Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Might Gennady have suspected at the very least that he was helping in some kind of counterespionage operation without knowing its details? Perhaps, but the kind of opportunistic deals that were presenting themselves in the business and intelligence communities after the collapse of the Soviet Union were commonplace. It is reasonable to assume Gennady signed off on Stepanov’s passport application, as he did with others, without differentiating it from the numerous other inquiries that crossed his desk. To this day, Gennady categorically states that he had no idea he was doing anything to help nail Hanssen.

  Another question is why would Jack Platt manipulate his friend Gennady in a manner that would get him in trouble, all the while claiming that his true objective was to get the man who had set up Gennady’s capture, torture, and imprisonment years earlier? There are a few possibilities. The first, of course, is that Jack, too, was operating in the dark. This is hard to believe because, by his own admission, he wanted to capture the man who turned out to be Hanssen. Jack also worked actively with the FBI. One cannot both be part of a top-flight team to take down one of the greatest traitors of the twentieth century and be a babe in the woods.

  Far more plausible is that Jack wanted to help roll up a big traitor and didn’t really know where the whole program would lead. We can also look again to his own words when he was asked during the 60 Minutes interview if true friends put each other in peril: “It may not be what friends do, but it may be what good intelligence officers do.” Indeed, while Jack’s friendship with Gennady mattered enormously to him, his commitment to his duty mattered more. Semper fi.

  Years after Hanssen’s takedown, Rochford said,* “[Stepanov] is really somewhat of a hero to the US government… I’ll always be thankful to him for what he’s done.” Rochford has no idea where Stepanov is today, though. “He was ready to talk and to cooperate. The government was ready to write the check and support him in ways that he needed, and so we came to a good understanding. We were flexible, and he was flexible at a tough time in his life, so I think that’s what it takes. You have to realize that it’s a relationship, and these things aren’t just ‘Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am, we’re done.’ These things are ongoing.”

  Other heroes in this episode were Musketeers Jack Platt and Dion Rankin, who concluded that had they not been patient with Gennady for two decades, against CIA wishes, Stepanov would never have met Cowboy Jack, who then turned him over to Rochford, all leading to the unmasking of Robert Hanssen. It was these two Musketeers all along who had pleaded with their respective bosses to take things slow with Gennady. They knew that if their investment was to pay off, it would pay off in the distant future, even if no one envisioned precisely how—and no one could have. It had been, in the meantime, softly, softly, catchee monkey.

  The Hanssen roll-up was not the only spy drama that played out in 2001, in what turned out to be a big year in espionage. And these other events would have grave implications for Gennady in the years to come.

  Stepanov, of course, never collected the $1 million caviar payment because there never was any caviar, or matryoshka dolls, for that matter; the whole escapade had been a ruse. He collected many times that amount for nailing Hanssen. And Gennady, having unwittingly taken the second biggest risk of all, was left with a security job and the nagging fear that somewhere out there Sasha Zhomov would be looking for somebody to pay the invoice for Robert Hanssen. Anybody.

  14

  затишье перед бурей

  (CALM BEFORE THE STORM)

  Shortly after Jack’s birthday present of Hanssen-on-a-stick, Gennady’s old friend, the source known as AVENGER,* who may have provided the final nail in the coffin of Jack’s SE colleague Rick Ames and who had been living temporarily in the US, was arrested in Moscow. Said to have been paid $2 million by the US for the Ames information, the fifty-year-old AVENGER and his wife had lived for a while in Haymarket, Virginia, then in Cockeysville, Maryland, where, sources say, the CIA had bought them a house for $980,000, then another for $400,000, in 2001. In Maryland, AVENGER ran a company called East-West International Business Consulting from his home. Although he said he was a consultant, some perceptive neighbors thought he was a spy (or at least he was suspicious), while one thought he was a pornographer.

