Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (40 page)

Chapter 62

Three months after Barbara alerted the FBI, John went to Vienna for his eleventh face-to-face overseas meeting with a KGB agent. He brought more than one dozen rolls of film with pictures of documents Michael had stolen from the U.S.S.
Nimitz
.

The weather on January 19, 1985, was, as always, bitter cold, and as John walked the usual route, he began to wonder once again why the Russians insisted on meeting in the streets rather than a safe house. With a chuckle, John did notice a change in scenery. Two blocks away from the Bazala store was now a McDonald’s restaurant. John had been spying long enough for American fast food to invade his turf.

For the first time, John’s KGB handler was apologetic. The photographs that John had delivered earlier from Jerry had turned out perfectly. The KGB now had all of the secret message traffic that Jerry had stolen during his duty aboard the U.S.S.
Enterprise
.

“Please tell Jerry that we will pay him,” the Russian said. “He will get all of his money at the next exchange in your country.”

Sensing a hint of apology, John protested at meeting in the middle of winter on the sidewalks of Vienna.

“Why the fuck don’t you guys take me somewhere where we can talk comfortably in private?” he asked. “Don’t you have a safe house here?”

“The Russian told me,” John recalled later, “that it was safer to walk the streets.” The CIA and other intelligence organizations are constantly trying to find Soviet safe houses. Taking John to one would be too risky.

John was insistent. He was tired of the cold. “He told me that he’d arrange for me to go to a safe house the next time I came to Europe,” John recalled. The plan called for John to be taken across the Czechoslovakian border when he returned in the fall.

The agent asked about Michael. “He’s about to leave on an extended Mediterranean cruise,” said John. “He’ll get as many messages as he can.”

The KGB agent told John that Michael should try to get as much information about the Israelis as possible. John brought up Rachel.

“She’s graduating from college and I’m trying to get her to join the Navy, become an officer.” With Rachel’s interest in oceanography, John told the Russian, “she’d be able to find out about SOSUS [the network of ocean hydrophones].”

Women, the KGB agent replied, rarely are suspected of being spies. Recruiting Rachel would be good.

What about Arthur? John lied. Arthur was working hard to get a new job with better access, he said. Hopefully, Arthur would find a job where he could tell when the DEFCON changed.

“The Soviets were paranoid about us attacking them,” John told me later, “so anything I could offer them that had to do with the DEFCON was always good.”

The rest of their conversation had to do with Jerry and his intentional bungling of the photographs from the U.S.S.
Enterprise
.

John had come prepared. “I wasn’t about to be caught in a fight between Jerry and the Soviets,” he recalled, “and I wasn’t going to stick my neck out for him or defend him.”

John simply handed the KGB agents copies of the letters that Jerry had written to him, including his resignation letter, and John’s responses.

Typical was a letter that Jerry had written John on August 14. He didn’t yet know what kind of work he would be doing, and he acknowledged that his leaving the Navy had been done against John’s advice. But he asked John to understand and respect his decision. “... there’s been something missing,” he wrote. “In all honesty, I was happier in the ‘60s and early ‘70s than I’ve been since.”

The KGB agent was clearly worried. Why had Jerry quit? Would offering him more money bring him back into the ring? Could he get access once again to keylists?

John played it safe. “I don’t know,” he said. “Jerry’s sitting out in California masturbating with his computer while Brenda finishes her degree, and the truth is, I don’t know what the fuck he is doing or thinking.”

Was there any chance that Jerry might contact the FBI?

John paused deliberately. He wanted his KGB handler to know that he took the question seriously. No, John finally answered, he didn’t believe Jerry would do that. He was too deeply involved.

Jerry’s value had diminished now that Michael had joined the spy ring, the KGB agent said, but if there were a chance that Jerry might reenlist and once again have access to keylists, it should be pursued. John should be careful, his handler warned, because often when a spy stops getting money, he begins to worry about being caught and looks for a way to exonerate himself.

