Betraying Navy - and Country

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Little is known about how Walker might have been recruited. Money appears to have been a motive. A former Navy communications man who served with Walker at Norfolk in the late '60s told TIME that Walker liked to live well even then. At one point during the period when Walker is now believed to have begun spying, the man recalled, Walker bought a 27-ft. sloop, no small feat on the salary of a young naval officer. Walker seems to have been enchanted by skulduggery: although a professional spy would not normally lug around incriminating evidence, Walker was caught carrying the map of drop sites, plus code pads, secret writing equipment and ciphers.

While the full extent of the security damage Walker caused may never be known, he had access over the years to some of the most sensitive information that the Navy possesses. After serving on two nuclear-missile-carrying submarines, the U.S.S. Andrew Jackson and the U.S.S. Simon Bolivar, from 1962 to 1967, Walker was posted to Norfolk from 1967 to 1969. There he was privy to communications codes for the entire U.S. Atlantic submarine fleet.

Even as the Walker scandal broke, another notorious spy case came to a close in a Los Angeles federal courtroom. Former Northrop Engineer Thomas Cavanagh, 40, was sentenced last week to 99 years in prison for attempting to sell "stealth" aircraft technology to FBI agents posing as Soviet embassy personnel. His price for this vital information: a modest $25,000.

Alarmed by the recent spate of cases in which Americans have supplied U.S. military secrets to the Soviets, the Senate on Friday added an amendment to the defense authorization bill. If enacted, the provision will mandate execution or life imprisonment without parole for anyone convicted of espionage for a Communist country. Said Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd, who introduced the amendment: "Those who would even contemplate such an outrage must know that their punishment will be certain and irrevocable."