by Earley, Pete
“And then I told my dad on purpose,” Michael recalled, “ ‘It’s real neat, Dad, every once in a while, secret documents come through there and I get to look at them and they have all kinds of information in them.’ ”
Michael watched to see his father’s reaction, but all John said was, “Oh really? Sounds interesting.”
“He didn’t approach me,” Michael said, “and I didn’t understand why. It really pissed me off.”
A few days later, John asked Michael to come by the house. He took Michael into the den and closed the door.
“Michael, you may know this already,” John said, “because your mother might have said something about it to you, but if you make copies of those documents that you work with, the classified ones, and you give them to me, I can get you some money. Some big money.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand a month if it’s good stuff.”
“I wasn’t shocked when he told me,” Michael said to me later. “I thought it was really cool. I mean, he finally trusted me enough to tell me what he did. He thought I was man enough to handle what he was saying.”
Michael asked John, “How do I know when to take something?”
“Mike, when the time comes, you will know it is right.”
“Okay, cut me in.”
Remembering that conversation, Michael told me later, “I was proud, really proud, and I felt so cool. I mean, this was just like a story out of some book, a spy novel, really! I could hardly wait to meet some beautiful blonde Russian agent.”
Michael didn’t keep John’s secret well. He told a surfing buddy that John was a spy, but Michael made it sound like John worked for the CIA. “It was like I was the first kid on the block to have a spy for a father” Michael recalled. “We were going to be spies together, man.
“I didn’t have any ideological concerns,” Michael explained. “I was in it because my dad was in it. He was a PI, I was a PI. He was in the Navy, I’m in the Navy. He’s a spy, I wanted to be a spy.”
Michael told Rachel while they were riding in Michael’s truck to a party. “Hey Rachel, there’s something you should know,” Michael said. “Look, my father’s a spy and I’m a spy too.”
“Wow! Really!” Rachel said.
“Yeah, I’m going to make us a lot of money.”
Michael stole his first classified document a few days after John recruited him. It was amazingly simple. The document was a report that came in the registered mail. Michael signed for it, looked through it, and thought it was something his father might want to see. So he simply stuffed it into a small backpack that he kept his personal items in and took it to John’s house. He walked into the den and tossed the report on John’s desk.
John looked through it. “This is very good, Michael,” he said. “See if you can bring me more.”
Michael didn’t have access to cryptographic materials. In fact, Michael wasn’t supposed to have access to any classified documents because he hadn’t undergone a background investigation by the Navy and didn’t have even a minimum security clearance. But no one in the Navy had taken the time to question Michael’s assignment. Instead, they simply believed him when he said he had the necessary clearances.
Even though Michael couldn’t get cryptographic materials, he had access to information about the F-14 fighter jet and to some classified messages about various operations. One exercise, in particular, interested John. The U.S.S. America was scheduled to go on a Caribbean cruise in late October 1983, but Michael received an emergency telephone call from the ship and was told to report early. Michael called John.
“Something big is happening, we’re pulling out tonight!”
“Get what you can, but be careful,” John warned.
At 5:30 A.M. on October 25, the United States invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, where a sixteen-member military council had taken control of the government only a few days earlier. Michael was part of the Navy force that participated in the invasion, and he claimed later that during it he saw dozens of sensitive messages about how it was coordinated and planned. “I didn’t understand most of the sensitive stuff that came in because it was in code, but I was able to read a few things,” he recalled.
Michael had not become sophisticated enough as a spy to know how to steal the messages and copy them. But each night he wrote down as much information as he could remember, and after the carrier returned home, he shared this information with his father.
“The United States played a much larger role than it admitted in the coup in Grenada,” Michael claimed later, “and when I told my dad about what I had seen, he got really excited. I was on a roll.”
Michael was beginning to realize that he had been “groomed” for the spy business. Why else had his father pushed him to become a private investigator, to study typing at night school, and to join the Navy?
One day, Michael confronted his father. “Dad, did you groom me to be a spy?”
John didn’t reply, so Michael asked him again. “Is this some sort of planned thing or what?”
“What’s your Social Security number, Mike?” John answered.
“What?”
“Tell me the first three numbers of your Social Security number,” John repeated.
“Zero, zero, seven,” Michael replied.
“Right,” said John, “only that’s oh-oh-seven, just like James Bond, ya dummy. You’ve got a license to kill, baby!”
Michael was startled.
“How did he do that?” Michael asked me later. “How’d he arrange for me to get those numbers? My dad really had planned it all out. He knew all along.”
This is what John told me when I asked him about his recruitment of Michael:
“I knew in my heart that Mike couldn’t refuse me. . . . He had always wanted to please me. It’s natural for a son to want to please his father, and Michael always had. Ever since he was a small boy, he and I had a special relationship. He was clearly my favorite so I knew that he would do what I asked him to.
