Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  “I knew he didn’t want to come over,” John recalled later. “He wanted to stay home with Rachel and I can understand that. But I had been bugging him for weeks to come over and he hadn’t, even though I told him it was vital that we talked. It turned out to be a major screw-up because Michael ended up leaving Norfolk without my having a chance to tell him how to hide documents.”

  Michael had ignored John’s telephone calls on purpose.

  “I didn’t want to listen to my dad bitch about me telling Mom I was a spy,” Michael told me. But John’s calls also irritated him for another reason.

  By then Rachel thought Michael had given up spying, because he had stopped bringing classified documents home. But John’s frantic calls had convinced Rachel that Michael had simply been doing a better job of hiding things from her.

  What Michael and Rachel both hoped would be a romantic evening together before the Nimitz deployed on March 8 was quickly blighted by an argument.

  “You promised me you’d stop,” Rachel said. “Michael, you’re going to get caught. This isn’t worth it.”

  “Look Rachel, we need the money!” Michael said.

  “We don’t need it that bad.” That night, Rachel refused to sleep with Michael. Instead, she slept on the couch.

  The issue was no longer Michael’s spying. It was John’s influence over his son.

  Chapter 64

  FBI agents in field offices report to their regional headquarters every 120 days, and when Walter Price flew to Boston in the spring of 1985, he told his supervisor about Barbara Walker’s charges. The supervisor sent an overnight letter to the FBI headquarters in Washington and mailed another copy to the FBI office in Norfolk. No one at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue paid any attention to the correspondence about Barbara Walker. Once again, the FBI dismissed her charges without bothering to investigate. But in Norfolk, her accusations interested two agents: Joseph R. Wolfinger and Robert W. Hunter. They were an unlikely pair.

  Wolfinger looked like an uncomplicated good old southern boy. At age thirty-nine, he had a slight paunch, ruddy complexion, witty demeanor, and a Virginia drawl that came from being born and raised in Norfolk. In contrast, Hunter stood ramrod straight and at age forty-nine worked out daily at a local exercise club. His graying hair was always neatly combed, his clothes well tailored, his manner slightly reserved.

  Their backgrounds also differed.

  Even though he rarely mentioned it for fear of sounding pretentious, Wolfinger had grown up the son of a wealthy and prominent Norfolk businessman. He decided early on to become a criminal defense attorney, but after graduating from the University of South Carolina Law School, he joined the FBI. He thought a three-year stint as an agent would give him an edge later in private practice when defending the accused.

  “I always had the impression that there were a lot of innocent people out there being charged with crimes,” Wolfinger recalled, “but what I discovered as an agent was that there were a lot of sick people out there doing a lot of depraved things and very few of the ones who had been arrested were innocent.”

  Wolfinger had done well as an agent and was highly regarded for his skill at handling complicated cases. He had a knack for skillfully weaving evidence together in such a fashion that even a dense juror who didn’t quite understand the nuances of a trial would still get the point: the FBI had found the guilty man.

  Hunter had spent his youth in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town where his father had toiled at a steel mill. After he graduated from high school, his family moved to Florida, where he enrolled in college.

  But he didn’t take the work seriously. He flunked out.

  Later, he returned to a junior college and ultimately graduated with honors from a state university. Hunter spent two years as a junior high school teacher and worked as an insurance investigator before joining the FBI. He arrived in Norfolk in late 1967, the same year as John Walker.

  An uncompromising but compassionate man, Hunter genuinely liked people, and he had the unusual ability to empathize with them. This frequently gave him an edge when conducting investigations – people would tell Hunter things that they never intended to. But this trait also proved risky. Sometimes it was difficult for Hunter to keep from becoming totally immersed in his work, and it had cost him personally; he and his wife had separated.

  Wolfinger was the first to see the Boston report on Barbara Walker, and was openly skeptical because she was an admitted alcoholic and angry ex-wife looking to nail her husband.

