Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (11 page)

While John was gone one afternoon in 1968, Barbara discovered a metal box hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk at home. Inside were several rolls of film, and black-and-white photographs of country roads with trees and bushes marked with hand-drawn arrows. There was a map too, and a hand-printed note that said, in part, “information not what we wanted, want information on rotor.” In big red block letters at the top of the note were the words, “Please Destroy.” The box contained $2,000 in cash too.

During the next couple of weeks, Barbara tried to make sense of her discovery. She finally confronted John.

“Tell me about the box,” she said. “What does it mean?”

“I’m a spy,” John replied. “That’s where I get all the money.”

Eighteen years later, after John was arrested, Barbara Walker recalled her exchange with John in testimony before a secret federal grand jury in Baltimore, Maryland. She was under oath when she testified.

QUESTION:
What occurred during the confrontation?

ANSWER:
I called him a traitor.

Q:
When you called him a traitor, what was his reaction?

A:
He told me to shut up, that someone might hear me.

Q:
Was there a physical confrontation as well?

A:
Yes.

Barbara Walker later said that John had punched her in the face, giving her two black eyes. But that was not all that she blamed on John.

Q:
Would it be fair to say, Mrs. Walker, that you are an alcoholic?

A:
Yes, it would.

Q:
Is that a condition which began to develop around the time that you are telling us about now?

A:
Yes.

John Walker denied Barbara’s claims that he had beaten her physically and driven her to drink. When we spoke, John said that he was aware of Barbara’s implication that she had objected to his spying out of a sense of loyalty to her country. The issue of patriotism never came up, John insisted.

“Barbara’s big concern was the same that it always had been,” John said. “She wanted to know why I didn’t love her anymore. Why I didn’t want to spend time with her and the kids, or just her. And I said, ‘Hey, you want to know why I don’t love you anymore? Let me count the ways, Barbara! Where do you want me to begin?’ You see, Barbara was contributing nothing to my life at the time, almost like my father was with my mother.

“I swear that’s how the argument began. It didn’t have anything to do with patriotism. She concocted that stuff about calling me a traitor to make herself look better. Hell, she wanted to know how I did it – she began asking me all kinds of questions because she thought it was exciting – and then she said to me, ‘Can I get involved in this with you?’ and I said, ‘Barbara, I’m going to get arrested any goddamn minute. Why do you want to get involved?’ and she said, ‘Because I want to prove my love for you. This is something we can do together.’ That’s what it was all about. Not patriotism.

“It was really sad because she never did figure out how to keep me happy.”

At the time John made those statements to me, he was clearly angry at Barbara for turning him in to the FBI. He wanted to hurt her. But John insisted he was telling the truth.

When I told Barbara Walker how John had described their confrontation, she began to cry. She also appeared irritated that someone might actually believe him.

“I’ve told the truth,” she said. “I called him a traitor and he hit me. I love my country.”

Barbara Walker acknowledged that she had questioned John about his spying and had volunteered to go with him on a dead drop. The explanation that she gave me was almost identical to what she told the grand jury during her sworn testimony.

Q:
Did you offer to go with him on a drop?

A:
Yes. I did.

Q:
Why did you offer to go on the drop?

A:
Since the marriage and our family structure was falling apart, I thought that if I showed him that I cared, that would help things to change.

Barbara Walker hammered home that same point to me during our more than thirty conversations. “Family always came first to me,” she said repeatedly. “You got to understand that.” At the same time, she rarely mentioned patriotism.

Barbara Walker’s testimony before the grand jury also included an exchange that inadvertently supported John’s explanation for why he became a KGB spy.

Q:
Did John ever tell you why he was engaged in this activity?

A:
The business in South Carolina was failing, and I was trying to maintain household expenses, plus the business, and I often would take my engagement ring to a pawnshop and pawn it. Every time I did, I told him about it.

Q:
He told you that he was doing it for the money?

A:
Yes.

Money and family. They were the two themes that continued to surface whenever I spoke to John and Barbara.

While Barbara and John disagreed about what happened the day she learned he was a spy, both agreed about what happened next.

John saw Barbara’s willingness to go with him on a dead drop as a “great opportunity.”

“I knew,” John told me, “that wives couldn’t be forced to testify against their husbands. If she went with me, then, even if I divorced her, she would still be my accomplice.”

Barbara did drive John to his next dead drop. He sat beside her in the front seat scanning the route with a pair of high-powered binoculars for possible FBI agents. Barbara told me later that she was petrified during the exchange. But she didn’t make any mistakes or panic when John first jumped from the car to drop his trash bag of documents, and later to pick up his KGB cash. The KGB had put two soft drink cans in the trash bag that John retrieved. Neatly tucked inside the cans were fifty-dollar bills, each rolled tight like cigarettes. Back home that night, John asked Barbara to set up her ironing board and press each fifty-dollar bill so that it would lay flat. She obliged.

“At that point, as far as I was concerned,” John later told me, “Barbara was just as much a spy as I was!”

The distinction that Barbara Walker had betrayed her country, not for money – as he had done – but because of a misguided love for him and a devotion to her children never crossed John’s mind.

