Often after work the staff repaired to what the locals referred to as the “Bilge Bar” on the first floor of the Gangplank Restaurant, a double-decker restaurant-bar at the nearby, newly opened (1977) 360-slip Gangplank Marina, a buoyant trailer park situated on the Washington Channel, which runs beside the Potomac. Washington’s only floating restaurant (which cheekily advertised itself as “The Capital’s Finest Floating Restaurant”) was the current hot spot for partying spies, lobbyists, politicians, and even the occasional astronaut. For FBI and CIA personnel, it was a good place to release the tension that naturally went with preventing a nuclear war on a daily basis.
(Courtesy Linda Herdering)
For the first year or so at the WFO, there was little progress. Assets were as hard as ever to recruit. “Mostly we just harassed KGB guys incessantly,” Rankin recalls, “by taking their parking places, blocking their parked cars, and, if they tried to lose us on the road, boxing them in on the highway, slow-speed, so they couldn’t take the exit they wanted. We once forced Gennady’s fellow KGB officer Alexander Kukhar to drive thirty miles outside Washington when he was trying to get to his apartment in Alexandria. He was a hothead, anyway, always trying to outrun us, which is never done. But after depositing him somewhere south of Quantico, Virginia, he never tried to lose us again. If we couldn’t recruit them, then we just wanted them to give up recruiting us and go home.”
But in late 1978, a glimmer of hope came over Jack’s transom. One day first-year undercover case officer Patrick Matthews (a pseudonym) came to Jack with a lead. “We got a goddamned winner,” Matthews said. “I was at the Young Diplomats Club with a Russian madman. It was a snowstorm, and this character, who claims to be a Soviet diplomat, took me there. I met him at a volleyball game—apparently he’s been here over a year. He hangs out at volleyball courts near the Pentagon, the Department of the Interior, the Mall—everywhere there are government jocks on their lunch hour and after work. I played volleyball and tennis with him last fall. Anyway, he said he’d pick me up because he’d been to the club before. We get in the car and there were ten or twelve unpaid parking tickets on the floor. He floors it and spins around, doing a full three sixty. He just smiled and said, ‘Ice on street.’ His name is Gennady Vasilenko.”
“This guy was beginning to cut a wide swath around town,” Jack remembered. “There was no way in the world I would pass this up. I asked HQ for traces on him. I got a six-page womb-to-tomb report. I knew everything: his ancestry, when he joined the KGB, his blood type—you name it. He married up. His father-in-law was the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. I knew a guy in Moscow, Vladimir Piguzov, who had recently been recruited in Indonesia. He taught at the KGB school and had access to all the students’ files, which he forwarded to the CIA. He got me the school’s internal evaluation of Gennady. Piguzov was later outed by a kid I trained, Edward Lee Howard. The bastard got him killed.”*
The volleyball-playing Russian was born on December 3, 1941, and from his earliest memories, Gennady Semyovich Vasilenko had a gun in his hands, as he grew up hunting with his hard-drinking father and uncle in the volcano-encircled Siberian city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. It was a hardscrabble Russian existence at its most stereotypical: he drank pure alcohol from the age of three, his house had no electricity or gas, and he remembers his first childhood pet—a bear cub—fondly. He also remembers skating down a frozen river for two miles every day to attend grade school.
Gennady’s parents had met in Podolsk, where his mother was training to be an accountant. They married when his mother was still in her teens. Gennady was the only child of this union, which wasn’t unusual in wartime when soldiers were off getting killed and women were often widowed or remained unmarried. “I was lucky to be born at all!” he says, laughing.
His athleticism came by necessity. He learned to ski when he was three years old just to get from place to place in the snow. He learned to fish in order to eat. Besides, there was nothing else to do in his small village, so if you were healthy, you explored or did something physical “or else you’d go crazy.”
