by Earley, Pete
“Her objective was that the FBI would believe that Mark had black- mailed me for x number of years, and the courts could not possibly grant Mark custody under those conditions. Somehow Mark would be brought out in the light and my dad would be brought out in the light, and somehow I would get Chris. That was her main objective and you could go to the bank on it.
“I never dreamed that my dad would get arrested. I never knew beforehand that my mother was going to do it. I didn’t think he was spying anymore and I knew that I didn’t have enough to hang him and I knew that my mother didn’t either.
“When she told me this, there was an excitement in me, and I knew there was going to be a move, and I knew that God was going to do it. I just knew it, but I knew it wasn’t going to be the FBI that got my son back. It was God working through my mother, guiding her hand. Don’t you see the irony of it all?
“My mother turned in my father to save her grandson and get my son back to me.”
Barbara Walker’s version to me contradicted her daughter’s story on several counts. Barbara said she and Laura actually spoke twice on the night that Laura first called and) contrary to what Laura had said) they spoke extensively about Christopher and Mark. Both women, Barbara told me, were worried about what might happen if Mark took action. During their conversation, Barbara began to realize that Laura really missed her son.
“I called Laura back that evening after she called me and we talked,” Barbara told me) “because it had always bothered me that she had left Chris when we were in Skowhegan and gone to California. I asked her) ‘How can you walk away from a child?’ I knew she was in pain and we talked, and this is when I began to sense that maybe all this wasn’t an ego thing with Laura. Instead of her saying, ‘This is my child!’ maybe she was saying, ‘This is my child!’ and there is a difference between wanting something because you own it and caring about someone because you love them. I began to believe that Laura really was hurting and she really did want Chris back.
“After the second telephone call, I went into the living room to be alone, and I sat there in the dark and I thought about the spying, and for the very first time I saw the whole picture. I suddenly could see everything clearly.
“You see, we weren’t talking about Laura and Christopher. We weren’t just talking about John’s spying. We were talking about all of it. In the past, I had, in my desperation, only focused on one thing at a time. How could John serve with these men in the Navy and do what he is doing? Or how could he socialize with them and act like he’s their best friend? Or how could he do this to his family? Or how could he do this to God? For the first time that night, all these things came together! I could see it all for the very first time because before that I didn’t. I really didn’t. All of those years, I was only seeing certain things and would only think about certain things, the pieces. But I saw it all that night in that room. I saw John and what he had done to his country, his friends, his children, his God, and to me, and all the pain and suffering that he had caused. Oh God! The men who have died because of what he had done. And me too, by going along with him.”
Barbara Walker began crying at this point while talking to me. She had drunk several large tumblers of scotch during the afternoon and she was emotionally upset. It took her several minutes to regain her composure. “I was just as guilty, just as wrong, and I hated it. I hated it, and I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I had to call the FBI. I didn’t care what happened to me. I didn’t care what happened to anyone. I just wanted it to stop.
“I had to call Information because I couldn’t see the phone book because I’d been drinking. I called the number and I was glad. You don’t know how many times I had wanted this over with. I wanted it to go away. I didn’t want the pain. I do love my country, and I just got tired of carrying this load on my back.
“That’s why I called the FBI that night. It wasn’t Christopher or Laura. It was John. I just couldn’t live the lies any longer: his lies and mine. It was time for it to end.”
Laura’s version of her conversation with Barbara is contradicted, in part, by two documents.
A letter written by John to Michael, and later found by the FBI, indicates that Laura resurfaced before Barbara’s birthday on November 23. The letter, dated November 18, said:
Dear Mike:
Just a short note to give you some good news: Laura is alive and well. She telephoned Cynthia, Mom and informed everyone that she had never left New York. She has been going to school and basically living there.
Apparently, her friend that called and said she had boarded a bus was lying: Laura was living with her all the time and just wanted to “drop out of sight,” I guess. I knew you would be interested in hearing this right away. Sorry I don’t have more details.
Needless to say, I am glad Laura is okay, but I have mixed emotions in general. Obviously, it was a shitty thing to do, and I am sure she has enjoyed making us all feel like bastards.
A telephone log maintained by the FBI also showed that Barbara first called the bureau on November 17, six days before her birthday. These documents suggest that Laura placed her call before November 23, most likely on November 17.
Laura’s memory of her conversation with Barbara also is contradicted, not only by Barbara, but by Laura’s own testimony at Jerry Whitworth’s trial. Laura told me that she and her mother spoke only briefly, and never discussed John or mentioned the alleged threats made by Mark Snyder. But when asked during Whitworth’s trial about her telephone conversation with Barbara, Laura acknowledged that she and her mother were worried that Mark might attempt to incriminate them if either of them crossed him.
One of the reasons that Laura was worried was because she had applied for a job at the CIA and was concerned that the FBI might think she was trying to help her father. Barbara Walker insisted in all of her interviews with me that her motivation for calling the FBI had nothing to do with her trip to Norfolk or her demand for $10,000. The FBI accounts indicate otherwise.
When she first met with agents, Barbara specifically mentioned that John owed her $10,000 in unpaid alimony, and she told the FBI she had just come from seeing John in Norfolk, where he had a young girlfriend and such luxuries as a houseboat and an airplane. It was these comments, in fact, that initially made FBI agents suspect that Barbara might have made up the spy charges against her husband out of anger, seeking revenge.
Even members of the Walker family aren’t certain what happened on the night that Laura telephoned Barbara. “I was told by Michael, after we both were arrested, that Barbara had turned John in because she was angry at him,” Arthur Walker told me several months after the spy ring was broken. “She’d just taken all she was going to take. Then she called Laura for support, and together they came up with all this stuff about Christopher so they wouldn’t look so bad for squealing on everyone.”
Because of the various discrepancies, it is impossible to reconstruct accurately the conversation, feelings, and possible motivations of Laura and Barbara during their emotional telephone call that night in November. But the result is clear. For whatever reason, Laura’s telephone call that night prompted Barbara to call the FBI, and marked the beginning of John’s downfall.
Chapter 60
The operations administration office was on level 3 of the enormous U.S.S. Nimitz and was considered one of the most important chambers in the carrier. Anything that had to do with the ship’s operation, destination, or mission passed through this office and generally found its way to Michael’s desk, because he was the yeoman responsible for routing messages, filing memos, and typing orders.
Besides working in what the Navy called OPS-ADMIN, Michael also was assigned to the office next door, known as STRIKE-OPS, which is where the carrier’s top echelon of officers meet to plan and coordinate actual combat operations. The Navy recognized the importance of Michael’s job even though he was technically a low-ranking yeoman. Only persons with a secret clearance or above were supposed to work in the center. A
fter his arrest, the Navy would announce that Michael had such a clearance, but, in truth, he had never undergone a background check.
“When I reported to work,” Michael told me, “I was told that I had to get a clearance to work in the office. I said, ‘Okay, no problem,’ but I never put in for one and no one ever followed up on it. They just believed me when I told them that I had one.”
Michael’s promotion to the OPS-ADMIN office and subsequent failure to obtain the proper clearance was a major breach of Navy security that was not publicly reported but was later substantiated by FBI and Naval Investigative Service agents.
“Somebody really screwed up even letting him in there,” an investigator confirmed later.
The room where Michael worked was spartan. Along one wall to the left of the door were three large file cabinets containing classified messages and orders. A copy machine and supply cabinet sat next to the file cabinets. In the center of the room stood a large steel table holding four large clipboards, each of which contained various messages about the ship’s maneuvers and operations. Michael’s desk faced the wall directly across from the door. It was one of a row of five desks, each belonging to someone of progressively higher rank. The wall to Michael’s right had a high-speed computer printer in front of it and an MPDS, or Message Processing Distribution System, machine. It reminded Michael of a teletype machine as it printed various messages sent to the office.
On the same wall as the door was a computer terminal and the duty officer’s desk. It was Michael’s job to tear messages off the MPDS machine, deliver them to the five senior officers in the office, and do whatever secretarial chores were required. He also had the mundane task of picking up the seven burn bags in the office and carrying them to a fan room. These bags looked much like standard grocery store bags, except that they were unmarked. Every secret and confidential document received by the OPS-ADMIN office was supposed to be placed in a burn bag once it was no longer needed.
The burn bags were stored in the fan room off the STRIKE-OPS office. This office was an even more sensitive assignment for Michael. It was guarded by a cipher lock, and no one was supposed to be inside without a specific reason – no one but Michael, who could come and go as he pleased since he needed access to the fan room where the burn bags were stored. The STRIKE-OPS office was the closest thing to a “war room” on the carrier.
Around a huge table the admiral and his officers made their major decisions. One wall had an enormous chart that showed the location of every missile and bomb aboard the carrier. Another wall contained a special audiovisual screen capable of showing within seconds a detailed map of any country in the world. The room also contained a telephone with a direct line to the Pentagon and, if necessary, the President of the United States. There were also several safes where various secret documents and reports were kept.
It was in the fan room, actually a closet off the STRIKE-OPS office with a ventilation fan in it, that each day’s burn bags were stored. This was where Michael did most of his work as a spy.
The carrier only burned the bags when necessary, and only after 11:30 P.M., when it was not launching aircraft. This schedule gave Michael time to sort through each burn bag and remove whatever secret documents interested him. It also enabled him to circumvent Navy security.
As far as the Navy knew, all the items in the burn bags were destroyed. Michael never had to worry about signing for documents or even copying them.
“OPS-ADMIN and STRIKE-OPS were gold mines for spying,” Michael recalled. “Classified shit was lying everywhere, and most of it eventually hit the burn bags. If you couldn’t find something out by going through the messages and classified reports in these two rooms, then it just didn’t exist or wasn’t happening.”
Michael began stealing classified material within days after reporting to work in OPS-ADMIN. The burn bags proved to be easy to ransack. Once a bag was full, it was stapled shut by Michael and taken to the fan room for storage. What no one knew was that Michael simply tore open the bags once he was alone in the fan room and took out whatever he wanted. “I kept a stapler in the fan room in plain sight and no one ever said a word,” Michael recalled.
