Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (10 page)

“Did you bring your shopping list?” the Russian asked. John handed him the notebook paper. When he finished reading it, the agent said that he was particularly interested in the last item on the list – the KW-7 keylist and technical manuals.

“I can get those, but it could be difficult,” John said. The Russian indicated that he would pay John a bonus of $1,000 or more for the KW-7 keylist, particularly if he could get it within a few weeks. The Russian handed John a packet containing instructions for the dead drop and listing the steps John must follow if he wished to contact the Soviets in an emergency. If they needed to get in touch with him, they would send a birthday card signed “Your dear friend,” his cue to go to a prearranged location in Washington where he would find instructions and a package.

“Do you understand everything that I’ve told you?” the Russian asked, after passing him the envelopes.

“Yes,” John assured him. The Russian handed him another envelope that contained cash.

“We will not meet again face-to-face for a long time,” the Russian said, “but we will become good friends and we will communicate in the dead drop packages. We want you to know that we are very concerned about you. Many people who come to us help us for years and then retire. We hope you will be one of them.

“Good-bye, dear friend,” the Russian said, gently patting John on the shoulder. The patting must have been a signal because a car pulled up alongside seconds later. The agent quickly stepped inside and was gone.

John kept on walking for several minutes and then hurried back to his car to count his money. The Russians had given him his $4,000 salary, plus an extra $1,000.

Sometime in early January 1968, John delivered the keylist for a KW-7 machine by leaving a copy of it in the bottom of a bag of trash during a dead drop in a Virginia suburb of Washington.

On January 23, 1968, the U.S.S.
Pueblo
was captured by the North Koreans in international waters off their coastline. The
Pueblo
was a secret intelligence-gathering ship outfitted with sophisticated eavesdropping gear that had been dispatched by the Navy and the NSA to “sample electronic environment off east coast North Korea” and to “intercept and conduct surveillance of Soviet naval units operating Tsushima Straits.”

One crew member of the
Pueblo
was killed and the other eighty-two were captured during the surprise North Korean attack. During the next eleven months, the crew members were held hostage and tortured in North Korea.

After John Walker was arrested, FBI agents quizzed him extensively about the timing of his delivery of the KW-7 keylist. Agents repeatedly asked if he knew anything about the
Pueblo
capture. John vehemently denied any connection between the two events. FBI agents handling the Walker case remained suspicious about the timing of John’s disclosure of the KW-7 keylist and the seizure of the
Pueblo
.

At one point, the FBI theorized that the Soviets might have urged the North Koreans to attack the
Pueblo
because the KGB had access to the KW-7 keylist, The Russians had to have known that the
Pueblo
contained extensive cryptographic equipment, including the KW-7 – the theory went.

John considered the FBI theory “totally preposterous” and, in all fairness, it is difficult to believe that john’s delivery prompted the Russians to undertake such a convoluted and risky action.

But after the
Pueblo
crew was released on December 23, 1968, a naval investigation revealed that the attack had happened so quickly that the ship’s crew had failed to destroy several important cryptographic machines before being captured. The most serious loss, according to disclosures only made public by the Navy in recent court documents, was the confiscation of a working KW-7 machine. U.S. intelligence sources now believe that machine was subsequently delivered to the Soviets.

Regardless of what prompted the attack, and whether or not John’s delivery played any role in it, the end result was the same. In early 1968, the Russians suddenly obtained a working KW-7 machine and its daily keylists. Because the KW-7 was so widely used and so vital to U.S. military communications, the NSA decided not to scrap it after the
Pueblo
incident. Instead, the NSA modified the KW-7 machine on the theory that its changes plus the daily keylists would be adequate safeguards to keep KW-7 encrypted messages secret.

What the NSA didn’t know, of course, was that John was providing the KGB with keylists and all of the KW-7 technical manuals. As soon as the NSA devised a way to modify the KW-7 and sent out the new technical manual, John photographed the document and delivered the film to the Russians.

In the first few months that he was a spy, the KGB gained access to the United States’ most widely used cryptographic system, thanks to John Walker and the seizure of the U.S.S.
Pueblo
.

It was as if the U.S. Navy had opened up a branch communications office directly in the center of Red Square, and it marked the beginning of the deciphering of more than
one million
classified U.S. military messages.

Chapter 14

Fear of arrest nagged John during the early months of 1968. Each morning his first thought was, “Today is the day that I will be arrested.” His anxiety surfaced periodically during the day in sweaty palms and feet that tapped restlessly. Even asleep, John could not escape his uneasiness. He had nightmares about being arrested in the message center and dragged outside into an angry mob of sailors.

“I spent the money from the Soviets as soon as I got it. There was no point in being frugal because I felt I was going to be arrested at any minute,” he said. “I lived from dead drop to dead drop.”

John earned $725 per month as a Navy warrant officer. The Soviets were paying him $4,000 per month. Though the KGB warned him not to attract attention by spending lavishly, John couldn’t resist. In April 1968, he rented a three-bedroom apartment in a swanky Norfolk complex and told Barbara that it was time for her and the children to come join him. Barbara was stunned by her new home.

The apartment featured luxuriant wall-to-wall carpeting, up-to-date kitchen appliances, pristine rooms, and a doorman. John was the only warrant officer in the building, but none of his co-workers at the Navy message center was suspicious when John bragged about his “new pad” because they had heard him boast about what a good investment the Bamboo Snack Bar had become.

“I thought Barbara would love the apartment and wouldn’t have a thing to nag me about, but I was wrong,” John said.

She complained that their furniture wasn’t good enough for their new home. Much to Barbara’s surprise, John offered to buy all new furnishings without regard to cost. Barbara had always felt she had a hidden talent for interior decorating, and during the next few days, she inspected dozens of colors, fabrics, and wall coverings. Whenever she asked for money, John reached into his front pants pocket and removed a thick wad of folded $50 bills that he enjoyed flaunting. By the time Barbara was finished, John had spent $10,000 in cash.

Barbara knew immediately that John had lied to her about having a second job, but she didn’t pester him about it. The family was reunited and neither she nor John had to scrimp anymore. The days of powdered milk and resoled shoes appeared to be over, and Barbara was glad.

With John’s encouragement, she began schooling her children in the social graces that befitted the family’s new financial status. Barbara bought a small wooden table, which she placed in the kitchen. Margaret, aged ten, Cynthia, nine, Laura, eight, and Michael, six, were required to eat dinner there each night until they had mastered sufficient table manners to join Barbara and John in the dining room. Dinner became an elaborate ritual whenever John worked the day shift.

When he arrived home, Barbara met him at the door clad in a cocktail dress, a martini and folded newspaper in her hands. John relaxed alone in the living room for several minutes. After he finished the newspaper, Barbara brought in hors d’oeuvres. Dinner was served when John sat at the head of the table. It ended when he finished eating and Barbara scurried to clear his plate. After dessert, John talked about his day, and then it was time for each child to tell “something new which they had learned that day.”

“I always felt so stupid,” Cynthia Walker said of the nightly after-dinner ceremony. “We always went around the table and Margaret was first. She always had something new that she had learned, and then it was Laura’s turn, and she always told some fantastic story even if she had to make it up. It didn’t matter what Michael said because he was so cute that no one cared. And then it would be my turn, and I wouldn’t know what to say so I’d sit there and be ridiculed and called stupid.”

Dinner was not the only drill in etiquette. After school, Barbara had her daughters practice walking across the living room without dropping a book that she placed on each of their heads.

“When you walk into a room, you should own it,” she lectured. “Every eye should be on you and you alone.”

Meticulous grooming and wearing fashionable clothes became important. Barbara enjoyed dressing all her daughters alike, and she spent time doctoring Cynthia’s straight brown hair with sugar water to make it curl like her sisters’.

John bought an eight-millimeter movie camera and began taking family movies.

“I hate home movies where some kid comes out of the ocean and waves into the camera and says, ‘Hi,’ ” Barbara Walker said, recalling her husband’s toy. “So I began writing scripts for the children to perform.”

Like most Navy wives whose husbands spent long periods at sea, Barbara was used to handling family finances. But after she joined John in Norfolk, he insisted on keeping track of the money. One night Barbara asked him to tell her why he seemed to have an endless flow of cash. “It’s better for you that you don’t know,” John replied cryptically. The next day, he brought a hypodermic syringe home from work and placed it in the middle drawer of his desk. He had used the syringe at the message center to squeeze oil into hard-to-reach gears in cryptographic machines, but John knew that Barbara’s curiosity would eventually lead her to his desk and he thought the syringe might make her think he was trafficking in illegal drugs.

John stacked five pennies in the desk drawer near the syringe. When he carefully opened the drawer a few days later, the pennies were no longer neatly stacked. The Russians had told him about the penny trick. It was an inconspicuous way to tell if someone had been snooping in his drawer. Barbara didn’t ask any more questions about the cash after he planted the syringe, John recalled.

On May 20, 1968, the submarine message center where John worked was ordered by Vice Admiral Arnold F. Schade, commander of the Atlantic submarine force, to send a top secret dispatch to Francis A. Slattery, commanding officer of the nuclear submarine
Scorpion
. The sub had just left Gibraltar on its way to Norfolk from a three-month Mediterranean cruise when Schade ordered it diverted toward the Canary Islands and six Soviet warships. The
Scorpion
was told to monitor the Russian ships, which included a nuclear submarine.

Shortly after midnight on May 22, the
Scorpion
filed a routine position report with the Norfolk message center; it was six hours away from the Russian warships. The submarine missed its next routine position report and suddenly didn’t respond to a series of attempts by the message center during the next twenty-four hours to contact it. Schade immediately received permission to launch a discreet, quick search for the
Scorpion
. Two squadrons of destroyers, several airplanes, and a nuclear submarine were dispatched.

During the next four days, John and his colleagues worked round-the-dock as concern over the missing submarine mounted. When the
Scorpion
didn’t return to Norfolk on schedule May 27, the families of its ninety-nine-man crew patiently waiting at the Navy dock discovered for the first time what John and other watch officers already knew.

The
Scorpion
was missing.

The Navy quickly declared an alert and organized a full-scale search. Within thirty-six hours, top secret dispatches were received indicating that SOSUS hydrophones had overheard the
Scorpion
being rocked by a series of explosions. The sensitive hydrophones also had recorded the sound of the sub’s hull being crushed by water pressure as the boat sank two miles to the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Because the
Scorpion
had been on a mission to monitor Soviet warships, there was immediate speculation that it had been attacked. The crypto machines in the message center worked nonstop as the investigation increased to a frantic pace.

The sinking of the
Scorpion
devastated Norfolk, the sub’s home port. The sailors in the message center were especially upset. “The
Scorpion
was under our control when it went down,” recalled John Rogers, the message center officer in early 1968 who was John Walker’s direct boss. “We felt a special responsibility for it. It was one of ours.”

Barbara Walker was shaken by the disaster too. She and other Navy wives talked for hours about the tragedy and the distraught families of the dead crew. But John displayed little outward emotion. “The Navy is full of risks,” he told Barbara. “Putting your life on the line is simply part of the job. That’s what they pay you for.”

The
Scorpion
incident troubled John more than he let on, however. Had something he sold to the Soviets played a role in the disaster? he wondered.

The Navy was still speculating in the summer of 1968 that the Russian warships might have attacked the
Scorpion
, and that made John very uncomfortable.

What if Navy investigators somehow found out that he was a spy? What in the world were the Soviets up to?

He was scared, but not enough to stop collecting material for the KGB. The increase in top secret messages brought on by the
Scorpion
tragedy gave John a mother lode of classified documents. He methodically copied dozens of them, including papers that outlined how the Navy conducted its search, what kinds of information had been detected by the SOSUS hydrophones, what the U.S. naval intelligence knew at the time about the Russian ships, and possible theories about why the submarine had gone down. The KGB told John in the notes left at dead drops that it was delighted with the material.

Five months after it sank, the broken remains of the
Scorpion
were found 400 miles south-southwest of the Azores. In December 1984,
The Virginian-Pilot
and
The Ledger-Star
, a Norfolk newspaper, published a series of previously classified Navy documents that concluded that the
Scorpion
sank after one of its own torpedoes exploded aboard the boat. The torpedo explosion theory is the most logical explanation the Navy found for the sinking, but no one is one hundred percent positive to this day about what actually caused the boat to sink. There are some sailors who still believe the Russians might have been involved in the tragedy.

Copying messages about the
Scorpion
was much easier than obtaining keylists. Most secret messages were routinely photocopied after they were deciphered so copies could be delivered through the chain of command. The military is notorious for duplicating its paperwork, and it was not difficult for John to make an extra copy of a sensitive message for the KGB. He hid the copies in plain sight.

“The best place to hide something is right under someone’s nose,” John bragged. “I put copies of messages in a file folder and stuck them in the back of a file cabinet that no one used.”

If someone accidentally found the file, they would most likely assume it was there because it was supposed to be. “The Navy never throws anything away and no one knows why some things are kept,n John explained. “Once we were going through some files in a ship and came across a bunch of old World War II battle plans.”

When John first told me about how he hid documents “in plain sight,” he acted as if it were something that he had thought up himself. Later, he told me that the KGB had first suggested it to him in various instructions left at dead drops. I don’t think John ever realized that the concept was not something that the KGB had originated, but was made famous in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter.”

John did receive a used Minox camera from the KGB with a small chain that looked like a carrying strap but actually was used for focusing the camera. The chain was the exact distance that John needed between his camera and a document. All he had to do to take a perfect picture was hold the chain on a document and pull the Minox back until the chain was taut. The Russians provided John with high-speed black-and-white film and told him to use a 150-watt bulb when photographing documents. John took the photographs inside the crypto vault when he was working the morning shift and free of supervision.

He also used the KGB’s rotor reader to determine the KL-4Ts circuitry. Once again, John applied KISS. During an early morning watch, he innocently announced that he needed to inspect the KL·47 machine because it was garbling messages. None of the men under his command flinched and John quickly put the hand-held rotor reader to work.

“A K-mart store has better security than the U.S. Navy,” John told me later, laughing.

Still, he was worried. He felt it was only a matter of time before he was arrested.

One morning, he decided to learn how to sail; he immediately fell in love with the sport and bought a twenty-four-foot sailboat. In the beginning, John took Barbara and the children out on the boat. But, Barbara would complain and the kids would fidget. Soon he was sailing exclusively with younger sailors who worked for him at the message center. John supplied the sailboat and a metal washtub filled with ice and beer; the sailors brought the girls. “I loved sailing. If I wasn’t at work, I was on my boat.”

Barbara stopped fixing elaborate dinners after John bought the sailboat because she never knew when he would come home. She found herself being left behind on weekends with the children.

“Barbara really bitched about the sailboat and finally I told her, ‘Hey, some men play golf, others play tennis, and still others play handball, and they mayor may not include their wives in these activities. I’m telling you right now that sailing is my thing. I need my time away, and sailing is it, and I don’t want to hear any bitching about it,’ “ John said. “Of course, Barbara hated that. She couldn’t understand what I would call absolutely normal male behavior in ninety-five percent of all American households where the husband goes out on Saturday morning to play golf. ‘Why don’t you want to stay home with me and the kids?’ she’d moan, or she’d demand that I take her with me every time I went out on the boat, and finally I said, ‘Look Barbara, this is just the way it is. Sometimes you can come out on the boat with me, but other times I am going to go with my friends; and if it’s going to upset you so much, tough shit, because you are not going with me and that’s final.’ ”