Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  Shortly after midnight on May 22, the Scorpion filed a routine position report with the Norfolk message center; it was six hours away from the Russian warships. The submarine missed its next routine position report and suddenly didn’t respond to a series of attempts by the message center during the next twenty-four hours to contact it. Schade immediately received permission to launch a discreet, quick search for the Scorpion. Two squadrons of destroyers, several airplanes, and a nuclear submarine were dispatched.

  During the next four days, John and his colleagues worked round-the-dock as concern over the missing submarine mounted. When the Scorpion didn’t return to Norfolk on schedule May 27, the families of its ninety-nine-man crew patiently waiting at the Navy dock discovered for the first time what John and other watch officers already knew.

  The Scorpion was missing.

  The Navy quickly declared an alert and organized a full-scale search. Within thirty-six hours, top secret dispatches were received indicating that SOSUS hydrophones had overheard the Scorpion being rocked by a series of explosions. The sensitive hydrophones also had recorded the sound of the sub’s hull being crushed by water pressure as the boat sank two miles to the Atlantic Ocean floor.

  Because the Scorpion had been on a mission to monitor Soviet warships, there was immediate speculation that it had been attacked. The crypto machines in the message center worked nonstop as the investigation increased to a frantic pace.

  The sinking of the Scorpion devastated Norfolk, the sub’s home port. The sailors in the message center were especially upset. “The Scorpion was under our control when it went down,” recalled John Rogers, the message center officer in early 1968 who was John Walker’s direct boss. “We felt a special responsibility for it. It was one of ours.”

  Barbara Walker was shaken by the disaster too. She and other Navy wives talked for hours about the tragedy and the distraught families of the dead crew. But John displayed little outward emotion. “The Navy is full of risks,” he told Barbara. “Putting your life on the line is simply part of the job. That’s what they pay you for.”

  The Scorpion incident troubled John more than he let on, however. Had something he sold to the Soviets played a role in the disaster? he wondered.

  The Navy was still speculating in the summer of 1968 that the Russian warships might have attacked the Scorpion, and that made John very uncomfortable.

  What if Navy investigators somehow found out that he was a spy? What in the world were the Soviets up to?

  He was scared, but not enough to stop collecting material for the KGB. The increase in top secret messages brought on by the Scorpion tragedy gave John a mother lode of classified documents. He methodically copied dozens of them, including papers that outlined how the Navy conducted its search, what kinds of information had been detected by the SOSUS hydrophones, what the U.S. naval intelligence knew at the time about the Russian ships, and possible theories about why the submarine had gone down. The KGB told John in the notes left at dead drops that it was delighted with the material.

  Five months after it sank, the broken remains of the Scorpion were found 400 miles south-southwest of the Azores. In December 1984, The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, a Norfolk newspaper, published a series of previously classified Navy documents that concluded that the Scorpion sank after one of its own torpedoes exploded aboard the boat. The torpedo explosion theory is the most logical explanation the Navy found for the sinking, but no one is one hundred percent positive to this day about what actually caused the boat to sink. There are some sailors who still believe the Russians might have been involved in the tragedy.

  Copying messages about the Scorpion was much easier than obtaining keylists. Most secret messages were routinely photocopied after they were deciphered so copies could be delivered through the chain of command. The military is notorious for duplicating its paperwork, and it was not difficult for John to make an extra copy of a sensitive message for the KGB. He hid the copies in plain sight.

  “The best place to hide something is right under someone’s nose,” John bragged. “I put copies of messages in a file folder and stuck them in the back of a file cabinet that no one used.”

  If someone accidentally found the file, they would most likely assume it was there because it was supposed to be. “The Navy never throws anything away and no one knows why some things are kept,n John explained. “Once we were going through some files in a ship and came across a bunch of old World War II battle plans.”

  When John first told me about how he hid documents “in plain sight,” he acted as if it were something that he had thought up himself. Later, he told me that the KGB had first suggested it to him in various instructions left at dead drops. I don’t think John ever realized that the concept was not something that the KGB had originated, but was made famous in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter.”

  John did receive a used Minox camera from the KGB with a small chain that looked like a carrying strap but actually was used for focusing the camera. The chain was the exact distance that John needed between his camera and a document. All he had to do to take a perfect picture was hold the chain on a document and pull the Minox back until the chain was taut. The Russians provided John with high-speed black-and-white film and told him to use a 150-watt bulb when photographing documents. John took the photographs inside the crypto vault when he was working the morning shift and free of supervision.

  He also used the KGB’s rotor reader to determine the KL-4Ts circuitry. Once again, John applied KISS. During an early morning watch, he innocently announced that he needed to inspect the KL·47 machine because it was garbling messages. None of the men under his command flinched and John quickly put the hand-held rotor reader to work.

  “A K-mart store has better security than the U.S. Navy,” John told me later, laughing.

  Still, he was worried. He felt it was only a matter of time before he was arrested.

  One morning, he decided to learn how to sail; he immediately fell in love with the sport and bought a twenty-four-foot sailboat. In the beginning, John took Barbara and the children out on the boat. But, Barbara would complain and the kids would fidget. Soon he was sailing exclusively with younger sailors who worked for him at the message center. John supplied the sailboat and a metal washtub filled with ice and beer; the sailors brought the girls. “I loved sailing. If I wasn’t at work, I was on my boat.”

