Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  They couldn’t know that their greatest adventures still lay ahead.

  5

  THE IOC

  Do not tell your mother!

  August 27, 2005

  Solntzevo police station

  By his third day in solitary confinement, there was no part of Gennady’s body that didn’t ache from the kicks and beatings, with thick-soled military boots being the weapon of choice. Lying on the stone floor of his cell, curled in the fetal position in his thoroughly blood-soaked FBI sweatshirt, he was certain his left knee was broken. He felt a gash in his forehead and, in his dizzy exhaustion, remembered that this one was not new; it was from the 1988 beating he had endured from his comrades in Havana. Could the bastards have drilled a second divot into his skull?

  Gennady had yet to be given a glass of water, let alone any food, and had lost all sense of time, but it was still dark when a jailer proffered a metal can of water through a portal in the cell’s bars. Struggling to sit up, Gennady took and quickly spit out the vile liquid.

  “What, you don’t like piss?” The guard chuckled as he walked away.

  Before the jailer disappeared down the hallway, an FSB thug carrying a tray full of food took his place. The jailer returned to let him into Gennady’s cell and provided the agent with a chair. Instead of offering any to Gennady, the agent slowly teased him by eating the eggs and toast himself, quaffing it down with a large glass of juice. Gennady begged him for something to drink.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. How rude of me,” replied the FSB man. “Ivan,” he called to the jailer, who appeared with another full tray, setting it just outside the cell bars.

  “I just have a couple of questions before we dine together.” The man smiled, then placed his tray on the floor, out of reach of Gennady’s arm (his other injured in his arrest), and pulled a thick leather whip off his belt. “Don’t worry, it’s the soft one,” he said as he unleashed a flurry of strikes.

  “When did you introduce Chris to Motorin?” Crack.

  “To Martynov?” Crack.

  “Your food’s getting cold, traitor Vasilenko.” The heel of a hurled boot hit him in the lip.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gennady barely uttered. “It was all a coincidence. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “So just how does a man with no pension afford a dacha in the country? Was it FBI money? CIA money? How much?”

  Crack.

  “I never took their money! I swear it on my children’s lives!”

  October 1980

  Upon his return to Washington, Gennady gifted Yakushkin with a UCLA baseball cap. The token, meant to make the stern rezident smile, was immediately tossed in the trash without comment. Within days, Gennady found that his sundry duties now included socializing in a veritable DC institution. Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon all had held court in the dark and cozy wooden booths at Martin’s Tavern on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. On this day, a different breed of Cold Warrior was ordering up an oversized brunch at Martin’s: Gennady Vasilenko and rezidentura newcomers Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin.

  Briefing the new arrivals, Gennady explained the purpose of the large map in the rezidentura anteroom, the first thing an agent saw upon entering. Gennady happily showed the men around town, pointing out, especially to the gregarious Motorin, where the cutest girls could be found. Motorin, a known skirt chaser and prankster, had more in common with Gennady than did the straitlaced Martynov. They were both six-foot-two, womanizing tennis players and neighbors in Arlington. Motorin was also something of a Western music fan. In time, he would share another bond with Gennady: they were both regularly on Yakushkin’s shit list for general insubordination.

  Then Gennady moved on to the subject of lonely girls in the pool of secretaries in the Soviet Embassy. Gennady and Motorin eventually would joke “Let’s raid the refrigerator” when they encountered a dry spell of American talent. Time would demonstrate that Motorin was as reckless as Gennady when it came to the ladies. One time he smashed up his car while squiring a prostitute around Washington. The FBI learned about it from the insurance adjustor assigned to estimate the damage.

  Valery Martynov had a young family similar in age to Gennady’s. In time, he would come to share Gennady’s growing fondness for America to the point where he worked harder than other KGB agents to master English, not only for spying purposes but because of his genuine affinity for the country.

