Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (6 page)

Chapter 7

John’s first letter from boot camp was dated October 28, 1955, three days after he left Scranton. Addressed to Jimmy, it had $10 tucked inside for Peggy. Before John left, he and Peggy had agreed that if he wanted to write both parents, he would address his letters to Peggy and Johnny, but if he wanted to tell his mother something without his father knowing or if he was sending Peggy cash, he would send the letter to Jimmy.

Peggy put John’s letter in an empty shoebox along with a second one, which came a week later. She still has them.

“I loved the Navy and it quickly became my home,” John recalled. “I had an inferiority complex at first because I hadn’t graduated from high school and I had gotten into trouble. But everything went right for me from day one. Just excellent! I couldn’t believe it, and then I realized that I was obviously sharper than most of the others.”

His letters to Peggy support John’s recollection. “Today, as we were marching along,” John wrote, “the CO could no longer stand the second platoon leader, so he kicked him out. Everyone knew he was about to pick a new man for the job. Well, it didn’t take him long to decide I was the best man.”

John liked the role of leader and worked hard to keep it. “I wanted to be the best.” After boot camp he went to radio operators’ school in Norfolk and immediately applied for submarine duty. Arthur, who had been assigned to the submarine U.S.S.
Torsk
for two years, had convinced John that there was no better assignment. Most sailors considered duty on diesel submarines arduous and dangerous because they were cramped, noisy, and unpredictable. When a diesel submarine submerged in icy waters, it got so chilly inside that crew members joked they could see each other’s breath. In the tropics, the temperature inside the boat could soar to over a hundred degrees. The air inside tasted thick and viscous, as if you had an oily film on your tongue. There was no privacy in the tight quarters.

But Arthur loved submarines.

“A submarine crew is a special breed,” he told John. “Each man has a specific responsibility and if he doesn’t perform it, he not only jeopardizes the mission, but also the lives of every man aboard. There is no room on a submarine for someone who is second best.”

John wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps, but a Navy doctor ruled that John was unfit for submarine service because of poor eyesight, so he was assigned to the U.S.S.
Johnnie Hutchins
, a destroyer anchored in Boston harbor. John was upset, but Arthur buoyed his spirits. “We’ll find a way to get you on a sub,” he promised.

John reported to the
Hutchins
early one morning in June 1956. By dusk, he had investigated every part of the antiquated training vessel and learned its history. The boat had been named to honor the son of a Texas tenant farmer who had been killed in 1943 during a battle off New Guinea. When a Japanese bomb exploded and killed the helmsman,
Johnnie Hutchins
, despite the fact that he was severely wounded, pulled himself to his feet just in time to spot a torpedo headed directly toward his ship. He turned the craft away from the torpedo and died.

The men aboard the
Johnnie Hutchins
had also served their country well in the war. The
Hutchins
had single-handedly sunk three Japanese midget submarines off the coast of Okinawa in 1945. The heroism of both sailor and ship inspired young recruits, even cynical, street smart ones like John. Late at night, he fantasized about taking charge of the
Johnnie Hutchins
during some future sea battle and leading its crew to victory.

The destroyer made two training cruises in 1956. Hugging the coastline, it moved slowly north to Quebec, Halifax, and Newfoundland. Later, the fifty-seven trainees and officers on board headed south to the Caribbean and Cuba. Both trips were considered routine by the Navy, but not by John. During liberty in Canada, John and a throng of other sailors went to a whorehouse. John had lost his virginity in the backseat of a car before he joined the Navy, but this experience was his first with a skilled partner and it marked the start of what became an addiction. John paid to have sex with scores of prostitutes during his twenty-year naval career. There was something alluring about the murky underbelly of life that drew John like a siren’s song. Bleak harbor hotels, lurid bars, and crude hookers fascinated him. The inherent danger of these places only added to his excitement. He felt comfortable in a cheap bar with his hand on a hooker’s thigh.

“I’m not the kind of person who confuses love and sex,” John explained. “Sex is not love. Sex is a muscle spasm that you have with someone, and that’s all. It’s entertainment. Love is something else.”

When the
Hutchins
docked in Boston, John began frequenting the roller rink at Revere Beach near Broad Sound. On weekends, the owners of the rink stopped all skating at nine P.M. and held a dance on the huge wooden floor. John never had trouble finding a date. Although he looked scrawny beside his brawny sailor pals, he had a pleasing face. He wore his inky hair close-cropped and was clean-shaven; in fact, he could go without shaving for a day without anyone noticing. And he still had the same mischievous grin. But his greatest weapon seems to have been full-moon eyes underscored by dark shadows that gave him a melancholy look that girls described as “dreamy.” Most of the girls who attended the dances at the skating rink were looking for mates. They would gladly have quit their jobs as waitresses, carhops, or factory workers to marry a sailor and start a family.

