Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (7 page)

Chapter 9

Navy life was hard on the new family.

Six months after Margaret was born, John had to report to the U.S.S.
Forrestal
, an aircraft carrier in Norfolk. The transfer sounded terrific at first. Arthur and Rita were in Norfolk and John was eager for Barbara to meet them.

And the
Forrestal
was not just any aircraft carrier. It was the newest carrier in the fleet, the first ever designed to accommodate jet aircraft, and the largest ship in the world. It was longer than ten football fields placed end to end, and it reached thirteen stories above the water. Capable of holding ninety aircraft, it could move at an astounding speed of thirty-three knots. Assignment to the 5,499-man crew of the
Forrestal
reinforced John’s belief that he was one of the Navy’s rising stars.

“I was really developing good self-esteem and self-confidence. By this time, I had aced the high school GED and had no difficulty passing a two-year college equivalency test. I was studying like a maniac and making every rank at the absolute minimum time. The thing I liked about the Navy was that promotions were based upon how well you did on exams, not how well you kissed ass. Your commanding officer might despise you, but if you did a good job, the Navy had to promote you, and I was thriving on that kind of competition.”

Unfortunately, John’s transfer to the
Forrestal
was a disaster. John and Barbara had assumed they could all stay with Arthur and Rita in Norfolk until they could find an apartment, but when they arrived, they discovered that Arthur and Rita were away on vacation. “We had to rent the first apartment that we saw, and we slept on the floor that night because we didn’t have enough money for a motel room and didn’t have any furniture,” said John. “We were really pissed at Art and Rita.” A few days later, John learned that the
Forrestal
was about to leave on a seven-month cruise of the Mediterranean. Barbara was unnerved. What would she and the baby do while John was at sea? She didn’t know anyone in Norfolk. John telephoned his parents in Scranton and made arrangements for Barbara and Margaret to move in with them.

John and Barbara were both miserable during the separation. John had promised her that he wouldn’t go ashore when the
Forrestal
docked in foreign ports because they wanted to save his pay to buy furniture and rent a nice apartment. John was also afraid he would be tempted by hookers if he left the ship. So when his shipmates went carousing, he stayed aboard and studied for his next promotion. At first, he received long, passionate letters from Barbara, but suddenly she stopped writing, and after four months of silence, John sent an angry telegram. Barbara replied with a curt: “Everything fine. Love you.”

“The reason I stopped writing,” Barbara claimed later, “was because I didn’t want him to know what his mother was doing to me, the hell that she was putting me through. Pop [johnny] and I did all the housecleaning and I did all the cooking and she didn’t do anything but go to work and come home and bitch, bitch, bitch.”

Peggy recalled Barbara’s stay differently, describing her daughter-in-law as lazy. “She expected to be waited upon.” Perhaps it was jealousy over John, but Barbara and Peggy couldn’t stand each other. As soon as John’s cruise was over, he and Barbara returned to Norfolk. “I’m quitting the Navy as soon as I can,” John suddenly announced one afternoon to Barbara and to his brother Arthur. “I can’t stand these goddamn aircraft carriers anymore.”

Arthur urged John to reconsider. “Try to get on subs once again,” he pleaded. But John had already tried and been rejected once more. “There might be a way for you to get assigned to a submarine through the back door,” Arthur volunteered. The next morning, Arthur drove to the personnel office at the Norfolk Naval Base, headquarters for the entire Atlantic fleet, and with luck was able to get John’s orders changed. He had been scheduled to go to another aircraft carrier, but instead was sent in May 1959 to a sub tender, the U.S.S.
Howard W. Gilmore
, based in Charleston, South Carolina. John was thrilled by the move. Arthur hadn’t gotten him on a sub, but this was close enough.

Barbara, meanwhile, gave birth to Cynthia, the couple’s second child, that same month. Two months later, Barbara was pregnant again. The couple’s third daughter, Laura, was born April 24, 1960. Barbara and John had been married less than three years, but they already had three daughters and their roles as husband and wife had been clearly defined.

“My job is to earn an income for my family,” John told Barbara the first time that she asked him to help change a diaper. “I work hard sixty hours a week on the ship and I’m not going to come home and change diapers or do dishes. You don’t work and you are the wife, so that’s your job.”

It made sense to Barbara. “I did very little to cross John or upset him early in our marriage,” she told me later. “I wanted things to be perfect when he was at home. If there was something that I really wanted to do and he didn’t want to do it, that was okay. If I really wanted to do it, I put it off until he was at sea.”

