Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (43 page)

Chapter 70

Based on its wiretaps, the FBI knew that John rarely rose early on Saturday mornings, so Hunter and Wolfinger decided to begin the stakeout at John’s house on May 18 at seven A.M. Because as a private detective John had himself conducted surveillance, Hunter ordered the six-car FBI stakeout team to place themselves at major intersections through which John would have to pass if he left home. An FBI airplane circled above at 3,500 feet. The agents were excited. Finally, they were going to be doing something besides listening to John talk on the telephone.

They didn’t have to wait long. Early that morning, John got in his minivan, and started to drive. The FBI team carefully followed, anticipating that John was en route to a clandestine meeting. When he parked near his houseboat and spent the next hour painting, the agents’ excitement waned.

By mid-afternoon some of the team began to grumble. The thrill of tracking a possible KGB spy to a dead drop was being surpassed by the need to mow lawns and spend time with families. By four-thirty P.M., there was enough dissatisfaction to warrant an impromptu meeting in a nearby parking lot. “There was some griping so we decided to call it a day, but we agreed we had to continue the stakeout on Sunday,” Hunter recalled.

Hunter felt fairly certain that John wasn’t going anywhere that night because agents monitoring his telephone calls had heard John tell callers that he and P.K. intended to go out on his boat that evening and watch a Memorial Day fireworks show. Even so, Hunter was nervous. If John left town that evening, it would be difficult to organize a tracking team in time to follow him.

By this time P.K. Carroll had left John’s detective agency and had become a plainclothes vice officer on the Norfolk force. Her hours were irregular and usually began late at night, when prostitutes and other purveyors of illegal activities were the busiest. This had taken a toll on her relationship with John, particularly after he announced that he didn’t “wait up until three A.M. for anybody.”

So Saturdays were special because it was the one day of the week when John felt fairly confident that he and P.K. could get together. He tried repeatedly to telephone her during the day, but didn’t reach her until 7:40 P.M. He was peeved when she refused to come over and spend the night with him because she was tired.

A few minutes after John finished calling P.K., he telephoned another woman. After complaining about P.K., he asked her out for that night. The girlfriend had plans, but said she was free the next night.

JOHN:
Ah shit, as it is, I’ll be out of town. I gotta work on a goddamn case tomorrow and, uh.

GIRLFRIEND:
Where you gonna go?

JOHN:
Down to North Carolina ...

GIRLFRIEND:
What part?

JOHN:
Down to, let me think, what’s the name of it again. It’s a little town just beyond Elizabeth City ... I’ve forgot the name of it. It’s a little, ah, just on the outskirts.

The agents monitoring John’s call telephoned Hunter and reported that John had just said he was going to a small town near Elizabeth City – not Charlotte as he had claimed earlier. Hunter considered the discrepancy a good sign. Obviously, John was up to something.

The FBI stakeout team arrived at their positions at seven A.M. Sunday. Two cups of coffee later, Hunter needed to find a bathroom. He drove to McDonald’s and, out of habit, surveyed the patrons as he left the men’s room.

“Goddamn if John Walker wasn’t sitting there eating breakfast and reading a newspaper,” Hunter recalled. “He had ridden his bike to the restaurant and no one had seen him!”

Back at his car, Hunter barked into his two-way radio: “Goddamn it, why didn’t we know that he had left the house?”

John bicycled home. At ten A.M., John W. Hodges, the pilot of the FBI plane, radioed Hunter and explained that the plane was getting low on fuel.

“Okay, bring her down, but try to be back in the air by eleven-thirty,” Hunter said.

Shortly before noon, Hunter received another call. What time, one of his agents asked, were they going to call off the stakeout? Hunter knew weekend work was hard on morale. After yesterday’s tedious watch, his agents were getting impatient.

“Okay,” Hunter announced. “We’ll keep this up until one o’clock, and then if he hasn’t gone anywhere, we’ll go home.”

