Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (19 page)

“I considered it nothing but blackmail,” he recalled.

John told Barbara that he would help her out financially if and when he could. But now that he was out of the Navy, he claimed his spy income had stopped.

“I was trying to wean her from the spy money by convincing her that I wasn’t getting anything more from the Soviets,” he said. “I had made up my mind before the divorce was signed that I wasn’t going to support that bitch any longer, and I thought if I could convince her that I had stopped spying, then she really would be out of my life for good.”

Barbara felt betrayed. “He’d promised to pay me and I’d agreed to keep the alimony out of the court document,” she told me. “I had protected him once again, and he had lied to me.”

John hadn’t wanted to retire, especially from the job that he had in Norfolk. As a member of the staff of the commander of the Atlantic surface forces, John had both an impressive title and a cushy job.

In truth, John was a mailman.

He supervised the delivery of classified messages to offices across the sprawling naval base with a staff of six, including four young women whom he dubbed “Johnny Walkers girls.”

“It was the best job I had in the Navy for getting pussy,” he said.

But after he and Barbara were divorced, John felt he had no choice but to retire because he knew that he couldn’t survive a background investigation and he was afraid to chance forging another one.

“It was just too risky with Barbara shooting off her mouth.”

Once out of the Navy, John began spending time in the offices of the American Association of Professional Salespersons, a company that he had founded and incorporated in February 1975. The AAPS was not really John’s idea, but rather that of a group of entrepreneurs who decided that independent salesmen and saleswomen were the only professionals in the country not represented by some sort of national association.

John didn’t know anything about sales or national associations, but the business seemed like a “sure money-maker,” Besides, even if it didn’t make a profit, as long as it didn’t become a financial drain, it provided John with a convenient method for laundering his spy income.

John had already rented an office, hired a secretary, and placed advertisements in several magazines. In return for yearly dues of about $150, a member received a pretentious-looking membership card and was promised discounts on the price of hotel rooms and car rentals. The majority of the money went directly into John’s pocket.

One of the first persons whom John asked for help with his new business was his father, Johnny Walker. John had only recently learned where his father lived.

Johnny Walker had deserted Peggy and his sons back in Scranton in 1961. John had just finished submarine school and had reported aboard the U.S.S.
Razorback
in San Diego when Peggy telephoned him, sobbing. Johnny had left a typewritten note on the kitchen table for her. In it, he explained that he no longer loved her and had decided, now that their sons were grown, to leave Scranton with another woman. Johnny’s new romantic interest was Dorothy Dobson, one of Peggy’s co-workers at Prestwood’s Photo Studio.

Peggy was both furious and heartbroken. She had stuck with Johnny Walker through his bouts with alcoholism and his roller coaster careers, and had even turned her head the other way to his philandering.

“Your father swore to me that he wouldn’t do it again,” she told John. “He promised and I believed him.”

The idea that she might also bear some blame for the dissolution of the marriage never entered Peggy’s mind.

The family lost contact with Johnny until November 1964, when he resurfaced and asked Peggy for a divorce so that he and Dorothy could marry. At the time, John was bitter about his father’s actions. John called his father a “goddamn bum” in a sympathetic letter to his mother that Peggy saved. “I’m thoroughly ashamed of him, and if he was to walk in here right now, I’d punch him,” John wrote.

But John’s anger mellowed over the years, and when Peggy told him one day that an uncle had heard Johnny Walker’s voice on the radio while driving through southeastern Maryland, John decided to track down his father. He found him living in a tiny town on the eastern peninsula of Virginia. John got Johnny’s address by telephoning the radio station where he worked. A secretary there also gave him the telephone number, but John didn’t want to risk calling the old man and having him hang up or refuse to meet with him.

John telephoned Arthur, but he wasn’t interested in getting reacquainted with his father. So John drove alone to Temperanceville, the tiny hamlet where Johnny and his second family lived in a rented house.

