Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (35 page)

Chapter 55

On March 27, 1983, as soon as Michael returned to Norfolk from boot camp, he asked Rachel to dinner at a posh restaurant.

“I want you to marry me,” he said. “Will you be my wife?”

Rachel began crying.

“Yes!” she said. “Oh Michael, I love you!”

They agreed to wait for one year before marrying, in order to save some money. Michael didn’t tell his plans to John. “The last thing my dad wanted was for me to get married.”

During the next few weeks, he divided his time between Rachel and surfing with his pals. John didn’t seem to mind, but he continually lectured Michael about becoming too serious with Rachel.

“You’re about to go overseas,” John told Michael one afternoon, “and you don’t want to be tied down to a woman here. There’s no sense in missing all the fun you can have in those ports.”

John thought marriage was an outdated and unworkable tradition.

“You know, Mike,” John explained, “I don’t hate your mother. The woman is intelligent, she can be a hard worker and a good wife. But I fell out of love with her. I didn’t love her anymore. It happens. Marriage isn’t for everyone. It’s not for me and it may not be for you.

“Half the marriages in America end in divorce and most of the others aren’t truly happy. If you don’t love a person, it’s better to get out. Why stay in there, because after a while you begin to hurt each other? That’s why I don’t understand your mother. Why does she want to bury me? We’re divorced, but she can’t let me go.”

Michael agreed. “We tried to get Mom to date when we lived in Maine, but she wouldn’t,” he told John. “She still acts like you guys are married.”

“That’s so fucking crazy,” John said. “Your mother hates my guts because I dated other women. But what the hell It’s part of the game of life in America. I’m telling you that every sailor does it. Everyone of them!”

Remembering their conversation later, Michael told me, “My dad told me it was better if I didn’t get married. He said I should have fun with Rachel but definitely not get married. I thought about it, and I began to think of the domestic cases that I’d worked as a private detective, and I have to admit, I was becoming skeptical. Rarely had I seen a happy marriage, but I was convinced that Rachel and me were going to be different. I didn’t tell him that, but I felt that way.”

On April 13, Michael kissed a teary-eyed Rachel good-bye and boarded a plane en route to the aircraft carrier, U.S.S.
America
. More than 5,500 men were assigned to the carrier. Michael reported to Fighter Squadron 102, nicknamed the Diamondbacks. It was an elite unit, part of the eighty-five aircraft on board.

At the time, the squadron operated a dozen F-14 Tomcat fighter jets, the Navy’s most sophisticated supersonic tactical warplanes. Because of Michael’s secretarial skins, which he had learned at night school, he was assigned to the administration office for the fighter squadron.

One of the carrier’s first stops was Diego Garcia, the same island his father had visited, and on which Jerry had served. Any free moment, Michael headed for the beach with his surfboard.

“I really felt,” he said later, “I’d made the right choice by joining.” Michael took so many pictures of the beach, waves, sunsets, carrier, and his newly made surfing friends that he filled three photo albums. He wrote to Rachel every day, but she was busy and didn’t respond as regularly.

Michael wrote John too, and in May 1983, he received a cassette tape from his dad. It started like any other letter written by a father to his absent son. John compared his Navy experiences to Michael’s and talked about how he missed him, but John’s manipulative nature and self-interest quickly surfaced.

Howdy Mike, this is Dad. Let me see, it’s the urn, fourth of May 1983.... I just got your letter.... I’m a real shit for not having written to ya but I’m not gonna tell ya why cause you’re about as busy as I am and I don’t have to explain, right?

Okay, I see that they have told you that you have to put two years in on your squadron before you can be transferred. Well, that’s usually the kind of bullshit they tell everybody. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to beat that so-called two-year rule. You know you could take a test for another rating and pass it, and if you made third class and your squadron had no billing for it, they would be obligated to transfer ya anyway.

But all in all, it doesn’t look that bad for ya.... Yeoman is by far the better of the ratings. A PN really handles nothing but enlisted pay records and enlisted problems, but yeomen, on the other hand, are more like secretaries.

