Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  So that was it. Jerry had decided to retire without telling John.

  “That son of a bitch was too scared to tell me that he was getting out,” John recalled. “He did it behind my back. He was going to get us both killed.”

  Back in California, Jerry considered himself safe. He didn’t have anything to worry about because he still had one year’s worth of classified messages from the U.S.S. Enterprise as bargaining chips. That was why he had given John copies of the messages about the F-14 intrusion as well as the fogged film.

  Jerry had to make certain that the KGB understood what he had to offer.

  Jerry knew the KGB would be tantalized by those messages and it wasn’t going to go after him as long as he had something it wanted. He also felt confident the KGB would give him all of the back pay it owed him even though he had retired. Once again, the KGB wasn’t going to risk losing the messages from the Enterprise. They were his “insurance.”

  Of course, John was about to unknowingly walk into a precarious situation when he flew to Vienna and met his handler. By that time, the KGB would have developed Jerry’s worthless film and would want to know why Jerry had ruined it.

  John had always said that the KGB was ruthless and that he was always on the verge of being assassinated by KGB agents. Jerry Whitworth, either intentionally or unintentionally, was about to put John’s theory to the test.

  Chapter 54

  Marie Hammond was horrified when she met Laura Walker at the airport in Buffalo, New York, in July of 1983. Laura looked emaciated, fatigued, and disheveled. Marie wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake inviting Laura to stay with her at a farm south of Buffalo on the edge of Lake Erie, where Marie’s grandmother lived.

  Marie and Laura had become good friends in 1980 when both of their husbands were stationed at Fort Polk, but Marie hadn’t seen Laura since then and she said later that she might not have recognized Laura that day had she not been expecting her.

  “Laura had hit rock bottom,” Marie told me.

  All she owned were two pair of blue jeans, two blouses, one dress and some underwear. Marie was afraid to let Laura sleep alone that night because she was so depressed. So she put a cot in her bedroom for Laura to use.

  “She was so fragile,” Marie recalled. “She was at the breaking point. I sat on the edge of the cot that night and held her and she just sobbed and sobbed.”

  Five years older and a born-again Christian, Marie was a safe port in Laura’s turbulent life. Marie herself was no stranger to heartache. At age nine, her father drowned. She hated her stepfather. When she was fourteen years old, she had a nervous breakdown. But she had repaired her life thanks to religion and by marrying, at age sixteen, Bill Hammond, her childhood sweetheart. Now she felt that God had called her to help Laura Walker. He had sent her to Marie, like the lost sheep who is found.

  The next day, Laura said she wasn’t certain that moving in with Marie had been such a good idea. Laura wanted to telephone her mother, so Marie agreed to pay for the call.

  “Mother,” Laura said when she reached Barbara, “I need money. I want to go get Chris, but I need money to do it.”

  Barbara was broke and in no mood to make a loan to Laura. “I don’t have any money to loan you,” Barbara replied.

  “Well, you can get it from Dad,” Laura insisted. “All you have to do is ask him.” Barbara became angry. If Laura wanted money from John, why didn’t she simply call her dad and ask him for it? Why did everyone expect Barbara to run to John when they needed his help?

  “I’m tired of being fucked!” Barbara snapped. “Go find someone else to fucking use!” She slammed down the telephone.

  Years later, Barbara Walker recalled that conversation to me with sorrow.

  “Normally, I wouldn’t have said that to her. I usually would do anything for my children, but I was hurting and so tired of hearing Laura whine about Christopher. I was tired of bailing her out all the time.”

  Laura was outraged. “Whenever my mother asked me for money, I always sent it to her,” Laura told me later. “Hundreds of dollars. Sometimes I did not have it. But if I did, I sent it.... She knew I was desperate. All she had to do was say, ‘No.’ But she was angry because she knew I was on my way to get Chris and she was not happy about that. And do you know why? Because she thought that once I got Chris that the espionage would be brought up and my dad would go to jail, and my brother might be dragged into it because at that time Michael was in the Navy, and, of course, she might go to jail too!

