Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (16 page)

Chapter 23

After a few months at sea, most single young sailors have something other than sightseeing tours on their minds when they reach a foreign port. Not Jerry Whitworth. He was a supply clerk on the aircraft carrier U.S.S.
Bon Homme Richard
when he went to sea in 1957 for the first time, and when he heard that the carrier was stopping at Osaka, Japan, for liberty, he rushed to the ship’s small library and checked out as many books as he could about the Far East.

Working as carefully as when he had planned his Saturday movie outings with cousin Harold, Jerry spent hours scrutinizing the tour guides and mapping a detailed itinerary.

Among the books that he read was
The World of Suzie Wong
, a romantic tale about a destitute English painter who falls in love with and. marries Suzie, an illiterate Hong Kong prostitute with a heart of gold. Mesmerized by the story, Jerry chattered endlessly about Suzie Wong.

When it was time to go ashore, Jerry’s shipmates cajoled him into joining them for a few drinks before he set off on a tour. They whisked Jerry to a bar, got him drunk, and took him to a whorehouse. When Jerry emerged the next afternoon, he told his friends that the illicit experience had been one of the most glorious moments in his life. He had met a wonderful oriental prostitute, just like Suzie Wong, who, he was certain, had felt something special toward him.

It didn’t take Jerry long before he realized he was not worldly, so he asked two friends on the carrier to teach him how to dress fashionably, what kind of drinks to order at bars, and how to bargain with hookers.

“Jerry was very influenced by other people,” recalled Roger Olson, who became Jerry’s closest friend in the Navy.

Jerry and Roger had met when assigned to the same barracks at boot camp. It hadn’t taken either man long to spill his life story. When Jerry mentioned that his father owned a bar, the Blue Moon Cafe, somewhere in California, Roger pressed him for details. Jerry wasn’t certain, but he thought the town’s name began with the letter M. Roger began reciting names: Madera, Malibu, Maxwell, Mendocino, Monterey, Mendota.

“Wait, I think that last one is it,” said Jerry. “Mendota?” asked Roger. “I think so.”

They dialed information and asked if there was a Blue Moon Cafe listed in Mendota.

Yes, the operator replied. A Johnnie Whitworth was also listed in the directory.

“I told Jerry that my parents lived in Dos Palos, which was only twenty-three miles north of Mendota,” Roger Olson recalled, “and I suggested that he go home with me that very weekend so we could drive down to find his father.”

Jerry telephoned the Blue Moon Cafe when he and Roger arrived in Mendota, just to make certain his father was there. When he and Roger walked through the cafe’s door, Juanita Whitworth recognized Jerry instantly.

“You must be Jerry,” she said. “I’m Juanita, Johnnie’s wife.”

Juanita’s recognizing Jerry bewildered Roger Olson. “I couldn’t figure it out because she had never met Jerry, but when I met Jerry’s father, I knew immediately what had happened. Jerry was the absolute spitting image of his father.”

Jerry and his father visited for several hours, and on the way back to Dos Palos, Jerry’s spirits were high.

“I don’t think he minded me being around,” Jerry told Roger. “Did you notice that he introduced me to several customers as his son?”

Nearly every free weekend after that, Jerry and Roger drove to Dos Palos. Jerry would leave early each Saturday morning for Mendota, where he helped his father run the combination cafe-bar. He would return on Sunday to spend a few hours with Roger and his parents, and then the two sailors would drive back to camp. Roger’s mom and dad, Dave and Addie Olson, soon began calling Jerry their “adopted son.”

Jerry shocked his Uncle Willard and other members of the Owens clan when he returned to Muldrow for the first time after joining the Navy. Uncle Willard had sent Jerry money for the bus ticket home. What surprised Uncle Willard was Jerry’s new attitude toward Johnnie Whitworth, and also Bobe.

“Jerry was really impressed with his daddy,” Willard Owens told me, “and he was angry with his mother. No one in Muldrow had told Jerry that Bobe was pregnant before she was married, and when Jerry started spending time with his father, well, he found out. Johnnie told him and it really upset him.”

Jerry’s best friend in Muldrow, Geneva Green, also recalled that Jerry was upset during his first visit back.

