Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring by Pete Earley

yours!”
    Barbara went into labor on November 1, 1962. John had planned to play in a baseball game that day with some fellows from the radio crew, so he dropped Barbara at the hospital entrance and then went on to the game. Barbara gave birth to a boy. As she was being wheeled back to her room, she thought back to Margaret’s birth when John had insisted on being with her in the delivery room.
    They had been so much in love. She began to cry.
    John had always wanted a son, and when he heard that Barbara had given birth to a boy, he rushed to the hospital, armed with long-stemmed roses and a large box of chocolates.
    “I had always planned to name our first son John Anthony Walker the third:’ Barbara Walker told me later. “Every time I got pregnant, I prayed it would be a boy so that John could have a son who he could pass his name to. On every previous pregnancy, I was going to name the baby John if it were a boy.
    “But when I had my baby boy, John wasn’t there. He was at some damn baseball game with his pals,” she said. “So I named my son Michael Lance Walker, and when John found out he was furious.”
    It was one of the sweetest moments in her life, Barbara Walker recalled.

PART III
    traitor
    The man who pauses on the paths of treason, halts on a quicksand; the first step engulfs him
    – Aaron Hill , Henry V (act 1, scene 1)

Chapter 10
    The three-inch-thick book had a bright red covet with the warning TOP SECRET-SPECAT printed on it in bold letters. The acronym SPECAT, short for SPECIAL CATEGORY, meant that even military personnel with top secret clearances couldn’t examine the book without special authorization. John knew why. The book contained the plans for the beginning of WorId War III.
    John lifted the cover of the red binder and read the title: Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) . Even the title was secret. Officially, no such plan existed. The SIOP (pronounced sigh-op ) was the Pentagon’s road map for a full-scale war with the Soviet Union. It contained a list of all U.S. nuclear weapons and their targets.
    In the early 1960s, mapping Armageddon was even more intricate and difficult than it is today because each U.S. missile carried only one nuclear warhead and the nation’s most powerful nuclear bombs would have had to be carried into the Soviet Union and dropped by B-52 bombers because they were so big. The trajectory of every nuclear missile, whether it was fired from land (intercontinental ballistic missiles) or sea (Polaris missiles), had to be precisely calculated to make certain that no missiles collided in the air and to ensure that some flight paths into Russia were kept open. These pathways, called target windows, had to be kept clear so that the B-52’s could carry out their missions.
    John had been given permission by the captain of the nuclear submarine U.S.S. Simon Bolivar to see the SIOP. The captain had received a message from Atlantic fleet headquarters in Norfolk saying that another U.S. submarine had developed mechanical problems and was limping back to port. Until that submarine was repaired, the Bolivar had to cover some of its targets.
    It took John just a few minutes to log the Bolivar’s new assignment, but the SIOP fascinated him and he read every possible detail before locking it up in a safe.
    “It was incredible,” he recalled later. “Haven’t you ever wondered if the United States would go after the eastern bloc countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia if there were a full-scale war? Haven’t you ever wondered if we would hit China and what cities would be blown up in Russia and in what order? Well, here it was – all of it – in my hands, and I was reading it! I mean, this was your wildest fucking nightmare and it was right before my eyes!”
    It was at this point that John remembers wondering how much the Soviet Union would pay for stolen U.S. military secrets, but he insisted that his curiosity was nothing more than just that – an innocent