Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  The agent also told John that the KGB couldn’t get their replica of a KWR-37 cryptographic machine, which they had built according to the technical manuals that Jerry had stolen, to decipher Navy messages. John immediately volunteered to get Jerry to look into the problem.

  “There is one other thing you should know,” John said. “I’ve recruited Laura and talked with Arthur.”

  The KGB agent was so shocked by John’s announcement that he stopped in his tracks for a moment. Why, he demanded hotly, had John taken such a dangerous step without permission?

  “He was really pissed off about Laura,” John recalled. “He told me that she would never give us anything and that she was a big risk. I don’t know how he knew that, but he did. He told me she was nothing but trouble.”

  John did his best to cool the agent’s anger. He explained that Barbara knew he was a spy and that she had told all of his kids that he was a spy. Recruiting Laura and Arthur might have been foolish, but John didn’t consider either of them a real danger.

  “Laura is too weak a person to ever turn me in,” he said, “and Arthur would never turn on me because we are of the same blood.”

  The agent was unconvinced. “There are people in your country who have come to us before. You aren’t the first,” he snapped, “and some of these people have helped the cause of peace for years and retired, yes, actually retired and died in their beds of old age without anyone ever knowing they were our friends.

  “But,” the agent said, “there have been those who have come to us through the years who have been foolish. They have been exposed. The chances of being captured expand each time another person is added to the circle.”

  John listened closely, but his natural cockiness kept him from revealing any outward anxiety.

  Suddenly, the agent became silent. He stopped and faced John.

  “People can get hurt in this business,” he said.

  After several silent seconds, he added, “You must realize that you are not the only person at risk here.”

  John was confused. His first thought, he said later, was that the KGB agent was suggesting John’s family could be in danger. But he later decided that the agent was talking about himself.

  “It suddenly hit me that this guy had his ass on the line too! I mean, he had to explain to someone in Moscow why Whitworth had been transferred, and he had to get us raises and tell his bosses back in Red Square how I had recruited Laura and Art without his permission. I think he was a bit worried too. I mean, who wants to be sent to Siberia?”

  The two men spoke for a long time, and eventually they both began to relax.

  Before their meeting ended the KGB agent asked John for a favor.

  “Tell me my friend,” he said, “how is my English?”

  John nearly burst out laughing, but he knew the agent was serious. Perhaps the misunderstanding about vans had made him question his grasp of the language.

  “Your English is okay,” John replied.

  “Is that all?” the KGB agent responded.

  “It’s fine, really, although it is somewhat outdated sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?” the agent asked.

  “Well, we don’t use words like dough or bread for money anymore.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “Money or cash.”

  Both men laughed.

  “It wouldn’t hurt if you threw in a bit of profanity,” John continued. “You see, most American men cuss a lot.”

  There was nothing wrong, John explained, enjoying the role of teacher, in occasionally sprinkling a conversation with obscenities.

  “Of course, if you really want to fit in around sailors, there is only one word you need to know.” John told the agent that military veterans loved to use a four-letter word that was slang for intercourse.

  The agent seemed offended by such language. He said that only the uneducated used such vulgarities, but he had read and heard stories about American leaders such as Richard Nixon using such words in private.

  Before the two men parted, the agent promised to deliver $200,000 to John on May 18 at a dead drop outside Washington. This would include raises in pay and also money for the van.

  “From now on, no more recruitment without talking to me first,” he added. “We must be careful.”

  The Russian began to walk away, but stopped, turned, and said something that John couldn’t quite make out because of the wind. As John made his way back to the U-Bahn and his hotel, he realized what the agent had said.

  John’s KGB handler had taken John’s advice seriously. He had told John to “get fucked.”

  “He really had a great sense of humor for a Russian,” John said later. “I was beginning to like him a lot.”

  John telephoned Jerry after returning from Vienna to Norfolk.

  “Have you seen Mary Ann recently?” he asked during a brief conversation.

  It was a prearranged signal. Exactly one hour after Jerry received that telephone call, he drove to a pay telephone several miles from his house. When it rang, he answered. John was on the line calling from a pay phone in Norfolk.

  “Jerry, you should go ahead and buy the van,” John said. “We can get ten thousand dollars for it. Also, there’s a bonus for you if you can get three months of unbroken yellow [yellow crypto keylist cards].”

  “I’ve canceled my retirement request,” Jerry said. “Everything is a go!”

  Chapter 38

  Had John Walker, Jr., not been a spy, he would have liked to have joined the FBI after retiring from the Navy. This is what he said, with all seriousness, during one of our prison interviews. The idea of exposing people, catching them doing something wrong, really turned John on. As it was, he became a private detective after his sales association folded. His first job was with Wackenhut, an international security company.

  John simply appeared at the Wackenhut office one afternoon and asked to speak to Philip Prince, the manager of investigations. Prince had been in charge of Wackenhut’s office in Norfolk for only one month and had been a private detective for only four months, but his inexperience didn’t show. He was a highly decorated retired Marine who had served three tours of duty in Vietnam. His military experience gave Prince a self-assured style that impressed John.

  John’s proposition was simple. He was willing to work dirt cheap in return for on-the-job training.

  “Money really isn’t a problem,” he told Prince. “I’ve got my pension and I’ve made some really hot investments. I don’t want to earn more than five thousand a year or I’ll get Uncle Sam peeking into my knickers.”

  John’s timing proved to be perfect. Wackenhut had been much more interested in promoting its security guard services in Norfolk than in investigating cases. As a result, Prince’s office was poorly staffed, poorly equipped, and poorly budgeted.

  “He was very up front about what he wanted,” Prince told me later, “and quite frankly, I was impressed. John spoke intelligently and at the same time admitted that he had a lot to learn. The biggest thing was he was dying to go to work. I mean immediately!”

  Prince sent John to Thomas Nelson Community College, where he whizzed through several special courses on arrest procedures and suspects’ rights that the state required before granting a private investigator a license.

  At the time, Wackenhut handled mostly messy divorce cases. Virginia didn’t have a no-fault divorce law, so angry spouses often hired Wackenhut to find evidence of adultery. Prince was trying to move the agency away from such piddling cases into investigations of insurance fraud, a more interesting and lucrative area.

  Because of its shipyards and large blue-collar work force, the Tidewater area was a hotbed for workmen’s compensation claims, and it was not unusual for an insurance company to find itself being ordered to pay benefits to a disabled worker for the rest of his life. However, if an insurer could prove the worker hadn’t been seriously injured while on the job or had exaggerated those injuries, it could either c
ancel or reduce its liability payments.

  John soon became Wackenhut’s star investigator of insurance fraud. While other Wackenhut employees were content to punch a time clock, he worked nonstop. Each case John was assigned seemed bigger and more important to him than the last. And he refused to give up until he obtained a “kill” – his terminology for catching a disabled worker doing some physical task that he shouldn’t have been able to accomplish because of a work-related injury.

  John hated to waste time and rather than waiting for a “suspect” to do something wrong, he began “setting them up.”

  His first so-called sting operation involved a suspect with a back injury. John let the air out of one of the man’s car tires and then took photographs of him lifting the spare tire out of his car trunk.

  “John had a theory about being a private investigator,” a fellow detective, Lonzo Thompson, told The Washington Post later. “His theory was: Always set the person up. Just don’t sit there. Tempt them. Play on a person’s greed. He felt everybody was basically greedy and you always get them through greed.”

  John’s sting operations soon took on the elaborateness of a Mission: Impossible operation. He even gave each sting its own name. He was proudest of the “Great Grocery Giveaway,” a scam that involved no less than four or five fellow detectives.

  The grocery giveaway sting was created to catch a woman who had suffered a back injury. John had a special circular printed that said the woman had won $50 worth of free groceries at a neighborhood store. But she had to collect them within five minutes. The woman raced to the store without putting on her neck and back braces. In the parking lot was a cart filled with the heaviest groceries that John could find. As the woman lifted the bags out of the cart, John hid in his van and took pictures.

  John remained the master of the sting. “I really saw myself as the producer,” John told me later. “I would use secretaries, professional actors, just about anyone I wanted to hire to produce a perfect scam. I could pull one on anyone and make it believable.

  “The things I did as a private detective,” John continued, “were much more exciting and imaginative than what I did as a spy.”

  Tempting people and catching them seemed to prove to John that his view of mankind as basically corrupt was accurate.

  John always posed as someone else on a case, even when he didn’t need to. It was all part of the drama and intrigue. His favorite disguise was that of a Roman Catholic priest. He was accused of posing at various times as a Boy Scout leader looking for a campsite, a surveyor purporting to survey the land in the vicinity and a bird-watcher attempting to take photographs of wildlife.

  Besides disguises, John became an expert in other phases of private detective work.

  He spent more than $25,000 on various video cameras, pinhole lenses, and electronic bugging devices. He also bought several trick canes: one contained a short sword, another had a stiff spring inside it that could be used as a dub, a third was a black-powder rifle, and the last had a secret vial inside that could be used to hide poison or alcohol.

  “Most investigators only wore a gun when they were going on an assignment which was obviously dangerous,” Prince recalled later, “but John was married to his gun.”

  Whenever Prince and John went out to lunch, John removed his sports jacket.

  “I really think he wanted people to see that he was carrying a gun,” Prince said.

  Sometimes John carried three guns at a time. “Look, I’m not a weight lifter, I have poor eyesight and I’m vulnerable because of that,” John told a co-worker one day. “A guy like me has to make sure that he has superior firepower.”

  Wackenhut was hired to provide security at a wedding reception one afternoon, and John was assigned to help check invitations at the front gate of the posh estate. The night before, he startled a fellow detective by telephoning to ask what kind of “firepower” the man was bringing with him.

  “Here’s what I’m packing,” John volunteered. “My first three rounds will be armor-piercing bullets so I can take out a car if it crashes the gate by shooting its engine. The next two rounds will be hollow-point bullets for maximum stopping power when the suspects exit the car. I’m also bringing my rifle with the banana clips, which can carry up to ninety rounds.”

