Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (33 page)

Chapter 51

Jerry Whitworth didn’t have to wait long during October 1982 for some tantalizing top secret messages to cross his desk aboard the U.S.S.
Enterprise
. The carrier and the twelve ships and submarines that traveled as part of its battle group entered the South China Sea on October 19 and intentionally crossed into what the government of Vietnam considers its territorial waters. The United States did not recognize Vietnam’s claim and said the carrier was merely sailing through the area as part of a “freedom of navigation” exercise to keep the waterway open. The trip was not reported in the carrier’s unclassified ship history that year, but it was confirmed later in court testimony by Captain Charles Reed Jones, Jr., commanding officer of the Navy’s Fleet Intelligence Center in the Pacific.

“The
Enterprise
battle group was asked to conduct a challenge to the Vietnamese-claimed territorial waters in the South China Sea,” Jones testified. “That claim is not recognized by the United States. It’s not recognized in international law because it’s considered to be excessive.”

The battle group was doing more than simply establishing the right of U.S. naval ships to cruise wherever they wished. The U.S.S.
Enterprise
was engaged in electronic surveillance, which is part of a rarely mentioned but almost routine cat-and-mouse game played by the superpowers. The Vietnamese had no way of knowing on October 19 if the arrival of an aircraft carrier off their shoreline was part of a training exercise or actual attack. So the military there took immediate defensive action. It cranked up its radar, prepared whatever surface missiles it had, and launched aircraft to monitor and, if necessary, encounter the intruder. The entire time that Vietnam was taking such steps, the U.S.S.
Enterprise
was busy monitoring the country’s military preparedness. Using the latest electronic surveillance devices, the ship attempted to identify Vietnamese missile sites and isolate the frequencies that the Vietnamese used for emergency communications.

Sometimes, these war games are even more sophisticated. A carrier, such as the U.S.S.
Enterprise
, might jam the enemy’s radar to see how it reacts. This form of intelligence-gathering is extremely effective, but it is also dangerous.

For instance, on March 23, 1986, the U.S. Sixth Fleet conducted a “freedom of navigation” exercise in the disputed waters of the Gulf of Sidra off the coast of Libya. For two days, Libya fired surface missiles at U.S. aircraft and ships. The United States responded by attacking several Libyan airplanes and missile installations on the Libyan mainland. Libyan leader Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi had warned the United States against crossing what he described as a “line of death” across the gulf, but U.S. officials claimed Libya had no territorial right to control the area.

The U.S.S.
Enterprise’s
cruise into waters claimed by Vietnam elicited the response that Navy intelligence officials had hoped for. Messages from reconnaissance aircraft and other members of the battle group streamed into the radio room where Jerry worked. As Navy analysts collected electronic data about Vietnam’s air, land, and sea defenses, Jerry quietly copied the messages that he wanted to keep for delivery to the Russians.

Monitoring Vietnam was just the start.

Sometime during November and December, the carrier battle group conducted “real world surveillance of the Soviet naval units operating in the Indian Ocean,” according to the
Enterprise’s
manifest. Details of the operation remain classified, but intelligence officer Jones disclosed during testimony that the U.S.S.
Enterprise
battle group happened upon a Russian aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean.

The
Enterprise’s
skipper decided to take advantage of the presence of the Kiev and conduct war games, including “a practice long-range strike against the surface force.” The
Enterprise
did this by sending several aircraft on a mock attack of the Russian carrier.

The aircraft, Jones later testified, flew “seven hundred nautical miles toward the Kiev, made contact, visual contact, with the Kiev and then came back.”

Once again, U.S. intelligence personnel aboard the
Enterprise
used sophisticated electronic monitoring devices to record the Russians’ every move during the mock attack, and Jerry Whitworth carefully put aside copies of the messages that he figured would bring the highest price.

