Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (45 page)

Rachel stroked Michael’s arm and tried to find out if he had said anything to them about her. He tried to hint that he hadn’t, but she didn’t seem to understand.

“I really didn’t want her there trying to make me feel good,” Michael said. “I didn’t want to see Rachel or anybody. I wanted to be in my own little world and to be left alone. She kept saying, ‘Now Mike, take it easy and everything will be okay,’ and I didn’t want to hear that bullshit. I immediately brought up getting a divorce and that upset her, but I knew it was something we had to do. I just wanted to get on with it all and get it over with.”

Rachel promised Michael that she would be strong and stick with him, and then he was taken into another room for interrogation. Rachel found herself being questioned, too.

Exhausted and emotionally distraught, Rachel was only able to make a few statements before she began sobbing. She said that she knew nothing about the spying, but when an agent showed Rachel the letter that Michael had been writing to her on the
Nimitz
, she became frightened.

The sentence, “
YOU AND I
can only begin to wonder what kind of trouble I’m in,” jumped out at her.

She asked if she could call her father in Norfolk, and when he got on the telephone, Rachel pleaded, “Daddy, I want to come home.”

Rachel’s father calmed her and suggested that she check into a motel in Baltimore and not risk driving five hours back to Norfolk, since it was late. Embarrassed, Rachel told her father that she didn’t have enough money for a motel. She was broke.

Without being asked, an FBI agent stepped forward and gave Rachel $50 for a room. It was money from his own pocket.

Rachel was not the only person who had asked for permission to see Michael. Barbara Walker also wanted to visit her son, but Michael refused repeatedly to see her.

Instead, Michael sent her a brief note: “Mother,” he wrote, “you are the biggest BITCH I’ve ever met!”

Chapter 72

Four FBI agents arrived at Arthur’s house at 6:50 A.M. on May 20, about four hours after John’s arrest, and asked Rita for permission to come inside.

Arthur walked into the entryway in his pajamas to see what was going on.

“Your brother John was arrested this morning and charged with espionage,” an agent explained.

“What?” Arthur demanded, faking shock over the news that John was a spy.

Agents Beverly Andress and Carroll Deane questioned Arthur in the den while two other agents quizzed Rita in the kitchen.

“I felt safe,” Arthur told me later, “because only John and I knew about what I had done, so I figured they were talking to me just because he was my brother.”

Arthur was worried about publicity more than being implicated. “My thought was, ‘Oh shit! The newspapers are gonna have in there: JOHN WALKER, SPY CAPTURED, etc.... which is exactly what happened later on, and then all the neighbors will know he’s my brother.’ ”

Unlike John, Arthur had always been concerned about his standing in the neighborhood.

“I had always told my kids, ‘If you get into any kind of trouble, don’t say nothing until you talk to an attorney,’ but I didn’t want to give the FBI any inkling that I was not fully cooperating,” Arthur explained later. “I was afraid they might be suspicious if I did.”

So Arthur acted as if he wanted to cooperate.

“I don’t want to be the one who nails my brother,” he told the agents, “but if I can help, I certainly will. I certainly have nothing to hide.”

“Of course,” Arthur told me later, “I was lying.”

Arthur didn’t know that Barbara had already implicated him in the spy ring and that the FBI was fairly confident by that point in its investigation that Arthur was the cryptic K in John’s dead drop letter. Arthur was about to dig himself a very big hole.

“In a sense, I really wasn’t lying when I told the FBI that I wanted to cooperate,” Arthur claimed later. “I really did want to cooperate, as strange as that may sound. You see, I had taken an oath and part of my oath was not to betray my country. I didn’t have the moral courage to turn John in or at least punch him out or do whatever would be necessary and I felt guilty about that, I really did, so I thought, ‘John is nailed now, so why not help them. Why not do the right thing.’ I thought it might help ease my own conscience about what I had done.”

At nine A.M., Beverly Andress asked Arthur to accompany her and Agent Deane voluntarily to the Norfolk FBI office for more questioning. He agreed and during the next six hours, Arthur attempted to satisfy the FBI and also keep from incriminating himself. It proved to be a tight-rope that he couldn’t walk.

Arthur began by admitting that John had once asked him about various documents at VSE Corporation, but he “categorically denied” any knowledge of John’s espionage and claimed to have never “passed on anything.”

“It’s something I wouldn’t even consider,” he said. “Even for my brother.”

But the longer the questioning went on, the more overwrought Arthur became.

“I began to do a damage assessment,” he explained to me later. “As I’m talking to the feds, I’m thinking how could I tell them stuff about John without telling them about myself? Because, you see, all I know about John is what I did. I started telling them and soon I was sliding right down into it. I was giving myself away.”

