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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JUNE 7, 1985
just the tip of a large iceberg. The Soviet Union and its Eastern
allies"stat1on'more than 2,000 officials in this country, and by
government estimates, 30 to 40 percent of these people are en
gaged at least part time in espionage•.••
The Walker case would be less unnerving if it didn't involve sub
marines, now perhaps the most valuable of current U. S. nuclear
forces. Two legs of the strategic triad--the B-52 manned bombers
and the land-based ballistic missiles--are at least theoretically
vulnerable to Soviet attack. The third leg is a strong deterrent
indeed: a strategic submarine force with no fixed address, hidden
in the ocean deep. Armed with 16 to 24 multiwarhead missiles
each, America's 35 Poseidon and Trident submarines could by them
selves destroy the Soviet Union many times over.
Information about antisubmarine warfare has therefore always been
guarded with a zeal approaching paranoia•••• The deepest worries
are that the Walker brothers, both of whom left the Navy in the
mid-'70s, may have given the Russians important information on
how to improve their own fleet of missile submarines. Both were
in a position to provide clues to how the United States locates
and listens to Soviet subs and on techniques the United States
uses to make its own subs operate silently....
The FBI began looking .at John Walker six months ago. A.s a private
detective in Norfolk, he gave no hints of his other life. He was
perhaps a bit flamboyant•..• But his work was routine stuff...:
investigations into divorce cases, auto accidents, claims for
workmen's compensation•..• Nor was there any hint of pro-Soviet
sympathies. Indeed, the opposite was the case. Walker was a
staunch Reagan supporter, and according to Laurie Robinson, the
general manager of his firm, Confidential Reports, Inc., he kept
an official p:,rtrait of the president on his desk..•.
But late last year, according to investigators, one person who
had long known of Walker's seeming double life blew the whistle:
his ex-wife, Barbara Walker, a clerk in a gift shop in West
Dennis, Mass•... In the late 1960s, according to a well-placed
counterintelligence source, Barbara Walker began to notice some
thing different about her husband's behavior. Several times over
the next few years, an FBI informant--reportedly either Bar bara
Walker or a daughter who also gave incriminating statements
--"personally observed" Walker traveling into the Washington,
D.C., area and placing a paper bag filled with what the informant
"believed to be classified material" underneath a tree. On one
of these trips, the informant said, Walker received $35,000 in
return. These incidents went unreported for� than 13 years.
The NEWSWEEK story proceeds to give a detailed account of John Walker's ar
rest on May 19 as he was delivering a bag of secret material to a dropoff
point in a semi-rural setting in Maryland. The FBI agents discovered a let
ter in the bag describing the activities of associates known only as "S" and
"D"--subsequently revealed as son Michael and brother Arthur. Also in the
bag were 129 classified Navy documents supplied by S and apparently taken
from the �ircraft carrier Nimitz. To continue with the NEWSWEEK story: