Herbert W Armstrong

U.S. defense chiefs are deeply concerned that the nation's security has been severely compromised, especially with regard to the Navy's undersea deterrent forces. Underneath the world's oceans, U.S. and Soviet nuclear­ powered and — armed subs engage in a vast cat-and-mouse game. The principle aim is for craft of either side to be able to run silent and deep undetected by the other's subs, anti-submarine warning aircraft and satellites. To be in possession of the enemy's tactics and abilities would confer an enormous advantage. Here, first, are excerpts from a cover article in the June 10, 1985 NEWSWEEK, entitled "A Family of Spies." (It seems that NEWSWEEK, with such a bold assertion, might actually jeopardize the prosecution's case since no subjects have even been brought to trial yet.):

How many more would be caught by the FBI's net? And how badly had U.S. security been breached? With backgrounds in perhaps the most sensitive of all naval areas — the undersea nuclear forces — the Walkers were conceivably in position to pass on details about America's undersea deterrent.

It has been a dismaying time for the defense establishment. In the last 12 months alone, espionage charges have been brought in eight separate cases, implicating 15 people — including, for the first time, an active agent of the FBI. The offenses alleged range from theft of coding devices to an offer to sell the Soviet Union information about America's critical radar-evading Stealth technology. Worse, there are people who think these cases may be just the tip of a large iceberg. The Soviet Union and its Eastern allies station more than 2,000 officials in this country, and by government estimates, 30 to 40 percent of these people are engaged at least part time in espionage....

The Walker case would be less unnerving if it didn't involve submarines, now perhaps the most valuable of current U.S. nuclear forces. Two legs of the strategic triad — the B-52 manned bombers and the land-based ballistic missiles — are at least theoretically vulnerable to Soviet attack. The third leg is a strong deterrent indeed: a strategic submarine force with no fixed address, hidden in the ocean deep. Armed with 16 to 24 multiwarhead missiles each, America's 35 Poseidon and Trident submarines could by themselves destroy the Soviet Union many times over.

Information about antisubmarine warfare has therefore always been guarded with a zeal approaching paranoia.... The deepest worries are that the Walker brothers, both of whom left the Navy in the mid-'70s, may have given the Russians important information on how to improve their own fleet of missile submarines. Both were in a position to provide clues to how the United States locates and listens to Soviet subs and on techniques the United States uses to make its own subs operate silently....

The FBI began looking at John Walker six months ago. As a private detective in Norfolk, he gave no hints of his other life. He was perhaps a bit flamboyant.... But his work was routine stuff...: investigations into divorce cases, auto accidents, claims for workmen's compensation.... Nor was there any hint of pro-Soviet sympathies. Indeed, the opposite was the case. Walker was a staunch Reagan supporter, and according to Laurie Robinson, the general manager of his firm, Confidential Reports, Inc., he kept an official portrait of the president on his desk....

But late last year, according to investigators, one person who had long known of Walker's seeming double life blew the whistle: his ex-wife, Barbara Walker, a clerk in a gift shop in West Dennis, Mass.... In the late 1960s, according to a well-placed counterintelligence source, Barbara Walker began to notice something different about her husband's behavior. Several times over the next few years, an FBI informant — reportedly either Barbara Walker or a daughter who also gave incriminating statements — "personally observed" Walker traveling into the Washington, D.C., area and placing a paper bag filled with what the informant "believed to be classified material" underneath a tree. On one of these trips, the informant said, Walker received $35,000 in return. These incidents went unreported for than 13 years.

The NEWSWEEK story proceeds to give a detailed account of John Walker's arrest on May 19 as he was delivering a bag of secret material to a dropoff point in a semi-rural setting in Maryland. The FBI agents discovered a letter in the bag describing the activities of associates known only as "S" and "D" — subsequently revealed as son Michael and brother Arthur. Also in the bag were 129 classified Navy documents supplied by S and apparently taken from the aircraft carrier Nimitz. To continue with the NEWSWEEK story:

As always with espionage, a big question was what might have moved the suspects to risk getting caught. The pivotal spy cases of the cold-war era — Kim Philby's coldblooded sellout of his British and American colleagues, Klaus Fuch's release of atom-bomb secrets — appeared to grow out of ideological disaffection with the West. But John Walker, in particular, seems all too typical of today's fifth columnists: it was the money that — mattered. His style and self-image were apparently too expansive. Despite his $13,000-a-year Navy pension, despite the silver-market killings he claimed — FBI agents found 10 one hundred-ounce silver bars worth $6,000 in a safe-deposit box — and despite the properties he owned, the detective agencies may not have been enough.... His stepmother, Dorothy Walker ("Personally, I never liked the boy"), says Walker frequently complained of not having enough money. Indeed, last week he had to ask for a public defender.

