SPY RING THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE WALKER CASE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260016-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 21, 2011
• Sequence Number: 16
• Publication Date: June 29, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2011/12/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260016-9
ARTICLE D
ON PAGE
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
29 June 1986
SPY RING
The Untold Story of the Walker Case
6
By Howard Blum
AST MONDAY, THERE HAD
been nothing. But today, when he
opened his copy of The Los Angeles
Times to the Personal Messages, he
found it:
"Rus: Haven't heard from you,
still want to meet. Propose meeting
in Ensenada, Mexico, a neutral site.
If you need travel funds, we'll fur-
nish same at your choice of location
in Silicon Valley or anywhere else.
Please respond to the above."
RUS - as the Government al-
leges Jerry A. Whitworth called
himself - realized he would have to
answer. After all, he had started
writing to the Federal Bureau of In-
vestigation months ago, hinting at
his secret. He had written that he
had betrayed his country. Now he
had to decide, he had explained in his last letter, whether to
betray his friend. Betrayal, he was learning, is a repetitious
profession.
Meanwhile, on that Monday in August 1984, while RUS con-
sidered what to do, across the country in Norfolk, Va., the se-
cret was also being threatened.
It was a secret so dangerous that, after it was revealed,
three members of a Navy family would be found guilty in
what Government officials have called "the most damaging
case of espionage in United States history." John A. Walker
Jr., 48, pleaded guilty to espionage last October; Arthur J.
Walker, 51, his brother, was convicted of stealing classified
documents, and Yeoman Michael L. Walker, John's 23-year-
old son, also pleaded guilty to espionage.
The Walker convictions have contributed to a wide range of
Government counterintelligence initiatives. Defense Secre-
tary Caspar W. Weinberger has ordered that the number of
people in the military and the defense industry who have ac-
cess to secrets - estimated at 4.3 million - be cut by 10 per-
cent. And in 1985 there were more arrests of alleged espio-
nage agents than in any year since the end of World War II.
While the flurry of arrests and statements of official out-
rage has received national attention, agents of the F.B.I., the
Naval Investigative Service (N.I.S.) and the National Se-
curity Agency (N.S.A.) have been sifting quietly and inde-
pendently through the activities of John Walker and others in
the Walker spy ring.
"We're still trying to find out just how it was possible that a
relatively low-ranking sailor, motivated only by money, was
able to run a successful spy ring for nearly two decades,"
Howard Blum, an author and former reporter for The
Times, is writing "Family Secrets: The Story of the
Walker Spy Case" for Simon & Schuster.
said John C. Wagner, the special agent-in-charge of the Nor-
folk, Va., F.B.I. office, who supervised the arrest of John
Walker. "The Bureau is continuing to interview his friends
and associates to learn about this strange and mysterious
man. We want to make sure we learn what John Walker
knew, how he knew it, and how he got away with it."
A 10-month investigation by this reporter has also been
focusing on John Walker. It included interviews with mem-
bers of the Walker family, their friends, Federal and military
agents and police officials, and an analysis of court records
and confidential Government documents. Drawing firm con-
clusions is difficult because many of the principals have ad-
mitted to lying to Federal authorities and - as in the case of
John Walker - have been unavailable for interviews. Never-
theless, among the findings are the following:
^ Military and Federal agents have been investigating John
Walker's possible involvement in two unsolved deaths.
^ Federal agents continue to investigate the "strong" possi-
bility that Walker recruited additional spies into his ring.
"We're pursuing leads that indicate people were blackmailed
into working for Walker," said a Federal agent.
^ Walker last fall tried to convince one of his daughters to
contact a former associate and offer him $200,000 to help
Walker escape from prison.
Intertwined in these investigations is the espionage trial in
San Francisco - closing arguments are scheduled to begin
tomorrow - of Jerry Whitworth, the former Navy radioman
who insists he is innocent. According to Federal prosecutors,
Whitworth was the fourth member of the Walker spy ring, the
man who sent "remorseful" letters to the F.B.I. and signed
them RUS. He is also the man John Walker often called his
best friend.
ON THAT SUMMER
day in 1984 when RUS
pondered the newspa-
per message, Barbara
Walker was angry.
