Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (12 page)

Chapter 16

The KGB had been upset when John first announced that he was being transferred to San Diego. In a dead drop letter, it assured John that it understood the unpredictable nature of military service, but it also urged him to be extremely cautious and it asked John to describe in detail why he was being moved.

John hadn’t told the KGB that he had requested the transfer. He was afraid the Russians wouldn’t understand why he was moving from one of the best spots in the Navy for a spy to a post where he would have almost no access to classified information.

As a result, the Russians suspected the worst.

In its note to John, the KGB asked if the Navy was moving him because it was suspicious and wanted John out of the critical message center.

“PLEASE BE CAREFUL!” the KGB wrote. “FOLLOW ALL SECURITY PRECAUTIONS EXACTLY!”

The KGB’s concern seemed genuine and that pleased John, but the KGB note also carried a not-too-subtle reminder. John’s spy salary would drop to $2,000 a month if he was unable to keep a steady flow of keylists coming. “The only lever the Soviets had on me was money, and they didn’t hesitate to use it.”

Before he left Norfolk, John had averaged one dead drop exchange per month. But the KGB told John that it wanted him to make only two or three dead drops per year once he moved to California.

“I was astonished when they told me to cut back,” John told me later during one of our sessions, “because it meant that they really didn’t care how current the material was that I was delivering. That
is
really significant because classified information is time sensitive and its value drops the older it gets.”

John told me that at first he couldn’t understand why the KGB was willing to wait six months for a cryptographic keylist. “What the KGB was really telling me was that its agents were perfectly happy to tape record all Navy cryptographic broadcasts on the air for six months and then use the keylists that I sold them to decipher the messages. It was just insane. I kept wondering, ‘How can they do this? What does it mean?’ and then it finally came to me. It finally made sense.”

John decided that the reason the Soviets were willing to wait for cryptographic keylists was because there was no reason for them to hurry.

“All this talk about us going to war with the Soviets is bullshit,” John told me, in a bit of self-rationalization. “There never is going to be a war between the Soviet Union and United States. If anything, we are going to be allies in the next war against some Middle Eastern or Central American country. It became very clear to me. That is why they didn’t care when they got my stuff. You see, it really didn’t matter.”

The longer that John was a spy, the more certain he became that he was correct and by the time he was finally arrested, John could cite several examples to prove his theory. This became one of the most frequent subjects of our conversations together. John insisted on explaining his reasoning over and over again, as if saying it repeatedly somehow made it true.

“It’s all a silly game,” he said. “Look, the Russians weren’t interested in a hell of a lot of stuff that they should have been anxious to get.”

When John first offered to brief the KGB about his experiences on nuclear submarines, it demurred, he claimed. When John volunteered to go after top secret “intelligence messages” – special dispatches between the Navy and the NSA and CIA agents – the KGB became alarmed and ordered John to stick to providing cryptographic material and classified information that flowed through regular Navy channels. The KGB showed less interest than John expected in his recall of the SlOP and the location of SOSUS hydrophones. But the most obvious confirmation of John’s “it’s-all-a-big-game” theory was an incident that occurred shortly after the
Scorpion
disappeared in 1968. John cited the episode to buttress his hypothesis, but in telling it to me, he revealed just how insanely far he was willing to go as a spy to help the Soviets.

As a message center watch officer in Norfolk, John was part of a two-man team responsible for deciphering and implementing the order from Washington that authorized a wartime launch of Polaris nuclear missiles. The Navy held a drill after the
Scorpion
disappeared to test its nuclear firing procedures.

“We didn’t know until the last moment whether it was practice or genuine,” John remembered. “That’s how real it was.”

After the drill, John wondered how much the Soviets would pay him to sabotage the real thing. John outlined his idea in a dead drop letter. In return for $1 million, John told the KGB that he would refuse to transmit “the order to fire” and make certain that hundreds of Polaris missiles were either not fired or were significantly delayed. John was flabbergasted when the KGB showed no interest at all in his offer.

“I couldn’t believe it. I mean, here I was, one of the men who actually turned the key, and the Soviets didn’t care. They didn’t give a damn! The KGB could have totally nullified the most important part of our triad of nuclear defense. I could have kept all the Polaris missiles from firing. Not one single Atlantic fleet submarine would have launched a nuclear missile against the Soviet Union, and they didn’t care! I mean, doesn’t that seem a bit strange? Wouldn’t that action have been worth one million dollars to the Soviet Union – to keep all the submarines in the Atlantic from firing? But they didn’t even ask me about it. They didn’t even ask! How could they not ask?”

