by Earley, Pete
Mrs. Walker advised Jerry Wentworth is a white male in his forties and is an enlisted man and may be a chief petty officer. She has neither seen nor heard from him since 1976. She believes his wife’s name is Brenda and she described Brenda as being young, in her twenties, and possibly attending a college in Berkeley, California. She noted the Wentworths got married in approximately 1977, and that Jerry Wentworth had been married previously and had gotten into some trouble with the U.S. Navy because he continued to accept allotment payments for his ex-wife after they were divorced, and he had to pay that money back to the U.S. Navy.... Mrs. Walker noted she is confident that Jerry’s last name is Wentworth [not Wittemore, as Laura Walker said.]
Washington had already asked the San Francisco FBI office to locate “Jerry Wentworth” as part of the bureau’s probe of John Walker, but no one in California had linked Wentworth with the RUS letters.
An urgent message, classified by the FBI as top secret, was sent to the San Francisco FBI office: “Wentworth may be RUS!”
Suddenly, finding Jerry Wentworth became an even higher priority, but despite the San Francisco office’s efforts, no person by that name could be found.
Frustrated, the agents asked if Barbara and Laura Walker could be interviewed again about John’s obscure friend.
When FBI agents in Buffalo asked Laura for her help, she quickly volunteered: “I think I have his telephone number.” She found it in a pile of papers, and gave it to the surprised and excited agent, who immediately notified San Francisco.
An FBI agent there dialed the telephone number in San Leandro and asked for Jerry Wentworth. No, there was no person living at that address named Wentworth. With the number in hand, agents began searching old directories. In a 1982 telephone book, next to the number Laura had given them, the FBI found the name Jerry A. Whitworth.
Both Laura and Barbara quickly agreed. Yes, the name could be Whitworth instead of Wentworth.
In a matter of hours, the FBI had obtained copies of Jerry’s motor vehicle records, listing his current address and his Navy record. In Washington, the analytical unit quickly established that Jerry had once worked for John at the Naval Training Center in San Diego.
RUS had been identified. He was Jerry Whitworth. The net around John Walker was beginning to close.
On May 16 – three days before John’s prearranged exchange with the KGB – the wiretaps on John’s telephone paid off. And it was fate, just as Wolfinger had predicted, that caused John to slip up and tip off the FBI.
It began with a telephone call from his mother, Peggy, who told him his favorite aunt had died in Buffalo. The funeral had been scheduled for that Saturday, May 18, and Peggy wanted John to attend. Despite Peggy’s pleas, John couldn’t. He had something important that he had to do.
John telephoned P.K. Carroll’s number as soon as he hung up on Peggy.
JOHN: My Aunt Amelia just died ...
P.K.: Oh, my God.
JOHN: What a mess. A funeral I should really go to and I can’t get away.
P.K.: I think you’d better get away for this one, John.
JOHN: I can’t. Um, shit. I’m gonna call Art right now ... See, I lived with her. Jesus Christ, when the family broke up, you know ... urn, I gotta try to collect my thoughts, get my schedule together. Tomorrow’s Friday, isn’t it ... Jesus, I suppose I could fly in. Huh?
P.K.: Yeah.
JOHN: God, if the weather catches me, Jesus Christ. You know, there’s some things I just can’t change the schedule of....
P.K.: Oh, I know that.
JOHN: They’re just unchangeable.
P.K.: I know that, but if it’s possible for you to go, I know you want to.
JOHN: Um ... damn it.
P.K.: I can’t believe it, John. Amelia is the one who, who made me feel like a part of your family up there.
JOHN: Yeah. She was something. Well, let me get off the phone, ‘cause I’m gonna now have problems getting, getting my act together. Okay?
P.K.: Okay.
John called Arthur next and told him of the funeral.
The next day, a Friday, May 17, John unwittingly gave the FBI another crucial due. At 4:13 P.M., John called his employees at Confidential Reports into his office and took his telephone receiver off the hook to keep from being interrupted by calls. “It was like giving us a microphone to listen in,” Hunter recalled.
