Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (36 page)

“I knew in my heart that Mike couldn’t refuse me. . . . He had always wanted to please me. It’s natural for a son to want to please his father, and Michael always had. Ever since he was a small boy, he and I had a special relationship. He was clearly my favorite so I knew that he would do what I asked him to.

“I had planned to wait until Mike was a little older and better established in the Navy, but Jerry had forced me to move. I was losing Jerry and that meant I didn’t have anyone else to produce. Art couldn’t deliver shit and I knew that without Mike, I was running a real risk. See, that is what recruiting Michael was all about. I had to get him into the ring before I could get out of it. That was the only way for me to get out without getting a .22 slug behind the ear. I realized that right after I became a spy. Mike was my ticket. He was my way out. No one was going to mess with
me
if Mike took over my organization. I could retire with P.K. and get some chickens and move to the hills of Virginia and relax because the KGB would be afraid to move on me.

“I don’t know how else to justify what I did except to give an analogy. I began thinking of Joseph Kennedy, okay. I mean, here was a guy who had done things when he was younger that he shouldn’t have done, but he didn’t get caught and he made enough money to send his kid to Harvard. I thought about Joe Bonanno [Joseph Bonanno, the alleged “Father of Fathers” in the Mafia]. He was the real godfather, but he made enough money that he ultimately became legitimate and even wrote a book.

“You see, money is the key. It always is. If you make enough money, then it doesn’t matter what you’ve done. You automatically become respectable. It was too late for me to ever become respectable, but I could still be the godfather. My family could come to me and I would give them money. I could turn the business over to my son some day. Only I was going to tell him, ‘Michael, put money aside. Don’t do what I did. You can make millions as a spy if you handle yourself right.’ I was going to tell him that his kid was the one who could go to Harvard. He could be legitimate. It was an honorable thing that I was doing. It really was.”

Like most young girls, Rachel had dreamed about having a big wedding, but when Michael returned from the Caribbean cruise, she agreed to elope in December 1983. “We were getting a lot of static from our parents,” Michael told me. “My dad was against it and so was hers, so we just went to Virginia Beach, got the license and blood tests, and had a justice of the peace do it one afternoon.”

Michael bought two bottles of champagne and they went back to their new apartment after the quick ceremony. Michael didn’t tell his father, and he didn’t wear his wedding ring whenever they got together.

But John knew.

“Mike, are you married?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“‘Cause I knew you didn’t want me to do it.”

“That’s true, but it’s the father’s duty to help pay for the wedding and buy things.”

The day after that conversation, John gave Michael and Rachel a popcorn popper and $50. Now that Michael was his business partner, John saw no need to keep him well supplied with $100 bills as he had done before.

“I was really pissed,” Michael told me. “I needed to come up with a seven-hundred-dollar tuition payment for Rachel’s college, and she is working her butt off as a waitress, and my dad gives me a popcorn popper. What the fuck did he think I was, some nerd who watched television and ate popcorn all the time?”

Michael decided that his relationship with his dad was going to be purely business, but John didn’t seem to notice.

“I don’t think he even realized our relationship had changed,” Michael recalled. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with him, and he didn’t even seem to know.”

Michael had developed his own game plan, and spying was an important part of it. “I don’t want to give the impression that I was greedy,” Michael told me later.

“I didn’t become a spy for the money, but I wanted to make something of myself and I wanted to be comfortable. I had a dream. I was beginning to see myself a lot like Jerry Whitworth. Here was a very intelligent man who was really a man of the world, and he was married to a woman who was going to be a doctor. I liked that idea. Me, an old sea dog who’s been everywhere and learned about life the hard way, and my wife, Rachel, being a doctor learning things from school. We could teach each other. I didn’t need my dad messing up my life anymore, but I did need the spy money. That didn’t change. I wanted that money.”

