THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505210045
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 349 lines
Earlier this month in Moscow, Bill Clinton and other Western leaders stood at attention alongside Boris Yeltsin as the Russians, brimming with patriotic fervor, staged a heroes' parade in Red Square.
The Cold War is over. The great East-West clash that defined the world order for half a century has melted away. Old foes are suddenly friends.
But locked inside a brick fortress on the plains of western Indiana is a human relic of the Cold War who seems caught in a time warp. For him, the decade that transformed the world hasn't changed a thing.
His name is Art Walker.
When the Berlin Wall crumbled, he cheered with the rest of America, but in his case the cheering was tinged with irony.
``My first thought was that I had felt it was going to happen for some time, because I never believed that that kind of economic system could work with human beings. We're just not built that way,'' he said in a recent interview.
``But yeah, it's ironic. Our guys are still mad at me, but they're shaking hands and having dinner together or whatever they're doing diplomatically. They're all pals now. . . .
``It sounds corny to say I was patriotic, but I was.''
Ten years ago this weekend, in the early morning hours of May 20, 1985, a chain of events began on a suburban Maryland roadside that sent Art Walker's world crashing down around him. And it's still in ruins today.
That was the day his ne'er-do-well kid brother John walked into an FBI ambush and was arrested at gunpoint on espionage charges. Authorities accused John A. Walker Jr. of masterminding the most damaging spy ring in decades, a daring Hampton Roads-based operation that provided sensitive Navy secrets to the Soviet Union for 17 years.
John Walker brought down three others with him: his best friend, Jerry Whitworth; his son, Michael; and his big brother, Art.
All are still in prison today.
Theirs is more a family tragedy than a national one. There is no proof that there was a single ship sunk, a bomb dropped, or an American life lost as a result of the Walkers' activities. It is, instead, a personal story of lives irretrievably damaged, of pain that will linger for decades after the superpower competition that spawned the spy ring is a distant memory.
Among those who have studied the case - law enforcement officers, lawyers, writers - there is disagreement about the roles of the four principals. But one thing seems clear: For none of the four are the tragic dimensions greater, or the gulf between deeds done and price paid wider, than for Art Walker.
Arthur James Walker is inmate No. 21998-083 in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Ind., a big, dreary complex ringed by guard towers and tall gleaming barbed-wire fences rising from the flat cornfields past the Wal-Mart and the drag strip southwest of town.
Dressed in neat prison khakis, bald, with a gray mustache and wire-frame glasses, he has an affable manner and a ready smile. He bears a remarkable resemblance to his brother John, three years younger.
He just passed his 60th birthday.
Ten years ago, he was a retired Navy lieutenant commander living quietly in a suburban Virginia Beach neighborhood, a family man with a wife and three kids. He was president of the local civic league and was involved with Little League baseball and the PTA. He had never been in trouble with the law.
Now he's serving three life sentences plus 40 years. His wife has divorced him. He has lost his home and all his other assets.
He copes with the present by not dwelling on the past.
``After you're down a while, you have your memories, thank goodness, but I'm the type who tends to concentrate on more pleasant memories of the past rather than anything that's kind of painful,'' he said.
``Sometimes my stomach just clenches right up when I get to thinking about it. . . . It was the most humiliating thing I've ever gone through . . . sitting here and knowing what people were thinking - that there was nothing much worse than what I'd done. Maybe baby-rapers or something.''
Arthur Walker was convicted of passing two low-level confidential Navy documents to his brother, who then passed them on to the Soviets: a damage control book for the Blue Ridge, a command and communications ship; and an extract of several years' damage reports for five helicopter assault vessels.
The exchange occurred after his retirement from the Navy. He had access to the documents in his job with VSE Corp., a Chesapeake defense contractor that planned and evaluated repairs of Navy vessels.
The same information could have been obtained by an hour's research in a public library with a copy of Jane's Fighting Ships.
His brother paid him $12,000, of which Art Walker kept only about $6,000. He gave the rest back to reimburse John for money John had put into Art's struggling car stereo installation business. Despite the infusions of cash, the business had gone bust.
The only purchases the prosecution ever was able to pinpoint as having been paid for with Art Walker's spy earnings were a backyard gas grill and a new hairpiece.
He was the first of the four defendants to go to trial. The government's case against him was based almost exclusively on a confession the FBI extracted from him, bit by bit, over 72 hours of interviews.
