by Earley, Pete
Arthur had one other thought as he looked over the numbers on the legal pad before him: “Why can’t people stay in the Navy forever? Why had I ever gotten out?”
Arthur had done well in the Navy. From the time he enlisted in 1953, he had seen the Navy as a safe harbor where he could “feel comfortable and secure without having to worry about setting the world on fire.”
Shortly after he and Rita married in May 1956, Arthur had announced, “I’ve decided to make the Navy my career. Why, if I put in twenty years and make chief petty officer – which shouldn’t be too difficult – I could retire at age thirty-eight and receive one hundred and seventy-five dollars per month for the rest of my life. Can you imagine that, Rita? The Navy would pay us one hundred and seventy-five dollars per month! Why, we’d be in fat city!”
Rita considered the comment significant. Neither of them, she told me later, ever “dreamed big.” Money wasn’t going to be the driving force in their lives. A decent job, a decent home, a decent income, and decent kids. That’s what life was all about.
In the Navy, Arthur’s motto was “Go along, get along.” Promotions came slowly, but they came. And when they did, Arthur recognized they were often based on luck and longevity as well as work.
“I never looked upon myself as unique or anything like that,” Arthur told me during a prison interview. “I always saw myself as just a run-of-the-mill sort of guy and that really never bothered me.”
In the 1960s, when other sailors clamored for duty on a nuclear-powered sub, Arthur stayed behind on diesel-powered boats. It took him seven years to rise to the petty officer rank of sonarman first class. By comparison, John rose to a similar rank in less than five years. The Navy did commission Arthur as an ensign, but he was chosen during the post-Korean War period when there was a shortage of naval officers and the Navy decided to lower its qualifications.
Even after he became an officer, Arthur’s career was not glamorous. His best assignment was his last, when he was named an instructor of antisubmarine warfare techniques at the Atlantic Fleet Tactical School in Norfolk. He taught there from 1968 until his retirement in July 1973, and during that assignment, he rose slowly through the ranks to lieutenant commander.
Arthur’s personal life was as ordinary as his career. Rita had stayed home and raised their three children. He had been active in a few neighborhood projects, but nothing outstanding. They lived on a tight budget. Their only real financial asset was their red-brick home, which had cost them $27,500 in 1968.
As long as Arthur was in the Navy, his life was orderly, routine, and satisfying. His kids did well in school and avoided the drug and truancy problems that John’s encountered.
But in July 1973 the Navy nudged Arthur out, and his life slowly began to fall apart. At first, things looked promising. Arthur went into business with some sailor pals and earned about $1,000 per month peddling frozen chickens, playing cards, and candles to military exchanges. The sales commissions were enough, with his Navy pension, to pay the bills.
Arthur wasn’t happy though; he didn’t like sales and there were problems with his partners. So he went out on his own, selling car radios. Military communities were filled with young sailors anxious to upgrade the radio systems in their cars.
Arthur got a $10,000 second mortgage on the house, filled the garage with inventory, and went to work. His pitch was simple. Why pay several hundred dollars for a mundane radio manufactured by an auto maker in Detroit when you could buy a superior unit from him at half the price? His best customers turned out to be car dealers who were dissatisfied with what Detroit had to offer.
Within a few months, Arthur was being pressured by several dealers to install the radios that he sold. He was on a roll, but no bank in town would give him another loan. So Arthur turned to John for help, and the two brothers formed Walker Enterprises, incorporating it in June 1975 – one year before John and Barbara divorced.
As usual, John thought big, and from the start, he pushed Arthur to expand. At first, cash wasn’t a problem. John just dug into his pockets and advanced Arthur a series of personal loans. By 1976, Walker Enterprises had moved into a large rented building and Arthur had hired a receptionist and four mechanics to install radios and air conditioning units.
But the company began to flounder in 1977, at about’ the same time John began withdrawing his financial support. By the next year, Arthur had lost all of his big customers. Detroit auto makers had gotten tough and had begun pressuring dealers to buy accessories directly from them, not from local outfits like Arthur’s.
By late 1979, Arthur’s dream company had become a horror show of debts.
“Things at home really deteriorated too,” Arthur Walker recalled.
After Barbara and John were divorced, Rita severed all ties with her brother-in-law, and she urged Arthur to do the same.
“Art’s friendship with John really got to be a bone of contention between us,” Rita acknowledged later. “I didn’t like John, never did. Also, Arthur was killing himself. He was working round the dock at the business, and John didn’t do a damn thing. I really resented it.”
On that December 1979 afternoon – when he totaled up the company’s debits and credits on a legal pad – Arthur finally stopped fooling himself. He called John to ask for advice.
“Goddamn Arthur, this is a nightmare,” John said after examining the company’s books. “Arthur, we got to shut this baby down right now before everything gets flushed down the drain. Let’s shut the doors and say the hell with it.”
That night, John typed a “kiss off” letter for Arthur to mail to all of Walker Enterprises’s creditors. The company had gone bust. Shutting down Walker Enterprises wasn’t as simple as John had naively promised. Several companies sued, and the IRS called Arthur to task for not withholding his employees’ payroll taxes.
