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

He stretched out on the steel bunk, but tired though he was, he was still unable to sleep. “I kept thinking about Barbara and how she had snitched on me.” Lying in the Baltimore jail, John decided that he had made only one mistake as a spy.
    “I should have killed Barbara,” he said later. “I should have assassinated her in the beginning. I should have put a fucking hole in her head.”
    With that final thought, he dosed his eyes and fell asleep. He was awakened later that night for dinner. When the guards came for him, John began to chuckle mysteriously.
    “The FBI was wrong,” he noted later with sarcasm. “No one slid a tray under the bars of my cell. I ate in a jail dining room.”

Chapter 2
    It was cold on the January 1986 night when I met John Walker, Jr., for the first time. He had been in various county jails in Maryland for seven months awaiting sentencing to a federal penitentiary. At this point John had not yet testified in public. Only his attorney, Fred Warren Bennett, and a handful of select FBI agents had discovered the damage he had caused.
    I walked through the gloom and fog toward the Montgomery County Detention Center, a modern jail only a few miles from the site where John had made his last dead drop. I had been fascinated by him for months, by what it could be that would drive a man to sell his country’s secrets to the Russians. I had read everything I could about him, talked with members of his family, learned as much as possible about John Walker, yet he was still an enigma. I wanted to know more, and I was here because now, for his own reasons, John Walker was ready to talk.
    Directed to a small interview room usually reserved for attorneys and their clients, I sat in front of a heavy wire screen. A sign warned that it was unlawful to pass anything to a prisoner. The jail heating system had malfunctioned earlier that day and the tiny cubicle was sweltering. By the time John finally was brought in by a guard, I had removed my jacket and tie and perspiration had soaked my shirt.
    John wore a jail-issued navy blue, short sleeve jumpsuit and thick black beach sandals. He carried a large brown folder filled with legal documents and yellow pads containing pages of scribbled notes. In his breast pocket were three freshly sharpened red pencils, all neatly aligned, points up. He had already outlined the main events of his life and he had reconstructed, he explained, his conversations with the KGB. He had provided all this information to the FBI, which had used a polygraph machine to verify its truthfulness, and now he wanted me to have it.
    “I want the truth out,” he explained. “I really don’t know how anyone is going to be able to write very much bad about me if they are objective and report the whole picture and tell all the facts about my life and not a bunch of lies.
    “Except for this one black mark,” he continued, “I’ve led a very impressive life.”
    Within the hour, John was telling me why he had become a KGB spy. This is what he said:
    “Everyone makes a big deal out of the fact that I became aspy. It’s because spying is such an unusual crime, but what they don’t understand is that I became a spy because that is what I had access to. If I’d worked in a bank, I would have taken money. If I’d had access to dope, I would have sold drugs. The fact that I became a spy is really insignificant. The point is that I became a spy because I needed money. It was as simple as that.”
    John paused and asked if my tape recorder was dose enough to the wire grill to pick up his voice clearly. “When I was working as a private eye, I had a three-hundred-dollar recorder, not one of those cheap ones like you have there,” he told me. I assured him that the recorder was reliable.
    “You got to understand what I was going through at the time. My job
    in the Navy was extremely arduous duty. It was the worst duty I ever had in the military and for the first time I was having trouble