Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (39 page)

Chapter 60

The operations administration office was on level 3 of the enormous U.S.S.
Nimitz
and was considered one of the most important chambers in the carrier. Anything that had to do with the ship’s operation, destination, or mission passed through this office and generally found its way to Michael’s desk, because he was the yeoman responsible for routing messages, filing memos, and typing orders.

Besides working in what the Navy called OPS-ADMIN, Michael also was assigned to the office next door, known as STRIKE-OPS, which is where the carrier’s top echelon of officers meet to plan and coordinate actual combat operations. The Navy recognized the importance of Michael’s job even though he was technically a low-ranking yeoman. Only persons with a secret clearance or above were supposed to work in the center. After his arrest, the Navy would announce that Michael had such a clearance, but, in truth, he had never undergone a background check.

“When I reported to work,” Michael told me, “I was told that I had to get a clearance to work in the office. I said, ‘Okay, no problem,’ but I never put in for one and no one ever followed up on it. They just believed me when I told them that I had one.”

Michael’s promotion to the OPS-ADMIN office and subsequent failure to obtain the proper clearance was a major breach of Navy security that was not publicly reported but was later substantiated by FBI and Naval Investigative Service agents.

“Somebody really screwed up even letting him in there,” an investigator confirmed later.

The room where Michael worked was spartan. Along one wall to the left of the door were three large file cabinets containing classified messages and orders. A copy machine and supply cabinet sat next to the file cabinets. In the center of the room stood a large steel table holding four large clipboards, each of which contained various messages about the ship’s maneuvers and operations. Michael’s desk faced the wall directly across from the door. It was one of a row of five desks, each belonging to someone of progressively higher rank. The wall to Michael’s right had a high-speed computer printer in front of it and an MPDS, or Message Processing Distribution System, machine. It reminded Michael of a teletype machine as it printed various messages sent to the office.

On the same wall as the door was a computer terminal and the duty officer’s desk. It was Michael’s job to tear messages off the MPDS machine, deliver them to the five senior officers in the office, and do whatever secretarial chores were required. He also had the mundane task of picking up the seven burn bags in the office and carrying them to a fan room. These bags looked much like standard grocery store bags, except that they were unmarked. Every secret and confidential document received by the OPS-ADMIN office was supposed to be placed in a burn bag once it was no longer needed.

The burn bags were stored in the fan room off the STRIKE-OPS office. This office was an even more sensitive assignment for Michael. It was guarded by a cipher lock, and no one was supposed to be inside without a specific reason – no one but Michael, who could come and go as he pleased since he needed access to the fan room where the burn bags were stored. The STRIKE-OPS office was the closest thing to a “war room” on the carrier.

Around a huge table the admiral and his officers made their major decisions. One wall had an enormous chart that showed the location of every missile and bomb aboard the carrier. Another wall contained a special audiovisual screen capable of showing within seconds a detailed map of any country in the world. The room also contained a telephone with a direct line to the Pentagon and, if necessary, the President of the United States. There were also several safes where various secret documents and reports were kept.

It was in the fan room, actually a closet off the STRIKE-OPS office with a ventilation fan in it, that each day’s burn bags were stored. This was where Michael did most of his work as a spy.

The carrier only burned the bags when necessary, and only after 11:30 P.M., when it was not launching aircraft. This schedule gave Michael time to sort through each burn bag and remove whatever secret documents interested him. It also enabled him to circumvent Navy security.

As far as the Navy knew, all the items in the burn bags were destroyed. Michael never had to worry about signing for documents or even copying them.

“OPS-ADMIN and STRIKE-OPS were gold mines for spying,” Michael recalled. “Classified shit was lying everywhere, and most of it eventually hit the burn bags. If you couldn’t find something out by going through the messages and classified reports in these two rooms, then it just didn’t exist or wasn’t happening.”

Michael began stealing classified material within days after reporting to work in OPS-ADMIN. The burn bags proved to be easy to ransack. Once a bag was full, it was stapled shut by Michael and taken to the fan room for storage. What no one knew was that Michael simply tore open the bags once he was alone in the fan room and took out whatever he wanted. “I kept a stapler in the fan room in plain sight and no one ever said a word,” Michael recalled.

Michael was caught once going through a burn bag in the fan room.