  But Barbara’s descriptions of clandestine dead drops were uncannily accurate, and Wolfinger suspected that she had not gained such knowledge from pulp spy novels. As supervisor of the foreign counterintelligence squad in Norfolk, Wolfinger wanted to know more, so he showed the report to Hunter.

  “This is definitely worth a few phone calls,” Hunter said.

  “It’s all yours,” Wolfinger replied.

  Hunter contacted Walter Price in Hyannis and asked if Barbara Walker would voluntarily take a polygraph test. Hunter also requested that agents in Buffalo interview Laura immediately.

  On March 7, the day before the U.S.S. Nimitz left Norfolk for its extended Mediterranean cruise, FBI agents Paul Culligan and Charles B. Wagner knocked on the door to Laura’s apartment. Culligan had talked to Laura earlier on the phone and decided he and Wagner had to approach her as friends, rather than federal agents. As part of that philosophy, Culligan and Wagner both changed from their suits into casual clothes for the interview with her.

  “We wanted our interview to be as nonthreatening as possible and do everything we could to gain her trust and confidence,” Culligan told me later. “Laura made it clear that she had some natural resistance to talking about her dad. The common bond between us was her son, Christopher, and we recognized early on that he was really the key to getting Laura’s cooperation. If she wanted her son, she had to get John off her back.”

  During their interview, the telephone in Laura’s apartment rang. It was Michael, who had called to tell Laura good-bye since he was scheduled to leave the next morning. Laura cut the conversation short without telling Michael that the FBI was there.

  “We knew that she had been speaking to Michael,” Culligan recalled, “but she didn’t seem at all concerned. I doubt if she would have acted that way if she had known Michael was involved.”

  Culligan, a thirty-eight-year-old, nine-year FBI veteran, coaxed enough information from Laura to write an incriminating statement about John. He asked her if she would be willing to sign the statement and also, if necessary, testify against her father. Laura agreed.

  Culligan called Hunter after the interview and told him that Laura seemed credible and was willing to testify. Culligan also had an idea: Why not ask Laura to telephone her father and tape record the call?

  “It would be one way we could answer the one question that was on everyone’s mind,” Culligan recalled, “which was, ‘Is John still doing this or is he inactive?’ ”

  Culligan, Hunter, and Wolfinger discussed it and decided to ask Washington for permission. Culligan returned to Laura’s apartment a few days later and explained why such a call was necessary.

  “She said she’d do it,” Culligan said.

  One week after Laura first talked to the FBI, she wrote Michael a letter apologizing for her abruptness when he telephoned.

  “But I never told Michael about the FBI,” Laura told me later, “because I was afraid he would tell my dad.”

  At the time, Laura said she didn’t believe Michael was involved. “Of course, I assumed that my father had tried to recruit him,” she explained, “but I figured he had said no because that’s what I had done.”

  Even after Michael joined the Navy, Laura said, “I never dreamed he might have said yes.”

  Before Hunter left for Buffalo to interview Laura personally and oversee her telephone call to John, he received more good news. Barry Colvert, one of the FBI’s polygraph examiners, had te
sted Barbara Walker in Hyannis and she had “passed.” She was not lying about her ex-husband’s being a Russian spy.

  Hunter arrived in Buffalo on March 25 and was taken by Culligan to meet Laura that afternoon.

  Hunter was impressed by her willingness to help. “Laura was quite honest and frank about her family’s secret,” he told me later. “She didn’t have to cooperate with us. She could have told us, ‘This is all I know and that’s all I’m doing,’ but she wanted to help. She wanted to call her dad.”

  The agents attached a listening device to Laura’s telephone and showed her how to turn on the recorder.

  “We had already decided,” Culligan recalled, “that we would leave when she made the call. We were going to have a tape of the conversation so there was no point in us being there and upsetting her or making her nervous.”

  But before they left, the agents suggested two possible stories that Laura could use to entice John into once again trying to recruit her as a spy.

  “You could tell him that there is an opening at Eastman Kodak,” Culligan said, “which is a world leader in photography and optics. Or that you want to join the Army Reserves.”

