Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (48 page)

Chapter 77

One month after Jerry Whitworth was arrested, he wrote a letter affirming his innocence to Geneva Green, his longtime friend and loyal supporter in Muldrow. Geneva was only one of Jerry’s friends who figured the government had made a mistake. Nearly everyone who knew Jerry took his side. His mother, Agnes Morton, led the way. “Jerry loves the United States,” she explained. “Why, he was born right here in Oklahoma. He was no New York person, no Los Angeles person. He was raised in the country. He’s well thought of by everyone, no meanness, no trouble. These charges are enough to drive anyone to an insane asylum.”

Jerry perpetuated the myth by writing dozens of letters to people he had known and asking them for help. But whatever their previous differences, it was Agnes who provided Jerry with his strongest support.

“My mother and I became very close,” Jerry confided to a friend later. “I was able to make peace with her.” In Jerry’s mind, the support that Agnes gave him after his arrest finally convinced him – his mother
really
did love him as a son.

They didn’t have much time to enjoy their new relationship. Six weeks after Jerry was arrested, Agnes was killed in a car accident outside Muldrow. She was returning home from Sallisaw, where she had met with a lawyer on Jerry’s behalf.

After Agnes died, Geneva Green became Jerry’s most vocal defender back in Muldrow. She wrote to him religiously and filled three huge scrapbooks with newspaper clippings about him. She was confident that once he was free, the two of them could sit down together on the couch in her living room and look through the clippings and laugh about how silly the entire incident had been. Geneva even offered to mortgage her modest home in order to help Jerry financially.

Jerry’s defiant attitude changed once James Larson told him that John had agreed to testify. Like attorneys Meekins, Donnelly, and Bennett had done before him, Larson now told his client that winning acquittal would be nearly impossible.

In February 1986, Larson and Jerry’s other attorney, Tony Tamburello, contacted the U.S. Attorney’s office with a plea bargain. Jerry would submit to complete debriefing, freely undergo polygraph exams, and would plead guilty to “a combination’ of counts,” including a charge that carried up to a life sentence.

In return, Jerry wanted to be promised that he would not be recalled into the Navy and court-martialed, and that Brenda would not be charged.

It seemed to Larson and Tamburello to be a reasonable request, but U.S. Attorney Joseph P. Russoniello quickly ruled out any deal.

In a short response, he wrote:

It is the position of the Department of Justice that ... a full exposition of the entire conspiracy in a public trial is of paramount importance. ... In our view there is a compelling need for an accurate public account of the scope of this conspiracy and Mr. Whitworth’s role in it. Mr. Whitworth’s strident and repeated assertions of having been framed by an overzealous FBI and a lying John Walker must be corrected. We firmly believe that public revelation of the overwhelming evidence against Mr. Whitworth will provide the true picture.

Once again, personal ambition and politics were playing a central role. The Justice Department’s dealings with John and Michael Walker had outraged some Pentagon officials, particularly Navy Secretary John F. Lehman, Jr.

In a highly unusual move in Washington, Lehman had publicly condemned the plea bargain. “We in the Navy are disappointed at the plea bargain,” Lehman told the press. “It continues a tradition in the Justice Department of treating espionage as just another white-collar crime and we think that it should be in a very different category.”

John Walker’s actions, he said, “were traitorous acts and ought to be treated differently than insider trading.”

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger rebuked Lehman two days later. “Secretary Lehman now understands that he did not have all the facts concerning the matter before he made several injudicious and incorrect statements with respect to the agreement,” Weinberger said.

Now that it had shaken John’s hand, the Justice Department had no choice politically but to crucify Jerry Whitworth. It had to prove that the price it had paid by cutting a deal with John had been worth it.

Jerry’s trial began on March 25, 1986, and it quickly turned into one of the most elaborate spy trials ever presented by the government. The Justice Department called dozens of witnesses, introduced hundreds of exhibits, and provided the public with an unprecedented look into the secret world of ciphers, cryptographic machines, and military communications.

For the first time in history, the government brought an actual cipher machine into a courtroom to show jurors.

But the most explosive evidence came from John Walker himself, who revealed for the first time, in public, the inner workings of his spy ring during five days of testimony. While John’s testimony grabbed the headlines, it was his behind-the-scenes cooperation that, he felt, helped federal prosecutors the most.

