“Ask him to give you the blueprints.”
Without casting more than a sideways glance at the note, Strauss continued his statement about getting on with the important work and getting the problem of the bugged embassy resolved once and for all. Then he dropped the bomb.
“Mr. Chairman, there is one way you could help us get over this hurdle of the status of my embassy. Why don’t you just give me those blueprints in your safe. I’m sure that would set us on the right course.”
I watched the other KGB officers in the room as they leaned forward in their chairs at this point in the conversation. There was something close to shock in their faces as Bakatin’s interpreter translated Strauss’s suggestion.
Bakatin thought for a moment, then said, “I will be back to you on this, Mr. Ambassador.”
Strauss had made his point very smoothly, and I thought Bakatin had been intrigued by the ambassador’s suggestion. I then took my turn at speaking and passed along the greetings of our new acting Director of Central Intelligence to the new KGB Chairman. Bill Webster had retired at the end of August, and Dick Kerr was acting DCI, while Robert Gates, the President’s nominee to take over at Langley, was working through the confirmation process.
“Mr. Chairman,” I said, “our acting Director, Mr. Richard Kerr, sends you his compliments and as an accomplished historian in his own right wanted you to know his view of the events that you have been so personally associated with here in Moscow in the last forty days. Mr. Kerr places the beginning of the twentieth century at August 1914, in the Balkans. And he places the beginning of the twenty-first century at August 1991, in Moscow.”
As Bakatin smiled, I felt Strauss turn to look at me twice.
A few moments later, we ended our visit with Bakatin and took a short tour of Yuri Andropov’s museum office overlooking Dzerzhinsky, now denuded of the once proud statue of Iron Felix. Then, as Strauss and I were walking down a broad staircase to the parade entrance of the Lubyanka, the ambassador turned to me.
“Milt, how does that 1914 thing you said to Bakatin go again?”
I told him, wondering where the old fox was headed. Strauss thought for a moment and then said, “Milt, I don’t want to hear you ever say that again. Not in this town. Not in any other town. You understand me?”
“Sure, Mr. Ambassador. But are you going to tell me why?”
“Yes, I am. That is so goddamn good that it now belongs to me. I’m stealing that from you, and I don’t want to hear you say it again.” Then he smiled.
I saw the “1914 thing” appear in an interview Bob Strauss gave to The Washington Post a few weeks later.
Vadim Bakatin did indeed hand over the blueprints to the KGB’s bugging scheme against our embassy in Moscow. No one in Washington really believed that the blueprints were complete, however, so it didn’t resolve the debate over what to do with the embassy building.
The action did, however, help get Bakatin fired and earned him a place in KGB history as the most reviled Chairman the organization had ever had.
Moscow, Mid-September 1991
I later met with a group of the new KGB leadership, one of whom provided me with an animated description of the role CNN had played on KGB thinking during the crucial moments of the putsch. The KGB officer staff, uncertain whether to throw in with the supporters of the new emergency committee or the resisters backing Yeltsin, found themselves in an information blackout. Lacking any other source of information on what Kryuchkov and his cohorts were up to, the men in the Lubyanka had tuned in to CNN to watch events in Moscow unfold.
The general summed it up for me, his voice full of irony and amusement. “We are sitting here in KGB headquarters watching CNN like probably you were, Milton, and we see Boris Yeltsin come out of the parliament building and get up on the tank. But we see on CNN that the turrets on the tanks lined up in front are turned in the wrong direction—they are no longer pointed at the parliament. Then the American President, who is on vacation, comes on CNN saying that coups sometimes fail. And by then there are whispers all over Dzerzhinsky that CIA knows more about what is happening right now in Moscow than we do in the KGB. And I even have reports that President Bush has called Boris Yeltsin while he is surrounded by tanks and tells him to be strong! And so we just turn off our phones and go home or to our dachas.”
Moscow, September 18, 1991
Vanity had its limits, Shebarshin decided after less than a month on the job as deputy to the new and reform-minded KGB Chairman, Vadim Bakatin. He submitted his resignation on Wednesday, September 18, and it was accepted on Friday. He had spent almost thirty years in the KGB, and now he would retire to his dacha to reflect on what it had really meant. It would take a few years for him to sort through those years, but then he would begin to write it all down.
