EMBASSY SECURITY PROPOSAL CRITICIZED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000500230015-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 30, 2000
• Sequence Number: 15
• Publication Date: March 27, 1986
• Content Type: NSPR

STATINTL
Emb.s security proposal ?
y y pruposai criticized
R
By Warren Strobel
E WASHINGTON TIMES
Critics of an administration plan
to spend $4.4 billion to upgrade secu-
rity at U.S. embassies say the pro-
gram is unmanageable and will still "
leave American installations abroad
vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
"They [the State Department]
don't know how to spend what
they've got now," said one Reagan
administration official. "The folks
don't handle money like you would at
home"
"Ali of a sudden they're going to
be spending twice as much money as
they're used to," said an official with
American Foreign Service Associ.
ation, a union for foreign service of-
ficers. "What does that say to you?
That's a lot of money coming down
the pike."
Both critics spoke on condition
that they not be identified.
But David Fields, an assistant sec-
retary of state, told the Senate Anti-
terrorism Caucus yesterday that the
Senate should approve the program
swiftly because several U.S. embas-
sies located on busy streets in world
capitals are "sitting ducks" for fa-
natical suicide terrorists.
Libya's official radio yesterday
called for Arab suicide squads to at-
tack U.S. embassies worldwide fol-
lowing armed clashes between U.S.
and Libyan forces in the Gulf of
Sidra.
The construction program, al-
ready on the State Department
drawing board, is among several
recommendations made last June by
a special panel appointed by Secre-
tary of State George .Shultz and
headed by retired Adm. Bobby Ray
Inman, a former CIA deputy direc-
tor.
Mr. Inman, a former director of
the National Security Agency, said
yesterday that State Department of-
ficials who advocate upgrading se-
curity abroad in a piece-meal fash-
ion aren't fully focused on the
problem.
"Doing things the way they were
done in the past will not adequately
protect this country," Mn Inman
said.
The largest overseas peacetime
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27 March 1986
construction project in U.S. history,
the embassy security upgrade pro-
gram calls for the construction of 70
new embassies and other facilities,
the relocation or renovation of 23
and the rehabilitation of eight more.
"I don't know whether they [em-
bassies] have to be hardened or not,
but I do know that won't solve the
problem," said the administration
critic.
"If I was looking at this program,
it would be as a go-slow kind of
thing," the administration official
said. "Protect only the places that
have to be protected"
Peter Smeallie, director of a Na-
tional Academy of Sciences panel
that studied how to build more se-
cure embassies, said, "There was a
lot of concern that the embassies
that are being selected for relocation
or reinforcement are not the best
ones."
Mr. Smeallie noted that one of the
three criteria developed by a special
commission to relocate an embassy
or other facility was the condition
that it not have a 100-foot setback
from the road.
"Basically you're not going to do
anything at the London embassy; it's
a landmark," Mr. Smeallie said.
"They're not going to move out of
there because they don't have a
100-foot setback. They don't have 5
feet."
"London is a big question mark.
I'll be the first to admit that," Rep.
Dan Mica, a Florida Democrat who
is the chief House advocate of the
funding hike, said. "We don't know
what we're going to do there. We ( the
buildingsl are essentially hanging
out on the street there on three or
four sides."
Mr. Mica conceded the State De
partment has had problems
managing construction efforts
using the recent construction of an
embassy in Egypt as "a textbook
case of disaster. Everything that
could go wrong went wrong."
But, Mr. Mica said, "We went to
extraordinary lengths to write this
[setback! condition [into the secu-
rity upgrade plan], because of our
concern over their past track record.
"Because we have these concerns
doesn't mean we shouldn't try to ad-
dress these very critical - life-
saving if you will - needs that have
been identified;' he said.
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ON
WASHINGTON TIMES STATINTL
17 March 1986
Artificial intelligence: Scientists
try to create a thinking machine
By J.H. Doyle
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
AUSTIN, Texas - Inside a
gleaming office complex, some of
the nation's brightest computer sci-
entists, linguists and psychologists
are trying to tutor a very dumb stu-
dent.
What children pick up easily, the
most powerful computer fumbles:
Human language and common sense
are still the biggest stumbling
blocks in creating a new generation
of "thinking" machines.
Undeterred, a 24-member Artifi-
cial Intelligence team is spoon-
feeding a computer program with
thousands of scraps of knowledge,
as well as giving it grammar and
vocabulary lessons.
