Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (34 page)

Chapter 53

Jerry Whitworth received an enticing letter from Brenda shortly before the U.S.S.
Enterprise
arrived home in San Francisco Bay on April 28, 1983.

“I long to have you home,” she wrote him, promising delights. “Look for the white 1957 Rolls-Royce, a chauffeur, and me, the lady in red.”

The boys in the radio room were jealous. Jerry seemed to have it all.

Indeed, Brenda had ridden to the dock in a rented Rolls-Royce and was waiting for him in high heels, dark stockings, and a fetching bright red dress with a white linen jacket. But as the aircraft carrier neared the pier, it ran aground on a sand bar and remained stuck for five hours until the incoming tide could free it.

By the time Jerry came ashore, the bill for the Rolls had risen to $470. It didn’t matter. Brenda tipped the chauffeur two twenty-dollar bills and thanked him for sticking around for nine hours. Jerry had a surprise for Brenda too. He had bought two of the most expensive seats at the San Francisco Opera for the 1983 summer season. The box seats cost $500 but Jerry added another $200 as a donation so that Brenda’s name would be listed in the program as a contributor.

Jerry had followed John’s advice and always used cashier’s checks for large purchases. But Jerry was no longer a mere puppet. He had devised his own scheme to hide his income by using as many as forty-two different bank accounts and forty-four credit cards.

It was going to be difficult to give up such luxuries, but Jerry had definitely decided to end his spying. He would do it slowly though, giving John only a few documents from the
Enterprise
at a time, in order to keep the spy money coming as long as possible.

Jerry also had a trick in mind. He had intentionally fogged the rolls of film (photos of about a third of the
Enterprise
documents he stole) that he was going to give to John. As a result, none of these pictures of the classified messages would be usable.

After his arrest, Jerry Whitworth claimed he had fogged the film because he had decided that he no longer wanted to spy and was also feeling pangs of patriotism and guilt over what he had done. But John Walker saw Jerry’s actions as much more devious. He believed that Jerry had fogged the film in order to get the KGB angry at John. He also believed that Jerry was trying to extort more money from the KGB.

John was anxious to find out what sort of material Jerry had when he arrived on June 3, 1983, in California. When the two men were alone, Jerry gave John the fogged film and a large envelope filled with a dozen classified messages. John scribbled notes on the back of the envelope as Jerry briefed him about his delivery. “All messages . . . secret and one top secret,” John wrote.

John was dearly impressed as Jerry explained how the carrier had sailed into waters claimed by Vietnam, and participated in a three-carrier war game, and how an F-14 had intruded Soviet airspace.

“Jesus Christ!” John remarked. “This is fucking great shit, Jerry.”

Years later, John remembered that he was also a bit confused during Jerry’s briefing that day. “I didn’t know why Jerry gave me both film and copies of documents, but when I asked, he said he wanted me to have the copies so I could read them because they were so interesting. They were about the F-14 intrusion into Soviet airspace. What I didn’t realize until later was that Jerry obviously wanted the KGB to know that he had valuable messages. The copies were just a sample.”

The film that Jerry gave John represented only about one third of the classified messages that Jerry had stolen. The rest, he said, were still hidden on the ship and it was much too dangerous to move them now.

“That didn’t strike me as odd at the time,” John recalled later, “because the stuff he had showed me was really great and I wasn’t worried about getting any more. Of course, now I realize I should have been suspicious of Jerry.”

John asked Jerry whether he had been able to get any cryptographic keylists, but Jerry said he hadn’t. Jerry had been promoted to senior chief and lost his access.

“It would seem odd if a senior chief was the classified materials custodian,” Jerry explained. “That’s a junior radioman’s job.”

Jerry didn’t have access to any technical manuals either, he added. But he could keep giving John messages that would interest his buyers.

On June 12, 1983, John delivered Jerry’s film and stolen messages to the KGB at a dead drop outside Washington. Even though Jerry hadn’t been able to steal any keylists, John figured the KGB would be thrilled by the classified messages.

