by Earley, Pete
In the spring of 1962, John moved his family again – the fifteenth move in five years – to Vallejo, California, where he reported for duty on the U.S.S. Andrew Jackson, one of the Navy’s new nuclear-powered submarines. It was a trying time. Barbara was having a difficult pregnancy and had started complaining about John’s refusal to help around the house or care for the children – Margaret, age four; Cynthia, age two; Laura, age one. Despite her badgering, John refused to lift a finger. “The Navy is my job. The house and children are yours!”
Barbara went into labor on November 1, 1962. John had planned to play in a baseball game that day with some fellows from the radio crew, so he dropped Barbara at the hospital entrance and then went on to the game. Barbara gave birth to a boy. As she was being wheeled back to her room, she thought back to Margaret’s birth when John had insisted on being with her in the delivery room.
They had been so much in love. She began to cry.
John had always wanted a son, and when he heard that Barbara had given birth to a boy, he rushed to the hospital, armed with long-stemmed roses and a large box of chocolates.
“I had always planned to name our first son John Anthony Walker the third:’ Barbara Walker told me later. “Every time I got pregnant, I prayed it would be a boy so that John could have a son who he could pass his name to. On every previous pregnancy, I was going to name the baby John if it were a boy.
“But when I had my baby boy, John wasn’t there. He was at some damn baseball game with his pals,” she said. “So I named my son Michael Lance Walker, and when John found out he was furious.”
It was one of the sweetest moments in her life, Barbara Walker recalled.
PART III
traitor
The man who pauses on the paths of treason, halts on a quicksand; the first step engulfs him
– Aaron Hill, Henry V (act 1, scene 1)
Chapter 10
The three-inch-thick book had a bright red covet with the warning TOP SECRET-SPECAT printed on it in bold letters. The acronym SPECAT, short for SPECIAL CATEGORY, meant that even military personnel with top secret clearances couldn’t examine the book without special authorization. John knew why. The book contained the plans for the beginning of WorId War III.
John lifted the cover of the red binder and read the title: Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). Even the title was secret. Officially, no such plan existed. The SIOP (pronounced sigh-op) was the Pentagon’s road map for a full-scale war with the Soviet Union. It contained a list of all U.S. nuclear weapons and their targets.
In the early 1960s, mapping Armageddon was even more intricate and difficult than it is today because each U.S. missile carried only one nuclear warhead and the nation’s most powerful nuclear bombs would have had to be carried into the Soviet Union and dropped by B-52 bombers because they were so big. The trajectory of every nuclear missile, whether it was fired from land (intercontinental ballistic missiles) or sea (Polaris missiles), had to be precisely calculated to make certain that no missiles collided in the air and to ensure that some flight paths into Russia were kept open. These pathways, called target windows, had to be kept clear so that the B-52’s could carry out their missions.
John had been given permission by the captain of the nuclear submarine U.S.S. Simon Bolivar to see the SIOP. The captain had received a message from Atlantic fleet headquarters in Norfolk saying that another U.S. submarine had developed mechanical problems and was limping back to port. Until that submarine was repaired, the Bolivar had to cover some of its targets.
It took John just a few minutes to log the Bolivar’s new assignment, but the SIOP fascinated him and he read every possible detail before locking it up in a safe.
“It was incredible,” he recalled later. “Haven’t you ever wondered if the United States would go after the eastern bloc countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia if there were a full-scale war? Haven’t you ever wondered if we would hit China and what cities would be blown up in Russia and in what order? Well, here it was – all of it – in my hands, and I was reading it! I mean, this was your wildest fucking nightmare and it was right before my eyes!”
It was at this point that John remembers wondering how much the Soviet Union would pay for stolen U.S. military secrets, but he insisted that his curiosity was nothing more than just that – an innocent inquisitiveness. His thoughts, he said, were similar to those of a man who inherits a valuable heirloom. He has no intention of selling the family treasure, yet he still wonders how much it would fetch from a collector. Knowing the Soviets might pay thousands of dollars for a copy of the SIOP made John’s access to it that much more savory.
John had entered the Navy’s submarine force at a pivotal time in its history. In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union had both moved to enlarge and modernize their postwar submarine fleets. The first dramatic step for the U.S. Navy came with the successful launch of a submarine powered by nuclear energy. Suddenly diesel submarines were obsolete. Atomic-powered submarines were legitimate underwater vessels, capable of remaining submerged for months. Almost overnight, the importance of submarines increased. Difficult for the enemy to track, they became the silent eyes of the Navy. The next major improvement came in 1961, when ballistic missiles were added to the submarines’ armory. No longer were submarines confined to firing torpedoes at ships. Now they could attack entire cities.
