Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  When the newsman mentioned Ames dropping off an envelope at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, that’s when it hit Gennady: just a few feet away in Jack’s guest bedroom was something he had brought for his friends to see. From his suitcase, he retrieved his own secret manila envelope and tossed it onto the table in front of the other Musketeers.

  “I worried about bringing this the last time,” Gennady said. “But they didn’t search my bag then, so I brought it now. Maybe this Ames guy fucked up my life?” As Dion recalls it, “Gennady had brought nine legal pages of notes he kept from his interrogation, written in English. As he was reading them, they rang a bell for Jack and I.” There were references to Pelton, Motorin, Martynov, his pharmacist friend, and even little Sherry, the bank teller in Guyana. “It sounded just like the memo we wrote from Guyana. So I went to Buzzard Point and retrieved our original. I came back to Jack’s house and we laid the original memo side by side with Gennady’s notes. They were like Xerox copies. That nailed it. A light bulb went off. Jack and I looked at each other, and we were thinking the same thing.” Now Gennady could at last see physical proof that there was nothing incriminating in Jack’s original memo, but every detail matched his interrogation. Gennady could also see that it wasn’t just he who had been compromised but all three Musketeers. “If he had any lingering doubts, by now he knew for certain it wasn’t us,” recalls Dion.

  “What did you write about us in your memo to the Center?” Jack asked.

  “I never wrote one. I was forbidden from seeing you,” Gennady answered.

  “Well, fuck, if they had our memo and none from you, you can see why they were suspicious, like you were hiding something,” Jack said.

  “Jack then did some digging at CIA and determined that there was no way Ames could have had access to our Guyana memo,” Dion recalls. “He was in Rome at the time. Plus we knew there were no tradecraft errors in Guyana. If anybody knew how to spot surveillance it was Cowboy. And thanks to Jack’s IOC, I never made those kinds of mistakes. Now we all knew there was another mole besides Ames.”

  “We’re still bleeding somewhere,” Jack said.

  Jack and Dion discussed the memo with other members of the joint CIA and FBI mole-hunting team, which included former Musketeer driver Mike Rochford, who had just met Gennady for the first time. Roch was struck by the Russian’s charisma and fun-loving manner: “I immediately saw what Cowboy and Dion saw in him.”

  Mike Rochford catching up with Gennady and Jack in 2016.

  The US intelligence community had breathed a collective, albeit premature, sigh of relief after the Ames roll-up, thinking the leak had been plugged. But to their dismay, they soon learned—courtesy of the Musketeers and other ongoing calculations—there was someone else at large in the warrens of the American spy apparatus, a traitor who had orchestrated what the Department of Justice would later call “the worst intelligence disaster in US history.” As hard as it would be to comprehend, the at-large traitor was far worse than Ames.

  The CIA and the FBI both came to agree with the obvious awful conclusion that Ames couldn’t have been responsible for all the damage because things like Jack and Dion’s memo, which had gotten back to the Russians, hadn’t been under Ames’s purview. Ames’s treachery had led to the deaths of many US assets. This other bastard was also responsible for betraying intelligence valued in the billions of dollars. He, or she, was also the one who put Gennady in Lefortovo.

  The mole hunt understandably escalated after the realizations of 1994.

  Even Congress got involved, as the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dennis DeConcini, not only held hearings on the subject that year but personally interviewed Ames in his prison cell. The evidence was as clear to DeConcini as it had been to Jack and Dion. “There has to be another,” DeConcini remarked, echoing the Musketeers’ conclusions.

  Mole-hunting units were expanded from Langley to FBI HQ to the Buzzard Point and New York City field offices.* Multiple lists were drawn up, again, with one list including three hundred CIA officers who had had questionable polygraph results and another containing the names of two hundred KGB agents who were in a position to know something. When a listed KGB man was tracked down, Rochford jumped on a plane to a far-flung region of the planet to offer him the million-dollar bounty. He counted twenty-eight pitches he made personally to try to solve the riddle.