John still didn’t have any idea, at this point, that Jerry’s film had been intentionally fogged. The only items that the KGB were actually going to get were the copies of messages about the F-14 intrusion.

John also picked up a package from the KGB at the dead drop. He assumed it contained cash, but when he opened it, he discovered there wasn’t any.

During the drive back to Norfolk, John decided the Soviets were simply playing it straight. “I figured the Soviets were worried because they didn’t understand why Jerry was being transferred, and they always assumed the worst – that the FBI had figured us out. So they weren’t going to pay us until they were certain Jerry was legitimate.”

There was another reason for the Russians to be cautious on June 12, 1983 – a reason that had nothing to do with either John Walker or Jerry Whitworth.

Less than two months earlier, the FBI had surprised the KGB by nabbing Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Barmyantsev, a high-ranking Soviet military attache, during a fake dead drop that had taken place amazingly close to John’s dead drop site.

Barmyantsev had fallen into a trap set by the FBI counterintelligence office in Washington. Special agent Bill O’Keefe had dreamed up the scam and spent nearly one year putting it into action.

Following logic that would have pleased John Walker, O’Keefe decided that the FBI should entrap the Russians rather than always waiting for them to make the first move. O’Keefe got approval to teach John Stine, a forty-five-year-old security officer at a defense contracting firm, how to play the role of a dissatisfied American anxious to betray his country for cash.

The FBI scheme, code-named Operation Jagwire, turned out to be amazingly similar to John’s real-life experiences with the KGB.

Stine approached the Russians on Thanksgiving Day in 1982 by simply walking into the Soviet Military Office in Washington and offering his services. After he gave them several documents marked SECRET, he was paid $500 and hustled into a basement garage and car trunk for a zigzag trip through Washington.

Later, Stine met his KGB handler face-to-face and was given $4,800 stuffed into a soda can along with detailed instructions for future dead drops. The instructions were written in exactly the same way as those John had received.

When Barmyantsev showed up to pick up Stine’s delivery, the FBI rushed in. Barmyantsev was so alarmed that he wet his pants, according to an account of Operation Jagwire written by journalists David Friend and Vance Muse. The entire sting operation remained a secret until Friend and Muse wrote about it in
Life
magazine.

It is likely, intelligence officials now believe, that operation may have inadvertently spooked the KGB before John’s dead drop and cost John and Jerry their KGB paychecks. The Russians were already nervous about Jerry when Operation Jagwire occurred.

Neither John nor Jerry knew about the FBI’s sting operation on July 28, 1983, when Jerry flew to Norfolk and asked for his spy salary.

“There isn’t any,” John replied.

Jerry wanted to know why. “Because you fucked things up,” John replied, “with all your stupid transfers and inability to decide whether or not you are going to keep doing this!”

John asked Jerry if he had brought the other two thirds of the messages from the U.S.S.
Enterprise
with him and was irritated when Jerry told him no. Jerry and Brenda had sold their condominium in San Leandro and were moving to Davis, California, Jerry explained. The movers had accidentally packed the messages with his household effects, which were in storage.

John didn’t believe Jerry, but he didn’t say so. He wasn’t certain what Jerry was up to. John also thought it was odd that Jerry had raced out to Norfolk to get his spy salary. Why was he in such a rush?

A few weeks after Jerry left Norfolk, John received a formal invitation in the mail.

Master Chief Lloyd Long requests the pleasure of your company for the retirement ceremony for Senior Chief Jerry A. Whitworth. Please join us in celebrating Jerry’s last hurrah . . .

So that was it. Jerry had decided to retire without telling John.

“That son of a bitch was too scared to tell me that he was getting out,” John recalled. “He did it behind my back. He was going to get us both killed.”

Back in California, Jerry considered himself safe. He didn’t have anything to worry about because he still had one year’s worth of classified messages from the U.S.S.
Enterprise
as bargaining chips. That was why he had given John
copies
of the messages about the F-14 intrusion as well as the fogged film.

