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Having dropped off the stolen Navy documents, Walker headed north
to retrieve the KGB’s grocery bag stuffed with cash. The KGB
agent, meanwhile, began driving south, traveling along a different
road en route to the stolen Navy secrets. The KGB had
choreographed every step of its meetings with Walker since his
initial contact with the Russians in late 1967. After their first
meeting -- when Walker had boldly strutted into the Soviet Embassy
in Washington and offered to sell Navy secrets for cash -- there had
been only one other face-to-face encounter in the U.S., a rendezvous
two weeks later with a KGB agent in a shopping center. Since then
the Russians had met him in person only in Europe. All other
exchanges had been done through dead drops and after a stunning eighteen
years of spying, Walker had become such an old hand at them that his
KGB handler had once gushed: “You are the most experienced, the
very best!”
“Goddamn right!” Walker had replied.
So far, the May 19th exchange seemed routine, but when Walker
arrived at the KGB’s predetermined drop point to collect his
$200,000, he couldn’t find it. Worse, when he raced back to his
drop point to check on his bag of Navy secrets, it too had
disappeared. He had checked both sites several times, conducting a
methodical search through the weeds, bushes, and tall grass, but
both bags were missing. Shortly before midnight, he gave up and
drove to a nearby Ramada Inn where he checked into room 763.
Walker’s first thought was that the FBI had finally discovered
him, but he was confused because no one had tried to arrest him in
the dead drop area. Maybe the Russians had simply screwed up, he
thought, and left his money in the wrong location. It had happened
twice before. Maybe they had aborted the drop because they had seen
something that had frightened them. Unable to sleep, he began going
over different scenarios in his mind when the telephone in his room
suddenly rang. It was 3:30 a.m.
“Yes,” Walker answered.
“This is the front desk,” an excited male voice announced.
“There’s been an accident!” Someone has hit your
blue-and-white van in the parking lot. You’d better get down here
quick!”
“Okay,” Walker replied. “Be right down.” He suspected it
was a trick. He had used the same ploy himself while working on
divorce cases as a private investigator in Norfolk, Virginia, to
lure cheating spouses out of a motel room. But who was trying to
draw him out?
Walker peeked through the motel window. He could see the parking
lot, but not his van, which was parked around a corner. The fact
that he didn’t see a dozen police cars outside gave him hope. Time
was running out, though. If the FBI had unmasked him, it would be
only a matter of minutes before federal agents came bursting in. The
first thing he had to do was to destroy the envelope that the KGB
had given him several months earlier in Vienna, Austria. It
contained hand-drawn maps of the dead drop route, directions about
where he was to leave his bag of secrets, and black-and-white
photographs of the predetermined drop points. There was only one
problem. If he burned the instructions, he wouldn’t be able to use
them again, and the Soviets had told him that if a dead drop was
ever aborted, both sides should simply try the exchange again
exactly one week later. If he destroyed the instructions, he
wouldn’t be able to find the drop site the following Sunday and
get his $200,000 payment.
Greed and ego quickly overruled caution. Walker scanned the room
for a place to hide the envelope. Room 763 was standard motel fare:
a double bed, a night table, two chairs, a small table with a
smoked-glass ash tray, a dresser, mirror, and combination
radio-television. Better to hide the envelope outside his room.
Then, if it were found, the FBI couldn’t prove it belonged to him.
He had noticed an ice machine next to the elevators when he first
arrived and decided to hide it there. Tucking the envelope under the
pillow on the bed for temporary safekeeping, he slipped his .38
caliber revolver from its hip holster and prepared to open the door.
“I didn’t know who was on the other side of the door and if it
was some kid waiting to rob me, I was going to waste him,” he said
later. He jerked open the door. The corridor was empty. He hustled
down the hallway, gun drawn. No one was around. Maybe someone really
had hit his van. Hurrying back to his room, he grabbed the envelope
and raced toward the ice machine.
“Stop! FBI!”