Shortly after three P.M., the agents took Arthur home and asked if they could search his house.

“Sure,” he said, knowing there was nothing incriminating hidden there.

Afterward, he returned voluntarily to the FBI office and agreed to take a polygraph examination.

By this time, Arthur was afraid to stop cooperating, even though he knew that he was getting himself into trouble. “I didn’t want the FBI to be suspicious of me because I still didn’t think they knew about what I had done,” Arthur said. “How could they? Only John and I knew. So I agreed to a polygraph to keep up that appearance. Oh God, was that a mistake. But my feeling at that point, when I agreed to take the polygraph, was that I had told them enough truth that that I could pass it.”

But when he was attached to the polygraph, before the test began, Arthur said that he wanted to amend his story.

In “hindsight” he recalled that he had become “suspicious” of John six months earlier during a “bullshit” session when John asked him about information concerning the overhaul of Navy ships and explained that “some people might be interested in something like that.”

“That made alarm bells go off in my head,” Arthur told the agents, “and on a scale of one to ten, I was approximately nine point five suspicious that John was doing something wrong because the only people I know of that would be willing to pay for that kind of information are those people in eastern bloc countries.”

Arthur went a step further.

He acknowledged that he had given John a document, but claimed it was unclassified, very old, and totally useless. In his own mind, Arthur told me later, he was convinced that he had told enough of the truth to protect himself. Surely, he thought, the polygraph machine wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to detect the subtle differences between his admissions and the truth.

Arthur was wrong. The polygraph indicated that he had been “deceptive.”

Arthur was genuinely astonished when told this. “It can’t be!” he said.

Hoping to clear himself, Arthur elaborated on his first story. This time, he admitted that he had once allowed John to see a single page of a ship’s casualty report, which is classified as confidential, and he said that he first became suspicious of John two years ago, rather than six months earlier. The FBI suggested that Arthur hire a lawyer.

Back home that night, Arthur admitted to Rita for the first time that he was involved.

“I’ve told the FBI that I gave John something,” he said.

“What?” Rita replied.

“Arthur, how could you?”

“Now don’t worry,” he replied. “It wasn’t anything serious.”

Rita panicked. Was he going to be arrested?

No, Arthur replied. The document that he gave John was insignificant. “I think it will be okay.”

The next morning, Arthur drove to the FBI office and said that he wanted to “start over from the beginning.”

“By this time,” Arthur recalled, “the FBI had told me enough for me to know that John was nailed and Mike had been arrested, so I figured it was time to stop evading and to tell them everything I knew about John. I still believed that I hadn’t done anything serious enough to be prosecuted.”

Arthur also thought that if he squealed on John, the FBI would be convinced that he had cooperated and readily accept his own story. Arthur told a bit more of the truth. He admitted showing John several pages of two confidential documents and told the FBI that John had paid him $2,000.

Then Arthur volunteered to take another polygraph test and, once again, it indicated that he was lying.

During the next few hours, Arthur revealed more and more. By evening, he was chain-smoking so heavily that the tiny interrogation room in the Norfolk office became dense with smoke and the FBI agents had to excuse themselves to go outside and breathe fresher air.

Hunter had returned to Norfolk by this time and checked periodically on the questioning of Arthur during the day.

Shortly after eight P.M., Hunter lost his temper. “I felt Arthur was an intelligent man and I thought he was simply trying to find out what we knew about him. The smoke was pouring out of the room and all we were hearing was bits and pieces of crap.”

Hunter stormed into the interrogation room and jabbed his finger on Arthur’s chest.

“Get your ass out of here and don’t come back until you want to tell us the truth!” Hunter yelled. “You’re lying. You’re not telling us the truth. You’re jerking our chain, so just get the hell out of here!”

Hunter lifted Arthur from his chair and pushed him out of the door.

At eight-thirty A.M. the next morning, Arthur reported to the FBI office on his own without an appointment.

“I want to clear my name,” he told the agents.

“That polygraph was driving me crazy,” Arthur explained later. “I had to pass that damn polygraph.”

During the next five hours, Arthur told how he was recruited by John, how much he was paid, and what documents he had passed. Agent Andress listened carefully and then asked Arthur a question that shocked him.

“Have you ever slept with Barbara?”

“No,” Arthur immediately responded. Later, Arthur explained, “I was embarrassed to admit to a woman that I had slept with my brother’s wife, but a few minutes later one of the male agents asked me and I said, ‘Hey, I’m not an angel. Yeah, I did it, but only once.’ ”

The fact that the FBI knew about Barbara was the most terrifying discovery of all for Arthur.