  Although Gennady spent as little time as possible in the rezidentura, when there, he shared a cubicle with other spies who would alter his life, as well as the history of espionage, in major ways. One was, like Gennady, another fan of American music: a young B. B. King–loving officer named Anatoly Stepanov (pseudonym), who was a KGB legacy, the son of another LINE KR officer. “He was a squirrelly guy,” remembers Gennady, who remembered Stepanov from the days when they both worked at Yasenevo. “Not really a team player, out for himself.” At the moment, Stepanov’s self-serving attitude was just a minor irritation, but it would come to haunt Gennady in the decades ahead.

  For Gennady, the cubicle boredom was finally broken when a suspicious walk-in arrived at the Soviet Embassy in the spring of 1980. Ronald William Pelton was a recently retired, highly placed official with the famously impenetrable—pre–Edward Snowden—National Security Agency. One day in 1980, Pelton walked off the street and into the embassy to volunteer his services. After a debriefing by Gennady’s colleague Vitaly Yurchenko, Gennady’s boss decided Pelton was a snare—a double agent—and he didn’t want to waste his time with him. “Let me try with this guy,” Gennady offered. It made sense: both men were schooled in technology, and it was hoped that would give them a starting point for friendly conversation. For Gennady, the Pelton recruitment was a perfect case in point to showcase his seducer’s modus operandi. During their meetings in pizza parlors and at malls, Gennady saw opportunity and cheered Pelton on, sympathizing with his financial struggles, the urgent repairs to his house he couldn’t afford to make, and the NSA bosses who didn’t appreciate his many gifts.

  In a few months, Gennady was squiring Pelton around Vienna, Austria, for clandestine debriefs—easier to soften a target to the notes of Mozart and Beethoven than those of John Philip Sousa, and it was a nice upgrade from pizza parlors. But the payoff was huge: Pelton eventually compromised, among other things, Operation Ivy Bells, the US scheme to monitor Soviet military communications, including submarine activity. He helped the Soviets uncover the bugging operation, which allowed them to take countermeasures, including passing potential disinformation. The rezidentura’s counterintelligence chief, Victor Cherkashin, summarizes Gennady’s success: “Washington… had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the operation… Pelton shut down the whole project for $35,000.” Gennady had delivered big-time.

  Gennady’s important assignments with Pelton and other walk-ins put his intricate dance with Jack and Dion on the back burner for the time being. The Musketeers’ soft recruitment gambits were seemingly to come to an end in 1981, when Gennady and his family were routinely rotated back to the Soviet Union. Before the Vasilenkos’ June departure, Dion went to his supervisor, Lane Crocker, with a last-ditch ploy. “I talked to Lane about the idea of offering Gennady an inducement to stay in the US,” Rankin recalls. “Jack and I thought that we couldn’t get an outright recruitment, but perhaps a defection.” With Irina, Ilya, and Julia here, the team believed this would be their best chance. Crocker, who supported both Dion and Operation DOVKA completely, quickly got his CIA counterpart’s concurrence on the overture. “I was given a large brown shopping bag containing four green cards for Gennady’s family and forty thousand dollars in cash,” says Rankin, which is the equivalent of more than $100,000 today. “That bag sat in my house for a week or so, until I could coordinate a meeting with Gennady. My wife, Jennifer, was a nervous wreck.”

  George Powstenko arranged the meet-up at Blackie’s House of Beef in DC. There, Dion hauled his pr
ecious brown bag up to a private room arranged by George for the sit-down with Jack and Gennady. Before lunch, Dion gave George “the look,” which told him to disappear for a few minutes, after which Dion and Jack showed Gennady the booty with the clear implication that it represented just an initial show of good intentions. “We let him know that there’d be much more where that came from,” says Dion.

  “All we want is for you to stay in America—no spying, just a better life,” explained Rankin.

  Gennady responded predictably: “Just take out enough for lunch and a bottle of champagne.” As he said this, he was mindful of personal issues that trumped his love of Western stuff and these new friends. “I need to go home,” he explained. “Irina’s father is not doing well, and I do love my country. Now let’s eat.” An hour later, as the trio stood in the parking lot, Gennady added solemnly, “I don’t want to hear from you guys. I’ll help you find me when I get out.”

  Dogged Dion made a few more attempts to change Gennady’s mind at social gatherings, but it was clear he was getting agitated, so Dion let it be, and the two said their goodbyes.

