Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (42 page)

Chapter 67

By late April, FBI agents had monitored John’s telephone lines nearly twenty days and had not heard any damaging evidence. They had, however, listened to one conversation that Hunter believed contained a clue.

At 7:12 P.M. on April 18, Rachel telephoned John at his home to ask about his encounter with Barbara.

The reason I was calling is to see what’s going on, you know.... I talked to Maggie a couple of times and I understand that Barbara was upsetting Maggie a little bit with her problem. You know what I mean.

Rachel’s comment, “You know what I mean,” seemed significant to Hunter, who decided that she also knew about John’s spying. He added Rachel’s name to his list of suspects. Another remark in that call also interested Hunter. When Rachel invited John to attend her college graduation ceremony on May 18, he replied:

Oh Lordy . . . I can’t believe it. I know that I’m gonna be busy that weekend. Can you goddamn believe it!

John seemed genuinely upset. What was he doing that weekend that he couldn’t reschedule? Hunter circled the date on his calendar.

Wolfinger and Hunter both knew John was being discreet on the telephone and everyone in the Norfolk FBI office, except Hunter, was becoming impatient with the wiretap. In order to monitor John’s calls, nearly every agent in the office had to work extra hours, and none of them was paid overtime. Some of Hunter’s colleagues wondered if the wiretap was worth the trouble.

Even novice agents knew that convicting someone of espionage was extremely difficult. Unlike crimes that involve a culprit and a victim, espionage involves two co-conspirators, and only a dolt would think a foreign intelligence operative, like a KGB agent, could ever be forced into a courtroom or, for that matter, even questioned.

As a result, Hunter was going to have to catch John either actually stealing classified documents or delivering them. And if the telephone tap was an accurate indicator, that was going to be difficult because John Walker was being very careful.

While other agents grew weary of listening to John’s often mundane and always profane conversations, Hunter found them fascinating. Day after day, he read the transcripts of John’s calls and listened to selected tapes. He heard John lie to his clients, chide employees, brag about his sexual prowess. Hunter studied not only what John said, but also his choice of words and even the rhythm of his sentences.

Hunter tried to think like John Walker, to place himself in John’s mind, and the endless hours of telephone conversations supplied hundreds of clues. Like piecing together the shards of a broken vase, Hunter began shaping an “image” of John Walker, and what Hunter developed disturbed him.

“John’s conversations with members of his own family were just unbelievable,” Hunter recalled. It wasn’t only the profanity. There was something more that went beyond the gutter. John Walker had a sinister, sneering side to him.

“I was beginning to see that this was a man who was not only devious and untruthful, but also evil,” Hunter said. “I really came to believe that. He was a truly evil person.”

Each conversation Hunter reviewed seemed to buttress his analysis that John seemed to bring out the worst when he spoke to his family – even his own mother, Peggy. During one tape-recorded conversation between the two of them, Hunter heard Peggy and John speak viciously about other family members. Even more biting was John’s conversation with his daughter Margaret, who gave vent to her feelings about her mother and sister.

The longer Hunter listened to taped conversations, the more upset he became. It was as if the entire Walker family had been stricken with a sickness, the children mimicking the twisted love-hate relationship of their parents.

In early May, the Washington headquarters of the FBI sent several of its foreign counterintelligence experts to Norfolk to have a strategy session with Hunter and Wolfinger.

“This was becoming a tremendously complicated case,” recalled Jack Wagner, the supervisor of the Norfolk FBI office.

At this point, the FBI suspected that four people besides John could be directly involved in the spy ring, including the enigmatic “Jerry Wentworth” in California.

There were other problems too. “John owned an airplane that was faster than the airplane that we owned,” recalled Wagner. “He owned a boat. We had to figure out what we were going to do if he used either of them. What if John flew to New York and boarded an airplane to Europe where we don’t have jurisdiction? Do we have an agent follow him? If so, he’d better have a valid passport.”

The Washington and Norfolk agents spent one afternoon discussing various procedures and scenarios, and found themselves agreeing about everything but one issue. The Washington agents wanted to plant an electronic tracking device on John’s new minivan in case he got away from agents during surveillance.

Hunter strongly opposed the idea.

“He might find it,” Hunter said. “This guy is an experienced detective.”

