Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (50 page)

John continued. “I keep reading about how I am the worst spy since the Rosenbergs gave away the bomb. Okay, show me. Where is the damage? Where’s the invasion by the communists? Where is the Red Dawn?

“Guess what? There wasn’t any and there’s not going to be one. Guess what? All you fucking stupid Americans who sit around all day watching the boob tube – it ain’t gonna happen. There isn’t going to be a war. That’s all a game, man, to keep the defense contractors rich.

“This is all we did. We let the Russians read our mail just like we read their mail. That’s it. That’s all. The United States monitors every international telephone call and every open circuit in the world. All I did was sell those poor bastards the same access.

“If a war started today, then you could say, ‘Okay, Walker, you did your shit! You profited from what you did! A war has just started because of the shit you did!’ I’d say, ‘Okay, I agree with you. I sold stuff that caused a war. I fucked up. Take me out back and shoot me because of it.’ That would be fair. I’d go even farther. If a war between us and the Russians started in the next three and a half years, then you can take me out and shoot me between the eyes or let me hang myself.

“But what has happened to me is unfair. I’ve been destroyed by the government for no real reason and so has Art and Mike. Our lives have been ruined and these prison sentences are just like salt in the wounds. If they let us out now, what would we do? They’ve taken all our money. Do you think anyone would hire us? It’s really unfair.

“You see, it’s like getting drunk and going ninety miles down the road. If a pedestrian is there and you hit and kill him, fine, then the state executes the son of a bitch for murder. But there wasn’t any pedestrian there for me to hit. So my drunk driving didn’t matter. For godsakes we aren’t at war with the Russians! Doesn’t anybody understand that?

“I sincerely in my heart felt that selling classified documents wouldn’t do any damage and, you know what, history has proved me right. Nothing has happened! So how much damage did John Walker do? None. Absolutely none.”

John Walker spoke with such conviction that I was convinced that he actually believed exactly that.

I stood. We shook hands and I left him.

Outside, past the cellblock gate, beyond the reinforced steel bars, the sun beat down on the black asphalt. It was sweltering. How different that afternoon was from the first time that I had met John Walker.

As a young reporter, I had once spent fourteen months writing stories about convicts and prisons in Oklahoma, and during that period I met and interviewed dozens of inmates.

One night in January 1977, I talked to several men on death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. It was a special night because the state of Utah was about to execute Gary Gilmore, the first convicted murderer to be put to death in more than a decade after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling rendered most death penalty laws unconstitutional.

Each man on death row had a radio and all of them were listening to the same station as I went from cell to cell. The radio kept giving news updates about Gilmore and last minute appeals to spare him.

These men were Oklahoma’s worst criminals, and yet I discovered something in their personalities that I later came to believe was lacking in John’s.

I had liked John when I first met him. He seemed ordinary, if not pedestrian. He was reserved. He spoke intelligently and articulated his points with wit.

But the longer I spent time with him – listening to him talk about his life during a series of all-day sessions, relaxing with him at lunch over sandwiches and soup served to us in various county jails, speaking to him long-distance as he crisscrossed the country going from one federal prison to the next – the more I came to realize that his banality was more frightening than the hostility and anger that I had witnessed on death row the night Gary Gilmore was executed.

There was a shallowness and emptiness to John, a lack of any sort of spiritual dimension in his life, a lack of any notion of loyalty to friends, family, and nation.

Betrayal came easily to John because he was loyal only to himself.

In doing research for this story, I interviewed various intelligence analysts and I began hearing over and over the same phrase: “attitudinal loyalty.” Supposedly our citizens have it and citizens of the Soviet Union don’t, especially the non-Russians within the Soviet empire.

Attitudinal loyalty is supposed to be important. It is supposed to make soldiers fight for their country without threats or without ostentatious displays of state-organized patriotism. It is supposed to keep the average citizen from deserting or betraying his country.

It’s in the blood, so to speak.

John Walker, Arthur Walker, and Jerry Whitworth undoubtedly had an attitudinal loyalty to their country. They were superpatriots.

