How the Walker Spy Ring Hurt the F-14 Tomcat

hey everybody welcome back to the channel for another live stream we're rejoined by my longtime good friend and fellow tomcat radar intercept officer alum dave hey joe parsons you guys remember him from two episodes first was this one about flight jackets hey joe is an expert as you saw in that episode and then this one about military artists and that's another thing that dave knows a thing or two about hey joe good to see you again it's good to be here always but we're here to talk about something that impacted both of us because we were in different tomcat squadrons at that time the walker spy ring and how it impacted the f-14 tomcat um so as we talk about classified material handling and that sort of thing the first thing that i thought of when when this current news was breaking is how it was hammered into us on day one of the f-14 training squadron what we used to call the rag vf101 how you could not take classified information home so the f-14 and also just mentioned that when we were in the training command going through flight school vt10 vt86 we never dealt with anything classified you know when you're in uh an undergraduate program uh flight school you're there's nothing classified about a t2 a ta4 in our day at t39 um we're just learning how to run basic intercepts do navigation et cetera et cetera pull g's call fights um so when we get to the rag suddenly we have the blue natops right so everybody remembers top gun maverick where maverick walks in he's got the natops under his under his arm and he goes to the podium and he goes hey you guys know this by heart and he chucks it away that's the blue natops sort of the owner's manual if you will unclassified then there was the yellow natops which was the confidential and that dealt with some things that were you know confidential in classification and then there was the red secret natops so the yellow and red nature could not leave the squadron spaces and there was a special study area and uh so that's the first time we ever had to deal with that and i remember some guys would be like i'm out of time and the wife you know needs me home and they names will remain unknown but they just put in their helmet bag and and took it home to study um and i think in several cases and you you know of some of these egregious errors they forgot they had it and they got busted in various forms for having confidential material outside of the squadron space yeah that um i had a tour of the pentagon prior to flight school as a marine officer and we had 28 saves and somebody's job every day was to make sure every one of those was closed and and then it was somebody's job every day to open up all those saves and um i got schooled in how to um handle classified and i just knew your career would be over i didn't want to mess with it um so i was already sensitized to it um and uh then i ended up in that squadron where walker was but you know i don't want to get ahead of the story well let's let's talk about that so uh your first squadron in fact um we have some photos from there vf 102 the diamondbacks i was a dime back later for my department head tour but this is what time frame are we talking here did you do your tour this was your first tomcat tour right i i got uh assigned to vf102 in late uh 1981 and um i just finished the rag and i joined them as they were transitioning to the tomcat all new to us so there was a lot uh to read up and we had all the pubs in um in our ops department in these there was about six safes in there and they they knew the stuff that we needed to read to get upset in the airplane so that uh it was the option yeoman's job that worked in ops in the morning to get in there and open those doors and so anybody could take a look at them during the day instead of having to open up the safes and at the end of the day they'd close it up and if you needed any other time you had to contact them but a lot of people coming and going um and where walker worked was actually in the admin spaces which was down the hall um and no classified was kept in there um but then i want to get a so let's talk well a couple things so you said you transitioned just so the viewers are clear vf 102 the diamondbacks flew the f4 what model was it the j they were the last operators of the j they had the j and so here we are transition to the tomcat so you're at least two years ahead of me through the rag but when i got there there was still one f4 squadron it was vf74 and the rag still existed the f4 rag so you know you and i are old enough that we remember the phantom at oceania but now you're transitioning to the tomcat the a version of the tomcat when i was in 102 about a decade after you uh we had the b version of the tomcat and you're aboard the uss america which is the same carrier that i was on when i was a department head you did i don't know what number cruise it was the america i did the final cruise of america and will remind the audience that america is now in the bottom of the atlantic as a reef that people can dive on which breaks our heart but the great ship america so you were saying that walker was a pretty squared away sailor he was a non-rate striker as we call it so talk to us about that at the time the policy was you got two undesignated seamen straight out of boot camp and we had two of them walker was one of them and he landed in um admin you know the master command master chief uh moved these guys around the other guy was off somewhere t.a.d and uh he was squared away uh he uh his uniforms are always iron um he was always groomed immaculately uh very polite um you would never suspect anything in fact when the news broke about his dad my first thought was man oh that kid just must be beside him so i was trying to figure out you know well how can i reach out and say hey you know this will blow over you know yeah yeah so so let me let me run this quick snippet that to your point is michael walker