Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (23 page)

“There’s no one like my Johnny,” Peggy said lovingly when we spoke later about the trip. “How many sons do you know who would take their mother on such an extraordinary trip?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that John had used her.

The money belt contained $24,000 from the KGB in fifty and one-hundred-dollar bills. Federal laws prohibit U.S. citizens from bringing more than $5,000 in currency into the country without reporting it.

I had been told about John’s scheme by Arthur, who also had mentioned it to the FBI.

“John told me that he had used our mother as a pack mule to bring his spy money into the country,” Arthur said during an interview. “He hid the money in a money belt and had her wear it, because he didn’t think anyone would search a little old grandmother. ‘Who’s gonna search a sweet little old lady?’ he asked me.

“And John was right. No one did.”

Chapter 35

The good times never last long enough.

Two months after John’s trip to Europe, Jerry arrived in Norfolk with troubling news. The
Niagara Falls
was being put into dry dock for overhaul, and the repairs would keep the ship out of commission for one year. Obviously, there was no need for the ship to use its cryptographic machines or to receive keylists when it was being worked on. So Jerry was losing his access.

Something else was bothering Jerry too. He and Brenda were having marital problems, in part because of his extended tours at sea aboard the supply ship. They’d been married nearly four years, but Jerry had been at sea much of that time.

“It’s become a problem,” Jerry explained.

John wasn’t surprised, nor did he believe that Jerry’s absences were the real root of Jerry’s marital strife. Brenda was changing.

In the beginning, when she was a teenager, she had depended upon Jerry for everything, and he had molded her. He had tried to do the same earlier to Shirley McClanahan and before that to his first wife, Lynn. John recognized what was happening. Brenda was changing, growing up. Jerry began to feel insecure around her, particularly since she was about to finish her education. He was being forced to accept the threat of being married to an equal partner, and it obviously scared him.

“Okay, Jerry,” John said sympathetically, “why not request a transfer – shore duty?”

Jerry promised to try and after returning to California telephoned John with good news. He had been assigned to the Naval Telecommunications Center at Alameda, California, where he would not only be CMS custodian, but also chief of the message center and manager of the AUTODIN Center, which routed messages between the various services.

John congratulated him. It was another perfect assignment for a spy. But during their conversations, John felt that Jerry was hiding something from him.

“Jerry was as easy to read as a book sometimes,” John recalled. “The guy didn’t have much imagination.”

John pushed Jerry for an answer. What was bothering him?

And Jerry finally confessed. He was thinking about retiring from the Navy!

“That asshole didn’t realize the risk that he was going to put us in if he retired!” John recalled later.

It was time, he decided, to have a “heart-to-heart” talk with Jerry. It was also time for John to get himself some of that personal insurance he needed. It was time once again for him to approach another one of his children.

John always learned from his mistakes. He had tried to recruit Margaret and Cynthia too suddenly. So he was much more cautious with his youngest daughter, Laura. He began wooing her in early 1978 when he first learned that she had decided to join the Army after her graduation. In June, two weeks before Laura was to report to basic training, John flew to Maine and brought her back to Norfolk for a vacation.

“Of all my children, Laura was the one that I knew the least and the one that caused me the most trouble as a parent,” John said. “At this point in my life, I considered Margaret a total loser. Cynthia was destroyed. But Laura was sharp. She seemed to be intelligent and she seemed to be doing something with her life. She would beat up somebody if they picked on her, unlike the other two girls. She was tough. She was screwed up, of course. All my kids were, but she was doing something with her life. I knew too that Laura craved attention; she always wanted to be in the center of the spotlight.

“She had joined the Army because a neighbor was an Army recruiter, and I considered the Army the least attractive branch of the service. There was not a hell of a lot to learn in the Army, but still I was impressed and I told her that I was impressed with her over the telephone.

“Then I suggested that we get together before she went into the Army. So she came down to stay with me and, I mean, she was a total stranger to me. When I left home, she was a little girl, but now I got this attractive, adult woman visiting. I told her that I wanted to get to know her and that she really didn’t know me. I took her out on the boat, and we went to bars together and went to dinner. I bought her several hundred dollars’ worth of clothes, and I told her a lot about myself and my conduct during the marriage and why I hadn’t been home much.

“I didn’t have a chance to really find out what was on her mind, but I did develop some rapport with her, and that is what I wanted to do.”

Laura considered the visit magical. For the first time in her life, her father paid attention to her. He showered her with affection and gifts. He spoke to her as an adult, almost an equal, and was very polite and complimentary. Her father was just plain “charming.”

Laura was hearing John’s side of the marriage story for the first time, she said later. It was a twisted version filled with self-justification, but for a young girl eager to win her father’s approval, it was a convincing spiel. John didn’t really have a choice when it came to abandoning his family, he explained. Whenever he came home, he and Barbara would fight.

“I honestly thought it was better for me to stay away,” he told his daughter.

Laura was confused by this new side of her father. “I was his daughter,” she explained to me later.

“I was his child and I looked to this man as a daughter would look to a father. I wanted him so desperately to love me, and suddenly he was paying attention to me,” Laura recalled. “We were going out together as father and daughter. He was buying me clothes. He was talking to me and asking me for my opinions.”

By the time John took Laura to the bus station for her trip to Fort Gordon, Georgia, and basic training, Laura was a convert.

“He was just wonderful,” she said, “and I felt for the first time a closeness to him.”

John continued to lavish his daughter with attention, and just before she finished basic training, he surprised her with a visit.

“It was really wild because the Army usually doesn’t let soldiers who are in basic training go off base for special liberty, but my dad talked my commanding officer into giving me special permission to have dinner with him,” Laura later recalled. “I had done extremely well, and I got to go out with my dad, and I was really excited and proud.”

John had brought Laura a small bag of marijuana because he knew that she enjoyed getting high. After dinner, they smoked several joints together while seated in the car he had rented.

Laura was enthralled. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, here I am getting stoned with my father!’ “

After a while, John began asking Laura about her training. Simple questions at first, about what she did and the type of equipment that she used. Laura had been assigned to communications and had just learned about cryptographic equipment and clearances.

“Well, how does all that stuff work in the Army?” John asked. “What do the machines look like?”

Laura told John everything he wanted to know.

“After that he wrote to me frequently,” she recalled. “He kept saying that he wanted to make up for all the lost years when I was a child. No one but my dad was writing to me. No one. I really began to appreciate what I considered was his love and to accept it.”

As a member of the Signal Corps, Laura was trained to operate the KG-27 cipher machine. She was sent to Fort Polk near Leesville, Louisiana, but she didn’t fit in.

At the time, Laura was a racist.

“I really hated blacks,” she explained. “All they ever had been to me was trouble. I hated them and I have to tell you now that it was stupid and I am really sorry for it, but I was having trouble with blacks and I shared my problems with my dad.”

It was during this period that Laura met Philip Mark Snyder. Her father would later claim that Laura dated him because “she wanted a nice white boy to protect her” – a charge that Laura didn’t deny.

Mark had grown up in Lanham, a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., where his father worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He had a medium build, sandy brown hair, and a quiet manner that hid a rebellious nature. As a teenager, Mark had carved a tattoo on his right arm, carefully filling the torn flesh with ink. He had dropped out of high school and worked as an electrician’s apprentice until he was old enough to join the Army.

He arrived in Fort Polk in February 1978, four months before Laura. They met when she was assigned to the Fifth Signal Battalion, which was his unit, but they didn’t begin dating seriously until Laura moved into the same trailer park as Mark.

“We used to get together at night in the trailer park,” Mark recalled. They would share a beer or smoke a joint and talk about how lousy the Army was. A short time after they began dating, the two set up housekeeping, and in August 1979, Laura discovered she was pregnant.

“Marrying Mark was an escape for me,” Laura told me later. “I was looking for someone to love me and take care of me.”

“We decided to get married because of the baby,” Mark recalled. “To me it was really an esteem thing. I mean, we were in love and everything, but the fact that she was going to have my baby really influenced me to go ahead and do it.”

They wed on September 17 in Simpson, a small community near Fort Polk, in a simple ceremony conducted by a justice of the peace. No member from either family was present.