A yeoman handles a wide range of things from officers’ records to classified control. They could handle the intelligence library and, and jobs such as that. I mean, it’s definitely a racket.... Advancement is quick. I’m sure it is. Your typing will help you. . . . Christ, just get down there and practice. And you’re already talking about reenlistment.

Man! That is all right.

Okay, um, what you are allowed to do is pass on the ship’s operating, squadron operating schedule to your immediate family even if it’s ah, restricted or classified. You’ll find there’s an anomaly there that doesn’t seem quite understandable, ah, that is to say, the movement of a ship could be classified information, confidential or even secret, and yet the Navy acknowledges the fact that you’re gonna go home and tell your wife what your sailing date is.

And you are saying how come I am allowed to reveal classified material to my wife who is not cleared. Well there really is no answer for that.

There’s probably some stupid instruction somewhere that says, ah, it is permissible to ah, tell your immediate family the ship’s movements...

Anyway, let me know your schedule and what you mean when you say three more eight-month cruises. What ships and what are, what is your squadron’s deployment schedule?

Ah, I would really be curious to know what that is....

Okay, I hope you haven’t forgotten Mother’s Day.... Your mom did call and P.K. talked to her. I was somewhere and she was looking for your address and I didn’t call her back. I haven’t heard anything from Margaret. I’m too busy, and Laura, of course, fell off the fucking planet...

...Mother’s Day, I almost feel obligated to try to get up to Scranton with or without P.K. Maybe I can get Uncle Art to go, but basically, I haven’t much opportunity to have any contact with the family.... Work, work, work, same old shit, right?

“Just like my father, I loved being on the ocean,” Michael recalled. “It was in my blood, I guess. There was something about being at sea that I loved.”

The U.S.S.
America
returned to Norfolk in June, and Michael discovered his father had converted his room into an office. Michael was upset because his father hadn’t even asked him. He also was angry because P.K. had moved back into the house and acted like she had more of a right to be there than Michael did.

John detected Michael’s anger and offered a half-hearted apology to Michael about taking over his room. After a few days, Michael moved out of the house and into a room at the naval station barracks.

“I was getting tired of my dad,” Michael said. “He was doing stupid things, and P.K. was really pissing me off. She was using my dad. It was black and white and I saw it, but he didn’t, and when I tried to tell him about it, it made him mad. I mean, he was on this real ego kick about his age and being young.”

John didn’t try to stop Michael from leaving. “I figured it was time for him to get out on his own,” John recalled. Besides, John’s indifference only seemed to make Michael more intent on pleasing him.

“I knew my father was a spy,” Michael recalled. “My mother had told me and he had dropped hints when we’d gone to bars. He kept saying that he’d tell me someday how he made his money. But the truth is that I got tired of waiting for him to ask me. I mean, heres how I felt, what’s the deal, doesn’t he think he can trust me?”

While the U.S.S.
America
was in port, Fighter Squadron 102 worked out of the Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach. Michael continued his secretarial duties in the administration office, where one job included signing and opening all registered mail. Often he received low-level classified reports during such deliveries.

One night when P.K. was gone, John invited Michael over for grilled hamburgers in the backyard. During dinner, John quizzed his son about his job at the air station.

“What’ya do out there?”

“I type orders and other things, do some filing, and also open up the registered mail,” Michael said.

“And then I told my dad on purpose,” Michael recalled, “ ‘It’s real neat, Dad, every once in a while, secret documents come through there and I get to look at them and they have all kinds of information in them.’ ”

Michael watched to see his father’s reaction, but all John said was, “Oh really? Sounds interesting.”

“He didn’t approach me,” Michael said, “and I didn’t understand why. It really pissed me off.”

A few days later, John asked Michael to come by the house. He took Michael into the den and closed the door.

“Michael, you may know this already,” John said, “because your mother might have said something about it to you, but if you make copies of those documents that you work with, the classified ones, and you give them to me, I can get you some money. Some big money.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand a month if it’s good stuff.”