Unknown to Hunter, at the very time he was making that decision, John was sitting in his den typing a note to his KGB handler. He referred to Michael, Arthur, Jerry, and Gary Walker by the code letters the KGB had assigned them:
S
,
K
,
D
, and
F
, respectively.

Dear Friend.

This delivery consists of materials from S and is similar to the previously supplied materials. The quantity is limited, unfortunately, due to his operating schedule and increased security prior to deployment. His ship departs in early March and they operate extensively just prior to deployment. The situation around him looks very good and he is amassing a vast amount of material right now.

His last correspondence indicated that he now has material that will fill two large grocery bags. Storage is becoming a problem. As is obvious, I did not make a trip to Europe to pick up material for this delivery.

His schedule does fit fairly well with our meeting and I plan to meet him during a port call which will give me two days to make it to our meeting. I will arrange to pick up the best of his material and deliver it in bulk; photographing it while on the road does not seem practical. Also, the entire amount he has would be impossible to safely transport and I plan to deliver that at the schedule you will provide.

I hope his ship doesn’t experience a schedule change which will put me in the same situation we once faced in Hong Kong. I did not make the primary date and we met on the alternate. So I have to make a decision and here it is: If his schedule changes and I cannot make the primary date, I will collect the material and make the secondary date.

D continues to be a puzzle. He is not happy, but is still not ready to continue our “cooperation.” Rather than try to analyze him for you, I have simply enclosed portions of two letters I’ve received.

My guess?

He is going to flop in the stockbroker field and can probably make a modest living in computer sales. He has become accustomed to the big-spending life-style and I don’t believe he will adjust to living off his wife’s income. He will attempt to renew cooperation within two years.

F has been transferred and is in a temporary situation giving him no access at all. He is having difficulty in making a career decision in the Navy. He is not happy and is experiencing family pressures with our father who is 73 and in poor health. He married – his father – a younger woman who has a significant drinking problem. F feels obligated to support them. He may come around and good access is possible.

K and I have discussed your proposal and I will pass on some extensive details when we meet. Briefly, he is involved in carrier and amphibious ship-maintenance planning. He would instantly recognize unrealistic repair schedules or see that ships were “off their normal schedules.” This may provide a basis for the information we seek. Otherwise, he has no useful material.

So I will see you as scheduled and hope I will make the primary date with no problem. I’m sure you have access to S’s port schedule and can anticipate my moves in advance. I am not providing his schedule in this note for obvious reasons.

Good luck.

Since S is providing a large quantity of material, the quantity of film to shoot is also becoming large. I have been trying to figure out an alternative method that will decrease the size of the packages to deliver. I have a super 8mm movie camera which is capable of single-frame shots. There is 50 feet of film in each cassette which, unless my math is off, would consist of over 9,000 frames.

I have enclosed a short sample of a document shot with the camera using different focusing methods. The first two were shot from 1.5 feet and measured: then two from two feet, then two while focusing normally. They don’t look very good to me, but I thought you may have an idea on how we could make this method work.

John was not to meet his KGB contact until after dark that night, but since he had nothing planned for the afternoon, he decided to leave early. He walked out of his house at 12:10 P.M. – fifty minutes before Hunter had promised to call off the stakeout.

Hodges, who had returned to the air with a full tank of fuel, contacted Hunter by radio when he saw John get into his van.

“He’s on the move!”

Recalling the wild goose chase of the day before, Hunter tried to keep from getting excited. But within a few minutes, Hodges was on the radio again.

“He’s driving evasively.”

John was doubling back, riding in circles, and performing other maneuvers to detect if he was being followed. The six FBI cars, under the direction of Hodges, carefully kept out of sight, and Hodges pulled his airplane up to four thousand feet into a position he hoped John wouldn’t notice.

John drove west onto Interstate 64 toward Richmond. FBI agent Beverly Andress, who was part of the stakeout team, called Hunter on the radio.

“Are we having fun yet?” she asked.

Obviously, John was driving in the wrong direction if he was going to North Carolina.

“Not yet,” Hunter replied. “I’ll let you know when.”

