When KGB investigators opened the container, they found stacks of cardboard boxes carefully packed with ceramic flower pots, all innocent enough. But after removing the first two rows of cardboard boxes, they came upon a wooden partition. When they pulled that back, they found what Krassilnikov would describe to his superiors as a “miracle laboratory.” Concealed cameras were trained through narrow slits disguised as ventilation ports on either side of the container. These fed into computers attached to a sophisticated collection of scientific sensors. An arduous KGB analysis of the equipment would reveal its high-tech Cold War mission—to sense sources of radioactivity across the vast expanse of the USSR. The KGB found that the equipment could register the intensity, spectral composition, and total dose of neutron and gamma radiation; establish the location of the reading, the atmospheric pressure, and the temperature at the time of the sampling; and link this data to panoramic photography taken simultaneously through the ventilation slits. The KGB concluded that the “miracle laboratory” had the capability of mapping the geographic locations of nuclear weapons production, storage, and transport points across the expanse of the Soviet Union. The sensors were found to be capable of identifying a nuclear warhead with one kilo of plutonium within a radius of ten meters. The KGB scientists estimated that the system could function for up to three months on its own power sources and that there could be only one possible intelligence service behind container #CTIV-1317221—the American Central Intelligence Agency.
Krassilnikov, convinced that the discovery in Nakhodka could be used to great advantage in the battle against the American special services, recommended a major propaganda exposé. To his surprise, the suggestion was received with a cool silence, a disappointment he attributed to the fact that Eduard Shevardnadze was Foreign Minister at the time and earnestly engaged in “new thinking.” But Krassilnikov was not willing to give up quite so easily on his discovery.
Langley, Late February 1986
I read the cable from Tokyo and wondered how long it would take for the SE world to come unstuck again. I had my answer when I saw Paul Redmond at my door.
“They got ABSORB,” Redmond said without emotion, the way a man does when he no longer has any doubts.
“Yeah,” I said, tossing the Tokyo cable into my out box. “Was Howard read in on the operation?”
“Shouldn’t have been. But who the hell keeps secrets around this place anymore?”
“Can we find out?” I asked.
“We’re looking at it.”
“What are you thinking?”
Redmond paused. “You know what I’m thinking.”
Moscow, March 10, 1986
Michael Sellers had met GTCOWL only once, almost exactly one year earlier. During that first meeting, a two-hour-long walking conversation as the two men furtively navigated Moscow’s back streets and alleys, the KGB man never revealed his identity. He said he knew how closely the KGB tracked American CIA officers in Moscow and didn’t want to take any chances with his own security. Sellers knew him only by the name they’d agreed to use—“Stas.”
Stas had first volunteered in 1984, when he dropped an envelope through the open window of the car of an American embassy official as he walked by. The CIA eventually sent an officer to contact him, but the officer who managed to break free of surveillance that night couldn’t understand the volunteer’s Russian, and the meeting had been a bust. The failure of that first meeting fueled a debate back at CIA headquarters about whether the Soviet was a real volunteer.
COWL was gruff, and even an excellent Russian speaker like Sellers found him difficult to understand. Sellers took him to be from the Second Chief Directorate’s local counterintelligence forces in Moscow. He was the Moscow version of a New York cop, a Soviet Popeye Doyle. He made no bones about what he wanted. It was money, and he wasn’t shy about the cynicism of his approach. He grew impatient whenever Sellers, who was wearing a tape recorder, asked him to repeat or clarify something.
But the man knew plenty about the KGB’s tracking of CIA operations in Moscow, and as the two spies cautiously made their way through the city’s darkened streets, COWL warned Sellers that he wouldn’t provide the CIA with documents that could be traced back to him, and he demanded that any money passed to him come from “clean” sources outside the Soviet Union and be placed in packages that were never opened by CIA officers in Moscow.
Sellers and COWL had worked out a careful communications plan to set up future meetings. COWL gave Sellers a phone number to call at prearranged times, with ten-minute windows he declared as “safe.” The CIA later concluded it was a KGB duty phone line, one that couldn’t be traced to any specific individual in the KGB. COWL would arrange to be the only officer at that number at the prescheduled times, and the CIA would call with prearranged, innocuous-sounding messages.
