by Earley, Pete
Even though they were divorced, Jerry had difficulty letting go when he returned to California. Much to Lynn’s surprise, Jerry made friends with her new boyfriend, and when they broke up and she left him, Jerry took the man out drinking. Together, they recalled how much they both loved Lynn. Her next boyfriend didn’t like Jerry and told him to stay away from Lynn.
Still, Jerry kept corresponding with her and occasionally visited her when she was at work or on evenings when her new lover was gone. This continued off and on for nearly five years after their divorce, until Lynn died in a car accident in 1973.
A close friend of Jerry’s and Lynn’s wrote a detailed letter to the federal court after Jerry was arrested in June 1985. In the letter, she described Jerry during 1967 to 1970 as being a person who “valued the uncomplicated.”
“He used to say that he never wanted to own more possessions than he could fit in a Volkswagen,” she wrote.
All that was about to change.
In mid-1970, Jerry reported to his new job as an instructor at the Naval Training Center in San Diego.
His commanding officer was John Anthony Walker, Jr.
Chapter 25
John and Jerry were together at the radio training school for only one year before John was transferred to Oakland and the Niagara Falls. But during that short period, John gained considerable influence over Jerry. Roger Olson noticed it immediately. Jerry had found another Windsor Murdock, another father figure to admire.
Roger was living in San Francisco aboard a Chinese junk that Jerry was helping him refurbish when John first befriended Jerry. One weekend, Jerry invited John to ride with him from San Diego to San Francisco to meet Roger and see the Chinese junk. The trip was a disaster. John didn’t like Roger, and Roger felt the same way about him.
“Your new boss reminds me of an aggressive used car dealer,” Roger told Jerry afterward. “The guy is a user. He uses people.”
“No, he’s not,” Jerry replied. “Roger, you just don’t know John Walker. He’s really a great guy!”
John didn’t bad-mouth Roger in front of Jerry, but he quietly worked to break up their friendship.
“When I first met Roger,” recalled John, “he had this pained look in his face. I sensed that he was jealous of me and my power to snatch poor little Jerry from him. I mean, here is Roger wanting to have Jerry come up every weekend and help him with this stupid Chinese junk, and I’m keeping him from doing it because we are going out on my boat having fun, drinking, racing, and having girls aboard, and good old Roger is out in the cold. I thought to myself, ‘If I can break up their friendship, I would really be doing Jerry a favor because no one needs someone like Roger around.’ ”
John deliberately entered The Dirty Old Man in races on days that he knew would force Jerry to choose between going to visit Roger and staying behind to sail. At first Jerry tried to sustain both obligations. He would compete in a Saturday morning race and then drive 514 miles to San Francisco to help Roger repair his junk. He would race home Sunday night and report to work Monday exhausted. After a while, he didn’t drive up to Roger’s much.
San Diego became even more inviting after he met Shirley McClanahan. She was ten years younger than he was, and Jerry liked that.
“I think Jerry always felt that I was a bit naive,” Shirley told me. “The more we dated, the more I decided that he felt comfortable around me because I was younger and he could guide me and kind of help shape how I was.”
He gave her books by Ayn Rand and dragged her to lectures on objectivism.
He introduced her to jazz and avant garde art shows and foreign film festivals.
Shirley didn’t care for most of Jerry’s preoccupations, but when he took her sailing aboard The Dirty Old Man, she was thrilled. After she and Jerry introduced John to Mary Ann Mason, Shirley enjoyed the Wednesday night outings even more, and soon the group became a regular foursome.
Each week they raced, had drinks at the yacht dub, and then dined at the Brigadeen restaurant. Frequently the meals cost more than $100, and Shirley noticed that John always paid the tab. Always. And John emphasized it after each meal by either mentioning it aloud or by pausing to study the check at length. It was impossible for John to pay for dinner without letting everyone at the table know that the money was coming out of his billfold.