Listen, I’ll be in late Monday. I’ll be driving in Monday morning from down around Charlotte, so I’ll be getting in around noon ... See you all Monday, have a good one.
Hunter and Wolfinger reviewed the tapes.
What could John be doing in Charlotte that was so important that he had to miss Rachel’s graduation and his Aunt Amelia’s funeral?
Both of them suspected it was a spy-related meeting. It had to be.
“It looks like John is finally making his move,” Hunter said. “God, if we don’t catch this guy, we better hang it up.”
Wolfinger smiled. “We will.”
Chapter 70
Spying aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz was child’s play. Alone in the fan room, Michael could pick through the burn bags from OPS-ADMIN and STRIKE-OPS unmolested. But this easy access created a new problem: storage. Just like John back home, Michael was having trouble finding room for all the documents he intended to steal. At first, he simply started hiding messages in his desk, but that was both risky and stupid. There wasn’t enough room and if anyone saw them, they might wonder why he was keeping them. The solution came one afternoon when he was loading a new box of computer paper into a printer in the OPS-ADMIN office.
“I looked at the empty box and bingo,” Michael recalled. “I realized it was the perfect size for documents.”
Michael took the empty cardboard box to his desk and began filling it with copies of messages and other classified documents. He put several sheets of stationery and some small boxes of envelopes on top of the classified documents to help hide them.
One morning, Michael arrived at work a few minutes late and found an officer looking through the box.
“What’s all this stuff, Walker?” he asked.
“That’s stuff I’m working on,” Michael recalled. He paused and then he said, somewhat crossly, “Hey, you didn’t get it out of order did you?”
Michael had learned as a private detective that one of the best ways to keep from answering a question was by asking one in return, especially one that implied that someone had screwed up.
“No, I didn’t mix anything up,” the officer replied, and then, defending himself, added, “I was looking for some big envelopes.”
“No sweat,” Michael said, “here, let me get them for you.”
Recalling that encounter, Michael told me, “That proved to me that I was in control, man. I could handle anything.”
Still the exchange alarmed him. He decided to move the box somewhere safer.
This time, he placed several pages of blank computer paper on top of the stolen documents, which now filled the entire box, making it look as if the box was filled with unused paper. He placed the lid on the box, sealed it the same way other boxes of computer paper were sealed, and carried it down the hallway to his berthing area.
Michael slept in a bottom bunk in a room that he shared with two other sailors. He had found a good hiding place one day, at the foot of his bed between the wall and a large air duct that rose from the floor to the ceiling. There was just enough room behind the air duct for the computer box, and when he had pushed it behind the duct, it was impossible to see from anywhere in the room except on his bunk.
Just like John, Michael believed that money could solve all problems. Ergo, not having money obviously caused problems, particularly in his marriage.
Michael was convinced that his marital spats with Rachel were related to their tight finances. If he could earn more money, then Rachel wouldn’t have to work as a waitress and she wouldn’t be so tired and they wouldn’t get into fights about never having time to spend toget
her. The real reason why he and Rachel didn’t have sex on the night before he left Norfolk was not because of his spying, Michael convinced himself, but because of money. His spying was just a red herring. Once Michael got paid by his dad, he and Rachel would have plenty of money and their personal problems would vanish.
Michael also decided while he was at sea that espionage was not really that dangerous. “My father had been doing this for twenty years and hadn’t got caught, and I was more cautious than he had been,” Michael recalled. “I didn’t see why I couldn’t do it for a while, just until we got on our feet. Then I would quit.”
The U.S.S. Nimitz was scheduled to stop in Naples during June, roughly midway in its eight-month cruise, and Michael and Rachel planned to rendezvous there.
John also planned to meet Michael in Naples to pick up documents and pay him. This time, Michael expected more than a $1,000 token payment.
