Secrets, Cheap : John Anthony Walker
On Dec. 18, 1967, a fresh-faced Navy communications officer slipped through the wrought-iron gates of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., and asked to see security. Escorted into a small side room, the 30-year-old didn't mince words. "I want to sell you top secrets," he told Yanis Lukashevich, an official he assumed to be KGB. The budding spy promptly handed over settings for the KL-47 cipher machine, which handled the sensitive personal messages of the Navy brass. He said he could provide the KGB with full data on four other principal military communications systems, essentially the keys to the American cryptographic kingdom. Asked his motivation, the officer replied: "Purely financial."
John Anthony Walker Jr. left that day with a stack of $50 bills, 20 in all, the first installment in a 17-year traitorship that would ultimately yield him more than $1 million. For the Soviets, Walker proved quite a bargain. He gave them the locations of American nuclear submarines and the procedures the United States would follow to launch nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union should there be a war. The Soviets were also alerted to the locations of secret underwater microphones used by the United States to track Soviet nuclear submarines. What's more, KGB agents learned each and every American troop and air movement to Vietnam from 1971 to 1973, and they passed on to their allies the times and planned sites for U.S. airstrikes against North Vietnam. "It was the greatest case in KGB history," Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB officer who defected for a brief time in 1985, told American intelligence officers. "We deciphered millions of your messages. If there had been a war, we would have won it."
Walker was able to elude the authorities for so long because the Soviets took extraordinary precautions to conceal their source. At most 12 Russians knew of his existence, says Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB chief of counterintelligence now living in the United States. That did not include two spies the Americans had working in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Another measure of his value: The first Soviet handler of the case, Yuri Linkov, later joked that he and his wife didn't have children because he was too busy chasing down Walker's leads. KGB head and later Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov called Walker "Agent No. 1."
As the years passed, however, "Agent No. 1" began to take stupid chances and let greed overwhelm him. Walker refused to pay his former wife, Barbara Crowley, $10,000 to keep her quiet, so she called the FBI in 1984 and drunkenly ranted about her husband's espionage. An alert pair of field agents took an interest in the case, and it was soon established that Walker had employed his best friend and his brother in the scheme. He had also placed his son in the Navy to continue the ring. At 3:30 a.m. on May 20, 1985, the FBI arrested Walker, who was staying in a Ramada Inn near Washington. The FBI team forced Walker to take off his hairpiece and brought him to FBI counterintelligence agent David Major. Walker claimed he was working for the French, doing industrial espionage. Major, already apprised of the FBI's considerable evidence against Walker, says he had one overriding thought: "I'm looking at the Rosenberg of my generation." -Jeff Glasser
This story appears in the January 27, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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