Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  Soon another major insurance company began sending Confidential Reports work.

  Word was getting around the insurance industry – Confidential Reports got results. John and his roughshod tactics were the reason. And, as he had promised, John always included Michael as his willing apprentice.

  Michael had always been small for his age, and when he filed an application with the Virginia Department of Commerce for a private investigator’s license, he could easily have passed for a boy much younger than eighteen. He had a baby face, weighed only 120 pounds, and stood only five feet, five inches tall.

  But Michael was a tremendous private investigator because he wasn’t afraid of anything.

  Because of his size, Michael could perform surveillance jobs that his father couldn’t. Once Confidential Reports was hired to watch a suspect, but each time John drove to the man’s neighborhood, he had to abort the surveillance because the suspect lived in an area with a neighborhood watch program, and whenever John parked near the suspect’s house, a concerned neighbor called the police.

  Frustrated, John put Michael on the job. The next morning, Michael donned a pair of short pants and a tee-shirt and rode his bike into the neighborhood. He stopped near the suspect’s house and sat on the curb “fixing” his bike. No one paid any attention.

  The next day, Michael tried a bolder approach by knocking on the door of the suspect’s house and offering to mow his lawn for a ridiculously low price. While Michael was mowing the grass, the suspect came outside with two glasses of lemonade. He and Michael began talking, and the novice investigator soon discovered enough for his father to set up a successful scam.

  Michael began dreaming up his own schemes, following his dad’s guidance.

  “I was patterning my life after his,” Michael recalled. “I wanted to be just as good as he was.”

  John wanted Michael to finish high school and had intended to enroll him in Frederick Military Academy in Norfolk when he first arrived, but after John read his son’s high school transcript, he knew the military academy wouldn’t accept the teenager. He telephoned officials at Ryan Upper School, one of the better nonmilitary private schools in Norfolk, and convinced them to give Michael a chance despite his dismal performance in the Skowhegan school system.

  Classes were difficult for Michael. He wasn’t as well prepared academically as most students. But he was smart enough to get a passing grade, and what he lacked in academic skills, he made up for socially.

  By the end of his first year, the class voted Michael “Mr. Personality.” Like his father, Michael seemed to have a talent for getting people to do what he wanted. The fact that he was almost two years older than most of his classmates helped. Michael was the only person in the junior class old enough to purchase beer legally, and that won him friends.

  Michael’s home life also impressed his classmates because he seemed to be able to do what he wanted and could throw a party whenever he wished.

  Michael’s parties soon became legendary at school. No one wanted to miss the free food, beer, and bedrooms that Michael made available. The parties also were “safe,” because Michael always hired bouncers. He also bragged that because his father was a private eye with contacts at the police department, no one had to worry about being busted.

  The marijuana growing in ceramic pots in Michael’s room only added to his classmates’ awe.

  An incident during the summer of 1981 showed how carefree life with Father could be. Michael was cleaning his dad’s houseboat (he had traded in The Dirty Old Man for a houseboat after the divorce) when John arrived home with two women he had met at a local bar. Both women were in their thirties, and John had promised them a cruise.

  Once underway, the two women paired off with John and Michael. Everyone began drinking heavily and after an hour of drifting under the hot sun, one woman announced she was going swimming. She took off her clothes and jumped into the water.

  John stripped and jumped in too, carefully holding his can of beer up over his head in an unsuccessful attempt to keep it from going under water. The woman with Michael giggled and began peeling off her clothing.

  Everyone was naked and in the water except for Michael, and when they yelled at him to join them, he refused.

  “I had a hard-on and didn’t want them to see me,” Michael recalled. “I was only eighteen and I was embarrassed. Of course, they all knew what was going on. I was standing on the boat like an idiot and everyone was laughing at me, so I thought. ‘What the hell?’ and I went to the other side of the boat and pulled down my pants and lowered myself off the side into the water. But then I thought, ‘Hey, this really sucks,’ so I climbed out of the water really quick, and I was drying off with this towel when the woman I’d been talking to climbs into the boat and comes up to me and rips off my towel.

