Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (38 page)

The night before she left, Barbara made an Italian dinner for Michael, Rachel, Margaret, and some of Margaret’s friends. The meal required more than $50 worth of special ingredients that Rachel paid for with her tip money. The next morning, Michael drove Barbara to the airport. On the way home, he detoured to John’s house.

“I went over to my dad’s and I told him what had happened,” Michael recalled.

“Mike, we got a real problem here,” John said.

“Hey,
we
don’t have a problem,” Michael replied. “You have a problem.”

Recalling the conversation later, Michael said, “I told my dad that I worked for him. My part of the deal was to get the shit and he was supposed to take care of Mom.”

Michael’s assertiveness apparently surprised John.

“Mark is a problem too,” Michael told John, “and Mom is a problem. What are you going to do about them?”

“Look,” said John, “you’re the one who has to tell Mom that you are involved, ‘cause she ain’t gonna believe me.”

“No,” said Michael. “You tell her, because if I tell her, she might kill herself. You do the damn thing. It will kill her, Dad. It will kill her if I tell her.”

“I tried to tell Mike that Barbara wasn’t going to kill herself,” John told me later. “I said, ‘Listen, Mike, your mother isn’t going to kill herself. She is too fucking weak to do that. Now you’ve got to quit thinking about it and just tell her.’”

John reminded Michael that they could both be in trouble if Barbara talked to the FBI. “If she rats on me, they are going to be suspicious of you.” John promised to find out when Barbara planned to return to Norfolk and to arrange a meeting between her and Michael so he could tell her that he had joined the spy ring.

“It’s got to come from your lips,” John said.

Three weeks later, Michael was promoted from the recreational department aboard the U.S.S.
Nimitz
to the legal office on the carrier. He worked harder than ever to impress his superiors, particularly those in the operations administration department.

“I didn’t hate my dad at this point,” Michael told me later, “but I was just tired of his pressure and bullshit. He just kept pushing me to get that transfer.”

After Michael had worked for one month in the legal office, a job in the operations administration office became vacant and he was selected to fill it. He stole his first classified document from that office within the first week and delivered it to John. Soon he was stealing documents regularly by hiding them in the backpack he carried to work each day. He hated his uniform, so he kept a change of clothes in the backpack, and put them on after work. He hid the stolen documents in the bottom of the backpack under his uniform.

One afternoon, Rachel emptied Michael’s bag while collecting laundry. Inside were several documents with the word SECRET stamped on them. That night, Rachel confronted Michael. “You said you’d quit.”

“I can’t, we need the money,” Michael replied. “Sending you to school isn’t cheap.”

“Neither is surfing,” Rachel replied.

“I remember telling Rachel to get off my back,” Michael recalled
later. “I said to her, ‘Rachel, don’t worry. I’ve got everything under control so just stop sweating it.’ ”

Chapter 58

Janet Fournier was working the complaint desk at the San Francisco FBI office on May 9, 1984, when the letter from “RUS” arrived. As an investigative assistant, Fournier was responsible for screening telephone calls and reviewing letters not addressed to specific agents. It was not glamorous work. Most of the time, she got stuck on the phone talking to disturbed callers who insisted on reporting their own murders. Fournier knew that most anonymous tips were worthless, but occasionally one paid off.

RUS sounded legitimate so Fournier hand carried the letter to the office’s foreign counterintelligence squad and showed it to Special Agent John Peterson. He was also impressed. RUS used words like
keylists
,
tech manuals
, and
intelligence messages
, terms that weren’t generally known outside the government. The spelling and punctuation of the letter were terrible, however, and that raised immediate questions. Was the writer trying to appear less intelligent than he was, or was he poorly educated?

Peterson put the letter in a plastic envelope to preserve possible fingerprints and sent it to the FBI’s laboratory in Washington. He also sent a copy of it for review to Dr. Murray Miron, a Syracuse University psychologist who was a consultant to the FBI in espionage cases.

As directed by RUS, Peterson placed an advertisement in the
Los Angeles Times
on May 21:

RUS considering your offer. Call weekdays 9:00 A.M. to 11 A.M. Telephone number (415) 626-2793, or write. Signed M.E., San Francisco.

The telephone number was a special line the FBI had installed on Peterson’s desk that enabled agents to trace an outside call instantaneously. But Jerry didn’t call. With his electronics background, he knew calls could be traced and a caller’s voice tape-recorded. Instead, he wrote another letter:

Dear Sir,

I saw your note today and was encouraged, however, I’m not going to call for obvious reasons. I’ll admit that my most earnest desire is to talk to someone (like yourself) about my situation, but I feel that I’m unable to trust any kind of personal contact – phone included. Nor have I begun to look for an attorney. Where does that leave us or more specifically me?