“Right! A real James Bond,” one of the Washington agents replied mockingly.

Hunter had become the butt of some jokes in Washington because he had written in a 302 statement that he considered John to be an “armed and dangerous” suspect. Some agents in Washington thought Hunter was overestimating Walker’s skills and making him more of a villain than he actually was.

After a brief argument, the Washington agents gave up and accepted Hunter’s advice. It was his case.

Before that meeting ended, Hunter asked theoretically what he and other agents should do if they followed John to an actual dead drop delivery. Should they arrest him? Should they confront John’s Soviet handler?

His questions were answered by a loud laugh from one of the Washington based agents. No one in the history of the FBI, the agent explained, had ever followed an American spy to a dead drop and arrested him making a delivery.

“I don’t care,” Hunter responded. “Guys, we got to plan for this, just in case.”

“Bullshit, Bob!” the Washington agent said. “It will never happen. C’mon, these things just don’t work that way.”

Chapter 68

Like Hunter, FBI agent John Peterson was not a man to give up, especially when following the scent of a self-admitted Russian spy who claimed to be part of a twenty-year-old espionage operation. For eight months, Peterson doggedly tried to find the mysterious RUS who had written to the San Francisco FBI office. Several times, Peterson thought he was on RUS’s trail, but he had been wrong. Each time, he hit another dead end. Finally, Peterson decided to try once more to lure RUS from hiding by placing yet another advertisement in the personal section of the
Los Angeles Times
. It ran on three consecutive Mondays, beginning in April, 1985.

RUS didn’t respond. Unknown to Peterson, Jerry Whitworth had changed his mind about confessing. He was busy trying to find a career and, as usual, was floundering. When he had retired from the Navy, Jerry planned to become a stockbroker. When he failed the test, he decided to become a computer salesman. That didn’t work either.

On March 25, Jerry wrote his old patron, John Walker, describing his problems. He was again considering being a stockbroker, he said, but admitted he brooded about his decision to retire from the Navy. Still, he professed optimism once he and Brenda were settled in their new careers.

John nearly laughed out loud when he read Jerry’s letter. He saw what was coming. Jerry was so damn predictable.

“Jerry couldn’t cut it outside the Navy,” John told me. “I sensed that when I met him. I knew he was failing and was setting the groundwork to come back to me and the spying.”

Still bitter about Jerry’s shenanigans with the fogged film, John decided against answering Jerry’s letters. He wanted to let Jerry sweat awhile.

In late April, at about the same time Jerry was trying to mend his friendship with John, the FBI’s analytical unit in the foreign counter-intelligence office in Washington made a startling discovery. While reviewing ongoing investigations, agents noticed a similarity between RUS and John Walker. Both men had been linked to a spying operation that had operated for twenty years. Was it possible that RUS and John Walker were linked somehow?

Agents re-examined Barbara and Laura Walker’s statements, particularly their comments about “Jerry Wentworth.”

Mrs. Walker advised Jerry Wentworth is a white male in his forties and is an enlisted man and may be a chief petty officer. She has neither seen nor heard from him since 1976. She believes his wife’s name is Brenda and she described Brenda as being young, in her twenties, and possibly attending a college in Berkeley, California. She noted the Wentworths got married in approximately 1977, and that Jerry Wentworth had been married previously and had gotten into some trouble with the U.S. Navy because he continued to accept allotment payments for his ex-wife after they were divorced, and he had to pay that money back to the U.S. Navy.... Mrs. Walker noted she is confident that Jerry’s last name is Wentworth [not Wittemore, as Laura Walker said.]

Washington had already asked the San Francisco FBI office to locate “Jerry Wentworth” as part of the bureau’s probe of John Walker, but no one in California had linked Wentworth with the RUS letters.

An urgent message, classified by the FBI as top secret, was sent to the San Francisco FBI office: “Wentworth may be RUS!”

Suddenly, finding Jerry Wentworth became an even higher priority, but despite the San Francisco office’s efforts, no person by that name could be found.

Frustrated, the agents asked if Barbara and Laura Walker could be interviewed again about John’s obscure friend.

When FBI agents in Buffalo asked Laura for her help, she quickly volunteered: “I think I have his telephone number.” She found it in a pile of papers, and gave it to the surprised and excited agent, who immediately notified San Francisco.

