by Earley, Pete
“I was certain that the KGB was prepared to kill me if it felt I was going to blow it and tip off the Navy,” John said. “The fact that they had received keylists, especially for the KW-7 machine, and had been able to decipher messages, was much more important than my life.”
He promised himself that he was going to be more careful.
Chapter 18
John and Barbara had rented a cozy, three-bedroom house in San Diego. James and Frances Wightman lived across the street. Jim worked at the Naval Training Center personnel bureau close to John’s office, and the two men often stopped after work for drinks. Fran Wightman and Barbara also developed a friendship that turned out to be much closer than their husbands’ relationship. On most days, the two women met in Fran’s kitchen for coffee. They enjoyed getting away from their children, and it gave Barbara a chance to seek advice from Fran, who was ten years her senior.
Jim and Fran both liked the Walkers, but they found the couple different from their other military friends. John simply had much more money and he treated his wife worse than anyone that Fran and Jim knew.
“I can’t think of one endearing thing that I’ve ever heard John say in front of anyone about his wife,” Jim Wightman told Fran one day. “He acts like he doesn’t love her at all.” Fran agreed.
One weekend, Barbara Walker knocked on the Wightman front door. Her hair was tangled, her face was smudged with motor oil, her blouse was splattered with brown stains. Barbara said she needed Fran’s help.
John and some friends had sailed on John’s sailboat from San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico. She had driven down to join them and then had returned home. On the way back to San Diego, she had trouble with the car’s engine.
When she finally got home, John called, furious because Barbara had left Ensenada without noticing that his eyeglasses were on the car’s dash. John had two sets of glasses, but the pair that he was wearing in Ensenada were shaded, making them unusable at night. John told Barbara to return to Ensenada with his eyeglasses.
“I’m afraid to go in my car and alone at night,” Barbara told Fran.
“Don’t worry, dear, I’ll go with you and we’ll take my car,” Fran quickly replied.
During the eighty-mile trip to Ensenada, Barbara told Fran more about John’s telephone call. “Barbara said that John was really angry at her and had called her a ‘damn bitch,’” Frances Wightman recalled later. “When we got to Ensenada, John was in this bar, sitting with dames all around him. It was clear what he was up to, and Barbara just handed him his glasses and left without John even saying thank you.”
A short time after the eyeglasses incident, Barbara and Fran decided to exercise at a nearby health spa. As the two women were riding to the spa, they saw John driving in the opposite lane. He was in his red MG convertible and he had a young girl next to him.
“I feel sick,” Barbara suddenly announced. “Please take me home.”
“Oh, come on, let’s go to the health spa and forget about this,” Fran said, but Barbara was visibly shaken and insisted that Fran drive her home.
A few days later, Barbara tried to push aside the incident by telling Fran that the girl was a hitchhiker who simply got a lift from John. Before long, John dropped all pretense of treating Barbara fondly around the Wightmans.
As he had done in Norfolk, John invited the sailors who worked for him at the Naval Training Center aboard his sailboat for parties and weekend outings. In July 1970, a new instructor at the radio school, Jerry Alfred Whitworth, took John up on his offer.
John liked Jerry from the moment they met. Jerry was “much more intellectual” than the twenty-five other instructors directly under John’s command. As far as John was concerned, most chief petty officers “were guys who had a cigar clenched in their teeth, a cup of coffee in their hand, and a pot belly hanging over their belts.” But Jerry looked and acted more “like a college professor.”
Jerry smoked a pipe, wore a well-trimmed black beard, was slightly bald, and loved discussing the “philosophy of objectivism” as expressed in the writings of novelist Ayn Rand, his favorite author. Jerry was thirty-one years old, two years younger than John, when they met. He was six feet two inches tall and weighed an athletic 180 pounds.
There was something else about Jerry that John recognized immediately. He was vulnerable.