“It really bothered him that his mother had been pregnant before they married, and when I asked him why, he said, ‘I’m a bastard. Don’t you understand, Geneva? She didn’t want me either!’ “

Jerry was discharged from the Navy in August 1960 and moved in with his father. Johnnie was opening another cafe in a nearby town, and he wanted Jerry to manage it, but Jerry couldn’t decide. His pal Roger Olson had also been discharged and was going to a California junior college in Coalinga. Roger wanted Jerry to attend school with him.

Jerry took several months trying to make up his mind and his father finally had no choice but to withdraw his offer and put one of his wife’s cousins in charge of the new cafe. After that, Jerry left for Coalinga.

In the beginning, Jerry said he was going to become an engineer, but he later switched his college major to philosophy. He changed to geology after that, and then finally decided on economics. His latest dream, he told Roger, was to teach college economics in Hong Kong.

Roger graduated from junior college and transferred to a four-year school a few months after Jerry arrived. Once Roger left, Jerry’s interest in academics waned, and in June 1963, he abandoned college and reenlisted for two years. This time, the Navy sent him to a supply center in the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station near Long Beach, California. There he met an unorthodox sailor named Windsor Murdock, who both intimidated and intrigued him.

“He is one of the most intelligent men that I have ever met,” Jerry told Roger Olson in awe. “He can be anything that he wants to be. I mean, he is a totally unique individual.”

Shortly after Jerry met Windsor, Uncle Willard telephoned with the tragic news that Jerry’s half sister, Regina, was dying of cancer at the age of sixteen.

“Regina had been a star basketball player just like her mother,” Geneva Green later told me, “and one day, I think it was her Aunt Beulah who noticed that Regina was limping during a game. Well, they took Regina to the doctor and he found out she had cancer, and in a day or two she took sick and died.

“Jerry came to see me after Regina died,” Geneva continued. “I was asleep when he knocked on the door, and when I let him in I could tell that he had been crying because his eyes were an red. He sat down and told me that he had been in the woods, alone, sitting and thinking. He told me that he had prayed and prayed to God to save Regina before she died. He told me he had told God that he would do anything if He would save Regina and not let her die. And then after she died, Jerry said he just couldn’t believe in God anymore.

“I remember exactly what he said. ‘Geneva,’ he said, ‘if God can let that happen to a good person like Regina, I just can’t believe in Him. Why would He let someone like her be hurt and let her die?’ ”

Willard Owens recalled a similar conversation with Jerry. “He took Regina’s death really hard. Jerry is a sensitive boy, and he told me that after Regina died, he became an atheist.”

When Jerry returned to work after the funeral, Windsor Murdock knew that the problem was more than grief.

“Have you ever read
Atlas Shrugged
?” he asked. “No,” said Jerry. “You should,” said Windsor. “It’ll change your life.”

The next day Jerry bought a copy of the Ayn Rand novel. The book and Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism were a revelation to him. He soon had read all of Rand’s books and began sending them to Geneva Green and Roger Olson.

Like an evangelical Christian anxious to save souls, Jerry bubbled with Ayn Rand fervor. For him, the murky mysteries of life were now crystal clear. There was no God, Jerry explained to Roger. God was the creation of man, an intellectual brace. Ayn Rand had reached that conclusion, just as he had!

All the weight that Papa and Mama Owens had placed on his shoulders as a child by dragging him to Pentecostal services suddenly was lifted. Logic and reason were the answers, not some primitive belief in a higher authority. Windsor Murdock had shown Jerry the way.

In June 1965, Jerry was honorably discharged from the Navy and went to work as a night manager at a fast food restaurant. He had intended to return to college, but went back to Muldrow instead when a buddy of Uncle Willard’s offered him a job.

Jerry lasted three months in Muldrow before deciding that he no longer fit in. He was convinced that the U.S. economic system was about to collapse and the country was about to enter another Great Depression. Townsfolk who had considered Uncle Willard radical now looked upon Jerry as fanatical.

He was lonely.

This time, he reenlisted for a six-year tour in order to qualify for vocational training.

No one in Muldrow was surprised when he left.

Chapter 24

Jerry wanted to learn electronics, but in May 1967, the Navy sent him to his third choice of schools – the radioman’s school in Bainbridge, Maryland, and from there, for advanced training to the Naval Training Center in San Diego, where he would return three years later as an instructor.