  Bob Wade and Rochford also made a dozen trips to London to trawl through KGB files smuggled out of Moscow in 1992 by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin. When Yasenevo was constructed in the early 1970s, Mitrokhin had been in charge of transferring the KGB’s records from the old Lubyanka facility. But secretly he made meticulous copies of many of the secret documents, and hid them in the floorboards of his dacha. By 1992, he had amassed twenty-five thousand pages, which he brought to Britain’s MI6 when he defected to London that year. By the time Rochford and Wade showed up, the files had unmasked seven KGB spies and moles. It made sense to assume the new US source might be disclosed in Mitrokhin’s cache. But he wasn’t.

  In 1994, Gennady’s spying skills were pushed to their limits—but on the home front. Schooled in stealth by the best, he had always been good at hiding the details of his dalliances from Irina, who of course knew what was happening but tolerated it as a Russian way of life. Her one demand was that Gennady’s infidelities remain discrete from their family’s world. The challenge now was his attraction to Masha, a beautiful Muscovite twenty-five years his junior. When asked how the affair started, Gennady gives his typical response to thorny questions: “Shit happens, especially when I’m around women.” Normally, Gennady had no problem navigating the treacherous shoals of adultery, but this was a special circumstance: Masha had been his daughter Julia’s childhood playmate and remained one of her best friends.

  Incredibly, Gennady was able to walk this tightrope for over a decade, even as Masha bore him more children and lived at an apartment Gennady kept for her in town. The insouciant Gennady would say today that he loves both his families and didn’t want to hurt anyone. “It’s just what it is,” he says calmly. Consequently, he had no intention of getting divorced and was perfectly happy with how things were going with the family that bore the Vasilenko name as well as his secret second family. What added to the logistical strain for Gennady was the finances of it all: he had to support two families without Irina noticing the missing income.

  In 1994, Gennady closed down Bullit when an old KGB friend offered him a VP position in a larger enterprise. The new multinational company, Securitar, run by ex-KGB officer Viktor Popov, was but one facet of Popov’s new private-sector security empire. He also ran Oskord Security Group with eighty ex-KGB staff and a thousand total employees. “Here we carry out the same tasks we did for the state,” Popov said in an interview. Securitar’s brochure advertised personal bodyguards, business security guards, installation of security equipment, and consulting services. “We took the best of what existed at the KGB and set it up here.”

  Thanks to Jack’s Williams College pal Dave Cook, who was now chief of security for the International Monetary Fund, Securitar quickly landed a major contract, providing security for the IMF’s Moscow office. Gennady got to meet former president George H. W. Bush when he provided security for the opening of the Moscow office of Goldman Sachs in 1994. On that occasion, Gennady chided Bush, telling him, “I was spying against the CIA when you were running it in the seventies.” Despite the jab, Bush posed for a picture with his former adversary.

  Securitar also signed a contract with a US medical supply company that was losing millions of dollars in drugs that simply disappeared after being shipped to Moscow, only to resurface back in the US on the cheaper “gray market” to compete with the original manufacturer. Gennady and Jack continued with their own business partnership, too, now renamed FKCFO (Former KGB, CIA, and FBI Officers).

  Ironically, the joint venture spree engendered by the US-Russian reset almost derailed that very reset and fi
red up the ’80s spy wars that had just recently calmed down. At the center of the storm was a dear friend of Gennady’s, ex-KGB agent Vladimir Galkin, and the man in the shadows who helped extinguish the flare-up was another close friend, Cowboy Jack. The origins of the misstep were the hackneyed misunderstandings between those bureaucratic rivals, the FBI and the CIA. And who better to mediate what amounted to a dustup than a man respected by both?

  Gennady’s friendship with Galkin began when they attended the Andropov Institute together for three years in the early ’70s. Galkin went on to become a senior officer in the First Directorate’s Line X, where he was tasked with stealing scientific and technical secrets from the West. During his seventeen-year career, he had many successes, including the penetration of France’s nuclear program. By 1996, fifty-year-old Vlad, who had retired from the KGB after the USSR’s dissolution in 1991, had started his own Russia-US joint venture called Knowledge Express, and he had come to the US to buy surveillance equipment at a New Jersey trade show. Instead, the FBI arrested him on arrival at JFK Airport on October 29, 1996.

  Galkin honestly identified himself to the FBI as a former intelligence officer, as so stated on his visa application, calling attention to an unwritten agreement between the CIA and Russian intelligence not to go after retired case officers. In custody, the FBI presented him with an ultimatum: cooperate on other outstanding espionage cases or face up to thirty years in prison. If he cooperated, however, he could be released to live in the United States, with a fat payday to boot.

  Instead, Galkin demanded a phone, called his wife, Svetlana, in Moscow, and told her to inform Russian intelligence of what had happened. One of the next calls she received was from Gennady. “I heard the news on television in Moscow and immediately called Svetlana. Then I called Jack and asked him to alert his friends and the whole CIA retired community to do something to free Galkin; otherwise, there would be retaliation against CIA guys like Jack doing business here in Russia. Jack did it. He made a lot of noise in the US, calling all his CIA friends at AFIO [Association of Former Intelligence Officers]. We made a lot of noise in Russia as well.”

  The “noise” was heard, and the CIA ruminated over damage control while the arrest made headlines around the world. Galkin was hauled off to courts and jails in Brooklyn and Boston, and finally to the federal district court in Worcester, forty miles west of Boston. The Soviet Embassy hired New York defense attorney Jerry Bernstein (a former member of the Organized Crime Strike Force, which famously flipped goodfella Henry Hill) to represent Galkin, whom Bernstein recently recalled as being “a lovely man, charming—just a nice guy.” The attorney remembers the judge glaring at the US attorneys, intoning, “You’d better not be starting World War III!” When Bernstein arranged what he thought was a nice bail package, allowing Galkin to stay in the Soviet Embassy, the KGB would hear nothing of it. “They wanted him completely exonerated and released or else they wanted him in jail where they could create an international incident over it,” Bernstein remembers.

  Behind the scenes, CIA Director John Deutch bickered with the FBI over who was at fault, with the Bureau claiming that it had notified the CIA of its plans to arrest the Russian, while Deutch stated that no such notification had ever occurred.

  The tension reached a boil when, on November 15, Russia’s prime minister, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, called Vice President Al Gore to personally complain. With Gore’s assent, Deutch convinced the DOJ to just drop the case. In court, as Bernstein remembers, “a motion to dismiss on the grounds of national security was introduced.” Galkin was released after seventeen days in custody, and he immediately flew home to Svetlana. Before departing, the FBI apologized and gave him an FBI coffee mug. He and Gennady have maintained regular contact to this day, and Gennady has no doubt that Jack’s intercession played a key role in getting the ball rolling on bringing the case to its climax.

  With guarantees of safety for KGB capitalists now de facto codified, Gennady felt comfortable bringing his other ex-KGB colleagues, including his boss Popov, with him to the US to meet Jack and Dion and pursue mutual business opportunities in the security field. Before the first arrival in the US of Gennady’s spook friends, Jack had told Gennady that he would be passing their names pro forma over to Roch and Dion, who would want to interview them. Jack embodied not only the loyal patriotic Marine but also the CIA man who never really retires, setting up the stereotypical consulting firm that keeps a cozy relationship with Langley—exactly how ex-KGB officers’ consulting companies worked with Yasenevo. Jack told Gennady that Rochford was particularly interested in talking to Victor Cherkashin, now himself in the private security game, and asked if Gennady would invite him over for a future conference on the topic.

  Jack assured Gennady that little would come of the referrals, since Gennady’s friends likely knew nothing of interest and, especially Cherkashin, were all financially comfortable, with no need to sell out their country (Cherkashin by this time headed a private security company called Alpha-Puma, with dozens of big contracts with major corporations and with more than a hundred employees). It was just a way of keeping everybody happy. With no special enthusiasm, Gennady agreed to pass on the invitation. Jack had told his friend the truth; however, he lied to the visiting Russians when he assured them they wouldn’t be pitched.