Chapter 15

In the summer of 1968, John Walker made a startling discovery. His money hadn’t made any of his personal problems disappear. In fact, he was more miserable now than he ever had been. The swanky apartment, expensive furnishings, and elaborate dinners hadn’t helped his marriage. “Barbara kept nagging me,” John claimed, “worse than before.” Barbara had become deeply depressed and began drinking more and more. John’s military career also was in trouble.

“I kept thinking that I was going to be arrested and I couldn’t concentrate at work. Promotions suddenly didn’t matter. Nothing mattered because any minute I was going to get arrested. I just knew it.”

John had received high marks in late 1967 from his first boss at the Navy message center, John Rogers. “John ran his watch well,” Rogers recalled. “There were no boo-boos. Traffic moved good. He was a smart-ass sometimes, but as far as I was concerned, he did a hell of a good job in the sub center when he worked for me.”

But by July 1968, John’s work was becoming slipshod.

Bill Metcalf, who became John’s boss that summer, considered John an abysmal watch officer. “My boss and I used to go to sea periodically and when we got back, we never knew what the hell was going to be wrong because Johnny Walker had been left in charge,” remembered Metcalf. “You could bet that he’d gotten into some type of a jam with his smart mouth. He just wasn’t as interested in doing as good a job as the other watch officers.”

John knew he was headed for disaster, but he didn’t know how to deal with his own paranoia. At one point, the KGB warned John in a note that the FBI had developed a new sophisticated homing device that it used to follow a suspect’s car. The device not only kept agents abreast of the location of the car, but also signaled when its automatic transmission was put into neutral or park. John had always been afraid the FBI would tail him to a dead drop. Now he was even more worried that a swarm of FBI agents would arrest him when he stopped to pick up his KGB cash.

John began renting cars in Washington because he thought they would be more difficult for the FBI to bug. He also began leaving his car’s automatic transmission in “drive” when he stopped during a dead drop. He kept the car from moving by jamming on its emergency brake. This worked fine until the emergency brake on one of his rental cars broke. He ended up chasing the unoccupied car down a deserted country road while carrying a trash bag filled with KGB cash.

“I was going wacky,” John recalled. “I couldn’t sleep. I was miserable and I seriously considered killing myself again because my life was such a nightmare.”

John’s colleagues noticed that John was more nervous than usual and that he suddenly had more money than before, but still no one suspected him of being a spy.

John bragged constantly about the money he made from leasing his bar, so much so that Howard Sparks, a fellow watch officer, visited it one day when he was on an assignment in Charleston. Much to John’s relief, Sparks reported that the place was filled with customers.

Bill Metcalf, meanwhile, disliked John. “The problems with Johnny Walker involved moral turpitude. The guy just didn’t have any moral standards as far as I was concerned. He constantly bragged about women and if a woman looked twice at him, why he’d be unzipping his britches. But there was never any hint that he was mishandling cryptographic material.”

In August 1968, John held a beer party on his sailboat, and a dozen young sailors and their girlfriends came. Jimi Elizabeth Thomas, an exuberant nineteen-year-old student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, was one of the guests. Jimi’s initials spelled JET and her friends nicknamed her Jimi-Jet because she lived her life like a jet-propelled aircraft breaking the sound barrier. No one talked faster, drank more, smoked as much, or danced longer than the light-brown-haired, buxom farm girl who seemed to end all of her sentences with a self-deprecating laugh.

“John was the only person at the party in uniform,” Jimi Thomas recalled when we spoke, “and he was at least ten years older than the rest of us. He seemed so mature and interesting because he had so much more experience than any of us. We talked and talked and talked and, of course, we drank. Oh did we drink! Alcohol turned out to be a predominant part of our relationship. Anyway, John eventually asked me for a date and I said yes. I think he told me that he was separated or divorced, I can’t remember which, but it wasn’t important at the time because I probably would have gone out with him anyway. The hard cold truth is that my standards were unfortunately not what they should have been at the time.”

Jimi came from a conservative, lower middle class family in Kinston, a rural North Carolina community, and she was eager to probe the fancy life that John quickly offered.

“I loved to dress up and we would go to the nicest restaurants in Norfolk, and I loved it, just loved it. John would buy dinner and we would drink and listen to bands and I knew it had to cost a bundle, but it didn’t seem to matter to him, not at all. I wanted both worlds: my campus life with the fraternity parties and school friends, and also the life of fancy restaurants and dress-up.” Jimi saw John only on week nights because weekends were reserved for campus functions. The arrangement suited him fine because it left his weekends for sailing and didn’t raise any suspicions at home.

Being with Jimi was a wonderful diversion for John. He delighted in showing her how to open lobster claws and marveled at her bubbly excitement over ordering for the first time from a menu written only in French. He explained his money by telling her that he was in the Mafia – a confession that excited, rather than repelled, Jimi-Jet.

Barbara Walker also was seeing someone else during this time period. In September 1968, Arthur and Rita moved from Key West to Virginia Beach, a community that abuts Norfolk, and Barbara and Arthur resumed their sexual relationship.

