Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Of course, in all matters concerning Jack and Gennady, comic relief and one-upsmanship were never off the radar. Harry Gossett recalls that he once accompanied the Musketeers to lunch at Evans Farm Inn, a favorite CIA watering hole in McLean. Jack’s choice of venue, however, had nothing to do with the menu, as Gennady would soon discover. At one point in the conversation, Gennady bragged sotto voce that this had been one of his favorite drop sites when he was stationed in DC. “I knew that you guys would never suspect a dead drop so close to your own headquarters,” Gennady proudly chided.

  “You mean under a rock like that?” Jack said as he pointed to a roadside rock about the size of a basketball. Gennady nodded. With that, Jack motioned Gennady and Harry over to the rock. “I wonder if anyone still does that,” Jack said. “Let’s see.” Harry noticed the smile on Gennady’s face dimming as Jack asked him to roll the rock away. After he had done so, a folded piece of paper was revealed on the ground.

  “I’ll be damned,” exclaimed Jack. “I wonder what it says.”

  Gennady picked it up and read it to himself.

  “You son of a bitch!” Gennady said to Jack.

  According to Harry, the note read: We knew about this drop site all along. Love, Cowboy.

  In the absence of his IOC course, Jack’s love of instructing young people found alternative forms of expression. Pat, the wife of his old Marine buddy Matty Caulfield, worked in the House of Representative’s Page School in the 1990s and invited Jack to speak to the students. When Caulfield asked her how the session went, she said, “Great, and the students really liked his friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “His friend in the KGB. He is the most handsome guy.” Matty couldn’t believe that Jack had snuck a former KGB agent into the House of Representatives.

  In 1998, a one year after the Georgetown conference the Russians returned to the US, where Jack put up his former adversaries Gennady and Cherkashin at his Great Falls house. Harry Gossett has vivid memories of a large group of Russian KGB retirees drunk on vodka on Jack’s front lawn. The ostensible reason for this trip was a police symposium on organized crime, to be held at the Espionage Research Institute in Virginia Beach, but Cherkashin had made the trip in part to visit his daughter, who was studying in California. Jack’s FBI friend Courtney West, who used to be a car salesman, remembers that Cherkashin approached him about possibly starting an auto import-export business. “He said that the nouveau riche Russian capitalists loved to drive around in big old Buicks and Pontiacs,” recalls West. “But just not as old as those in Cuba.”

  The group drove to Virginia Beach, where the Russians made presentations on tactics used to combat the Russian Mafia and agreed to furnish the Americans with whatever intel they needed. Cowboy Jack made a presentation on the American Mafia. While at Virginia Beach, Cherkashin felt a searing pain in his right side, and Cowboy drove him to a local hospital. After an injection, Cherkashin had an unpleasant taste in his mouth and suspected that the syringe contained a truth serum, in advance of a pitch from US intelligence. He was wrong about the serum but right about the pitch.

  As he recovered on the beach, Cherkashin was approached by a dark-haired man, who walked right up to his canopied beach chair. As recounted in Cherkashin’s autobiography, Spy Handler, the exchange went something like this:

  “Victor Cherkashin?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Michael Rochford.”

  After a little chitchat about the conference, Roch got to the point, admitting he was FBI.

  “I work casing the Russian Embassy, and I know a lot of people posted there over the years. I want to talk to you about your time in the United States.”

  “I don’t think I can be of much help to you,” Cherkashin responded, adding that he’d been retired for seven years, and lying that all he knew about Aldrich Ames was what he’d read in the papers. Roch told the KGB man that he was looking for a different source, someone who knew about the executions of Motorin and others. Then possibly bluffing, or thinking of a CIA analyst wrongly under suspicion at the time, Roch said that an arrest was imminent; the Bureau just wanted corroboration. He added that he knew Cherkashin had met with the source, which was another bluff—and untrue. In fact, no one in the KGB knew the source’s real identity, only that he went by the name of “Ramon Garcia.”* In fact, just like the Americans, the Russians didn’t know which agency “Garcia” worked for.

  “The FBI is ready to pay you one million dollars,” said Rochford.

  Cherkashin wrote that he didn’t have to think for a second about his response: “A million dollars is worth little compared to my honor.” He added that he had enough money anyway. Cherkashin excused himself, only to be approached a few more times by Rochford during the conference. The Russian became so rattled that he left early for Moscow, without even seeing his daughter. But the Bureau was still not finished pitching the KGB’s former DC counterintelligence chief, and Rochford was dogged in his hopes of turning him.

  Jack and Gennady’s next adventure was completely unforeseeable. When American TV networks were gearing up to produce special broadcasts to celebrate the CIA’s fiftieth anniversary, the greatest American actor of his generation simultaneously thought to commemorate the occasion with a feature film. CBS, the Discovery Channel, and Robert De Niro all needed experts, especially colorful, telegenic ones. The two cowboys were ready for prime time.

  12

  GOING PUBLIC

  You have to be a mother and a father to your agent…

  You have to be ready to marry him!

  As the search for the second double agent proceeded in the shadows, mass media outlets were loading up on espionage content, much of it inspired by the looming anniversary of the CIA’s founding in 1947.

  First up was Cowboy Jack’s friend, and Shoffler Bruncher, Jeff Goldberg. From 1996 to 1997 Goldberg was in the midst of co-producing a three-hour documentary for the BBC and the Discovery Channel entitled CIA: America’s Secret Warriors, to be broadcast on March 31, 1997. For the in-depth, Agency-approved show—which went on to receive the prestigious DuPont-Columbia Journalism Silver Baton Award for broadcast journalism—Goldberg brought on board Jack, Jack’s former colleague Milt Bearden, and many other spooks of note. It was Cowboy Jack Platt’s first media appearance. “I had to teach him how to handle interviews with the media,” Goldberg recalls. “It was his first time in the glare.” But Jack, ever the cowboy, would only absorb so much coaching. In fact, anyone viewing those first interviews would see that Jack brought his own unvarnished persona to the camera. They were the same traits that endeared him to his family and army of friends around the world—CIA brass notwithstanding.

  Next to come calling was Milt Bearden, who approached all three Musketeers about a job that came with some genuine glitz and glam: acting icon Robert De Niro was looking for technical advisors for his forthcoming true spy saga The Good Shepherd, which he would both act in and direct. Since his retirement in 1994, Bearden had carved out a new career for himself as the go-to ex-CIA media consultant. Some of his colleagues began referring to him as “Hollywood” Bearden. In 1997, De Niro was trying to develop a film about the CIA during the early ’60s, but that project hadn’t jelled. Then the Shepherd film, about the origins of the CIA, was brought to him. “I had always been interested in the Cold War,” De Niro said at the time. “I was raised in the Cold War. All of the intelligence stuff was interesting to me.”

  The movie had been mired in a classic case of Hollywood development hell, having started out in 1994 as a script written by Eric Roth for Francis Ford Coppola and Columbia Pictures, before moving over to director John Frankenheimer at MGM, before pivoting to Robert De Niro and first Universal, then Morgan Creek Pictures.

  When De Niro took over the project in the late ’90s, the actor-director asked his good friend and fellow Manhattanite, legendary US diplomat Richard Holbrooke for ideas about consultants. Among his many postings, Holbrooke had served as the US
ambassador to Germany in the early ’90s. While working out of Berlin, Holbrooke had developed a good professional friendship with the CIA’s then Chief of Station in Bonn, none other than Jack’s former SE colleague Milt Bearden.

  “It started out almost like a spy operation,” Bearden recalls. “Bob [De Niro] said he wanted to do a spy thriller, and Holbrooke turned over a cocktail napkin and wrote my number on it.”* De Niro proceeded to call Bearden at his home in New Hampshire. The former spy initially didn’t believe who was on the other end of the line. “Yeah, right,” he said to the man who claimed to be Robert De Niro.

  With his legendary attention to detail, De Niro told Bearden that he was especially interested in “street men” with a working knowledge not only of tradecraft but also of the KGB. “Bob was going to Moscow and asked if I knew any KGB guys,” Bearden says. “That part was easy.” Bearden knew that nobody understood fieldwork like former IOC director Cowboy Jack Platt, and nobody could open KGB doors like Jack’s pal Gennady, who was loved by everyone save the KGB brass. Jack and De Niro were already aware of each other through Jack’s sister. “Polly sent me a draft of the script of The Good Shepherd two years before I met De Niro,” Jack recalled. “I said, ‘It’s a piece of shit.’”