His pet bear grew so fast Gennady noticed the difference from day to day. Still, the boy counted the bear as a friend and was too young to understand mundane concepts such as the nature of the beast. One day he was playing with the bear in the river and it pounced on him, nearly drowning him. Fortunately, a soldier happened to be walking by, witnessed the struggle, and threw the bear off the boy, saving his life. When Gennady’s father got home, he shot the bear. “I’ve always been lucky,” Gennady says.
Gennady’s father was born in Siberia too and was a literature teacher who wrote poetry. He was a warm man despite his lot in life, and Gennady adored him. In fact, there is not a trace of bitterness in Gennady’s voice toward his parents and the harsh conditions of his childhood. As any reader of Russian literature knows, seething outrage is suffused throughout the culture over the country’s hundreds of years of war, not to mention its miserable climate and woeful economic conditions. However, if the Platts had the gene for alcoholism, the Vasilenkos possessed a life spark, resilience, and practical optimism that overrode their conditions.
And, of course, there was the Vasilenko luck.
During World War II, Gennady’s father was fighting the Japanese in the Kuril Islands, serving in an artillery battalion. He was shouting orders during a particularly vicious advance, and with his mouth agape, a piece of shrapnel tore through one cheek and flew out the other—amazingly damaging very little besides skin. “He was lucky he was shouting at that moment,” Gennady says.
Not even World War II made the Vasilenkos angry toward their country and leadership. Gennady explained that the Russians were constantly in peril, at that time against Hitler, who had invaded the Motherland. Of course, they knew Stalin was a brutal man, but he had to be to fight Hitler, they concluded. Even when Khrushchev denounced Stalin in the early 1950s, the Vasilenkos, like so many other Russians, were skeptical. They figured the smear job was just Soviet bureaucratic nonsense. It took generations for the facts about Stalin’s genocidal policies to convert from data points into accepted reality. “When the Nazis are outside your village, you hate the Nazis and fight ‘for the Motherland and Stalin.’”
After the war, Gennady’s father was stationed in Potsdam, where he met another woman. He divorced Gennady’s mother, had another family (a set of fraternal twins and another boy), and moved to the Black Sea city of Gudauta, where he became a regional military commandant. Gennady traveled there and met his half siblings a few times. He doesn’t express a sense of trauma about the breakup of his family, shrugging it off as a common condition of Russian existence during that period. This may explain his resilience during the operatic personal life he came to live as an adult.
Teenaged Gennady Vasilenko.
When he was in grade school, Gennady moved with his mother closer to Moscow, where she found a job near where her sister lived. Gennady then began to channel his raw athleticism into all manner of organized sports: skiing, hockey, tennis, track and field, basketball, soccer, and gymnastics. Despite the lack of social sophistication associated with his upbringing in the country, he found that wilderness children actually had an athletic advantage over city kids. Without a trace of inferiority, the increasingly charismatic Gennady came into his own in the big city.
As a young adult, the six-foot-two, athletic, and handsome Gennady was drafted onto the Soviet Olympic volleyball team in 1964 (the Tokyo Summer Games was the first Olympics to include the sport), but he was sidelined by a shoulder injury. However, the strapping playboy-athlete went on to become a member of the KGB-sponsored Dynamo team and a telecommunications and engineering major at the I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, which he attended in order to avoid the draft. While he was no technology savant, this basic training would come in handy years later when he handled National Security Agency turncoat Ronald Pelton.
Gennady first saw Irina Goncharova on a bus on the way to the Institut
e. “I liked her from the first glance.” It turned out that she had the same destination. He began searching for her at the Institute, which was a challenge given it was set on hundreds of acres with many buildings containing labyrinthine passageways. Eventually, Gennady, as always, got lucky. He spotted Irina in the Institute cafeteria and recognized some of the people she was eating with. Goncharova? As in Vladimir Goncharov? Royalty. The Siberian wild child deep within him had a pang of insecurity. But just one pang—after all, he was the blessed Gennady, who deserved only good things. Why not him? He inquired about Irina, arranged to be on the same bus, and walked her from her stop to her house in Sokol. They were married a year and a half later.
