TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capts.9

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                                                                                June 17, 1985

COVER STORY

"Very Serious Losses"


As the Navy spy scandal spreads, officials assess the damage


He had retired from the U.S. Navy, and he had quit spying for
the Soviet Union. But he was miserable. Unemployed and living
on his $1,200-a-month service pension, the former chief radioman
kept house in an olive-colored trailer in Davis, Calif., while
his wife pursued her Ph.D. in hopes of helping to support them
both. He listened to classical music, yet it did not soothe
him. Referring to his decision to stop dealing in Government
secrets, he wrote to his spymaster boss:  "I realize this
doesn't fit in with your advice and counseling over the years.
 In all honesty, I was happier in the '60s and early '70s than
I've been since. I have agonized over this decision. I hope
you can understand."  His ringleader understood only too well,
predicting in a note to his Soviet contact that the unhappy
former spy would soon rejoin them, and explaining:  "He has
become accustomed to the big-spender life-style and I don't
believe he will adjust to living off his wife's income."

All such speculation became moot last week. With his
ringleader under arrest and the FBI watching his every move,
Jerry Alfred Whitworth, 45 drove 60 miles to San Francisco and
surrendered to federal agents. The balding and bearded former
communications specialist was charged with passing U.S.
intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union.

With Whitworth's arrest, the Navy's unfolding spy debacle took
on an ominous added dimension. Up until then, the espionage
ring that began unraveling three weeks earlier had seemed a
family affair. The three suspects were related:  Alleged
Ringleader John Walker Jr., 47; his son Michael, 22; and John's
brother Arthur, 50. All were present or former Navy men, and
all lived in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, the home base
of the Atlantic nuclear fleet and a center of highly classified
shipbuilding. While each had some access to the secrets of
submarine warfare and coded communications, authorities had
hoped that the ring was limited by geography and surname.

But Whitworth, in addition to being outside the family, could
have extended the ring's reach to the Pacific and even to the
Indian Ocean. He had taught Navy communications in San Diego,
had served in the Pacific as communications watch officer abroad
the nuclear- powered carrier Enterprise and had been in charge
of communications security at the Alameda Naval Air Station near
Oakland. He was familiar with the Navy's Indian Ocean
activities thanks to two tours of duty at the highly secret base
on the remote island of Diego Garcia. The FBI claimed that
Whitworth had operated "at the heart of Navy communications."
 Retired Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll called him "a dream agent"
for the Soviets.

Some high Government officials suspected that the ring was even
larger, and the New York Times quoted one as saying there could
be "four or five" additional arrests. He told the Times:  "I'm
afraid that this is only the tip of the iceberg."

But even as it stands, the case may be the most serious breach
of security since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested in
1950 for giving U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets. Defense
Secretary Caspar Weinberger acknowledged "very serious losses
that went on over a long period of time."  A top Pentagon
official gave this damage assessment:  "Some of our secrets in
submarine warfare, amphibious operations and weaponry,
communications coding systems, intelligence gathered by the
Navy, and carrier tactics."  When some newspaper reports, based
mainly on sources in the much embarrassed Navy, tried to
downplay the ring's impact, Pentagon Spokesman Michael Burch
offered a grim rebuttal:  "From what we are continuing to learn,
we know now that the damage evaluation has gone up."

As authorities tried to pinpoint the losses and pursue other
leads, the nation struggled with the disturbing implications of
the Walker case and other recent spy arrests. Suddenly,
ordinary Americans seemed all too wiling to betray their
country, not for ideology, as in Stalin's early days, but for
money, prestige and thrills. The Walker fiasco also made the
U.S. acutely aware of its growing vulnerability to spies. More
Soviet agents are operating in the U.S. than ever before, and
the number of military and technological secrets is growing
exponentially. Says Retired Admiral Bobby Inman, former
director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of
the CIA:  "We must be one of the world's easiest targets."

The immediate concern of security officials was whether the
Walker ring had turned over key information on how the U.S.
tracks submarines, thereby allowing the Soviets to develop
evasion techniques. But of even graver concern was the
possibility, considered remote by most experts, that the Walkers
had compromised the security of America's sea-based strategic
missile force. U.S. military planners contend that land-based
missiles and bombers are highly vulnerable to Soviet pre-emptive
attack. Only the sea leg of America's nuclear triad is thought
to be impervious to detection. If either side could knock out
the other's subs, the balance of terror would be drastically
changed.

