Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (22 page)

PART IV

family

He that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrow.

–
Jeremy Taylor
,
Sermons Vol. 1

Chapter 33

John kept in sporadic touch with his children after the divorce, not because he particularly missed them, but because they were his kids and they might be useful someday. He was still paranoid about the Soviets, and felt vulnerable because he was acting as Jerry’s handler and not producing any classified material himself.

John also knew that Jerry was not the most reliable long-term partner. Jerry’s naval career was a revolving door of discharges and reenlistments, and his life was full of vacillation and bursts of interest and then disinterest in fads. Like a pimp without a working stable of whores, John knew that he would lose his spy income and possibly his life if Jerry ever quit.

“The material we were giving the KGB was just too valuable to chance letting us live if we ever stopped producing,” John explained once again. “Jerry and I were really victims of our own success. I knew that. But I also knew that if I could recruit one of my own children, then the KGB could never lay a hand on me. That is why I went after them. That’s the real reason. They were my only ticket out.”

Whether or not the KGB ever intended to harm John is impossible to tell But in John’S mind, that threat was always there, and recruiting one of his children was the best insurance policy that he could think of.

“It’s a parent’s job to protect the children. Even if they are adults, it’s your obligation as a parent to protect them,” John told me. “I mean, they are your kids. I understood that. I knew that if I recruited any of my kids, I would be putting them in harm’s way. There is no way that I can justify that, but I began to consider the risks and the profits. My kids just didn’t have it. They weren’t going to make anything out of their lives – especially Cynthia, whom everyone had picked on. She didn’t have any self-esteem. This made me start to think of spying in a different way. I had been doing it for a long time, and it was a safe way to make a lot of money. Why not let them in on the gravy train? You see, I was actually helping them. They sure as hell weren’t going to amount to anything on their own.”

By late 1977, Barbara and the children had outstayed their welcome at the farm owned by Annie and Bob Nelson and had moved to Skowhegan, a small Maine town. Barbara had spent all of her money from the divorce. Now broke, she was forced to take a job at the Dexter Shoe Company, cementing shoes together on a piecework basis to support herself, her children, and her mother, who had moved in with her.

Margaret was the first to flee Maine. She moved to Boston, where she lived with family-friends and worked in a factory making plastic cups and bowls. John telephoned her first.

“Margaret had been a feminist since she was five years old,” John recalled. “You couldn’t tell that child anything, and I didn’t think there was much chance of convincing her to go into the service. But I decided to try anyway.”

John convinced Margaret to move to Norfolk and stay with him until she could find her own apartment. He offered to pay for her ticket and expenses until she found work. Once she arrived, John began urging her to join the military.

“As I predicted,” John said, “Margaret wasn’t interested at all in enlisting. ‘I don’t think I could put up with all that discipline’ – the “yes, sirs” and other crap she told me.”

Instead, Margaret enrolled in a junior college and decided to become a graphic artist.

“I couldn’t believe that dummy,” said John. “I went to the library and checked out a census that showed salaries that different professions earned. I said, ‘Look here, Margaret, graphic artists aren’t even listed on this because they don’t make squat.’ But she didn’t care. She was a complete zero brain.”

In fact, John’s effort to recruit Margaret had been half-hearted; her strong personality made it unlikely she would join the service. His next target was exactly the opposite.

When John told me about his attempt to recruit Cynthia, he couched it in the most sympathetic terms possible. “I talked to Laura and Cynthia on the telephone and I really got pissed about the situation up there in Maine,” John said. “Cynthia was just going to rot away up there, so I decided to fly up and rescue her.”

Of all his children, John had shown the least attention to Cynthia, whom he constantly belittled and referred to as “a retard.” But suddenly, he was concerned about her – enough so that he left immediately for Skowhegan to convince Cynthia to return with him to Norfolk.

She would be easy, he felt, to push into the military and recruit as a spy. In his own strained logic, John saw his plan as a reflection of his love for Cynthia.

“This wasn’t all for me. The Navy had been good for me and I really believed that the military would have been good for all of my kids, even if they didn’t become spies. Particularly Cynthia, who I had to get away from her mother.”

Before Barbara and the kids moved to Maine, Cynthia had fallen in love with a young Marine in Norfolk and become pregnant. Now, at nineteen, she was unmarried and single-handedly raising her small son, while struggling to attend classes at a vocational school. She was surviving financially on welfare and having a tough time emotionally.

John planned his trip so that he would arrive while Barbara was working. He found the house and knocked. Cynthia answered, dressed in a bathrobe. She was sick, but still thrilled to see her father.

“Pack your shit,” John commanded. “You and the baby are going back home to Norfolk. I want you to live with me.”

“But Daddy,” Cynthia replied, “we have the flu.”

