Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  7

  SOFTLY, SOFTLY, CATCHEE MONKEY

  What are you guys doing to my friends?

  August 2005, Solntzevo, Russia

  His captors were moving him around from cell to cell, without warning, forcing him to adapt to different environments on a dime. The objective was disorientation: to make him feel a glimmer of hope that the next room would be better, the next inquisitor would be kinder. The dashed expectations, in theory, would leave him so lost that he would do—or say—anything to achieve a return to normalcy.*

  For now, Gennady was groggy, tired enough to crave sleep, but anxious enough to know his sleep would be sabotaged by a boot, a slap, or, at this moment, a cold bucket of dirty water thrown at his face. He spit out the water and coughed to catch his breath.

  “Terrorists don’t sleep well in Russia,” the gray-faced FSB man lectured Gennady. He removed his thick-soled boot and whipped it around by its fraying laces, moving it closer and closer to Gennady’s face.

  “You know that I am not a terrorist!”

  “You had the bomb residue on your fingers,” the interrogator shouted, the air from the rotating boot feeling cold against Gennady’s wet cheeks.

  “You put it there!”

  “Listen to the conspiracies from the terrorist!” the interrogator said, now lowering his boot onto a steel table. “We’ll start out nice, shall we? How did you convince your friends at the rezidentura in Washington to join the Americans?”

  Gennady had no idea what the man was talking about. “Who joined the Americans?”

  “You know, comrade. You worked together.”

  “I worked with hundreds of people,” Gennady said.

  “I’m not talking about hundreds. I’m talking about two in particular.”

  “I don’t know who you—”

  Before Gennady could finish his sentence, he felt the boot hit the bridge of his nose, blood now dripping on his upper lip. Two in particular? What were they talking about? Did they mean Jack and Dion? Nothing made sense except the pain. The pain was perfectly clear.

  December 1986

  For all his gruff demeanor and gun-slinging antics, Cowboy had a deliberate, strategic side. “Softly, softly, catchee monkey” Cowboy liked to say to explain his modus operandi. He knew he would never turn Gennady with a sledgehammer and had been frustrated that Gerber, whose intellect he admired, didn’t seem to appreciate that his romancing of the Russian was part of a gradual campaign. So when Cowboy decided he wanted to travel once more to Guyana and learned that Gerber would be out of the office late in the year, he schemed to approach his substitute SE chief, Milt Bearden, and angle for permission.

  Cowboy entered Bearden’s office—decked out in his best rodeo attire Bearden recalls—demanding a quick sign-off on both a trip to Guyana and the purchase of a special rifle.

  “You’re going to have to tell me who you’re going to kill before I sign off.”

  “It’s for Gennady Vasilenko,” Cowboy informed him.

  The two sparred for twenty minutes over the advisability of such a request. Like Gerber and Redmond before him, Bearden knew that Cowboy had met with Gennady dozens of times without a hint of success. “Why try again?” Bearden asked. “Is this thing going anywhere? Or are you and Rankin just jerking each other off?”

  Yet Bearden finally relented and signed off on the foray. Gerber says that when he found out what Jack had done, he wasn’t upset; he just laughed at Jack’s cheekiness.

  Before leaving, Cowboy and Dion went to a local custom T-shirt shop and had gifts made for Gennady, the embassy staff, and their friends at the Pegasus. The shirts bore a map of Guyana and Gennady’s favorite new expression: GUYANA: IT’S NOT THE END OF THE EARTH, BUT YOU CAN SEE IT FROM HERE. Gennady hated it there so much, Dion explains, that he retains the shirt to this day.

  After their arrival in Georgetown, Dion and Cowboy kidnapped the third Musketeer, taking him to the Pegasus, where they were anxious to make a presentation.

  “Happy birthday, Commie.” Cowboy laughed as he handed Gennady the long, thin package.

  “It’s my cowboy gun!” Gennady rejoiced on receiving his prize, kissing the stock of the deer-hunting rifle. The lever-action Marlin 336 chambered in .30-30 was—and remains—among the quintessential American hunting rifles, the kind audiences routinely see in movies made during Hollywood’s golden age of Westerns. But in the suspicious eyes of the KGB, it would prove to be a potent symbol of Gennady’s betrayal of the Motherland.