Arthur was hounded by feelings of guilt and failure. One afternoon, Rita found him in their bedroom laying out his old Navy uniform.
“What are you doing, Art?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied. “Just making certain I got everything, I guess. You know, with all the trouble going on in Iran with the hostages, you never know when the Navy might call me back.”
Rita began worrying about Arthur’s mental stability. “He was really acting strange,” she recalled.
John recognized his brother’s despondency, too, but in it, he also saw an opportunity. Shortly after New Year’s Day in 1980, John invited Arthur to lunch. He picked him up and drove north about two miles from Arthur’s house to a tiny restaurant at the end of a small shopping center. Along the way, John tried to cheer up his older brother. “Life can really be a bitch,” John said. “But, hey, we’re the Walker boys, remember? Everything is going to work out.”
Arthur didn’t think so. During lunch, all he could talk about was how terrible his life had become.
“I feel almost helpless for the first time in my life,” he told John. “I don’t seem to have any control over anything. What’s happening here? I mean, I was trying to do the right thing at work, but we just kept getting deeper and deeper in debt. Now I got to get a job and feed the family and come up with some way to payoff all these debts.”
After lunch, the two men returned to John’s truck.
“Damn it,” Arthur said, “I could just cry.”
“C’mon, let’s walk,” John said. He put his arm around Arthur’s shoulder. As the two brothers stepped down the sidewalk, John said, “I think I know a way for you to get out of this mess.”
Chapter 37
John was scheduled to meet his KGB contact in Vienna on January 26, 1980. Having in his own mind safely recruited both Laura and Arthur, he left for Oakland on January 19 with a dual purpose: pick up whatever film Jerry had for him and convince Jerry to change his mind about retiring.
Jerry needed both a kick and a carrot. The carrot was easy. John intended to offer Jerry more money if he stayed in the Navy and kept producing as a spy. He
was certain the KGB would back him up. But the kick would come first. Jerry’s access at Alameda was excellent, but Jerry wasn’t producing. Knowing that he was about to retire, he had begun to lose interest in spying.
“It’s just too difficult to get anything good, Johnny,” Jerry complained when they got together. The communications center at Alameda was much too crowded, and Jerry was worried about being discovered. Just before he had left the U.S.S. Niagara Falls, he had been caught by his boss, Terry Cliffton Pierce, looking at schematics of cryptographic equipment. Pierce had demanded an immediate explanation, but Jerry, keeping his cool, had wiggled out of the situation by claiming that he was having a problem with one of the cryptographic machines and was trying to repair it. The answer had satisfied Pierce, but just the same, the incident scared Jerry.
“Do you honestly believe you can just quit?” John finally asked, after listening patiently to Jerry’s complaints. “Don’t you understand the danger you’re putting us in, not to mention Brenda? Who do you think we’re dealing with, some dipshit in western New York?”
Jerry seemed amused. Why should he or John have anything to worry about? Hadn’t John been assuring him that the stolen cryptographic material was going to ally nations? Why would they wish to hurt either of them? John was overreacting in an attempt to keep him from quitting.
“You’ve been reading too many spy novels,” Jerry said.
“Jerry, this is not some two-bit spy book,” John replied. “What I’m trying to make you understand is that you could be putting us both in danger by retiring. The people I have been dealing with are very dangerous people. The items that we have given them are only good as long as no one knows they have been compromised. Now do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”
Jerry continued to brush John’s warnings aside. Once again, he accused John of exaggerating.
John exploded.
“You dumb asshole!” he snapped. “You could get us both killed! This is not some stupid game! Haven’t you ever heard of the fucking umbrella trick? Don’t you read the goddamn newspapers? This shit really happens!
“The people we are dealing with,” John added, his voice intense, “can reach anywhere in the world – anywhere! You can’t hide from them. They are that powerful!”
Jerry’s demeanor changed.
John’s comment about the “umbrella trick” was a direct reference to the sensational September 1978 murder of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian defector, who had died mysteriously in a London hospital. Before his death, Markov told the police that he had been poked in the leg with the tip of an umbrella. Surgeons discovered a minute hollow metal ball in Markov’s thigh containing traces of ricin, one of the five most toxic substances in the world.
Police theorized that the murderer jabbed the ball into Markov’s leg with the umbrella tip, and the poison escaped after the heat of Markov’s body melted wax used to seal two tiny holes in the ball.
Because Markov was a persuasive anticommunist commentator for the British Broadcasting Corporation, intelligence officials immediately claimed the KGB had executed Markov. John had read all the news stories he could find about Markov’s death, and he and Jerry had discussed the daring murder shortly after it occurred.
“Jerry’s face got white, and I realized that he had finally figured out what I was saying,” John said. “I think he had actually convinced himself through the years that we were helping the fucking Israelis! I think he was genuinely surprised when it dawned on him who I was selling the information to. Not that it mattered. After all, I told him at the start that the buyers could have been the Mafia or an enemy as well as an ally. He knew that from the start.”
The next morning, John had a chat with Brenda about Jerry’s request for retirement. The discussion was held after Jerry left for work.