When I suggested to John that the KGB might not have trusted him to carry out his part of the bargain during a nuclear attack, he became incredulous.

“I had already betrayed my country,” he replied. “Why wouldn’t they trust me to not turn the key?”

No, there could be only one reason for the KGB’s lack of interest.

“All this talk of war between the superpowers is nothing but talk,” John concluded, “and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t profit along with all the goddamn ship contractors, arms dealers, and politicians who push this fantasy of an inevitable war.”

Chapter 17

The “practical application laboratory” at the Naval Training Center in San Diego where John had gone to work was made up of three mock radio rooms, similar to ship radio rooms except the laboratory’s cryptographic equipment didn’t actually work.

John was able to steal a few things at the school for the KGB. Some classified documents crossed his desk, but mostly John stole SITSUMs, or Situation Summaries. These were short intelligence reviews of Navy operations around the world, and the KGB found them useful.

But what the Soviets really wanted were keylists, and they pressured John to get them. When he couldn’t, the KGB cut John’s monthly salary from $4,000 to $2,000. The salary cut bothered John, but he didn’t feel any immediate financial pinch and didn’t see much use in complaining or trying to find some way to obtain keylists. Barbara and the children liked San Diego, and John was more relaxed than he had ever been.

He decided that a sabbatical from spying wasn’t all bad. He wasn’t nearly as worried about being unmasked as a spy now, in part because Washington, D.C., and the FBI were physically so far away from San Diego. John knew this was foolish. The FBI would go anywhere in the country to catch a spy. But the distance still was psychologically comforting. He also wasn’t making as many dead drops or photographing as much material as he had in Norfolk. John’s attitude about being captured was changing.

“I really went through several periods as a spy. In the beginning, I felt like I was going to be caught any minute. There was a lot of fear, but after a couple years, I got into a what-the-fuck-is-happening mode. How can this be – that I’m not being arrested? It just didn’t make any sense that I hadn’t been captured. Then, after I’d been in California for a while, I began to enjoy myself. There was a certain thrill to it all and a metamorphosis began to take place. I began to realize that the FBI is not like it is on television. You see, the FBI doesn’t really do any investigating. It doesn’t know how to investigate. The FBI is not powerful at all because its agents are really just bureaucrats and they have the same inherent ineptitude of all government bureaucrats. All they do is spend their days waiting for some snitch to call them and turn someone in. That’s how they operate, and I was beginning to sense that.”

John and the KGB used a series of signals to contact each other when he did have a delivery. John would fly to Washington, rent a car, and drive to Sixteenth Street, a major north-south route in the northwest section of the city. He was supposed to use a piece of chalk to mark a signal at a prearranged spot along the busy street.

The signal was changed after every drop, but it always was a single letter or number, such as A, F, 6, or 7, and John always drew it on Sixteenth Street near the Walter Reed Army Medical Center on a Thursday.

At various times during his spying career, John drew his signal on the wall of a corner appliance store, a bridge abutment, a stone retaining wall, and on the side of an apartment complex. The Soviet embassy also is on Sixteenth Street and John assumed that an employee drove to work each Thursday along the route and watched for his mark.

The exchange always took place two days later, on Saturday, at precisely 8:00 P.M. at one of the KGB’s suburban dead drop sites. If the Soviets failed to show, John knew he had to repeat the procedure the next week and keep trying until the exchange was completed.

Sometime in 1970, John is not exactly certain when, he flew to Washington and went through the various steps to make a dead drop. But when he arrived at Sixteenth Street, John noticed that it looked like rain. He was supposed to mark the letter X in chalk on the first concrete rail of a bridge, but he was worried about the weather. A heavy downpour might wash off the chalk mark, and John did not want to return to Washington in a week to repeat the procedure.

After several minutes, he decided to improvise. He drove to a convenience store and bought a tube of bright red lipstick. Hurrying back to the signal spot, John waited for a lull in the traffic, then he scribbled the letter X in lipstick on the post.

John was pleased with his ingenuity, but the Soviets were not. That Saturday, the KGB left John a blistering note.

