Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  In 1978, Bennett moved into public defender work in a crime-infested suburban county of Washington, D.C. His office oversaw five thousand cases per year, and he handled the most sensational of them. Often he became so emotionally involved in the cases that it threatened his health. Once he sobbed openly in court after a client was convicted during an emotional trial.

  Later, he took over the Federal Public Defenders Office.

  John was impressed by Bennett’s enthusiasm and obvious salesmanship, but that wasn’t the deciding factor.

  “Fred believed me when I told him something,” John explained later. “I liked that.”

  Bennett quickly realized the case against John was persuasive. Wolfinger and Hunter had done a masterful job. So Bennett approached John about negotiating a guilty plea. He explained his plan in nautical terms.

  “We are on a sinking ship,” he told John. “So are Arthur, Michael, and Jerry Whitworth. Whoever gets off the ship first and gets to the U.S. Attorney is going to get the best deal. Whoever is left on the ship after a deal is cut gets screwed and sinks.”

  The trick, Bennett explained, is knowing when to jump ship.

  “If we appear too eager,” he said, “then we aren’t going to get as good a deal as if we hang in there for a while and file motions, threaten to litigate, and make them come to us. But we’ve got to be careful not to overdo it or we’ll be the ones who go down.”

  The only person that John really had to worry about, Bennett added, was Jerry Whitworth.

  Arthur didn’t have much to offer in exchange for a deal and Michael already had confessed. But Jerry had provided John documents for ten years and the government was anxious to know how much harm those classified secrets had done.

  Bennett put in a telephone call to Whitworth’s two attorneys and talked openly to them about plea negotiations. Both sides agreed to keep each other informed about such dealings.

  With John’s approval, Bennett launched a two-prong defense. Publicly, Bennett attacked the government’s case full force. Unlike Arthur’s attorneys, Bennett’s posture was to make life as difficult as possible for federal prosecutors.

  But behind the scenes, Bennett worked hard at trying to cut a deal for John.

  “I knew I was down the toilet,” John recalled. “The press and politicians were responsible for that. It was going to be impossible for me to get a fair trial with all the leaks by the Navy and fucking politicians calling me the worst spy in history. So Fred suggested we adopt what he called a ‘slow guilty plea.’ We were going to drive them insane by appealing everything for the next ten years. Obviously, I’d refuse to testify or talk about what I had given to the Soviets or about the tradecraft that we used unless a deal was cut.”

  John knew he was headed to prison for life, but he also knew that the parole board and prison system operate under mandatory guidelines that could make it possible for him to be paroled, no matter how unpopular he was, if he played his cards right. He also wanted to do something to help Michael.

  “I didn’t want Michael behind bars all of his life,” he said. “Michael had to be the first one out and later I could join him.”

  So John agreed with Bennett about negotiating and on July 2, they held their first secret meeting with the government.

  “We had agreed to a very limited debriefing of John to show his bona fide credibility,” Bennett recalled. The government was anxious to find out the identities of John’s fellow spies because some questions had been raised about the appearance of the letter A in John’s notes.

  During the four-hour debriefing session, John insisted that only Arthur, Jerry, and Michael had provided classified information to him. Gary Walker, he said, hadn’t passed anything, and the letter A meant nothing. It was just another code name for Whitworth.

  When asked to describe the kinds of documents that he had stolen, John announced glibly, “If I had access to it, color it gone.”

  But John became nervous when he was asked how he started as a spy.

  “John started telling us this wild and totally ridiculous story,” Hunter recalled later, “about how he went down to apply for a job at a Yellow Cab Company in Norfolk and met these two mysterious characters, and it was so awful, I felt funny writing this stuff down. It was just total nonsense. “

  John was given a polygraph test after the briefing.

  The machine indicated that John had been deceptive in two areas. He had lied about the number of persons helping him spy and about how he got started.

  The lie detector results alarmed Bennett. The government was not going to be interested in plea bargaining if John intended to lie. He quickly huddled with his client in the corner.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I once strapped a money belt on my mother when we were in Europe,” John said, explaining why the machine had indicated John was deceptive when asked about his spying partners.

  “How about the other?”

  “I lied about that, Fred, ‘cause I got started by walking into the Soviet embassy,” John explained. “How can I tell them that without blowing our defense?”

  “At that point,” Fred Bennett recalled later, “John hadn’t even told me about the Soviet embassy. That was one piece of information he hadn’t been candid with me on. He had told me the story about the cab company.”

  Bennett returned to the bargaining table.

  “Okay,” Bennett said, “my client assures me that there are no other people involved. John had trouble with the polygraph machine because of some guilt feelings about his mother and a money belt and that’s all there is to that. There is no A.

  “Secondly, my client can’t go into how he got started as a spy because it would reveal the cornerstone of our defense.”

  Bennett thought he had been convincing, but as he surveyed the faces in the room, he had a sinking feeling. “The debriefing had turned into a fiasco,” he recalled. “Here we were trying to show how credible John was and he blew the polygraph.”

  The government held another debriefing session with John shortly before Arthur’s trial in August. This time, federal prosecutors wanted to talk about Jerry Whitworth. John had plenty to say.

