John Walker Spy Ring
DECEMBER 1967-MAY 1985
JOHN WALKER SPY RING
By the late 1960s, US Navy top-secret operations were routinely shadowed by Russian “trawlers” bristling with antennae. B-52 airstrikes against North Vietnam seemed to be anticipated by the enemy, even when diverted to secondary targets. New Soviet submarine designs in the 1970s corrected the vulnerabilities exploited with our SOSUS technology, and Soviet submarines were always waiting outside Holy Loch, Guam, Rota, and La Maddelena when American boomers deployed. When a large task force approached the Kamchitka Peninsula in 1983 intending to gauge Soviet response to an American approach, it was all but ignored. A single person viewing all these events could only have concluded that the Soviets were aware of our plans in advance.
But no single person saw these events in total, and the “experts” of the day held that our cryptography was unbreakable. Ultra-secret cypher machines used multiple coded alphabetic wheels to translate plain text messages into inscrutable jibberish. Only a recipient with a similar cypher machine and the same key settings (that changed daily) could decode the message. Fatally, American leaders considered it impossible that our codes could be broken.
But the Soviets were reading top secret US Navy message traffic. By 1985, the Soviets had decoded over a million such messages according to Vitaly Yurchenko, a top KGB operative who defected to the West in August 1985. The messages were being passed to North Vietnam and other nations friendly to the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Soviets had constructed facsimiles of US Navy cypher machines from covertly obtained repair manuals and were being supplied with the daily key lists for months in advance. The single spy most responsible for this disastrous breach of US security was Chief Radioman John A. Walker, Jr.
John Walker fancied himself a hero but was, in reality, a high school drop-out who entered the Navy after a conviction for burglary. The Navy appeared to turn him around, he made rank, earned his GED, and qualified as a submarine communications watch officer. But making ends meet for his wife and four children on his $120 weekly salary was trying in the mid-1960s. To boot, an off-duty business in Charleston, into which he had invested thousands, was failing. When he was transferred to Naval Communications Area Master Station (NCAMS) in Norfolk in November 1967, he left his family in Charleston and commuted each weekend. On steady night shifts in Norfolk, he handled message traffic for all submarines in the Atlantic. He and his watchmates often joked about how much the Russians might pay for such top-secret information. And a month later, after hours, Walker photocopied the K-47 cypher keylist for the coming month and tucked the 8 X 10 sheet in his pocket. He drove to Washington DC, where he found the address of the Soviet embassy in a phone booth phone book…
Continued tomorrow…
Barron, John. Breaking the Ring: The Bizarre Case of the Walker Family Spy Ring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987.
Earley, Pete. Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring. New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1988.
Hunter, Robert W. Spy Hunter: Inside the FBI Investigation of the Walker Espionage Case. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1999.
Sontag, Sherry and Christopher Drew. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 1998, pp. 248-50.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: The KL-47 cypher system was a carry-over from the 1940s that was only used by 1967 as a backup or for low priority messages. However, Walker did not chose this keylist as his first to sell to the Soviets because its compromise wouldn’t seriously damage US communications. Rather, unlike keylists for other cryptographic systems, the KL-47 keylist had the words “TOP SECRET–SPECAT” plainly stamped at the top of the page. Walker reasoned this would entice the Soviets and earn him a larger fee.
