Still, any strategy that allowed for even a few enemy missile subs to fire at U.S. targets was a far cry from the days when most of the Soviet Yankees traveled the seas with unknown and lethal shadows that could prevent them from shooting at all. And for intelligence officials, it was a huge relief to realize that the Soviets were not readying to use their improved position to start a war.
Ironically, the 1984 run-the trip that brought home the "big casino"-was the first of Parche's five missions to the Barents that would fail to win a Presidential Unit Citation. (Instead, Parche was given a Navy Unit Commendation, the next highest award.) Parche may have supplied the United States with an amazing wealth of critical information, but her own role in the ongoing cold war drama was becoming more routine.
Actually, Naval Intelligence was now hatching a plan to access the Soviet cable in real time, without having to wait for a submarine to travel there at all. The concept had been kicking around NURO since the mid-1970s, when some officials envisioned linking the Okhotsk tap by cable to Japan. John Butts, the director of Naval Intelligence, and his team were now pushing an ambitious idea to lay 1,200 miles of cable between the Barents taps and Greenland. He envisioned barges that would look so perfectly innocuous that no one would ever dream that they were involved in stretching and laying his imagined cable. And he saw a full-time staff of linguists and cryptologists dedicated to translating and decoding the material as it came in.
The plan was grand. In fact, it was grandiose. Some of Butts's colleagues began to joke that he was trying to take over the world. They watched, wondering whether Butts and his aides would realize they were getting more than a little carried away. They waited as Butts tallied up the $1 billion cost. The intelligence committees in Congress didn't wonder or wait. They simply made it clear they were going to sink Butts's plan, barges and all.
Throughout all of this, the two superpowers continued talking about shedding, or at least shrinking, their nuclear arsenals. And when Chernenko died in March 1985, the old Soviet guard all but died with him. For its new leader, the Politburo reached into a younger generation to find fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev. He had been convinced ever since the Able Archer panic that the Soviet Union had to get back to the negotiating table. Now, as he took up his post as general secretary, he seemed more willing than any of his recent predecessors to consider major changes in U.S.-Soviet relations.
Indeed, he made his first move late on the day of Chernenko's funeral. "The USSR has never intended to fight the United States and does not have such intentions now," Gorbachev flatly declared to Bush and Shultz. "There have never been such madmen within the Soviet leadership, and there are none now."
During these first steps toward conciliation, U.S. authorities made startling discoveries that reminded the nation that the days of spies and old-style cold warriors were not over. Rich Haver, it seems, hadn't been seeing ghosts at all.
It was early in 1985 when Bill Studeman, who was about to succeed Butts as director of Naval Intelligence, walked into Haver's office with a critical piece of paper. Haver, who was now the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, took it and read through the FBI's account of an interview with a woman named Barbara Walker, who had come to report that her husband, a former Navy chief, had been spying for the Soviets. The FBI noted that Walker had been living the good life, although his only visible means of support was a failing detective business.
Haver knew instantly that he was holding the answer that he and Studeman had sought back in the late 1970s when they tried to convince admirals to investigate a possible communications break.
John A. Walker Jr. was a retired Navy submariner and communications specialist. In 1967 he had been a watch officer in Norfolk handling communications with American submarines in the Atlantic. He had access to reports on submarine operations, technical manuals, and the daily key lists that were used to unscramble all of the messages sent through the military's most widely used coding machines. If the Soviets had gotten hold of any of this, they would have known that they needed to look over their shoulders, that their missile subs were being followed by much quieter U.S. subs. They also would have known just how quiet U.S. submarines were, and just how critical submarine-quieting technology was to the balance of ocean power.
Later, Haver and Studeman learned that Walker had given all this to the Soviets, and more. In fact, when Walker retired from the Navy in 1976, he had continued his espionage by drawing others into his scheme. First he recruited another Navy communications specialist, Jerry A. Whitworth, who continued Walker's access to the crucial key lists. In the early 1980s, Walker enlisted his brother Arthur, who worked for a defense contractor. And soon after that, Walker began using his son Michael, an enlisted man on the USS Nirnitz, a nuclearpowered aircraft carrier. Walker was caught only because his ex-wife wanted to prevent him from recruiting their daughter into a spy ring that had already swallowed their son.
The news was sobering. For all the years that the United States had been eavesdropping on the Soviets through the cable taps, the Soviets had been listening in on U.S. communications, and without the years of research, investment in technology, or risk to men's lives. In fact, Walker's ring had cost the Soviets less than $1 million over eighteen years, and for that money he had almost single-handedly destroyed the U.S. nuclear advantage.
Walker was arrested on May 20. The next day, Haver was assigned to write the damage report, largely because he had written much of it ten years earlier when he first tried to raise the alarm. But the damage was worse than even Haver had predicted. Walker also had passed crucial secrets about U.S. techniques for quieting subs, such as cushioning engine equipment to prevent vibrations from resonating through hulls. Indeed, around the time Walker was caught, U.S. sonar operators were reporting that they couldn't identify some of the newest Soviet attack subs until their own boats were right on top of the Soviets-or in some cases, were surprised by them. A few of the newest Soviet subs, the Sierras and the Akulas, were, in fact, nearly as silent as the U.S. Sturgeon class. (It later turned out that the Soviets also had been helped by Japanese and Norwegian companies, including a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, which had surreptitiously sold them the huge, computer-guided milling machines needed to make the propeller blades on Soviet subs much smoother and quieter.)
Studeman later testified before a federal judge, saying that Walker's ring might have had "powerful war-winning implications for the Soviet side." And when Vitaly Yurchenko, a high-ranking KGB officer, defected in July 1985, he told the CIA that the Walker-Whitworth ring was the most important espionage victory in KGB history.
Walker pleaded guilty that October and agreed to help authorities assess the damage in exchange for leniency for his son. The elder Walker received a single life sentence, with eligibility for parole after ten years. The deal was approved by Defense Secretary Weinberger, but Navy Secretary Lehman was furious. In his eyes, Walker's treachery was being treated as "just another white-collar crime."
Lehman rhapsodized that if it had been up to him, he would have applied one of the penalties for treason from back in the days following the American Revolution. The essence, as Lehman quoted it, was: