Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  K and I have discussed your proposal and I will pass on some extensive details when we meet. Briefly, he is involved in carrier and amphibious ship-maintenance planning. He would instantly recognize unrealistic repair schedules or see that ships were “off their normal schedules.” This may provide a basis for the information we seek. Otherwise, he has no useful material.

  So I will see you as scheduled and hope I will make the primary date with no problem. I’m sure you have access to S’s port schedule and can anticipate my moves in advance. I am not providing his schedule in this note for obvious reasons.

  Good luck.

  Since S is providing a large quantity of material, the quantity of film to shoot is also becoming large. I have been trying to figure out an alternative method that will decrease the size of the packages to deliver. I have a super 8mm movie camera which is capable of single-frame shots. There is 50 feet of film in each cassette which, unless my math is off, would consist of over 9,000 frames.

  I have enclosed a short sample of a document shot with the camera using different focusing methods. The first two were shot from 1.5 feet and measured: then two from two feet, then two while focusing normally. They don’t look very good to me, but I thought you may have an idea on how we could make this method work.

  John was not to meet his KGB contact until after dark that night, but since he had nothing planned for the afternoon, he decided to leave early. He walked out of his house at 12:10 P.M. – fifty minutes before Hunter had promised to call off the stakeout.

  Hodges, who had returned to the air with a full tank of fuel, contacted Hunter by radio when he saw John get into his van.

  “He’s on the move!”

  Recalling the wild goose chase of the day before, Hunter tried to keep from getting excited. But within a few minutes, Hodges was on the radio again.

  “He’s driving evasively.”

  John was doubling back, riding in circles, and performing other maneuvers to detect if he was being followed. The six FBI cars, under the direction of Hodges, carefully kept out of sight, and Hodges pulled his airplane up to four thousand feet into a position he hoped John wouldn’t notice.

  John drove west onto Interstate 64 toward Richmond. FBI agent Beverly Andress, who was part of the stakeout team, called Hunter on the radio.

  “Are we having fun yet?” she asked.

  Obviously, John was driving in the wrong direction if he was going to North Carolina.

  “Not yet,” Hunter replied. “I’ll let you know when.”

  When John reached the outskirts of Richmond and turned north on a bypass that feeds traffic to Washington, D.C., Hunter grabbed his radio microphone.

  “Bev,” he said excitedly, “now we are having fun!”

  Meanwhile, Wolfinger pulled away from the chase and drove to a telephone to call FBI headquarters in Washington. “Operation Windflyer,” the code name the FBI had chosen for this case, he reported, “is under way.”

  Hunter wanted to get to Washington before John Walker, so the agent pushed down on the gas pedal of his Jeep Cherokee and soon found himself behind John’s Astro minivan. Fighting the urge to turn and stare at John, Hunter sped past. He wanted to reach a special communications center that the FBI had set up in Washington to monitor the operation.

  John didn’t notice anyone during the drive. Just before Washington, he pulled into a highway rest stop to use the bathroom.

  Hodges quickly warned the remaining four FBI chase cars to pull off the highway. When John returned to the interstate, one of the chase cars sped into the rest area. Two agents dashed into the bathroom and amid startled travelers, searched for any packages that John might have hidden. There were none.

  As John got closer to Washington, the FBI put into operation some of the plans that Hunter, Wolfinger, and the experts from FBI headquarters had agreed upon only a few weeks earlier.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary action involved the flooding of the area around John with tracking vehicles. Trying to follow John in heavy traffic with one or two cars was just too risky, the FBI had decided. There was always the chance that he might notice a car on his tail. Using one or two cars was also dangerous because they might get trapped behind cars at a traffic light or lose John if he made a series of sudden turns.

  So the FBI called upon forty-one persons in twenty vehicles to trail John when he arrived at the Beltway that circles Washington. It was one of the most massive surveillance operations ever undertaken by the agency.

  It also didn’t work.

  The hitch occurred after John crossed the Potomac River and began driving through a rural section of Maryland on a narrow road. The sudden appearance of twenty cars in such a sparsely populated area might spook John.

  So the FBI pulled back its network of cars and decided to rely on the plane. By this time, a fresh pilot and crew had taken over.

  The new aircraft kept on John’s trail, but it soon became difficult to find John’s minivan as it rode along the curves and dips under a protective cover of foliage.

  After several minutes, the pilot and crew lost sight of John’s van in the canopy of trees. The plane quickly dropped lower to give its passengers a better look, but that didn’t help. John was gone.

  Every second counted now. It was crucial to get the ground search started, but because the Soviets frequently monitor FBI broadcasts through the antennae on their embassy, the pilot decided not to risk using his radio to contact the communications post where Hunter and Wolfinger were waiting. Instead, he raced to a nearby airport, where he landed and telephoned the command center.

  It was 4:55 P.M., and by the time the FBI unleashed its ground crew, John had disappeared.

  “We didn’t have the faintest idea where he was,” recalled Hunter.

  Anger and frustration began to build. People began looking for someone to blame. No one said anything aloud, but everyone was reminded of Hunter’s decision not to place an electronic tracking device on John’s car. The Norfolk office had successfully followed John to Washington, and agents in that jurisdiction had lost track of him.

  But it didn’t matter. Hunter was the case manager, and now that John had vanished, Hunter was the agent who would have to bear responsibility.

  For three hours the FBI inspected the rural Maryland countryside where John had last been seen. No one could find him. Back at the command center, frustration led to second-guessing. Hunter held to one thin hope. Barbara Walker had said John always drove through a dead drop area on a practice run when she accompanied him on dead drops. If true, there was a chance that John might return.

  While Hunter fidgeted, John was dining peacefully at the Ramada Inn in Rockville, confident that this drop would go as smoothly as the rest.

  At 7:45 P.M., the FBI airplane spotted John’s minivan returning to the rural Maryland road where he had earlier disappeared. A cheer went up at the FBI command center and Hunter was immediately transformed from dupe to sage.

  This time the FBI flooded the area with tracking cars.

  John later recalled being suspicious of the increased traffic. “I stopped at one small intersection and there was a car on each of the other three roads.” But he ignored the warnings and placed his 7-Up signal can for his KGB contact at the prearranged spot.

  The FBI rushed in as soon as John left. Thinking that he might have dropped off a container of film for the Russians, a special search team of FBI agents quickly explored the area and found the 7-Up can. The FBI said later that members of its highly trained foreign counterintelligence squad knew that the 7-Up can was a signal by John to his KGB handler. They knew that disturbing the can could jeopardize the dead drop exchange and they gave instructions for the can to be returned unmolested to its original location after agents were confident that it didn’t contain any film.

  But the FBI screwed up. Because of what later was described as “an innocent miscommunication,” the can was confiscated by the FBI and removed as evidence.

  This proved to be
a major blunder, because it ruined the FBI’s chance of catching both a KGB agent and John, and of proving without any doubt whom John was meeting.

  Luck, however, was on the FBI’s side.

  At 8:20 P.M., an FBI unit spotted a 1983 blue Malibu sedan driving in the area where John had left his signal can. The car had a diplomatic license plate – DSX 144 – and was being driven by a man with a woman and child as passengers.

  No one had to tell the FBI which foreign country the letters DSX represented. It was the Soviet Union.

  Back at the command post, Hunter watched as the number 144 was run through a computer. Within seconds, the computer identified the car as one assigned to Aleksei Gavrilovich Tkachenko, third secretary of the Soviet embassy since January 7, 1983.

  “We got really excited when we saw the Russian in the area because it confirmed everyone’s suspicion,” Hunter explained. “There was no reason for a Russian to be out at the very edge of the twenty-five-mile restricted area in the middle of the night.”

  At that moment, Hunter and the other agents figured they had a good chance of catching both John and Tkachenko.

  But to their horror, Tkachenko began driving away from the dead drop area. It was then that the FBI realized that one of its agents had picked up John’s signal can.

