by Earley, Pete
John spun to his right. Two FBI agents wearing bullet-proof vests had jumped out from a hallway opposite the elevators. Their blue-steel revolvers were pointed directly at John’s heart.
What happened next is disputed. John says he immediately surrendered, dropping both gun and envelope instantaneously. But FBI agents Robert Hunter and James L. Kolouch described the arrest far more dramatically in sworn court testimony.
“Shortly after 3:30 A.M.,” Hunter testified, “we heard John Walker’s motel door open and dose, and we heard footsteps. And I heard another door open and dose, and footsteps again, and the door open and dose again, which meant he came out and opened the door to the stairwell, obviously checking to see if anyone was there, and then returned to his room. We wanted to confront him by the elevator, not in the stairway, so we waited.
“We waited what seemed like a long period of time. It was quite exciting at that point, and a few minutes later, in fact approximately three-forty-five A.M., his door opened again, and I heard footsteps, and he quickly came around the corner and punched the elevator button with his left hand. As he punched the elevator button, agent Kolouch and I came out of our hiding spot in the hallway and he heard us as we moved and he immediately turned, a weapon in his hand.
“So we were standing there face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, so to speak, with our weapons on each other.”
QUESTION: He had a weapon in his hand at that point?
HUNTER: Yes.
Q: Where was it pointing?
HUNTER: Right at me!
Q: Well, who blinked first?
HUNTER: I’m sure he did; I didn’t blink. We identified ourselves as FBI and told him to drop his weapon, and there was a confrontation that lasted a few seconds. It seemed like a long time, but it was a few seconds and he did finally drop the weapon.
“I didn’t want to kill him,” Hunter continued, pausing in his testimony for dramatic effect. “I wanted to talk to him. I needed to talk to this fellow. That’s why I didn’t pull the trigger.”
FBI agent Kolouch gave a slightly different account of John’s arrest during testimony at a different hearing. John didn’t drop his weapon at first, Kolouch testified, but John’s gun, he added, “was not pointed exactly – directly at us, but just about fifteen, twenty degrees off a direct line to us.”
Whether or not John dropped his gun immediately or went eyeball-to-eyeball with Hunter seems immaterial now – to everyone but John Anthony Walker, Jr. During a series of long personal interviews after his arrest, John complained repeatedly that the FBI agents had embellished their testimony to make themselves appear heroic.
“I didn’t point my gun at either of them,” John insisted. “I’m not that stupid. I’m a trained detective and I never point my gun unless I am going to fire it. Besides, do you really think those guys would have hesitated if I had swung around and aimed my gun directly at them? I dropped my piece and the envelope the second they yelled ‘FBI.’ “
John was caught in a number of lies during interviews after his arrest, but he always shrugged off his falsehoods and his exaggerations as immaterial. The suggestion that an FBI agent might have added a bit of High Noon drama to the story of the arrest, however, infuriated him. “They lied!” he shouted at one point.
The second that John dropped his gun, both agents rushed forward. Kolouch pushed John against the wall, ripped his brown hairpiece from his head, quickly frisked him, and yanked off his thick-soled running shoes. Agent Hunter stood guard, his gun pointed at the back of John’s now bald head. Other agents hurried out of hiding in room 750. Once Kolouch was certain John was not carrying concealed weapons, he hustled him into room 750 and ordered him to strip. Different agents seized each piece of clothing as he undressed, examining them in microscopic detail. They took away his metal-framed glasses and inspected them for microdots.
Naked, surrounded by FBI agents, without his toupee and nearly blind, John began to shake. Despite his experience as a private detective and his natural bravado, John Walker, Jr., was terrified.
“Fucking spy,” he heard someone mumble. “Traitor.”
John could tell from the agents’ conversations that his motel room was being searched. He knew they wouldn’t find anything. They already had what they were looking for: the envelope of instructions that he should have burned.
“You have the right to remain silent,” agent Hunter said, reading John his rights under the Miranda ruling. He gave John a paper. “Sign this. It says I have read you your rights and you understand them.”
“I can’t,” John replied. “I don’t have my glasses and I can’t read without them.”
Hunter barked an order and the glasses were quickly returned. Then Hunter asked if he wanted to tell them about the dead drop.
“I’m not saying a word without my attorney,” John answered, regaining his composure. He noticed that an FBI agent was standing next to Hunter, jotting down notes on a pad. Anytime that Hunter said anything to John or he returned any comment, the agent noted the time and event. The FBI certainly wasn’t going to screw up this arrest, he thought.
John was allowed to dress, then handcuffed and hustled out of the motel.
“Your next meal is going to be slipped under bars, Walker,” John heard someone say.
Neither John nor the FBI agents with him – Hunter, Kolouch, and Jackson Lowe – said a word during the forty-minute ride to the FBI office in Baltimore. But after he was fingerprinted, photographed, and once again read his rights, John was pelted with questions.
“What were you doing last night?” Hunter demanded. “Who were you meeting?”
“What are the instructions in the envelope for?”
John refused to cooperate. “I want an attorney,” he said. “I have nothing else to say.” The FBI agent standing near Hunter made a notation in his note pad: “6:21 A.M., interview ended.”