  AVENGER had been lured back to Moscow in 2001 for what his wife said he thought was a KGB reunion. Before leaving the US, he met with Mike Rochford and another agent for lunch in Virginia. Both agents tried to warn the asset, saying that his identity was included in one of the files given to the Russians by Hanssen just a year earlier. “He refused to believe us and returned anyway,” Rochford says. AVENGER was arrested on arrival at the Moscow airport.

  “The evidence was so well documented,” the Moscow Gazeta reported of AVENGER’s subsequent 2003 trial, “that judges sentenced the traitor to two years longer than the prosecution demanded,” for a total of eighteen years. It was not the last the world would hear of AVENGER. Seven years later, in 2010, his actual name would surface and be forever linked to Gennady Vasilenko, when one man’s disclosures would play a critical role in the fates of both AVENGER and Gennady. In fact, they would inadvertently save Gennady’s life.

  Following the United States’ Stepanov success and the AVENGER loss, another former KGB officer made himself—and his files—available to US intelligence. According to both Russian and US sources, that officer was forty-nine-year-old Minsk native Aleksandr Nikolayevich Poteyev. Having risen up through the KGB ranks, Poteyev went on to serve in Russia’s new SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, where he was assigned to New York in the early 1990s. It was during his New York stint that he is believed to have been recruited by the CIA. After he rotated back to the Yasenevo Center, he was eventually promoted to the post of deputy director of the SVR’s Department S, which runs spying operations in the United States. There at the Center, like Stepanov and so many other Russian spies who feared a looming nationwide economic depression under Putin and the oligarchs, Poteyev stashed away his own espionage nest egg.

  Sometime in 2001, Poteyev cashed in, allegedly to the tune of between $2 and $5 million, when he tipped the Americans to ten of his US-based Russian agents living deep undercover with false identities, at least two of whom had maintained their “legends” for sixteen years by that point. Known as “Illegals” in Russian espionage parlance, these sorts of deep-cover agents, who blend in seamlessly with the target country’s citizenry, are a Soviet/Russian trademark. They are considered “illegal” because they are unregistered with the host country’s state department or interior ministry, which is the agreed-upon rule among hostile intelligence services. The Illegals program was initiated after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when the new Soviet Union was not formally recognized by other nations, and thus had no diplomatic cover available. The few trainees accepted into the program, culled through many hundreds of aspirants, were subjected to what the New York Times described as “grueling training, psychological screening for a life of isolation and stress.” Soviet Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev pointed out that only the most stoic, brave, strong people, without any weaknesses or defects, served in the program. In 2015, Lieutenant General Vadim Alekseevich Kirpichenko, who headed the program during the 1970s, described the pressures on the Illegals to the Espionage History Archive, saying, “It’s one thing to become someone else for an evening or a theatrical season. And it’s something totally different to turn into someone who once lived or a specially ‘constructed’ person, to think and dream in another language and not think of oneself in the real dimension. Therefore we often joke that an illegal going out into the operational arena could already be given the rank of people’s artist.” In the Russians’ scheme, Illegals, who were never allowed to meet one another, would only activate in the event of war or a pre-war crisis, when diplomatic ties are severed and the “legal” Russian rezident spies from diplomatic missions are forced to leave. In that eventuality, the Illegals would handle the local contacts normally handled by
the rezident spies; otherwise, they remained in deep hibernation, specifically ordered to refrain from recruiting assets or any other spying activities that could blow their cover. If a crisis never occurred, the Illegals could live their entire lives without taking on an assignment.*

  In 2001, there was no indication that these Illegals had been activated in any meaningful way, so US authorities decided to monitor them, in hopes of penetrating Russia’s sources and techniques (such as determining their sophisticated electronic methods of communicating with one another and Moscow).

  Ex-KGB agents were making money deals left and right with the “main enemy,” while in Moscow, Sasha Zhomov was seething. And he now had one more traitor to track down. When—not if—he collared the offenders, Sasha vowed to make an example of them.

