WALKER FAMILY SPY RING

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301750009-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 6, 2010
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: June 7, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
PROGRAM The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour STATION WETA-TV
PBS Network
DATE June 7, 1985 7:00 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT Walker Family Spy Ring
ROBERT MACNEIL: We focus first tonight on the Walker
family spy charges. Attorney General Edwin Meese said today in
Dallas the FBI isn't sure there will be more arrests in the
alleged spy ring. That ring has raised fears that important Navy
information may have been passed to the Soviet Union.
Correspondent June Cross has filed a background report
on what's known about the spy case some are calling the most
serious blow to U.S. security since the Rosenberg atomic bomb
secrets case 37 years ago.
JUNE CROSS: The file on the Walker spy ring reads like
a novel. The principals even had their own code names: John A.
Walker, retired Navy communications specialist, code name Jaws.
His son, Michael Lance Walker, operations clerk aboard the
aircraft carrier Nimitz, code name S. His brother, Arthur J.
Walker, anti-submarine warfare specialist. Code name K. And
John Walker's best friend, Jerry Alfred Whitworth, retired senior
enlisted radioman, code name D.
The ring became public almost three weeks ago. That's
when FBI agents trailed John Walker from his Norfolk home on his
way to a rendezvous with a Soviet agent. FBI agents say they
watched Walker drop a bag filled with classified material at this
site. The next morning agents arrested Walker in a Ramada Hotel
in suburban Maryland.
Other agents searched Walker's office. They found
incriminating letters from Michael Walker, his son. Michael was
a yeoman aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz cruising in the
Mediterranean. Michael was detained and returned to this country
May 25th. Authorities escorting him carried a 15-pound bag of
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classified documents, documents they said detailed the moves of
American and Soviet ships at sea. Prosecutors say Michael Walker
intended to smuggle those documents to his father.
The FBI found other letters in John Walker's office.
These led to the arrest of his brother, Arthur J. Walker. During
his 20-year career in the Navy, Arthur had taught anti-submarine
warfare tactics in Norfolk. But for the past five years, he'd
been privy to maintenance and repair records for Navy ships while
working for the VSE Corporation of Virginia Beach.
With three suspects in custody, concern rose in the
Pentagon over how damaging the spy ring could prove to be.
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE CASPAR WEINBERGER: The Walker case
represents, I think it's fair to say, a serious loss, and it had
gone on a very long time.
CROSS: Concern rose even higher this week. On Monday
FBI agents in San Francisco arrested the fourth suspect, an old
Navy buddy of John Walker's. Jerry Whitworth, a former radioman,
retired from the Navy two years ago. He's unemployed now and
living in a trailer park in Davis, California. Authorities
charged him with stealing documents from the Naval Air Station in
Alameda.
Then on Tuesday John Walker's ex-wife Barbara said she
had tipped off the FBI as to what was going on. John Walker
served 21 years in the Navy, and federal prosecutors now think he
was working for the Soviets at least ten of them. That includes
six years when he served on board submarines and at command
centers in the Norfolk area.
Walker had a top secret clearance and access to internal
Navy memos, memos which detailed plan for action in wartime. A
documentary on anti-submarine warfare completed around the time
he resigned the Navy gives a clue as to how important that
knowledge could have been to the Soviets.
MAN: The submarine has changed from being merely one
part of the armory, as it was in the Second World War, to being
really the primary war-winning weapon system. And therefore
where it is, how it navigates about the place, how it is detected
or not detected, how it communicates with its own headquarters,
and so on, have all become absolutely vital.
CROSS: Walker worked as a private eye. He had a
fascination with gadgets and intrigue. That fascination, said
one former associate, might explain why he turned to espionage.
MAN: He was a man wrapped up in fantasies. He loved
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the intrigue. He loved the disguise. He loved the game of
intrigue. And that could have been what his motivation was.
CROSS: Besides his house, Walker owned a houseboad, a
single-engine airplane, and some land in the Bahamas. But in
court this week the Walkers claimed they had no cash to pay
lawyers, so they were assigned public defenders.
The judge hearing the case clamped a restraining order
on the FBI forbidding it or the Navy from discussing anything
further about the case. And on Capitol Hill, Senators Sam Nunn
and William Roth proposed measures to tighten the way security
clearances are given
SENATOR SAM NUNN: We're not going to have a perfect
system in a free society. But what we can do is take essential
steps to make certain we do everything we can to prevent and to
deter and to discourage and, when espionage is committed, to try
to deal with it.
CROSS: But many people are still wondering how the
Walkers were able to elude detection for so long. Assistant
Attorney General Stephen Trott tried to answer that question.
