by Earley, Pete
Intelligence experts divide information into two types: tactical, or “real time intelligence,” and strategic, or “long-term intelligence.”
Tactical information is generally less than six months old, usually involving specific information about an individual operation, such as the exact time and location of a bombing raid in North Vietnam. Strategic intelligence tends to be much more general. Once the Soviets had access to the keylist for the KW-7 machine, they would be only a step away from being able to read thousands of U.S. military messages, including some tactical information because the KW-7 was being used extensively in Vietnam. Selling the Russians the keylist for an antiquated KL-47 cryptographic machine would allow a peek through a keyhole at U.S. military secrets. Supplying the Russians with the KW-7 keylist was much more damaging, more like throwing open the entire door. The Soviets would still have only half the puzzle – the keylist – but John had access to technical manuals that could be used to reconstruct a KW-7 machine.
John understood the consequences of selling the Russians the keylist and the technical manuals for the KW-7. If the United States and the Soviet Union went to war, the Russians would be able to read Navy messages both tactical and strategic. John knew that giving the Russians access to the KW-7 cryptographic machine could cost American lives in Vietnam. If the Russians shared tactical intelligence gained through the KW-7 machine with the North Vietnamese, the lives of both U.S. pilots on bombing raids and of grunts engaged in ground combat would be jeopardized.
John considered the ramifications before he included the KW-7 machine on his shopping list, but in the end, he couldn’t think of any reason not to sell it. He had convinced himself that the United States and Soviet Union were never going to war and that the Russians wouldn’t share intelligence information with the North Vietnamese. The KW-7 was simply too valuable for the Russians to share with the Viet Congo Already John’s sense of his own importance as a figure in the cold war had grown to monstrous proportions.
“I decided,” John told me during one of our first interviews together, “that if I was going to be a spy, and I clearly was going to be one, then I would be the best damn spy there ever was, and that meant giving them everything. And that’s exactly what I did.”
John met his Russian contact outside the Zayre store in Alexandria as scheduled. He was looking in a display window when a voice behind him said, “Hello, dear friend. Please do not turn around, but walk with me.”
John did as he was told. From an occasional glimpse, John knew the man was about six feet one, had dark brown hair, wore glasses, and was dean shaven. This KGB agent had a dear, pleasant voice that reminded John of his father. In his thirties, John guessed, but didn’t wear a wedding band. Only one rather obvious mannerism betrayed the fact that he was not an American. The Russian was holding his cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger. Americans hold cigarettes between their first two fingers.
“How did you get here?” the Russian asked. “I drove my car from Norfolk as instructed,” John replied. “Did anything unusual happen?”
“No,” said John, who was uncertain what the Russian meant.
The Russian asked John if he had seen any cars more than once during his trip, which might mean that they had been trailing him.
“No, I don’t believe I was followed,” John answered.
During the next ten minutes, John and the Russian walked through a neighborhood near the shopping center. The Russian spoke slowly and calmly about John’s new career as a spy. The KGB would pay him a salary of $4,000 a month in return for cryptographic information like the KL-47 keylist. He’d get extra money if he obtained specific items that the Russians needed, but he would never receive less than $2,000 each month as long as he had access to cryptographic materials.
John quickly agreed to the terms and the Russian turned to security. John should never telephone the Soviet embassy. He should tell no one, including his wife, that he had become a spy. He should be extremely careful with his money and not spend it lavishly by buying a new car, fancy clothes, or a new house. Copying documents was risky. John would be given a Minox camera to photograph them. He could steal them, photograph them, and return them. This procedure was much safer than trying to use a photocopy machine.
The KGB agent described how a dead drop was performed and gave John some pointers on how to detect whether he was being followed. “If you are on foot, get into a taxi but only go a short distance – two or three blocks perhaps – and then get out. Watch behind you this entire time and see if anyone does the same.” John could also lose someone who was following him in a car by walking up a one-way street against traffic.
As they spoke, John realized the Russian seemed to be following a carefully crafted script, just as the embassy employee had. As the lecture on security drew to a dose, the Russian asked John if he had access to a technical manual for the KL-47 machine. John told the KGB agent that the operations headquarters in Norfolk didn’t have one. In that case, the agent explained, John would be given a hand-held device invented by the KGB specifically to read the internal wiring of the KL-47 machine. He would receive it and a Minox miniature camera in the next dead drop. John should hide the “rotor reader” because it would be a dead giveaway to anyone who knew anything about cryptology.
“What about the pill?” John asked. The Russian didn’t understand what pill John was talking about. “Aren’t you going to give me some sort of pill that I can take if I’m arrested so I can commit suicide?” John asked.
The Russian appeared confused. “No, we don’t do that,” he responded.
The Russian asked John to give him the keylist for the KL-47 machine and any other material he had brought with him.
“I didn’t know I was supposed to bring it out here,” John replied. “Where is it?” the KGB agent asked.
“I put it in a locker at National Airport,” John said. The Russian stopped walking. He warned John that lockers were routinely checked and he suggested that John get the documents immediately. “I will contact you there,” he said, turning briskly and walking away.
John hurried to the airport. He had hidden the documents because he hadn’t wanted to carry them to the shopping center, fearing that the FBI would be waiting there to arrest him.
The main terminal was crowded as usual. John stopped short of the lockers and surveyed the crowd. A man in a two-piece gray suit standing near the lockers was reading a newspaper. A woman sat nearby knitting. John wondered if they were watching for him. He didn’t move for several minutes. Then a woman with two youngsters came up and embraced the man with the newspaper and they all left. John decided he was being paranoid. Opening his locker quickly, he grabbed the package of documents and rushed out through the glass doors. A few feet later he heard the Russian’s voice behind him.
“Hello, friend,” he said. “Let’s walk into that parking lot.” A car pulled up beside them as they neared the parking lot entrance, and the KGB agent took John’s package and handed it through an open window to a man inside the car, which sped away.
“Did you bring your shopping list?” the Russian asked. John handed him the notebook paper. When he finished reading it, the agent said that he was particularly interested in the last item on the list – the KW-7 keylist and technical manuals.
“I can get those, but it could be difficult,” John said. The Russian indicated that he would pay John a bonus of $1,000 or more for the KW-7 keylist, particularly if he could get it within a few weeks. The Russian handed John a packet containing instructions for the dead drop and listing the steps John must follow if he wished to contact the Soviets in an emergency. If they needed to get in touch with him, they would send a birthday card signed “Your dear friend,” his cue to go to a prearranged location in Washington where he would find instructions and a package.
“Do you understand everything that I’ve told you?” the Russian asked, after passing him the envelopes.
“Yes,” John assured him. The Russian
handed him another envelope that contained cash.
“We will not meet again face-to-face for a long time,” the Russian said, “but we will become good friends and we will communicate in the dead drop packages. We want you to know that we are very concerned about you. Many people who come to us help us for years and then retire. We hope you will be one of them.
“Good-bye, dear friend,” the Russian said, gently patting John on the shoulder. The patting must have been a signal because a car pulled up alongside seconds later. The agent quickly stepped inside and was gone.
John kept on walking for several minutes and then hurried back to his car to count his money. The Russians had given him his $4,000 salary, plus an extra $1,000.
Sometime in early January 1968, John delivered the keylist for a KW-7 machine by leaving a copy of it in the bottom of a bag of trash during a dead drop in a Virginia suburb of Washington.
On January 23, 1968, the U.S.S. Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans in international waters off their coastline. The Pueblo was a secret intelligence-gathering ship outfitted with sophisticated eavesdropping gear that had been dispatched by the Navy and the NSA to “sample electronic environment off east coast North Korea” and to “intercept and conduct surveillance of Soviet naval units operating Tsushima Straits.”
One crew member of the Pueblo was killed and the other eighty-two were captured during the surprise North Korean attack. During the next eleven months, the crew members were held hostage and tortured in North Korea.
After John Walker was arrested, FBI agents quizzed him extensively about the timing of his delivery of the KW-7 keylist. Agents repeatedly asked if he knew anything about the Pueblo capture. John vehemently denied any connection between the two events. FBI agents handling the Walker case remained suspicious about the timing of John’s disclosure of the KW-7 keylist and the seizure of the Pueblo.
At one point, the FBI theorized that the Soviets might have urged the North Koreans to attack the Pueblo because the KGB had access to the KW-7 keylist, The Russians had to have known that the Pueblo contained extensive cryptographic equipment, including the KW-7 – the theory went.
John considered the FBI theory “totally preposterous” and, in all fairness, it is difficult to believe that john’s delivery prompted the Russians to undertake such a convoluted and risky action.
But after the Pueblo crew was released on December 23, 1968, a naval investigation revealed that the attack had happened so quickly that the ship’s crew had failed to destroy several important cryptographic machines before being captured. The most serious loss, according to disclosures only made public by the Navy in recent court documents, was the confiscation of a working KW-7 machine. U.S. intelligence sources now believe that machine was subsequently delivered to the Soviets.
Regardless of what prompted the attack, and whether or not John’s delivery played any role in it, the end result was the same. In early 1968, the Russians suddenly obtained a working KW-7 machine and its daily keylists. Because the KW-7 was so widely used and so vital to U.S. military communications, the NSA decided not to scrap it after the Pueblo incident. Instead, the NSA modified the KW-7 machine on the theory that its changes plus the daily keylists would be adequate safeguards to keep KW-7 encrypted messages secret.
What the NSA didn’t know, of course, was that John was providing the KGB with keylists and all of the KW-7 technical manuals. As soon as the NSA devised a way to modify the KW-7 and sent out the new technical manual, John photographed the document and delivered the film to the Russians.
In the first few months that he was a spy, the KGB gained access to the United States’ most widely used cryptographic system, thanks to John Walker and the seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo.
It was as if the U.S. Navy had opened up a branch communications office directly in the center of Red Square, and it marked the beginning of the deciphering of more than one million classified U.S. military messages.