He is painfully aware that if he had kept his mouth shut, he never would have been convicted.
``Although I'm sorry I ever did so,'' he said, ``I felt it was my duty to let them know the extent of my involvement.''
Even though his role in the spy ring was easily the smallest of the four men convicted, his sentence was the second harshest, after Whitworth's.
It had the desired effect: After John Walker saw his brother sentenced to life, he agreed to turn state's evidence against Whitworth in exchange for leniency for his son.
Why did Art Walker do it? He has asked himself a thousand times. Essentially, he has concluded, it came down to an inability to say no to his brother.
Ever since they were kids, whenever John got into a scrape, it was reliable old Art who stepped in to help him out.
In 1980, John told Art he needed Navy documents, and he could get money for them. John didn't tip his hand at first, doling out only a little information at a time.
``When he first mentioned it, it didn't sound like anything serious had been going on,'' Art Walker said. ``It happened very slowly over a period of time. When it finally dawned on me, I was stunned. . . .
``I felt there was pressure on me to help him out. I was not prepared to say no. . . , to cause a hassle between us.''
He knew the materials he had access to at VSE Corp. had little value, ``so I made this real crazy decision. I thought: `OK, I'll show him there's nothing here where I am.' That's kind of what I proceeded to do, so I could finally convince him, in so many words, `Quit bugging me.' ''
What about the money?
It's true he was feeling some financial pressure, Art Walker said, but ``it was nothing that was overwhelming. . . . I wasn't doing badly. I had my Navy retirement and I had a nice job. I was putting my third kid through college. You can work money problems out. . . .
``The money per se was nothing. It's nice if you can have a couple of extra grand, naturally. Who's not going to take it? But I didn't go out searching for it.''
John Walker has been widely portrayed as a master of manipulation, a Svengali who shamelessly lured his best friend, his son and his brother into espionage to line his own pockets. But Arthur Walker, despite the terrible price he has paid, refuses to judge his brother so harshly.
``We were kind of close,'' he said. ``To classify John as manipulative - I certainly never saw him that way. . . . As John, I believe, mentioned after the fact, his idea was to help me. . . . I don't want to sound naive enough to believe that he wasn't trying to help himself at the same time, but I do believe that that was his primary motive.''
The two are in different penitentiaries, but they stay in contact by mail. ``We chat about how each other is doing,'' Art Walker said. ``He's my brother, so I love him. I just don't like what he did. . . .
``What's done is done. I'm not a vengeful kind of person.''
In fact, he added, ``John has made a lot of noise protesting my innocence.''
In 1988, John Walker agreed to be interviewed for a ``Frontline'' documentary on public television about the spy ring. But he attached a condition to his cooperation. He insisted that his brother also be interviewed and that the circumstances of Arthur's case be fully laid out.
When the program was aired in 1989, however, there was no interview with Arthur, and his case was not explored in depth. So John Walker sued WGBH, the Boston TV station that produced the show, for breach of contract.
The suit is scheduled to go to trial May 30, but Walker's attorney said last week there is a ``good likelihood'' that WGBH will agree to an out-of-court settlement.
Meanwhile, Art Walker has been trying to get paroled, but despite a sterling prison record and a sheaf of testimonials from family, friends and retired Navy officers, he has hit a brick wall.
After a perfunctory hearing last January, his application was denied by the U.S. Parole Commission.
``They knew nothing about all the letters that were sent in on my behalf. . church wrote, some other friends wrote. . . .
``This guy just kind of flippantly said, `Oh, they're probably laying in a folder somewhere,' and I thought, `How can this be a hearing?' . . . It kind of took the wind out of my sails.''
One of those who wrote the Parole Commission was retired Navy Cmdr. Thomas R. Eagye II, who was Art Walker's executive officer on the submarine Corsair in the early 1960s. He traveled from his home in Colorado to Terre Haute for Walker's parole hearing, and is still working to get him released.
``This guy does not belong in jail,'' Eagye said in an interview. ``There's something wrong when three submarine skippers are trying to get a spy out of prison. . . .
``I want to get Art pardoned. That poor guy has paid something horrible.''
When they served together, Eagye said, Art Walker ``was a terrific young officer. The crew called him `A.J. Squared Away.' ''
He attributes Walker's predicament to his brother's persuasive powers and the FBI's aggressive tactics.