“We were sitting in the living room having coffee and Brenda was all excited about her school work, bubbling on with joy about how Jerry was getting out and she was going to become a doctor of nutrition and also a doctor of medicine so she could do research or whatever, and as I’m sitting there listening to her ramble on and on, I thought, ‘Geez, she had been married to Jerry for five or six years by now, and he has gotten about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in spy money, and they have been living this good life, and she doesn’t have any fucking idea about what is going on!’ I mean, here is a person with an IQ of God only knows, one hundred and eighty or more, and she thinks Jerry is going to be able to support her schooling if he gets out of the Navy.”
John decided to burst Brenda’s bubble. “Brenda, you realize, don’t you, that Jerry and I have income on the side through an interest that we invested in together?” John asked.
Yes, she understood that. John was blunt. “That money is contingent on Jerry having a certain type of job and being in a certain geographic area, and the scenario that you just have spelled out to me makes it clear that Jerry isn’t going to be getting any more money from our investments.”
Brenda seemed unconcerned. They could manage without the extra money, she said.
“Brenda, I’m not sure that you have any conception of what kind of income Jerry really has,” John said. “I think you should talk to him about it.”
(Brenda Reis Whitworth declined to be interviewed. This conversation is based on John Walker’s statements to the author and the FBI, and various polygraph examinations that John took.)
After Jerry got home from work, he and John talked again about his decision to retire. It was time for the carrot.
“I think we should ask for more money,” John told Jerry.
Five or six thousand dollars per month. Jerry liked the idea. John went on to explain that he’d come up with a way for Jerry to photograph documents at Alameda without being caught.
“What you need is a van to photograph this shit in,” John explained. “Look, I’ll try to get you, say, ten thousand for a new van. You drive it to work and at lunch time you tell folks that you have to take a nap or whatever. You stick stuff in your briefcase, take it with you, and photograph stuff, then you simply take the stuff back in your office.”
It sounded like a workable plan to Jerry.
“By the time I left,” John recalled, “I felt confident that Jerry was going to pull his request for retirement and buy a van.”
John received some unexpected help in scaring Jerry back into line from an unusual source. Christopher John Boyce, a twenty-seven-year-old Californian convicted of being a KGB spy, had escaped from the federal correction institution at Lompoc, California.
Jerry had followed Boyce’s trial and discussed it with John, who also had developed an interest in Boyce and his partner, Daulton Lee, the subjects of the 1979 best-selling book, The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage by New York Times reporter Robert Lindsey.
Several members of the media speculated after Boyce escaped that he had been broken out of a federal prison by specially trained agents of the KGB, who had smuggled him out of the country and into Russia.
Jerry followed the story closely. Imagine, the KGB breaking a spy out of prison! Sweet Jesus, if that was true, Russian agents really did have a long reach.
John barely had time to unpack on his return to Norfolk before he headed for Vienna. The wind was blowing and it was snowing when John met with his KGB contact on January 26. John had told the Russians in a dead drop note delivered a month earlier that Jerry had been transferred to Alameda, but he had not mentioned that Jerry had put in for retirement. Now that he had recruited Laura and Arthur, and also convinced Jerry to stay in, John felt the meeting with the KGB would go smoothly. But he found his KGB contact in a foul mood.
“Why did Jerry move? What’s wrong with him?” the agent asked.
“He had to move,” John explained. “His ship was put in dry dock and all his equipment was shut down.”
“He was supposed to be aboard the ship for three years,” the agent said. “You promised us three years.”
John named the cryptographic systems that Jerry was working with. They included the KW-36 and the KGB’s much beloved KW-7. He also had access to some technical manuals and lots of message traffic. The problem, John explained, was that Jerry didn’t have anywhere safe to photograph documents. The communications center was much too busy to risk Jerry smuggling in his Minox for photographs.
“But I’ve come up with a solution,” John explained. “You need to buy Jerry a van so that he can photograph documents in it during his noon lunch break.”
John expected the KGB agent to be impressed by his solution, but instead, the agent looked confused and asked John to explain his idea once again. The problem, John discovered during the second explanation, was that the agent didn’t realize what John was talking about when he used the word van. The KGB agent thought he meant a large truck used by companies for deliveries. How, the agent asked John at one point, could Jerry drive such a vehicle to work without appearing suspicious?
“Listen,” John said, after explaining what a van looked like, “everyone in California rides around in vans. It ain’t going to be a problem.” John couldn’t believe how stupid his handler seemed to be.
Once again, the KGB agent broke one of his own rules and hustled John into a Vienna coffeehouse so that the two of them could get warm. They sat, as before, at a back corner table, and as they drank their hot drinks in silence, John noticed that his KGB handler seemed nervous. Outside on the sidewalk again, the agent and John struck a deal. The Russians were willing to give Jerry $10,000 for a van, and they would also pay John and Jerry as much as $12,000 per month for good crypto, the agent said.
But that was not all.
“Tell Jerry we will pay him a ten-thousand-dollar bonus if he can get unbroken crypto for three straight months. This is important.”