STEPHEN TROTT: This is not a police state. The
presumption is that people are innocent. And we don't surveil
every citizen in this country all the time for everything. One
of the byproducts of that, one of the prices that you pay is
occasionally you're going to get a seam in that type of liberty
and somebody, for money or for other reasons, will take advantage
of it and become a spy.
MACNEIL: We get an assessment of what the damagemay
have been in this case from George Carver, a 26-year veteran of
the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served as a special
assistant to three CIA Directors, and Harvin -- Harland -- I'm
sorry -- Ullman (?), a former captain in the Navy, who's now
Director of Defense and Maritime Studies at the Georgetown
University Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Gentlemen, Secretary Weinberger says -- we just heard
him say it -- he thought there were very serious losses that went
on over a long period of time.
Mr. Carver, how serious do you think these losses have
been? Assuming these men are convicted as charged.
GEORGE CARVER: One of the problems you get in a case
like this is that the precise extent of the damage is in itself a
piece of intelligence that would do the Soviets a great deal of
good to have, and therefore these questions have to be a little
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bit fuzzed, particularly by people with official knowledge who
are talking about them.
I personally feel that the risk of damage is very high,
and I feel that we may have suffered a loss almost on a par with
the kind of losses we suffered in the Rosenberg case right after
World War II.
MACNEIL: What is it that may have been lost that makes
you put such a high value on it?
CARVER: What may have been lost is an understanding of
how we go about communicating with our deployed ballistic-missile
submarines on patrol at sea. This is one of the most important
of the three legs of the so-called triad, which are basic
strategic capability. And Walker himself served as a
communications officer on board a Polaris submarine. He served
as a communications watch officer of Atlantic Fleet Submarine
Headquarters. And it's not so much any single message that he
might have compromised as it is what he could have told the
Soviets, even 10, 15, 20 years ago, about the ways in which we
communicated with our submarines on patrol, and even more the
ways in which they communicate with their parent headquarters
while they were on patrol.
MACNEIL: Mr. Ullman, do you agree, first of all, that
the loss may have been very great, on a scale with the Rosenberg
case?
HARLAND ULLMAN: No, I don't. I disagree, I guess
fundamentally, with my close friend and colleague George Carver
in three ways.
First, I think that while the loss was serious, I don't
believe, in military terms, it was as crucial as some people
think. And we can come back to that in a second.
I think, however, where the loss may have been more
damaging than some people seem to think, first, is in the
psychological damage that has been done. The country is used to
the occasional Benedict Arnold, but not the family of Benedict
Arnolds. And people serving in uniform and recently retired from
uniform, it seems to me, are very discouraging to the public
viewpoint when they're caught in these kinds of acts.
And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I hope this
does not cause a major overreaction, in the sense that we put in
place all sorts of security rules and regulations which are
likely to be not very productive, but restrain and restrict our
constitutional rights.
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MACNEIL: Let's come back presently to what might be
done to tighten security and concentrate now on the damage.
Does the -- Mr. Carver, back to you. Are the secrets
that may have been lost, do they more concern the movements of
U.S. submarines or the ability of the U.S. and the NATO navies to
detect the presence and the whereabouts of Soviet submarines?
CARVER: Well, both come into play. The thing
that concerns me the most is what the Soviets might have learned
about the ways in which we communicate with our submarines and
that our submarines communicate with their headquarters which
would facilitate their tracking, the Soviets tracking our
submarines. At the moment, we have a strategic edge in that our
deployed ballistic-missile submarine force is very difficult to
defect, and the Soviets can never be absolutely sure where those
particular elements of our strategic arsenal are located.
Finding out how we communicate with them, or vice versa, finding
out, for example, the extent to which it can be done from
underwater, the extent to which submarines have to surface in
order to communicate, the procedures involved, the kinds of
messages in their intercept activities theys hould look for,
because those are the kinds of messages passing to and from
submarines on patrol, this, I believe, would give the Soviets an
incalculable edge and an extremely important edge in this
constant cat-and-mouse game on which America's security, if not
its survival, could easily hinge.
MACNEIL: Well, Mr. Ullman, wouldn't that be a very
serious loss indeed, since, as has been pointed out, the
deployment of these U.S. nuclear submarines is, if not the most,
certainly one of the most important parts of the strategic
defense system?
ULLMAN: I think that there are two aspects to the
answer. The first is that, in a tactical or in an operational
way, the loss can be significant. But that is very
time-sensitive because operations change. I mean you're looking
at somebody who has really been out of the operational game for
four, five, six or seven years.
The second point I would make is that technologies
change. And the nature of Soviet submarines have grown a great
deal quieter over the years. And therefore the Soviets, because
of this quietness, have been able to elude forms of American
detection simply because their submarines are getting better and
better.
