John Anthony Walker
John Anthony Walker Jr. was a United States Navy chief warrant officer and communications specialist convicted of spying for the Soviet Union from 1967 to 1985 and sentenced to life in prison.
In late 1985, Walker made a plea bargain with federal prosecutors, which required him to provide full details of his espionage activities and testify against his co-conspirator, former senior chief petty officer Jerry Whitworth. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to a lesser sentence for Walker's son, former Seaman Michael Walker, who was also involved in the spy ring. During his time as a Soviet spy, Walker helped the Soviets decipher more than one million encrypted naval messages, organizing a spy operation that The New York Times reported in 1987 "is sometimes described as the most damaging Soviet spy ring in history."
After Walker's arrest, Caspar Weinberger, President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense, concluded that the Soviet Union made significant gains in naval warfare attributable to Walker's spying. Weinberger stated that the information Walker gave Moscow allowed the Soviets "access to weapons and sensor data and naval tactics, terrorist threats, and surface, submarine, and airborne training, readiness and tactics."
In the June 2010 issue of Naval History Magazine, John Prados, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., pointed out that after Walker introduced himself to Soviet officials, North Korean forces seized USS Pueblo in order to make better use of Walker's spying. Prados added that North Korea subsequently shared information gleaned from the spy ship with the Soviets, enabling them to build replicas and gain access to the U.S. naval communications system, which continued until the system was completely revamped in the late 1980s. It has emerged in 2012 that North Korea acted alone and the incident actually harmed North Korea's relations with most of the Eastern Bloc.
Early life
Walker was born in Washington, D.C., on July 28, 1937, and attended high school in Scranton, Pennsylvania. After dropping out of high school, Walker and a friend staged a series of burglaries on May 27, 1955. Their loot included two tires, four quarts of oil, six cans of cleaner, and $3 in cash. The pair evaded police during a high-speed chase, but were arrested two days later. He was offered the option of jail or the military. He enlisted in the Navy in 1955, and successfully advanced as a radioman to chief petty officer in eight years. While stationed in Boston, Walker met and married Barbara Crowley, and they had four children together, three daughters and a son. While stationed on the nuclear-powered Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine in Charleston, South Carolina, Walker opened a bar, which failed to turn a profit and immediately plunged him into debt. In 1965 Walker transferred to the newly built FBM,, where he received a top secret crypto clearance to work in the submarine's communications spaces. He and other members of the submarine's communications team were members of the John Birch Society, distributing literature about the organization to crew members and to friends ashore, where Walker attempted the playboy lifestyle.Spy ring
John Walker was promoted to warrant officer in March 1967 and in April was assigned as a communications watch officer at the headquarters of COMSUBLANT in Norfolk, Virginia, where his responsibilities included "running the entire communications center for the submarine force...." Walker began spying for the Soviets in late 1967, when, distraught over his financial difficulties, he walked into the old Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., sold a top-secret document for several thousand dollars, and negotiated an ongoing salary of $5001,000 a week.Soviet KGB general Boris Aleksandrovich Solomatin, stationed at Washington, D.C. 1966–68, "played a key role in the handling of John Walker". Walker justified his treachery by claiming that the first classified Navy communications data he sold to the Soviets had already been completely compromised when the North Koreans had captured the U.S. Navy communications surveillance ship,. Yet the Koreans captured Pueblo in late January 1968 – many weeks after Walker had betrayed the information. Furthermore, a 2001 thesis presented at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College using information obtained from Soviet archives and from Oleg Kalugin, indicated that the Pueblo incident may have taken place because the Soviets wanted to study equipment described in documents supplied to them by Walker.
It has emerged in 2012 that North Korea acted alone and the incident actually harmed North Korea's relations with most of the Eastern Bloc.