talking about how he sort of set the tone that you're talking about so let me run this snippet he ever suspected me of stealing documents from any of the commands that i was assigned to mostly because of the way i carried myself i didn't look like a spy so being a 4-0 sailor as we remember has a lot of resonant effects in terms of what would you suspect people of you know and so he this is part of spycraft is a misdirection is uh you know not being uh a person who attracts any attention yeah he and he um since we worked in the same spaces i distinctly remember him multiple times walking down the hall walking out of the building near him or behind him in the stairwell and he always had this vinyl pouch under his arm that everybody you know as we compared notes afterwards um when they finally said you know he got some stuff out of squadron first inclination was wow and then was how and um but he always had this vinyl pouch that had something in it we everybody thought since he was a striker that he was carrying pubs to study from it was just the same vinyl pouch that um they gave to recruits uh in boot camp to carry their orders around in in papers and um you know when they were talking to our intel officer or who we called our spy they thought well maybe when they had to do burn runs maybe he got uh volunteered for the burn runs because you'd have like five people to have control of the classified because i don't even think he had a clearance i'm pretty sure he didn't no he didn't he did not and uh that maybe got the burn bag and as they were all going down the passageway he went into the restroom or something you know but then we found out later that what he was doing was you at that time and i think even to this day you can send classified in the regular united states postal service and you have to double wrap it there's all these rules and on the outside you can there's no way you can tell it's classified it's a thick envelope but then when you open it up there's an envelope within the envelope that is marked classified so um that that is what how when those would arrive in admin at that point he's supposed to turn it over to somebody that has classified that and i think that was the weak link in that if somebody is going to sell out his country that's how he can get a hold of it all he has to do you know we have those big gray navy desks and he was over in a corner and nobody was paying attention to what he was doing so he just throw it in a drawer and when nobody's around he could throw it in his pouch and he was off and running with it because he wasn't in the squadron very long so everybody went oh this probably had as more and more details came out we figured oh he everything he did he did over on the nimitz but then um i was invited down to meet the ncis agent when uh in late 1985 i remember we were on our way over across the north atlantic and he had um xerox copies of all the front pages of everything that he had and he had laid him out all on his rack in his room and i was just stunned that the whole rack was full of stuff but my eyes went straight too right in the center was the vx4 tactics guide for the sparrow and i'm like oh no you know finally get a real capable missile you know they finally get this thing right and and now the bad guys know all about it well so we'll talk about the vx4 piece in a second here i just want to point out what benjamin perez said here which is true not just for spycraft but also for officership you know this is sort of fit rep 101 is always look really busy right um and uh the other one is have a cover that you put on your desk right have an extra cover this is jaws marshall mentioned this uh it was a hosurism you know wherever you are it doesn't matter as long as you have a cover on your desk and so people like oh it must be in the squadron spaces somewhere you could be on the golf course you could be out on a boat um whatever so you're you're correct there benjamin so again to hey joe's point here is a non-rated enlisted guy who's sort of has this earnest vibe to his own you know admission in prison there you know he just was trying to be really squared away because that takes the suspicion off of him and i remember as we were dealing with the yeoman particularly because i was the legal officer in my first squadron and it was really up to the yeoman chief to keep the paperwork squared away and it was time for non-judicial punishment he'd hand me a folder and my assumption was it's good to go and i just walk into you know the captain's mast and just sort of hand to the skipper and i was never burned by those guys they were super professional right so this is like the perfect cover for him to be doing what he was doing because he was striking for wyan it gave him access to classified material the officers are all kind of like yeah he's squared away and he's taking care of us and you know thank god we got him there you know handling this classified material because you know we know it's a pain in the ass and you can get into trouble if you do it wrong right so that's the premise that this guy it turns out is doing all of this uh this stuff so as you mentioned he goes from vf 102 land based because you guys were about to go uh underway in america to nimitz now how what was the there were some details around that in terms of uh how that happened well now they um they said we're gonna have to send one of them away uh to the nimitz and they talked to both these guys not in my presence but i found out later that they said well walker said he wanted to stay at home longer um because nimbus wouldn't be deploying right away uh he'd have nine months more with his girlfriend uh whereas the other guy didn't really care but we were kind of like wow we wish we could have kept him he was squared away and um so uh it wasn't too many months later that all of a sudden all this other stuff broke and he you know i heard he was he got himself in a really good option job over there and he had his hands on everything that was coming through the ship so you you met his girlfriend on the way out of the ocean air show one year yeah one year the uh i don't know what happened in the traffic but it was just a nightmare it was before they uh expanded the roads outside of oceana and there were only two two lanes and um even though there were one way something happened up ahead and everybody was getting out of their cars and noticed he was in the car two doors down and he he uh we were all comparing notes from what was going on and he introduced me to his girlfriend she seemed really nice and that's why i felt for him when it was like oh your dad's a spy oh man that must be horrible i hope everything's all right you know and his poor girlfriend but i don't know what happened to her during all this time but well i i think they got married and then when this all was unfolding she divorced him because one of the things he says in one of those documentaries is you know he lost his house his wife so i'm assuming that's that's uh who he was talking about so let's introduce the players here before we get into some greater detail uh about this whole situation so um we start with john walker let me see if i can find a picture i have of him stand by so the head of this whole thing is john walker right um his right-hand man is a guy he was he served with who had been a senior chief uh as well named jerry whitworth um remind what what is rm what rating is that when you're man newman senior chief radioman jerry whitworth his brother arthur walker who is getting carted away from court with handcuffs on and then his son we've already talked about michael walker so those are the those are the main players in this uh family business as it were and so john walker did sort of direct his son to take the orders we're talking about knowing as you've said as a yeoman he'd have access to direct access to classified material and unsupervised access to classified material so while he's going oh my girlfriend this and and uh you know you guys go on without me i'll suck it up and go over to nimitz really that was uh you know with a purpose to have direct access to classified material now their stock and trade was all of this crypto and back in those days this is pre-internet pre-digital anything it's like crypto was like punch card ticker tape stuff and they basically just took that and rolled it up and bagged it up and this is what they would do their regular drop-offs up there in the greater dc metro area and that's how he ultimately got got busted you know he was observed at one of those those drop-offs but he uh he promised his son he the dad this is what a scumbag the dad is um besides being a traitor but um he promised michael five thousand dollars a month for doing this like regular income and there was no sort of deliverables he didn't it wasn't five thousand dollars based on giving me x number of messages or this you know these yards of of these uh you know crypto readouts or whatever um but much to michael's ultimate frustration and you know now he's got a lot of time to think about it in prison he only got a thousand bucks just once that's all he was paid ever to do what he did that cost him his his life um so there's that irony on top of everything else so i remember and you know this better than i do because you went from the squadron to the missile requirements office so you were dealing with the fallout of this even you know years later seven years later but i remember that vx4 so just to school everybody now we have vx9 which is vx4 which was the air-to-air test and eval command and vx5 was the air-to-ground test and eval command so they combined them to create wait for it vx9 but in our day the only one we really dealt with was vx4 and i remember dealing with those guys my first missile x ever i was rio training officer in vf-32 we're down on the puerto rican op area i got to shoot a phoenix and it had uh you know jamming and i had to go to pmtc to observe the jamming before we did the missile x in puerto rico and the observer um from vx4 was like are you seeing the music that was the code word for are you seeing the jamming from the drone and if i if the answer was negative then i was not supposed to fire that phoenix missile because it was supposed to be seeing if this software could work against that jamming so in these days not just firing a missile but firing a missile in a jamming air-to-air jamming environment was crucial and this speaks to the exploitation that affected the uh the tomcats two of our three missiles so let's talk about what vx4 discovered as this all started to come to light well like i said when i saw on the rack of the ncis agent they had the tactics guide what vx4's job they were the operational testers so after the developmental testers at pax river shake down the airplane and expand the envelope you have people that are tactics experts out at vx4 that get a hold of they test whatever it is the aircraft the pods missiles radar they test it to make sure it's operationally uh effective and suitable and part of that is having pubs and since when you're bringing something new out the natops even classified knee tops lag um the introduction of the actual hardware so what vx4's job was is to get something out to us early to let us know okay you're gonna get this and here's how you use it so what it was was i always thought they were better distillations of these ponderous pubs that could put you to sleep sometimes and you had to dig through them um these were just really you know just like the cliff notes and here's how you use this weapon system and when i showed up in the pentagon in 1991 and was put in charge of all the air-to-air missile requirements that's first thing i learned from my program office was hey we're still struggling to catch up for all the stuff that got compromised you know there's all these rumors about what the iranians gave away