Shirley also noticed that John loved to give Mary Ann flashy presents, particularly when Jerry and Shirley were with them.
“I told Jerry that if he bought me something expensive, I’d give it back to him,” Shirley recalled. “He was shocked, but I explained to him that all that stuff Johnny bought Mary Ann was like payments for sex as far as I was concerned. I thought John treated Mary Ann like a whore and I told her the same thing. I said, ‘My God, Mary Ann, he treats you like a whore. He always buys you gifts after you go someplace for a weekend. It’s like a payoff,’ but she ignored me.
“Once, she even thought it was funny. Mary Ann was extremely wen endowed, and John was always buying her sweaters that were really low cut. I think he wanted to make her look like a whore too. Mary Ann was having a lot of problems at that point in her life. She was getting involved heavily in drugs and booze and was very promiscuous. She was seeing a psychiatrist, and I thought John was really pulling her down and just using her for his own pleasure, but there wasn’t anything I could do.”
Despite Shirley’s repeated assurances that she didn’t expect any presents from Jerry, she still believed he was envious of John’s money.
“When you listened to Jerry, you could hear the influence that John and his money were having,” Shirley recalled. “He was beginning to almost idolize Johnny. I remember when I made third class in the Navy, I was really excited, so I went over to Jerry’s room at the barracks. I had never been inside his room before, but when I went in I found all these books that he had bought on how to make investments and make money. He was beginning to get real interested in obtaining wealth, and I knew that was John’s influence.”
Jerry’s view toward marriage and sexual fidelity was also changing, Shirley discovered. She knew Jerry had dated other women after they first met, but when they became serious, she thought he had stopped seeing anyone else. She had been reluctant to engage in sex after a few dates, and when she finally agreed to go to bed with Jerry, it meant something special to her and, she thought, to him.
She later confided in Mary Ann that Jerry was a poor sexual partner. He lacked confidence in bed and had difficulty satisfying her. But she was beginning to fall in love with him, and she wanted their relationship to continue despite the frequent frustration.
Much to Shirley’s surprise, Jerry announced one night that it was important for him not to focus on just one woman. “I’m seeing someone else, besides you,” he said.
Shirley was crushed and she blamed John, but the truth was that he was only part of the reason for Jerry’s attitude. Jerry had seen the movie Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a 1969 comedy in which two couples swap spouses, and – based on that movie alone – he had decided that it was foolish to limit himself to one sexual partner.
Shirley didn’t care for Jerry’s view. She and Mary Ann considered themselves rebellious. They smoked marijuana and had psychedelic posters of Janis Joplin and the rock group Santana on the walls of their apartment.
But deep down, Shirley still held the same belief in fidelity that her parents had. She loved Jerry. She had taken him home to meet her mother and father. Now she sensed that Jerry was pulling away and was afraid to make a commitment.
A short while later, Shirley discovered that Jerry had gone to bed with another woman who was a mutual friend.
“Jerry was still very important to me at this point. I still was serious about our relationship, and when I found about it, it soured everything because I felt betrayed,” Shirley recalled. “It was not something that he should have done. I never confronted him with it, but I felt really hurt.”
After that, Shirley saw less of Jerry, although he still called her. Sh
e lost track of John, too, after he left San Diego in 1971 for duty aboard the Niagara Falls.
Shirley left the Navy and didn’t see much of Mary Ann thereafter, but in the fall of 1973, she received a telephone call from John Walker. He had returned to Union City from his first Pacific cruise and was trying to find Mary Ann. Shirley and John spoke for several minutes and she agreed to meet him for dinner. During dessert, John pulled a gift-wrapped box from his coat pocket and handed it to Shirley. Inside was a bracelet made of gold and jade.
“I want you to have this,” John said, reaching across the table for Shirley’s wrist. “I bought it in Taiwan.”
Shirley demurred, but John insisted.
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you, but Johnny, if you expect something in return for this, you can forget it. I’m going home alone tonight just like I came.”
John laughed. “No problem,” he said.
But after dinner John announced that he had to retrieve something from his motel room before he drove Shirley home. Once inside the room, John became amorous.
“He got real handy and pushy,” Shirley recalled, “so I belted him and told him to leave me alone.”
Years later, when she told me about her experiences with John Walker and Jerry Whitworth, Shirley wondered aloud – when she first met them, they had seemed so different, but were they really?
She wasn’t at all sure they were.
After his Diego Garcia tour ended in June 1974, Jerry Whitworth was discharged from the Navy for a third time. He and Roger Olson had renewed their friendship and they left immediately on a two-month cruise in a twenty-foot sloop that Roger had bought. The 1,500-mile trip took them around Baja California into the Gulf of California and was Jerry’s imitation of Easy Rider.
It was during a break from sailing, while the men were in a waterfront bar, that they had a discussion very much like the one that Jerry had once had with John Walker aboard The Dirty Old Man.
“We were talking about ways to earn money,” Roger Olson recalled, “and we talked about hauling a large amount of marijuana back to the United States with us, but the possibilities of getting caught made it just too big of a gamble. Then the idea of selling classified information came up. I knew it was a possibility because Jerry had told me that he had top secret information at his disposal, but we both said that a man shouldn’t sell out his country. There was nothing in the world worth selling out your country for. We talked about it for a long time, and we both agreed that it was something we just wouldn’t do. No way.”
During the voyage, they talked endlessly about their lives, how both had suffered failed marriages and faced uncertain futures. Roger was dating a Jewish woman, and he had become fascinated by Judaism and Israel. The more Roger spoke, the more Jerry became interested in the religion.
“Jerry was not anti-Jew, but now he began to become more and more an advocate of Israel as the trip went on, and he actually began to develop strong feelings about Israel,” Roger said. “I knew I influenced him.”
Just before the voyage ended, Roger noticed that Jerry had become nervous. He was uncertain about what he should do next with his life, and he was frustrated by his own lack of direction.
“All of my life has been without focus,” he complained one night. “I’ve never been able to find a center in my life, something to concentrate on.”
As always, Jerry fell back on the teachings of Ayn Rand.
“Happiness is the moral purpose of life,” Rand had written. Productive achievement is its noblest activity. Logic and reason are the only absolutes.
But what were his achievements? Jerry asked. He was thirty-five years old and still a rootless drifter. How had his logic and intellect served him or made him happy? There was no great cause in his life, no passion, no purpose or individualistic fight.
Roger knew his longtime friend was unhappy.
“Jerry, more than anything else, I think, wanted attention. He wanted to do something important. He wanted to be someone and amount to something in someone’s eyes other than his own.”
Chapter 26
San Diego International Airport, also known as Lindbergh Fidd, lies slightly northeast of the Naval Training Center where John and Jerry had originally met. Since both men were pilots, they knew the airfield well, particularly a colorful restaurant called Boom Trenchard’s Flare Path Cafe near the main runway.
Jerry had just returned from his two-month voyage with Roger when John telephoned from Oakland and said he wanted to fly down and take him to lunch. Jerry was eager to tell John about his sailing adventure and his new job – spotting swordfish for sports fishermen from a low-flying Piper Cub airplane.
They sat upstairs at Boom Trenchard’s in a corner table out of earshot of the bar. John let Jerry chatter on, listening patiently to his account of the Baja cruise, theories about national politics, and talk about his latest interest – Israel.
After lunch and a few gin and tonics, John’s voice dropped to a whisper and he got to the point.
“Jerry, I want to talk to you about something that is highly confidential and sensitive and extremely delicate,” John said. “It involves crime, so if you don’t want to discuss it, tell me right now and we will drink these drinks and leave here friends and I will never bring it up again.”
Jerry told John to continue.