“Forget the flu,” John said. “It only lasts seven days. Now is the time to make your escape and get out of here. Now where’s your stuff?”

John helped Cynthia pack a suitcase and the three of them rode to the airport.

John left Cynthia and the baby inside the terminal while he went out to refuel his airplane. When he returned, he found Cynthia near tears and the baby crying.

“Cynthia couldn’t decide what to do. I mean, it was ridiculous. Her mother had picked on her all her life and she still didn’t know what to do,” John recalled.

“You got fifteen minutes to decide,” John said to Cynthia. “This is your last chance because I’m leaving in fifteen minutes with or without you and the baby. I’ve turned in the rental car, you know, so there’s no way for you to get home unless you call a taxi, and I’m not paying for that!”

Cynthia was confused.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she told me later, her voice filled with emotion. “I love my dad, but I was afraid.”

As John’s deadline approached, he turned more insistent.

“You are going to be a fucking welfare mother all your life if you don’t get out of this environment! Is that what you want?” he demanded. “Cynthia, you got to build some self-esteem. Look, come to Norfolk with me. We’ll find someone to take care of the kid and you can join the service. I didn’t have any confidence once and look what the Navy did for me. It can do the same for you, and it will get you away from your mother, who is a goddamn lazy alcoholic. Look, Cynthia, my dad was an alcoholic too. I know what you are facing. This is your big chance. Your only chance. You got to take it just like I did.”

Cynthia couldn’t decide and John finally gave her an ultimatum.

Go or stay? Decide now! This instant!

“We’re staying,” Cynthia said, clutching her son in her arms.

Enraged, John turned around to leave.

“Daddy,” Cynthia said, beginning to cry. “How are we going to get home?” John didn’t answer. He stormed out of the small terminal and returned to Norfolk alone.

“I had done my best to help that girl,” John said later. “But she didn’t have the guts to go with me.”

Remembering the incident, Cynthia Walker later told me amid tears why she hadn’t gone with John.

“I wanted to have a good relationship with my father, but I was afraid to move back to Norfolk. All of my family considered me dumb. But I listened and watched them, and they really didn’t know anything about me because they were so busy talking. I was afraid to go back with my father to Norfolk because I knew what he wanted me to do. He never said anything specific, but my mother had told all of us that he was a spy, and I was afraid to go back with him because I knew he would try to get me involved. I just felt it.”

Chapter 34

The Russians sent word that they were extremely pleased with the materials Jerry had collected aboard the U.S.S.
Constellation
, so much so, that they were doubling Jerry’s pay to $4,000 per month, the same amount that John was receiving.

In a meeting in San Diego on July 7, 1978, John told Jerry about the raise and gave him $24,000 in cash. Jerry had some splendid news himself to report. In order to aid Brenda’s graduate studies in nutrition, he had requested a transfer to a ship based in northern California and, much to his delight, he had been ordered to report on August 10 to the U.S.S.
Niagara Falls
, the same supply ship that John had served on between 1972 and 1974.

In fact, he was going to have John’s old job as CMS custodian, which would give him easy access to cryptographic machines and keylists. John, Jerry suggested, could even give him tips on where to photograph materials aboard the ship!

“Fantastic!” John replied. “We’re making all the right moves!”

Eight days later, John told his KGB contact during another face-to-face meeting in Vienna about Jerry’s new assignment. John’s handler didn’t have to be reminded of what a prime source the U.S.S.
Niagara Falls
was for crypto.

“This is just excellent,” the KGB agent said.

Unlike the weather during their January meeting, it was perfect in June 1978, and the temperate summer evening put both men in festive spirits as they strolled along Meidlinger Hauptstrasse.

“Vienna in the winter–oohhoo,” the KGB agent said, shaking his shoulders as if he were dislodging snow, “It’s nearly as terrible as my country. This is much nicer.”

John laughed with him.

Again, the agent lectured John about the faults of capitalism, but this time John challenged him and discovered the agent eager for debate.

“I kept wondering what KGB regulation required him to give me an indoctrination speech every time we met,” John said. “When we first talked, I thought he was just going through some routine of bullshit that the KGB required, but after a while, when I got to know him, I came to believe he honestly was sincere about what he was saying. He usually began by asking me why the United States wanted to destroy his country, and I always replied that his country was the aggressor.

“I told him, ‘The United States doesn’t want to blow you dummies up. We don’t want your country. Christ, every American in the United States including those on welfare, has a higher standard of living than people in your country.’

“But after listening to him speak, some of what he said began to make sense, and I could see why he actually believed the Soviet Union was in dire danger from the United States. I mean, Russia didn’t fly over us after World War II in U-2 spy planes taking photographs like we did of them. Imagine the frustration of knowing that those airplanes are up there flying over you every day, and you don’t have sophisticated enough weapons to shoot them down.