``John was desperate, because the Russians had the squeeze on him,'' Eagye said. ``Art was in the process of getting divorced, and was up to his ears in debt. . . .
``So Art is lying there with all four paws in the air, and the FBI broom swept him up along with everybody else.''
The man pushing the broom was Bob Hunter, a barrel-chested Pennsylvanian who landed in Norfolk as a rookie FBI agent in 1967, shortly before John Walker began selling Navy secrets to the Soviets.
``I knew nothing about Norfolk,'' Hunter, 59, recalled recently, sipping iced tea on his back deck. Now retired, he lives in a leafy waterfront neighborhood in northern Virginia Beach.
``Then I learned it was the largest military complex in the world. The other agents and I often sat around and talked about it. We figured, `There's got to be somebody out there selling secrets.' ''
But there was never a hint of John Walker's activities until the fall of 1984 when his embittered ex-wife Barbara, who had known for years he was a spy, finally spilled the story to an FBI agent in Hyannis, Mass., near where she was then living.
The information was passed on to the Norfolk office, and the case was assigned to Hunter. In the spring of 1985, the Bureau tapped the phones at John Walker's Ocean View home and his private detective agency.
In mid-May, the FBI hit pay dirt. The phone taps turned up hints that Walker was planning an out-of-town weekend trip. On Sunday, May 19, agents trailed his van to the Washington area and watched as he dropped off a bundle of classified documents alongside a narrow road in a sparsely populated area of the Maryland suburbs.
The agents retrieved the bundle, and in the wee hours of May 20 they confronted Walker in a hallway outside his motel room and arrested him.
In addition to the classified documents, the bundle contained a letter from Walker to his handlers at the KGB, the Soviet spy agency, implicating the other participants in the operation.
``Up to that point, when we found the package, we'd had absolutely no evidence against him,'' Hunter said. ``Then, we had a perfect case.''
As investigators followed the leads Walker had unwittingly provided them, the evidence mounted steadily. Once the cases were ready to go to trial, Hunter said, ``there was never a moment of doubt in my mind that they were all going down the chute.''
Even today, 10 years later, Hunter speaks of John Walker with undisguised disgust.
``I can understand murder much quicker and easier than I do betraying your country,'' he said. ``No contest. . . . I never have understood it.
``John Walker said so many times . . . that he was the best spy there ever was. He's an arrogant guy. And depending on how you look at it, I'd say he probably was the best - or the worst.''
During one of their interviews, Hunter remembers, ``He looks over and he says, `Hunter, you know, you really screwed me up.'
``I said, `What do you mean, John?'
``He says, `You know, I was training Michael in the espionage business. I was getting ready to retire. I was going to pass the business on to him. Goddammit, this was my legacy to my son!' ''
What about Art Walker? Hunter confesses ambivalence about the older brother's role.
``Art was a mystery . . . ,'' he said. ``He's a very smooth, likable guy - one of those guys you'd meet in a bar and have a few beers with and enjoy talking to.
``But Arthur's a liar.''
FBI Special Agent Barry Colvert agrees. Colvert administered polygraph tests to key figures in the Walker case, including John and Art Walker and John's ex-wife, Barbara.
In Art Walker's case, the tests showed deception on a variety of questions, Colvert said, including whether he ever had contact with foreign agents and whether he was ever involved in espionage before he retired from the Navy.
When he tested John Walker later, Colvert said, questions about Arthur's involvement yielded similar results.
``At one point John says, `I'm gonna run a story by you. I know you think I've been covering up. What if I told you my brother Art started this, and because he didn't have access to the same type information I had, I gave him some sensitive material and he sold it to the Russians. And when he came back he said, I can't do that again, I can't ever do that again. Then I picked it up where he left off.' ''
In their next interview, after talking to his attorney, John Walker recanted that scenario, Colvert said.
``When I interviewed Barbara in the very beginning,'' Colvert said, ``she remembered a conversation with Art in the early days in which she said, `I think John's selling stuff to the Russians' and Art said, `If it's any consolation, I did it too, but I got out of it.' ''
Art Walker has denied repeatedly that such a conversation ever occurred.
One person who believes him is Pete Earley, a Northern Virginia author who wrote ``Family of Spies,'' widely considered the most definitive of several books about the Walker case.
