Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (44 page)

The FBI rushed in as soon as John left. Thinking that he might have dropped off a container of film for the Russians, a special search team of FBI agents quickly explored the area and found the 7-Up can. The FBI said later that members of its highly trained foreign counterintelligence squad knew that the 7-Up can was a signal by John to his KGB handler. They knew that disturbing the can could jeopardize the dead drop exchange and they gave instructions for the can to be returned unmolested to its original location after agents were confident that it didn’t contain any film.

But the FBI screwed up. Because of what later was described as “an innocent miscommunication,” the can was confiscated by the FBI and removed as evidence.

This proved to be a major blunder, because it ruined the FBI’s chance of catching both a KGB agent and John, and of proving without any doubt whom John was meeting.

Luck, however, was on the FBI’s side.

At 8:20 P.M., an FBI unit spotted a 1983 blue Malibu sedan driving in the area where John had left his signal can. The car had a diplomatic license plate – DSX 144 – and was being driven by a man with a woman and child as passengers.

No one had to tell the FBI which foreign country the letters DSX represented. It was the Soviet Union.

Back at the command post, Hunter watched as the number 144 was run through a computer. Within seconds, the computer identified the car as one assigned to Aleksei Gavrilovich Tkachenko, third secretary of the Soviet embassy since January 7, 1983.

“We got really excited when we saw the Russian in the area because it confirmed everyone’s suspicion,” Hunter explained. “There was no reason for a Russian to be out at the very edge of the twenty-five-mile restricted area in the middle of the night.”

At that moment, Hunter and the other agents figured they had a good chance of catching both John and Tkachenko.

But to their horror, Tkachenko began driving away from the dead drop area. It was then that the FBI realized that one of its agents had picked up John’s signal can.

Three days later, Tkachenko, his wife, Olga, and two daughters, Mariya and Oksana, were escorted to National Airport by Aleksandr Vasilyevich Shcherbakov, Viktor Vladimirovich Volkov, and Yevgenity Gennadyevich Vtyhrin, three beefy embassy security guards. The family boarded a flight that took them first to New York City and then to Montreal, Canada, where they were able to fly aboard a Soviet Aeroflot airplane to Moscow.

The Tkachenkos left Washington so suddenly that when FBI agents searched the family’s apartment, they found half-cooked hamburger in a pan on the stove. They also found a bumper sticker in the master bedroom that Tkachenko had retrieved from the 1984 presidential campaign and attached to a bathroom mirror in a bit of black humor. It said: “President Reagan: Bringing America Back.”

Because Tkachenko had dropped off his signal can before John, there was no way for John to realize that Tkachenko had aborted the drop. So John drove to his drop site and tucked his delivery behind a telephone pole.

His grocery bag contained the 129 classified documents that Michael had stolen before the U.S.S.
Nimitz
left Norfolk, John’s incriminating letter to the KGB, and copies of recent letters that Jerry Whitworth had written John.

FBI agent Bruce K. Brahe II found the grocery bag a few minutes after John hid it near the telephone pole.

“I touched it with my foot,” he recalled. “It had a crumply dry sound.”

Opening the bag, Brahe noticed the trash inside had been cleaned.

“The caps were on the bottles; the bottles were rinsed out ... I immediately knew this was the package; I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t.”

When he reached into the bag, Brahe found John’s package of documents wrapped in a white trash bag, sealed with tape.

“I got it,” he yelled.

“Are you sure?” asked a fellow agent.

Spicing his reply with expletives, Brahe made clear that he was certain. John, meanwhile, could find neither his package from the KGB nor, when he returned to the telephone pole, his documents. He returned to his room in the Ramada Inn.

FBI agents tailed John to the hotel and shortly after three A.M., the Justice Department gave Hunter permission to arrest John on charges of espionage.

The only problem was getting John out of his room.

Breaking through the door was simply too dangerous. “We really need this sucker alive,” Hunter said. “John Walker has too much to tell.”

Hunter remembered listening to a taped phone conversation between John and his mother in which John bragged about his new minivan. Hunter and the other agents at the hotel decided to stage an accident. Agent William Wang would pose as a desk clerk, telephone John, and claim that John’s new van had been hit by a drunk driver. When John came out into the hotel hallway, he would be arrested.

It was an old trick, but the agents felt confident that it would work.

Hunter and James Kolouch put on bulletproof vests and carefully got into position near the elevator bank closest to John’s room. If possible, John was to be taken alive.

Both agents drew their guns and waited.

At precisely three-thirty A.M., Wang telephoned John’s room.

A few minutes later, Hunter and Kolouch heard John’s door open

Chapter 71

The U.S.S.
Nimitz
was in the Israeli port of Haifa when it received a secret encrypted message about eight hours after John’s arrest. The FBI was afraid that Michael Walker might have friends or accomplices working in the carrier’s radio room so the message referred to him by a prearranged code name: Brown. John Walker was referred to, rather appropriately, as Red, and only the top-echelon officers, whom the FBI had alerted a few weeks before, knew the two men’s real identities. The Naval Investigative Service had assigned the code name Cabin Boy to its probe of Michael.

SECRET

NOFORM SPECAT

REF:
CABIN BOY

WINDFLYER / ESPIONAGE

REQUESTED BY FBI/ NORFOLK VA.

Brown’s father, herein called Red, was arrested by the FBI early AM 20 May for 3C activity after FBI surveillance disclosed him loading a dead drop in Poolesville, MD area ... FBI subsequently recovered 129 secret-confidential documents. Information from FBI reflects material seized came from Brown and that Brown allegedly has similar material, enough to fill two grocery bags, stashed somewhere on his ship which he was to deliver to Red at a port call. The recovered papers consist of 80 secret and 49 confidential documents. FBI was advised that preliminary review reveals that most, if not all, came from Brown’s ship and are dated February 1985 before the ship’s deployment. One of the documents is entitled ‘
Nimitz
Mediterranean Pre-Deployment News’ classified ‘Secret.’

It has the handwritten notation on the lower right corner ‘OPS Admin Secret Board.’ ... Evidence indicates that Brown has provided additional documents in the past to his father. It is not known at this time how long Brown has been involved in this activity with his father. Interrogate Brown using the following warning: “Violations of the espionage statutes: Improper handling of classified material: and theft of U.S. government classified material and property.”

Attempt to obtain permissive search of Brown’s personal effects, his locker, his work space, desk and other logical spaces for classified material, cameras, film, notes, letters, letter writing materials ... and any other materials indicative of espionage activity.... Recommend pre-trial confinement for Brown, arrange to have all his spaces secured until a command authorized search can be obtained. Ensure Brown has no access to his spaces and that his every movement is monitored to prevent destruction of evidence ... It is possible that Brown has additional accomplices aboard the
Nimitz
and this should be explored...

Michael was not aboard the carrier when the message arrived. He was in a bar getting drunk with some friends. He returned to the dock riding his skateboard.

“I was sick,” Michael Walker recalled. “Riding the waves on the boat that took us out to the carrier was too much for me to take. I thought I was going to throw up. It was about twelve-thirty A.M. when I got to my room and climbed in my rack. I turned on the light and when I lay down I could see that box glowing behind the air duct. It was like the damn thing was saying, ‘Move me! Move me!’ I had this strange feeling that something was telling me to move that damn box, but I said to myself, ‘The hell with it’ and rolled over and went to sleep.

“The next morning, at around six A.M., this guy wakes me up and says my commander wants to talk to me. I went to the berthing area and called the yeoman on duty in OPS-ADMIN on the telephone and told him that it was my day off and I was hung over and could I come up at eight A.M., and he checks with the commander and says okay.

“I climbed back in my bunk and that box is really glowing now and it’s like screaming at me, ‘Move me, you dumb shit!’ but I went back to sleep. I could have carried it to the burn room and destroyed it, but I just felt too bad.

“I got up two hours later and shaved and got my hair combed and locked my locker and went up to OPS-ADMIN and people are going through my desk and basket and no one wants to talk to me, and I suddenly knew what was happening. I felt like I had E-S-P-I-O-N-A-G-E written across my face. I was about to barf when someone said, ‘Michael, the captain wants to see you.’ All of a sudden, three big guys from the Master at Arms office came in. ‘Walker, come with us,’ this guy says. I thought, ‘This is it!’ I felt like dog shit!”

