THE YAZOO CITY SHIPYARD

After the failure of the Yazoo Pass expedition before Confederate Fort Pemberton in March 1863, MGEN Ulysses Grant adopted a new strategy against Vicksburg, the last and most menacing Rebel city preventing Union control of the Mississippi River.  Grant would move his 30,000 troops south on the Louisiana shore, cross the river to the south at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, and move toward Jackson, cutting Vicksburg’s supply line via the Yazoo River.  Union gunboats, necessary to cover Grant’s river crossing, made a daring run past Vicksburg on the dark night of 16-17 April.  Doing so gave them access to the Yazoo, which reaches the Mississippi just south of Vicksburg.  By noon on 18 May 1863 RADM David Dixon Porter found himself on the Yazoo River with the ironclad USS BARON DE KALB and the tinclads CHOCTAW, LINDEN, PETREL, ROMEO, and FOREST ROSE.  Porter was supporting MGEN William T. Sherman’s move up the Yazoo.

At Snyder’s Mill the Rebels had constructed extensive earthworks that would have been a formidable obstruction to Sherman’s and Porter’s advance had not the Confederates abandoned it the day before.  Here Porter’s men found tents, field equipment, supplies, and 14 gun emplacements replete with artillery and ammunition.  A band of Confederates left to recover this material skidaddled at the sight of Porter’s boats.  Porter then sent LCDR John G. Walker ahead in BARON DE KALB to investigate rumors of a Confederate shipyard further upriver in Yazoo City.

DE KALB arrived this day in Yazoo City to find a column of smoke marking the Confederate shipyard.  Three warships lay on the ways nearly completed:  CSS MOBILE awaited only her iron plating; CSS REPUBLIC was being fitted with an iron ram at her bows; and a third 310-foot steamer Walker described as, “a monster,” was about to receive her 4.5″ iron plating.  Her 70-foot beam enclosed six steam engines, powering four paddlewheels and two screw propellers.  She would have given the Union a boatload of trouble indeed!  The steamers were seaworthy enough for Walker to have commandeered them for the Union, but for the lack of pilots to guide them downriver they were burned.  The shipyard was found to have five lumber and planing mills, blacksmith, machine, and carpentry shops, and all manner of equipment necessary to build or repair vessels of any size.  A hospital ashore nursed 150 wounded Confederates, who were paroled, never to fight again.  Walker destroyed the works, conservatively estimated to be worth $2 million in 1863 dollars.

Walker’s return was plagued on the 22^nd by three field pieces and 200 infantry from the shore near Liverpool Landing.  But as quickly as Union guns trained shoreward, the Rebels fled.

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CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

“Additional Report of Acting Rear-Admiral Porter, U.S. Navy, transmitting report of Lieutenant-Commander Walker, U.S. Navy, commanding U.S.S. Baron de Kalb, regarding operations at Yazoo City.”  IN:  Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 25, Naval Forces on Western Waters from May 18, 1863, to February 29, 1864.  Washington, DC: GPO, pp. 7-9.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Civil War Naval Chronology 1861-1865.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1961, pp. III-82-83.

Jones, Virgil Carrington.  The Civil War at Sea:  Vol 2  The River War.  New York, NY:  Holt Rinehart Winston, 1961, pp. 421-22.

“Report of Acting Rear-Admiral Porter, U.S. Navy.”  IN:  Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 25, Naval Forces on Western Waters from May 18, 1863, to February 29, 1864.  Washington, DC: GPO, pp. 5-7.

Sweetman, Jack.  American Naval History:  An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 3rd ed.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 2002, pp. 71-72.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  The Yazoo Pass expedition was an attempt to reach the Yazoo River from the north by breaching the Mississippi River levee opposite Helena, Arkansas.  Doing so flooded a former river channel that connected with Moon Lake, and the Coldwater and Tallahatchie Rivers to reach the Yazoo.  The expedition was halted by the impassable Confederate Fort Pemberton on the Tallahatchie just three miles from the Yazoo.

Tinclads were the most prolific class of gunboat in the Mississippi Squadron of our Civil War.  Each was a former civilian riverboat, purchased by our Navy and reinforced with heavy timber bulwarks overlain with sheet metal.

Most naval squadrons of these days had limited capacity for housing POWs.  Captured soldiers and sailors were therefore paroled.  They signed documents swearing never again to take up arms against the Union and were released in return.  Paroles had mixed effectiveness, especially since soldiers thereby returning to their homes did not wish to be perceived as deserters.

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                                   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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