Word: whitworth
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...such speculation became moot last week. With his ringleader under arrest and the FBI watching his every move, Jerry Alfred Whitworth, 45, drove 60 miles to San Francisco and surrendered to federal agents. The balding and bearded former communications specialist was charged with passing U.S. intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union...
...With Whitworth's arrest, the Navy's unfolding spy debacle took on an ominous added dimension. Up until then, the espionage ring that began unraveling three weeks earlier had seemed a family affair. The three suspects were related: Alleged Ringleader John Walker Jr., 47; his son Michael, 22; and John's brother Arthur, 50. All were present or former Navy men, and all lived in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, the home base of the Atlantic nuclear fleet and a center of highly classified shipbuilding. While each had some access to the secrets of submarine warfare and coded communications...
...Whitworth, in addition to being outside the family, could have extended the ring's reach to the Pacific and even to the Indian Ocean. He had taught Navy communications in San Diego, had served in the Pacific as communications watch officer aboard the nuclear-powered carrier Enterprise and had been in charge of communications security at the Alameda Naval Air Station near Oakland. He was familiar with the Navy's Indian Ocean activities thanks to two tours of duty at the highly secret base on the remote island of Diego Garcia. The FBI claimed that Whitworth had operated...
...contents of the dropped-off bag were devastating to the spy ring. It included 129 classified Navy documents, many indicating that the U.S. had tracked the movement of specific Soviet navy and merchant vessels. It also contained the "Dear Johnnie" letters from the unhappy former spy, Whitworth; Walker's own three-page "Dear Friend" letter to his Soviet contact; and enough information on other associates to lead to the quick arrests of Michael aboard the Nimitz and John's brother Arthur in Virginia Beach...
...Whitworth was the most reclusive of the arrested spy suspects. Born in Muldrow, Okla., he was brought up mainly by relatives of his estranged parents. He joined the Naval Reserve while in high school, attended a junior college for two years, then made the Navy his career. His path crossed that of John Walker when both taught at the Navy Communications School in San Diego early in the 1970s. He shipped out to Diego Garcia in February 1973, assigned to what the FBI calls "sensitive technical communications." Next came a course in satellites at the Army Communications Electronics School...