“I really began to feel like part of the government’s team,” John recalled. “Before I left, I posed for pictures with the prosecution.”

One night, John was moved into the same Oakland jail as Arthur, who also was a witness. It was the first time the two brothers had met since being arrested and, feeling rather festive, they called me at my home.

“We’re just sitting here in the recreation room watching television and having some coffee,” Arthur reported cheerfully. “We’re the only two in this cell block and they’re treating us like celebrities.”

“Hey, I’m famous!” John said proudly after Arthur handed him the telephone. Someone in the jail, he said, had asked him to autograph his picture in an encyclopedia’s year-end review.

The defense called Geneva Green as a witness. “I truly believed Jerry was innocent,” Geneva told me later, “and I was proud to get up there and tell everyone that he was my friend. I didn’t understand, though, why Jerry didn’t take the stand and defend himself.”

On July 10, James Larson made what to Geneva Green was a shocking disclosure in his closing statement to the jury.

“The writer of the RUS letters was Jerry Whitworth,” Larson acknowledged

Geneva felt sick! Jerry really was a spy!

“I was angry at first,” she recalled. “I’d been duped. We all had. We all had believed Jerry was really innocent, but now we knew. I felt betrayed, personally betrayed. Jerry had lied to us all.”

After the trial, Jerry said during a presentencing evaluation that he was “extremely sorry” for passing classified information, but claimed that he did not pass John all of the documents that John had said.

I wanted out basically all the time. I just couldn’t keep doing it, but I did. I never really did what he wanted me to do, but only gave him what I thought would satisfy him. I would never go outside my duty area, which is what he wanted.

The person who conducted the evaluation of Jerry described him this way:

Upon interview, Whitworth, for the most part, exhibits a flat effect. He is given to occasional inappropriate laughter, despite what appears to be a rather constricted emotional tone. His expressions of remorse are absent in emotional tone, and he becomes tearful only when discussing the subject of his wife and his marriage. It is quite clear that Jerry Whitworth exhibits very little insight into his behavior and psychological state and is prone to explanation and description, rather than understanding. ... It will take time and professional assistance for him to accept, on the deepest levels, the gravity of his crime and the effects on the country and those around him.

On an emotional level, a review of Jerry Whitworth’s life suggests an intense need for acceptance and an almost pathological need to please John Walker. Equally clearly, John Walker preyed on Jerry Whitworth’s vulnerabilities. Although there are many in our society who are equally vulnerable as Jerry Whitworth, few have been as manipulated...

Chapter 78

Special Agent Robert Hunter should have felt exultant on November 7, 1986, as he sat in a Baltimore courtroom listening to Judge Alexander Harvey II formally sentence John to life in prison.

Hunter had played a major role in the successful investigation, arrest, prosecution, and debriefing of John. No other government official had spent as much time with John as Hunter.

By this time, Jerry Whitworth had been found guilty and sentenced to 365 years in prison with no possibility of parole until he reached the age of 107. Jerry also had been fined $410,000.

The sentence came after the government made public a statement by a former high-ranking KGB official, Vitaly Yurchenko, who had defected and told the FBI that the Walker spy ring was “the most important operation in the KGB’s history” and had allowed the deciphering of “one million” classified Navy messages.

Jerry was described by the judge who sentenced him as “one of the most spectacular spies of the century” and a man who represented the “evil of banality.”

“Jerry Whitworth is zero at the bone,” said Judge John P. Vukasin, Jr. “He believes in nothing. His life is devoted to determining the wind direction and how he can make a profit from the coming storm.”

Arthur Walker had been sentenced to life in prison and a $250,000 fine by Judge Clarke, who said Arthur’s “greatest culpability is his silence.”

Arthur should have “counseled John, at the very least ... if he didn’t want to tell on him.”

Now John faced Judge Alexander Harvey II.

Based on the government’s plea bargain, John’s sentence already had been decided. He would be sentenced to two life terms, plus 100 years, all to be served concurrently, making him eligible for parole in ten years.

Michael would receive two twenty-five-year terms and three ten-year terms, all concurrent, making him eligible for parole after serving eight years.

“One is seized,”Judge Harvey told John, “with an overwhelming feeling of revulsion that a human being could ever be as unprincipled as you.”