Upon his 1968 graduation, with wife Irina and baby daughter Julia (pronounced “Yu-lee-ah”) in tow, he was successfully recruited by the KGB. Gennady chuckles. “I was the only guy who got into the KGB on a sports scholarship.” That his father-in-law was such a big shot didn’t hurt either.
While at the Yuri Andropov Institute at Yurlovo, Gennady specialized in telecommunications, computer studies, and engineering, instructed by many of the USSR’s heroes, the very spies who had worked with Western turncoats such as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and the Rosenbergs. These teachers constantly referred to the US government, but not its people, as the “main enemy.”
There was, of course, a great emphasis on field training at Yurlovo. In this regard, the Russians were the most intense, craftiest, and even harshest in the world. When the trainees were on a supposed break from studies, perhaps enjoying some leisure time in Moscow with no documentation, their superiors would often leak false criminal evidence about them to the local police, who would then proceed to roll them up like common criminals. “They wanted to see if you could figure it out, how you could handle tough situations,” Gennady says. “If you admitted being KGB, you were out.” The watchword was “Deny everything.”
Upon graduation in 1974, Gennady began his first posting at the KGB’s Yasenevo headquarters, Department 3, the Africa and Asia division. Nicknamed both “The Woods” and “Little Langley,” the Yasenevo HQ was situated in a forest on the Volga River, southwest of central Moscow. All roads to the high-concrete-walled compound were marked with the same sign, SANITARY ZONE, while the gated entrance bore the plaque SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION CENTER. Author David Wise, the only Western journalist to be allowed to visit the “Russian Langley,” wrote, “Physically, the parallels with the rival Central Intelligence Agency are remarkable. Like the CIA, the espionage directorate is out in the woods, away from the capital.”
Inside the walls were a bucolic park, tennis courts, a soccer field, and a large fountain stocked with KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov’s prized ducks. Of course, the chief had to advertise more than his soft side: he regularly ordered that crows be shot and hung by their feet from the trees that surrounded the fountain to remind potential turncoats of their fate. Much like at the CIA’s home base in McLean, Virginia, KGB agents could be seen jogging near the complex at all hours.
At the center of the park was the nucleus of the complex, a twenty-story building (described as “soulless modern” by KGB officer Victor Cherkashin) that included conference halls, a gym, and an indoor swimming pool. At Yasenevo, Gennady made many lifelong friends, especially in the Africa department, which was in a small room shared by three agents. His closest friend was fellow volleyball player Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, who would be rotated to Africa after his term at Yasenevo. Although he and Gennady would be separated by thousands of miles, they managed to keep in touch over the years as their lives played out in overlapping dramas. These dramas would collide three decades later, involving two of the century’s most damaging espionage cases.
Occasionally Gennady was sent to work at the KGB’s fearsome Lubyanka complex at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow—fearsome because it housed a basement prison that was made to order for torture and summary executions, which is exactly what it was used for during the Revolution and the early days of the KGB. A local woman, who became a KGB folk figure known as the “Cellar Babushka,” was hired solely to clean up the bloody messes. Similar executions had been performed at the notorious Lefortovo Prison located on the outskirts of Moscow.
In late 1977, under the guise of a diplomat, Gennady was assigned to the coveted post of counterintelligence (Line KR) agent at the KGB’s Washington, DC, rezidentura. He took an apartment in Arlington, Virginia, for his growing family, which now included Julia’s younger brother, Ilya. The romantic portrayal of espionage evaporated almost as soon as Gennady’s cab dropped him off at the Soviet Embassy at 1125 16th Street NW, four blocks north of the White House. (Years later, the cheeky Americans would name the intersection “Andrei Sakharov Plaza,” after the dissident Soviet scientist who had been exiled to the forbidden city of Gorky in the 1980s.) It was the largest embassy in Washington, employing more than five hundred people, many of whom came into the office at night because during the day “everybody was out spying.”
