Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (8 page)

“I knew my husband was changing. I had married a young sailor who liked to be called Jack, but Jack was becoming John and there was a difference,” Barbara Walker told me later.

When I asked her to explain, she said that John Walker was only twenty-eight years old in 1966, but he looked much older. He had lost most of his inky black hair and his melancholy eyes were concealed behind thick black-framed glasses. His skinny frame had puffed out.

“John was worried about getting old. He suddenly had to have a sports car and he kept talking about how we needed more money and nicer things.”

Barbara convinced herself that John’s sexual escapade in Charleston was merely a passing fling. When he returned home from sea, Barbara didn’t mention the telephone call from his buddy or her encounter with the sailor’s wife. Barbara had decided that the best way for her to keep John from straying was to work harder at pleasing him when he was at home.

On July 6, 1966, John and Barbara bought a small house and 4.87 acres of land in Ladson, South Carolina, roughly fourteen miles north of Charleston. John and Bill Wilkinson had talked about becoming business partners, but couldn’t agree on an investment. John wanted to buy an apartment house in Charleston, but Bill wanted to buy a franchise for a miniature golf course. The Ladson property was a compromise. They intended to convert it into a storage lot for cars. The lot was Bill’s idea.

“What’s the first thing a kid does when he joins the service?” Bill asked John one day. Before John could answer, Bill said, “Why, he buys himself a car and then he gets orders to go to sea and has to find somewhere to put it.”

It was a position that Bill had found himself in shortly after he joined the Navy. The owner of a car storage lot had shown Bill how to cancel his car insurance and use that money to pay a storage fee.

Converting the property into a storage lot would cost a lot more than the $1,400 in working capital that John and Bill had pooled.

“That’s when Johnny got the idea of turning the place into a bar,” Bin Wilkinson recalled, “and I came up with the name House of Bamboo, because I’d been to a bar named that in Houston, Texas, that I thought was classy.”

With help from local teenagers, the men set to work remodeling the house, but a few weeks after they started, Bill announced that he was dropping out of the partnership.

“How can you do this to me, Bill?” John complained, but Bill said he didn’t have a choice. He and his wife had separated earlier, but now they wanted to get back together and Wilkinson needed his share of the money to bring her home from her mother’s. John reluctantly returned Bill’s money and decided to change the name of the still unopened bar to the Bamboo Snack Bar.

John and Barbara had already signed a $15,400 mortgage to buy the Ladson property. Without Wilkinson as a partner, John had to take out a second mortgage of $4,250.

In September 1966, Arthur Walker’s ship, the U.S.S.
Grenadier
, arrived in Charleston for repairs. He headed directly for John’s apartment, and by nightfall, he had agreed to come into the bar as a partner for $1,000.

Barbara was apprehensive about opening the bar, but she said she put up an enthusiastic front. “I knew that it wasn’t going to work. How could it? Johnny was leaving for sea duty, Art was going to go back to Key West, and I was going to be stuck running it, cleaning toilets, and serving drunks. It had to fail, I mean, what did I know about running a bar? Nothing.”

Barbara was also worried about Arthur’s influence on John. “The two of them began to party again and this upset me. I knew Art’s reputation because Art had told John about women he had slept with and John had told me. So I knew about it, but Rita didn’t.”

In order to save money, John, Barbara, and Arthur started the painting and final renovations of the bar themselves, but they hadn’t finished when John had to leave for a cruise aboard the
Bolivar
.

What happened next is disputed by Barbara and Arthur, but this is how Barbara tells the story. “John was going to sea and he was worried that Arthur wouldn’t do his share of painting at the bar, so he insisted that Art stay in our apartment. He wanted Art there every night to guarantee that the next morning he would be ready to go back to the bar and help with renovating it.

“One night, after John had gone to sea, Art and I went to the bar and painted or something, and when we got back to the apartment that night it was really late, and I was unhappy and tired, and here is good old Art – someone who says he cares and is very compassionate.

