by Earley, Pete
Chapter 34
The Russians sent word that they were extremely pleased with the materials Jerry had collected aboard the U.S.S. Constellation, so much so, that they were doubling Jerry’s pay to $4,000 per month, the same amount that John was receiving.
In a meeting in San Diego on July 7, 1978, John told Jerry about the raise and gave him $24,000 in cash. Jerry had some splendid news himself to report. In order to aid Brenda’s graduate studies in nutrition, he had requested a transfer to a ship based in northern California and, much to his delight, he had been ordered to report on August 10 to the U.S.S. Niagara Falls, the same supply ship that John had served on between 1972 and 1974.
In fact, he was going to have John’s old job as CMS custodian, which would give him easy access to cryptographic machines and keylists. John, Jerry suggested, could even give him tips on where to photograph materials aboard the ship!
“Fantastic!” John replied. “We’re making all the right moves!”
Eight days later, John told his KGB contact during another face-to-face meeting in Vienna about Jerry’s new assignment. John’s handler didn’t have to be reminded of what a prime source the U.S.S. Niagara Falls was for crypto.
“This is just excellent,” the KGB agent said.
Unlike the weather during their January meeting, it was perfect in June 1978, and the temperate summer evening put both men in festive spirits as they strolled along Meidlinger Hauptstrasse.
“Vienna in the winter–oohhoo,” the KGB agent said, shaking his shoulders as if he were dislodging snow, “It’s nearly as terrible as my country. This is much nicer.”
John laughed with him.
Again, the agent lectured John about the faults of capitalism, but this time John challenged him and discovered the agent eager for debate.
“I kept wondering what KGB regulation required him to give me an indoctrination speech every time we met,” John said. “When we first talked, I thought he was just going through some routine of bullshit that the KGB required, but after a while, when I got to know him, I came to believe he honestly was sincere about what he was saying. He usually began by asking me why the United States wanted to destroy his country, and I always replied that his country was the aggressor.
“I told him, ‘The United States doesn’t want to blow you dummies up. We don’t want your country. Christ, every American in the United States including those on welfare, has a higher standard of living than people in your country.’
“But after listening to him speak, some of what he said began to make sense, and I could see why he actually believed the Soviet Union was in dire danger from the United States. I mean, Russia didn’t fly over us after World War II in U-2 spy planes taking photographs like we did of them. Imagine the frustration of knowing that those airplanes are up there flying over you every day, and you don’t have sophisticated enough weapons to shoot them down.
“And after the war, you know, there were some generals in the Pentagon who wanted to drop ‘a big one’ on Red Square. I began to think, ‘Yeah, I can see where this guy is coming from. I can see why he’s worried.’
“I liked some of the things he told me about the Soviet Union too, although I don’t know if they are really true. For example, he asked me a lot about Watergate and the press. He said he couldn’t understand why Nixon had to resign. He just didn’t understand the press in our country at all.
“I mean, the Soviet press follows the party line because of principle. It believes what it says is best for the country, but the press in America doesn’t give a damn about anything but making money. A reporter will print anything to get ahead and get his promotion. He doesn’t have to prove anything, he just prints it. In the Soviet Union, the press can’t print a story unless it is true. I mean, if someone is arrested, the Soviet press can’t splash their names in the newspaper and ruin their lives until after they are convicted of the crime. Our media runs a tiny retraction if a guy is found not guilty and says, ‘Oh, we’re sorry!’ After they’ve printed a zillion stories tearing the guy’s life to shreds! I agreed with him on that one. I hate the fucking press.
“He made some other interesting points. We got into an argument, for instance, about church and state, and he told me there really wasn’t any real separation between church and state in the United States. The Soviet Union is the only country in the world, he explained, where there isn’t a state-backed religion and that’s really why we want to destroy it.
“He told me this – now this is a KGB agent talking – he told me that the state of Rhode Island required all candidates for governor to sign a statement which said they believed in the Holy Trinity! That’s outrageous – if it’s true. I never checked it, but it sounds like something we’d do. I mean, the Boy Scouts of America requires its members to believe in a deity, doesn’t it? I know it does! I think that really sucks. I mean, he was right, we have a government-sponsored religion. We force people to believe that there is a God.
“So the truth was that this KGB agent and I really began to develop a genuine friendship, I honestly believe that. I really think this guy liked me and it bothered him that I was doing this only for the money. He really wanted to win me over, so I listened to him and sometimes agreed with him. I think it made him feel better.”
A short time after he returned from Vienna to Norfolk, John called Jerry to ask for his help. John had been sued by a Norfolk investor who claimed that John owed him money because of a business deal that involved John’s professional sales association.
John had decided to scare the investor into dropping his $10,000 lawsuit by threatening him with violence.
“Jerry, we’re going to run a little scam on this guy,” John explained over the telephone. “I need you to come out here and pose as a Mafia goon.”
Jerry loved it and flew to Norfolk. Together, he and John paid a visit to the investor, and with Jerry standing silently behind him as a “Mafia enforcer,” John threatened to kill the investor if he didn’t drop the lawsuit. The ruse apparently worked because Norfolk court records show the case was dismissed at the plaintiff’s request.
