by Earley, Pete
On April 9, Beverly Andress and Barbara held another secret session. Andress’s 302 statement recounted the meeting:
Mrs. Walker advised she never understood why John Walker would “commit treason.” She believed that while he was successful in his naval career, he could not accept the business failures. Barbara Walker stated that she lived with the knowledge of her husband’s treason and that concern for her family kept her from contacting the FBI. ... Laura’s estranged husband, who has some knowledge of John Walker’s espionage activities, has stated to Laura that if she attempts to gain custody of their son, Christopher, he will turn John Walker in. Mrs. Walker stated she could not justify John Walker’s activities and finally could not accept how his actions were affecting their daughter as well as their grandson.
Back at the FBI office in Norfolk, Hunter and Wolfinger went over the facts as they knew them. By now, they were confident John and Arthur were Soviet spies, that John had tried to recruit Laura, that Michael knew about his dad’s espionage, and that Laura’s husband was allegedly blackmailing her to maintain custody of their son.
On April 10, Hunter and Andress telephoned Barbara and held an- other parking lot rendezvous. Barbara told them she had agreed to meet with John that evening. Once again, they urged Barbara to put off the meeting. Even if she didn’t intend to tip John off, she might accidentally warn him by appearing nervous.
“Okay,” Barbara said. “I’ll try to cancel.”
Hunter and Andress could do little but return to their office and pace. John was scheduled to pick up Barbara at seven P.M., and Hunter and Andress waited anxiously. Hunter’s telephone rang shortly after five P.M.
Mrs. Walker advised that she called John Anthony Walker, Jr., and told him she would not be able to meet him at 7 P.M. this evening as planned. Barbara Walker advised that John Walker was angry because she would not meet him and stated during their conversation, “We’ll hook up before you leave here. It is vital that we talk. There are things that cannot be discussed on the phone.”
The next day, April 11, Barbara telephoned Hunter again.
“I’ve got to meet John,” she said. “Otherwise, he’ll be suspicious. He’s picking me up tonight at seven.”
Hunter and Andress scurried to the now familiar parking lot and picked up Barbara for another meeting.
“You must tell John that you haven’t turned him in,” Hunter told Barbara. “Tell him you lost your nerve. Tell him you just couldn’t do it.”
Barbara agreed and then she stunned the agents.
“I want to wear a wire,” she said. “I want you to fix it so you can listen to what we say.”
“Barbara, what if he pats you down?” Hunter replied.
As part of their investigation, he and Andress had both read local newspaper clippings about John in which he claimed to be an expert at detecting electronic bugs. “What if he has some device in his car that can detect microphones? It’s simply too dangerous.”
“I might be able to get him to talk about his spying though,” Barbara said.
“No way,” said Hunter. “It just wouldn’t be safe.”
John arrived at seven P.M. that night, as promised, and picked up Barbara at Margaret’s apartment. He drove her to a McDonald’s restaurant.
Back at FBI headquarters, Hunter and Andress huddled nervously in Wolfinger’s office and debated whether Barbara Walker could remain calm enough to fool John. In a moment of gallows humor, a fellow agent suggested they begin taking bets. Would Barbara tell John? Or would she keep quiet?
The entourage, which had instinctively gathered around Wolfinger, Hunter, and Andress, began taking an impromptu poll. When it came time for Hunter to announce his bet, his peers became quiet.
“What’s she gonna do, Bob?” someone asked.
“Damn if I know,” he finally said. “I’ll be goddamned if I know!”
Chapter 66
Barbara Walker was scared.
“It was very hard playing the part that I was to play,” she recalled. “I tried to be blase and avoided looking in his eyes.”
John was also nervous.
“Barbara was dearly pissed about the ten grand and that scared me. It was the most money she had ever asked for; most of the time it was for a couple hundred or so, but this was the biggest amount and it was the first time I’d really turned her down. I had to make it dear that Michael was involved but I just didn’t want to come out and say, ‘You stupid cunt, your son is part of the spy ring,’ because I figured she wouldn’t believe me.”
