by Earley, Pete
Jimi came from a conservative, lower middle class family in Kinston, a rural North Carolina community, and she was eager to probe the fancy life that John quickly offered.
“I loved to dress up and we would go to the nicest restaurants in Norfolk, and I loved it, just loved it. John would buy dinner and we would drink and listen to bands and I knew it had to cost a bundle, but it didn’t seem to matter to him, not at all. I wanted both worlds: my campus life with the fraternity parties and school friends, and also the life of fancy restaurants and dress-up.” Jimi saw John only on week nights because weekends were reserved for campus functions. The arrangement suited him fine because it left his weekends for sailing and didn’t raise any suspicions at home.
Being with Jimi was a wonderful diversion for John. He delighted in showing her how to open lobster claws and marveled at her bubbly excitement over ordering for the first time from a menu written only in French. He explained his money by telling her that he was in the Mafia – a confession that excited, rather than repelled, Jimi-Jet.
Barbara Walker also was seeing someone else during this time period. In September 1968, Arthur and Rita moved from Key West to Virginia Beach, a community that abuts Norfolk, and Barbara and Arthur resumed their sexual relationship.
Once again, their accounts of what happened differ. Arthur told me that he and Barbara only slept together once in Norfolk, but Barbara insisted that Arthur had a key to the back door of her apartment.
“Art used to go to lunch with John and find out exactly what he was doing that afternoon to make sure that he wasn’t going to come home unexpectedly,” she told me. “He would rush over and we’d go to bed.”
I noticed Barbara Walker’s obvious distaste for Arthur whenever she spoke about him. “He is much worse than John,” she told me several times. When I asked Arthur about this, he told me that Barbara had always been jealous of his seemingly idyllic marriage to Rita. Rita Walker also made the same comment separately to me. At one point after Arthur was arrested, Barbara Walker telephoned Rita Walker and told her the names of several women who, she claimed, Arthur had had sex with while married to Rita.
One of the enigmas of the Walker spy case concerns a statement Barbara Walker made to the FBI about her bedroom escapades with Arthur in Norfolk during the fall of 1968.
Barbara claimed that she told Arthur that John was a spy. Arthur responded, she said, by saying, “If it’s any consolation to you, I did the same thing, only on a smaller scale and for a shorter period of time.” Barbara Walker said she was so stunned by Arthur’s response that she didn’t ask him any other questions. The FBI was shocked by Barbara Walker’s comment and immediately speculated that Arthur might have become a KGB spy prior to John. But even though Barbara Walker passed a polygraph test that indicated she was telling the truth, the FBI was never able to find any evidence that Arthur Walker had been involved in espionage before his brother.
Arthur Walker vigorously denied that Barbara ever told him anything about John’s espionage. When I asked him about her statements, Arthur said it was possible that Barbara “might have thought she told me something like that” but during the heat of passion, he either misunderstood her or wasn’t paying any attention.
“Barbara likes to speak in riddles,” he said. “She might have said, ‘John is doing something illegal,’ or ‘John is doing something immoral,’ and I might have responded by saying, ‘Well, so have I,’ but she never told me that John was a spy. That’s not something you’d forget.”
Whatever revelations Barbara made to Arthur in 1968, both she and her husband were busy with their secret lovers. In November, John took Jimi-Jet to Washington with him. She stayed in a motel while he, unbeknownst to her, went on a dead drop exchange. After he returned, they drove to Baltimore for a night of drinking at various striptease bars.
Before Jimi left college on Christmas break, John bought her a diamond dinner ring, and on Christmas Eve, he sent her three poinsettias. Her parents and friends were impressed, but Jimi was beginning to feel uneasy.
“I didn’t love Johnny Walker,” she recalled. “I loved the good times that he could offer, but I didn’t love him and he knew that. The interest that held me was his money and the good times. It was all materialistic.”
When Jimi returned to school in January, she decided to stop seeing John, but he telephoned her room and announced that he had made reservations for a trip to Miami. “I’d really never been anywhere and I wanted to go. Of course, we flew first class – John always did – and once again, it was nonstop drinking. But John took me shopping and bought me anything I wanted – anything. He never bought anything for himself, but he spent money on me.”
John was getting his money’s worth, “Jimi was literally saving my life,” he recalled. “She was the only good thing I had going at the time.”
When Jimi told John she didn’t love him and felt uncomfortable with their relationship, he reacted by spending even more money on her than before and planning more exotic adventures.
“John was not a demanding lover at all,” Jimi Thomas told me. “Twice during a weekend was fine with him. He seemed more interested in being close to someone.”
When the college semester ended in May, she returned to Kinston and did not contact John. That fall John was told that his work at the message center was becoming unsatisfactory. He decided to ask for a transfer, in part because he felt it might be safer for him to spy in a new job farther away from the FBI and Washington. He was ordered to report in mid-September to radioman school at the Naval Training Center in San Diego, California. On September 10, 1969, John’s first formal negative evaluation was placed in his file.
