Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (24 page)

By this time, Wilkinson was Imperial Wizard of the KKK and was delighted when John stopped to see him. While there, John donned the white pointed hat and robe of the white supremacy group and posed for snapshots in the living room of Bill’s home in front of the fireplace.

Afterward, John asked Bill to appoint him kleagle of Virginia, which meant that he was the Klan’s organizer in the state.

The next day, John flew to Leesville to see Laura, but he couldn’t find her at the Army base.

“I finally located Mark and discovered that Laura had quit the Army and that she and Mark were living in this really shitty trailer away from the base,” John recalled. “I went over there and let her have it. Here she was pregnant, married to a pothead. Her car isn’t working, she’s quit her job, she’s living in a pigsty, and she’s got no future, no prospects, nothing.”

John quickly unleashed his anger: “Laura, you are worse than some nigger bitch,” he said. “At least niggers have their babies and stay in the Army, and you are so fucking stupid that you didn’t even get that right.”

For the next several hours, John admonished his daughter. Her life was “totally fucked up,” he said. The more he talked, the angrier and more vulgar he became.

He called his daughter a “nigger welfare cunt.”

Even her unborn child was berated by John. “I can just imagine what an asshole this baby is going to be,” he told her.

John slept on the couch in the living room of his daughter’s trailer that night, but rose early the next morning.

“I’ll never forget what happened that morning,” he recalled later. “Laura was pouring herself some corn flakes while Mark was getting dressed in his uniform. It is probably 5:30 A.M., and I came in and I sat down next to Laura at the kitchen table, and Mark comes walking in with a water pipe and a bowl of marijuana and he breaks out an ounce and starts smoking it. He is sitting there getting stoned, and Laura is looking at him with this hatred in her eyes. My God, it’s a wonder she didn’t draw blood.”

Laura Walker recalled that breakfast encounter as a breaking point for her. She had been through a day of verbal abuse from her father, and now her husband was sitting before her, smoking pot for breakfast. She had made a terrible mistake. The honeymoon between them came to a screeching halt.

After Mark left for work, Laura broke down. She told her father that her marriage was a disaster. “If I hadn’t gotten pregnant, I would have never married him. I know that,” she said.

“Look, honey,” John replied, “Mark isn’t really that bad a guy. I like him. He’s probably okay. The problem is that you two have to get back in the mainstream of life. You’ve got to get back in the Army and make some money. You guys could make about fourteen hundred a month if you go back in and, like I told you before, I can help you make a lot more than that.”

Once again, John offered to pay her to spy, only this time he was gentle, understanding.

“Okay, look, I can get you five hundred dollars, maybe even one thousand dollars each month, just as a retainer,” John explained. “You don’t have to do anything right now, except go back in the Army. Later, once you’re back in and things are going smooth, when your career is good, then you can start getting stuff. I can give you five hundred now. Today! I brought it with me, but you have to get back in the Army.”

Years later when I interviewed Laura, she told me that her father had developed a system for breaking her down.

“His approach was almost like brainwashing, a brainwashing technique, although I didn’t realize it at the time. First, he’d break you down and make you feel like the lowest form of life. He’d say you are never going to be successful. You are not very bright. You’re just not anybody special. He’d break your spirit down and just devastate you. Then he’d come to your rescue. ‘Why don’t you let me help you make a lot of money?’ ”

The pressure that he put on her, Laura said, almost made her shake. She was willing to say almost anything to get him to ease up, back off, and tell her that he cared about her.

Yet, Laura Walker insisted during her talks with me that she consistently declined to join her father as a spy.

In her testimony at Jerry Whitworth’s trial, she was not that firm.

QUESTION:
You refused each and every time?

ANSWER:
Each and every time.

Q:
And your refusal, I take it, was firm?

A:
Sometimes it was; sometimes it wasn’t.

Q:
Now, when you say ‘Sometimes it wasn’t,’ what was the basis for you not being firm?

A:
Sometimes I would just be in an emotional low, and because he was so persistent. There were times when I felt broken and he really worked on that. So there were times when it was difficult for me to be firm.