By May 1960, John had earned a total of five promotions, but he and Barbara were still living on about the same amount of money that they had when first married, even though their family now numbered five. “Every time John got a promotion and more pay, we put the raise into our savings account on the theory that if we don’t have it, we won’t miss it,” Barbara explained.

They also adhered to a strict credit policy: anything bought on credit had to be paid off within two years, and nothing new could be purchased on credit until all previous charges were paid. Saving money was an obsession with them, a testament that showed how much they cared for each other. Barbara bought powdered milk for her daughters even when she could afford fresh milk. John wore his shoes until they could no longer be resoled. Both refused to tip waitresses.

“When I first met Barbara,” John said, “I told her my plans for life. I had no intention of doing my twenty years and retiring and having nothing to show for it. I was going to save my money and invest it and have something going for me when I got out – a business run by someone else. Barbara knew that. She had to be prepared for it because I wasn’t going to be like my dad with no money, no future, nothing going for him.”

In June 1960, John passed an eye exam and was judged fit for submarine duty. It was the third time he had taken the test, and the only reason he passed was that the Navy had lowered its vision requirements. Five months later, John moved Barbara and his daughters back in with Peggy and Johnny in Scranton and left for sixteen weeks of training at the Navy submarine school in New London, Connecticut.

Barbara found life in Scranton more depressing than ever. She fought with Peggy constantly. A short time after Barbara arrived, Johnny moved out of the house and back in with his mother in Scranton. Barbara dashed to phone John and tell him that his mother had driven Johnny away. John rushed home and upbraided Peggy. “If you were half the wife that Barbara is, he wouldn’t have left you,” John said, Peggy seethed. It wasn’t really her boy talking, she said later. “It was that witch, Barbara.”

After completing submarine training, John was assigned to the U.S.S.
Razorback
, a diesel submarine stationed in San Diego, and he moved his wife and children there. The
Razorback
left on an extended cruise days after John arrived. On June 28, 1961, Peggy finally received her first letter from him. He had been at sea for four months and his letter contained an apology for his angry outburst at her over Johnny and was filled with sweet references to Barbara, whom he called Bobbie:

“Much to my surprise this afternoon, I received a phone call from Bobbie. I feared the worst, but she was just lonesome and wanted to call. In a way I wish she hadn’t called; it only made me very homesick. Like all women, she started to cry and I swore I would have also if there weren’t so many sailors around. So, if you get a chance, I’d rather have you write Bobbie than me. I think it’s harder on the girls than the men.”

After the U.S.S.
Razorback
returned, it was sent to San Francisco and John moved his family into subsidized Navy housing on the base. For the first time in their marriage, John and Barbara had a normal nine-to-five life together for a long period. They also allowed themselves some spending money to eat at restaurants and see movies. John bought a bicycle and rode it to the ship each day to save money.

The togetherness, however, wore thin. John discovered that Barbara spent most of her time talking about their three daughters and he was quickly bored by domestic discussions. She in turn grew weary of john’s endless sea stories. One evening John came home early from a short test cruise on the submarine and found the house in disarray. Dirty clothes had been dropped on the floor, and the kitchen was jammed with several days’ worth of dirty dishes and silverware. Barbara, who was pregnant again, and the three girls were nowhere to be seen. When they arrived home a few hours later, John was waiting on the front step.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

“I was too tired to clean up tonight so I took the girls to a drive-in movie,” Barbara said.

John told me later during an interview that this incident was a turning point.

“I have always been a neat person,” he explained. “I can’t stand an untidy house and that incident stands out in my mind. To put it in perspective, I was literally busting my ass, trying to get ahead at work, but my wife, who I thought was in the same mold, was becoming a typical lazy Navy wife who didn’t want to do anything but sit at home and raise kids. I began to sense that she was not the woman who I thought I had married. We had gotten married at an early age and both of us had a lot of growing up to do and I was growing up in a much different direction than she was. Things in the marriage were still okay, but I was beginning to see long-range things in Barbara that I was not happy with. Laziness was the main thing, which resulted in her being what I would call a slob.

“She had started watching television, and it seemed that she was watching it twenty-three hours a day and doing absolutely nothing to progress or improve herself. Technically, we were both high school dropouts, but I had done something about that. I had gotten my GED. When we first met, I viewed Barbara as someone who was poor as hell, but who had lots of ambition. She had pulled herself out of the sewer, and I figured she would claw her way to the top. We were very similar in that way. We were aggressive and had high aspirations. We were going to make something of ourselves. But after a few years of marriage, it became clear to me that she was falling to the side. She wasn’t doing anything. She talked about getting her GED. She talked about it endlessly, but she never went after it. I’ll give her this much: raising kids is tough. But I was out at sea a lot and I still managed to study hard enough to make all of my ranks.”