  Cowboy had gone down to Guyana with the Marlin packaged neatly in a felt-lined case along with fifty rounds of ammunition. He had arranged to procure it through McKim Symington, who knew more about firearms than anyone else Cowboy was acquainted with. A colleague of Symington’s had put the weapon up for sale at roughly the same time Cowboy was in the market for one for Gennady.

  “I have a confession,” Cowboy said to Gennady. “My name isn’t Chris.”

  “Let me guess. Jack Platt?” Gennady responded with a sly grin.

  “You knew?”

  “Only since the second time I saw you.”

  “You son of a bitch. How—?”

  “Please, Chris. Show some respect for the KGB. Your little students aren’t the only ones who know how to follow people. In fact, I think my people perfected it. Besides, I like the name ‘Chris.’ But who the fuck cares what your name is?”

  “Who the fuck, indeed.”

  Spring 1987

  Cowboy, now fifty-two and having revamped the Agency’s field training operation, decided he’d had enough of working for the government. For years he had felt disillusioned with the Agency’s bureaucracy and its ceaseless loss of assets. “He just didn’t belong in meetings,” Paige recalls. He had also felt betrayed years earlier by President Jimmy Carter and CIA Director Stansfield Turner when they fired more than six hundred Agency employees in October 1977—the “Halloween Massacre.” It was getting very hard for a spy to, well, spy. As far as he was concerned, the Clandestine Service was dead. Years later, Cowboy would express bitterness over the way his legacy IOC training was treated in his absence. “The FBI still uses the course, but the CIA shut it down in 1993,” he recalled. “ ‘The Cold War is over,’ they had said. I’m glad I got out of that fuckin’ place when I did.”

  Upon his retirement, Cowboy was honored with the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal at a small ceremony held on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters. But the only government people who actually threw him a retirement party were his friends at the Bureau, chiefly Dion Rankin and Mike Rochford. When asked if it was rare for FBI agents to throw a party for a retiring CIA case officer, Dion just laughs. “Are you kidding? We hardly associated with them. But Cowboy was different. When the Bureau people heard they were throwing a lunchtime party for Jack at the Fish Market Restaurant in Old Town Alexandria, about thirty not only came, but we all pitched in to buy him a gift.” Dion knew that Cowboy coveted a Thompson submachine gun, and he located a nice six-hundred-dollar replica at Arlington Arms, which Rochford picked up and to which they affixed a plaque with Jack’s name and the epigram OUTSPOKEN, OUTLANDISH—OUTSTANDING. “Roch” remembers, “It was a rare thing for us to buy a gun for an FBI retiree, let alone a CIA. But when they heard it was for Cowboy, all the Squad members pitched in.” One of Jack’s IOC trainees, Mike Sulick, who was to become Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA, summarizes the feelings of many: “The key thing about Jack’s career was that Jack was among the first to recognize the value of cooperation with the FBI.”

  FBI director William H. Webster, who was in the midst of transitioning to CIA Director, sent a letter of congratulations to Jack. It read, in part:

  I want to take this occasion to thank you for your many contributions over the years to a number of significant achievements which involved joint operations between the FBI and the CIA. In addition to the vital assistance you have provided in the training of FBI personnel, your zeal and professionalism have also greatly strengthened
the long-standing working relationship between our two agencies.

  With a reference to his upcoming post at CIA and to Jack’s legendary scrapes with authority, Webster handwrote a cheeky postscript: “Please leave the Agency on time. I will not come aboard as Director until you have gone. [Signed] WHW.”

  Soon after retirement, Jack created a training and security consulting firm, Hamilton Trading Group (HTG), based just a mile from the CIA’s McLean headquarters. In this new venture, he partnered with veteran CIA officer Ben Wickham, who explains, “Jack had the idea for a security company. We named it after Alexander Hamilton because he was good with numbers but a bad shot.” Everything with Jack was tinged with mischief.

