by Earley, Pete
It was almost time for him to undergo a routine background investigation by the FBI. Everyone with a top secret clearance was required to undergo a security check every five years. It was a routine procedure: an FBI agent would review John’s credit records and question his friends, neighbors, and relatives to learn if he had any sort of problem that made him a security risk.
John wasn’t worried about anything that he had done. But he was “scared to death of Barbara’s mouth.”
“Barbara had been saying stuff to her stupid relatives and even our kids,” John recalled. “She’d have a few drinks and then she’d call one of her relatives and say something like, ‘You don’t know what a son of a bitch John is. He’s involved in crime and if you knew what it was, you would urge me to murder the bastard.’ ”
John decided that he couldn’t chance a thorough examination. There was only one thing for him to do – forge his own security clearance. It was risky, but he was confident that he could pull it off.
At that time, a background investigation began when a Navy security officer reviewed the personnel records aboard a ship and flagged the names of all the persons who hadn’t had a background check in five years. The easiest way to avoid an investigation, John decided, was by making it appear as if he had already been through one. As an officer, he had access to ship personnel records.
One afternoon, he strolled into the records office and removed his own file and the records of another sailor who had recently passed a background review. He compared the files and noticed that the only difference was a salmon-colored background investigation form with an FBI stamp on it. “I think the FBI stamp said something like ‘Background Investigation Completed, No Derogatory Information Found,’ “ John recalled.
John used tracing paper to copy the FBI stamp. The next day, he drove to a print shop and asked the clerk there if he could make a rubber stamp exactly like the FBI’s.
“I wore my uniform to the print shop and I showed the guy the paper that I had traced. I told him that we had lost the stamp and needed another one exactly like it. He just figured I was getting it for the Navy.” The clerk said he could duplicate the stamp, but it would cost $2.97. John grinned.
That same day, John stole the proper salmon-colored form from the ship’s supply cabinet. He filled it out on his typewriter and used his fraudulent FBI stamp to authenticate it. He put the forged form in his personnel file and waited. Several weeks later, he thumbed through the personnel records of several sailors. The ship’s security officer had tagged them for a five-year review, but had passed over John’s file.
“I had undermined the Navy’s security system and all it cost me was two ninety-seven,” he bragged.
The Niagara Falls remained in Oakland undergoing various repairs and conducting routine exercises for much of 1973. John found living at home during this period intolerable. He blamed Barbara, of course.
“I decided to stop coming home,” John told me. “It was as simple as that. I went sailing and I went flying and I stayed on the ship. I just escaped from it all.”
Most of the ship’s crew slept in three-tier bunks, but because John was an officer, he had his own cabin. He dismantled his favorite reclining chair and reassembled it aboard the ship. He bought a small refrigerator and stocked it with beer, even though having alcohol on the ship was against regulations. He put a portable television on top of the refrigerator.
“I’d sit in my chair, drink a cold beer, and watch a program or read. To hell with Barbara and the kids.”
Chapter 21
John was more than ready when the Niagara Falls began its second extended cruise in the western Pacific on January 3, 1974. The U.S. Navy had been withdrawing from Vietnam since the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty almost exactly one year before, but the Navy still had a fleet of customers waiting for fresh supplies.
One of the ship’s first stops was the horseshoe-shaped island of Diego Garcia, a lonely, barren outpost in the Indian Ocean. The Navy was building a communications station on the island, and one of the men assigned there was John’s sailing buddy from San Diego, Jerry Whitworth.
The Niagara Falls was supposed to deliver its supplies to the island by helicopter, but when both the ship and the helicopter developed engine problems, the supply ship dropped anchor and John was able to go ashore and visit his friend. Jerry gave him a guided tour of the island, but there wasn’t much to see. At the time, all of the sailors lived in Quonset huts. There were no women on the island, and there was little except an occasional volleyball or softball game for amusement.
After the tour, John and Jerry sat in metal folding chairs and drank several bottles of beer outside the gray metal hut where Jerry lived. The isolation of the island and lack of women really depressed John.
“What in the hell do you do here to amuse yourself?” he asked.
Jerry grinned. He kept busy, he explained. He had a girlfriend in Bangkok and he and his friend Cliff went scuba diving nearly every day. John couldn’t think of a worse assignment, but Jerry seemed content.
After a few moments, Jerry began asking John about The Dirty Old Man and questioning him about various sailors they had worked with at the radio school in San Diego. John didn’t even remember some of the men’s names, even though he had been their direct supervisor, but Jerry seemed to remember them all and, much to John’s surprise, he also seemed to know where most of them were now assigned and what they were doing.
“He talked about these people as if they were all his tight friends, but I couldn’t see the substance for any friendship between Jerry and these people,” John recalled. “I discovered that he would write to dozens of people and then report to everyone of them in his letters about what the others were doing. He began doing this to me, sending me letters talking about all of these guys who I didn’t give a damn about, but Jerry thought they were his tight buddies. I know many of these guys barely knew Jerry, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. It was like everyone he ever met was automatically one of his close friends. Jerry was the sort of guy who might strike up a conversation on an airplane with someone. Later, he would make it sound as if the person he met on the airplane was a longtime friend.”
As on previous cruises, the Niagara Falls used the naval station in Subic Bay as its foreign home port, and John quickly reacquainted himself with the strip of sordid bars and whorehouses that always spring up near military facilities.
Years later, his son Michael recalled finding several color slides in his father’s desk at home that showed John lying naked in bed with one or more Filipino women. No sort of sexual escapade between adults seemed off-limits to John. There was no right or wrong, only pleasure and pain, and John was eager to indulge himself in a host of sexual diversions.
“A man with cash could buy anything in the Philippines and places like Hong Kong, where life is so cheap.”
It was a common practice in the shoddy dubs for young prostitutes to parade naked across the top of the bar. If a customer thought a particular prostitute was attractive, he would tip her with a peso.
“The way you tipped one of these girls,” John explained, “was by balancing the peso on its edge on top of your bottle of beer.”
The prostitute would squat down over the bottle and retrieve the peso by picking it up with her vagina. John was fascinated by this, but after seeing several hookers claim the coins, he became bored.
One afternoon, John decided to play a prank on one of the prostitutes. He took three pesos from his pocket and used two of them as a pair of tongs to hold the third coin. He heated this coin with a cigarette lighter and then placed it atop his beer bottle. A young prostitute walking along the bar quickly moved over to claim it. She smiled at John seductively as she expertly lowered herself over the peso. When her vagina touched the burning metal, she shrieked and shot up, dropping the hot peso and almost spilling John’s beer. The other customers, who had watched John heat the coin, guffawed.
John’s pranks often were
tainted by cruelty. He recalled an incident involving an old hooker well past her prime. Most bars didn’t allow this woman inside because the owners knew sailors liked young, fresh girls, not old, saggy women.
One afternoon, the seasoned hustler appeared at a bar where John and some friends were drinking. The woman solicited various sailors, her proposition more a plea for money than a tantalizing offer. She was hungry and hadn’t eaten in several days. As the woman was rejected by sailor after sailor, the men began to laugh. None of them would be caught in bed with such an ugly whore. The woman ignored the slurs and continued her rounds.
When she reached John, he announced that he wasn’t interested in having sex with her, but he was a magnanimous fellow who felt sorry for her and was willing to help her find a suitable sexual mate. Everyone in the bar laughed and began looking for someone or something that the woman could use as a sexual partner.
Finally, someone brought in a dog from the street. If the woman could make the dog ejaculate, then she would be paid.
The men encircled the old hag and dog. They held the frightened mongrel with its back on the bar and ordered the old prostitute to begin. It took her several minutes, but she was finally able to achieve with her hands and mouth what they demanded.
“After she finished, no one wanted to pay her,” John recalled, “but I gave her money.”
John eventually moved out of the raunchy bars into some of the better dubs. His favorite was The Kangaroo Club and it became his off-duty home. He delighted in sitting at “his” table, surrounded by pretty girls who were fully dressed but were prostitutes.
“They used to fight over me, so I would pay to have one girl sit next to me and then have another do things for me. They would polish my shoes and stuff like that, and I remember one time that this girl had done everything she could think of – brought us drinks and polished my shoes – so I removed the clip from my forty-five and had her polish my bullets by hand. I had the shiniest bullets in the Navy.”
John became particularly enamored of a young prostitute called Peaches, and he began to monopolize her time.
“My whoring around was not just for sex,” John told me one afternoon. “Most sailors would just fuck some girl and then leave, but when I’d run into a girl I liked, I really got to know her and she would tell me things and take me places that no other Americans got to go.”
During our discussions in prison, John had bragged about a number of his sexual adventures, but he spoke with surprising gentleness about Peaches. He told me that he badgered her for weeks until she finally agreed to take him to the tiny fishing village where she grew up.
“All of her family came out to meet me, and her father took me inside and pulled out this old box and began showing me his medals from World War II when he was a Kit Carson Scout,” John explained. “He didn’t speak very good English, but it was really interesting.”
John told me that he spent the night in a hammock in the living room of the family hut. “The family was asleep on mats on the floor, all of them in one room,” John said. “Mom, dad, grandma, the whole crew was sleeping together just like a pile of gerbils.
“I went outside and I began to think about how fucked up Americans are,” John continued. “I mean, we put kids in a room and tell them they have to learn how to sleep alone with the light off. I remember that Michael used to cry and cry because he was scared of the dark, but we wouldn’t turn on that damn light, and when I would go to bed, I’d open his door and find him asleep on the floor near the doorway so he could get close to the light that was coming under the door. I mean, who really gives a fuck if your kids sleep with the light on? We are just so fucking wrong!”
Returning to his adventure with Peaches, John told me, “I went out on the beach and after a while, the kids came out and made a bonfire, and they waded out in the water and began throwing nets. They caught about two hundred tiny squid, and they cleaned them and skewered them on sticks and we cooked them right there on the beach over the fire. We drank coconut milk, and the reality of the situation really hit me.
“Hey, these people are poor, really fucking poor, but they had something I didn’t have and never had.” I asked him what he meant and John Walker, looking a bit unsettled, replied in an angry voice, “They had a fucking family!”
Before the Niagara Falls returned to Oakland, it was ordered to participate in an Antisubmarine Warfare Exercise with three other ships. It was one of the first times that a supply ship was used to hunt enemy submarines, and John photographed several classified messages about it because he knew the KGB would want to know how the Navy found Russian subs.
Before the Niagara Falls reached Oakland in late July, John made two significant decisions. “I decided to make another go of it with Barbara and the kids rather than divorce her,” he said.
John also decided it was time to take on a partner as a spy.
“Spying isn’t as easy as it seems. You’ve got to assemble the stuff and photograph it. Someone could walk in on you at any moment so you tend to do your photographing late at night when people aren’t around. This means that you are tired, and it’s easy to make a mistake. I used to use a 150-watt bulb when I photographed documents in the crypto vault. What happens if you forget to put the old 50-watt bulb back into the desk lamp and the next day someone notices? Or what if you put the crypto cards back in the wrong order? It’s very easy to trip up.
“After the hassle with the background investigation, I knew I was going to have to bring someone in and eventually get out of the service. Otherwise, I was going to have the same problem every five years of my career with the danger of a background check and Barbara shooting off her big mouth. I began thinking about getting out of the service, even though I really loved it, and letting someone photograph the documents while I continued to deliver them.
“I had been thinking about this, I guess for a long, long time and just hadn’t realized it, because I knew immediately who I was going to recruit. I had to have someone who was a totally unique individual. He had to be intelligent, trustworthy, and couldn’t be a faggot or an alcoholic or into drugs.
“I decided that there was only one person on the entire planet earth that I trusted enough to recruit as a spy.”
Chapter 22
Jerry Alfred Whitworth was born on August 10, 1939, in the same bedroom where his mother, Agnes, had been born twenty-five years earlier. It was not a joyous event. Agnes, whom everyone called Bobe, was not married when she discovered that she was pregnant, and her parents, Marion and Cassie Owens, were horrified.
The Owenses were a devout, hard-working couple who had come from rural Arkansas to Oklahoma when it was still untamed Indian territory. Cassie Owens could read and write, but her husband could do neither. Even so, Marion Owens possessed a rural shrewdness that came from surviving adversity and working the land.
By the time that Jerry Whitworth was born, Papa and Mama Owens had reared six children, buried a seventh, survived the great dust bowl of the 1930s, and established one of the most prosperous vegetable farms in Sequoyah County. The Owenses were one of the most prominent families in the Cookson Hills, and that made Bobe’s surprise pregnancy even more humiliating.
The Owens clan arranged a wedding for Bobe before she gave birth. But no one can remember just how long Johnnie Whitworth stayed with his bride. Some claim he left before Jerry was born; others say he waited a few days afterward.
“I remember Ike – that’s what everyone called Johnnie Whitworth – asking Bobe if she wanted to go to California with him,” said Beulah Owens Watts, Bobe’s younger sister. “Bobe told Ike no, she wasn’t leaving home, and that was the last that most of us ever saw of Jerry’s father.”
Jerry lived with his mother at his grandparents’ farm for the first six years of his life. It was a picturesque place with a pair of cottonwood trees suitable for climbing in the backyard and a deep well that supplied unclouded spring water.
The closest town was Muldrow, a scrawny
community of about two thousand residents, some six miles west. Papa Owens liked Muldrow, but he didn’t consider it his hometown. He lived in Cottonwood, an unrecognized locale composed of nothing more than a puny cemetery, the old Cottonwood Baptist Church, and three or four houses.
Papa Owens was a man’s man – arrow straight and hardy. He spoke few words, was obeyed without question, and showed little outward emotion. Jerry’s mother, Bobe, was much the same. She stood almost six feet tall, was reed slender, and was known as the “best basketball player that Muldrow ever produced.”
No one knew for certain why Bobe hadn’t married after high school or why she found Johnnie Whitworth appealing. But Bobe was unhappy as a single mother, and her son realized this even though he didn’t know why.
Years later, after Jerry Whitworth had been arrested and found guilty of espionage, his attorneys submitted a presentence personal and mental evaluation of their client to the federal court. In that report, Jerry described his mother as “cold and distant” and complained that Bobe had not spent much time with him as a boy. This lack of affection from his mother haunted him most of his life, the evaluation claimed.
As a child, whenever Jerry wanted attention, he ran to Mama Owens, his grandmother. She comforted Jerry when he got a splinter in his hand. She was the one who hurried to his bed when he cried out petrified by a nightmare. And she massaged his chest with homemade salve when his small body burned with fever.
In early 1947, when Jerry was seven years old, his mother took him to see his Aunt Beulah in EI Cajon, California. At the time, Jerry thought the only purpose for the trip was to visit, but while they were there, Beulah introduced Bobe to William “Bill” Henry Morton.
Morton’s family lived in Muldrow, but he was stationed at an Army base near El Cajon. He was twenty-six years old, seven years younger than Bobe, when they met. After a lightning courtship, Bill and Bobe drove to Yuma, Arizona, and married. No one told Jerry until it was done, and he reacted by running out of the room in tears. When Bill was discharged from the Army in 1948, the family returned to Muldrow, where they lived in a modest house less than one mile from Papa and Mama Owens.