Samuel Loring Morison

Samuel Loring Morison (born October 30, 1944) is a former American intelligence professional, who was convicted of espionage and theft of government property in 1985, and pardoned in 2001. He was "the only [American] government official ever convicted for giving classified information to the press."

Morison was born in London, England, where his father was stationed during World War II. His paternal grandfather, Samuel Eliot Morison, was a distinguished naval historian, a Rear Admiral in the Naval Reserve and Harvard University professor. Morison spent much of his younger years in New York and Maine. He attended Tabor Academy, a college preparatory school in Massachusetts and graduated from the University of Louisville in 1967.

Morison worked as an intelligence analyst at the Naval Intelligence Support Center (NISC) in Suitland, Maryland, from 1974 to 1984, specializing in Soviet amphibious and mine-laying vessels. During those years, Morison also earned $5,000 per year as a part-time contributor and editor of the American section of the London-based Jane's Fighting Ships, an annual reference work on the world's navies.

Conflicts with his supervisors led Morison to seek a full-time position with Jane's in London. At this time, he began overstepping the boundary of permissible information that could be sent to Jane's. As a GS-12 Soviet amphibious ship analyst with a Top Secret clearance, Morison provided Jane's with three secret satellite photographs that he had taken from the desk of a coworker at NISC in July 1984. Morison cut classified control markings from them before mailing them to Jane's.

In 1984, two images of Soviet aircraft taken by a KH-8 or KH-9 satellite were inadvertently published in records of Congressional hearings. That same year, Jane's Defence Weekly was provided with several images taken by a KH-11 satellite of a Soviet naval shipbuilding facility. A 1984 computer-enhanced KH-11 photo, taken at an oblique angle, was leaked, along with two others, to Jane's Defence Weekly. The image shows the general layout of the Nikolaiev 444 shipyard on the Black Sea. Under construction is the Kiev-class aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov, originally named Kharkov and later Baku, along with an amphibious landing ship.

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