Father, son on spy counts

Press, 30 May 1985, Page 6

Father, son on spy counts

NZPA-AP Baltimore, Maryland A grand jury in the United States indicted a former United States Navy communications expert and his seaman son yesterday on charges of supplying United States defence secrets to a Soviet agent for money. The six-count espionage indictment was returned in the United States District Court at Baltimore against John Anthony Walker, aged 47, now a Norfolk, Virginia, private detective, and his son, Michael Lance Walker, aged 22, a seaman assigned to the United States nuclear-powered aircraftcarrier Nimitz, from which some of the secret documents allegedly came. For the first time, the Government charged

formally that the Walkers had worked against their country for money. The grand jury said that the son had begun stealing secrets for the Soviets as early as November or December, 1983, when he had taken such a document from the Ocean Naval Air Station, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The grand jury said that young Walker was paid SUSIOOO ($2200) for this document in March, 1984, but it di<4 not say how the payment was made. The grand jurors identified a Soviet agent to whom, they said, the Walkers had tried to deliver documents on May 19. He was named as Aleksey Gavrilovich Tkachenko, vice-consul at the Soviet Embassy in Washington.