“And after the war, you know, there were some generals in the Pentagon who wanted to drop ‘a big one’ on Red Square. I began to think, ‘Yeah, I can see where this guy is coming from. I can see why he’s worried.’

“I liked some of the things he told me about the Soviet Union too, although I don’t know if they are really true. For example, he asked me a lot about Watergate and the press. He said he couldn’t understand why Nixon had to resign. He just didn’t understand the press in our country at all.

“I mean, the Soviet press follows the party line because of principle. It believes what it says is best for the country, but the press in America doesn’t give a damn about anything but making money. A reporter will print anything to get ahead and get his promotion. He doesn’t have to prove anything, he just prints it. In the Soviet Union, the press can’t print a story unless it is true. I mean, if someone is arrested, the Soviet press can’t splash their names in the newspaper and ruin their lives until after they are convicted of the crime. Our media runs a tiny retraction if a guy is found not guilty and says, ‘Oh, we’re sorry!’ After they’ve printed a zillion stories tearing the guy’s life to shreds! I agreed with him on that one. I hate the fucking press.

“He made some other interesting points. We got into an argument, for instance, about church and state, and he told me there really wasn’t any real separation between church and state in the United States. The Soviet Union is the only country in the world, he explained, where there isn’t a state-backed religion and that’s really why we want to destroy it.

“He told me this – now this is a KGB agent talking – he told me that the state of Rhode Island required all candidates for governor to sign a statement which said they believed in the Holy Trinity! That’s outrageous – if it’s true. I never checked it, but it sounds like something we’d do. I mean, the Boy Scouts of America requires its members to believe in a deity, doesn’t it? I know it does! I think that really sucks. I mean, he was right, we have a government-sponsored religion. We force people to believe that there is a God.

“So the truth was that this KGB agent and I really began to develop a genuine friendship, I honestly believe that. I really think this guy liked me and it bothered him that I was doing this only for the money. He really wanted to win me over, so I listened to him and sometimes agreed with him. I think it made him feel better.”

A short time after he returned from Vienna to Norfolk, John called Jerry to ask for his help. John had been sued by a Norfolk investor who claimed that John owed him money because of a business deal that involved John’s professional sales association.

John had decided to scare the investor into dropping his $10,000 lawsuit by threatening him with violence.

“Jerry, we’re going to run a little scam on this guy,” John explained over the telephone. “I need you to come out here and pose as a Mafia goon.”

Jerry loved it and flew to Norfolk. Together, he and John paid a visit to the investor, and with Jerry standing silently behind him as a “Mafia enforcer,” John threatened to kill the investor if he didn’t drop the lawsuit. The ruse apparently worked because Norfolk court records show the case was dismissed at the plaintiff’s request.

Jerry returned to California and duty aboard the U.S.S.
Niagara Falls
which soon left on an extended Pacific cruise.

On December 14, 1978, John flew to Manila to meet with Jerry at the Philippine Plaza Hotel. The
Niagara Falls
was anchored at Subic Bay to replenish its supplies, just as it had done when John was aboard.

Jerry’s delivery was impressive. Working diligently during a four-month period, Jerry had copied the technical manuals for five more cryptographic machines, along with keylists for them. This delivery, when added to all previous ones, gave the Soviets the internal diagrams of nearly all U.S. cryptographic machines and was later described by federal prosecutors as the most damaging disclosure that Jerry Whitworth made as a spy.

In effect, Jerry passed John sufficient information in Manila for the Soviets to reconstruct all of the United States’s most widely used cryptographic machines. Intelligence experts would later claim that the military would have to spend several million dollars to alter the machines and hurry newer types of machines into place.

John had toyed with the idea of mixing business and pleasure in the Philippines. He had thought about trying to find his former Filipino girlfriend, Peaches, and returning to her picturesque home. But after he saw what Jerry had collected for him, he was simply too nervous to take any chances. John knew how important the documents were that Jerry had photographed. Even one technical manual by itself would have been sufficient to thrill the KGB, but Jerry had far surpassed that.

John flew home the day after the meeting with Jerry. On January 27, 1979, in what now had become an almost routine procedure, John delivered the film to his KGB handler in Vienna outside the Bazala store. It was another painfully frosty night, but this time John wore electric socks to keep his feet warm.

Both men were elated by what Jerry had photographed. At one point, the KGB agent broke his self-imposed rule against their leaving the freezing city sidewalks. He motioned John inside a modest coffeehouse. It reminded John of some dank and dreary bars that he had frequented in Norfolk, but the temperature was much warmer than in the street.

The KGB agent ordered for both of them in fluent German. The coffee shop was filled with men and only one or two women. John had been ordered by his handler not to speak while inside for fear he would draw attention to himself, so John simply nodded when the pudgy waitress brought them two steaming cups of what John thought was black coffee and two bowls of soup.