Chapter 14
Fear of arrest nagged John during the early months of 1968. Each morning his first thought was, “Today is the day that I will be arrested.” His anxiety surfaced periodically during the day in sweaty palms and feet that tapped restlessly. Even asleep, John could not escape his uneasiness. He had nightmares about being arrested in the message center and dragged outside into an angry mob of sailors.
“I spent the money from the Soviets as soon as I got it. There was no point in being frugal because I felt I was going to be arrested at any minute,” he said. “I lived from dead drop to dead drop.”
John earned $725 per month as a Navy warrant officer. The Soviets were paying him $4,000 per month. Though the KGB warned him not to attract attention by spending lavishly, John couldn’t resist. In April 1968, he rented a three-bedroom apartment in a swanky Norfolk complex and told Barbara that it was time for her and the children to come join him. Barbara was stunned by her new home.
The apartment featured luxuriant wall-to-wall carpeting, up-to-date kitchen appliances, pristine rooms, and a doorman. John was the only warrant officer in the building, but none of his co-workers at the Navy message center was suspicious when John bragged about his “new pad” because they had heard him boast about what a good investment the Bamboo Snack Bar had become.
“I thought Barbara would love the apartment and wouldn’t have a thing to nag me about, but I was wrong,” John said.
She complained that their furniture wasn’t good enough for their new home. Much to Barbara’s surprise, John offered to buy all new furnishings without regard to cost. Barbara had always felt she had a hidden talent for interior decorating, and during the next few days, she inspected dozens of colors, fabrics, and wall coverings. Whenever she asked for money, John reached into his front pants pocket and removed a thick wad of folded $50 bills that he enjoyed flaunting. By the time Barbara was finished, John had spent $10,000 in cash.
Barbara knew immediately that John had lied to her about having a second job, but she didn’t pester him about it. The family was reunited and neither she nor John had to scrimp anymore. The days of powdered milk and resoled shoes appeared to be over, and Barbara was glad.
With John’s encouragement, she began schooling her children in the social graces that befitted the family’s new financial status. Barbara bought a small wooden table, which she placed in the kitchen. Margaret, aged ten, Cynthia, nine, Laura, eight, and Michael, six, were required to eat dinner there each night until they had mastered sufficient table manners to join Barbara and John in the dining room. Dinner became an elaborate ritual whenever John worked the day shift.
When he arrived home, Barbara met him at the door clad in a cocktail dress, a martini and folded newspaper in her hands. John relaxed alone in the living room for several minutes. After he finished the newspaper, Barbara brought in hors d’oeuvres. Dinner was served when John sat at the head of the table. It ended when he finished eating and Barbara scurried to clear his plate. After dessert, John talked about his day, and then it was time for each child to tell “something new which they had learned that day.”
“I always felt so stupid,” Cynthia Walker said of the nightly after-dinner ceremony. “We always went around the table and Margaret was first. She always had something new that she had learned, and then it was Laura’s turn, and she always told some fantastic story even if she had to make it up. It didn’t matter what Michael said because he was so cute that no one cared. And then it would be my turn, and I wouldn’t know what to say so I’d sit there and be ridiculed and called stupid.”
Dinner was not the only drill in etiquette. After school, Barbara had her daughters practice walking across the living room without dropping a book that she placed on each of their heads.
“When you walk into a room, you should own it,” she lectured. “Every eye should be on you and you alone.”
Meticulous grooming and wearing fashionable clothes became important. Barbara enjoyed dressing all her daughters alike, and she spent time doctoring Cynthia
’s straight brown hair with sugar water to make it curl like her sisters’.
John bought an eight-millimeter movie camera and began taking family movies.
“I hate home movies where some kid comes out of the ocean and waves into the camera and says, ‘Hi,’ ” Barbara Walker said, recalling her husband’s toy. “So I began writing scripts for the children to perform.”
Like most Navy wives whose husbands spent long periods at sea, Barbara was used to handling family finances. But after she joined John in Norfolk, he insisted on keeping track of the money. One night Barbara asked him to tell her why he seemed to have an endless flow of cash. “It’s better for you that you don’t know,” John replied cryptically. The next day, he brought a hypodermic syringe home from work and placed it in the middle drawer of his desk. He had used the syringe at the message center to squeeze oil into hard-to-reach gears in cryptographic machines, but John knew that Barbara’s curiosity would eventually lead her to his desk and he thought the syringe might make her think he was trafficking in illegal drugs.
John stacked five pennies in the desk drawer near the syringe. When he carefully opened the drawer a few days later, the pennies were no longer neatly stacked. The Russians had told him about the penny trick. It was an inconspicuous way to tell if someone had been snooping in his drawer. Barbara didn’t ask any more questions about the cash after he planted the syringe, John recalled.
On May 20, 1968, the submarine message center where John worked was ordered by Vice Admiral Arnold F. Schade, commander of the Atlantic submarine force, to send a top secret dispatch to Francis A. Slattery, commanding officer of the nuclear submarine Scorpion. The sub had just left Gibraltar on its way to Norfolk from a three-month Mediterranean cruise when Schade ordered it diverted toward the Canary Islands and six Soviet warships. The Scorpion was told to monitor the Russian ships, which included a nuclear submarine.