Spy Arthur Walker Still In His Brother’s Shadow

Because I have spent much of my career writing about crime and prisons, I have gotten to know a lot of criminals, including some down right evil psychopaths. Occasionally, I  get a note from a prisoner asking me to write a letter to a parole board recommending clemency.

The most recent came from Alice Lundgren, wife of Jeffrey Lundgren, who was executed by the State of Ohio in 2006 for murdering a family of five. The Lundgren cult is the subject of my book, Prophet of Death. I told Alice no.

In the past 37-years, I have written only one letter on behalf of an inmate.

Arthur Walker is the older brother of John Walker Jr., the infamous traitor who ran the most damaging spy ring in our nation’s history. My first book, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring, is the only account written about the case that is based on exclusive interviews with each of the ring’s members, including John, his best-friend, Jerry Whitworth; John’s son, Michael Walker; and Arthur.

If you have read the book or are familiar with the story, then you know that John Walker Jr. was arrested in May 1985, after spying for the Soviet Union for some 18 years. John is manipulative and calculating. To me, he epitomizes the banality of evil.

I met Arthur Walker while I was writing for The Washington Post and he was the first Walker family member to give me an interview. What’s fascinating about Arthur is that he literally talked himself into prison. The FBI suspected him of being part of the spy ring, but if he had kept his mouth shut, it would have been difficult for the government to prove he’d done anything wrong.

Arthur, however, couldn’t keep quiet. Taking a page from Edgar Allan Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart, Arthur spoke for 35 hours to the FBI without asking for an attorney and then allowed himself to be duped into testifying before a grand jury investigating John. ( A crafty federal prosecutor subpoenaed Arthur’s wife, Rita, to testify and then approached Arthur while he was waiting outside in the hallway and persuaded him to come inside and give testimony without a lawyer.)

By the time Arthur finally got around to talking to an attorney, the government’s case against him was ironclad — and it was based entirely on his own statements.

Arthur was charged with seven counts of conspiracy to commit espionage and before the case came to trial,  he offered to plead guilty to one count and nolo contendere to the other six. That meant a judge could have sentenced him as if he had pleaded guilty to all seven. Put simply, there was no reason to put him on trial.

But the government wanted to make a public example of him.  “We are not going to give up the public’s right to see into an espionage case,” Stephen S. Trott, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, declared. “You don’t put a knife in your country’s back and come in and ask for some kind of deal.”

I’ve always suspected the government’s real motive in putting Arthur on trial was to send a warning to John. Nearly all of the evidence presented at Arthur’s three day trial was about John. In fact, Arthur seemed like an after thought at his own trial.

At the time, John was playing hardball with the government. He was refusing to tell the FBI and CIA what he had given to the KGB. Prosecutors also wanted him to testify against Jerry Whitworth. Without John’s help, convicting Whitworth was going to be difficult.

By putting Arthur on trial first and then hammering him with a maximum sentence,  federal prosecutors were able to send John a message. This is how one of the prosecutors explained the government’s strategy to me.

“We wanted John to see how easily we had just crucified his brother and we wanted him to understand that we were now going to go after his son, Mike. Say what you want about John Walker, at some level, he was still a father and that made him vulnerable.”

Sure enough, shortly after Arthur was sentenced to life in prison, John agreed to a plea bargain. He promised to tell the FBI and CIA about the secrets that he had compromised and he agreed to testify against Jerry Whitworth. In return, the government agreed to go easy on Michael Walker.

We now know the documents that Arthur passed to John for delivery to the KGB were worthless. While they were classified at the government’s  lowest level, the information in them could easily have been found in such publications as Jane’s Fighting Ships. Arthur was twice manipulated. First by his brother and then by federal prosecutors.

Does this mean he shouldn’t have been punished? Of course not. However, given the insignificance of the materials that he gave John and the fact that he has been in prison for 25 years, I believe he has paid his debt. He is now 75 years old. Before his arrest, he had a clean record and had lived a rather ordinary life in Virginia Beach after a lackluster, but honorable Navy career. If he were released today, I doubt he could get a job handling classified information, so I don’t think there is much threat that he will repeat his crime.

No one likes a traitor and writing a letter seeking clemency for one is certainly not going to impress my friends at the CIA and FBI. But keeping Arthur locked up is a waste of taxpayers’ money and unfair. He made a dumb mistake when he was pressured by his brother and short of cash, and he has paid for it. What’s more, his role in the spy ring was minor and after his arrest, he was geninuely remorseful. He was ashamed,

This weekend, I received word from Arthur’s son that the parole board rejected his appeal. Obviously, my letter didn’t do any good. When I heard that decision, my mind flashed back some 25 years ago to a night when I met with Arthur and his attorney, Sam Meekins, in a Virginia Beach jail. Arthur had just been found guilty and Sam was gingerly trying to warn him that he was going to get a lengthy sentence.

Arthur was geninuely confused. He thought the government was going to cut him some slack because he had talked so openly with the FBI and grand jury. He’d offered to plead guilty before the trial too and he’d even agreed to testify against John if that became necessary. Didn’t he deserve a break for trying to make amends?

Meekins said: “There is fair play for robbers and rapists and even murderers. The court can cut them some slack, but not you. This case got too big, Art, too many headlines, too much television. It got bigger than you, Arthur, bigger than you.”

The case against Arthur Walker still is bigger than him.