Moscow, October 1991
David Rolph didn’t wait this time for headquarters to tell him to get moving; he decided to take advantage of the revolutionary climate in Moscow by launching an aggressive new campaign to recruit Russian agents. In the upheaval after the failed coup, KGB surveillance in Moscow had all but vanished. For the first time since the start of the Cold War, CIA officers could walk or drive around Moscow without being followed and could meet Russian officials without fear of exposure or arrest. Moscow was no longer a “denied area.”
Five months earlier, CIA case officers still feared the KGB’s mythical power to follow them everywhere, using what some called “ultradiscreet surveillance.” Now, case officers in Moscow trained in the clandestine arts of “sticks and bricks”—dead drops, chalk marks on walls, burst transmissions—could simply call up a Russian and ask him to lunch.
Moscow Station prepared a list of Soviet and Russian officials who were worth the time and energy to get to know, divided up the names, and started calling them to see if they’d be interested in talking. It was the kind of routine meet-and-greet activity that diplomats conduct the world over, yet it was something that had never been done before by the CIA in Moscow. And it worked. The case officers found that in the wake of the coup, government officials all over Moscow were eager to talk to them, to make their observations and opinions heard in Washington—particularly if it meant a free lunch.
The end of the Soviet Union, like so many upheavals, stirred things up and brought a few old ghosts out of hiding. Long-lost agents, people who had spied for the CIA and then either been arrested or had simply gone underground, now began to come forward, demanding payment for services rendered during the Cold War. One of these was a former GRU officer who’d gone to extraordinary lengths to try to spy for the CIA a decade earlier. Back in 1981, he’d swum down the Moscow River until he’d reached a beach reserved for foreign diplomats. Coming ashore, he had found an American embassy official having a picnic with his family and handed him a note volunteering his services. The note had been turned over to the CIA, and a case officer had been sent out to meet him, but the GRU officer had been quickly caught and arrested.
He was out of prison now, however, and he came to the embassy looking for help, and so the CIA agreed to give him some assistance.
Throughout the fall of 1991, the KGB was a confused mess. Kryuch-kov was under arrest, and Boris Yeltsin was determined to defang the intelligence and security apparatus. Not only was the KGB broken up under new chief Vadim Bakatin, as Rem Krassilnikov had predicted, but massive budget cuts were forcing wholesale firings and layoffs. Krassilnikov had survived, but he was no longer the KGB’s only contact with the CIA. Now the CIA was meeting representatives from the SVRR, the successor to the First Chief Directorate; the FSB, the successor to the Second Chief Directorate; and even the new Russian republic KGB, which reported directly to Russian President Yeltsin.
Still, there were already signs that the old KGB wasn’t going to simply disappear as easily as the East German Stasi.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, October 1991
Dottie didn’t know the purpose of the meeting, only that it was an interview in the
counterintelligence center. I was expected, she had said. And I found myself in a small room at a conference table with Sandy Grimes, Jeanne Vertefeuille, Jim Milburn, and Jim Holt, the latter two FBI officers attached to the CIA to help with the investigation of the 1985 losses that had been given new life when Redmond was transferred to the counterintelligence center.
No one made any effort to conceal what was going on: The panel was looking over the list of possible suspects, and I had been on the list from the start. We went over a number of questions about where and when I became aware of certain compromised operations. Most of them in 1985, I answered. Then came a slightly offbeat question.
“If you were going to spy for the KGB, how would you pull it off?”
I thought only briefly before I responded. “It wouldn’t be hard at all,” I said. “I have a very quiet but sanctioned contact with the top levels of the KGB, and disappear every so often to have a little talk with them about matters of mutual interest. If I were interested in spying for the KGB, I’d easily be able to roll it into my official contact with them. What would it take?” I said. “A couple pieces of paper passed at one of these meetings and we’ve got another disaster in SE.”
I would learn much later that of all forty-four people interviewed by the counterintelligence panel, only Aldrich Ames would stumble over that question.
Idylwood Park, Vienna, Virginia, Monday, December 16, 1991
Bob Hanssen left one last package for the KGB under a footbridge, this one containing a classified paper entitled “The KGB’s First Chief Directorate: Structure, Functions, and Methods.” It was something that the KGB’s First Chief Directorate might want to see.
In a note that Hanssen left for his KGB handlers, he said that he had been promoted to a new position that was not directly involved in Soviet matters.
Hanssen would soon break contact with Moscow. On a business trip to Indianapolis, apparently in late 1991 or early 1992, he walked into a Catholic church and once again confessed to a priest that he had been spying for the Soviets. Just as he had done after his wife had caught him in 1980, Bob Hanssen had turned to his church to help him purge his sins. Now he was determined to end his double life.
But perhaps Hanssen’s change of heart was not the result just of his religious convictions. Perhaps the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turmoil inside the KGB had something to do with convincing him that spying for Moscow was no longer a good idea. In the end, he would find it impossible to really stop. Eight years later, he would start up with the Soviets one last time.
Langley, December 31, 1991
The Soviet Union had ceased to exist. With little fanfare, a detachment of Red Army soldiers had marched out on the Kremlin wall and had for the last time lowered the Hammer and Sickle, raising in its place the Russian tricolor.
It’s over, I thought. The whole thing we called the Cold War was over. And it felt pretty good. We hadn’t beat them in straight sets, not by any stretch of the imagination. But beat them we had. Our KGB adversaries had been gifted. We might not have been more gifted, but our system was, and in the end we were probably just good enough.
I remember the reaction of the many visitors to the Christmas party we held in our corridor at headquarters when we handed out a party favor unique to our efforts that year and for many years before. It was a white campaign-style button with a red hammer and sickle and star and the words in red across the top, SE Division Christmas Party 1991. Below and to the right of the symbol of the USSR were the words
The Party’s Over
But it wasn’t over—not quite yet.
EPILOGUE
As the Hammer and Sickle was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin at the close of 1991, marking the end of the Soviet Union, the CIA’s SE Division disappeared too. Replacing it at Langley was the Central Eurasian Task Force, later to become the Central Eurasian Division, whose new role was more closely linked to monitoring and managing a disintegrating Soviet empire than assaulting it from all quarters. From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, the CIA moved quickly to open up new ties to the security and intelligence services of the nations rising from the ashes of the Soviet Union.
Many of the newly independent countries were eager for relationships with the CIA, partly to counterbalance the power of Soviet intelligence. John MacGaffin, who took over the division in January 1992, was rather startled by his first meeting with the new president of Turkmenistan; he was happy to have a visit from a senior CIA official who might be able to tell him about Moscow’s attempts to spy on his new government. As they sat in the president’s office, the leader’s first question for MacGaffin came in a whisper: “Is it safe to talk in here?”
For a time, newly opened CIA stations across Central Asia were lightly staffed and received little interest back at headquarters. It was difficult to imagine in the early and mid-1990s what intelligence could possibly come out of Uzbekistan that would be of much interest to the President of the United States. Washington was reveling in a new world order, and Langley was earnestly in search of a new identity, a new rationale for its existence. Yet even as the agency attempted to reorder and redesign itself, the effort to solve the lingering mystery surrounding the 1985 losses ground on, until February 1994, when an FBI team forced Aldrich Ames’s Jaguar to the curb and arrested him on charges of espionage.
Ever since his arrest, the CIA has insisted that Ames was uncovered purely through painstaking analysis, but there is more to the story, a piece of the puzzle that has remained hidden for nearly a decade. In solving the Ames case, the CIA had help from a Russian agent. The agent didn’t identify Ames by name, but he did provide information, such as times, dates, and places, that meshed with the background of one suspect—Aldrich Ames.
At first, it seemed that Ames’s arrest would allow the mole hunters to close the books on 1985. But their relief was short-lived. Paul Redmond and his team knew within weeks of the arrest that there was at least one other mole still at large. Ames couldn’t possibly have known about all of the cases and operations that had been blown over the years—including the investigation of Felix Bloch and several highly sensitive technical intelligence probes. Redmond soon established a new mole hunt unit to track down yet another spy.