“Chief Warrant Officer Walker is an individual with excellent potential as a communications specialist. However, during this reporting period he has allowed his performance to fall below his previous level. The apparent lack of interest in his job, with the consequent reduction in the reliability of his performance, have contributed directly or indirectly to numerous serious mistakes.”
The Navy knew something was wrong with John, but no one bothered to investigate what it might be, despite his top secret crypto clearance and abundance of cash.
John told Barbara that he would send for her and the children after he got settled in California. Then he telephoned Jimi and asked her to fly to Norfolk for a final weekend together. He took her to dinner at the Officers’ Club.
“He was on edge,” Jimi recalled. “He wanted me to be close to him. There was a special plea for that. I don’t know what he was searching for, but he wanted something. He wanted a relationship with someone.”
While John and Jimi were at the club’s bar having drinks, a co-worker of John’s approached and began talking to Jimi. He had been attending an aloha party in one of the club’s back rooms and he took a Hawaiian lei off his neck and draped it around Jimi’s.
As John and Jimi drove away from the club that night, John reached over and snatched the lei from Jimi’s neck.
“It was the first time I had seen him angry,” said Jimi, “He was a very unhappy man.”
Jimi, who later became a born-again Christian, never heard from John Walker again.
Chapter 16
The KGB had been upset when John first announced that he was being transferred to San Diego. In a dead drop letter, it assured John that it understood the unpredictable nature of military service, but it also urged him to be extremely cautious and it asked John to describe in detail why he was being moved.
John hadn’t told the KGB that he had requested the transfer. He was afraid the Russians wouldn’t understand why he was moving from one of the best spots in the Navy for a spy to a post where he would have almost no access to classified information.
As a result, the Russians suspected the worst.
In its note to John, the KGB asked if the Navy was moving him because it was suspicious and wanted John out of the critical message center.
“PLEASE BE CAREFUL!” the KGB wro
te. “FOLLOW ALL SECURITY PRECAUTIONS EXACTLY!”
The KGB’s concern seemed genuine and that pleased John, but the KGB note also carried a not-too-subtle reminder. John’s spy salary would drop to $2,000 a month if he was unable to keep a steady flow of keylists coming. “The only lever the Soviets had on me was money, and they didn’t hesitate to use it.”
Before he left Norfolk, John had averaged one dead drop exchange per month. But the KGB told John that it wanted him to make only two or three dead drops per year once he moved to California.
“I was astonished when they told me to cut back,” John told me later during one of our sessions, “because it meant that they really didn’t care how current the material was that I was delivering. That is really significant because classified information is time sensitive and its value drops the older it gets.”
John told me that at first he couldn’t understand why the KGB was willing to wait six months for a cryptographic keylist. “What the KGB was really telling me was that its agents were perfectly happy to tape record all Navy cryptographic broadcasts on the air for six months and then use the keylists that I sold them to decipher the messages. It was just insane. I kept wondering, ‘How can they do this? What does it mean?’ and then it finally came to me. It finally made sense.”
John decided that the reason the Soviets were willing to wait for cryptographic keylists was because there was no reason for them to hurry.
“All this talk about us going to war with the Soviets is bullshit,” John told me, in a bit of self-rationalization. “There never is going to be a war between the Soviet Union and United States. If anything, we are going to be allies in the next war against some Middle Eastern or Central American country. It became very clear to me. That is why they didn’t care when they got my stuff. You see, it really didn’t matter.”
The longer that John was a spy, the more certain he became that he was correct and by the time he was finally arrested, John could cite several examples to prove his theory. This became one of the most frequent subjects of our conversations together. John insisted on explaining his reasoning over and over again, as if saying it repeatedly somehow made it true.
“It’s all a silly game,” he said. “Look, the Russians weren’t interested in a hell of a lot of stuff that they should have been anxious to get.”
When John first offered to brief the KGB about his experiences on nuclear submarines, it demurred, he claimed. When John volunteered to go after top secret “intelligence messages” – special dispatches between the Navy and the NSA and CIA agents – the KGB became alarmed and ordered John to stick to providing cryptographic material and classified information that flowed through regular Navy channels. The KGB showed less interest than John expected in his recall of the SlOP and the location of SOSUS hydrophones. But the most obvious confirmation of John’s “it’s-all-a-big-game” theory was an incident that occurred shortly after the Scorpion disappeared in 1968. John cited the episode to buttress his hypothesis, but in telling it to me, he revealed just how insanely far he was willing to go as a spy to help the Soviets.
As a message center watch officer in Norfolk, John was part of a two-man team responsible for deciphering and implementing the order from Washington that authorized a wartime launch of Polaris nuclear missiles. The Navy held a drill after the Scorpion disappeared to test its nuclear firing procedures.
“We didn’t know until the last moment whether it was practice or genuine,” John remembered. “That’s how real it was.”
After the drill, John wondered how much the Soviets would pay him to sabotage the real thing. John outlined his idea in a dead drop letter. In return for $1 million, John told the KGB that he would refuse to transmit “the order to fire” and make certain that hundreds of Polaris missiles were either not fired or were significantly delayed. John was flabbergasted when the KGB showed no interest at all in his offer.