John joined the submarine fleet just as it was being converted from an aged diesel flotilla into a modern nuclear armada. His first submarine assignment had been to a diesel-powered vessel, but a year later he joined the crew of the new, nuclear-powered U.S.S. Andrew Jackson. One year after John came aboard, the Jackson moved to the East Coast, where it launched the first Polaris “A-3” missile on October 26, 1963. The two-stage, 30,000-pound Polaris “A-3” could hit a target 2,875 miles away – nearly twice the range of previous Polaris missiles. For the next two years, John roamed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean on the Jackson. Barbara and the four children lived in Navy housing in Charleston specially built for Polaris missile crews.
The workings of nuclear submarines and Polaris missile launches were not the only bits of front-line technology John was privy to. Depending upon which Navy official was speaking, the Russians were either nipping at our heels in submarine development in the fifties and sixties or were years ahead of us. To counter the Russian threat, whatever its size, the Pentagon devised numerous anti-submarine-warfare techniques. The most impressive was SOSUS, an acronym for Sound Surveillance System. SOSUS was nothing more than a giant underwater ear in the form of several hundred specially built hydrophones installed by cable-laying ships on the continental shelf off the East and West Coasts.
The architects of America’s nuclear submarine program had adopted a one-reactor, one-propeller design and paid extraordinary attention to making U.S. nuclear submarines as noiseless as possible. However, the Russians had focused on speed, and built nuclear subs with two reactors and twin propellers that created a much more jarring wake than our single blade. The Russians also bolted pumps, motors, and other internal machinery directly to the inner hull of each submarine, which resulted in the broadcasting of the slightest vibration or clatter into the sea. By the time that John joined the Jackson crew in 1962, the Navy had perfected SOSUS to the point that a Soviet submarine could not leave its home port on the Barents Sea or the Sea of Okhotsk and head for deep water without being detected by SOSUS ears. By the mid-sixties, the U.S. Navy had so thoroughly bugged the continental shelf that it was impossible for a foreign submarine to approach the U.S. coast without each mile of its voyage being carefully tracked by SOSUS. The hydrophones, later enhanced by computers, worked so well that SOSUS operators could tell from the sound of propeller wash not only the location of a submarine but also its type.
The SOSUS system was another top secret that made John pause and wonder: “How much would this be worth to the Reds?”
John didn’t consider such thoughts unique. “Ever
yone aboard a submarine talked about these things,” he insisted. “It was always in a joking way, such as ‘Hey, I’ll bet the Reds would pay a bundle for this,’ but it was standard conversation in the radio room.”
In interviews with me, John’s shipmates denied such conversation ever took place. Any mention, even in jest, of selling classified information to the Russians would have been seen as suspect behavior and probable cause for investigation, they claimed. But John insisted that the value of classified material was a frequent topic and that the Navy unwittingly encouraged such speculation because it bombarded submarine crews with warnings about techniques the Soviets used to discover Navy secrets.
“The Navy was paranoid about nuclear submarines and it stressed the importance of keeping information secure. Naturally that made you wonder: ‘How much would this stuff be worth?’ “
While John was a radio operator on board the U.S.S. Andrew Jackson, he underwent his first and only “background investigation,” conducted by a naval investigator named Milo A. Bauerly. There was little reason at the time for Bauerly to be suspicious of John. During his nine years in the Navy, John had earned seven promotions, each on schedule. His commanding officers called him “bright, energetic, and enthusiastic.” His neighbors and friends assured Bauerly that John didn’t have a drinking or drug problem. He appeared to be happily married, was not in any financial trouble, was not a homosexual, and had no known contact or friendship with foreigners.
Bauerly knew about John’s criminal record as a teenager – the matter was serious enough to make him read the sealed juvenile court records in the Scranton courthouse. But participation in a single bungled burglary of a clothing store seemed insignificant when compared to his pristine Navy record. John was not the first case Bauerly had seen of a troubled teenager straightened out by the Navy. Based on Bauerly’s findings, the Navy granted John a clearance on December 29, 1964, to work with top secret and cryptographic materials.
John developed a reputation as a clown aboard the Jackson. During one cruise, be mixed several spoonfuls of peanut butter with other ingredients and beat the concoction into a mixing bowl until it had the same texture as human excrement. Having formed the peanut butter into a coil, he placed it on a piece of paper on an ensign’s desk. Needless to say, the officer was horrified when he discovered the substance.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded. John stuck his finger in the peanut butter and then pressed it to his lips. “Tastes like shit, sir!” he replied calmly.
