Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (18 page)

Chapter 28

Jerry Whitworth reenlisted and was sent to the Navy’s satellite communications school at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, just as he and John planned. Only the Navy’s most competent radiomen, known by their peers as hot runners, were accepted by the school, and Jerry’s record was so good that he fell into that group.

The Pentagon was in the midst of redesigning its entire military communications network, and the Navy was leading the other services in technology. It would have been difficult for the KGB to choose a better time to infiltrate naval communications.

The service was on the verge of launching the first of four telecommunication satellites that were to be placed above the earth at precise “geosynchronous altitudes.” This meant that each satellite would travel around the globe at the same speed as the earth’s rotation, causing it, in effect, to always be in the same spot. From their locations, the four satellites would be able to cover the entire globe, each casting a giant “satellite footprint” over the earth. Once the satellites were in place, any Navy ship traveling anywhere in the world could broadcast an ultrahigh-frequency radio transmission upward and bounce it off a satellite back to the proper Navy communication station below.

Besides improved communications, the satellites would also solve one of the Navy’s most vexing problems. Since 1914, when the first ship-to-shore radio broadcast was made, the Navy had been looking for a way for its ships to send messages without revealing their locations. The problem was that though high-frequency radio broadcasts could travel three thousand miles without becoming too weak to transcribe, they could be traced. Like a lighthouse beam, the ultrahigh-frequency radio transmissions left a path behind that could be followed to its source.

If an enemy ship intercepted a broadcast, it could follow the radio waves back to the transmitting ship. This was extremely dangerous during war, particularly for submarines, whose domination of the seas depended upon surprise.

Several attempts were made to make ships’ transmissions difficult to trace, but none worked. During the cold war, worry about the “traceability problem” increased, especially after Soviet intelligence ships began operating routinely off the East and West Coasts, where they could intercept ship-to-shore transmissions.

Finally, the Navy had a way to circumvent the Russians. What no one suspected was that Jerry Whitworth, one of the first radio operators to be trained in satellite communications, had become a KGB spy.

The use of satellites was leading to other massive revisions in U.S. military communication. The Navy had already created the Common User Digital Information Exchange System, known as CUDIXS, to control access to the twenty-channel communication satellites that were to be used jointly by the Navy and other service branches.

Other communication systems had to be revamped or created because of the sudden revolution that technology was bringing to communication. Among the most important communication systems were AUTOVON, or Automatic Voice Network, a worldwide defense department telephone system; AUTOSEVOCOM, Automatic Secure Voice Communications System, a worldwide defense department telephone system with security devices installed on it to protect its transmissions; and AUTODIN, Automatic Digital Information Network, the message system that routes messages from military installations to the proper destination.

Jerry Whitworth worked hard to develop an expertise in everyone of these communication systems.

Thus, just as John Walker had entered the submarine force when it was being transformed from the diesel age to the nuclear age, Jerry Whitworth was at the edge of a communications revolution in the Navy.

Through no effort of its own, the KGB was getting a look inside the Navy as it developed the most sophisticated military communications network in the world.

Years later, William O. Studeman, a rear admiral and top naval intelligence expert, claimed that Jerry Whitworth’s “misuse of a position of trust in naval communications jeopardized the backbone of this country’s entire national defense.”

Back in February 1975, after he completed five weeks of training at satellite school, Jerry’s mind was only focused on one thing. Anxious to brief his new spymaster, he flew directly from the school to Norfolk and telephoned John’s home. Barbara answered. No, she explained, John wasn’t home and she didn’t know where he was or when he would be back. But Barbara agreed to come to the airport, pick up Jerry, and put him up for the night in the three-bedroom brick-and-frame house at 8524 Old Ocean View Road that she and John had bought.

During the ride from the airport, Jerry began to sense that John either had left Barbara permanently or was only occasionally staying with her and the children.