In the spring of 1968 John Walker's wife discovered items in his desk at home causing her to suspect he was acting as a spy. Walker continued spying, receiving an income of several thousand dollars per month for supplying classified information. Walker used most of the money to pay off his delinquent debts and to move his family into better neighborhoods, but he also set aside some for future investment, such as turning around the fortunes of his money-losing bar by hiring a skilled bartender. While Walker occasionally used the services of his wife, Barbara Walker, he anticipated the possibility of losing access to classified material due to reassignment. Walker's chance to seek further assistance came in September 1969 when he became the deputy director of the Radioman A and B schools at Naval Training Center San Diego. There, Walker befriended student Jerry Whitworth.
Walker was transferred from San Diego in December 1971 to become the communications officer aboard the supply ship. Whitworth, who would become a Navy senior chief petty officer/senior chief radioman, agreed to help Walker gain access to highly classified communications data in 1973; and served aboard Niagara Falls after Walker retired from the Navy. Transfer to the staff of commander of the Amphibious Force, Atlantic Fleet had stopped Walker's access to the data the Soviets wanted, but he recruited Whitworth to keep the data flowing – softening the idea of espionage by telling him the data would go to Israel, an ally of the United States. Later, when Whitworth realized the data was going to the Soviets instead of Israel, he nonetheless continued supplying Walker with information, until Whitworth's own retirement from the Navy in 1983.
In 1976, Walker retired from the Navy in order to give up his security clearance, as he believed certain superior officers of his were too keen on investigating lapses in his records. Walker and Barbara had also divorced. However, Walker did not end his espionage work, and began looking more aggressively among his children and family members for assistance.
By 1984 Walker recruited his older brother Arthur James Walker, a retired lieutenant commander who served from 1953 until 1973 and then went to work at a military contractor, and his son Michael Lance Walker, an active duty seaman since 1982. Walker had also attempted to recruit his youngest daughter, who had enlisted in the United States Army, but she cut her military career short when she became pregnant and refused her father's offer to pay for an abortion, instead deciding to devote herself to full-time motherhood. Arthur Walker had been having severe financial problems and had been offered an exorbitant sum of money from his brother to provide a confidential document. John Walker later admitted that he had learned this ploy from the KGB to offer a large amount of money for something easily obtainable to dissipate doubts in the target, then keep the person hungry for even greater sums of money. Two known manuals had been provided to the KGB, one being on a command vessel for an amphibious fleet. Arthur rationalized that these documents were banal and could not do not serious harm. Walker then turned his attention to his son, who had drifted during much of his teenage years and dropped out of high school. Walker gained custody of his son, put him to work as an apprentice at his detective agency in order to prepare him for espionage and encouraged him to re-enroll in high school to earn a diploma, then to enlist in the Navy.
When Walker began spying, he worked as a key supervisor in the communications center for the U.S. Atlantic Fleet's submarine force, and he would have had knowledge of top-secret technologies, such as the SOSUS underwater surveillance system, which tracks underwater acoustics via a network of submerged hydrophones. It was through Walker that the Soviets became aware that the U.S. Navy was able to track the location of Soviet submarines by the cavitation produced by their propellers. After this, the propellers on the Soviet submarines were improved to reduce cavitation. The Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal was disclosed in this activity in 1987. It is also alleged that Walker's actions precipitated the seizure of USS Pueblo. CIA historian H. Keith Melton states on the show Top Secrets of the CIA, which aired on the Military Channel, among other occasions, at 0400CST, February 5, 2013:
In 1990, The New York Times journalist John J. O'Connor reported, "It's been estimated by some intelligence experts that Mr. Walker provided enough code-data information to alter significantly the balance of power between Russia and the United States". Asked later how he had managed to access so much classified information, Walker said, "KMart has better security than the Navy". According to a report presented to the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive in 2002, Walker is one of a handful of spies believed to have earned more than a million dollars in espionage compensation, although The New York Times estimated his income at only $350,000.
Theodore Shackley, the CIA station chief in Saigon, asserted that Walker's espionage may have contributed to diminished B-52 bombing strikes, that the forewarning gleaned from Walker's espionage directly affected the United States' effectiveness in Vietnam. Independent analysis of Walker's methods by an American Naval officer in Cold War London, Lieutenant Commander David Winters, led to operational introduction of technologies – such as over-the-air rekeying – that finally closed security gaps previously exploited by the Walker spy ring.