Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  It was Gennady’s Western-style warmth and intramural athleticism that made him a perfect operative to place in Washington, DC. His interpersonal talents called to mind the telltale passage in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

  He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

  Of course, Gennady’s almost frenzied joie de vivre would regularly place him in the crosshairs of his dutiful Spartan boss, Yakushkin—much like another man who often ran afoul of his bosses in the SE Division, a man Gennady would come to know as “Chris,” and a man who would change Gennady’s life.

  “After reading the dossier, I sat down with [Patrick] Matthews,” Jack said. “I said, ‘I can get in with him by my experience with Carlos the Jackal. He would be interested in that. Also, he’s a gun aficionado, like me. Tell him my name is Chris.’” Since the chain-smoking Jack wasn’t about to challenge the Russian to a game of volleyball, he had to come up with another entrée. Jack had a connection at the shiny new Capital Centre sports venue who could score tickets for him on short notice, so he checked the arena’s schedule and instructed Matthews as to what to tell the Russian. Matthews, posing as a businessman, dutifully arranged the meet-up, telling Gennady, “My friend Chris can get us tickets to the Globetrotters. Bring your son.” Patrick had met Gennady’s eight-year-old son previously. He lied that he didn’t know exactly where Chris worked. Gennady happily accepted the offer.

  3

  CONTACT

  Halfway through the game I realized, I really like this guy.

  August 28, 2005

  Day four in solitary confinement in the Solntzevo police station

  The FSB was at it again. New faces this time. But Gennady wasn’t sure. He could not differentiate between individuals anymore. Torturers weren’t people; they were teeth on a zipper, essentially identical but for the occasional variable feature of a jagged edge. How did a man survive this? What life experience could he dip into for guidance? Were there any aphorisms that could get him through this? All good things to those who wait? To thine own self be true? The truth will out? Bullshit. None of it mattered to these animals. They were in this racket because they liked hurting people under the moral cover of “love of country.”

  Gennady’s cheekbone was on the cold concrete. There was moisture. Blood again. How much blood did a man have? How much could seep from him before there was none left?

  “You want it to stop?” his interrogator asked. “Tell me about this ‘Chris’ person. When did you offer your services to him?”

  Gennady could barely whisper now: “I never offered anybody anything, cocksucker.”

  They worked him over even more viciously. This was what glasnost got you. This was what friendship with an American got you. Nobody wanted peace. This was what they all liked: violence under the banner of patriotism. The violence managed to find the last reservoir of air, just enough to make him cough up one last curse.

  Spring 1979

  Under the guise of a Soviet diplomat, Gennady had become a man-about-town in Washington, his mission to befriend and ultimately recruit Americans—especially FBI and CIA employees—to spy for the Soviets at the same time Jack was doing the reverse. “Of course, the failure rate is ninety-nine percent, but we had to try,” says Gennady, echoing Cowboy. “Maybe we’d make one good recruit in five years. Most of the traitors were walk-ins, same as at the CIA.”

  Gennady’s modus operandi was to utilize his great athletic prowess at tennis and volleyball in order to cozy up to federal employees; he was the KGB’s version of Kelly Robinson in the ’60s TV series I Spy. Gennady proudly states that on his very first day in the US he managed to secure passes to play on the volleyball and tennis courts reserved for State Department employees and their guests.

  As soon as he landed in Washington, Gennady had found out about volleyball and tennis games being played at the State and Interior departments. Identifying himself as a diplomat, he signed himself up. To his delight, in the Interior department’s lobby, a bulletin board listed the names and departmental affiliations of all the players. Gennady had hit the jackpot, and at first he wrote the names down, but he soon decided that was too time consuming—so he impressed his new boss by just yanking the lists off the bulletin board and presenting them as prized inside information, which, in a broad sense, they were.

  Gennady thought his career was over when, as he was removing a list one day, he heard a voice behind him saying, “Hey, don’t take that!” The voice belonged to a security officer, who followed up with, “That’s the old list. Here’s the new one.” He handed the newer list to the frozen Russian, then walked on.

  Gennady, recipient of Russia’s Master of Sport award, had also become the captain of the Soviet team that played in the dozen-team Embassy Volleyball League. The Washington Post called him “the tall, handsome Master of Sport.” The Soviets, volleyball powerhouses who practiced in their spiffy new private gym at their new embassy under construction in the Mount Alto area, won the league championship practically every year. During one stretch, Gennady’s team went undefeated for four years. When Brazil finally eked out a win, Captain Gennady had an answer. For the next game, he recruited two Soviet national team all-stars who “just happened” to be in town that day. Gennady’s rezidentura teammate Igor Filin was initially peeved at being benched in order to make room for the substitutes. But when he saw them, he almost fell off the bench. “Goddamned Gennady,” he said to no one in particular. “He’s got ringers!”

  One of the ringers, a twenty-one-year-old, six-foot-seven-inch behemoth, made a furtive move to the net every time Brazil served, preventing the serve from even crossing the plane. The Washington Post called it “the sneakiest Russian maneuver since the invasion of Afghanistan.” Volleyball Magazine wrote of Gennady’s secret weapon: “He has logged more air time than most TWA pilots. In career kills he trails only Joseph Stalin in the record books… He stuffs the ball well before it ever violates Soviet air space.” The Soviets managed a 15–2 victory.

