Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (25 page)

Chapter 37

John was scheduled to meet his KGB contact in Vienna on January 26, 1980. Having in his own mind safely recruited both Laura and Arthur, he left for Oakland on January 19 with a dual purpose: pick up whatever film Jerry had for him and convince Jerry to change his mind about retiring.

Jerry needed both a kick and a carrot. The carrot was easy. John intended to offer Jerry more money if he stayed in the Navy and kept producing as a spy. He was certain the KGB would back him up. But the kick would come first. Jerry’s access at Alameda was excellent, but Jerry wasn’t producing. Knowing that he was about to retire, he had begun to lose interest in spying.

“It’s just too difficult to get anything good, Johnny,” Jerry complained when they got together. The communications center at Alameda was much too crowded, and Jerry was worried about being discovered. Just before he had left the U.S.S.
Niagara Falls
, he had been caught by his boss, Terry Cliffton Pierce, looking at schematics of cryptographic equipment. Pierce had demanded an immediate explanation, but Jerry, keeping his cool, had wiggled out of the situation by claiming that he was having a problem with one of the cryptographic machines and was trying to repair it. The answer had satisfied Pierce, but just the same, the incident scared Jerry.

“Do you honestly believe you can just quit?” John finally asked, after listening patiently to Jerry’s complaints. “Don’t you understand the danger you’re putting us in, not to mention Brenda? Who do you think we’re dealing with, some dipshit in western New York?”

Jerry seemed amused. Why should he or John have anything to worry about? Hadn’t John been assuring him that the stolen cryptographic material was going to ally nations? Why would they wish to hurt either of them? John was overreacting in an attempt to keep him from quitting.

“You’ve been reading too many spy novels,” Jerry said.

“Jerry, this is not some two-bit spy book,” John replied. “What I’m trying to make you understand is that you could be putting us both in danger by retiring. The people I have been dealing with are very dangerous people. The items that we have given them are only good as long as no one knows they have been compromised. Now do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

Jerry continued to brush John’s warnings aside. Once again, he accused John of exaggerating.

John exploded.

“You dumb asshole!” he snapped. “You could get us both killed! This is not some stupid game! Haven’t you ever heard of the fucking umbrella trick? Don’t you read the goddamn newspapers? This shit really happens!

“The people we are dealing with,” John added, his voice intense, “can reach anywhere in the world – anywhere! You can’t hide from them. They are that powerful!”

Jerry’s demeanor changed.

John’s comment about the “umbrella trick” was a direct reference to the sensational September 1978 murder of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian defector, who had died mysteriously in a London hospital. Before his death, Markov told the police that he had been poked in the leg with the tip of an umbrella. Surgeons discovered a minute hollow metal ball in Markov’s thigh containing traces of ricin, one of the five most toxic substances in the world.

Police theorized that the murderer jabbed the ball into Markov’s leg with the umbrella tip, and the poison escaped after the heat of Markov’s body melted wax used to seal two tiny holes in the ball.

Because Markov was a persuasive anticommunist commentator for the British Broadcasting Corporation, intelligence officials immediately claimed the KGB had executed Markov. John had read all the news stories he could find about Markov’s death, and he and Jerry had discussed the daring murder shortly after it occurred.

“Jerry’s face got white, and I realized that he had finally figured out what I was saying,” John said. “I think he had actually convinced himself through the years that we were helping the fucking Israelis! I think he was genuinely surprised when it dawned on him who I was selling the information to. Not that it mattered. After all, I told him at the start that the buyers could have been the Mafia or an enemy as well as an ally. He knew that from the start.”

The next morning, John had a chat with Brenda about Jerry’s request for retirement. The discussion was held after Jerry left for work.

“We were sitting in the living room having coffee and Brenda was all excited about her school work, bubbling on with joy about how Jerry was getting out and she was going to become a doctor of nutrition and also a doctor of medicine so she could do research or whatever, and as I’m sitting there listening to her ramble on and on, I thought, ‘Geez, she had been married to Jerry for five or six years by now, and he has gotten about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in spy money, and they have been living this good life, and she doesn’t have any fucking idea about what is going on!’ I mean, here is a person with an IQ of God only knows, one hundred and eighty or more, and she thinks Jerry is going to be able to support her schooling if he gets out of the Navy.”

John decided to burst Brenda’s bubble. “Brenda, you realize, don’t you, that Jerry and I have income on the side through an interest that we invested in together?” John asked.

Yes, she understood that. John was blunt. “That money is contingent on Jerry having a certain type of job and being in a certain geographic area, and the scenario that you just have spelled out to me makes it clear that Jerry isn’t going to be getting any more money from our investments.”

Brenda seemed unconcerned. They could manage without the extra money, she said.

“Brenda, I’m not sure that you have any conception of what kind of income Jerry really has,” John said. “I think you should talk to him about it.”

(Brenda Reis Whitworth declined to be interviewed. This conversation is based on John Walker’s statements to the author and the FBI, and various polygraph examinations that John took.
)

After Jerry got home from work, he and John talked again about his decision to retire. It was time for the carrot.

“I think we should ask for more money,” John told Jerry.

Five or six thousand dollars per month. Jerry liked the idea. John went on to explain that he’d come up with a way for Jerry to photograph documents at Alameda without being caught.

“What you need is a van to photograph this shit in,” John explained. “Look, I’ll try to get you, say, ten thousand for a new van. You drive it to work and at lunch time you tell folks that you have to take a nap or whatever. You stick stuff in your briefcase, take it with you, and photograph stuff, then you simply take the stuff back in your office.”

It sounded like a workable plan to Jerry.

“By the time I left,” John recalled, “I felt confident that Jerry was going to pull his request for retirement and buy a van.”

John received some unexpected help in scaring Jerry back into line from an unusual source. Christopher John Boyce, a twenty-seven-year-old Californian convicted of being a KGB spy, had escaped from the federal correction institution at Lompoc, California.

Jerry had followed Boyce’s trial and discussed it with John, who also had developed an interest in Boyce and his partner, Daulton Lee, the subjects of the 1979 best-selling book,
The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage by New York Times reporter Robert Lindsey
.

Several members of the media speculated after Boyce escaped that he had been broken out of a federal prison by specially trained agents of the KGB, who had smuggled him out of the country and into Russia.

Jerry followed the story closely. Imagine, the KGB breaking a spy out of prison! Sweet Jesus, if that was true, Russian agents really did have a long reach.

John barely had time to unpack on his return to Norfolk before he headed for Vienna. The wind was blowing and it was snowing when John met with his KGB contact on January 26. John had told the Russians in a dead drop note delivered a month earlier that Jerry had been transferred to Alameda, but he had not mentioned that Jerry had put in for retirement. Now that he had recruited Laura and Arthur, and also convinced Jerry to stay in, John felt the meeting with the KGB would go smoothly. But he found his KGB contact in a foul mood.

“Why did Jerry move? What’s wrong with him?” the agent asked.

“He had to move,” John explained. “His ship was put in dry dock and all his equipment was shut down.”

“He was supposed to be aboard the ship for three years,” the agent said. “You promised us three years.”

“Jesus Christ!” John responded, “I don’t run the fucking Navy! Look, Jerry found out that his ship was going into dry dock for repairs, so he got himself reassigned to Alameda, and that’s one hell of a good spot.”

John named the cryptographic systems that Jerry was working with. They included the KW-36 and the KGB’s much beloved KW-7. He also had access to some technical manuals and lots of message traffic. The problem, John explained, was that Jerry didn’t have anywhere safe to photograph documents. The communications center was much too busy to risk Jerry smuggling in his Minox for photographs.

“But I’ve come up with a solution,” John explained. “You need to buy Jerry a van so that he can photograph documents in it during his noon lunch break.”