  His fellow detectives never knew when John was telling the truth or exaggerating, in part because he so frequently mixed the two. One of John’s co-workers recalled, for example, that John had taught him how to investigate burglaries.

  “Do you know how you can tell if a professional burglar or some kid ransacked a house?” John asked him one day. “A kid will go through a chest of drawers from the top down, which means he has to open and close each drawer as he works his way down the chest. But a pro starts at the bottom and works up so all he has to do is open each drawer. He never has to close a drawer.”

  John was right, the co-worker said, but he couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  “After he told me that, he started telling me how he had solved more burglaries than the entire police department. It was just nonsense.”

  Prince liked John, but Michael Bell, the manager of investigations for Wackenhut’s Richmond office, didn’t. He thought John was a dangerous “windbag.”

  When singer John Denver arrived in Norfolk to perform, Wackenhut was hired to provide security. John was anxious to help, but Bell convinced Prince to give him the plum assignment.

  “John was furious that he wasn’t involved,” Bell recalled later, “but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.”

  That didn’t stop John from telling people that he had helped. “John Denver never gives anyone autographs,” he bragged after the concert to a girlfriend, “but I did manage to get him to sign a few things for me.”

  It was conversations like this that made some detectives at Wackenhut wonder about John’s credibility.

  One night, Prince took John to the UDT Seal Club, a watering hole for retired Seals, the elite special forces in the Navy.

  “Most of the guys who hung out there were rough boys who had been through a lot of combat and training, and weren’t afraid of getting into a good fight,” Prince recalled later.

  John’s usual swagger disappeared when the two men entered the bar, and his chatter about scams and gun battles never surfaced. After a few quick drinks, John excused himself and left. The next morning when John came to work, he shrugged off his obvious discomfort in the Seal Club.

  “The kind of shit we are doing is just as dangerous as anything those guys ever did,” he told Prince, but Prince disagreed. He told John that anyone could talk a good game, but few could deliver in a combat situation.

  Prince asked John how he would have reacted if someone in the bar had picked a fight with him. Without any sign of embarrassment, John said that he would have talked his way out of a fight.

  “It would have been the only smart thing for me to do because of my size and age,” John explained. “I’m not into macho bullshit.”

  But, John added, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have gotten even.

  “Phil, it might take three years or even longer,” John said, “but I’m a Sicilian, and we Sicilians always get revenge.”

  To illustrate his point, John recalled how he had gotten even one night with a woman friend who had irritated him. The two of them were in a bar when the woman decided that John should drive her from Norfolk to the seashore nearby.

  John was drunk and didn’t want to go, but ultimately gave in.

  He said the woman undid the zipper on his trousers while he was driving and engaged in oral sex with him as he drove. A few seconds after the woman began, John reached the toll booths on the Virginia Beach Expressway. He had a quarter and could have driven through the automatic toll gate, but instead, he aimed his car at a toll booth with a female attendant in it and gradually brought the car to a stop. The woman engaged in sex with John looked up into the face of a startled attendant, John said, laughing.

&
nbsp; “If you fuck with me,” John explained, “you’ll pay a price.”

  Chapter 39

  Working as a private detective dovetailed perfectly with John’s spying. It gave him an instant justification for a quick trip to Washington and frequent excursions to California.

  On May 18, 1980, John retrieved $200,000 from the KGB at a dead drop. Twelve days later, he and Patsy Marsee flew to Oakland where Jerry and Brenda were waiting. Jerry led the group outside the airport terminal to see his silver and blue Dodge Ram van. Inside was a chilled bottle of champagne and an assortment of cheeses, which the foursome savored on the ride to Jerry and Brenda’s new condominium in San Leandro. When they were alone the next morning, John counted out Jerry’s share: $100,000 in fifty and one-hundred-dollar bills. Jerry was excited. “I’ve never held one hundred thousand dollars before!”

  The new van was working flawlessly at Alameda, Jerry reported. He had told his subordinates that his physician had placed him on a rigorous program of morning exercises that required him to take a noontime nap. This gave him the freedom to photograph documents whenever he wished by simply slipping them into his briefcase and going out to his van to rest.

  Once inside, with the curtains pulled tight, Jerry could photograph without fear of interruption. He merely returned the documents after he finished. He was confident that he could earn the $10,000 bonus that John’s “buyers” had offered for three months’ worth of consecutive keylists.

  A few days after John returned from California, he received an unexpected visit from Laura and his new grandson, Christopher, less than a month old. Laura was going to show Christopher to Mark’s parents. Then she would continue north to Maine to show Barbara the baby.

  John made a fuss over Christopher and Laura, and then, after dinner that night, once again pressured her to become a spy. John’s offer apparently remained on Laura’s mind when she arrived in Skowhegan, because she told her mother about it.

  Laura’s visit and revelation that spring came at a dramatic time in Barbara Walker’s life. Her beloved son, Michael, had decided to leave her.