John kept a photograph of President Ronald Reagan on his desk at Confidential Reports. Laura Walker and Barbara Walker considered themselves good Americans, as did Rachel Walker and Michael Walker.

But they did not go to the authorities when they first discovered John’s secret. They remained loyal to a man who gave them nothing in return.

Michael Walker did his father’s bidding without a thought to the question of right or wrong: that question never once entered into his decision to become a spy.

How could this be?

Perhaps it is time for intelligence experts to rethink this central concept of attitudinal loyalty, this idea that Americans don’t betray their country to foreign powers the way that Europeans are perceived to do quite regularly. We trust our citizens to an extent that is almost unknown in history and unheard of in most other countries. This is as it should be.

However, we live in a society where money is no longer a mere commodity, but a sacrament. Money is power, possessions, persona, sex, and status.

John was able to separate his patriotism and his spying, and rationalize both, as he rationalized everything in his life.

But what was it about John Walker that gave him a hold over persons that superseded their love of country?

I am not a psychiatrist. As a writer, I am, at best, a chronicler of today’s events, tomorrow’s history. But at the risk of attempting to analyze, I believe there were occasions during my interviews with John when I saw into the soul of the spy.

This is what I saw:

John Walker, Jr., had an uncanny skill to see the frailties of those around him. He was able to identify the flaws in their personalities and, like a chameleon, he became whatever he needed to become, whatever they wanted him to be, in order to take advantage of them, manipulate them, and profit from their weaknesses. This was not done by chance. It was calculated, precise.

Jerry Whitworth, Arthur Walker, Barbara Walker, and Michael Walker were drawn to John and did what he asked even though he openly abused them. He became their master, in part, because he convinced each of them that without him, they were somehow incomplete. He was superior, had accomplished more, was successful. They welcomed him and, like a leech, he drew their blood.

John fled from strong persons. Whenever he met someone with a complete personality – from the unbending priests and nuns at St. Patrick’s High School in Scranton; to Bill Metcalf, the Norfolk Navy officer who complained about John’s morals and gave him his first and only poor evaluation as a sailor; to Mike Bell, the tough Wackenhut detective who refused to bend his rules to fit John’s schemes – John immediately retreated.

John preferred a world where there were no white knights, no black knights, no knights at all. There were only gray people drifting in an atmosphere of moral weightlessness. It was this type of world that reflected John’s own image, like a mirror.

“Everyone is corrupt ... everyone has a scam.”

John Walker was able to use his skill at discerning other people’s weaknesses to destroy them, including his own son. John Walker had no moral center, only an unquenchable thirst to control, to obtain admiration and power, no matter what the cost, as long as someone else paid.

Most of the criminals whom I have met as a journalist seem to have had some moral code of conduct, however twisted and slim, beyond which they could not trespass without traces of guilt and occasional remorse.

John didn’t. He was totally without principle.

There was no right or wrong, no morality or immorality, in his eyes. There were only his own wants, his own needs, whatever those might be at the moment. In John’s world, only fools believed that they were their brothers’ keepers.

John Walker did not show any remorse when Robert Hunter asked him about his crimes because he truly didn’t feel any. This is why John could say to me, with all seriousness, during one of our last sessions together, “I have lived every fantasy that I have ever had. I’ve done everything I wanted to do. And the real mistake I made in life was letting myself be surrounded by weak people.

“My mistake was in caring about my brother, Arthur, and daughter, and best friend, and in trying to help them. In the end, they used me. Each of them used me. They brought me down. If anything,” John concluded, “I am the real victim in this entire unpleasant episode.”

This was John’s truth, John’s reality.

And to John Walker that is all that really mattered.

As I walked to my car in the parking lot that hot afternoon after talking to John, I remembered something Barbara Walker had said about how John had changed during the early years of their marriage. “I had married a young sailor that liked to be called Jack, but Jack was becoming John and there was a difference.”

Jack had been playful, caring, loving. But John was none of those things.

John worried only about himself and his gratification. The name change, she felt, was significant, and so do I.

