I Pledge Allegiance--: The True Story of the Walkers: An American Spy Family

by Howard Blum

Book Overview

Here is an espionage story that is shocking because it is the true account of John Walker, a Navy Communications expert, who recruited his son, his brother, and his best friend to form the most... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671626140
• ISBN13: 9780671626143
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 438 Pages
• Weight: 1.86 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Struggling to be a Big Man

One of the most horrifying aspects of this tale, a horror story, is the apparent blitheness with which these ordinary people entered into an enterprise that ultimately yielded them hundreds of years in prison.It goes like this: you meet an old navy buddy for drinks and he tells you he's got a business proposition for you. He admits it's a little illegal, but notes too the chances of getting caught are slim. So it makes good business sense-low risk/reward ratio, opportunity galore, and anyway you've sort of been at loose ends since retiring from the navy. Heck, you've got to be bold and take some risks to get anywhere in this world.Or it might go like this: you're a young man and you admire and respect your dad. Nothing unusual in that-he's your dad! He was in the navy and he wants you to follow in his footsteps, so you do. And he says he'll pay you good money for classified documents-sure it's a little risky, but if you want to be a Man you have to take a risk now and then. Or, you could live your life as a wimp. It's your choice. So that leads to the most bone-chilling scene in the horror story: Dad smirking and wise-cracking while his son, his own and only son, is gets life in prison. Well, 25 years, but to a 22-year-old, that's life.Howard Blum did a lot of research for this book: countless interviews, reams of technical documents on law and espionage and naval procedure, letters. But it doesn't read like some legal tract or academic research project. It reads like a B movie script, tawdry and melodramatic, with much attention given to the day-to-day problems of international spies and their families: the alcoholic wife, the wayward children, the ... struggle for respect. And when it's over there is the melancholy realization that the alcoholic wife and the wayward children were the lucky ones, if you can call it that. They avoided the lure of the psychotic monster at the center of the drama. The son was next luckiest. I read that he got out on parole after 15 years.

"An American Dream Gone Mad?"

The 1980s have been judged as an age of backstabbing greed and flashy, free-spending avarice where they with the most pricey toys win. The June, 1985 arrest of retired Navy chief warrant officer John A. Walker, Jr., his older brother James, only son Michael and close Navy friend Jerry Whitworth on federal espionage charges meshed perfectly with the era's predominantly materialistic values, especially after it was learned that in an incredible 17 years as a Soviet spy, Walker had earned and frivolously spent $1 million, his chief, if not sole, motivation. Howard Blum's "I Pledge Allegiance" is a detailed, exhaustively researched and powerfully written chronicle of not only the rarefied, shadowy world of traitors, intelligence officers and spies, but a disturbing critique of American social values and how all too easily they are warped to serve selfish if not highly dangerous ends. Walker and associates over the years had handed over tons of highly-classified US Navy communications material, which, in the eyes of many defense experts, enabled the Kremlin to seriously damage if not completely neutralize our submarine and surface forces if it had so wished. Walker's spying had been so effective that it was also believed by some to have led to the unprecedented elevation of former KGB director Yuri Andropov to Soviet leader in 1982 and Moscow's downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 less than a year later. Blum's strength as an author rests in his extensive knowledge of defense, foreign policy and intelligence matters as well as naval history, regulations and communications. This and his considerable reporting skill, demonstrated in his interviews of Walker family and friends, whose various fears, resentments, psychic injuries and strongly corrosive personal and family problems are drawn out and carefully woven into a chronicle of, as the book's jacket had said, "an American dream gone mad," makes for exciting and informative reading, something even the best works of reportage have a hard time achieving. And, the most gripping thing of all is that every bit of it really happened.