“Jerry must be paid the money he is owed,” the agent said. “Tell him we are sorry it took so long.”

It was arranged that John would make a dead drop delivery and collect more than $200,000 that the KGB owed him, Michael, and Jerry, on May 19.

Back at his hotel that night, John wasn’t so sure that Jerry was owed an apology.

After all the stunts he had pulled, John wasn’t even certain Jerry was due his full amount, John said later. “He sure as hell didn’t mind putting my life in danger.”

His session that day with the KGB also had convinced John that, if necessary, the Russians would eliminate Jerry. All John had to do was persuade them that Jerry had become a threat to the spy ring.

John reached a decision: Jerry was going to have to pay for the trouble he had caused, and since John was the only person who knew for certain how much money the KGB had left in a dead drop, taking a percentage of Jerry’s earnings would be easy.

All John had to do was tell Jerry that the Russians had cut his monthly salary because he had retired. “I didn’t really need Whitworth anymore at that point,” John said.

“He was nothing but trouble.”

Chapter 63

Michael was bringing John so many secret documents from the U.S.S.
Nimitz
in the spring of 1985 that he didn’t have time to photograph them all. Instead, John began putting them in a closet in an upstairs bedroom. It wasn’t long before they began spilling out into the room.

One afternoon Michael dropped off a thick report with the word SECRET stamped in red letters on the cover. Two days later, when Michael stopped by his father’s house, the report was sitting out in the open near a telephone book in John’s den.

Michael was angry about his father’s sloppiness.

“Dad, what the hell is this?” Michael complained. “I can’t believe you are leaving this shit lying around in the open!”

“Don’t sweat it,” John replied. “No one’s going to see it.”

“I was really upset,” Michael told me later. “I mean, he had been careless for years. That’s how my mother found out. But he just ignored me because he was busy and convinced no one would ever catch him. I felt that way too, I guess, but I didn’t leave stuff laying out at home.”

Michael and John had been getting along poorly for months. Michael’s dislike of P.K. was just one reason. John was pestering Michael to tell his mother that he was a spy and Michael didn’t want to. John also had been urging him to help recruit Rachel, and originally Michael thought the idea was great.

“We could do it as husband and wife,” Michael told Rachel one night. “Mr. and Mrs. James Bond.”

But Rachel had been cool to the suggestion.

“You think it would be funny if I joined the Navy and became an officer,” she told Michael, “because then you could tell your pals, ‘Hey guys, I have to salute my wife before we go to bed.’ But think about what you’re suggesting, Michael. What if the Navy sent us to different parts of the world?”

Besides, she added, didn’t Michael understand that John was simply using them?

“He’s asking us to do his dirty work. It’s our butts on the line.”

Michael disagreed. “He’s just cutting us in on the action.”

On March 7, the day before the U.S.S.
Nimitz
left for the Mediterranean cruise, John telephoned Rachel several times at the apartment and asked if Michael was there.

“I’ve got to see him,” John said. “I want him to stop by and talk to me.” Michael knew what his dad wanted.

Barbara had been making threatening calls to John and Arthur. John wanted Michael to telephone his mother and get her off everyone’s back. John also wanted to tell Michael how to hide documents aboard the carrier during a long cruise.

“I knew he didn’t want to come over,” John recalled later. “He wanted to stay home with Rachel and I can understand that. But I had been bugging him for weeks to come over and he hadn’t, even though I told him it was vital that we talked. It turned out to be a major screw-up because Michael ended up leaving Norfolk without my having a chance to tell him how to hide documents.”

Michael had ignored John’s telephone calls on purpose.

“I didn’t want to listen to my dad bitch about me telling Mom I was a spy,” Michael told me. But John’s calls also irritated him for another reason.

By then Rachel thought Michael had given up spying, because he had stopped bringing classified documents home. But John’s frantic calls had convinced Rachel that Michael had simply been doing a better job of hiding things from her.