John tapped on the door. A frail, bespectacled man answered.

“Hello, Dad,” John said.

“Hello, Jack,” Johnny Walker replied, using the name that John had gone by in Scranton. “Coffee?”

Their reunion lasted into the evening. John met Dorothy and his half sisters and brothers. He and his father were uncomfortable at first, but that feeling passed. Like most sons, John had always seen his father, even when he was drunk, as an imposing figure. But after that session, John realized Johnny was, in John’s own words, a “beaten and sickly old man.”

His father still had a magical speaking voice though, and John was certain that Johnny could find a dozen or more recruits for the association of salespersons.

“I told him that he could be the manager for the eastern Virginia region,” John recalled. Johnny would get a finder’s fee for every salesperson who became a member.

“I’d always hated my old man,” John said later. “But after that, I decided, ‘What the hell? He really wasn’t a bad guy after all.’ We didn’t have that much in common anymore, and we were total opposites, but, so what, I didn’t see nothing wrong with us being friends.”

Chapter 30

The “diving” at Diego Garcia turned out to be better than either John Walker or Jerry Whitworth had ever imagined, particularly after Jerry maneuvered himself into the position of Classified Material System [CMS] custodian.

He remained there for one year and didn’t return to the States until March 1976, when he took a sixty-day leave. He immediately flew to Norfolk and gave John eight rolls of film that contained, John said later, the keylists for three cipher systems and hundreds of classified messages. It was an impressive cache, but when Jerry handed it over, he told John that he just didn’t feel quite right about what they were doing.

John immediately paid Jerry $12,000, which represented his salary for the past twelve months, and then counted out another $6,000 bonus and announced that he was raising Jerry’s monthly salary to $2,000.

“Jerry, there’s nothing to feel bad about,” John said. “Remember, there are a lot of buyers out there, including our allies. Don’t worry so much.”

Jerry apparently believed the ruse. Before flying to Norfolk, he had stopped in California and had dinner with Mary Ann Mason. During their conversation, Mary Ann told Jerry about her recent vacation with John.

“He’s still spending money like crazy,” she told Jerry. “He’s bought a couple of airplanes and still has a boat. Tell me, Jerry, where in the world does John get his money?”

“He’s a spy,” Jerry blurted.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Mary Ann Mason told me later. “Jerry told me that Johnny had been selling classified information to an ally country for years and that was why he was so well off. When I asked who the ally was, Jerry told me, ‘Israel,’ and I thought, ‘Wow, what a novel idea, selling information to Israel.’ ”

At the time, Mary Ann didn’t think Jerry was lying. “I really think Jerry believed what he was telling me,” she said, “because he was as taken with the idea as much as I was. He really thought it was exciting and neat, and he told me that John was really doing something significant.”

With $18,000 in cash now in his pockets, Jerry left Norfolk for the Caribbean, where he planned to visit with his former flight instructor from San Diego, who had opened a charter airline service on one of the islands.

A few days after Jerry left, John received a telephone call from him. Jerry’s former teacher hadn’t shown up as promised, and Jerry was furious about being stood up.

“That was so like Jerry,” John said, recalling the incident. “He had always talked like this guy was his best friend, and this guy probably looked at Jerry as just one of some twenty-six students in a class.”

Disappointed, Jerry flew to North Dakota, where he visited Brenda Reis, with whom he had been corresponding since her high school tour at the Naval Training Center. Brenda agreed to return to San Diego with Jerry and live with him while she attended the state university there. They hadn’t planned on marrying, but Jerry soon found that Brenda’s tuition was a strain on his income, so he suggested that they get married in order to qualify for a Navy allotment.

They were wed on May 24, 1976. Jerry insisted that the marriage remain a secret.

“Jerry told me later,” said John, “that he didn’t want all his friends to know that he had screwed up again if the marriage didn’t work out.”

In June, Jerry reported to the U.S.S.
Constellation
, an aircraft carrier, where he once again had excellent access to cryptographic material. The timing of the assignment gave John a chuckle. On July 4, 1976, one of the national television networks used the flight deck of the U.S.S.
Constellation
as the anchor spot for a part of the bicentennial celebration.

When John turned on his television and spotted the U.S.S.
Constellation
, he started laughing. John could just picture Jerry in the ship’s crypto vault snapping photographs of the KW-7 keylist with his spy camera while the rest of the crew was outside watching some Hollywood movie star sing about the two hundredth birthday of the red-white-and-blue.

What made the situation even more hilarious was that Jerry actually seemed to believe he was helping Israel, and John had long disliked Jews.

“I was surrounded by some dumb shits,” he told me.

Now that John had retired from the Navy, the Soviets sent word that they wanted to meet him face-to-face overseas. They suggested three possible sites, only one of which John was able to remember later. Appropriately enough he chose Casablanca and suggested the meeting take place in early August 1977. That was when the U.S.S.
Constellation
was scheduled to arrive in Hong Kong for liberty, and John figured he could meet Jerry there, pick up his film, and then fly to the meeting in Morocco.

John wrote the Soviets a message agreeing to the meet and stuck it in the package that he was preparing to deliver to the KGB in April 1977.

A few days before the scheduled exchange, John made a frightening discovery. He came downstairs from his bedroom one morning and noticed that the door to his study was open.

His first thought was that Sherrie, his half sister and Johnny and Dorothy’s child, had been in there.

Sherrie had leukemia and was undergoing treatment at a Richmond hospital. Because the six-hour drive from her home to the hospital exhausted her and Johnny, the two frequently stopped at John’s house for the night in order to break up the trip from Temperanceville.

Sherrie, who later succumbed to the disease, was an inquisitive child, and she and Johnny Walker had stayed with John the night before. “I figured she had wandered into my study,” John said.

But when John went inside, he became concerned. A window was open and several items on his desk had been moved.

He quickly checked the bottom drawer of his desk where he kept his instructions from the KGB, the KL-47 rotor reader, and other spy-related paraphernalia.

He had made it a practice to place a small piece of clear adhesive tape inconspicuously along one side of the drawer. If the drawer was opened, the tape would be torn in half and John would know instantly that someone had been looking inside.

John checked the tape. It was torn.

He jerked open the drawer and did a quick inventory. Nothing was missing.

“I began to suspect the FBI. I decided they had broken into my room and looked for information about the next drop. It really wasn’t that crazy an idea. I mean, if the FBI had broken into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office over the Pentagon Papers, then what would keep them from going after me?” John explained.

He decided to use someone else to make the dead drop delivery.

John drove to an old Victorian house at 617 West Ocean View Avenue, which he owned, and knocked on the door of an apartment rented by Roberta Kiriluk Puma, a six-foot, 140-pound, twenty-seven-year-old blonde with green eyes. John had met Roberta, who was a freelance writer, artist, and bartender, one year earlier when she had applied to be the resident manager of the six apartments in the house.

John’s pitch was simple: if Roberta went to Washington with him on a business trip, he would forgive a $500 debt that he claimed she owed him. He’d also give her a few bucks for herself. John showed Roberta four photographs of the drop site and explained that she would have to help him make a delivery there.

Roberta Puma later recalled her response to John in a story published in
The Virginian-Pilot
and
The Ledger-Star
after John’s arrest. In that story, which she helped write, Roberta said she considered John’s offer to be “one of the goofiest come-ons” that she had heard. She did not suspect that he was doing anything illegal, she said. Rather, Roberta thought John was trying to get her into bed.

She agreed to go with John after discussing the matter with a friend who urged her to “see how far the charade will go.”

A few days later, John and Roberta drove in his car to Dulles International Airport, where John rented a car for himself. They drove both vehicles to the Ramada Inn in Rockville, where John parked the rental car and slipped into the front seat of his own car with Roberta.

