Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  “You see what I did and said didn’t really matter. It was the money, the money that mattered. As long as they got paid, then it worked. The spy ring worked. But when Whitworth screwed up the payments, then everything went to hell.

  “Take Barbara, my lovely ex-wife. Oh, did you know she still loves me? I heard her say it on television after my arrest. ‘Oh, I still love him.’ That shows how sick that fucker really is. If you dislike me, then I can understand you standing up and beating the shit out of me. I can handle that kind of confrontation. But this? She sleeps with my brother and turns me in to the cops and then says she loves me! Jesus! Tell me you hate me, Barbara, because I sure hate you. You know why she did it? For the money, man. The money. She wanted to get even with me for sleeping around on her, for not loving her, and she knew if she turned me in, there were going to be books and interviews and television programs that would pay her to be on them.

  “I hate all of them and I don’t need them. Any of them. You see, the truth is that I don’t need people and that’s what really makes me different. It makes me fucking powerful, man! My stupid daughter Cynthia writes to me and says, ‘Daddy, I still love you! I want you to know that I will always love you!’ Who needs that bullshit! Tell me something useful, information I can use. Tell me what Barbara and Laura are going to do next to screw up my life.”

  John seemed momentarily pensive, then continued.

  “Maybe it’s something I learned from my father. My wonderful alcoholic father. He didn’t need anyone unless they could buy him some booze. Then, he sure as hell needed you. You were his best goddamn friend, his favorite son. Fuck yes, he loved you when you bought him his whiskey.

  “After my arrest, my dad told reporters that I and Art weren’t his sons. Thanks, Dad. After all I did for him. Thanks a lot, Dad. But you see, I know. I know that if I was out of this fucking jail and I drove up to his house and offered to buy him a bottle, then I’d be good old Jack, his favorite son.”

  John always seemed to talk about his father when we met so I mentioned it to him, and he became irritated.

  “Ahh, we’re going to play shrink now, huh?” he said, mimicking a thick German accent. “It is clear that the subject Walker suffered from a neurosis caused during his early childhood.”

  Then, in his normal voice, “Bullshit! Sure he fucked me up. He fucked up all his kids. So what?”

  I handed John an article from The Washington Post in which several psychologists had evaluated John Walker based on what they had read about him and what they already knew about spies. John had read the article when it was published in June 1985, and remembered it with obvious spite.

  “These son of a bitches don’t even know me,” he said. “Fred brought a shrink in here to talk to me to see if we could plead insanity as a defense, and when the guy got ready to leave, he says to me: ‘John, you are one of the sanest men I’ve ever met.’ I’m not the one with the problem, man. It’s not me. It’s society that’s all fucked up. How can you not see that?”

  I didn’t reply.

  John continued. “I keep reading about how I am the worst spy since the Rosenbergs gave away the bomb. Okay, show me. Where is the damage? Where’s the invasion by the communists? Where is the Red Dawn?

  “Guess what? There wasn’t any and there’s not going to be one. Guess what? All you fucking stupid Americans who sit around all day watching the boob tube – it ain’t gonna happen. There isn’t going to be a war. That’s all a game, man, to keep the defense contractors rich.

  “This is all we did. We let the Russians read our mail just like we read their mail. That’s it. That’s all. The United States monitors every international telephone call and every open circuit in the world. All I did was sell those poor bastards the same access.

  “If a war started today, then you could say, ‘Okay, Walker, you did your shit! You profited from what you did! A war has just started because of the shit you did!’ I’d say, ‘Okay, I agree with you. I sold stuff that caused a war. I fucked up. Take me out back and shoot me because of it.’ That would be fair. I’d go even farther. If a war between us and the Russians started in the next three and a half years, then you can take me out and shoot me between the eyes or let me hang myself.

  “But what has happened to me is unfair. I’ve been destroyed by the government for no real reason and so has Art and Mike. Our lives have been ruined and these prison sentences are just like salt in the wounds. If they let us out now, what would we do? They’ve taken all our money. Do you think anyone would hire us? It’s really unfair.

  “You see, it’s like getting drunk and going ninety miles down the road. If a pedestrian is there and you hit and kill him, fine, then the state executes the son of a bitch for murder. But there wasn’t any pedestrian there for me to hit. So my drunk driving didn’t matter. For godsakes we aren’t at war with the Russians! Doesn’t anybody understand that?

  “I sincerely in my heart felt that selling classified documents wouldn’t do any damage and, you know what, history has proved me right. Nothing has happened! So how much damage did John Walker do? None. Absolutely none.”

  John Walker spoke with such conviction that I was convinced that he actually believed exactly that.

  I stood. We shook hands and I left him.

  Outside, past the cellblock gate, beyond the reinforced steel bars, the sun beat down on the black asphalt. It was sweltering. How different that afternoon was from the first time that I had met John Walker.

  As a young reporter, I had once spent fourteen months writing stories about convicts and prisons in Oklahoma, and during that period I met and interviewed dozens of inmates.

  One night in January 1977, I talked to several men on death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. It was a special night because the state of Utah was about to execute Gary Gilmore, the first convicted murderer to be put to death in more than a decade after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling rendered most death penalty laws unconstitutional.