“I had planned to wait until Mike was a little older and better established in the Navy, but Jerry had forced me to move. I was losing Jerry and that meant I didn’t have anyone else to produce. Art couldn’t deliver shit and I knew that without Mike, I was running a real risk. See, that is what recruiting Michael was all about. I had to get him into the ring before I could get out of it. That was the only way for me to get out without getting a .22 slug behind the ear. I realized that right after I became a spy. Mike was my ticket. He was my way out. No one was going to mess with me if Mike took over my organization. I could retire with P.K. and get some chickens and move to the hills of Virginia and relax because the KGB would be afraid to move on me.
“I don’t know how else to justify what I did except to give an analogy. I began thinking of Joseph Kennedy, okay. I mean, here was a guy who had done things when he was younger that he shouldn’t have done, but he didn’t get caught and he made enough money to send his kid to Harvard. I thought about Joe Bonanno [Joseph Bonanno, the alleged “Father of Fathers” in the Mafia]. He was the real godfather, but he made enough money that he ultimately became legitimate and even wrote a book.
“You see, money is the key. It always is. If you make enough money, then it doesn’t matter what you’ve done. You automatically become respectable. It was too late for me to ever become respectable, but I could still be the godfather. My family could come to me and I would give them money. I could turn the business over to my son some day. Only I was going to tell him, ‘Michael, put money aside. Don’t do what I did. You can make millions as a spy if you handle yourself right.’ I was going to tell him that his kid was the one who could go to Harvard. He could be legitimate. It was an honorable thing that I was doing. It really was.”
Like most young girls, Rachel had dreamed about having a big wedding, but when Michael returned from the Caribbean cruise, she agreed to elope in December 1983. “We were getting a lot of static from our parents,” Michael
told me. “My dad was against it and so was hers, so we just went to Virginia Beach, got the license and blood tests, and had a justice of the peace do it one afternoon.”
Michael bought two bottles of champagne and they went back to their new apartment after the quick ceremony. Michael didn’t tell his father, and he didn’t wear his wedding ring whenever they got together.
But John knew.
“Mike, are you married?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“‘Cause I knew you didn’t want me to do it.”
“That’s true, but it’s the father’s duty to help pay for the wedding and buy things.”
The day after that conversation, John gave Michael and Rachel a popcorn popper and $50. Now that Michael was his business partner, John saw no need to keep him well supplied with $100 bills as he had done before.
“I was really pissed,” Michael told me. “I needed to come up with a seven-hundred-dollar tuition payment for Rachel’s college, and she is working her butt off as a waitress, and my dad gives me a popcorn popper. What the fuck did he think I was, some nerd who watched television and ate popcorn all the time?”
Michael decided that his relationship with his dad was going to be purely business, but John didn’t seem to notice.
“I don’t think he even realized our relationship had changed,” Michael recalled. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with him, and he didn’t even seem to know.”
Michael had developed his own game plan, and spying was an important part of it. “I don’t want to give the impression that I was greedy,” Michael told me later.
“I didn’t become a spy for the money, but I wanted to make something of myself and I wanted to be comfortable. I had a dream. I was beginning to see myself a lot like Jerry Whitworth. Here was a very intelligent man who was really a man of the world, and he was married to a woman who was going to be a doctor. I liked that idea. Me, an old sea dog who’s been everywhere and learned about life the hard way, and my wife, Rachel, being a doctor learning things from school. We could teach each other. I didn’t need my dad messing up my life anymore, but I did need the spy money. That didn’t change. I wanted that money.”
Chapter 56
Michael was not the only person John tried to recruit in the fall of 1983, after he discovered Jerry had retired. He said he also approached his half brother, Gary Richard Walker, the oldest of three children born to Johnny Walker, Sr., and Dorothy Dobson Walker after they left Scranton and settled in Virginia.
John had first met Gary back in 1976 when their father began commuting to Richmond to obtain medical treatment for Sherrie, John’s half sister who died of leukemia after fighting the disease for five years. Gary had joined the Navy in July of 1979 and had been stationed in Norfolk with a helicopter squadron responsible for finding and destroying underwater and surface mines.
“Gary was really a nice kid,” John recalled, “and I invited him over to the house and out on the boat a few times when he came to Norfolk. He didn’t have anything, of course. In fact, he was sending most of his money home to my alcoholic father. I could see it happening all over again.
“My father had used me as a kid, and now he was using Gary the exact same way. He was sponging off him, taking his money and spending it on booze.
“So I decided to recruit him, again, not to enrich me in any way, but to help him out. We were driving in my car one day and I began the same way that I had with Whitworth. ‘Gary, I know a way you can make some money,’ I said. ‘It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time and it’s completely safe, but it’s also illegal. Even my telling you about it will be enough for you to get into trouble because you will be part of the conspiracy. Now, do you want to hear more or not?’
“I couldn’t believe it,” John recalled, “but Gary said he’d have to think about it and he said that he didn’t want me to tell him any more at that point. I figured I’d wait for a while and then try again. I was really amazed ‘cause he was the first one who told me ‘No.’ “
Gary Walker testified in 1986 that he had no recollection of John’s proposition.