“Here was a guy who looked poised and self-assured, but who really had a thing about friendship,” John recalled later. “Jerry really needed to have friends. He needed people to like him.”
It was really not surprising that John recognized this trait. With only a few exceptions, all of John’s closest male friends had shared a similar personality quirk and all of them had been manipulated by John.
Charles “Chas” Bennett, John’s young pal in Scranton, described John’s power over him as being akin to a “mystical spell.” John’s best friend aboard the Razorback, Donald “Cleve” Clevenger, a roly-poly Missouri native, also had been dominated by John. After John’s arrest, Clevenger was still full of misguided admiration in interviews with me about John: “Johnny Walker is the smartest man I’ve ever known. He is the only person I know of in the Navy who was smart enough to do what he did.” Even Bill Wilkinson, the snarling Southern racist whom John befriended aboard the Bolivar, acknowledged that John had once held a certain authority over him.
In each case, John had befriended people who admired him and whom he felt he could manipulate. John and I discussed this later. He said, “I think it is because I was always doing something interesting and exciting and they weren’t. I was the high point of their lives because they didn’t have anything else going for them.”
So it was not unusual that John’s dominating personality and Jerry’s insecurity brought them together like the opposite poles of magnets, each drawing closer to the other to satisfy his own need.
Few of their co-workers understood the friendship that was developing between John and Jerry because the men were so different. Michael O’Connor, an instructor and pal of Jerry’s, asked him once why he was so buddy-buddy with John.
“I was surprised,” recalled O’Connor, “that someone with Jerry’s knowledge, attitude, education, general wherewithal, meaning that he was a squared-away individual, a cut above the average person on the street, and apparently having some direction in his life, why he would associate with such a dingdong as Walker.”
Jerry couldn’t answer Michael’s question. He wasn’t certain why he liked John so much. But he was loyal to John and defended him around the other instructors.
“If we got into a discussion about the attributes of Walker, it was a no-win situation for Jerry and it was certainly a no-win situation for me,” O’Connor said. “We avoided that topic and we had a mutual understanding. I didn’t care for Walker and Jerry knew that.”
Jerry Whitworth’s direct supervisor at the radio school, Bob McNatt, also found Jerry’s friendship with John Walker unusual. “Even though he was the boss, Walker was a flake, a jerk,” recalled McNatt. “I had been in the Navy eighteen years by then, and I had seen a lot of people like Walker. He was really interested in things outside his Navy job, like his sailing and flying his airplane. He just didn’t seem to care about the job that we were doing, and he never demonstrated to us that he had any special skills or that he knew anything about what we were doing professionally. The truth is that Walker essentially spent all his time talking about and looking for sex.”
McNatt was unimpressed when he first met Jerry Whitworth, but the two men soon became friends.
“When Jerry Whitworth checked into school, he had a beard and mustache, and guys like me looked at guys like that and said, ‘Oh Christ, here comes another one.’ But Jerry surprised me. He was extremely competent. He was dearly one of the best .in our profession. He was smart, clean-cut, a good thinker, and very serious. He always seemed to be thinking of bigger and better things – not get-rich-quick schemes – but philosophical issues. God, the only thing that I could se
e that those two had in common was that Jerry liked to sail and John had the boat.”
In truth, Jerry Whitworth did not like John when they first met. He thought him vulgar and crude. But Jerry wanted to learn how to sail and John was eager to teach him aboard his new sailboat, appropriately named The Dirty Old Man. Sailing became the bridge that brought the two together.
“I worked hard at teaching Jerry how to sail,” John told me during an interview, “and he learned quickly and was very good. I treated him like an equal and never pulled rank on him when we were together on the boat, even though I was an officer, and I think that impressed him. The truth was that I genuinely liked Jerry, a lot. I also wanted him to like me.”
As always, John had an ulterior motive. His budding friendship with Jerry Whitworth corresponded with his first thoughts about taking in a partner as a KGB spy. “I knew that I would eventually have to go to sea again, and I couldn’t think of any way to make drops while I was out in the Pacific,” John recalled. “If I had a partner, then there would always be at least one person able to make dead drops.” But John didn’t see his interest in Jerry as being sinister, rather, “I felt as if I was doing him a favor, considering him as a partner.”
Soon the teacher and pupil spent all of their free time sailing. Wednesday nights, in particular, found them together competing in local sailboat races. John had joined the San Diego Yacht Club, one of the city’s most prestigious boating associations, and the dub held weekly “beer can races” – impromptu competitions in which the winner often was determined not by speed, but by how much beer the boat’s crew consumed before crossing the finish line.
John sailed every Wednesday night and Jerry was always his first mate, following his every command. It wasn’t long before John told Jerry that he was his “best friend,” and three months after they first met, Jerry penned this note in The Dirty Old Man’s guest book:
“My experience on the DOM has been the best!”
Unbeknownst to Jerry, John was constantly testing him during their outings on the boat.
“I wanted to determine if he had larceny in his heart,” John recalled, “so I began asking him what appeared to be innocent questions.”
The questions were asked when only the two of them were aboard and they were posed as if John were merely engaging Jerry in one of those philosophical discussions that both enjoyed.
One night, John and Jerry were returning to San Diego from Mexico when John brought up the subject of movies. It was a clear night, cool with a black, star-studded sky. John and Jerry were sitting on the deck in their swim trunks as the boat edged along the coast at four knots. Both had been drinking heavily.
“I finally got around to seeing that hippie movie,” John said.
“Which one?” asked Jerry.
“The one where those hippie faggots go riding across the country on motorcycles,” John replied.
“You mean Easy Rider,” said Jerry, referring to the 1969 film that starred Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.
“Uh-huh, that’s it,” said John.
Jerry had seen it several months earlier and had recommended it. “Well, what’d you think?” Jerry pressed.
“I thought it sucked! I was the only person in the fucking theater who cheered when those idiots got shot by rednecks,” John said, laughing. “I was the only normal person in the entire theater obviously!”
Jerry laughed too and then, after several minutes of silence, he said, “I’d like to do that – ride my motorcycle across the country.”
“You going to finance it by selling drugs like they did?” asked John.
“You know,” Jerry said, “I might do something like that if I only had to do it once. You know, make one big score and end up with a large sum of money so I could do whatever the hell I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
John didn’t push the subject.
“I didn’t respond,” John said years later. “He had already told me what I wanted to know. The Easy Rider remark wasn’t that significant on the surface, but it was probably the two hundredth remark that I had gotten from Jerry, and together they told me exactly what I wanted to know about him.”
On another late cruise, Jerry let something slip that further bolstered John’s intuition. Jerry told John that he had been married once and hadn’t notified the Navy when his wife divorced him. Instead, Jerry continued to draw extra pay for housing that married sailors received and eventually pocketed $6,000 of illegal gains.
There were other lures that John used to strengthen his bond with Jerry.
Whenever possible, John used his rank as chief warrant officer to favor the radioman first class. In July 1971, John picked Jerry to chaperone approximately a hundred high school students who had been invited to spend a week at the Naval Training Center as a reward for winning local science contests.
“When I selected Jerry, it really pissed off some of the higher ranking chiefs. They didn’t like the fact that I had chosen him over them and they didn’t like the image that Jerry presented because he was younger and had a beard: But I chose Jerry because I was impressed with him and because these kids were at an extremely delicate age, from thirteen and sixteen years old, and I didn’t want to have some fat-ass chief of mine screwing some little sixteen-year-old and getting the Navy sued by her parents.”
The chaperone’s assignment turned out to be a landmark event for Jerry Whitworth because it was during the high school visit that he met his future wife, Brenda L. Reis. Several young girls were enamored of their gregarious guide, and Jerry corresponded with a few teenagers for a while after they returned home.
