Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  John loved being with Mary Ann, and he hated going home at night to Barbara and his children.

  “Mary Ann was as nutty as a fruit cake and just a lot of fun,” John recalled.

  She was everything that John liked in a woman and Barbara was not. Mary Ann wasn’t dependent on him. She didn’t nag him. She never told him that she loved him and she never asked him if he loved her. The truth was that John was bored with Barbara and his children. They were dead weight that held him back. He had little patience for them and was becoming more and more resentful at home. He complained when his daughters needed braces for their teeth and he began asking Barbara about how she spent “his” money.

  John was different around Mary Ann. He showed great patience when they were together and seemed obsessed with every detail of her appearance and her personal life. Mary Ann really liked John, but she didn’t love him and she wasn’t certain whether it was John or the good times his money provided that attracted her the most. John didn’t seem to care.

  One night, after several hours of heavy drinking and a few joints of marijuana, John told Mary Ann about his past. He spoke for a long time, and even though her mind was numbed by an alcohol and marijuana induced high, she still recalled clearly years later the overriding subject on John’s mind.

  “John told me his father had been forced to leave his family and now he was thinking about doing the same thing. He talked a lot about his father.”

  John never told Barbara about Mary Ann, but she knew he was sleeping with someone else. “I think he wanted me to know about his infidelities,” Barbara Walker said. “I think he was proud of them. He would come home at three or four in the morning, and he used to delight in leaving his shirts with makeup all over them for me to find.”

  After one such incident, Barbara, in a moment of desperation, picked up one of John’s lipstick-stained shirts and threw it at him.

  “I’m not washing this,” she screamed. “You can let the little whore who got the makeup on it wash it.”

  John just laughed.

  Frances Wightman pushed Barbara to rebel against John and his playboy life-style.

  “Why don’t you stand up for yourself?” Fran demanded during one of their afternoon kitchen sessions. “Why don’t you tell John to go straight to hell?”

  Barbara Walker became so upset by Fran’s straightforwardness that she could barely speak.

  “Barbara said she couldn’t leave him,” Frances Wightman told me, recalling the conversation, “and I said to her, ‘Johnny is treating you like dirt, Barbara. Why the hell can’t you leave him?’ and she said, ‘How am I going to support four kids by myself without a high school diploma?’ I told her, ‘Barbara, start stashing some money aside and enroll in a course at Patrick Henry High School, which was close by. ‘Go get your diploma and get out of this situation.’ But she just wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t stand up for herself. She was beaten down and had no self-respect. He didn’t love her or the kids, except for maybe Michael, but Barbara loved him. She really did. It was sick.”

  Laura Walker recalled during an interview later that “San Diego was the turning point” for the entire family. “This is when my father no longer cared about anyone but himself, and he let everyone know it, and it is when my mother began turning to alcohol because of the way that he treated her,” Laura told me.

  Frances Wightman saw the signs of alcoholism too. “I think Barbara literally gave up. She just retreated.”

  One afternoon, after several drinks, Barbara took off her wedding band and engagement diamond and threw them in the trash. John didn’t even notice.

  “I remember watching this television show called Land of the Giants one afternoon in our house,” Michael Walker said, recalling his childhood in San Diego. “I was on the sofa with my head propped on the armrest when I stuck my hand between the cushions and I felt this gun. I thought it was a toy at first, but when I pulled it out, it was real. It was loaded and everything. It was my mom’s nickel-plated .38, and I put it back between the cushions after I found it, and I went to Margaret’s room, and we called all the kids together and the first thing I said was, ‘Hey, Mom is going to shoot Dad.’ I just knew it. See, I knew that they were fighting at this time because I had seen them fighting a few months earlier when my dad and I were playing pool. We were playing away and my mother came in the room, and my dad says, ‘Mike, go to your room,’ and I was shocked because my dad and I never let anything interrupt our pool games. So I was shuffling my heels, heading for the hallway when I hear this Wham! and I turned around and he had decked her, knocked her flat on the floor with his fist, and I thought, ‘This is it. We are all going to die.’ So I knew that things between my parents were bad. That’s why I figured when I saw the gun in the sofa that Mom was going to kill him. We were convinced, all of us kids, that it was going to happen, so we sat by the front window so we could warn my dad when he came home from work. We were really getting tired of waiting. It kept getting later and later, and my mother was sitting in the next room getting drunk, and here comes the MG up the driveway. We kids started screaming out the window, ‘Don’t come in, Dad! She’s going to kill you!’ but he didn’t hear us, and then all of a sudden we hear this Bang! Bang! and I figured, ‘Oh fuck, Dad is dead.’ The next thing I knew, Margaret had jumped out the window to get away.”

