Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (21 page)

The more John thought about it, the more paranoid he became.

“I didn’t know what the Russians were thinking and I decided that I needed some insurance. I needed to convince them that I was invaluable as a spy even though I wasn’t directly producing material. This is when the idea of recruiting others besides Jerry began to form in my mind.”

Before his return flight landed in New York City, John outlined a letter on the back pages of his journal, It was a letter that he intended to send to his brother, Arthur, a letter that was not only going to make Arthur angry, but also bring their joint business, Walker
Enterprise
s, closer to financial ruin.

John was tightening the noose on Arthur, and while he would later deny in interviews that he intended to put pressure on him, this was exactly the effect of the letter.

SUB: Position of Jaws in WE [Walker
Enterprise
s]

1. This is not a “Dear John” letter. I have put my thoughts, recommendations and basic position in writing for three reasons:

a. I wrote it during my Far East trip.

b. We seldom have the opportunity to talk.

c. You are difficult to talk to anyway since you become strongly argumentative when I bring up my problems.

2. At the risk of boring you with the obvious, the following facts should be recapped:

FINANCIAL

a. I have invested considerable direct cash into the formation of WE.

b. I have invested a large sum of invisible cash into WE in the form of a vehicle, office furniture, typewriter, copy machine, bldg rent, utilities, secretarial pay, personal vehicle expenses . . .

John’s letter continued in this cool and calculated manner. He demanded the repayment of more than $10,000 [spy money] that he had pumped into Walker
Enterprise
s, along with back wages and compensation for time lost.

John knew Arthur couldn’t afford to pay, but he didn’t care.

“Arthur had never missed taking home a paycheck from Walker
Enterprise
s, but the company was losing money like crazy,” John told me later. “Now who in the hell do you think was making that possible? Me! That’s who! I was financing his kids’ college education for christsakes! I just kept pumping more and more spy money into the business.”

John had decided it was time for old Uncle Art to feel reality.

Chapter 32

Four months passed quickly, and in mid-January 1978, John boarded a flight for Italy. Jerry had delivered another promising cache of cryptographic material and collected another $6,000 in salary. This time, Jerry hadn’t complained about what they were doing, nor had he brought up the subject of Israel. He was beginning to get used to the extra income.

“In the Wild West days, the bad guys had to wade down streams to cover their tracks,” John recalled, “but today’s criminals worry about keeping their names out of computers and that was my big worry about going to Europe.”

John used an alias when he bought his ticket from Norfolk to New York City. But traveling under a fictitious name was a bit trickier on out-of-the-country flights. Airlines compare the names on each passengers passport with their ticket. With the KGB’s help, however, John came up with a way to beat the system.

“Having a fake passport or two would have been stupid because if anyone saw them, they would know you were doing something illegal,” John explained to me. “So I did something much simpler. I misspelled my name.”

When John bought his ticket to Milan, he told the ticket agent that his name was John A. Walker, Jr. It was such a minor oversight that the harried airline ticket agent at John F. Kennedy International Airport didn’t even notice the difference when she glanced at John’s ticket and passport. As a result, there was no record in the airline’s computer of anyone named John A. Walker, Jr., ever leaving the country.

The KGB had been correct, John discovered, when it told him that security at Italian airports was virtually nonexistent.

“The place was a madhouse!” John hustled through Italian customs without ever having to open his suitcase or get his passport stamped.

The KGB had told John to board a train for Vienna next, but he decided to make a side trip on his own. He had realized when he met the KGB in Casablanca that he was totally defenseless.

“The KGB always wanted to meet me at night in out-of-the-way places where I could be robbed or even murdered,” John recalled. He also remained paranoid about the Russians. “I still didn’t know if they were going to kill me.”

So John asked a taxi driver in Milan where he could buy a small, cheap handgun, and within a few minutes he was taken to a cramped apartment where he paid $100 for a .25 caliber automatic with twenty-five bullets. He also paid the cabbie a $25 finder’s fee.

“The gun was a piece of crap, but it was small enough to fit in my coat pocket.”

The train ride to Vienna was long and tiring. Just as the KGB agent had said, the only time John had to show his passport was when the train reached the Austrian border. At that point, the doors to the train were locked and the Austrian customs officials came aboard with German shepherd dogs. While the dogs sniffed each passenger and piece of luggage for narcotics, the snappily dressed customs agents glanced at – but did not record – the names on each passenger’s passport.

