Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (29 page)

Chapter 43

The Navy called it “dropping guard,” and this turned out to be a painfully apt description when Jerry Whitworth was on duty. Whenever a ship arrived in port in San Francisco, the commander could elect to “drop guard” by asking the Naval Telecommunications Center at Alameda to handle all its message traffic during the months it was in port.

About two thirds of the ships that came to port dropped guard and relied on Alameda, and Jerry Whitworth, to collect all communications about its future assignments, operational plans, ship modifications, and anything else that happened to be addressed to it. The first person in Alameda to receive such messages was the “in-router,” who was responsible for making certain the message was delivered to the right box so that it ultimately could be delivered to the ship’s commander.

It was not a sophisticated system in 1981. Aaron Darnell Brown, a Navy in-router during 1981 in Alameda, recalled years later how he hand-carried messages from teletype machines to various wire baskets in the center for routing. During an average twenty-four-hour work period, the message center received 1,300 messages ranging from confidential to top secret. Brown usually put them in the wire baskets and, he noticed, Jerry Whitworth then examined each message. Brown figured Jerry was just doing his job.

Jerry was not well liked by many of the Navy radio operators at the center, according to Karen Margaret Barnett, a “watch stander” at Alameda responsible for making certain that messages from the center got to their final destinations.

“He thought he was just better than the rest of us,” she complained.

Shortly after Jerry and Brenda returned from visiting John in the fall of 1981, an incident occurred that caused Jerry to lose his arrogance.

When he reported to work one day, Jerry discovered that a breach in security had been uncovered and swarms of naval investigators were examining the records at Alameda. He was petrified. Apparently, one of the younger sailors who worked at the center had destroyed a cryptographic keylist without having another sailor present, as required.

“Jerry called me and told me about the security breach and how the Navy was making it into a federal case, you know, as big as the crucifixion of Jesus Christ,” John recalled. “Anyway, Jerry told me that he was being assigned temporary duty at Stockton.

“I really didn’t think much of it until I asked him what his access there would be like, and Jerry says he’s not going to have any access in Stockton. He was going to have a desk job there.”

John urged Jerry to apply for the CMS custodian at Stockton so he could continue getting keylists, but Jerry sounded uninterested. What Jerry didn’t have the guts to tell John was that he had engineered his own transfer to Stockton, because he wanted to stop spying.

The Alameda security breach was only part of the problem. Jerry was flip-flopping again. Less than two months earlier, he had complained to John about how no one would ever know how great they were as spies.

Now Jerry was running scared. He had had enough. Jerry knew that he had become addicted to the money, but he thought he could beat that. What he had trouble figuring out was how to deal with John. Like the other people in John Walker’s life, Jerry felt a Svengali-like attraction and loyalty to his mentor. John was counting on him. John was his very best friend, even better than Roger Olson.

It had been an adventure at first, like the two free spirits in
Easy Rider
– who refused to play by the rules. But the incident at Alameda had brought the spying into focus. “Hey, the Navy wasn’t messing around.”

This was serious stuff. Sooner or later, he was going to be caught. Jerry knew it and he was scared.

When federal agents arrested Christopher Boyce (of
The Falcon and the Snowman
) that August it was revealed the KGB hadn’t broken Boyce out of prison. No one had. He’d simply escaped on his own. Jerry thought: so much for romance and intrigue. The question was: What to do? And Jerry wasn’t sure.

John sensed that Jerry was withdrawing, but he didn’t react immediately.

“I just didn’t need this shit. I was busy as hell at the detective agency and I didn’t have time to fly out to California and hold Jerry’s hand every time he got frightened.”

John had problems of his own in late 1981. He was tired of Patsy Marsee and was trying to break off their relationship. Meanwhile, he had taken up with Pamela “P.K” Carroll, a twenty-two-year-old woman with emerald eyes and light brown hair, who had applied for a job at the agency. John not only hired her, but pursued her, even though she was about the same age as his own daughters.

Just as he had done with all of the other women whom he courted, John had promised to take P.K. to the Bahamas. He was scheduled to leave on New Year’s Day. John decided to fly out to see Jerry after the Bahamas trip.

Jerry seemed to be in good spirits when John arrived. He was enjoying his new job at Stockton and his break from spying. He was thinking about retiring again. John wasn’t surprised. “Whenever Jerry faced a problem, he ran away,” John said.

“Your transfer is really going to cause me some problems,” John complained. “And it’s going to hurt you financially. I thought you liked getting those ten-thousand-dollar bonuses.”

Jerry announced that he no longer needed any spy money. Brenda was going to have her degree in a few years and her income, along with his pension, would be more than enough for them to make it financially. Besides, Jerry had decided to become a stockbroker, and a successful broker could make $100,000 per year easy. That was more per year than the sporadic payments that he had received from john, and there was no risk of going to prison.

“Shit, Jerry, what risk?” John asked. “There is no threat of us being caught. The FBI isn’t a threat at all, really. Unless some catastrophic accident happens, like a tree dropping on my car or something like that, we are completely safe.”