The drink tasted bitter, and John could manage only a few swallows. His companion drank the brew easily and noisily sucked the soup from a large spoon.

When they went outside, John asked if the KGB had just tried to poison him by buying him such a poor cup of coffee. The KGB agent explained that the drink was Mokka, an after-dinner coffee favored by Austrians.

“You especially should like it,” the agent said.

He explained that in the late 1600s, the Austrians repelled an invasion by the Turks. One of the items left behind by the fleeing Turkish army was a bag filled with mysterious brown beans. No one knew what to do with them until an Austrian spy, who had operated inside a Turkish camp, came forward and taught his fellow countrymen how to brew the beans into coffee.

“Mokka,” the KGB handler said, “is a good drink for spies.”

This was a common story in Austria, one told routinely by tour guides and tour hosts, but John didn’t know it. He was impressed with his handler’s seeming “intelligence and wit.”

John returned to Norfolk delighted after the exchange. Everything seemed to be going right in the spring of 1979. The money that he was earning as a spy was enabling him, as he put it, to “live every fantasy that I ever had.”

On February 17, John and Patsy Marsee boarded John’s Grumman American AA-5B single-engine aircraft in Norfolk and left on a daring month-long South American escapade that John chronicled faithfully in his journal, “2/17 Fly low, we observe island chain running east-west. That’s impossible! Is our compass wrong? Has ‘Devil’s Triangle’ got us?”

The trip took them to Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru, and when they returned home, John telephoned Jerry to brag. “We virtually pushed my small plane to the limit of its endurance,” he said. “Just a small change in the weather could have killed us.”

Jerry was also enjoying his spy money.

On May 12, he gave a lavish party at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, one of the world’s oldest and most impressive hotels. After an elaborate sit-down dinner in a private dining room, Jerry stood and told the forty or more guests he wished to make an announcement. Everyone assumed he was going to announce his engagement to Brenda. Instead, he revealed that they had already been married for three years.

“Everyone was stunned,” John told me later with a chuckle. “Particularly old Roger Olson. He couldn’t believe that Jerry, his best buddy, had kept a secret from him. I loved it. Old Roger really didn’t have any idea about the kind of secrets that Jerry was keeping!”

Jerry paid for the entire evening, and, in some cases, for the transportation and lodging of his special guests, including John. Jerry had even invited two attractive women to the party because he thought John might find them appealing.

He was right.

“I had a really excellent sexual experience with both of them,” John bragged later. “In fact, one of the girls, I think she was nineteen, wanted me to take the train with her up to Coalinga, but I had to turn her down.”

John had other commitments. He and another Norfolk pilot, Mickey Baker, had agreed to ferry two small airplanes from Norfolk to Reykjavik, Iceland, in late May and early June. Each pilot was to be paid $1,000, plus expenses, for delivering the airplanes.

But John wasn’t doing it for the cash. The Icelandic flight in the Cessna 177 airplane was extremely dangerous. It was another adventure, another chance for John to prove he was better than his peers.

As soon as he returned, he flew to Europe for a June 30 meeting with the KGB in Vienna. This trip was particularly important because John had invited his mother, Peggy, to accompany him. Peggy had dreamed about visiting Italy. She still remembered most of the fairy tales that her father, Arthur Scararnuzzo, had told her about the old country.

“My Johnny had always told me that someday he was going to take me home to Italy,” Peggy told me later. “I never really believed him though, ‘cause kids, they say lots of things, and when he told me that he had bought the tickets and we really were going, why, I almost had cardiac arrest.”

Peggy was sixty-six years old when she and John left New York City, but by the time the airplane landed at Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, a few miles outside Rome, she felt like a teenager.

Peggy took dozens of photographs, which she carefully pasted in a scrapbook. Just as she and her husband had kept a scrapbook of their achievements when they were first married, now Peggy and her favorite son would keep a record.

“I was just so excited,” Peggy recalled. “I thought I was going to die and John, he says to me, ‘Mama, you’re embarrassing me,’ because I was just so excited about being there and seeing everything. But I didn’t care. It was just so wonderful. Oh, it was just so wonderful!”

After several days of frantic sightseeing, Peggy and John caught a seven A.M. train from Rome to Vienna, a seventeen-hour trip.

Vienna was disappointing after Rome.

Peggy went on a few tours while John was out “conducting some sort of business,” but she was ready to return to Scranton when it was time to leave Europe. Before she and John left their Viennese hotel, her son asked her to wear a money belt through U.S. Customs for him.

“It has some important papers in it that I don’t want stolen,” he told her. Peggy attached the bulky belt that John had sewn himself around her waist over her slip. It was not noticeable under her loose dress. Despite the discomfort, she obediently wore it throughout the long transatlantic flight to New York City.