The Navy insisted last week that the sea leg was as sturdy as
ever. "Our submarine fleet is invulnerable," declared Vice
Admiral Nils Thunman, deputy chief of naval operations for
submarine warfare. "The oceans are becoming more opaque, not
less."  When satellites, surface ships and sophisticated sound
systems are used against the Navy's own "boomers" in tests, he
said, "nobody can find us."

But did the Navy spies provide clues that would help the Soviets
spot weaknesses in the way the U.S. tracks their subs?  No one
could be certain, but prudent security officials had to assume
the worst. Arthur Walker, a lieutenant commander when he retired
in 1973, had taught antisubmarine tactics at an Atlantic fleet
school. On the carrier Nimitz, where he was arrested as it
patrolled off Israel, Michael Walker was only a seaman, but he
was assigned to clerk duties and had access to the "burn bag"
of discarded classified documents. As chief radiomen, both John
Walker and Whitworth had worked as cryptographers on ships
engaged in spotting Soviet subs and thus could have been aware
of radio traffic reporting any sightings. If the Soviets
learned from the spies just which subs had been detected, they
might be able to assess the capabilities of the U.S. tracking
system and ultimately foil it. Moreover, the codes and radio
frequencies used by U.S. sub trackers might help the Soviets
intercept such information on their own. Donn Parker, an
electronic- security expert in Menlo Park, Calif., says about
cryptographers: "They're the keepers of the kingdom. All the
information in an organization ultimately goes through their
hands."

The Navy denied a report that its entire system of hydrophones,
which are acoustic devices laid on the ocean bottom at strategic
choke points that Soviet subs have to cross to get into position
for nuclear strikes at the U.S., would have to be revamped at
a huge cost. Admiral Thunman said concerns about the
hydrophones were "ridiculous."

Other aspects of the case were not so easy to dismiss. Clearly,
it highlights a recent escalation in the number of Americans
willing to sell security secrets to the Soviets. Since 1975,
38 people have been charged with espionage; 21 have been
convicted. In the ten years before that, no Americans were
arrested on spy charges. Equally disturbing are the shifting
motives for betraying one's country. Counterintelligence
experts are discovering that most recent converts to espionage
care little about politics, and are rarely trapped by blackmail.
 Mainly, they are either hard up or greedy for cash. "People
addicted to the fast life are vulnerable," says Assistant U.S.
Attorney Eric Fisher, who prosecutes spy cases in California's
Silicon Valley. "When times turn bad they will look go
[selling] dope or espionage."

Inman says the upsurge in spying is due in part of official
attitudes. Over the years, he contends, high Government figures
have taken to leaking classified information, usually to
influence a policy decision or jockey for bureaucratic
advantage. As a consequence, public respect for secrecy had
declined, and betrayals by low-paid bureaucrats and military
personnel have increased. Former CIA Director Richard Helms
makes a similar point. "People are not particularly patriotic
anymore," he says. "When they are faced with the opportunity
[to spy], they say, 'Screw it. If I can make some money, why
not?'"  Moreover, the enormous increase in the amount of value
of technological information, as well as the proliferation of
classified documents, has created many more targets and put
many more people in a position to spy.

Fearful of falling hopelessly behind the U.S. in technology,
the Soviets have stepped up their recruitment of turncoats in
America. They and their East European satellites have increased
their official representatives in the U.S. by more than a third
in the past four years, and the FBI estimates that at least a
third of those officials are intelligence agents. One former
Soviet intelligence operative, who defected to Britain, claims
that the Kremlin has several hundred agents in North America.
 "How can you keep tabs on so many of us?" he asks. "You can't,
unless you force Moscow by mass expulsions to drastically slim
down its bloated espionage apparatus. Until that happens, you
are going to have a whole series of Walker-type spy rings."

Once a spy is recruited, detecting him is no easy matter for
America's undermanned intelligence division of the FBI. Indeed,
the Walker ring apparently operated for two decades. When it
finally was exposed, no clever sleuthing did the trick. John
Walker's former wife Barbara, 47, who had known about his secret
life for at least 15 years, finally went to the FBI last
November.