Sitting behind the wheel of my car in the prison parking lot, I looked through the windshield at what now was John’s home and I wondered: Whatever happened to Jack? If you were able to strip away all of the lies and rationalizations that surround John Walker’s life, like a craftsman removing layers of old paint, would you find Jack Walker?

And then I answered my own question.

No. Jack Walker no longer exists, if he ever did.

There is only John, flashy Johnny Walker, private eye, daredevil pilot, KGB spy.

If you removed the first layer of veneer, you would discover beneath it another, and yet another under it. And so on. In the end, you would learn that whatever had been inside had decayed long ago.

John Walker’s life had become nothing but a series of lies, myths, and illusions wrapped around an empty core. And that was all that remained.

I started my car and drove away.

Author’s Note

This book is the story of John Walker, Jr., and the members of his spy ring. It is the result of over one hundred interviews with many of the people involved in this extraordinary affair, including members of the Walker family. I conducted twenty-three separate interviews with John Walker, lasting an average of seven hours each. I also met with Arthur Walker, Michael Walker, Barbara Joy Crowley Walker, Laura Walker Snyder, Cynthia Walker, Margaret (Peggy) Scaramuzzo Walker, Rita Frisch Walker, James Walker, Tina Walker, and John Walker, Sr. It is accurate to say that I have spent several hundred hours talking to immediate members of the Walker family, and many more with the other eighty-seven people interviewed.

From the start, John Walker’s attorneys made it clear to me that John would only tell his story if he was compensated financially. As this book documents, John Walker does not do anything unless he benefits from it personally. John sold his country’s secrets for money; he enlisted members of his family in his spy ring for money; and he would only tell his story for money.

Journalists do not like arrangements like this and I am no exception. But the more I learned about the case, the more I was convinced that a thorough and accurate account of one of the most heinous traitors in this country’s history could not be written without full access to John Walker. It is for that reason that I entered into a personal contract with John and the other members of his family that remunerated them in exchange for their exclusive cooperation.

It should be noted as a matter of information that John Walker is very unlikely to benefit financially from our agreement. The Internal Revenue Service has placed a lien on John’S assets and any income he receives for failing to pay income taxes on his earnings as a spy. Thus, ironically, any money received from this book will go to the United States government.

My contract with John stipulated that I have “sole discretion over the contents [of the book], which will not be subject to control or approval by John Walker. This is not “John Walker’s book.” All our conversations were on-the-record and I made no deals as to how John would be portrayed or what would be included in the book. Neither John nor any other member of the Walker family was permitted to read any of the manuscript before it was published.

In addition to the personal interviews I conducted, the book also relies on numerous trial transcripts and FBI reports, as well as documents that have not been made public previously, including John Walker’s personal journals, family letters, grand jury testimony, and telephone conversations recorded by the FBI through wiretaps.

As noted above, besides the members of the Walker family I have mentioned, I interviewed eighty-seven other people who were involved in some aspect of this story. Among them were:

Philip Mark Snyder

Curt Christopher Walker

Frank Scaramuzzo

Roger Olson

Pamela K. Carroll

Charles “Chas” Bennett

Joseph “Joey” Long

Annie Crowley Nelson

Donald Clevenger

Bill Wilkinson

James Wightman

Frances Wightman

Robert Hunter

Jack Wagner

Joseph Wolfinger

Howard Sparks

Geneva Green

Willard Owens

Beulah Watts

Harold Watts

Sue Watts

Robert McNatt

Michael Bell

Philip Prince

Marie Hammond

Walter Price

Paul Culligan

Roberta Puma

Other persons who were interviewed but did not wish to have their names listed include teachers and friends of Michael Walker, naval co-workers of John Walker, former employees at Confidential Reports, persons investigated by John Walker, two relatives of the Walker family, and intelligence officials.

I interviewed Jerry Whitworth at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. However, because he was in the midst of appealing his conviction, Whitworth declined to answer any questions about his relationship with John Walker. Therefore, my account of Whitworth’s involvement in the spy ring is based upon information from the fifty- five-volume transcript of Whitworth’s trial; interviews with his attorney, James Larson; a previously unpublished pre-sentence report written by Dayle C. Carlson, Jr., who questioned Whitworth about his spying and friendship with John; interviews with FBI agents; FBI investigative re- ports; and interviews with John Walker. While my conversations with Whitworth were limited, I still found them valuable in studying his personality and background.

