you're talking as if the Morison case was routine. The
Morison case changes everything, everything. The country was --
I'm sure the caller was fairly content with the way the country
was about three weeks ago. Well, it's changed radically in the
last five days.
MAN: I'm a very big person on defense. But, of course,
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I'm against what people call waste, I call corruption and graft.
But I have a very serious question for your guest.
I believe there's a check-and-balance in this situation
that he's discussing, in that if the material that's taken,
that's in question is very sensitive material, indeed a threat to
our security to be released, and on the other hand, if the
material is just material that would expose waste and corruption
in government, I believe once the material is presented to a
jury, then in fact the people will make that determination. And
if it is just frivolous material that's exposing waste in
government, the trial-by-jury process will put it back into the
people's hands, where it belongs.
So, I can't really understand why he's so upset at what
the Administration has done in this particular case.
REHM: All right, sir. Thanks for your call.
I think our caller perhaps missed your earlier comments
about the usefulness of the information that was actually
published.
KARP: Yes. The information that was published was of
no use whatever to the Soviet Union. They already had those
photographs. They already had the technical manual involved.
I think we're dealing -- you have hopes that a jury, now
faced with judge-made law, will in fact fly in the face of a
judge. Well, they didn't do it in the Morison case. They might
have said that this is nonsense, that Morison doesn't look any
way like a spy, and that the secrets, a secret which was not much
of a secret, since the Soviet Union had it, cannot be regarded,
under the law, as something closely held. They might have
laughed when the prosecutors said they discovered that Morison
was the culprit by fingerprints on the photographs.
Here's a man who works for Jane's magazine. Right? And
the photographs appear. So you might have thought they would
laugh at the prosecutor there.
You might have thought they would laugh when the
prosecution brought up a witness who said that the information
was not new to the Soviet Union, but it was about three-four
months fresher than their information was. Well, the jury didn't
laugh.
So, I am a great friend of juries. But this is an issue
which when you have judge-made law, it's a terrible thing to make
the jurors the defendants [sic] of liberty.
REHM: You are having a hard time convincing the people,
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perhaps, that they have lost or are about to lose something which
you regard as very precious because, somehow, they have not been
convinced that they've lost anything, number two. And that,
number two, if what they -- if they have lost something that is
very precious.
KARP: Well, if people think their ignorance is bliss,
there's nothing I can do about it. But it's not going to be very
blissful.
REHM: What do you want people to do in reaction to your
KARP: In reaction to my article?
KARP: I mean what do you want a free people to do when
their liberties are being slowly, or rapidly, in fact, eroded?
And by liberty I mean the ability to hold the government
accountable. I think they ought to remember the first principles
of the country. They ought to remember that the government is
not the sole arbiter of its own worth, of its own policies. They
should remember that the press -- they should not be taken in by
the kind of propaganda which says that the press is powerful.
The press is nothing if it didn't have readers. What would the
New York Times -- the New York Times owns half the forests in
Canada. I assure you it would be nothing, absolutely nothing, if
the two million readers of The Times disappeared.
So, the first thing, I think, is to simply -- we have to
clear our minds of a lot of cant and rubbish and lies, like the
power of the press and the media, and the notion that people who
-- whistle-blowers whose careers are at stake, who are, at the
best of times, sent to Coventry, shunned, whose jobs are
threatened, are actually giving information to the press because
they want to make a little money. That is really, in fact, an
insult.
But I can only say for the larger question, you just
simply have to go back to the principles of the country.
REHM: Good morning.
MAN: I've got a problem with the way your current guest
is looking at this case with the freedom of the press. When you
look at what Mr. Morison did, the item he published, or had
published, has no general public interest. It might be to the
readers of the Jane's Defense Weekly, but not to general inter-
est. And because of that, you can't quite compare him with a
whistle-blower. That is just terrible.
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KARP: No, I'm not comparing...
KARP: No, no, no, no, no, no. Please. The Morison
case is a case. It is also a precedent. You must understand
that. We're not going to sit here all day and discuss the
character of Morison. The character of Morison means nothing.
The issue is that now you can convict people for giving
classified information about national defense to the press, and
you could not do it before.
MAN: But I disagree with calling him a
whistle-blower...
KARP: I didn't call him a whistle...
REHM: He hasn't called him a whistle-blower.
KARP: I didn't call him a whistle-blower. I'm talking -
about the effects in the future.
You know, Napoleon once said he recommended hanging
somebody in order to, what he said, encourage the others. That's
what the Morison conviction does. It's a weapon to be used over
the heads of men no doubt more honorable than Mr. Morison.
REHM: All right, sir. Thanks for calling.
MAN: I have a question. I was wondering whether or not
the implications of this case would lead to the prosecution of
any members of the Administration who routinely use leaks that
they feel are in their own best interest to further their own
political whims in the Administration. And, you know.
KARP: Well, I mean, everything is now up in the air.
If a high-ranking official leaks the information, it's called an
authorized leak, and therefore he's not under the Espionage Act.
In fact, that is exactly the issue. You will now have -- the
entire realm of national security information will be official
government handouts. That's what the Morison conviction means.
REHM: All right, sir. Thanks for calling.
Mr. Karp, do you think it is now up to the press to
generate public opposition to the Administration's policies? Or
is it up to the Congress? Is it up to the courts? How do you
see the issue going forward from here?
KARP: Well, it's up to Congress. It's absolutely up to
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Congress. It's up to public men of every kind to say something.
As I said before, I don't -- the press cannot take up
cudgels for itself. It's easily condemned as a special interest
serving itself. It has to be able to say that -- it has to quote
Tip O'Neill or it has to quote an opposition leader. It has to
quote men of distinction and power and responsibility. And then
it's a new story. Otherwise they're just writing a couple of
editorials, and it doesn't do any good. So you need elected
officials to come up and defend the rights of the people.
REHM: And your piece now in the New York Times will
appear tomorrow morning.
KARP: Yes.
REHM: I'll be looking forward to reading it.
Walter Karp. He is a contributing editor of Harper's
magazine and the author of "Liberty under Siege."
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