She had come down to
Virginia from her
apartment in Cape
Cod to see her oldest
daughter, Margaret,
and to have a vaca-
tion. But within days,
both women remem-
ber, things began to
gnaw at her. Barbara
Walker was 46, twice a
grandmother, living in
a sandy tourist town in
an apartment above
the Word Bookstore,
clocking in each day
for the 6 A.M. shift at
the loading dock of the
Christmas Tree Shop.
Continued
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 Declassified and Approved For Release 2011/12/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260016-9
Barbare Waller, fares, wife of
Jul. Waller, in cm Cud, hl the
Illluutes before Inlilght the week
before her 47th birthday, she
"ad up t k phone sad shawl her
fanny's secret with the ELL Jells
Walker had been di echig a
Russian spy ring far 17 years.
Walker had been directing a Rus-
sian spy ring for the past 17
years.
IT WAS JUST A STROKE OF
luck that he finally got to meet his
father, Jerry Whitworth told a
Navy friend, Michael O'Connor-
"bad luck."
Back in 1956 - the way Whit-
worth often told it, and his father
in a recent interview corrobo-
rated it - 17-year-old Jerry
joined the Navy to see the world.
He wound up stationed as a store-
keeper at the Hunter's Point ship-
yard, but he was in San Francisco
so he wasn't complaining. He had
made it out of Muldrow, Okla.,
Carol N@iW
in 1983, her belly =WW ashore a out of his grandparents' home
a beach with the chickens running in the
in Virginia. She had bee. shat. Carious L j, , Its dirt yard and the flat acres of soy.
body was feud iw 1934. Beth deaths an under investigation. Billy Pgrowing out
hillips,s station where he
Pumped gas after school and on weekends, out of a life that
was, he complained, "just plain hickey. "
Whitworth had this way, many of his acquaintances say,
of not simply making friends, but - a loner's art -of mak-
ing best friends. He confided in them, he needed them and he
would let them call the shots. After a few weeks in the Navy,
he had a new best buddy, Roger Olson. It didn't take Whit-
worth long to to tell Olson about his childhood: Came from a
broken home; Dad picked up and left just after he was born,
headed out to California, and Jerry moved in with his grand-
parents.
The way Whitworth told it made you ache for him, Olson,
who is out of the Navy now and living in Papua New Guinea,
would later tell his parents. Whitworth later told members of
his defense team that Olson had asked him, "Whereabouts in
California your old man settled?"
Whitworth wasn't sure. All he remembered was his uncle's
saying that Johnie Whitworth had built himself a restaurant,
the Blue Moon Cafe, and was running it with his new wife.
Couldn't remember the town. Just that it started with an M.
Olson was from California, and he wanted to help. He began
rattling off names. Modesto. Moorpark. Maxwell. Then he hit
it - Mendota. Mendota, Whitworth repeated. That sounded
like it. When they called Mendota information, there was a
Blue Moon Cafe.
On their first weekend pass, the two sailors, according to
statements made by Olson, drove down Highway 99 in Ol-
son's Dodge Charger, following the signs that pointed the
way to "Mendota- the Cantaloupe Center of the World."
When they got to the restaurant, it was easy to spot Johnie
Whitworth. The man behind the counter was the spitting
image of his son - tall, fence-post lean, and with a broad,
high, thoughtful brow.
When Jerry Whitworth saw his father, he rushed up to the
counter and said, according to Johnie Whitworth, "You don't
recognize me, do you?"
The older man was not the sort to play games. He was also
busy. "Can't say that I do," he remembers answering, and
started for the kitchen.
"Well," Jerrysaid, "I'm from Muldrow and I'm yourson."
He was, his father recalled, quite excited.
"How the hell I'm supposed to recognize you?" Johnie
Whitworth remembers saying. "You grown some, boy." He
was laughing when he said it. But it wasn't the greeting Jerry
Whitworth had expected.
Several hours passed before Johnie Whitworth found time
to sit down with his son. By then, the father recalled without
apology, there didn't seem to be much to say.
On the way back to the base, Whitworth didn't talk much.
He did tell Olson, according to Olson's mother, "I guess
things never really work out the way you imagine them to."
And then, as they pulled into Hunter's Point, he told his
friend, "It's good to be home."
WHEN JOHN WALKER TURNED 18, HE, TOO, FOUND
a home in the Navy. He didn't have much of a choice.
His was the sort of family, Walker wrote in an autobio-
graphical letter to his daughter Margaret, where there was
always too much liquor around and not enough money. When
he was 17, a high-school junior in Scranton, Pa., a friend con-
vinced him there was a quick way to do something about that.