Once again, Jerry was lonely.

One night, he read a newspaper advertisement that said a lecture about objectivism was being held at a local hall. He arrived just as a petite woman was walking into the building.

“She really turned me on, and I decided I was going to get a date with her,” Jerry said later.

He sat near her and made a point of speaking with her after the talk.

Lynn–Evelyn–Woodhouse, nineteen, was immediately smitten by Jerry. At twenty-eight, he seemed so much more worldly and refined than her teenage friends.

He asked her to go with him to another lecture on objectivism that was to take place in Hollywood in a few days. Three weeks later, Jerry asked Lynn to move in with him. She refused but announced that she would marry him if he asked. He proposed, and they were married on September 21, 1967.

“It was a mismatch that no one understood,” recalled Geneva Green. “Jerry brought Lynn back to Muldrow to show her off and we were all stunned.”

Even Uncle Willard found the marriage between his gangly nephew and his child bride peculiar.

“She was a real nut,” Willard Owens recalled. “She was skinny and small, and she didn’t have much to say. We tried to make her welcome, of course, but she still acted strange. During the night, she got up and just took off. No one knew it until morning, not even Jerry. Imagine, a young girl in a strange town getting out of bed at night and going off on her own without even telling her husband or anyone else that she was leaving. No one knew where she went or what she did. She just came walking in the next morning as if nothing had happened.”

Willard Owens wondered if Jerry’s new bride hadn’t been out during the night seeking male companionship, but when he suggested that, Jerry became enraged.

Later, Jerry told both his Uncle Willard and Roger Olson that he and Lynn had experienced sexual problems that had left Lynn frustrated and unsatisfied.

In July 1968, Jerry was assigned to the U.S.S. Arlington, which was sent to Vietnam. A few weeks after Jerry left California, he received what he later described to friends as a “Dear john” letter from Lynn. She had found someone else and was divorcing him.

“Jerry was very hurt by Lynn. He loved her very, very much,” recalled Roger Olson. “It crushed Jerry. Jerry didn’t like to lose anyone who was important to him as a friend.”

Even though they were divorced, Jerry had difficulty letting go when he returned to California. Much to Lynn’s surprise, Jerry made friends with her new boyfriend, and when they broke up and she left him, Jerry took the man out drinking. Together, they recalled how much they both loved Lynn. Her next boyfriend didn’t like Jerry and told him to stay away from Lynn.

Still, Jerry kept corresponding with her and occasionally visited her when she was at work or on evenings when her new lover was gone. This continued off and on for nearly five years after their divorce, until Lynn died in a car accident in 1973.

A close friend of Jerry’s and Lynn’s wrote a detailed letter to the federal court after Jerry was arrested in June 1985. In the letter, she described Jerry during 1967 to 1970 as being a person who “valued the uncomplicated.”

“He used to say that he never wanted to own more possessions than he could fit in a Volkswagen,” she wrote.

All that was about to change.

In mid-1970, Jerry reported to his new job as an instructor at the Naval Training Center in San Diego.

His commanding officer was John Anthony Walker, Jr.

Chapter 25

John and Jerry were together at the radio training school for only one year before John was transferred to Oakland and the
Niagara Falls
. But during that short period, John gained considerable influence over Jerry. Roger Olson noticed it immediately. Jerry had found another Windsor Murdock, another father figure to admire.

Roger was living in San Francisco aboard a Chinese junk that Jerry was helping him refurbish when John first befriended Jerry. One weekend, Jerry invited John to ride with him from San Diego to San Francisco to meet Roger and see the Chinese junk. The trip was a disaster. John didn’t like Roger, and Roger felt the same way about him.

“Your new boss reminds me of an aggressive used car dealer,” Roger told Jerry afterward. “The guy is a user. He uses people.”

“No, he’s not,” Jerry replied. “Roger, you just don’t know John Walker. He’s really a great guy!”

John didn’t bad-mouth Roger in front of Jerry, but he quietly worked to break up their friendship.