In the spring of 1962, John moved his family again – the fifteenth move in five years – to Vallejo, California, where he reported for duty on the U.S.S.
Andrew Jackson
, one of the Navy’s new nuclear-powered submarines. It was a trying time. Barbara was having a difficult pregnancy and had started complaining about John’s refusal to help around the house or care for the children – Margaret, age four; Cynthia, age two; Laura, age one. Despite her badgering, John refused to lift a finger. “The Navy is my job. The house and children are yours!”

Barbara went into labor on November 1, 1962. John had planned to play in a baseball game that day with some fellows from the radio crew, so he dropped Barbara at the hospital entrance and then went on to the game. Barbara gave birth to a boy. As she was being wheeled back to her room, she thought back to Margaret’s birth when John had insisted on being with her in the delivery room.

They had been so much in love. She began to cry.

John had always wanted a son, and when he heard that Barbara had given birth to a boy, he rushed to the hospital, armed with long-stemmed roses and a large box of chocolates.

“I had always planned to name our first son John Anthony Walker the third:’ Barbara Walker told me later. “Every time I got pregnant, I prayed it would be a boy so that John could have a son who he could pass his name to. On every previous pregnancy, I was going to name the baby John if it were a boy.

“But when I had my baby boy, John wasn’t there. He was at some damn baseball game with his pals,” she said. “So I named my son Michael Lance Walker, and when John found out he was furious.”

It was one of the sweetest moments in her life, Barbara Walker recalled.

PART III

traitor

The man who pauses on the paths of treason, halts on a quicksand; the first step engulfs him

–
Aaron Hill
,
Henry V (act 1, scene 1)

Chapter 10

The three-inch-thick book had a bright red covet with the warning TOP SECRET-SPECAT printed on it in bold letters. The acronym SPECAT, short for SPECIAL CATEGORY, meant that even military personnel with top secret clearances couldn’t examine the book without special authorization. John knew why. The book contained the plans for the beginning of WorId War III.

John lifted the cover of the red binder and read the title:
Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)
. Even the title was secret. Officially, no such plan existed. The SIOP (pronounced
sigh-op
) was the Pentagon’s road map for a full-scale war with the Soviet Union. It contained a list of all U.S. nuclear weapons and their targets.

In the early 1960s, mapping Armageddon was even more intricate and difficult than it is today because each U.S. missile carried only one nuclear warhead and the nation’s most powerful nuclear bombs would have had to be carried into the Soviet Union and dropped by B-52 bombers because they were so big. The trajectory of every nuclear missile, whether it was fired from land (intercontinental ballistic missiles) or sea (Polaris missiles), had to be precisely calculated to make certain that no missiles collided in the air and to ensure that some flight paths into Russia were kept open. These pathways, called target windows, had to be kept clear so that the B-52’s could carry out their missions.

John had been given permission by the captain of the nuclear submarine U.S.S.
Simon Bolivar
to see the SIOP. The captain had received a message from Atlantic fleet headquarters in Norfolk saying that another U.S. submarine had developed mechanical problems and was limping back to port. Until that submarine was repaired, the
Bolivar
had to cover some of its targets.

It took John just a few minutes to log the
Bolivar’s
new assignment, but the SIOP fascinated him and he read every possible detail before locking it up in a safe.

“It was incredible,” he recalled later. “Haven’t you ever wondered if the United States would go after the eastern bloc countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia if there were a full-scale war? Haven’t you ever wondered if we would hit China and what cities would be blown up in Russia and in what order? Well, here it was – all of it – in my hands, and I was reading it! I mean, this was your wildest fucking nightmare and it was right before my eyes!”

It was at this point that John remembers wondering how much the Soviet Union would pay for stolen U.S. military secrets, but he insisted that his curiosity was nothing more than just that – an innocent inquisitiveness. His thoughts, he said, were similar to those of a man who inherits a valuable heirloom. He has no intention of selling the family treasure, yet he still wonders how much it would fetch from a collector. Knowing the Soviets might pay thousands of dollars for a copy of the SIOP made John’s access to it that much more savory.

John had entered the Navy’s submarine force at a pivotal time in its history. In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union had both moved to enlarge and modernize their postwar submarine fleets. The first dramatic step for the U.S. Navy came with the successful launch of a submarine powered by nuclear energy. Suddenly diesel submarines were obsolete. Atomic-powered submarines were legitimate underwater vessels, capable of remaining submerged for months. Almost overnight, the importance of submarines increased. Difficult for the enemy to track, they became the silent eyes of the Navy. The next major improvement came in 1961, when ballistic missiles were added to the submarines’ armory. No longer were submarines confined to firing torpedoes at ships. Now they could attack entire cities.

