Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  “There were exactly the same number of safes in the room as names on my pad,” Michael recalled. “Bingo, l knew exactly what had happened. Someone had been afraid they might forget a combination to the safes, so they had written them down and tried to disguise them as telephone numbers.”

  Michael began methodically trying each combination until he linked each girl’s name with each safe.

  After John was arrested, the FBI searched his house and confiscated a film typewriter ribbon that agents were able to use to reconstruct his correspondence.

  John had used his typewriter to type a list of the documents Michael had stolen from the Nimitz. The list included classified material about the Nuclear Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missile, spy satellites, newly developed underwater mines, and thirty-three messages concerning intelligence operations.

  The FBI would wonder later how Michael had removed documents from the Nimitz safes and copied them. But no explanation was needed for another item that they found on John’s typewriter ribbon. It was a brief note that he had written to Michael:

  Dear Mike ... Everyone liked your pictures and it appears that you are becoming an excellent photographer. Keep up the good work ...

  PART VI

  exposed

  The surest way to be deceived is to think one’s self more clever than others.

  – La Rochefoucauld, Maximes No. 127

  Chapter 61

  The telephone operator gave Barbara the number for the FBI office in Boston when she telephoned for information on November 17, but the agent in Boston told her to call the FBI office in Hyannis, one of the bureau’s smallest outposts.

  Barbara called Hyannis and spoke with Special Agent Walter Price, a fifteen-year FBI veteran who had been assigned there all but two of those years. Within the FBI, the Hyannis office was considered an anachronism, opened when John F. Kennedy was president and scarcely one of the bureau’s choicer assignments.

  Based on her speech, Price suspected that Barbara had been drinking, and when he asked, she acknowledged that she had poured herself a few drinks to calm her nerves. Price promised to drop by Barbara’s West Dennis apartment and conduct a follow-up interview in person, but he didn’t set a specific date.

  As soon as Barbara replaced the telephone receiver, she called John in Norfolk.

  “I wanted to tell him about Laura and also warn him,” she explained later. But their conversation quickly turned sour.

  “She demanded the ten thousand and began threatening me again,” John told me. “It was the same old story.”

  John noted Barbara’s call in the November 18 letter to Michael that the FBI found later.

  Your mother called ... with her usual threats, and didn’t really say much. Everything normal here except for Mom’s endless threats. As usual, try to communicate with her and try to get her to STOP.

  When Barbara finished talking to John, she telephoned Arthur. “I’m going to turn your brother in,” Barbara said. Arthur figured she was drunk.

  “She had called prior times,” Arthur said later, “and always said that she was going to do it. I was going to be a little flippant and say, ‘Ha-ha, what are you going to turn him in for? He isn’t doing anything.’ ”

  Instead, Arthur handed her over to Rita. The next day, Arthur called John.

  “Barbara called again,” he reported. “She says she’s gonna turn you in.”

  “Yeah, she’s drunk again,” John replied. “That crazy bitch.”

  “John, you had better take good care of her, okay?” Arthur said, but he knew John wouldn’t give Barbara any money.

  “I sometimes wondered how he kept operating with that hanging over his head,” Arthur recalled. “Evidently, his own ego convinced him that she wasn’t going to do it.”

  During the next few days, agent Price stopped by Barbara’s apartment twice but she wasn’t home. They finally met November 29, and a few minutes after Price began questioning Barbara, she politely excused herself and returned with a large tumbler of scotch. Price dutifully took notes as she described traveling to Washington with John and delivering classified documents to KGB agents during dead drops. During the two-hour session, Barbara told how John had tried to recruit Laura and her suspicion that Mark Snyder was threatening Laura to prevent her from gaining custody of Christopher.

  “It was obvious to me,” Barbara said later, “that this agent didn’t believe a word I was telling him.”

  Barbara decided to confront Price. “What if I had someone who could testify about all this?” she asked. “What if Laura told you about her father trying to recruit her as a spy?”

  “That would help,” Price said.

  Back at his office, Price noted in his initial report to Boston that Barbara was an admitted alcoholic and angry ex-wife. He also noted that she had talked about John’s spying in the past tense, which, he felt, indicated that John hadn’t been spying since 1976 when he and Barbara were divorced and John retired from the Navy.

  How, Price wondered, would the FBI prosecute someone for a crime allegedly committed nearly a decade earlier? There was another problem with the case. What kind of a witness would Barbara make? Would a jury believe a jilted divorcee who had a drinking problem and was angry because her ex-husband owed her $10,000 and was living with a woman half her age?

  Price reacted by typing the numbers 65-0 on his report. The 65 indicated the subject of the report was espionage and the zero signified that no case number had been assigned because the agent considered the information not worthy of further investigation.

  When Price’s report arrived in Boston, a clerk there filed it in the “Zero file,” a place for complaints that, more often than not, are more fiction than fact.

  Barbara Walker telephoned Laura a few hours after the interview with Price and asked her for support.