The lax security wasn’t the only thing that the KGB had been correct about. It was teeth-chattering cold in Vienna on the night of January 20, 1978, when John checked into the Hotel Regina, one of the city’s moderately priced hotels. The KGB had told John to stay there, but he immediately felt uncomfortable because most of the guests were Austrian and the only language he heard was German.

“I really felt out of place. In the middle of January, there aren’t many American tourists in Vienna.”

The city has a population of 1.6 million and is divided into twenty-three sprawling, crazy-quilt districts, but it didn’t take a skilled ship’s navigator like John long to get his bearings. The Hotel Regina was only one block away from the U-Bahn, the city’s efficient and heavily used subway system.

Just as he had done when making dead drops in the United States, John decided to familiarize himself with his route on the morning of the face-to-face meeting. He boarded the U-2 subway line, which rings the ancient inner city, and rode it five stops until he reached the U-4 line that carried him away from the old city to the Schonbrunn Palace, the summer home and favorite residence of the former ruling family of Austria, the Hapsburgs.

With schoolboy awe, he noted in his journal that the trains operated on an “honor” system, with passengers buying small orange tickets that they later punched themselves in machines near the tracks.

While riding toward the 1,400-room Schonbrunn Palace, John read the sheet of instructions that the KGB agent had given him in Casablanca. The Vienna Procedure was written on a single sheet of white typing paper, and the first time that John saw it, he thought it had been typed. But when he looked carefully at the document, he realized each letter had been printed by hand across the page in incredibly small and neat lines:

THE VIENNA PROCEDURE

AT 18:15 P.M. COME UP TO THE “KOMET KUCHEN” STORE (KITCHEN CABINETS AND APPLIANCES) ON THE CORNER OF SCHONBRUNNER STRASSE AND RUCKERGASSE. TO GET THERE WALK FROM SCHONBRUNN PALACE AND PARK GROUNDS; ON SCHONBRUNNER SCHLOSSSTRASSE AND ITS CONTINUATION SCHONBRUNNER STRASSE TO RUCKERGASSE. TURN LEFT ON THE LATTER AND STOP AT THE WINDOW OF THE “KOMET KUCHEN” STORE, WHICH IS LOOKING ON RUCKERGASSE, JUST A COUPLE OF YARDS AWAY FROM THE CORNER. FOR EASY IDENTIFICATION PLEASE CARRY YOUR CAMERA BAG ON YOUR LEFT SHOULDER AND HOLD A SMALL PAPER BAG IN YOUR RIGHT HAND. PAUSE BY THAT WINDOW FOR ABOUT TWO MINUTES FROM 18:15P.M. TO 18:17 P.M., DRIFTING SLOWLY ALONG IT AWAY FROM SCHONBRUNNER STRASSE TOWARD THE OTHER CORNER OF THE BUILDING ...

Finding the Komet Kuchen store was easy. It had four large red, white, yellow, and blue neon signs extending from it, and two stories of brilliant silver aluminum siding above its store windows. When John reached it, he gazed through the display windows at the washers and dryers, color televisions, and stereos inside.

He walked around the corner of the store as instructed, paused, and then returned to the front of the building. As he was walking back, John noticed that there was a public park diagonally across the street from the store. A KGB agent could easily and unobtrusively watch him from the park benches there and also tell if he was being followed.

Following the instructions, John crossed the street and stood in front of another display window. He was now standing parallel to the park. He walked down the sidewalk and turned right at the next corner into a narrow side street lined with cars.

The instructions called for him to walk one block and turn left, then walk another block and turn left again. This brought him back to the main thoroughfare, and he found himself once again facing the public park.

Had anyone been following John, he would have been easily apparent to a watcher sitting in the park. There would be no reason for someone to take such an indirect route unless he was shadowing someone.

John was having fun despite the bitter cold. He was getting caught up in the James Bond type procedures and the drama of clandestine meetings. John continued his trek and was led by the instructions up and down a number of streets that always brought him back to a major street, Meidlinger Hauptstrasse. A bird’s-eye view of the course would show that John had walked in a series of circles all near city parks or small plazas where a KGB agent could sit unnoticed and see both the beginning and end of his jaunts.

