Jerry Whitworth

Jerry Alfred Whitworth
Jerry Alfred Whitworth, circa 1985
Residence	United States Penitentiary in Atwater, California
Nationality	United States
Occupation	United States Navy communications specialist
Criminal charge	Espionage
Criminal penalty	365 years, fined $410,000
Criminal status	Incarcerated
Motive	Financial gain
Conviction(s)	Espionage

Jerry Alfred Whitworth (born 1939) was sentenced to 365 years for his part in the Walker family spy ring, which, at the time of Whitworth's arrest, U.S. authorities described as "the most damaging espionage ring uncovered in the United States in three decades" .

Whitworth was born in his grandparents' house next door to the New Covenant Free Will Baptist Church in the Paw Paw Bottoms of the Arkansas River, seven miles southeast of Muldrow, Oklahoma.

Whitworth came from a broken home. His father left his mother and moved to California before he was one year old. He seems to have been a lonely child - at the time of his arrest, one of his teachers said that Whitworth "seemed to need a place to belong". Soon after he joined the U.S. Navy at the age of 17, Whitworth used his first weekend pass from Alameda Naval Air Station in California to go to Mendota to see his father for the first time since childhood.

By the early 1960s, Whitworth had left the navy and was a student at Coalinga College, a community college in Coalinga which is now known as West Hills College Coalinga, and was planning to go on to study engineering at the University of California. However, deciding that this would take too long, he decided to re-join the navy and make it his permanent career. He took several courses in communications and served aboard a communications relay ship, a supply ship and three carriers. Other postings included two at a naval communications center on Diego Garcia and two in San Diego.

Whitworth agreed to help John Walker in getting highly classified communications data in 1973; from then until his retirement in 1983, his work for the navy involved encrypted communications and required security clearance. At first, Walker told Whitworth that the information was going to Israel but, even when Whitworth learned that the material was actually going to the Soviet Union, he continued to provide it.

Whitworth married for the first time in 1967 but his wife left him within a year. She committed suicide in 1974 but he did not learn this until around 1980. He married a second time in 1976, to a woman 15 years his junior, and was still married to her at the time of his arrest.