by Earley, Pete
“The gun was a piece of crap, but it was small enough to fit in my coat pocket.”
The train ride to Vienna was long and tiring. Just as the KGB agent had said, the only time John had to show his passport was when the train reached the Austrian border. At that point, the doors to the train were locked and the Austrian customs officials came aboard with German shepherd dogs. While the dogs sniffed each passenger and piece of luggage for narcotics, the snappily dressed customs agents glanced at – but did not record – the names on each passenger’s passport.
The lax security wasn’t the only thing that the KGB had been correct about. It was teeth-chattering cold in Vienna on the night of January 20, 1978, when John checked into the Hotel Regina, one of the city’s moderately priced hotels. The KGB had told John to stay there, but he immediately felt uncomfortable because most of the guests were Austrian and the only language he heard was German.
“I really felt out of place. In the middle of January, there aren’t many American tourists in Vienna.”
The city has a population of 1.6 million and is divided into twenty-three sprawling, crazy-quilt districts, but it didn’t take a skilled ship’s navigator like John long to get his bearings. The Hotel Regina was only one block away from the U-Bahn, the city’s efficient and heavily used subway system.
Just as he had done when making dead drops in the United States, John decided to familiarize himself with his route on the morning of the face-to-face meeting. He boarded the U-2 subway line, which rings the ancient inner city, and rode it five stops until he reached the U-4 line that carried him away from the old city to the Schonbrunn Palace, the summer home and favorite residence of the former ruling family of Austria, the Hapsburgs.
With schoolboy awe, he noted in his journal that the trains operated on an “honor” system, with passengers buying small orange tickets that they later punched themselves in machines near the tracks.
While riding toward the 1,400-room Schonbrunn Palace, John read the sheet of instructions that the KGB agent had given him in Casablanca. The Vienna Procedure was written on a single sheet of white typing paper, and the first time that John saw it, he thought it had been typed. But when he looked carefully at the document, he realized each letter had been printed by hand across the page in incredibly small and neat lines:
THE VIENNA PROCEDURE
AT 18:15 P.M. COME UP TO THE “KOMET KUCHEN” STORE (KITCHEN CABINETS AND APPLIANCES) ON THE CORNER OF SCHONBRUNNER STRASSE AND RUCKERGASSE. TO GET THERE WALK FROM SCHONBRUNN PALACE AND PARK GROUNDS; ON SCHONBRUNNER SCHLOSSSTRASSE AND ITS CONTINUATION SCHONBRUNNER STRASSE TO RUCKERGASSE. TURN LEFT ON THE LATTER AND STOP AT THE WINDOW OF THE “KOMET KUCHEN” STORE, WHICH IS LOOKING ON RUCKERGASSE, JUST A COUPLE OF YARDS AWAY FROM THE CORNER. FOR EASY IDENTIFICATION PLEASE CARRY YOUR CAMERA BAG ON YOUR LEFT SHOULDER AND HOLD A SMALL PAPER BAG IN YOUR RIGHT HAND. PAUSE BY THAT WINDOW FOR ABOUT TWO MINUTES FROM 18:15P.M. TO 18:17 P.M., DRIFTING SLOWLY ALONG IT AWAY FROM SCHONBRUNNER STRASSE TOWARD THE OTHER CORNER OF THE BUILDING ...
Finding the Komet Kuchen store was easy. It had four large red, white, yellow, and blue neon signs extending from it, and two stories of brilliant silver aluminum siding above its store windows. When John reached it, he gazed through the display windows at the washers and dryers, color televisions, and stereos inside.
He walked around the corner of the store as instructed, paused, and then returned to the front of the building. As he was walking back, John noticed that there was a public park diagonally across the street from the store. A KGB agent could easily and unobtrusively watch him from the park benches there and also tell if he was being followed.
Following the instructions, John crossed the street and stood in front of another display window. He was now standing parallel to the park. He walked down the sidewalk and turned right at the next corner into a narrow side street lined with cars.