  Hunter and Culligan told Laura that they would return for the tape recording at eleven P.M. that night.

  “There was no doubt in my mind,” said Culligan, “that she would make the call. She wanted Christopher back.”

  That afternoon and evening, Hunter tried repeatedly to put himself in Laura’s shoes. “My heart went out to her,” he recalled. “I tried to imagine how hard this must be for her. Here was a girl who hadn’t spoken to her father in more than one year, yet she was willing to telephone him and let us tape record the conversation.”

  Hunter also tried to picture John Walker.

  What kind of a father was he, and what had he done to his own daughter that would make her turn so strongly against him?

  Chapter 65

  “My name is Laura Mae Walker Snyder. Today’s date is March 25, 1985.... I’m going to be calling John Walker ... in Norfolk, Virginia.”

  JOHN: Hello?

  LAURA: Urn, hi.

  JOHN: Hi.

  LAURA: Do you know who this is?

  JOHN: No.

  LAURA: This is Laura.

  JOHN: Laura?

  LAURA: Yes, a voice-

  JOHN: Laura Walker?

  LAURA: Yes, that Laura.

  JOHN: Well, I’ll be damned. I didn’t figure I’d ever hear from you....

  As the tape recording of Laura’s telephone call to John indicates, she fulfilled her promise to the agents. Once John got over his surprise, his conversation ranged over familiar territory, berating Barbara with his usual profanity and assailing Laura for the way she had run her life.

  She turned the subject to spying, as she had promised Hunter and Culligan, and talked about her veteran’s status and about the Kodak plant. When the subject shifted to Mark, John was furious again about Laura’s “telling that guy something as private as what we discussed.”

  “Well, I got desperate,” Laura said. “But I think now ... he’s so stoned and so gone that he doesn’t even know his name anymore.”

  “Well, the problem is that makes him dangerous,” John answered.

  Despite Laura’s bait, John didn’t say anything incriminating. Still, the call convinced the FBI that John was someone to be taken seriously.

  Though signed statements by Barbara and Laura, even though they had been verified by polygraph, were not sufficient for the FBI to seek criminal charges against John, the FBI and the Justice Department agreed that the tape recording and the statements were enough to request permission to tap John’s telephone.

  On April 5, a court approved the placing of wiretaps on telephones in John’s house, office, and houseboat. It would take the FBI six days to install the wiretaps and begin its twenty-four-hour monitoring. In the meantime, the FBI faced a problem that threatened to unravel its investigation. Barbara Walker announced that she was coming to Norfolk to visit Margaret.

  Hunter and Wolfinger were uneasy. At the time, all they knew about Barbara was that she was an alcoholic who had tried in the past, according to her statements, to turn John in. If she backed down now and alerted John, he could destroy whatever evidence might exist at his home and cover his tracks.

  Barbara arrived at Margaret’s apartment during the first week of April, and Hunter and FBI agent Beverly Andress telephoned her immediately to arrange a clandestine meeting. Hunter had asked Andress to join him because he knew some women felt more comfortable talking to another woman rather than a man.

  It was crucial that he and Andress not upset Barbara.

  They met Barbara at a parking lot near Margaret’s apartment, motioned her into the back seat of Hunter’s sedan, and sped away to a section of Norfolk where they felt confident she wouldn’t be recognized.

  Hunter was startled when he met Barbara. He hadn’t expected her to be well tailored, attractive, and articulate.

  After listening to John’s tape-recorded telephone conversation with Laura, Hunter expected Barbara to be as uncouth as her ex-husband, “It was hard for me to believe that he talked to his own daughter the way he did, using the language he did,” Hunter told me later. “I heard an anger, an arrogance, particularly in the way he referred to women as bitches and cunts. I thought John was one of the most profane guys I’d ever heard.”

  But Barbara had a certain polish. Hunter and Andress both had studied the six-page investigative report that Walter Price had written after a follow-up interview he had with Barbara on March 19.

  At that point, Barbara had told the FBI that John had two spying partners: Arthur Walker and a close friend of John’s named “Jerry Wentworth.”