An FBI agent there dialed the telephone number in San Leandro and asked for Jerry Wentworth. No, there was no person living at that address named Wentworth. With the number in hand, agents began searching old directories. In a 1982 telephone book, next to the number Laura had given them, the FBI found the name Jerry A. Whitworth.

Both Laura and Barbara quickly agreed. Yes, the name could be Whitworth instead of Wentworth.

In a matter of hours, the FBI had obtained copies of Jerry’s motor vehicle records, listing his current address and his Navy record. In Washington, the analytical unit quickly established that Jerry had once worked for John at the Naval Training Center in San Diego.

RUS had been identified. He was Jerry Whitworth. The net around John Walker was beginning to close.

On May 16 – three days before John’s prearranged exchange with the KGB – the wiretaps on John’s telephone paid off. And it was fate, just as Wolfinger had predicted, that caused John to slip up and tip off the FBI.

It began with a telephone call from his mother, Peggy, who told him his favorite aunt had died in Buffalo. The funeral had been scheduled for that Saturday, May 18, and Peggy wanted John to attend. Despite Peggy’s pleas, John couldn’t. He had something important that he had to do.

John telephoned P.K. Carroll’s number as soon as he hung up on Peggy.

JOHN:
My Aunt Amelia just died ...

P.K.:
Oh, my God.

JOHN:
What a mess. A funeral I should really go to and I can’t get away.

P.K.:
I think you’d better get away for this one, John.

JOHN:
I can’t. Um, shit. I’m gonna call Art right now ... See, I lived with her. Jesus Christ, when the family broke up, you know ... urn, I gotta try to collect my thoughts, get my schedule together. Tomorrow’s Friday, isn’t it ... Jesus, I suppose I could fly in. Huh?

P.K.:
Yeah.

JOHN:
God, if the weather catches me, Jesus Christ. You know, there’s some things I just can’t change the schedule of....

P.K.:
Oh, I know that.

JOHN:
They’re just unchangeable.

P.K.:
I know that, but if it’s possible for you to go, I know you want to.

JOHN:
Um ... damn it.

P.K.:
I can’t believe it, John. Amelia is the one who, who made me feel like a part of your family up there.

JOHN:
Yeah. She was something. Well, let me get off the phone, ‘cause I’m gonna now have problems getting, getting my act together. Okay?

P.K.:
Okay.

John called Arthur next and told him of the funeral.

The next day, a Friday, May 17, John unwittingly gave the FBI another crucial due. At 4:13 P.M., John called his employees at Confidential Reports into his office and took his telephone receiver off the hook to keep from being interrupted by calls. “It was like giving us a microphone to listen in,” Hunter recalled.

Listen, I’ll be in late Monday. I’ll be driving in Monday morning from down around Charlotte, so I’ll be getting in around noon ... See you all Monday, have a good one.

Hunter and Wolfinger reviewed the tapes.

What could John be doing in Charlotte that was so important that he had to miss Rachel’s graduation and his Aunt Amelia’s funeral?

Both of them suspected it was a spy-related meeting. It had to be.

“It looks like John is finally making his move,” Hunter said. “God, if we don’t catch this guy, we better hang it up.”

Wolfinger smiled. “We will.”

Chapter 70

Spying aboard the U.S.S.
Nimitz
was child’s play. Alone in the fan room, Michael could pick through the burn bags from OPS-ADMIN and STRIKE-OPS unmolested. But this easy access created a new problem: storage. Just like John back home, Michael was having trouble finding room for all the documents he intended to steal. At first, he simply started hiding messages in his desk, but that was both risky and stupid. There wasn’t enough room and if anyone saw them, they might wonder why he was keeping them. The solution came one afternoon when he was loading a new box of computer paper into a printer in the OPS-ADMIN office.

“I looked at the empty box and bingo,” Michael recalled. “I realized it was the perfect size for documents.”

Michael took the empty cardboard box to his desk and began filling it with copies of messages and other classified documents. He put several sheets of stationery and some small boxes of envelopes on top of the classified documents to help hide them.

One morning, Michael arrived at work a few minutes late and found an officer looking through the box.

“What’s all this stuff, Walker?” he asked.

“That’s stuff I’m working on,” Michael recalled. He paused and then he said, somewhat crossly, “Hey, you didn’t get it out of order did you?”