The instructions called for him to walk one block and turn left, then walk another block and turn left again. This brought him back to the main thoroughfare, and he found himself once again facing the public park.
Had anyone been following John, he would have been easily apparent to a watcher sitting in the park. There would be no reason for someone to take such an indirect route unless he was shadowing someone.
John was having fun despite the bitter cold. He was getting caught up in the James Bond type procedures and the drama of clandestine meetings. John continued his trek and was led by the instructions up and down a number of streets that always brought him back to a major street, Meidlinger Hauptstrasse. A bird’s-eye view of the course would show that John had walked in a series of circles all near city parks or small plazas where a KGB agent could sit unnoticed and see both the beginning and end of his jaunts.
The last stop was outside a clothing store called Bazala, a four-story building on the corner of Meidlinger Hauptstrasse near a small plaza. As he stood in front of the store’s two glass doors, John realized that despite an hour of walking, he was less than four blocks away from the Komet Kuchen where he had started!
By the time he got back to his hotel, it was time for him to turn around and return for the actual meeting. A light snow was falling when he arrived at the Komet Kuchen at 6:15 P.M.
The wind was stronger too.
John had placed Jerry’s delivery in his camera bag and he was carrying the .25 caliber automatic in his hand inside the right pocket of his coat. By the time he reached the Bazala clothing store, he couldn’t feel his toes because they were numb.
“Hello, dear friend,” a familiar voice said. It was the same KGB agent he’d met in Casablanca. “Do you have something for me?”
The men exchanged camera cases and the KGB agent excused himself. He walked away, but returned a few minutes later.
John gripped the automatic pistol tightly in his hand. If someone was going to arrest him or if the KGB intended to kill him, now was the perfect time. Bundled pedestrians hurried past, their shoes making a slight crunching sound in the snow.
“Dear friend, let us walk this way please.”
John removed his finger from the trigger, but left his hand in his pocket with the weapon.
“I assumed that we would go to a safe house or at least inside a coffeehouse because it was freezing outside,” John recalled later. “But he motioned me to begin walking and told me that it would be too dangerous for us to go inside anywhere. I couldn’t believe it! I was freezing and we were going to walk the streets for at least another fucking hour or two.”
Once again, the KGB agent followed the same script. He questioned John about his trip and then asked questions about the acquisition of specific “merchandise” and possible future “acquisitions.” These were followed by inquiries of a more personal nature about John’s family and, as always, Barbara’s drinking habits.
At some point during the conversation, John decided to bring up a topic of his own. He reminded the KGB agent about his comment in Casablanca, when the agent had asked whom John would send in his place if he was ever detained.
“There is only one person I would trust to make such a trip,” John said. “My brother Arthur. He is the only person that I would ever consider to replace me. He’s is intelligent enough to do it, and he has the balls to do it. He is an international traveler and he looks so much like me that even you might have trouble telling the difference.”
The KGB agent already knew about Arthur because John had told the Russians about the various members of his family.
“Does he know what you do?” the agent asked.
“He knows I’m doing something illegal, but not what.”
“Would he do it?”
“He’s having tremendous financial difficulties,” said John. “Has been ever since he got out of the Navy. He owes me. I think Art can be turned.”
“Do nothing,” the agent advised, “until I speak to my superiors.”
By now the two men had been walking for more than an hour in the wind and John was
exhausted. But the agent had not completed his agenda.
“My friend, why do you Americans wish to destroy us?”
John was surprised by the question. The last thing that he wanted to hear was a propaganda speech.
“We don’t,” he mumbled. “You guys are the aggressors.”
“My friend, this is so untrue,” the KGB agent said. “In Siberia, we have more minerals than any other nation. We have enough oil for our country and we have a nation twice the size of the United States. We don’t need anyone else. We don’t need the extra problems. All we wish is to be left alone. It is the United States who is the aggressor.”
The agent spoke about the decadence of the West. Why capitalism was doomed to fail. How oppressed peoples across the globe were taking up arms and endorsing communism. John couldn’t believe it. It was simply crazy. He was freezing!
“The first time that he discussed his country – he never said Russia when we were together – I was really snickering under my breath,” John recalled. “I was thinking, ‘Oh God, this is typical propaganda bullshit.’ Here he is telling me about the beauty of socialism. I really scoffed at it.”
After an agonizing forty-five-minute indoctrination, the agent finally finished talking. Once again, he thanked John for his contributions to world peace.
“Just keep the money corning,” John replied.
He thought the KGB agent looked pained by the remark. He hoped so!
By the time that John got back to his hotel, he felt physically and mentally drained. But after he warmed up, he found that he was too excited to sleep.
He decided to spend some of the money that the KGB agent had given him.
He caught a taxi outside the Hotel Regina and asked the driver to take him to a brothel. Having sex with a big-busted Austrian Fraulein would be the perfect end to his high-strung day.
He was sure that James Bond would have done the same thing himself.
PART IV
family
He that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrow.
– Jeremy Taylor, Sermons Vol. 1
Chapter 33
John kept in sporadic touch with his children after the divorce, not because he particularly missed them, but because they were his kids and they might be useful someday. He was still paranoid about the Soviets, and felt vulnerable because he was acting as Jerry’s handler and not producing any classified material himself.
John also knew that Jerry was not the most reliable long-term partner. Jerry’s naval career was a revolving door of discharges and reenlistments, and his life was full of vacillation and bursts of interest and then disinterest in fads. Like a pimp without a working stable of whores, John knew that he would lose his spy income and possibly his life if Jerry ever quit.
“The material we were giving the KGB was just too valuable to chance letting us live if we ever stopped producing,” John explained once again. “Jerry and I were really victims of our own success. I knew that. But I also knew that if I could recruit one of my own children, then the KGB could never lay a hand on me. That is why I went after them. That’s the real reason. They were my only ticket out.”
Whether or not the KGB ever intended to harm John is impossible to tell But in John’S mind, that threat was always there, and recruiting one of his children was the best insurance policy that he could think of.
“It’s a parent’s job to protect the children. Even if they are adults, it’s your obligation as a parent to protect them,” John told me. “I mean, they are your kids. I understood that. I knew that if I recruited any of my kids, I would be putting them in harm’s way. There is no way that I can justify that, but I began to consider the risks and the profits. My kids just didn’t have it. They weren’t going to make anything out of their lives – especially Cynthia, whom everyone had picked on. She didn’t have any self-esteem. This made me start to think of spying in a different way. I had been doing it for a long time, and it was a safe way to make a lot of money. Why not let them in on the gravy train? You see, I was actually helping them. They sure as hell weren’t going to amount to anything on their own.”
By late 1977, Barbara and the children had outstayed their welcome at the farm owned by Annie and Bob Nelson and had moved to Skowhegan, a small Maine town. Barbara had spent all of her money from the divorce. Now broke, she was forced to take a job at the Dexter Shoe Company, cementing shoes together on a piecework basis to support herself, her children, and her mother, who had moved in with her.
Margaret was the first to flee Maine. She moved to Boston, where she lived with family-friends and worked in a factory making plastic cups and bowls. John telephoned her first.
“Margaret had been a feminist since she was five years old,” John recalled. “You couldn’t tell that child anything, and I didn’t think there was much chance of convincing her to go into the service. But I decided to try anyway.”
John convinced Margaret to move to Norfolk and stay with him until she could find her own apartment. He offered to pay for her ticket and expenses until she found work. Once she arrived, John began urging her to join the military.
“As I predicted,” John said, “Margaret wasn’t interested at all in enlisting. ‘I don’t think I could put up with all that discipline’ – the “yes, sirs” and other crap she told me.”
Instead, Margaret enrolled in a junior college and decided to become a graphic artist.