After one meeting, COWL dropped out of sight for several months. He failed to respond to one call but eventually responded to another call-out in March 1986. Sellers was sent out to meet him.
On the night of March 10, Sellers thought he had broken free of surveillance for his late-night run by pulling off an identity transfer with another embassy employee. Later, when he was “black” on Moscow’s icy streets, he quickly changed into Russian street clothes and melted into the flow of Muscovites on their way home.
The meeting site was an alleyway between two Stalinist apartment blocks not far from Moscow’s Lenin Hills district. Sellers arrived at the meeting site at 10:30 P.M., and as he got to within twenty feet of COWL, he could sense something was very wrong. COWL had lost weight and, it seemed to Sellers, his tough-guy swagger. When he began to speak, he could only stammer. The man was a ghost of his former self, and in that instant Sellers braced himself for what he knew was about to happen.
Oh, shit, Sellers said to himself. Here it comes.
Suddenly, glaring lights lit up the street, and men came running from all directions. The arrest, Sellers thought, was straight out of the movies. He was thrown into the back of a van by a small army of KGB security men, and GTCOWL disappeared in the blur.
In the back of the van, the KGB men, talking among themselves in Russian—perhaps not realizing how well Sellers could understand them—appeared confused as to whom they had just arrested. Finally, one of the security men reached over to Sellers, and as he pulled off his fake mustache, a look of recognition flashed across his face.
“Ah, Misha!” the man exclaimed, using the Russian diminutive of Michael. The CIA disguise was better than they had anticipated. The security men noticed the mud on Sellers’s shoes, and they began debating in Russian how he could possibly have gotten out of the embassy and disguised himself as a Russian worker without anyone on the surveillance stakeout team noticing him.
The van drove Sellers and his minders to an annex of Lubyanka Prison—the interrogation office at #2 Dzerzhinsky.
Sellers spent only a few hours in interrogation. By 2:30 A.M., Stuart Parker, a counselor officer in the American embassy, had arrived to take him home. But during those few hours, Sellers had sparred with Rem Krassilnikov, trying to parry each question from the KGB’s gray ghost. Normally, CIA officers were told to say nothing while under arrest, except to declare diplomatic immunity and ask to see a counselor officer from the embassy. Sellers knew the game, but he couldn’t resist giving a few jabs, especially since he could speak Russian with his captors. When Krassilnikov told Sellers that his arrest would damage his career with the CIA, Sellers told him he was wrong; it wouldn’t hurt his career at the agency. Perhaps to encourage Sellers to keep talking, Krassilnikov tried to switch to small talk, describing the little details of his life known to the KGB. He was the goaltender on the American embassy’s broom ball team—what did he think about American hockey versus Russian hockey? But in trying to keep Sellers engaged, Krassilnikov revealed some interesting facts. It became clear to Sellers that the KGB didn’t know how he had gotten out of his apartment for his meeting. The KGB still didn’t have a good
understanding of the CIA’s identity transfer techniques, and finding Sellers at the arrest scene had puzzled them; his watchers thought he was still in his apartment.
It wasn’t until long after his arrest that Sellers learned COWL’s real identity: Sergey Vorontsov.
Langley, March 11, 1986
The “mornings of compromise” were becoming an unsettling routine. The notification of the COWL ambush had arrived the previous evening, and everyone at the staff meeting was aware of what had happened in Moscow the night before. Redmond poked his head in my office on the way to Gerber’s office for yet another briefing on a compromise in Moscow.
“Let’s go to the morning miseries,” I finally told him.