Once again, their accounts of what happened differ. Arthur told me that he and Barbara only slept together once in Norfolk, but Barbara insisted that Arthur had a key to the back door of her apartment.

“Art used to go to lunch with John and find out exactly what he was doing that afternoon to make sure that he wasn’t going to come home unexpectedly,” she told me. “He would rush over and we’d go to bed.”

I noticed Barbara Walker’s obvious distaste for Arthur whenever she spoke about him. “He is much worse than John,” she told me several times. When I asked Arthur about this, he told me that Barbara had always been jealous of his seemingly idyllic marriage to Rita. Rita Walker also made the same comment separately to me. At one point after Arthur was arrested, Barbara Walker telephoned Rita Walker and told her the names of several women who, she claimed, Arthur had had sex with while married to Rita.

One of the enigmas of the Walker spy case concerns a statement Barbara Walker made to the FBI about her bedroom escapades with Arthur in Norfolk during the fall of 1968.

Barbara claimed that she told Arthur that John was a spy. Arthur responded, she said, by saying, “If it’s any consolation to you, I did the same thing, only on a smaller scale and for a shorter period of time.” Barbara Walker said she was so stunned by Arthur’s response that she didn’t ask him any other questions. The FBI was shocked by Barbara Walker’s comment and immediately speculated that Arthur might have become a KGB spy prior to John. But even though Barbara Walker passed a polygraph test that indicated she was telling the truth, the FBI was never able to find any evidence that Arthur Walker had been involved in espionage before his brother.

Arthur Walker vigorously denied that Barbara ever told him anything about John’s espionage. When I asked him about her statements, Arthur said it was possible that Barbara “might have thought she told me something like that” but during the heat of passion, he either misunderstood her or wasn’t paying any attention.

“Barbara likes to speak in riddles,” he said. “She might have said, ‘John is doing something illegal,’ or ‘John is doing something immoral,’ and I might have responded by saying, ‘Well, so have I,’ but she never told me that John was a spy. That’s not something you’d forget.”

Whatever revelations Barbara made to Arthur in 1968, both she and her husband were busy with their secret lovers. In November, John took Jimi-Jet to Washington with him. She stayed in a motel while he, unbeknownst to her, went on a dead drop exchange. After he returned, they drove to Baltimore for a night of drinking at various striptease bars.

Before Jimi left college on Christmas break, John bought her a diamond dinner ring, and on Christmas Eve, he sent her three poinsettias. Her parents and friends were impressed, but Jimi was beginning to feel uneasy.

“I didn’t love Johnny Walker,” she recalled. “I loved the good times that he could offer, but I didn’t love him and he knew that. The interest that held me was his money and the good times. It was all materialistic.”

When Jimi returned to school in January, she decided to stop seeing John, but he telephoned her room and announced that he had made reservations for a trip to Miami. “I’d really never been anywhere and I wanted to go. Of course, we flew first class – John always did – and once again, it was nonstop drinking. But John took me shopping and bought me anything I wanted – anything. He never bought anything for himself, but he spent money on me.”

John was getting his money’s worth, “Jimi was literally saving my life,” he recalled. “She was the only good thing I had going at the time.”

When Jimi told John she didn’t love him and felt uncomfortable with their relationship, he reacted by spending even more money on her than before and planning more exotic adventures.

“John was not a demanding lover at all,” Jimi Thomas told me. “Twice during a weekend was fine with him. He seemed more interested in being close to someone.”

When the college semester ended in May, she returned to Kinston and did not contact John. That fall John was told that his work at the message center was becoming unsatisfactory. He decided to ask for a transfer, in part because he felt it might be safer for him to spy in a new job farther away from the FBI and Washington. He was ordered to report in mid-September to radioman school at the Naval Training Center in San Diego, California. On September 10, 1969, John’s first formal negative evaluation was placed in his file.

“Chief Warrant Officer Walker is an individual with excellent potential as a communications specialist. However, during this reporting period he has allowed his performance to fall below his previous level. The apparent lack of interest in his job, with the consequent reduction in the reliability of his performance, have contributed directly or indirectly to numerous serious mistakes.”

The Navy knew something was wrong with John, but no one bothered to investigate what it might be, despite his top secret crypto clearance and abundance of cash.

John told Barbara that he would send for her and the children after he got settled in California. Then he telephoned Jimi and asked her to fly to Norfolk for a final weekend together. He took her to dinner at the Officers’ Club.

“He was on edge,” Jimi recalled. “He wanted me to be close to him. There was a special plea for that. I don’t know what he was searching for, but he wanted something. He wanted a relationship with someone.”

While John and Jimi were at the club’s bar having drinks, a co-worker of John’s approached and began talking to Jimi. He had been attending an aloha party in one of the club’s back rooms and he took a Hawaiian lei off his neck and draped it around Jimi’s.

As John and Jimi drove away from the club that night, John reached over and snatched the lei from Jimi’s neck.

“It was the first time I had seen him angry,” said Jimi, “He was a very unhappy man.”

Jimi, who later became a born-again Christian, never heard from John Walker again.