by Earley, Pete
“He asked me if I knew why I was there,” Michael recalled, “and I played dumb and said that I didn’t have a clue. ‘Your father has been arrested for espionage and we have reason to believe you are involved,’ he tells me. ‘No, I’m not involved,’ I said, but I knew that I had the word GUILTY tattooed on my forehead.
“He says to me, ‘Okay, you want to say anything?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and then he asked if he could search my bunk and I said, ‘Sure,’ ‘cause I didn’t think they would find the box. I had hid it too well. They made me strip and that’s when they found my letter to Rachel and my reference to getting in touch with my dad. What a stupid mistake. Hitt reads it and shakes his head ‘cause he knew exactly what the letter meant. Then they had me show ‘em where my bunk was. They took me back to the Master at Arms office while they searched it.”
Hitt carefully logged what he found during the search of Michael’s bunk, locker, desk at OPS-ADMIN, and the fan room where Michael had hidden several documents he was saving.
Hitt found 195 classified documents hidden in the fan room, 665 documents in the computer box behind the air duct at the foot of his bunk, and 316 documents in his work area. In all, Michael had stolen 1,176 documents during the cruise.
“Around eleven that night,” Michael recalled, “they took me back up to see Hitt, I was smoking like crazy. I had given up cigarettes a long time before, but I had to have one that day and I’m sitting there, nervous as hell, and Hitt says, ‘Tell me about the box,’ and I said, ‘What box?’ but by this time my eyes are dilating and my ears are turning red and I’m realizing that I’m not such a hot poker player after all. And he got angry and said, ‘Don’t play games with me,’ so I said, ‘Oh, that box, well I was going to put it in the burn room but the burn room was closed so I stuck it behind there and forgot about it.’ He says to me, ‘Walker, that’s bullshit.’ ”
Michael was taken to a cell in the brig. A guard was stationed outside the bars to watch him.
“I began crying and couldn’t stop,” Michael said. “I couldn’t sleep. I was really scared. All that night, I cried and cried. The next morning, I threw up. I was totally humiliated. I asked to see Hitt and boom, like that, they put a yellow band on my arm that meant I was in the brig and marched me up to see him.
“I said to him, ‘Hey, are they going to kill me?’ And he says, ‘I don’t think so.’ I was worried about being executed, man! I mean, I was in the Navy and my dad wasn’t. They could court-martial me on the spot and blast my ass right there. So I confessed. I was so nervous I couldn’t even type my confession and I can usually type eighty words a minute.”
In order to prove Michael had engaged in espionage, the government had to show that he had stolen classified material, that such material was going to or was intended for a foreign government, and that releasing the material was harmful to the United States.
Michael admitted all three during his confession:
“My father never said who he sold classified documents to, but when he suggested I furnish him with classified documents from my work I believed he must be seIling them to the Russians or some other Communist country. When my father asked me to give him classified documents from my work place, I remembered that when I was still in high school, he commented to me one day that someday he would tell me how he makes his money. I now concluded that selling classified documents to the Russians must be what he meant. My father’s request of me to furnish him classified documents wasn’t a total surprise to me, but I really can’t explain why not. I knew he had done other illegal things like smoking pot freely in front of us at home ... I knew when I was taking the classified documents that the unauthorized disclosure of them to a foreign government could harm the United States.”
After Michael signed his confession, he was taken back to the brig, where he had a change of heart. “I decided that I wanted them to kill me,” he told me solemnly. “I wanted them to do it right there on the ship. Go up on the deck and shoot me! Get it over with! It would have been easier than having everyone know what I’d done. I began to cry like a baby again. I couldn’t stop.”
Something else happened when Michael got back to the brig. “My dad had paid me one thousand dollars,” Michael recalled. “That’s all. He had told me that we would make thousands, up to fifty thousand per year working together, but all I ever received was a lousy thousand dollars. My entire life had been screwed and ruined for a lousy fucking one thousand dollars!”