  Each man on death row had a radio and all of them were listening to the same station as I went from cell to cell. The radio kept giving news updates about Gilmore and last minute appeals to spare him.

  These men were Oklahoma’s worst criminals, and yet I discovered something in their personalities that I later came to believe was lacking in John’s.

  I had liked John when I first met him. He seemed ordinary, if not pedestrian. He was reserved. He spoke intelligently and articulated his points with wit.

  But the longer I spent time with him – listening to him talk about his life during a series of all-day sessions, relaxing with him at lunch over sandwiches and soup served to us in various county jails, speaking to him long-distance as he crisscrossed the country going from one federal prison to the next – the more I came to realize that his banality was more frightening than the hostility and anger that I had witnessed on death row the night Gary Gilmore was executed.

  There was a shallowness and emptiness to John, a lack of any sort of spiritual dimension in his life, a lack of any notion of loyalty to friends, family, and nation.

  Betrayal came easily to John because he was loyal only to himself.

  In doing research for this story, I interviewed various intelligence analysts and I began hearing over and over the same phrase: “attitudinal loyalty.” Supposedly our citizens have it and citizens of the Soviet Union don’t, especially the non-Russians within the Soviet empire.

  Attitudinal loyalty is supposed to be important. It is supposed to make soldiers fight for their country without threats or without ostentatious displays of state-organized patriotism. It is supposed to keep the average citizen from deserting or betraying his country.

  It’s in the blood, so to speak.

  John Walker, Arthur Walker, and Jerry Whitworth undoubtedly had an attitudinal loyalty to their country. They were superpatriots.

  John kept a photograph of President Ronald Reagan on his desk at Confidential Reports. Laura Walker and Barbara Walker considered themselves
good Americans, as did Rachel Walker and Michael Walker.

  But they did not go to the authorities when they first discovered John’s secret. They remained loyal to a man who gave them nothing in return.

  Michael Walker did his father’s bidding without a thought to the question of right or wrong: that question never once entered into his decision to become a spy.

  How could this be?

  Perhaps it is time for intelligence experts to rethink this central concept of attitudinal loyalty, this idea that Americans don’t betray their country to foreign powers the way that Europeans are perceived to do quite regularly. We trust our citizens to an extent that is almost unknown in history and unheard of in most other countries. This is as it should be.

  However, we live in a society where money is no longer a mere commodity, but a sacrament. Money is power, possessions, persona, sex, and status.

  John was able to separate his patriotism and his spying, and rationalize both, as he rationalized everything in his life.

  But what was it about John Walker that gave him a hold over persons that superseded their love of country?

  I am not a psychiatrist. As a writer, I am, at best, a chronicler of today’s events, tomorrow’s history. But at the risk of attempting to analyze, I believe there were occasions during my interviews with John when I saw into the soul of the spy.

  This is what I saw:

  John Walker, Jr., had an uncanny skill to see the frailties of those around him. He was able to identify the flaws in their personalities and, like a chameleon, he became whatever he needed to become, whatever they wanted him to be, in order to take advantage of them, manipulate them, and profit from their weaknesses. This was not done by chance. It was calculated, precise.

  Jerry Whitworth, Arthur Walker, Barbara Walker, and Michael Walker were drawn to John and did what he asked even though he openly abused them. He became their master, in part, because he convinced each of them that without him, they were somehow incomplete. He was superior, had accomplished more, was successful. They welcomed him and, like a leech, he drew their blood.

  John fled from strong persons. Whenever he met someone with a complete personality – from the unbending priests and nuns at St. Patrick’s High School in Scranton; to Bill Metcalf, the Norfolk Navy officer who complained about John’s morals and gave him his first and only poor evaluation as a sailor; to Mike Bell, the tough Wackenhut detective who refused to bend his rules to fit John’s schemes – John immediately retreated.

  John preferred a world where there were no white knights, no black knights, no knights at all. There were only gray people drifting in an atmosphere of moral weightlessness. It was this type of world that reflected John’s own image, like a mirror.

  “Everyone is corrupt ... everyone has a scam.”

  John Walker was able to use his skill at discerning other people’s weaknesses to destroy them, including his own son. John Walker had no moral center, only an unquenchable thirst to control, to obtain admiration and power, no matter what the cost, as long as someone else paid.

  Most of the criminals whom I have met as a journalist seem to have had some moral code of conduct, however twisted and slim, beyond which they could not trespass without traces of guilt and occasional remorse.

  John didn’t. He was totally without principle.

  There was no right or wrong, no morality or immorality, in his eyes. There were only his own wants, his own needs, whatever those might be at the moment. In John’s world, only fools believed that they were their brothers’ keepers.

  John Walker did not show any remorse when Robert Hunter asked him about his crimes because he truly didn’t feel any. This is why John could say to me, with all seriousness, during one of our last sessions together, “I have lived every fantasy that I have ever had. I’ve done everything I wanted to do. And the real mistake I made in life was letting myself be surrounded by weak people.

  “My mistake was in caring about my brother, Arthur, and daughter, and best friend, and in trying to help them. In the end, they used me. Each of them used me. They brought me down. If anything,” John concluded, “I am the real victim in this entire unpleasant episode.”

  This was John’s truth, John’s reality.

  And to John Walker that is all that really mattered.

  As I walked to my car in the parking lot that hot afternoon after talking to John, I remembered something Barbara Walker had said about how John had changed during the early years of their marriage. “I had married a young sailor that liked to be called Jack, but Jack was becoming John and there was a difference.”

  Jack had been playful, caring, loving. But John was none of those things.

  John worried only about himself and his gratification. The name change, she felt, was significant, and so do I.

  Sitting behind the wheel of my car in the prison parking lot, I looked through the windshield at what now was John’s home and I wondered: Whatever happened to Jack? If you were able to strip away all of the lies and rationalizations that surround John Walker’s life, like a craftsman removing layers of old paint, would you find Jack Walker?

  And then I answered my own question.

  No. Jack Walker no longer exists, if he ever did.

  There is only John, flashy Johnny Walker, private eye, daredevil pilot, KGB spy.

  If you removed the first layer of veneer, you would discover beneath it another, and yet another under it. And so on. In the end, you would learn that whatever had been inside had decayed long ago.

  John Walker’s life had become nothing but a series of lies, myths, and illusions wrapped around an empty core. And that was all that remained.

  I started my car and drove away.

  Author’s Note

  This book is the story of John Walker, Jr., and the members of his spy ring. It is the result of over one hundred interviews with many of the people involved in this extraordinary affair, including members of the Walker family. I conducted twenty-three separate interviews with John Walker, lasting an average of seven hours each. I also met with Arthur Walker, Michael Walker, Barbara Joy Crowley Walker, Laura Walker Snyder, Cynthia Walker, Margaret (Peggy) Scaramuzzo Walker, Rita Frisch Walker, James Walker, Tina Walker, and John Walker, Sr. It is accurate to say that I have spent several hundred hours talking to immediate members of the Walker family, and many more with the other eighty-seven people interviewed.

  From the start, John Walker’s attorneys made it clear to me that John would only tell his story if he was compensated financially. As this book documents, John Walker does not do anything unless he benefits from it personally. John sold his country’s secrets for money; he enlisted members of his family in his spy ring for money; and he would only tell his story for money.

  Journalists do not like arrangements like this and I am no exception. But the more I learned about the case, the more I was convinced that a thorough and accurate account of one of the most heinous traitors in this country’s history could not be written without full access to John Walker. It is for that reason that I entered into a personal contract with John and the other members of his family that remunerated them in exchange for their exclusive cooperation.

  It should be noted as a matter of information that John Walker is very unlikely to benefit financially from our agreement. The Internal Revenue Service has placed a lien on John’S assets and any income he receives for failing to pay income taxes on his earnings as a spy. Thus, ironically, any money received from this book will go to the United States government.

  My contract with John stipulated that I have “sole discretion over the contents [of the book], which will not be subject to control or approval by John Walker. This is not “John Walker’s book.” All our conversations were on-the-record and I made no deals as to how John would be portrayed or what would be included in the book. Neither John nor any other member of the Walker family was permitted to read any of the manuscript before it was published.

  In addition to the personal int
erviews I conducted, the book also relies on numerous trial transcripts and FBI reports, as well as documents that have not been made public previously, including John Walker’s personal journals, family letters, grand jury testimony, and telephone conversations recorded by the FBI through wiretaps.

  As noted above, besides the members of the Walker family I have mentioned, I interviewed eighty-seven other people who were involved in some aspect of this story. Among them were:

  Philip Mark Snyder

  Curt Christopher Walker

  Frank Scaramuzzo

  Roger Olson

  Pamela K. Carroll

  Charles “Chas” Bennett

  Joseph “Joey” Long

  Annie Crowley Nelson

  Donald Clevenger

  Bill Wilkinson

  James Wightman

  Frances Wightman

  Robert Hunter

  Jack Wagner

  Joseph Wolfinger

  Howard Sparks

  Geneva Green

  Willard Owens

  Beulah Watts

  Harold Watts

  Sue Watts

  Robert McNatt

  Michael Bell

  Philip Prince

  Marie Hammond

  Walter Price

  Paul Culligan

  Roberta Puma

  Other persons who were interviewed but did not wish to have their names listed include teachers and friends of Michael Walker, naval co-workers of John Walker, former employees at Confidential Reports, persons investigated by John Walker, two relatives of the Walker family, and intelligence officials.

  I interviewed Jerry Whitworth at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. However, because he was in the midst of appealing his conviction, Whitworth declined to answer any questions about his relationship with John Walker. Therefore, my account of Whitworth’s involvement in the spy ring is based upon information from the fifty- five-volume transcript of Whitworth’s trial; interviews with his attorney, James Larson; a previously unpublished pre-sentence report written by Dayle C. Carlson, Jr., who questioned Whitworth about his spying and friendship with John; interviews with FBI agents; FBI investigative re- ports; and interviews with John Walker. While my conversations with Whitworth were limited, I still found them valuable in studying his personality and background.