Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  KGB enforcers arrest Gennady’s friend, Valery Martynov, May 28, 1987.

  Like Martynov, Sergei Motorin had been greatly enjoying life in the United States. Gennady describes him enthusiastically as a friend he had known better than Martynov. Tall, athletic, and sandy haired with a wispy blond moustache, Motorin betrayed the slightest hint of a Californian. In 1980, Motorin stopped into an electronics store in the affluent DC suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland. His eyes fell upon a high-end piece of combination television and stereo equipment. His cash on hand fell short of the retail price, nearly $1,000—a significant sum. The retailer presented Motorin with an offer: he could make up for the shortfall with a case of Russian vodka. When Motorin brought the vodka, he could take the stereo.

  There were two problems with this arrangement. The first was that the KGB expressly forbade Soviet officials from selling Russian goods to Americans because they were to be used exclusively for compromising traitors—and for fear it might compromise them. (It turned out the latter was a good assumption.) The second problem was that the FBI had filmed the whole transaction, and they vowed to send pictures of their thus far fruitless meetings to Victor Cherkashin, the rezidentura’s new counterintelligence chief, to which Motorin responded, “Fuck off.” A real Americanized wise guy, like his friend Gennady, who had probably seen too many Hollywood flicks.

  The FBI kept working on Motorin, “bumping into” him at least eight more times over a period of months, all the while being photographed by the Bureau’s surveillance team. It wasn’t that Motorin’s sins were unforgivable in and of themselves; it was that he didn’t want to go back to the Soviet Union, which is exactly what would have happened if his bosses saw the photos. They would surely conclude that nine meetings couldn’t be a coincidence. One fellow KGB agent states, “He lived in mortal fear of being recalled… He preferred a well-fed America to a Soviet Union on a permanent diet.”

  What Motorin failed to do next ultimately sealed his fate. KGB rules dictated that any approach by a foreign operative must be reported. But Motorin knew what that meant: a busted covert agent was immediately shipped back to Moscow. It was a sentence Motorin couldn’t accept. Soon he was studying the central map in the rezidentura, the very one that Gennady had briefed him on years before, and memorizing the day’s dead drops, with code names. Then Motorin reported the details to his FBI contact, roughly seventy-five times over the years. This allowed the Bureau to go directly to KGB meetings at the exact time, thereby avoiding the expense of trailing operatives for hours while they ran their surveillance-eluding routes. In his five years as a spy, Motorin essentially gave up the Soviet’s whole Washington, DC, operation for some high-end American electronics.

  Whereas Martynov was taken down in the elaborate “honor guard” charade, Motorin just disappeared. Stories vary on precisely how he was rolled up, but one report indicates he was arrested in the winter of 1986 on his way to meet a CIA contact. He was taken to the dreaded Lefortovo Prison in Moscow.

  On occasion, firing squads did the dirty work in the prison’s courtyard. (Wild rumors ran rampant about the prison’s massive meat grinder, which, like in a scene from the musical Sweeney Todd, mashed the bodies of the tortured before disposing of them in Moscow sewers. The specter of such a fate was the historic backdrop against which Gennady—and all other KGB agents—perpetually worked.) Martynov and Motorin were tortured at Lefortovo for a damage control assessment of their betrayals. The men stuck to their much-rehearsed stories to no avail. Soon they were introduced to the Lefortovo “method.” Gennady later said, “Lefortovo was called the ‘Killing Prison’; traitors were led down a dark basement corridor. Gunmen hid in niches; they would emerge behind them in the dark and shoot them in the back of the head. The prisoner is not even told he is going to be killed.”

  Both Motorin and Martynov had been in their early forties in 1987 when they were executed, leaving young wives and children behind. It had taken the Americans decades to cultivate assets as helpful as they had been. Yet after a few short years, they were gone. The midpoint of this lethal time period, 1985, was known in the intelligence community as the “Year of the Spy.”

  In Guyana that October 1987, all cards were now on the table, with Cowboy and Dion doubling down on their plea to have Gennady stay in the West. The definition of their friendship agreed to during their “dealmaker” trip to San Diego was now forgotten, as this plea came with a desperate warning, especially given what had happened to Gennady’s two rezidentura colleagues. Cowboy told him that Vitaly Yurchenko might have also placed him in jeopardy with the KGB.