The next morning, ten Marines wearing helmets and carrying M-16’s formed a human wall around Michael and marched him from the brig to the carrier deck. News of his arrest had spread through the ship, and as Michael was led away, he felt as if all six thousand men aboard were watching him. “I knew I had betrayed those guys,” he said. “I knew each and everyone of them hated my guts.”
During the flight to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Michael was allowed to read a copy of a newspaper and for the first time he learned details about his father’s arrest. It was not until just before he arrived at the air base, however, that he heard a radio broadcast that explained that Barbara and Laura were the tipsters. Michael felt betrayed.
“I wanted to kill them both,” he told me. “I really wanted to kill them with my own hands. I was so pissed off. How could they do this to me without any warning. That’s when I decided again that I just wanted to die. Shit! My own mother and sister had been plotting this and the entire time, neither one of them told me a thing. Why hadn’t they told me they were going to turn him in? They had to have known I was involved. They just didn’t want to admit it.
“I thought about it a lot, you know, what kind of a family I had, and I just couldn’t believe that they had done this to me. They had completely ruined my life and not even given me a warning. I think I would have jumped ship and come home and machine gunned every last one of them if they hadn’t caught me! Then I would have gotten on my surfboard and just paddled out into the ocean and let the sharks eat me. How could they do it to me?
“If they would have told me, Rachel and I could have disappeared somewhere, gone to the West and lived with Indians or something. But they didn’t give me any warning because I think they both were afraid that I’d tell them I was involved. They didn’t want to know that. They wanted to turn my dad in and they didn’t really give a damn about me, but they didn’t want to admit that. They wanted to act shocked and horrified later. I was screwed.”
Agent Hunter was at the foot of the airplane’s stairway when Michael’s sneaker touched the runway. “Mr. Walker, I’m with the FBI, you are under arrest,” he said, before whisking Michael into a waiting car. Surrounded by police cars, the motorcade headed for Baltimore.
Rachel had driven to the air base with a friend as a sign of support for Michael and had tried to get his attention, screaming as loudly as she could. But he hadn’t heard her, and there were so many reporters and television crews there, she couldn’t get close enough to wave.
The day after Michael was arrested, Rachel had written a letter to him, but she didn’t know where to send it, so she simply asked the FBI to deliver it. They kept it as evidence. Its tone was panicky, and it was full of poorly disguised attempts to cover her own knowledge. In that letter, Rachel told Michael about her questioning by the FBI and the NIS.
They had asked her whether he had ever brought anything home from work. They had questioned her about the family – Laura, Cynthia, Margaret, Barbara – and asked whether John had ever given Michael large sums of money. “I said no, because that’s the truth,” she wrote. She ended with assurances of her love and support.
After she missed making contact with Michael at the air base, Rachel telephoned the Baltimore FBI office. An agent told her that she could visit Michael there, so she left immediately for Baltimore, where she got lost and had to be led by an agent to the FBI field office. When she was taken into a room to see Michael late that afternoon, she burst into tears.
The FBI tape-recorded
the couple’s conversation and didn’t allow them to be alone, so neither said anything incriminating. Michael had already confessed, of course, but he didn’t mention that to Rachel. “I didn’t want the FBI to know that Rachel knew about the spying and I didn’t know how she would react.”
Rachel stroked Michael’s arm and tried to find out if he had said anything to them about her. He tried to hint that he hadn’t, but she didn’t seem to understand.
“I really didn’t want her there trying to make me feel good,” Michael said. “I didn’t want to see Rachel or anybody. I wanted to be in my own little world and to be left alone. She kept saying, ‘Now Mike, take it easy and everything will be okay,’ and I didn’t want to hear that bullshit. I immediately brought up getting a divorce and that upset her, but I knew it was something we had to do. I just wanted to get on with it all and get it over with.”
Rachel promised Michael that she would be strong and stick with him, and then he was taken into another room for interrogation. Rachel found herself being questioned, too.
Exhausted and emotionally distraught, Rachel was only able to make a few statements before she began sobbing. She said that she knew nothing about the spying, but when an agent showed Rachel the letter that Michael had been writing to her on the Nimitz, she became frightened.
The sentence, “YOU AND I can only begin to wonder what kind of trouble I’m in,” jumped out at her.
She asked if she could call her father in Norfolk, and when he got on the telephone, Rachel pleaded, “Daddy, I want to come home.”
Rachel’s father calmed her and suggested that she check into a motel in Baltimore and not risk driving five hours back to Norfolk, since it was late. Embarrassed, Rachel told her father that she didn’t have enough money for a motel. She was broke.
Without being asked, an FBI agent stepped forward and gave Rachel $50 for a room. It was money from his own pocket.
Rachel was not the only person who had asked for permission to see Michael. Barbara Walker also wanted to visit her son, but Michael refused repeatedly to see her.
Instead, Michael sent her a brief note: “Mother,” he wrote, “you are the biggest BITCH I’ve ever met!”
Chapter 72
Four FBI agents arrived at Arthur’s house at 6:50 A.M. on May 20, about four hours after John’s arrest, and asked Rita for permission to come inside.
Arthur walked into the entryway in his pajamas to see what was going on.
“Your brother John was arrested this morning and charged with espionage,” an agent explained.
“What?” Arthur demanded, faking shock over the news that John was a spy.
Agents Beverly Andress and Carroll Deane questioned Arthur in the den while two other agents quizzed Rita in the kitchen.
“I felt safe,” Arthur told me later, “because only John and I knew about what I had done, so I figured they were talking to me just because he was my brother.”
Arthur was worried about publicity more than being implicated. “My thought was, ‘Oh shit! The newspapers are gonna have in there: JOHN WALKER, SPY CAPTURED, etc.... which is exactly what happened later on, and then all the neighbors will know he’s my brother.’ ”
Unlike John, Arthur had always been concerned about his standing in the neighborhood.
“I had always told my kids, ‘If you get into any kind of trouble, don’t say nothing until you talk to an attorney,’ but I didn’t want to give the FBI any inkling that I was not fully cooperating,” Arthur explained later. “I was afraid they might be suspicious if I did.”
So Arthur acted as if he wanted to cooperate.
“I don’t want to be the one who nails my brother,” he told the agents, “but if I can help, I certainly will. I certainly have nothing to hide.”
“Of course,” Arthur told me later, “I was lying.”
Arthur didn’t know that Barbara had already implicated him in the spy ring and that the FBI was fairly confident by that point in its investigation that Arthur was the cryptic K in John’s dead drop letter. Arthur was about to dig himself a very big hole.
“In a sense, I really wasn’t lying when I told the FBI that I wanted to cooperate,” Arthur claimed later. “I really did want to cooperate, as strange as that may sound. You see, I had taken an oath and part of my oath was not to betray my country. I didn’t have the moral courage to turn John in or at least punch him out or do whatever would be necessary and I felt guilty about that, I really did, so I thought, ‘John is nailed now, so why not help them. Why not do the right thing.’ I thought it might help ease my own conscience about what I had done.”
At nine A.M., Beverly Andress asked Arthur to accompany her and Agent Deane voluntarily to the Norfolk FBI office for more questioning. He agreed and during the next six hours, Arthur attempted to satisfy the FBI and also keep from incriminating himself. It proved to be a tight-rope that he couldn’t walk.
Arthur began by admitting that John had once asked him about various documents at VSE Corporation, but he “categorically denied” any knowledge of John’s espionage and claimed to have never “passed on anything.”
“It’s something I wouldn’t even consider,” he said. “Even for my brother.”
But the longer the questioning went on, the more overwrought Arthur became.