Their goal is to cram the machine
- a mindless array of thumbnail-
size silicon chips - with enough
facts, rules-of-thumb and human
language skills that it may begin to
think and learn on its own.
Here, at the Microelectronics and
Computer Technology Corp. (MCC),
a joint research and development
venture backed by America's corpo-
rate giants, the future is being built.
MCC is "pushing back the fron-
tiers of science," said its chairman,
retired Navy Adm. Bobby R. Inman,
who previously served as deputy di-
rector of the Central Intelligence
Agency.
Article by article, the team of re-
searchers is dissecting an en-
cyclopedia, then encoding its con-
tents into the computer's memory
bank. For example, all the facts pre-
sented in an article on "flight" are
encoded, plus the underlying
knowledge about the world needed
to understand the article.
They are feeding the machine
thousands of bits and pieces of com-
mon sense: If you're out in the rain,
you get wet. If you drop something,
it falls to the ground. An object can't
be in two places at once. Each person
lives for a single interval of time.
They also are teaching the com-
puter about itself. "It has to under-
stand that it is a program;' said a
scientist. "It needs to know that a
human being is watching it."
Approved
MCC, which began its high-stakes
research in January 1984, is owned
by 21 U.S companies, including
Rockwell International, Honeywell
Inc., and Bethesda-based Martin
Marietta Corp.
MCC's goal is to create a variety
of new computer technologies for
the 1990s and beyond - passing
along the fruits of its research to its
shareholder companies to give them
a head start over foreign competi-
tors in designing new products and
services.
The $65-million-a-year project
has resulted in a remarkably high
degree of cooperation between oth-
erwise archrivals. At its Austin
headquarters, one-third of MCC's
410 employees are on loan from the
various firms.
MCC is one of the new heavy-
weights of artificial intelligence -
the discipline that has already
taught computers, among other
things, to play chess and to help per-
form medical diagnoses.
Researchers at MCC and a hand-
ful of laboratories are trying to build
a "fifth generation" computer capa-
ble of reasoning its way through
tasks in the home, at the workplace
and on the battlefield.
But when asked to explain what
makes machines "intelligent," a
computer scientist is likely to talk in
circles.
" `Artificial intelligence' is trying
to do things we don't know how to do
yet;' said Marvin Minksy, an AI pio-
neer at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. "But that's a working
definition. It changes every year.
"Twenty years ago, having a ma-
chine recognize a picture or play
chess or understand simple lan-
guage would have been out of reach,"
he said. "It's sort of a moving hori-
zon."
Even before the first generation
of vacuum-powered computers, men
dreamed of building machines that
mimic human thought. But efforts
over the past 30 years to make a
flexible computer have fallen short.
Powerful, number-crunching
computers can analyze vast
amounts of data, spit out amazing
mathematical solutions and guide an
unmanned probe to the outer
reaches of the solar system. Yet
these machines have no inkling of
human goals and beliefs, no sense of
Jonathan Slocum, MCC's director
of "natural language processing,"
believes that words provide a key to
machine intelligence.
His reasoning is simple: A child's
ability to learn about the world is
closely tied to his use of words as
symbols. Digital computers have no
grasp of the meaning of words or
what lies beyond them. And these
machines will forever lack common
sense until they are able to commu-
nicate with, and learn from, people.
But what might seem like a simple
task - teaching English to a com-
puter program by cramming it with
grammatical rules, words and defi-
nitions - has proved to be a monu-
mental endeavor.
"We would be very happy if these
machines were as effective as a 4-
year-old child with respect to the
grammar," Mr. Slocum said.
Home computers can mimic ver-
bal skills by using sentences to dis-
play a problem's solution. But faced
with interpreting sentences, ad-
vanced computers - which rely on
limited vocabularies of narrowly de-
fined words - break down.
Simple conversation, as it turns
out, takes an enormous amount of
information processing at in-
credibly high speeds.
"We rarely perceive ambiguity in
something someone says;' Mr. Slo-
cum said. "[But] almost any sen-
tence you hear a human being utter
will be ambiguous"
Depending on its context, the
word "ball" in a sentence could mean
a dance, a round object used in
sports or a good time. Similarly, a
simple sentence might contain 10
words with an average of three defi-
nitions each.
"We don't consciously review all
the interpretations. Human beings
select one and go with it almost all
the time," Mr. Slocum said. "If your
confidence [in your first interpreta-
tion] is high, you're not going to stop
the speaker.