After the ceremony, Mark and Laura left immediately on a trip to Virginia and Maryland to break the news to Mark’s parents and John. The newlyweds arrived in Norfolk a few weeks after Jerry Whitworth told John that he was thinking about retiring.

For John, the timing of Laura’s surprise visit was perfect.

One afternoon Laura accompanied her father to watch Patsy Marsee play softball. Afterward, they stopped at Knickerbocker’s.

“We need money,” Laura said. Mark had put them several thousand dollars in debt, she claimed, because he was hooked on marijuana.

“He doesn’t sell it though,” she told John. “Instead, he’s been smoking it himself, which means he doesn’t have any money to pay the dealer when he comes around, so we have to pay with money from our paychecks. Dad, we’re broke and need money for this baby.”

“In other words, you want some cash from me,” John replied.

He then began asking Laura the exact same questions that he had once asked Roberta Puma.

“Laura, would you spend two years in jail if, at the end of it, someone promised to give you, say, ten thousand dollars for your trouble?”

“Sure,” Laura said. “I’d do two years for ten thousand.”

“You know, Laura,” John continued, “the Army is an awful lot like prison. In a sense, you already are in prison. You have to do your time. But there is more than one way to get compensated for it. A way to get ten thousand dollars or more. The same was true for me when I was in the Navy. I was doing my time, but there was a way for me to make extra money so we could afford things like nice apartments and sailboats. Your mother understood these things and I think you might too.

“What I am trying to tell you, Laura, is that I have been involved in something for a long time that involves crime and if you don’t want to hear about it, then tell me now, because otherwise I intend to tell you how I got my money for things like my boat and my airplane, and how you can make a lot of money for yourself and Mark so the two of you can live very comfortably and afford the really nice things in life that you deserve, without too much trouble and totally without any danger.”

Laura urged her father to continue.”

“It was exactly the same bait that I used with Whitworth,” John confided to me. “I mean, why would I change it since it worked with him? I began telling her about what I did, piece by piece, pulling in the line.”

The only difference between John’s pitch to Laura and his recruitment of Jerry was emphasis. He didn’t bother mentioning allies like Israel.

“I really talked about how much money she and Mark could make,” John said. “It was something which they could do together, I said.”

Just as he had done with Jerry, John declined to tell Laura whom he sold classified information to. Instead, he said that he had willing buyers.

“But Daddy, I’m pregnant,” Laura said. “I’m going to get out of the Army, so there is no way I could get stuff for you.”

“There are ways to deal with that problem,” John remarked. “You don’t have to get out of the service just because you are pregnant. Besides, what are you and Mark going to do if you get out of the service and have a baby? How are you going to make enough money to support a child? The Army is your job, Laura, and you can’t just quit your job because you are going to have a baby. You guys aren’t going to be able to afford a pot to piss in once you quit your job.”

Laura was confused. “But I’m pregnant,” she repeated.

John was quick with a solution: “Geez, Laura, why don’t you just get an abortion? I mean, you can always have more kids later.”

“I told him that I could never do that,” Laura explained to me later, “never kill my child, and my father said, ‘Okay, then don’t get an abortion. There still are other ways that we can get you back into the service.’ I couldn’t believe that he wanted me to abort my own child.”

Laura told John that she would think about his proposition.

Later that night, when she and Mark were alone, she told Mark that her father had suggested she get an abortion so she could stay in the Army.

Mark was irritated. What kind of grandfather suggests aborting his grandchild? he demanded.

“It was just an option,” Laura said.

“Well, I don’t think it is an option,” Mark replied.

Before Laura and Mark left Norfolk, John took them to a new car dealership and put a $500 down payment on a brand new Mazda GLE. It was a wedding present, he said.

Laura was exuberant, even though she had no idea how she and Mark would make the payments. She was smart enough to know that John was putting them deeper in debt, but she still wanted that car.

A short time after Laura and Mark left Norfolk, Jerry finally made up his mind. He submitted the required forms in October 1979 to retire from the Navy.

Now that Jerry was definitely bailing out, John began turning up the heat on Laura. In October, he flew to the small Louisiana home town of Bill Wilkinson, his old Navy pal from the U.S.S.
Simon Bolivar
.