On May 27, 1955, the friend, according to Scranton court
records, revealed to Walker that he had gotten aw
ay with
$577 in a series of burglaries. Would Walker like a piece of
such action?
After their third attempt at a robbery, the two were discov-
ered by a policeman. The officer commandeered a passing
car and, firing two shots, chased John Walker through the
streets of Scranton. Still, Walker made it to the state high-
way, and got away. For five days.
Walker pleaded guilty and Juvenile Court Judge Otto P.
Robinson announced that he would sentence the youth to the
State Correctional Institution. But Walker's older brother,
Arthur, showed up in court in his Navy uniform and, Arthur
has said, convinced the judge to accept an alternative ar-
rangement: John would quit school and join the Navy.
For John Walker, it seemed, here was a lesson that would
guide him for the rest of his life: No jam was so tight that you
couldn't find a way out of it. All you needed was the angle.
IN THE NAVY, "TAPE APES" ARE USUALLY THE
first to know what's going on. These are the men in the radio
rooms. The best of them, those on their way to becoming
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to trace - and addressed it to the man who had placed the
message in that morning's paper: "Agent in Charge,
F.B.I."
Yet despite the confidence of John Walker and RUS that
day in 1984, there was no escape, only a reprieve. Three
months later, in the minutes before midnight the week be-
fore her 47th birthday, Barbara Walker picked up the
phone and shared her family's secret with the F.B.I.: John
While John, her former husband,
still had the big red brick ranch
house in Norfolk, their old house,
except now he was sharing it with a
blonde younger than Margaret. Or
he might be off in his plane, or on
his houseboat, or sitting behind a
desk "his detective agency. Confi-
dential Reports Inc.
Prwdmity to John seemed to de-
mand recriminations. Barbara
Walker would look back at her visit
with Margaret and recall days
filled with rage and Pain and - an-
other companion, she admitted -
liquor. There was also the secret.
She had been its custodian for
nearly two decades. Her only
profit, she complained afterward,
had been a broken marriage- and
guilt. But this Monday, she decided
to get her share. She would get
eawouGLEv-oui John Walker to give her some
money. Or she would tell all she knew.
It was in this mood that she marched into the office of
Confidential Reports in Virginia Beach and demanded to
see John Walker.
"Let me just check if he's free," Laurie Robinson, Walk-
er's business partner, remembers telling Barbara Walker.
That was when, according to Mrs. Robinson, Barbara
slapped her. Mrs. Walker says she cannot remember if she
did, but she does recall the confrontation with John.
"I want $10,000," Mrs. Robinson heard her screaming.
Laurie Robinson heard her threatening to "tell it all,"
unless Walker gave her the money.
Walker, a veteran sailor used to heavy weather, gave her
emotions room. Then he started talking. "You don't want
to do it," Mrs. Robinson remembers him saying. "Too
much is at stake for the entire family. You wouldn't do it to
your children. Think of your children."
He kept on until Barbara Walker sheathed her threat.
Her love for her three daughters and one son was stronger,
she would later explain, than her hatred of their father. By
the time she left the office, both Walker and she were con-
vinced, they later said, that the secret was invulnerable.
It was shortly after Barbara Walker's weary exit that,
across the country, RUS reached the same conclusion. He
typed: "I have great difficulty in coming forth, particu-
larly since the chance of my past involvement ever being
known is extremely remote, as long as I remain silent."
Then he photostated the letter- that would make it harder
Continued
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2011/12/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260016-9
chiefs, are the "hot rumens." Them men
are o[t on the only hnsmest links in an elec-
tronic naval 'r dens system
that, having cart luindteds of millions of
dollars the globe. to dw~p and operate, stretches
If the Pentagon wants to send orders to a
carrier - which receives about 2,500 mes-
sages daily - it is nearly as easy as plac-
ing a long distance call. Messages are
"bounced" off one of four orbiting ultra-
high frequency naval comintinications
satellites.
The problem is that any ship, enemy or
ally, within a satellite's range - or "foot.
print" as it's called-can intercept a mes-
sage sent to a specific ship. Therefore,
more than 90 percent of military mes.
sages, according to Navy estimates, are
sent in code - codes supervised by the hot &--0.
runners. If an enemy could not only re-
ceive but also "read" an opponent's mes-
sage, it would be like "playing poker and
knowing what the other hand is," sug-
gested Vice Adm. Robert C. Kirksey. Gov.
ernment scientists are convinced, however, that United
States codes are impossible to crack.
