U.S. catches British spy disease: with variations

Press, 22 June 1985, Page 19

U.S. catches British spy disease: with variations

ROBERT CHESSHYRE,

of the London “Observer,” reports from

Washington on the way greed has replaced ideology in America’s espionage scandals.

When former Chief Petty Officer John A. Walker got drunk, he would telephone his former wife in Maine and boast of his exploits as a spy for the Soviet Union. He corresponded through the regular mail with his fellow agents, flew around the world to meet their ships when they docked at far-away ports, and used his home telephone to talk about his movements.

For at least 15 years, he dropped rubbish bags stuffed with classified documents in the woods near Washington to be retrieved by officials from the Soviet Embassy, and lurked each time while his contact replaced the documents with the large bundles of greenbacks he was paid for his treachery. From the relatively humdrum business of prying into other people’s lives to set up divorce cases, he apparently earned enough to buy up parcels of land — including plots in the Bahamas — run a houseboat, and fly a private plane. According to a brother — one of the few family members not accused of espionage — Walker only joined the Navy as a teenager because he was arrested for breaking into an office and was handed the option of jail or the armed forces. Yet had it not been for his impoverished and bitter former wife finally turning him in to the F. 8.1. after years of agonising — she allegedly knew he had made a document drop from which he collected $35,000 as early as 1970 — Walker, another of his brothers, his son, and his best friend would still

be peddling United States naval secrets to the Russians.

This extraordinary saga of treason not only has the American public agog at its daily twists and turns, but has severely jolted a nation already suffering from a rash of spy cases.

With four members of the Walker ring in jail — and probably more to come — there are now 12 Americans awaiting trial on espionage charges: 11 others have been convicted in the past four years. What used to be known as a British disease has crossed the Atlantic; and, in keeping with the times, money (“spying for greed”) rather than ideology is spreading the contagion. Congress has discovered to its horror that 4.3 million Americans have security clearance, giving the estimated 800 full-time Soviet agents in the United States a staggering target opportunity. Security reassessments are seldom done. John Walker, who enjoyed one of the highest categories of clearance, was vetted only once in 17 years. According to his wife, Walker, now 47, was spying as long ago as 1968, just one year after serving as senior radio man aboard the Polaris nuclear missile submarine Simon Bolivar. He was then a communications officer at the Atlantic Fleet Submarine headquarters at Norfolk, Virginia. With his flamboyant style, unstable character, and mildly extravagant habits, he was exactly the type that F. 8.1. handbooks warn are prime targets for Russian agents. Once Walker himself had taken

the bait, he appeared to have no difficulty in using Russian dollars to ensnare his fellow spies, whom he identified in a letter to his Russian controller, recovered by the F. 8.1., by letters of the alphabet — “S” for his 22-year-old son Michael, a seaman aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz; “K” for his brother Arthur, 50, a retired lieu-tenant-commander and anti-sub-marine warfare instructor, who had been working for a defence contractor; and “D” for his best friend, Jerry Whitworth, 45, a retired communications petty officer like himself. The further letter “F” was thought to have referred to Walker’s half-brother Gary, 24, an aviation electronics technician working on helicopters at Norfolk, but he is now said not to be implicated. Brother Arthur admitted to the F. 8.1. that he was paid $12,000 for

delivering documents taken from his employer, VSE Corp, Virginia Beach, where he was involved in planning maintenance of carriers and amphibious ships. Michael Walker was talked into joining the Navy by his father; he would have needed little bidding. A neighbour said he would “do damn near anything to please his father.” John Walker’s last drop four weeks ago comprised 75 documents, sent by his son from the Nimitz, on board which another 151 b of classified material was found near the young seaman’s bunk.

This is a tale not just of greed, but of “middle class” white America, a mobile entrepreneurial society of fluctuating fortune living largely on its wits in small towns and trailer parks. For John Walker, this environment proved the perfect cover.

The ease with which the retired navyman manipulated and dominated people encouraged the cynic in him. While spying for the Russians, he publicly espoused extreme Right-wing views, apparently even setting himself up as the Virginia state director of the Ku- . Klux-Klan. Walker seems to have inherited his taste for dramatics from his father, John, senior who was variously a publicist, a cinema manager, and a local radio personality in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the family lived. The father also had a struggle with the bottle, and now lives in the town of Temperanceville in Virginia.

That drinking caused family strains, eventual divorce and hardship, and Walker left school, where he was described as an underachiever, without graduating. He himself married when both he and his wife, Barbara, were still teenagers. They had three daughters and a son, Michael, before them-

selves divorcing in 1976.

Possibly nearly 20 years of successful spying made him careless, but he treated Barbara with dangerous contempt. While he enjoyed the good life in Virginia, she was struggling as a shoe-factory worker in the small Maine town of Skowhegan, putting in overtime to make ends meet.

A neighbour described her returning from work covered in glue and soot, too tired to change clothes. “She’d say, ‘Johnny Walker did this to me’.”

For at least a year, from January, 1984, she agonised openly with her friends about whether she should turn her husband in. Then last January, Barbara, now living on Cape Cod above a Christian bookstore, and one of her daughters, Laura, finally told what they knew to the F. 8.1. What she didn’tknow was that her favourite child, Michael, was implicated. She is reported to be “just about destroyed” by his arrest. The F. 8.1. waited nearly six; months before pouncing. The break came when Walker was overheard on a telephone tap saying that he would be away over the week-end of May 18-19 on an assignmen t only he could handle.

Agents tailed him north towards Washington to the small town of Poolesville, Maryland, where thev saw him standing by a tree bearing a “no hunting” sign. An hour later Special Agent Bruce Brahe retrieved the brown bag containing documents from the Nimitz. Walker was arrested in the early hours of the next morning in a nearby Ramada Inn, where he allegedly drew a gun during a brief struggle.

A trial date has been set for September, and more arrests are still predicted.