  Three days later, Tkachenko, his wife, Olga, and two daughters, Mariya and Oksana, were escorted to National Airport by Aleksandr Vasilyevich Shcherbakov, Viktor Vladimirovich Volkov, and Yevgenity Gennadyevich Vtyhrin, three beefy embassy security guards. The family boarded a flight that took them first to New York City and then to Montreal, Canada, where they were able to fly aboard a Soviet Aeroflot airplane to Moscow.

  The Tkachenkos left Washington so suddenly that when FBI agents searched the family’s apartment, they found half-cooked hamburger in a pan on the stove. They also found a bumper sticker in the master bedroom that Tkachenko had retrieved from the 1984 presidential campaign and attached to a bathroom mirror in a bit of black humor. It said: “President Reagan: Bringing America Back.”

  Because Tkachenko had dropped off his signal can before John, there was no way for John to realize that Tkachenko had aborted the drop. So John drove to his drop site and tucked his delivery behind a telephone pole.

  His grocery bag contained the 129 classified documents that Michael had stolen before the U.S.S. Nimitz left Norfolk, John’s incriminating letter to the KGB, and copies of recent letters that Jerry Whitworth had written John.

  FBI agent Bruce K. Brahe II found the grocery bag a few minutes after John hid it near the telephone pole.

  “I touched it with my foot,” he recalled. “It had a crumply dry sound.”

  Opening the bag, Brahe noticed the trash inside had been cleaned.

  “The caps were on the bottles; the bottles were rinsed out ... I immediately knew this was the package; I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t.”

  When he reached into the bag, Brahe found John’s package of documents wrapped in a white trash bag, sealed with tape.

  “I got it,” he yelled.

  “Are you sure?” asked a fellow agent.

  Spicing his reply with expletives, Brahe made clear that he was certain. John, meanwhile, could find neither his package from the KGB nor, when he returned to the telephone pole, his documents. He returned to his room in the Ramada Inn.

  FBI agents tailed John to the hotel and shortly after three A.M., the Justice Department gave Hunter permission to arrest John on charges of espionage.

  The only problem was getting John out of his room.

  Breaking through the door was simply too dangerous. “We really need this sucker alive,” Hunter said. “John Walker has too much to tell.”

  Hunter remembered listening to a taped phone conversation between John and his mother in which John bragged about his new minivan. Hunter and the other agents at the hotel decided to stage an accident. Agent William Wang would pose as a desk clerk, telephone John, and claim that John’s new van had been hit by a drunk driver. When John came out into the hotel hallway, he would be arrested.

  It was an old trick, but the agents felt confident that it would work.

  Hunter and James Kolouch put on bulletproof vests and carefully got into position near the elevator bank closest to John’s room. If possible, John was to be taken alive.

  Both agents drew their guns and waited.

  At precisely three-thirty A.M., Wang telephoned John’s room.

  A few minutes later, Hunter and Kolouch heard John’s door open

  Chapter 71

  The U.S.S. Nimitz was in the Israeli port of Haifa when it received a secret encrypted message about eight hours after John’s arrest. The FBI was afraid that Michael Walker might have friends or accomplices working in the carrier’s radio room so the message referred to him by a prearranged code name: Brown. John Walker was referred to, rather appropriately, as Red, and only the top-echelon officers, whom the FBI had alerted a few weeks before, knew the two men’s real identities. The Naval Investigative Service had assigned the code name Cabin Boy to its probe of Michael.

  SECRET

  NOFORM SPECAT

  REF: CABIN BOY

  WINDFLYER / ESPIONAGE

  REQUESTED BY FBI/ NORFOLK VA.