Yet there is one potential weakness in this vast and com-
plex system - the cognizant agent. "We define a cognizant
agent," said Earl David Clark Jr., the N.S.A.'s deputy chief
of communications security until he retired this year, "as a
cleared individual, with all clearances, who for some reason
decides to work for a hostile intelligence organization."
John Walker was a hot runner who ran the naval message
center at Norfolk. Before leaving the Navy in 1976, he was a
chief warrant officer in charge of code security aboard sub-
marines. And he was, until 1965, a cognizant agent. Jerry
Whitworth was also a hot runner. He ran the message center
in Alameda, Calif., and was in charge of code security at a
satellite communications base on Diego Garcia Island in the
Indian Ocean as well as on the aircraft carrier Enterprise.
He was, the Government is trying to prove in his trial, Walk-
er's partner and, for more than a decade, a cognizant agent.
few years ago, Boom Tren-
UNTIL IT CLOSED DOWN A
cherd's Flare Path Restaurant
in San Diego drew the tape apes
from the nearby Naval Train.
ing Center. What they liked
about Boom's were the jacks
along the bar where you could
plug in a pair of Bakelite ear-
phones and listen to the tower
at Lindbergh Field, the airport
across the road. A radioman's
sort of place.
There didn't seem to be any-
thing special, then, about John
Walker's arranging to meet
Whitworth at Boom's on a Sep-
tember afternoon in 1974. Ex-
cept this time, there was no
horsing around with earphones.
Walker was going to make, as he would later describe it at
Whitworth's trial, his "sales pitch." But first he told Whit-
worth that "even discussing" what he was about to reveal
was illegal. Would Whitworth take a "blood oath" to keep his
secret?
Not that Walker had any doubts. It was one of his conceits
that he could read people pretty well. Ever since he had got-
ten the idea to recruit Whitworth, Walker had been "prob-
ing," as he called it.
Walker had been Whitworth's boss in the practical applica-
tions laboratory at the training center in California when
they had first met in October 1970.
There was, Walker discovered, a gung-ho side to Whit-
worth. Whitworth would go scuba diving to catch a better
look at the whales moving up the California coast and take
Piper Cubs up for loops. And, like Walker, he loved to sail. On
many weekends, Whitworth would crew for Walker's boat,
The Dirty Old Man.
There was also an intellectual side to Whitworth that im-
Lamb Wssaq Walker's
ex' Irti r at CadidelMfal leparts.
He asked her to make cewtact
certabl Navy effim
pressed Walker. Whitworth read
Ayn Rand, and this led him, he told
friends, into libertarianism. He
would attend libertarian meetings,
Shary Ratliff, a friend and profes.
sor of religion recounted, and peo-
ple would ask him how he could
reconcile the philosophy with the
rigid authoritarianism of military
life. Whitworth said he simply
loved the Navy.
There was another matter: John
Walker, as he explained it in
numerous interviews with the
F.B.I., was convinced that Whit-
MARTY KATZ/OUTLINE worth, who was always in search of
love, worshipped him. There have been allegations by Bar-
bara Walker at Whitworth's trial that he was bisexual. And,
in a recent interview, Laurie Robinson said Walker told her
that not long after he met Whitworth, the two had a "brief
fling ?
A member of his defense team says, however, Whitworth in
private dismissed Barbara Walker's allegations "with a
laugh," and adds, "Jerry is a very straight person. He's not
the type to be a bisexual or homosexual, so we just haven't
asked him about it."
It was because of Walker that Whitworth met his wife. A
group of high-school science-fair winners had come to San
Diego from across the country, and Walker assigned his
friend to help chaperone them. Two of the students would, ac-
cording to what Whitworth has told his attorneys, continue to
exchange letters with him for years; a third student, Brenda
Reis, from North Dakota, would marry him when she turned
21, five years later.
So that afternoon in Boom Trencherd's, when he asked if
Whitworth would take a blood oath, Walker was certain, he
said in court, that his friend would do that for him. After
Whitworth swore, Walker told him the secret. Sort of.