“I couldn’t believe it. I mean, here I was, one of the men who actually turned the key, and the Soviets didn’t care. They didn’t give a damn! The KGB could have totally nullified the most important part of our triad of nuclear defense. I could have kept all the Polaris missiles from firing. Not one single Atlantic fleet submarine would have launched a nuclear missile against the Soviet Union, and they didn’t care! I mean, doesn’t that seem a bit strange? Wouldn’t that action have been worth one million dollars to the Soviet Union – to keep all the submarines in the Atlantic from firing? But they didn’t even ask me about it. They didn’t even ask! How could they not ask?”
When I suggested to John that the KGB might not have trusted him to carry out his part of the bargain during a nuclear attack, he became incredulous.
“I had already betrayed my country,” he replied. “Why wouldn’t they trust me to not turn the key?”
No, there could be only one reason for the KGB’s lack of interest.
“All this talk of war between the superpowers is nothing but talk,” John concluded, “and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t profit along with all the goddamn ship contractors, arms dealers, and politicians who push this fantasy of an inevitable war.”
Chapter 17
The “practical application laboratory” at the Naval Training Center in San Diego where John had gone to work was made up of three mock radio rooms, similar to ship radio rooms except the laboratory’s cryptographic equipment didn’t actually work.
John was able to steal a few things at the school for the KGB. Some classified documents crossed his desk, but mostly John stole SITSUMs, or Situation Summaries. These were short intelligence reviews of Navy operations around the world, and the KGB found them useful.
But what the Soviets really wanted were keylists, and they pressured John to get them. When he couldn’t, the KGB cut John’s monthly salary from $4,000 to $2,000. The salary cut bothered John, but he didn’t feel any immediate financial pinch and didn’t see much use in complaining or trying to find some way to obtain keylists. Barbara and the children liked San Diego, and John was more relaxed than he had ever been.
He decided that a sabbatical from spying wasn’t all bad. He wasn’t nearly as worried about being unmasked as a spy now, in part because Washington, D.C., and the FBI were physically so far away from San Diego. John knew this was foolish. The FBI would go anywhere in the country to catch a spy. But the distance still was psychologically comforting. He also wasn’t making as many dead drops or photographing as much material as he had in Norfolk. John’s attitude about being captured was changing.
“I really went through several periods as a spy. In the beginning, I felt like I was going to be caught any minute. There was a lot of fear, but after a couple years, I got into a what-the-fuck-is-happening mode. How can this be – that I’m not being arrested? It just didn’t make any sense that I hadn’t been captured. Then, after I’d been in California for a while, I began to enjoy myself. There was a certain thrill to it all and a metamorphosis began to take place. I began to realize that the FBI is not like it is on television. You see, the FBI doesn’t really do any investigating. It doesn’t know how to investigate. The FBI is not powerful at all because its agents are really just bureaucrats and they have the same inherent ineptitude of all government bureaucrats. All they do is spend their days waiting for some snitch to call them and turn someone in. That’s how they operate, and I was beginning to sense that.”
John and the KGB used a series of signals to contact each other when he did have a delivery. John would fly to Washington, rent a car, and drive to Sixteenth Street, a major north-south route in the northwest section of the city. He was supposed to use a piece of chalk to mark a signal at a prearranged spot along the busy street.
The signal was changed after every drop, but it always was a single letter or number, such as A, F, 6, or 7, and John always drew it on Sixteenth Street near the Walter Reed Army Medical Center on a Thursday.
At various times during his spying career, John drew his signal on the wall of a corner appliance store,
a bridge abutment, a stone retaining wall, and on the side of an apartment complex. The Soviet embassy also is on Sixteenth Street and John assumed that an employee drove to work each Thursday along the route and watched for his mark.
The exchange always took place two days later, on Saturday, at precisely 8:00 P.M. at one of the KGB’s suburban dead drop sites. If the Soviets failed to show, John knew he had to repeat the procedure the next week and keep trying until the exchange was completed.
Sometime in 1970, John is not exactly certain when, he flew to Washington and went through the various steps to make a dead drop. But when he arrived at Sixteenth Street, John noticed that it looked like rain. He was supposed to mark the letter X in chalk on the first concrete rail of a bridge, but he was worried about the weather. A heavy downpour might wash off the chalk mark, and John did not want to return to Washington in a week to repeat the procedure.
After several minutes, he decided to improvise. He drove to a convenience store and bought a tube of bright red lipstick. Hurrying back to the signal spot, John waited for a lull in the traffic, then he scribbled the letter X in lipstick on the post.
John was pleased with his ingenuity, but the Soviets were not. That Saturday, the KGB left John a blistering note.
“The KGB was superpissed,” John recalled.
He had violated proper security procedures by using lipstick. Was he trying to be funny? He could have jeopardized the entire operation. He was getting sloppy and complacent. The KGB lectured him about the necessity of maintaining proper security at all times. Any deviations could bring about a disaster.
The letter made John angry, but it also scared him. For the first time, he explained later, he realized that the information he had passed to the KGB was useful to the Russians only as long as the United States didn’t know they had it.