Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring Read Online Free

was getting out a goddamn press release. Getting public attention was more important than using me as a double agent.”
    John had always believed that he would never be prosecuted if he were caught. “I was too important as a double agent.” Now the reality of his arrest was taking hold. To the FBI, John Anthony Walker, Jr., was just another criminal, a momentous one because his crime threatened national security, but a criminal just the same. John was incensed. How in the world could the government do something as stupid as prosecute him? he wondered. “I thought, ‘I know more about espionage than the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency combined! For christsake don’t these idiots know that they are blowing it!’ ”
    John was taken to an isolated cell in the Baltimore City Jail, and it was there, after an hour of solitude, that he finally realized his days as a spy had ended. No one from the CIA was coming to his aid. No one was going to ask him to serve as a double agent the way they always did in the spy novels he loved.
    John was exhausted, but too excited and nervous to sleep. Why had the FBI finally caught him? What mistake had tipped them off? The more he thought about his arrest, the more certain he became. He hadn’t made any mistakes. Someone had turned him in. And there was only one person who would have done it – Barbara, his ex-wife. Barbara Crowley Walker. She had finally worked up enough courage to do it. It was difficult to believe, but it had to be her. His brother Arthur had warned him last fall, had told him that Barbara had called and threatened to turn John in.
    “So what else is new,” John had replied. Barbara, a self-admitted alcoholic, had threatened him so many times over the years that John had stopped taking her seriously. She was worse than the little boy who cried wolf.
    Suddenly, several other events of the past few months started to come into focus. Like pieces of a mosaic, John saw the individual episodes begin to form a much larger picture. It was not only Barbara who had caused his downfall, but also his best friend, Jerry Whitworth; his own son, Michael; and even his own brother, Arthur.
    “It’s like an airplane crash,” John recalled later. “Investigators check the wreckage and discover that it wasn’t one single thing that caused the crash, but several different things that all came together.”
    A combination of all of their faults had led to his arrest. Each had failed him in his own way. “Why have I always been surrounded by weak people?” he asked later. “It was this group of misfits and weaklings that brought me down.”
    An astrologer once told John that he was a “double Leo” because of the location of the planets on his birthday, July 28, 1937. A “double Leo” is an extremely rare and gifted person, the astrologer explained, and John had believed her. “Double Leos are winners,” he often told friends. “Take away all my money and throw me in the street naked. Within a week, I’ll have gotten everything back and made even more.”
    Now that he had been arrested, he thought about the astrologer. She had been right. John Anthony Walker, Jr., was a winner, and he was not about to give the people he despised, such as his ex-wife, the pleasure of seeing him suffer. No, he thought, he was going to smile when they brought him in front of television cameras shackled in handcuffs and leg irons. His arrest and unavoidable prison sentence, he decided, would be “another adventure ... a long-needed vacation.” He would write a book while he was in jail about his experiences as a spy, and he would call it John Walker, Jr. – Spy . He would write two books, in fact, and call the sequel John Walker, Jr. – Private Investigator . He might even write a third about how to run a profitable small business. His arrest would make him famous. At last the entire world would know what only he and the Russians had known before: he was the best!
    John began to unwind.