Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Through the intercession of friends in the CIA hierarchy, Jack was assigned to the Laos operations desk, where he worked to save the lives and families of Laotian assets/friends and see them resettled in the USA—this in preparation for Jack’s being posted in the Asian country. He enrolled in the Agency’s language school, where he studied French for the better part of a year in advance of joining the Soviet operations team at the station in Vientiane, Laos, family in tow. The country had been a French protectorate for the first half of the twentieth century, and although rural areas still spoke Lao, a good number of the citizens in the capital of Vientiane spoke French.

  In Laos, from 1972 to 1974, Jack coordinated closely with a cabal of “Black Thai” Laotian spies known as the Kangaroos, whose job it was to keep the CIA apprised of the visits of foreigners, especially Russians. Jack also frequented a popular local bar called The Purple Porpoise, which was owned by a lovable magician named Montague “Monty” Banks. The bar was an Asian version of Rick’s Café Américain from the movie Casablanca, rife with spies and conmen from a dozen countries. While Monty regaled Jack’s kids with card tricks, their dad was off in a corner plying a Kangaroo asset. The kids were engulfed in the spook world, and when popular movie prints arrived at the US commissary, Jack brought home his favorites. Leigh especially remembers watching the James Bond thriller Live and Let Die when Jack brought it home for her birthday. “I believe we watched it at least twenty times in three days,” Leigh recalls. Similar movies were brought into the home at least once a month during their time in Vientiane.*

  Entertainment got even more real for Leigh, whom Jack used as cover while he took photos of Chinese Communist operatives enveloping the country. He routinely claimed that he was just an American dad on vacation with his young daughter. The ruse worked until Laos was falling to the Communists and a Chinese military officer confiscated his camera.

  When the Platts’ tour was up, Jack became so concerned that all the accumulated furnishings would fall into enemy hands on the day they left that he staged a robbery of his own house. He alerted his many Laotian friends that the night before his departure he would be out for a few hours with the family, so they were welcome to help themselves to everything except their luggage. He asked only that they share the spoils with their poorest neighbors. Dozens of Laotians saw the family off the next day.

  By far the most important takeaway from the Laos years was the added tradecraft tutelage by his coworkers Brian O’Connor and George Kenning Jr. These men, like Hav Smith, had developed successful field detection and evasion techniques that became part of Jack’s own arsenal.

  Laos was also a critical juncture in the Platts’ marriage, because it was in that political and climatological cauldron that Paige realized Jack had a serious drinking problem. “Alcoholism is insidious, slow in coming,” Paige says, haunted as she recalls military pilots drinking and then flying at Camp Lejeune. “Alcohol flowed like water wherever we were stationed.” The “goodbye parties” for intelligence personnel in Laos would literally last three or four days, Paige remembers, and it got more intense as Laos and Vietnam collapsed politically. Given her mother’s fate, she held out little hope that any alcoholic had the capacity to abandon the bottle. She knew she was headed for a showdown with Jack, but there were serious challenges to consider: Children. Finances. Getting a lawyer. These were the days before communication between spouses vaulted into the zeitgeist as a cure-all. Besides, Jack was a spy. Communicate? No, spies kept their mouths shut.

  Before Jack’s two-year Laotian stint wound down, he had complained to his family about a likely, dreaded recall to hell—i.e., Langley—but out of the blue, he learned of a vacant Agency position in Paris. He grabbed it before anyone else had a chance. By coincidence, his friends and colleagues from Laos, O’Connor and Kenning, also transferred to the City of Light. So the stage was set for a good experience all around.

  The entire Platt family was excited about the Paris relocation—finally a Western country with good schools for the girls. Their Rockville home again would be occupied more regularly by strangers than by the actual mortgage holders. One drawback to the new posting was that the Platts, accustomed to 100-degree Laotian living, were virtually “freezing” all day long for the first few months in France. The advantage for Jack was to be working with some of the finer senior case officers in the CIA.

  A Paris assignment that was especially close to Jack’s heart was the continued liaison with Kenning and O’Connor in efforts to save their Laotian assets, many of whom had become like family. Working with fellow Paris Station officer Larry Riddick, Jack accelerated the paperwork that allowed hundreds of Laotians to resettle in the US, and he maintained contact with many of them for the rest of his life.