When John reached the outskirts of Richmond and turned north on a bypass that feeds traffic to Washington, D.C., Hunter grabbed his radio microphone.

“Bev,” he said excitedly, “now we are having fun!”

Meanwhile, Wolfinger pulled away from the chase and drove to a telephone to call FBI headquarters in Washington. “Operation Windflyer,” the code name the FBI had chosen for this case, he reported, “is under way.”

Hunter wanted to get to Washington before John Walker, so the agent pushed down on the gas pedal of his Jeep Cherokee and soon found himself behind John’s Astro minivan. Fighting the urge to turn and stare at John, Hunter sped past. He wanted to reach a special communications center that the FBI had set up in Washington to monitor the operation.

John didn’t notice anyone during the drive. Just before Washington, he pulled into a highway rest stop to use the bathroom.

Hodges quickly warned the remaining four FBI chase cars to pull off the highway. When John returned to the interstate, one of the chase cars sped into the rest area. Two agents dashed into the bathroom and amid startled travelers, searched for any packages that John might have hidden. There were none.

As John got closer to Washington, the FBI put into operation some of the plans that Hunter, Wolfinger, and the experts from FBI headquarters had agreed upon only a few weeks earlier.

Perhaps the most extraordinary action involved the flooding of the area around John with tracking vehicles. Trying to follow John in heavy traffic with one or two cars was just too risky, the FBI had decided. There was always the chance that he might notice a car on his tail. Using one or two cars was also dangerous because they might get trapped behind cars at a traffic light or lose John if he made a series of sudden turns.

So the FBI called upon forty-one persons in twenty vehicles to trail John when he arrived at the Beltway that circles Washington. It was one of the most massive surveillance operations ever undertaken by the agency.

It also didn’t work.

The hitch occurred after John crossed the Potomac River and began driving through a rural section of Maryland on a narrow road. The sudden appearance of twenty cars in such a sparsely populated area might spook John.

So the FBI pulled back its network of cars and decided to rely on the plane. By this time, a fresh pilot and crew had taken over.

The new aircraft kept on John’s trail, but it soon became difficult to find John’s minivan as it rode along the curves and dips under a protective cover of foliage.

After several minutes, the pilot and crew lost sight of John’s van in the canopy of trees. The plane quickly dropped lower to give its passengers a better look, but that didn’t help. John was gone.

Every second counted now. It was crucial to get the ground search started, but because the Soviets frequently monitor FBI broadcasts through the antennae on their embassy, the pilot decided not to risk using his radio to contact the communications post where Hunter and Wolfinger were waiting. Instead, he raced to a nearby airport, where he landed and telephoned the command center.

It was 4:55 P.M., and by the time the FBI unleashed its ground crew, John had disappeared.

“We didn’t have the faintest idea where he was,” recalled Hunter.

Anger and frustration began to build. People began looking for someone to blame. No one said anything aloud, but everyone was reminded of Hunter’s decision not to place an electronic tracking device on John’s car. The Norfolk office had successfully followed John to Washington, and agents in that jurisdiction had lost track of him.

But it didn’t matter. Hunter was the case manager, and now that John had vanished, Hunter was the agent who would have to bear responsibility.

For three hours the FBI inspected the rural Maryland countryside where John had last been seen. No one could find him. Back at the command center, frustration led to second-guessing. Hunter held to one thin hope. Barbara Walker had said John always drove through a dead drop area on a practice run when she accompanied him on dead drops. If true, there was a chance that John might return.

While Hunter fidgeted, John was dining peacefully at the Ramada Inn in Rockville, confident that this drop would go as smoothly as the rest.

At 7:45 P.M., the FBI airplane spotted John’s minivan returning to the rural Maryland road where he had earlier disappeared. A cheer went up at the FBI command center and Hunter was immediately transformed from dupe to sage.

This time the FBI flooded the area with tracking cars.

John later recalled being suspicious of the increased traffic. “I stopped at one small intersection and there was a car on each of the other three roads.” But he ignored the warnings and placed his 7-Up signal can for his KGB contact at the prearranged spot.