  Barbara stopped fixing elaborate dinners after John bought the sailboat because she never knew when he would come home. She found herself being left behind on weekends with the children.

  “Barbara really bitched about the sailboat and finally I told her, ‘Hey, some men play golf, others play tennis, and still others play handball, and they mayor may not include their wives in these activities. I’m telling you right now that sailing is my thing. I need my time away, and sailing is it, and I don’t want to hear any bitching about it,’ “ John said. “Of course, Barbara hated that. She couldn’t understand what I would call absolutely normal male behavior in ninety-five percent of all American households where the husband goes out on Saturday morning to play golf. ‘Why don’t you want to stay home with me and the kids?’ she’d moan, or she’d demand that I take her with me every time I went out on the boat, and finally I said, ‘Look Barbara, this is just the way it is. Sometimes you can come out on the boat with me, but other times I am going to go with my friends; and if it’s going to upset you so much, tough shit, because you are not going with me and that’s final.’ ”

  While John was gone one afternoon in 1968, Barbara discovered a metal box hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk at home. Inside were several rolls of film, and black-and-white photographs of country roads with trees and bushes marked with hand-drawn arrows. There was a map too, and a hand-printed note that said, in part, “information not what we wanted, want information on rotor.” In big red block letters at the top of the note were the words, “Please Destroy.” The box contained $2,000 in c
ash too.

  During the next couple of weeks, Barbara tried to make sense of her discovery. She finally confronted John.

  “Tell me about the box,” she said. “What does it mean?”

  “I’m a spy,” John replied. “That’s where I get all the money.”

  Eighteen years later, after John was arrested, Barbara Walker recalled her exchange with John in testimony before a secret federal grand jury in Baltimore, Maryland. She was under oath when she testified.

  QUESTION: What occurred during the confrontation?

  ANSWER: I called him a traitor.

  Q: When you called him a traitor, what was his reaction?

  A: He told me to shut up, that someone might hear me.

  Q: Was there a physical confrontation as well?

  A: Yes.

  Barbara Walker later said that John had punched her in the face, giving her two black eyes. But that was not all that she blamed on John.

  Q: Would it be fair to say, Mrs. Walker, that you are an alcoholic?

  A: Yes, it would.

  Q: Is that a condition which began to develop around the time that you are telling us about now?

  A: Yes.

  John Walker denied Barbara’s claims that he had beaten her physically and driven her to drink. When we spoke, John said that he was aware of Barbara’s implication that she had objected to his spying out of a sense of loyalty to her country. The issue of patriotism never came up, John insisted.

  “Barbara’s big concern was the same that it always had been,” John said. “She wanted to know why I didn’t love her anymore. Why I didn’t want to spend time with her and the kids, or just her. And I said, ‘Hey, you want to know why I don’t love you anymore? Let me count the ways, Barbara! Where do you want me to begin?’ You see, Barbara was contributing nothing to my life at the time, almost like my father was with my mother.

  “I swear that’s how the argument began. It didn’t have anything to do with patriotism. She concocted that stuff about calling me a traitor to make herself look better. Hell, she wanted to know how I did it – she began asking me all kinds of questions because she thought it was exciting – and then she said to me, ‘Can I get involved in this with you?’ and I said, ‘Barbara, I’m going to get arrested any goddamn minute. Why do you want to get involved?’ and she said, ‘Because I want to prove my love for you. This is something we can do together.’ That’s what it was all about. Not patriotism.

  “It was really sad because she never did figure out how to keep me happy.”

  At the time John made those statements to me, he was clearly angry at Barbara for turning him in to the FBI. He wanted to hurt her. But John insisted he was telling the truth.

  When I told Barbara Walker how John had described their confrontation, she began to cry. She also appeared irritated that someone might actually believe him.

  “I’ve told the truth,” she said. “I called him a traitor and he hit me. I love my country.”

  Barbara Walker acknowledged that she had questioned John about his spying and had volunteered to go with him on a dead drop. The explanation that she gave me was almost identical to what she told the grand jury during her sworn testimony.

  Q: Did you offer to go with him on a drop?

  A: Yes. I did.

  Q: Why did you offer to go on the drop?

  A: Since the marriage and our family structure was falling apart, I thought that if I showed him that I cared, that would help things to change.

  Barbara Walker hammered home that same point to me during our more than thirty conversations. “Family always came first to me,” she said repeatedly. “You got to understand that.” At the same time, she rarely mentioned patriotism.

  Barbara Walker’s testimony before the grand jury also included an exchange that inadvertently supported John’s explanation for why he became a KGB spy.

  Q: Did John ever tell you why he was engaged in this activity?

  A: The business in South Carolina was failing, and I was trying to maintain household expenses, plus the business, and I often would take my engagement ring to a pawnshop and pawn it. Every time I did, I told him about it.

  Q: He told you that he was doing it for the money?

  A: Yes.

  Money and family. They were the two themes that continued to surface whenever I spoke to John and Barbara.