“The KGB was superpissed,” John recalled.

He had violated proper security procedures by using lipstick. Was he trying to be funny? He could have jeopardized the entire operation. He was getting sloppy and complacent. The KGB lectured him about the necessity of maintaining proper security at all times. Any deviations could bring about a disaster.

The letter made John angry, but it also scared him. For the first time, he explained later, he realized that the information he had passed to the KGB was useful to the Russians only as long as the United States didn’t know they had it.

“I was certain that the KGB was prepared to kill me if it felt I was going to blow it and tip off the Navy,” John said. “The fact that they had received keylists, especially for the KW-7 machine, and had been able to decipher messages, was much more important than my life.”

He promised himself that he was going to be more careful.

Chapter 18

John and Barbara had rented a cozy, three-bedroom house in San Diego. James and Frances Wightman lived across the street. Jim worked at the Naval Training Center personnel bureau close to John’s office, and the two men often stopped after work for drinks. Fran Wightman and Barbara also developed a friendship that turned out to be much closer than their husbands’ relationship. On most days, the two women met in Fran’s kitchen for coffee. They enjoyed getting away from their children, and it gave Barbara a chance to seek advice from Fran, who was ten years her senior.

Jim and Fran both liked the Walkers, but they found the couple different from their other military friends. John simply had much more money and he treated his wife worse than anyone that Fran and Jim knew.

“I can’t think of one endearing thing that I’ve ever heard John say in front of anyone about his wife,” Jim Wightman told Fran one day. “He acts like he doesn’t love her at all.” Fran agreed.

One weekend, Barbara Walker knocked on the Wightman front door. Her hair was tangled, her face was smudged with motor oil, her blouse was splattered with brown stains. Barbara said she needed Fran’s help.

John and some friends had sailed on John’s sailboat from San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico. She had driven down to join them and then had returned home. On the way back to San Diego, she had trouble with the car’s engine.

When she finally got home, John called, furious because Barbara had left Ensenada without noticing that his eyeglasses were on the car’s dash. John had two sets of glasses, but the pair that he was wearing in Ensenada were shaded, making them unusable at night. John told Barbara to return to Ensenada with his eyeglasses.

“I’m afraid to go in my car and alone at night,” Barbara told Fran.

“Don’t worry, dear, I’ll go with you and we’ll take my car,” Fran quickly replied.

During the eighty-mile trip to Ensenada, Barbara told Fran more about John’s telephone call. “Barbara said that John was really angry at her and had called her a ‘damn bitch,’” Frances Wightman recalled later. “When we got to Ensenada, John was in this bar, sitting with dames all around him. It was clear what he was up to, and Barbara just handed him his glasses and left without John even saying thank you.”

A short time after the eyeglasses incident, Barbara and Fran decided to exercise at a nearby health spa. As the two women were riding to the spa, they saw John driving in the opposite lane. He was in his red MG convertible and he had a young girl next to him.

“I feel sick,” Barbara suddenly announced. “Please take me home.”

“Oh, come on, let’s go to the health spa and forget about this,” Fran said, but Barbara was visibly shaken and insisted that Fran drive her home.

A few days later, Barbara tried to push aside the incident by telling Fran that the girl was a hitchhiker who simply got a lift from John. Before long, John dropped all pretense of treating Barbara fondly around the Wightmans.

As he had done in Norfolk, John invited the sailors who worked for him at the Naval Training Center aboard his sailboat for parties and weekend outings. In July 1970, a new instructor at the radio school, Jerry Alfred Whitworth, took John up on his offer.

John liked Jerry from the moment they met. Jerry was “much more intellectual” than the twenty-five other instructors directly under John’s command. As far as John was concerned, most chief petty officers “were guys who had a cigar clenched in their teeth, a cup of coffee in their hand, and a pot belly hanging over their belts.” But Jerry looked and acted more “like a college professor.”

Jerry smoked a pipe, wore a well-trimmed black beard, was slightly bald, and loved discussing the “philosophy of objectivism” as expressed in the writings of novelist Ayn Rand, his favorite author. Jerry was thirty-one years old, two years younger than John, when they met. He was six feet two inches tall and weighed an athletic 180 pounds.

There was something else about Jerry that John recognized immediately. He was vulnerable.

“Here was a guy who looked poised and self-assured, but who really had a thing about friendship,” John recalled later. “Jerry really needed to have friends. He needed people to like him.”

It was really not surprising that John recognized this trait. With only a few exceptions, all of John’s closest male friends had shared a similar personality quirk and all of them had been manipulated by John.

Charles “Chas” Bennett, John’s young pal in Scranton, described John’s power over him as being akin to a “mystical spell.” John’s best friend aboard the
Razorback
, Donald “Cleve” Clevenger, a roly-poly Missouri native, also had been dominated by John. After John’s arrest, Clevenger was still full of misguided admiration in interviews with me about John: “Johnny Walker is the smartest man I’ve ever known. He is the only person I know of in the Navy who was smart enough to do what he did.” Even Bill Wilkinson, the snarling Southern racist whom John befriended aboard the
Bolivar
, acknowledged that John had once held a certain authority over him.

In each case, John had befriended people who admired him and whom he felt he could manipulate. John and I discussed this later. He said, “I think it is because I was always doing something interesting and exciting and they weren’t. I was the high point of their lives because they didn’t have anything else going for them.”

So it was not unusual that John’s dominating personality and Jerry’s insecurity brought them together like the opposite poles of magnets, each drawing closer to the other to satisfy his own need.

Few of their co-workers understood the friendship that was developing between John and Jerry because the men were so different. Michael O’Connor, an instructor and pal of Jerry’s, asked him once why he was so buddy-buddy with John.

“I was surprised,” recalled O’Connor, “that someone with Jerry’s knowledge, attitude, education, general wherewithal, meaning that he was a squared-away individual, a cut above the average person on the street, and apparently having some direction in his life, why he would associate with such a dingdong as Walker.”

Jerry couldn’t answer Michael’s question. He wasn’t certain why he liked John so much. But he was loyal to John and defended him around the other instructors.

“If we got into a discussion about the attributes of Walker, it was a no-win situation for Jerry and it was certainly a no-win situation for me,” O’Connor said. “We avoided that topic and we had a mutual understanding. I didn’t care for Walker and Jerry knew that.”

Jerry Whitworth’s direct supervisor at the radio school, Bob McNatt, also found Jerry’s friendship with John Walker unusual. “Even though he was the boss, Walker was a flake, a jerk,” recalled McNatt. “I had been in the Navy eighteen years by then, and I had seen a lot of people like Walker. He was really interested in things outside his Navy job, like his sailing and flying his airplane. He just didn’t seem to care about the job that we were doing, and he never demonstrated to us that he had any special skills or that he knew anything about what we were doing professionally. The truth is that Walker essentially spent all his time talking about and looking for sex.”

McNatt was unimpressed when he first met Jerry Whitworth, but the two men soon became friends.

“When Jerry Whitworth checked into school, he had a beard and mustache, and guys like me looked at guys like that and said, ‘Oh Christ, here comes another one.’ But Jerry surprised me. He was extremely competent. He was dearly one of the best .in our profession. He was smart, clean-cut, a good thinker, and very serious. He always seemed to be thinking of bigger and better things – not get-rich-quick schemes – but philosophical issues. God, the only thing that I could see that those two had in common was that Jerry liked to sail and John had the boat.”

In truth, Jerry Whitworth did not like John when they first met. He thought him vulgar and crude. But Jerry wanted to learn how to sail and John was eager to teach him aboard his new sailboat, appropriately named
The Dirty Old Man
. Sailing became the bridge that brought the two together.

“I worked hard at teaching Jerry how to sail,” John told me during an interview, “and he learned quickly and was very good. I treated him like an equal and never pulled rank on him when we were together on the boat, even though I was an officer, and I think that impressed him. The truth was that I genuinely liked Jerry, a lot. I also wanted him to like me.”

As always, John had an ulterior motive. His budding friendship with Jerry Whitworth corresponded with his first thoughts about taking in a partner as a KGB spy. “I knew that I would eventually have to go to sea again, and I couldn’t think of any way to make drops while I was out in the Pacific,” John recalled. “If I had a partner, then there would always be at least one person able to make dead drops.” But John didn’t see his interest in Jerry as being sinister, rather, “I felt as if I was doing him a favor, considering him as a partner.”