So I think that, because of technology and a number of
other things, the actual loss due to the Walkers has probably
been somewhat exaggerated.
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MACNEIL: Would the U.S. Navy and intelligence systems
know, because of some change of behavior by the Soviets, how much
they'd found out?
ULLMAN: Not necessarily. Go back to 1941, when Stalin
had an alertment about Hitler's impending invasion of Russia and
chose not to believe it. It seems to me that the Russians would
have to act on that information. On some of it they may choose
not to. And those pieces of information on which they did act,
it might be very difficult to know.
And I repeat the point about changing technology. I
mean American and Soviet systems have improved during the 10 or
15 years that the Walkers were actively engaged, if in fact
they're proven guilty of this espionage. And it seems to me that
as these capabilities change, then methods of employment change.
I think that's a very important point to note.
CARVER: But it's a point easily exaggerated. The
Japanese throughout World War II used the same basic systems of
communication even long after they had learned that we had
developed at least some facility and skill in reading their
codes. And their persistence in using these systems of
communications enabled us to win, among other things, the Battle
of Midway and the naval war in the Pacific, without which we
couldn't have won World War II.
Systems are a lot easier to change in theory and in
discussion on a television program that they are in fact. And
knowing how we communicated with deployed ballistic-missile
submarines and long-range subsurface partrol even as long ago as
20 years would be of great value to the Soviets because they
could plot our changes over time and learn how we effect those
communications today, which I believe -- and Mr. Ullman and I are
good friends and we differ on lots of things, and this is one of
the things on which we differ fundamentally.
MACNEIL: Mr. Ullman, finally, Secretary Weinberger was
reported today by the Pentagon to have ordered precautions to
offset any advantage the Soviets might have gained. Doesn't that
suggest that the Pentagon suspects, or at least fears, that there
may have been some ongoing advantage they could have gained which
necessitated some change of orders or procedures or something to
offset it?
ULLMER: Not necessarily. And I think a point that
needs to be made here is that when John Walker Sr. was in the
most sensitive areas, which were in the command facilities of the
Submarine Force Atlantic, he was really exposed more to tactical
submarines, the SSNs, the attack submarines, rather than the
ballistic-missile submarines. And I think that even though
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Walker did serve in ballistic-missile submarines, the difference
between the two has been so compartmentalized that I'm not sure
that he had access to the operation of the ballistic-sumbarines.
CARVER: There again I have to disagree. In Atlantic
Fleet Submarine Headquarters, he was a trick or watch chief, in
charge of one of the three eight-hour watches in the
communications center. And in that capacity, he would have been
not only privy to all the information that came -- or messages
that flowed back and forth, he would have had to have known about
all the systems of communication, those with ballistic submarines
as well as those with non-ballistic submarines and other kinds of
patrol.
MACNEIL: Can we assume that you two well-informed
gentlemen, disagreeing as you do, reflect a kind of debate that's
probably going on inside the people who are actively in the CIA
and the other intelligence services, trying to figure you how
much damage was done, if it was done, right now? Is there a
similar debate, do you suppose, going on there?
CARVER: I would think the chances are very high. You
get three experts, you get at least five opinions, as you well
know.
MACNEIL: Okay. Let's move on to the question of what
can be done about it.
Among other issues, the Walker family spy charges have
set off a storm of criticism about the sheer number of people who
have access to classified information. Some 4.3 million are
cleared to see some secret information. The clearances are
divided into four basic categories. Three hundred thirty-three
thousand people have access to confidential information. As many
as 3 1/2 million are legally allowed to see information
classified secret. Six hundred thousand have top secret
clearances, and that figure includes a hundred thousand who, like
John Walker, have code word classifications that allow them to
see some of the most sensitive information.
Last year the government received 200,000 applications
for security clearances. In 1974 there were half as many
applications. And it's been estimated that the government
eventually grants security clearances to 99 percent of the people
who apply.
guests.
To get more on this clearance issue, back to our two
Mr. Carver, there are many calls -- we saw two on film a
moment ago by Senators Nunn and Roth -- for reducing the number
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of people -- they suggested halving it -- who get some kind of
security clearances. What do you think of that idea?
CARVER: While I think that Senator Nunn and Senator
Roth are on the tright track, I do think that you can curtail the
number drastically, but you have to be prepared to cope with the
fallout. Curtailing the number so that only those who actually
need the information in the course of their duties get it, and
many who have clearances as a sort of status symbol or because
they are the superiors of those who have daily access with
classified information don't.
But cutting it back requires a scalpel, not a meat ax.
And if we cut it back too far, we will run the risk of exposing
the very kind of information we want to protect.