“What the hell are you doing?” an officer who had been looking for Michael demanded when he discovered the yeoman looking through classified material that he obviously had removed from a burn bag.

“I got to get a message that the captain wanted,” Michael answered quickly. “Someone threw it away by mistake.”

“Okay. When you get done, I need you to run an errand,” the officer replied.

“I was always cool about things,” Michael told me. “The entire office ran on trust. You did your job and no one even thought about the guy next to them being a spy.”

The longer Michael worked in the two offices, the more daring he became. He found a classified report in the OPS-ADMIN office that he wanted to copy for his dad. It was more than four inches thick and the copying machine could only duplicate twenty-five pages at a time, so Michael took it apart and carefully stacked it in sections.

When he was about halfway through his copying project, the duty officer came over to the machine with an order that he needed to copy.

“Geez, Walker, what’s all this shit?” he asked.

“Gotta make a copy for the captain,” Michael said. Then he offered to interrupt his task so the duty officer didn’t have to wait.

“Thanks,” the officer said, handing Michael the order.

“This guy walked back to his desk,” Michael recalled, “so I made two copies and kept one for myself, and then I finished copying this secret report. As long as you were cool about it and acted like you knew what you were doing, you were okay. The key was not panicking.”

Michael took the report home to his father by hiding it in his backpack. “He couldn’t believe that I had copied this huge report right under everyone’s nose.”

“You’ve got balls,” John told Michael.

“I decided,” Michael recalled, “that I was going to drain that ship of every secret it had.”

In the fall of 1984, the U.S.S.
Nimitz
left Norfolk for a short cruise in the Caribbean. On October 12, John sent a tape-recorded letter to Michael. The two spies had agreed to refer to classified material by the code name
pictures
.

Dear Mike, How you doing? I miss you. Where are you? I just tried to call Rachel, wasn’t home. Called her mother and said she’s on some field trip up in Pennsylvania... Don’t know what you’re doing. I guess you’re having fun. Hope you’re getting me some good pictures... I’ll be interested in looking at your photographs ... that’s what I like to see. I’d say like hang onto them. Let me see them when you come back in ... and remember to get what you can, okay? ...

Michael began enjoying himself.

The U.S.S.
Nimitz
was participating in a secret and sensitive war game, Michael had discovered, which involved a simulated invasion of Cuba. The operation began at two A.M. and was supposed to be a surprise for the crew, but the officers in the OPS-ADMIN office didn’t want to run any risks so they had tipped off Michael and warned him to be ready.

As a result, Michael reported to the OPS-ADMIN office before two o’clock, and was the first person there when the exercise began.

Within minutes, a radio operator arrived at the office with a top secret message. Unlike secret and confidential messages, top secret messages are so sensitive that anyone who reads one is required to sign a log that is kept with the top secret message until it is destroyed.

“You got a clearance for this?” the radioman, who has since left the Navy, asked Michael.

Michael took a chance. “Yeah, sure.”

“Okay,” the radioman said, handing it to him.

“I couldn’t believe this dumb ass gave me a top secret message and then didn’t have me sign for it,” Michael recalled. “Another yeoman was in the room and I told him to go next door. ‘Hey, you go in STRIKE-OPS – that way it will look like we are manning both offices. That’ll impress the captain,’ ” Michael said to him.

As soon as the other yeoman left, Michael locked the OPS-ADMIN door and raced to the copy machine. Just as Michael pushed the copying button, someone pounded on the door.

“I hid my copy and opened the door,” Michael recalled, “and it was the captain and he was pissed. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I must have locked the door by mistake,’ I said. I thought I was busted. ‘Don’t ever lock this door again,’ he yelled. I gave him the top secret message and he was so busy, he didn’t even ask if I’d signed for it.”

During the entire mock invasion of Cuba, Michael sat at the computer terminal in the STRIKE-OPS office and printed out messages for the admiral and other brass.

“We were launching aircraft,” Michael told me enthusiastically, “and directing cruisers and submarines and doing all kinds of exciting shit just as if we were at war and actually attacking Cuba, and what was really neat was that I was hitting the 2 key on my keyboard whenever I printed messages. I was printing one message, like I was supposed to, and then another one for myself. I did that all night long and no one noticed.”

When the carrier returned to port, Michael delivered his package of messages to John.

“Ever wonder how we’d invade Cuba?” Michael asked John, tossing the stolen documents on his desk.

John was impressed.

“Michael was really turning out to be a better spy than I ever expected,” John proudly told me later. “He was really innovative about getting me stuff.”

Michael’s biggest achievement was yet to come. Once while working a relaxed night shift, he went into the STRIKE-OPS office and began snooping through various desks there. On top of one was a Rolodex telephone file.

Michael gave it a spin and noticed a woman’s name on one of the small white cards. The card read “Jodie,” followed by several digits, but there were too many to be a telephone number. Michael wrote the name and numbers on a pad and continued looking through the directory. He found “Sarah” next and copied down her name and number. When he finished going through the Rolodex, Michael counted the names and then looked around the room.

“There were exactly the same number of safes in the room as names on my pad,” Michael recalled. “Bingo, l knew exactly what had happened. Someone had been afraid they might forget a combination to the safes, so they had written them down and tried to disguise them as telephone numbers.”

Michael began methodically trying each combination until he linked each girl’s name with each safe.

After John was arrested, the FBI searched his house and confiscated a film typewriter ribbon that agents were able to use to reconstruct his correspondence.

John had used his typewriter to type a list of the documents Michael had stolen from the
Nimitz
. The list included classified material about the Nuclear Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missile, spy satellites, newly developed underwater mines, and thirty-three messages concerning intelligence operations.

The FBI would wonder later how Michael had removed documents from the
Nimitz
safes and copied them. But no explanation was needed for another item that they found on John’s typewriter ribbon. It was a brief note that he had written to Michael:

Dear Mike ... Everyone liked your pictures and it appears that you are becoming an excellent photographer. Keep up the good work ...

PART VI

exposed

The surest way to be deceived is to think one’s self more clever than others.

–
La Rochefoucauld
,
Maximes No. 127

Chapter 61

The telephone operator gave Barbara the number for the FBI office in Boston when she telephoned for information on November 17, but the agent in Boston told her to call the FBI office in Hyannis, one of the bureau’s smallest outposts.

Barbara called Hyannis and spoke with Special Agent Walter Price, a fifteen-year FBI veteran who had been assigned there all but two of those years. Within the FBI, the Hyannis office was considered an anachronism, opened when John F. Kennedy was president and scarcely one of the bureau’s choicer assignments.

Based on her speech, Price suspected that Barbara had been drinking, and when he asked, she acknowledged that she had poured herself a few drinks to calm her nerves. Price promised to drop by Barbara’s West Dennis apartment and conduct a follow-up interview in person, but he didn’t set a specific date.

As soon as Barbara replaced the telephone receiver, she called John in Norfolk.

“I wanted to tell him about Laura and also warn him,” she explained later. But their conversation quickly turned sour.

“She demanded the ten thousand and began threatening me again,” John told me. “It was the same old story.”

John noted Barbara’s call in the November 18 letter to Michael that the FBI found later.

Your mother called ... with her usual threats, and didn’t really say much. Everything normal here except for Mom’s endless threats. As usual, try to communicate with her and try to get her to
STOP
.

When Barbara finished talking to John, she telephoned Arthur. “I’m going to turn your brother in,” Barbara said. Arthur figured she was drunk.

“She had called prior times,” Arthur said later, “and always said that she was going to do it. I was going to be a little flippant and say, ‘Ha-ha, what are you going to turn him in for? He isn’t doing anything.’ ”

Instead, Arthur handed her over to Rita. The next day, Arthur called John.

“Barbara called again,” he reported. “She says she’s gonna turn you in.”

“Yeah, she’s drunk again,” John replied. “That crazy bitch.”

“John, you had better take good care of her, okay?” Arthur said, but he knew John wouldn’t give Barbara any money.

“I sometimes wondered how he kept operating with that hanging over his head,” Arthur recalled. “Evidently, his own ego convinced him that she wasn’t going to do it.”

During the next few days, agent Price stopped by Barbara’s apartment twice but she wasn’t home. They finally met November 29, and a few minutes after Price began questioning Barbara, she politely excused herself and returned with a large tumbler of scotch. Price dutifully took notes as she described traveling to Washington with John and delivering classified documents to KGB agents during dead drops. During the two-hour session, Barbara told how John had tried to recruit Laura and her suspicion that Mark Snyder was threatening Laura to prevent her from gaining custody of Christopher.