Jerry wasn’t so sure. What about Barbara? he asked. Didn’t she know what was going on?

“She doesn’t know anything,” John said, “and she’s not going to talk. Listen, there are things about Barbara you don’t know. She can’t go to the FBI about me without hurting herself and besides, I’m sending her money. Don’t worry about Barbara.”

John turned the tables.

“What about Brenda?”

Did she know?

“Jerry told me Brenda didn’t have a clue to what he was doing,” John recalled. “Jerry said he had convinced Brenda that he was working for the United States in a secret sort of way. He never fully explained what he told her, but he convinced me that she didn’t know.”

After hearing Jerry’s explanation, John said, “Hey, that’s a good idea, telling her that you are working for the government. I wish I’d thought of it first. At least it explains some of the extra money around the house.”

Jerry asked John if he had a plan in case he ever was captured.

“Look, if either of us are ever arrested, we hang tough,” John said.
“Neither of us will say a word until we get lawyers, and for godsakes don’t believe the FBI if they come in and tell you that I’ve squealed, ‘cause it won’t be true. They will simply be trying to turn us against each other. Certainly don’t admit anything and don’t incriminate yourself, and if we are ever caught red-handed, then we claim the material was being sold to a friendly nation like Israel.”

John paused and then grinned. “I mean, you believed that once, didn’t you?”

Jerry didn’t react. He was angry.

“I’ve been thinking about the money,” John continued, “and I’ve been wondering whether we could get you a one-shot, lump payment in return, say, for a promise to deliver keylists for the next ten years.”

Jerry appeared surprised. He was talking about getting out of espionage and John was talking about locking him into it for another decade.

“One million dollars,” John continued, “works out to be the same one hundred thousand per year that you think you can make as a stockbroker, only this is tax free. Think it over.”

Chapter 44

Despite his persistent reminders, John had been unable to get Laura to follow through with what he thought was her promise to reenlist in the Army and become a spy. Instead, after Mark was discharged from the Army in the fall of 1980, they and the baby moved in with Barbara in Skowhegan. Laura’s marriage was a shambles. She was tired of Mark, but he still wanted to make it work. He had gotten a job in Skowhegan with the federal CETA program and later found work at a company making fire alarms. But his salary still was not enough for them to afford their own place.

Mark and Laura weren’t the only persons living with Barbara. Cynthia and her little boy lived there) and so did Barbara’s mother, Annie. Although Annie was receiving Social Security and Cynthia was receiving welfare, Barbara remained the main breadwinner. John would occasionally send Barbara a few hundred dollars for emergencies, but he wasn’t paying her anything regularly and Barbara really didn’t care. Over the years, John had earned nearly $1 million from the KGB, but his family had seen very little of it.

“It was a strange situation in Maine,” Mark Snyder told me later. “Barbara was working hard, no doubt about it. She was gluing shoes together and making four or five dollars per hour tearing her hands apart. But I remember she wouldn’t take any money from John. She said she didn’t want his money or anything to do with him.”

In April 1981, Laura decided that she wanted out of Skowhegan and her marriage. “Laura went to this wedding of a friend of hers in California, and she liked it out there and wanted to move back there,” Mark said. “I said, ‘Okay, whatever/ and she went out to get established and Chris stayed with me in Skowhegan.”

What Mark said he didn’t realize until later was that Laura wanted only Christopher to join her in California, not him.

Laura’s decision to leave Skowhegan irritated Barbara. She accused Laura of abandoning her son. But Laura felt she had no choice. She settled in Hayward, near San Francisco, and went to work at a home construction company. About a month after she left Skowhegan, Laura telephoned Mark and asked him to bring Christopher to her. When Mark arrived, he announced that both of them were staying.

“The agreement was that Mark would stay with me until he got his own place,” Laura said. “Then he was supposed to move out. Eight months later, he was still there. He never moved. I would beg him. I gave him money. I tried everything. I gave him half of my five-hundred-dollar income tax refund to go, but he still wouldn’t. I’ll never forget that morning after I gave him the money. It was his day off and I said, ‘What do you plan to do? Are you moving this afternoon or later or what?’ He said, ‘I am not leaving.’ I remember I just began to cry and to sob right there because I knew that I could not get rid of this guy. I was bound to this man because he was my husband, and I had become a born-again Christian and 1 was trying to understand what it meant to live my life for the Lord. I knew that divorce was wrong, but I could not understand why I had to be with this creep any longer. It was a total nightmare.”

When John arrived in California on January 29, 1982, Mark was still living with Laura, although they rarely spoke to each other. “My father always seemed to arrive at my most vulnerable moments,” Laura recalled. “I don’t know how he planned it, but he always had that knack for coming when I was desperate.”

John telephoned Laura after he finished talking business with Jerry and invited her to join Jerry, Brenda, and him for dinner. Mark wasn’t invited and Laura was happy to get away from him for an evening. John and Laura got along extremely well that night, so John suggested that they spend the next day together.

“I want to see my grandson,” John explained, “buy a camera and take some pictures of him.”