  “Gennady, we asked him repeatedly about you, whether you might defect,” Cowboy told his friend. Cowboy and Dion didn’t tell Gennady that Yurchenko had blown Gennady’s biggest success, Ronald Pelton.

  But Gennady would have none of it. “I have always been a patriot, and everyone at the Center [KGB headquarters] knows it,” he said. “And how would you propose to get my family over here? Now come watch my volleyball championship game.”

  At the time, he was playing volleyball for the Guyana national team. Cowboy and Dion sat with bank teller Sherry, directly across the court from the bleachers that held the KGB contingent. The Soviet rezident, Gennady’s good friend Boris Kotov, pointed out Cowboy and Dion to Gennady, saying, “Look at that. They look like two Americans. What are they doing here? Gennady, try to find out about them.”

  “Right after the game, sir,” came Gennady’s reply.

  That evening back at the Pegasus, Cowboy and Dion filed their report about their day with Gennady. They noted the revelations about Motorin’s and Martynov’s executions, how Gennady had handled Pelton’s escape, and even Gennady’s strong “friendship” with Sherry. They added that they had made one more pitch to the Russian, citing that Yurchenko might have compromised him. After delivering the memo to the CIA station in Georgetown, the duo packed their bags for the trip home. The day before, Dion had gifted Gennady with a souvenir: a dark blue jacket with FBI ACADEMY on the front. They had all laughed as the Russian modeled it.

  This vignette would not be amusing for long. Six thousand miles away in Mother Russia, Gennady’s KGB bosses would soon deliver other “gifts” to him; Dion and Cowboy’s report—this seemingly harmless piece of paper—had inadvertently set Gennady’s terrible fate in motion.

  The two Musketeers had made vague plans to return to visit Gennady again in early 1988 to celebrate Cowboy’s birthday in February. As that time drew closer, FBI deputy Chief of Station Bob Wade called Cowboy to say that an Agency source reported that Gennady had disappeared. “Don’t bother going. Your friend Gennady has fallen off the face of the earth,” Wade informed a crestfallen Cowboy.

  “We had lost so many people by 1988 that I had a fear of what had happened to Genya,” Cowboy said. “I was really upset. I was more than concerned. But there was nothing I could do.”

  8

  HAVANA TAKEDOWN

  I should have listened when they told me to stay away from the son of a bitch.

  In January 1988, Gennady was summoned from Georgetown, Guyana, to Havana for a routine meeting with a KGB colleague visiting Cuba. One of Gennady’s assignments was to type up a report documenting his observations about significant political events taking place in South America, of which there were few worth recording. It was the equivalent of cobbling together a grade school book report about a boring piece of literature. While Guyana’s climate was appealing, Gennady had been growing bored with the monotony and could no longer delude himself with notions of the country’s strategic importance. There had been no more Jonestowns or flashy proxy showdowns between the Americans and the Soviets. After all, a place can be strategically important but tactically boring as hell. Besides, how much more of a suntan could a kid from Siberia get?

  Still, Gennady was looking forward to the Cuba trip. He had been there before for the rezidentura and knew a thing or two about Cuban women, Havana nights. The legends of the decadent 1950s had outliv
ed the demise of the American Mafia’s casinos, and as far as he was concerned, female beauty could flourish just as easily under dictator Fidel Castro as it could mobster Meyer Lansky. The report for the file would be the price he paid to experience la dolce vita. Gennady had become an old hand at grinding out some garbage memo and pretending it was of global historical significance. And the great bureaucracy that was the KGB knew it was all nonsense, too.

  At the Havana airport on January 11, 1988, Gennady met a KGB officer—not the agent who usually picked him up when he delivered diplomatic pouches—who explained they had found a private place for Gennady to stay during his visit. The two went straight from the airport to a nondescript house. Tired from the trip, he entered the little house and followed his KGB greeter out to a terrace. Suddenly, the world went black and he was falling. Several comrades had attacked him from behind. He fell forward, unable to block the fall with both arms because they had pinned one behind him. The fall gave him a concussion and broke his arm. Gennady still has the scar on his forehead—more of an indentation where his hairline used to be—from being smashed to the floor.

  The KGB goons dragged him into another room and threw him onto a chair. The lead interrogator began with two words: “Chris Llorenz.”

  “What about him?” Gennady asked.

  “You tell us.”

  “There is nothing to tell.”

  Gennady felt the sting of a slap to his cheek. “What have you told Llorenz?”

  “I’ve told him to aim a little lower when he shoots his Smith and Wesson,” Gennady said. “That way he can hit the tin cans better. He always aims too high when he shoots.”

  Another crack across his face. “You think this is a joke?” his interrogator shouted.

  “I think you are a joke!” Gennady shouted back. “I told my superiors every time I met with Chris! Is that what a clever traitor does?”

  The chair Gennady was seated on was kicked over onto the floor, inflaming his concussion. He felt as if his skull had been shattered into a hundred pieces and fragments were swirling around his brain. His statement wasn’t entirely true. Yes, Gennady had dutifully informed his superiors about most of his meetings with Jack, but he found any implication that he had been a traitor so preposterous that he hadn’t bothered to tell them about every contact he had had with the rough-and-tumble American. It wasn’t as if the meetings had even been clandestine: they had been shooting high-powered rifles on public seawalls!

  “Maybe that’s your traitor’s cover.”

  “When I told my boss I would see Chris and my boss said no, sometimes I said, ‘Fuck you.’ That’s my traitor’s cover.”

  The thugs kicked him as he lay curled up in a ball on the ground.

  “What about Dion Rankin?” the lead interrogator asked.

  “What about him?” Gennady answered.

  “Did you meet with him?”

  “Yes, of course I did. And I told my bosses I did. That was my job!”

  “But you admit you saw Llorenz and Rankin after you were told not to?”

  “Damned right!”

  “Don’t be clever! Did you know his real name? Jack Platt? Did you expect that we wouldn’t figure that out?”

  “I knew Chris wasn’t his real name, but I never talked about it. Tell me something,” Gennady said. “How exactly do you think I could recruit a man if I never meet with him?”

  This stopped the beatings. For a bit.

  The questioning and physical abuse went on for days, and almost every query came back to one thing: his friendship with “Chris”—Jack—the man he had been tasked with recruiting as a spy. Not only had Gennady failed to “turn” Chris; the KGB believed they now had evidence that Chris had turned him. The KGB, however, never got anything new from Gennady because, as he recalls it, “[t]here was nothing to tell.”

  But Gennady also knew that a lack of evidence was far from a guarantee of his survival. “I knew the KGB’s history of executions,” he says. “I believed I was dead. Even if they knew the arrest was a mistake, they’d shoot me to cover up the mistake. So I thought, Why not jump off the deck and just kill myself? Then I thought about my wife and kids.”

  Gennady knew it was hopeless when they didn’t even bother chaining him inside the dark compartment they transferred him to, below deck on an old KGB freighter that left Havana hours later. They had already worked him over and they would do so again. It occurred to Gennady that enduring another beating might perversely be the only thing that would convince his comrades he had been telling the truth about his allegiance to Mother Russia.

  Gennady’s KGB comrades let him wander alone around the rusty deck at night, hundreds of miles from anywhere. Yet, this brief illusion of freedom was worse. Had they tortured him below deck there was always the chance they would figure out that he was innocent and set him free. No, Gennady thought, my comrades have made up their minds. They think I belong to the Americans. They used to tease the handsome and fun-loving Russian that he carried himself more like a California jock than a dour KGB spook. He was, after all, a professional sportsman.

  There was another reason why the KGB failed to get anything more out of Gennady during those harrowing days and nights at sea: every night, seated with his hands tied behind him, Gennady was punched in his ears with the fists of his captors. As time wore on, he literally could not hear what he was being asked. His partial deafness is a disability that lingers to this day.

  Gennady ran the facts through his throbbing head as he held the railing of the freighter, once again contemplating an easy hop overboard into the darkness. Which would be better: the cold black sea or Lefortovo Prison’s “method”? Gennady envisioned his future in that high-security hellhole, the interrogation center of the KGB. The “Killing Prison.” How long did he have before he took that final walk? Would he even know the KGB assassin who would descend bat-like from the darkness and put a bullet in the base of his skull? He figured if he hopped overboard he would drown in the frigid water within an hour. A bullet to the brain in Lefortovo would kill him in a split second, but he could be there—and be tortured—for years. No easy answers, only terrible options.

  KGB agents, suspected of being CIA operatives, had been turning up dead throughout the 1980s; Soviet justice had no place for traitors in its prisons, only its anonymous cemeteries. Some of them had been his friends and office mates, like Martynov and Motorin. The KGB had a traitor burrowed deep inside the US intelligence infrastructure, a sociopath willing to out his fellows to the Russians for blood money. The Soviets vowed to do anything to keep the traitor in place, including cracking down on their own spies, who were getting too cozy with their Western counterparts. In Gennady’s case, he was not only disobeying orders by fraternizing with Platt; a document recently obtained from an asset appeared also to finger him as another KGB turncoat, a betrayal so severe that trials were not needed, only elimination. Gennady was innocent, but he knew that when the bureaucracy panicked and couldn’t nail who was guilty, they nailed whomever they could grab. My guilt need not be genuine, Gennady thought. It need only be plausible.

  As the freighter groaned toward Russia, Gennady suspected from the clues in his interrogation who had betrayed him: his CIA “friend,” the Cowboy. Whoever the hell he was—Jack or “Chris”—both he and Gennady had failed in their recruitment schemes, but then again, most spy games end in failure. Still, one party always fails worse than the other, and Cowboy must have played the game just a little less badly; somehow he had seen a dividend in giving up the Russian.

  I should have listened, Gennady thought. I should have listened when they told me to stay away from the son of a bitch. As the freighter pitched and rolled in the ocean, his head in a fizzy netherworld from his beatings, Gennady thought of the photo he had taken with Cowboy on a hunting trip, a photo he had once cherished. How could I have been so stupid?

  His thoughts returned to jumping overboard. But he didn’t jump. Why should he? He was innocent. He had a family he lo
ved. He would survive and reinvent himself, or at least try.

  Gennady had indeed fallen off the face of the earth; although, unbeknownst to Cowboy, he was still breathing. “After a while the guys on the ship were friendly,” Gennady says. “Once they got to know me, they came to realize that there must be a mistake.” Nonetheless, his captors told him he’d have to stay at “Hotel Lefortovo” until the investigation was completed. “But I knew the system,” Gennady says. “Eight other KGB guys had just been shot.”

  It took two weeks for the freighter to make its way across the Atlantic, through the Aegean and Black seas, and finally arrive in Odessa, Ukraine. From there it was more blackness, inside a KGB van traveling northeast for days to Lefortovo.

  Upon his arrival, he was taken into an interrogation room where, on a table before him, was the very Marlin lever-action rifle Cowboy had given him in Guyana. “Remember this? Famous American hunting rifle?” a fresh new inquisitor asked. “A nice Russian one wasn’t good enough?”

  How the hell did they get the Marlin? Gennady wondered. He hadn’t brought it to Cuba. They must have raided his place in Guyana.

  “Here’s another gift from your boyfriend.” The goon picked up the gun and smashed its stock into Gennady’s chin, knocking him to the ground. Gennady, concussed and nauseous, drifted off into purgatory on the cold Lefortovo floor.

  It was the last time he saw the Marlin.

  When Gennady awoke, he was in a new cell, one of several he would occupy during his stay at Lefortovo. The first of his cellmates—all of them were strategically placed by the KGB in order to attempt to extract information from Gennady—told him that Soviet intelligence operatives had said his CIA friend had been recording their meetings. Gennady rolled on his fetid mattress with his face turned toward the wall. The last thing he wanted right now was to make a new “friend” after what he thought the last one had done to him. Gennady seethed in the darkness: Had Cowboy Jack really recorded their meetings? If so, what had Gennady said? Had Jack reframed their relationship to his benefit somehow? Bureaucrats did stuff like that, sexed things up in reports to get ahead, keep their jobs. Gennady thought of the puffed-up memo he had recently cobbled together in Guyana to make his posting seem strategically significant. Could that be what Jack had done—written a report that had been misinterpreted by somebody who thought to sell it as something it wasn’t?