“I began to do a damage assessment,” he explained to me later. “As I’m talking to the feds, I’m thinking how could I tell them stuff about John without telling them about myself? Because, you see, all I know about John is what I did. I started telling them and soon I was sliding right down into it. I was giving myself away.”
Shortly after three P.M., the agents took Arthur home and asked if they could search his house.
“Sure,” he said, knowing there was nothing incriminating hidden there.
Afterward, he returned voluntarily to the FBI office and agreed to take a polygraph examination.
By this time, Arthur was afraid to stop cooperating, even though he knew that he was getting himself into trouble. “I didn’t want the FBI to be suspicious of me because I still didn’t think they knew about what I had done,” Arthur said. “How could they? Only John and I knew. So I agreed to a polygraph to keep up that appearance. Oh God, was that a mistake. But my feeling at that point, when I agreed to take the polygraph, was that I had told them enough truth that that I could pass it.”
But when he was attached to the polygraph, before the test began, Arthur said that he wanted to amend his story.
In “hindsight” he recalled that he had become “suspicious” of John six months earlier during a “bullshit” session when John asked him about information concerning the overhaul of Navy ships and explained that “some people might be interested in something like that.”
“That made alarm bells go off in my head,” Arthur told the agents, “and on a scale of one to ten, I was approximately nine point five suspicious that John was doing something wrong because the only people I know of that would be willing to pay for that kind of information are those people in eastern bloc countries.”
Arthur went a step further.
He acknowledged that he had given John a document, but claimed it was unclassified, very old, and totally useless. In his own mind, Arthur told me later, he was convinced that he had told enough of the truth to protect himself. Surely, he thought, the polygraph machine wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to detect the subtle differences between his admissions and the truth.
Arthur was wrong. The polygraph indicated that he had been “deceptive.”
Arthur was genuinely astonished when told this. “It can’t be!” he said.
Hoping to clear himself, Arthur elaborated on his first story. This time, he admitted that he had once allowed John to see a single page of a ship’s casualty report, which is classified as confidential, and he said that he first became suspicious of John two years ago, rather than six months earlier. The FBI suggested that Arthur hire a lawyer.
Back home that night, Arthur admitted
to Rita for the first time that he was involved.
“I’ve told the FBI that I gave John something,” he said.
“What?” Rita replied.
“Arthur, how could you?”
“Now don’t worry,” he replied. “It wasn’t anything serious.”
Rita panicked. Was he going to be arrested?
No, Arthur replied. The document that he gave John was insignificant. “I think it will be okay.”
The next morning, Arthur drove to the FBI office and said that he wanted to “start over from the beginning.”
“By this time,” Arthur recalled, “the FBI had told me enough for me to know that John was nailed and Mike had been arrested, so I figured it was time to stop evading and to tell them everything I knew about John. I still believed that I hadn’t done anything serious enough to be prosecuted.”
Arthur also thought that if he squealed on John, the FBI would be convinced that he had cooperated and readily accept his own story. Arthur told a bit more of the truth. He admitted showing John several pages of two confidential documents and told the FBI that John had paid him $2,000.
Then Arthur volunteered to take another polygraph test and, once again, it indicated that he was lying.
During the next few hours, Arthur revealed more and more. By evening, he was chain-smoking so heavily that the tiny interrogation room in the Norfolk office became dense with smoke and the FBI agents had to excuse themselves to go outside and breathe fresher air.
Hunter had returned to Norfolk by this time and checked periodically on the questioning of Arthur during the day.
Shortly after eight P.M., Hunter lost his temper. “I felt Arthur was an intelligent man and I thought he was simply trying to find out what we knew about him. The smoke was pouring out of the room and all we were hearing was bits and pieces of crap.”
Hunter stormed into the interrogation room and jabbed his finger on Arthur’s chest.
“Get your ass out of here and don’t come back until you want to tell us the truth!” Hunter yelled. “You’re lying. You’re not telling us the truth. You’re jerking our chain, so just get the hell out of here!”