  Laura had said Jerry’s last name was “Wittemore.” Neither Hunter nor Andress pressured Barbara for more details; instead they worked at gaining her trust by sympathizing with her. Although Barbara was noticeably tense, she clearly wanted to follow up on her accusations. She wanted John stopped, she said.

  But just as the two agents began to relax, Barbara announced that she had telephoned Arthur on the same night that she had called the FBI and had warned him. She also had called John that night and threatened to turn him in to the FBI.

  Near panic, Hunter quizzed Barbara about how John and Arthur had responded. Did they believe that she had called the FBI? Did she think either of them was aware of the FBI investigation? Barbara didn’t know.

  “That interview was the beginning of a very stressful week,” Hunter recalled. “We had a real control problem with Barbara.”

  Back at the Norfolk FBI office, Hunter and Wolfinger decided to literally hold Barbara’s hand every day to make certain she didn’t flip-flop. Margaret Walker also scared them. Barbara had told the FBI that Margaret knew about the investigation. Barbara had also said that Margaret had a good relationship with her father and was caught between “a rock and hard place – her father and me.”

  Which, the agents wondered, would Margaret choose?

  The morning after their first meeting, Barbara telephoned Hunter to tell him some details she had remembered about the mysterious Wentworth. Hunter kept the conversation upbeat and thanked her repeatedly for calling.

  But the next day, neither Hunter nor Andress could reach Barbara on the telephone. Both were concerned, but they decided there was little that they could do. They couldn’t drive to Margaret’s apartment. What if John showed up unexpectedly?

  Another day passed and Barbara remained out of communication. Now the agents were alarmed. Where had Barbara gone? What had happened? Had she changed her mind? Had she met with John?

  On April 8, Barbara resurfaced. “I’ve seen John,” she announced over the telephone. Trying to remain calm, Hunter arranged an immediate meeting. Whenever Hunter and Andress conducted an interview, they filed a written report on government form FD-302, referred to as 302 statements by investigators. The 302 statement that Hunter and Andress wrote after meeting with Barb
ara Walker was quickly classified as secret and sent overnight to the foreign counterintelligence office in Washington for review. In part, it said:

  Barbara Walker saw her former husband, John Anthony Walker, Jr., on April 7, 1985, when he visited their daughter, Margaret ... at her home.

  John told Barbara he wanted to talk to her for a couple of hours before she went home ... Mrs. Walker advised that during her last visit in August ... she talked to Michael Walker about his father’s illegal activities. Mrs. Walker advised that Michael talked her out of reporting John Walker to the FBI because it would hurt Michael’s Navy career. She does not believe that John Walker has recruited Michael to commit espionage, but advised that Michael has worked for his father doing surveillance connected with his private detective business.

  Mrs. Walker advised John Walker has talked to their daughter, Margaret, concerning comments Barbara made about reporting his activities to the FBI. She advised that John Walker has commented to Margaret that he was surprised he had not been arrested yet, and that he had “done something good and the kids would hate their mother for turning him in.”

  Based on that 302 statement, the FBI began a discreet investigation of Michael Walker.

  Both Hunter and Andress urged Barbara to stay away from John and stressed repeatedly how important she was to their investigation and how much they appreciated her patriotism. The Justice Department also made it clear that in return for Barbara’s cooperation, she would be granted total immunity from any prosecution.

  Hunter felt more squeamish than ever about his case. The wiretaps still hadn’t been installed and he knew John was pressuring Barbara to meet with him. The fact that John had discussed Barbara’s threats with Margaret meant he was aware that the FBI could be watching him. Obviously, he would be on guard.

  Something else Barbara had said also worried Hunter – that her son Michael was in the Navy and had urged her last fall not to turn John in. Yet she claimed Michael wasn’t involved in the spy ring.

  Her thinking seemed naive, but Hunter didn’t press the point. He didn’t want to do anything that might spook Barbara. Turning in an ex-husband would be difficult enough. If Barbara realized she was also turning in her son, she might withdraw.