Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (26 page)

The agent seemed offended by such language. He said that only the uneducated used such vulgarities, but he had read and heard stories about American leaders such as Richard Nixon using such words in private.

Before the two men parted, the agent promised to deliver $200,000 to John on May 18 at a dead drop outside Washington. This would include raises in pay and also money for the van.

“From now on, no more recruitment without talking to me first,” he added. “We must be careful.”

The Russian began to walk away, but stopped, turned, and said something that John couldn’t quite make out because of the wind. As John made his way back to the U-Bahn and his hotel, he realized what the agent had said.

John’s KGB handler had taken John’s advice seriously. He had told John to “get fucked.”

“He really had a great sense of humor for a Russian,” John said later. “I was beginning to like him a lot.”

John telephoned Jerry after returning from Vienna to Norfolk.

“Have you seen Mary Ann recently?” he asked during a brief conversation.

It was a prearranged signal. Exactly one hour after Jerry received that telephone call, he drove to a pay telephone several miles from his house. When it rang, he answered. John was on the line calling from a pay phone in Norfolk.

“Jerry, you should go ahead and buy the van,” John said. “We can get ten thousand dollars for it. Also, there’s a bonus for you if you can get three months of unbroken yellow [yellow crypto keylist cards].”

“I’ve canceled my retirement request,” Jerry said. “Everything is a go!”

Chapter 38

Had John Walker, Jr., not been a spy, he would have liked to have joined the FBI after retiring from the Navy. This is what he said, with all seriousness, during one of our prison interviews. The idea of exposing people, catching them doing something wrong, really turned John on. As it was, he became a private detective after his sales association folded. His first job was with Wackenhut, an international security company.

John simply appeared at the Wackenhut office one afternoon and asked to speak to Philip Prince, the manager of investigations. Prince had been in charge of Wackenhut’s office in Norfolk for only one month and had been a private detective for only four months, but his inexperience didn’t show. He was a highly decorated retired Marine who had served three tours of duty in Vietnam. His military experience gave Prince a self-assured style that impressed John.

John’s proposition was simple. He was willing to work dirt cheap in return for on-the-job training.

“Money really isn’t a problem,” he told Prince. “I’ve got my pension and I’ve made some really hot investments. I don’t want to earn more than five thousand a year or I’ll get Uncle Sam peeking into my knickers.”

John’s timing proved to be perfect. Wackenhut had been much more interested in promoting its security guard services in Norfolk than in investigating cases. As a result, Prince’s office was poorly staffed, poorly equipped, and poorly budgeted.

“He was very up front about what he wanted,” Prince told me later, “and quite frankly, I was impressed. John spoke intelligently and at the same time admitted that he had a lot to learn. The biggest thing was he was dying to go to work. I mean immediately!”

Prince sent John to Thomas Nelson Community College, where he whizzed through several special courses on arrest procedures and suspects’ rights that the state required before granting a private investigator a license.

At the time, Wackenhut handled mostly messy divorce cases. Virginia didn’t have a no-fault divorce law, so angry spouses often hired Wackenhut to find evidence of adultery. Prince was trying to move the agency away from such piddling cases into investigations of insurance fraud, a more interesting and lucrative area.

Because of its shipyards and large blue-collar work force, the Tidewater area was a hotbed for workmen’s compensation claims, and it was not unusual for an insurance company to find itself being ordered to pay benefits to a disabled worker for the rest of his life. However, if an insurer could prove the worker hadn’t been seriously injured while on the job or had exaggerated those injuries, it could either cancel or reduce its liability payments.

John soon became Wackenhut’s star investigator of insurance fraud. While other Wackenhut employees were content to punch a time clock, he worked nonstop. Each case John was assigned seemed bigger and more important to him than the last. And he refused to give up until he obtained a “kill” – his terminology for catching a disabled worker doing some physical task that he shouldn’t have been able to accomplish because of a work-related injury.

John hated to waste time and rather than waiting for a “suspect” to do something wrong, he began “setting them up.”

His first so-called sting operation involved a suspect with a back injury. John let the air out of one of the man’s car tires and then took photographs of him lifting the spare tire out of his car trunk.