What Michael and Rachel both hoped would be a romantic evening together before the
Nimitz
deployed on March 8 was quickly blighted by an argument.

“You promised me you’d stop,” Rachel said. “Michael, you’re going to get caught. This isn’t worth it.”

“Look Rachel, we need the money!” Michael said.

“We don’t need it that bad.” That night, Rachel refused to sleep with Michael. Instead, she slept on the couch.

The issue was no longer Michael’s spying. It was John’s influence over his son.

Chapter 64

FBI agents in field offices report to their regional headquarters every 120 days, and when Walter Price flew to Boston in the spring of 1985, he told his supervisor about Barbara Walker’s charges. The supervisor sent an overnight letter to the FBI headquarters in Washington and mailed another copy to the FBI office in Norfolk. No one at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue paid any attention to the correspondence about Barbara Walker. Once again, the FBI dismissed her charges without bothering to investigate. But in Norfolk, her accusations interested two agents: Joseph R. Wolfinger and Robert W. Hunter. They were an unlikely pair.

Wolfinger looked like an uncomplicated good old southern boy. At age thirty-nine, he had a slight paunch, ruddy complexion, witty demeanor, and a Virginia drawl that came from being born and raised in Norfolk. In contrast, Hunter stood ramrod straight and at age forty-nine worked out daily at a local exercise club. His graying hair was always neatly combed, his clothes well tailored, his manner slightly reserved.

Their backgrounds also differed.

Even though he rarely mentioned it for fear of sounding pretentious, Wolfinger had grown up the son of a wealthy and prominent Norfolk businessman. He decided early on to become a criminal defense attorney, but after graduating from the University of South Carolina Law School, he joined the FBI. He thought a three-year stint as an agent would give him an edge later in private practice when defending the accused.

“I always had the impression that there were a lot of innocent people out there being charged with crimes,” Wolfinger recalled, “but what I discovered as an agent was that there were a lot of sick people out there doing a lot of depraved things and very few of the ones who had been arrested were innocent.”

Wolfinger had done well as an agent and was highly regarded for his skill at handling complicated cases. He had a knack for skillfully weaving evidence together in such a fashion that even a dense juror who didn’t quite understand the nuances of a trial would still get the point: the FBI had found the guilty man.

Hunter had spent his youth in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town where his father had toiled at a steel mill. After he graduated from high school, his family moved to Florida, where he enrolled in college.

But he didn’t take the work seriously. He flunked out.

Later, he returned to a junior college and ultimately graduated with honors from a state university. Hunter spent two years as a junior high school teacher and worked as an insurance investigator before joining the FBI. He arrived in Norfolk in late 1967, the same year as John Walker.

An uncompromising but compassionate man, Hunter genuinely liked people, and he had the unusual ability to empathize with them. This frequently gave him an edge when conducting investigations – people would tell Hunter things that they never intended to. But this trait also proved risky. Sometimes it was difficult for Hunter to keep from becoming totally immersed in his work, and it had cost him personally; he and his wife had separated.

Wolfinger was the first to see the Boston report on Barbara Walker, and was openly skeptical because she was an admitted alcoholic and angry ex-wife looking to nail her husband.

But Barbara’s descriptions of clandestine dead drops were uncannily accurate, and Wolfinger suspected that she had not gained such knowledge from pulp spy novels. As supervisor of the foreign counterintelligence squad in Norfolk, Wolfinger wanted to know more, so he showed the report to Hunter.

“This is definitely worth a few phone calls,” Hunter said.

“It’s all yours,” Wolfinger replied.

Hunter contacted Walter Price in Hyannis and asked if Barbara Walker would voluntarily take a polygraph test. Hunter also requested that agents in Buffalo interview Laura immediately.

