Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (14 page)

They flew to Dulles International Airport and checked into a Holiday Inn in Fairfax, Virginia. The exchange with the KGB went smoothly, and when they returned to the motel, Barbara was startled at the amount of cash that John had received. She began counting the used fifty and one-hundred-dollar bills, arranging them in neat stacks of $1,000 on the double bed. It took her several minutes, and when she was finished, she had thirty-five stacks in front of her.

How were they going to get $35,000 in cash home without arousing suspicion at the airport? she asked. What if airport security decided to open their carry-on bags?

John suggested that they hide as much of the money as they could inside the lining of Barbara’s coat. They would tape the rest of the cash to their bodies. Barbara tore open the seam and stuffed several stacks of bills inside. When she was finished, John handed her a long piece of gauze and a roll of thick white tape, which she used to attach bills around his waist. He did the same for her, forming a green girdle of somber pictures of Ulysses S. Grant and Benjamin Franklin.

John and Barbara easily slipped past airport security. Once their flight was under way, they took turns going into the lavatory to remove the money, which they stuffed into a bag.

“There was no reason to be uncomfortable during the flight,” John said. “No one checks a passenger’s carryon bag when they deplane.”

After they returned home, they went to their bank and opened their safe deposit box. John had brought along ten envelopes, and he put $2,500 into each one, and then put all the envelopes in the box.

“You should come to the bank on the first of every month and take out one envelope,” John told Barbara. “Each envelope has one thousand dollars in it for our monthly bills. The mortgage, telephone, water, etc. The other fifteen hundred is spending money.”

Barbara was to buy cashier’s checks from a teller before she left the bank and use them to pay the bills by mail. Under no circumstances, John said, was Barbara to deposit any cash in their personal checking account.

“There is no way we can justify the cash flow,” he told her.

Barbara nodded. She assured John that she would take good care of his money while he was at sea.

Chapter 20

On June 16, 1972, the
Niagara Falls
left San Francisco for the naval station at Subic Bay, Republic of the Philippines, its foreign home port. Technically, the three-year-old
Niagara Falls
was a warship, but its most striking features were not its armaments, which included four 3-inch guns, but its cranes. Fourteen different lifting devices rose from the supply ship’s deck, like television antennae clustered on the rooftop of a crowded Bronx tenement. The ship also had two twin-jet, turbine- powered helicopters for transporting passengers and cargo.

The
Niagara Falls
actually was a floating shopping mall, 581 feet long, 79 feet across at its widest point, and filled with up to 16,050 tons of such items as uniforms, jet fighter parts, apples, medical supplies, ice cream, and mail. It had a crew of 424, including John.

The radio room was John’s empire, where he supervised all message traffic to and from the ship and, for the first time in his naval career, had “officer deck duties,” which meant he sometimes got to steer the ship.

Because the
Niagara Falls
was scheduled to be gone for ten months, it carried an extraordinary amount of cryptographic materials, including keylists for all of the Navy’s most important crypto machines.

These included the KWR-37, the NSA’s newest cryptographic machine; the KL-47, which was still used as a backup system; the KY-8, a voice scrambling machine that made voice communications sound like chatter by an incoherent Donald Duck; and the KW-7, still the most widely used encoding and deciphering device for the U.S. military. All keylists aboard the ship were kept inside a special safe located inside a large steel vault protected by a combination lock.

But such security was meaningless when the person in charge was a spy. John was the only officer on the ship who had the authority to inspect the keylists and various crypto technical manuals at any time without anyone else present in the vault.

Just as he had predicted, this gave him tremendous access. Sometimes he kept his Minox camera locked in his desk inside the crypto vault so he could pull it out whenever he needed to photograph keylists or an interesting classified message. He kept the exposed rolls of film in his camera bag. Safe inside the vault, he would spend hours photographing the NSA-created codes for operating cryptographic machines.

By mid-July, John’s ship was busy replenishing U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam. It was the middle of the monsoon season, and the
Niagara Falls
was frequently caught in turbulent seas and heavy rains. Yet it managed to deliver a record number of supplies to fifty-three warships during a fourteen-day period.

It soon developed a routine. It would deliver goods to warships off the Vietnam coast for fifteen days and then return to Subic Bay to restock its shelves, which could take from five to fifteen days.

Because John was the
Niagara Falls
Classified Material System (CMS) custodian, he often was asked to serve as a courier when the ship made its supply run. If a warship needed a fresh batch of keylists, John tucked them into a briefcase chained to his wrist and flew by helicopter to the ship and its waiting CMS custodian. While there, John asked if the ship had any top secret dispatches that needed to be hand-delivered to another warship awaiting replenishment by the
Niagara Falls
. Most of the time, John was given a pouch filled with various classified material to deliver “up the line.”

Working as a courier gave John access to such a wide range of secrets that after his arrest, the Navy could not determine exactly what John might have stolen or how it might have affected naval operations in Vietnam.

Sometimes John delivered top secret dispatches by helicopter to various officials in Da Nang. He always tried to schedule these trips so he could spend the night in the city and visit the bars and whorehouses.

“I usually hid a few beers in my briefcase for the guys on ship when I got back.”

Flying into a war zone was exhilarating, John said. “I carried a twelve-gauge pump shotgun sometimes, and always had my forty-five automatic with me.”

While returning one afternoon from making a delivery in Da Nang, John saw white smoke rising from the brush below the helicopter. “Me and a crew member were leaning out the side door of the helo. The door slides up, and it was open because it was hotter than hell inside the helo. It seemed like 115 degrees at least, so we were leaning out. I didn’t have any communication in my helmet, so I couldn’t talk to the pilots or the other crew members because of all the noise, but I knew immediately that we were being fired upon and the white smoke was muzzle flashes.”

John grabbed the crew member and pointed at the smoke, but he didn’t see it.

“We’re being fucking shot at!” he yelled. “We’re being fucking shot at!” But John’s voice couldn’t be heard because of the engine noise. John drew his .45 automatic pistol. “I thought, ‘I’ll show those fucking idiots what’s going on!’ ”

He fired the entire clip at the spot where he had seen the white smoke.

When the helicopter landed on the deck of the
Niagara Falls
, John rushed up to speak with the pilot.

“Hey, we were fired at!” John explained, but the pilot was unconvinced. John got mad. “Look, I saw the muzzle flashes!” he said.

“The smoke could have been something else,” the pilot replied. Besides, if we were fired at, they missed, so there isn’t any proof.”

“Listen, we were shot at, you dumb shit,” John said. “I’m the officer and officers don’t lie, and if I said we were shot at and we returned fire, then that’s what we did.”

The pilot shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, okay, we were shot at.”

“Now listen,” John continued, “the regulations say that if you are shot at and you return fire, then you should get the combat action ribbon. So we should get it because we saw combat.”

The pilot disagreed.

“C’mon, they’ll think we’re nuts if we put in for that!”

But John insisted, “I’m the officer and I’m telling you to submit our names for it.”

A few days later, John and the helicopter crew were called before the ship’s executive officer, who told them that they had no business putting themselves in for the combat ribbon. John was denied the award.

On October 2, the
Niagara Falls
arrived in Hong Kong for “R & R,” described in the ship’s log as “five glorious and carefree days.” John told his commanding officer that he was experiencing severe financial difficulties at a bar he owned in South Carolina and had to return home immediately.

“The captain was really pissed because he didn’t think officers should take leave. But he let me go.” As required, John was thoroughly searched before he left the ship. The shore patrol was trying to stop sailors from smuggling supplies off the ship and selling them in Hong Kong’s black market. No one questioned the dozen rolls of exposed film in John’s camera bag, however. There was no reason to suspect that they contained anything other than snapshots of fellow crew members. John was following his golden rule for spying once again. KISS.

John arrived in Union City unannounced because he wanted to check on what Barbara was doing. “She was drunk,” he claimed. “All of the money in the safety deposit box was gone. The kids got some of it, I know,” John remembered. “They had been getting up early in the morning and sneaking into Barbara’s room and going through her purse. They didn’t take five or ten dollars. They took hundreds and just spent it.”

John flew immediately to Washington, D.C., and delivered his film from the
Niagara Falls
to the KGB. “I had to make an emergency drop to get enough money to pay the bills,” John explained. The KGB gave him approximately $30,000 at the drop.

When he returned to Union City, he used some of the cash to pay bills. John also prepaid as many monthly bills as he could through April 1973, when the
Niagara Falls
was scheduled to return to Oakland.

He wrapped and stashed the remaining cash inside a hollow cinder block. He covered the block with concrete and cemented it to the floor in the back of the garage. Then he flew back to his ship.

On November 28, the radio room in the
Niagara Falls
received an urgent rescue message. An F-4 jet fighter had crashed somewhere in its vicinity, and the ship was ordered to begin an immediate search for the missing pilots. John helped coordinate the rescue mission as the
Niagara Falls
’s crew scanned the water from the deck looking for flares or other signals from the pilots. It was an exciting time for crew members, and they were disappointed when other ships arrived and took charge of the search.

John knew at the time that the information he had sold the KGB could have contributed to the downing of U.S. jets. The FBI claimed after his arrest that while on the
Niagara Falls
he took photographs of keylists used in Vietnam by U.S. and South Vietnamese troops. These “in-country keylists” were different from the ones that John had already provided the KGB. They were used only in Vietnam and, theoretically, the Soviets could have used them to decipher some U.S. plans about bombing raids and troop movements.

In 1972, when John sold the keylists to the KGB, the Nixon administration was dropping more bombs in Indochina than had ever been dropped during any other war. Yet these bombing raids were not as effective as the military had hoped, and the Pentagon never knew exactly why.

The fact that the KGB could have used John’s information to ambush U.S. troops and pilots in Vietnam didn’t bother him; as usual, he convinced himself the Soviets wouldn’t use his information in that manner. He claimed that the KGB never shared any of his secrets with the North Vietnamese.

“I was simply too valuable to them as a spy,” John explained after his arrest. “If the KGB started giving the North Vietnamese information that I provided, word would have leaked out. The Soviets didn’t want anyone to know they were reading our mail, and I am confident that nothing I gave the KGB ever was relayed to the Viet Congo. Getting a steady supply of keylists was much more important to the KGB than helping an ally.”

It was this type of reasoning that made it easy for John to participate in a thrilling rescue attempt for downed pilots during the afternoon and later that evening photograph all the classified messages about the incident for the KGB to study.

On December 24, the Secretary of the Navy, John Warner, arrived by helicopter aboard the
Niagara Falls
for a Christmas visit. He was the first high-ranking government official whom John met after he became a KGB spy. The experience, John said later, was stimulating. His spying made him feel just as important as Warner, perhaps even more.

None of John’s superiors aboard the
Niagara Falls
had the remotest suspicion he was a spy, as evidenced by his 1972 performance evaluation:

“CWO-2 Walker is intensely loyal, taking great pride in himself and the naval service, fiercely supporting its principles and traditions. He possesses a fine sense of personal honor and integrity, coupled with a great sense of humor. He is friendly, intelligent and possesses the ability to work in close harmony with others. He is especially at ease in social situations and has an active self-improvement program which includes enrollment in the commercial instrument flying course and the completion of naval intelligence correspondence course. He is an active sailboat enthusiast and an accomplished aircraft pilot....”

When the
Niagara Falls
returned to Oakland on April 12, 1973, John hurried home to reclaim the money that he had hidden in the garage six months before. He found the concrete chipped away and the money inside the cinder block gone. Once again, the Walkers were broke, and John left immediately for Washington and another dead drop. The KGB had restored John’s salary to $4,000 per month after he resumed delivering keylists and John anticipated a payment of nearly $50,000 in salary and various bonus payments.

When he opened the KGB trash bag, John found a long note, handwritten entirely in capital letters:

PLEASE DESTROY!

DEAR FRIEND, WELCOME BACK! IT HAS BEEN A LONGTIME! HOW WAS THE TRIP? WHAT ARE YOUR IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES? I HOPE YOU ARE FINE, EVERYTHING IS OKAY AND YOU ARE ENJOYING YOUR VACATION. ENCLOSED ARE $24,500. THIS INCLUDES THE PAYMENT FOR THE PERIOD OF SIX MONTHS PLUS $500 FOR EXPENSES. THE REST OF THE MONEY THAT WE OWE YOU WILL BE ENCLOSED IN MY NEXT DELIVERY TOGETHER WIT USUAL AMOUNT DUE TO YOU AT THIS TIME. I REALIZE THAT YOU MAY RESENT THIS PROCEDURE, BUT WE ARE DOING IT OUT OF CONCERN FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY. MY DELIVERY IS ALREADY MUCH TOO VOLUMINOUS AND DIFFICULT TO HIDE. UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, WE DECIDED TO SPLIT THE AMOUNT IN ORDER TO REDUCE ITS VOLUME AND THUS THE RISK OF AN ACCIDENTAL EXPOSURE DURING THE INSPECTION AT THE AIRPORT IN VIEW OF THE NEW SECURITY REGULATIONS INTRODUCED AT AIR TERMINAL IN JANUARY. THE SECURITY HAD BEEN STEPPED UP TO SUCH A DEGREE THAT I AM SERIOUSLY WORRIED WHETHER YOU WILL BE ABLE TO GET SAFELY THROUGH INSPECTION THE CONTENTS OF THIS DELIVERY. . .

The note was several pages long and contained instructions for future meetings, but John paused after reading the first page. The KGB, he decided, was “jerking” him around, and he was angry. But there was little he could do about the decision, and he had something more pressing to worry about.

It was almost time for him to undergo a routine background investigation by the FBI. Everyone with a top secret clearance was required to undergo a security check every five years. It was a routine procedure: an FBI agent would review John’s credit records and question his friends, neighbors, and relatives to learn if he had any sort of problem that made him a security risk.

John wasn’t worried about anything that he had done. But he was “scared to death of Barbara’s mouth.”

“Barbara had been saying stuff to her stupid relatives and even our kids,” John recalled. “She’d have a few drinks and then she’d call one of her relatives and say something like, ‘You don’t know what a son of a bitch John is. He’s involved in crime and if you knew what it was, you would urge me to murder the bastard.’ ”