Yasenevo, USSR, March 12, 1986
Valentin Aksilenko sat in his fifth-floor office in the First Chief Directorate’s American Department, pondering a string of strange occurrences. Since he’d left the Washington Rezidentura three years earlier, he had been the headquarters branch chief watching over the KGB’s foreign intelligence operations in Washington. And watching Washington was getting more curious for Val Aksilenko, a big, thoughtful man with thinning red hair. At forty-five, he had done well for himself and for the KGB, and during his five-year tour in Washington he had been promoted to colonel in the KGB’s Line PR—political intelligence. But now it seemed that the familiar world he had taken for granted had slipped its axis. He felt increasingly uneasy, but he couldn’t put his finger on the source of his discomfort. Probably it was his own problems, he thought. His marriage was falling apart. Maybe it was a combination of things. Even the job he thought he understood so well was becoming increasingly opaque. Things were happening that he couldn’t account for or understand.
The anomalies had begun last June, when the American was arrested. Contradictory reports began to surface regarding the identity of the Soviet traitor he had been trying to meet, but the only common thread in the competing stories was the spy’s first name—Adolf. It seemed that people at the top wanted the name to stick out. Maybe it was because this Adolf was arrested a month after the celebrations commemorating the end of the Great Patriotic War. But there was another message in the dogged use of the spy’s name, which some thought might even be a phony name cooked up by the KGB leadership. But why?
Then, in September 1985, stories began making the rounds at Yasenevo that a fellow First Directorate officer had been caught red-handed by the boys in the Second and Seventh Directorates unloading a dead drop in Moscow—a rock full of rubles was what they were saying. It took a while for the man’s name to surface, but eventually the rumor mill pointed to a Line KR officer on leave from Lagos.
Then there was the story of the incredible escape of Gordievsky while under active investigation. Contradictory facts were still being leaked out on that case, too, mostly in the form of finger-pointing between the intelligence and the counterintelligence directorates. Speculation as to how he had escaped and who had helped him was rampant. Some were convinced that the American special services must have been in on it with the British. Others thought Dzerzhinsky Square—KGB headquarters—had been part of the conspiracy. But there was nothing official on any of this from the top. They were staying very quiet.
On top of that, there was the lingering problem of Vitaly Yurchenko, who had come home to Moscow a hero, complete with an honor guard. The trouble was that nobody believed his story.
The Yurchenko affair was an affront to most officers in the First Directorate, who knew that his story of heroic resistance, single-minded determination, and valiant escape was a fantasy dreamed up by Yurchenko to save himself from execution. They knew the yarns, carefully repeated and spun by Kryuchkov and his deputy, Vadim Kirpichenko, were nonsense. Aksilenko could understand the leadership’s desire to sweep Yurchenko’s treason under the rug, but he couldn’t understand turning him into an institutional icon. Nobody who’d worked in the West seriously believed the nonsense that the CIA had drugged Yurchenko. The rank and file were beginning to write off the whole affair as just another sign of the corrupt KGB leadership protecting itself. Yurchenko had been promoted to flag rank just as he defected. That made him one of the boys. It wasn’t the same when a lieutenant colonel jumped ship. The grumbling grew.
Even comments filtering down about former CIA officer Edward Lee Howard made no sense. No formal acknowledgments had been made that Howard had been working for the KGB, but there were leaks that he might be responsible for the recent successes in rolling up American assets in Moscow. Aksilenko had read the coverage of the Howard affair in the American press as it crossed his desk, but it never quite tallied with the leaks he heard inside the KGB.
And now on his desk before him was a scripted report advising “Tass was authorized to announce” that an American diplomat had been arrested the previous night committing an act of espionage. No further details.
Something was going on, Aksilenko thought; so many of these strange incidents seemed to have their origins in Washington. And here he was, the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch chief responsible for Washington, and he didn’t have a clue what was happening. Maybe he could pick up something from Valeriy Martynov, who had been part of the “honor guard” escorting Yurchenko back to Moscow. Martynov was still around, Aksilenko had heard, but he’d taken a fall and was recovering from surgery.
