The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  “Do you know Mr. Platt of the CIA?” his questioners demanded.

  Vasilenko shuddered quietly.

  Jack Platt. So that’s what this is all about, he thought as he tried to recover from the brief beating. Yes, of course I know Platt, you bastards. Jack, what have you done?

  Jack and Gennady. The American and Russian spies had been friends since 1977, nearly inseparable at times, breaking all the Cold War rules against fraternization with the enemy. Theirs was a friendship that helped put a human face on the Cold War battle between the CIA and KGB and showed that personal bonds of loyalty could overcome the ruthless games played by spies on both sides.

  Platt, then a Washington-based officer in the CIA’s Soviet Division, was trolling for Russians to recruit when a Soviet defector, a former classmate of Vasilenko’s at the KGB’s training institute, had identified Gennady as one of the KGB officers working under diplomatic cover in the Soviet embassy in Washington. Gennady had never imagined that he would one day be a KGB spy. He had the soul of a jock, a Russian version of a frat boy with dreams of playing volleyball on the Soviet Olympic team. Born in 1941, he had been an engineering student at the Avtomotora Institute in Moscow and had by the early 1960s emerged as one of the best young volleyball players in the USSR. In 1964, he seemed assured of making the Soviet team that was heading to the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, until a shoulder injury kept him off the Olympic squad.

  Despite his injury, Vasilenko kept playing volleyball on club squads in the city and eventually caught the eye of Dynamo, the powerful KGB-backed sports association, and was recruited for the Dynamo volleyball team. By the late 1960s, he found his way from the volleyball squad into the real KGB, and after attending the Yuri Andropov Higher KGB School, he was ushered into the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate. In 1976, he was assigned to Line KR, counterintelligence, and was sent to the Washington Rezidentura. Later, he would joke to Platt that he was the only Russian who had joined the KGB on an athletic scholarship.

  Platt, by contrast, was an American Army brat who had attended a dozen different schools around the United States and Europe and had graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts before becoming a Marine officer in 1959. He left the Marines for the CIA in 1963, spending five years as a case officer in Austria, followed by another three in Laos. He liked to joke that he was transferred from Laos to Paris as a reward for helping the United States “take second place in the Asian war games.”

  When Platt set his sights on Vasilenko as a potential recruit, he began maneuvering all over Washington in an effort to meet him in a seemingly casual and coincidental way. Platt had an intermediary arrange it so he could bump into the Russian at a Harlem Globetrotters game in Washington, and the two ended up sitting together and chatting throughout the game. By the end of the game, Platt realized, he actually liked Vasilenko. He was completely different from most of the KGB hoods he’d come across in the past—natural and disarming, a man who seemed to love life more than he loved Marx and Engels. But that didn’t mean that Gennady Vasilenko was going to be a pushover for a CIA recruitment pitch. Vasilenko may not have been a good Communist, but he was a proud Russian, and he wasn’t interested in betraying his country.

  For Platt, Vasilenko was an intriguing challenge. The CIA officer, who was working the recruitment jointly with FBI counterintelligence agents, soon realized that Vasilenko loved the game as much as he did. Gennady seemed to think he could tease the Americans into showing him a good time without having to step across the line into becoming a spy. He could deflect Platt’s entreaties—which were sometimes vague, sometimes more explicit—by turning the tables and pitching Platt to work for the KGB.

  “What in the hell could you offer me?” Platt chided Vasilenko. “A great new life in the socialist workers paradise?”

  The case almost collapsed before Platt could get it going. In September 1979, Platt and an FBI agent working with him took Vasilenko out to drink at the Gangplank restaurant, one of Platt’s favorite haunts along Washington’s Potomac waterfront. At the time, Platt was a fourteen-to-sixteen-beer-a-day alcoholic, and he was trying to recruit the Soviet through a beery haze. On this night, his FBI colleague got drunk as well, and unlike Platt, he couldn’t function well while drinking. As they both sat with Vasilenko at the Gangplank, the FBI agent became loud and sloppy and late that night turned to the customers at the next table and began telling them exactly what was going on at their table.