  “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ because I was standing there naked, and she grabbed me and starts to kiss me and I pushed her away. ‘I can’t fuck you in front of my dad,’ I said, and everyone, including my father, just started roaring.”

  The woman persisted, but Michael just couldn’t do it with his father watching.

  Despite their closeness, Michael still knew that his father was keeping a secret from him. John made sure of it. He would drop hints periodically, usually when they were in some bar – Bob’s Runway, for instance.

  “Michael, you’re getting pretty old,” John said once.

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “You’re almost old enough for me to tell you how I make my extra money.”

  “Okay, how?”

  “Later. Maybe in a little while I’ll tell you.” John was dearer when he spoke to Michael about what he had planned for his son.

  From the moment Michael moved in, John began pestering him about the Navy, constantly talking about how great the service was. In the summer of 1981, before Michael’s final year in high school, John pushed even harder. He brought Michael brochures about various Navy programs and even had recruiters telephone Michael at home and chat with him.

  “Michael, you’ve got to do something with your life after school,” John said one evening while they were grilling hamburgers in the backyard.

  “I’m going to be a private investigator with you,” Michael replied.

  “No way,” John answered. “Look, Michael, there is no retirement program for PIs, no nothing. Being a PI is a career that someone starts after they retire.”

  “Okay,” Michael replied, “I’ll join the Navy.”

  “That would be great, son,” John replied. “You would really make your old man happy if you did that.”

  Years later, Michael looked back on that casual conversation and saw more importance in it than he had at the time.

  “I had always thought about going into the Navy because my dad was in the Navy. I liked the uniform and status that the Navy had. Besides, my dad was such a neat guy and I wanted to be like that. I really wanted to be like him. What I didn’t realize until later was that he had been grooming me to be a spy with all this private investigator stuff and talk about the Navy and being a radioman. I just didn’t see what was happening.”

  Chapter 41

  Jerry Whitworth flew to Norfolk on November 6, 1980, to deliver John another magnificent haul of documents. The NSA had started distributing a new cipher system known as the KG-36, and Jerry had copied a keylist for it and portions of its technical manual. He had photographed a keylist and updated schematics for the KWR-37 too, which the KGB had been having trouble getting to function. More importantly, he had collected ninety straight days of keylists for the KW-7 machine.

  On June 6, 1981, the KGB left $100,000 for John at a dead drop outside Washington. Inside was a note commending Jerry for his work. Using their prearranged code, John telephoned Jerry and told him that “the buyers” had paid $50,000 for his last delivery.

  Hoping to increase his earnings, Jerry had started dabbling in the stock market and real estate. His first purchases were high-risk, hi
gh-gain stocks, and he did poorly. Ultimately, he lost $30,000 in the stock market. But those losses didn’t seem to depress him. There was always plenty more money to spend.

  Like most radio operators, Jerry enjoyed electronic gadgets. He spent $1,218.90 at Mohmad Edid Abdallah’s television store during one shopping spree and eventually bought more than $20,000 worth of personal computer equipment.

  Jerry and Brenda had started living better too. They spent money for a painting and two sculptures. They began dining at San Francisco’s better restaurants. Jerry bought a Fiat convertible, a Mazda sports car, and “his and her” motorcycles. Jerry had moved a long way from Ayn Rand’s theory of objectivism.

  On July 12, Jerry and Brenda arrived in Norfolk for a short vacation. John paid Jerry the $60,000 in spy money and couldn’t help but marvel at the change in his friend.

