Convicted Cold War spy John Walker dies in federal prison
John walker sold secrets to the Soviets from 1968 to 1985.
He should have been croaked immediately after his trial.
Next up Jonathan Pollard?
I usually don’t like to rejoice at someone’s death, but I’ll grit my teeth and do so in this case. The claim in the article that he was slated to be paroled within the year makes it a little easier.
I’m glad he didn’t make parole.
So you’d have wanted the US to be a bit more like the USSR?
Looking at what he did, he sold some codes to the Soviets to decrypt naval communications, which allowed them to monitor our subs. In the end, did that really harm anyone? Sure, you don’t know at the time when you are going to fight a war, but from 1968 to 1985, there wasn’t much in the way of direct conflict between our two countries. In the grand scheme of things, he didn’t seem to do anything really harmful
Yog-Gobsmacked is the only adequate word to describe my reaction to your post.
good news
Wonderful. And now if Joan Rivers dies, that will be two scourges against humanity we won’t have to worry about anymore.
Brutal.
But, yeah.
You have it kinda backwards. Up until he told them, the soviets had no idea that American fast attacks, were trailing soviet boomers. You rember that phrase in Hunt for Red October, Crazy Ivan. That was the soviet reaction after finding out. Long term, the sovs redeployed their boomers to the bastion.
I believe he was also the one, that told the sovs, that the KH-19 big bird satelites uploaded their data to a secondary satelite flying ajacent. The sov’s totally thought the bird was broken and ignored it, cause it was not communicating with the ground.
We wont mention the Walker class boats, that the soviets brought out a few years later.
If it was not for the need to put him through the strainer, to see what he and his kid compromised, they should have put them up against a wall and shot them.
Declan
I have to ask how old you are. In the 1980s there was a very real danger of a nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR. Both sides believed the other would launch a first strike. Both sides were wrong. The Soviets didn’t want a nuclear war any more than we did. But we thought they did, and they thought we did. In 1983 the Soviets falsely detected U.S. ICMBs headed their way. Fortunately for the world, the officer in charge decided it was a false alarm. But it was a close thing. It could easily have gone the other way. And that is why I wonder about your age. A younger person, someone who was not around or was not old enough to understand during the Cold War, might not know how serious the situation was.
Declan covered the specifics of Walker’s damage.
ISTM that Walker was prevented from spying while he was in prison, so there was no need to kill him.
All I can add is that the OP missed an opportunity to title this thread “Johnnie Walker Dead”.
It’s all a very weird game full of hypocrisy, isn’t it? I mean, on the one hand, I fully understand why people caught spying must be punished, and punished severely, but OTOH, everyone spies. Everyone. A good argument could be made that a significant portion of all the spying in the world is being done by us (and nearly all the rest of it against us). There’s certainly an interesting ethical and moral dynamic involved, that’s for sure.
Why was he never traded in a spy swap? Wasn’t that what we usually did with the USSR?
Not usually. It happened sometimes. But usually, when it happened, it involved Soviet/East block nationals we were holding prisoner and American/western nationals the Soviets were holding prisoner, not our own citizens spying against us, or Soviets spying against Soviet Union. Those would usually get put in prison for life, in the US case, or shot, in the Soviet case.
I’m not a fan of spying nor do I take it that seriously except on rare occasions with exacting, tangible outcomes
What’s a boomer and what’s a bastion?
So if I have it correct, the Soviets ignored our spying bird satellites until being told about the secondary uploading? What happened after that? Did they destroy them?
Boats that were built using US technology, is the implication?
I can imagine how serious everyone thought it was, but ultimately, what actual harms did each side suffer due to the paranoia and what harms came from the actual foreign enemy? Its not enough to me for you to say the Soviets were bad and they almost harmed us. If all they did was threaten us, I’d say it was a pretty peaceful time. Imagine the same result we have now but none of the spying on both sides, or even the spying from our side. If the US totally ignored the USSR and just continued to live peacefully, letting the Soviets get paranoid, would we really have been worst off? That’s why I’m not a fan of spying, it seems to be a self-fulfilling prophesy: you have to spy on others and prevent them from spying on you, but if you spy on others, others will want to spy on you even more, and so on
The US is one of the richest, smartest, most technologically adept countries, and the undisputed most powerful. Nobody can harm us. What would happen if we just stopped all spying and just put all that money into science and education? Other than preventing these small time terrorist attacks which we don’t need spyplanes to do, what are we afraid of? Russia invading us? Chinese aircraft carriers?
Or are you guys afraid that if we stopped spying, we wouldn’t be powerful anymore? That our whole defense industry is supported by hidden microphones in fake statuettes and Google image satellite pictures? That if we didn’t know what Kim Jong Un is up to every second, he could show up at the White House and take it over?
Apparently you can’t imagine how serious everyone thought it was. It was so serious, we almost blew up the planet.
Did you know that the world’s economy depends upon computers? Did you know that there are government hackers out there who are developing means to shut computers down? Spying helps us keep tabs on those people, and to develop countermeasures. If we ignored the problem, we may wake up one morning to find out that our communications, power, water, transportation, defense, and other systems are down. I think that’s pretty serious.
If we ignored Li’l Kim, do you think he’ll stop his mischief? Or, as has happened historically with North Korea, do you think that he will perform more outrageous acts to get our attention? There are more threats than ‘small time terrorists’. Do you think the 9/11 attacks were ‘small time’? They gave us two stupid, expensive, unfunded wars, kept a president in office whose administration destroyed the American economy and severely harmed the world economy, caused laws to be passed that eroded our civil rights, resulted in ‘no-fly’ lists that cannot be challenged (so much for the 6th Amendment)… Shall I go on? And all this was from those ‘small time terrorists’. Think what would happen if an enemy state decided to have a go at us, and we didn’t have any warning because we decided to play nice and stop spying.
China may not want to attack the United States (they’re smart enough to know that they depend on us), but they’d love to invade Taiwan. North Korea can’t reach us. But they can reach South Korea. ISIS is no match for the U.S. militarily, but they could easily infiltrate the country. Isolationism is a bad idea. A country can’t bury its head in the sand and pretend there isn’t a lion about to pounce.