John Anthony Walker

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John Anthony Walker (around 1985, FBI photo)

John Anthony Walker Jr. (born July 28, 1937 in Washington, DC - † August 28, 2014 in Butner , North Carolina ) was a member of the United States Navy and communications expert who worked for the Soviet Union as a spy between 1967 and 1985 .

Career

John Anthony Walker Jr. was born in 1937, the middle of three sons to a Warner Brothers employee and an Italian-American mother. He attended Catholic school, his father became addicted to alcohol and became unemployed. Impoverished, the family moved to live with their grandparents in Scranton , Pennsylvania. In late 1955, Walker joined the Navy and became a naval radio operator. He initially served on a destroyer escort. Then he came on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal (CV-59). While going ashore in Boston, he met Barbara Crowley in the winter of 1957 and married her shortly thereafter. The couple had three daughters by 1960 and a son around 1963.

After training at the submarine school, Walker served on the USS Razorback (SS-394) in the Pacific Fleet . He received his cryptographic qualification, passed a reliability test and a psychological examination of his reliability as a condition for handling nuclear weapons.

Spy ring

Walker began working for the Soviet secret service in 1967. Because of financial difficulties, he went to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC and sold a Top Secret document (a wireless cipher card ) for several thousand dollars. From then on, he received $ 500 to $ 1,000 a week. He shared u. a. Details about the American cipher machine KL-7 with. In 1976 he left the Navy and officially opened a private investigation agency, but continued to act as a spy. He received documents from, among others, his older brother, Arthur Walker, and his friend Jerry Whitworth, both of whom were former naval officers and communications specialists. His son Michael Walker, a petty officer on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, also worked for the spy ring.

After some delay , the FBI and the NIS found his track on the testimony of John Walker's divorced wife . Walker was arrested in May 1985. In exchange for a lighter sentence for his son, he pleaded guilty and made a full confession. He was sentenced to life in prison (as did his brother and Whitworth) and died at the age of 77 in a federal prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina . His son was sentenced to a prison term of 25 years and was in 2000, prematurely released on parole .

reception

The Walker spy ring is considered to be one of the most powerful espionage activities of the Cold War . The case met with wide media coverage and became the subject of several non-fiction books. The authors include journalists John Barron ( Spies for the KGB: the most momentous espionage affair in recent decades: the Walker case , 1988) and Pete Earley ( Family of spies: inside the John Walker spy ring , 1988) and the former FBI -Agent Robert W. Hunter ( Spy hunter: inside the FBI investigation of the Walker espionage case , 1999). In 2008 John Anthony Walker published his autobiography My life as a spy on Prometheus Books.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The John Walker Spy Ring and The US Navy's Biggest Betrayal. In: USNI News. September 2, 2014, accessed July 19, 2016 .
  2. Martin Weil: John A. Walker Jr., who led family spy ring, dies at 77. In: The Washington Post . August 30, 2014, accessed July 23, 2016.