“When I first met Roger,” recalled John, “he had this pained look in his face. I sensed that he was jealous of me and my power to snatch poor little Jerry from him. I mean, here is Roger wanting to have Jerry come up every weekend and help him with this stupid Chinese junk, and I’m keeping him from doing it because we are going out on my boat having fun, drinking, racing, and having girls aboard, and good old Roger is out in the cold. I thought to myself, ‘If I can break up their friendship, I would really be doing Jerry a favor because no one needs someone like Roger around.’ ”

John deliberately entered
The Dirty Old Man
in races on days that he knew would force Jerry to choose between going to visit Roger and staying behind to sail. At first Jerry tried to sustain both obligations. He would compete in a Saturday morning race and then drive 514 miles to San Francisco to help Roger repair his junk. He would race home Sunday night and report to work Monday exhausted. After a while, he didn’t drive up to Roger’s much.

San Diego became even more inviting after he met Shirley McClanahan. She was ten years younger than he was, and Jerry liked that.

“I think Jerry always felt that I was a bit naive,” Shirley told me. “The more we dated, the more I decided that he felt comfortable around me because I was younger and he could guide me and kind of help shape how I was.”

He gave her books by Ayn Rand and dragged her to lectures on objectivism.

He introduced her to jazz and avant garde art shows and foreign film festivals.

Shirley didn’t care for most of Jerry’s preoccupations, but when he took her sailing aboard
The Dirty Old Man
, she was thrilled. After she and Jerry introduced John to Mary Ann Mason, Shirley enjoyed the Wednesday night outings even more, and soon the group became a regular foursome.

Each week they raced, had drinks at the yacht dub, and then dined at the Brigadeen restaurant. Frequently the meals cost more than $100, and Shirley noticed that John always paid the tab. Always. And John emphasized it after each meal by either mentioning it aloud or by pausing to study the check at length. It was impossible for John to pay for dinner without letting everyone at the table know that the money was coming out of his billfold.

Shirley also noticed that John loved to give Mary Ann flashy presents, particularly when Jerry and Shirley were with them.

“I told Jerry that if he bought me something expensive, I’d give it back to him,” Shirley recalled. “He was shocked, but I explained to him that all that stuff Johnny bought Mary Ann was like payments for sex as far as I was concerned. I thought John treated Mary Ann like a whore and I told her the same thing. I said, ‘My God, Mary Ann, he treats you like a whore. He always buys you gifts after you go someplace for a weekend. It’s like a payoff,’ but she ignored me.

“Once, she even thought it was funny. Mary Ann was extremely wen endowed, and John was always buying her sweaters that were really low cut. I think he wanted to make her look like a whore too. Mary Ann was having a lot of problems at that point in her life. She was getting involved heavily in drugs and booze and was very promiscuous. She was seeing a psychiatrist, and I thought John was really pulling her down and just using her for his own pleasure, but there wasn’t anything I could do.”

Despite Shirley’s repeated assurances that she didn’t expect any presents from Jerry, she still believed he was envious of John’s money.

“When you listened to Jerry, you could hear the influence that John and his money were having,” Shirley recalled. “He was beginning to almost idolize Johnny. I remember when I made third class in the Navy, I was really excited, so I went over to Jerry’s room at the barracks. I had never been inside his room before, but when I went in I found all these books that he had bought on how to make investments and make money. He was beginning to get real interested in obtaining wealth, and I knew that was John’s influence.”

Jerry’s view toward marriage and sexual fidelity was also changing, Shirley discovered. She knew Jerry had dated other women after they first met, but when they became serious, she thought he had stopped seeing anyone else. She had been reluctant to engage in sex after a few dates, and when she finally agreed to go to bed with Jerry, it meant something special to her and, she thought, to him.

She later confided in Mary Ann that Jerry was a poor sexual partner. He lacked confidence in bed and had difficulty satisfying her. But she was beginning to fall in love with him, and she wanted their relationship to continue despite the frequent frustration.

Much to Shirley’s surprise, Jerry announced one night that it was important for him not to focus on just one woman. “I’m seeing someone else, besides you,” he said.

Shirley was crushed and she blamed John, but the truth was that he was only part of the reason for Jerry’s attitude. Jerry had seen the movie
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
, a 1969 comedy in which two couples swap spouses, and – based on that movie alone – he had decided that it was foolish to limit himself to one sexual partner.