  “I never would have squealed on Jerry,” John told me later. “I would have simply adopted a policy of hanging tough and telling the government, ‘Fuck you!’ But when Fred showed me the RUS letters, I was really pissed. Jerry had tried to sell me out, so as far as I was concerned, all promises were off.”

  John was convincing, Hunter recalled, when he described Jerry’s participation as a spy. He made it clear that if the government gave him a chance, he could provide more than enough rope to hang Jerry.

  Still, the government held back.

  John had followed Arthur’s trial in the newspapers and on television and had been furious with the outcome. He later bitterly accused the government of using Arthur to get to him. “I knew exactly what they were doing,” John said. “That trial was a demonstration put on for my benefit. It was like they took Art in a room and tied him to a chair and beat him with rubber hoses and then said to me, ‘See, you motherfucker, see what we did to your brother. Now just watch what we’re going to do to your son.’ I hated those bastards for what they did to Art.”

  The trial scared John. If the government could convince a federal judge that Arthur, who had never met with any Russians, was guilty, then how hard would it be to convict John?

  Bennett made one more effort to cut a deal. He spoke with several persons in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Baltimore. He was told that John’s case was simply too political for a plea bargain. No one at the Justice Department was willing to negotiate a deal because of the heat they’d get from the press, Pentagon, and Congress.

  On September 4, Bennett received an angry telephone call from James Larson, one of Whitworth’s two attorneys. Larson had just learned from the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco that John Walker had been cooperating with the government by squealing on Jerry Whitworth.
Larson was furious because he thought Bennett and he had agreed to advise each other before either entered into plea negotiations.

  Why had the government told Whitworth’s attorneys about the debriefings?

  Obviously, the Justice Department was playing an old game. It was telling Jerry that John had talked in the hope that Jerry would offer to testify against John.

  After he received Larson’s call, Bennett decided there wasn’t much chance of a plea bargain and he began preparing for John’s trial in late October. But for the first time in his career, Bennett was stumped.

  “Finally I decided that we would concede everything during my opening statement and then say, ‘So what?’ We were going to argue that the FBI couldn’t prove John was meeting the Soviets. It wasn’t much, but it was all we had.”

  What Bennett didn’t know was that the Justice Department was also worried about John’s trial. The problem was Jerry Whitworth. Jerry was claiming he was innocent and refusing to cooperate. He seemed to think he could beat the charges against him, and several Justice Department attorneys regretfully agreed. There was simply not enough evidence to convict Whitworth – unless John Walker testified against him. John was the only person who could prove that Jerry had spied.

  The only person who wasn’t distressed before his approaching trial was John.

  “I was really getting excited about it,” he told me later. “I wanted to see fucking Barbara’s lying face and Laura’s fucking lying face. I know I am bad, and I know what I did, but these bitches didn’t have to lie about me and Art to the FBI, the way they had, you know, adding a bunch of stuff to their stories that didn’t happen.”

  John was beginning to enjoy the notoriety. A national magazine sent him a letter naming him one of the ten top newsmakers of 1985. Every major television network and news program had requested an interview.

  Five days before John’s trial, the government contacted Bennett. If John would testify against Jerry, a deal would be cut to help Michael.

  John quickly agreed.

  “I told Fred that he had timed it perfectly,” John recalled. “We weren’t going to be the ones that sank with the ship.”

  Chapter 77

  One month after Jerry Whitworth was arrested, he wrote a letter affirming his innocence to Geneva Green, his longtime friend and loyal supporter in Muldrow. Geneva was only one of Jerry’s friends who figured the government had made a mistake. Nearly everyone who knew Jerry took his side. His mother, Agnes Morton, led the way. “Jerry loves the United States,” she explained. “Why, he was born right here in Oklahoma. He was no New York person, no Los Angeles person. He was raised in the country. He’s well thought of by everyone, no meanness, no trouble. These charges are enough to drive anyone to an insane asylum.”

  Jerry perpetuated the myth by writing dozens of letters to people he had known and asking them for help. But whatever their previous differences, it was Agnes who provided Jerry with his strongest support.

  “My mother and I became very close,” Jerry confided to a friend later. “I was able to make peace with her.” In Jerry’s mind, the support that Agnes gave him after his arrest finally convinced him – his mother really did love him as a son.

  They didn’t have much time to enjoy their new relationship. Six weeks after Jerry was arrested, Agnes was killed in a car accident outside Muldrow. She was returning home from Sallisaw, where she had met with a lawyer on Jerry’s behalf.

  After Agnes died, Geneva Green became Jerry’s most vocal defender back in Muldrow. She wrote to him religiously and filled three huge scrapbooks with newspaper clippings about him. She was confident that once he was free, the two of them could sit down together on the couch in her living room and look through the clippings and laugh about how silly the entire incident had been. Geneva even offered to mortgage her modest home in order to help Jerry financially.

  Jerry’s defiant attitude changed once James Larson told him that John had agreed to testify. Like attorneys Meekins, Donnelly, and Bennett had done before him, Larson now told his client that winning acquittal would be nearly impossible.