  “Hey, you know what we’re doing over here?” the FBI agent said through slurred speech over his shoulder. “I’m in the FBI, he’s in the CIA, and we’re trying to recruit this Russian.”

  Unfortunately, the customers drinking at the next table were also CIA analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence, and the next morning they reported the incident to the CIA’s Office of Security. The FBI agent was taken off the case and transferred out of Washington, and Platt was confronted by his boss, who told him that he was a drunk who needed help. If he would admit his problem and ask for help, the CIA could arrange treatment for him, his boss told him. If not, it might be time to brush up his CV and start looking for another job.

  Platt finally agreed to do something about the drinking and checked into a hospital. When he was admitted, he hadn’t had a drink in twelve hours, but his blood alcohol level showed he was still drunk. Released a month later after going cold turkey, a newly sober Platt asked his supervisors to let him renew his contacts with Vasilenko. At first they balked, saying the case had been irretrievably botched by that FBI agent at Gangplank. But Platt persisted, and in January 1980, he reestablished contact. As he expected, Vasilenko was happy to hear from him, and the two picked up where they had left off, except that now Platt didn’t drink with the KGB man.

  Vasilenko dutifully reported his contacts with the CIA to his supervisors in the KGB Rezidentura and explained that he was hoping to turn Platt into a Russian agent. His bosses were not overly happy about the contacts, particularly when it became clear that Vasilenko and Platt were seeing each other quite frequently and there were no signs that Platt was edging closer to betraying the CIA. But Vasilenko argued that he knew what he was doing; besides, if KGB officers weren’t allowed to meet CIA officers, how could they ever hope to recruit them as spies? The KGB Rezident agreed, but Vasilenko was on notice that he had to tread carefully. Over time, the relationship between Gennady and Jack became a true friendship, over drinks at cafés and restaurants around Washington, over family dinners at their homes. Eventually they worked up the nerve to go out hunting and shooting together in the West Virginia forests. Still, Platt and his FBI colleagues could never move Vasilenko beyond what the CIA called a “developmental”—a target of a recruitment, but not yet a spy. He would sometimes talk about office gossip, but Platt couldn’t get him to betray his operations.

  In fact, even as Vasilenko and Platt were meeting for drinks and dinner, the Russian was involved in the most important case of his KGB career. In January 1980, Ronald Pelton, a disgruntled former employee of the National Security Agency, had walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington, offering to sell information about the agency’s operations against the Soviet Union. Pelton told the KGB about a sensitive operation called “Ivy Bells,” in which American submarines had planted taps on undersea telephone cables used by the Soviet Navy in the Sea of Okhotsk on the Soviet Union’s Pacific coast.

  Vasilenko was the first KGB officer to meet with Pelton. During his first visit to the Soviet embassy, it was Vasilenko’s job to spirit him out without being detected by the FBI surveillance teams that staked out the embassy. Vasilenko decided to dress Pelton in a disguise and put him on a bus crowded with Russian embassy employees going home for the evening in order to sneak him out through the back of the embassy building. After that operation, Vasilenko kept meeting with Platt without telling him anything about Pelton. But Vasilenko’s bosses gradually became more suspicious of his contacts with Platt and finally ordered him to bre
ak it off. Once again Vasilenko grew angry, but this time he didn’t try to argue. Instead, he continued to see Platt and simply stopped reporting the contacts to his supervisors.

  Platt’s bosses, meanwhile, were growing frustrated with his inability to close the deal with Vasilenko. Some at the CIA wanted him to either break off the contact or force the issue by threatening to blackmail Vasilenko. The Soviet was now having unauthorized contacts with a CIA officer; couldn’t Platt use the threat of exposure to force Vasilenko to cross the line? Platt angrily refused to use such hardball tactics. It wasn’t because he considered Vasilenko a friend—Platt’s ultimate goal of recruiting Vasilenko trumped his friendship with the KGB officer—it was because he knew the strategy was doomed to fail. Vasilenko was a roustabout, but he also had a stubborn sense of honor, and trying to blackmail him would only backfire. No, Platt realized, the only way Gennady Vasilenko would ever become an American spy was if he decided to do so on his own. Jack Platt just wanted to keep up the friendship so that he could be there if and when he was ready.

  In 1981, Vasilenko was transferred from Washington back to KGB headquarters in Moscow, and Platt realized that there was no way he could maintain contact with him there without putting him at risk. Platt told Vasilenko to have a nice time back in the socialist paradise, secretly hoping that a couple of years back in the drudgery of Moscow would convince him of the merits of working for the United States. He vowed to himself that when Vasilenko reemerged for his next overseas assignment, he would track him down and recruit him once and for all.

  In 1984, Vasilenko finally came out again, this time assigned to Guyana. The Soviet ambassador in Guyana had excellent connections back in Moscow and had complained that his embassy deserved a fully staffed KGB Rezidentura. That was, after all, a measure of status within the foreign affairs bureaucracy. Vasilenko was sent to Georgetown as deputy Rezident to help satisfy the sudden demand. Back in Washington, Platt had moved on to a new assignment, running the CIA’s Internal Operations training course, teaching young CIA officers how to work behind the Iron Curtain. But he was also trying to watch for signs that Vasilenko had reemerged from Moscow. It took a while, but eventually Vasilenko was back on the CIA’s scope, and Platt started asking for permission to go to Guyana to try to pick up where he had left off in 1981. By October 1987, Platt had finally been given approval to travel to Georgetown and to buy a hunting rifle to take to Vasilenko as a kind of homecoming present. Platt hoped that he could convince Vasilenko to go hunting with him in the wilds of South America as a way to renew their friendship after so many years apart.

  It turned out that Vasilenko was just as eager to see Platt, but he did recognize that there were new dangers. It was one thing to go out to dinner in Washington with an adversary; that was part of the business of intelligence. But how could Vasilenko explain to his bosses in Moscow the fact that his CIA friend had flown thousands of miles—bringing along an expensive gift—to renew their friendship? From now on, all of their contacts would be unauthorized, and Vasilenko had to make certain they remained out of view. He had good reason to be more cautious now; KGB Center was swirling with rumors that old colleagues from Washington had been arrested and that other KGB officers had fallen under suspicion as well. There seemed to be a bloodbath under way in Yasenevo, and morale was plunging. Officers walking the corridors felt like hiding their faces, in case another mole might be just around the corner. Paranoia and fear, the birthrights of the KGB, began to climb to pre-détente levels.

  But just because Vasilenko wanted to keep his friendship with Platt a secret didn’t mean that he was ready to spy for the Americans. He wanted to see Platt mostly because he was bored and wanted some diversion. He was still rebuffing all of Platt’s offers to spy, still teasing him with KGB office gossip without crossing the line into espionage. Platt spent a few days in Guyana, meeting Vasilenko each day along the oceanfront seawall, little more than a cement levee erected to protect a military hospital built just beyond the beach in nearby lowlands. The men brought snacks, drinks, and ice so they could picnic each day out of sight of the prying eyes of Soviet personnel at the embassy. During the afternoons, they would have shooting contests, firing pistols at tin cans. While they kept their conversations light, there were small signs of progress along the way that kept Platt interested from a professional standpoint as well. At one point, Vasilenko casually mentioned that a KGB man named Vladimir Tsymbal had been sent from Moscow to visit the Washington Rezidentura in 1985 and again in 1987.

  Platt was intrigued by this offhand remark. Tsymbal, Platt knew, was a covert communications specialist in the First Chief Directorate’s Line KR. The CIA knew from past experience that Tsymbal was used by the KGB to arrange the delicate covert agent communications details for highly sensitive operations. He was one of the KGB’s top technical experts, and when Tsymbal showed up somewhere, the CIA’s first instincts were to start looking for a spy. So why had Tsymbal been sent to Washington in 1985 and again two years later? What agent operations in Washington were so important that they required Moscow’s best covert communications tech? Probing for answers from Vasilenko was no use; even if he wanted to tell Platt, he wouldn’t have known the truth. No, Platt would just have to report back to headquarters on what Vasilenko said and see if the counterintelligence analysts in Langley could make sense of Tsymbal’s travels.