John expected the KGB agent to be impressed by his solution, but instead, the agent looked confused and asked John to explain his idea once again. The problem, John discovered during the second explanation, was that the agent didn’t realize what John was talking about when he used the word van. The KGB agent thought he meant a large truck used by companies for deliveries. How, the agent asked John at one point, could Jerry drive such a vehicle to work without appearing suspicious?

“Listen,” John said, after explaining what a van looked like, “everyone in California rides around in vans. It ain’t going to be a problem.” John couldn’t believe how stupid his handler seemed to be.

Once again, the KGB agent broke one of his own rules and hustled John into a Vienna coffeehouse so that the two of them could get warm. They sat, as before, at a back corner table, and as they drank their hot drinks in silence, John noticed that his KGB handler seemed nervous. Outside on the sidewalk again, the agent and John struck a deal. The Russians were willing to give Jerry $10,000 for a van, and they would also pay John and Jerry as much as $12,000 per month for good crypto, the agent said.

But that was not all.

“Tell Jerry we will pay him a ten-thousand-dollar bonus if he can get unbroken crypto for three straight months. This is important.”

The agent also told John that the KGB couldn’t get their replica of a KWR-37 cryptographic machine, which they had built according to the technical manuals that Jerry had stolen, to decipher Navy messages. John immediately volunteered to get Jerry to look into the problem.

“There is one other thing you should know,” John said. “I’ve recruited Laura and talked with Arthur.”

The KGB agent was so shocked by John’s announcement that he stopped in his tracks for a moment. Why, he demanded hotly, had John taken such a dangerous step without permission?

“He was really pissed off about Laura,” John recalled. “He told me that she would never give us anything and that she was a big risk. I don’t know how he knew that, but he did. He told me she was nothing but trouble.”

John did his best to cool the agent’s anger. He explained that Barbara knew he was a spy and that she had told all of his kids that he was a spy. Recruiting Laura and Arthur might have been foolish, but John didn’t consider either of them a real danger.

“Laura is too weak a person to ever turn me in,” he said, “and Arthur would never turn on me because we are of the same blood.”

The agent was unconvinced. “There are people in your country who have come to us before. You aren’t the first,” he snapped, “and some of these people have helped the cause of peace for years and retired, yes, actually retired and died in their beds of old age without anyone ever knowing they were our friends.

“But,” the agent said, “there have been those who have come to us through the years who have been foolish. They have been exposed. The chances of being captured expand each time another person is added to the circle.”

John listened closely, but his natural cockiness kept him from revealing any outward anxiety.

Suddenly, the agent became silent. He stopped and faced John.

“People can get hurt in this business,” he said.

After several silent seconds, he added, “You must realize that you are not the only person at risk here.”

John was confused. His first thought, he said later, was that the KGB agent was suggesting John’s family could be in danger. But he later decided that the agent was talking about himself.

“It suddenly hit me that this guy had his ass on the line too! I mean, he had to explain to someone in Moscow why Whitworth had been transferred, and he had to get us raises and tell his bosses back in Red Square how I had recruited Laura and Art without his permission. I think he was a bit worried too. I mean, who wants to be sent to Siberia?”

The two men spoke for a long time, and eventually they both began to relax.

Before their meeting ended the KGB agent asked John for a favor.

“Tell me my friend,” he said, “how is my English?”

John nearly burst out laughing, but he knew the agent was serious. Perhaps the misunderstanding about vans had made him question his grasp of the language.

“Your English is okay,” John replied.

“Is that all?” the KGB agent responded.

“It’s fine, really, although it is somewhat outdated sometimes.”

“What do you mean?” the agent asked.

“Well, we don’t use words like dough or bread for money anymore.”

“What do you call it?”

“Money or cash.”

Both men laughed.

“It wouldn’t hurt if you threw in a bit of profanity,” John continued. “You see, most American men cuss a lot.”

There was nothing wrong, John explained, enjoying the role of teacher, in occasionally sprinkling a conversation with obscenities.

“Of course, if you really want to fit in around sailors, there is only one word you need to know.” John told the agent that military veterans loved to use a four-letter word that was slang for intercourse.