John joined the submarine fleet just as it was being converted from an aged diesel flotilla into a modern nuclear armada. His first submarine assignment had been to a diesel-powered vessel, but a year later he joined the crew of the new, nuclear-powered U.S.S.
Andrew Jackson
. One year after John came aboard, the
Jackson
moved to the East Coast, where it launched the first Polaris “A-3” missile on October 26, 1963. The two-stage, 30,000-pound Polaris “A-3” could hit a target 2,875 miles away – nearly twice the range of previous Polaris missiles. For the next two years, John roamed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean on the
Jackson
. Barbara and the four children lived in Navy housing in Charleston specially built for Polaris missile crews.

The workings of nuclear submarines and Polaris missile launches were not the only bits of front-line technology John was privy to. Depending upon which Navy official was speaking, the Russians were either nipping at our heels in submarine development in the fifties and sixties or were years ahead of us. To counter the Russian threat, whatever its size, the Pentagon devised numerous anti-submarine-warfare techniques. The most impressive was SOSUS, an acronym for Sound Surveillance System. SOSUS was nothing more than a giant underwater ear in the form of several hundred specially built hydrophones installed by cable-laying ships on the continental shelf off the East and West Coasts.

The architects of America’s nuclear submarine program had adopted a one-reactor, one-propeller design and paid extraordinary attention to making U.S. nuclear submarines as noiseless as possible. However, the Russians had focused on speed, and built nuclear subs with two reactors and twin propellers that created a much more jarring wake than our single blade. The Russians also bolted pumps, motors, and other internal machinery directly to the inner hull of each submarine, which resulted in the broadcasting of the slightest vibration or clatter into the sea. By the time that John joined the
Jackson
crew in 1962, the Navy had perfected SOSUS to the point that a Soviet submarine could not leave its home port on the Barents Sea or the Sea of Okhotsk and head for deep water without being detected by SOSUS ears. By the mid-sixties, the U.S. Navy had so thoroughly bugged the continental shelf that it was impossible for a foreign submarine to approach the U.S. coast without each mile of its voyage being carefully tracked by SOSUS. The hydrophones, later enhanced by computers, worked so well that SOSUS operators could tell from the sound of propeller wash not only the location of a submarine but also its type.

The SOSUS system was another top secret that made John pause and wonder: “How much would this be worth to the Reds?”

John didn’t consider such thoughts unique. “Everyone aboard a submarine talked about these things,” he insisted. “It was always in a joking way, such as ‘Hey, I’ll bet the Reds would pay a bundle for this,’ but it was standard conversation in the radio room.”

In interviews with me, John’s shipmates denied such conversation ever took place. Any mention, even in jest, of selling classified information to the Russians would have been seen as suspect behavior and probable cause for investigation, they claimed. But John insisted that the value of classified material was a frequent topic and that the Navy unwittingly encouraged such speculation because it bombarded submarine crews with warnings about techniques the Soviets used to discover Navy secrets.

“The Navy was paranoid about nuclear submarines and it stressed the importance of keeping information secure. Naturally that made you wonder: ‘How much would this stuff be worth?’ “

While John was a radio operator on board the U.S.S.
Andrew Jackson
, he underwent his first and only “background investigation,” conducted by a naval investigator named Milo A. Bauerly. There was little reason at the time for Bauerly to be suspicious of John. During his nine years in the Navy, John had earned seven promotions, each on schedule. His commanding officers called him “bright, energetic, and enthusiastic.” His neighbors and friends assured Bauerly that John didn’t have a drinking or drug problem. He appeared to be happily married, was not in any financial trouble, was not a homosexual, and had no known contact or friendship with foreigners.

Bauerly knew about John’s criminal record as a teenager – the matter was serious enough to make him read the sealed juvenile court records in the Scranton courthouse. But participation in a single bungled burglary of a clothing store seemed insignificant when compared to his pristine Navy record. John was not the first case Bauerly had seen of a troubled teenager straightened out by the Navy. Based on Bauerly’s findings, the Navy granted John a clearance on December 29, 1964, to work with top secret and cryptographic materials.

John developed a reputation as a clown aboard the
Jackson
. During one cruise, be mixed several spoonfuls of peanut butter with other ingredients and beat the concoction into a mixing bowl until it had the same texture as human excrement. Having formed the peanut butter into a coil, he placed it on a piece of paper on an ensign’s desk. Needless to say, the officer was horrified when he discovered the substance.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded. John stuck his finger in the peanut butter and then pressed it to his lips. “Tastes like shit, sir!” he replied calmly.

When the
Jackson
moved from San Diego to Charleston, John and Barbara began to live a little higher on the hog. “We bought this little bar and two or three barstools, and we really stocked up the bar well,” John said. “It was the first time that we could afford to buy expensive liquor, and when I came home at night, Barbara would be waiting with a drink and we would both have one before dinner, just like we saw on television and in the movies. I drank scotch and Barbara drank gin and tonic, and Margaret [age eight] was big enough that we even had her mixing them for us.”

John was on a ninety-day rotation at the time, which meant that after three months at sea, he spent three months at home. After each cruise, John came back armed with bottles of cheap, tax-free liquor. The Navy limited the number of bottles a sailor could bring home, but John paid nondrinkers to buy him their allotments. “I think all of us had a drinking problem during those years,” said Donald Clevenger, a crewmate of John’s and a friend of the family in the mid-1960s.

“Our life-styles were built around parties and booze. There always seemed to be a group of people at Johnny’s house, a special gang. Usually they were radio people from the boat ...”

In August 1965, one of John’s commanding officers transferred to the nuclear-powered submarine U.S.S.
Simon Bolivar
, and he asked John to transfer with him and run the
Bolivar’s
radio room. John quickly agreed. “I was beginning to peak. I was at the top of my profession.”

On the
Bolivar
, John befriended Bill Wilkinson, one of the radio operators of lesser rank who worked for him. Wilkinson, a wiry, feisty Louisiana boy with an uncultivated style, became John’s drinking buddy and sparked John’s interest in politics, debating the civil rights movement and segregation with him for hours on end. Wilkinson was a racist – he later became Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan – and John delighted in teasing him about blacks. All John had to do to rattle Wilkinson when the two men went on liberty was to tell him that his dinner had been prepared by a black. Wilkinson would rather starve than eat it.

John joined the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative political group, and had Barbara host several coffees for members and recruits. He enrolled in a book club that mailed him one “great book of the western world” each month. John and Barbara read the first book that arrived in the mail and discussed it, but later she fell behind on the reading and dropped out. John didn’t. He read each book – Greek mythology, Plato – not because he enjoyed them, but because he was trying desperately to better himself.

“What I was trying to do during this period in my life,” John said, “was constantly improve and learn.” At the time few people realized John’s motivation. “The only reason I joined the John Birch Society was because it was good for my career. I mean, what could be more natural. The Navy is an anticommunist group. So are the Birchers. It just made sense. It was all show.” So were the books. He made certain that his boss and the radio crew aboard the
Bolivar
saw what he was reading.

In the spring of 1966, Barbara received an upsetting telephone call from a close buddy of John’s. “I think my wife is in love with your husband,” he warned her. A few minutes later, the sailor’s wife knocked at her door. The woman announced that she was leaving her husband for John. Barbara poured her a cup of coffee and began gently asking her a series of questions.

“How did you get here, dear?”

The woman, who was only twenty-two, said that she had driven over in her husband’s car. “If you get divorced, you are going to lose that car,” Barbara said. “Now, are you going to go to work or what?” The woman said she hadn’t thought about that. “Well, your husband isn’t going to support you anymore if you divorce him.” Barbara spent almost an hour explaining “reality” to the woman. After she left, Barbara began dealing with her own situation.

“She had given me every indication – she had said everything but they had had an affair.... It hurt me a lot that John had slept with someone else, but I did not blame the other woman. He had set her up for the kill. She was young and didn’t know better.”

Barbara was furious at John, who was away on a ninety-day Polaris cruise. She did not know that John already had had several sexual liaisons in foreign ports with hookers by this time. She had never suspected him of adultery.

Her fury was tempered, however, by the same “reality” that she had described to the young woman. Even if a judge required John to pay child support and alimony, his Navy pay wouldn’t be sufficient for her and the children to continue living as they were. After all their years of penny-pinching, John and Barbara had finally achieved a financial status that allowed them some luxury, and Barbara didn’t want to give that up. Not yet.

She was still in love with John, too. They often fought and she was angry at him much of the time, but there were still some good times between them. Just a few months earlier, they had taken a second honeymoon. Barbara had flown to Spain and met John when he was on liberty. They had bought a fire-engine red MG Midget and driven the back roads of Spain, Italy, and France. It had been a magical trip. Barbara recalled eating Brie and drinking Chablis with John while watching the sun set over the Rock of Gibraltar. They made love one night in the outskirts of Paris in a tiny room John had rented from a farm family. The next morning they ate breakfast with the couple and their gaggle of children.