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Book Review: Breaking the Ring

by Bill Uttenweiler
The Aerospace Corporation
Vandenberg AFB, CA

One hour a day. Five hours a week. Don’t ask how many hours a year I spend commuting from my home in Santa Maria to my job on the Base. I’ve long since tired of the music on the radio. As an alternative, I often listen to recorded books-on-tape from local libraries.

Usually I’ve chosen military histories and science fiction novels, but recently I discovered an unabridged reading of John Barron’s Breaking the Ring at the Lompoc Public Library. At last, an excellent book-on-tape about spies and those who hunt them.

Barron, who enjoys unparalleled access to FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice officials, provides rich details on the personality and activities of principal spy John A. Walker and the three others he recruited to maintain his illegal income when he retired from the US Navy—his brother Arthur, his son Michael, and his friend Jerry A. Whitworth.
Spy buffs cannot help but thrill at the details. For example, the KGB instructed him to walk a twisting, winding 40-minute route along the streets of downtown Vienna for face-to-face meets. Half of the time they were in January blizzards. Walker finally complained and the Soviets agreed to other arrangements just before his arrest.

Likewise, the dead-drop procedures for the Washington DC suburbs were amazingly complex. Each time, Walker had to make six visits to sites in the area: to leave a 7-Up can as message for his KGB handler, to check for one from the handler, to drop his materials, to pick up the cash and instructions from the KGB, to leave a confirmation for the handler that he had them, and to check for the handler’s confirmation that he had Walker’s drop!

Barron also provides profiles of the professionals of the FBI, Department of Justice, and other government agencies who investigated and prosecuted him. Mercifully, he spares the names (but not the mistakes) of several who embarrassed themselves. These include the FBI agents who failed to realize the significance or follow-up on Barbara Walker’s allegations against her ex-husband, the FBI agent on the surveillance team who misinterpreted instructions not to forget the 7-Up can left by Walker as a signal to his KGB handler as an instruction to "get it now;" and the young CIA officer who took a depressed Vitaly S. Yurchenko to a second-rate (instead of first-rate) French restaurant near the Soviet Embassy and sat at the table while the Soviet redefected.

Breaking the Ring details the cryptographic gear which Walker and his subagents compromised. Referring back to the Allied code-breaking during World War II, he explains how Walker’s and Whitworth’s spying would have been disastrous had war broken out with the Warsaw Pact.

This is not Barron’s first book about espionage. His other titles include KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (1974), KGB Today: The Hidden Hand (1983), and MIG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko (1980). I read the first book at the suggestion of a friend who worked in the Counterintelligence Directorate at the Headquarters, AF Office of Special Investigation. Appendix C of that book was a translation of a KGB document entitled "The Practice of Recruiting Americans in the USA and Third Countries." A a couple of months later that document was declassified, in part because of its release to Barron.

The eight-hour audiotape version of Breaking the Ring is in the collection of the Lompoc [CA] Public Library. [Local residents] can request it through any library in the tri-county Black & Gold System. The fee for this service is 50 cents.

Webmaster's note: this article was originally written in June 1996 for the VSAC News and NCMS Channel Islands Newsletter.]