“Okay, the next thing that you got to understand is that if we even talk about this, if I tell you what I am doing, you will be violating the law because you will be part of a conspiracy, and you could be put in prison even though you haven’t done anything at all. This is how important this is. We are talking about something here that is extremely dangerous!” John explained. “So do you want to hear more or should we finish our drinks and discontinue this conversation?”
By now Jerry was totally absorbed and pushed John to hurry up and tell him.
“Okay, Jerry, but if I tell you anything further, you’ve got to promise me that you are not going to go to the authorities and turn me in. You have got to give me your word as a gentleman and as my best friend that it will never go any further than here, this table, even if you decide that you don’t want to get involved,” John said. “This is very, very important because I have never told anyone else what I am doing,” John added, lying. “No one but you, and you are the only person that I trust.”
“Okay,” Jerry replied. “What is it?”
“You promise not to turn me in?” asked John.
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Sure. I promise forgodsakes!”
“Okay,” said John. “I trust you. I want you to know that you are the only person I’ve told this to, and the only reason that I am telling you now is because what I am doing is very safe and very, very profitable, and I want you to get involved. I want a partner and you are the only person that I would ever trust. I’m really putting my balls in your hands with this.”
John sounded so sincere that day. But years later he recalled how he had continued to “bait the hook” that afternoon.
“Bringing Jerry into the ring was a very difficult thing to do and extremely dangerous because all Jerry had to do was say, ‘Yes to me and then pick up the telephone and turn me in. If Jerry had really played his cards right, he could have become a national hero. The Navy would have given him meritorious promotions, allowed him his choice of duty stations, and given him anything he would have asked for if he had turned me in. I knew this. It wasn’t a little thing, it was a big thing. Jerry had a lot to gain by turning me in. So I had to make certain that the money I discussed with him had to outweigh the money that he could get by turning me in. I had thought about how to do this for a long time, and I wanted to touch all of the right spots, so I took my time and I dragged my pitch out.
“There were at least twenty different times when he could have said, ‘Okay, John, I’ve heard enough. Let’s drop the subject,’ but he didn’t. Particularly after I mentioned the big drawing card. I told him that he could ma
ke from one thousand to four thousand dollars per month if he helped me. I kept emphasizing that it was safe. ‘There is no chance at all that you will be caught,’ I said, and then the icing on the cake was that I tailored my pitch to fit what I knew Jerry wanted to hear. He had told me enough about his cruise with Roger that I knew he wanted to do something with his life. I made it sound as if I was doing something that was really important. Admirable, in fact.”
After several minutes of evasive talk, John finally described what he was doing – sort of.
“Okay, Jerry, you promised not to rat on me, so I’m going to tell you what I do. I’m going to trust you. I gather intelligence in the international arena. I buy it and sell it.”
“You mean you sell classified information?” Jerry asked.
“Exactly. I’ve been doing it for years!”
“Holy shit!” Jerry replied.
“Who’s the buyer?”
“I had anticipated this question,” John said later, “and I knew that my answer was critical. This could turn him on me. So I said, ‘Jerry, I can’t tell you that, but I will say that you should understand there is a large population of people who buy this type of information. It is not necessarily the bad guys. It could be publications like Jane’s Fighting Ships [a private publication that specializes in providing information about U.S. and foreign military equipment] or it could be an ally, for example, Israel.’”
“Israel had been having a tough time and Jerry had told me all this bullshit about Israel and the Jews, so I purposely led him in that direction. ‘There are lots of reasons why an ally, like Israel, would want to buy classified material, Jerry. You know that. You know what NOFORN [no foreign distribution] means,’ I said.”
“I suggested Israel to soften the blow and I kept hammering on the point that Israel was our best friend, almost our fifty-first state, for godsakes, It had always been my intention to claim I was passing information to Israel if I was ever captured. I figured that all the Jews in this country would see me as some sort of misguided patriot and they’d get me out of trouble since they own all the newspapers and television networks.