  Wickham and Jack hadn’t known each other when both were actively working for the CIA. They had met the same year they started the company, introduced by a mutual colleague, and were drawn to each other’s complementary skills. Successful local real estate agent Roy Jacobsen helped provide capitalization, and retired FBI agent Bob Olds also joined the founding team. Jacobsen took the lead on pitch meetings, the wise and stolid Wickham concentrated on the business details, and Jack exercised his street skills to serve clients. This was a prudent division of labor because Jack’s business graces were obviously not his strong suit. “Our first receptionist only lasted one day around Jack and his coarse language,” Wickham says, adding that Hamilton once lost an account because Jack’s repeated invocation of the f-bomb to describe the firm’s offerings (“We offer the best fucking tradecraft”) offended female executives. It didn’t help that Cowboy’s leave-behind business card read: “You can count on us. We don’t fuck around.”

  HTG contractor and former FBI man Harry Gossett, who had known Jack since 1980 in the Washington Field Office, was there when the company lost a big State Department job thanks to Jack. “A young State Department clerk came by to deliver the news that Jack had offended someone by using ‘the f word,’” Gossett recalls.

  “What f word was that?” Jack asked the timid messenger.

  “You know…”

  “Oh, you mean ‘foreign’?” Jack asked, toying with him.

  “No, sir.”

  “Was it ‘federal’?”

  No response.

  “Well, what the fuck was it?” Jack bellowed, cracking up everyone but the clerk.

  “We did it for the fun of it,” remembers Jacobsen. “It has never been about money for any of us. We’re all crazy that way.” Jacobsen’s contacts provided the first income. “Ben didn’t like pitch meetings, and Jack… forget it.”

  “Jack just didn’t care about money,” Paige remembers, “and he hardly took anything out of Hamilton.” He just liked keeping busy and working with people he liked and on projects that he found challenging. Jack would often come home and tell Paige, “You know, I really love my boss,” referring to himself. Paige would roll her eyes.

  HTG exploited Jack’s strong relationships with the FBI to get contracts, which included training the aforementioned State Department’s Regional Security Office and FBI agents in surveillance detection on the streets of the Bureau’s “Hogan’s Alley” city replica in Quantico, Virginia. Jack also tapped Williams College classmate and ex-FBI man Dave Cook, who now headed security for the International Monetary Fund, to help land a lucrative contract. HTG secured training contracts with the FBI’s Academy Counterintelligence Investigations Corps (CIIOPS) as well as the DoD’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA). For this contract alone, Jack traveled to eighteen cities to train agents of the Bureau’s Special Surveillance Group (SSG) and Special Operations Group (SOG).*

  CIA losses continued to mount, including assets Boris Yuzhin, Colonel Leonid Polishchuk, and Vladimir Potashiv. Jack remained convinced that turncoats were still out there, and if there was one thing he hated, it was traitors to the United States, the “precious experiment,” as his father had always called it. The country’s survival was a subject that could bring Jack to tears, both because of his fear for the nation’s well-being and because it brought back memories of his discussions with his beloved old man. He was determined to hunt the traitor down and punish him (“Gimme five minutes alone with the bastard”) and believed that the answer to the puzzle would ultimately lie with Gennady’s contacts.

  On Halloween in 1987, it was back to Guyana again for now private citizen Cowboy Jack and recently (albeit temporarily) retired Dion. The Bureau hadn’t given up on Gennady, and neither had his friend Cowboy, who always believed that Gennady would one day live in the United States, whether as a Soviet defector/asset or just as a private citizen. Thus Cowboy worked out a contract arrangement with the Agency so that he could play out Operation Dovka as long as possible. The Three Musketeers had continued to meet in Guyana approximately twice a year since 1985, and it was always the same routine: target shooting on the seawall and closing the bars every night (Cowboy sipping near beers, of course).

  “Each meeting got us a little more into the case,” remembers Dion, who at that time was working just this case for the Bureau, also as a contract operative. “Gennady told us he had handled Pelton and how he had snuck him out the back entrance of the Soviet Embassy in coveralls after shaving his beard. He told us innocuous things that we already knew, like who else the KGB had been targeting in Washington. He also gave me a Makarov .380 on one trip. I asked him if he stole it from a Soviet cache that he routinely transshipped to Cuba.”

  “Of course,” he laughed. “Fuck ’em.”

