Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  “But the point about Israel was really irrelevant. He was part of the conspiracy now. We were talking about theft and transportation to a foreign government. He knew that classified information wasn’t supposed to go to anyone, allies included.

  “But Jerry agreed on the spot to do it, to become my partner, just as I figured he would. The next step was talking about his future. How to get him back in the service and where he should go to get the best documents.”

  Every few minutes, Jerry interrupted their conversation by simply leaning back and shaking his head, John recalled later. “He just couldn’t believe that I had been a spy for years without him figuring it out. He kept asking me questions.”

  “Does Barbara know what you are doing?” Jerry asked.

  “I got to be truthful with you,” John said. Then he lied. “Yeah, I have to admit that she knows I am into something illegal, but she doesn’t know what it is.”

  “Does anyone else know what you do?”

  “No,” said John. “No one. You are the only one who knows that.”

  “Can Barbara be trusted?”

  “C’mon Jerry,” John replied. “You know what a fucking dunce Barbara is. But she won’t blow the whistle as long as I keep her in booze and money. Besides, she doesn’t know enough to really do anything, and who’s going to believe a drunk?”

  “Were you doing this at school when we met?” Jerry asked.

  “Yes,” John replied. “Sure was.”

  “Damn!” said Jerry. “While we were at radio school, you were spying for the Israelis?”

  “Yes,” John said again.

  “Damn, how long before that?”

  “I’m not going to tell you,” John replied. “Look, Jerry, in this type of operation it is better if you don’t know too much. All you really need to know is that it is completely safe, there are really no major risks, what I do really doesn’t hurt anyone – it’s just information sharing – and you can earn a lot of money by doing it. One hell of a lot of money. More money than you could ever make flying over the goddamn ocean trying to find a bunch of fucking swordfish for some fat-ass fisherman.”

  “Why,” asked Jerry, “did you pick me? How did you know that I would say ‘Yes’ ”

  “You’re my best friend Jerry. I trust you,” John replied. “I also talked to you long enough to know that you would do it with me. You probably didn’t even realize it, but I have been making queries over a long time.”

  Jerry looked surprised, so John mentioned their conversation aboard The Dirty Old Man about the movie Easy Rider. Jerry didn’t even remember it.

  “Jerry, we are the very best at what we do,” said John. “We are intelligent, and what I am doing is not hurting one person or any government. Believe me, this is safe and easy money – really easy money, just there for the taking, and we are helping our friends the Jews.”

  All profits would be split fifty-fifty, John explained. Jerry would steal the documents, John would be the courier. He would meet Jerry “anywhere on the planet earth” to pick up material and would deliver his share.

  “Cryptographic material is the best. You can get up to four thousand dollars per month for it, but you’ll get at least a grand for routine message traffic,” John explained. “Of course, some crypto is worth more. The KY-8 system [an older, voice broadcast system] isn’t going to get that much ‘cause it’s been out there a long time and, believe me, we aren’t the only sellers in the market. But the KW-7, now, that’s a gold mine, baby! If you can get me good KW-7 crypto, you’ll be getting four thousand a month no sweat, as long as you live.”

  Jerry suddenly interrupted John’s explanation. When John had first begun his recruitment pitch, he had talked about message traffic. Now he was talking about something more serious – cryptographic material.

  John felt a sudden panic. “I thought, ‘Oh shit, it’s finally dawned on this dummy who the buyers really are and he’s getting scared.’”

  Jerry looked at John for several seconds and then said, “Under no circumstances can you tell anyone that I am involved, and that includes your buyers. I must remain anonymous.”

  “Of course,” John replied quickly. “You will be a silent partner. No one will ever know. I swear it. I absolutely swear it. It will be our secret.”

  Like a salesman who had just dosed a lucrative deal, John thought about his meeting with Jerry on the flight home to Oakland from San Diego. He marveled at Jerry’s eagerness to join him.

  “I felt very comfortable. I knew Jerry would not turn me in. He was simply too excited about the money and being part of a spy ring. I really thought he was going to change his name to James Bond!”

  Jerry Whitworth refused to testify years later at his trial on espionage charges. But he admitted to being a spy after his conviction, when interviewed by Dayle C. Carlson, Jr., a correctional consultant, who prepared the presentence report about him:

  “During interviews, Whitworth admitted that he had passed classified information to John Walker ... Whitworth stated that it was a period of his life during which he was somewhat disillusioned with circumstances in the world, including the Watergate experience, the takeover of South Vietnam and Cambodia by the Communists and other unsettling political events. He was particularly interested in the survival of Israel and felt that its struggle was worth supporting. He stated that he was also attracted to the mystique and what he described as “heroics” of being involved with passing classified information to Israel. He agreed to assist Walker. Although there was an agreement for Whitworth to receive approximately $1,000 a month in the beginning, Whitworth stated that he was not particularly interested in the money at first.”

  Jerry Whitworth had been taught as a child the difference between right and wrong. But he also had learned something else growing up in the Cookson Hills of southeastern Oklahoma, something that was honed by Ayn Rand’s call for each individual to become more than merely a cog in some vast bureaucratic machine.

