THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Monday, May 29, 1995                   TAG: 9505260024
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A10  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Letter 
                                             LENGTH: Short :   38 lines

WALKER IS A CRIMINAL FOR HIS TRAITOR ACTIONS

Your newspaper's liberal bias, and the wide gulf between you and your readers, was never more evident than in Sunday's front page. Here you are, the only newspaper to serve the city with the largest naval base in the world, and you choose to print a front page color picture of, and devote three pages to a traitorous spy.

You seek to illicit sympathy for Arthur Walker. Ten years ago, you write, he was a model suburban gentleman. Now that his wife divorced him, and he has lost all his assets, you want us to feel sorry for him. You decided his sentence is too harsh.

You attempt to minimize his crime by reporting the information he sold is available in unclassified sources in any library. So what? He traded classified documents for cash. It was not his prerogative to evacuate the legitimacy of the classification.

Do you even know what a Confidential designation means? While it has been a few years since I read the definition, it roughly states that unauthorized disclosure of Confidential information may cause harm to the United States.

It is indeed fortunate that as you report, no deaths are attributed to what Walker and his family did. That, however, should have no bearing on his punishment. Human casualties ceratinly were a possibility that did not seem to have concerned them.

Arthur Walker is a criminal, who sold out his country after a career of wearing its uniform.

PETER W. STROMANN

Virginia Beach, May 22, 1995 by CNB