Readers should note that “Smiley,” Bill Metcalf, Shirley McClanahan, Mary Ann Mason, Sheila Woods, and Windsor Murdock are pseudonyms used to protect the privacy of real persons. All quotes attributed to them are actual statements. All other persons in this book are identified by their correct names.

Statements by Michael O’Connor, Aaron Darnell Brown, Karen Margaret Barnett, Michael McElwee, and John Peterson were taken from their sworn testimony at Whitworth’8 trial.

At various times, I have chosen to let one person recall a specific incident. In such cases, these events were confirmed by at least two other persons, and usually more, before being included. The exception is John Walker’s account of his meetings with the KGB. I have done my best to compare John’s statements to me with his comments to the FBI, which used a polygraph machine to determine whether or not he was lying. I also have used John’S financial records and personal journals to verify his trips overseas to meet the KGB. John showed an amazing ability to recall statements made to him by his two KGB handlers. Perhaps this is because he was always excited and keenly aware of what was happening when he met with them. In the few cases where I have been unable to substantiate what John Walker told me, I have used the words “John claimed” to warn the reader that his statements cannot be corroborated.

During interviews, I found that people often recalled the same events quite differently. I have noted major disparities in the book, usually by giving more than one account, but in minor cases, I have chosen the version that seemed most likely to be true.

I would like to thank several people for their help. My agent Nichola: Ellison spent countless hours working on this project. Author Nelson DeMille also read my initial drafts and made invaluable suggestions.

Without the help of defense attorneys Samuel Meekins, Jr., and Fred Warren Bennett, this book could not have been written. I am indebted to them for their candor and determination to see that all of the facts about the Walker case, even embarrassing ones, were made public. Attorney Christopher Brown also provided me with considerable help in regard to Michael Walker.

Walter Harrington, Patricia Hersch, and Gay Daly gave me excellent editorial guidance and moral support.

I would also like to thank Benjamin Bradlee, executive editor of
The Washington Post
, for granting me a leave of absence to write this book. My editors there, Jay Lovinger and Stephen Petranek, also offered valuable advice. Tony Germanotta, a reporter at
The Virginian-Pilot
and
The Ledger-Star
, proved a helpful source.

Others whose help I would like to acknowledge are Brian E. Crooks, Candace J. Vanderclute, Frank Fox, Linda Webb, Edward S. Stancheski, James Kalbaugh, Jay Myerson, Oliver Goodenough, Stanley J. Reed, Graeme W. Bush, Robert H. Powell III, John Y. Richardson, Jr., Raymond Teichman, Kathy Morris, Karen L. McClearyCale, Peter D. Miller, Lynn Smith, Dr. C.T. Shades, William Schwartz, John Fyfe, Jr., John Lefevere, members of United Christian Parish, and Fred Klein, my editor at Bantam Books.

My account of the murder of Georgi Markov was based on KGB, Inside the World’s Largest Intelligence Network, by Brian Freemantle. Information about SOSUS came, in part, from Running Critical: The Silent War, Rickover and General Dynamics, by Patrick Tyler. I also referred to The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency, by James Bamford, when questions arose about cryptology. Although I interviewed Dr. Murray S. Miron, his analysis of the RUS letters for the FBI was first published in Breaking the Ring, a book by John Barron.

As always, I am grateful to my wife, Patti, and my children, Steve, Kevin, Tony, Kathy, Kyle, Evan, Traci, and granddaughter Maribella. Other family members who I’d like to acknowledge include my parents, Elmer and Jean Earley; Gloria Brown, James Brown, LeRue and Ellen Brown; Phillip Corn; Donnie and Marcie Davis; Matthew Davis, George and Linda Earley; Michelle Holland; William and Rosemary Luzi; Charlie and Donna Stackhouse; and Jay and Elsie Strine.

I invite readers to post comments about this book and my other books on my website,
PeteEarley.com
. While I may not be able to respond to every message, I do read them all.