  Brown’s father, herein called Red, was arrested by the FBI early AM 20 May for 3C activity after FBI surveillance disclosed him loading a dead drop in Poolesville, MD area ... FBI subsequently recovered 129 secret-confidential documents. Information from FBI reflects material seized came from Brown and that Brown allegedly has similar material, enough to fill two grocery bags, stashed somewhere on his ship which he was to deliver to Red at a port call. The recovered papers consist of 80 secret and 49 confidential documents. FBI was advised that preliminary review reveals that most, if not all, came from Brown’s ship and are dated February 1985 before the ship’s deployment. One of the documents is entitled ‘Nimitz Mediterranean Pre-Deployment News’ classified ‘Secret.’

  It has the handwritten notation on the lower right corner ‘OPS Admin Secret Board.’ ... Evidence indicates that Brown has provided additional documents in the past to his father. It is not known at this time how long Brown has been involved in this activity with his father. Interrogate Brown using the following warning: “Violations of the espionage statutes: Improper handling of classified material: and theft of U.S. government classified material and property.”

  Attempt to obtain permissive search of Brown’s personal effects, his locker, his work space, desk and other logical spaces for classified material, cameras, film, notes, letters, letter writing materials ... and any other materials indicative of espionage activity.... Recommend pre-trial confinement for Brown, arrange to have all his spaces secured until a command authorized search can be obtained. Ensure Brown has no access to his spaces and that his every movement is monitored to prevent destruction of evidence ... It is possible that Brown has additional accomplices aboard the Nimitz and this should be explored...

  Michael was not aboard the carrier when the message arrived. He was in a bar getting drunk with some friends. He returned to the dock riding his skateboard.

  “I was sick,” Michael Walker recalled. “Riding the waves on the boat that took us out to the carrier was too much for me to take. I thought I was going to throw up. It was about twelve-thirty A.M. when I got to my room and climbed in my rack. I turned on the light and when I lay down I could see that box glowing behind the air duct. It was like the damn thing was saying, ‘Move me! Move me!’ I had this strange feeling that something was telling me to move that damn box, but I said to myself, ‘The hell with it’ and rolled over and went to sleep.

  “The next morning, at around six A.M., this guy wakes me up and says my commander wants to talk to me. I went to the berthing area and called the yeoman on duty in OPS-ADMIN on the telephone and told him that it was my day off and I was hung over and could I come up at eight A.M., and he checks with the commander and says okay.

  “I climbed
back in my bunk and that box is really glowing now and it’s like screaming at me, ‘Move me, you dumb shit!’ but I went back to sleep. I could have carried it to the burn room and destroyed it, but I just felt too bad.

  “I got up two hours later and shaved and got my hair combed and locked my locker and went up to OPS-ADMIN and people are going through my desk and basket and no one wants to talk to me, and I suddenly knew what was happening. I felt like I had E-S-P-I-O-N-A-G-E written across my face. I was about to barf when someone said, ‘Michael, the captain wants to see you.’ All of a sudden, three big guys from the Master at Arms office came in. ‘Walker, come with us,’ this guy says. I thought, ‘This is it!’ I felt like dog shit!”

  Michael was taken to the brig and ordered to sit. He was not allowed to speak to anyone or leave the chair except to go with two escorts to the bathroom.

  “I figured I had screwed up somehow. I didn’t think my dad was busted, I thought they had caught me. Someone had seen something. “

  Michael asked for a pen and paper and began a letter to Rachel.

  Hello Bunny, I love you. Today is our third day in Haifa.

  I would have had the day off today, however, I am still on board trying to take care of a BIG problem, which is why I am writing this letter.

  Currently, I am sitting in the Master at Arms office waiting to speak with the executive officer among other NIS [Naval Investigative Service] agents, etc. At this time I have no idea what has come up, although I would imagine it is pretty serious.

  I will finish this letter once I have had my little discussion with the XO. If I end this letter on an unhappy note, please contact my father as soon as possible. Needless to say I am not in any trouble with drugs, fighting or any other sailor type bullshit. YOU AND I could only begin to wonder what kind of trouble I am in.

  I will close this letter for now and get back with you later. The time now is 0930.

  Michael was taken to the ship’s legal department, where he was briefly questioned by Gary Hitt, an investigator for the Naval Investigative Service.