Chapter 56

Michael was not the only person John tried to recruit in the fall of 1983, after he discovered Jerry had retired. He said he also approached his half brother, Gary Richard Walker, the oldest of three children born to Johnny Walker, Sr., and Dorothy Dobson Walker after they left Scranton and settled in Virginia.

John had first met Gary back in 1976 when their father began commuting to Richmond to obtain medical treatment for Sherrie, John’s half sister who died of leukemia after fighting the disease for five years. Gary had joined the Navy in July of 1979 and had been stationed in Norfolk with a helicopter squadron responsible for finding and destroying underwater and surface mines.

“Gary was really a nice kid,” John recalled, “and I invited him over to the house and out on the boat a few times when he came to Norfolk. He didn’t have anything, of course. In fact, he was sending most of his money home to my alcoholic father. I could see it happening all over again.

“My father had used me as a kid, and now he was using Gary the exact same way. He was sponging off him, taking his money and spending it on booze.

“So I decided to recruit him, again, not to enrich me in any way, but to help him out. We were driving in my car one day and I began the same way that I had with Whitworth. ‘Gary, I know a way you can make some money,’ I said. ‘It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time and it’s completely safe, but it’s also illegal. Even my telling you about it will be enough for you to get into trouble because you will be part of the conspiracy. Now, do you want to hear more or not?’

“I couldn’t believe it,” John recalled, “but Gary said he’d have to think about it and he said that he didn’t want me to tell him any more at that point. I figured I’d wait for a while and then try again. I was really amazed ‘cause he was the first one who told me ‘No.’ “

Gary Walker testified in 1986 that he had no recollection of John’s proposition.

In the fall of 1983, John was still expecting Jerry Whitworth to deliver the remaining two thirds of the documents he had taken off the U.S.S.
Enterprise
, even though he had retired from the Navy. John wanted the film of those documents before he met his handler in Vienna in February 1984, so he flew to California on January 27 to visit with Jerry at his new trailer in Davis.

At this point, John still didn’t realize that the last film delivery had been fogged.

“In California, Jerry tells me that he’s been too busy to photograph the remaining two thirds of the documents that he had stolen,” John said. “I was furious.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Jerry?” he demanded. “Do you want to die? Are you trying to get us both killed?”

For the first time in their friendship, Jerry got angry. He didn’t need John telling him what to do. The risks were just too great to continue spying, he complained, and besides, with Brenda about to finish her education, he didn’t need to spy any longer.

Much to John’s surprise, Jerry also didn’t want to give him the remaining two thirds of messages from the
Enterprise
. But Jerry was no match for John when it came to pressure.

“We argued and finally I told him that I was going to photograph the remaining two thirds of documents in his house,” John said. “I wasn’t going to Vienna without them. That scared him because he didn’t want Brenda to come home and find out what we were doing. So we drove to this motel, and when we got there, I was so pissed, I said, ‘Jerry, this is your fault, you go in there and register us.’ I figured the motel owner thought we were both queers ‘cause we went into the room for two hours and then came out. We photographed the hell out of his material in that room, and then I left town. The last thing Jerry asked me was when was he getting paid.”

John’s KGB contact was irritated when they met on February 4 in Vienna. What was going on with Jerry? he demanded.

John was surprised. He hadn’t yet told the Russian that Jerry had quit the Navy.

“What do you mean?” John replied.

The KGB agent quickly explained that the film that John had delivered at the last dead drop had been fogged. It had been photographed under a light that was too intense. The only items that were any good were the copies of messages that John had included in the dead drop-the ones that dealt with the F-14 intrusion into Soviet airspace.

Obviously, the KGB agent explained, his country was anxious to learn all it could about the war games that the U.S.S.
Enterprise
had participated in off the Soviet coastline. But the KGB was confused. Why had Jerry overexposed the photographs?

“Are you positive that the film was fogged?” John asked. “Your people didn’t mess it up developing it?”

The KGB agent didn’t bother to respond.