Inside McDonald’s, John pleaded poverty.
“Jesus Barbara, if I had the money, I’d pay you,” he said, “but goddamnit, I don’t have it right now. I really don’t.”
Barbara didn’t believe him.
“Look Barbara,” John said, “there is something you should understand. If I ever get arrested, a lot of people are going to get hurt. A lot of people – not just me.”
“I’m aware of that,” Barbara replied.
“Are you sure?” John said, “Because I don’t think you understand what I am saying to you.”
“Are you telling me that Michael is involved?” Barbara asked, point blank.
“Yes, and no. I’m not saying that,” said John. “You’ll have to ask Michael that. Why don’t you ask him?”
Once again, John had dodged the question. He told me later that he was afraid Barbara wouldn’t believe him if he gave her a direct answer.
That night at McDonald’s, John asked Barbara outright: “Barbara, have you gone to the FBI?”
“No, I haven’t turned you in,” she replied.
“Good, ‘cause you wouldn’t want to see your fifty-year-old husband in prison,” John replied. “I don’t think our kids would like it either.”
On the drive back to Margaret’s apartment, John pulled over to the side of the street.
“I asked Barbara why she was doing this to me,” John recalled. “I said, ‘Barbara, we’ve been divorced for ten fucking years! Why do you keep aggravating me? This is like a sickness. People get divorced all the time in this country. They don’t have to destroy each other. Why can’t you leave me alone?’ And Barbara’s voice changed, and I know Barbara and I know she was being totally honest, maybe for the first time in years, and she said to me, ‘I just want to get back at you!’ That says it all! Her decision to turn me in to the FBI had nothing to do with my spying or fucking America and homemade apple pie. It didn’t have anything to do with Laura or her kid either. I had betrayed our marriage vows. I didn’t love Barbara anymore and she couldn’t stand that. It was destroying her and she was going to take me down with her.”
When Barbara stepped from the car that night, she turned and told John, “Talk to you later.”
But Barbara knew, she told me later, that she wouldn’t. She had done it. She had met with John and not tipped him off, but rather than feeling good about it, she felt sick. She couldn’t get to sleep that night on the couch in Margaret’s apartment.
Barbara Walker gave me this explanation: “You see, I never wanted to hurt John. It is hard to explain but it is like primates, you know, monkeys picking each other off the branches of a tree. This is how the game is played. ‘Do you like me?’ ‘No, I don’t like you!’ ‘Then I knock you off the tree.’
“It took us a long while when we first started dating before John and I could say, ‘I love you!’ The first time I said anything emotional to him, I said, ‘I hate you!’ because he had violated the protection that I had built around myself. Saying ‘I hate you’ is very much like saying ‘I love you.’
“During our talk that night in McDonald’s, John reached out several times and touched me. I didn’t reach out to him, but he touched me. You see, I knew that deep down he really cared. It was just that he was showing it with anger and hostility. It was like we were the monkeys on that tree limb and I was asking him if he cared. When he said ‘No,’ I pushed him off. But it didn’t mean that I hated John or wanted to hurt hi
m. It meant that I was his best friend.
“You see,” Barbara concluded, “I was sick that night because I still love John.”
As far as John was concerned, his meeting that night with Barbara was a success. He returned home and tape-recorded a letter to Michael in which he mentioned his encounter with Barbara and his recent telephone chats with Laura.
Barbara’s visit in Norfolk came to an end the next day, April 12, and Hunter volunteered to drive her to the airport and put her aboard an airplane. By now all of the telephone taps had been put in place, and Wolfinger had drawn up a schedule for each agent to work the round-the-clock wiretap.
“This is the most bizarre case,” Hunter told Wolfinger after returning from the airport, “and it’s getting worse.”