we kind of assumed that okay they know what an m54a does so the c was supposed to fix that and some air force sergeant had sold a side one or literally put it in a vw bus and drove it from west germany to east germany once so they they had the sidewinder so we there was a crash effort to um fix all the uh or i or ccdm features inside water but in those days they had to be hard carded solutions where you had to de-skin the missiles put them in there so we were trying to get where they were before i got there trying to get to the point where um the seven mike and the m54c plus would all have reprogrammable memories so that you could put updates because we started seeing some of the uh soviet jammers as we got to know more of them they obviously knew how our stuff worked you know um if it wasn't from the walkers there's all sorts of other places that um they can get stuff you know the compromise but the worst one was the walkers and um you know and the other thing that i don't think we mentioned is there was that really good uh submarine tell-all book that came out uh i think you and i were talking about it yeah blind man's bluff uh i didn't realize the connection until i read that and i when i reviewed the walker scenario is when walker gave up uh the codes the first codes he gave up the first thing that happened within a month was the pueblo got captured because the codes weren't any good without the coding machine it's like the enigma machine uh it's actually based sort of the same kind of rotors on that so they had to get a hold of one so they had the north koreans they knew what what that ship had on it said they had north koreans go get it and the account i read was right away as soon as they got that ship into the harbor off came the coding machines and often went off to uh moscow and so then they could read all our traffic you know so hammer li 280 says i can think of at least one aircraft these days with a natops manual that is distributed as a pdf file um so let's be very clear that's not a problem if you're talking about the unclass natops that's like the owner's manual in fact you can google uh you know super hornet f-18e natops and you can find a pdf online just like you can google f14a f14b and you can get the natas manual um the blue pill the blue covered natops is not or has never been classified so let's be very clear about now if somebody can say oh and by the way i got the super hornet confidential natops on through a google search now we've got an issue right um so again we're talking about two of the three missiles at the height of wwe cold war tomcat is you know supreme in terms of carrier aviation fleet air defense versus the soviet union threat you know bears badgers mig-21s make 25s make 29 we're just hearing about this airplane you know we had some glimmer that they had another airplane that was kick-ass like that and so we would memorize their weapons envelopes we would do tactics you know beaming and notching and all the other stuff that you can do in dcs these days and knowing what the eccm the electronic counter measures that we may face and fusing that into the tactics was crucial so when vx4 comes out and says hey guys zero out the sparrow launch accept acceptability region what we used to call lar and forget the tactics we were talking about because they're no good anymore because everything's been exploited that was a big deal that you you can't underestimate what impact that had on tomcat squadron's tactics same same with the phoenix like you're saying you know because this was aim 7f um dash i can't think of which dash it was maybe dash nine um and then we had as a function of this they had to fast track aim seven mic right so we went i want to say it was like six months to a year where we had a sparrow that we were not confident in in a jamming environment same with the brand new version of the aim 54 that we had we figured if you launch it against an airplane that has active jamming it's just going to go stupid and so that's not a good place to be um in you know in a tomcat squadron that's at the the pointy edge of the spear so you know thank you very little michael walker yeah he um i i'm i'm hesitating because i got exposed to all the classified ramifications being the requirements officer but it caused problems across the board for all those weapons and basically when you're still in those days our biggest worry was the soviets were going to throw a hundred bombers at a carrier and every missile had to count you couldn't afford to have any any degradation in those missiles whatsoever yet they knew how they worked that's a great point yeah so how did this play out um obviously one by one they went to prison um i know that that arthur walker and john walker have died um john walker died at the age of um 77 um here's a picture of him you know he's that big head of hair is uh gone here he he wound up dying in prison arthur walker wound up dying in prison michael walker still alive um but uh not a happy man um i'm not sure what happened with jerry whitworth obviously he's in prison somewhere but i'm not sure if he's still alive um so the bottom line here is you know that this is serious serious impact on on readiness you know um and we can talk about the handling of classified information we can talk about you know oh what's the big deal etc in this case the impacts were were real and so when you're talking secret ts um wholesale pubs are being copied and sent overseas i also remember in you know the kids these days don't appreciate life before the internet but remember we had a message board and we had a secret message board so you had the unclass message board that would sit around the ready room um and you'd go through it and the skipper would write notes to you like mooch what are we doing about this you know it would be illegal something about legal or you know in the inner red pen well he gets ready the skipper had read xo had blue right and somebody