Following his directions, Roberta drove through the drop area on a trial run.

“He didn’t act like there was any particular urgency, and he was not any more nervous than usual,” the newspaper quoted Roberta Puma as saying.

John told Roberta that they would keep in contact that night by talking on Channel 9 of a Citizens Band radio in his car. They would pose as members of an ambulance crew responding to an accident.

A short while after they returned to the hotel, John announced that he was “going out in the field.” As instructed, Roberta left the hotel later that night and drove to the drop area. When she spotted the signal can beside the road, she picked up the CB mike and repeated the message that John had told her to use. “This is mobile one, proceeding to accident scene.”

Roberta waited a few seconds, but John didn’t reply, so she drove through the drop area without stopping and then returned to the Ramada Inn as she had been told to do.

Unbeknownst to Roberta, John had been watching her at the drop area. He had put on military camouflage, smeared his face with black and green greasepaint, and crawled along a drainage ditch until he was a few hundred feet from the road.

“I had my 12-gauge shotgun and my .38 revolver with me,” John later told me, clearly enjoying the recounting of this adventure. “I had arrived near the drop point just when it turned dark, around seven-thirty P.M., and worked my way into the area. I was hoping to come in behind the FBI. I didn’t think they would expect anyone to come at them from behind and I thought I might be able to sneak up on them and see one of them lighting a cigarette, whispering, or maybe overhear them when they received a radio transmission.

“I was hidden in the grass and bushes when Roberta drove into the area and I listened to her transmission through an earphone on my portable radio.”

If the FBI were hiding, John figured they’d make their move and arrest Roberta during her first trip through the drop site.

“No one moved or did anything when she came by, so I figured it was safe, but right after she left, I heard these damn dirt bikes and I saw two lights on the road.”

John buried his face in the dirt.

“Those damn FBI agents got dirt bikes!”

The motorcycles, however, swept past the drop site without stopping.

Hurrying from his hiding place to a pay phone, John called Roberta at the Ramada Inn and told her to make another drive through the area. This time, he told her to toss out the garbage bag that he had brought with him from Norfolk.

John crept back into position in the woods and soon saw the beams from an approaching car. It stopped, and John watched as the murky outline of Roberta stepped out, opened the car trunk, and removed a bag of trash.

He half expected searchlights to flood the area and a battery of FBI agents to rush Roberta and handcuff her. But as she walked toward the telephone pole and put the bag next to it, nothing out of the ordinary happened.

A few minutes later, another car pulled up and a man leaped from the car and grabbed the trash bag. John wasn’t dose enough to see the license plate, but he assumed it was a KGB courier.

The car sped away.

“I immediately figured out that Sherrie must have gotten into my desk drawer and opened the window,” John said later. “I shouldn’t have been worried at all about the FBI. But afterwards, I began to wonder how I would have reacted if I’d come up on some agents in the dark with my shotgun. It might have been an interesting scene – me, heavily armed, sneaking up behind the FBI.”

In the newspaper account, Roberta Puma said John had suggested they spend the night together at the Ramada Inn after she finished making the drop, but she said she refused.

So John drove Roberta home and gave her an envelope filled with cash.

“I opened up the envelope and was stunned,” Roberta Puma said in the news article. “There was fifteen hundred dollars in the envelope, I think. And money hadn’t really been discussed in depth. I wondered if he was testing me, my honesty... .”

She telephoned John and told him that he had overpaid her. The next morning, he took back about $1,000.

Sometime after the drop, John took Roberta to lunch at Knickerbocker’s Restaurant in Norfolk and began asking her a series of hypothetical questions. Would she spend a month in jail for, say, $10,000? He kept increasing the jail time and the money it would be worth, ending at half a million dollars.

“I told him I wouldn’t spend a weekend in jail for any amount of money, any amount,” Roberta Puma said.

John was disappointed.

He had been toying with the idea of hiring Roberta to make his dead drops, thus taking one more step to protect himself from arrest.