Reaching that decision had tormented Barbara Walker. She had
married John in Durham, N.C., in 1957 and raised their four
children while he pursued his naval career. He was a
communications specialist on the Simon Bolivar, a nuclear
submarine armed with Polaris missiles, taught at the Navy
Communications School in San Diego, finally was made a warrant
officer in Norfolk, Va. There he held two posts that any spy
would cherish:  communications watch officer for the commander
of the Atlantic fleet's amphibious force and later a similar
position for the entire Atlantic Naval Surface Force. It was
shortly before they had moved to Norfolk in the early 1970s
that Barbara apparently first became suspicious of John's
secretive activities. She kept her worries to herself until
they had a furious argument. Then, she told the Cape Cod Times
last week, "I called him a traitor."  She claimed that her
husband, who she said had a "Jekyll and Hyde" personality, beat
her. Said she:  "I walked around with two great shiners."

Their marriage steadily eroded and, despite their Roman
Catholic backgrounds, ended in divorce in 1976 after 19 years.
 The settlement required him to give her $10,000 in cash and
their Norfolk home. He later paid her another $10,000 and
assumed a $27,000 mortgage to get back the house, recently
valued at $70,000. He was not obligated to pay alimony bud did
contribute $500 a month to support three of the children,
Cynthia Marie, Laura Mae and Michael. Margaret was then legally
an adult. Barbara took all the children and moved to Skowhegan,
Me.--"as far away as I could get."

The divorcee found work cementing shoes in a factory and rented
a two-story house. She worked extra hours to pay her bills
and, according to the Washington Post, would arrive home "in
jeans and a sweatshirt covered with soot and glue, too tired to
change clothes." Shalel Way, a friend in Skowhegan, told the
Post that Barbara would complain, "Johnny Walker did this to
me.."  She shared her secret with Way, even asking for a Tarot
card reading to help her decide whether to tell the FBI. She
claimed that John would get drunk, call her on the phone and
brag about helping the Soviets. "Johnny Walker is a traitor to
his country," Way quoted Barbara as saying. "I'm really going
to get him for this. That's my country."

Gradually, the children moved away. Laura went into the Army,
where, following the family's almost obsessive occupational
interest, she became a communications specialist. Cynthia went
to West Dennis, Mass., on Cape Cod, with her newborn son.
Margaret moved to Virginia. Michael joined his father in 1980,
completing his final two years of high school at Norfolk's
private Ryan Upper School.

Now alone, Barbara joined Cynthia in West Dennis, getting a
salesclerk job in a gift shop. It was there that she finally
made up her mind to turn in her ex-husband. She did so, she
told the Cape Cod Times, "to protect my family--I did what I
believed in."  Only after her former husband was arrested did
she learn that she had unwittingly turned in Michael too. "How
can a father do this?" she was quoted as saying. "He used his
own son. If what they say is true, he's lucky he's in jail
because I would kill him."

Presumably encouraged by her mother, Laura also implicated her
father. She told the FBI that he had tried to enlist her in the
spy ring in 1979, which would have given the undercover
operatives an entry into Army as well as Navy communications.

The FBI then set out to catch John Walker red-handed.
Apparently at the bureau's urging, Barbara visited her former
husband in Norfolk in April. She did not tell him that she had
been in touch with the authorities. During her stay, she said
John bragged that if caught spying he would become "a celebrity
and go down in history."  Barbara told the Cape Cod newspaper
that her ex-husband had been paid hundred of thousands of
dollars over the years by the Soviets, adding bitterly:  "John's
a big spender. His girlfriends were very expensive, and he did
a lot of traveling."

Certainly after the divorce, if not before, Walker was often
seen escorting attractive women to Norfolk nightspots. His
fondness for Scotch brought him a now ironic nickname, "Johnny
Walker Red."  He could take dates on Chesapeake Bay cruises in
his green houseboat, the Drift-R-Cruise, or on his 26-ft. sloop
(each valued by his lawyer at $6,000). There were also flights
in his single-engine Grumman- Tiger, which was worth an
estimated $20,000. He dated Pamela Carroll, a Norfolk police
officer who moonlighted at his private detective agencies.

Walker worked for two years in the Norfolk branch of Wackenhut,
a national firm providing industrial security services. While
there he was sued for inflicting "emotional distress" by a
wealthy Virginia Beach couple who claimed that Walker snooped
around their home in varied disguises:  as a birdwatcher wearing
a green bag with eyeholes over his head and carrying a
telescope; as a Boy Scout leader looking for a place to camp;
as a Catholic priest. Next, Walker went into business for
himself, digging up evidence in divorce cases and probing phony
insurance claims. He also swept business offices for hidden
microphones and telephone taps, which could have given him a
chance to plant listening devices in the offices of defense
contractors while pretending to protect them. One of his
business associates, Laurie Robinson, said that Walker never
gave her the slightest hint that he might be spying for the
Soviets. She was apparently cleared of suspicion by the FBI.