The biggest intelligence-gathering operation and most dangerous cat-and-mouse game still awaited the carrier. Records show that on April 9, 1983, the
Enterprise
rendezvoused with the aircraft carriers the U.S.S. Midway and the U.S.S. Coral Sea for the first-ever exercise in the Pacific conducted by three aircraft carriers.

Within days, the three battle groups traveled to within four hundred miles of the Soviet-controlled Kamchatka peninsula. Officially, the operation was purely a training exercise, an attempt “to demonstrate effective joint and combined theater operations with a three-carrier battle force ... in a high threat environment.”

But the Navy had an ulterior motive.

Just as the
Enterprise
had gathered intelligence about Vietnam, the three carriers were eager to observe how the Soviet Union intended to react to the sudden appearance of three carriers and nearly thirty support warships at the lip of its border. Using sophisticated electronic snooping and jamming devices, intelligence officials aboard the carriers diligently recorded the Soviets’ military reaction. The number of Russian aircraft launched, locations of Soviet missiles, frequencies of emergency broadcasts, all were monitored.

During testimony later, Lieutenant Commander James Dale Jeeter explained that the three carriers operated exactly the “way they intended to fight.” This was important because the Pentagon, which had spent more than one year preparing for the exercise, assumed the Russians would respond under similar “real life battle conditions.”

The three-carrier exercise was also important because if the United States ever had to “successfully carry a war to the shores of the Soviets” it would most likely use a three-carrier formation. During the seventeen-day exercise, the three carriers simulated dozens of wartime maneuvers in response to a series of possible scenarios. The 255 airplanes aboard the three ships were constantly engaged in mock attacks and reconnaissance missions, while U.S. submarines attempted to penetrate the carriers’ defenses without being detected by anti-submarine ships. The communications center aboard the
Enterprise
was swamped with messages.

When the Navy conducts most of its operations, especially large ones like this, it carefully lists all of its objectives in a thick instruction booklet, which it gives to the various participants. Such books existed for the three-carrier operation, but the Navy wanted to try something new with this exercise. So nearly all of the day-to-day operational orders that were issued during the exercise were sent or received by the
Enterprise’s
radio room, just as they would have been had the United States actually been at war. This gave the Pentagon a chance to review the performance of its ship’s various radio crews.

It also gave Jerry Whitworth access to a step-by-step narrative of what the three carriers would do during an attack.

At one point during the operation, the Soviet Union claimed an F-14 aircraft from the
Enterprise
violated Russian airspace. Whether or not this incident occurred, and, if it did, whether it was part of some intelligence-gathering ploy or an accident, is classified information. The Pentagon will acknowledge only that the Russians protested. But Jerry later told John about the F-14 intrusion and gave John some of the one hundred classified messages that the Pentagon later acknowledged were transmitted after the F-14 flight.

When the three-carrier operation ended, the Pentagon tried to determine whether it was successful. Its immediate reaction was mixed. While the exercise had given the Navy a chance to train its commanders, the Pacific Fleet headquarters was dissatisfied and frustrated because, strangely, the three carriers had not generated as much intelligence information about the Russians’ response to a three-carrier threat as the Pentagon had anticipated.

Pentagon analysts couldn’t figure out why the Soviets hadn’t done more to monitor the fleet exercise. It seemed somewhat odd, especially since the Russians had paid close attention to smaller exercises in the past that were less important. Years later, Pentagon officials wondered if Jerry Whitworth hadn’t been the reason for the Russians’ lack of interest. “Jerry copied everything he could about the operation,” John confided after his arrest.

If a full-scale war ever erupted between the Soviet Union and United States, the twelve-inch stack of messages that Jerry had photographed would provide the Russians with a blow-by-blow chronology of how the U.S. Navy intended to form an off-shore flotilla and attack the Soviets’ borders. What’s more, the three-carrier operation had been done in cooperation with Canadian naval forces, so the Russians could identify what our northern neighbor would do during a war.

Selling the KGB messages from the three-carrier operation was akin to giving one football team its opponent’s playbook a few days before the Super Bowl.

Only the consequences were much, much higher.