``I spent a long time investigating this case, and I consider all of that talk nonsense,'' Earley said in an interview. ``It's a nice little fairy tale as far as I'm concerned.''
``As a reporter, you look for the money,'' Earley said. When he did a careful examination of Art Walker's family finances, he found no trace of any unaccounted-for income during his Navy years.
``This is not some shifty, smart, brilliant spy,'' Earley said. ``I think when you look at Art Walker you get exactly what you see.''
But Colvert, the FBI polygraph examiner, remains unconvinced to this day.
``Art is a decent guy,'' Colvert said. ``I really like him. He's got one hell of a conscience. . . . But I think it's quite possible that Arthur started it. I really do.''
And his fellow agent Hunter - even though the FBI never found evidence that Art Walker played more than a minor role in the operation - won't concede that the punishment is out of proportion to the crime.
``There's no doubt that it pales in comparison to the stuff that John, Jerry and even Michael did,'' Hunter said. ``But you know . . . Art Walker was an officer in the United States Navy. He took that oath the same as I did when I went in the Bureau, to uphold the Constitution and defend it and all that stuff. I say screw 'im.''
The Cold War mentality still held sway in 1985 when Sam Meekins and Brian Donnelly were thrust into the spy case of the decade.
The two Hampton Roads lawyers were Art Walker's court-appointed counsel. Looking back, the case seems almost surrealistic.
``The paranoia of being caught up in spy-counterspy, espionage, counter-espionage, everything you ever read about - suddenly we were living with it,'' Meekins said in a recent interview.
``The FBI told me not to call Sam on the phone and talk to him, because the phones could be tapped,'' Donnelly recalled.
``I had friends in northern California,'' Meekins said. ``The FBI showed up at their door asking questions about me.''
The lawyers knew the material their client had shared with his brother was insignificant, but they had trouble finding expert witnesses to testify to that fact.
``I remember talking to some people, some Beltway bandit types, asking them to come down here, retired admiral-type people, who would not talk publicly,'' Donnelly said. ``But they'd call up, and they'd laugh. . . . It was like, `Hey, I'm retired, I get a check. I'm not coming down there to lose my pension. But what you've got is basically bull----.' ''
In the end, the lawyers concluded, it didn't matter. Art Walker's goose was cooked.
``It really was over before it started,'' Donnelly said. ``. . . He was crucified because he was John's brother, and he knew about John's activities and he didn't stop him. That was his provable crime, I think, more than anything.''
Art Walker, ever adaptable, is making the best of prison life. He has a job doing clerical work in the penitentiary's business office, which has allowed him to pick up some accounting skills.
``In nice weather, it's a little easier to take here because you can get outside,'' he said. ``I started playing tennis some years ago. I felt I needed to do something besides vegetate physically, which is easy to do. . . . The wintertime gets kind of boring. I do a lot of reading then.''
He still has regular contact with a son who lives in Hampton Roads. The son brings his 10-year-old daughter for periodic visits with her grandfather.
``My lovely granddaughter - I could use a hug from her,'' Art Walker said, looking out the window of the sunlit visiting room through the gleaming fence to the freshly planted fields beyond.
``It's an important thing, by the way, to me anyway, to have any kind of tie line to the outside - very, very important. It makes a lot of difference.
``I call my son and we just chitchat about nothing in particular. That's kind of nice. These things mean a lot. . . . that little bit of moral support.''
If he ever gets out, Art Walker has a standing job offer from Tom Eagye, his old sub skipper.
``I've regained a great amount of my self-confidence since 1985,'' he said. ``So I'm not fearful of not being able to make it. Not that I'll be living high on the hog out there, but I've worked most of my life.
``I'd sure like to give it a crack again.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MICHAEL A CURLETT/Staff
Arthur James Walker, inmate No. 21998-083, is serving three life
sentences plus 40 years in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute,
Ind.
Graphics
THE WALKER SPY RING
THE FBI AGENT & THE SPIES
Photos
TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff
Retired FBI agent Bob Hunter, who was a central figure in the
breakup of the Walker Ring, has little sympathy for Arthur Walker.
``He took that oath the same as I did when I went in the Bureau,''
Hunter says. ``I say screw 'im.''
[For complete graphics, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: ESPIONAGE SPIES ARREST by CNB