Whitworth Knew He Was Aiding Soviets, Prosecutor Insists

A federal prosecutor, holding up top-secret naval coding material, told jurors Tuesday that Jerry A. Whitworth had to know he was working for the Soviets when he stole the highly sensitive information.

Assistant U.S. Atty Leida Schoggen began the prosecution’s closing argument by countering the defense claim made during the trial that Whitworth, the former Navy communications specialist, would never have knowingly helped the Soviet Union.

“Jerry Whitworth was and is as much a master spy as John Walker ever was,” Schoggen told jurors.

Confessed spy John A. Walker Jr., the prosecution’s key witness, testified that he brought Whitworth into the spy operation in 1974 and that Whitworth supplied code material, which Walker sold to the Soviets.

In all, four people were charged in the spy operation, including Whitworth, Walker and Walker’s brother, Arthur, and son, Michael. Walker and his brother are serving life sentences. Michael is serving a 25-year prison term.

Whitworth’s lawyers, citing the grand jury indictment’s wording that specifically accuses Whitworth of spying for the Soviets, have hoped to place doubt in the jurors’ minds that Whitworth knew that the information ended up in Soviet hands.

Walker testified that he never told Whitworth he was dealing with the Soviets but instead lied by telling his Navy friend that the coding material was going to an allied nation or a private intelligence agency.

Schoggen contended that the evidence easily satisfied U.S. District Judge John P. Vukasin’s requirement that in order to reach a guilty verdict, the jury must find that Whitworth knew that the naval secrets he allegedly stole were being passed to the Soviets.

Prosecutors had argued that the requirement significantly increased the chance that Whitworth would be acquitted of espionage. They pressed for the less-demanding standards of the espionage laws, which require that the defendant have only a reason to believe that the military secrets would help any foreign nation. However, Vukasin ruled that the government was bound by the language of the grand jury indictment and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals let his ruling stand.

Schoggen told jurors that even without Walker’s testimony, there is a strong case that Whitworth, 46, was a spy. She pointed to testimony by a series of naval radiomen and officers and intelligence officials who said during the three-month trial that like all Navy radiomen, Whitworth was drilled repeatedly on the need to keep the code material from falling into Soviet hands.

Several prosecution witnesses told of encountering intensive Soviet efforts to record coded Navy radio traffic, hoping that by feeding the garbled transmissions into computers, Soviet cryptographers could break U.S. codes.

Schoggen referred to the rectangular key cards that are fed into Navy code machines and spell out specific codes to be used on a given day and asked jurors to ponder the effect of a spy who would “hand them wholesale, key after key after key.”

In addition to being accused of supplying the key cards, Whitworth also is charged with supplying wiring diagrams for the machines used for encoding and decoding radio messages. The diagrams would have allowed the Soviets to recreate the machines. By using recreated machines and the key cards, the Soviets could have deciphered virtually any naval message sent in any sector of the world.

Whitworth faces multiple terms of life imprisonment if he is convicted of espionage for his role in what law enforcement and intelligence authorities have called the most damaging spy ring since at least the 1950s, when Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets.

He is charged with eight espionage-related charges, plus five tax-evasion charges stemming from his alleged failure to report $332,000 in income that he reportedly earned spying. Schoggen is expected to complete her closing argument today, which will be followed by arguments by defense attorneys.