In an October 7, 1956, letter to Jimmy, John handed out a lot of advice and then went on to boast about the action at the Revere rink. The letter was a mixture of genuine concern and cockiness. “How are you doing in school?” John wrote at one point. “Just remember those little nuns are
real
dumb. You can always pull the wool over their eyes.”

The letter also contained four bright red-and-white stickers marked CONFIDENTIAL. When John returned to Scranton for a weekend visit, his brother asked him how he had come by them.

John explained that the Navy used them to identify radio messages that were considered sensitive. Confidential was the lowest of these classifications and the only one that John had access to. Next was secret, followed by the highest classification, top secret.

“The Navy likes to classify everything,” John explained.

Even radio messages that he sent to shore for supplies such as toilet paper were classified confidential

“Can you believe that?” Jimmy seemed uneasy. “Look,” John said. “I put them on as a joke. It really isn’t any big deal.”

Chapter 8

Barbara Crowley didn’t want to go, but her friend Mary Ellen kept asking. There’s nothing wrong with two teenage girls attending a dance at the Revere rink, Mary Ellen had insisted. Most of the sailors who patronized the rink were respectable; many were away from home for the first time. It was the older sailors that a girl had to watch out for, and they prowled Boston’s seedy bars, not its roller rinks.

As far as Barbara was concerned, only “sleazy” girls went to the skating rink at Revere Beach. She wanted to attend the dance held each Saturday in the grand ballroom of an expensive downtown hotel. “It’s where all the college kids go!” she explained. But Mary Ellen protested that they weren’t college students, and besides, mingling with fraternity boys made her uneasy.

“Everyone bleeds the same blood,” Barbara snapped.

The two girls continued to argue until Barbara gave in. “I’ll go, but I’m not interested in getting involved with any sailors,” she said.

Barbara had worked hard to pull herself up from a humble background, and she was adamant about marrying someone from a better social class than the one she had been born into. “My family was as poor as you can get,” Barbara told me years later. Born on November 23, 1937, she was one of seven children of George and Annie Crowley, native Bostonians. “As far back as I can remember, we were on some kind of welfare, and it’s hard to get poorer than that.”

When Barbara was a small child, her father worked as a welder for Bethlehem Steel in the vast Boston shipyards. Annie took in laundry and ironing to supplement George’s meager earnings. The family lived in a modest house in Chelsea, a working-class neighborhood in Boston. When Barbara was five, her father fell from a scaffold at the shipyards and injured his arm. Doctors discovered during an examination that he had multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that impairs the muscles and damages the nervous system. A short time after the accident, he became bedridden.

“My mother went to work as a waitress,” said Barbara’s older sister, Annie Crowley Nelson. “My brothers sold newspapers and I baby-sat. Everyone had a job because my father was sick for a long time before he passed away.”

Barbara was just eight when her father died. A year later, her mother married another Boston laborer, Oscar Knight Smith, who moved the family to Mercer, an isolated hamlet in central Maine. Smith found a job at a local paper mill, but his meager salary was barely enough to keep the family fed, clothed, and sheltered. Shortly after the wedding, Smith got sick and doctors found a brain tumor. It was not the first. Years earlier, doctors had removed a section of his skull to extract another tumor. The surgery on this second tumor left Smith partially paralyzed. Once again, the family was in wretched financial shape.

“I was in ninth grade and it was Christmas when my stepfather suddenly told me that I wasn’t going to go back to school,” Barbara Walker complained bitterly to me. “He told me that I had to get a job, and he and my mother sent me to a fish factory where I cut frozen fish.

“Friday,” Barbara Walker continued, “was my mother’s favorite day because that is when she came to pick up my paycheck.”

Barbara told me that she hated her stepfather. “I left home on my eighteenth birthday – the minute I was legally old enough,” she said.

Barbara moved in with the family of a friend in Boston and eventually went to work as a keypunch operator at the Federal Reserve Bank.

At nineteen, she was an attractive young woman. She was five feet two inches tall, and weighed only a hundred pounds, but she had a Jayne Mansfield figure and shoulder length black hair. “Barbara was a very strong-willed person,” Annie Crowley Nelson said of her younger sister. “She was intelligent and was not snotty, but she carried herself with a certain pride.”

It took Barbara time to warm to strangers, and it was her haughtiness that first attracted John Walker, Jr., when they met at the rink. “Barbara could turn her nose up at anybody. She had that Boston better-than-you attitude,” he recalled. “She was good looking and was a real working girl. She got up every morning and took the 8:05 subway to work. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted out of life, and she was just what I wanted in a woman.”

