by Earley, Pete
Chapter 78
Special Agent Robert Hunter should have felt exultant on November 7, 1986, as he sat in a Baltimore courtroom listening to Judge Alexander Harvey II formally sentence John to life in prison.
Hunter had played a major role in the successful investigation, arrest, prosecution, and debriefing of John. No other government official had spent as much time with John as Hunter.
By this time, Jerry Whitworth had been found guilty and sentenced to 365 years in prison with no possibility of parole until he reached the age of 107. Jerry also had been fined $410,000.
The sentence came after the government made public a statement by a former high-ranking KGB official, Vitaly Yurchenko, who had defected and told the FBI that the Walker spy ring was “the most important operation in the KGB’s history” and had allowed the deciphering of “one million” classified Navy messages.
Jerry was described by the judge who sentenced him as “one of the most spectacular spies of the century” and a man who represented the “evil of banality.”
“Jerry Whitworth is zero at the bone,” said Judge John P. Vukasin, Jr. “He believes in nothing. His life is devoted to determining the wind direction and how he can make a profit from the coming storm.”
Arthur Walker had been sentenced to life in prison and a $250,000 fine by Judge Clarke, who said Arthur’s “greatest culpability is his silence.”
Arthur should have “counseled John, at the very least ... if he didn’t want to tell on him.”
Now John faced Judge Alexander Harvey II.
Based on the government’s plea bargain, John’s sentence already had been decided. He would be sentenced to two life terms, plus 100 years, all to be served concurrently, making him eligible for parole in ten years.
Michael would receive two twenty-five-year terms and three ten-year terms, all concurrent, making him eligible for parole after serving eight years.
“One is seized,”Judge Harvey told John, “with an overwhelming feeling of revulsion that a human being could ever be as unprincipled as you.”
John said nothing, but he later recalled his thoughts. “I figured Harvey would grandstand for the press,” John told me later. “Fuck ‘em!”
Hunter was troubled after Michael and John left the courtroom. The FBI had given Arthur another polygraph and it had indicated that he was being deceptive when he was asked if he had been a spy while in the Navy. John had failed another polygraph too when asked about how he had gotten started as a spy.
Meanwhile, the FBI had reviewed John’s story about going to the Soviet embassy in Washington and determined that there was no heavy iron fence around the embassy in late 1967 as John had claimed. John’s version of his encounter with an embassy employee also was amazingly similar to an account in The Falcon and the Snowman, which John liked so much.
On the other hand, Hunter had asked John to draw the floorplan of the embassy for him, and what John drew matched perfectly with the FBI’s records. “There is no question in my mind that John Walker had been in the Soviet embassy,” Hunter recalled. But when?
What troubled Hunter most was that no one might ever be able to discover the truth because of a mix-up months earlier before Arthur’s trial. Shortly after John and Arthur were arrested, Fred Bennett had telephoned Samuel Meekins, Jr., and requested copies of all of Arthur’s statements to the FBI.
Meekins obliged and Bennett showed the statements to John. When it came time for Hunter to question John about Arthur, John told the exact same stories as Arthur had.
“He knew exactly what Arthur had told us,” Hunter said, “and John did not deviate on it at all. It was impossible for us to catch them in lies after that.”
His FBI colleagues told Hunter that none of this mattered. The good guys had won. Hunter had done his job. All the spies had been captured and imprisoned.
Hunter received a letter of commendation from FBI Director William H. Webster. It felt good, said Hunter, but it also was incomplete. Hunter had always been able to empathize with people and he had developed a genuine warmth for Barbara and Laura, and even Michael and Arthur.
But not John. There was an invisible barrier around John that Hunter couldn’t pass through. During one of their final interviews, Hunter had tried to talk on a personal level with John.
“We had spent a lot of time together,” Hunter recalled. “A lot of time, and I had been wondering. I mean, this was just incredible, here was a guy who had been in espionage all these years and gotten his best friend, and brother, and then his son involved. He had tried to get Laura involved too and I had yet to see any remorse, so I decided to ask him.”