“The impact hit me. This is the FBI. They really do know all and see all,” he said. “They had checked me out. I figured that they even knew if I had peed in the alley as a kid. It finally hit me that I had said too much. I had done myself in.”

That night, Arthur and Rita sat down and made eight pages of notes about everything Arthur knew or had given to John. The next morning, May 24, Arthur once again came to the FBI office voluntarily to make a statement. The interview lasted more than five hours, and this time Agent Andress asked him about his girlfriend, Sheila, and other sexual relationships that Arthur allegedly had with other women.

“Who told you about that?” he asked, bewildered.

“Arthur,” an agent replied, “we know more about you than you know about yourself.”

Arthur gave the FBI a long and thorough statement that afternoon and after Hunter read it, he was convinced that during Arthur’s thirty-five hours of interviews, he had “confessed bit by bit.”

The Justice Department disagreed.

Arthur’s admissions were not corroborated and some of his statements were contradictory. More importantly, Arthur insisted throughout the interviews that he didn’t believe the documents that he had passed really had harmed the government.

The next morning was a Saturday and when Arthur awoke and went into the kitchen, he found Rita crying at the breakfast table. The FBI had been questioning her and she felt the interrogations were demeaning.

“I haven’t done anything,” she said, “but I still feel guilty.”

“Rita, you didn’t do anything,” Arthur said. “I’m the one they’re after.”

“But you’re my husband,” she replied.

After a few minutes, Arthur said, “Rita, there’s something I got to tell you and you’re not going to like hearing it.”

Arthur figured that sooner or later the FBI would tell Rita about his sexual act with Barbara. It was better, he decided, that it came from him. In the next few minutes, Arthur admitted infidelity with both Barbara and Sheila.

“I’m sorry I did it,” he said when he had finished. “But I did.”

Then Arthur began to cry. Rita was in shock.

“I had been upset that morning,” Rita recalled later, “because, and I got to be honest, because my personal conviction was that anyone who was a spy should be hanged and killed. I felt that strong about it. But when the person is your husband, the man you have been married to for twenty-nine years and you cared about and who was the father of your children, it is a different situation, and I was in a funky mood and he helped me snap out of it. I had assumed that he had told me everything at that point and then he says, ‘Rita, there’s more,’ and I looked at him and he told me about the women. I was blown away emotionally. That was it. How could he have done that? How could he have done that to me and the children? It was too much.”

Rita began to cry, too. Within five days her entire life had been turned upside down.

A grand jury was meeting in Baltimore on May 28, a Tuesday, to review evidence against John and Michael. Rita had been caned as a witness, but Arthur hadn’t.

Arthur told the FBI that he would drive Rita to Baltimore if that was okay because she was afraid of driving on major highways. He let her out a block away from the courthouse and drove back to the motel. The phone was ringing when he got there.

“Art, come get me,” Rita said. She was crying. “They don’t want me.”

“I had broken down,” Rita recalled. “They asked me some simple questions about how long I had been married and then said, ‘Well, we don’t need you this morning.”

Arthur raced back to the courthouse and went inside without drawing any attention from the media. As he waited outside the U.S. Attorney’s office while someone fetched Rita, he was approached by Hunter and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Schatzow. They took him into a conference room and asked if he wanted to volunteer to appear before the grand jury.

“Okay,” he said.

Later that afternoon, Arthur answered a series of carefully worded questions posed by Schatzow before the grand jury.

SCHATZOW:
Since 1980, have you had occasion to provide your brother, John Walker, with documents, which contained classified information?

ARTHUR:
Yes,sir.

SCHATZOW:
Approximately how many occasions have you done it?

ARTHUR:
I believe I have previously stated two occasions of classified information, perhaps three. I don’t remember off hand what we have been going over...

SCHATZOW:
At the time you gave those documents to your brother, you knew that he was going to give them to somebody else for money, is that right?

ARTHUR:
Yes, sir. I knew they were, there was certainly the possibility that they were going to be passed on, yes, sir.

SCHATZOW:
And you knew also that the somebody was a foreign government, isn’t that correct?

ARTHUR:
Yes, sir.

SCHATZOW:
And you assumed that to be the Soviets?

ARTHUR:
My assumption, I don’t remember him ever mentioning them specifically, but my assumption was he certainly was going to somebody who wanted to buy information about the U.S.

SCHATZOW:
You knew the reason that these people were buying information about the United States was to either hurt the United States or to help that foreign country, isn’t that right?