  Alan Kohler was a young FBI man newly assigned to the Washington Field Office’s counterintelligence squad and obviously knowledgeable of the ongoing attempts to ferret out the second traitor. Soon after he landed at the WFO, he also became aware of Cowboy Jack and his revered reputation before even meeting him. “I knew of Jack as a legend,” Kohler says. “All of the veterans talked about him.” Kohler is very clear about what the retired CIA man could bring to the mole hunt years after his retirement: “Part of Jack’s relevance was his ability to reach out to Russians.”

  As he had in the past, Jack turned to his family for assistance. Michelle, at that point thirty years old and with the nickname “Moxie,” remembers, “My job was to babysit the KGB guys when they were between meetings in Washington. I’d take them shopping, to museums, whatever.” But just like with the IOC training, Michelle/Moxie was also functioning as an operative for her dad. “I would be told which ones to distract so the FBI could target other ones. It was the same at parties. Dad would give me a look, and I knew to start engaging someone so Dad could have a private conversation with an asset or target.”

  In February 1997, the HTG-Securitar joint venture indeed brought retired KGB men Victor Cherkashin, Alexander Pavlovskij, and Viktor Popov to Georgetown University in order to attend a conference on nuclear waste disposal security. During that event, Jack and Gennady submitted a bid for the disposal on a Pacific atoll of spent nuclear fuel from many countries (the state of Colorado ultimately won the bid). When Cherkashin met Rochford and Dion’s new WFO counterintelligence chief Ray Mislock at the conference, he was certain what was coming next, even though Jack again reassured him that no pitches were forthcoming.

  During a break in the conference, the group had what would prove to be a fortuitous brunch in Alexandria with some of Jack’s connected friends, investigative author Dan Moldea, espionage expert and documentary producer Jeff Goldberg, and former top Senate investigator, now private security consultant Phil Manuel.

  Manuel, whose early origins were in military counterintelligence, had recently partnered with the HTG-Securitar venture and would travel to Russia twice with Jack. Since Jack and his HTG partner Ben Wickham were business novices—Ben the investigator, Jack the trainer—Manuel became the company’s unofficial business advisor, helping to handle clients, primarily US firms that wanted to do business in Russia but were concerned about who they might end up dealing with as well as how to navigate the expanding oligarch corruption. An astute observer of human nature, Manuel liked watching Jack interact with people like Cherkashin, and he learned why the Agency put such faith in his training skills. “He was interrogating you, but you never knew he was inte
rrogating you. He was looking for the slightest insight, a ‘tell.’”

  In Manuel’s mind, Jack’s “Cowboy” persona was disarming, and even Jack’s coarse language could throw people off the scent—Manuel suspected Jack was always looking for traitors. “He would only tell you what he wanted you to know.” Manuel’s bond with Jack was intellectual; he knew the “serious Jack Platt.” Jack enjoyed the Cowboy facade, but that guarded the man who knew Russian history and was a fervent anti-Communist—the last true anti-Communist warrior who had fought in the shadows but who didn’t hate Russians, just their system, which he thought was dangerous. Manuel and Jack spent hours talking about how Soviet intelligence operated, with Jack turning Manuel on to the Russian political newspaper Iskra (The Spark), how Lenin felt revolutions got started, and the role of propaganda. “Jack was steeped in this stuff and felt it explained what the Russians were up to.”

  Moldea, who had recently been appointed to HTG’s board of directors, had met Jack in 1994, introduced, like Manuel, by a mutual friend: DC Metro Police detective Carl Shoffler, famous for having arrested the Watergate burglars in June 1972. Other attendees at the quarterly Shoffler Brunch included ex-CIA officer Ben Wickham, ex-FBI agent Harry Gossett, and ex–New York mob guy turned FBI consultant Ron Fino. The group was a heady mix of Washington investigative insiders, and in years to come, these new associations would prove a valuable support system for Jack and Gennady. For a time, Jeff Goldberg, who became very close to Jack, considered writing a book about Jack’s life, but for many of the reasons some books don’t get written, it never made it out of the starting gate.*