“I wasn’t shocked when he told me,” Michael said to me later. “I thought it was really cool. I mean, he finally trusted me enough to tell me what he did. He thought I was man enough to handle what he was saying.”

Michael asked John, “How do I know when to take something?”

“Mike, when the time comes, you will know it is right.”

“Okay, cut me in.”

Remembering that conversation, Michael told me later, “I was proud, really proud, and I felt so cool. I mean, this was just like a story out of some book, a spy novel, really! I could hardly wait to meet some beautiful blonde Russian agent.”

Michael didn’t keep John’s secret well. He told a surfing buddy that John was a spy, but Michael made it sound like John worked for the CIA. “It was like I was the first kid on the block to have a spy for a father” Michael recalled. “We were going to be spies together, man.

“I didn’t have any ideological concerns,” Michael explained. “I was in it because my dad was in it. He was a PI, I was a PI. He was in the Navy, I’m in the Navy. He’s a spy, I wanted to be a spy.”

Michael told Rachel while they were riding in Michael’s truck to a party. “Hey Rachel, there’s something you should know,” Michael said. “Look, my father’s a spy and I’m a spy too.”

“Wow! Really!” Rachel said.

“Yeah, I’m going to make us a lot of money.”

Michael stole his first classified document a few days after John recruited him. It was amazingly simple. The document was a report that came in the registered mail. Michael signed for it, looked through it, and thought it was something his father might want to see. So he simply stuffed it into a small backpack that he kept his personal items in and took it to John’s house. He walked into the den and tossed the report on John’s desk.

John looked through it. “This is very good, Michael,” he said. “See if you can bring me more.”

Michael didn’t have access to cryptographic materials. In fact, Michael wasn’t supposed to have access to any classified documents because he hadn’t undergone a background investigation by the Navy and didn’t have even a minimum security clearance. But no one in the Navy had taken the time to question Michael’s assignment. Instead, they simply believed him when he said he had the necessary clearances.

Even though Michael couldn’t get cryptographic materials, he had access to information about the F-14 fighter jet and to some classified messages about various operations. One exercise, in particular, interested John. The U.S.S.
America
was scheduled to go on a Caribbean cruise in late October 1983, but Michael received an emergency telephone call from the ship and was told to report early. Michael called John.

“Something big is happening, we’re pulling out tonight!”

“Get what you can, but be careful,” John warned.

At 5:30 A.M. on October 25, the United States invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, where a sixteen-member military council had taken control of the government only a few days earlier. Michael was part of the Navy force that participated in the invasion, and he claimed later that during it he saw dozens of sensitive messages about how it was coordinated and planned. “I didn’t understand most of the sensitive stuff that came in because it was in code, but I was able to read a few things,” he recalled.

Michael had not become sophisticated enough as a spy to know how to steal the messages and copy them. But each night he wrote down as much information as he could remember, and after the carrier returned home, he shared this information with his father.

“The United States played a much larger role than it admitted in the coup in Grenada,” Michael claimed later, “and when I told my dad about what I had seen, he got really excited. I was on a roll.”

Michael was beginning to realize that he had been “groomed” for the spy business. Why else had his father pushed him to become a private investigator, to study typing at night school, and to join the Navy?

One day, Michael confronted his father. “Dad, did you groom me to be a spy?”

John didn’t reply, so Michael asked him again. “Is this some sort of planned thing or what?”

“What’s your Social Security number, Mike?” John answered.

“What?”

“Tell me the first three numbers of your Social Security number,” John repeated.

“Zero, zero, seven,” Michael replied.

“Right,” said John, “only that’s oh-oh-seven, just like James Bond, ya dummy. You’ve got a license to kill, baby!”

Michael was startled.

“How did he do that?” Michael asked me later. “How’d he arrange for me to get those numbers? My dad really had planned it all out. He knew all along.”

This is what John told me when I asked him about his recruitment of Michael: