Fail in Effort to Get It and Contents Suppressed as Evidence : Lawyers Admit Walker Hid Grocery Bag

Lawyers for accused master spy John A. Walker Jr. admitted in federal court Thursday that the night before Walker’s May 20 arrest he drove to a secluded spot near Washington and hid a grocery bag that the government claims was filled with Navy secrets destined for the Soviet Union.

However, the surprising acknowledgment, made during a pretrial hearing, cannot be used as evidence against the 47-year-old Norfolk, Va., private detective at his espionage trial, now scheduled for Oct. 28.

At the same time, U.S. District Judge Alexander Harvey rejected a motion by defense attorneys to bar admission of the bag and the stash of 129 classified documents found in it as government evidence.

By conceding Walker’s connection to the grocery bag--without admitting his guilt or claiming innocence on the espionage charges--his attorneys had hoped to lay the groundwork for convincing Harvey that the bag had been unlawfully seized and, therefore, should not be admitted as evidence. FBI agents failed to obtain a search warrant before retrieving the bag from the base of a utility pole where Walker had left it, they argued.

Walker is accused of running a Soviet spy ring that included his son, Michael Lance Walker, 22, and Jerry A. Whitworth, 45, a longtime friend from California. Whitworth is awaiting trial in San Francisco, while both father and son are to be tried in Baltimore.

On Thursday, Harvey granted Michael Walker’s request to be tried separately from his father but set no date.

Last week a fourth member of the alleged ring, John Walker’s older brother, Arthur J. Walker, was found guilty in federal court in Norfolk, Va., of passing two secret Navy documents to the Soviets through John Walker.

The government charges that John Walker left the bag for his alleged “handler,” a vice consul at the Soviet Embassy who was observed near the scene by federal agents and who fled the country with his family three days later. The secret documents inside the bag allegedly were supplied by Michael Walker, at the time a sailor aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz, the government has charged.

According to a statement read in court Thursday by public defender Thomas P. Mason, John Walker briefly stopped his 1985 Chevrolet van at 8:37 p.m. May 19 on a rural Montgomery County, Md., road near a large tree.

“During the two minutes’ period of time the defendant left a large brown grocery-type bag at the base and to the rear of a utility pole,” Mason said.

Mason did not acknowledge that the bag contained stolen government documents. But he did admit that Walker, following directions from an unnamed “contact,” returned to the “drop point” at least twice later that night to pick up an unspecified “delivery” from the contact.

FBI Agent Bruce K. Brahe, who trailed Walker on May 19, testified that he found the grocery bag, filled with trash as well as secrets, and then hid nearby while Walker returned in his van to the alleged drop site, stopping to search around the utility pole on foot.

Fred W. Bennett, another of John Walker’s court-appointed attorneys, explained that the statement was introduced as a legal tactic and said that it could not be used against Walker later.

“It is not admissible against the defendant in the trial, and it is in no respect an admission (of guilt),” Bennett said.

But although Walker lost his bid to bar the grocery bag from evidence, Harvey granted another defense motion to keep the government from using against Walker a brief statement he gave to the FBI after his arrest.

The judge said that agents had wrongly encouraged Walker to make the statement after he had told them he did not want to talk without an attorney. Both defense and prosecution lawyers refused to disclose what Walker had allegedly said.