“It was obvious to me,” Barbara said later, “that this agent didn’t believe a word I was telling him.”

Barbara decided to confront Price. “What if I had someone who could testify about all this?” she asked. “What if Laura told you about her father trying to recruit her as a spy?”

“That would help,” Price said.

Back at his office, Price noted in his initial report to Boston that Barbara was an admitted alcoholic and angry ex-wife. He also noted that she had talked about John’s spying in the past tense, which, he felt, indicated that John hadn’t been spying since 1976 when he and Barbara were divorced and John retired from the Navy.

How, Price wondered, would the FBI prosecute someone for a crime allegedly committed nearly a decade earlier? There was another problem with the case. What kind of a witness would Barbara make? Would a jury believe a jilted divorcee who had a drinking problem and was angry because her ex-husband owed her $10,000 and was living with a woman half her age?

Price reacted by typing the numbers 65-0 on his report. The 65 indicated the subject of the report was espionage and the zero signified that no case number had been assigned because the agent considered the information not worthy of further investigation.

When Price’s report arrived in Boston, a clerk there filed it in the “Zero file,” a place for complaints that, more often than not, are more fiction than fact.

Barbara Walker telephoned Laura a few hours after the interview with Price and asked her for support.

“Would you be willing to testify against your father?” Barbara asked. “I’ll try to make it easier for you. Your sisters and brother are not going to be happy with what you do, so I’ll arrange it so it looks like I forced you into it by giving the FBI your name. I won’t tell them that you agreed.”

Laura volunteered to talk to Price.

Barbara immediately called Price and gave him Laura’s number in Buffalo. “At last, I figured something would happen,” Barbara recalled. “I kept waiting and waiting for someone to telephone me, but nothing happened. I couldn’t believe it! After all these years of worrying and trying to turn him in, and then I finally call and no one believes me.”

Laura was also surprised. She kept waiting for Price to telephone her, but he didn’t. Finally she telephoned Barbara.

“Why hasn’t anyone called?” Laura asked. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Barbara said. “Maybe you should call Walter Price and ask him.”

Barbara gave Laura the agent’s number and she promised to call him.

“Now, something is going to happen,” Barbara said. “You promise to call him, Laura.”

Laura telephoned Price, but she became squeamish when he began asking her specific questions. She began to panic.

“What my mother says is true!” Laura told him. Later she admitted that she was getting worried about “squealing” on her father. “I beat around the bush,” Laura told me, “because I just didn’t want to come out and say everything that I knew.”

Finally, Laura told Price that she didn’t want to talk anymore. “Look, I know my mother called you and I just want to tell you that I’m here to confirm what she said.”

Price agreed to add Laura’s statement to his original report, but she was so vacillating that their conversation helped persuade him an investigation wasn’t warranted.

Laura began to worry.

“I couldn’t believe that I had called the FBI on my dad and I decided, in my own mind, that I wasn’t going to cooperate with the FBI,” she said. “Instead, I called up my mom and I said, ‘Mother ... I want to call Dad and let him know that we’ve called the FBI.’ I was going to blackmail my dad! I said, ‘Mom, I want to call Dad and tell him that we called the FBI and we are going to cooperate unless he goes down and gets Chris for me. He’s got an airplane and he’s a private investigator. Boy, he would hop on that plane and go get Chris in nothing flat if we threatened him like that.’

“And my mother says to me, ‘No, we are not going to do it,’ but I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do it. I don’t want Dad to go to jail, but I want him to go and do it. I want my son, and Dad should do it.’ And my mother said, ‘Laura, don’t be an asshole,’ and I said, ‘Mom, that’s what I want to do,’ and she said, ‘He’ll never buy it.’ See, I didn’t realize that he probably wouldn’t have done it because my mother had already tried that umpteen times – threatening to turn him in. But that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to blackmail my own dad, but she talked me out of it.”

Barbara continued to wait for the FBI to investigate. She was confident that Laura’s call to Price would convince the agent that John was a spy. Day after day, she waited for a telephone call. At night she drank herself to sleep. Christmas approached and passed. New Year’s Eve came, and there was still no word from Price or the FBI.

Finally, Barbara gave up.

“I decided that no one really cared. John had gotten away with it, and there wasn’t anyone who was going to stop him.”