When the Jackson moved from San Diego to Charleston, John and Barbara began to live a little higher on the hog. “We bought this little bar and two or three barstools, and we really stocked up the bar well,” John said. “It was the first time that we could afford to buy expensive liquor, and when I came home at night, Barbara would be waiting with a drink and we would both have one before dinner, just like we saw on television and in the movies. I drank scotch and Barbara drank gin and tonic, and Margaret [age eight] was big enough that we even had her mixing them for us.”
John was on a ninety-day rotation at the time, which meant that after three months at sea, he spent three months at home. After each cruise, John came back armed with bottles of cheap, tax-free liquor. The Navy limited the number of bottles a sailor could bring home, but John paid nondrinkers to buy him their allotments. “I think all of us had a drinking problem during those years,” said Donald Clevenger, a crewmate of John’s and a friend of the family in the mid-1960s.
“Our life-styles were built around parties and booze. There always seemed to be a group of people at Johnny’s house, a special gang. Usually they were radio people from the boat ...”
In August 1965, one of John’s commanding officers transferred to the nuclear-powered submarine U.S.S. Simon Bolivar, and he asked John to transfer with him and run the Bolivar’s radio room. John quickly agreed. “I was beginning to peak. I was at the top of my profession.”
On the Bolivar, John befriended Bill Wilkinson, one of the radio operators of lesser rank who worked for him. Wilkinson, a wiry, feisty Louisiana boy with an uncultivated style, became John’s drinking buddy and sparked John’s interest in politics, debating the civil rights movement and segregation with him for hours on end. Wilkinson was a racist – he later became Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan – and John delighted in teasing him about blacks. All John had to do to rattle Wilkinson when the two men went on liberty was to tell him that his dinner had been prepared by a black. Wilkinson would rather starve than eat it.
John joined the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative political group, and had Barbara host several coffees for members and recruits. He enrolled in a book club that mailed him one “great book of the western world” each month. John and Barbara read the first book that arrived in the mail and discussed it, but later she fell behind on the reading and dropped out. John didn’t. He read each book – Greek mythology, Plato – not because he enjoyed them, but because he was trying desperately to better himself.
“What I was trying to do during this period in my life,” John said, “was constantly improve and learn.” At the time few people realized John’s motivation. “The only reason I joined the John Birch Society was because it was good for my career. I mean, what could be more natural. The Navy is an anticommunist group. So are the Birchers. It just made sense. It was all show.” So were the books. He made certain that his boss and the radio crew aboard the Bolivar saw what he was reading.
In the spring of 1966, Barbara received an upsetting telephone call from a close buddy of John’s. “I think my wife is in love with your husband,” he warned her. A few minutes later, the sailor’s wife knocked at her door. The woman announced that she was leaving her husband for John. Barbara poured her a cup of coffee and began gently asking her a series of questions.
“How did you get here, dear?”
The woman, who was only twenty-two, said that she had driven over in her husband’s car. “If you get divorced, you are going to lose that car,” Barbara said. “Now, are you going to go to work or what?” The woman said she hadn’t thought about that. “Well, your husband isn’t going to support you anymore if you divorce him.” Barbara spent almost an hour explaining “reality” to the woman. After she left, Barbara began dealing with her own situation.
“She had given me every indication – she had said everything but they had had an affair.... It hurt me a lot that John had slept with someone else, but I did not blame the other woman. He had set her up for the kill. She was young and didn’t know better.”
Barbara was furious at John, who was away on a ninety-day Polaris cruise. She did not know that John already had had several sexual liaisons in foreign ports with hookers by this time. She had never suspected him of adultery.
Her fury was tempered, however, by the same “reality” that she had described to the young woman. Even if a judge required John to pay child support and alimony, his Navy pay wouldn’t be sufficient for her and the children to continue living as they were. After all their years of penny-pinching, John and Barbara had finally achieved a financial status that allowed them some luxury, and Barbara didn’t want to give that up. Not yet.
She was still in love with John, too. They often fought and she was angry at him much of the time, but there were still some good times between them. Just a few months earlier, they had taken a second honeymoon. Barbara had flown to Spain and met John when he was on liberty. They had bought a fire-engine red MG Midget and driven the back roads of Spain, Italy, and France. It had been a magical trip. Barbara recalled eating Brie and drinking Chablis with John while watching the sun set over the Rock of Gibraltar. They made love one night in the outskirts of Paris in a tiny room John had rented from a farm family. The next morning they ate breakfast with the couple and their gaggle of children.
“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.