Once the FBI makes an arrest, it usually hands the prisoner over to the U. S. Marshals Service, which oversees custody of federal prisoners. But the federal marshals’ office in Baltimore didn’t open until nine A.M., so there was little for the FBI agents and John to do for the next few hours but sit and stare at each other in the Spartan interrogation room.
Shortly after seven A.M., Hunter decided to unnerve John. He had a typewritten letter brought into the room and placed near John, who immediately began to fidget. John recognized the document. He had typed the letter himself, in his den at home, and sealed it inside the packet of Navy documents he had collected for the Soviets. Obviously, the FBI had picked up the grocery bag that John had left for the KGB. John’s handler had warned him against including any personal remarks in a dead drop delivery. It was much safer to wait and talk in person in Vienna. But John had wanted to make certain the Russians realized how hard he had been working for them. He had asked them at an earlier meeting to consider giving him a $1 million payment in return for a steady supply of documents during the next ten years. John had included the typewritten letter in the dead drop package to help support his million-dollar request. He wanted to remind the Soviets that he had built an elaborate spy network and brief them on the ring’s members and other potential recruits. John had been clever enough to use code names in the letter, but now he realized that the letter, along with the classified documents in the bottom of the grocery bag, would provide the FBI with enough clues to track down each member of his spy ring. John’s twenty-two-year-old son, Michael Lance Walker, a seaman aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz, a nuclear aircraft carrier, had supplied all of the 129 documents in the grocery bag. Many of them were secret messages to the carrier or classified information about its mission. It wouldn’t be difficult for the FBI to figure out that Michael had stolen them for his father.
The bag also contained personal letters to John from his best friend, Jerry Alfred Whitworth, a retired naval communications specialist, who had been an active member of the spy ring for ten years. John had included Whitworth’s letters because the Soviets were particularl
y interested in him. It would not take the FBI long, John knew, to discover the identities of the two other men mentioned in his letter: Arthur James Walker, John’s older brother and a retired naval officer; and Gary Walker, John’s half brother, who was an Army mechanic. Arthur had provided John with a few rather useless classified documents, but Gary had never passed him anything. Gary was simply someone John had been trying to turn.
“Obviously,” John said later, “I had put too much in my letter, but then, I never expected to get caught.”
As he sat in the FBI interrogation room, John’S thoughts turned to his own predicament. The documents that the FBI had recovered were an impressive cache. John remembered the most important ones: a thick study that identified problems with the nuclear Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile; a detailed explanation of how the Navy would respond if war broke out in Central America; schematics of the missile defense system aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz and its known weaknesses; an exhaustive study of how America’s spy satellites could be sabotaged; and, as amazing as it sounds, some of the actual authentication codes needed to launch U.S. nuclear missiles.
These documents were just the tip of what John had passed through the years. If the FBI did a thorough investigation, as John suspected would happen, its agents would gradually uncover the full extent of his disloyalty and make a rather frightening discovery. From 1967 to 1985, John had sold the KGB vital U.S. cryptographic secrets that had enabled Russian agents to decipher approximately one million coded Navy dispatches, including messages about U.S. troop movements during the Vietnam War. He had wondered if American GIs had been captured or died in Vietnam because of information that he had revealed. Only the Soviets and their allies in North Vietnam knew for sure, but John realized that the sheer volume alone of the secrets that he compromised made him one of the biggest traitors in U.S. history, regardless of whether or not any Americans had died. He and his spy ring were part of an unprecedented breach in Navy security.
Besides selling U.S. cryptographic materials, John had also told the KGB how to strengthen Russian defenses and how the U.S. Navy intended to attack the Soviet Union if a war was declared between the superpowers. He had disclosed the precise location of sensitive underwater microphones used by the United States to track Soviet subs, and he had told the KGB where U.S. submarines would most likely be hiding if a war began.
There was no question, even in John’s mind, that if the Soviet Union and the United States had gone to war, the Soviets would have enjoyed a dramatic edge because of what he had done.
Sitting in the conference room, John decided to see if he could throw the FBI off the trail.
“Who do you think I’m dealing with?” John asked, breaking his silence.
Hunter didn’t hesitate: “The Soviets.”
“There are lots of others out there interested in classified information,” John replied. “Private intelligence-gathering organizations.”
Hunter asked John to name the country that he was spying for, but John refused to say anything else. (Months later, a federal judge told prosecutors that they could not use as evidence or even make public John’s statements that morning. The judge ruled that the exchange was improper because Hunter had not read John the Miranda warning after he had shown him the typewritten letter – even though John had already been read his rights twice that morning. It would be the only court battle that John would win.)
At five minutes before nine, John was finally turned over to federal marshals. As he was being taken away, he overheard Hunter tell another agent that a press conference had been called to announce the arrest. “I was amazed, totally bewildered,” John recalled. “These assholes dearly didn’t know who they were dealing with. Here I was, a person who had run a successful, perhaps the most successful spy ring in the nation’s history, and all these bastards were worried about was getting out a goddamn press release. Getting public attention was more important than using me as a double agent.”
John had always believed that he would never be prosecuted if he were caught. “I was too important as a double agent.” Now the reality of his arrest was taking hold. To the FBI, John Anthony Walker, Jr., was just another criminal, a momentous one because his crime threatened national security, but a criminal just the same. John was incensed. How in the world could the government do something as stupid as prosecute him? he wondered. “I thought, ‘I know more about espionage than the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency combined! For christsake don’t these idiots know that they are blowing it!’ ”
John was taken to an isolated cell in the Baltimore City Jail, and it was there, after an hour of solitude, that he finally realized his days as a spy had ended. No one from the CIA was coming to his aid. No one was going to ask him to serve as a double agent the way they always did in the spy novels he loved.
John was exhausted, but too excited and nervous to sleep. Why had the FBI finally caught him? What mistake had tipped them off? The more he thought about his arrest, the more certain he became. He hadn’t made any mistakes. Someone had turned him in. And there was only one person who would have done it – Barbara, his ex-wife. Barbara Crowley Walker. She had finally worked up enough courage to do it. It was difficult to believe, but it had to be her. His brother Arthur had warned him last fall, had told him that Barbara had called and threatened to turn John in.
“So what else is new,” John had replied. Barbara, a self-admitted alcoholic, had threatened him so many times over the years that John had stopped taking her seriously. She was worse than the little boy who cried wolf.
Suddenly, several other events of the past few months started to come into focus. Like pieces of a mosaic, John saw the individual episodes begin to form a much larger picture. It was not only Barbara who had caused his downfall, but also his best friend, Jerry Whitworth; his own son, Michael; and even his own brother, Arthur.
“It’s like an airplane crash,” John recalled later. “Investigators check the wreckage and discover that it wasn’t one single thing that caused the crash, but several different things that all came together.”
A combination of all of their faults had led to his arrest. Each had failed him in his own way. “Why have I always been surrounded by weak people?” he asked later. “It was this group of misfits and weaklings that brought me down.”
An astrologer once told John that he was a “double Leo” because of the location of the planets on his birthday, July 28, 1937. A “double Leo” is an extremely rare and gifted person, the astrologer explained, and John had believed her. “Double Leos are winners,” he often told friends. “Take away all my money and throw me in the street naked. Within a week, I’ll have gotten everything back and made even more.”
Now that he had been arrested, he thought about the astrologer. She had been right. John Anthony Walker, Jr., was a winner, and he was not about to give the people he despised, such as his ex-wife, the pleasure of seeing him suffer. No, he thought, he was going to smile when they brought him in front of television cameras shackled in handcuffs and leg irons. His arrest and unavoidable prison sentence, he decided, would be “another adventure ... a long-needed vacation.” He would write a book while he was in jail about his experiences as a spy, and he would call it John Walker, Jr. – Spy. He would write two books, in fact, and call the sequel John Walker, Jr. – Private Investigator. He might even write a third about how to run a profitable small business. His arrest would make him famous. At last the entire world would know what only he and the Russians had known before: he was the best!
John began to unwind. He stretched out on the steel bunk, but tired though he was, he was still unable to sleep. “I kept thinking about Barbara and how she had snitched on me.” Lying in the Baltimore jail, John decided that he had made only one mistake as a spy.
“I should have killed Barbara,” he said later. “I should have assassinated her in the beginning. I should have put a fucking hole in her head.”
With that final thought, he dosed his eyes and fell
asleep. He was awakened later that night for dinner. When the guards came for him, John began to chuckle mysteriously.
“The FBI was wrong,” he noted later with sarcasm. “No one slid a tray under the bars of my cell. I ate in a jail dining room.”
Chapter 2
It was cold on the January 1986 night when I met John Walker, Jr., for the first time. He had been in various county jails in Maryland for seven months awaiting sentencing to a federal penitentiary. At this point John had not yet testified in public. Only his attorney, Fred Warren Bennett, and a handful of select FBI agents had discovered the damage he had caused.
I walked through the gloom and fog toward the Montgomery County Detention Center, a modern jail only a few miles from the site where John had made his last dead drop. I had been fascinated by him for months, by what it could be that would drive a man to sell his country’s secrets to the Russians. I had read everything I could about him, talked with members of his family, learned as much as possible about John Walker, yet he was still an enigma. I wanted to know more, and I was here because now, for his own reasons, John Walker was ready to talk.
Directed to a small interview room usually reserved for attorneys and their clients, I sat in front of a heavy wire screen. A sign warned that it was unlawful to pass anything to a prisoner. The jail heating system had malfunctioned earlier that day and the tiny cubicle was sweltering. By the time John finally was brought in by a guard, I had removed my jacket and tie and perspiration had soaked my shirt.
John wore a jail-issued navy blue, short sleeve jumpsuit and thick black beach sandals. He carried a large brown folder filled with legal documents and yellow pads containing pages of scribbled notes. In his breast pocket were three freshly sharpened red pencils, all neatly aligned, points up. He had already outlined the main events of his life and he had reconstructed, he explained, his conversations with the KGB. He had provided all this information to the FBI, which had used a polygraph machine to verify its truthfulness, and now he wanted me to have it.