Years After Leak Case Pardon, Theft of Records Alleged

The last time Samuel Morison was in federal district court in Maryland he was booked on an espionage charge over leaks of photos from a U.S. satellite.

Morison’s back—this time not on espionage but alleged theft of government records.

Morison, a former naval intelligence analyst, was arrested Tuesday for allegedly stealing and attempting to sell records from the Naval Archives that were written by his grandfather, the Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison.

According to a complaint filed in Maryland federal district court, the 69-year-old Crofton, Md., resident tried to sell 34 boxes of the World War II-era navy office documents that were reported missing last February. Morison, the U.S. Department of Justice said, was a paid consultant and researcher for the Navy Archives from March 2010 to February 2013.

The Archival Recovery Team, whose mission is to track down stolen items from the National Archives, began investigating the source of the documents when a bookstore owner, who was working on consignment for Morison, posted an eBay advertisement. A phone call acquired by the investigators allegedly shows Morison asking the bookstore owner, identified only as “CW” in court papers, for $15,000 for the exchange.

Federal authorities executed a search warrant in May at Morison’s house and retrieved about 34 boxes of government records and property, the Justice Department said. Morrison, according to the government, had access to the records but he had no authority to remove the documents from the Navy Archives.

Morison’s case was under seal Tuesday. It was not immediately known whether he had a lawyer.

Morison made headlines in the mid 1980s when he leaked an aerial photo of a Soviet naval vessel to a British defense periodical. Free speech activists, including the American Civil Liberties Union, rallied to the defense of Morison, who was charged under the Espionage Act for the leak.

A federal trial judge found Morison guilty at trial and sentenced him to two years in prison. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the conviction and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal in 1988, according to a 2001 New York Times article.