  Everything in 2001 changed in the time it took two hijacked commercial planes to crash into two New York City skyscrapers. Unsurprisingly, security firms like Jack’s HTG saw their phones light up on a nonstop basis after the attacks. Around the same time, Harry Gossett notes, there were also a number of terrorist train attacks overseas. Consequently, HTG was enlisted to conduct weeklong training exercises designed to recognize terrorist methods of casing public transportation installations for eventual destruction. Training was undertaken at most of Amtrak’s large stations, from New York to Los Angeles.

  Jack’s daughter Michelle remembers accompanying her father and other HTG supervisors, like Gossett, to New York for some of these exercises, where the group spent after-hours penthouse time with De Niro and his downstairs neighbor and frequent co-star Harvey Keitel at their 110 Hudson Street address. De Niro, still researching his The Good Shepherd project with the help of Bearden and the Musketeers, watched the staged interrogations of the agents portraying the terrorists. He also learned about some of Hav “The Illusionist” Smith’s best spy magic.

  Jack, Harvey Keitel, Michelle Platt, Robert De Niro, and Gennady. (l. to r.)

  “One day on the set I showed Bob the accordion fold,” Milt Bearden recalls, “which is folding a piece of paper, standing it on end, then lighting it at the creases until it disappears. There’s no smoke. When the ashes floated to the ceiling it was coincidentally reminiscent of Shepherd screenwriter [Eric] Roth’s feather scene in Forrest Gump, so it was a keeper.”

  Jack recalled one humorous incident that played out during the still-ongoing De Niro consulting gig: the actor wanted to be taught Haviland Smith’s “brush pass” technique in a crowded environment. With Amtrak’s permission, Jack took a bespectacled, hat-covered De Niro into Penn Station for the exercise. However, even with a porkpie hat pulled down over his brow, the actor was constantly recognized. What kind of spy gets asked for autographs in the middle of an operation? Jack laughed and called the whole thing off with two words De Niro had likely never heard before: “You’re fired!”

  “The serious part,” remembers Gossett, “was that our trainees eventually rolled up a number of terrorists who were casing the stations.”

  Back in Russia, the business world—and life in general—was in a different kind of turmoil. The old hard-liners, embodied in the nascent strongman presidency of former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, now shared power with the oligarchs, Russia’s version of the United States’ robber barons. The Russian variants of the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Morgans had names like Abramovich, Berezovsky, and Prokhorov. The oligarchs had come to power under former president Boris Yeltsin, and his successor, Putin, was purging those who did not take a vow of loyalty to his new regime. The remaining oligarchs were wealthy businessmen who offered their support for Putin in exchange for the right to continue secretly buying off—at fire-sale prices—many of the country’s most valuable assets and natural resources.* As author and Russia expert Gregory Feifer explains, “Putin and the oligarchs narrowed the space for competition, boosted the role of law enforcement, brought in a measure of suspicion and fear, which surely caused some former intel officers to think about lying low, and oversaw an explosion of corruption that enabled the Kremlin, and otherwise well-connected businesses, to snap up others.” For small operations, the joint-venture honeymoon was over almost as fast as it had begun.†

  Ben Wickham, HTG’s CEO, recently reviewed the company’s books during the post-honeymoon period. “Much of the inquiries we made through Gennady and others in Russia fell off during that period,” Ben reports. “We had one major client whose interest in Russia in terms of due diligence declined, probably due to a number of factors: (a) [the] Russian bank collapse [in] 1998 and (b) the increase in Putin’s power and fear by American banks and investment firms of a nationalization of Russian companies involved particularly in the oil and gas sectors.”