The largest question, however, remained: how much damage has been done? Intelligence-community officials are sharply divided.... But one thing is clear: espionage in the United States is a growing problem and there is no obvious solution.... And while security reviews for Americans are notoriously lax — a check of John Walker would have suggested his vulnerability — this country's open-society traditions discourage Big Brother tactics like annual polygraphs.

Money then, was the real motive, and the communists know how to play on what they call "capitalist greed." Their agents search out victims with various suspected vices such as money-lust, women or homosexuality. It's also interesting to note, as revealed in the following June 5 UPI dispatch, that John Walker's ex-wife decided to talk for personal reasons, not out of any concern for the welfare of the country.

On the verge of tears, the ex-wife of accused spymaster John Walker said she was doing what she "believed in" when she exposed what authorities labeled Wednesday as the biggest Soviet espionage ring found in the United States in 30 years.... A law enforcement official said the arrests appeared to have unearthed the biggest U.S. spy operation since the celebrated case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for smuggling secrets about atomic weapons to the Soviet Union....

Barbara Walker, who was divorced from John Walker nine years ago, said she delayed going to authorities to protect her family, which she called her "first priority," the Cape Cod newspaper reported Wednesday. "Why in the name of all that's holy did I wait so long?" she asked. "You have the answer. It is because of what is happening to my family and my children." She said Michael Walker, her son who also is charged with espionage, "is very important to me." Since the public disclosures, she told the newspaper, her family has been "harassed" by the news media about the arrests and it appeared the drama surrounding the Walker family was only beginning to unfold.

Oblivious to "The Real War"

Two decades of declining patriotism and the "me-generation" philosophy have thus produced spies who spy only for money, and others who can't realize that the actions of a few jeopardize the lives of millions. Perhaps even more significantly, this particular spy case confirms, in its own manner, the premise of former President Richard Nixon's 1980 book, THE REAL WAR — that there is a life-and-death struggle underway in the world, a real war to which increasing numbers of Americans — and others in prosperous Western societies — are almost oblivious. Mr. Nixon, whose political strength was always, and today still is, in the area of foreign affairs, wrote in his book (pages xiv, xv, 4, 5 and 22 of the 1981 Warner Books paperback edition):

"The Real War" is being fought on many fronts. It takes place on the economic front, in the realms of ideas and ideals, in covert action and psychological warfare and propaganda — in all the various arenas of competing faiths and competing systems. We could be overwhelmingly superior militarily and still lose if we fail on the economic, ideological, or diplomatic front.... We could also lose by ignoring the Soviet challenge around the periphery — those piecemeal advances into countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East on which the West depends on not only for oil, but for so many of the other vital resources without which a modern industrial economy cannot operate. We could lose by letting the Soviets get the upper hand psychologically, so that the West sinks into a gradual paralysis....

Having dealt directly and at great length with the leaders of the Soviet Union, I know that they exploit weakness but respect strength. If they see a new strength in the American sinew, a new firmness in the American step, a new steel in the American eye, then two things will happen. They will be more cautious in their adventuring, and they will also be more realistic in their negotiating. If they think they can roll us, they will try to roll us.

They know that the object of war is not to obliterate the opponent, but to make him surrender. As the Prussian military strategist Clausewitz observed long ago, the aggressor never wants war; he would prefer to enter your country unopposed.

If we study Soviet actions, they show a clear pattern: not necessarily a "master plan" or a predictable timetable for world conquest, but rather a constant strengthening of military forces and a consistent exploitation of every opportunity to expand their own power and to weaken that of the West. Just as water flows downhill, the Soviets press to extend their power wherever it can reach, by whatever means they calculate can be effective. They are totally amoral opportunists....

We are at war. We are engaged in a titanic struggle in which the fates — of nations are being decided.... The basic rule of Soviet behavior was laid down years ago by Lenin: Probe with bayonets. If you encounter steel, withdraw. If you encounter mush, continue. The question is which will the Soviets encounter: steel or mush?

The "front line" in Europe is holding steady for the moment, Moscow having failed last year to forestall the deployment of new NATO weapons. It is in the area of the "periphery" where the challenge is the most intense — Asia, Africa and Latin (specifically Central) America. The Soviets nurture "national liberation" movements in these regions, using Cuban and East Bloc personnel to do the work for them. Where conditions of unrest are not yet ripe enough for the "peace forces" to exploit, Soviet agents stir up strife in order to plant the seeds of revolution, spreading lies through a deliberate policy of "disinformation." The Soviets do not have to have sizeable Communist parties in the target countries of the periphery. In fact, large official Communist parties are often a detriment, drawing too much negative attention. Much better to work through other forces of the Left, some of whom are just naive.

Ever flexible, learning lessons from the past, the Soviets have chosen a "hard-to-detect, hard-to-criticize" path to power in target countries. In the May 1985 issue of the British journal ENCOUNTER, H.S. Ferns writes in the article "This Spy Business":

The ruthless methods of Stalin in the promotion of Soviet-controlled revolution beyond the borders of the USSR...have been abandoned. Even strict and detailed control of Communist Parties outside the reach of Soviet armed forces has been jettisoned, and for one very good reason. Such control does not work. China is a convincing instance, and such a disaster for the Kremlin that even the most hardened Stalinist cannot argue the utility, from the Soviet point of view, of orthodox Marxist rigidity in the promotion of revolution.

Flexibility has become the keyword in Soviet thinking. The "United Front" tactics of the 1930s involved clandestine domination of the Left everywhere by Communist Parties loyal to Stalinism. Nowadays the slogan "No Enemies on the Left" means an acceptance of, and collaboration with...democratic socialists, revolutionary nationalists, hippy bombsters and even romantic anarchists.... The Soviet politicians...take the long view — confident that when circumstances are right they can do away with their allies as Lenin did with his in 1918-23. Keeping the pot of revolution boiling is more important than doctrinal orthodoxy.

Given this approach, it would be stupid to give the KGB the task of destabilizing enemy regimes. If Mrs. Thatcher could prove in an open Yorkshire court that [mine workers' union chief] Arthur Scargill and his mates have links with the KGB, she would be home and dry. But she cannot. What is important for the Soviet Government, however, is to establish agents of influence in "bourgeois" governments, in the media, and in educational institutions, who can by their advice and counsel keep a blind eye to what goes on, sedate and disorientate the patient, — and reduce interference — With the destabilization process.

The strategy and tactics employed by Communists more closely parallel the methods used by Satan than in any other worldly system today. For a parallel as to Satan's opportunistic nature, notice I Peter 5:8: "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour" (RAV).

Satan's principal tactics are to lie, deceive, plant doubts, spread rumors, cause division and undermine the confidence of the people in their leaders and institutions (remember our own experiences in the 1970s). These are all elements of Communist subversion as well. It might be good to reread Mr. Armstrong's semiannual letter of May 6, in which he explained, based upon personal knowledge gained years ago, the aim and methods of communism.

The less the citizens in our nations believe in a personal God and a literal devil, the less they recognize the tactics employed by what President Reagan called — and some were offended by his words — " the evil empire. " (You might want to pick up a copy of Mr. Nixon's book, if you do not already own a copy: it is available in paper back. When you read it, you will be struck with parallels to what might be called the real real war, the one between begotten Christians and their chief adversary.)

Meanwhile, the East-West war in the periphery is on, full blast. It is a difficult one for the West to fight because the real issues are often clouded by secondary issues of economic development (or the lack thereof), national independence (exchanged for dependence to Moscow) or alleged racism. Notice some events now occurring in Asia, as published in the June 10 NEWSWEEK, Periscope column, in an article titled "The Soviets Go Fishing in the South Seas":

Reagan administration officials are worried that the Soviet Union may soon gain a strategic toehold in the South Pacific. The Soviets are close to signing an agreement with the tiny island nation of Kiribati (formerly the Gilbert Islands) that would give them fishing rights — and some experts say a potentially valuable intelligence-gathering presence — in the roughly 2 million­square-mile zone Kiribati claims within its territorial limits.

Kiribati's President Ieremia Tabai has rejected Moscow's requests for a shore base, refueling facilities and access to food and other supplies on the islands. But, despite pleas from Western nations, including Great Britain and the United States, Tabai is pursuing a deal that would bring the financially strapped nation $3 million a year from the Soviets for a fishing license. Similar Soviet overtures to two other pro-Western South Sea island nations — Tuvalu and Fiji — for trawling rights in their waters have recently been turned down, according to diplomatic sources. But Washington officials fear that an agreement between Moscow and Kiribati could lead to a chain reaction among the other islands and a shift in the balance of power in the region." "For the Soviets to gain anything in the way of a legitimized presence in this area is disconcerting," says one U.S. official. "These are vulnerable countries."

A much bigger fish in the Pacific is the Philippines. The strategic archipelago nation, absolutely vital to the U.S. position in the Pacific, is under increasing strain. Manila is in political and economic limbo. President Marcos' days seem numbered, but the democratic opposition is weak and divided: the economy, as a result, is in prolonged doldrums. Exploiting this opportunity, Communist guerrillas are steadily advancing. More on this next time, as well as a focus on another problem area in the periphery where the "real war" is being fought — at least by one side — in dead earnest.

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau