Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov, aka PROLOGUE, aka PHANTOM (b. 1954)—Zhomov was a KGB officer in the Second Chief Directorate (internal counterintelligence) who offered to sell information to the CIA in Moscow in 1987. Over Grimes’s and Vertefeuille’s objections, the SE Division accepted Zhomov, who was, in fact, a “dangle,” sent to protect the USSR’s valuable assets Ames and Hanssen. Zhomov dropped his overture to the CIA in July 1990 after receiving a substantial payment from them. Obsessed with avenging the later losses of Ames and Hanssen, Zhomov became the KGB’s mole hunter, overseeing the arrests and torture of Gennady Vasilenko and Aleksandr Zaporozhsky.

  Organizations

  CIA (1947–present)—Established by the National Security Act of 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency is the United States’ civilian foreign intelligence service, obtaining information primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). The CIA, headquartered on 258 acres in the Langley community of McLean, Virginia, has no law enforcement function, and is mainly focused on overseas intelligence gathering with only limited domestic intelligence collection.

  FBI (1908–present)—The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the United States’ domestic intelligence and security service, focused on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and criminal investigation. It operates under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice, reporting to both the attorney general and the director of National Intelligence. Primarily a domestic agency, the Bureau maintains fifty-six field offices in major cities throughout the United States and sixty legal attaché (LEGAT) offices in US embassies and consulates across the globe.

  FSB (1995–present)—The Russian Federal Security Service (Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti) is the principal security agency of Russia and the main successor agency to the USSR’s Committee of State Security (KGB). Analogous to the United States’ FBI, its main responsibilities are within Russia and include counterintelligence, internal and border security, counterterrorism, and surveillance, as well as crime and federal law violation investigation. It is housed in the KGB’s old headquarters building in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square (formerly Dzerzhinsky Square).

  GRU (1810–present)—Formally known as the Main Intelligence Directorate, the GRU is the foreign military intelligence agency of the general staff of the armed forces of the Russian Federation. It is Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency, deploying over six times as many agents in foreign countries as the SVR, the successor of the KGB’s foreign operations directorate (PGU KGB). It commands more than twenty-five thousand Spetsnaz troops.

  KGB (1954–1991)—Headquartered in Moscow’s Lubyanka building, the KGB was a military organization. The Soviet Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) was the successor to the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, etc. The KGB’s main functions were foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and domestic operative-investigatory activities. After 1991, KGB operations were divided between the FSB (domestic) and the SVR (foreign).

  MVD (1802–present)—Formally known as the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, the MVD (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del) is the interior ministry of Russia. It oversees police, traffic, drug control, and economic crime investigations. The ministry is headquartered in Moscow.

  Spetsnaz (1950–present)—Translated as “special purpose,” Spetsnaz are elite tactical special-forces units controlled by the FSB, MVD, or GRU. They carry out anti-terrorist and anti-sabotage operations but are often deployed against Russian counterrevolutionaries, dissidents, and other undesirables. The idea for the units was envisioned decades earlier by military theorist Mikhail Svechnikov in order to overcome disadvantages faced by conventional forces in the field.

  SVR (1991–present)—The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki), is Russia’s external intelligence agency and the successor of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. It is tasked with intelligence and espionage activities outside the Russian Federation and with negotiating anti-terrorist and intelligence-sharing arrangements with foreign intelligence agencies. The SVR consists of at least eight known directorates: PR (political intelligence); S (illegal overseas agents); X (scientific and technical intelligence); KR (external counterintelligence); OT (operational and technical support); R (operational planning and analysis); I (computer service—information and dissemination); and E (economic intelligence). Its headquarters is in the Yasenevo district of Moscow.

  1

  APPRENTICE SPIES

  Forced recruitment almost never works because you’ve got somebody against their will and they resent it.

  —Jack “Cowboy” Platt, CIA case officer

  August 27, 2005,* Great Falls, VA

  Oh no, not again, Cowboy thought. Hanging up the phone, sixty-nine-year-old retired CIA case officer Jack “Cowboy” Platt recalled something F. Scott Fitzgerald had written about “the dark night of the soul,” and now he knew exactly what it meant. Sitting in his darkened den in Northern Virginia, Platt stared at a photo of himself together with the subject of the call, his Russian “younger brother” and former KGB man Gennady “Genya” Vasilenko. The framed memento had been taken during a recent Shenandoah Valley hunting trip. Better times, for sure. Tonight’s communication had changed everything and tempted Jack to drive to a location he hadn’t visited in twenty-five years: the ABC Liquor Store just down the road from CIA headquarters in McLean. The bottle had come closer to killing him than the Soviets ever did.

  Platt looked at his left hand, mangled by a grenade that had malfunctioned during his stint in the Marines, and thought, Jesus Christ, Gennady was probably cursing me out as they tortured him. The thought was intolerable, because it was Jack’s fault. It was his scheme that had brought them to this. Tipped off by Gennady’s son on the phone call from Russia, Jack then read the sickening details on the Internet. His “best laid plan,” which had quietly succeeded in rolling up one of the United States’ most damaging traitors ever, had blown up in the worst way: Gennady, coincidentally known to his peers as “Russian Cowboy,” had been rounded up and imprisoned in Moscow for the second time. And it was Jack’s fault—again.

  In a notorious Moscow hellhole of a prison, confused and terrified, sixty-three-year-old Gennady also recalled his hunting trips with Cowboy. Two days earlier, on the first day of hunting season in the woods surrounding Moscow, he had been at his rural dacha with his mother; his girlfriend, Masha; and their young children, his second family. As the country celebrated its annual Moscow Days, Gennady was in the front yard “playing with the kids” when he caught sight of ten or so black-clad Spetsnaz encircling his property. I am about to become the first victim of hunting season, Gennady thought. As he reached out to shake hands with the sheriff, an acquaintance, the commandos pounced, beating the pulp out of him and breaking his knee in front of his hysterical mother, girlfriend, and children. “If you step one inch in any direction, we’ll shoot you in front of them,” one guard snarled. Then they hauled him off to hell.

  Hell for Gennady came in many waves. First he was taken to the local police station, where he was told that illegal explosives had been found at his apartment. All the residences of his immediate family had been ransacked. The troops had “found” more explosives in Gennady’s homes and cars. In fact, the evidence had been planted to frame up the arrest. They even had been secretly coating his car with invisible explosive particles so he would have residue on his fingers. For the icing on the cake, the FSB had planted World War II–era explosives in Gennady’s garage so they could charge him with terrorism.

  Finding him at the police station, his oldest son, thirty-five-year-old Ilya, brought him a change of clothes from home, but the only jacket Gennady had at the dacha was the one Cowboy’s FBI friend Dion Rankin had given him years before, the blue one emblazoned with FBI ACADEMY. Just perfect, thought Gennady. They already think I’m with the Americans. He was so anxious to take off his bloodstained T-shirt that he put the FBI sweatshirt on anyway. �
�Fuck ’em,” he said, uttering Cowboy’s favorite curse, which Gennady had appropriated years earlier.

  When FSB thugs came into the room to soften him up with continued beatings, Gennady knew this was not about old gunpowder or boxes of hunting bullets. It was about vengeance. Concussed, he began vomiting and bleeding on his FBI sweatshirt. Drifting in and out of consciousness, lying in a pool of his own blood, he realized that today was his daughter Julia’s birthday.

  Assuming their captive was now sufficiently pliable to an admission, the goons got around to the real reason for the brutality: they wanted Gennady to confess to helping the US ferret out an American traitor four years earlier—perhaps the Russians’ most valuable double agent ever. The Russian bureaucracy was in damage-control mode since the asset’s exposure, and they couldn’t just allow those who they thought facilitated the hard-won spy’s arrest to get away unscathed. They had to send a message, and Gennady was that message.

  The beatings and mental torture were unending. Throughout it, the police, and later the FSB, had one question: “How did your American boyfriend turn you into a traitor?” And the answer was always the same.

  “Yebat’ sebya! Ya ne predatel’!” yelled Gennady. Go fuck yourself! I’m not a traitor!

  March 1979, Washington, DC

  When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s very difficult to remember that the initial objective was to drain the swamp.

  —A sign on Cowboy Jack Platt’s desk at CIA headquarters

  Jack remembered racing down Washington’s Capital Beltway in an alcoholic fury to meet the “target” for the first time at a Harlem Globetrotters game, having likely already pounded down his typical twelve to fourteen beers for the day. Appropriate, he figured, because this possible recruit he was going to meet was a hard-partying Russian and the best lead the CIA’s domestic station had had in a while.

  Thirty-seven-year-old Gennady Vasilenko was the new KGB man in town, the son-in-law of one of the godfathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Vladimir Goncharov, and the game these days was all about nuclear war: preventing it in the best case, starting it first if need be, and finding ways to survive it. Both sides believed it was going to happen, too, to the point where Soviet agents were assigned to drive around Washington at night to see if and when an inordinate number of lights appeared to be on in the White House and the Pentagon, in theory betraying an uptick in activity and perhaps indicating an imminent attack. Jack’s mission—his actual job description at the CIA—was to “turn” Soviet agents stationed in the US, to get them to betray their country by giving the Americans military and political intelligence, especially as it related to nuclear secrets. Jack had been at this assignment for about a year and hadn’t flipped anybody.

  “In almost sixty-five percent of the cases, the prime motivation [to turn] was revenge,” Jack would reflect in retirement. His conclusion was drawn from a study of fifty traitors he had undertaken for the Agency. “Revenge for a true wrong or a perception in his or her head that something terrible had been done to him or her by that system and ‘I’ll make ’em pay.’” Other methods, of course, included the tried-and-true blackmail over a target’s weaknesses, the big three being sex, gambling, and booze. However, in the thirty years of the CIA’s existence, the Americans had almost no success in turning KGB agents in Washington, despite having much to offer. The Soviets met with similar frustration. Former KGB agent Yuri Shvets estimated that for every two thousand approaches, only one was successful.

  “Failure is the norm,” Jack said, and what he lacked in number of recruits, he made up for in quality throughout his career. “Not one of the people I recruited ever got caught.” Jack never resorted to the blackmail technique; it wasn’t his style. “Forced recruitment almost never works, because you’ve got someone against their will, and they resent it. You have to re-recruit them every time. Besides, with a forced recruitment, there’s a damned good chance that the target just goes back to his boss and tells him what happened.” (Nonetheless, Jack and his CIA recruitment team had already created a generic list of vulnerabilities using the acronym MECMAFO: Money hungry, Ego, Criminal acts, Midlife crisis, Addiction, Family trouble, and Outcast loners.)

  The few notorious blackmail operations that actually succeeded got blown out of proportion in spy folklore, Jack explained. “Everybody knows the story of the British foreign service officer who liked little boys,” referring to the trope that most spying is rooted in blackmail. “Okay, fine. That’s one case when the KGB got somebody that way, but everybody goes back to that one case! It’s not the norm.” Jack added that violent persuasions to turn a source are equally fanciful. “In twenty-six years in the CIA I never carried a gun.”

  A native of San Antonio, Texas, John “Jack” Cheney Platt III was born on February 18, 1936, at Nix Hospital. Jack inherited not only his family’s devotion to military service but also their gene for alcoholism, experiencing frequent blackouts until a successful rehab stint in his forties. “My grandfather was an alcoholic, my father was an alcoholic, his brother, and my mother had three nervous breakdowns,” Jack recalled. “They had cocktails every night before dinner. My sister, Polly, and I snuck sips in the kitchen when we were kids. She died an alcoholic. I didn’t stand a chance. I was a beer-aholic. A twelve-pack a day guy, minimum.”

  Jack’s only sibling, younger sister (by three years) Mary Marr “Polly” Platt, grew up to be an Oscar-nominated art director and production executive. Married for a time to director Peter Bogdanovich, she also became the first woman inducted into the Art Directors Guild.* Despite their divergent politics—Jack a growling Texas conservative and Polly a show-business liberal—the siblings adored each other and were best friends. Their relationship was reminiscent of that between To Kill a Mockingbird’s tomboy, Scout, and her brother, Jem, each child protecting the other from neighborhood predators. In her unpublished memoir, Polly recalled smashing a local boy in the shins with a shovel when he caught Jack off guard in a street scuffle. Even as aging parents and grandparents, they were known to reenact creative renditions of their childhood, making spectacles of themselves. Jack’s daughter Leigh tells how they would go to restaurants and start whining like small children, banging utensils: “Weeeeee’re huuunnngrryyyyy!”

  The sibling bond had a darker side as well. Polly’s and Jack’s children all recall watching in horror as the two got rip-roaring, falling-down drunk together in Paris. “They fell into a hedge of rose bushes and came out bleeding profusely,” remembers Polly’s daughter Antonia Bogdanovich. “The bloody mess only made them laugh harder.”

  Their parents were New Yorker John Cheney Platt II, a career army officer, and Vivian Hildreth Marr, of Newburyport, Massachusetts. During World War I, Platt Sr. left his undergraduate studies at MIT, where he had been a champion boxer and a brilliant student, to enlist in the army. Early in his military stint, Platt Sr. was dispatched to Mexico, where he engaged José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, aka Pancho Villa. For the next three decades, Colonel Platt and his family were posted to places like New Jersey, California, Illinois, and Texas as Platt gained a reputation as a noted court-martial judge. After World War II, Platt was sent to Bremerhaven, Germany, during the occupation, where he was in charge of two thousand German POWs, many from Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. He returned to Germany for another tour from 1949 to 1951, during which he was a judge in the Dachau trials. He was also a judge in the famous Hesse crown jewels heist, in which a US colonel stole items valued at $2.5 million ($30 million today).

  Young Jack was well aware of his father’s service and what, to Jack, was a noble battle for justice against a monstrous enemy. Sometimes there really were battles between good and evil, and there was no doubt in Jack’s mind that his father’s—and the United States’—work to bring down tyranny was such a battle.

  “I actually believed what President Kennedy meant when he said ‘Ask not what your country can do for you,’” Jack explained, adding that his early experiences overseas a
lso had a profound effect. “I’m a proud, unreconstructed patriot who knows it’s a privilege to be an American citizen.”

  Vivian Platt suffered from acute mental illness for much of her life and spent serious time in mental health institutions, having the first of her nervous breakdowns when the family was stationed in Germany. “Polly judged her mother harshly and blamed her for being weak,” according to an article in Premiere. “I realize now,” Polly told the magazine, “that perhaps my mother had not fulfilled her own promise, her own gifts—and she was living in a world where that was not even considered.” Still, Polly described life with her mother as excruciating; the Platt children never knew when their mother would erupt and begin torturing their father over some triviality, such as the way he carved roast beef. Even worse, according to Polly’s daughter Sashy Bogdanovich, Vivian once willfully drove off a bridge—with young Polly in the car. Not only a likely suicide attempt but also one without regard for her child. The children of alcoholics and wildly unstable parents are known for seeking to control all possible variables in a world they come to see as capricious and treacherous. With Platt Sr., who died of cirrhosis and emphysema, and Vivian, who experienced a grotesque death of alcoholism, Jack and Polly got a double dose and managed the aftershocks for the rest of their lives.

  Polly had vivid memories of postwar Germany, a place filled with the smoldering ruins of conflict. Their father took young Jack and Polly on a tour of the Dachau concentration camp “so we’d never forget what happened there,” Jack said. Seeing such landscapes, Polly said, “I started fantasizing that I had these incredible powers, that I could rebuild all the broken buildings.” Both Jack and Polly, in their future careers, would be known as caring, team players. “There’s a tradition in the Platt family for bringing home the wounded,” Jack said. Platt Sr. lived long enough to see Neil Armstrong’s shoes find their rightful American footing on the moon in 1969—an expressed goal—and died soon afterward in Polly’s guest house in California, she having made good on a promise to never put him in an assisted-living facility.