  “All anybody was interested in was covering their own butt,” Laura said.

  Laura tried to call her mother back that day, but all she got was a busy signal. She assumed incorrectly that Barbara had taken the telephone off the hook.

  Actually, Barbara was telephoning Mark Snyder to warn him that Laura was in Buffalo and might be coming after Christopher.

  “This is when I decided in my mind that I was going to cut off all ties to my family,” Laura explained later. “That call was it. It was probably not a wise thing to do, but when your own mother tells you to fuck off, you have really hit the bottom.”

  Marie was just as angry when Laura told her what Barbara had said. “What kind of family does this to each other?” she asked. “You don’t know the half of it, Marie,” Laura replied. “My family has worse secrets than this one!”

  The two women talked for several minutes and then Laura said, “Marie, I’m going to fix my family. My mother doesn’t know what it’s like to lose a child, but I’m going to teach her what it’s like. I’m never going to speak to her again. As far as I am concerned, she can just think that I’m dead.”

  Marie agreed – it was a good idea.

  A few days later, Laura and Marie came up with another way for Laura to get enough money to go after Christopher. Marie was an avid follower of the televised ministry of Virginia Beach evangelist M. G. (Pat) Robertson, host of The 700 Club, a “prayer and praise” program. They decided to telephone Robertson and ask his ministry for the money.

  They phoned several times, but their request for money was turned down. After listening to Laura’s story, however, one counselor offered to pray for her over the telephone and during that prayer, the counselor began speaking in tongues.

  Marie was on the line. “I thought, ‘Oh great, this is going to do a lot of good,’ but then the counselor started interpreting the tongues for me,” Marie Hammond told me later. “She said, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord, your friend shall not return to Stephen [Laura’s boyfriend in California] and live in sin.’ She outlined about seven things that Laura was required to do to have the Lord walk with her, and then she said that if Laura did those seven things, God would return Christopher to her. He would deliver her son back to her. I’d never told this counselor about Stephen, but she mentioned him by name. It truly was a miracle.”

  Laura took the message seriously. She joined a charismatic church and was later baptized in a swimming pool. One Sunday, while Laura was at church, Barbara telephoned the farm and asked to speak with her.

  “She’s not here,” Marie told Barbara. Then Marie added, “I put her on a bus to Maine about a week ago. She was coming to see you. Hasn’t she arrived there yet?”

  “No! She’s not here!” Barbara replied.

  “I wonder what’s happened to her?” Marie said. “I hope nothing is wrong!”

  Barbara was worried. She telephoned John.

  “Something’s happened to Laura!” she told him. “She’s disappeared! We’ve got to find her.”

  John thought Barbara was drunk and exaggerating, but after they talked for a few minutes, he decided that she was serious. He promised to call the state police in New York and have his pals in the Norfolk police department put out a missing persons bulletin.

  When Laura returned from church, Marie told her what she had done. “I just couldn’t let your family continue treating you the way it has,” Marie said. “Besides, you said you didn’t ever want to talk to any of them again.�
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  Laura agreed. Now Barbara would know what it was like to lose a child.

  That fall, Laura began working as a waitress in a diner and earned enough money to buy a truck and some clothes. She also began talking to Marie again about going after Christopher, but she was scared. One night Marie found Laura crying. This is how Marie later recalled the conversation.

  “I heard Laura sobbing in her bedroom and I went in and asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘Oh Marie, everything is so screwed up.’ Laura had been praying, but she still didn’t know what to do and I said to her, ‘Well, I’m sure the Lord has– ’ and, I remember Laura cut me off in mid-sentence. She said, ‘Marie, you don’t understand. My father has committed treason!’ I was confused and really didn’t understand what Laura was telling me, and she saw that and I think it made her angry. She said, ‘Marie, my dad is a spy! He was a spy in the Navy and he’s spying now, and Mark knows it and if I try to get Christopher, Mark will turn us all in. He’ll claim that I was a spy too.’ She was afraid.”

