Vassiliev scanned his notebooks and left the digital copies with his friends. He quickly secured British visas for his wife and himself through his contacts at the UK embassy and flew to London. In his hand luggage Vassiliev had a laptop—completely empty, as he suspected he would be searched at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport—and several floppy disks containing the digital copies of his precious notebooks.
Vassiliev then enlisted the help of American scholars. Together they turned his notebooks into two books about Soviet operations in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s that would become the most damning exposés of their kind ever written: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (1998) and The Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2009).13
Vassiliev was neither a hero nor a whistleblower. He was just a smart opportunist who saw an opening and took full advantage of it. But his actions shed much-needed light on one of the most secretive organizations in the world. In 2009, the notebooks, translated and digitized, were put online on the Wilson Center’s website.14 Finally, the United States had proof from inside Yasenevo about the crucial role that the Communist Party of the United States played in Soviet espionage—something the SVR had always denied. Some American nuclear physicists’ reputations were cleared as well—most notably that of Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who had never been a Russian agent.
What had started as a cunning Russian intelligence disinformation operation ended up a cataclysmic disaster for the SVR. Vassiliev didn’t even have to defect; he just left the country. The Foreign Intelligence Service had been too slow to understand that the country’s borders were now porous. Meanwhile, books still worked.
The Foreign Intelligence Service was so embarrassed that it never even tried to start an investigation of Vassiliev. “I’m not a traitor—they let me in!” Vassiliev told us, with a smile, from his home in the United Kingdom.
True, if the agency had complained, its top leadership would have been the first to blame, and nobody wanted that. So Vassiliev was left in peace. But he never returned to Moscow.
In the end, only four of the five books outlined in the Foreign Intelligence plan were published, counting Vassiliev’s. The project about the assassination of Trotsky was abandoned—Yasenevo most likely decided it was not ready to open the KGB files on the killing of the Soviet Union’s most prominent political émigré. Nahum Eitingon’s secrets remained safely sealed, probably forever.
At the time, it looked as if the failed book operation was just a last hurrah from the old guard on its way out—a last attempt by a dying breed to influence the way history was remembered. That assessment would continue to seem correct for several years. After all, all of Yasenevo’s top positions were still occupied at the time by generals who had come up through the ranks of the KGB. And you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Soon enough it became clear that while the old dogs would retire and the KGB itself would fade away, the new Russian security and intelligence services were not ready to abandon the old tricks either.
In the late 1990s, when we started writing about Russian intelligence, we were constantly hearing from our more experienced colleagues that the secret services were conducting disinformation operations, although the details were vague. There were rumors that the Russian spies had just changed the names for their long-standing disinformation operations—that “active measures” had become “assistance programs” or “assistance operations,” in the sense that operations that succeeded in changing a foreign government’s policy or position would “assist” the Russian government.
In 1999 we received confirmation of this particular rumor. It came, somewhat surprisingly, from the FSB—Russia’s domestic security agency—when an FSB spokesperson proudly presented himself to journalists as head of the new “department for assistance programs,” a department that included the FSB’s press office. Many FSB case officers were embarrassed to hear he had revealed what was presumably a confidential term.15
In 2010, disenchanted FSB officers leaked documents that showed the FSB was behind a disinformation operation in Ukraine, the goal of which was to prevent Kiev from purchasing gas from Turkmenistan rather than Russia. (The FSB planted a false story in the Ukrainian media that the Ukrainian secret services funded the Turkmenistani opposition.16) Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the FSB was clearly sticking with the KGB’s tool kit.
Was Russian Foreign Intelligence also using the old KGB tricks abroad? The SVR kept its cards closer to its chest than did the FSB. The SVR didn’t say anything about whether or not it was bold enough to continue conducting disinformation operations in the West. But in spring 2013, more than twenty years after Robert Gates toasted the dawn of a new era of cooperation between US and Russian intelligence services, we learned the answer.
The ugly concrete high-rise on Sixty-Seventh Street between Third and Lexington in New York City, the premises of the SVR’s rezidentura in New York, was referred to informally as the submarine by the agents who worked there.
The twelve-story building housed the Russian mission to the United Nations, and it was a fortress, pure and simple. Built in the early 1960s, it was heavily guarded and protected by a fence, supplemented by CCTV cameras surveilling every angle. Across the street, near the entryway festooned with the tricolor flag of Russia, was a New York City Police Department precinct and several police cars constantly parked there.
In May 2013, on the eighth floor, two officers were deep in discussion. The eighth floor was a fortress within a fortress. There were no windows here, and no phone lines connected the submarine to the outside world. The interior ceilings on the eighth floor were a foot shorter than on other floors because of the extra-thick walls. The electricity and ventilation systems were self-contained to prevent outsiders from planting listening devices.17
The two officers were in shirtsleeves. A decades-old rule was to leave all suit coats and jackets in the eighth-floor cloakroom in case a listening device had been discreetly placed in an officer’s jacket by the insidious Americans.
“Zhenya drafted, what do you call it, a proposal,” said the first officer.
“Aha,” said the second.
“I will have to process it now,” pressured the first.
“What’s the subject matter?” asked his interlocutor.
“He drafted, as I told you before, the proposal about Bombardier planes.”
The first officer was referring to the Canadian company Bombardier, which was in talks at the time with the Russian government about a possible joint project manufacturing airplanes.
“So what’s his idea?” asked his colleague.
The first officer elaborated: the idea was to set up the midsize airplane assembly plant in Russia.
“That’s an important point,” the second officer agreed.
Knowing they were in a highly secured area, the two officers didn’t think twice about speaking openly with one another. But they hadn’t accounted for human error.
Stuck somewhere among the papers in the room was a file binder, brought into the submarine by the first officer. He believed he had recruited a promising asset, an American, and had accepted a delivery from him—a file binder containing an analytical report of interest to Russian intelligence. Unfortunately for Russian intelligence, the SVR officer’s asset was, in fact, an undercover FBI agent who had a planted a listening device in the binder. Now the device was recording the entire conversation about Bombardier.
The first officer kept pushing. He believed the deal would bring modern technologies to Moscow and could open up production and export possibilities for Russia. He also deeply respected Zhenya and his proposal. “Zhenya” was, in fact, Evgeny Buryakov, deputy head of the Manhattan office of Russia’s state-run bank. The bank’s head, Buryakov’s boss, was a KGB foreign intelligence veteran, and Buryakov himself was, in fact, a Foreign Intelligence officer who operated under nonofficial cover, meaning he did not hav
e diplomatic immunity.
The first officer said that there was a problem with the deal and explained that the Canadian workers unions were resisting it. However, he had a solution: put pressure on the Canadian unions.
“Therefore,” he told his colleague, “the proposal for MS is geared toward pressuring the unions and securing from the company a solution that is beneficial to us.”
The FBI agents listening in might well have asked themselves who or what the mysterious MS was.
Sergei Tretyakov, a high-ranking KGB/SVR officer who served as the deputy head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service’s submarine headquarters in New York before his defection in 2000, provided a clue. Tretyakov explained that the gentlemen’s agreement the Russians had made with American intelligence back in the early 1990s to put a stop to active measures had been a ruse from the beginning. “We said, ‘OK, now we are friends. We’ll stop doing this’ and the SVR shut down Service A,” Tretyakov told us. “But Service A simply underwent a name change. It became Department M.” The old KGB active measures were renamed MS (Meropriyatia Sodeystvia; Assistance Measures or Operations).18 “The same people who had run it under the KGB were still doing it for the Foreign Intelligence,” Tretyakov told us.19
So the MS proposal under discussion in the submarine in May 2013 was just this—active measures, slightly rebranded.
In January 2015, Zhenya was arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiracy to act in the United States as an agent of a foreign government. Two other Russian intelligence officers, identified as such by the FBI, left the United States. Zhenya pleaded guilty and received thirty months in jail. In April 2017 he was released and put on an Aeroflot plane bound for Moscow.20
Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new generation had taken over Russian intelligence. Many had no experience serving in the KGB (e.g., Buryakov had been only sixteen years old when the Soviet Union collapsed), yet they ran the same kinds of operations. The post-Soviet intelligence officers followed tradition and stuck with the old KGB methods, primarily the use of disinformation. Russian intelligence proved to be a self-reproducing circuit.
Disinformation and deceit was a foundation stone for Russian intelligence, the essential tool in its tool kit. Foreign intelligence had refused to give up active measures tactics in the 1990s, essentially as a matter of survival. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian spies kept using active measures with just a slight rebranding to repel criticism at home. And they used active measures beyond their own borders—first, and largely successfully, to improve their own image abroad and, second, to do what they had done all through the Cold War: help the Kremlin to achieve its ends in the West.
PART III
PUTIN’S PROJECT
CHAPTER 20
A FRESH START
On October 12, 2001, men in the dark suits of the President Protection Service blocked every conceivable entrance to the Hall of Columns in the House of the Unions in Moscow.
The blue-and-white classical building, just a stone’s throw from the Bolshoi Theater, had once been a ballroom venue for the Assembly of Nobility. After the revolution, the hall hosted important state events, including party congresses and funeral services. It was in this hall that Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev lay in state before being taken to their final resting places in the Kremlin necropolis (Lenin’s body was displayed here for five days before being brought to the wooden mausoleum on the Red Square, where a frozen Zarubin would guard it). This evening, however, the Hall of Columns was hosting the First World Congress of Compatriots—an updated version of the previous congresses organized by Tolstoy in the early 1990s. This time, however, Vladimir Putin was in charge. The new Russian president had not approved of Tolstoy’s congresses of 1991–1993, and now, as the title of the event indicated, he wanted to start fresh. Mikhail Tolstoy was not even invited.
The massive chandeliers sparkled brightly, illuminating the twenty-eight gilded columns that gave the hall its name as well as numerous red-velvet curtains and chairs. It was a far cry from Tchaikovsky Hall, a plain space nearby that had long served as a haven for the impoverished Moscow intelligentsia and fans of classical music, where Tolstoy’s congress had been held.
As the ceremonies commenced, Putin took his seat onstage at a long table under the new emblem of the congress. The emblem for Yeltsin’s congress had been made up of three curved lines—the white, blue, and red of the Russian tricolor—with a curve to symbolize the Soviet era’s distortion of the smooth course of Russian history. Putin’s congress adopted a new image. The emblem was a globe with the map of Russia marked in black—a symbol of the president’s international ambitions.
Putin took the pulpit. In the audience, delegates from forty-seven countries hushed. From his very first words, it was clear that Putin saw the huge Russian diaspora as something the Russian state could use to advance its interests. “A strong diaspora can only exist if there is a strong state,” he proclaimed, noting that the Russian-speaking community, including Russian citizens, was the fifth largest in the world.1 His message contrasted sharply with that of Yeltsin and Tolstoy. Yeltsin had wanted to correct the historical injustice that had forced millions of Russians out of the country with no hope of ever returning. Putin, on the other hand, saw this diaspora as a valuable asset for the Russian state. This speech also marked the first time Putin invoked the term Russky Mir (Russian world)—the worldwide community of Russian-speaking people with an identity firmly connected to Russia’s history, culture, and language—which would, in time, become a Russian foreign policy concept.
Unlike Yeltsin, Putin was not interested in asking Russians abroad for help building a democratic Russia. Rather, he wanted to send a message to the Russians abroad that Russia had once again become a strong state—and that it was high time for her compatriots to advance Russia’s positions beyond its borders. It was no accident that Putin, a former state security officer, chose the word “compatriot” for his address. The term directly evoked KGB terminology. Tolstoy had used the term just a decade earlier in an attempt to bypass KGB interference, but Putin’s use of it represented a 180-degree change from Tolstoy’s approach.
Putin also talked about the need to create a coordinating body to oversee the diaspora. Soon after, the Kremlin launched not one but several government-funded organizations to do just that. These organizations ranged from civic engagement groups to dozens of media outlets, including journals and websites.
Putin didn’t stop there. Within a few years, the Kremlin launched a federal agency under the Foreign Ministry to monitor the diaspora, commonly called the Rossotrudnichestvo.2 This agency in turn became an umbrella body for a collection of foundations that supported compatriots abroad and provided funding for Russian-speaking media. These generously funded groups joined the Russian culture centers—traditionally, a disguise for intelligence operations—in operating all over the world.
Using culture as a guise for intelligence was a time-honored tradition. The KGB’s 1968 manual, “The Use of the Soviet Culture Committee for Cultural Ties with Compatriots Abroad in Intelligence Activity,” put it this way: “The main operational task for our intelligence to conduct through the Soviet Committee is to use the official work, propaganda and other means of influencing compatriots to prepare the grounds for the deployment of recruitment and other intelligence and counterintelligence measures using emigration as an operational base.”3
In October 2001, Putin’s message resonated at the congress, and the majority of the delegates were fully supportive of the Russian president.4 But that was not enough for Putin. He expected something different from the congress in the Hall of Columns—a big idea that could help engage the emigrants in the Kremlin’s project of expanding its influence abroad. He also needed someone to implement and execute the idea, somebody from the other side—an émigré, not a Russian government official. Putin didn’t see such a person among the participants of the congress. When the congress was over, he fired
the minister who had been in charge of putting the event together.5
In Putin’s eyes, what was at stake was nothing less than the security of his regime. Only ten years had passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had come as a complete surprise to the KGB. Only three years had passed since the major—and equally unforeseen—economic crisis that had shuttered Yeltsin’s government. The KGB always looked on emigrants with suspicion, as a hotbed of subversives ready to challenge the authority of the Kremlin if something ever went wrong. Putin wanted to “prepare the grounds for the deployment of recruitment,” as the KGB’s textbook put it.
In the Hall of Columns, an elderly, gray-haired man was watching Putin closely through his old-fashioned, horn-rimmed glasses. Alexei Jordan was the leader of the United Russian Cadet Corps in the United States. Jordan hailed from a prominent, religious family of White émigrés of German ancestry that was proud to have ancestors among Crusaders—thus his non-Russian-sounding name.
Despite his advanced age—Alexei Jordan was now in his late seventies—he was still full of energy. Ever since 1991, he had spent several months each year in Russia promoting the cadets movement, a network of all-boys military schools that the White army established abroad after its members fled the revolution. In the generations since, the cadets movement had become a tool to keep the Russian military’s largely aristocratic traditions alive for the next generations of emigrants.6 Jordan’s efforts were met with great enthusiasm in Russian military schools; the disoriented post-Soviet army saw the cadets movement as a lifeline tying the uncertain present to a glorious imperial past.7
Alexei Jordan’s activities were funded by his son, Boris, an American financier who made a fortune in Russia in the 1990s. Alexei had always been close to his son. He knew that Boris had recently tied his fate to the political regime in the Kremlin; in fact, Boris had recently helped Putin bring a rebellious TV channel to heel. Now, as Alexei Jordan listened to Putin, he was deep in thought.
The Compatriots Page 17