  “Would you be willing to testify against your father?” Barbara asked. “I’ll try to make it easier for you. Your sisters and brother are not going to be happy with what you do, so I’ll arrange it so it looks like I forced you into it by giving the FBI your name. I won’t tell them that you agreed.”

  Laura volunteered to talk to Price.

  Barbara immediately called Price and gave him Laura’s number in Buffalo. “At last, I figured something would happen,” Barbara recalled. “I kept waiting and waiting for someone to telephone me, but nothing happened. I couldn’t believe it! After all these years of worrying and trying to turn him in, and then I finally call and no one believes me.”

  Laura was also surprised. She kept waiting for Price to telephone her, but he didn’t. Finally she telephoned Barbara.

  “Why hasn’t anyone called?” Laura asked. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Barbara said. “Maybe you should call Walter Price and ask him.”

  Barbara gave Laura the agent’s number and she promised to call him.

  “Now, something is going to happen,” Barbara said. “You promise to call him, Laura.”

  Laura telephoned Price, but she became squeamish when he began asking her specific questions. She began to panic.

  “What my mother says is true!” Laura told him. Later she admitted that she was getting worried about “squealing” on her father. “I beat around the bush,” Laura told me, “because I just didn’t want to come out and say everything that I knew.”

  Finally, Laura told Price that she didn’t want to talk anymore. “Look, I know my mother called you and I just want to tell you that I’m here to confirm what she said.”

  Price agreed to add Laura’s statement to his original report, but she was so vacillating that their conversation helped persuade him an investigation wasn’t warranted.

  Laura began to worry.

  “I couldn’t believe that I had called the FBI on my dad and I decided, in my own mind, that I wasn’t going to cooperate with the FBI,” she said. “Instead, I called up my mom and I said, ‘Mother ... I want to call Dad and let him know that we’ve called the FBI.�
� I was going to blackmail my dad! I said, ‘Mom, I want to call Dad and tell him that we called the FBI and we are going to cooperate unless he goes down and gets Chris for me. He’s got an airplane and he’s a private investigator. Boy, he would hop on that plane and go get Chris in nothing flat if we threatened him like that.’

  “And my mother says to me, ‘No, we are not going to do it,’ but I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do it. I don’t want Dad to go to jail, but I want him to go and do it. I want my son, and Dad should do it.’ And my mother said, ‘Laura, don’t be an asshole,’ and I said, ‘Mom, that’s what I want to do,’ and she said, ‘He’ll never buy it.’ See, I didn’t realize that he probably wouldn’t have done it because my mother had already tried that umpteen times – threatening to turn him in. But that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to blackmail my own dad, but she talked me out of it.”

  Barbara continued to wait for the FBI to investigate. She was confident that Laura’s call to Price would convince the agent that John was a spy. Day after day, she waited for a telephone call. At night she drank herself to sleep. Christmas approached and passed. New Year’s Eve came, and there was still no word from Price or the FBI.

  Finally, Barbara gave up.

  “I decided that no one really cared. John had gotten away with it, and there wasn’t anyone who was going to stop him.”

  Chapter 62

  Three months after Barbara alerted the FBI, John went to Vienna for his eleventh face-to-face overseas meeting with a KGB agent. He brought more than one dozen rolls of film with pictures of documents Michael had stolen from the U.S.S. Nimitz.

  The weather on January 19, 1985, was, as always, bitter cold, and as John walked the usual route, he began to wonder once again why the Russians insisted on meeting in the streets rather than a safe house. With a chuckle, John did notice a change in scenery. Two blocks away from the Bazala store was now a McDonald’s restaurant. John had been spying long enough for American fast food to invade his turf.

  For the first time, John’s KGB handler was apologetic. The photographs that John had delivered earlier from Jerry had turned out perfectly. The KGB now had all of the secret message traffic that Jerry had stolen during his duty aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise.

  “Please tell Jerry that we will pay him,” the Russian said. “He will get all of his money at the next exchange in your country.”

  Sensing a hint of apology, John protested at meeting in the middle of winter on the sidewalks of Vienna.

  “Why the fuck don’t you guys take me somewhere where we can talk comfortably in private?” he asked. “Don’t you have a safe house here?”

  “The Russian told me,” John recalled later, “that it was safer to walk the streets.” The CIA and other intelligence organizations are constantly trying to find Soviet safe houses. Taking John to one would be too risky.

  John was insistent. He was tired of the cold. “He told me that he’d arrange for me to go to a safe house the next time I came to Europe,” John recalled. The plan called for John to be taken across the Czechoslovakian border when he returned in the fall.

  The agent asked about Michael. “He’s about to leave on an extended Mediterranean cruise,” said John. “He’ll get as many messages as he can.”

  The KGB agent told John that Michael should try to get as much information about the Israelis as possible. John brought up Rachel.

  “She’s graduating from college and I’m trying to get her to join the Navy, become an officer.” With Rachel’s interest in oceanography, John told the Russian, “she’d be able to find out about SOSUS [the network of ocean hydrophones].”

  Women, the KGB agent replied, rarely are suspected of being spies. Recruiting Rachel would be good.