Michael was taken to the brig and ordered to sit. He was not allowed to speak to anyone or leave the chair except to go with two escorts to the bathroom.

“I figured I had screwed up somehow. I didn’t think my dad was busted, I thought they had caught me. Someone had seen something. “

Michael asked for a pen and paper and began a letter to Rachel.

Hello Bunny, I love you. Today is our third day in Haifa.

I would have had the day off today, however, I am still on board trying to take care of a BIG problem, which is why I am writing this letter.

Currently, I am sitting in the Master at Arms office waiting to speak with the executive officer among other NIS [Naval Investigative Service] agents, etc. At this time I have no idea what has come up, although I would imagine it is pretty serious.

I will finish this letter once I have had my little discussion with the XO. If I end this letter on an unhappy note, please contact my father as soon as possible. Needless to say I am not in any trouble with drugs, fighting or any other sailor type bullshit. YOU AND I could only begin to wonder what kind of trouble I am in.

I will close this letter for now and get back with you later. The time now is 0930.

Michael was taken to the ship’s legal department, where he was briefly questioned by Gary Hitt, an investigator for the Naval Investigative Service.

“He asked me if I knew why I was there,” Michael recalled, “and I played dumb and said that I didn’t have a clue. ‘Your father has been arrested for espionage and we have reason to believe you are involved,’ he tells me. ‘No, I’m not involved,’ I said, but I knew that I had the word GUILTY tattooed on my forehead.

“He says to me, ‘Okay, you want to say anything?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and then he asked if he could search my bunk and I said, ‘Sure,’ ‘cause I didn’t think they would find the box. I had hid it too well. They made me strip and that’s when they found my letter to Rachel and my reference to getting in touch with my dad. What a stupid mistake. Hitt reads it and shakes his head ‘cause he knew exactly what the letter meant. Then they had me show ‘em where my bunk was. They took me back to the Master at Arms office while they searched it.”

Hitt carefully logged what he found during the search of Michael’s bunk, locker, desk at OPS-ADMIN, and the fan room where Michael had hidden several documents he was saving.

Hitt found 195 classified documents hidden in the fan room, 665 documents in the computer box behind the air duct at the foot of his bunk, and 316 documents in his work area. In all, Michael had stolen 1,176 documents during the cruise.

“Around eleven that night,” Michael recalled, “they took me back up to see Hitt, I was smoking like crazy. I had given up cigarettes a long time before, but I had to have one that day and I’m sitting there, nervous as hell, and Hitt says, ‘Tell me about the box,’ and I said, ‘What box?’ but by this time my eyes are dilating and my ears are turning red and I’m realizing that I’m not such a hot poker player after all. And he got angry and said, ‘Don’t play games with me,’ so I said, ‘Oh, that box, well I was going to put it in the burn room but the burn room was closed so I stuck it behind there and forgot about it.’ He says to me, ‘Walker, that’s bullshit.’ ”

Michael was taken to a cell in the brig. A guard was stationed outside the bars to watch him.

“I began crying and couldn’t stop,” Michael said. “I couldn’t sleep. I was really scared. All that night, I cried and cried. The next morning, I threw up. I was totally humiliated. I asked to see Hitt and boom, like that, they put a yellow band on my arm that meant I was in the brig and marched me up to see him.

“I said to him, ‘Hey, are they going to kill me?’ And he says, ‘I don’t think so.’ I was worried about being executed, man! I mean, I was in the Navy and my dad wasn’t. They could court-martial me on the spot and blast my ass right there. So I confessed. I was so nervous I couldn’t even type my confession and I can usually type eighty words a minute.”

In order to prove Michael had engaged in espionage, the government had to show that he had stolen classified material, that such material was going to or was intended for a foreign government, and that releasing the material was harmful to the United States.

Michael admitted all three during his confession:

“My father never said who he sold classified documents to, but when he suggested I furnish him with classified documents from my work I believed he must be seIling them to the Russians or some other Communist country. When my father asked me to give him classified documents from my work place, I remembered that when I was still in high school, he commented to me one day that someday he would tell me how he makes his money. I now concluded that selling classified documents to the Russians must be what he meant. My father’s request of me to furnish him classified documents wasn’t a total surprise to me, but I really can’t explain why not. I knew he had done other illegal things like smoking pot freely in front of us at home ... I knew when I was taking the classified documents that the unauthorized disclosure of them to a foreign government could harm the United States.”