  There was something halting in Gennady’s laugh, however, but Cowboy had learned not to press him on every little errant expression. Indeed, belying Gennady’s pleasure at the reunion with Cowboy and Dion was a bleak reality he couldn’t shake, but he had to find the right moment to bring it up. One day at the seawall, Cowboy noticed Gennady brooding uncharacteristically and shrugged at him, as if to say, “What’s wrong?”

  Gennady set down his Marlin rifle. “What are you guys doing to my friends?” His voiced choked.

  “What friends?” Cowboy asked. He suddenly felt defensive and his mind raced over whom the uncharacteristically confrontational Gennady may be referring to.

  “Motorin and Martynov were killed!”

  Cowboy and Dion looked at each other, genuinely shocked at the news. They were aware that Gennady must have known his two Washington rezidentura KGB mates (especially Motorin) but hadn’t been aware of how close they had been. At the same time, the Americans knew that Gennady had no idea his pals had been working for the FBI. And they weren’t about to tell him. Despite the way he had phrased the question to Cowboy and Dion, Gennady hadn’t assumed the CIA had literally murdered his friends—both US and Soviet intelligence weren’t exactly known for killing their “main enemy” espionage adversaries—but there was a traitor deep inside whom the Americans had better deal with, and fast.

  “Believe me,” Cowboy replied to Gennady, “this is the first I’ve heard of it. But I’ll find out.” He wasn’t kidding.

  No one in the US intelligence community had known about the two KGB officers’ fates before Gennady confronted Cowboy and Dion in Guyana. Gennady’s emotional outburst about Martynov and Motorin was precisely the kind of information Cowboy had hoped to glean through his sustained, deliberate contact with Gennady, even if it fell short of turning his Russian friend. Softly, softly, catchee monkey.

  But who on the American side had turned? The traitor, whoever he was, had tipped his KGB handlers that Martynov and Motorin were owned and controlled by US intelligence. In response to this valuable report, the KGB decided to bring the traitors back home for a little visit. But they needed to deploy a ruse in order to get them there with their guards down—while keeping the Americans in the dark.

  Gennady’s former DC rezidentura colleague, Valery Martynov, had done quite well for himself since the day Gennady had taken him and fellow new guy Sergei Motorin out for their welcome brunch at Martin’s Tavern. Martynov, whose photo reveals a serious-looking, dark-haired man in his thirt
ies with a full lower lip, had been assigned to “scientific espionage”—primarily trying to ferret out weapons technology secrets, including nuclear arms.

  At one science conference, Martynov met a member of the CI-4 Squad, who in a very short time convinced him to spy for the Americans for the paltry fee of four hundred dollars per month. For the next three years, he met with FBI men approximately twice a month at a safe house in Virginia. Years later, his former boss Cherkashin concluded that Martynov turned traitor for two reasons: to provide for his family and to experience the James Bond excitement of it all.

  Things seemed to be going well when Martynov received a particularly interesting assignment: he was to accompany re-defecting KGB agent Vitaly Yurchenko back to Moscow. Yurchenko had famously defected to the West in Rome in August 1985, giving up Edward Lee Howard. Then, after three months of debriefing in Washington, he re-defected back to the USSR after his mistress, the wife of a Soviet diplomat based in Toronto, broke up with him.

  The day before Yurchenko boarded the plane, his Toronto mistress jumped twenty-seven stories to her death. Svetlana Dedkova was depressed due to not being able to see her fifteen-year-old son back in Moscow, part of the USSR’s policy of holding the children of spies hostage by preventing their parents from having any contact with them. This was considered the second most dissuasive threat to would-be traitors after execution and imprisonment. Gennady had paid close attention to these developments.

  Valery understood his role to be a member of an “honor guard” that would return Yurchenko to Mother Russia. It was a KGB trick. The honor guard swindle was the only way the KGB felt they could fool Martynov into returning to the USSR. Shortly after the Aeroflot jet landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, KGB officers jumped Martynov as he got off the plane. A rare photo of the incident—surely released by the KGB to send a message to aspiring traitors—shows Martynov being braced against a wall by five hulking security men. One of them has his hand cupped over Martynov’s mouth in a gesture that served as a morbid coda to the US asset’s adventures in espionage. Martynov’s eyes gaze upward, oddly passive, as if he had known this moment was coming.