The way Walker recounts the conversation - and Whit
.
worth has so far refused to comment on Walker's allegations,
other than to plead not guilty in court - he told his friend that
he had been stealing classified information for years. Walker John Walker's houseboat, While
has testified that he told Whitworth that he sold the informa.
tion to a "contact" who resold it to an ally, like Israel, or to a his former wife made de with an
defense contractor. At one point, he suggested the buyer was
the Mafia. apartment in Cape Cod, he shared
But, Walker later told Government agents, he never told their big red brick ranch house with
his best friend that, in 1968, when the bar he and his wife were
running in South Carolina had put him in a financial bind, he a woman and kept a plane as well
had driven up to the Soviet Embassy in Washington and, hav- as the boat in Virg6Ma.
ing asked to see the security
officer, sold him a top-secret
key list for a KL-47 crypto-
graphic machine. And he never
told Whitworth that after this
first $1,000 sale he became a
Russian spy, making frequent
"dead drops" of photos of stolen
documents in the woods around
Washington, or of having nearly
annual "face-to-faces" with his
K.G.B. control agent in Vienna
or Casablanca.
But Walker testified last
month in San Francisco that he
did tell Whitworth that he could
make between $2,000 and $4,000
a month supplying Walker with
top-secret coding material and
message traffic. Whitworth,
Walker said, had only one con-
cern: Did Barbara Walker
know what John was up to?
"I assured him," Walker tes-
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 Declassified and Approved For Release 2011/12/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260016-9
tified, "that she would not be a problem." Still, it was not
until nine months later, in June 1975, while stationed at Diego
Garcia Island as the petty officer in charge of cryptographic
equipment, that Whitworth wrote to Walker: "I finally made
my first dive. It was real good. My future dives don't look
very diverse. Will have to wait and see. Most of these things
are so dated." Whitworth was writing to tell his friend and
partner, Federal prosecutors charge, that he had finally be-
come a spy.
THIS TIME, JOHN WALKER
was prepared. He wore electri-
cally heated socks. And he had
his 67-year-old mother waiting in
a hotel room.
He wore the socks, he would
tell the F.B.I., because, as he
had learned on his last winter
trip to Vienna, espionage is an
outdoor business; one attracts
less attention in the street. His
control had him walking for
hours through the icy nighttime
streets and Walker thought he
was going to get frostbite.
On Jan. 27, 1979, he had the
electric socks. His instructions
were precise. A K.G.B. courier
had, that fall, left a handwritten
page and a set of maps at the
drop site in the Virginia woods. The page, written in block let-
ters, was headed, "The Vienna Procedure."
At 6:15 P.M., a copy of these documents shows, he was to
arrive at the Komet Kiichen store on the corner of Schonbrun-
nerstrasse and Ruckergasse. His recognition signals were in
place - the camera bag on his left shoulder, the small paper
bag in his right hand. For the next 40 minutes, as the instruc-
tions specified, he "drifted slowly" through an intricate route
of window shopping.
At 6:55 P.M., he was looking into the window of a men's
clothing store on Meidlinger Hauptstrasse. When Walker
turned around, his control was standing there. "Hello, old
friend," the K.G.B. agent greeted Walker, he would say in an
interview with Federal agents nearly seven years later.
The two men walked a bit, and then exchanged camera
cases. Inside the case Walker received was approximately
$50,000, according to Federal prosecutors, wrapped in tightly
bound packages of $50 bills. The bag pulled on his shoulder;
$50,000 is a heavy load. But Walker was not too concerned
about smuggling the money into the United States. That was
why, both he and his brother Arthur independently told the
F.B.I., he had brought his mother to Europe. He would make
her wear a money belt stuffed with the cash under her sweat-
er. No customs agent would search a nice old lady. (John
later denied in open court that he had ever made this admis-
sion. His mother has refused to be interviewed.)
It was toward the end of their meeting that Walker brought
up something that was troubling him. He told his control -
according to a jailhouse conversation with his son, Michael,
that is central to ongoing Federal investigations - that he
was worried someone had become suspicious of his activities.
THE "BACK BEATERS" NOW HAVE THE CASE. IN RE-
cent months, conducting interviews from Okinawa to Penn-
sylvania, agents from the F.B.I., the N.I.S. and the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have been looking into two
previously dormant death investigations: the unsolved mur-
Maps, written directions and
photographs, all F.B.I. evidence,
give complicated instructions from
the K.C.B. to John Walker for a
drop of classified documents in
Montgomery County, Md.
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der of a sailor who worked at the Armed
Forces Staff College in Norfolk by day
while, by [tight, under another name, she
was a go-go dancer; and the disputed sui-
cide of a Portsmouth, Va., police detec-
tive. "We are convinced that John
Walker was involved in both of these
deaths," said an N.I.S. agent who
refused to be quoted by name.
On the afternoon of Feb. 8, 1983, a
friend of Carol Ann Molnar's called the
police and reported her missing. She had
last been seen at 3 A.M. on Feb. 6 at the
Galleon Club in Norfolk, where she was
dancing. Her car was found, but Miss
Molnar remained missing until May 1.
On that morning, her body washed
ashore beneath the piers near the Naval
Air Station. She had been shot.
The investigation remained in the "un-
solved" file. Then, in the months follow-
ing John Walker's arrest in May 1985,
naval investigators found themselves
searching for the Molnar file. There were
a number of coincidences.
Carol Molnar had been employed at the
Armed Forces Staff College, where she had access to classi-
fied information. She had worked for more than a year in the
same office as one of Walker's steady girlfriends, Patsy G.
Marsee. (Miss Marsee, who acknowledged to the F.B.I. that
she accompanied Walker in 1977 to Casablanca, where he met
with his K.G.B. control agent, has denied any knowledge of
Walker's espionage activities. She has not been charged with
any crime.)
Another coincidence involved where the body was found.
Miss Molnar's body drifted ashore a couple of hundred yards
across from where Walker docked his houseboat.
There was also the matter of the bars she danced in -
Bob's Runway, the Wayside, the Galleon. These bars, the
N.I.S. learned, were Walker's hangouts.
But the investigators got their first real piece of evidence in
Okinawa last Christmas, more than a month after John
Walker's sentence had been plea-bargained. They were inter-
viewing Daniel Rivas, a sailor who had worked part-time for
Walker's Confidential Reports detective agency.
According to Rivas, he was shown a picture of Carol Ann
Molnar. He said he told the agents that he had once been with
Walker at a hotel bar in northern Virginia when Miss Molnar
showed up for "an appointment" with Walker. Rivas said he
left the two of them in the bar, "busy talking about some-
thing."
The agents, Rivas said in a recent interview, also showed
him a black ski mask and asked if he recognized it. Rivas re-
called saying, "It's mine. I kept it in the back of Johnny's
van. We used it for nighttime surveillance work on divorce
cases, things like that."
The ski mask, according to N.I.S. sources, was found in the
back seat of Miss Molnar's car after she disappeared.
In a telephone interview from Mississippi, where he is now
stationed, Rivas gave additional information: "Johnny
Walker had me follow her for a couple of nights down in Vir-
ginia Beach. Johnny told me some pimp was after this girl
and he had been hired to protect her. So I watched her for a
couple of nights and asked around. But I heard and saw noth-
ing. And that was that."
The Joyner case might also have remained dormant if John
Walker had not been arrested.
5
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2011/12/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260016-9
The .,.,., ~. . a, ,a.... ~. --- --...... ...,
Joyner Jr., a 39-year-old police
detective, was found on March
18, 1984, police reports state, in
Warwick Creek in northeast-
ern North Carolina. His revolv-
er, four rounds missing, was
found in the water. According
to the medical examiner's re-
port, Joyner, who was right-
handed, held the gun back-
ward in his left palm and
pulled the trigger with his
thumb. The death was offi-
cially ruled a suicide.
But the detective's widow, in
an effort to have the case re-
opened, hired Billy A. Frank-
lin, a lawyer and private inves-
tigator.
It was a matter of chance
that Franklin was asked by the
Norfolk Police Department on
the day following John Walk-
er's arrest to administer a lie
detector test to Pamela K. Car-
roll, Walker's occasional live-
in girlfriend and a policewom-
an. In the course of that test,
Franklin said he fixated on
something he found out: P. K.
Carroll, along with at least six
other police officers, had
previously worked for Walk-
er's detective agency.'Then he
remembered why this infor-
mation jarred him: a brown
Confidential Reports business
card had been found on the
creek bank across from Joyn-
er's body.