  In October 1987, Platt wrote up a summary of his trip to Georgetown, complete with Vasilenko’s mysterious reference to Tysmbal’s visits to Washington, and sent a copy along to the FBI, since the MONOLITE case was still considered a joint CIA-FBI operation. Platt retired from the CIA in 1987, but he returned immediately as a contractor in order to try to finish the case. He was planning to return to Georgetown in February to see his old friend once again.

  As he tried to compose himself for further interrogations, Gennady Vasilenko could only think again, Jack, Jack, what have you done?

  Aboard a Soviet Freighter Bound for Odessa, January 1988

  Gennady Vasilenko had said little to his inquisitors in Havana, so they had thrown him on board a freighter headed back to the Soviet Union, where the KGB would have plenty of time to convince him that he should talk. Gennady was not confined on board; the KGB figured he had no place to go. But as he paced the deck, he began to seriously consider jumping overboard in the middle of the Atlantic, ending his life and the pain that he knew was now descending on his family. Yet as the ship trudged through the waves, bearing him back to an unforgiving future, Vasilenko finally rejected suicide. He was not a spy, he shouldn’t have been arrested, so he would fight for his life.

  Lefortovo Prison, Moscow, June 1988

  The interrogations of Gennady Vasilenko had been endless, covering the same ground time and again, focusing on Platt’s October trip to Guyana, prompting the same responses from Vasilenko each time. Yes, I knew Platt. Yes, I continued to see him even though I had been told to break off contact, but I thought I could recruit him. No, I never spied.

  Vasilenko knew just how deadly this game of endless questions and repetitive answers really was. Inside Lefortovo, if a decision was made by a tribunal for the verdict of death, the execution could be carried out right on the premises. Men he knew and had worked with in Washington, Motorin and Martynov, had been shot inside these same prison walls. There would be no public trial, no appeals.

  But the KGB was strangely legalistic, and Vasilenko soon realized that the investigators had very little hard evidence against him. They had apparently arrested and jailed him based on reports of Platt’s visit to Guyana, but that didn’t seem to be enough for a tribunal to order his execution. Fortunately for Vasilenko, Platt had never exaggerated his success with Vasilenko, even in his internal CIA reports. The trip report Hanssen had provided to the KGB showed only that Vasilenko had held an unauthorized meeting with him in Guyana.

  But the KGB inquisitors decided to fill in the blanks and skillfully sought to convince Vasilenko that they already had enough evidenc
e with which to convict him. During his first interrogation in Lefortovo, the investigators claimed that Cuban intelligence had discovered a tape recording of his October meeting with Platt in Georgetown. Platt, they said, had left it behind in his hotel. Confess, they said. We have the smoking gun.

  But Vasilenko remembered that Platt had promised him he would never tape-record their conversations, and he decided to trust his friend and call the KGB’s bluff. He realized that they were lying, trying to frighten him into a false confession, and that realization saved his life. Vasilenko became convinced that the KGB’s questioning was so intense only because the investigators needed him to implicate himself.

  So he refused to cave in to the pressure, refused to confess to espionage that he had not committed. After each session, his frustrated inquisitors sent him back to his cell, where they relied on informers they had planted as his cellmates to determine whether he would admit to guilt during unguarded moments. From January through June, the KGB sent three different informers in to share a cell with Vasilenko; each came back saying that he had not confessed and did not appear to be a spy.

  Complicating the investigation for the KGB was the fact that they couldn’t find any of the “spy gear” or communications plans that they typically discovered when they uncovered a CIA mole. Did that mean he was innocent, as he proclaimed? Or did it just mean that he was very clever?

  The investigators were running out of time to prove their case. Vasilenko’s arrest had touched a raw nerve within the ranks of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, where the psychic wounds from so many arrests, executions, and defections of friends and colleagues over the past three years were beginning to take their toll. First Directorate officers had been stunned at first, but now the arrest of a popular and unpretentious officer wasn’t going down well at Yasenevo. In an informal and secret KGB poll of his co-workers in counterintelligence, none of his colleagues said they believed he was a traitor. Vasilenko was also aided by the fact that his wife was from an influential family; so the KGB had to prove that it had an ironclad case before it ordered his execution.