20
Langley, Late March 1986
Sometime in early March, the CIA chief in Bonn sent a cable by special courier to Langley. A letter dropped anonymously into the mailbox of a Bonn case officer had informed him that KGB officer Gennady Varennik had been uncovered as a CIA agent. To establish his bona fides, the letter’s author gave the name of Varennik’s CIA handler, Chuck Leven, and promised to reveal why and how Varennik had been caught. Further details would be made available to the CIA if a package containing $50,000 was placed in a dead drop site in East Berlin, the letter writer said. The money should be cached in waterproof packaging and left under a particular flagstone on a walking path. Instructions were all carefully detailed in the letter. Finally, the author asked that a signal be transmitted on an HF frequency from the American embassy’s backup transmitter. That signal would confirm receipt of the letter and that it was being acted upon.
The letter sent a shock through the leadership of SE Division, in part because it offered ammunition to support all of the major theories then in play about the cause of the lost agents. The statement that Gennady Varennik had been compromised was a confirmation of what was already known, but the promise of details was enough to encourage the CIA to agree to the letter writer’s conditions. There was a debate about whether the letter was a KGB ruse, but no one counseled against going along with the writer’s demands.
Bonn was instructed to make the broadcast, and East Berlin was authorized to make the drop of $50,000 in a park. Some in SE Division were puzzled by the coincidence that the operation was taking place in East Berlin. An operational backwater because of its smothering Stasi surveillance, East Berlin was beginning to heat up.
It all began with the setup of the CIA chief in East Berlin, a female case officer who had previously served in Austria. A Hungarian contact had invited her to dinner at a quiet East Berlin restaurant, but they were quickly joined at their table by a Soviet with a heavy briefcase. The Hungarian politely excused himself on cue, leaving the field to the Soviet, whose intentions became clear immediately.
Unloading a videocassette player from his briefcase, the Soviet, a senior KGB American targets officer, explained to the East Berlin chief that he had prepared a little video story of the last several years of her career. He switched on the machine and turned the screen to face his quarry, while the KGB production of This Is Your Life rolled across the screen.
There were outside shots of her apartment in Vienna, along with recordings of conversations that seemed to have been picked up by KGB microphones planted in her walls. The Vienna story line bluntly suggested that the conversations captured by KGB microphones in her
apartment had led directly to the compromise of CIA operations in Austria. This would all be bad for her career, would it not?
As the television drama cut to East Berlin, the scripting became more provocative. More candid shots followed, obviously taken by concealed Stasi cameras shooting through pinholes in her apartment walls and ceiling. These were accompanied by similar shots of at least one of her fellow East Berlin officers, also female, dramatically fading to black. As the KGB officer added his own narrative voice-over to the video, he began to insinuate that the unmarried East Berlin chief might be involved in a lesbian relationship, something she would certainly not want known in Langley. As the tape played out and the KGB officer switched it off and stowed away his player, he turned to the CIA chief and made his pitch. She could come across and assist the KGB, or she would soon begin to suffer the consequences of all her “mistakes.”
The CIA chief thanked the KGB man for the evening’s entertainment and told him he was barking up the wrong tree. She said she would report the evening’s events in great detail to Washington and told him he could do whatever he wanted with his video. The next morning, Langley had a full cabled account of the attempted recruitment.
I was dispatched within twenty-four hours to West Berlin to see if there was anything she felt more comfortable expanding on in person. We had a long talk about the incident in a corner niche at the Kempinski Hotel in West Berlin, and I concluded there was nothing more to be added to the report, beyond some color and atmospherics about the meeting and the heavy-handed pitch. The East Berlin chief could provide a more detailed account when she next visited Langley.
The incident might have been filed away had it not been for a similar occurrence just a few weeks later in Brazzaville, the capital of the Congo, another Soviet client-state where the KGB had free rein. There was no video game this time, just an out-of-the-blue recruitment pitch by a visiting KGB officer appearing at the female CIA chief’s home. She was cold-pitched on the spot to commit treason. Like the East Berlin chief, she flatly turned down the KGB and reported the incident in detail to headquarters. Gerber thought the isolated officer in Brazzaville might welcome some assistance and sent Sandy Grimes, a longtime SE Division officer, to Africa to do the debrief.
The Main Enemy Page 19