This bit of evidence, slim and
circumstantial, was passed on
to the intelligence assessment
teams. They learned the fol-
lowing: Joyner was also work-
ing for the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms and, at
the time of his death, was in-
vestigating a gun-smuggling
ring. It was near the time of
Joyner's death that John
Walker approached Rivas,
Rivas said recently, with a
plan to smuggle $300,000 worth
of Uzi machine guns through
Mexico and into Latin Amer-
ica. According to Laurie
Robinson, Walker's partner,
"Johnny kept a computer file
on a cop named Joyner."
Walker's possible involve-
ment in the death of Joyner re-
mains under investigation. A
suit by Mrs. Joyner to collect
originally denied because of the suicide
ruling - was settled out of court. The
insurance company agreed, according
to Franklin, to pay $125,000.
eiectncai socxet in the den (where he
had also kept the hand-written drop in-
structions from the K.G.B., despite the
request on many to "Please Destroy"),
Walker had written, in an alphabet
code, reports on the activities of his
ring. According to Federal authorities,
K was Arthur Walker, S was Michael
Walker and D was Jerry Whitworth.
There were also references in the note-
book to A. Since his arrest, Walker has
told the F.B.I. that A was another sym-
bol for Whitworth; he stated that he
T HE CLIENT, AS JOHN
Walker explained it to Laurie
Robinson shortly after she
joined Confidential Reports in January
1981, was offering them a simple but
lucrative assignment. All they had to
do, Mrs. Robinson recently recounted,
was conduct in-depth background
checks on various Navy officers. This
client, identified by Walker as repre-
senting a Midwest construction compa-
ny, said the officers were being consid-
ered for executive positions. Confiden-
tial Reports was to determine if they
could be trusted.
So Walker, according to Mrs. Robin-
son, worked out a plan. "First there
was the foot-in-door," she said. "I'd go
the officers' club and tell the guy
Johnny had already singled out that I
represented a promotional company. I
was giving away a free dinner. All the
officer had to do was give me a list,
along with the Social Security num-
bers, of the men under him and I would
pick two numbers out of a hat. Ten
times out of ten, it worked. I made con-
tact with the subject."
Once Mrs. Robinson made contact, it
was up to her to "charm," as she
phrased it, the officers.
"I would just hang around the offi-
cers' club talking up the guy until he
said something like, 'You know, you're
an awful nice-looking lady,' and then I
knew I was home free," Mrs. Robinson
explained. "We'd go out to dinner or for
drinks and basically they'd be telling
me how wonderful they were and I'd be
asking them things about their life and
career."
There was another matter her part-
ner instructed her to find out. "John
wanted to know if these officers had
something to hide, if there was any
potential for anyone to blackmail
them," she continued. Walker's client
wanted men he could trust, she said he
told her, not men who had things that
could be used against them.
Mrs. Robinson remembers filing "at
least 10" background reports on Navy
officers for Walker. "I wrote up reports
on a commander who bragged he had
access to the war room," she recalled.
"Then there was one, an officer on a
carrier, who told me about how he was
cheating on his wife, and if the Navy
ever found out, that would ruin his
chances for promotion. There was even
a lieutenant commander, a guy with
fairly high security, who was addicted
to gambling - horse racing, Atlantic
City, the Bahamas, this guy went
where the action was."
Mrs. Robinson's revelations about
her background checks have prompted
investigators to review two items found
in John Walker's home after his arrest.
The first was a notebook. The other was
a cache of slides and videotapes.
used the code letters A and D inter-
changeably.
"It's possible that A was also Whit-
worth," said an F.B.I. agent familiar
with the case. "But not very likely.
Walker was too organized to mix up his
codes. I've got to believe, especially in
light of what we know about how he ran
his detective agency, that there was a
fifth man. Someone we haven't caught
up with yet."
The search for a fifth man - or
woman - has also been encouraged by
home movies discovered in Walker's
home. "We got pictures of men and
women and men and men," said a Fed-
eral agent. "Walker was into some
strange things, things that could be
used to blackmail people into working
for him."
"Do we know for sure that there was
a fifth member of the ring?" asked a
Federal agent. "The answer is no. But
after what we learned from Laurie
Robinson, we've got to believe Walker
was trying to recruit other members.
We also know for certain that on at
least three occasions he used women to
help him make his drops. Were these
men or women being blackmailed?
There's a lot about Johnny Walker
we're still trying to learn."
