John Anthony Walker

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John Anthony Walker, Jr. (born July 28, 1937) was a Chief Warrant Officer and communications specialist for the U.S. Navy, who sold his services as a spy to the Soviet Union from 1968 to 1985, the height of the Cold War era. In this time he helped the Soviets decipher over one million classified encrypted naval messages, and most observers agree that he was one of the most effective and destructive Soviet spies in US history.

Walker was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Coming from a broken home, he did poorly in school and had various problems with the law as a teenager. A high school dropout, Walker committed a string of petty thefts and was arrested for one of them in 1955. John's older brother Arthur (already serving in the Navy) talked the judge into letting John join the Navy instead of going to prison.

Surprisingly, Walker did very well in his naval career and received glowing evaluations by his superiors praising his high technical skills and love of the Navy. He became an expert radioman. He completed submarine training in Groton, Connecticut and received a top secret security clearance for submarine duty, one of the most demanding in the armed forces and eventually reached the rank of Chief Warrant Officer.

In 1957 Walker married a woman he'd met while stationed in Boston, Barbara Crowley, and they had four children together, three daughters and a son. However, before long, the marriage became very troubled due to John's and Barbara's long separations. Walker was a flamboyant, hard-drinking womanizer and there were reports that he neglected his wife and children.

Walker had begun spying for the Soviets in early February 1968, when, facing serious financial problems because a South Carolina bar/restaurant he was operating on the side was deeply in debt and failing fast, he walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC and sold a classified document (a radio cipher card) for a few thousand dollars. Walker had justified this betrayal on grounds the classified Navy communications data he had initially sold the Soviets had already been completely compromised during the recent USS Pueblo incident (where a US Navy communications surveillance ship had been captured on the high seas by North Korea, its crew being held prisoner for nearly a year.)

Whenever Walker was transferred away from assignments where his handlers required information, he would recruit friends and members of his own family (his wife, his older brother Arthur and his son, Michael) to join in his spying activity. His friend and fellow spy was a Navy senior chief radioman named Jerry Whitworth, who had access to highly-classified satellite communications data. The resulting Walker Spy Ring continued to provide important intelligence to the Soviets even after John Walker had retired from the Navy in 1976.

Walker's activities went completely unsuspected by US authorities, despite his living quite extravagantly with his only source of visible income being his Navy pension. Living in Norfolk, Virginia after his Navy retirement he became a licensed private investigator and a private airplane pilot, both of which he conveniently used to explain his lavish lifestyle and frequent journeys all over North America and to Western Europe (mainly to meet his Soviet handler for instructions and to receive payment.) As additional cover, he also joined far right-wing political organizations such as the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. It is estimated that Walker earned more than $1 million USD from nearly two straight decades of spying.

In May 1985, Walker and his accomplices were arrested on suspicion of espionage by the FBI. Six months before, Walker's ex-wife, weary of years of neglect by her ex-husband and with Walker's refusal to pay her alimony being the last straw, along with her daughter, Laura Walker, finally told the FBI about the spy. Despite initial reluctance to investigate the case on the part of the FBI, the four men were arrested and were then tried for and convicted of espionage and most received multiple life prison terms. His son Michael Walker, who had a relatively minor role in the ring and turned state's evidence in exchange for a reduced sentence, was released from prison on parole in February 2000. Some researchers believe Walker's nearly two decades of spying contributed strongly to the unprecedented accession of then-KGB director Yuri Andropov (whose agents had overseen Walker's activities) to become head of the Soviet after the November 1982 death of Leonid Brezhnev, as well as helping precipitate the Soviets' 1 September 1983 shootdown of the civilian aircraft Korean Air Flight 007 near the Kamchatka Peninsula, killing all 269 passengers and crew, including U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald.

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[edit] External links

[edit] Further reading

  • Howard Blum; I Pledge Allegiance: The True Story of the Walkers: an American Spy Family; Simon & Schuster Books, 1987, ISBN 0-671-62614-0
  • Walker, Laura with Jerry Horner; Daughter of Deceit: The Walker Spy Case; Word Publishing, 1988, ISBN 0849906598
  • Robert W. Hunter; Spy Hunter: Inside the FBI Investigation of the Walker Espionage Case; Naval Institute Press, 1999, ISBN 1-55750-349-4
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