On March 7, the day before the U.S.S.
Nimitz
left Norfolk for its extended Mediterranean cruise, FBI agents Paul Culligan and Charles B. Wagner knocked on the door to Laura’s apartment. Culligan had talked to Laura earlier on the phone and decided he and Wagner had to approach her as friends, rather than federal agents. As part of that philosophy, Culligan and Wagner both changed from their suits into casual clothes for the interview with her.

“We wanted our interview to be as nonthreatening as possible and do everything we could to gain her trust and confidence,” Culligan told me later. “Laura made it clear that she had some natural resistance to talking about her dad. The common bond between us was her son, Christopher, and we recognized early on that he was really the key to getting Laura’s cooperation. If she wanted her son, she had to get John off her back.”

During their interview, the telephone in Laura’s apartment rang. It was Michael, who had called to tell Laura good-bye since he was scheduled to leave the next morning. Laura cut the conversation short without telling Michael that the FBI was there.

“We knew that she had been speaking to Michael,” Culligan recalled, “but she didn’t seem at all concerned. I doubt if she would have acted that way if she had known Michael was involved.”

Culligan, a thirty-eight-year-old, nine-year FBI veteran, coaxed enough information from Laura to write an incriminating statement about John. He asked her if she would be willing to sign the statement and also, if necessary, testify against her father. Laura agreed.

Culligan called Hunter after the interview and told him that Laura seemed credible and was willing to testify. Culligan also had an idea: Why not ask Laura to telephone her father and tape record the call?

“It would be one way we could answer the one question that was on everyone’s mind,” Culligan recalled, “which was, ‘Is John still doing this or is he inactive?’ ”

Culligan, Hunter, and Wolfinger discussed it and decided to ask Washington for permission. Culligan returned to Laura’s apartment a few days later and explained why such a call was necessary.

“She said she’d do it,” Culligan said.

One week after Laura first talked to the FBI, she wrote Michael a letter apologizing for her abruptness when he telephoned.

“But I never told Michael about the FBI,” Laura told me later, “because I was afraid he would tell my dad.”

At the time, Laura said she didn’t believe Michael was involved. “Of course, I assumed that my father had tried to recruit him,” she explained, “but I figured he had said no because that’s what I had done.”

Even after Michael joined the Navy, Laura said, “I never dreamed he might have said yes.”

Before Hunter left for Buffalo to interview Laura personally and oversee her telephone call to John, he received more good news. Barry Colvert, one of the FBI’s polygraph examiners, had tested Barbara Walker in Hyannis and she had “passed.” She was not lying about her ex-husband’s being a Russian spy.

Hunter arrived in Buffalo on March 25 and was taken by Culligan to meet Laura that afternoon.

Hunter was impressed by her willingness to help. “Laura was quite honest and frank about her family’s secret,” he told me later. “She didn’t have to cooperate with us. She could have told us, ‘This is all I know and that’s all I’m doing,’ but she wanted to help. She wanted to call her dad.”

The agents attached a listening device to Laura’s telephone and showed her how to turn on the recorder.

“We had already decided,” Culligan recalled, “that we would leave when she made the call. We were going to have a tape of the conversation so there was no point in us being there and upsetting her or making her nervous.”

But before they left, the agents suggested two possible stories that Laura could use to entice John into once again trying to recruit her as a spy.

“You could tell him that there is an opening at Eastman Kodak,” Culligan said, “which is a world leader in photography and optics. Or that you want to join the Army Reserves.”

Hunter and Culligan told Laura that they would return for the tape recording at eleven P.M. that night.

“There was no doubt in my mind,” said Culligan, “that she would make the call. She wanted Christopher back.”

That afternoon and evening, Hunter tried repeatedly to put himself in Laura’s shoes. “My heart went out to her,” he recalled. “I tried to imagine how hard this must be for her. Here was a girl who hadn’t spoken to her father in more than one year, yet she was willing to telephone him and let us tape record the conversation.”

Hunter also tried to picture John Walker.

What kind of a father was he, and what had he done to his own daughter that would make her turn so strongly against him?