“I told Art that I was going to take a shower and go to bed, so I took my shower and put on pink pajamas – we aren’t talking negligee, I mean, who looks sexy in pink pajamas? – and I came back in the living room and the lights were turned low and there was music on and Art was sitting at the bar, and he said, ‘Let’s have a drink.’ So I sat down on the bar stool ... and then Art says, ‘Oh let’s dance,’ and I think, ‘Barbara, this is not a brilliant thing to do: dancing in your pajamas,’ but I did it anyway, and one thing led to another and Art kissed me and I felt bad, real bad, and I said to him, ‘I really wish that wouldn’t have happened,’ and he got nervous and decided to leave and he says, as he is running out the door, ‘Don’t feel like you’ve been compromised.’”

“The next day, Art came back and we worked at the bar, and then we went to the apartment and we had some drinks and we were sitting on the couch and he kissed me, and this time we didn’t stop and I had sex with my husband’s brother.

“John almost caught us when he came home. He came into the bar and Art was standing there and John announced that he almost came home early the night before, and I thought, ‘What if he had?’ He would have caught us in bed together – he would have caught me in bed with his brother.”

Arthur admitted to having sex with Barbara, but told me that the encounter occurred later, after Barbara and John had opened the bar and moved into a trailer behind it.

According to Barbara Walker, her sexual relationship with Arthur lasted for the next ten years. Arthur Walker claimed Barbara exaggerated. He admitted to having sex with Barbara twice, once in 1966 and again in 1968.

A few weeks after John arrived home from the
Bolivar
in the fall of 1966, Barbara decided to tell him about her affair with Arthur, but she changed her mind at the last minute. “I wanted to tell him that I had slept with his brother because I wanted to hurt him like he had hurt me, but I just couldn’t do it.”

As luck would have it, just before the bar was finally ready to open, John was promoted to the rank of warrant officer and received orders to report to the naval base in Norfolk.

“I begged John not to open the bar. We just didn’t have the money to back us and we were going to fall flat on our asses, but there was no way to stop him and Arthur. They were going to own a bar. It sounded so grand and they loved telling their sailor buddies about it.”

John and Barbara struck a deal. He would move to Norfolk, and she and the four children would stay behind in Charleston. If the bar didn’t show a profit after one year, they would sell it. John and Barbara had exhausted all of their savings and had borrowed every cent they could by the time the bar opened in September 1967. Now they were trying to maintain two households, pay interest on their bank debts, and operate the bar on John’s salary of $120 per week. From the day it opened, the bar lost money.

While John was the partner who insisted on the bar opening, Barbara also proved to have a touch of foolishness when it came to business deals. At one point, a customer told Barbara that he had helped survey the land in Florida where Walt Disney intended to build a new park called Disney World. Barbara listened intently as he talked about the fortune she could make by buying several pieces of Florida property near the future vacation spot. Barbara telephoned John that night and suggested they dose the bar and use whatever money was left to buy real estate in Florida. When he refused, Barbara became enraged and accused him of being a coward. She slammed down the telephone receiver.

A short time after the bar opened, Arthur’s boat left Charleston and he returned to Key West, Florida, where he was stationed. Rita, his wife, soon learned about the $1,000 that Arthur had invested in the bar and insisted that Arthur get the money back and any profits owed him. John exploded when Arthur’s letter arrived.

“There aren’t any goddamn profits,” he wrote in a blistering return letter to Arthur. “Not only am I not sending you any money, but as a partner, I expect you to cover this month’s losses. I expect a goddamn check from you!”

Near bankruptcy, John still refused to close the bar. Instead, he borrowed $700 from a now-defunct amusement company.

By November 1967, John was making the four-hundred-mile trip from Norfolk to Ladson nearly every weekend. He refused to acknowledge that no woman could raise four children, run a business, and survive on his hand-to-mouth budget. Barbara just wasn’t working hard enough, he said, and he was angry because she had started to drink to ease her pain.

They argued and Barbara told John that she had had enough of his money-losing operation. She had reached the end that afternoon when one of their creditors came in and demanded that Barbara pay for equipment that she and John had leased.