T OHN WALKER WAS LYING ON A
J bed in a Ramada Inn off Route 270
near Rockville, Md., wondering, he
would later say, what had gone wrong.
Earlier that evening, May 19, 1985, he
had left a large brown grocery bag
leaning against a utility pole in the
woods. Yet when he went to the contact
point to look for the package that
should have been left for him, nothing
was there.
At 3:30 the next morning, F.B.I.
agent William Wang, claiming he was
the desk clerk, called Walker's room.
Someone had smashed into Walker's
van. Could he come down to the lobby
right away?
John Walker left his room and went
to the elevator. As he pressed the but-
ton, agents Robert Hunter and James
Kolouch, guns drawn, yelled: "Stop!
F.B.I."
"You're under arrest," Hunter said,
handcuffing him. Kolouch ripped Walk-
er's toupee off his head.
Later that morning, F.B.I. agents
went to Arthur Walker's house in Vir-
ginia Beach. He was uncooperative. A
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few days later, however, saying that he
felt "so damn guilty," Arthur Walker
- who had left the Navy in 1973 and
was working for an engineering and
technical concern that did Government
work- confessed to espionage.
While F.B.I. agents were interview-
ing Arthur Walker, Michael Walker
was sitting in the master of arms's of-
fice on the aircraft carrier Nimitz, an-
chored off the Israeli coast. N.I.S.
agents were searching through his be-
longings. He waited, busy writing a let-
ter to his wife, Rachel: "At this time I
have no idea what has come up, al-
though I would imagine it is pretty seri-
ous.... If I end this letter on an un-
happy note please contact my father as
soon as possible." The agents found a
box filled with 15 pounds of classified
documents hidden behind an air-condi-
tioning unit adjacent to his bunk. The
letter, now property of the F.B.I., was
never sent.
At about the time of the discovery on
the Nimitz, Whitworth, according to
court documents, was in Davis, Calif.
- where he and his wife had moved
after he left the Navy in 1983 - writing
a letter on his computer to John Walk-
er. It was a friendly, conversational let-
ter, full of his plans to buy a new house
and news of his wife's job prospects.
Whitworth was interrupted by a knock
on the door. It was two F.B.I. agents.
He, too, never got to mail his letter.
O N A SUNDAY NIGHT EARLY
last October, Margaret Walker
received a call at her home in
Norfolk from her father. He was in a
Rockville, Md., prison and he wanted
her help. His plan, as she remembered
it in a recent interview, was simple:
she was to cash in all his insurance poli-
cies and use the money to bring Dan
Rivas, his former employee, back to
Virginia from Okinawa. "Tell Dan,"
his daughter says he told her, "that I
am prepared to pay him $200,000."
When Margaret asked her father what
he expected Rivas to do for the money,
Walker said: "He's going to help me es-
cape. I have a plan."
Walker told his daughter the plan had
a code name - the System. If anyone
called about the System, she would
know what they would be talking about.
Later that night, Walker also called
Laurie Robinson. He told her about the
System and his talk with Margaret.
"Time is of the essence, of the es-
sence," he repeated before hanging up,
Mrs. Robinson recalled in an interview.
The two women said they agonized
over what to do. As they described it,
they felt they had been manipulated
and lied to for years by John Walker,
and now, from prison, he was still at-
tempting to use them. Yet both of them
cared about John Walker. Could they
betray him?
Walker called Mrs. Robinson back
the next Sunday night. She did not con-
tact Rivas - who says he never learned
about the plan - but instead gave a
tape of the conversation to the F.B.I.
But Walker soon found another "Sys-
tem." On Oct. 28, he struck a deal with
the Government: John Walker will
serve two life terms and a 10-year
term, to run concurrently. Michael
Walker will serve two 25-year terms
and two 10-year terms, to run concur-
rently. The father will be eligible for
parole in 10 years. The son, in 8 years
and 4 months. Two weeks later, in a
Norfolk court, Arthur Walker was
given three concurrent life sentences.
John Walker's deal, though, had a
price. He had to testify against his best
friend, Jerry Whitworth.
On April 28, John Walker took the
stand in a San Francisco courtroom
and announced to the world his claim
that he had recruited Whitworth as a
spy. As he spoke, he was smiling, as
though repressing a secret hilarity. It
was as if he were trying to convey one
last lesson to his friend: Betrayal is
easy, a fact of life. ^
7.
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