  Jack quickly gained a reputation as the Paris Station prankster; often at formal embassy receptions he executed hyperbolic pratfalls (“Plattfalls”) just to see the honor guards’ reactions. His serious Paris Station responsibilities included assisting in the training and preparation of a Russian scientist (working for the US) to return to Moscow. He also dealt with forty-two leaked CIA names, published by the French newspaper Libération in 1976 as CIA officers working under cover of the US Embassy in Paris. Jack was one of them. Disgruntled CIA officer Philip Agee had orchestrated the treason, and Jack wanted badly to get his hands on him.

  Within days of the Libération disclosure, French classmates asked Leigh if her dad was CIA. She had always thought he was employed by the “economics section” of the State Department, assigned to various embassies. She assumed he kept getting transferred because of his coarse language or, worse, that he was some kind of criminal. Did they move around so much because he was afraid of getting nicked on an unsavory scheme? Leigh thought this way because she had been in the midst of devouring the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery books. Her curiosity had also been piqued when her parents forbade her to go on a school trip to the Soviet Union though they had let her go on an earlier trip to Spain.

  After overhearing her parents discuss their tapped phones during the Libération scandal, Leigh demanded the truth. Jack admitted he was with the CIA, actually saying, “I’m a spy.” He conceded that he hadn’t let her go on the trip to the Soviet Union for fear that the KGB might learn of her identity, kidnap her, and hold her as a pawn. The high schooler was both thrilled (“Totally cool!”) and relieved, telling her dad, regarding their constant relocations, “I thought it was because you couldn’t keep a job.”

  Weeks after their initial showdown, Leigh approached her father again and asked him a question that had been plaguing her: “Have you ever killed anybody?”

  After a beat, Jack answered, “I never pulled the trigger.”

  Michelle Platt remembers finding out about her father’s career a little differently. One day, while Aunt Polly (“Hollywood Polly”) was visiting them in Paris, Polly let loose about Jack’s being a spy. Michelle was stunned. She had been under the impression that her father was a Foreign Service officer, which made sense because the family was always moving around the world. “It’s impossible to keep secrets in a family forever,” Michelle says. Jack was not pleased about sister Polly’s loose lips and told her so. “Not everybody wants their name in lights!”

  Diana knew something was different about her father and his friends when she was instructed on how to interact with her “uncles” should she run into them publicly. Jack told her, “If you see Uncle Larry in public, you walk up to him like you don’t know him and ask him what time it is. If he gives you a big hug, acknowledge him and hug him back. If he just tells you the time like he doesn’t know you, scram.”

  Paige briefly worked for the CIA, but Agency work was not a great gig for women in the Cold War era. Nevertheless, she helped Jack in some of his exercises. “My mom always worked,” Michelle says. Paige had taught English as a second language in Laos and worked for a temp agency, Forbes magazine, and a computer company. Even when he encountered Paige’s colleagues, Jack kept
his cover by using the name Mr. Gordon, taking Paige’s maiden name. Paige had the business sense in the marriage, recalls Michelle, acknowledging, “My father was not a great businessman.”

  Despite many warm family memories of globetrotting and ski trips in Austria, the Platts weren’t exactly the Brady Bunch. “We were latchkey kids,” Michelle says. Marital tension brewed beneath the surface, as Paige was tiring of Jack’s alcoholism and was perpetually contemplating leaving him, which partly explained her self-reliance.

  In the Platt family dynamic, Paige was the disciplinarian, Jack the troublemaker—despite Paige’s futile efforts to exploit her husband’s fabled Marine fearsomeness. Leigh recalls her mother being annoyed with her when she was young and admonishing, “Wait until your father gets home.” When Jack got home, he would sternly agree that he would deal with the delinquent Leigh. He would then proceed to take her into the bathroom and tickle her until tears gushed from her eyes. Once he was satisfied that her tears were sufficient, he would tell Leigh to go and tell her mother that she was crying because of how strict he had been with her. Eventually, Jack’s un-scariness on the domestic front became common knowledge to the Platt girls’ friends. “Everybody wanted our dad to be their dad,” says Diana. One of Jack’s future business partners said, “Paige’s eyes must ache from all the rolling.”