  What about Arthur? John lied. Arthur was working hard to get a new job with better access, he said. Hopefully, Arthur would find a job where he could tell when the DEFCON changed.

  “The Soviets were paranoid about us attacking them,” John told me later, “so anything I could offer them that had to do with the DEFCON was always good.”

  The rest of their conversation had to do with Jerry and his intentional bungling of the photographs from the U.S.S. Enterprise.

  John had come prepared. “I wasn’t about to be caught in a fight between Jerry and the Soviets,” he recalled, “and I wasn’t going to stick my neck out for him or defend him.”

  John simply handed the KGB agents copies of the letters that Jerry had written to him, including his resignation letter, and John’s responses.

  Typical was a letter that Jerry had written John on August 14. He didn’t yet know what kind of work he would be doing, and he acknowledged that his leaving the Navy had been done against John’s advice. But he asked John to understand and respect his decision. “... there’s been something missing,” he wrote. “In all honesty, I was happier in the ‘60s and early ‘70s than I’ve been since.”

  The KGB agent was clearly worried. Why had Jerry quit? Would offering him more money bring him back into the ring? Could he get access once again to keylists?

  John played it safe. “I don’t know,” he said. “Jerry’s sitting out in California masturbating with his computer while Brenda finishes her degree, and the truth is, I don’t know what the fuck he is doing or thinking.”

  Was there any chance that Jerry might contact the FBI?

  John paused deliberately. He wanted his KGB handler to know that he took the question seriously. No, John finally answered, he didn’t believe Jerry would do that. He was too deeply involved.

  Jerry’s value had diminished now that Michael had joined the spy ring, the KGB agent said, but if there were a chance that Jerry might reenlist and once again have access to keylists, it should be pursued. John should be careful, his handler warned, because often when a spy stops getting money, he begins to worry about being caught and looks for a way to exonerate himself.

  “Jerry must be paid the money he is owed,” the agent said. “Tell him we are sorry it took so long.”

  It was arranged that John would make a dead drop delivery and collect more than $200,000 that the KGB owed him, Michael, and Jerry, on May 19.

  Back at his hotel that night, John wasn’t so sure that Jerry was owed an apology.

  After all the stunts he had pulled, John wasn’t even certain Jerry was due his full amount, John said later. “He sure as hell didn’t mind putting my life in danger.”

  His session that day with the KGB also had convinced John that, if necessary, the Russians would eliminate Jerry. All John had to do was persuade them that Jerry had become a threat to the spy ring.

  John reached a decision: Jerry was going to have to pay for the trouble he had caused, and since John was the only person who knew for certain how much money the KGB had left in a dead drop, taking a percentage of Jerry’s earnings would be easy.

  All John had to do was tell Jerry that the Russians had cut his monthly salary because he had retired. “I didn’t really need Whitworth anymore at that point,” John said.

  “He was nothing but trouble.”

  Chapter 63

  Michael was bringing John so many secret documents from the U.S.S. Nimitz in the spring of 1985 that he didn’t have time to photograph them all. Instead, John began putting them in a closet in an upstairs bedroom. It wasn’t long before they began spilling out into the room.

  One afternoon Michael dropped off a thick report with the word SECRET stamped in red letters on the cover. Two days later, when Michael stopped by his father’s house, the report was sitting out in the open near a telephone book in John’s den.

  Michael was angry about his father’s sloppiness.

  “Dad, what the hell is this?” Michael complained. “I can’t believe you are leaving this shit lying around in the open!”

  “Don’t sweat it,” John replied. “No one’s going to see it.”

  “I was really upset,” Michael told me later. “I mean, he had been careless for years. That’s how my mother found out
. But he just ignored me because he was busy and convinced no one would ever catch him. I felt that way too, I guess, but I didn’t leave stuff laying out at home.”

  Michael and John had been getting along poorly for months. Michael’s dislike of P.K. was just one reason. John was pestering Michael to tell his mother that he was a spy and Michael didn’t want to. John also had been urging him to help recruit Rachel, and originally Michael thought the idea was great.

  “We could do it as husband and wife,” Michael told Rachel one night. “Mr. and Mrs. James Bond.”

  But Rachel had been cool to the suggestion.

  “You think it would be funny if I joined the Navy and became an officer,” she told Michael, “because then you could tell your pals, ‘Hey guys, I have to salute my wife before we go to bed.’ But think about what you’re suggesting, Michael. What if the Navy sent us to different parts of the world?”

  Besides, she added, didn’t Michael understand that John was simply using them?

  “He’s asking us to do his dirty work. It’s our butts on the line.”

  Michael disagreed. “He’s just cutting us in on the action.”

  On March 7, the day before the U.S.S. Nimitz left for the Mediterranean cruise, John telephoned Rachel several times at the apartment and asked if Michael was there.

  “I’ve got to see him,” John said. “I want him to stop by and talk to me.” Michael knew what his dad wanted.

  Barbara had been making threatening calls to John and Arthur. John wanted Michael to telephone his mother and get her off everyone’s back. John also wanted to tell Michael how to hide documents aboard the carrier during a long cruise.