  The two women prayed together for several hours and then Marie went back to her own bedroom. She couldn’t sleep.

  “I got out of bed and I sat near the window and looked outside,” Marie said later.

  “I was scared too. I said, ‘God, there has to be a solution.’ . . . I must have prayed for another two hours and then finally I said, ‘Okay, God, I’m leaving this up to you. Show me the way.’ ”

  Chapter 55

  On March 27, 1983, as soon as Michael returned to Norfolk from boot camp, he asked Rachel to dinner at a posh restaurant.

  “I want you to marry me,” he said. “Will you be my wife?”

  Rachel began crying.

  “Yes!” she said. “Oh Michael, I love you!”

  They agreed to wait for one year before marrying, in order to save some money. Michael didn’t tell his plans to John. “The last thing my dad wanted was for me to get married.”

  During the next few weeks, he divided his time between Rachel and surfing with his pals. John didn’t seem to mind, but he continually lectured Michael about becoming too serious with Rachel.

  “You’re about to go overseas,” John told Michael one afternoon, “and you don’t want to be tied down to a woman here. There’s no sense in missing all the fun you can have in those ports.”

  John thought marriage was an outdated and unworkable tradition.

  “You know, Mike,” John explained, “I don’t hate your mother. The woman is intelligent, she can be a hard worker and a good wife. But I fell out of love with her. I didn’t love her anymore. It happens. Marriage isn’t for everyone. It’s not for me and it may not be for you.

  “Half the marriages in America end in divorce and most of the others aren’t truly happy. If you don’t love a person, it’s better to get out. Why stay in there, because after a while you begin to hurt each other? That’s why I don’t understand your mother. Why does she want to bury me? We’re divorced, but she can’t let me go.”

  Michael agreed. “We tried to get Mom to date when we lived in Maine, but she wouldn’t,” he told John. “She still acts like you guys are married.”

  “That’s so fucking crazy,” John said. “Your mother hates my guts because I dated other women. But what the hell It’s part of the game of life in America. I’m telling you that every sailor does it. Everyone of them!”

  Remembering their conversation later, Michael told me, “My dad told me it was better if I didn’t get married. He said I should have fun with Rachel but definitely not get married. I thought about it, and I began to think of the domestic cases that I’d worked as a private detective, and I have to admit, I was becoming skeptical. Rarely had I seen a happy marriage, but I was convinced that Rachel and me were going to be different. I didn’t tell him that, but I felt that way.”

  On April 13, Michael kissed a teary-eyed Rachel good-bye and boarded a plane en route to the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. America. More than 5,500 men were assigned to the carrier. Michael reported to Fighter Squadron 102, nicknamed the Diamondbacks. It was an elite unit, part of the eighty-five aircraft on board.

  At the time, the squadron operated a dozen F-14 Tomcat fighter jets, the Navy’s most sophisticated supersonic tactical warplanes. Because of Michael’s secretarial skins, which he had learned at night school, he was assigned to the administration office for the fighter squadron.

  One of the carrier’s first stops was Diego Garcia, the same island his father had visited, and on which Jerry had served. Any free moment, Michael headed for the beach with his surfboard.

  “I really felt,” he said later, “I’d made the right choice by joining.” Michael took so many pictures of the beach, waves, sunsets, carrier, and his newly made surfing friends that he filled three photo albums. He wrote to Rachel every day, but she was busy and didn’t respond as regularly.

  Michael wrote John too, and in May 1983, he received a cassette tape from his dad. It started like any other letter written by a father to his absent son. John compared his Navy experiences to Michael’s and talked about how he missed him, but John’s manipulative nature and self-interest quickly surfaced.

  Howdy Mike, this is Dad. Let me see, it’s the urn, fourth of May 1983.... I just got your letter.... I’m a real shit for not having written to ya but I’m not gonna tell ya why cause you’re about as busy as I am and I don’t have to explain, right?

  Okay, I see that they have told you that you have to put two years in on your squadron before you can be transferred. Well, that’s usually the kind of bullshit they tell everybody. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to beat that so-called two-year rule. You know you could take a test for another rating and pass it, and if you made third class and your squadron had no billing for it, they would be obligated to transfer ya anyway.

  But all in all, it doesn’t look that bad for ya.... Yeoman is by far the better of the ratings. A PN really handles nothing but enlisted pay records and enlisted problems, but yeomen, on the other hand, are more like secretaries.

  A yeoman handles a wide range of things from officers’ records to classified control. They could handle the intelligence library and, and jobs such as that. I mean, it’s definitely a racket.... Advancement is quick. I’m sure it is. Your typing will help you. . . . Christ, just get down there and practice. And you’re already talking about reenlistment.

  Man! That is all right.

  Okay, um, what you are allowed to do is pass on the ship’s operating, squadron operating schedule to your immediate family even if it’s ah, restricted or classified. You’ll find there’s an anomaly there that doesn’t seem quite understandable, ah, that is to say, the movement of a ship could be classified information, confidential or even secret, and yet the Navy acknowledges the fact that you’re gonna go home and tell your wife what your sailing date is.

  And you are saying how come I am allowed to reveal classified material to my wife who is not cleared. Well there really is no answer for that.

  There’s probably some stupid instruction somewhere that says, ah, it is permissible to ah, tell your immediate family the ship’s movements...

  Anyway, let me know your schedule and what you mean when you say three more eight-month cruises. What ships and what are, what is your squadron’s deployment schedule?

  Ah, I would really be curious to know what that is....

  Okay, I hope you haven’t forgotten Mother’s Day.... Your mom did call and P.K. talked to her. I was somewhere and she was looking for your address and I didn’t call her back. I haven’t heard anything from Margaret. I’m too busy, and Laura, of course, fell off the fucking planet...

  ...Mother’s Day, I almost feel obligated to try to get up to Scranton with or without P.K. Maybe I can get Uncle Art to go, but basically, I haven’t much opportunity to have any contact with the family.... Work, work, work, same old shit, right?

  “Just like my father, I loved being on the ocean,” Michael recalled. “It was in my blood, I guess. There was someth
ing about being at sea that I loved.”

  The U.S.S. America returned to Norfolk in June, and Michael discovered his father had converted his room into an office. Michael was upset because his father hadn’t even asked him. He also was angry because P.K. had moved back into the house and acted like she had more of a right to be there than Michael did.

  John detected Michael’s anger and offered a half-hearted apology to Michael about taking over his room. After a few days, Michael moved out of the house and into a room at the naval station barracks.

  “I was getting tired of my dad,” Michael said. “He was doing stupid things, and P.K. was really pissing me off. She was using my dad. It was black and white and I saw it, but he didn’t, and when I tried to tell him about it, it made him mad. I mean, he was on this real ego kick about his age and being young.”

  John didn’t try to stop Michael from leaving. “I figured it was time for him to get out on his own,” John recalled. Besides, John’s indifference only seemed to make Michael more intent on pleasing him.

  “I knew my father was a spy,” Michael recalled. “My mother had told me and he had dropped hints when we’d gone to bars. He kept saying that he’d tell me someday how he made his money. But the truth is that I got tired of waiting for him to ask me. I mean, heres how I felt, what’s the deal, doesn’t he think he can trust me?”

  While the U.S.S. America was in port, Fighter Squadron 102 worked out of the Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach. Michael continued his secretarial duties in the administration office, where one job included signing and opening all registered mail. Often he received low-level classified reports during such deliveries.

  One night when P.K. was gone, John invited Michael over for grilled hamburgers in the backyard. During dinner, John quizzed his son about his job at the air station.

  “What’ya do out there?”

  “I type orders and other things, do some filing, and also open up the registered mail,” Michael said.