Barron, John. Breaking the Ring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 244 pages.
This book is the story of the spy case involving John Walker, his
family, and Jerry Whitworth. Walker began spying for the Soviets in 1968,
and until the arrests of 1985, Walker's spy ring had furnished the Soviets
with over a million messages and the keys to decipher them. When Vitaly
Yurchenko defected briefly in 1985, he said that the KGB, which regarded the
Walker-Whitworth case as the greatest in its history, couldn't believe that
his wife had turned him in; they figured the U.S. must be protecting some
counterintelligence assets that they didn't know about. But Walker himself
once said that K-Mart has better security than the Navy.
John Barron was a naval intelligence officer in the 1950s, and since
then has written two books on the KGB, with assistance from his sources in
the CIA. His reputation as a U.S. intelligence booster allowed him excellent
access to the FBI agents who built the case against Walker and Whitworth, as
well as to some intelligence specialists who were concerned with damage
assessment. He also interviewed Walker, who turned state's evidence, and
attended Whitworth's trial.
ISBN 0-395-42110-1
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