Michael was caught once going through a burn bag in the fan room.
“What the hell are you doing?” an officer who had been looking for Michael demanded when he discovered the yeoman looking through classified material that he obviously had removed from a burn bag.
“I got to get a message that the captain wanted,” Michael answered quickly. “Someone threw it away by mistake.”
“Okay. When you get done, I need you to run an errand,” the officer replied.
“I was always cool about things,” Michael told me. “The entire office ran on trust. You did your job and no one even thought about the guy next to them being a spy.”
The longer Michael worked in the two offices, the more daring he became. He found a classified report in the OPS-ADMIN office that he wanted to copy for his dad. It was more than four inches thick and the copying machine could only duplicate twenty-five pages at a time, so Michael took it apart and carefully stacked it in sections.
When he was about halfway through his copying project, the duty officer came over to the machine with an order that he needed to copy.
“Geez, Walker, what’s all this shit?” he asked.
“Gotta make a copy for the captain,” Michael said. Then he offered to interrupt his task so the duty officer didn’t have to wait.
“Thanks,” the officer said, handing Michael the order.
“This guy walked back to his desk,” Michael recalled, “so I made two copies and kept one for myself, and then I finished copying this secret report. As long as you were cool about it and acted like you knew what you were doing, you were okay. The key was not panicking.”
Michael took the report home to his father by hiding it in his backpack. “He couldn’t believe that I had copied this huge report right under everyone’s nose.”
“You’ve got balls,” John told Michael.
“I decided,” Michael recalled, “that I was going to drain that ship of every secret it had.”
In the fall of 1984, the U.S.S. Nimitz left Norfolk for a short cruise in the Caribbean. On October 12, John sent a tape-recorded letter to Michael. The two spies had agreed to refer to classified material by the code name pictures.
Dear Mike, How you doing? I miss you. Where are you? I just tried to call Rachel, wasn’t home. Called her mother and said she’s on some field trip up in Pennsylvania... Don’t know what you’re doing. I guess you’re having fun. Hope you’re getting me some good pictures... I’ll be interested in looking at your photographs ... that’s what I like to see. I’d say like hang onto them. Let me see them when you come back in ... and remember to get what you can, okay? ...
Michael began enjoying himself.
The U.S.S. Nimitz was participating in a secret and sensitive war game, Michael had discovered, which involved a simulated invasion of Cuba. The operation began at two A.M. and was supposed to be a surprise for the crew, but the officers in the OPS-ADMIN office didn’t want to run any risks so they had tipped off Michael and warned him to be ready.
As a result, Michael reported to the OPS-ADMIN office before two o’clock, and was the first person there when the exercise began.
Within minutes, a radio operator arrived at the office with a top secret message. Unlike secret and confidential messages, top secret messages are so sensitive that anyone who reads one is required to sign a log that is kept with the top secret message until it is destroyed.
“You got a clearance for this?” the radioman, who has since left the Navy, asked Michael.
Michael took a chance. “Yeah, sure.”
“Okay,” the radioman said, handing it to him.
“I couldn’t believe this dumb ass gave me a top secret message and then didn’t have me sign for it,” Michael recalled. “Another yeoman was in the room and I told him to go next door. ‘Hey
, you go in STRIKE-OPS – that way it will look like we are manning both offices. That’ll impress the captain,’ ” Michael said to him.
As soon as the other yeoman left, Michael locked the OPS-ADMIN door and raced to the copy machine. Just as Michael pushed the copying button, someone pounded on the door.
“I hid my copy and opened the door,” Michael recalled, “and it was the captain and he was pissed. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I must have locked the door by mistake,’ I said. I thought I was busted. ‘Don’t ever lock this door again,’ he yelled. I gave him the top secret message and he was so busy, he didn’t even ask if I’d signed for it.”
During the entire mock invasion of Cuba, Michael sat at the computer terminal in the STRIKE-OPS office and printed out messages for the admiral and other brass.
“We were launching aircraft,” Michael told me enthusiastically, “and directing cruisers and submarines and doing all kinds of exciting shit just as if we were at war and actually attacking Cuba, and what was really neat was that I was hitting the 2 key on my keyboard whenever I printed messages. I was printing one message, like I was supposed to, and then another one for myself. I did that all night long and no one noticed.”
When the carrier returned to port, Michael delivered his package of messages to John.
“Ever wonder how we’d invade Cuba?” Michael asked John, tossing the stolen documents on his desk.
John was impressed.
“Michael was really turning out to be a better spy than I ever expected,” John proudly told me later. “He was really innovative about getting me stuff.”
Michael’s biggest achievement was yet to come. Once while working a relaxed night shift, he went into the STRIKE-OPS office and began snooping through various desks there. On top of one was a Rolodex telephone file.
Michael gave it a spin and noticed a woman’s name on one of the small white cards. The card read “Jodie,” followed by several digits, but there were too many to be a telephone number. Michael wrote the name and numbers on a pad and continued looking through the directory. He found “Sarah” next and copied down her name and number. When he finished going through the Rolodex, Michael counted the names and then looked around the room.