“John had a theory about being a private investigator,” a fellow detective, Lonzo Thompson, told
The Washington Post
later. “His theory was: Always set the person up. Just don’t sit there. Tempt them. Play on a person’s greed. He felt everybody was basically greedy and you always get them through greed.”

John’s sting operations soon took on the elaborateness of a
Mission: Impossible
operation. He even gave each sting its own name. He was proudest of the “Great Grocery Giveaway,” a scam that involved no less than four or five fellow detectives.

The grocery giveaway sting was created to catch a woman who had suffered a back injury. John had a special circular printed that said the woman had won $50 worth of free groceries at a neighborhood store. But she had to collect them within five minutes. The woman raced to the store without putting on her neck and back braces. In the parking lot was a cart filled with the heaviest groceries that John could find. As the woman lifted the bags out of the cart, John hid in his van and took pictures.

John remained the master of the sting. “I really saw myself as the producer,” John told me later. “I would use secretaries, professional actors, just about anyone I wanted to hire to produce a perfect scam. I could pull one on anyone and make it believable.

“The things I did as a private detective,” John continued, “were much more exciting and imaginative than what I did as a spy.”

Tempting people and catching them seemed to prove to John that his view of mankind as basically corrupt was accurate.

John always posed as someone else on a case, even when he didn’t need to. It was all part of the drama and intrigue. His favorite disguise was that of a Roman Catholic priest. He was accused of posing at various times as a Boy Scout leader looking for a campsite, a surveyor purporting to survey the land in the vicinity and a bird-watcher attempting to take photographs of wildlife.

Besides disguises, John became an expert in other phases of private detective work.

He spent more than $25,000 on various video cameras, pinhole lenses, and electronic bugging devices. He also bought several trick canes: one contained a short sword, another had a stiff spring inside it that could be used as a dub, a third was a black-powder rifle, and the last had a secret vial inside that could be used to hide poison or alcohol.

“Most investigators only wore a gun when they were going on an assignment which was obviously dangerous,” Prince recalled later, “but John was married to his gun.”

Whenever Prince and John went out to lunch, John removed his sports jacket.

“I really think he wanted people to see that he was carrying a gun,” Prince said.

Sometimes John carried three guns at a time. “Look, I’m not a weight lifter, I have poor eyesight and I’m vulnerable because of that,” John told a co-worker one day. “A guy like me has to make sure that he has superior firepower.”

Wackenhut was hired to provide security at a wedding reception one afternoon, and John was assigned to help check invitations at the front gate of the posh estate. The night before, he startled a fellow detective by telephoning to ask what kind of “firepower” the man was bringing with him.

“Here’s what I’m packing,” John volunteered. “My first three rounds will be armor-piercing bullets so I can take out a car if it crashes the gate by shooting its engine. The next two rounds will be hollow-point bullets for maximum stopping power when the suspects exit the car. I’m also bringing my rifle with the banana clips, which can carry up to ninety rounds.”

His fellow detectives never knew when John was telling the truth or exaggerating, in part because he so frequently mixed the two. One of John’s co-workers recalled, for example, that John had taught him how to investigate burglaries.

“Do you know how you can tell if a professional burglar or some kid ransacked a house?” John asked him one day. “A kid will go through a chest of drawers from the top down, which means he has to open and close each drawer as he works his way down the chest. But a pro starts at the bottom and works up so all he has to do is open each drawer. He never has to close a drawer.”

John was right, the co-worker said, but he couldn’t leave well enough alone.

“After he told me that, he started telling me how he had solved more burglaries than the entire police department. It was just nonsense.”

Prince liked John, but Michael Bell, the manager of investigations for Wackenhut’s Richmond office, didn’t. He thought John was a dangerous “windbag.”

When singer John Denver arrived in Norfolk to perform, Wackenhut was hired to provide security. John was anxious to help, but Bell convinced Prince to give him the plum assignment.

“John was furious that he wasn’t involved,” Bell recalled later, “but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.”

That didn’t stop John from telling people that he had helped. “John Denver never gives anyone autographs,” he bragged after the concert to a girlfriend, “but I did manage to get him to sign a few things for me.”

It was conversations like this that made some detectives at Wackenhut wonder about John’s credibility.

One night, Prince took John to the UDT Seal Club, a watering hole for retired Seals, the elite special forces in the Navy.

“Most of the guys who hung out there were rough boys who had been through a lot of combat and training, and weren’t afraid of getting into a good fight,” Prince recalled later.

John’s usual swagger disappeared when the two men entered the bar, and his chatter about scams and gun battles never surfaced. After a few quick drinks, John excused himself and left. The next morning when John came to work, he shrugged off his obvious discomfort in the Seal Club.

“The kind of shit we are doing is just as dangerous as anything those guys ever did,” he told Prince, but Prince disagreed. He told John that anyone could talk a good game, but few could deliver in a combat situation.

Prince asked John how he would have reacted if someone in the bar had picked a fight with him. Without any sign of embarrassment, John said that he would have talked his way out of a fight.

“It would have been the only smart thing for me to do because of my size and age,” John explained. “I’m not into macho bullshit.”

But, John added, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have gotten even.

“Phil, it might take three years or even longer,” John said, “but I’m a Sicilian, and we Sicilians always get revenge.”

To illustrate his point, John recalled how he had gotten even one night with a woman friend who had irritated him. The two of them were in a bar when the woman decided that John should drive her from Norfolk to the seashore nearby.

John was drunk and didn’t want to go, but ultimately gave in.

He said the woman undid the zipper on his trousers while he was driving and engaged in oral sex with him as he drove. A few seconds after the woman began, John reached the toll booths on the Virginia Beach Expressway. He had a quarter and could have driven through the automatic toll gate, but instead, he aimed his car at a toll booth with a female attendant in it and gradually brought the car to a stop. The woman engaged in sex with John looked up into the face of a startled attendant, John said, laughing.

“If you fuck with me,” John explained, “you’ll pay a price.”

Chapter 39

Working as a private detective dovetailed perfectly with John’s spying. It gave him an instant justification for a quick trip to Washington and frequent excursions to California.

On May 18, 1980, John retrieved $200,000 from the KGB at a dead drop. Twelve days later, he and Patsy Marsee flew to Oakland where Jerry and Brenda were waiting. Jerry led the group outside the airport terminal to see his silver and blue Dodge Ram van. Inside was a chilled bottle of champagne and an assortment of cheeses, which the foursome savored on the ride to Jerry and Brenda’s new condominium in San Leandro. When they were alone the next morning, John counted out Jerry’s share: $100,000 in fifty and one-hundred-dollar bills. Jerry was excited. “I’ve never held one hundred thousand dollars before!”

The new van was working flawlessly at Alameda, Jerry reported. He had told his subordinates that his physician had placed him on a rigorous program of morning exercises that required him to take a noontime nap. This gave him the freedom to photograph documents whenever he wished by simply slipping them into his briefcase and going out to his van to rest.

Once inside, with the curtains pulled tight, Jerry could photograph without fear of interruption. He merely returned the documents after he finished. He was confident that he could earn the $10,000 bonus that John’s “buyers” had offered for three months’ worth of consecutive keylists.

A few days after John returned from California, he received an unexpected visit from Laura and his new grandson, Christopher, less than a month old. Laura was going to show Christopher to Mark’s parents. Then she would continue north to Maine to show Barbara the baby.

John made a fuss over Christopher and Laura, and then, after dinner that night, once again pressured her to become a spy. John’s offer apparently remained on Laura’s mind when she arrived in Skowhegan, because she told her mother about it.

Laura’s visit and revelation that spring came at a dramatic time in Barbara Walker’s life. Her beloved son, Michael, had decided to leave her.

In June 1980 Michael went to Norfolk to be with John. He was seventeen years old, and Barbara had not been able to control him for some time. Michael never liked Maine and had resented his mother’s decision to move there after the divorce. Barbara’s sister and her husband lived in an old farmhouse near the tiny Maine hamlet of Anson.

Michael described the farm, years later, as being “in the boondocks – the real sticks.”

“It was five miles to the nearest store,” Michael said. “Annie and Bob and their kids had ninety cats and old dogs. I just wasn’t used to anything like it. I had to learn how to milk cows and I didn’t like that. They had chickens running everywhere, and they were mean and chased me. When it was time for dinner, Bob would grab a chicken and twist off its head. After seeing that, I stopped eating chicken and still won’t. They are the lowest, mangiest creatures on earth. I was miserable on that farm. We didn’t like our cousins, and they hated us. They called us city slickers and we called them country bumpkins.”