Q:
But in your mind you never were going to provide him with any classified information.

A:
That’s correct.

Q:
And you never have?

A:
That’s correct.

John Walker was outraged when he read accounts of his daughter’s testimony in a newspaper.

“No matter what Laura says now, that morning she left me no doubt she’d do it. She agreed to be a spy, and the fact that she said that she would be a spy and took the five-hundred-dollar retainer I gave her and then never got back into the Army and never gave me any classified documents just shows what kind of unscrupulous cunt she really is.”

John Walker vehemently defended his attempt to recruit his daughter to me.

“She was pitched,” he said, “not to enrich me in any way. The only reason that she was pitched was because I was her father and I wanted to help her out of the mess she was in. I merely did what any father would do. I helped my daughter out of a tight spot the best way that I could.”

Chapter 36

John and Laura were not the only Walkers who found the fall of 1979 a stressful time. Arthur Walker also faced what he later described as a “desperate” situation. His dream company, Walker
Enterprise
s, was bankrupt and his marriage was souring. On an unseasonably warm afternoon in early December 1979, Arthur sat down in his office at Walker
Enterprise
s and totaled his company’s debits and credits on a yellow legal pad. The numbers almost made him break into tears. How had his company fallen into such a bad financial condition? Where had he gone wrong? Everything had happened so fast.

“I was physically ill,” Arthur recalled. “I was embarrassed and I was scared. I honestly thought that I was on the verge of losing my house, my cars, everything that Rita and I had worked for.”

Arthur had one other thought as he looked over the numbers on the legal pad before him: “Why can’t people stay in the Navy forever? Why had I ever gotten out?”

Arthur had done well in the Navy. From the time he enlisted in 1953, he had seen the Navy as a safe harbor where he could “feel comfortable and secure without having to worry about setting the world on fire.”

Shortly after he and Rita married in May 1956, Arthur had announced, “I’ve decided to make the Navy my career. Why, if I put in twenty years and make chief petty officer – which shouldn’t be too difficult – I could retire at age thirty-eight and receive one hundred and seventy-five dollars per month for the rest of my life. Can you imagine that, Rita? The Navy would pay us one hundred and seventy-five dollars per month! Why, we’d be in fat city!”

Rita considered the comment significant. Neither of them, she told me later, ever “dreamed big.” Money wasn’t going to be the driving force in their lives. A decent job, a decent home, a decent income, and decent kids. That’s what life was all about.

In the Navy, Arthur’s motto was “Go along, get along.” Promotions came slowly, but they came. And when they did, Arthur recognized they were often based on luck and longevity as well as work.

“I never looked upon myself as unique or anything like that,” Arthur told me during a prison interview. “I always saw myself as just a run-of-the-mill sort of guy and that really never bothered me.”

In the 1960s, when other sailors clamored for duty on a nuclear-powered sub, Arthur stayed behind on diesel-powered boats. It took him seven years to rise to the petty officer rank of sonarman first class. By comparison, John rose to a similar rank in less than five years. The Navy did commission Arthur as an ensign, but he was chosen during the post-Korean War period when there was a shortage of naval officers and the Navy decided to lower its qualifications.

Even after he became an officer, Arthur’s career was not glamorous. His best assignment was his last, when he was named an instructor of antisubmarine warfare techniques at the Atlantic Fleet Tactical School in Norfolk. He taught there from 1968 until his retirement in July 1973, and during that assignment, he rose slowly through the ranks to lieutenant commander.

Arthur’s personal life was as ordinary as his career. Rita had stayed home and raised their three children. He had been active in a few neighborhood projects, but nothing outstanding. They lived on a tight budget. Their only real financial asset was their red-brick home, which had cost them $27,500 in 1968.

As long as Arthur was in the Navy, his life was orderly, routine, and satisfying. His kids did well in school and avoided the drug and truancy problems that John’s encountered.

But in July 1973 the Navy nudged Arthur out, and his life slowly began to fall apart. At first, things looked promising. Arthur went into business with some sailor pals and earned about $1,000 per month peddling frozen chickens, playing cards, and candles to military exchanges. The sales commissions were enough, with his Navy pension, to pay the bills.

