JOHN WALKER SPY RING (cont.)

The Soviets were indeed interested in what RMC John Walker had brought!  After waiting in a Soviet embassy anteroom while the authenticity of his KL-47 keylist was verified, an official returned to Walker with a roll of used $20 bills amounting to $2000.  Walker was then cloaked in a trench coat and hat and hunched low into the back seat of an embassy vehicle.  Two guards sat on either side to block him from view.  They drove nearly an hour through the back streets of Washington DC until Walker was let out to return to Norfolk.  When he arrived in Charleston that weekend, his wife questioned the sudden windfall that now meant their Christmas would not be another sparse one.  Walker answered with a lie about a second job driving one-way rental cars back to Washington.

Enthused over the likelihood of further profits, Walker began steadily smuggling classified information to the Soviets.  He moved his family to Norfolk, into an expensive downtown apartment.  He bought a boat and took up sailing.  When they needed new furniture, he uncharacteristically told his wife to get what she wanted and not worry about the money.  His lifestyle had changed drastically from “powdered milk, no nights out,”–and no one in the Navy questioned it.

Walker was transferred to USS NIAGARA FALLS (AFS-3) in 1971 where his cryptography skills landed him a job as the Classified Materials System Custodian.  This gave him unlimited access to all classified communications throughout the Pacific Fleet–in the privacy of his own office!  He photographed operational messages, vulnerability assessments, repair manuals for top-secret cypher machines, keylists for months in advance, indeed, any classified material upon which he could get his hands.  Months before his penta-annual background check required of all similar rates, he simply photocopied a background check summary sheet, forged a rubber stamp at an office supply store, and placed it in his file.  At inspection it was assumed the check had been done.

But by 1976, Walker worried that another fake background check would be caught.  He retired from the Navy at the rank of Chief Warrant Officer to avoid discovery, but not before recruiting RMSC Jerry A. Whitworth, a friend from radioman school in San Diego.  Whitworth began supplying classified information, as did Walker’s brother, LCDR Arthur J. Walker, and later Walker’s son, RM Michael L. Walker.  Walker and his later spy ring operated for over 17 years, earning Walker an estimated $1 million in payoffs.  He was ultimately caught 20 May 1985, making a drop of classified documents his son had pilfered from USS NIMITZ (CVN-68).

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  21 DEC 23

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

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:  Walker was caught when his ex-wife, Barbara, tipped the FBI after Walker refused to pay alimony.  Walker was convicted of treason during peacetime, and sentenced to three life terms plus 100 years, all concurrent.  He died in prison in 2014 of stage IV throat cancer and complications of diabetes.  Arthur Walker also died in prison in 2014.  Jerry Whitworth remains behind bars today.  Under a pre-trial plea bargain, Michael Walker accepted a sentence of 25 years, but was released early on parole in February 2000.

John Walker remained completely unrepentant, claiming his actions to be virtuous by observing that the US and Russia never went to war.  But the damage to US security is inestimable.  Even Walker himself cannot catalog the full scope of information he passed.  The Department of State at the time was using the same cryptographic machines, albeit with different key settings.  Conservatively, over $1 billion has been spent since his capture re-tooling and recoding our cryptographic systems.

Walker was motivated purely by money.  It was his treason that prompted our Navy to pay attention in recent decades to the issues of sailor indebtedness and financial management.

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                                        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.

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