  Soon thereafter, it was Jack’s turn to say a final farewell to his Russian Cowboy counterpart, driving the Vasilenkos to Dulles Airport. At the gate, after Irina and the kids had disappeared down the jetway, Jack gave his friend a “Russian bear” hug. One more time, Jack asked, “Are you sure I can’t get you and your family to stay?”

  The refrain to switch sides had become more of a squabble between an old married couple at this point rather than an enticement to commit treason. Gennady just replied, “Would you stop with that already?”

  “Call me when you get settled,” Jack said.

  “No way,” Gennady replied. “That’s not how it works in Moscow for KGB. But we will see each other again. This I promise. Like I told you before, I’ll help you find me when I’m out of the country. Tell all the American girls to wait for me.” He laughed as he boarded his plane.

  When Jack returned to the parking garage, he noticed that Gennady had left a long box in the backseat of the car, to which a handwritten note had been affixed:

  Chris, they only made seven of these. Don’t ask how I got it. Of course, this means I can still chase girls! Until we meet again, GV.

  Opening the box, Jack saw a custom Russian carbine, sporting a gorgeous hand-carved walnut stock. Jack would later learn that this was a rare MCC 551, designed for a former Communist Party bigwig.

  For the next three years, Gennady was back at “Little Langley,” the KGB’s Yasenevo First Chief Directorate headquarters, working a desk job in the massive North America department, which consumed half the main building’s fifth floor. Gennady’s friend “Chris” was similarly assigned at the real Langley, where for the next five years he was tasked with updating the Agency’s field operations training—another blessed reason to be out of the building as much as possible. Some colleagues have opined that Agency bureaucrats still didn’t trust Jack in the field given his former alcohol problems. Others disagree, explaining that Jack was selected because he alone had inherited his mentor Hav Smith’s operational trickery, devised for the vicious Berlin front. Additionally, Jack’s experience included all that he had learned at the feet of his Laotian colleagues, Brian O’Connor, George Kenning Jr., and their “Black Thai” operatives, the Kangaroos, and all of that combined expertise was needed now more than ever. An espionage storm was brewing that would soon make the Musketeers’ carefree days but a distant memory.

  In the 1980s, Cowboy Jack and his CIA colleagues were dealing with the harsh new reality of Iron Curtain espionage. According to a 2008 study by the Department of Defense, US spies saw a 30 percent drop in successful “espionage attempts” after 1980. Divorce rates among operatives doubled during the same period, and CIA field officers were being routinely identified and expelled from the “denied areas.” But most importantly, the work had become exponentially more dangerous than ever before—indeed deadly.

  Haviland Smith once summarized the challenge starkly: “What most Americans don’t ever consider is that the job of CIA case officers who work overseas in human espionage operations is to break the laws of the countries where they serve. During the Cold War, when we met a Soviet citizen in Moscow who was one of our agents, we were breaking Soviet law by that simple act. There is no other nonmilitary organization in the US government whose job it is to break other countries’ laws.”

  The KGB was always more adept at the craft of espionage, due in large part to the USSR’s closed-society history and the free rein given to its defense and security apparatus. By the ’80s, its home-turf surveillance had become downright smothering—not just on suspected spies but on all non-Soviets. Camera and microphone factories likely ran three shifts per day in order to keep up with the KGB’s demand that every conceivable Moscow hotel, restaurant, and museum be covered. Anya Schmemann, the daughter of Serge Schmemann, a reporter for the New York Times who had brought his family on his Moscow assignment during this period, recalled that her family was under relentless surveillance, including being followed, having their phones and apartment tapped, and having their mail opened. The Schmemanns accepted as fact that their government-provided housekeeper was providing the KGB with updates on the family’s activities—and they behaved accordingly.

  Field operatives obtained evidence that the KGB was even resorting to the use of the dangerous tracking tool known to the CIA as “spy dust” and to the KGB as metka (Russian for “mark”). This substance—nitrophenyl pentadienal (NPPD), sometimes combined with luminol—was sprinkled on a target as a fine, invisible-to-the-eye powder. When a KGB agent shone a special light on the surface of the CIA operative’s clothes, the particles illuminated, making for easy tracking at night and in a crowd.

