"Very Serious Losses"

By Ed Magnuson.

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 aboard 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 willing 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 to (selling) dope or espionage."

Inman says the upsurge in spying is due in part to 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 has 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 any- more," 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 and 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 (see following story).

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, and 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 but 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 hundreds 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 Virginian-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 of 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 two 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 tries 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 out 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.

With reporting by Kenneth W. Banta/Norfolk and Anne Constable/Washington