  Perhaps John Steinbeck described this independent attitude best in his classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, a book that Jerry admired.

  At one point in the book, Pa Joad tells his family that “sometimes a fella got to sift the law” if he wants to survive. A man has to take a few risks now and then if he wants to amount to something.

  After he was convicted, Jerry Whitworth told his Uncle Willard during an emotional prison visit, “Don’t believe all the things they are saying about me. I thought what I was doing was heroic when I did it. My conscience is clear, completely clear.”

  Chapter 27

  Back in Oakland, John received bad news. He was being transferred from the Niagara Falls to a staff job at the naval base in Norfolk.

  He didn’t want to go.

  Neither did Barbara. When he broke the news to her, Barbara jolted John with some news of her own. She wanted a divorce.

  Barbara had done just fine while John was at sea. The owners of Tilly’s Restaurant were so pleased with her work as assistant manager that they had offered to put her in charge of the entire eatery. The extra pay plus child support from John would be enough, Barbara thought, for the family to survive without him.

  Barbara had told the children about her decision before John got home from the Philippines. “One night, when she was sitting at the bar at the house in Union City, my mother told all of us that she was going to divorce Dad when he got back,” recalled Michael Walker. “I was really upset. I didn’t want them to get a divorce. I didn’t want to lose my father.”

  Laura Walker’s reaction was just the opposite.

  “I felt great,” she recalled. “We would have been set ... I was thrilled that she was going to finally get rid of him.”

  Barbara’s sudden backbone surprised John. He asked her to step into the master bedroom to discuss her decision. The children waited outside. “None of us really knew what my dad would do or how he would react,” recalled Laura. “Everyone was afraid. When they came out, all four of us kids were in th
e family room waiting. My mother came up to us and she said, ‘We are all going to Norfolk. We are going with your father!’ ”

  “I just couldn’t believe it, that she would do this to us,” said Laura. “I said to myself, ‘Hey, this is it. I’m getting out.’ ”

  Barbara told me later that John had fallen on his knees in the bedroom and begged her not to leave him. He had talked about his grandfather and the great times the Scaramuzzos had as a large Italian family. He reminded her of their early years together, how much in love they had been. Barbara knew that there wasn’t much of a chance that their marriage could be repaired. Too much had happened.

  But she was willing to try once again.

  She still loved John and, if he would only make an effort, maybe they could get along. It was a thin hope, but she grasped at it anyway. The truth was that despite her intentions, Barbara couldn’t imagine life without John and, in his own strange way, he couldn’t imagine life without her.

  “I really hadn’t been thinking straight when I talked Barbara out of her decision,” John told me later. “I’d been away from home for two long tours and my experiences in the Philippines had really stuck with me. I had begun to romanticize having a family like my grandpa. You know, a good old Italian family with everyone fat and happy. I just wasn’t in touch with reality, but it hit fast.”

  Laura ran away from home that night. She was fourteen, and when she came home on her own the next day, John directed her into the master bedroom for punishment.

  “If you want to run away,” John said, “then do it and don’t ever come back home again! If you run away again, we don’t want to hear from you! Don’t come back and don’t ask us for any money. Just get the hell out of here if you want to go!”

  John walked to the closet and removed a leather belt.

  “Now bend your ass over that bed,” he said.

  Laura obliged and John began hitting her with the strap. Laura was determined not to cry so she clenched her teeth and refused to shed any tears as John struck her. When she thought he had finished, she stood up and started to turn.

  She intended to show him that despite the pain, she hadn’t cried. He hadn’t broken her pride.

  John was not finished, however, and as Laura turned, the belt caught her on the arm and broke the skin. The sight of her own blood panicked the girl.

  “You don’t even know me!” she screamed, holding back tears. “You don’t understand me!”

  “You’re right,” John replied, lowering the belt. “I don’t.”

  “My father never hit me again after that,” Laura told me.

  After a five-day drive across the country with the family, and with The Dirty Old Man in tow, John reached a suburban D.C. motel. He left the kids splashing in the pool and Barbara drinking in their rented room while he drove to a dead drop exchange with the KGB. He had several rolls of film from the Niagara Falls to deliver, and he also wanted to tell the Russians about his new assignment in Norfolk and, most importantly, his new partner.

  As a staff officer in the Amphibious Force, Atlantic Fleet in Norfolk, John knew that he would have limited access to cryptographic equipment.

  “I believe I will only have access to the KG-13 keylists,” John explained in his dead drop note to the KGB. “No access to KW-7.”

  But, the note continued, there was still a very good chance that he could keep a steady flow of KW-7 keylists coming. His closest friend, Jerry Whitworth, had agreed to become a spy and reenlist in the Navy.

  “I never had any intention of keeping Jerry’s identity a secret from the Soviets,” John recalled, “despite my promise to him. It just wasn’t realistic. The Russians weren’t going to play ball unless they knew all the characters.”

  John knew the Russians would be upset because he had recruited someone without their permission, but he also knew that the KGB wasn’t going to utter a single complaint about Jerry when it realized how valuable he was going to become to them.

  “Whitworth is an expert in communications satellites,” John explained in his note.

  “I knew,” John said later, “that mentioning satellites was all it would take to get the KGB excited.”

  Chapter 28

  Jerry Whitworth reenlisted and was sent to the Navy’s satellite communications school at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, just as he and John planned. Only the Navy’s most competent radiomen, known by their peers as hot runners, were accepted by the school, and Jerry’s record was so good that he fell into that group.

  The Pentagon was in the midst of redesigning its entire military communications network, and the Navy was leading the other services in technology. It would have been difficult for the KGB to choose a better time to infiltrate naval communications.

  The service was on the verge of launching the first of four telecommunication satellites that were to be placed above the earth at precise “geosynchronous altitudes.” This meant that each satellite would travel around the globe at the same speed as the earth’s rotation, causing it, in effect, to always be in the same spot. From their locations, the four satellites would be able to cover the entire globe, each casting a giant “satellite footprint” over the earth. Once the satellites were in place, any Navy ship traveling anywhere in the world could broadcast an ultrahigh-frequency radio transmission upward and bounce it off a satellite back to the proper Navy communication station below.

  Besides improved communications, the satellites would also solve one of the Navy’s most vexing problems. Since 1914, when the first ship-to-shore radio broadcast was made, the Navy had been looking for a way for its ships to send messages without revealing their locations. The problem was that though high-frequency radio broadcasts could travel three thousand miles without becoming too weak to transcribe, they could be traced. Like a lighthouse beam, the ultrahigh-frequency radio transmissions left a path behind that could be followed to its source.

  If an enemy ship intercepted a broadcast, it could follow the radio waves back to the transmitting ship. This was extremely dangerous during war, particularly for submarines, whose domination of the seas depended upon surprise.

  Several attempts were made to make ships’ transmissions difficult to trace, but none worked. During the cold war, worry about the “traceability problem” increased, especially after Soviet intelligence ships began operating routinely off the East and West Coasts, where they could intercept ship-to-shore transmissions.

  Finally, the Navy had a way to circumvent the Russians. What no one suspected was that Jerry Whitworth, one of the first radio operators to be trained in satellite communications, had become a KGB spy.

  The use of satellites was leading to other massive revisions in U.S. military communication. The Navy had already created the Common User Digital Information Exchange System, known as CUDIXS, to control access to the twenty-channel communication satellites that were to be used jointly by the Navy and other service branches.

  Other communication systems had to be revamped or created because of the sudden revolution that technology was bringing to communication. Among the most important communication systems were AUTOVON, or Automatic Voice Network, a worldwide defense department telephone system; AUTOSEVOCOM, Automatic Secure Voice Communications System, a worldwide defense department telephone system with security devices installed on it to protect its transmissions; and AUTODIN, Automatic Digital Information Network, the message system that routes messages from military installations to the proper destination.

  Jerry Whitworth worked hard to develop an expertise in everyone of these communication systems.

  Thus, just as John Walker had entered the submarine force when it was being transformed from the diesel age to the nuclear age, Jerry Whitworth was at the edge of a communications revolution in the Navy.

  Through no effort of its own, the KGB was getting a look inside the Navy as it developed the most sophisticated military communications network in the world.

  Years later, William O. Studeman, a rear admiral and t
op naval intelligence expert, claimed that Jerry Whitworth’s “misuse of a position of trust in naval communications jeopardized the backbone of this country’s entire national defense.”

  Back in February 1975, after he completed five weeks of training at satellite school, Jerry’s mind was only focused on one thing. Anxious to brief his new spymaster, he flew directly from the school to Norfolk and telephoned John’s home. Barbara answered. No, she explained, John wasn’t home and she didn’t know where he was or when he would be back. But Barbara agreed to come to the airport, pick up Jerry, and put him up for the night in the three-bedroom brick-and-frame house at 8524 Old Ocean View Road that she and John had bought.

  During the ride from the airport, Jerry began to sense that John either had left Barbara permanently or was only occasionally staying with her and the children.

  The next morning the two men got together and Jerry immediately brought up Barbara’s stability. How much did she know about John’s spying, and was she a risk? he asked.

  “Barbara doesn’t have enough guts to be a risk,” John replied.

  Those words marked the start of a five-minute discourse about Barbara that was filled with profanity and hatred. John made it clear to Jerry that he viewed Barbara as nothing but a piece of “useless flesh” who was absolutely worthless to him.

  Then the conversation turned to espionage and John discovered that Jerry’s technical training was so sophisticated that despite his years in the Navy, John frequently had to stop Jerry in mid-sentence and ask him to explain.

  Finally, Jerry resorted to drawing crude diagrams on John’s notepad that explained how messages were relayed via satellite.

  John had received $35,000 from the KGB at his last dead drop exchange, and even though the money was all for him, he wisely decided to reward his partner. John counted out $4,000 in fifties and hundreds for Jerry, and explained that the sum represented his apprentice salary of $1,000 per month.