Usually an agent conducts an investigation by interviewing witnesses, collecting evidence, and then arresting a suspect. But the FBI was afraid to interview anyone but Laura and Barbara for fear that John might hear about the investigation, and, so far, there was absolutely no hard evidence that John had committed a crime.
“I don’t know if we can get this guy or not,” Hunter continued. “He’s been doing this for twenty years, Barbara’s warned his brother, we don’t know what the hell Margaret might do, and John’s supposedly an expert on wiretaps and bugs. You’ve got to wonder if he is going to screw up.”
“I don’t know, Bob,” Wolfinger said. “Sometimes you get a case where everything seems to fall together no matter what you do. It’s almost as if it’s inevitable. Fate. It’s like a person’s time has come. It’s time for them to be arrested.
“Maybe John Walker’s time has come,” Wolfinger said.
Chapter 67
By late April, FBI agents had monitored John’s telephone lines nearly twenty days and had not heard any damaging evidence. They had, however, listened to one conversation that Hunter believed contained a clue.
At 7:12 P.M. on April 18, Rachel telephoned John at his home to ask about his encounter with Barbara.
The reason I was calling is to see what’s going on, you know.... I talked to Maggie a couple of times and I understand that Barbara was upsetting Maggie a little bit with her problem. You know what I mean.
Rachel’s comment, “You know what I mean,” seemed significant to Hunter, who decided that she also knew about John’s spying. He added Rachel’s name to his list of suspects. Another remark in that call also interested Hunter. When Rachel invited John to attend her college graduation ceremony on May 18, he replied:
Oh Lordy . . . I can’t believe it. I know that I’m gonna be busy that weekend. Can you goddamn believe it!
John seemed genuinely upset. What was he doing that weekend that he couldn’t reschedule? Hunter circled the date on his calendar.
Wolfinger and Hunter both knew John was being discreet on the telephone and everyone in the Norfolk FBI office, except Hunter, was becoming impatient with the wiretap. In order to monitor John’s calls, nearly every agent in the office had to work extra hours, and none of them was paid overtime. Some of Hunter’s colleagues wondered if the wiretap was worth the trouble.
Even novice agents knew that convicting someone of espionage was extremely difficult. Unlike crimes that involve a culprit and a victim, espionage involves two co-conspirators, and only a dolt would think a foreign intelligence operative, like a KGB agent, could ever be forced into a courtroom or, for that matter, even questioned.
As a result, Hunter was going to have to catch John either actually stealing classified documents or delivering them. And if the telephone tap was an accurate indicator, that was going to be difficult because John Walker was being very careful.
While other agents grew weary of listening to John’s often mundane and always profane conversations, Hunter found them fascinating. Day after day, he read the transcripts of John’s calls and listened to selected tapes. He heard John lie to his clients, chide employees, brag about his sexual prowess. Hunter studied not only what John said, but also his choice of words and even the rhythm of his sentences.
Hunter tried to think like John Walker, to place himself in John’s mind, and the endless hours of telephone conversations supplied hundreds of clues. Like piecing together the shards of a broken vase, Hunter began shaping an “image” of John Walker, and what Hunter developed disturbed him.
“John’s conversations with members of his own family were just unbelievable,” Hunter recalled. It wasn’t only the profanity. There was something more that went beyond the gutter. John Walker had a sinister, sneering side to him.
“I was beginning to see that this was a man who was not only devious and untruthful, but also evil,” Hunter said. “I really came to believe that. He was a truly evil person.”
Each conversation Hunter reviewed seemed to buttress his analysis that John seemed to bring out the worst when he spoke to his family – even his own mother, Peggy. During one tape-recorded conversation between the two of them, Hunter heard Peggy and John speak viciously about other family members. Even more biting was John’s conversation with his daughter Margaret, who gave vent to her feelings about her mother and sister.
The longer Hunter listened to taped conversations, the more upset he became. It was as if the entire Walker family had been stricken with a sickness, the children mimicking the twisted love-hate relationship of their parents.