After Michael signed his confession, he was taken back to the brig, where he had a change of heart. “I decided that I wanted them to kill me,” he told me solemnly. “I wanted them to do it right there on the ship. Go up on the deck and shoot me! Get it over with! It would have been easier than having everyone know what I’d done. I began to cry like a baby again. I couldn’t stop.”

Something else happened when Michael got back to the brig. “My dad had paid me one thousand dollars,” Michael recalled. “That’s all. He had told me that we would make thousands, up to fifty thousand per year working together, but all I ever received was a lousy thousand dollars. My entire life had been screwed and ruined for a lousy fucking one thousand dollars!”

The next morning, ten Marines wearing helmets and carrying M-16’s
formed a human wall around Michael and marched him from the brig to the carrier deck. News of his arrest had spread through the ship, and as Michael was led away, he felt as if all six thousand men aboard were watching him. “I knew I had betrayed those guys,” he said. “I knew each and everyone of them hated my guts.”

During the flight to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Michael was allowed to read a copy of a newspaper and for the first time he learned details about his father’s arrest. It was not until just before he arrived at the air base, however, that he heard a radio broadcast that explained that Barbara and Laura were the tipsters. Michael felt betrayed.

“I wanted to kill them both,” he told me. “I really wanted to kill them with my own hands. I was so pissed off. How could they do this to me without any warning. That’s when I decided again that I just wanted to die. Shit! My own mother and sister had been plotting this and the entire time, neither one of them told me a thing. Why hadn’t they told me they were going to turn him in? They had to have known I was involved. They just didn’t want to admit it.

“I thought about it a lot, you know, what kind of a family I had, and I just couldn’t believe that they had done this to me. They had completely ruined my life and not even given me a warning. I think I would have jumped ship and come home and machine gunned every last one of them if they hadn’t caught me! Then I would have gotten on my surfboard and just paddled out into the ocean and let the sharks eat me. How could they do it to me?

“If they would have told me, Rachel and I could have disappeared somewhere, gone to the West and lived with Indians or something. But they didn’t give me any warning because I think they both were afraid that I’d tell them I was involved. They didn’t want to know that. They wanted to turn my dad in and they didn’t really give a damn about me, but they didn’t want to admit that. They wanted to act shocked and horrified later. I was screwed.”

Agent Hunter was at the foot of the airplane’s stairway when Michael’s sneaker touched the runway. “Mr. Walker, I’m with the FBI, you are under arrest,” he said, before whisking Michael into a waiting car. Surrounded by police cars, the motorcade headed for Baltimore.

Rachel had driven to the air base with a friend as a sign of support for Michael and had tried to get his attention, screaming as loudly as she could. But he hadn’t heard her, and there were so many reporters and television crews there, she couldn’t get close enough to wave.

The day after Michael was arrested, Rachel had written a letter to him, but she didn’t know where to send it, so she simply asked the FBI to deliver it. They kept it as evidence. Its tone was panicky, and it was full of poorly disguised attempts to cover her own knowledge. In that letter, Rachel told Michael about her questioning by the FBI and the NIS.

They had asked her whether he had ever brought anything home from work. They had questioned her about the family – Laura, Cynthia, Margaret, Barbara – and asked whether John had ever given Michael large sums of money. “I said no, because that’s the truth,” she wrote. She ended with assurances of her love and support.

After she missed making contact with Michael at the air base, Rachel telephoned the Baltimore FBI office. An agent told her that she could visit Michael there, so she left immediately for Baltimore, where she got lost and had to be led by an agent to the FBI field office. When she was taken into a room to see Michael late that afternoon, she burst into tears.

The FBI tape-recorded the couple’s conversation and didn’t allow them to be alone, so neither said anything incriminating. Michael had already confessed, of course, but he didn’t mention that to Rachel. “I didn’t want the FBI to know that Rachel knew about the spying and I didn’t know how she would react.”