The next morning, they drove to San Leandro with two-year-old Christopher. John bought a camera and they drove to a park where Christopher could play.

“Okay, what are you going to do?” John asked Laura as both watched Christopher making roads in a sandbox.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, do you want to get into the espionage or not?”

Laura said she couldn’t reenlist in the Army because of Christopher.

“I’ve talked to a recruiter for you,” John replied quickly. “All you have to do is sign over custody of Christopher to your mother or me and then go back into the Army. Your mother would love to get custody of Christopher because then she could get a welfare check for him, and you’d have a job again.”

How long would she have to give up Christopher? Laura asked.

“Just fill out the custody agreement, then go back in the Army for training, and once you get a decent apartment you can get Christopher,” John said. “Besides your Army pay, I can give you up to five hundred dollars per month as a retainer, and once you start giving me documents, that amount will increase. But you’ve got to make up your mind, Laura, because my man in Europe is getting worried about you. You’re going to be too old soon.”

“So tell me,” John continued, “are you going to join the Army and take the money, or what?”

In interviews after his arrest, John claimed once again that Laura agreed to do it. “She said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it, if you’ll give me money for a divorce from Mark.’ So I agreed to help her get her bills cleared up and pay her enough to get a divorce and get back to Maine, where she could reenlist.”

When Laura Walker recalled her conversation with her father, she denied she had ever agreed to be a spy. But again her court testimony revealed some ambiguity.

QUESTION:
Please tell us what was discussed.

ANSWER:
He started by saying that his man in Europe was concerned because I was getting older, and that – I can’t remember how, but he somehow indicated that I was reaching an age limit of some sort. And then he said again that the offer still stood for me to – if I was willing to agree to do what he had proposed. And we talked about my going back in.

Q:
What did he say about the kind of information that would be desired, if anything?

A:
He said that anything was valuable. And he mentioned journals, manuals, repair manuals. But the most desirable was codes, any kind of codes that I could get my hands on. No matter how old, they were still valuable.

Q:
Now, how was your position, if you accepted, described by your father if you had gone forward with a plan where you were supplying information? Did he have any word that he used to describe the relationship between you in the business?

A:
Partners.

Q:
At that time, in this park in 1982 in San Leandro, did you give him a firm answer as to whether you were going to participate or not?
A:
I didn’t come right out and say “No,” but I tried to explain that I wouldn’t – that I couldn’t do it.

Q:
Did you say anything or do anything that would encourage him to think that it was still an open possibility or that your participation might be forthcoming?

A:
I think I was a little wishy-washy in my refusal.

Q:
Did he give you any money that day?

A:
No.

Q:
Later on did he send you any money?

A:
Yes.

Q:
And that was in connection with what event?

A:
The divorce.

Laura told me that her chat in the park with her father had scared her.

“When he said, ‘I was talking to my man in Europe,’ it was the first time I had ever heard a reference to a foreign country,” Laura explained. “It really stunned me because the reality of the fact that he was transmitting secrets to a foreign country hit me. But what surprised me and shocked me even more was the fact that he discussed me with some foreigner, and it freaked me out! I suddenly became afraid. People knew my name and they may have a whole dossier on me, and all of a sudden I was feeling really afraid for myself and my son. ‘Am I being watched?’ I wondered. This whole spy thing began to mount on me....”

Once again, when John left Laura in California, he was convinced that she was going to help him. A few days later, he sent her $500 and a charge card. When the money arrived, Laura had intended, she said later, to pack up and move back East. But she didn’t carry through with her plan.

“I had changed my mind. When you are twenty-one years old, your marriage is a disaster and has been from the beginning, and you have a two-year-old child and, to be perfectly honest with you, I could not get my act together and I’ll admit it – I was a doe head and I made so many expensive mistakes – so I decided that I was not going to go and I called my dad and said, ‘I am not going to go,’ and he said, ‘Well, I hope you send the credit card back’ because he knew he would never see the money. I sent the credit card back, but I gave Mark the money and here again, I made the same mistake twice, can you believe it? I gave him five hundred dollars again to move out, and he did not move.”

John later recalled his exchange with Laura that day over the telephone:

“I asked her if she had gotten the money and credit card. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the money was gone. I need you to send me five hundred more.’ I told her that I wasn’t sending her any more money. Maybe an airline ticket, but that is it, and then I asked her if she was going to help me or what? And she says, ‘It depends on whether you send me another five hundred dollars.’ ”

In February 1982, John left for Vienna to meet his KGB handler. During the long flight, he thought about Laura and how his Russian handler had predicted that she would never provide any material to him.

His handler had warned John that recruiting Laura was a mistake. All Laura would be was a threat.

“I remember thinking that Laura was running a scam on me. Her own father!” John told me later. “How could I have been so stupid? But it was finally hitting me. She never intended to spy, really. All she was doing was simply using me for the money. She was stringing me along.”

John paused, and then he said, with little emotion in his voice, “At that point there were two people I should have killed: Barbara and Laura.