Once inside the embassy, Gennady was directed to the rezidentura, located on the fourth floor, in the back, down a narrow, poorly lit corridor. He was instructed to always hang any coat he carried in a hallway closet in order to prevent him and any colleagues from secreting CIA-furnished spy gadgetry into the workplace. On a digital clock outside a nondescript door, Gennady typed in a code he had been given, unlocking the thick steel entrance to the enclave. That’s when the dreariness of his real-world spy job hit him.
Dozens of agents were crammed into a single, eight-hundred-square-foot room. On entry into the anteroom, an agent was greeted by a large map of the Maryland-DC-Virginia area, onto which operatives had marked their next covert meetings, drop-offs, etc., signed with their code names. This map would prove to be a goldmine for the CIA when it placed its own assets inside the facility. In his memoir Washington Station, KGB agent Yuri Shvets described the rest of the rezidentura:
Everyone… had to work in incredibly tight quarters. Thin partitions divided the residency into four extremely small rooms, tiny as birdcages, which accommodated its four sections: Political Intelligence, External Counterintelligence, Scientific and Technological Intelligence, and Technical Operations.
All of which explains why Gennady immediately turned on his heel and ran out to play volleyball at the State Department. But before lacing up his Converse All Stars, he presented himself to the recently appointed rezident, Major General Dmitri Yakushkin, a beret-wearing, hulking, six-foot-four man of surprising refinement. With a degree in economic science, Yakushkin was a highly cultured spy from a prominent Russian family and was known to be concerned with human rights and arms control. He was also a workaholic, putting in twelve-hour days at the rezidentura. He and his KGB-translator wife, Irene, wary of being targeted by the “main enemy,” almost never socialized. Their only known recreation was an occasional weekend visit to the recently purchased forty-five-acre Russian retreat in Centreville, Maryland, on the state’s Eastern Shore—the very one President Obama would order the Russians to vacate in 2016 after they hacked the DNC’s emails.
Gennady would enjoy a father-son relationship with Yakushkin, but he regularly tested his boss’s nerves. One day, shortly after Gennady received a promotion, he decided to screw with Yakushkin. He borrowed an embassy security guard’s uniform and on a lapel affixed the star he had received—which for a spy was supposed to be hidden away in a drawer. He then loaded up the uniform with every ornament he could find and burst into Yakushkin’s office, shouting, “KGB spy Vasilenko reporting for duty, sir!” Given that the whole idea of being a spy was to be subtle, Yakushkin shouted, “You stupid motherfucker!” Gennady pretended he didn’t understand why his boss was so angry. “But I went all the way back to Moscow to get this undercover uniform!” Gennady exclaimed. Yakushkin then recognized it was a joke, broke out in laughter, and opened up a bottle of Dimple, his favorite scotch. Still, he knew Gennady was a problem child at heart.
Whatever Americans have come to think of KGB agents as
a result of Hollywood portrayals, Gennady did not fit anyone’s image of a spy. Westerners are inclined to imagine that Russian agents are as cold as Siberia, utterly devoid of individual humanity—think assassins from an Ian Fleming thriller, like the chiseled, blond, robotic killer Grant in From Russia with Love, or Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye, who strangled men with her thighs, her pulse barely elevated. Or Vladimir Putin. These stereotypes echoed in the American consciousness for decades, all brutality and ruthlessness.
But Gennady was all open-faced charm. Not in the unctuous sense of a cinematic smooth operator, but with the lovability of a big brother to whom you could tell things that your parents would never understand. Despite being married, Gennady liked women and pursued them habitually—a pastime he attributes to growing up in a town where all the men had been lost during the war, leaving him with the enviable thirty-to-one ratio of women to men. And these poor women craved some attention, Gennady would argue. In fact, as a young teen, Gennady was practically preyed upon by older women on a daily basis. (“He was the village stud” was the way one friend described Gennady’s childhood.) The experience taught him the power of seduction and sexuality by the time he was twelve. So, as an adult, he became a seducer at heart, even when the seduction was fraternal, not sexual. Smiling Gennady could make a traitor feel positively buoyant about betraying his country, as if becoming a turncoat were nothing more than a senior prank.
Best of Enemies Page 5
