A SEAGOING FAMILY SPYING FOR MONEY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200005-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 2, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: June 16, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200005-7
ART?rLF AP EAi
LOS ANGELES TI"'ES
.16 June 198S
A Seagoing Family
Spying for Money
The Vital Question:
7uch Damage
ake no mistake, the Walker spy case is a serious
matter. Why they did it is perhaps the most
important question of all, but the first order of
business in any case of espionage is damage.assess..
ment. Government prosecutors aren't saying how
many secret docu?ents-were delivered to the Soviets
over the last 15 or 20 years by the four men a
t
d
rres
e
3o far. Odds are they don't know. But the alleged leader of the ring, John
A. Walker Jr., 47, who retired from the Navy as a chief warrant officer in
1978, was arrested in a Maryland hotel May 20 after an attempt to deliver
a trash bag containing documents to his Russian case officer. Prosecutors
say Walker's son Michael, 22, was arrested on the aircraft carrier Nimitz
two days later with 15 pounds of similar documents. That represents a lot
of secrets right there.
Worse news is bound to come. The other two men arrested in the
case-Walker's brother Arthur J., 50, a retired. lieutenant commander,
and his California friend Jerry A. Whitworth, 45, a retired senior chief
petty officer-both had access to secrets of real importance involving
techniques of anti-submarine warfare (in
Walker's case) and cryptographic materi-
al (in Whitworth's ). Those are things that
can affect the outcome of wars.
You can be sure the government will do
everything it can, which is plenty, to
make a new secret of the extent of the
damage. But you can also be sure the
government will never know the extent of
that damage unless Walker and his son,
who both pleaded innocent to espionage
charges, change their minds and decide to
cooperate. It's not hard to determine what
the alleged spies learned in the course of
their Naval careers-job descriptions lay
it all out neatly-but it's very difficult to
know what they might have picked up
with a little curiosity and sticky fingers.
Despite the beat efforts of security
officers, something like chaos reigns
where secrets are concerned. Documents
get rnisrouted and mislaid on desk' tops.
People talk. Safe doors are left open while
secretaries go down the hall to the
bathroom. Whole libraries of secrets
routinely passed through radio commu-
r?ications cepters, where Walker. and his
friend Whitworth both worked.
Not long ago I met a man who had been
stationed at the Naval Weapons Labora-
tory in Dahlgren, Va., back in 1964. One
day, while making an inventory of secret
documents after the door to a walk-in safe
had been left often, he noticed in a corner
some big cardboard boxes filled with
computer punch cards. He asked an
enlisted man what they were. He was told
they were targeting coordinates for the
entire SIOP, the Single Integrated Opera-
tional Plan that determines where U.S.
nuclear warheads will go in the event of
all-out war. Targeting information for the
missiles on Polaris submarines was rou-
tinely transmitted to the Naval Weapons
Lab from the main computer of the Joint
Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS)
at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha,
Neb. Some months earlier the JSTPS
computer had failed to shut down after
sending the Polaris data, and spewed out
cards for the whole SIOP-the designated
targets for every last warhead and bomb
in the-American strategic inventory. The
guardians of the safe didn't know what to
do with them, so they simply piled them in
a corner. This sort of thing makes security
officers feel ill, and they are often ill.
Walker and his alleged colleagues may
have stumbled across almost anything in
the course of rummaging about for years
on end. Transfer to Moscow was only a
Xerox machine away.
How much does this . matter? Not
knowing what was compromised makes it
hard to say. Detailed Soviet knowledge of
the Ameidcan approach to anti-submarine
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200005-7
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200005-7
warfare over two decades would be no
joke. If you want an idea of what's
involved, readTom Clancy's novel, "The
Hunt for Red October," a kind of "military
procedural" about a large-scale sub-
hunting operation. But the potential cryp-
tographic losses are the real wild card in
the Walker case. These alone could make
it the worst breach of military security in
American history. A document is only a
document, whatever it may contain, but
access to coded communications opens a
door into continuing operations. In war-
time nothing is more important than
knowing where an enemy plans to_ go and
when he plans to go there. The major
British contribution to Allied victory
during World War II-second only to
sticking it Oi?t wbo &italn faced Gm'ma;
nnyy alone-was tho re g'' 4 seem
German radio'tragic encrypted ot>t ?
ma machines, If the Soviets had. tltnila!?
access to TJ.B, naval communications Iii
wartime the consequences would bO alor::
mote. But this Is not wartime, andthh
damage-whatever it is-will gradually
be repaired:.