The next morning the two men got together and Jerry immediately brought up Barbara’s stability. How much did she know about John’s spying, and was she a risk? he asked.

“Barbara doesn’t have enough guts to be a risk,” John replied.

Those words marked the start of a five-minute discourse about Barbara that was filled with profanity and hatred. John made it clear to Jerry that he viewed Barbara as nothing but a piece of “useless flesh” who was absolutely worthless to him.

Then the conversation turned to espionage and John discovered that Jerry’s technical training was so sophisticated that despite his years in the Navy, John frequently had to stop Jerry in mid-sentence and ask him to explain.

Finally, Jerry resorted to drawing crude diagrams on John’s notepad that explained how messages were relayed via satellite.

John had received $35,000 from the KGB at his last dead drop exchange, and even though the money was all for him, he wisely decided to reward his partner. John counted out $4,000 in fifties and hundreds for Jerry, and explained that the sum represented his apprentice salary of $1,000 per month.

“I’m paying you for January and February, while you were in school,” John explained. “The remaining two grand is an advance for March, and this is just the beginning.”

Jerry had even more good news. “I’ve requested duty at Diego Garcia,” he explained. The island had become an important link in the Navy’s satellite chain and had been outfitted with the Navy’s most important cryptographic machines. Jerry began rattling off the various machines: KW-26, KG-14, KG-13, KW-37, and, of course, the ever-faithful KW-7.

“In other words,” John said, looking up from the notes he was taking, “everything that’s fucking important when it comes to crypto is on the rock.”

Jerry grinned.

“We are going to have to have a code,” John explained, “some way to communicate by mail so I can know where to meet you and can tell my buyers what to expect.”

John suggested referring to stolen documents and keylists as pictures because of Jerry’s interest in photography. But Jerry thought this idea was too transparent. He suggested they use scuba diving as a code. Jerry would write that the diving was great if he was able to steal keylists. If not, he would complain about his underwater treks.

Patiently John went over the crude diagrams on his notepad, slowly repeating the crucial points in the satellite communication network. At last satisfied that he had it right, he tucked the pad in his pocket.

“Jerry, there’s something else we need to discuss,” he explained. “If either of us ever gets caught, which there isn’t much chance of, but just the same, if one of us gets caught, he doesn’t squeal on the other. There is nothing worse in the entire goddamn world than a snitch.”

“Right,” Jerry replied.

“We got to swear to it,” said John. “We got to swear that we will never rat on each other.”

John had a flair for the melodramatic, and he wanted Jerry to feel as if they were entering into a sacred “blood oath,” similar to the dramatic ceremonies that he had seen in movies about the Mafia, in which young gangsters cut their own fingers and then pressed their bleeding hands against each other’s as a symbolic brotherly bond. They were going to be like that. Brothers in silence.

Jerry joined John in swearing fidelity to each other and then, like a father handing down a valued family heirloom, John offered Jerry the battered Minox that the KGB had given him seven years earlier.

Jerry laughed. He had already bought his own Minox, he explained. He was anxious to get to work.

Three months later, John received a letter from Jerry, who by that time was settled in Diego Garda.

“Hi, Johnny,” it said. “I finally made my first dive. It was real good.”

Chapter 29

Shortly after Jerry’s visit to Norfolk, John moved into the Beachcomber Motel and Apartments a few miles down the street from his house. Barbara was furious.

She now realized that being persuaded out of a divorce in Union City had been a major mistake. The children were also unhappy.

Margaret, now seventeen, did whatever she pleased, Cynthia, sixteen, and Laura, fifteen, had become chronic runaways, and Michael, thirteen, was unruly and rebellious.

“My mother had me arrested twice by the police and declared incorrigible,” recalled Laura. “Not once, but twice she had me put in a juvenile home. She had Cynthia arrested too! She simply couldn’t control us, and we hated home. Quite frankly, I wished at the time that I could have stayed in the detention home because it was better than my own home.”

Michael had gotten into minor scrapes in San Diego and Union City, but those problems had been the typical things that small boys do, such as stealing a model car from a toy store or accidentally starting a fire while playing with matches. In Norfolk, however, he became a self-described “hellion.”

Recalling his childhood, Michael Walker told me with pride about his sexual adventures as a boy.

“I got my first piece of ass when I was nine or ten years old. I had been looking at Playboy books that my dad had for some time and I knew what sex was about. There was this neighborhood girl and we both were curious, so we began petting and finally we went into the woods and I achieved penetration, although I was too young to climax. This was in Union City, and by the time I hit Norfolk, I was a sex fool. I mean, I was only thirteen years old, but I was going out with girls who were sixteen and eighteen and having sex regularly.

“I thought I was really cool. I never really attended junior high school in Norfolk because I didn’t like it. Once I skipped school forty-three days in a row. I’d be out on my own or go to one of my buddies’ houses and watch television all day. We began smoking Marlboros and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, and I tried to grow a mustache.

“I remember coming home one day and my mom asked me, ‘Hey, Michael, did you go to school today?’ and I wasn’t going to lie to her so I said, ‘No, I didn’t go today. I didn’t go yesterday. In fact, I haven’t gone all week! So what are you going to do about it?’ And she wouldn’t do anything. I thought I was one tough kid.”

Barbara called John at the motel whenever there was trouble with the kids. Each time, his reply was the same.

“My attitude at that point,” John said, “was that there was no problem so big that it couldn’t be run away from. I really didn’t want to be hassled and I really didn’t want any part of Barbara or the kids, any of them, even Michael.”

He was busy with his girlfriends, both old and new. After moving into the motel, John had used his contacts in the Navy to locate Mary Ann Mason. She had left the Navy and was living with a man in San Diego, but when John invited her to fly with him to the Bahamas, Mary Ann told her boyfriend that she had to rush to the East Coast to visit a relative. Reunited, John and Mary Ann took a week-long vacation and John proved to be as generous as ever.

“I knew that he and his wife weren’t living together,” Mary Ann recalled, “but it didn’t seem to bother him. He was the same old Johnny and, as usual, he had plenty of money to spend.”

John soon found a new girlfriend in Norfolk. Patsy G. Marsee was an employee at the Armed Forces Staff College, John met her through a mutual acquaintance and he described her a few days afterward in a conversation with Arthur as a “woman of the 1970s.”

“She doesn’t need to hang on to some man all the time,” he explained. “She isn’t a nag.”

John didn’t hide his girlfriends from Barbara or his children. When Barbara left town one weekend and asked John to supervise the kids, he arrived at the house arm-in-arm with a girlfriend.

Cynthia Walker also bumped into her father at the restaurant where her boyfriend worked.

“My boyfriend took me into the kitchen to introduce me to his friends,” she recalled, “ and as we were getting ready to leave the kitchen, he opened the door and then yanked me back.”

“What in the world is wrong?” Cynthia asked.

“Your father’s in the lounge,” the boy replied.

“So what’s the big deal?”

“Well, he’s with a girl and it’s not your mom.”

“I was only sixteen years old then,” Cynthia Walker remembered, “and I didn’t know what to do. Should we leave or what? I finally decided just to go in and eat and act like nothing was wrong. We walked right past his table and he looked at me and didn’t even acknowledge me – like I didn’t even exist, and it got me really upset.”

Such escapades outraged Barbara. One afternoon, she ordered Michael and his cousin, Curt Christopher Walker, the youngest child of Arthur and Rita, to get into the car. Barbara drove the boys to the Beachcomber Motel and made them sit outside John’s apartment until they spotted John walking with a girl.

“Look, Michael,” Barbara Walker said, “there’s your father with one of his whores!”

Another time, Barbara woke up Michael after midnight, and ordered him downstairs to the den.

