MEYER AND HALPERIN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504400026-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 26
• Publication Date: December 7, 1985
• Content Type: REPORT

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504400026-4
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DATE December 7, 1985 7:00 P.M.
I
SUBJECT Meyer and Halperin
STATION WJLA-TV
Washington, D.C.
DAVID SCHOUMACHER: There's nothing new about betraying
our country. Benedict Arnold, after all, was only the first. He
sold out his soldiers for 20,000 pounds, the equivalent of about
a million dollars in today's economy.
So, what struck us most about all the recent spy cases
is not that there've been so many, but that the price of treason
has not kept up with inflation. Jonathan Pollard, a Navy
intelligence analyst, allegedly sold out to Israel for $50,000.
Ronald Pelton is said to have become a spy for the Soviet Union
for just $25,000.
Still, although the pay isn't all that good, money, not
politics, or even love, has become the motive for this
generation's traitors.
To consider what can be done about it, we're joined in
our Washington studios by Cord Meyer, who was an official of the
Central Intelligence Agency from 1967 to 1977, once a station
chief in London, and Assistant Deputy Director. Mr. Meyer is now
a syndicated columnist and teaches at Georgetown University
School of Foreign Service.
Also with us is Morton Halperin, Director of the
Washington Office of the American Civil Liberties Union and a
former member of the National Security Council.
Mr. Meyer, on this program Arkady Shevcheko, the U.N.
diplomat, said that although he had sold out his own country, the
Soviet Union, that he thought that traitors should be hanged. Is
that what your view?
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Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504400026-4
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CORD MEYER: I think I'm inclined to agree with Senator
Roth of Delaware, who has just introduced a bill in the Senate
which would call for an optional death penalty. It would give
the judge in the case the right, in the event of major crimes, to
optionally choose to apply the death penalty. The advantage
obviously being that it would be a deterrent, and it also would
be a bargaining chip in the negotiations that led to a final
decision.
In the absence of that possible penalty, the deterrent
effects of the other sentences that are available are not, to my
mind, sufficient.
SCHOUMACHER: Mr. Halperin, would that work as a
deterrent, do you think, the death penalty?
MORTON HALPERIN: I think it might contribute to
deterrent. But in my view, the death penalty is cruel and
unusual punishment, is unconstitutional, and should not be
applied.
Moreover, attempting to use the death penalty here will
introduce an enormous amount of needless controversy into what I
think otherwise could be an agreement about what to do to reduce
the amount of spying that there is.
I think life sentences are sufficiently deterring. I do
not believe that people become spies because they think they will
only get life imprison, as they have gotten, rather than the
death penalty. I think they become spies because they think
they're not going to get caught, and with good reason, because
the system has simpy been very poorly designed to catch spies.
And it's only recently, and mostly because of luck, that we've
begun to catch some of these spies.
SCHOUMACHER: You know, there are several different
kinds of people you talk about here when you talk about spies.
First of all, there are enemy agents. Then there are Americans
who have turned traitor. And then, finally, there is the third
category, which we saw in the Morison case, and earlier in the
Pentagon Papers -- that is, essentially whistle-blowers who don't
approve of a certain government policy, and go to the press.
Should somebody like Morison face the death penalty?
HALPERIN: I don't think he should have faced any
penalty at all. I don't believe that it should be a crime to
give information to the press.
Moreoever, if we confuse the two things, again we get
involved in controversy about the public's right to know, and
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distract our attention from what is the critical problem,
--namely, the fact that people are selling or giving secret
information to our enemies and causing great harm to the security
of the country. That's the real problem, not the publication in
a magazine of a photograph which did not cause any harm, which is
what Morison was accused of doing.
SCHOUMACHER: What about the view from inside the
agency? Would they want to see reporters, as well as their
sources, prosecuted, do you think, Mr. Meyer?
MEYER: Well, I think that Morton is completely correct.
Nobody's dreaming of a death penalty for the kind of infraction
that Morison was guilty of. Senator Roth makes clear in his
proposal it would only apply in the case of very major espionage
infractions.
argument.
MEYER: That is really beside the point, that whole
But I do think that the Morison case is a serious
problem because he really leaked information to Jane's, that
publication, that almanac in Britain, on the basis of information
that had been given to him and that was in his safekeeping. He
made it public in order to get a job with Jane's magazine.
HALPERIN: The government ought to have the right to
fire somebody in that situation. But I think when you start
using criminal penalties to deal with that rather than real
spying, you chill public debate because the penalty could apply
to the reporters as well, and you interfere with the public
right to know.
So I think that's a totally separate issue that ought to
be kept separate.
MEYER: It's not entirely separate. Because if you go
back and look at what President Harry Truman said in 1951, he
said that the difference between --a damaging leak that let's
very vital information out and available to our opponents is no
different from what was...
HALPERIN: But I think that was...
MEYER: ...an effective espionage...
HALPERIN: Even Harry Truman sometimes made a mistake.
MEYER: Well, I don't know. Harry had a lot of common
sense about him.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504400026-4