  When the Post caught up with Gennady, he was hooting. “It was just a joke,” he said, explaining that he was tired of the other teams complaining about the Russian players, when in fact, those other teams used many players who had no affiliation with their embassy teams. He almost gave away his real job when he added, “I know where they are working and what they are doing.” Interviewed a week later, after the Brazilian ambassador’s official hairstylist wrote a letter of complaint to the rec league before the next game, “the personable Vasilenko was still laughing.” After beating the Brazilians a month later for the championship, Gennady took the entire Brazilian team out for beers. By the end of the night, the Brazilians were referring to “the Russian team as their great new friends.”

  The Post interviewed a Soviet specialist who pontificated that Gennady’s ringer incident couldn’t be a joke: “The Russians don’t have a sense of humor, so I doubt it was a joke.” That shows that the “specialist” didn’t know as much as he thought he knew. Gennady is still chuckling about it decades later.

  With rapid-fire pace, Gennady made new athlete pals all over the district. In a short time, he became good friends with a four-star general, and the two shared dinners with each other’s families. It was only a matter of time, it seemed, before he would be a couple of Kevin Bacon handshakes away from every government employee who knew a jock. And so it was that Gennady’s occasional tennis partner Patrick Matthews, who worked with Jack, initiated the Globetrotters gambit.

  Jack snickered when he read the Washington Post pi
ece about the Globetrotters’ upcoming games that weekend. The paper noted that the Trotters held a slim 13,046 to 323 winning margin over their hapless perennial opponents, the Washington Generals. Elsewhere in the paper, a more sobering opinion piece by Republican senator William S. Cohen of Maine provided perspective for the gambit soon to be played out by Jack and Gennady. In his effort to show why he opposed the pending Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), Cohen wrote that if the US approved the treaty, “the ultimate consequence will be to stand in the shadow of a Soviet Union first-strike capability and capitulate rather than risk the instant liquidation of more than 100 million Americans.” (President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in fact signed the treaty three months later in Vienna.)

  It was Saturday, March 3, 1979, when Cowboy Jack got to his seat in the bustling Capital Centre outside Washington and found that Patrick had not yet arrived. The stands were filling up mostly with families. Fathers and sons predominated. Cowboy saw a father and boy of six or seven inspecting their tickets and eyeing the row where he was sitting. The father looked like a California jock—in his late thirties, tall and athletic, with brown hair parted on the side. The boy was whip-thin, like his dad, with light brown hair.

  Decked out in full South Texas regalia, Cowboy stood up and introduced himself with his legend “Chris Llorenz.” One reason for using the pseudonym was that the Soviets had to have a huge portfolio on “Jack Platt” from his days posted in Paris and Vienna. He also chose the bizarre venue of a Globetrotters game with tradecraft in mind. “I didn’t want another routine meeting at a cocktail party,” Cowboy explained. “That’s how everybody else does it. Too obvious.”

  Cowboy was taken by the affection between father and son, having grown accustomed to the tendency of Russian fathers to be more like generals than parents with their sons, barking orders as if they were preparing for war. Simultaneously, Gennady and Ilya took note of their new American companion and his John Wayne attire. They had seen boots like these before on television and in the movies. Could this man… be… a cowboy?

  Cowboy and Gennady exchanged carefully crafted versions of themselves. Gennady, who by now had been given the dual CIA/FBI code name MONOLITE (later GT/GLAZING), said he was a diplomat with the Soviet Embassy. Cowboy said he was with the Pentagon, once having served as a liaison with the French police to help capture the terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Venezuelan born, pro-Palestinian Ilich “Carlos the Jackal” Ramírez Sánchez had been at the time a thirty-year-old fugitive, wanted for the 1975 murders of an informant for the French government and two French counterintelligence agents. He was further suspected of masterminding the December 1975 raid on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) headquarters in Vienna, in which sixty people were held hostage and flown to Algiers before being released. His friends had nicknamed him “Carlos,” and he had been dubbed “the Jackal” when a journalist spotted Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal near some of Sánchez’s belongings.*

  While Cowboy worked for the CIA, not the Pentagon, the liaison reference was true. When he was posted at the Paris Station he had in fact worked with the French police on Carlos. Cowboy knew that by flagging himself as a Pentagon man, it would make him all the more appealing as a target for Gennady. And it wasn’t lost on him that the Soviets also were monitoring the Jackal. The exchange highlighted Cowboy Jack Platt’s credo: Be as truthful as you possibly can—too many lies can be perceived and exploited by the adversary.

  Gennady thought, If anybody gets Carlos, it’ll be this cowboy. He also surmised that Cowboy’s “job” at the Pentagon was what it was: a legend. He suspected Cowboy’s real vocation from the outset, especially when Patrick started excusing himself so the two men could speak alone. “I suspected that Chris was either FBI or CIA, and my boss was certain Chris was CIA.”

  The incident exemplifies the inherent absurdity their jobs often entailed. Both were acting, and both knew it. “We eyed each other the way dogs do when they first meet, circling around each other,” Cowboy recalled. “I was putting on a performance twenty-four hours a day in case I was being watched. I’m on a stage, but the job can be fun.” Or as Gennady describes it, “You have to be a mother and a father and a friend to your recruit. You might meet them by spilling a drink on them, or denting his car, which I did a number of times.”

  Cowboy remembered that either Meadowlark Lemon or Curly Neal fired the ball from center court, and Cowboy slyly expressed admiration for his “shooting.” Gennady made a gun gesture with his hand: “He is a shooter?” Cowboy clarified the misunderstanding, which led to a broader discussion about guns, an instantaneous bond between the men. “We both love the outdoors,” Cowboy explained, “and I knew from the dossier that Gennady loved guns but had no access to the outdoors and hunting. He was usually stuck inside a cubicle. We had to get to know each other. So I had planned to lob the word ‘shooter’ into the conversation at some point to get the discussion started.”

  Gennady said that he had always wanted to shoot an American hunting rifle. He described the type of firearm, animating his arms and hands as if he were loading it, manipulating its bolt action, bringing it up to his shoulder, aiming at a carefully selected target, and firing it. Cowboy thought his new Russian contact’s handling of the imaginary weapon bordered on being sexual, as if he were dancing with it or talking it into an upstairs bedroom.

  “I could probably get my hands on some different guns. Maybe we could go out shooting, Gennady,” Cowboy said.

  “Please, Chris, you can call me Genya. Yes. Yes, let’s do that.”

  “Halfway through the game I realized, I really like this guy,” Cowboy recalled.

  As the men went their separate ways after the game, they couldn’t have known how similar they were at their core.

  The one chink in Cowboy Jack’s armor was a danger variable he himself had helped establish on his list of potential spy vulnerabilities: he was an alcoholic, and his condition in the late 1970s was not yet under control. Nor was it a secret to those in the intelligence community. “I thought one day the CIA might throw him out,” Gennady says. “They actually came close to doing it. Then I could offer him a job at the KGB.” Of course, Gennady loved his vodka, but having been weaned on it since childhood, it had little effect on him.

  As different as Cowboy and Gennady were in personality and operating style, both men were patriotic risk takers. Both loved their chosen professions and had no respect for the desk jockeys and quasi academics who populated their trade. The only way to do this job, they were certain, was to be out engaging the enemy—even if that engagement included friendship—rather than just typing up reports, which was a bigger part of being a spy than most people could fathom. And they really loved their guns.

  Both men had reputations as “cowboys” in a world of staid “agency men.” It was clear that part of their bonding resulted from the fact that they were both spooks who played by their own rules, kindred spirits who validated each other’s quirky approach to their straitlaced profession. So intensely did Cowboy and Gennady loathe bureaucrats that they subscribed to a theory—neither was sure who came up with it—that bureaucrats were actually manufactured in a factory by a shrewd capitalist enterprise because the global demand for them was so huge. Cowboy theorized that this factory was, for some reason, located in Teaneck, New Jersey—mostly because Cowboy didn’t like Teaneck, New Jersey.

  The duo had signed on to their respective spy organizations at a time when the stakes couldn’t have been higher and the East-West chasm couldn’t have been wider. The Cold War, after a brief period of détente, had escalated in the 1960s: U-2 spy planes were shot down, the Cuban missile crisis took the world to the lip of Armageddon, the Berlin Wall had been erected, Oleg Penkovsky had sold the USSR’s technical nuclear missile designs to the US (for which he was summarily executed), to name but a few of the provocations. By far the top priority for both the KGB and the CIA was to gather intelligence t
o stop a nuclear first strike. The KGB even gave the intel-gathering operation a code name: VRYAN (Vnezapnoye Raketnoye Yadernoye Napadeniye), a Russian acronym for “surprise nuclear missile attack.”

  Fellow KGB agent assigned to DC Yuri Shvets wrote, “The primary mission entrusted to me and my colleagues at the Washington residency, as spelled out in the KGB chairman’s orders and instructions, was to prevent a sudden US nuclear missile attack against the USSR. No more. No less.”

  A 1990 study by George H. W. Bush’s President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) concluded that in the late ’70s and early ’80s the Soviets genuinely believed a nuclear first strike against them by the US and NATO was a strong likelihood, not just academic war gaming. The Soviets referred to this period as the “war scare.”

  The intel-gathering priority was not as fanciful as it might seem today. Other now-declassified documents show that as far back as July 20, 1961, President Kennedy’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a first nuclear strike. They answered questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until recently. According to a memo about the meeting, Kennedy posed the following queries to his National Security Council:

  • “Has there ever been made an assessment of damage results to the USSR which would be incurred by a preemptive attack?”

  • “What would happen if we launched a strike in the winter of 1962?” Allen Dulles, then Director of the CIA, responded: “The attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved.” In December 1962 the US would have had too few missiles, but by December of 1963 there likely would have been sufficient numbers.