John said nothing, but he later recalled his thoughts. “I figured Harvey would grandstand for the press,” John told me later. “Fuck ‘em!”

Hunter was troubled after Michael and John left the courtroom. The FBI had given Arthur another polygraph and it had indicated that he was being deceptive when he was asked if he had been a spy while in the Navy. John had failed another polygraph too when asked about how he had gotten started as a spy.

Meanwhile, the FBI had reviewed John’s story about going to the Soviet embassy in Washington and determined that there was no heavy iron fence around the embassy in late 1967 as John had claimed. John’s version of his encounter with an embassy employee also was amazingly similar to an account in
The Falcon and the Snowman
, which John liked so much.

On the other hand, Hunter had asked John to draw the floorplan of the embassy for him, and what John drew matched perfectly with the FBI’s records. “There is no question in my mind that John Walker had been in the Soviet embassy,” Hunter recalled. But when?

What troubled Hunter most was that no one might ever be able to discover the truth because of a mix-up months earlier before Arthur’s trial. Shortly after John and Arthur were arrested, Fred Bennett had telephoned Samuel Meekins, Jr., and requested copies of all of Arthur’s statements to the FBI.

Meekins obliged and Bennett showed the statements to John. When it came time for Hunter to question John about Arthur, John told the exact same stories as Arthur had.

“He knew exactly what Arthur had told us,” Hunter said, “and John did not deviate on it at all. It was impossible for us to catch them in lies after that.”

His FBI colleagues told Hunter that none of this mattered. The good guys had won. Hunter had done his job. All the spies had been captured and imprisoned.

Hunter received a letter of commendation from FBI Director William H. Webster. It felt good, said Hunter, but it also was incomplete. Hunter had always been able to empathize with people and he had developed a genuine warmth for Barbara and Laura, and even Michael and Arthur.

But not John. There was an invisible barrier around John that Hunter couldn’t pass through. During one of their final interviews, Hunter had tried to talk on a personal level with John.

“We had spent a lot of time together,” Hunter recalled. “A lot of time, and I had been wondering. I mean, this was just incredible, here was a guy who had been in espionage all these years and gotten his best friend, and brother, and then his son involved. He had tried to get Laura involved too and I had yet to see any remorse, so I decided to ask him.”

Hunter approached John gingerly.

“John, we have been together a long time now and talked about a lot of things together, but I’ve never seen any indication of remorse. Do you feel remorse, any sorrow about what you’ve done?”

John’s face became red. “Remorse?” he replied. “What are you talking about? Even if I had any, I wouldn’t display it to you. What do you want me to tell you, that I have remorse so you can go home and say, ‘I got John Walker to admit he was remorseful’?”

“I knew just about everything you could find out about John Walker,” Hunter recalled later.

And yet Hunter felt at that moment that he really knew “nothing at all” about him.

After they were sentenced, John and Michael were allowed a few minutes together.

“I’m going to kill myself,” John told his son. “When I get to a penitentiary, I’m going to do it.”

Anyone else might have been suspicious, but Michael believed him.

“Don’t do it, Dad, please,” Michael said.

“I’ve done everything I wanted in life,” John said. “Now it’s time for me to just get the fuck out of here.”

“Dad, I know you’re gonna think this is stupid,” Michael said, “but I’ve been reading the Bible and it helps. It really helps, man. Perhaps–”

John cut him short. “I’ve tried that, Mike, it don’t work for me, but, hey, it’s a good idea with you. It will help with your parole.”

Then John told Michael about a dream. “I had a dream about us, Mike,” John said. “You and I were together in this room and I kept telling you to lay down on this bed of nails. You didn’t want to, but I said, ‘Goddamnit, Michael, lay down!’ and you finally did exactly what I told you.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” Michael said. “We’re still buddies, still partners, right?”

John nodded.

“It felt really good,” John told me later. “Because Michael was willing to take care of me.”

After he had been in prison a few months, Michael decided to meet with his mother for the first time since his arrest.

“I hated my mother at that point and, the truth was, I also hated my dad,” he told me later. “I began to realize I had always hated them. I hated half of my mother – the alcoholic half, the cruel half. And I hated half of my father – the selfish half, the manipulative half.

“But they were my parents. My mother. My father. And I had no choice. I had to love them too – didn’t I?”