Michael had learned as a private detective that one of the best ways to keep from answering a question was by asking one in return, especially one that implied that someone had screwed up.

“No, I didn’t mix anything up,” the officer replied, and then, defending himself, added, “I was looking for some big envelopes.”

“No sweat,” Michael said, “here, let me get them for you.”

Recalling that encounter, Michael told me, “That proved to me that I was in control, man. I could handle anything.”

Still the exchange alarmed him. He decided to move the box somewhere safer.

This time, he placed several pages of blank computer paper on top of the stolen documents, which now filled the entire box, making it look as if the box was filled with unused paper. He placed the lid on the box, sealed it the same way other boxes of computer paper were sealed, and carried it down the hallway to his berthing area.

Michael slept in a bottom bunk in a room that he shared with two other sailors. He had found a good hiding place one day, at the foot of his bed between the wall and a large air duct that rose from the floor to the ceiling. There was just enough room behind the air duct for the computer box, and when he had pushed it behind the duct, it was impossible to see from anywhere in the room except on his bunk.

Just like John, Michael believed that money could solve all problems. Ergo, not having money obviously caused problems, particularly in his marriage.

Michael was convinced that his marital spats with Rachel were related to their tight finances. If he could earn more money, then Rachel wouldn’t have to work as a waitress and she wouldn’t be so tired and they wouldn’t get into fights about never having time to spend together. The real reason why he and Rachel didn’t have sex on the night before he left Norfolk was not because of his spying, Michael convinced himself, but because of money. His spying was just a red herring. Once Michael got paid by his dad, he and Rachel would have plenty of money and their personal problems would vanish.

Michael also decided while he was at sea that espionage was not really that dangerous. “My father had been doing this for twenty years and hadn’t got caught, and I was more cautious than he had been,” Michael recalled. “I didn’t see why I couldn’t do it for a while, just until we got on our feet. Then I would quit.”

The U.S.S.
Nimitz
was scheduled to stop in Naples during June, roughly midway in its eight-month cruise, and Michael and Rachel planned to rendezvous there.

John also planned to meet Michael in Naples to pick up documents and pay him. This time, Michael expected more than a $1,000 token payment.

On April 1, he wrote Rachel an affectionate letter. Two days later, he wrote her again and began what soon became a foolish habit: he made a disguised reference to his spying. “I need to be careful,” he told her.

Michael received a chatty tape-recorded letter from Rachel soon thereafter. The thirty-minute tape contained news about her upcoming college graduation, work plans, mutual friends, and Michael’s family. It also revealed how much Rachel had changed during the three years she had known Michael. Gone was the bashful and naive coed who dressed modestly and hid behind a pair of thick glasses.

Rachel may have feared Michael’s spying and asked him to stop, but she still loved him and she wanted to please him. Her appearance and personality had changed so dramatically that people who had known her in high school frequently didn’t recognize her when they happened to meet.

Rachel enjoyed her punk rock image. She wore three dangling earrings in one lobe and two in the other, and her hair was multicolored and spiked. Going braless, which had once embarrassed her, now was as natural as the skin-tight miniskirts and the black fishnet stockings that she favored. Sometimes her language was coarse and abrasive.

By mid-April, more than a month since he had left Norfolk, Michael started to worry because he hadn’t received a single letter from his father. Michael wrote Rachel and told her he had had no word, had “a lot of supplies” for John, and was counting on a steady flow of cash as a result.

A few days after Michael sent his letter, John’s April 11 tape recording arrived.

Michael listened carefully to his father’s description of his meeting with Barbara, but couldn’t decide from it whether the meeting had gone well or poorly. John also had updated Michael on other members of the family in his tape recording, including Cynthia. He complained, as always, about money troubles, and made an oblique reference to Michael’s spying. He was looking forward, he said, to good pictures of “those ports” Michael had been visiting.

By the end of April, Michael was becoming concerned about how much he would be paid for his spying. He wrote his father a letter asking for advice, and waited patiently for a reply, but John didn’t respond.

By early May, Michael still didn’t have a clue about what was happening back home. Rachel, busy with college final exams, also hadn’t written. Michael reacted with a short angry note to Rachel. “Sometimes I feel I am missing everything... I get the feeling that something bad is going to happen.”