Hunter approached John gingerly.
“John, we have been together a long time now and talked about a lot of things together, but I’ve never seen any indication of remorse. Do you feel remorse, any sorrow about what you’ve done?”
John’s face became red. “Remorse?” he replied. “What are you talking about? Even if I had any, I wouldn’t display it to you. What do you want me to tell you, that I have remorse so you can go home and say, ‘I got John Walker to admit he was remorseful’?”
“I knew just about everything you could find out about John Walker,” Hunter recalled later.
And yet Hunter felt at that moment that he really knew “nothing at all” about him.
After they were sentenced, John and Michael were allowed a few minutes together.
“I’m going to kill myself,” John told his son. “When I get to a penitentiary, I’m going to do it.”
Anyone else might have been suspicious, but Michael believed him.
“Don’t do it, Dad, please,” Michael said.
“I’ve done everything I wanted in life,” John said. “Now it’s time for me to just get the fuck out of here.”
“Dad, I know you’re gonna think this is stupid,” Michael said, “but I’ve been reading the Bible and it helps. It really helps, man. Perhaps–”
John cut him short. “I’ve tried that, Mike, it don’t work for me, but, hey, it’s a good idea with you. It will help with your parole.”
Then John told Michael about a dream. “I had a dream about us, Mike,” John said. “You and I were together in this room and I kept telling you to lay down on this bed of nails. You didn’t want to, but I said, ‘Goddamnit, Michael, lay down!’ and you finally did exactly what I told you.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Michael said. “We’re still buddies, still partners, right?”
John nodded.
“It felt really good,” John told me later. “Because Michael was willing to take care of me.”
After he had been in prison a few months, Michael decided to meet with his mother for the first time since his arrest.
“I hated my mother at that point and, the truth was, I also hated my dad,” he told me later. “I began to realize I had always hated them. I hated half of my mother – the alcoholic half, the cruel half. And I hated half of my father – the selfish half, the manipulative half.
“But they were my parents. My mother. My father. And I had no choice. I had to love them too – didn’t I?”
PART VII
john
Even so we should abandon all sentimentality in our views of the traitor, and recognize him as a thief and a liar.
– Rebecca West, The New Meaning of Treason
Chapter 79
The noisy electric motor slowly opened the prison cellblock gate. I stepped past the reinforced steel bars into a small waiting area as a ceiling mounted camera watched. After the gate slammed shut, I heard a loud thunk, which meant the steel door to the right had been unlocked by an unseen guard.
A voice through the speaker in the ceiling directed me to an interview room barely big enough for the two chairs and the metal table inside. The air had a smell of stale tobacco, and the fluorescent lighting was so harsh I had to squint. Burnt orange paint had been applied so thickly to the walls that the concrete blocks were smooth. There were no windows.
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br /> A half hour later, a guard brought in John Walker, Jr.
We shook hands and the guard left. We spoke casually, and then he began to talk about the FBI’s handling of his case.
“After I was arrested,” he explained, “I told the FBI it wasn’t the Soviet Union I was dealing with, and they went ahead and prosecuted my brother Art. They convicted Art of dealing with the Soviet Union based on no information at all. He was railroaded. Fred and I were negotiating a twenty-five-year sentence for Michael. And Art, who is obviously a lesser player, is crucified and gets multiple life sentences and fines.
“I knew they did that to get to me and I knew Michael was next, so I confessed really. I said, ‘What do you want me to say? I’ll say it.’
“After Art’s trial, I said to them, ‘Okay, you tell me how I did it,’ and they said, ‘Your brother Art said you told him that you went to the Soviet embassy.’ Hey, what a great idea! Fucking wonderful! So I said, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. That’s how it was!’ and they said, ‘Good, now you’re telling the truth,’ and they wrote that down.
“Don’t you see? The FBI wouldn’t accept the fact that I might have been dealing with anyone else. The FBI is preconditioned to think it is the Soviet Union, and they wouldn’t have believed me if I had said it was anyone else but the Soviet Union. Period! That’s the way bureaucrats think. The Soviets are the enemy. It’s got to be the Soviets.
“Okay, this time, I got to admit, they were right because it was the Soviets. I did go to the Soviet embassy. I’m not going to lie to you. I want to tell the truth. But just think for a moment about the case against me.”
By this time, I’d been thinking about it for almost two years.
I’d been thinking, too, that John Walker’s dissembling, paranoid, convoluted reasoning and illogic were getting on my nerves. The FBI was stupid. John Walker was clever. The FBI was out to get him through Arthur. Arthur was convicted on no information at all. The FBI was paranoid about the Soviet Union. That’s why they didn’t believe him.
And so forth, round and round until I drew a mental picture of John Walker like a dog chasing his own tail, wondering why no one else was impressed with his courage and ingenuity.
“Barbara called in November,” John continued. “I went to Vienna in January and made a delivery. The FBI didn’t know it, right? Or did they? How could they not know? How could they not follow me after she warned them? I didn’t do anything fancy. Granted, I used a false name on the domestic flight and changed my real name a bit on the international flight. But it wouldn’t have been that hard to follow me.
“Okay, how do you know that they didn’t follow me? What if they actually did follow me to Vienna, saw who I was dealing with and decided not to arrest me there because of who I met? Maybe I wasn’t really dealing with the Soviets after all and the FBI knew that but didn’t want the public to know. Consequently, back in the United States, where they could have caught both of us, they somehow managed to fuck up.”
I wanted to point out to John that the FBI has no arrest powers overseas, and that, if anyone had been following him, it was more likely the CIA at that time and not the FBI.
But he was intent on pursuing his own logic and I had learned from earlier discussions that John didn’t react well when challenged. So I let him continue.
By this time, he was becoming animated and was mocking the FBI by pretending he was an agent explaining to a reporter in a shrill voice what had happened.
“ ‘Oh, golly, Mr. Reporter, we fucked up! We picked up the signal can at the dead drop! Isn’t that a shame? And, gosh darn, we fucked up and only caught John, and the other guy, the Russian, got away because one of our agents ran away with the bag before the Russian could get it! Gosh, we are sorry about that!’ ”
Returning to his normal speaking voice, John continued, “Maybe I was set up. Think about it. Isn’t it possible that the FBI went over there and watched me deliver documents to someone who I thought was a Russian, but who really was someone else? Maybe the FBI wanted me to make that delivery in January because they knew what Michael had stolen and wanted it delivered into someone else’s hands. Maybe all of this is a giant charade to get the Soviets to take me in a prison exchange. Who knows, I might really be working for the CIA. What better cover than to accuse someone of being a Russian spy, trade him to the Soviets and then actually use him as a spy? Think about that.”
I thought about it. I thought about how John had sold secrets to the Soviets for almost eighteen years, the incalculable damage he’d done to his country, and I started to feel angry. Angry at the distortions, angry at his inane and puerile suggestions that there was a “much larger game afoot.” Angry that he had harmed those who had loved him, emotionally crippling his wife, manipulating his best friend and brother, corrupting his children until Michael became a warped image of himself.
“Even the fucking President of the United States of America,” John continued, “thinks I’m a spy, but this all might be part of a great scam. Maybe I don’t even know what is happening here. You see, nearly anything is possible.”
And so it was.
I asked, “What about Michael, Arthur, and Jerry?”
He replied quickly, “What about them?”
“Do you feel responsible?”
“The worst thing I feel sorry about,” John said, “so much so it is hard to talk about, is Michael. He is my son, and I did what no parent should do. I put him in danger. He couldn’t say no to me, and I knew it. There is no justification for my action, except, as I have said, I really believed I did it for him, for his own good.”
For a brief moment, as John said, “There is no justification,” I thought I was about to see, perhaps for the first time, a human being.