Arthur wasn’t happy though; he didn’t like sales and there were problems with his partners. So he went out on his own, selling car radios. Military communities were filled with young sailors anxious to upgrade the radio systems in their cars.

Arthur got a $10,000 second mortgage on the house, filled the garage with inventory, and went to work. His pitch was simple. Why pay several hundred dollars for a mundane radio manufactured by an auto maker in Detroit when you could buy a superior unit from him at half the price? His best customers turned out to be car dealers who were dissatisfied with what Detroit had to offer.

Within a few months, Arthur was being pressured by several dealers to install the radios that he sold. He was on a roll, but no bank in town would give him another loan. So Arthur turned to John for help, and the two brothers formed Walker
Enterprise
s, incorporating it in June 1975 – one year before John and Barbara divorced.

As usual, John thought big, and from the start, he pushed Arthur to expand. At first, cash wasn’t a problem. John just dug into his pockets and advanced Arthur a series of personal loans. By 1976, Walker
Enterprise
s had moved into a large rented building and Arthur had hired a receptionist and four mechanics to install radios and air conditioning units.

But the company began to flounder in 1977, at about’ the same time John began withdrawing his financial support. By the next year, Arthur had lost all of his big customers. Detroit auto makers had gotten tough and had begun pressuring dealers to buy accessories directly from them, not from local outfits like Arthur’s.

By late 1979, Arthur’s dream company had become a horror show of debts.

“Things at home really deteriorated too,” Arthur Walker recalled.

After Barbara and John were divorced, Rita severed all ties with her brother-in-law, and she urged Arthur to do the same.

“Art’s friendship with John really got to be a bone of contention between us,” Rita acknowledged later. “I didn’t like John, never did. Also, Arthur was killing himself. He was working round the dock at the business, and John didn’t do a damn thing. I really resented it.”

On that December 1979 afternoon – when he totaled up the company’s debits and credits on a legal pad – Arthur finally stopped fooling himself. He called John to ask for advice.

“Goddamn Arthur, this is a nightmare,” John said after examining the company’s books. “Arthur, we got to shut this baby down right now before everything gets flushed down the drain. Let’s shut the doors and say the hell with it.”

That night, John typed a “kiss off” letter for Arthur to mail to all of Walker
Enterprise
s’s creditors. The company had gone bust. Shutting down Walker
Enterprise
s wasn’t as simple as John had naively promised. Several companies sued, and the IRS called Arthur to task for not withholding his employees’ payroll taxes.

Arthur was hounded by feelings of guilt and failure. One afternoon, Rita found him in their bedroom laying out his old Navy uniform.

“What are you doing, Art?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied. “Just making certain I got everything, I guess. You know, with all the trouble going on in Iran with the hostages, you never know when the Navy might call me back.”

Rita began worrying about Arthur’s mental stability. “He was really acting strange,” she recalled.

John recognized his brother’s despondency, too, but in it, he also saw an opportunity. Shortly after New Year’s Day in 1980, John invited Arthur to lunch. He picked him up and drove north about two miles from Arthur’s house to a tiny restaurant at the end of a small shopping center. Along the way, John tried to cheer up his older brother. “Life can really be a bitch,” John said. “But, hey, we’re the Walker boys, remember? Everything is going to work out.”

Arthur didn’t think so. During lunch, all he could talk about was how terrible his life had become.

“I feel almost helpless for the first time in my life,” he told John. “I don’t seem to have any control over anything. What’s happening here? I mean, I was trying to do the right thing at work, but we just kept getting deeper and deeper in debt. Now I got to get a job and feed the family and come up with some way to payoff all these debts.”

After lunch, the two men returned to John’s truck.

“Damn it,” Arthur said, “I could just cry.”

“C’mon, let’s walk,” John said. He put his arm around Arthur’s shoulder. As the two brothers stepped down the sidewalk, John said, “I think I know a way for you to get out of this mess.”