“I thought to myself,” John recalled later, “ ‘Thanks a lot Jerry, how in the hell am I going to explain this one?’ This is Jerry Whitworth, who considers himself a professional photographer, who hasn’t taken a bad photo in his life, and suddenly, he has messed up several rolls of film. Jerry was obviously jerking me around, but at that point I still didn’t understand what he was up to.”

John told his KGB handler he had no idea why Jerry might have overexposed the photographs. He also told him that Jerry had quit the Navy and had also been complaining about how little money the Soviets had paid them in comparison to the price of building a nuclear missile or launching a spy satellite. The KGB agent looked visibly shaken, John claimed later.

The real problem with Jerry was money, John said. It had been fifteen months since Jerry had been paid. Why, he asked, had the Soviets not paid them anything at the last dead drop? The KGB agent didn’t offer a lengthy explanation.

“He simply told me,” John said later, “that the Soviet embassy in Washington didn’t have enough cash on hand for the dead drop. Someone had screwed up. It was fucking unbelievable. Here we are, supposedly the world’s most important spies, and the Soviets can’t raise enough cash to pay us.”

During his talk with the KGB handler, John attempted to begin to de-emphasize Jerry’s importance to the spy ring. John wanted, he said later, to disassociate himself from Jerry in case the KGB decided to kill him.

Still, he made one last shot at getting a $1 million payment for a guarantee from Jerry to continue spying ten more years. In the back of his mind, John explained later, was the thought that even if the KGB didn’t bite this time, it might the next, when he asked for $1 million for himself.

“He didn’t seem to like the idea of paying Jerry more money,” John told me. “He felt that Jerry was trying to pressure him and take advantage of him.”

John tried to reassure the KGB agent. He explained that he had personally photographed the remaining two thirds of the messages from the U.S.S.
Enterprise
and was certain that the photographs were good. He also promised to check with Jerry to see if he still had copies of the first batch of messages to compensate for the fogged film.

Then John changed subject. Michael had been successfully recruited and had been aboard the U.S.S. America during the invasion of Grenada, he announced. Better yet, Michael had been transferred on January 31, 1984, from his air squadron to the U.S.S.
Nimitz
, the largest aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet. Michael was working hard, John assured the KGB agent, to get into the ship’s administration center, where he would have access to classified documents.

Arthur also was scouring VSE for worthwhile information, John added, possibly a method for alerting the Soviets if the DEFCON was changed by the Pentagon.

John had several other potential recruits in mind too. His half brother, Gary, might be turned because he was financially assisting his parents. John knew other persons in Norfolk who might be recruited, and there was a chance that John could goad Laura back into the Army or maybe John’s other daughters, Margaret and Cynthia, could be turned.

Obviously, John was attempting to prove his continued worth to the KGB.

The agent stopped john’s sales pitch. He was mentioning so many potential recruits that the KGB agent was having trouble keeping track of them. “He didn’t like me using all of their names, saying them out loud,” John recalled.

The agent suggested that each recruit be given a single-letter designation so their actual names wouldn’t be overheard, but, he added, there wasn’t any point to assigning letters to persons who weren’t already in the military. John agreed.

From now on, the KGB agent explained, the letter S would stand for Michael, and K for Arthur. Jerry would be called D, and Gary F. John didn’t ask why, he simply noted the letters on a small card that he was carrying.

The Russian agent turned the conversation back to Jerry and his irrational behavior. Jerry was becoming a problem, the KGB agent said. His sudden retirement could be a signal that he had become worried about being captured.

“He could become a risk,” the KGB agent said. “You must watch him closely.”

After the meeting, John returned to his hotel and found that he couldn’t think about anything but Jerry and the fogged film.

“It was dear that Jerry had fogged the film intentionally,” John said later, “but why? What purpose could he possibly have for fogging film and then sending me to the KGB with it?”

John telephoned Jerry as soon as he returned to Norfolk.