Jerry returned to California and duty aboard the U.S.S. Niagara Falls which soon left on an extended Pacific cruise.
On December 14, 1978, John flew to Manila to meet with Jerry at the Philippine Plaza Hotel. The Niagara Falls was anchored at Subic Bay to replenish its supplies, just as it had done when John was aboard.
Jerry’s delivery was impressive. Working diligently during a four-month period, Jerry had copied the technical manuals for five more cryptographic machines, along with keylists for them. This delivery, when added to all previous ones, gave the Soviets the internal diagrams of nearly all U.S. cryptographic machines and was later described by federal prosecutors as the most damaging disclosure that Jerry Whitworth made as a spy.
In effect, Jerry passed John sufficient information in Manila for the Soviets to reconstruct all of the United States’s most widely used cryptographic machines. Intelligence experts would later claim that the military would have to spend several million dollars to alter the machines and hurry newer types of machines into place.
John had toyed with the idea of mixing business and pleasure in the Philippines. He had thought about trying to find his former Filipino girlfriend, Peaches, and returning to her picturesque home. But after he saw what Jerry had collected for him, he was simply too nervous to take any chances. John knew how important the documents were that Jerry had photographed. Even one technical manual by itself would have been sufficient to thrill the KGB, but Jerry had far surpassed that.
John flew home the day after the meeting with Jerry. On January 27, 1979, in what now had become an almost routine procedure, John delivered the film to his KGB handler in Vienna outside the Bazala store. It was another painfully frosty night, but this time John wore electric socks to keep his feet warm.
Both men were elated by what Jerry had photographed. At one point, the KGB agent broke his self-imposed rule again
st their leaving the freezing city sidewalks. He motioned John inside a modest coffeehouse. It reminded John of some dank and dreary bars that he had frequented in Norfolk, but the temperature was much warmer than in the street.
The KGB agent ordered for both of them in fluent German. The coffee shop was filled with men and only one or two women. John had been ordered by his handler not to speak while inside for fear he would draw attention to himself, so John simply nodded when the pudgy waitress brought them two steaming cups of what John thought was black coffee and two bowls of soup.
The drink tasted bitter, and John could manage only a few swallows. His companion drank the brew easily and noisily sucked the soup from a large spoon.
When they went outside, John asked if the KGB had just tried to poison him by buying him such a poor cup of coffee. The KGB agent explained that the drink was Mokka, an after-dinner coffee favored by Austrians.
“You especially should like it,” the agent said.
He explained that in the late 1600s, the Austrians repelled an invasion by the Turks. One of the items left behind by the fleeing Turkish army was a bag filled with mysterious brown beans. No one knew what to do with them until an Austrian spy, who had operated inside a Turkish camp, came forward and taught his fellow countrymen how to brew the beans into coffee.
“Mokka,” the KGB handler said, “is a good drink for spies.”
This was a common story in Austria, one told routinely by tour guides and tour hosts, but John didn’t know it. He was impressed with his handler’s seeming “intelligence and wit.”
John returned to Norfolk delighted after the exchange. Everything seemed to be going right in the spring of 1979. The money that he was earning as a spy was enabling him, as he put it, to “live every fantasy that I ever had.”
On February 17, John and Patsy Marsee boarded John’s Grumman American AA-5B single-engine aircraft in Norfolk and left on a daring month-long South American escapade that John chronicled faithfully in his journal, “2/17 Fly low, we observe island chain running east-west. That’s impossible! Is our compass wrong? Has ‘Devil’s Triangle’ got us?”
The trip took them to Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru, and when they returned home, John telephoned Jerry to brag. “We virtually pushed my small plane to the limit of its endurance,” he said. “Just a small change in the weather could have killed us.”
Jerry was also enjoying his spy money.
On May 12, he gave a lavish party at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, one of the world’s oldest and most impressive hotels. After an elaborate sit-down dinner in a private dining room, Jerry stood and told the forty or more guests he wished to make an announcement. Everyone assumed he was going to announce his engagement to Brenda. Instead, he revealed that they had already been married for three years.
“Everyone was stunned,” John told me later with a chuckle. “Particularly old Roger Olson. He couldn’t believe that Jerry, his best buddy, had kept a secret from him. I loved it. Old Roger really didn’t have any idea about the kind of secrets that Jerry was keeping!”
Jerry paid for the entire evening, and, in some cases, for the transportation and lodging of his special guests, including John. Jerry had even invited two attractive women to the party because he thought John might find them appealing.
He was right.
“I had a really excellent sexual experience with both of them,” John bragged later. “In fact, one of the girls, I think she was nineteen, wanted me to take the train with her up to Coalinga, but I had to turn her down.”
John had other commitments. He and another Norfolk pilot, Mickey Baker, had agreed to ferry two small airplanes from Norfolk to Reykjavik, Iceland, in late May and early June. Each pilot was to be paid $1,000, plus expenses, for delivering the airplanes.