Years later, federal prosecutors asked Lieutenant Commander Jeeter and intelligence specialist Captain Jones to put a dollar value on the messages that Jerry had copied while aboard the
Enterprise
. Both said that would be impossible.

“Basically, what you have here is a cookbook of how we do business,” Jeeter explained. “It’s a recipe. You know, it’s kind of like Coca-Cola. Once you have the recipe, you may do it a little bit different way, but you always come back to the cookbook.”

Added Jones, “It would be hard to put a price tag on it.... If, for example, you had your forces arrayed so that you could look at the exercise and follow it and watch it, you could develop an awful lot of insight, but if, on top of that, you had all the boilerplate of that exercise, the purpose, the tactics, and the wrap-up of how the opposing force thinks they’ve done, well, you’ve got to save just an incalculable amount of manpower, and the value you have to put on that is tremendous because the insight that it provides you into that Navy’s capabilities and, more importantly, I think, that Navy’s senior management’s thinking and insights into that thought process and what they think is awfully important ... and ... of tremendous value.”

As the
Enterprise
returned to the United States, Jerry recognized the messages he had stolen as a golden opportunity. They could easily earn him enough money from the KGB to retire. Just as important, they could provide him with a way out from under the thumb of John Walker.

Jerry had a plan.

Chapter 52

John was angry when he telephoned Arthur after returning from Vienna. Arthur immediately drove over to John’s house.

“My buyers said the stuff you gave me from VSE was so utterly useless that they don’t want me even to risk carrying it around,” John told Arthur. “Isn’t there anything at VSE besides this low-level confidential shit that you could get me?”

“Not really, John. We just don’t have much there.”

John had a suggestion: Could Arthur tell by looking at various ship overhaul schedules when the Navy was changing the DEFCON level, the numerical system that reflects the defense readiness condition of the military on a scale of 1 to 5. Arthur wasn’t certain. “What would I see that would be a clue?”

“An increased ammunition order,” John replied. “Or maybe a change in a ship’s overhaul schedule.”

“That’s good, but I’m not going to see or hear that kind of stuff.”

“Will you see a sudden pull back of a ship for fixing?”

“Sure, but there might be other reasons besides a change in the DEFCON. If I think of something that would be indicative, I will let you know.”

John wasn’t letting Arthur off the hook that easily. “Okay, you work on overhaul planning, so you know when a ship is going to overhaul, right?”

“Yes,” Arthur replied, “but this type of planning goes on approximately one year prior to repair. I don’t have any information on ship movements during that year, only when the ship is going into the shipyard. Is someone really going to pay to know when a ship is going into overhaul?”

“They might,” John replied. “They might pay for something like that.”

“I got a definite impression,” Arthur told me later, “that at this point, John was scratching for anything that would help him deliver. He was going to pitch this ship overhaul information to somebody.”

The two brothers spoke about other information that might interest the KGB and then John became pensive.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” he said to Arthur, “if we could raise our kids like the Mafia does, where you are born into a family operation and there isn’t anything to worry about? Imagine, you wouldn’t have to sweat about your kids getting a good job or having financial problems. They’d just do what they were supposed to do and inherit your family operation. “

“Listen, John, that’s a bunch of bullshit. I know my kids wouldn’t ever do it, especially now. You’d have to start them from birth, and even then I’m not sure you could achieve that with them ‘cause there would be so many other influences. I mean, my kids wouldn’t break the law even for me.”

John disagreed. “Your kids would do anything for you,” he said. “Trust me. A kid can never say no to a parent.”

“I began to become suspicious,” Arthur told me later, “because I knew Mike had enlisted in the Navy. I wondered if John had pushed him into spying. John had told me that his man on the West Coast was getting out of the business, and I knew John was really under a lot of pressure to come up with something. I didn’t want to say anything though. I figured it was between Mike and his dad and besides, what could I say? I had done it too. I’d spied for John, so what in the hell would I tell Michael?”