  For Gennady, this reversal meant reprioritizing his business career, especially after the denial of his 2002 passport request to come to the US and jump-start the joint venture. He now desperately needed one of the few well-paying, full-time jobs available in Russia. In 2003, Gennady, as was typical of him, landed on his feet at one of the snapped-up enterprises, NTV Plus,‡ where he was named deputy chief of security. Once again, Gennady’s old-boy KGB network had come to his aid, this time in the form of his new boss, ex-KGB man Igor Filin, who had been a colleague—and fellow DC rezidentura volleyballer—in the 1970s. This new, highly compensated job was a great financial boost for the extended Vasilenko family, as juggernaut NTV Plus was the first digital satellite channel in Russia, a division of the analog NTV channel, which was available to 70 percent of the Russian people. At the time, NTV was the only statewide independent TV channel in Russia. (Today, NTV Plus boasts 240 channels in its service.)

  In late 2004, Milt Bearden wrote Gennady at his NTV office on De Niro’s behalf, reminding him that he would soon be meeting with casting agents to read for his role in The Good Shepherd, which after almost a decade of germination was finally set to begin filming in August 2005. “I auditioned with other actors, but I was so nervous,” Gennady recalls. “So I drank before the audition and didn’t think I did so great because reading English is not easy for me—especially when I’m drunk.” He was told that the studio would make a decision later that summer.

  On March 28, 2005, after finally securing a passport and visa, Gennady arrived in New York with Igor Filin for meetings with their counterparts at Time Warner and HBO, as large corporations shared security strategies in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks. On his personal time, Gennady caught up with Robert De Niro, their discussions revolving around Gennady’s potential casting in the role of “Ulysses.” Gennady then traveled down to Washington to visit with his fellow Musketeers.

  By this time, the friendly spies had concluded that all the drama in their lives was finally over. Gennady had been imprisoned and exonerated, and he and Jack had become successful businessmen who traveled often to see each other’s families. Despite the oligarchs’ thievery, life for Gennady was good; he had great friends all over the world, a lucrative job that allowed him to travel (a luxury for Russians), a country dacha, and an extended family he doted on—and he was about to become a movie star. His fellow spy pals in the US, the Musketeers, also seemed content in semiretirement, finally able to spend quality time with their families. Dion Rankin was living the good life in Macon, Georgia, while doing occasional contract work for the Bureau. Cowboy Jack was in Great Falls, running training sessions for HTG by day and, as a borderline insomniac, re-watching tapes of his favorite movies, the spy-themed Hopscotch and Live and Let Die, by night. Walter Matthau’s Hopscotch was especially poignant for the Platt family: the plot centered on an authority-detesting CIA officer who has been assigned to a desk job.

  Jack also finally had more time to devote on his sole grandson, Diana’s son, Cody. Years later, Cody recounted taking Jack to his elementary school’s Career Day: Before the class, students were asked to write down what they’d like to do for a living when they grew up. “When Jack walked in, in his tattered cowboy gear, they thought I [had] brought in a homeless person,” Cody remem
bers. “Then he told them that he was a spy hunter, and I saw my classmates furiously erasing what they had written down for career choices. I felt bad—they had been hearing from lawyers, firemen, whatever, then I bring in fucking James Bond.”

  For Gennady, an enjoyable 2005 summer of hunting and fishing would culminate on his daughter Julia’s thirty-ninth birthday on August 25, which would coincide with Moscow Days which Gennady, Masha, and his second family would be observing at the dacha.

  Meanwhile, in Yasenevo, Sasha Zhomov had Gennady Vasilenko squarely in his crosshairs.

  15

  YOU DON’T KNOW ME

  Everybody is bent—it depends how much.

  —From the prison diary of Gennady Vasilenko

  August 25, 2005

  As he drifted in and out of consciousness on the jail floor, deliriously recalling the commandos that had just tackled him in front of his family, Gennady strained to understand why the FSB was demanding that he confess to the Hanssen betrayal. Could it be that Zhomov just needed a scapegoat? Were they still holding a grudge regarding their inability to make the case against him stick in 1988? Was it the passport he signed off on for Stepanov, “the Snake” who sold the Hanssen file? Or was it another misinterpreted cable, like the one Cowboy had written and Hanssen had furnished to the KGB in 1988?