But John wasn’t doing it for the cash. The Icelandic flight in the Cessna 177 airplane was extremely dangerous. It was another adventure, another chance for John to prove he was better than his peers.
As soon as he returned, he flew to Europe for a June 30 meeting with the KGB in Vienna. This trip was particularly important because John had invited his mother, Peggy, to accompany him. Peggy had dreamed about visiting Italy. She still remembered most of the fairy tales that her father, Arthur Scararnuzzo, had told her about the old country.
“My Johnny had always told me that someday he was going to take me home to Italy,” Peggy told me later. “I never really believed him though, ‘cause kids, they say lots of things, and when he told me that he had bought the tickets and we really were going, why, I almost had cardiac arrest.”
Peggy was sixty-six years old when she and John left New York City, but by the time the airplane landed at Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, a few miles outside Rome, she felt like a teenager.
Peggy took dozens of photographs, which she carefully pasted in a scrapbook. Just as she and her husband had kept a scrapbook of their achievements when they were first married, now Peggy and her favorite son would keep a record.
“I was just so excited,” Peggy recalled. “I thought I was going to die and John, he says to me, ‘Mama, you’re embarrassing me,’ because I was just so excited about being there and seeing everything. But I didn’t care. It was just so wonderful. Oh, it was just so wonderful!”
After several days of frantic sightseeing, Peggy and John caught a seven A.M. train from Rome to Vienna, a seventeen-hour trip.
Vienna was disappointing after Rome.
Peggy went on a few tours while John was out “conducting some sort of business,” but she was ready to return to Scranton when it was time to leave Europe. Before she and John left their Viennese hotel, her son asked her to wear a money belt through U.S. Customs for him.
“It has some important papers in it that I don’t want stolen,” he told her. Peggy attached the bulky belt that John had sewn himself around her waist over her slip. It was not noticeable under her loose dress. Despite the discomfort, she obediently wore it throughout the long transatlantic flight to New York City.
“There’s no one like my Johnny,” Peggy said lovingly when we spoke later about the trip. “How many sons do you know who would take their mother on such an extraordinary trip?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that John had used her.
The money belt contained $24,000 from the KGB in fifty and one-hundred-dollar bills. Federal laws prohibit U.S. citizens from bringing more than $5,000 in currency into the country without reporting it.
I had been told about John’s scheme by Arthur, who also had mentioned it to the FBI.
“John told me that he had used our mother as a pack mule to bring his spy money into the country,” Arthur said during an interview. “He hid the money in a money belt and had her wear it, because he didn’t think anyone would search a little old grandmother. ‘Who’s gonna search a sweet little old lady?’ he asked me.
“And John was right. No one did.”
Chapter 35
The good times never last long enough.
Two months after John’s trip to Europe, Jerry arrived in Norfolk with troubling news. The Niagara Falls was being put into dry dock for overhaul, and the repairs would keep the ship out of commission for one year. Obviously, there was no need for the ship to use its cryptographic machines or to receive keylists when it was being worked on. So Jerry was losing his access.
Something else was bothering Jerry too. He and Brenda were having marital problems, in part because of his extended tours at sea aboard the supply ship. They’d been married nearly four years, but Jerry had been at sea much of that time.
“It’s become a problem,” Jerry explained.
John wasn’t surprised, nor did he believe that Jerry’s absences were the real root of Jerry’s marital strife. Brenda was changing.
In the beginning, when she was a teenager, she had depended upon Jerry for everything, and he had molded her. He had tried to do the same earlier to Shirley McClanahan and before tha
t to his first wife, Lynn. John recognized what was happening. Brenda was changing, growing up. Jerry began to feel insecure around her, particularly since she was about to finish her education. He was being forced to accept the threat of being married to an equal partner, and it obviously scared him.
“Okay, Jerry,” John said sympathetically, “why not request a transfer – shore duty?”
Jerry promised to try and after returning to California telephoned John with good news. He had been assigned to the Naval Telecommunications Center at Alameda, California, where he would not only be CMS custodian, but also chief of the message center and manager of the AUTODIN Center, which routed messages between the various services.
John congratulated him. It was another perfect assignment for a spy. But during their conversations, John felt that Jerry was hiding something from him.
“Jerry was as easy to read as a book sometimes,” John recalled. “The guy didn’t have much imagination.”
John pushed Jerry for an answer. What was bothering him?
And Jerry finally confessed. He was thinking about retiring from the Navy!
“That asshole didn’t realize the risk that he was going to put us in if he retired!” John recalled later.
It was time, he decided, to have a “heart-to-heart” talk with Jerry. It was also time for John to get himself some of that personal insurance he needed. It was time once again for him to approach another one of his children.
John always learned from his mistakes. He had tried to recruit Margaret and Cynthia too suddenly. So he was much more cautious with his youngest daughter, Laura. He began wooing her in early 1978 when he first learned that she had decided to join the Army after her graduation. In June, two weeks before Laura was to report to basic training, John flew to Maine and brought her back to Norfolk for a vacation.