Shirley didn’t care for Jerry’s view. She and Mary Ann considered themselves rebellious. They smoked marijuana and had psychedelic posters of Janis Joplin and the rock group Santana on the walls of their apartment.

But deep down, Shirley still held the same belief in fidelity that her parents had. She loved Jerry. She had taken him home to meet her mother and father. Now she sensed that Jerry was pulling away and was afraid to make a commitment.

A short while later, Shirley discovered that Jerry had gone to bed with another woman who was a mutual friend.

“Jerry was still very important to me at this point. I still was serious about our relationship, and when I found about it, it soured everything because I felt betrayed,” Shirley recalled. “It was not something that he should have done. I never confronted him with it, but I felt really hurt.”

After that, Shirley saw less of Jerry, although he still called her. She lost track of John, too, after he left San Diego in 1971 for duty aboard the
Niagara Falls
.

Shirley left the Navy and didn’t see much of Mary Ann thereafter, but in the fall of 1973, she received a telephone call from John Walker. He had returned to Union City from his first Pacific cruise and was trying to find Mary Ann. Shirley and John spoke for several minutes and she agreed to meet him for dinner. During dessert, John pulled a gift-wrapped box from his coat pocket and handed it to Shirley. Inside was a bracelet made of gold and jade.

“I want you to have this,” John said, reaching across the table for Shirley’s wrist. “I bought it in Taiwan.”

Shirley demurred, but John insisted.

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you, but Johnny, if you expect something in return for this, you can forget it. I’m going home alone tonight just like I came.”

John laughed. “No problem,” he said.

But after dinner John announced that he had to retrieve something from his motel room before he drove Shirley home. Once inside the room, John became amorous.

“He got real handy and pushy,” Shirley recalled, “so I belted him and told him to leave me alone.”

Years later, when she told me about her experiences with John Walker and Jerry Whitworth, Shirley wondered aloud – when she first met them, they had seemed so different, but were they really?

She wasn’t at all sure they were.

After his Diego Garcia tour ended in June 1974, Jerry Whitworth was discharged from the Navy for a third time. He and Roger Olson had renewed their friendship and they left immediately on a two-month cruise in a twenty-foot sloop that Roger had bought. The 1,500-mile trip took them around Baja California into the Gulf of California and was Jerry’s imitation of
Easy Rider
.

It was during a break from sailing, while the men were in a waterfront bar, that they had a discussion very much like the one that Jerry had once had with John Walker aboard
The Dirty Old Man
.

“We were talking about ways to earn money,” Roger Olson recalled, “and we talked about hauling a large amount of marijuana back to the United States with us, but the possibilities of getting caught made it just too big of a gamble. Then the idea of selling classified information came up. I knew it was a possibility because Jerry had told me that he had top secret information at his disposal, but we both said that a man shouldn’t sell out his country. There was nothing in the world worth selling out your country for. We talked about it for a long time, and we both agreed that it was something we just wouldn’t do. No way.”

During the voyage, they talked endlessly about their lives, how both had suffered failed marriages and faced uncertain futures. Roger was dating a Jewish woman, and he had become fascinated by Judaism and Israel. The more Roger spoke, the more Jerry became interested in the religion.

“Jerry was not anti-Jew, but now he began to become more and more an advocate of Israel as the trip went on, and he actually began to develop strong feelings about Israel,” Roger said. “I knew I influenced him.”

Just before the voyage ended, Roger noticed that Jerry had become nervous. He was uncertain about what he should do next with his life, and he was frustrated by his own lack of direction.

“All of my life has been without focus,” he complained one night. “I’ve never been able to find a center in my life, something to concentrate on.”

As always, Jerry fell back on the teachings of Ayn Rand.

“Happiness is the moral purpose of life,” Rand had written. Productive achievement is its noblest activity. Logic and reason are the only absolutes.

But what were his achievements? Jerry asked. He was thirty-five years old and still a rootless drifter. How had his logic and intellect served him or made him happy? There was no great cause in his life, no passion, no purpose or individualistic fight.

Roger knew his longtime friend was unhappy.

“Jerry, more than anything else, I think, wanted attention. He wanted to do something important. He wanted to be someone and amount to something in someone’s eyes other than his own.”