On April 1, he wrote Rachel an affectionate letter. Two days later, he wrote her again and began what soon became a foolish habit: he made a disguised reference to his spying. “I need to be careful,” he told her.
Michael received a chatty tape-recorded letter from Rachel soon thereafter. The thirty-minute tape contained news about her upcoming college graduation, work plans, mutual friends, and Michael’s family. It also revealed how much Rachel had changed during the three years she had known Michael. Gone was the bashful and naive coed who dressed modestly and hid behind a pair of thick glasses.
Rachel may have feared Michael’s spying and asked him to stop, but she still loved him and she wanted to please him. Her appearance and personality had changed so dramatically that people who had known her in high school frequently didn’t recognize her when they happened to meet.
Rachel enjoyed her punk rock image. She wore three dangling earrings in one lobe and two in the other, and her hair was multicolored and spiked. Going braless, which had once embarrassed her, now was as natural as the skin-tight miniskirts and the black fishnet stockings that she favored. Sometimes her language was coarse and abrasive.
By mid-April, more than a month since he had left Norfolk, Michael started to worry because he hadn’t received a single letter from his father. Michael wrote Rachel and told her he had had no word, had “a lot of supplies” for John, and was counting on a steady flow of cash as a result.
A few days after Michael sent his letter, John’s April 11 tape recording arrived.
Michael listened carefully to his father’s description of his meeting with Barbara, but couldn’t decide from it whether the meeting had gone well or poorly. John also had updated Michael on other members of the family in his tape recording, including Cynthia. He complained, as always, about money troubles, and made an oblique reference to Michael’s spying. He was looking forward, he said, to good pictures of “those ports” Michael had been visiting.
By the end of April, Michael was becoming concerned about how much he would be paid for his spying. He wrote his father a letter asking for advice, and waited patiently for a reply, but John didn’t respond.
By early May, Michael still didn’t have a clue about what was happening back home. Rachel, busy with college final exams, also hadn’t written. Michael reacted with a short angry note to Rachel. “Sometimes I feel I am missing everything... I get the feeling that something bad is going to happen.”
Chapter 70
Based on its wiretaps, the FBI knew that John rarely rose early on Saturday mornings, so Hunter and Wolfinger decided to begin the stakeout at John’s house on May 18 at seven A.M. Because as a private detective John had himself conducted surveillance, Hunter ordered the six-car FBI stakeout team to place themselves at major intersections through which John would have to pass if he left home. An FBI airplane circled above at 3,500 feet. The agents were excited. Finally, they were going to be doing something besides listening to John talk on the telephone.
They didn’t have to wait long. Early that morning, John got in his minivan, and started to drive. The FBI team carefully followed, anticipating that John was en route to a clandestine meeting. When he parked near his houseboat and spent the next hour painting, the agents’ excitement waned.
By mid-afternoon some of the team began to grumble. The thrill of tracking a possible KGB spy to a dead drop was being surpassed by the need to mow lawns and spend time with families. By four-thirty P.M., there was enough dissatisfaction to warrant an impromptu meeting in a nearby parking lot. “There was some griping so we decided to call it a day, but we agreed we had to continue the stakeout on Sunday,” Hunter recalled.
Hunter felt fairly certain that John wasn’t going anywhere that night because agents monitoring his telephone calls had heard John tell callers that he and P.K. intended to go out on his boat that evening and watch a Memorial Day fireworks show. Even so, Hunter was nervous. If John left town that evening, it would be difficult to organize a tracking team in time to follow him.
By this time P.K. Carroll had left John’s detective agency and had become a plainclothes vice officer on the Norfolk force. Her hours were irregular and usually began late at night, when prostitutes and other purveyors of illegal activities were the busiest. This had taken a toll on her relationship with John, particularly after he announced that he didn’t “wait up until three A.M. for anybody.”
So Saturdays were special because it was the one day of the week when John felt fairly confident that he and P.K. could get together. He tried repeatedly to telephone her during the day, but didn’t reach her until 7:40 P.M. He was peeved when she refused to come over and spend the night with him because she was tired.