  Nonetheless, the Musketeers—along with Roch—enlisted in the project and, over the next few years as the movie was being developed and revised, helped Bearden school De Niro in spy tradecraft as well as introduced him to spies in both the US and Moscow. In the summer of 1997, Bearden accompanied De Niro to the Moscow International Film Festival, where the actor was to receive a lifetime achievement award. But De Niro used the festival as his “operational cover,” from which he could slip away and meet with Gennady and his KGB pals, which included counterintelligence chief Leonid Shebarshin. Of course, the sojourn was also beneficial for Gennady and his joint venture with Jack since being seen with De Niro could only elevate their standing as players. According to both Bearden and Rochford, Jack was able to open doors in Russia by dropping De Niro’s name because the KGB guys all wanted to meet the star.

  As soon as De Niro could sneak away from the festival, he met up with Gennady, who introduced him to KGB friend Viktor Badonov, and the group took a tour of the KGB Museum, located in the old Lubyanka headquarters. At some point Gennady decided it was time to introduce the actor to a little Russian R and R. “We took Bob to a town where there was a lot of industrial storage,” Gennady recalls. “The town’s mayor [had] built a huge sauna with a waterfall, and we all went into the sauna.” Bearden has a strong memory of what happened next. “The KGB guys all wore felt hats in the sauna, while this huge guy with tattoos of Russian tanks on his arms would brush us with birch branches.” Bearden recalls De Niro being whipped by “a nine-foot-tall masseur with a tank tattoo. He’d say to De Niro, ‘Do you love me?’ Bob didn’t.”

  At the KGB Museum in Lubyanka: (l. to r.) Victor Badenov (KGB), Gennady, Robert De Niro, Barry Primus (actor), unidentified cameraman, Milt Bearden.

  The Moscow trip included a visit to a stadium that housed a boxing training facility, and as if cued from a cliché movie scene, one of the local tough guys, who recognized the Raging Bull star, insisted that they go a couple of rounds in the ring. “De Niro was game for anything,” Bearden says, “but he kept looking at me, as if to say, ‘I sure hope Bearden isn’t going to get me killed.’ One of the other agents asked me what I thought would happen. And I said that Bob would have the guy down by three [rounds], and that’s what happened.”

  Capping off the Moscow whirlwind, the group visited the Gromov Flight Research Institute southeast of Moscow, where De Niro met with a cosmonaut and suited up in a pressurized flight suit. But neither cosmonauts nor birch-branch-wielding Cossacks made as lasting an impression on De Niro as the Russian Cowboy, Gennady Vasilenko. The two men shared a similar joie de vivre, coupled with an unyielding work ethic. Both Bearden and De Niro were taken with not only Gennady’s affable personality but also his telegenic charisma. “He is right out of Central Casting,” says Bearden.

  “I wanted him for the lead KGB role [Ulysses], but it didn’t happen,” De Niro recalls. By the time cameras finally began rolling for Shepherd in 2005, Gennady had fallen off the face of the earth once again.

  De Niro learned not only the practical side of tradecraft from the Musketeers but also the human side. “Like anything, relationships are the whole thing,” he said. “A person puts their life in the handler’s hands. So the handler has to have the ability to make the asset feel comfortable… the KGB and CIA guys were brothers under the skin.”

  Recently, the actor seemed to echo what Cowboy Jack often said he’d learned from the Great Game: that spies have to be great actors. “I was putting on a performance twenty-four hours a day in case I was being watched,” Jack said. “I’m on a stage, but the job can be fun.” De Niro agreed: “You’re not who you say you are. It forces you to make other people believe you. As I became friendly with people in intelligence, I learned how smart and charming they are. They’re human, not sinister.” Jack concluded about the actor, “He would have been a hell of a case officer.”

  Throughout the years of Shepherd development, De Niro met with more than forty CIA officers and more than twenty KGB. But his lasting relationships would be those with Bearden, Jack, and Gennady. For the Musketeers, it was a friendship that would soon have dramatic repercussions.