  “He kept wanting me to push for more and more cash,” John claimed later. “Jerry kept complaining. He said we were being underpaid for the risks that we were taking, particularly since he was providing such good information. Jerry would ask me, ‘John, do you know how much one nuclear missile costs? Or one little communication satellite? Those things cost millions of dollars each, but we are providing information that is more important than a missile or a satellite and what are we getting out of it?’ ”

  Then Jerry made a suggestion that John later claimed astounded him. Jerry had found someone else to bring into the spy ring! He wanted to recruit another spy! The candidate was a disgruntled Navy lieutenant assigned to the U.S.S. Independence, an aircraft carrier. The lieutenant and Jerry had met and talked endlessly about world politics. Jerry was confident that his newly made friend could be turned.

  John quizzed Jerry about the lieutenant and then cautioned Jerry against approaching the man until “our foreign buyers” approved the plan.

  “Doesn’t it bother you,” Jerry asked John after telling him about the lieutenant, “that we are so good at this and no one will ever know it?”

  John nodded. Privately, however, Jerry’s transformation was beginning to worry him. If the KGB approved Jerry’s plan, then Jerry would become the new spy’s handler.

  John wasn’t sure he liked that. There was one thing, however, that John was certain about. Jerry Whitworth had found a new fad to follow: greed.

  Chapter 42

  After Walker Enterprises collapsed, Arthur Walker found himself needing a job. This time, he fell back on his Navy experience and went to work at VSE Corporation, one of the largest publicly held defense contractors. With more than 1,700 employees in twenty-six offices around the country, VSE handles thousands of classified documents each day. Arthur helped identify what kind of repairs were needed during ship overhauls in Norfolk.

  Arthur told me that he hadn’t really fully understood what John meant in January 1980 when the two of them had taken a walk outside the restaurant. “John didn’t say, ‘Hey, Art, you want to be a spy?’ He just planted a few seeds.” But after that initial conversation, John got more specific, and by the fall of 1980, John was pestering Arthur about getting documents for him.

  Arthur knew better.

  He had been thoroughly familiar with espionage laws while in the Navy, and in February 1980, shortly after going to work for VSE, he had signed a statement that said, “I shall not knowingly and willfully communicate, deliver, or transmit, in any manner, classified information to an unauthorized person or agency. I am informed that such improper disclosure may be punishable under federal criminal statutes ...”

  In retrospect, the FBI would decide that John used a textbook KGB method to entrap Arthur. He began by asking Arthur to let him look at unclassified materials, and when Arthur brought some samples one afternoon to John’s van in the parking lot outside VSE, John gave him an envelope filled with cash.

  “Consider it upfront money,” John said.

  Inside was $6,000, an intentionally extravagant payment for seemingly worthless material.

  “John, don’t give me any money for this,” Arthur protested. “Besides, you’re paying all the debts from Walker Enterprises.”

  John agreed to take back $2,000 from the envelope, but he insisted that Arthur keep the rest.

  “Keep it to play with,” John said, “and for godsakes, don’t tell Rita about it.”

  Arthur tucked the money in his briefcase. A few days later, John asked Arthur for more documents.

  “The only thing that I have that anyone would be remotely interested in would be some general ship plans which are unclassified,” Arthur replied. “Do you want something like that?”

  “Yeah, if it can make us some money, then do it.”

  “Okay, how do you want to do it?” asked Arthur, assuming that John intended to photograph the documents.

  John laughed, and gave his brother the news: “Hell no, you do it.”

  “He showed me a Minox and a Kodak 110 camera,” Arthur later told me, “and I felt more comfortable with the Kodak, so I took some general plans that were unclassified out of the office and drove down one night to his detective agency, and I photographed them. It was challenging work because the plans were large and difficult to photograph.”

  Arthur called John the next day.

  “Hey John, the photos of the general plans are in your drawer.”

  “Hey, great, thanks for helping me out.”

  Arthur figured he’d gotten off easy. “I didn’t feel bad at all because the general plans weren’t classified and I had helped him out and, remember, he was footing all the debts from Walker Enterprises.”

  But Arthur had given John more than he realized.