“I told that son of a bitch about the fogged film and he told me not to worry about that because he still had the original one third of the messages and he would photograph them again for me,” John recalled. “That’s when I knew that Jerry had fogged the film. Why else had he kept those messages around?”

John decided that Jerry had tried to pull off a “rather simple and stupid scam.”

Jerry had fogged the film because he wanted to make certain he could collect his back pay and also sell the material in installments, John concluded, and he hadn’t cared whether the Russians killed John in the process.

“It wasn’t going to work,” John recalled. “I told Jerry that it was his ass if he didn’t take pictures of the first one third of the messages and bring them to me.”

Jerry brought the film to Norfolk in April 1984. He came on the same weekend that John was to make his dead drop outside Washington and, once again, Jerry was hoping to be paid on the spot all of the back salary money that the KGB owed him. But the KGB had other ideas. The Russians weren’t going to pay anyone who gave them fogged film.

John and P.K. met Jerry, and when the two men were alone, John got right to the point.

“I know why you are here,” John said. “You want your money. But you’re too early. You are going to have to wait a few days.”

That weekend, John made a dead drop delivery and picked up a package of cash. The Soviets had listed each member of John’s spy ring by his letter code name and marked a dollar amount next to each letter.

John took his Swiss Army knife and cut out all of the letter designations and amounts except for Jerry’s, and then he called Jerry into his den and showed him the paper. He wanted Jerry to realize that the spy ring had other suppliers and John wasn’t dependent on him.

“Okay, I’m going to let you read this because I don’t want to get caught in any argument between you and those motherfuckers,” John said. He handed Jerry the piece of paper.

It said: “D gets ZERO.”

“Jerry’s face turned white,” John Walker recalled, “and I said to him, ‘It’s your own goddamn fault because you are playing these stupid games and they are disciplining you. You are going to get us all killed.’”

The two men sat for several minutes without talking.

Then John said, “Jerry, we have been friends for a long time, and if you think you are going to pull this off with the people we are dealing with, you are nuts. I don’t need this type of aggravation. You’re going to take the heat on this alone. I’ve got other suppliers besides you.”

Jerry left the next day. A few days later, John received a letter from him. Jerry said he was resigning from the spy business.

“I’m out of it,” Jerry wrote, and then he added a sentence that really infuriated John. “I suggest that you hire someone with cheaper labor costs.”

“That was such an insult,” John told me. “It really pissed me off and I thought to myself, ‘Screw this guy. He’ll come crawling back eventually,’ because I knew Jerry couldn’t cut it on the outside. He was a loser.”

A few days after Jerry wrote his resignation letter, he typed another letter, but this one was addressed to the resident agent of the FBI in San Francisco:

Dear Sir:

I have been involved in espionage for several years, specifically I’ve passed along Top Secret Cryptographic Keylists for military communications, Tech Manuals for same, Intelligence Messages, and etc.

I didn’t know that the info was being passed to the USSR until after I had been involved a few years and since then I’ve been remoreseful [sic] and wished to be free.

Finally , I’ve decided to stop supplying material – my contact doesn’t know of my decision. Originally I was told I couldn’t get out without approval, this was accompanied with threats. Since then I believe the threats were a bluff.

At any rate the reason for this letter is to give you – FBI – an opportunity to break what probably [sic] is a significant espionage system. (I know that my contact has recurited [sic] at least three other members that are actively supplying highly classified material). (I have the confidence of my contact).

I pass the material to my contact (a US citizen) who in turn passes the material to a contact overseas (his actual status – KGB or whatever – I don’t know). That is not always the case tho, sometimes US locations are used. A US location is always used to receive instructions and money.

If you are interested in this matter you can signal me with an Ad in the Los Angeles Times Classified Section under “Personal Messages (1225)”.

What I would expect to cooperate is
complete immunity
from prosecution and absolutely no public disclosure of me or my idenity [sic]. I will look for an Ad in
Monday editions only
for the next four weeks. Also, I would desire some expense funds depending on the degree that my livelihood is interupted [sic].