A few minutes after John finished calling P.K., he telephoned another woman. After complaining about P.K., he asked her out for that night. The girlfriend had plans, but said she was free the next night.
JOHN: Ah shit, as it is, I’ll be out of town. I gotta work on a goddamn case tomorrow and, uh.
GIRLFRIEND: Where you gonna go?
JOHN: Down to North Carolina ...
GIRLFRIEND: What part?
JOHN: Down to, let me think, what’s the name of it again. It’s a little town just beyond Elizabeth City ... I’ve forgot the name of it. It’s a little, ah, just on the outskirts.
The agents monitoring John’s call telephoned Hunter and reported that John had just said he was going to a small town near Elizabeth City – not Charlotte as he had claimed earlier. Hunter considered the discrepancy a good sign. Obviously, John was up to something.
The FBI stakeout team arrived at their positions at seven A.M. Sunday. Two cups of coffee later, Hunter needed to find a bathroom. He drove to McDonald’s and, out of habit, surveyed the patrons as he left the men’s room.
“Goddamn if John Walker wasn’t sitting there eating breakfast and reading a newspaper,” Hunter recalled. “He had ridden his bike to the restaurant and no one had seen him!”
Back at his car, Hunter barked into his two-way radio: “Goddamn it, why didn’t we know that he had left the house?”
John bicycled home. At ten A.M., John W. Hodges, the pilot of the FBI plane, radioed Hunter and explained that the plane was getting low on fuel.
“Okay, bring her down, but try to be back in the air by eleven-thirty,” Hunter said.
Shortly before noon, Hunter received another call. What time, one of his agents asked, were they going to call off the stakeout? Hunter knew weekend work was hard on morale. After yesterday’s tedious watch, his agents were getting impatient.
“Okay,” Hunter announced. “We’ll keep this up until one o’clock, and then if he hasn’t gone anywhere, we’ll go home.”
Unknown to Hunter, at the very time he was making that decision, John was sitting in his den typing a note to his KGB handler. He referred to Michael, Arthur, Jerry, and Gary Walker by the code letters the KGB had assigned them: S, K, D, and F, respectively.
Dear Friend.
This delivery consists of materials from S and is similar to the previously supplied materials. The quanti
ty is limited, unfortunately, due to his operating schedule and increased security prior to deployment. His ship departs in early March and they operate extensively just prior to deployment. The situation around him looks very good and he is amassing a vast amount of material right now.
His last correspondence indicated that he now has material that will fill two large grocery bags. Storage is becoming a problem. As is obvious, I did not make a trip to Europe to pick up material for this delivery.
His schedule does fit fairly well with our meeting and I plan to meet him during a port call which will give me two days to make it to our meeting. I will arrange to pick up the best of his material and deliver it in bulk; photographing it while on the road does not seem practical. Also, the entire amount he has would be impossible to safely transport and I plan to deliver that at the schedule you will provide.
I hope his ship doesn’t experience a schedule change which will put me in the same situation we once faced in Hong Kong. I did not make the primary date and we met on the alternate. So I have to make a decision and here it is: If his schedule changes and I cannot make the primary date, I will collect the material and make the secondary date.
D continues to be a puzzle. He is not happy, but is still not ready to continue our “cooperation.” Rather than try to analyze him for you, I have simply enclosed portions of two letters I’ve received.
My guess?
He is going to flop in the stockbroker field and can probably make a modest living in computer sales. He has become accustomed to the big-spending life-style and I don’t believe he will adjust to living off his wife’s income. He will attempt to renew cooperation within two years.
F has been transferred and is in a temporary situation giving him no access at all. He is having difficulty in making a career decision in the Navy. He is not happy and is experiencing family pressures with our father who is 73 and in poor health. He married – his father – a younger woman who has a significant drinking problem. F feels obligated to support them. He may come around and good access is possible.