As a retired Navy officer, Walker had car stickers that let him
pass through the gates of the area's many Navy, Marine, Air
Force and Army bases. Once he was inside, any papers he might
have acquired and put into a briefcase or package were not
likely to be checked. Moreover, as a former warrant officer,
Walker could mix with Navy officers in their clubs as well as
fraternize with enlisted men in their hangouts. The rank nicely
bridges the Navy's class lines between noncoms and "gentlemen."
 Declared another private detective in Norfolk:  "He couldn't
have been better positioned."

Walker cultivated anything but a pinko image. He placed a photo
of Ronald Reagan on his desk and talked, said an associate,
"like a real patriot."  One day in 1979 he persuaded Debbie
Aiken, then a talk-show host for a Norfolk radio station, into
letting him discuss the Ku Klux Klan on her program. He claimed
to be the Klan's state organizer. "He drove up to the station
in a pickup truck with bodyguards," she recalls. One carried
a shotgun. "Walker told me he had to be protected, that he
feared for his life at all times. It was more than a little
strange."

After Barbara Walker's tip, the FBI secured court permits to
tap Walker's telephones. On May 19, after hearing him talk
about a special trip to Charlotte, N.C., agents watched his
Chevrolet Astro van head north toward Potomac, Md., instead.
According to trailing agents, Walker drove evasively checking
to see if he was being followed. He did in fact shake his
pursuers for nearly three hours, but they luckily ran across him
near Poolesville, Md. On a lonely country road, the agents saw
him park near a tree posted with a NO HUNTING sign. He briefly
got out of his van, then drove away. They watched for nearly
an hour. A Soviet embassy official, later identified as Aleksey
Gavilovich Tkachenko, drove near the spot, but did not stop.
Finally, the agents moved in and picked up a brown shopping bag.
 At 3 a.m. they surprised Walker at a nearby Ramada Inn. He
tried to flee down a hallway but prudently decided not to use
the loaded pistol he was carrying.

The contents of the dropped-off bag were devastating to the spy
ring. It included 129 classified Navy documents, many indicating
that the U.S. had tracked the movement of specific Soviet navy
and merchant vessels. It also contained the "Dear Johnnie"
letters from the unhappy former spy, Whitworth; Walker's own
three-page "Dear Friend" letter to his Soviet contact; and
enough information on other associates to lead to the quick
arrests of Michael aboard the Nimitz and John's brother Arthur
in Virginia Beach.

Arthur and his wife Rita, 50, were well liked by neighbors in
the prosperous five-family cul-de-sac. Alone in their brick
four-bedroom home after their three grown children moved away,
the couple was involved in local civic work. Arthur had helped
form the block's anti-crime program, and served as president of
both a local civic league and a swim club. Recalled one
neighbor:  "They were an all- American family."

Arthur Walker taught antisubmarine warfare tactics at the
Atlantic Fleet Tactical School in Norfolk from 1968 until his
retirement in 1973. Entering the Navy in 1954, he had served
as a sonar operator on three subs before winning his commission.
 His subsequent duties included those of navigator, officer in
charge of communications, engineering officer and executive
officer on various submarines. When he retired, he quickly found
a civilian job as an engineer with VSE Corp., a Navy contractor
with regional headquarters in Chesapeake, Va. He worked on
plans for the maintenance of Navy carriers and amphibious ships.

If Arthur Walker was an unlikely spy, young Michael was almost
unimaginable in the role. He was a good dancer, loved surfing
and was gregarious. Michael was popular with girls in his
senior class, which voted him its "best-looking" male graduate.
 He helped his father on small detective jobs and, at least two
friends say, seemed almost to "worship" him. One claimed that
the admiration was mixed with fear, recalling the time Michael
borrowed his dad's van for a class camping trip only to have it
break down. "I saw a different side of Michael then," said the
classmate. "All the calm evaporated. He panicked. He said his
father would kill him."

One of Michael's best friends was startled when "he came in one
day and said, 'I think I'm going into the Navy.'  It just didn't
fit with the partying, the surfing."  Michael met his future
wife Rachel, 22, a college student living in Norfolk, after he
enlisted in 1982. They have been apart most of the time since
he went to sea. At the time of his arrest, a 15-lb. cache of
classified documents was found near his bunk on the Nimitz.
Rachel tearfully told a Virginia-Pilot reporter, "All I want to
do is close my front door and not open it until this is all
over."