But then John added the rest.
As always, there was an excuse, an out. His life was little more than layer upon layer of rationalization. His father was a drunk – that’s why John became a teenage thief. Barbara nagged constantly – that’s why he became a spy. Blah, blah, blah.
The man was hopeless and, against all my instincts as a reporter, I wanted to tell him what a miserable human being he was. But something in his words kept me from responding. There is a certain fascination in listening to a deranged man who can excuse his own evil with the mere wave of his hand, as if shooing away a pesky fly.
“I regret what has happened to Michael,” John continued, “but he was an adult, and I gave him plenty of chances to say no. You see, it is so easy to blame me, but what did I really do? In every case I was dealing with weak people and I was trying to help them out.”
I looked at John and our eyes met. He paused and then looked away. He knew I didn’t believe him. But he continued anyway.
“Art, when it comes to Art, yeah, I got some regrets, he’s my brother. But I had loaned a ton of money to Walker Enterprises and Art didn’t put the effort into the business that it required. You need to be a workaholic to make a business go. Sure, he damn near killed himself worrying, but he didn’t put in the time in the business. He worried, and he waited, like most fat-ass Americans, for good luck to come along. Well, I don’t believe in luck. You make your own good luck and Art couldn’t cut it. Worse yet, he didn’t have the balls to say to his kids, ‘Go get a job and earn your own money for college.’ And he didn’t have the balls to tell Rita to get off her butt and stop watching soap operas and get a job or help retarded kids or do something.
“He was stupid. His family used him. What did he ever get from them? What is he getting now? Rita is so angry now she won’t send him any money, not even for cigarettes. My brother has to smoke cigarette butts that he finds on the fucking jail floor. ‘Hey nigger, will you kick that butt over here for me to smoke?’
“I was Art’s only real friend. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? I had to salvage that dummy. I got him out of debt and he never paid me back. Never. There is no way Art should have been taking home a paycheck each week, but he did and it came from my sp
y money. And then Rita wouldn’t even be in the same room as me.
“I feel bad about Whitworth. He was my best friend. I’m sure he views me as Lucifer for obvious reasons. But Whitworth enjoyed the spying and he was good at it. He worked at getting good access and was a damn good spy.
“On the other side of the coin, even though Whitworth was good, he was a flake. Don’t you see it? He was weak too! He had to have a crutch. He wanted to believe he was doing something noble for the Israelis. What bullshit, but it was something he could grab onto to keep him from having to deal with reality. He and Art were living a fool’s paradise. They didn’t want to admit what they were doing and what kind of persons they really are. They still don’t want to admit it even now. But come on. They were big boys. They weren’t kids. They were veteran warriors. Top notch sailors. They knew what they were getting into and they did it, just like I predicted they would.
“You see, everyone wants to blame me, but who did they run to when they needed money? The FBI thinks I got money hidden somewhere. How stupid. My fucking family took it all. Now you tell me. Who was really lying the most? Art, sitting in suburbia with a witch and a Better Homes and Gardens house and all the time he had a fucking mistress and was a spy; Jerry, a patron of Israel and intellectual follower of Ayn Rand and all the time a fucking spy for the KGB? Or me?
“You see, I never pretended really to be anything but what I was. I knew exactly what I was and why I was doing it.
“You know, I gave everyone of them at least twenty chances to say no. But they didn’t, did they? That’s because deep down everyone of them wanted the fucking money! Just like every fucking American wants the money or a promotion or some edge on everyone else. Everyone has a scam. Everyone has an angle. You see in the end, Barbara, my brother Arthur, Whitworth, and even Laura, everyone of them really except Michael, in the end they all wanted the fucking money. So why can’t they admit it? If you want the truth, the truth is this: I told each of them whatever they wanted to goddamn hear, whatever crutch they needed, as long as it got them to do what I wanted them to do. I didn’t give a shit what I said or promised. And it worked, until the money stopped. And that’s the point, really.