  In February 1986, Larson and Jerry’s other attorney, Tony Tamburello, contacted the U.S. Attorney’s office with a plea bargain. Jerry would submit to complete debriefing, freely undergo polygraph exams, and would plead guilty to “a combination’ of counts,” including a charge that carried up to a life sentence.

  In return, Jerry wanted to be promised that he would not be recalled into the Navy and court-martialed, and that Brenda would not be charged.

  It seemed to Larson and Tamburello to be a reasonable request, but U.S. Attorney Joseph P. Russoniello quickly ruled out any deal.

  In a short response, he wrote:

  It is the position of the Department of Justice that ... a full exposition of the entire conspiracy in a public trial is of paramount importance. ... In our view there is a compelling need for an accurate public account of the scope of this conspiracy and Mr. Whitworth’s role in it. Mr. Whitworth’s strident and repeated assertions of having been framed by an overzealous FBI and a lying John Walker must be corrected. We firmly believe that public revelation of the overwhelming evidence against Mr. Whitworth will provide the true picture.

  Once again, personal ambition and politics were playing a central role. The Justice Department’s dealings with John and Michael Walker had outraged some Pentagon officials, particularly Navy Secretary John F. Lehman, Jr.

  In a highly unusual move in Washington, Lehman had publicly condemned the plea bargain. “We in the Navy are disappointed at the plea bargain,” Lehman told the press. “It continues a tradition in the Justice Department of treating espionage as just another white-collar crime and we think that it should be in a very different category.”

  John Walker’s actions, he said, “were traitorous acts and ought to be treated differently than insider trading.”

  Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger rebuked Lehman two days later. “Secretary Lehman now understands that he did not have all the facts concerning the matter before he made several injudicious and incorrect statements with respect to the agreement,” Weinberger said.

  Now that it had shaken John’s hand, the Justice Department had no choice politically but to crucify Jerry Whitworth. It had to prove that the price it had paid by cutting a deal with John had been worth it.

  Jerry’s trial began on March 25, 1986, and it quickly turned into one of the most elaborate spy trials ever presented by the government. The Justice Department called dozens of witnesses, introduced hundreds of exhibits, and provided the public with an unprecedented look into the secret world of ciphers, cryptographic machines, and military communications.

  For the first time in history, the government brought an actual cipher machine into a courtroom to show jurors.

  But the most explosive evidence came from John Walker himself, who revealed for the first time, in public, the inner workings of his spy ring during five days of testimony. While John’s testimony grabbed the headlines, it was his behind-the-scenes cooperation that, he felt, helped federal prosecutors the most.

  “I really began to feel like part of the government’s team,” John recalled. “Before I left, I posed for pictures with the prosecution.”

  One night, John was moved into the same Oakland jail as Arthur, who also was a witness. It was the first time the two brothers had met since being arrested and, feeling rather festive, they called me at my home.

  “We’re just sitting here in the recreation room watching television and having some coffee,” Arthur reported cheerfully. “We’re the only two in this cell block and they’re treating us like celebrities.”

  “Hey, I’m famous!” John said proudly after Arthur handed him the telephone. Someone in the jail, he said, had asked him to autograph his picture in an encyclopedia’s year-end review.

  The defense called Geneva Green as a witness. “I truly believed Jerry was innocent,” Geneva told me later, “and I was proud to get up there
and tell everyone that he was my friend. I didn’t understand, though, why Jerry didn’t take the stand and defend himself.”

  On July 10, James Larson made what to Geneva Green was a shocking disclosure in his closing statement to the jury.

  “The writer of the RUS letters was Jerry Whitworth,” Larson acknowledged

  Geneva felt sick! Jerry really was a spy!

  “I was angry at first,” she recalled. “I’d been duped. We all had. We all had believed Jerry was really innocent, but now we knew. I felt betrayed, personally betrayed. Jerry had lied to us all.”

  After the trial, Jerry said during a presentencing evaluation that he was “extremely sorry” for passing classified information, but claimed that he did not pass John all of the documents that John had said.

  I wanted out basically all the time. I just couldn’t keep doing it, but I did. I never really did what he wanted me to do, but only gave him what I thought would satisfy him. I would never go outside my duty area, which is what he wanted.

  The person who conducted the evaluation of Jerry described him this way:

  Upon interview, Whitworth, for the most part, exhibits a flat effect. He is given to occasional inappropriate laughter, despite what appears to be a rather constricted emotional tone. His expressions of remorse are absent in emotional tone, and he becomes tearful only when discussing the subject of his wife and his marriage. It is quite clear that Jerry Whitworth exhibits very little insight into his behavior and psychological state and is prone to explanation and description, rather than understanding. ... It will take time and professional assistance for him to accept, on the deepest levels, the gravity of his crime and the effects on the country and those around him.

  On an emotional level, a review of Jerry Whitworth’s life suggests an intense need for acceptance and an almost pathological need to please John Walker. Equally clearly, John Walker preyed on Jerry Whitworth’s vulnerabilities. Although there are many in our society who are equally vulnerable as Jerry Whitworth, few have been as manipulated...