This is a very complicated question, procedurally,
administratively, and above all legally, and even
constitutionally.
MACNEIL: Mr. Ullman, what do you think about cutting
back the numbers of people with clearances?
ULLMAN: I think that that's probably very important.
And I certainly agree with George in the respect that it needs to
be done surgically rather than in a wholesale sense.
But the other part, it seems to me, is reducing or
downgrading classified material so that it actually fits what its
classification ought to be. We tend to overclassify. We
classify virtually everything.
I think the other part of the problem is trying to
tighten up our classificiation so whem something is secret or top
secret, it genuinely reflects that level.
MACNEIL: The categories I went through, the most
sensitive information, a hundred thousand people. Is that the
group of people, the code word classification -- you can see it
there -- is that the group of people which would have be narrowed
in order to restrict the number who had access to material that
would be of real interest to an enemy of the Soviet Union?
CARVER: ...but you've got a functional problem. How
much you could cut back on that particular number is a very moot
point because many of those people could be performing a variety
of different types of functions: in the field of overhead
photography, in the field of submarine communication, in the
field of strategic targeting, etcetera. And you might not be
able to cut back too drastically without adversely affecting the
capacity of the U.S. to perform those very functions.
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MACNEIL: Well, what about the next-less-sensitive
category, the three and a half million -- which seems like an
extraordinary number to a layman -- who have access to top secret
information? What about that classification? Is that where the
biggest cut could come?
CARVER: I happen to think it is because I agree with
Harland that lots of things are overclassified and that many
things are classified top secret, even, which don't deserve or
merit any such classification. What you have to do...
MACNEIL: Excuse me for interrupting. Is that the point
you're making, Mr. Ullman, that if you cut back the amount of
information, you wouldn't need so many people cleared to...
ULLMAN: That's probably correct. Yes.
MACNEIL: I see. That's the point you're making there.
I'm sorry, Mr. Carver. I interrupted you.
CARVER: What you're doing, Mr. MacNeil, is you're
clearing your deck. You want to cut off the extraneously
classified information and the people who don't really need the
clearances so that you can concentrate on protecting that which
really does need to be protected. But that in itself is a
difficult job.
MACNEIL: Let's go to another point. Mr. Walker, who's
now been charged, was not found by the security services of this
country. He was found, apparently, his wife says, former wife,
because she turned him in. Now, what can be done to people who
legitimately have security classifications, and should have them,
to insure that -- or to police their suitability for having them,
if you know what I mean?
Mr. Ullman, do you have a...
ULLMAN: That's one of the most difficult questions.
Generally, security investigations and reinvestigations are based
on detecting aberrant or abnormal behavior. And therefore it
would be in the best interest of a spy to behave normally. If he
does that, then there's no reason to pick him up.
If one then institutes a whole series of tests, lie
detector tests, so forth and so on, it seems to me then one runs
the risk of imposing and infringing on constitutional rights.
For example, if I may be allowed analysis by anecdote,
about four years ago there was a story in the Washington Post
which reported that the Administration was underfunding its
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defense plans. A lie detector test was administered to a number
of senior officials. One of them proved positive, a former West
Point graduate with two Silver Stars from Vietnam. And he was
relieved from his duties. The next day the Washington Post
correspondent reported in The Post that they got the wrong guy.
So if you overreact, you run a very, very real risk, it
seems to me, of infringing on genuine rights and genuine need to
know.
MACNEIL: Mr. Carver, how do you think you police the
people who legitimately should have security clearance?
CARVER: With great difficulty, partly because of the
problem that my friend Mr. Ullman just played. There is no --
you have a balance question, a very complicated balance question,
between protecting that which the U.S. Government has to protect
in order to be able to protect our nation and our citizens and
the things on which our survival itself could hinge without doing
undue infringement on people's civil rights and
constitutional liberties.
Now I say undue advisedly, Mr. MacNeil. There is no way
to do an effective counterintelligence job, to run an effective
security investigation of the kind that's necessary to make a
sensible judgment about issuing or withholding or withdrawing a
clearance without being intrusive. You have to look into
people's beliefs. You have to look into people's behavior. You
have to look into their affairs, both literal and metaphorical,
their financial activities, etcetera, etcetera. This requires a
degree of intrusiveness that is unpalatable to the American
ethos, and quite properly so. It also involves a mind-set which
is even more unpalatable.
You can't be a good security officer assuming that
everyone is innocent until you can prove him guilty. You have to
start out with a presumption that he may well be guilty until you
can satisfy yourself that he's provably innocent. And that's a
very hard thing to do in a constitutional democracy.
MACNEIL: Well, gentlemen, thank you both for joining
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