John pestered Barbara for a dance, but she refused because he was a sailor. He jokingly told her that he could tell her fortune, but she continued to ignore him. When the dance ended, Barbara’s friend Mary Ellen announced that John had offered her and the sailor she had met a ride home. Reluctantly Barbara agreed to go along, but when John was a block away from her house she made him pull up to the curb and told him she would walk the rest of the way. “I didn’t want John to know where I lived. I didn’t want to see him again.” But Mary Ellen had given Barbara’s telephone number to John that night, and he called her the next day. “If you don’t go out with me, I’ll throw rocks through your windows,” he said, laughing. Barbara declined, but John persisted. Finally, she agreed to a date – a tour of the U.S.S.
Johnnie Hutchins
. Afterward, she and John ate fried dams and butterscotch sundaes at Howard Johnson’s.

The next evening they went out again, and soon John was dining regularly with Barbara and her surrogate family. By the summer of 1957, Barbara and John were in love. They also had two large problems. John’s tour on the U.S.S.
Johnnie Hutchins
was coming to an end. The destroyer was going to be decommissioned in Bayonne, New Jersey, and John had been told to pack his seabag, “I’m in love with Barbara,” he told a shipmate. “She is the first person I have ever really loved, but I don’t want to get married. I love the Navy and my job and I don’t want to get tied down yet.”

Barbara’s doctor had told her that she was going to have a baby. She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant, but she hadn’t taken any precautions either. She had simply hoped it wouldn’t happen. She told John the day that she found out. He knew that he didn’t have to marry Barbara. Other sailors talked about women they had gotten pregnant and left behind.

Barbara should have been more cautious, John said. “My first reaction was just to get the hell out when she told me that she was pregnant,” John remembered. But the more he thought about marrying Barbara, the more he liked the idea. “I thought, ‘Hey, this could be really good. I could have one of those great Italian families like my grandpa Scaramuzzo, you know, where I would come home from work and Barbara and the kids would be waiting for me and I would sit around and tell them stories like Grandpa did.’ Only I was going to do it right, not like my father and mother had done.”

Before John decided, however, Barbara told him that she had a secret she wanted to share. Her mother and stepfather had returned to Boston to live, but she had never mentioned them to John. She asked John to drive her to a store in a poor section of Chelsea, but wouldn’t tell him why. When they got there, he followed her upstairs into a cramped apartment. “It was a disaster inside,” John told me. “Barbara began introducing me to all these people who were living there and then she told me that this was her real family, not the nice Italian family that she was living with.”

After they left the apartment, Barbara said, “I’ve not always been proud of my family, but I wanted you to meet them and know that I want something different from this for myself.”

A few days later, she confronted John. “Well, what are we going to do – get married or what?”

“Oh, all right,” John replied. “Let’s get married.”

They eloped to Seabrook, New Hampshire, where a motel operator telephoned the police, who quickly drove around and informed the flustered couple that in this state they had to be twenty-one years old to get a marriage license. Barbara looked in a world almanac at a public library and discovered that couples could get married in North Carolina without waiting, if the woman was at least nineteen years old, and so they were married June 4, 1957, in Durham.

Barbara telephoned her mother to announce her news, but John didn’t tell anyone at first. He did, however, send a telegram to Arthur, who was stationed in Norfolk, asking for a $100 loan. Arthur and Rita had been married less than a year and didn’t have much income, but Arthur immediately withdrew the money from their savings account and was about to wire it to John when Rita caught him.

“Why does he need the money?” she demanded.

“He didn’t say,” Arthur replied.

“Then call and ask him!”

Arthur telephoned John. “Rita wants to know what you need the hundred bucks for, John.” John could hear Rita coaching Arthur in the background. “Tell him if he got some girl pregnant) he doesn’t have to marry her,” she was saying.

“I need the money for rent,” John said.

“Rent?” Arthur repeated for Rita’s benefit.

“Did he get somebody pregnant?” Rita asked.

“I got married,” John said. “Now are you going to send the money or what?”

Arthur wired the $100 that afternoon.

Now that Arthur and Rita knew, John decided to call his parents. His father sounded genuinely happy, but John could tell that Peggy was merely feigning enthusiasm. “If you’re happy, then I’m happy, Johnny-boy,” she told him with deliberate cheerfulness.

When Barbara developed toxemia, her doctor took John aside and warned him that the baby would probably be born dead. John was more worried about Barbara. He asked for permission to be with her in the delivery room, an unusual request in 1957. As John stood beside her, holding her hand, Barbara gave birth on December 27 to a pale but healthy girl. They named the baby Margaret Ann, after their respective mothers.

“We named her after you, Mom!” John told Peggy when he called her from the hospital. She sounded thrilled, but couldn’t help but feel sad after she hung up the receiver.

Later she explained that she had been thinking about her own marriage and comparing it to her son’s. She and Johnny had met at a dance, too. She and Johnny had been anxious to better themselves. She had gotten pregnant and gotten married in a brisk ceremony. She and Johnny had started out, just as John and Barbara were doing, not as newlyweds with time to learn about each other, but as a trio.

Clutching her rosary, Peggy prayed.