John Anthony Walker

For other people of the same name, see John Walker.
John Anthony Walker

John Anthony Walker circa 1985
Born (1937-07-28)July 28, 1937
Washington, D.C., USA[1]
Died August 28, 2014(2014-08-28) (aged 77)
Federal Correctional Institution, Butner Low, Butner, North Carolina
Nationality United States
Occupation United States Navy Chief Warrant Officer and communications specialist[2]
Private investigator
Spouse(s) Barbara Crowley (divorced)
Children Michael Walker (son, accomplice)
Motive Financial gain

John Anthony Walker, Jr. (July 28, 1937 – August 28, 2014) was a United States Navy Chief Warrant Officer and communications specialist convicted of spying for the Soviet Union from 1968 to 1985.[2]

In late 1985, Walker made a plea bargain with federal prosecutors, which required him to testify against his co-conspirator, former senior chief petty officer Jerry Whitworth, and provide full details of his espionage activities. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to a lesser sentence for Walker's son, former Seaman Michael Walker, who was also involved in the spy ring.[2] During his time as a Soviet spy, Walker helped the Soviets decipher more than one million encrypted naval messages,[3] organizing a spy operation that The New York Times reported in 1987 “is sometimes described as the most damaging Soviet spy ring in history.”[4]

After Walker's arrest, Caspar Weinberger, President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense, concluded that the Soviet Union made significant gains in naval warfare attributable to Walker's spying. Weinberger stated that the information Walker gave Moscow allowed the Soviets "access to weapons and sensor data and naval tactics, terrorist threats, and surface, submarine, and airborne training, readiness and tactics."[5] John Lehman, United States Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, stated in an interview that Walker's activities enabled the Soviets to know where US submarines were at all times. Lehman said the Walker espionage would have resulted in huge loss of American lives in the event of war.

In the June 2010 issue of Naval History Magazine, John Prados, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, pointed out that after Walker introduced himself to Soviet officials, North Korean forces seized the USS Pueblo (AGER-2) in order to make better use of Walker's spying. Prados added that North Korea subsequently shared information gleaned from the spy ship with the Soviets, enabling them to build replicas and gain access to the US naval communications system, which continued until the system was completely revamped in the late 1980s.[6]

Early life

Walker was born in Washington, D.C., on July 28, 1937, and he attended high school in Scranton, Pennsylvania.[1] When arrested for burglary, he was offered the option of jail or the military.;[1][7] he enlisted in the Navy in 1955. While stationed in Boston, Walker met and married Barbara Crowley, and they had four children together, three daughters and a son. While stationed on the nuclear-powered Fleet Ballistic Missile (FBM) submarine USS Andrew Jackson (SSBN-619) in Charleston, South Carolina, Walker opened a bar which failed to turn a profit and immediately plunged him into debt.[1]

Spy ring

Walker began spying for the Soviets in 1968,[8] when, distraught over his financial difficulties, he walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., sold a top secret document (a radio cipher card) for several thousand dollars, and negotiated an ongoing salary of $500 to $1,000 a week.[1] Walker has justified his treachery by claiming that the first classified Navy communications data he had sold to the Soviets had already been completely compromised when the North Koreans had captured the U.S. Navy communications surveillance ship, the USS Pueblo.[9] Yet the Koreans captured the Pueblo in January 1968 — just one month after Walker had betrayed the information. Furthermore, a 2001 thesis presented at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College using information from Soviet archives and from Oleg Kalugin, indicates that the Pueblo incident may have taken place because the Soviets wanted to study equipment described in documents supplied to them by Walker.[10]

Walker continued spying, receiving an income of several thousand dollars per month for supplying classified information. Walker used most of the money to get his delinquent debts paid and move his family into better neighborhoods, but he also set aside some for future investment, such as turning around the fortunes of his money-losing bar by hiring a skilled bartender.[1] While Walker occasionally used the services of his wife, Barbara Walker, he anticipated the possibility of losing access due to reassignment. Walker's chance to seek further assistance came in 1969 when he was stationed to teach radio operators in San Diego, California. There Walker befriended student Jerry Whitworth.[1] Whitworth, who would become a Navy senior chief petty officer/senior chief radioman, agreed to assist Walker in accessing highly classified communications data in 1973.[1] A transfer had stopped Walker's access to the data the Soviets wanted, but he was able to recruit Whitworth to keep the data flowing by telling him the data would be going to Israel, an ally of the United States, in order to soften the consideration of Whitworth engaging in espionage. Later, when Whitworth realized the data was going to the Soviets instead of Israel, he nonetheless continued feeding it to Walker until his retirement from the Navy in 1983.

In 1976, Walker retired from the Navy in order to give up his security clearance, as he believed certain superior officers of his were too keen on investigating lapses in his records. Walker and Barbara also divorced. However, Walker did not end his espionage, and began looking more aggressively among his children and family members for assistance (Walker was a private investigator at this time). By 1984, he had recruited his older brother Arthur, a retired lieutenant commander who then went to work at a military contractor, and his son Michael, an active duty seaman.[1] Walker had also attempted to recruit his youngest daughter, who had enlisted in the United States Army, but she cut her military career short when she became pregnant and refused her father's offer to pay for an abortion, instead deciding to devote herself to full-time motherhood. Walker then turned his attention to his son, who had drifted during much of his teenage years and dropped out of high school. Walker gained custody of his son, put him to work as an apprentice at his detective agency in order to prepare him for espionage and encouraged him to re-enroll in high school to earn a diploma, then to enlist in the Navy.

When Walker began spying, he worked as a key supervisor in the communications center for the U.S. Atlantic Fleet's submarine force, and he would have had knowledge of top secret technologies, such as the SOSUS underwater surveillance system which tracks submarine traffic via a network of submerged hydrophones.[11][12] It was through Walker that the Soviets became aware that the U.S. Navy was able to track the location of Soviet submarines by the cavitation produced by their propellers. After this, the propellers on the Soviet submarines were improved to reduce cavitation.[13] The Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal was disclosed in this activity in 1987.[14] It is also alleged that Walker's actions precipitated the seizure of the USS Pueblo. CIA historian H. Keith Melton states on the show "Top Secrets of the CIA" which aired on the Military Channel, among other occasions, at 0400CST, February 5, 2013:

They [referring to the Soviets] had intercepted our coded messages, but they had never been able to read them. And with Walker providing the code cards, this was one-half of what they needed to read the messages. The other half they needed were the machines themselves. Though Walker could give them repair manuals, he couldn't give them machines. So, within a month of John Walker volunteering his services, the Soviets arranged, through the North Koreans, to hijack a United States Navy ship with its cipher machines, and that was the USS Pueblo. And in early 1968 they captured the Pueblo, they took it into Wonsan Harbor, they quickly took the machines off ... flew 'em to Moscow. Now Moscow had both parts of the puzzles. They had the machine and they had an American spy, in place, in Norfolk, with the code cards and with access to them.

In 1990, The New York Times journalist John J. O'Connor reported, "It's been estimated by some intelligence experts that Mr. Walker provided enough code-data information to alter significantly the balance of power between Russia and the United States".[15] Asked later how he had managed to access so much classified information, Walker said, "KMart has better security than the Navy".[16] According to a report presented to the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive in 2002, Walker is one of a handful of spies believed to have earned more than a million dollars in espionage compensation,[7] although The New York Times estimated his income at only $350,000.[15]

Theodore Shackley, the CIA station chief in Saigon, asserted that Walker's espionage may have contributed to diminished B-52 bombing strikes, that the forewarning gleaned from Walker's espionage directly affected the United States' effectiveness in Vietnam.

Arrest and imprisonment

John and Barbara Walker divorced in 1976. Their marriage was one marked by physical abuse and alcohol. By 1980 Barbara had begun regularly abusing alcohol and was very fearful for her children. She wanted the children not to become involved in the spy ring, and that led to constant disagreement with John. Barbara tried several times to contact the Boston office of the FBI, but she either hung up or was too drunk to speak. In November 1984 she again contacted the Boston office and in a drunken confession reported that her ex-husband spied for the Soviet Union. She did not then know that Michael had become an active participant, and later admitted she would not have reported the spy ring had she known her son was involved.[1]

The Boston Office of the FBI interviewed Barbara Walker and initially considered her story to be the rantings of a drunken, bitter woman trying to "drop a dime" on an ex-husband. Since Barbara's report regarded a person who resided in Norfolk, Virginia, the Boston office sent the report to the Norfolk, Virginia, office. When the FBI in Norfolk reviewed the report the counterintelligence squad concluded it might be a truthful report and initiated a discreet investigation. The FBI conducted an interview of Walker's daughter, Laura, who confirmed that her father was a KGB Spy and said that he had tried to recruit her into his espionage ring when she was in the US Army.

When both Barbara Walker and Laura Walker passed polygraph examinations, electronic surveillance was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court against John Walker. In May, 1985, the FBI learned through the electronic surveillance that it was likely that John Walker would be traveling out of town on the weekend of May 18 & 19th, 1985. On May 19, 1985, Walker left his house in Norfolk and was followed covertly by the FBI to the Washington DC area where the surveillance was joined by personnel from the FBI's Washington Field Office. Later that evening at around 8:30 p.m. he drove to a rural area in Montgomery County, Maryland where he was observed placing a package in a wooded area near a "No Hunting" sign. The FBI retrieved the package that was found to have 124 pages of classified information stolen from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz where Walker's son, Michael, was assigned. John Walker was arrested during the early morning hours of May 20, 1985, by a team of agents from the Norfolk and Washington FBI Field Offices. The FBI apprehended Walker himself at a motel in Montgomery County, Maryland, by using, ironically, a trick he had used to catch people in adultery cases — that is, by telephoning his hotel room and telling him that his car had been hit in an accident.[1] Barbara Walker was not prosecuted because of her role in disclosing the ring.[1][7] Former KGB agent Victor Cherkashin, however, describes in his book Spy Handler that Walker was compromised by an FBI spy named "Martynov," who overheard officials in Moscow speaking about Walker.[17]

Michael Walker was arrested onboard the Nimitz, where investigators found a footlocker full of copies of classified matter. He had to be taken off his ship under guard to avoid getting beaten by other Marines and sailors. Arthur Walker and Jerry Whitworth were arrested by the FBI in Norfolk, Virginia and Sacramento, California respectively. Arthur Walker was the first member of the espionage ring to go to trial. During his arrest, Arthur Walker was read his rights and repeatedly told he needed to stay silent until he could retain a lawyer, but kept admitting complicity in an effort to "show remorse". He was tried, convicted and sentenced to three life sentences in Federal District Court in Norfolk.

Walker cooperated somewhat with authorities, enough to form a plea bargain that would reduce the sentence for his son. He agreed to submit to an unchallenged conviction and life sentence, to provide a full disclosure of the details of his spying, and to give testimony against Whitworth in exchange for a pledge from the prosecutors that the maximum sentence requested for Michael was 25 years imprisonment, which was later Michael's sentence.[2][18] All the members of the spy ring besides Michael Walker received life sentences for their role in the espionage. Whitworth was sentenced to 365 years in prison and fined $410,000 for his involvement. Whitworth is now incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Atwater, a high-security federal prison in California. Walker's older brother Arthur received three life sentences plus 40 years and died in the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, North Carolina on July 5, 2014, six weeks before the death of his younger brother.[19]

Walker's son, Michael, who had a relatively minor role in the ring, and who agreed to testify in exchange for a reduced sentence, was released from prison on parole in February 2000.[1]

Walker was incarcerated at FCC Butner, in the low security portion.[20] He was said to suffer from diabetes mellitus and stage 4 throat cancer.[1][21]

Death

Walker died on August 28, 2014, while still in prison. He would have become eligible for parole in 2015.[22]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Earley, Pete. Family of spies: the John Walker Jr. spy case CourtTV Crime Library. Accessed August 20, 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Recent US Spy Case CNN. Accessed November 16, 2007.
  3. ↑ 米海軍スパイ事件の教訓 070630aquisionresearch_spring 「防衛取得研究」（第一巻　第一号）（平成１９年０６月）＜PDF＞
  4. ↑ Shenon, Philip. (January 4, 1987) In short: nonfiction. NY Times. Accessed November 16, 2007.
  5. ↑ http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2010-06/navys-biggest-betrayal
  6. ↑ Prados, John. The Navy's Biggest Betrayal. Naval History 24, no. 3 (June 2010): 36.
  7. 1 2 3 Herbig, Katherine L. and Martin F. Wiskoff. (July 2002) Espionage against the United States by American citizens, 1947-2001. FAS website. Accessed August 1, 2015.
  8. ↑ Sontag, Sherry; Drew, Christopher; Annette Lawrence Drew (November 1998). Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (paperback reprint ed.). New York City: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-103004-X. OCLC 42633517.
  9. ↑ KW-7 and John Walker John Walker USS Pueblo
  10. ↑ Heath, Laura J. Analysis of the Systemic Security Weaknesses of the U.S. Navy Fleet Broadcasting System, 1967–1974, as Exploited by CWO John Walker (PDF) U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Master's Thesis. 2005.
  11. ↑ "The John Walker Spy Case: Secrets of the Deep Agent May be Linked to USS Pueblo". Seattle Post-Intelligencer. May 18, 1986. Archived from the original on July 16, 2011.
  12. ↑ Cold War Strategic ASW Cold War Strategic ASW UNDERSEAWARFARE
  13. ↑ "Eaglespeak".
  14. ↑ A. FACTUAL BACKGROUND THE TOSHIBA-KONGSBERG INCIDENT II. THE TOSHIBA-KONGSBERG INCIDENT
  15. 1 2 O'Connor, John J. (February 4, 1990) TV View; American spies in pursuit of the American dream NY Times. Accessed November 16, 2007.
  16. ↑ Johnson, Reuben F. (July 23, 2007) The ultimate export control: why F-14s are being put into a shredder The Weekly Standard. Volume 012, Issue 42. Accessed November 16, 2007.
  17. ↑ Cherkashin, Victor. Spy Handler. New York: Basic Books, 2005. (Page 183)
  18. ↑ Time, Belated concern, Time Inc. (November 11, 1985) Accessed November 16, 2007.
  19. ↑ Watson, Denise M; King, Lauren (July 10, 2014). "Convicted spy Arthur Walker dies in prison in N.C.". Virginian Pilot. Retrieved 11 July 2014.
  20. ↑ Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator
  21. ↑ How to Publish a Book by an Odious Person Washington Post. Accessed August 26, 2013.
  22. ↑ Denise M. Watson (29 August 2014). "Spy ring mastermind John Walker dies in N.C. prison". PilotOnline.com. Retrieved 29 August 2014.

Further reading

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