In time, Redmond began to suspect that the new mole might be at the FBI, but he was rebuffed by bureau officials who seemed intent on ignoring the warning signs. Determined to take advantage of a weakened and exposed CIA, under fire for having allowed Ames to go undetected for so long, the FBI demanded and won from Congress new powers to take the lead on counterintelligence investigations. In the wake of the Ames case, a senior FBI agent was dispatched to CIA headquarters to take control of the counterespionage group, the spy-hunting unit within the CIA’s counterintelligence center. FBI investigators agreed with Redmond that there was another spy—but they were determined to look for the mole inside the CIA. And now they were calling the shots.
Redmond bristled as the FBI trampled on his turf, and he ominously told colleagues that “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Undeterred, FBI officials lorded it over their CIA counterparts, setting counterintelligence policy on their own terms. With the FBI now in charge and eager to consolidate its bureaucratic gains over the CIA, the last thing it wanted to do was launch an investigation that would target its own agents.
And so Robert Hanssen went undiscovered for another seven years, until he was finally arrested in February 2001. Hanssen’s arrest blindsided the FBI, and his case would ultimately prove every bit as traumatic for the bureau as the Ames case had been for the CIA. Like Ames before him, Hanssen was discovered with help from a Russian agent—but not the same one.
The Hanssen case seemed to answer many of the questions that had been left unresolved by the arrest of Aldrich Ames: It was Hanssen who had tipped off the KGB that Felix Bloch was under investigation; it was Hanssen who had revealed the existence of the tunnel built under the Soviet embassy in Washington; and
it was Hanssen who had betrayed dozens of other FBI technical operations. But maddeningly, even Hanssen couldn’t account for everything.
The more investigators kept digging, the more they found that Hanssen, Ames, and Edward Lee Howard—the spies thought to be responsible for the 1985 losses—could not account for all of them. Gradually it became clear that there could be a fourth man, still undiscovered, who was behind at least some of the betrayals.
For starters, there was the case of Sergei Bokhan, the GRU colonel in Athens who defected in May 1985 after receiving a suspicious order to return home. Bokhan received his summons a full month before Ames identified him and five months before Hanssen volunteered his services to the KGB. Edward Lee Howard, who was preparing for an assignment in Moscow when he was fired in 1983, knew only about operations that required internal handling in Moscow. Bokhan was being handled with rigid compartmentalization by Athens, so Howard was eliminated as the source of compromise.
And Bokhan was not the only anomaly. There was also Leonid Polyshchuk, the KGB officer posted to Lagos who’d been arrested unloading a dead drop in Moscow in August. After his arrest, the KGB put out the word that Polyshchuk had been caught because of the vigilant surveillance conducted by the Second and Seventh Chief Directorates. But a careful review of the case strongly suggests that the KGB was tipped off in the spring of 1985, shortly after Polyshchuk arrived in Lagos. The KGB, aware that Polyshchuk had been in the market for an apartment near his parents in Moscow, almost certainly arranged for one to come on the market in order to lure him back to Moscow. Polyshchuk’s father sent word to him in Lagos about the good fortune of finding an apartment in early April—well before Ames betrayed him on June 13.
Oleg Gordievsky was another unresolved case. He was recalled to Moscow in May 1985, before Hanssen went to the KGB and before Ames’s fateful meeting at Chadwicks. The fact that the KGB questioned but did not immediately arrest Gordievsky suggests that they lacked the hard evidence they had against the other compromised agents. Ames has been held responsible for betraying Gordievsky, and there is no doubt that he identified him to the KGB. But he did so on June 13, by which time Gordievsky was already back in Moscow and under hostile interrogation. Since his arrest, Ames has consistently told the CIA and FBI that he betrayed Gordievsky at Chadwicks in June, when he first gave the KGB his long list of Soviet agents. Both agencies are convinced he is telling the truth. Neither Howard nor Hanssen could have known about Gordievsky.
The Main Enemy Page 57