Jerry had to make certain that the KGB understood what he had to offer.

Jerry knew the KGB would be tantalized by those messages and it wasn’t going to go after him as long as he had something it wanted. He also felt confident the KGB would give him all of the back pay it owed him even though he had retired. Once again, the KGB wasn’t going to risk losing the messages from the
Enterprise
. They were his “insurance.”

Of course, John was about to unknowingly walk into a precarious situation when he flew to Vienna and met his handler. By that time, the KGB would have developed Jerry’s worthless film and would want to know why Jerry had ruined it.

John had always said that the KGB was ruthless and that he was always on the verge of being assassinated by KGB agents. Jerry Whitworth, either intentionally or unintentionally, was about to put John’s theory to the test.

Chapter 54

Marie Hammond was horrified when she met Laura Walker at the airport in Buffalo, New York, in July of 1983. Laura looked emaciated, fatigued, and disheveled. Marie wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake inviting Laura to stay with her at a farm south of Buffalo on the edge of Lake Erie, where Marie’s grandmother lived.

Marie and Laura had become good friends in 1980 when both of their husbands were stationed at Fort Polk, but Marie hadn’t seen Laura since then and she said later that she might not have recognized Laura that day had she not been expecting her.

“Laura had hit rock bottom,” Marie told me.

All she owned were two pair of blue jeans, two blouses, one dress and some underwear. Marie was afraid to let Laura sleep alone that night because she was so depressed. So she put a cot in her bedroom for Laura to use.

“She was so fragile,” Marie recalled. “She was at the breaking point. I sat on the edge of the cot that night and held her and she just sobbed and sobbed.”

Five years older and a born-again Christian, Marie was a safe port in Laura’s turbulent life. Marie herself was no stranger to heartache. At age nine, her father drowned. She hated her stepfather. When she was fourteen years old, she had a nervous breakdown. But she had repaired her life thanks to religion and by marrying, at age sixteen, Bill Hammond, her childhood sweetheart. Now she felt that God had called her to help Laura Walker. He had sent her to Marie, like the lost sheep who is found.

The next day, Laura said she wasn’t certain that moving in with Marie had been such a good idea. Laura wanted to telephone her mother, so Marie agreed to pay for the call.

“Mother,” Laura said when she reached Barbara, “I need money. I want to go get Chris, but I need money to do it.”

Barbara was broke and in no mood to make a loan to Laura. “I don’t have any money to loan you,” Barbara replied.

“Well, you can get it from Dad,” Laura insisted. “All you have to do is ask him.” Barbara became angry. If Laura wanted money from John, why didn’t she simply call her dad and ask him for it? Why did everyone expect Barbara to run to John when they needed his help?

“I’m tired of being fucked!” Barbara snapped. “Go find someone else to fucking use!” She slammed down the telephone.

Years later, Barbara Walker recalled that conversation to me with sorrow.

“Normally, I wouldn’t have said that to her. I usually would do anything for my children, but I was hurting and so tired of hearing Laura whine about Christopher. I was tired of bailing her out all the time.”

Laura was outraged. “Whenever my mother asked me for money, I always sent it to her,” Laura told me later. “Hundreds of dollars. Sometimes I did not have it. But if I did, I sent it.... She knew I was desperate. All she had to do was say, ‘No.’ But she was angry because she knew I was on my way to get Chris and she was not happy about that. And do you know why? Because she thought that once I got Chris that the espionage would be brought up and my dad would go to jail, and my brother might be dragged into it because at that time Michael was in the Navy, and, of course, she might go to jail too!

“All anybody was interested in was covering their own butt,” Laura said.

Laura tried to call her mother back that day, but all she got was a busy signal. She assumed incorrectly that Barbara had taken the telephone off the hook.

Actually, Barbara was telephoning Mark Snyder to warn him that Laura was in Buffalo and might be coming after Christopher.