Michael talked to his father only twice during the first year after the divorce. He pleaded with him during both conversations: “Please let me come live with you, Dad! I hate it here.”

But Barbara and John both said no. John didn’t want to be bothered and Barbara wanted Michael to make a fresh start. He had failed seventh grade in Norfolk, so Barbara enrolled him in the seventh grade in Anson in the fall of 1976.

The fourteen-year-old newcomer didn’t fit in. Michael’s language was as filthy as his father’s, he was a chain smoker – “I only smoke filterless Camels, a man’s cigarette” – and he was impossible to discipline. His goal as a student was to be so disruptive that he would be suspended from school. He succeeded.

Barbara’s decision to move to Skowhegan in 1977 had been prompted, in part, by Michael. The Walkers had been living with Annie and Bob for about one year when Michael hit his twelve-year-old cousin, Jennifer, in the face several times with his fists. Both families decided it was time for Barbara to find her own place.

“My mom had gone through all the money that she got from the divorce,” Michael recalled. “She had paid to have plumbing added to Annie and Bob’s house and she had taken everyone out for lobster dinners several times. She was still drinking a lot too. The money just slipped through her hands.”

Once settled in Skowhegan, Barbara again enrolled Michael in the seventh grade. “School had started about three days before my mom took me in, and when I went into the classroom everyone was watching me,” Michael remembered. “I was really scoping out the women, and I was blowing it with the teacher but making it with the chicks.”

Michael’s teacher asked him to take a seat and open his textbook.

“What page, man?” he replied.

The woman teacher corrected him. “Don’t call me ‘man.’ ”

“Okay, man, now what page was that?”

“I remember that everyone started howling,” Michael recalled. “That was the beginning of the end, because the teacher gave me detention, which meant I had to stay and work after school, and I wasn’t going to stand for that. I knew I was on the way out of there.”

There was one teacher who tried to work with Michael. Years later, Michael could only remember his last name: Nixon. Each morning when Michael arrived at school, William Nixon would give him a pep talk. “We’re going to work hard today, right, Mr. Walker?”

But despite Nixon’s encouragement and personal interest, Michael stayed in trouble.

“I would come to school stoned as hell on marijuana,” he recalled. “I mean really blown away. I was just stoned out of my mind. Someone would say, ‘Hey, Mike, wanna try some coke?’ and I’d say, ‘Sure, man, why not?’ Or someone would say, ‘Hey, Mike, got some great speed here,’ and I’d say, ‘Hey man, give me some!’ I let my hair grow down to my waist and I didn’t care about nothing but having a good time and getting high.”

Michael began mimicking the Hollywood stereotype of a marijuana-crazed, fun-loving teenager. Even when he wasn’t stoned, he acted as if he were by always taking on the appearance of someone without any cares, worries, or thoughts.

“I was seeing the principal every day, and when I was in class I was acting like an idiot. I spent my time drawing pictures of marijuana leaves on the desks. I remember once we had to take this test, so I drew little pictures in all those tiny squares you were supposed to black in for answers, and the principal called me in and he said the test showed I had an IQ of two.”

Once again Michael dropped out of the seventh grade.

He and two other Skowhegan boys spent their days smoking pot in a shed. They called themselves the “Barn Rats,” and they installed an old carpet, lounge chairs, and an elaborate stereo system. They began stealing to make enough money to buy marijuana.

“We would stake out a house and watch it so we knew when the people left for work,” recalled Michael. “We’d break in by just kicking in a door or a window with our boots. I got real good at rummaging through drawers with my knuckles so I wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.”

Barbara knew that her son was smoking marijuana and running wild, but she had been unable to control Cynthia and Laura as teenagers, and Michael was more stubborn and had been spoiled more as a child than either of them. She simply didn’t know what to do.

According to his own account, Michael successfully burglarized five houses in Skowhegan before the police closed in on the Barn Rats. A juvenile court judge gave Michael a blistering lecture, but because it was his first offense, he was put on probation for six months.