  Barbara’s shots hit the coffee table.

  After the shooting, John decided that he had to get away from Barbara and his family. He also had to do something about the Soviets, who were increasing the pressure on him to deliver keylists. So John came up with what he considered the perfect solution: he asked to go to sea. He applied specifically for sea duty on a ship deployed off the coast of Vietnam.

  “People are so stupid,” John explained later. “They think no one wanted to go to Vietnam, and that’s such bullshit. The Vietnam War was one way to get your ticket punched in the Navy. It was a way to advance your career, and it was a way to get me away from that crazy bitch Barbara.”

  In the summer of 1971, John received orders to report by November 1 to the U.S.S. Niagara Falls, a supply ship based in Oakland but due for an extended Vietnam deployment.

  John flew immediately to Washington, D.C., to tell the KGB about his new assignment. “I will be the CMS custodian aboard the ship,” John wrote in a note. “CMS stands for CLASSIFIED MATERIAL SYSTEM custodian, which means I will be the officer responsible for ALL of the ship’s cryptographic keylists and machines.”

  No one, not even the commander of the Niagara Falls, would have the unlimited access to cryptographic material that John would have as CMS custodian, the new title for the job that had been done by the Registered Publications System custodian in Norfolk.

  No one!

  John was confident, as he flew back to San Diego after making a dead drop exchange, that the KGB would soon restore his spy salary to $4,000 per month.

  The Navy had, in John’s own words, given him “the keys to the kingdom.”

  Chapter 19

  John saw his transfer to San Francisco and the U.S.S. Niagara Falls in the fall of 1971 as an opportunity to make a temporary peace with Barbara: patch things up at home and then leave on an extended cruise in the western Pacific. He decided to appease her.

  “I thought it would add a little vigor to this lump who called herself my wife,” he told me, “if I let her choose our next house.”

  John told Barbara that the price of a house in San Francisco wouldn’t be a problem. Location was the important criterion. “I want a house near the Navy base in Oakland so I don’t have to do a lot of driving, and I also want to be near a marina and airport,” he told her. “Look upon buying this house as an adventure. Take your time and spend all the fucking money you want.”

  Barbara was excited. She bought several maps of San Francisco, and she and John marked every marina and airport on them. They also talked about the different neighborhoods and various styles of homes available.

  When it was ti
me for Barbara to leave, John gave her a thick wad of $100 bills. “Here’s $10,000 in cash for a deposit,” he said. “Just remember to find a house near a marina and airport, and stay in the Alameda area. That would be perfect.”

  Four days later, Barbara returned to San Diego and announced she had put a deposit on a lovely house in Union City. John didn’t recognize the name so he consulted a map.

  He was horrified.

  Barbara had bought a house that was an hour-and-a-half drive from the naval base and wasn’t near either an airport or a marina.

  “Why the hell did you buy a house in Union City?” John demanded. “I told you specifically to buy near a marina and airport in the Alameda area. I thought we agreed.”

  “Well,” Barbara responded, “sometimes you can’t find a house with everything you want.”

  “You stupid bitch!” John screamed. “Do you know what you have done? For the next three years of my life I’m going to have to commute for three hours each day. What the fuck is your problem, Barbara? Are you really so stupid?”

  The Walkers arrived in Union City in late October 1971, and John reported to work aboard the Niagara Falls. The ship was scheduled to remain in port until June 1972 in preparation for its extended cruise to Southeast Asia.

  Over the next eight months, life at the Walker home degenerated.

  “Barbara’s drinking really got super bad,” John recalled. “I’d come home from work and find that she had spent the entire day in bed with a bottle. The kids were beginning to show signs of a fucked-up family too, particularly Laura, who was running wild.”

  Margaret was only fourteen, but she was already as tall and as strong as an adult woman. She dominated her two younger sisters and brother, all of whom considered her pushy. Cynthia, at age thirteen, was the exact opposite of Margaret. Quiet, skinny, and mousy, Cynthia was considered to be rather simple-minded by her family. Laura was a sassy and deceptive twelve-year-old, independent and strong-willed. Michael was spoiled. He was Barbara’s baby and his father’s favorite. Although he was shorter than most nine-year-old boys and thin, Michael was cocky and clever at getting his way.

  “Margaret got on dope really early in Union City,” John recalled. “She started getting stoned all the time and she began turning my other children on to pot. She was overbearing and bossy. She acted almost like a parent to the others, which wasn’t good. One day, I really got angry because she had hit someone, probably Cynthia, whom everyone picked on. I said, ‘Margaret, you are not in charge of your sisters and brother, and I swear to Christ that if you hit one of them one more time, I am going to beat the fuck out of you! Now, I am proportionally bigger than you and you are proportionally bigger than them, and my hitting you is just the same as you hitting them.’ I tried to explain it to her, but she kept hitting them behind my back, and I couldn’t blame her in a way, because if Margaret didn’t take control, then nobody was in charge when I was at work.”

  “Cynthia had an especially rough time,” John said. “Everyone but Michael picked on Cynthia. She was slow, like the dumb blonde you see in the movies. She was cute, and Barbara and Margaret and Laura totally destroyed Cynthia’s self-esteem.”

  Of all his children, John said he had the hardest time dealing with Laura. “She was the kid who gave us the most trouble. She was totally uncontrollable. She began running away and she really got into a lot of bad shit for her age. The only one who lived a charmed life was Michael. He had all the girls waiting on him. He was the baby of the family.”

  John and Barbara argued constantly. If he berated her, she would snap, “You made me what I am!”

  He hated it when she said that. How in the world, he asked years later, could she blame him for her obviously “deep-seated character faults”?

  John simply began walking out whenever an argument started. “I was a runner. I’d come home and she’d start in on me, so I’d just turn right around and walk out the door and keep going. I refused to argue with her.”

  John’s children remembered their father’s actions differently than he claimed. “I remember seeing my father knock my mother across the room,” Cynthia Walker told me. “She used to tell people that she was bruised because she had slipped and fallen or had run into a wall or chair, but we knew why she was black and blue.”

  “I think my mother really started hating my father during this time period,” Cynthia added, “but she also loved him. One side of her loved him so much that she couldn’t leave him, but the other side hated him so much that she couldn’t stand it. The sight of him was repulsive to her.”

  John certainly wasn’t confused about his feelings toward Barbara. “Barbara became nothing to me in Union City,” John recalled. “She was a pig who didn’t do anything but sit at home, watch television, and drink for hours. She was a weak person and I knew exactly how to punish her for what she was doing to me. What is the opposite of love? It isn’t hate, like everyone says. It is total indifference, and that is exactly what she began to see in Union City. I was totally indifferent to her. I couldn’t care less what Barbara did. It was really my wish that she would simply dry up and blow away.”