"If your confidence is low," he
said, "you may stop the speaker and
ask whether he meant this or that"
Mr.. Slocum is writing a computer
program in which his "linguist's in-
tuition" is encoded in plausibility
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ities for the likelihood that a state- examine a problem - or example,
ment is true. a battlefield situation - and decide
Dissecting a sentence, his com- what problem-solving strategy to
puter program assigns plausibility employ, "introspect" to see if it's
scores for the possible meaning of making progress and take another
each word, and then applies "rules tack if needed.
for combining plausibility factors" "That kind of behavior leads to
as it examines each element. something that appears very much
Future computers will recognize, like consciousness," he said, which is
he said, when to accept at face value "largely the ability to introspect on
its first interpretation of a sentence, what you're doing...
when to ask for clarification and Computer "programs have a form
when to say "I'm confused." of consciousness," he said. "They
"Four-year-olds are quite good have to be conscious of why they do
They know most of the grammar what they do. You can stop it at any
that an adult does," he said. "They point and ask,'Why did you do that?'
don't know all the grammatical and it will tell you after a fashion."
structures that exist in the language, But a new generation of superfast
but they know a great majority of computers with huge memory banks
them." will be required if machines are to
It will take a major scientific learn English and "get smart." Re-
breakthrough, he said, for comput- searchers at MCC and a few other
ers to use metaphors, idioms and U.S. and Japanese laboratories are
similes. After all, how does a literal- developing "parallel processors":
minded machine catch the meaning networks of tens, hundreds and even
of phrases such as "cry a river of thousands of computer chips - each
tears," "kick the bucket" or "she is with a separate memory bank-that
like a rose"? work in concert to solve a problem.
What Mr. Slocum's computer pro- Others are creating new com-
gram lacks in grammar skills, he puter languages for parallel comput-
hopes to bolster with a working vo- ers that can correctly divide prob-
cabulary of 20,000 words. Future lems into sub-problems - for
computerprograms,usfng complete instance, examining different parts
of
dictionaries of words and multiple a sentence.
interpretations, will have "vast pro- "Hopefully, 10 years from now,"
ficiency, outstripping any human be- said Mr. Lenat, MCC will have taken
a giant step toward building a new
ing;' he said. generation of machines with some
Meanwhile, MCC's artificial intel- degree of common sense.
ligence team is bringing up baby - "But until computers are smarter
feeding the computer program with than they are now;" he said, "most
more facts about humans, the world questions they ask will be stupid."
and itself. lbmorrow: Machines that change
The computer is a blank slate, said the world?
Douglas B. Lenat, an AI project di-
rector at MCC. "We're bootstrapping
it up to the point where it will be a
reasonable student.
"The more you know, the more
easily you can learn," he said. "If you
start out a [computer] program that
knows next to nothing, it's hard for it
to assimilate new pieces of informa-
tion.
"But children already know so
much about the world;' he said, "that
it's very likely that they'll have some-
thing they can hook new experience
onto and thereby relate."
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WASHINGTON POST
3 March 1986
Whitworth Spy Trial to Open
John Walker's ex-wife, Barbara
,toy Crowley Walker, and his daugh-
ter, Laura Walker Snyder, whom
John Walker tried to recruit to spy
when she was an Army communi-
Defendant Last of Four in Walker Ring
5
By Ruth Marcus
Washington Post Staff Writer
SAN FRANCISCO-The trial of
iar with the technology said, the
Soviets would have been able to
listen freely to some sensitive Navy
communications. The Whitworth
trial is expected to disclose what
channels of communications may
have been compromised and how
sensitive they were.
The star witness at Whitworth's
trial, which is expected to last eight
to 10 weeks, will be his Navy col-
league and close friend Walker, 48,
a retired Navy chief warrant officer
and Norfolk private detective.
Walker masterminded the espi-
onage ring that ipcluded his broth-
er, retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Arthur
James Walker, 51, and John Walk-
er's son, Navy Seaman Michael
Lance Walker, 23. John Walker's
agreement to testify against Whit-
worth provided a crucial link in the
prosecution's case, which until then
was largely circumstantial.
John Walker pleaded guilty in
federal court in Baltimore Oct. 28
to conspiring to commit espionage
with the two other Walkers and
Whitworth. Under the plea agree-
ment, he is to be sentenced to life in
prison. He promised to testify
against Whitworth in return for a
reduced sentence for his son, who
also pleaded guilty and will be sen-
tenced to 25 years.
Arthur Walker was convicted
Aug. 9 of giving John Walker two
reports marked "confidential," the
lowest category of classified infor-
mation, from VSE Corp., a Ches-
apeake, Va., firm where Arthur
Walker worked as an engineer.