At the time, Michael didn’t know his father had been arrested on burglary charges as a teenager in Scranton in 1955 and had gone through an almost identical process. When I later told him about his father’s criminal past as a juvenile, Michael considered the similarities more than mere coincidence. It was another example to him of how father and son were inexplicably bound, how fate was leading him along the same path as his father.

Barbara was embarrassed and alarmed by her son’s arrest and decided that Michael needed professional help.

She telephoned Marti Stevens, a trained counselor and schoolteacher with a good reputation for helping kids in trouble. Stevens agreed to accept Michael as one of six special students she was tutoring. She taught Michael basic courses for half a day; the other hours, he was required to work at the farm because Barbara couldn’t afford to pay tuition.

“I had forty cows to handle and chickens to feed,” Michael recalled. “I hated it, but I wanted to make it. I didn’t want to be stuck in seventh grade all my life. I was still getting stoned every day, but I was trying, really trying. I remember being out in a field shoveling frozen cow shit on a freezing February day. Finally, I said, ‘Screw this, I can’t handle this teacher and I quit,’ but three days later, she called me up and got me back out there. She told me that she was going to make me pass my tests and get me into high school and she helped me. On the day of the tests, I went to school straight and I passed ‘em, and that fall, I was back in school with kids my age and they all said, ‘Hey Mike, how’d you do this?’ and I said, ‘Hey, I got my ways.’ ”

Much to Barbara’s surprise, Michael did well in school. Off came his shoulder-length hair. Gone was the small plastic bag of marijuana that he used to carry boldly in his shirt pocket. Michael even began bringing school books home. The reason for the change was simple: Michael was in love.

“It was the first time I really was in love with a girl, even though I had been having sex with this other chick in Skowhegan quite a long time,” he recalled. “I wanted to keep this relationship strong and healthy.”

Michael was sixteen, his girlfriend was eighteen. She had a car, money, and came from a well-respected family.

But after nearly two years, Michael’s girlfriend told him that she wanted to date other men. Without missing a beat, Michael returned to hanging out, smoking dope, and making trouble.

During the summers of 1978 and 1979, Michael spent several weeks with his father in Norfolk. They developed a relationship during these sessions that Michael later had trouble describing. Most of the time, John was more of a “best buddy” to Michael than a father.

But John still made it clear that he was in charge.

“We had a really neat friendship, but my dad still projected his military training with me. Like I wouldn’t just walk into his den. I’d walk up to the door to the den and I would stand there until he looked up and recognized me. Then I’d ask, ‘Can I come in?’ and he’d say, ‘You can enter.’

“I’d go over to his desk and stand there until he was ready to speak to me. That didn’t bother me though. I liked my dad a lot. He was really a cool dude and he was the most ... I don’t know exactly what the word is that I’m looking for, but I guess charismatic, yeah, charismatic, and most versatile, flexible person that I knew.

“Why, he could be a dirty, low-down biker one day and be wearing a tuxedo the next. He could do anything or be anyone he wished, it seemed.

“My dad lived alone and I liked to do things for him. I would clean the house and make it really pretty. I’d wash all the windows and vacuum every room and mow the grass. I would do everything I could to please him and make him like me,” Michael recalled.

“I could hardly wait until I could move to Norfolk and be with him and go out on his boat and party with him.”

On the June morning in 1980 that Michael was scheduled to leave Skowhegan for Norfolk) his mother walked into his room and sat on the end of his bed. She wanted to speak to him before she left for her job at the shoe factory.

This is how Michael remembered their exchange: “I was in bed sleeping when she came in around eight o’clock. She was really sad. She sat down on my bed and I felt terrible because she was crying) and she said, ‘Michael, I have to go to work) but before you go I got to tell you something,’ and then she told me that she wanted me to stay in Skowhegan with her and not move in with my father in Norfolk. I said, ‘Mom) I love you, but I have to go. It’s time for me to make a break and I want to live with Dad.’ My mother began crying and left the room.

“I honestly think that she knew what was going to happen to me and she wanted to warn me or keep it from happening,” Michael said. “She knew what my dad had tried with Laura and that my father was going to do the same with me, but I don’t think she knew how to keep it from happening. Maybe she thought I’d just tell him no. I don’t know, but when she left that morning, I really believe that she knew what lay in store for me in Norfolk.”