“I tried to explain that we didn’t have the money,” Barbara told John, “and then he told me that if we didn’t have it, then he was going to take it out in trade with me in the trailer for an hour.”

John didn’t react.

“Is that what you want John? You want me to prostitute myself for your damn bar?” Barbara shouted. “Do what you have to do,” he replied. “But I’m not closing this bar.”

They had sacrificed for years to save enough money to buy a business, John said. He wasn’t going to call it quits now and lose everything.

“I’m not going to end up like my oId man,” John said.

Chapter 11

From its exterior, the operations headquarters of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet looks more like a furniture warehouse than a gold mine of highly sensitive military secrets. But the drab, concrete building off Terminal Boulevard in Norfolk is a bustling command post that controls the precise movements of a horde of complex fighting ships.

The Navy has neatly divided the world into four geographic arenas – the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Eastern Pacific, and Western Pacific – and established huge communication centers in each sector. Day after day thousands of scrambled messages from naval stations, warships, submarines, and spy satellites flow into four centers, technically called Naval Communication Area Master Stations, or NAVCAMS. All ships operating in the Atlantic are directed from within the windowless, two-story operations building in Norfolk.

In April 1967, John became a watch officer in the message room responsible for communicating with every U.S. submarine operating in Atlantic waters. If a nuclear submarine came upon the Leninsky Komsomol, a Russian sub, off the coast of France, the encounter was immediately reported to the office where John worked. If hostilities erupted in the Middle East and the Pentagon decided to dispatch more submarines to the Mediterranean, John was the man who contacted an Atlantic-based submarine and directed it through the Strait of Gibraltar. While he was on duty in the message room, John was required to read every top secret message that was sent to or received from a submarine in the Atlantic.

Sometime in December in 1967 John stole his first top secret document for the Soviets. John said later the theft was an “impulsive” act caused by his deep depression over his marital and financial problems.

“It was late one night and there were eight or nine people on the watch. This other guy and I were talking about how much classified information was worth, and this guy jokingly says that it would be easy to steal documents. I said, ‘Well, who are you going to sell them to? What are you going to do, walk up to the front door of the Soviet ... ‘ and I stopped without finishing the sentence because I was thinking, ‘Hey, he’s right, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do! It’s my way out! I’m going to steal classified information and take it to the Soviet embassy.’ After the guy left my desk, I kept thinking, ‘Naw, you don’t really want to do this,’ and just as quickly I’d say to myself, ‘Oh yes you do!’ and so I did it right then, just like that, totally on impulse.”

A casual conversation with another sailor might have nudged John across the Judas line, but there is strong evidence that his actions were not quite so capricious. John himself remembered he had been curious about the value of stolen military secrets since the day he had first peeked into the SlOP and learned the locations of key SOSUS hydrophones. And he chose the first document that he stole with great care.

In the mid-1960s, the message center where John worked was housed in two modestly furnished offices. The larger front office contained two rows of dull gray government-issue desks, filing cabinets, a paper shredder, a copying machine, and a small enclosed area where a radio operator worked. The watch officer’s desk where John sat was separate from the other five desks in the room. Located in a corner, facing the wall, it gave John a measure of privacy.

A doorway near John’s desk led to a smaller room that contained banks of cryptographic machines and teletypes. The cryptographic machines were used to unscramble ship-to-shore messages and to encrypt shore-to-ship transmissions.

The crypto room also contained two small safes and a huge walk-in vault built into one corner of the room. The vault was protected by a thick steel door with a combination lock. There was a desk inside the vault and two more combination safes. The Navy’s most critical codes were kept inside the two small safes in the vault.

In the 1960s, the Navy used direct high-frequency radio transmissions to send messages between ship and shore rather than bouncing transmissions off satellites. Because the signals were easy for the Soviets to monitor, the Navy encrypted ninety-nine percent of all its messages before they were broadcast. The content of the message was regarded as immaterial. If John needed to tell a sailor aboard a nuclear submarine that his wife had just given birth to a boy, he encrypted the message just as he would if the president decided to launch a missile strike. As a consequence, the Soviets could never be certain when they overheard a scrambled radio transmission whether it was important.

Like the other military services, the Navy relies on the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, for its codes and cryptographic machines. During John’s tenure at Norfolk, the codes were delivered by the NSA under armed guard to the Navy Accounting Center in Washington, where they were distributed to the Armed Forces Courier Service for delivery to a specially trained naval officer at each station and on each ship known as the Registered Publications System (RPS) custodian. The RPS custodian manned the desk inside the message center vault in the crypto room, keeping a detailed record of who saw the NSA codes and why.

At the time, the Navy changed its codes each day. In this way, even if the Russians were lucky enough to unscramble a radio transmission, they would know the code only for twenty-four hours. When it was time to change the code, the RPS custodian removed one month’s worth of codes, called keylists, from the vault and placed them in one of the safes outside the vault for the watch commander. The keylist told the watch commander how to change the various dials, rotors, plugs, and wires on the cryptographic machines so that they would encrypt and decipher messages according to the code for that day.

Since John was a watch officer, he knew the combination of the safe where the current month’s worth of keylists were kept. John also had obtained the combinations to the vault and the two safes inside it.

The first document that John stole was a keylist for a KL-47 cryptographic machine. The KL-47, which dated back to the 1940s, was one of the oldest cryptographic machines still in use in the message center. (The exact date, name of its inventor, and technical drawings of the KL-47 machine are still classified.) John chose the KL-47 because its settings were still changed each day by hand, rather than by computer cards. The keylist for the KL-47 was written out on a single eight-by-ten-inch sheet of paper.

“I chose the KL-47 more for its appearance than for its actual worth. It was one of the only cryptographic machines that were used during World War Two, so it was outdated and really only used for a backup in the sixties, but it still had a very high classification and that was impressive as hell. I remember the keylist had the words TOP SECRET- SPECAT, printed in big bold red letters across the top of the page.”

John wasn’t certain whether an employee at the Soviet embassy in Washington would recognize the keylist for a KL-47 cryptographic machine, but he was confident that the simplest embassy worker would understand the words Top Secret.

There was another advantage to selling the Russians the keylist for the KL-47. If the CIA or Navy learned somehow that the KL-47 had been compromsised, they would have a much more difficult time tracing the leak to John than they would if he gave the Russians the keylist to one of the NSA’s most up-to-date systems. “The KL-47 had been around for twenty years, and God only knows how many people had used it during that time.”

The hardest part of stealing the KL-47 keylist was not removing it from the safe, John explained later, but copying it. Because he was the watch officer, John could remove the KL-47 keylist and study it at any time without arousing suspicion, but making a copy of any top secret document was immediately suspect.

Some time after midnight, John opened the safe, removed the keylist, and took it to his desk. He had been working the evening shift, but he waited until he had rotated onto the morning watch to steal the document because this was the only shift where the watch officer was the highest ranking person in the message room. With his back to the other six or eight men in the message center, he hid the keylist under some other papers on his desk, then walked casually over to a file cabinet where another sailor had left a magazine. Back at his desk, he tucked the KL-47 keylist between the magazine’s pages.

John waited for nearly a half hour before he stood up and walked across the room to the copying machine that was enclosed in a small glass office. He had been watching and no one had gone near it that night.

“I figured that if I was going to get caught, it probably would happen the very first time I tried stealing a document,” he recalled. His fears were prophetic. When John reached the copy machine, he placed the magazine on the glass, closed the plastic cover, and made a photocopy of a page of the magazine. He looked around the room behind him. No one was watching, and so he placed the keylist face down on the glass and quickly closed the plastic cover.

“Hey, Skipper, you can get into a lot of trouble for what you’re doing!” a voice said.

John spun around. One of his men was standing a few feet behind him, coffee cup in hand. John was about to have diarrhea.

“You know better than to copy personal items on that machine,” the sailor said.

“Naughty, naughty, naughty.” He laughed and John feigned a chuckle. When the sailor turned and walked away, John struggled to regain his composure.

Then he pressed the copy button.

This was the closest that John ever came to getting caught while actually stealing a top secret document.