Soon the teacher and pupil spent all of their free time sailing. Wednesday nights, in particular, found them together competing in local sailboat races. John had joined the San Diego Yacht Club, one of the city’s most prestigious boating associations, and the dub held weekly “beer can races” – impromptu competitions in which the winner often was determined not by speed, but by how much beer the boat’s crew consumed before crossing the finish line.

John sailed every Wednesday night and Jerry was always his first mate, following his every command. It wasn’t long before John told Jerry that he was his “best friend,” and three months after they first met, Jerry penned this note in
The Dirty Old Man’s
guest book:

“My experience on the DOM has been the best!”

Unbeknownst to Jerry, John was constantly testing him during their outings on the boat.

“I wanted to determine if he had larceny in his heart,” John recalled, “so I began asking him what appeared to be innocent questions.”

The questions were asked when only the two of them were aboard and they were posed as if John were merely engaging Jerry in one of those philosophical discussions that both enjoyed.

One night, John and Jerry were returning to San Diego from Mexico when John brought up the subject of movies. It was a clear night, cool with a black, star-studded sky. John and Jerry were sitting on the deck in their swim trunks as the boat edged along the coast at four knots. Both had been drinking heavily.

“I finally got around to seeing that hippie movie,” John said.

“Which one?” asked Jerry.

“The one where those hippie faggots go riding across the country on motorcycles,” John replied.

“You mean
Easy Rider
,” said Jerry, referring to the 1969 film that starred Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

“Uh-huh, that’s it,” said John.

Jerry had seen it several months earlier and had recommended it. “Well, what’d you think?” Jerry pressed.

“I thought it sucked! I was the only person in the fucking theater who cheered when those idiots got shot by rednecks,” John said, laughing. “I was the only normal person in the entire theater obviously!”

Jerry laughed too and then, after several minutes of silence, he said, “I’d like to do that – ride my motorcycle across the country.”

“You going to finance it by selling drugs like they did?” asked John.

“You know,” Jerry said, “I might do something like that if I only had to do it once. You know, make one big score and end up with a large sum of money so I could do whatever the hell I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

John didn’t push the subject.

“I didn’t respond,” John said years later. “He had already told me what I wanted to know. The
Easy Rider
remark wasn’t that significant on the surface, but it was probably the two hundredth remark that I had gotten from Jerry, and together they told me exactly what I wanted to know about him.”

On another late cruise, Jerry let something slip that further bolstered John’s intuition. Jerry told John that he had been married once and hadn’t notified the Navy when his wife divorced him. Instead, Jerry continued to draw extra pay for housing that married sailors received and eventually pocketed $6,000 of illegal gains.

There were other lures that John used to strengthen his bond with Jerry.

Whenever possible, John used his rank as chief warrant officer to favor the radioman first class. In July 1971, John picked Jerry to chaperone approximately a hundred high school students who had been invited to spend a week at the Naval Training Center as a reward for winning local science contests.

“When I selected Jerry, it really pissed off some of the higher ranking chiefs. They didn’t like the fact that I had chosen him over them and they didn’t like the image that Jerry presented because he was younger and had a beard: But I chose Jerry because I was impressed with him and because these kids were at an extremely delicate age, from thirteen and sixteen years old, and I didn’t want to have some fat-ass chief of mine screwing some little sixteen-year-old and getting the Navy sued by her parents.”

The chaperone’s assignment turned out to be a landmark event for Jerry Whitworth because it was during the high school visit that he met his future wife, Brenda L. Reis. Several young girls were enamored of their gregarious guide, and Jerry corresponded with a few teenagers for a while after they returned home.

Brenda was different from the others, however. The slightly pudgy sixteen-year-old from Grand Forks, North Dakota, didn’t lose interest in her Navy guide.

Shortly after he began corresponding with Brenda, Jerry mentioned her to John. He was not seriously interested in her romantically, he explained. “She just seems like a nice girl who is fun to write to.” Besides, Jerry already had a romantic interest in San Diego. Shirley McClanahan was a tall Navy dental technician at the Naval Training Center with bright red hair, brown eyes, and a slightly chunky but attractive figure.

John encouraged Jerry to invite Shirley to the beer can races, and he did.

“I remember Jerry asked me to go with him and John on the sailboat, and I had never been sailing before,” Shirley told me later. “It was just exhilarating. I couldn’t get enough of it.”