“This is when I decided in my mind that I was going to cut off all ties to my family,” Laura explained later. “That call was it. It was probably not a wise thing to do, but when your own mother tells you to fuck off, you have really hit the bottom.”

Marie was just as angry when Laura told her what Barbara had said. “What kind of family does this to each other?” she asked. “You don’t know the half of it, Marie,” Laura replied. “My family has worse secrets than this one!”

The two women talked for several minutes and then Laura said, “Marie, I’m going to fix my family. My mother doesn’t know what it’s like to lose a child, but I’m going to teach her what it’s like. I’m never going to speak to her again. As far as I am concerned, she can just think that I’m dead.”

Marie agreed – it was a good idea.

A few days later, Laura and Marie came up with another way for Laura to get enough money to go after Christopher. Marie was an avid follower of the televised ministry of Virginia Beach evangelist M. G. (Pat) Robertson, host of
The 700 Club
, a “prayer and praise” program. They decided to telephone Robertson and ask his ministry for the money.

They phoned several times, but their request for money was turned down. After listening to Laura’s story, however, one counselor offered to pray for her over the telephone and during that prayer, the counselor began speaking in tongues.

Marie was on the line. “I thought, ‘Oh great, this is going to do a lot of good,’ but then the counselor started interpreting the tongues for me,” Marie Hammond told me later. “She said, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord, your friend shall not return to Stephen [Laura’s boyfriend in California] and live in sin.’ She outlined about seven things that Laura was required to do to have the Lord walk with her, and then she said that if Laura did those seven things, God would return Christopher to her. He would deliver her son back to her. I’d never told this counselor about Stephen, but she mentioned him by name. It truly was a miracle.”

Laura took the message seriously. She joined a charismatic church and was later baptized in a swimming pool. One Sunday, while Laura was at church, Barbara telephoned the farm and asked to speak with her.

“She’s not here,” Marie told Barbara. Then Marie added, “I put her on a bus to Maine about a week ago. She was coming to see you. Hasn’t she arrived there yet?”

“No! She’s not here!” Barbara replied.

“I wonder what’s happened to her?” Marie said. “I hope nothing is wrong!”

Barbara was worried. She telephoned John.

“Something’s happened to Laura!” she told him. “She’s disappeared! We’ve got to find her.”

John thought Barbara was drunk and exaggerating, but after they talked for a few minutes, he decided that she was serious. He promised to call the state police in New York and have his pals in the Norfolk police department put out a missing persons bulletin.

When Laura returned from church, Marie told her what she had done. “I just couldn’t let your family continue treating you the way it has,” Marie said. “Besides, you said you didn’t ever want to talk to any of them again.”

Laura agreed. Now Barbara would know what it was like to lose a child.

That fall, Laura began working as a waitress in a diner and earned enough money to buy a truck and some clothes. She also began talking to Marie again about going after Christopher, but she was scared. One night Marie found Laura crying. This is how Marie later recalled the conversation.

“I heard Laura sobbing in her bedroom and I went in and asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘Oh Marie, everything is so screwed up.’ Laura had been praying, but she still didn’t know what to do and I said to her, ‘Well, I’m sure the Lord has– ’ and, I remember Laura cut me off in mid-sentence. She said, ‘Marie, you don’t understand. My father has committed treason!’ I was confused and really didn’t understand what Laura was telling me, and she saw that and I think it made her angry. She said, ‘Marie, my dad is a spy! He was a spy in the Navy and he’s spying now, and Mark knows it and if I try to get Christopher, Mark will turn us all in. He’ll claim that I was a spy too.’ She was afraid.”

The two women prayed together for several hours and then Marie went back to her own bedroom. She couldn’t sleep.

“I got out of bed and I sat near the window and looked outside,” Marie said later.

“I was scared too. I said, ‘God, there has to be a solution.’ . . . I must have prayed for another two hours and then finally I said, ‘Okay, God, I’m leaving this up to you. Show me the way.’ ”