  The plans that Arthur photographed were of an amphibious assault ship, and while Arthur thought they were worthless, the KGB apparently did not. Captain Edward D. Sheafer, a senior intelligence officer for the Atlantic Fleet, testified at Arthur’s trial that the Soviet Union was building an amphibious assault fleet in the late 1970s and had directed its agents to locate technical information about such ships.

  John had hoodwinked Arthur once again. Arthur was not as naive about what was happening as he later appeared to be.

  “I got to be honest here,” he told me during one candid conversation. “John was mentioning money, big money. I have to admit that there was a temptation there. Maybe that’s not the right word, but if someone says, ‘Hey, I’ll pay you fifty thousand a year to do this/ you are going to stop and think about this for a minute or an hour or whatever and say, ‘Huh? Fifty thousand! What will I do for fifty thousand bucks a year tax free?’ I mean, there might be things that I would do for money, but other things that I wouldn’t. Like I wouldn’t kill anybody, but if a bookie asked me to deliver money for him, well, that’s a crime, but it doesn’t seem too bad. At least it doesn’t at the time, but you’ve already made that first step, you know.

  “That’s what I’m talking about. I’d already taken the first step, you know. I had given him unclassified documents. I had photographed documents in his office and nothing bad had happened to me. Nothing. In return, John had given me money. I hadn’t done anything illegal up to that point, but it was a step in that direction. A big step.”

  In the fall of 1981, John finally pressed Arthur for classified material.

  “Arthur, you’ve got to get me something that says classified on it,” John said. “I’m hurting bad. I really need something to please them. Anything that even looks classified. Anything.”

  “At this point,” Arthur told me later, “I had a lot of mixed emotions. I love this country and I began thinking about it, about what John had already done.... I began convincing myself that John couldn’t have given away anything that was that important. I mean, Little Artie Walker really should be talking to the feds at this point, but instead, I’m getting ready to steal some shit and take pictures of it.”

  Arthur asked John for instructions.

  “If I’m going to do this shit, I need some methodology,” Arthur said. “I need to know how this stuff is done. Mostl
y photographs?”

  “Primary method is photographs. Film. Find something of value and photograph it,” John replied.

  “What’s worth the most?”

  “The best? Crypto, especially keycards; after that, top secret/crypto, secret, confidential, and technical manuals.”

  “I ain’t got no crypto or even know what it looks like anymore. Best I could even hope to see might be some secret. How am I going to judge whether something’s valuable?”

  “By the classification.”

  “Classified tech manuals?”

  “Yeah, they’re good.”

  On September 1, 1981, Arthur went to the security office at VSE, where classified documents were locked in a safe. He requested the “damage control book” for the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, the flagship for the Pacific Fleet, which carried the fleet commander and his staff. It was one of the most important ships in the Navy.

  Arthur said he needed the book because he was working on the ship’s overhaul schedule. The book was classified confidential, the lowest possible classification in the government, but Arthur thought that it might still contain information that John could sell because the U.S.S. Blue Ridge was the flagship.

  The book contained a list of all the ship’s vulnerabilities, its schematics, and information about its equipment and its capabilities. Arthur took the book to his desk and removed several pages that were clearly marked “CONFIDENTIAL.”

  He then returned the book to the safe at VSE without anyone noticing that the pages were missing. Tucking the classified documents in his briefcase, Arthur drove home, and after eating dinner with Rita, announced that he was going to John’s office to help him with a case.

  For the first time, Arthur was terrified, having finally acknowledged to himself that he was in too deep now to get out.

  “I felt like Jell-O when I was doing it. The fact that I even considered it bothered me more than the documents themselves. I’m not even sure how to explain it.... I was trying to help him at this point, okay? He is the man, I mean, he needed something that said ‘classified’ on it. He was trying to prove his value to someone else.... I don’t want to sound naive. I knew what I was doing was wrong. But I just couldn’t turn him in.”