Brenda was different from the others, however. The slightly pudgy sixteen-year-old from Grand Forks, North Dakota, didn’t lose interest in her Navy guide.
Shortly after he began corresponding with Brenda, Jerry mentioned her to John. He was not seriously interested in her romantically, he explained. “She just seems like a nice girl who is fun to write to.” Besides, Jerry already had a romantic interest in San Diego. Shirley McClanahan was a tall Navy dental technician at the Naval Training Center with bright red hair, brown eyes, and a slightly chunky but attractive figure.
John encouraged Jerry to invite Shirley to the beer can races, and he did.
“I remember Jerry asked me to go with him and John on the sailboat, and I had never been sailing before,” Shirley told me later. “It was just exhilarating. I couldn’t get enough of it.”
Soon Jerry and Shirley joined John every Wednesday night aboard The Dirty Old Man at the San Diego Yacht Club. They always had a good time, but Shirley usually felt uncomfortable around John’s dates.
“I always liked Johnny, but I couldn’t believe how different he and Jerry were,” Shirley recalled. “Jerry rarely used profanity and was laid back and meek almost. He was a sensitive, caring type guy. But John, oh God! was he ever Mr. Crude. If you were a woman, all he wanted to do was get into your pants. That was his thing. Women had one use for him. He tried to go to bed with every woman he met, I think, and you should have seen the dogs that he took out on the boat when his wife wasn’t along. Some of them were real sleaze bags.”
John’s poor choice in women wasn’t related to any problem with his looks or money. After he turned thirty, he had developed an obsession about being well-groomed.
Gone was his pasty complexion: he was tanned and his skin looked weathered.
Gone was the pudgy waistline: he had dieted and exercised.
Gone too was the balding head: he had bought himself a $300 hairpiece.
He wore a thick gold chain around his neck and kept his shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist. He favored brightly colored plaid hip-hugger pants with bell-bottom cuffs and black half boots.
Shirley didn’t think Barbara Walker was much better than most of John’s dates. “I couldn’t stand John’s wife,” Shirley told me later. “She used to sit on the boat and drink, drink, drink. She was only in her thirties, but she was dowdy. In my opinion she was j
ust as crude as John in her own way.”
Shirley decided that she and Jerry should introduce John to her roommate and dose friend, Mary Ann Mason, who also was a dental technician at the Naval Training Center.
Mary Ann was a voluptuous twenty-two-year-old blonde who reminded John of Jimi-Jet, especially after Mary Ann explained her attitude about life. “I don’t worry about tomorrow,” she said, “I just see how much fun I can have today.”
Born in Michigan, Mary Ann was raised by an aunt and uncle. When she was sixteen, she returned to her parents’ home, only to find that she couldn’t stand her father. She quit school and struck out on her own. After several years of bumming around the country in the late sixties, she joined the Navy, even though she had trouble accepting its spit-and-polish regimen.
John was anxious to date Mary Ann, but she was apprehensive because he was married. “Based on my past experience,” she told John, “all married men ultimately have to come clean with their guilt and tell their wives what they have been doing. I don’t need your wife waving a revolver at me.”
“She’ll never know,” john assured her. “Believe me, I can keep a secret.”
Mary Ann agreed to continue going out on John’s boat when Shirley and Jerry were along, but she refused to see John alone. Just as he had done with Jimi Thomas, John came up with novel ways to change Mary Ann’s mind. He asked her if she wanted to go flying with him. “I just got my pilot’s license,” he said. “Help me celebrate.”
He took her horseback riding at dusk on the beach. “You’ve got to see the sunset. It’s fabulous.”
He bribed her with weekend trips to posh Mexican seaside resorts, and he bankrolled lavish shopping sprees. “John never showed up without flowers or perfume,” Mary Ann Mason remembered. “He was very generous and he wasn’t pushy at all. We dated a long time before we went to bed together. I liked that, because most guys would buy you dinner and then expect you to go to bed with them.”