  Intertwined with movie consulting was Jack and Gennady’s ongoing security enterprise partnership. More and more, Gennady took his business trips to the US as an opportunity to experience the beautiful diversity of North America. On one occasion, he visited Dallas with his ex-KGB pal Mikhail Abramov, and State Senator Gonzalo Barrientos personally escorted them to the Mesquite Rodeo and other Lone Star State attractions. Later that year, Gennady brought his son Ilya over for an idyllic hunting and fishing trip in Bozeman, Montana, and to see Yellowstone National Park, where they stayed with Jack’s friend Nathan Adams. As Gennady became more and more enamored with America’s natural wonders, Jack wondered how many KGB men might have been persuaded to defect had the CIA just shown them Paradise Valley.

  If there were a metaphorical opposite to Montana’s Big Sky Country, it was the claustrophobic crevasses of the Moscow espionage world, where Milt Bearden and journalist James Risen found themselves during this period while researching their book The Main Enemy. “I called my old KGB liaison,” Bearden says, “which we referred to as ‘the Gavrilov Channel’ [named after a nineteenth-century Russian poet], and asked if he could arrange an interview for me with Sasha Zhomov. We had been conducting a sort of Kabuki dance with each other for years. I figured it was high time we had a face-to-face.” The meeting was arranged at a posh Moscow hotel, where Sasha parked in a forbidden spot right at the entrance. Bearden watched as a concierge attempted to shoo Sasha away, whereupon the stone-faced KGB mole hunter showed his identification, causing the poor young man to turn pale and scurry off.

  After some small talk about their shared history in the spy trenches, Bearden attempted a personal question. “How long do you intend to stay on the job?”

  “Until I catch the bastard that betrayed us,” Sasha answered, adding after a pause, “We know what you’re doing with Vasilenko and Platt.”

  Bearden deftly switched topics, assuming that Sasha was referring to a campaign by the CIA to turn Gennady. He was not about to share with the enemy his own reservations about the perilous friendship.

  In parting, Bearden said, “I’ll let you know when I come back to Moscow.”

  “Ha! Don’t bother. We’ll know.”

  When he returned to the US, Bearden confronted Jack: “I tried to warn Jack that his closeness with Gennady could get his friend killed. I told him, ‘Zhomov is watching!’ But Jack wouldn’t listen. They were playing a dangerous game. Jack was blinded by his love for Gennady. We always tried to warn our officers not to get too close because someone could die. It’s one of the occupational hazards, because in or
der to get someone to betray their country, you have to establish a strong emotional bond—and it can become too strong, like it did with Jack and Gennady.”

  In the Los Angeles Times in 1998, Bearden’s co-author, James Risen, wrote up the strange-but-true friendship of Jack and Gennady. This time the pair was willing to go deeper into their world than they had for the earlier Albright interview, including Gennady’s wrongful imprisonment after Guyana. Seemingly unfazed by Bearden’s warnings, and having become entranced by Hollywood, Jack and Gennady were testing the waters for a movie or book based on their lives. According to Matty Caulfield, “Polly wanted to make a movie of Jack and Gennady. They came to California for meetings in the late nineties, but it never happened.”

  One reader of the 1998 Los Angeles Times article was Phil Shimkin of CBS News, who was inspired to produce a 60 Minutes II episode about them with correspondents Dan Rather and Scott Pelley. The episode featured Jack, Gennady, and a number of Gennady’s KGB colleagues. Among the spy friends Gennady brought to the project were Leonid Shebarshin (former First Directorate chief), Colonel Viktor Popov (senior counterintelligence officer), Mikhail Abramov (expelled from Canada), Vladimir Galkin (mistakenly arrested by the US in 1996, long after his retirement), Evgeniy Karpov (who had worked in the Soviet UN office), and Vitaly Teperin (Gennady’s classmate at the Andropov Institute).*

  The documentary’s interviews with Jack and Gennady serve as a primer on their spying philosophies, not to mention their innermost observations of each other. Gennady said that spies are motivated by “dissatisfaction with their bosses, with their life, with their wives.” Jack firmly defined his job: “I’m not a spy. My job is to find people who’ll spy. I can’t get into the Kremlin!” Gennady summarized his spy handling technique: “You have to be a mother and a father to your agent… You have to be ready to marry him!” Jack took a “marital” view, admitting that he had been hoping all along to exploit Gennady’s relative youth: “We have a whole lifetime together if this works out right.” Softly, softly, catchee monkey.