“She had done this sort of thing before when she was drunk,” Michael explained to me later, “and she was drunk on this night. She had a bottle of beer and I sat as far away from her as I could when we got downstairs. I smelled trouble coming. I was, maybe, yeah, I was fourteen at this point. She says, ‘Michael, I know you are fooling around with women,’ and I said, ‘No way, Mom.’ She says, ‘Don’t lie to me. I know you are having intercourse with girls, aren’t you?’ And I said, ‘Intercourse, uh, what’s that, Mom?’

“Well, she got really angry and she says, ‘You know your father fools around with women, don’t you?’ and then, just like that, she says, ‘Did you know your father is a spy?’ I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it. She went from his fucking around to him being a spy, just like that. I stood up and I said, ‘Okay, Morn, I’m going to bed now,’ and I started to walk to the door when she suddenly throws this bottle of beer at me and comes close to hitting me in the face with it.

“My mother began screaming at me. ‘You are just like your father! Just like Johnny Walker!’

“That was the first time she ever mentioned to me that my dad was a spy, and it tore me apart. I didn’t believe it. I figured she was lying because of what he was doing to her.”

Barbara soon began complaining to Arthur and Rita about John. Arthur had retired from the Navy in 1973 in Norfolk after reaching the rank of lieutenant commander, and he and Rita still lived in the same modest brick house that they had bought back in 1968. Rita became a sympathetic listener, and Barbara was soon telling her about not only John’s womanizing, but other wrongdoing.

“John is doing something so horrible, I can’t even tell you,” Barbara told Rita one day. “But it is just so horrible and illegal that you would hate him if you knew.”

Rita didn’t doubt it. She already disliked John.

The two women’s friendship seemed odd because they had nothing in common except being sisters-in-law. Rita spent all of her time fussing over her children, was strict, stubborn, and spoke her mind.

Occasionally, Arthur tried to defend his brother. John’s womanizing was harmless, he said.

To which Rita responded, “Adultery is one sin that no spouse ever forgives.”

The fact that Arthur and John decided to form a business at the same time that Barbara was crying on Rita’s shoulder didn’t help either couple’s marriage.

On June 23, 1975, the two brothers incorporated Walker
Enterprise
s, a small company that installed radios and stereo equipment in new cars. It was really Arthur’s business. All John provided was the much-needed capital. But Rita didn’t want Arthur and John to associate.

Rita recalled her feelings toward John during an interview one Sunday afternoon while we sat in her kitchen. “John treated Barbara lousy and Barbara was in a lot of pain. She would come over and I would know that she had been drinking. Oftentimes, I would make her spend the nights in our den on the couch because I didn’t want her driving home. She needed someone to lean on, she needed help. Don’t ask me to explain it, but Barbara still loved John despite all the things that he did to her. She still loved him! It was amazing. I couldn’t stand watching him use her and the kids. It made me sick. But she still loved him.”

One night, Barbara invited Arthur and Rita over for one of her notable Italian dinners. John wasn’t there. Afterward, while everyone was clearing the table, Barbara suddenly collapsed.

“I can’t feel anything in my arm,” she screamed.

Rita and Arthur rushed to help her. “Art, call an ambulance!” Rita ordered.

But before Arthur reached the telephone, Barbara called him off. “It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t call anyone. I’m going to be okay and John will just get angry if he finds out.”

They helped Barbara onto the couch.

During the next hour, Barbara would claim to be suffering nearly intolerable pain one instant and then recover magically, only to have a relapse whenever Rita and Arthur mentioned that it was time for them to go home.

When Rita and Arthur finally got away that night, Rita turned to her husband and said, “Barbara is falling apart. We’ve got to do something.”

“It’s okay if you want to help,” Arthur replied. “I think you should. But I’ve got to stay out of this. John’s my brother.”