Whitworth was the most reclusive the arrested spy suspects.
Born in Muldrow, Okla., he was brought up mainly by relatives
of his estranged parents. He joined the Naval Reserve while in
high school, attended a junior college for two years, then made
the Navy his career. His path crossed that of John Walker when
both taught at the Navy Communications School in San Diego early
in the 1970s. He shipped out to Diego Garcia in February 1973,
assigned to what the FBI calls "sensitive technical
communications."  Next came a course in satellites at the Army
Communications Electronics School in Fort Monmouth, N.J. He was
sent back to Diego Garcia for a tour that ended in 1976, when
he became a communications specialist aboard the carrier
Constellation. Travel notes found in John Walker's home place
Walker in Hong Kong in August 1977, at the same time that the
Constellation, with Whitworth on it, stopped there. About a
year later, Whitworth was a chief radioman aboard the supply
ship Niagara Falls when it made a visit to the Philippines; once
again Walker was there to greet him. Walker's travel notes, the
FBI contends, show that on both these trips Walker met a Soviet
contact.

Authorities say Whitworth was the man who last year posted
three letters in Sacramento to the FBI. Two offered information
about "a significant espionage system" in return for "complete
immunity" from prosecution. The third letter indicated that the
man, who signed the letters only "RUS, Somewhere, USA," had
changed his mind about becoming an informant. Asked why the FBI
had not followed up on the first letters, U.S. Attorney Joseph
Russoniello in San Francisco explained:  "Not knowing who you're
dealing with, whether it's Jack the Ripper or the greatest
master spy since Mata Hari, an offer on the blind to do business
is not the way we do business."

When agents searched the trailer where Whitworth lived with his
second wife Brenda, 30, they found the computer disks on which
the "Dear Johnnie" letters to Walker were still stored, as well
as a 48- page manual of Navy contingency plans for major
hostilities in the Middle East. Brenda protested that they also
carried away all her computerized notes for her doctoral
dissertation on nutrition. Born and reared on a farm in North
Dakota, she had met Whitworth on a 1971 trip to San Diego. She
had found him "dynamic and very interesting to talk to," she
told the San Francisco Examiner. They corresponded for three
years and were married in 1976. Said she last week:  "I stand
by my husband. I believe in his innocence."

In court appearances, John and Michael Walker pleaded innocent
to espionage charges. A hearing for Arthur Walker, who
reportedly is cooperating with prosecutors, was postponed until
this week. Whitworth had not yet entered a plea. All were
denied release on bail.

Worried about the impact of the Walker ring, Defense Secretary
Weinberger appointed a blue-ribbon committee of Pentagon and
Navy investigators to probe the damage done to U.S. security,
particularly in the potential doomsday arena of undersea
warfare. The entire cumbersome system by which the military
tires to prevent and detect defections within its ranks seemed
ripe for review. There could be only modest consolation for the
pentagon in the fact that the latest espionage sensation seemed
ut of step with modern spying trends. These were old-style
military spies, grabbing whatever secrets their duty stations
happened to offer. High military officials had some reason to
hope that the information provided by this network was
technologically out-of-date.

Most of the recent spy operations in the U.S. have been of a
different breed, involving well-placed civilian scientific
specialists in positions to expose secrets in the proliferating
field of high technology. The lesson of the Walker case was
that if U.S. security cannot cope with uniformed moles, it may
be woefully unprepared for the sophisticated civilian spies of
the technological age.

--By Ed Magnuson.  Reported by Kenneth W. Banta/Norfolk and
Anne Constable/Washington


--------------------------------------------------------- A WEB
OF CONTACTS AROUND THE WORLD

Alameda, Calif. -- June 1983

While Whitworth is stationed at naval base, he meets with John
Walker.

Poolesville, Md. -- May 19, 1985

FBI recovers 129 classified documents after Walker makes a drop.

Israeli Coast -- May 22, 1985

John Walker's son Michael arrested on aircraft carrier Nimitz.

Hong Kong -- August 1977

John Walker meets with Whitworth before passing information to
Soviets.

Norfolk, Va. -- 1975 -

John Walker's home before and after his retirement from the
Navy.

Chesapeake, Va. -- 1980 -

Arthur Walker works at VSE Corp., source of classified
information that he passes to his brother.

Indian Ocean -- 1973-76

Whitworth is twice posted at Diego Garcia, a highly secret
facility.

Philippines -- December 1978

John Walker sees Whitworth before another rendezvous with
Soviets.