  The family still went on occasional outings together, usually on The Dirty Old Man, but there was always some fear and uncertainty involved in such events. None of the children knew when either of their parents would explode and the beatings would begin. “We all knew something was wrong,” Laura Walker said. “My mother loved him, but they never hugged or kissed. We knew they didn’t make love either, or at least that is what all of us kids decided. When I got older, my mother told me that when she and my father were sleeping, my father would roll over and become passionate and romantic and get her hot and interested, and then would just roll over and go to sleep without satisfying her. She said he did it on purpose. She said he never had been able to satisfy her sexually.”

  “The worse my father treated my mother, the worse she treated us,” Laura continued. “We paid doubly. We paid for the horrible treatment that my father gave us, and then we paid for the treatment that my mother gave us.”

  The Walker children gave differing accounts of Union City, but all of them remembered it with particular sadness.

  “My mother was totally depressed in Union City,” said Laura. “She turned into an alcoholic because of the way my father treated her. It wasn’t just the alcohol, though. I think she was having a nervous breakdown.”

  Even little Michael noticed the change in his mother. “She began drinking straight whiskey and watching television all day long,” Michael told me when I asked him about his mother. “Look,” he continued, “I really love my mother, but I want to tell you the truth, and the truth is that she got sadistic back then.”

  One morning, Michael and Cynthia rode a bus into Oakland and bought two mice at a pet store. Michael loved animals and wanted to keep the mice as pets, but Barbara was in no mood for that.

  “She had been drinking,” Michael recalled, “and she wanted to know where we had gotten the mice.”

  Michael and Cynthia lied.

  “We won them at a pet store,” Cynthia said.

  “Well, you can’t keep them,” Barbara replied.

  Then, according to Michael, “My mother grabbed one of the mice, the one that I had named Little Ben, and she took him into the bathroom and made me and Cynthia stand there and watch while she dropped him in the toilet and flushed it. I saw Little Ben swim like crazy, and then he was gone. I cried and cried, and I pleaded with her to leave the other mouse alone. Now she could have let Little Ben loose outside, but she didn’t because she wanted to punish us. A few days later she came into my room and grabbed the other mouse, and with me standing there crying, she tossed him in the toilet and flushed it. I kept asking her to please let him go outside. I kept saying that we could just turn him loose or I could take him somewhere, but she wouldn’t let me. It really bummed me out because it was so sick. She got worse. She was really angry inside.”

  Barbara’s outrage at
John and frustration at her children always seemed to surface after she began drinking. One night, Barbara ordered Cynthia to wash and dry the dinner dishes. Cynthia cried because the dishes hadn’t been washed for several nights and she didn’t want to do them by herself. But her mother insisted. Reluctantly, Cynthia filled the sink and began washing while Barbara sat in the living room drinking scotch. An hour later, Cynthia was still in the kitchen and Barbara was getting angry over how long she was taking to finish the job.

  Finally, Barbara flew into the kitchen.

  “My mother grabbed Cynthia by the back of the hair and she pushed Cynthia’s face right into the dishwater,” Michael told me. “She held her there under the water. I was afraid, really afraid, that she was going to drown her. I remember thinking, ‘Not my sister Cynthia, oh God!’ I thought my mother was going to kill her right there, but she let her up and then started hitting her.”

  When I asked Barbara Walker about that incident, she acknowledged that she had done exactly what Michael had described.

  Cynthia also was punished by Barbara once for accidentally knocking sand into another girl’s face while playing in a sandbox. Barbara wrapped a blindfold around Cynthia’s eyes and made her wear it all afternoon.

  “Now you’ll see what it’s like to be blind,” Barbara told the child as her sisters and friends jeered.

  Cynthia Walker broke down and wept when I asked her about these two incidents. She was twenty-eight years old and herself a mother, but the memories still brought back tremendous pain.

  “There is so much that I have blocked out of my mind,” she told me. “I don’t want to remember some of these things. Both of my sisters were very vivacious and boisterous, and they got what they wanted. I always felt like the ugly duckling. They told me that I was stupid and retarded, and I believed them. My whole family did that. It wasn’t until later and after years of therapy that I began to realize that I wasn’t what they said and that I hadn’t had a normal childhood.”