had green was it the ammo that had green yeah and those were the protocol of colors on the message board were very important um but anyway you'd have to hawk that you know it was always a jayo's nightmare when you hadn't read the board for some days and you turn it when it says mooch what's the answer it would say like a list of dates like question marks like oh hey skipper suitcase two days ago sorry for the delay um that wasn't good officership but then in the ready room in the safe right you had the classified message board and you also had copies of the top gun journal which was you know this cool like magazine that top gun put out that talked about sort of tactics in a jamming environment and the latest and greatest soviet capabilities and we were expected to know this like by memory right you didn't have time in the airplane to let go what was that again and like find it you know this isn't a a wax or a p3 where there's a million guys in the airplane and you can just break out the pub and zorch around at 250 knots we're going mach 1.5 you know against an airplane that's going mach 1.5 so we had to know that as soon as you saw the jamming on the ddd react right did you have to do something to the phoenix before you launched it whatever it was right so we had to study these pubs again when you find out for vx4 hey all that study forget it it's a waste now start from scratch except don't do anything for a couple years because raytheon and hughes have got some work to do now because of everything that was leaked and exploited you know i mean it's it was these were not good times um here's the cover and i remember this issue of the virginia pilot which is our local newspaper in uh in hampton roads um you know and as you as you say it's ironic that when this news broke there was no linkage to michael walker the guy who ultimately did a lot to the tomcat community you know so i think it's a crack up that you like uh you feel like when you see that headline you're like oh i gotta call michael and say i feel really sorry for your dad this too shall pass you know yeah that's exactly how i felt yeah so you know yep yep so hey joe any last thoughts on this topic no i just uh it brought back lots of memories but the you know the cold war we you know especially the two north atlantic deployments i had with the soviets came out in force both times in um 82 and 85 they were um they meant business and we were gonna have to be able to use every missile uh that we had on the aircraft to keep them from taking out the ship and um and that that was just like a gut punch to find out that they knew you know from our experts exactly how everything was working so if if we if we launched let's say in those days there were you know we had 12 airplanes in each one of the tomcat squadrons in fact i got a picture here of of the nimitz flight deck circa these days right so here's nimitz just so everybody knows because we were talking about your airwing which was cag one with vf102 your sister squadron was vf-33 here's kag eight aboard nimitz and this is when michael walker was on ship's company the tomcat squadrons were vf-84 the jolly rogers not vf-103 the jolly rogers that happened later but vf-84 and vf41 the black aces and my viewers will remember the black aces were involved in the first gulf of sidra incident but you know you look at this flight deck so in these days a tomcat squadron had 12 jets well you didn't put 12 jets on the flight deck because they couldn't fit so you know as i'm counting the number of let's just say black aces here i see one two three and then there's some on the bow let's say at the most you had seven on the flight deck so that meant the other five were in the hangar so let's say the bubble went up to your point you know if you're gonna fight this war with winders and bullets you know in guns you're gonna lose we would lose the war so this is exactly what we're talking about in terms of the impact that the walker spy ring and particularly and acutely michael walker had on tomcat squadrons and power projection from aircraft carriers in those days big deal and i don't know what uh impact they had on the submarine world because that's all closely held but they they were reading all the traffic um the the irony is i did read in several places that the soviets were kind of paranoid about attacking realized we weren't out to attack them uh you know because we'd get in their face a lot so and walker tried to claim credit for that that well that's why he did it to to assure them but um i i don't think that's a reason to feel any sympathy for him whatsoever no yeah so hey joe always a pleasure to have you on the channel thank you for bringing your expertise to this particular topic um hope we see you uh in person uh very soon yeah i hope so all right all right take care all right everybody that will do it for this live stream as always thanks for showing up on a weekday we had a pretty good crowd thanks for the great discussion if you're not already a subscriber please click the button and become one so you don't miss any notifications about these sorts of live streams and the other content that we'll be putting out don't forget the punx trilogy is available in all formats thanks to the support of viewers like you so check amazon and usni.org slash books for all formats of the punks trilogy and if you'd like to help support the channel please consider using the super thanks the heart icon below or become a patron at patreon.com wardcarroll okay and don't forget that once we sign off this will be available as a regular episode of the channel so come back and check out the chat and review what we talked about here thanks everybody and i look forward to talking to you again very soon

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 123,523

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Id: 1kwMmdAWjBg

Length: 35min 41sec (2141 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022