I’ll be very open. It took me several months to finally write the first letter. Yes, I’m remorseful and I feel that to come forward and help break the espionage ring would compensate for my wrongdoing, consequently clearing my conscience.

But there are other emotions: the difficulty of ratting on a “friend”, and the potential of getting caught up in a legal mess (public disclosure of my involvement and a possible double-cross on immunity, assuming it was granted in the first place).

I would guess that you are conferring with higher authority and possibly other agencies. I’m wondering if my situation is really considered serious enough to warrant investigation and to give me due consideration (immunity & etc.)!

I’m going to begin looking for an attorney, which will be tricky from my view, to discuss my situation. And I will keep an eye on the LA Times, Monday editions, for any additional word/instructions from you.

It would certainly be nice for people in my predicament to have a means of confidential consultation with someone in a position of authority without the possibility of arrest.

My contact will be expecting more material from me in a few months, if I don’t I’m not sure what his response will be. I’m going to come clean with him at that time (assuming no deal is made with you) and tell him I’m finished with the “business”. And then get on with my life.

More info on him: he has been in “the business” for more than 20 years and plans to continue indefinitely. He thinks he has a good organization and has no real fear of being caught, less some coincidential [sic] misfortune; in that regard he feels safe also. I agree with his assessment.

Why haven’t I discussed my desire to come clean (with you) with my contact and/or possibly convince him to do the same? It would be sure folly – dangerous to my health.

One line in Jerry’s letter stuck out when Peterson and his superiors at the FBI office read it: RUS’s contact had been “in ‘the business’ for more than 20 years.”

The FBI responded with an ad in the June 4 edition of the Times:

RUS: Understand your concerns, but we can help. Must have dialogue with you or proxy, if you are serious. ME. SF.

Each day Peterson waited by the special telephone and searched the mail, but nothing happened. As usual, Jerry was vacillating. He didn’t know whether or not to turn in John. He wasn’t worried about John or anyone else in the spy ring. He was worried about himself. How could he nail John without incriminating himself?

Becoming impatient, the FBI placed another ad in the June 11 edition.

RUS: Considering your dilemma. Need to speak to you to see what I can do. This can be done anonymously. Just you and me at 10 A.M. June 21 at intersection of the street of my office and Hyde Street in my city. I’ll carry a newspaper in my left hand. We will only discuss your situation to provide you with guidance as to where you stand. No action will be taken against you whatsoever at this meeting. Respond if you cannot make it or if you want to change locations. I want to help you in your very trying situation, but I need facts to be able to assist you.

The offer was tempting.

The FBI promised it wouldn’t arrest the mysterious RUS. But Jerry had read the note closely and noticed the FBI’s caveat: “No action will be taken against you whatsoever at this meeting.”

Whom did the FBI think it was dealing with? Jerry correctly guessed what the FBI had planned. At ten A.M. Peterson waited at the designated corner as he had promised, but he wasn’t alone. Several FBI agents were hiding nearby. The FBI intended to follow him if he appeared, and after the meeting, nab him.

Once again, Jerry replied by letter:

Sir: I won’t be meeting you the 21st. A letter will follow in a week or two.

The FBI waited, but nothing appeared. Meanwhile, Peterson received an evaluation by Miron of the first RUS letter:

This communication exhibits a number of characteristics which suggest that it should be considered to be highly credible. It is quite likely that anyone engaged in espionage would be expected ... to be psychopathic in character. Idealists who might try to aid or abet our enemies would be expected to eschew any money for themselves so as to better prove their ‘nobler’ intentions. The author of this letter exhibits the language of the psychopath. His passing reference to conscience is both glib and superficial. Even the protestation of remorse is mitigated by the notion that the author wishes to be free of what we can presume to be some pressures consequent of an earlier attempt to demur from further participation. The author’s psychopathic bent is further supported by his ending request that he be compensated for ‘interruption’ of his ‘livelihood.’ All of this is entirely believable.

Based upon the content and style of the author’s language, it is my judgment that he is a technically trained Caucasian male approximately between the ages of 30 to 45.

There are indications that the author is familiar with cryptography, codes and radio/computers apparatus. Although he is, in my judgment, clearly psychopathic, he can be expected to be sufficiently shrewd and wily to have avoided detection for other schemes in which he may be involved: i.e., he would not be expected to have a criminal record and have received relatively high fitness reports on the job.

On August 13, Peterson tried to flush RUS from hiding once again:

RUS: Haven’t heard from you, still want to meet. Propose meeting in Ensenada, Mexico, a neutral site. If you need travel funds, will furnish same at your choice of location in Silicon Valley or anywhere else. Please respond to the above.

Jerry responded with another letter:

Dear Sir:

I saw your note in todays [sic] LA Times. Since my last note to you I’ve done a lot of serious thinking and have pretty much come to the conclusion that it would be best to give up on the idea of aiding in the termination of the espionage ring previously discussed.

To think I could help you and not make my own involvement known to the public, I believe is naive. Nor have I contacted an attorney.

I have great difficulty in coming forth, particularly, since the chances of my past involvement ever being known is extremenely [sic] remote, as long as I remain silent.

Yes, I can still say I would prefer to get it off my chest, to come clean.

The above notwithstanding, I’ll think about a meeting in Ensenada. Funds are not the problem.

My contact is pressing for more material, but so far no real problems have occurred. I haven’t explicity [sic] told him, I’m no longer in the business.

By now the agents in the FBI office in San Francisco were convinced that RUS was legitimate. They believed he was a spy for the KGB and that, unless he was exaggerating, somewhere in the country, someone had been operating a spy ring for two decades.

It was chilling and frustrating. RUS had surfaced and then disappeared.

What the San Francisco FBI office didn’t know was that their counterparts in Norfolk had found another source by late 1984, and she wasn’t interested in rewards, immunity, or playing games by corresponding in newspaper advertisements.

Her name was Barbara Walker.

Chapter 59

In the fall of 1984, Marie Hammond’s relatives asked her and Laura to leave the farm outside Buffalo owned by Marie’s grandmother. One of the incidents that had sparked discontent involved Laura. Marie’s grandmother sometimes suffered from memory loss and disorientation, so one afternoon, when Marie went on an errand, she asked Laura to watch the old woman. “Laura spiked shut my grandmother’s bedroom door so she couldn’t get out of her room,” Marie said later. “I just about died. Laura said she had some things to do and didn’t have time to watch my grandmother so she simply spiked my grandmother’s bedroom door shut.”

Marie rejoined her husband, who was still in the Army. Laura headed north to Buffalo and enrolled in a beauty school. It wasn’t long before she was broke and deeply depressed about Christopher.

“A guy literally took me in off the street,” Laura told me. “He had fallen in love with me and I let him know that I didn’t love him, but he wanted to do these things for me – help pay my rent and help with transportation – and he feigned being a Christian, so anyway, I moved in with him.”

That November, Laura decided to end her seventeen-month, self-imposed excommunication from her family by calling Barbara, who now lived near Cynthia in West Dennis, a town near Hyannis, Massachusetts. Laura and Barbara have given me different accounts of what was said during this conversation. Parts of their stories are also inconsistent with what they have testified to under oath.

When I spoke to Laura about the telephone call, she told me the same story that she had told other reporters after her father’s arrest. She always began by saying that she had called her mother on November 23, Barbara’s birthday.

“I said to her, ‘Happy Birthday,’ and then I apologized for not calling her sooner. I said, ‘Maybe now you know how I feel about Chris. Maybe now you understand what it is like not to know where your child is.’

“It was very important to me that my mother knew how sorry I was for what I had done. We didn’t say much else because we were in too much pain. She was in too much pain and so was I. We didn’t even talk about Christopher. I was too upset and we certainly didn’t talk about Mark.

“The next night, and I’ll never forget this, it was November 24, 1984, and I was blindly watching television when my mother telephoned and she said, ‘Laura, I turned your father in.’ This is the very next night. She had gotten off the phone with me on her birthday and called the FBI. There wasn’t any discussion about turning Dad in. She did this entirely on her own without telling me what she was going to do. She said, ‘Laura, I did this for you. I did this so you could get your son back.’ She said, ‘Will you cooperate with the FBI? Will you tell them everything?’

“Her objective was that the FBI would believe that Mark had black- mailed me for x number of years, and the courts could not possibly grant Mark custody under those conditions. Somehow Mark would be brought out in the light and my dad would be brought out in the light, and somehow I would get Chris. That was her main objective and you could go to the bank on it.

“I never dreamed that my dad would get arrested. I never knew beforehand that my mother was going to do it. I didn’t think he was spying anymore and I knew that I didn’t have enough to hang him and I knew that my mother didn’t either.

“When she told me this, there was an excitement in me, and I knew there was going to be a move, and I knew that God was going to do it. I just knew it, but I knew it wasn’t going to be the FBI that got my son back. It was God working through my mother, guiding her hand. Don’t you see the irony of it all?

“My mother turned in my father to save her grandson and get my son back to me.”

Barbara Walker’s version to me contradicted her daughter’s story on several counts. Barbara said she and Laura actually spoke twice on the night that Laura first called and) contrary to what Laura had said) they spoke extensively about Christopher and Mark. Both women, Barbara told me, were worried about what might happen if Mark took action. During their conversation, Barbara began to realize that Laura really missed her son.

