The John Walker spy ring seems to have been forgotten nowadays, even though it was a mind-blowing disaster. John Walker spied for the USSR for 18 years (1967-1985) and what's more: he recruited various friends and family members to do likewise, ending up controlling a tidy little spy network in the Naval community. I had never heard/read more than the bare bones of the story, and this was the first book-length treatment I have found. As is usual with these books, much real estate is dedicated to descriptions of the main character's childhood and family life. The psychodynamics in this family are just mind-boggling - nothing but abuse, alcoholism and poor parenting through several generations. When you read how John Walker tried to get several of his children to enlist in the Navy, with the explicit intent of getting them to become part of the spy ring, you can only shake your head and wonder... Still, the book does a good job of describing not just John Walker's private life, but his career as a Naval man and as a spy. The book also explains how he was found out - it was a plain old case of his ex-wife calling the FBI. That is of course less exciting than for instance the unmasking of the Cambridge Spies, which was based on painstaking analysis of old decoded cable traffic and on testimony of Russian defectors. There is nothing edifying in this story : John Walker was a thoroughly despicable husband and father, and on top of his personal transgressions, he sold secrets. The book was written with cooperation from John Walker and some of his friends and associates, and it's full of his self-justifying rhetoric. It's nauseating, but at the same time it's instructive to see just how far a psychopath can go in justifying his own actions.
