While Gennady considered other opportunities to travel to the US, the mole hunt was escalating. The FBI’s operation was based out of the Washington Field Office. Over at Bureau headquarters, James “Tim” Caruso, who had earlier initiated a six-man team, was called back into mole-hunting service.
Also in the WFO, Musketeer Dion Rankin was back on the scene, brought up from Macon, Georgia, to assist in the hunt for traitors. He rented an apartment and for the next fourteen months commuted back to Macon on weekends. Working with about ten others under supervisor Bob “Bear” Bryant, he traveled across the country, interviewing persons of interest, and even journeyed to Moscow to retrace the steps of compromised officers like Marti Peterson and Paul “Skip” Stombaugh. “We put a microscope on every compromise,” Dion remembers. “We found evidence of poor tradecraft. I was beginning to think that the mole idea was mistaken.”
Dion wasn’t the only friend of Cowboy Jack enlisted. The Russian-speaking FBI man who had acted as a driver for the Musketeers in 1979, Mike Rochford, was also brought in to head up still another offshoot of the mole hunt. “In 1992, I was asked to return from Nashville to look for the mole,” says Rochford. “Now we were working out of headquarters, not the WFO.” Roch tore into the “Pennywise” list with abandon, ready to jump on a plane at a moment’s notice in order to make a furtive rendezvous anywhere in the world with a Russian source who might exchange the prize for a cool million and a new life with the “main enemy.” One of Roch’s key areas of interest was a micro study of the movements of Gennady’s old boss Victor Cherkashin. Of course, both Dion and Roch maintained an open channel to their semiretired pal Cowboy Jack.
While Dion, Roch, and their colleagues made fruitless attempts to seduce ex-KGB men, one was about to show up voluntarily, and his trip from Moscow would set off a bizarre chain of events that led to the roll-up of the long-sought double agent, no lists or bank records needed. His name: Gennady Vasilenko.
11
A SECOND REUNION
Why did you sell me out?
Gennady finally obtained his own passport and US travel visa and journeyed to Washington in the summer of 1992. Jack and Dion had been counting the days with a not small dose of trepidation.
“Jack and I met Gennady at Dulles and went back to Jack’s house,” remembers Dion. “We all stayed there for a few days.” Gennady had been cordial at the airport but uncharacteristically cool, far from the quick-to-hug friend they were accustomed to. It was clear he was seething inside.
Indeed he was. Gennady wanted badly to confront Jack about his ordeal, but he knew he couldn’t do it at the airport. Part of him felt as if he might explode, and the airport was no place for such antics. In the car, his head was a confusion of nerves and acute emotions. What words would he choose to confront Jack with, and how could he expect to get answers if the only words he could think of were curses? But despite his rage, Gennady also felt something else: a visceral sense of joy and comfort in seeing his old friend. His own brain no longer made any sense to him.
“That night we were in the kitchen with Genya, talking about it, trying to figure out just how he had been compromised,” says Dion. “It got tense.”
“Why did you sell me out? Was that the plan from the beginning?” Gennady implored. He wasn’t yelling, but his voice broke. More than a quarter century later, Gennady’s eyes well up as he recounts this showdown.
Jack was wounded but not shocked. He had had an agitated sense that this confrontation would come. And he didn’t blame Gennady in the least, given what he had been through. “What would I gain from hurting you?” Jack shot back. “Since when did I cultivate a taste for helping the KGB? Semper fi, baby. I’m a fucking Marine, and I love my country, just like you love yours.”
“Were you recording me?” Gennady asked.
“Of course not,” Jack answered firmly. “You know how I feel about having my fieldwork second-guessed by a seventh-floor suit.”
“Did you say you recruited me?” Gennady asked. Jack said that he hadn’t. That Gennady wasn’t yelling made Jack feel worse, guiltier as opposed to instinctively defensive. Gennady’s tone was more akin to an injured brother than a sworn ideological enemy. For his part, Gennady had never seen Jack this way—distressed, not his usual irreverent self. Jack explained that he had never claimed either verbally or in his reports that Gennady had been a recruit; he simply had reported that they met on occasion and Gennady was a contact, not a spy. There was a fundamental difference, as Gennady well knew. Jack could only wonder if the KGB had some other reason for wanting to scapegoat his Russian friend.
Jack completely dropped any remaining Marine exterior as tears welled up in earnest. “Jesus Christ, Genya, you’re the brother I never had. I would never, could never…”
Suddenly, Gennady hugged his old friend like he had before he was arrested. Jack was crying and Gennady and Dion were close to it.
“I missed you guys so much,” the Russian said as all three men seemed to exhale simultaneously.
As the week came to a close, Dion drove Gennady down to Macon for the weekend before his return to Russia. Before leaving, Gennady gave Jack a copy of his prison release document as a gift. It was his certification to Jack that he didn’t believe Jack had betrayed him, a sacrament of forgiveness.
Gennady had many mouths to feed and a new career he was creating out of thin air. Coincidentally, Cowboy Jack was in a similar, if not as immediate, quandary. He had retired too young and still needed to contribute to his and Paige’s expenses. By this time, the girls were grown and on their own, but their college loans remained. In one of their phone calls, Gennady explained to Jack how the joint-venture business was exploding in Moscow. It occurred to Jack that, with their combined contacts in the ex-spy world, they should be able to create a thriving enterprise. Jack’s partners at HTG agreed and soon a joint venture between Bullit and HTG was born.
One of the new company’s selling points was that, through Gennady’s old KGB network, it had easy access to FSB men who facilitated the granting of passports. HTG could now expedite travel for potential Russian business partners. More importantly, HTG was able to vet Russian partners for wary American investors. As Harry Gossett points out, “Russia didn’t exactly have a Better Business Bureau whose files you could check.”
In 1993, Jack made his first of five trips to Moscow, and Gennady continued coming to the US at least once a year. On Jack’s first trip, Gennady met him at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport and immediately noticed Jack’s apprehension. “I never wanted to come to Moscow,” Jack said. “I wanted to start a second life. Been there, done that. But when I saw, through Gennady, the opportunity through business to come to Moscow, I came. It’s very sad. It’s the only country that’s had five hundred years of bad luck.” Jack was also well aware that the FSB had to have a thick file on him. “I was fully prepared to be arrested,” Jack recalled. He told a chortling Gennady, “If I’m arrested, I’ll never speak to you again.” After a few days of Gennady watching his fellow Musketeer look over his shoulder, he pulled the car off to the side of the road and told his nervous friend, “Stop looking for it. It’s not there.”
Gennady also maintained frequent phone contact with Dion, back in Washington and Macon. When Gennady mentioned to Dion that his cash flow was still insufficient to provide for all his children, Dion drove to Atlanta to help him import high-quality cotton towels. Although hundreds of towels were sent over to Moscow, the gambit foundered quickly.
Also in 1993, Jack reconnected with journalist-publisher Joe Albright at their thirty-fifth Williams College reunion. Joe was the nephew of diplomat-philanthropist Harry Guggenheim, heir to the Guggenheim mining dynasty, and from one of the richest families in the world. The ex-husband of the first female secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, Joe was himself heir to a publishing empire that included the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and the New York Daily News. He was now reporting from the Moscow branch of the Cox News Service, Ja
ck well remembered.
Ever industrious, Jack prevailed upon Joe to write for Cox a profile of his and Gennady’s new joint venture. Working with his new wife, journalist Marcia Kunstel, Joe set to the task. How could he turn down such a fascinating story? Jack and Gennady’s unlikely friendship was made public for the first time when the story went to print in November 1993.
“The Cold War is truly done,” wrote Albright and Kunstel. “Their whole relationship is hard to imagine, even less easy to understand—how two men standing on opposite sides of the world’s most deadly geopolitical chasm could become chums, at the same time each was trying to lure the other to jump across.” Jack and Gennady had merely redirected their immense skill sets to “the battleground of international capitalism.”
The pair was most impressed with Gennady’s manifest charisma, writing, “The tall and graceful Russian, whose Harris tweeds and soft-spoken manner give him a professional air…” But they acknowledged that Jack had come up with the idea for the joint venture. Speaking of himself and Ben, Jack told them, “We’d done our homework. We knew what was there—minerals, resources. We knew Gennady had contacts.” Albright’s piece described the duo’s original meeting and the unlikelihood of their friendship and business partnership. However, Jack and Gennady weren’t ready as yet to divulge the details of their espionage work.
While the joint venture expanded its network of ex-spies, current spy Sandy Grimes, who along with Jeanne Vertefeuille headed up the CIA’s mole-hunting team, was zeroing in on Jack’s old colleague in SE, Aldrich “Rick” Ames. In the SE Division, Jack had worked with Ames, whom Jack had seen as more of a “street” operative, like himself; his oddball personality certainly wasn’t winning over many people at Langley. Jack had once assigned Ames a sensitive “handover,” a Yugoslav source in New York, and Ames had handled the assignment perfectly—Ames had seemed to be a part of the team.
However, the analyses of Grimes, Payne, and Worthen said otherwise. Worthen, who drove by the Ames house every day on the way to work, happened to notice expensive curtains going up in every window of the house. That seemingly minor observation led to a thorough investigation of Ames’s finances. Everything began to come into focus when the results pointed to big bank deposits ($15,000, $20,000, etc.) in the early 1980s on the very days—Grimes determined—when Ames officially had met KGB contacts from the Soviet Embassy, their names originally provided to the CIA by Gennady’s colleagues Motorin and Martynov. Although these contacts had been sanctioned as legitimate attempts by Ames to penetrate the embassy, in fact, he had used his work role as a cover for other—private—business that obviously paid extremely well. Additionally, bank records showed that Ames, who used to carpool to work with Grimes, acquired a new habit of making extremely large cash purchases, unbefitting the GS-14 paycheck of a CIA case officer (at that time $70,000): the cash purchase of a $540,000 house, the purchase of a new Jaguar sports car priced at $43,000, among others.
Nonetheless, CIA superiors of Grimes and Vertefeuille said they needed harder proof, noting that Rick had told his colleagues he had come into a large inheritance from the family of his Colombian wife, Rosario—an excuse that was impossible to verify or disprove. Some on the team concluded that Ames’s troubles all stemmed from the fact that he was trying to accommodate his wife’s lavish tastes. But Grimes and Vertefeuille weren’t buying either hypothesis.
Per regulation, the team’s conclusion had to be shared with the Bureau, which would write the report. When the report was issued in March 1993, Team Jeanne and Sandy had assumed it would name Ames as the prime suspect. When it named him only as being on a short list, they were crestfallen; they had wanted the Bureau to focus all its energy on Ames before he could flee the country. “When I read that report, it was one of the worst days of my life,” Sandy says.
Some in the CIA believed internal FBI politics, and perhaps no small measure of ego, led to the drafting of the ineffectual document. However, the team’s morale improved not long after the report was issued, when the CIA obtained new evidence that the Bureau couldn’t dismiss so easily. Here of Grimes and Vertefeuille’s memoir about the Ames affair, Circle of Treason, an oblique passage refers to something clearly too secret to amplify upon: “Luckily in 1993, additional information became available.” That’s it. Whatever it was, it “added to the comfort level of those who had not already been convinced.” In a recent presentation at Washington’s International Spy Museum, Grimes used the same phrase, almost verbatim. No one in the audience asked for an elucidation during the Q&A. In a recent conversation, Grimes expanded, if only slightly. It wasn’t just that the new evidence pointed to Ames; “It left no question that it was Ames.”
Perhaps something can be gleaned from the 2014 ABC series The Assets, which was based, albeit loosely, on Circle of Treason. In episode 8, “Avenger,” Grimes’s character is seen taking a meeting with a KGB source in Berlin called “Avenger,” who pointed the finger squarely at Ames, though without mentioning his name. Grimes recently denied any trips to Europe on the case but conceded that a critical new source did become available to the team. The AVENGER source was said to have been paid $2 million for the information. Most interestingly, one entire chapter of Grimes and Vertefeuille’s book was deleted by the Agency. It is known that it concerned Gennady Vasilenko. Gennady wasn’t AVENGER, although Gennady had known AVENGER since the mid-1970s, when both men worked at Yasenevo. Despite Grimes and her team knowing his name, the public’s answer to the AVENGER riddle, including his identity, would come in 2010.
When the damning information was shared with the FBI, they moved quickly to set up a full-bore investigation of Ames, called NIGHTMOVER, headed by supervisor Les Wiser Jr. Thanks to agents like Dion Rankin, Ames was already on the Bureau’s short list.*
Rick Ames and his wife, Rosario, were arrested on February 21, 1994. The newspapers and many forthcoming books would anoint the FBI’s Les Wiser as “the man who caught Aldrich Ames” when, in fact, Jeanne and Sandy’s team had had to lead the FBI by the nose to him. Ames cooperated and received a life sentence, but he was able to plea bargain a five-year sentence for his wife.
It was soon determined that Ames had started his spree in 1985 by selling out Gennady’s pals Motorin and Martynov for $25,000 each, and he continued selling secrets for the next nine years, amassing $4.2 million in total. In an interview with Tim Weiner of the New York Times soon after his arrest, Ames admitted that the main motive for his betrayal was money. But interestingly, he also faulted a culture flaw at the CIA that had similarly dogged Cowboy Jack. “I have had a kind of on-again, off-again binge drinking problem that occasionally reached the edge of scandal but never quite fell off,” Ames said. “I usually had several drinks before a meeting [with the Soviets]. I would drink during a meeting.” Each encounter saw the better part of a bottle of vodka disappear.
Aldrich Ames’s arrest, February 21, 1994.
(FBI photo)
The CIA was less concerned with motive than with assessing the massive damage Ames had inflicted. In 1995, CIA director John Deutch summarized the harm caused by the turncoat:
• In June 1985, he disclosed the identity of numerous US clandestine agents in the Soviet Union, at least nine of whom were executed. These agents were at the heart of our effort to collect intelligence and counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. As a result, we lost opportunities to better understand what was going on in the Soviet Union at a crucial time in history.
• He disclosed, over the next decade, the identity of many US agents run against the Soviets, and later the Russians.
• He disclosed the techniques and methods of double agent operations, details of our clandestine tradecraft, communication techniques, and agent validation methods. He went to extraordinary lengths to learn about US double agent operations and pass information on them to the Soviets.
• He disclosed details about US counterintelligence activities that not only devastated our efforts at the time but
also made us more vulnerable to KGB operations against us.
• He identified CIA and other intelligence community personnel. (Ames contends that he disclosed personal information on, or the identities of, only a few American intelligence officials.) We do not believe that assertion.
• He provided details of US intelligence technical collection activities and analytic techniques.
• He provided finished intelligence reports, current intelligence reporting, arms control papers, and selected Department of State and Department of Defense cables. For example, during one assignment, he gave the KGB a stack of documents estimated to be fifteen to twenty feet high.
Cowboy Jack, predictably, cut to the chase: “Ames single-handedly wiped out twenty years’ worth of work. The combined efforts of people to develop the nine people he got killed in just seven pounds of paper.”
Whatever the root causes of Ames’s treachery, the effect was a staggering amount of damage. His capture raised the spirits of the entire US intelligence apparatus, though the feeling didn’t endure.
By sheer coincidence, Ames was arrested while Gennady was visiting Jack and Dion in Virginia, and the trio stayed glued to CNN’s coverage. Dion and Gennady recall Jack’s face going white at the news.
“Christ, Rick Ames! He worked for me as a case officer!” Jack exclaimed. “He was Hav Smith’s guy, turned into a typical CIA drunk…” He paused. “I should talk. But at least I got clean. And I was never a first-class asshole, like Rick. I don’t think he had a friend in the division. Now that I think about it, I’m not really surprised.”
Best of Enemies Page 18