The last stop was outside a clothing store called Bazala, a four-story building on the corner of Meidlinger Hauptstrasse near a small plaza. As he stood in front of the store’s two glass doors, John realized that despite an hour of walking, he was less than four blocks away from the Komet Kuchen where he had started!

By the time he got back to his hotel, it was time for him to turn around and return for the actual meeting. A light snow was falling when he arrived at the Komet Kuchen at 6:15 P.M.

The wind was stronger too.

John had placed Jerry’s delivery in his camera bag and he was carrying the .25 caliber automatic in his hand inside the right pocket of his coat. By the time he reached the Bazala clothing store, he couldn’t feel his toes because they were numb.

“Hello, dear friend,” a familiar voice said. It was the same KGB agent he’d met in Casablanca. “Do you have something for me?”

The men exchanged camera cases and the KGB agent excused himself. He walked away, but returned a few minutes later.

John gripped the automatic pistol tightly in his hand. If someone was going to arrest him or if the KGB intended to kill him, now was the perfect time. Bundled pedestrians hurried past, their shoes making a slight crunching sound in the snow.

“Dear friend, let us walk this way please.”

John removed his finger from the trigger, but left his hand in his pocket with the weapon.

“I assumed that we would go to a safe house or at least inside a coffeehouse because it was freezing outside,” John recalled later. “But he motioned me to begin walking and told me that it would be too dangerous for us to go inside anywhere. I couldn’t believe it! I was freezing and we were going to walk the streets for at least another fucking hour or two.”

Once again, the KGB agent followed the same script. He questioned John about his trip and then asked questions about the acquisition of specific “merchandise” and possible future “acquisitions.” These were followed by inquiries of a more personal nature about John’s family and, as always, Barbara’s drinking habits.

At some point during the conversation, John decided to bring up a topic of his own. He reminded the KGB agent about his comment in Casablanca, when the agent had asked whom John would send in his place if he was ever detained.

“There is only one person I would trust to make such a trip,” John said. “My brother Arthur. He is the only person that I would ever consider to replace me. He’s is intelligent enough to do it, and he has the balls to do it. He is an international traveler and he looks so much like me that even you might have trouble telling the difference.”

The KGB agent already knew about Arthur because John had told the Russians about the various members of his family.

“Does he know what you do?” the agent asked.

“He knows I’m doing something illegal, but not what.”

“Would he do it?”

“He’s having tremendous financial difficulties,” said John. “Has been ever since he got out of the Navy. He owes me. I think Art can be turned.”

“Do nothing,” the agent advised, “until I speak to my superiors.”

By now the two men had been walking for more than an hour in the wind and John was exhausted. But the agent had not completed his agenda.

“My friend, why do you Americans wish to destroy us?”

John was surprised by the question. The last thing that he wanted to hear was a propaganda speech.

“We don’t,” he mumbled. “You guys are the aggressors.”

“My friend, this is so untrue,” the KGB agent said. “In Siberia, we have more minerals than any other nation. We have enough oil for our country and we have a nation twice the size of the United States. We don’t need anyone else. We don’t need the extra problems. All we wish is to be left alone. It is the United States who is the aggressor.”

The agent spoke about the decadence of the West. Why capitalism was doomed to fail. How oppressed peoples across the globe were taking up arms and endorsing communism. John couldn’t believe it. It was simply crazy. He was freezing!

“The first time that he discussed his country – he never said Russia when we were together – I was really snickering under my breath,” John recalled. “I was thinking, ‘Oh God, this is typical propaganda bullshit.’ Here he is telling me about the beauty of socialism. I really scoffed at it.”

After an agonizing forty-five-minute indoctrination, the agent finally finished talking. Once again, he thanked John for his contributions to world peace.

“Just keep the money corning,” John replied.

He thought the KGB agent looked pained by the remark. He hoped so!

By the time that John got back to his hotel, he felt physically and mentally drained. But after he warmed up, he found that he was too excited to sleep.

He decided to spend some of the money that the KGB agent had given him.

He caught a taxi outside the Hotel Regina and asked the driver to take him to a brothel. Having sex with a big-busted Austrian Fraulein would be the perfect end to his high-strung day.

He was sure that James Bond would have done the same thing himself.