In early May, the Washington headquarters of the FBI sent several of its foreign counterintelligence experts to Norfolk to have a strategy session with Hunter and Wolfinger.
“This was becoming a tremendously complicated case,” recalled Jack Wagner, the supervisor of the Norfolk FBI office.
At this point, the FBI suspected that four people besides John could be directly involved in the spy ring, including the enigmatic “Jerry Wentworth” in California.
There were other problems too. “John owned an airplane that was faster than the airplane that we owned,” recalled Wagner. “He owned a boat. We had to figure out what we were going to do if he used either of them. What if John flew to New York and boarded an airplane to Europe where we don’t have jurisdiction? Do we have an agent follow him? If so, he’d better have a valid passport.”
The Washington and Norfolk agents spent one afternoon discussing various procedures and scenarios, and found themselves agreeing about everything but one issue. The Washington agents wanted to plant an electronic tracking device on John’s new minivan in case he got away from agents during surveillance.
Hunter strongly opposed the idea.
“He might find it,” Hunter said. “This guy is an experienced detective.”
“Right! A real James Bond,” one of the Washington agents replied mockingly.
Hunter had become the butt of some jokes in Washington because he had written in a 302 statement that he considered John to be an “armed and dangerous” suspect. Some agents in Washington thought Hunter was overestimating Walker’s skills and making him more of a villain than he actually was.
After a brief argument, the Washington agents gave up and accepted Hunter’s advice. It was his case.
Before that meeting ended, Hunter asked theoretically what he and other agents should do if they followed John to an actual dead drop delivery. Should they arrest him? Should they confront John’s Soviet handler?
His questions were answered by a loud laugh from one of the Washington based agents. No one in the history of the FBI, the agent explained, had ever followed an American spy to a dead drop and arrested him making a delivery.
“I don’t care,” Hunter responded. “Guys, we got to plan for this, just in case.”
“Bullshit, Bob!” the Washington agent said. “It will never happen. C’mon, these things just don’t work that way.”
Chapter 68
Like Hunter, FBI agent John Peterson was not a man to give up, especially when following the scent of a self-admitted Russian spy who claimed to be part of a twenty-year-old espionage operation. For eight months, Peterson doggedly tried to find the
mysterious RUS who had written to the San Francisco FBI office. Several times, Peterson thought he was on RUS’s trail, but he had been wrong. Each time, he hit another dead end. Finally, Peterson decided to try once more to lure RUS from hiding by placing yet another advertisement in the personal section of the Los Angeles Times. It ran on three consecutive Mondays, beginning in April, 1985.
RUS didn’t respond. Unknown to Peterson, Jerry Whitworth had changed his mind about confessing. He was busy trying to find a career and, as usual, was floundering. When he had retired from the Navy, Jerry planned to become a stockbroker. When he failed the test, he decided to become a computer salesman. That didn’t work either.
On March 25, Jerry wrote his old patron, John Walker, describing his problems. He was again considering being a stockbroker, he said, but admitted he brooded about his decision to retire from the Navy. Still, he professed optimism once he and Brenda were settled in their new careers.
John nearly laughed out loud when he read Jerry’s letter. He saw what was coming. Jerry was so damn predictable.
“Jerry couldn’t cut it outside the Navy,” John told me. “I sensed that when I met him. I knew he was failing and was setting the groundwork to come back to me and the spying.”
Still bitter about Jerry’s shenanigans with the fogged film, John decided against answering Jerry’s letters. He wanted to let Jerry sweat awhile.
In late April, at about the same time Jerry was trying to mend his friendship with John, the FBI’s analytical unit in the foreign counter-intelligence office in Washington made a startling discovery. While reviewing ongoing investigations, agents noticed a similarity between RUS and John Walker. Both men had been linked to a spying operation that had operated for twenty years. Was it possible that RUS and John Walker were linked somehow?
Agents re-examined Barbara and Laura Walker’s statements, particularly their comments about “Jerry Wentworth.”