It'r what you don't know that- hurts
most where military secrets are con-
cerned. Walker's arrest by itself iQlved;
'big -part of the problem by, al
military officials to the breach of
Repairing the damage is basically . g
question 'of, housecleaning-changing
Procedures and equipment. The latter can
take time, and in some cases could never
be possible. There has been some specula.
lion in the press that Walker may have
compromised "compartmented" known
edge. This is a technical term meani g
information protected by its own..codez
name. Frequently it refers to a source 'at
method .for the acquisition of
gence-a way. let's say, for deU
that a Soviet nuclear submarine is about
to put to sea. This could be something
simple and seemingly innocuous: A box:
car full of potatoes M;ght routinP1y appear.
at a certain siding two d,ys teforesaiiing,
or some part of the chip's gear, warmed up
for departure, might give off a telltale
signal. Some years ago,. for example, a
Defense Intelligence Agency analyst dis-
covered a way-to determine what Soviet
SS-9 missiles were pointed at. It was a
simple thing. The Soviets could easily
have hidden it. Since they dui lotning
they probably didn't know ve knew, or
know how we knew. Once a secret like
that is gone, it's gone for good.
The job facing security officers now will
be to figure out why it happened so they
can discourage a repetition. This raises
the question of a motive. Ideology appar-
ently had nothing to do with it. In the
1930s and '40s Soviet intelligence depend.
ed heavily on sympathizers with the
world's only socialist regime. The atom
spies (Klaus Fuchs, Bruno Pontecorvo,
Allan Nunn May and Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg) and the Cambridge circle
(Guy F. Burgess, Donald D. Maclean,
Anthony F. Blunt and Kim Philby) were
all recruited on the basis of ideology. But
this cannot explain many other Soviet
successes. A retired CIA counterintelli-
gence officer once told me he thought
Soviet spy runners had an almost hypnot-
ic ability to get people to say yes. They
knocked on a lot of doors, often with
amazing bluntness, and it seemed to work.
The alleged pitch to John Walker may
never be known, but nothing has turned
up from his friends and family so far to
suggest he ever thought working for the
Soviets might advance the world revolu-
tion or serve world peace or anything of
the like. Money and excitement seem to
have been the key.
This has been the pattern with other
recent spy cases. It is notoriously difficult
to generalize about the motives of spies
because there are, relatively speaking, so
few of them. It's not like divorce or
applications to law school. Something
over 4 million people in the United States
have security clearances and we may
assume all of them begin to feel the pinch
again within a month or two of the last
raise. Money explains why they're work-
ing, not why they're spying.
Perhaps the explanation is that they
don't really feel it matters. It's one thing
consciously to betray your country in a
moment of danger, quite another to slip a
sheaf of technical data into a manila
envelope from the cartloads of the stuff at
the office headed for the shredder. It's
wrong, that's for sure, but who's ever
going to know, and what difference does it
make? The Cold War is already 40 years
old and officials in Washington insist
we're going to go right on deterring the
Soviets-not fight them-forever. So
what if the other side picks up a pointer or
two about the hydrophone system that
helps track Soviet submarines? Every-
body knows war is impossible in the
nuclear age. No one gets hurt. It's all just
part of the Great Game. Did John Walker,
if guilty, as charged, ever think he was
threatening the life of his son on the
Nimitz? I imagine not. It's a curious fact
that the officials who try to protect
American military secrets, and the people
who sell them, share a sense of disbe-
lief-we may be preparing for a big war
with the Soviets, but we're never going to
have it. The rest of us, interestingly, are
worried sick.
Thomas Powers, author of,' The Man Who
Kept_the. Secrets: Richard Hv1n,e n.,d the
CIA," is working on a book about strategic
weapons.
z
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605200005-7