If U.S. District Judge John P. Vu-
kasin Jr. permits it. Arthur Walker
and Michael Walker are also ex-
pected to be called on by prosecu-
tors to corroborate Jbhn Walker's
story-marking the first time ei-
ther will have detailed publicly his
espionage activities. According to
court documents, John Walker
urged his brother to "operate like
Jerry, who was making big bucks"
photographing classified documents
for John Walker.
retired Navy communications ex-
pert Jerry Alfred Whitworth is to
start in federal court here this week
in a case that should provide the
fullest public picture yet of the dam-
age allegedly caused by the Walker
spy ring and an unprecedented
glimpse into the arcane, superse-
cret world of military communica-
tions and codes.
Whitworth. 46, the last of four
Navy men charged in the Walker
espionage ring to appear in court, is
charged with 13 counts of espio-
niaie, conspiracy and e erc Tin-
come tax viol pons
The government alleges that,
from 1974 until John Anthony
Walker Jr.'s arrest May 20, 1985,
Whitworth conspired with Walker
to pass classified defense docu-
ments and information. He received
more than $332,000, according to
the government.
A senior chief radioman when he
retired from the Navy in 1983 after
a 21-year career, Whitworth "re-
ceived training in virtually all as-
pects of Navy communications and
served both at sea and at Navy
bases ashore in positions that per-
mitted him access to a broad soec-
trum of sensitive military commu-
nications," according to a federal
indictment.
The most sensitive of the infor-
mation allegedly funneled to the
Soviets was "cryptographic keylists
and key cards," the daily-changing
codes that are used to encrypt and
read classified messages, along with
technical manuals and design plans
for the coding machines them-
selves. With the "logic diagrams"
contained in the manuals, prosecu-
tors said in court papers filed last
month, "a sophisticated adversary
having modern computer capabil-
ities" would have been able "to re-
create the encryption machine."
Armed with both pieces of the
cryptographic puzzle, sources famil-
cations specialist, are also on the
government's list of potential wit-
nesses, as is Pamela K. Carroll, a
former girlfriend of John Walker.
In addition to the first public
statements by Walker about the
origins and operation of the spy
ring, the trial will feature testimony
by Earl Clark, the former deputy
chief of communications security at
the National Security Agency, who
is to discuss the importance of se-
cure military communications and
explain to the jurors how the coding
machines and cards work. Clark is
expected to bring one of the coding
machines into court to demonstrate
its operation.
The overnment's witness list
inclu es o v v aman. former
director of the National Security
k
Agency
ormer deputy director
of the CIA; Vice Adm. Robert E.
Kit sey, t e director of the Navy
division that handles cryptography
and communications; Rear Adm.
Lawrence Layman, head of naval
communications, and Gerald Rich-
ard, an FBI expert in Soviet spy
methods, or "tradecraft."
On June,12, nine days after Whit-
worth's arrest and at the height of
public attention to the Walker case,
Chief of Naval Operations Adm.
James D. Watkins provided the first
official assessment of the potential
damage done by the ring. He said
that the loss appeared to be "very
serious" but "not catastrophic," and
that the biggest damage was in the
area of communications.
Whitworth's trial will offer the
first public damage assessment since
then-other than testimony at Ar-
thur Walker's trial, which was lim-
ited to the two reports he passed to
the Soviets-and the first since
Walker agreed to provide details
about the operations of the spy net-
work.
The defense case will focus pri-
marily on attacking Walker, accord-
ing to defense lawyer James Lar-
son. "We think the central issue in
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US
S Nimitz, where Michael Walker
the case really is the credibility of
the defense will attempt to under-
mine Walker's story by "going into
what he says very thoroughly and
very carefully."
Larson said he planned to call
some defense witnesses, unlike law-
yers for Arthur Walker, who rested
their case without presenting a de-
fense. But, Larson said, "A lot of
our defense will consist of cross-ex-
amination of their witnesses, not
necessarily presenting alternative"
witnesses:
One potential defense witness is
Whitworth himself., In papers filed
Feb. 7, defense lawyers argued that
the case against Whitworth should
be split in two, with the espionage
charges tried separately from the
tax counts. Although they did not
explain why, defense lawyers Lar-
son and Tony Tamburello said
Whitworth "wishes to testify con-
cerning the espionage charges but
not the tax and fraud allegations."
The motion to sever the charges is
pending.
Vukasin is to hear arguments
today on a renewed bid by Assistant
U.S. Attorneys William Farmer Jr.
and Leida B. Schoggen to introduce
a series of letters to the FBI from
"RUS" offering to expose a "signif-
icant espionage system." Prosecu-
tors contend that Whitworth wrote
the letters, but Vukasin has ruled
against their introduction.
Jury selection, which is expected
to begin tomorrow, is expected to
consume a week because of the
publicity the Walker cases have
generated.
Whitworth was sitting at the per-
sonal computer in his Davis, Calif.,
mobile home on the morning of May
20, 1985, writing a letter to John
Walker, when two FBI agents rang
the doorbell.
Walker, they informed him, had!
been arrested and charged with es-
pionage. "I was dumbfounded and
didn't respond immediately," Whit-
worth wrote in an affidavit .... "I
don't exactly recall my response,
but I think it was something like, 'I
don't know what to think.' "
Hours earlier, FBI agents had
arrested Walker in a hallway of the
Rockville Ramada Inn. Agents trail-
ing Walker had seen him near a se-
cluded site in Poolesville, in west-
ern Montgomery County, where
they later found a bag disguised as
trash and filled with classified doc-
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Also contained in the bag were
two "Dear Friend" letters from
Walker to his Soviet handler. " 'D'
continues to be a puzzle," Walker
wrote. "He is not happy, but is still
not ready to continue our 'cooper.
ation' . . My guess ... he is go-
ing to flop in the stockbroker field
and can probably make a modest
living in computer sales." Walker
included two "Dear Johnny" letters
from "D" himself, which discussed,
among other things, "news about
Brenda's job prospects."
Whitworth's wife is Brenda. Reis;
Whitworth, who had retired from
the Navy in October 1983, was
studying to be a stockbroker, hav-
ing decided to abandon. the idea of
computer sales.
FBI agents had already been
alerted to Whitworth's possible in-
volvement by two "confidential in-
formants" later identified as Barba-
ra Walker and Laura Walker Sny-
der, who told them of West Coast
man named "Jerry Wentworth" who
was allegedly part of the spy ring.
In a search of Walker's Norfolk
house, agents found-among other
things-papers that identified "D"
as "Jer," and handwritten notes that
dealt with secure Navy communi-
cations systems and that contained
one of Whitworth's fingerprints,
according to court papers.
Two weeks after they first
knocked on his door, the FBI issued
an arrest warrant for Whitworth,
who turned himself in at the FBI's
San Francisco office.
As portrayed in the indictment,
the espionage conspiracy between
Whitworth and Walker started in
1974 at a meeting in Boom Tren-
chard's Flare Path restaurant and
bar in San Diego.
JERRY ALFRED WHITWORTH
.. ,espionage trial begins this week
worth would be responsible for ob-
taining such information, the profits
from the enterprise to be split
equally between them."
The indictment details a series of
more than 20 meetings, in Califor-
nia, Norfolk, Hong Kong and the
Philippines, at which Whitworth
allegedly passed classified informa-
tion to Walker. The meetings were
often followed shortly by meetings
betwen Walker and his Soviet con-
tact, according to the indictment.
In addition to the charge that he
conspired with Walker to commit
espionage, Whitworth faces eight
counts of espionage for allegedly
passing Walker classified information
from the aircraft carrier USS Con-
stellation, the USS Niagara Falls, the
Naval Telecommunications Center at
Alameda, Calif., and the nuclear air-
craft carrier USS Enterprise. At
those postings Whitworth held in-
creasingly responsible jobs in com-
munications, with access to intelli-
gence messages and coding material.
The Navy colleagues had met a Whitworth, a balding, bearded,
few years earlier when Whitworth studious-looking man who has been
was a communications instructor at held without bond since his arrest,
the Service School Command in San grew up on a 600-acre wheat and
Diego and Walker was assistant di- soybean farm in Muldrow, Okla.,
rector of the Radioman "A" school near the Arkansas border. He was
there. Walker had been spying for voted "class clown" at Muldrow High
the Soviets since 1968, but by and left home at age 17. He joined
1974-two years before his retire- the Navy in 1962, and he specialized
ment from the Navy-he had appar- in communications in a career that
ently decided to expand his opera- took him across the globe.
tions. Whitworth's uncle, Willard
At Boom Trenchard's, the indict- Owens, said Whitworth "sounds
ment alleges, the two men "formed great" despite nine months in jail
an espionage partnership whereby and remains optimistic about his
Walker would eventually be respon- chances for acquittal. "He believes
s
ible for the transportation and sale that h
's going to come free of the
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His twice-weekly conversations
with Whitworth, he said, touch on
the monotony of the jail food and the
newspapers and magazines Whit-
worth has been reading, but they
mostly focus on life in Muldrow.
.We talk about things here at
home mostly," he 'said, "about the
farm and the way it used to be and
the way it will be when he comes
out."
Prosecutor: `The Best Job a Lawyer Can Have'
William S. Farmer Jr., the chief prosecutor in the
Whitworth case, believes that being a federal prosecu-
tor "is the best job a lawyer can have."
A banker's son who grew up in the South but fell in
love with San Francisco "after having taken one cable
car ride," Farmer, who is known as "Buck," started in
the San Francisco office of the Justice Department's
antitrust division, working on oil mergers and timber
bid-rigging cases.
He switched to the U.S. attorney's office in 1979 in
order to get more trial experience, but he still likes to
handle complex cases. "The quick case, the routine stuff
is not so much a challenge because ... one person's
dope case is going to look like another person's dope
case," said Farmer, a graduate of Princeton University
and the University of Texas Law School.
Farmer, 44, who is being assisted at the trial by As-
sistant U.S. Attorney Leida B. Schoggen, worked on
the espionage case against James Harper, an electron-
ics engineer who helped his wife sell stolen documents
from a Palo Alto, Calif., defense contractor to Polish
intelligence agents. Harper pleaded guilty in 1984 and
was sentenced to life in prison.
But the most memorable of the cases handled by the
U.S. attorney's office during Farmer's six years there
was one that involved hinr a bit too personally.
Farmer was sitting in his office one day in 1982, he
recalled, when "just on a whim" he chose to accept a
collect telephone call from an inmate at Lompoc Prison.
Farmer had successfully prosecuted a Colombian co-
caine dealer, Jose Robert Gomez-Soto, who was serving
time at Lompoc.
The inmate caller, Leon (Magic) Colburn, told Farm-
er that Gomez-Soto was plotting to assassinate Farmer,
the federal judge who had sentenced him, several wit-
nesses and federal agents.
"Magic" was supposed to be the hit man, and the FBI
arranged to have him cooperate, but there were some
nerve-racking days, Farmer recalled, "when I was wor-
ried to death that 'Magic' wouldn't be taken out of pris-
on and Gomez-Soto would go through some other line of
communication [to arrange the hit] and we wouldn't
know anything about it."
The plot was foiled, and Gomez-Soto and his son
were eventually convicted of conspiracy to murder, but
"it was a harrowing experience," Farmer said. "At the
time I didn't appreciate the fact that I was scared."
- Ruth Marcus
Larson Takes on `Most Challenging' Case
Jerry Whitworth's chief defense lawyer, James Lar-
son, is no stranger to defending underdogs.
A graduate of Stanford University and UCLA law
school, Larson said he was active in "the movement"
during the 1960s and ended up representing "draft re-
sisters, black liberation groups, prisoners and alleged
lefties."
The most celebrated was Wendy Yoshimura, a
Symbionese Liberation Army member captured with
heiress Patricia Hearst in San Francisco in 1975. Yo-
shimura was convicted of illegal possession of weapons
and explosives in connection with terrorist activity in
Berkeley, Calif., in the early 1970s.
"Philosophically and politically I am always concerned
with the abuse of power by the government, and I think
there are a lot of interesting intellectual and moral is-
sues involved in criminal law," Larson, 42, said in a re-
cent interview.
The Whitworth case is Larson's first espionage trial,
and "it's definitely the most challenging of all," he said.
"Particularly in this case, you've got the full weight and
power of the government coming down on an individual,
and the drama basically takes place on the front page of
the newspaper. It really calls upon every resource that
you've got to defend him."
Larson has been working full time on the Whitworth
case for about six months. His cocounsel is Tony Tam-
burello, who has simultaneously been preparing to han-
dle the retrial of Larry Layton, former People's Temple
member charged with conspiracy in the 1978 slaying of
a California Democratic congressman Leo J. Ryan at
Jonestown, Guyana.
Tamburello's fees are being paid by the government
because-although the federal death penalty for spying
has been invalidated-espionage under the law is still
technically a capital crime that entitles a defendant to a
second lawyer.
"I'm certainly looking forward to a resolution of the
case," Larson said. "I think it's going to be a very inter-
esting trial."
- Ruth Marcus
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