  Jack’s battle with the bottle may have created personal turmoil, but none of his colleagues would say it affected his work. In fact, by this point, he had received a number of Agency performance citations for his success in the field. When asked to explain the accolades, he said, “When I was overseas I had a successful recruiting in every posting.”

  A critical assignment for him came in 1975 when he toured CIA stations around the world with one of the USSR’s most damaging defectors, ex-KGB officer Yuri Nosenko. It was Nosenko who had informed the Warren Commission that, among other things, while the Soviets were aware of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, they thought he was a kook and would never have mobilized him to take violent action against a US president. Jack’s mission was to facilitate Nosenko’s secret briefings of CIA officers of critical intelligence, including how the KGB had infiltrated US embassies and bugged the embassy in Moscow. Jack was proud to have such an important asset in his care. He also took note of how Nosenko’s instinctive fondness for American life animated his cooperation with the CIA—this despite having been kept in solitary confinement for three years by Jack’s suspicious predecessors in the SE Division. It was a lesson that would apply to another KGB officer with American tastes who would soon enter his life.

  In 1978, the Platts left Paris and settled again in the US, and Cowboy Jack returned to the Agency’s dreaded Langley headquarters, where he joined three hundred other SE officers. The SE was known to be the most elite, secretive, and cliquish division at the CIA, but Cowboy had little need for in-crowd mentality; he was all about the mission. By far the most fulfilling of Cowboy’s new tasks was continuing to assist in the resettlement of refugees from the war-torn regions of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. However, most of Jack’s time was spent in the counterintelligence world, and that was another story altogether.

  At this time, the Agency was helmed by Jimmy Carter appointee Admiral Stansfield Turner, and like Jack’s numerous other executive nemeses, Turner was set in his ways, reflexively refusing to explore creative methods for conducting espionage. Thus, always looking to get away from the CIA’s bean counters and careerists, Jack succeeded, after six months at SE, in having himself assigned to one of the newly established domestic stations: the DC branch, where he managed “Soviet recruitment operations.” The secret facility, located in Bethesda, Maryland, was housed in the recently built (1972) thirteen-story Air Rights Center at 7315 Wisconsin Avenue—just thirteen miles (but a universe) away from the suits on Langley’s seventh floor. The station operated in four small rented offices under the commercial cover of a consulting firm. In the lower right-hand corner of Jack’s desk was a fully stocked cooler for beers, but the best part for Jack was being reunited with his friend and mentor Hav Smith, who was the new outpost’s Chief of Station. (Jack’s ultimate boss was SE Division chief Dick Stolz, former COS in Moscow and one of the Agency’s most respected officers.)

  Although it is widely perceived that the CIA has a strictly foreign mandate, this is not the case. Its Domestic Operations Division (later the National Resources Division) was formed in the early 1960s, with the sole mission of targeting and recruiting foreign nationals of interest living in the US. However, once a target was identified, the Agency had to coordinate with the FBI, which, per regulation, would take the lead on the joint operation. Of course, as has been extensively documented, this interagency arrangement, rife with career rivalries, did not always operate as smoothly as would be hoped.

  The aim of the CIA’s new DC Station was to target—and turn—KGB officers working out of the Soviet Embassy. “I was doing what we called ‘residency analysis’ of the Soviet compound,” Jack recalled. “By our count, they employed over one hundred spies in Washington, either KGB or GRU [military intelligence].” The effort, which was coordinated with the FBI’s W. Lane Crocker, had failed for forty years to turn a local KGB man, although the Russian-speaking Crocker had a legendary reputation for unmasking KGB agents in the US. The fifteen FBI assignees to Crocker’s so-called KGB Squad, or CI-4,* held to their mantra: “Identify, penetrate, neutralize.” Like the SE Division at the CIA, it was often described as the best squad in the Bureau.

  Now, with the specter of nuclear annihilation ever on their shoulders, it was hoped that in combination with the skills of the CIA’s best, the FBI could end that losing streak. For Jack, the joint operation also meant new friendships with G-men, as well as a burgeoning respect for their bureaucracy, which seemed to move with more energy and efficiency than his own CIA’s.

  Jack had long ago concluded that a doomed strategy for turning an asset was the “cold pitch”—cornering a target by surprise and proposing a spy arrangement. To illustrate his point, Jack told the story of a CIA deputy of his named Nick, who was tailed by the KGB to a menacing monastery in Kiev called Pechersk Lavra, or Monastery of the Caves. Pechersk Lavra was known for its ominous and narrow corridors, where many prominent Orthodox Christians had been buried over the centuries. In a ham-handed cold pitch, a KGB agent, who had met Nick in the Sudan, followed him into the catacombs and proposed that he spy for the Soviets. “In the movies,” Jack said, “the target surrenders, fearing for his life.” In reality, the op had all the power of a wet fart. Nick told the sinister agent, “You gotta be shitting me.” Nick simply walked out of the caves, called Jack, and said, “You’re not going to believe what the Russians just tried.” Not only did the KGB fail to turn Nick; the CIA removed him from his post at the State Department just to be on the safe side, thereby ensuring he could never be of any value to them, and alerted the US intelligence community of what the Soviets were up to.

  In Laos, one of Jack’s best recruits had been a high-ranking Laotian official known as the “Lenin of Laos.” “Lenin’s” primary value was to keep the CIA informed about political movements in the Laotian hierarchy. Special emphasis was placed on advance warning of any coup attempts.

  In Paris, there had been Jacques Rossi, a Polish-French educator. A one-time aide to Leon Trotsky and an interpreter for Stalin, from 1936 to 1953 (Stalin’s death) Rossi had labored in the Soviet gulag system. Rossi had provided Jack with extensive intelligence on the gulag, and Jack had recognized that exposure of the gulag system presented a powerful propaganda tool. He encouraged Rossi to write about it. Eventually, Rossi published The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps, which painted a devastating portrait of the dark side of the workers’ paradise.

  In Washington, DC, the FBI-CIA joint operation was initially headquartered on the eleventh floor of the Washington Field Office (WFO), which, since 1951, was located in
the Old Post Office at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW (now the Trump International Hotel).* In addition to the fifteen members of the CI-4 Squad, more than seven hundred Bureau employees worked in the building—an edifice that was universally considered to be in decrepit condition, with faulty electrical wiring and broken water pipes. Agents covered their desks with tarps at the end of each day in order to catch plaster falling from the ceiling. “It was a dump, concrete falling all around us,” recalls Dion Rankin, a member of the Squad. The FBI agent in charge of the field office called it “the worst space in government.”† The ghost of Chief Crazy Horse was said to live in the basement, where he had been briefly imprisoned. The building, which had been slated for demolition a number of times, was home to rats, bats, and roaches. “There was no ventilation, so we left windows open. As a consequence, pigeons flew over our heads in the office. But we loved it. It was hysterical.” Another fellow agent remembers the only nod to modernity: “We at least had a high-tech secure line to Langley. We called it our ‘Cone of Silence.’”

  CI-4 and the rest of the field office would soon be moved into the top two floors of a new WFO facility in the Harkins Building (1900 Half Street SW), situated in Buzzard Point on the Anacostia River, across from Bolling Air Force Base. For the next seventeen years, the WFO would remain in this area named after turkey buzzards, which are known for picking clean the bones of dead animals, and it is situated on the lowest lying area of the swamp that Washington, DC, was built upon. Buzzard Point was the definition of a “lateral move,” with many agents preferring to stay at the centrally located old firetrap.

  Two or three days a week, Hav Smith’s officers from Bethesda, like Jack Platt, would trek down to “the Point” to strategize with men like Rankin, who would, per regulation, take the lead on any recruitment operations. FBI man Harry Gossett notes that a recruitment pitch often occurred just before a KGB officer was preparing to be rotated out. The Bureau had recruited an army of informants working inside convenience stores favored by the Russians—preferences detected through surveillance. “The sources helped us with the triple T, the ‘toilet tissue trigger,’” Gossett says. “When we learned that the Russians were buying huge amounts of toilet paper, we knew they were headed back to Russia, where the toilet paper is infamous for having the feel of fine sandpaper. You’d know if you ever went there.”