Jack further conceded that despite their agreement to be just friends, there were moments when he nevertheless would suspend their covenant and try to pitch Gennady, summarizing, “It may not be what friends do, but it may be what good intelligence officers do.” This powerfully suggests that whatever his genuine capacity for friendship, his patriotism ran even deeper.
While two of the Musketeers were warming to the media, their former colleagues were still toiling in the trenches to unearth the second Russian asset. One of those trenches was located on a beautiful Mediterranean island. In July 1999, when Gennady’s old DC boss Victor Cherkashin was taking a vacation in Cyprus, who should show up at his hotel room again but the indefatigable FBI man Mike Rochford. According to Cherkashin, the retired KGB officer consented to drive Roch around the island nation and listen to his renewed pitch. Again the $1 million was offered. Again, no deal.
Finally, a relieved Cherkashin was certain that he had seen the last of Rochford. But to his utter amazement, when Cherkashin was attending his daughter Alyona’s California wedding two months later, Roch showed up, this time at Alyona’s apartment. Cherkashin cursed him under his breath for picking such an inappropriate time for conducting spy business. However, this time there was no pitch forthcoming. According to Cherkashin, Roch merely wanted an assurance that Cherkashin wouldn’t recruit Alyona’s new American husband into Russian intelligence. Cherkashin told him that it wouldn’t happen. He never saw Rochford again.
Rochford was getting exhausted from the repeated failures. But neither he nor the traitor he was hunting could know that a Rube Goldberg–like cascade of events was about to set the turncoat’s downfall in motion. Gennady would become the linchpin in the takedown, and in a stroke of poetic justice, the traitor would turn out to be precisely the man who had helped wrongfully imprison him in Lefortovo.
13
A HEAVY BOX OF CAVIAR
I’d say from now on your wife should never start the car.
It all began as a minor Securitar office nuisance involving Lt. Col. Anatoly Stepanov, the B. B. King–loving KGB agent who had been posted with Gennady years before in Washington. Since those days in the seventies, Stepanov had risen to the position of deputy chief of Department S, which handled the Illegals (see Chs. Fourteen & Seventeen). But all the while, he coveted the top spot, and the rank of General, neither of which he was granted. After the KGB disbanded, Stepanov became involved, like so many of his peers, in the security consulting game, albeit with a singular lack of success. He also dabbled, again like many other peers, in the import-export trade.
“I ran into Stepanov at the annual meeting of retired officers,” remembered Gennady. The year was 1999. When asked how he was doing, Stepanov responded, “I don’t have a job.” Gennady’s former colleague added that he was also recently divorced and that his son was having behavior problems.
“Come on, stop by our office,” offered Gennady.
“Securitar had a very large office, and many of our former colleagues stopped by often to use our space,” Gennady recalls. “The next week he stopped by Securitar and we said he could use a table and a phone.”
At Securitar, Stepanov proved to be ineffectual, and a bit of a sad sack to boot. Someone in the office secretarial pool nicknamed him “the Snake.” Gennady describes him as “a pain in the ass,” and he had quickly rung up a four-hundred-dollar bill at the office. The “pain in the ass” soon shared a tale of woe: in a frantic effort to make ends meet, he had recently gotten jammed up with Russian mobsters on a convoluted caviar import deal and wanted to travel to the United States to see if he could make a score in order to clear his marker with the mafia.
Stepanov told Gennady that he could help secure a 20 percent commission for Securitar if they sent him to New York, where the firm could collect a finder’s fee on a one-million-dollar shipment of caviar. That is, if he could convince the Russian hoodlums to not whack him in the interim. Cowboy and Gennady talked about it and mutually decided to assist Stepanov. Both Cowboy and Gennady have stated unequivocally that they had no idea the Snake’s desire to go to the US had to do with more than gangsters and caviar—but it was about espionage of the highest order.
Gennady told Cowboy that he wanted to help Stepanov if for no other reason than to bounce his old, annoying comrade from his office. Cowboy was sympathetic. He hardly knew Stepanov and already wanted to strangle the guy.
“I’ll try to bring him to New York. Does he have a passport?” Cowboy asked.
“No, but I can take care of that if you can arrange a visa,” Gennady said. Stepanov had misplaced his passport years earlier. In those days, a Russian citizen could get a foreign passport issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where Gennady had many friends. “Since I knew all the guys working undercover at the foreign ministry,” Gennady explains, “I got a contract that gave me permission to sign verification documents for passports. I had already made dozens of passports for employees, family, et cetera. It took about three or four months to get [Stepanov]’s passport, but I got it.” Of course, visas were another matter.
On his next joint-venture trip to Moscow, Cowboy met with Stepanov, alone, in the Securitar office.
“Since you know Gennady, I can trust you,” Stepanov said, then added, “Perhaps we can make a separate deal.”
Cowboy held his gaze for a moment. He had an instinctively negative feeling toward the guy, but truth be told, Stepanov had never given Cowboy cause to dislike him. Until now. Cowboy thought he knew what Stepanov meant: trading intelligence for profit. He sensed that Stepanov might betray some relatively inconsequential Soviet information if he was safely in the US. After all, a lot of ex-KGB guys were now approaching the West, hoping to grab some quick cash.
Instead, Stepanov explained that in addition to the caviar caper, he wanted to sell some items in the US markets, specifically Russian matryoshka dolls. Fine, whatever, Cowboy thought.
Cowboy, for his part, was hell-bent on nailing whoever had sold out Gennady in Havana, but in the absence of knowing who that was, he wanted to help his associates in the FBI and the CIA in their never-ending campaign to hunt down traitors. He would therefore attempt to introduce Stepanov to the FBI’s mole-hunting team if the man indeed came to the US, just as Cowboy had done with many of Gennady’s colleagues. Gennady was aware he was doing it but thought nothing of it; none of his colleagues knew anything about moles and double agents.
“I didn’t want any FBI salary,” Cowboy said. “I just did it to find out who killed Gennady’s friends and sent him to Lefortovo. Eighty percent of my motivation was to find out who killed them and who almost killed my friend Genya.” Cowboy also knew about the Bureau’s “Pennywise” list of the Russians who could, at least in theory, have information about who American traitors might be.
Soon after his discussions with Stepanov began, Cowboy alerted Mike Rochford in Washington. Roch realized instantly that Stepanov was, unbeknownst to Cowboy and Gennady, near the top of the “Pennywise” list. Roch had, in fact, had a few exploratory meetings with Stepanov in Europe but never got very far with him, in large measure because Stepanov didn’t feel safe, and wouldn’t until he was in the United States. At the time, Roch had been searching for information about CIA officer Brian Kelley, who was wrongly suspected for some time of being the traitor. Perhaps some seemingly innocuous piece of information Stepanov possessed might get the Bureau one puzzle piece closer to closing the book on Kelley, or whoever the bastard was. By this point, every scrap of information, no matter how small, was precious.
Cowboy kept his old colleagues at the CIA informed about what was going on on his end, but they treated him like a nuisance, convinced he was simply trying to prove that he had been right all along about the Americans’ investment in Gennady, which in fact he was.
Now the challenge was how to get Stepanov to New York to meet with Rochford in a way that would make him feel comfortable and wouldn’t raise the hackles o
f Russian intelligence. Gennady, who was facilitating the passport application, obviously couldn’t write “Seeking to collect for the Russian Mafia fee owed by applicant for stolen caviar.” Furthermore, Cowboy and Roch couldn’t make the whole effort seem too urgent or Gennady would perceive risk and shut the entire passport process down. So Cowboy and Roch had to find a suitable business partner for Stepanov’s Russian doll deal.
Cowboy orchestrated the charade beautifully. The FBI had a contact who had become an art curator at the prestigious Frick Collection in New York. According to sources, Edgar Munhall, who was openly gay, had attempted to join the FBI as a young man but was put off by its intolerant culture. Nevertheless, he had maintained contacts with the Bureau and indicated that he would be pleased to introduce Stepanov to some art dealers who might be in the market to buy precious Russian dolls.
Cowboy had a few preliminary meetings with Munhall, who had no idea of the role he was playing in the big picture, and who constantly addressed Cowboy as “Hey, Handsome!” Cowboy growled at him and contemplated how he, a Marine from Texas, could be involved with the whole New York art scene. Cowboy ultimately concluded that if he could barely tolerate it, the homophobic Russian intelligence services would surely not suspect that a counterintelligence operation was under way.
In Moscow, Gennady countersigned the paperwork for Stepanov at the KGB’s passport office. Gennady has always said that his only motive for arranging for the passport was “getting this asshole off my back about coming to the US to try to make a buck.”
Cowboy reminded Gennady that he would introduce Stepanov to Rochford, as he had with all of Gennady’s visiting ex-KGB pals. “You know and I know I’m helping the FBI,” Cowboy said to his friend. “But not to worry, because this snake won’t talk to them—and he probably doesn’t have anything anyway.”
In April 2000, Stepanov flew to New York. And Mike Rochford, with an FBI team in tow, was on his way, too. Cowboy traveled separately by bus. Before Stepanov’s arrival, Cowboy and Rochford met at a hotel to plan out how they were going to manage the recruitment. “I’ll meet him first, take him to the curator, and suss him out to see if he’s approachable,” Cowboy told Rochford.
After Stepanov arrived in Manhattan, Cowboy introduced him to Munhall at the Frick, who, true to his word, expressed curiosity about Stepanov’s Russian dolls. Stepanov’s eyes lit up at the prospect of making some money from the sale. Cowboy took note and asked himself, What if the bastard is led to believe he’ll lose the deal?
During a lunch that followed, Stepanov told Cowboy that he possessed “volume one of the case.” Cowboy thought, What the hell does that even mean? But he really didn’t want to know. However, Cowboy had never made a secret of how badly he wanted to nail whoever got Gennady nicked in Havana years before, so he wishfully assumed it might have something to do with the US traitor. Later, back at the hotel, Cowboy reported the “volume one” reference to Rochford and said that Roch should proceed with Stepanov. At that point, Cowboy’s job was to make the Frick’s curator unavailable to Stepanov for a while in order to buy time for Rochford to make his move.
One day, Stepanov emerged from a meeting onto a New York sidewalk and he “accidentally” ran into Mike Rochford, who said, “Hey, I’d like to talk to you.” Stepanov looked at Roch like he was “crazy,” Roch says, “and he should have. [He] tells me he doesn’t talk to strangers, and I show him my business card, and we start chatting.” Roch reminded him that they had met before, overseas.
Stepanov said, “Mike, I never trusted anybody who won’t drink with me.”
Roch quickly located a watering hole with a suitable private corner table.
When Stepanov wasn’t meeting with Rochford, he was meeting his new friend Jack Platt, who in turn was reporting back to Rochford. By week two, the FBI man was ready to throw in the towel with this Stepanov character. That’s when Jack gave Roch a pep talk, one that changed history.
In a later interview for Washington’s International Spy Museum, Roch described, without naming Jack, how a “team member” kept “kicking me out the door. I didn’t want to go.” Jack recalled, “I told Roch, ‘Whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it, because he hasn’t asked about you. He hasn’t mentioned being interrogated. He’ll meet with you again.’”
Jack had to massage Stepanov’s psyche, edging him ever closer to betraying his country. At this stage, Jack had gone from being dismissive of “the Snake” to thinking this could actually be the real thing. Even the swashbuckler Jack was now nervous playing this game, employing all his countersurveillance skills as he feared for his own safety. Writing a brilliant script on the fly, Jack met with Stepanov and informed him that the Frick curator had changed his mind about the Russian dolls. Suddenly, Stepanov found himself stranded in New York without any money and with only one prospect: selling whatever “volume one of the case” was. Jack was now certain “the Snake” was primed to deal with Rochford.
With his job accomplished, Jack left the city, and Rochford and others on his team took over the operation. Jack was anxious to get back to his consulting work and didn’t give the Snake or the curator another thought.
Back in the bars, Stepanov insisted that establishing trust with Roch was critical to moving the relationship to another level. Roch understood and agreed. So they drank, the Russian-speaking Rochford remembers. “Over two weeks, we bar hopped. When we drank Tullamore Dew [triple-distilled Irish whiskey] he loosened up. I wanted to rename the operation ‘Tell Me More, Dude.’” After about the tenth day of speaking Russian and sniffing each other out, Rochford was again on the verge of writing off the feckless doll/caviar trader, when Stepanov offered to tell him about how the KGB came upon a “particular event” and its status. Author David Wise coaxed some of the ensuing conversation out of Rochford for his 2003 book Spy.
Rochford told his target that he didn’t know what “particular event” he was talking about.
“I can tell you know what I’m talking about,” Stepanov said. “You’ll have to agree to sit down with me, and we’ll write up a contract, and we’ll set out how I will go about the business of trying to help you solve this matter.”
“Well, that’s worth my time. We’ll get off the streets, we’ll go up to the hotel, and we’ll do this.”
Stepanov pressed the FBI for money. The FBI’s response was simple: “No dossier, no dough.”
During the course of Rochford’s discussions with Stepanov, the Russian informed him that he indeed possessed what the Americans were looking for: explosive information about the Russians’ asset inside the US intelligence apparatus. Rochford, normally so skilled in maintaining a poker face, was stunned, and worried that he betrayed his surprise. This one sentence vindicated Rochford, the literally hundreds of mole-hunting staff, and the great expense that had been allocated to the operation for over a decade. Of course, one major detail nagged at the investigator: How on earth had a KGB snake like Stepanov come to possess the mother lode?
Interviews with well-placed sources, who understandably would rather go unnamed, assert the following series of events:
Nine years earlier
In August 1991, a cabal of Communist Party hard-liners decided they had had enough of President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and audaciously decided to stage a coup. Vice President Gennady Yanayev declared himself president and had Gorbachev “detained” at his Crimean summer home. The military, ostensibly under Yanayev’s control, closed the Crimean airport so Gorbachev could not return to Moscow. Soviet states (now independent countries) condemned the coup, as did US president George H. W. Bush. Realizing their lack of support, within two days the coup leaders fled to the Crimea, and Gorbachev returned to power.
The swiftness of the coup’s collapse masked the sheer uncertainty and terror being felt in the bowels of the Soviet government. On August 22, the blowback against the hard-liners reached its peak, with some twenty thousand protestors storming Dzerzhinsky Square, the fabled home of the KGB ins
ide the Lubyanka building. After hours of toil, a government employee commandeered a massive German crane, from which a noose was placed around the neck of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the fifteen-ton, thirty-six-foot-high cast-iron statue of the KGB’s founder. As the statue was being garroted for removal, inside Lubyanka, fears were mounting as to just how far the KGB-hating celebrants would take this catharsis.
The Soviets became panicked that their most sensitive and incriminating intelligence files would be exposed during the riots, confiscated by the ecstatic, yet unruly, hordes. Watching from his fifth-floor Lubyanka office, KGB chairman Leonid Shebarshin gave the order: “Close and block all doors and gates. Check the gratings.”
After the Moscow riots, workers load the dismantled statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky on a flatbed truck, August 23, 1991.
(AP Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko)
The last of the Soviets had reason to be terrified. And the coincidence of the German crane was not lost on any of them. Two years earlier, during the waning hours of the East German regime, officers in the headquarters of the once menacing Stasi, the Ministry for State Security, began frantically destroying files. They shredded some and burned others. Some of the Erfurt townspeople noticed that dark smoke was bellowing out of the chimneys. Realizing the building was heated by gas and that gas produced white smoke, a furious mob rightly assumed that something other than gas was being burned. They stormed and occupied the building on December 4, 1989. They alerted military prosecutors and, once inside headquarters, began tossing state files out the windows and into the streets. Prosecutors seized the files for immediate review. This phenomenon had been replicated in Stasi buildings all over East Germany.
Best of Enemies Page 21