Walker spun to his right. Two FBI agents wearing bulletproof
vests had jumped out from a room opposite the elevators. Their
revolvers were pointed at his heart. As soon as Walker dropped
his gun, both men rushed him. FBI Agent James L. Kolouch pushed
Walker against the wall, ripped his brown hairpiece from his head,
quickly frisked him, and yanked off his thick-soled running shoes
while agent Robert Hunter stood guard, his gun pointed at the back
of Walker’s head. Once Kolouch was certain Walker was not carrying
concealed weapons, he was pushed into Room 750 where he was ordered
to strip. Different agents seized each piece of clothing as he
undressed, examining them in microscopic detail. They even took his
metal-framed glasses and inspected them for microdots. Naked,
surrounded by FBI agents, without his toupee and now nearly blind,
Walker began to loose his natural bravado. He tried desperately to
reassure himself. “I thought, ‘I am too important of a spy to be
prosecuted...They can use me as a double agent. I know more about
espionage than the FBI and CIA combined!” Then, he had another
thought: “What real evidence do they have against me? The KGB
isn’t going to testify.”
It was at that moment that FBI Agent Hunter decided to further
unnerve Walker. He had a typewritten letter brought into the room
and placed where Walker could see it. He immediately recognized the
document. He had typed it himself in his den at home and sealed it
inside the Navy documents that he had stolen for the Russians.
Obviously, the FBI had found the grocery bag that he had left during
the dead drop. Did they also get his $200,000? The KGB had warned
him against putting anything personal in dead drops, but he had
ignored that advice. Worse, Walker had mentioned the other spy
ring’s members in his note. He had used code names, but he knew
that identifying them would be child’s play for the FBI.
Walker’s 22-year-old son, Michael Lance Walker, a seaman aboard
the U.S.S. Nimitz, a nuclear aircraft carrier, had supplied
all of the 129 stolen documents in the bag. There were also personal
letters in the bag from John Walker’s best friend, Jerry Alfred
Whitworth, a naval communications specialist, who had been an active
member of the ring for 10 years. Plus, Walker had mentioned a third
spy, his own older brother, Arthur, another Navy veteran who worked
for a defense contractor.
Taken to an isolation cell in the Baltimore City Jail, he began
going over every step he had made in the past 24 hours. How had the
FBI learned about the dead drop? What mistake had tipped them off?
The more he thought about his capture, the more certain he became.
Barbara Crowley Walker, his ex-wife, had to be the FBI’s source.
His brother, Arthur, had warned him several months earlier that
Barbara was threatening to turn them in. But John Walker had not
taken her seriously. Why should he? She had threatened him so many
times that he had assumed her most recent rantings were a joke. As
he sat in jail thinking, he decided that he had only made one
mistake as a spy. “I should have killed Barbara,” he later
explained. “I should have assassinated her in the beginning. I
should have put a f------ hole in her head.”
Walker’s arrest and the discovery of his spy ring stunned the
country. Even though Christopher John Boyce and Daulton Lee, two
spoiled California youths (whose lives were depicted in the book
and movie The Falcon and Snowman), had caused a stir when they
were caught selling classified information in the 1970s from a
defense contractor to the KGB, the last major spy case that had
involved Americans had been the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg scandal
in the 1950s. While no one was surprised when foreigners betrayed
their countries, there was a strong belief that U.S. citizens simply
were immune to espionage. Walker’s arrest shattered that illusion
and sparked what the media quickly dubbed “The Year of The Spy.”
Following Walker’s arrest, seven other U.S. citizens would be
accused of spying before the yearend. In Moscow, meanwhile, Walker
was celebrated as the KGB’s most successful Cold War spy. From
1967 until 1985, he had provided the KGB with vital U.S.
cryptographic secrets that had enabled Russian agents to decipher
coded military messages. Soviet KGB General Boris Aleksandrovich
Solomatin, who oversaw Walker, later called him the “most
important” spy ever recruited by Russia. John Walker gave away the
“keys to your most secret code machines,” Solomatin bragged,
“giving us the equivalent of a seat inside your Pentagon where we
could read your most vital secrets.” KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko
was more blunt: “Walker was the greatest case in KGB history. We
deciphered millions of your messages. If there had been a war, we
would have won it.”
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