  But the KGB wasn’t flawless. For the better part of a quarter century they failed to realize that a GRU general, Dmitri Polyakov (CIA code name BOURBON), had been spying for the CIA. Polyakov’s bosses had denied him the opportunity to take his gravely ill young son to the United States for medical treatment. The boy died, so Polyakov sought his revenge by furnishing the CIA with valuable information about Soviet battlefield weaponry and the state of the tenuous relationship between his country and Communist China. Some in the spy community believe that Polyakov’s information, coupled with a dose of Ping-Pong diplomacy,* helped pave the way for President Richard Nixon’s breakthrough outreach to China in 1972. A veteran CIA officer described Polyakov’s reports as being “like Christmas.” Said former CIA Director James Woolsey, “Polyakov was the jewel in the crown.” Polyakov was executed for treason in 1988.

  Often a spy’s detection came down to something as simple as a staple: meticulously detailed CIA-made fake passports were routinely spotted as such by KGB-trained customs officers due to the fact that the documents’ bindings were held together with staples made of superior American stainless-steel-coated wire, whereas a true Soviet passport began falling apart as soon as it was put together, due to inferior copper-coated Russian staples that began corroding immediately. But more likely their discovery came as a result of the KGB’s brilliant surveillance, brutal interrogations, and seemingly endless supply of agents on the streets. US spies referred to this oppressive—and brutally effective—Soviet-style espionage as the “Moscow rules” (commandments for operating in “denied areas”), and in order to deal with this dangerous new world, CIA executives decided by 1980 that field operatives required better training.

  Up until this time, field case officers relied on the training that all new personnel received at the CIA’s then-secret facility called The Farm, situated between Interstate 64 and the York River, near Williamsburg, Virginia. Disguised on maps and signage as a fictitious military base named “Camp Peary,” with a gated security entrance sign bearing the words ARMED FORCES EXPERIMENTAL TRAINING ACTIVITY, the nearly ten-thousand-acre complex is actually owned and operated by US spymasters.

  On the property sits a barracks, warehouse, gym, target
ranges, and even a private airstrip labeled “Camp Peary Airstrip” on Google Maps. Rookie officers spend their first four months completing the Agency’s Operations Course (OC), where they learn to shed surveillance, recruit and handle agents, master disguises, and perform basic paramilitary functions. The Farm’s training program certainly had been adequate for the first decades of the CIA, which was founded in 1947, but considering the KGB tactics developing behind the Iron Curtain—and the CIA’s losses—it was found clearly wanting. Thus it was decided that officers heading into that particular maelstrom needed additional preparation, beyond the OC.

  The origins of the OC involved Hav Smith’s time in Berlin in 1961 when the Wall went up. Having to send so-called rabbits into the Soviet Sector had required a whole new approach. It hadn’t been so much about guarding the rabbits; it had been about protecting their assets. If the enemy was able to follow a case officer to a meet-up, the officer would be arrested, perhaps briefly roughed up, and then exiled back to the US. But the hard-won asset would almost assuredly be killed.

  Hav went back to the US to formulate the OC. Dave Forden was one of his first students. They trained in New York City’s Grand Central Station, where the “rabbits” were set loose, and Hav stood on a second-floor balcony so he could watch the action. The new brush pass technique was perfected there, going up and down the station stairs.

  The idea for new human-contact tradecraft had been firmly resisted by Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms in the 1960s, but in the 1980s, with “Moscow rules” in effect, it was clear to all that even more involved training had to be done. To head up the development of an additional course, Dave Forden—by now the SE Division chief—needed someone who was as tough as nails, could think subversively, and possessed years of experience in hostile “denied” overseas environments. Unsurprisingly, Forden turned to Marine Jack Platt, whose mentor, now-retired tradecraft master Haviland Smith, had taught him many of his best surveillance-detection creations. As Jack told trainee-author Michael Sellers in 2010, “We stood on the shoulders of great men and women who ran the course before us.”