by Earley, Pete
The biggest intelligence-gathering operation and most dangerous cat-and-mouse game still awaited the carrier. Records show that on April 9, 1983, the Enterprise rendezvoused with the aircraft carriers the U.S.S. Midway and the U.S.S. Coral Sea for the first-ever exercise in the Pacific conducted by three aircraft carriers.
Within days, the three battle groups traveled to within four hundred miles of the Soviet-controlled Kamchatka peninsula. Officially, the operation was purely a training exercise, an attempt “to demonstrate effective joint and combined theater operations with a three-carrier battle force ... in a high threat environment.”
But the Navy had an ulterior motive.
Just as the Enterprise had gathered intelligence about Vietnam, the three carriers were eager to observe how the Soviet Union intended to react to the sudden appearance of three carriers and nearly thirty support warships at the lip of its border. Using sophisticated electronic snooping and jamming devices, intelligence officials aboard the carriers diligently recorded the Soviets’ military reaction. The number of Russian aircraft launched, locations of Soviet missiles, frequencies of emergency broadcasts, all were monitored.
During testimony later, Lieutenant Commander James Dale Jeeter explained that the three carriers operated exactly the “way they intended to fight.” This was important because the Pentagon, which had spent more than one year preparing for the exercise, assumed the Russians would respond under similar “real life battle conditions.”
The three-carrier exercise was also important because if the United States ever had to “successfully carry a war to the shores of the Soviets” it would most likely use a three-carrier formation. During the seventeen-day exercise, the three carriers simulated dozens of wartime maneuvers in response to a series of possible scenarios. The 255 airplanes aboard the three ships were constantly engaged in mock attacks and reconnaissance missions, while U.S. submarines attempted to penetrate the carriers’ defenses without being detected by anti-submarine ships. The communications center aboard the Enterprise was swamped with messages.
When the Navy conducts most of its operations, especially large ones like this, it carefully lists all of its objectives in a thick instruction booklet, which it gives to the various participants. Such books existed for the three-carrier operation, but the Navy wanted to try something new with this exercise. So nearly all of the day-to-day operational orders that were issued during the exercise were sent or received by the Enterprise’s radio room, just as they would have been had the United States actually been at war. This gave the Pentagon a chance to review the performance of its ship’s various radio crews.
It also gave Jerry Whitworth access to a step-by-step narrative of what the three carriers would do during an attack.
At one point during the operation, the Soviet Union claimed an F-14 aircraft from the Enterprise violated Russian airspace. Whether or not this incident occurred, and, if it did, whether it was part of some intelligence-gathering ploy or an accident, is classified information. The Pentagon will acknowledge only that the Russians protested. But Jerry later told John about the F-14 intrusion and gave John some of the one hundred classified messages that the Pentagon later acknowledged were transmitted after the F-14 flight.
When the three-carrier operation ended, the Pentagon tried to determine whether it was successful. Its immediate reaction was mixed. While the exercise had given the Navy a chance to train its commanders, the Pacific Fleet headquarters was dissatisfied and frustrated because, strangely, the three carriers had not generated as much intelligence information about the Russians’ response to a three-carrier threat as the Pentagon had anticipated.
Pentagon analysts couldn’t figure out why the Soviets hadn’t done more to monitor the fleet exercise. It seemed somewhat odd, especially since the Russians had paid close attention to smaller exercises in the past that were less important. Years later, Pentagon officials wondered if Jerry Whitworth hadn’t been the reason for the Russians’ lack of interest. “Jerry copied everything he could about the operation,” John confided after his arrest.
If a full-scale war ever erupted between the Soviet Union and United States, the twelve-inch stack of messages that Jerry had photographed would provide the Russians with a blow-by-blow chronology of how the U.S. Navy intended to form an off-shore flotilla and attack the Soviets’ borders. What’s more, the three-carrier operation had been done in cooperation with Canadian naval forces, so the Russians could identify what our northern neighbor would do during a war.
Selling the KGB messages from the three-carrier operation was akin to giving one football team its opponent’s playbook a few days before the Super Bowl.
Only the consequences were much, much higher.
Years later, federal prosecutors asked Lieutenant Commander Jeeter and intelligence specialist Captain Jones to put a dollar value on the messages that Jerry had copied while aboard the Enterprise. Both said that would be impossible.
“Basically, what you have here is a cookbook of how we do business,” Jeeter explained. “It’s a recipe. You know, it’s kind of like Coca-Cola. Once you have the recipe, you may do it a little bit different way, but you always come back to the cookbook.”
Added Jones, “It would be hard to put a price tag on it.... If, for example, you had your forces arrayed so that you could look at the exercise and follow it and watch it, you could develop an awful lot of insight, but if, on top of that, you had all the boilerplate of that exercise, the purpose, the tactics, and the wrap-up of how the opposing force thinks they’ve done, well, you’ve got to save just an incalculable amount of manpower, and the value you have to put on that is tremendous because the insight that it provides you into that Navy’s capabilities and, more importantly, I think, that Navy’s senior management’s thinking and insights into that thought process and what they think is awfully important ... and ... of tremendous value.”
As the Enterprise returned to the United States, Jerry recognized the messages he had stolen as a golden opportunity. They could easily earn him enough money from the KGB to retire. Just as important, they could provide him with a way out from under the thumb of John Walker.
Jerry had a plan.
Chapter 52
John was angry when he telephoned Arthur after returning from Vienna. Arthur immediately drove over to John’s house.
“My buyers said the stuff you gave me from VSE was so utterly useless that they don’t want me even to risk carrying it around,” John told Arthur. “Isn’t there anything at VSE besides this low-level confidential shit that you could get me?”
“Not really, John. We just don’t have much there.”
John had a suggestion: Could Arthur tell by looking at various ship overhaul schedules when the Navy was changing the DEFCON level, the numerical system that reflects the defense readiness condition of the military on a scale of 1 to 5. Arthur wasn’t certain. “What would I see that would be a clue?”
“An increased ammunition order,” John replied. “Or maybe a change in a ship’s overhaul schedule.”
“That’s good, but I’m not going to see or hear that kind of stuff.”
“Will you see a sudden pull back of a ship for fixing?”
“Sure, but there might be other reasons besides a change in the DEFCON. If I think of something that would be indicative, I will let you know.”
John wasn’t letting Arthur off the hook that easily. “Okay, you work on overhaul planning, so you know when a ship is going to overhaul, right?”
“Yes,” Arthur replied, “but this type of planning goes on approximately one year prior to repair. I don’t have any information on ship movements during that year, only when the ship is going into the shipyard. Is someone really going to pay to know when a ship is going into overhaul?”
“They might,” John replied. “They might pay for something like that.”
“I got a definite impression,” Arthur told me later, “that at this point, John was scratching for anything that
would help him deliver. He was going to pitch this ship overhaul information to somebody.”
The two brothers spoke about other information that might interest the KGB and then John became pensive.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” he said to Arthur, “if we could raise our kids like the Mafia does, where you are born into a family operation and there isn’t anything to worry about? Imagine, you wouldn’t have to sweat about your kids getting a good job or having financial problems. They’d just do what they were supposed to do and inherit your family operation. “
“Listen, John, that’s a bunch of bullshit. I know my kids wouldn’t ever do it, especially now. You’d have to start them from birth, and even then I’m not sure you could achieve that with them ‘cause there would be so many other influences. I mean, my kids wouldn’t break the law even for me.”
John disagreed. “Your kids would do anything for you,” he said. “Trust me. A kid can never say no to a parent.”
“I began to become suspicious,” Arthur told me later, “because I knew Mike had enlisted in the Navy. I wondered if John had pushed him into spying. John had told me that his man on the West Coast was getting out of the business, and I knew John was really under a lot of pressure to come up with something. I didn’t want to say anything though. I figured it was between Mike and his dad and besides, what could I say? I had done it too. I’d spied for John, so what in the hell would I tell Michael?”
Chapter 53
Jerry Whitworth received an enticing letter from Brenda shortly before the U.S.S. Enterprise arrived home in San Francisco Bay on April 28, 1983.
“I long to have you home,” she wrote him, promising delights. “Look for the white 1957 Rolls-Royce, a chauffeur, and me, the lady in red.”
The boys in the radio room were jealous. Jerry seemed to have it all.
Indeed, Brenda had ridden to the dock in a rented Rolls-Royce and was waiting for him in high heels, dark stockings, and a fetching bright red dress with a white linen jacket. But as the aircraft carrier neared the pier, it ran aground on a sand bar and remained stuck for five hours until the incoming tide could free it.
By the time Jerry came ashore, the bill for the Rolls had risen to $470. It didn’t matter. Brenda tipped the chauffeur two twenty-dollar bills and thanked him for sticking around for nine hours. Jerry had a surprise for Brenda too. He had bought two of the most expensive seats at the San Francisco Opera for the 1983 summer season. The box seats cost $500 but Jerry added another $200 as a donation so that Brenda’s name would be listed in the program as a contributor.
Jerry had followed John’s advice and always used cashier’s checks for large purchases. But Jerry was no longer a mere puppet. He had devised his own scheme to hide his income by using as many as forty-two different bank accounts and forty-four credit cards.
It was going to be difficult to give up such luxuries, but Jerry had definitely decided to end his spying. He would do it slowly though, giving John only a few documents from the Enterprise at a time, in order to keep the spy money coming as long as possible.
Jerry also had a trick in mind. He had intentionally fogged the rolls of film (photos of about a third of the Enterprise documents he stole) that he was going to give to John. As a result, none of these pictures of the classified messages would be usable.
After his arrest, Jerry Whitworth claimed he had fogged the film because he had decided that he no longer wanted to spy and was also feeling pangs of patriotism and guilt over what he had done. But John Walker saw Jerry’s actions as much more devious. He believed that Jerry had fogged the film in order to get the KGB angry at John. He also believed that Jerry was trying to extort more money from the KGB.
John was anxious to find out what sort of material Jerry had when he arrived on June 3, 1983, in California. When the two men were alone, Jerry gave John the fogged film and a large envelope filled with a dozen classified messages. John scribbled notes on the back of the envelope as Jerry briefed him about his delivery. “All messages . . . secret and one top secret,” John wrote.
John was dearly impressed as Jerry explained how the carrier had sailed into waters claimed by Vietnam, and participated in a three-carrier war game, and how an F-14 had intruded Soviet airspace.
“Jesus Christ!” John remarked. “This is fucking great shit, Jerry.”
Years later, John remembered that he was also a bit confused during Jerry’s briefing that day. “I didn’t know why Jerry gave me both film and copies of documents, but when I asked, he said he wanted me to have the copies so I could read them because they were so interesting. They were about the F-14 intrusion into Soviet airspace. What I didn’t realize until later was that Jerry obviously wanted the KGB to know that he had valuable messages. The copies were just a sample.”
The film that Jerry gave John represented only about one third of the classified messages that Jerry had stolen. The rest, he said, were still hidden on the ship and it was much too dangerous to move them now.
“That didn’t strike me as odd at the time,” John recalled later, “because the stuff he had showed me was really great and I wasn’t worried about getting any more. Of course, now I realize I should have been suspicious of Jerry.”
John asked Jerry whether he had been able to get any cryptographic keylists, but Jerry said he hadn’t. Jerry had been promoted to senior chief and lost his access.
“It would seem odd if a senior chief was the classified materials custodian,” Jerry explained. “That’s a junior radioman’s job.”
Jerry didn’t have access to any technical manuals either, he added. But he could keep giving John messages that would interest his buyers.
On June 12, 1983, John delivered Jerry’s film and stolen messages to the KGB at a dead drop outside Washington. Even though Jerry hadn’t been able to steal any keylists, John figured the KGB would be thrilled by the classified messages.
John still didn’t have any idea, at this point, that Jerry’s film had been intentionally fogged. The only items that the KGB were actually going to get were the copies of messages about the F-14 intrusion.
John also picked up a package from the KGB at the dead drop. He assumed it contained cash, but when he opened it, he discovered there wasn’t any.
During the drive back to Norfolk, John decided the Soviets were simply playing it straight. “I figured the Soviets were worried because they didn’t understand why Jerry was being transferred, and they always assumed the worst – that the FBI had figured us out. So they weren’t going to pay us until they were certain Jerry was legitimate.”
There was another reason for the Russians to be cautious on June 12, 1983 – a reason that had nothing to do with either John Walker or Jerry Whitworth.
Less than two months earlier, the FBI had surprised the KGB by nabbing Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Barmyantsev, a high-ranking Soviet military attache, during a fake dead drop that had taken place amazingly close to John’s dead drop site.
Barmyantsev had fallen into a trap set by the FBI counterintelligence office in Washington. Special agent Bill O’Keefe had dreamed up the scam and spent nearly one year putting it into action.
Following logic that would have pleased John Walker, O’Keefe decided that the FBI should entrap the Russians rather than always waiting for them to make the first move. O’Keefe got approval to teach John Stine, a forty-five-year-old security officer at a defense contracting firm, how to play the role of a dissatisfied American anxious to betray his country for cash.
The FBI scheme, code-named Operation Jagwire, turned out to be amazingly similar to John’s real-life experiences with the KGB.
Stine approached the Russians on Thanksgiving Day in 1982 by simply walking into the Soviet Military Office in Washington and offering his services. After he gave them several documents marked SECRET, he was paid $500 and hustled into a basement garage and car trunk for a zigzag trip through Washington.
Later, Stine met his KGB handler face-to-face and was given $4,800 stuff
ed into a soda can along with detailed instructions for future dead drops. The instructions were written in exactly the same way as those John had received.
When Barmyantsev showed up to pick up Stine’s delivery, the FBI rushed in. Barmyantsev was so alarmed that he wet his pants, according to an account of Operation Jagwire written by journalists David Friend and Vance Muse. The entire sting operation remained a secret until Friend and Muse wrote about it in Life magazine.
It is likely, intelligence officials now believe, that operation may have inadvertently spooked the KGB before John’s dead drop and cost John and Jerry their KGB paychecks. The Russians were already nervous about Jerry when Operation Jagwire occurred.
Neither John nor Jerry knew about the FBI’s sting operation on July 28, 1983, when Jerry flew to Norfolk and asked for his spy salary.
“There isn’t any,” John replied.
Jerry wanted to know why. “Because you fucked things up,” John replied, “with all your stupid transfers and inability to decide whether or not you are going to keep doing this!”
John asked Jerry if he had brought the other two thirds of the messages from the U.S.S. Enterprise with him and was irritated when Jerry told him no. Jerry and Brenda had sold their condominium in San Leandro and were moving to Davis, California, Jerry explained. The movers had accidentally packed the messages with his household effects, which were in storage.
John didn’t believe Jerry, but he didn’t say so. He wasn’t certain what Jerry was up to. John also thought it was odd that Jerry had raced out to Norfolk to get his spy salary. Why was he in such a rush?
A few weeks after Jerry left Norfolk, John received a formal invitation in the mail.
Master Chief Lloyd Long requests the pleasure of your company for the retirement ceremony for Senior Chief Jerry A. Whitworth. Please join us in celebrating Jerry’s last hurrah . . .