  While Barbara and John disagreed about what happened the day she learned he was a spy, both agreed about what happened next.

  John saw Barbara’s willingness to go with him on a dead drop as a “great opportunity.”

  “I knew,” John told me, “that wives couldn’t be forced to testify against their husbands. If she went with me, then, even if I divorced her, she would still be my accomplice.”

  Barbara did drive John to his next dead drop. He sat beside her in the front seat scanning the route with a pair of high-powered binoculars for possible FBI agents. Barbara told me later that she was petrified during the exchange. But she didn’t make any mistakes or panic when John first jumped from the car to drop his trash bag of documents, and later to pick up his KGB cash. The KGB had put two soft drink cans in the trash bag that John retrieved. Neatly tucked inside the cans were fifty-dollar bills, each rolled tight like cigarettes. Back home that night, John asked Barbara to set up her ironing board and press each fifty-dollar bill so that it would lay flat. She obliged.

  “At that point, as far as I was concerned,” John later told me, “Barbara was just as much a spy as I was!”

  The distinction that Barbara Walker had betrayed her country, not for money – as he had done – but because of a misguided love for him and a devotion to her children never crossed John’s mind.

  Chapter 15

  In the summer of 1968, John Walker made a startling discovery. His money hadn’t made any of his personal problems disappear. In fact, he was more miserable now than he ever had been. The swanky apartment, expensive furnishings, and elaborate dinners hadn’t helped his marriage. “Barbara kept nagging me,” John claimed, “worse than before.” Barbara had become deeply depressed and began drinking more and more. John’s military career also was in trouble.

  “I kept thinking that I was going to be arrested and I couldn’t concentrate at work. Promotions suddenly didn’t matter. Nothing mattered because any minute I was going to get arrested. I just knew it.”

  John had received high marks in late 1967 from his first boss at the Navy message center, John Rogers. “John ran his watch well,” Rogers recalled. “There were no boo-boos. Traffic moved good. He was a smart-ass sometimes, but as far as I was concerned, he did a hell of a good job in the sub center when he worked for me.”

  But by July 1968, John’s work was becoming slipshod.

  Bill Metcalf, who became John’s boss that summer, considered John an abysmal watch officer. “My boss and I used to go to sea periodically and when we got back, we never knew what the hell was going to be wrong because Johnny Walker had been left in charge,” remembered Metcalf. “You could bet that he’d gotten into some type of a jam with his smart mouth. He just wasn’t as interested in doing as good a job as the other watch officers.”

  John knew he was headed for disaster, but he didn’t know how to deal with his own paranoia. At one point, the KGB warned John in a note that the FBI had developed a new sophisticated homing device that it used to follow a suspect’s car. The device not only kept agents abreast of the location of the car, but also signaled when its automatic transmission was put into neutral or park. John had always been afraid the FBI would tail him to a dead drop. Now he was even more worried that a swarm of FBI agents would arrest him when he stopped to pick up his KGB cash.

  John began renting cars in Washington because he thought they would be more difficult for the FBI to bug. He also began leaving his car’s automatic transmission in “drive” when he stopped during a dead drop. He kept the car from moving by jamming on its emergency brake. This worked fine until the emergency brake on one of his re
ntal cars broke. He ended up chasing the unoccupied car down a deserted country road while carrying a trash bag filled with KGB cash.

  “I was going wacky,” John recalled. “I couldn’t sleep. I was miserable and I seriously considered killing myself again because my life was such a nightmare.”

  John’s colleagues noticed that John was more nervous than usual and that he suddenly had more money than before, but still no one suspected him of being a spy.

  John bragged constantly about the money he made from leasing his bar, so much so that Howard Sparks, a fellow watch officer, visited it one day when he was on an assignment in Charleston. Much to John’s relief, Sparks reported that the place was filled with customers.

  Bill Metcalf, meanwhile, disliked John. “The problems with Johnny Walker involved moral turpitude. The guy just didn’t have any moral standards as far as I was concerned. He constantly bragged about women and if a woman looked twice at him, why he’d be unzipping his britches. But there was never any hint that he was mishandling cryptographic material.”

  In August 1968, John held a beer party on his sailboat, and a dozen young sailors and their girlfriends came. Jimi Elizabeth Thomas, an exuberant nineteen-year-old student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, was one of the guests. Jimi’s initials spelled JET and her friends nicknamed her Jimi-Jet because she lived her life like a jet-propelled aircraft breaking the sound barrier. No one talked faster, drank more, smoked as much, or danced longer than the light-brown-haired, buxom farm girl who seemed to end all of her sentences with a self-deprecating laugh.

  “John was the only person at the party in uniform,” Jimi Thomas recalled when we spoke, “and he was at least ten years older than the rest of us. He seemed so mature and interesting because he had so much more experience than any of us. We talked and talked and talked and, of course, we drank. Oh did we drink! Alcohol turned out to be a predominant part of our relationship. Anyway, John eventually asked me for a date and I said yes. I think he told me that he was separated or divorced, I can’t remember which, but it wasn’t important at the time because I probably would have gone out with him anyway. The hard cold truth is that my standards were unfortunately not what they should have been at the time.”