“I couldn’t believe that dummy,” said John. “I went to the library and checked out a census that showed salaries that different professions earned. I said, ‘Look here, Margaret, graphic artists aren’t even listed on this because they don’t make squat.’ But she didn’t care. She was a complete zero brain.”
In fact, John’s effort to recruit Margaret had been half-hearted; her strong personality made it unlikely she would join the service. His next target was exactly the opposite.
When John told me about his attempt to recruit Cynthia, he couched it in the most sympathetic terms possible. “I talked to Laura and Cynthia on the telephone and I really got pissed about the situation up there in Maine,” John said. “Cynthia was just going to rot away up there, so I decided to fly up and rescue her.”
Of all his children, John had shown the least attention to Cynthia, whom he constantly belittled and referred to as “a retard.” But suddenly, he was concerned about her – enough so that he left immediately for Skowhegan to convince Cynthia to return with him to Norfolk.
She would be easy, he felt, to push into the military and recruit as a spy. In his own strained logic, John saw his plan as a reflection of his love for Cynthia.
“This wasn’t all for me. The Navy had been good for me and I really believed that the military would have been good for all of my kids, even if they didn’t become spies. Particularly Cynthia, who I had to get away from her mother.”
Before Barbara and the kids moved to Maine, Cynthia had fallen in love with a young Marine in Norfolk and become pregnant. Now, at nineteen, she was unmarried and single-handedly raising her small son, while struggling to attend classes at a vocational school. She was surviving financially on welfare and having a tough time emotionally.
John planned his trip so that he would arrive while Barbara was working. He found the house and knocked. Cynthia answered, dressed in a bathrobe. She was sick, but still thrilled to see her father.
“Pack your shit,” John commanded. “You and the baby are going back home to Norfolk. I want you to live with me.”
“But Daddy,” Cynthia replied, “we have the flu.”
“Forget the flu,” John said. “It only lasts seven days. Now is the time to make your escape and get out of here. Now where’s your stuff?”
John helped Cynthia pack a suitcase and the three of them rode to the airport.
John left Cynthia and the baby inside the terminal while he went out to refuel his airplane. When he returned, he found Cynthia near tears and the baby crying.
“You got fifteen minutes to decide,” John said to Cynthia. “This is your last chance because I’m leaving in fifteen minutes with or without you and the baby. I’ve turned in the rental car, you know, so there’s no way for you to get home unless you call a taxi, and I’m not paying for that!”
Cynthia was confused.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she told me later, her voice filled with emotion. “I love my dad, but I was afraid.”
As John’s deadline approached, he turned more insistent.
“You are going to be a fucking welfare mother all your life if you don’t get out of this environment! Is that what you want?” he demanded. “Cynthia, you got to build some self-esteem. Look, come to Norfolk with me. We’ll find someone to take care of the kid and you can join the service. I didn’t have any confidence once and look what the Navy did for me. It can do the same for you, and it will get you away from your mother, who is a goddamn lazy alcoholic. Look, Cynthia, my dad was an alcoholic too. I know what you are facing. This is your big chance. Your only chance. You got to take it just like I did.”
Cynthia couldn’t decide and John finally gave her an ultimatum.
Go or stay? Decide now! This instant!
“We’re staying,” Cynthia said, clutching her son in her arms.
Enraged, John turned around to leave.
“Daddy,” Cynthia said, beginning to cry. “How are we going to get home?” John didn’t answer. He stormed out of the small terminal and returned to Norfolk alone.
“I had done my best to help that girl,” John said later. “But she didn’t have the guts to go with me.”
Remembering the incident, Cynthia Walker later told me amid tears why she hadn’t gone with John.
“I wanted to have a good relationship with my father, but I was afraid to move back to Norfolk. All of my family considered me dumb. But I listened and watched them, and they really didn’t know anything about me because they were so busy talking. I was afraid to go back with my father to Norfolk because I knew what he wanted me to do. He never said anything specific, but my mother had told all of us that he was a spy, and I was afraid to go back with him because I knew he would try to get me involved. I just felt it.”