“I called Laura back that evening after she called me and we talked,” Barbara told me) “because it had always bothered me that she had left Chris when we were in Skowhegan and gone to California. I asked her) ‘How can you walk away from a child?’ I knew she was in pain and we talked, and this is when I began to sense that maybe all this wasn’t an ego thing with Laura. Instead of her saying, ‘This is
my
child!’ maybe she was saying, ‘This is my
child
!’ and there is a difference between wanting something because you own it and caring about someone because you love them. I began to believe that Laura really was hurting and she really did want Chris back.

“After the second telephone call, I went into the living room to be alone, and I sat there in the dark and I thought about the spying, and for the very first time I saw the whole picture. I suddenly could see everything clearly.

“You see, we weren’t talking about Laura and Christopher. We weren’t just talking about John’s spying. We were talking about all of it. In the past, I had, in my desperation, only focused on one thing at a time. How could John serve with these men in the Navy and do what he is doing? Or how could he socialize with them and act like he’s their best friend? Or how could he do this to his family? Or how could he do this to God? For the first time that night, all these things came together! I could see it all for the very first time because before that I didn’t. I really didn’t. All of those years, I was only seeing certain things and would only think about certain things, the pieces. But I saw it all that night in that room. I saw John and what he had done to his country, his friends, his children, his God, and to me, and all the pain and suffering that he had caused. Oh God! The men who have died because of what he had done. And me too, by going along with him.”

Barbara Walker began crying at this point while talking to me. She had drunk several large tumblers of scotch during the afternoon and she was emotionally upset. It took her several minutes to regain her composure. “I was just as guilty, just as wrong, and I hated it. I hated it, and I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I had to call the FBI. I didn’t care what happened to me. I didn’t care what happened to anyone. I just wanted it to stop.

“I had to call Information because I couldn’t see the phone book because I’d been drinking. I called the number and I was glad. You don’t know how many times I had wanted this over with. I wanted it to go away. I didn’t want the pain. I do love my country, and I just got tired of carrying this load on my back.

“That’s why I called the FBI that night. It wasn’t Christopher or Laura. It was John. I just couldn’t live the lies any longer: his lies and mine. It was time for it to end.”

Laura’s version of her conversation with Barbara is contradicted, in part, by two documents.

A letter written by John to Michael, and later found by the FBI, indicates that Laura resurfaced before Barbara’s birthday on November 23. The letter, dated November 18, said:

Dear Mike:

Just a short note to give you some good news: Laura is alive and well. She telephoned Cynthia, Mom and informed everyone that she had never left New York. She has been going to school and basically living there.

Apparently, her friend that called and said she had boarded a bus was lying: Laura was living with her all the time and just wanted to “drop out of sight,” I guess. I knew you would be interested in hearing this right away. Sorry I don’t have more details.

Needless to say, I am glad Laura is okay, but I have mixed emotions in general. Obviously, it was a shitty thing to do, and I am sure she has enjoyed making us all feel like bastards.

A telephone log maintained by the FBI also showed that Barbara first called the bureau on November 17, six days before her birthday. These documents suggest that Laura placed her call before November 23, most likely on November 17.

Laura’s memory of her conversation with Barbara also is contradicted, not only by Barbara, but by Laura’s own testimony at Jerry Whitworth’s trial. Laura told me that she and her mother spoke only briefly, and never discussed John or mentioned the alleged threats made by Mark Snyder. But when asked during Whitworth’s trial about her telephone conversation with Barbara, Laura acknowledged that she and her mother were worried that Mark might attempt to incriminate them if either of them crossed him.

One of the reasons that Laura was worried was because she had applied for a job at the CIA and was concerned that the FBI might think she was trying to help her father. Barbara Walker insisted in all of her interviews with me that her motivation for calling the FBI had nothing to do with her trip to Norfolk or her demand for $10,000. The FBI accounts indicate otherwise.

When she first met with agents, Barbara specifically mentioned that John owed her $10,000 in unpaid alimony, and she told the FBI she had just come from seeing John in Norfolk, where he had a young girlfriend and such luxuries as a houseboat and an airplane. It was these comments, in fact, that initially made FBI agents suspect that Barbara might have made up the spy charges against her husband out of anger, seeking revenge.

Even members of the Walker family aren’t certain what happened on the night that Laura telephoned Barbara. “I was told by Michael, after we both were arrested, that Barbara had turned John in because she was angry at him,” Arthur Walker told me several months after the spy ring was broken. “She’d just taken all she was going to take. Then she called Laura for support, and together they came up with all this stuff about Christopher so they wouldn’t look so bad for squealing on everyone.”

Because of the various discrepancies, it is impossible to reconstruct accurately the conversation, feelings, and possible motivations of Laura and Barbara during their emotional telephone call that night in November. But the result is clear. For whatever reason, Laura’s telephone call that night prompted Barbara to call the FBI, and marked the beginning of John’s downfall.