The next day, Rita telephoned Barbara. “Barbara, you’ve got to make up your mind. You either stay with John or leave him! You can’t go on like this. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll help you through it, but you’ve got to decide. You’ve got to do something. “

Rita was not the only person urging Barbara to act. After John moved out, Barbara had gotten back in touch with her older sister, Annie Crowley Nelson. Annie was also pushing her to abandon her failed marriage.

Annie and her husband, Bob, lived on a farm near Anson, Maine, and one night, Bob Nelson got on the phone and told Barbara that she and her children were welcome to move in with them “until you can get on your feet.”

With Annie and Rita encouraging her, Barbara contacted Albert Teich, Jr., a Norfolk lawyer, and instigated divorce proceedings. John was indignant. Over the years, he had physically beaten and humiliated Barbara. He had driven her to alcoholism, destroyed her feelings of self-worth, and openly flaunted his sexual affairs with other women in front of her. But the fact that she had decided to divorce him without warning, to John, was unthinkable.

“She didn’t even have the decency to call me on the phone and tell me she had filed for a divorce,” he seethed to me later. “I didn’t know until the guy served me with court papers. She was a real pig.”

As soon as John was served, he rushed to see Barbara and tried to talk her out of it.

“You are going to lose all your medical benefits,” he argued. “What’s wrong with how we are living now?”

At one point, he even argued that getting a divorce might damage the children emotionally.

John later admitted that his motives for trying to stop the divorce were based solely on self-interest. “Barbara was a loose cannon,” he told me, “and I didn’t want her blabbing things to her relatives and having them call the FBI.”

But Barbara Walker told me that she believed John’s behavior was part of the confused “love-hate” relationship that they shared.

“In his own way, John still loved me and he still does,” Barbara Walker explained to me one day. “You see, what really had happened was that I had become a mother to John. It wasn’t his father who had messed him up. It was Peggy, and I had become his second mother. He would play around with his girlfriends – once he telephoned me and told me that he was waiting for some young girlfriend of his to get out of the shower so they could go to bed together – but then he always wanted me there to run home to.”

This time, however, Barbara decided firmly to abandon her “fifth child.”

“Okay, you fucking bitch,” John yelled when she stayed adamant about the divorce. “But I’m not only getting a divorce from you, but from the kids, everyone. You just go do your thing. I don’t want visitation and I don’t want to hear about your problems or theirs. Just go! I want all of you to get the fuck out of my life!”

No, Barbara told him. The divorce wasn’t going to be that easy. She wanted $10,000 in cash, $500 per month in child support, and $1,000 per month in alimony.

John was flabbergasted. He had no choice but to agree, but, afraid that she would turn him in, he asked her not to mention alimony in writing. At the time, he was earning $18,000 per year from the Navy. “There’s no way I can explain paying you that much money each month on my salary,” he warned her.

Barbara agreed. John could pay her the $1,000 per month under the table.

The divorce became final on June 22, 1976. In addition to the cash and child support, Barbara got the deed to three lots in Florida that John had bought over the years for $40,000 as investments.

Barbara told John that she and the children were moving to Maine to live with Annie and Bob. They would leave Norfolk on a Friday, she said. Actually, the moving truck came on a Wednesday and she and the children left that night. She had lied to John because she hadn’t wanted to face him again. All she wanted was to get as far away as possible.

“Barbara just couldn’t hack it anymore,” recalled her sister, Annie, who came down to help Barbara move.

“I’ll never forget that move,” said Michael. “My mother, my Aunt Annie, and my sisters and I were all packed into my mom’s car. It was a brand new Monte Carlo, which she had bought, I guess, with some of the divorce money. We were in there with our dog and two gerbils and off we went for Maine. It was crazy! We didn’t know anything about Maine and I didn’t even know for sure where it was. I wanted to stay in Norfolk with my dad, but my mom wouldn’t let me.”

As promised, John sent Barbara an envelope of cash during the first week of July 1976. It included the $1,000 alimony that he had promised. But on July 31, 1976, John retired from the Navy and immediately stopped sending Barbara alimony.