In the fall of 1983, John was still expecting Jerry Whitworth to deliver the remaining two thirds of the documents he had taken off the U.S.S. Enterprise, even though he had retired from the Navy. John wanted the film of those documents before he met his handler in Vienna in February 1984, so he flew to California on January 27 to visit with Jerry at his new trailer in Davis.
At this point, John still didn’t realize that the last film delivery had been fogged.
“In California, Jerry tells me that he’s been too busy to photograph the remaining two thirds of the documents that he had stolen,” John said. “I was furious.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Jerry?” he demanded. “Do you want to die? Are you trying to get us both killed?”
For the first time in their friendship, Jerry got angry. He didn’t need John telling him what to do. The risks were just too great to continue spying, he complained, and besides, with Brenda about to finish her education, he didn’t need to spy any longer.
Much to John’s surprise, Jerry also didn’t want to give him the remaining two thirds of messages from the Enterprise. But Jerry was no match for John when it came to pressure.
“We argued and finally I told him that I was going to photograph the remaining two thirds of documents in his house,” John said. “I wasn’t going to Vienna without them. That scared him because he didn’t want Brenda to come home and find out what we were doing. So we drove to this motel, and when we got there, I was so pissed, I said, ‘Jerry, this is your fault, you go in there and register us.’ I figured the motel owner thought we were both queers ‘cause we went into the room for two hours and then came out. We photographed the hell out of his material in that room, and then I left town. The last thing Jerry asked me was when was he getting paid.”
John’s KGB contact was irritated when they met on February 4 in Vienna. What was going on with Jerry? he demanded.
John was surprised. He hadn’t yet told the Russian that Jerry had quit the Navy.
“What do you mean?” John replied.
The KGB agent quickly explained that the film that John had delivered at the last dead drop had been fogged. It had been photographed under a light that was too intense. The only items that were any good were the copies of messages that John had included in the dead drop-the ones that dealt with the F-14 intrusion into Soviet airspace.
Obviously, the KGB agent explained, his country was anxious to learn all it could about the war games that the U.S.S. Enterprise had participated in off the Soviet coastline. But the KGB was confused. Why had Jerry overexposed the photographs?
“Are you positive that the film was fogged?” John asked. “Your people didn’t mess it up developing it?”
The KGB agent didn’t bother to respond.
“I thought to myself,” John recalled later, “ ‘Thanks a lot Jerry, how in the hell am I going to explain this one?’ This is Jerry Whitworth, who considers himself a professional photographer, who hasn’t taken a bad photo in his life, and suddenly, he has messed up several rolls of film. Jerry was obviously jerking me around, but at that point I still didn’t understand what he was up to.”
John told his KGB handler he had no idea why Jerry might have overexposed the photographs. He also told him that Jerry had quit the Navy and had also been complaining about how little money the Soviets had paid them in comparison to the price of building a nuclear missile or launching a spy satellite. The KGB agent looked visibly shaken, John claimed later.
The real problem with Jerry was money, John said. It had been fifteen months since Jerry had been paid. Why, he asked, had the Soviets not paid them anything at the last dead drop? The KGB agent didn’t offer a lengthy explanation.
“He simply told me,” John said later, “that the Soviet embassy in Washington didn’t have enough cash on hand for the dead
drop. Someone had screwed up. It was fucking unbelievable. Here we are, supposedly the world’s most important spies, and the Soviets can’t raise enough cash to pay us.”
During his talk with the KGB handler, John attempted to begin to de-emphasize Jerry’s importance to the spy ring. John wanted, he said later, to disassociate himself from Jerry in case the KGB decided to kill him.
Still, he made one last shot at getting a $1 million payment for a guarantee from Jerry to continue spying ten more years. In the back of his mind, John explained later, was the thought that even if the KGB didn’t bite this time, it might the next, when he asked for $1 million for himself.
“He didn’t seem to like the idea of paying Jerry more money,” John told me. “He felt that Jerry was trying to pressure him and take advantage of him.”
John tried to reassure the KGB agent. He explained that he had personally photographed the remaining two thirds of the messages from the U.S.S. Enterprise and was certain that the photographs were good. He also promised to check with Jerry to see if he still had copies of the first batch of messages to compensate for the fogged film.
Then John changed subject. Michael had been successfully recruited and had been aboard the U.S.S. America during the invasion of Grenada, he announced. Better yet, Michael had been transferred on January 31, 1984, from his air squadron to the U.S.S. Nimitz, the largest aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet. Michael was working hard, John assured the KGB agent, to get into the ship’s administration center, where he would have access to classified documents.
Arthur also was scouring VSE for worthwhile information, John added, possibly a method for alerting the Soviets if the DEFCON was changed by the Pentagon.
John had several other potential recruits in mind too. His half brother, Gary, might be turned because he was financially assisting his parents. John knew other persons in Norfolk who might be recruited, and there was a chance that John could goad Laura back into the Army or maybe John’s other daughters, Margaret and Cynthia, could be turned.
Obviously, John was attempting to prove his continued worth to the KGB.