Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  While he didn’t believe in a magical king in the sky, incredibly, Gennady still believed he was lucky. He didn’t know why he still believed this since the past few years had indicated only that he was, in fact, the unluckiest man on the planet. But somehow there remained a notion within Gennady that the past five years had been an aberration, that he was still the toddler who had been saved by a soldier from the bear drowning him in the Siberian River.

  Where was his soldier now? His Marine? His Cowboy?

  17

  RESET: THE RED BUTTON

  You were sent to USA for long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house, etc.—all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e., to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intelligence reports to the Center.

  —Encrypted message sent to the Illegals from the Yasenevo Center in 2009 (translated and decrypted by the FBI)

  On March 6, 2009, in Geneva, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton presented a smiling Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov with a small yellow plastic box topped with a red button embossed with the English word “reset.”* After ceremonially pressing the button, Lavrov accepted the gift, aimed at announcing a reset of the traditionally stormy US-Russian relationship.† Four months later, Russian Federation president Dmitry Medvedev, hopeful that the West would invite Russia into the World Trade Organization, and perhaps even NATO, announced that US armed forces supplies could pass through Russian airspace on their way to Afghanistan. Two months after that, President Barack Obama stated that the United States would drop its plan—long seen by the Russians as provocative—for a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, as proposed by the previous (Bush) administration.

  The reset continued apace for the next year: in March 2010, the two former Cold War adversaries reduced their nuclear arsenals; two months later, they agreed on sanctions against Iran; and three days after that, Obama canceled sanctions against the Russian state arms export agency, which the US had initiated in response to the Russians’ exporting arms to Iran.

  The vibe flowed down through their respective intelligence services. CIA Director Leon Panetta wrote that he was in the midst of developing “a sound relationship” with his Russian counterpart, the Putin-appointed SVR chief Mikhail Fradkov. In his memoir, Worthy Fights, Panetta describes the “occasionally candid relationship” he developed with Fradkov, noting that Fradkov wanted “to share information and collaborate on some common operational activities.” Panetta had hoped “perhaps naively, that we could look for ways to cooperate [with the Russians] in areas such as Chechen terrorism, where we had common enemies.” All seemed right with the world. But some at the CIA weren’t buying it.

  By this time, one of Jack’s former students in the IOC, Michael Sulick, had risen to the number-two post in the Agency, Deputy Director of Clandestine Services, otherwise known as the man who ran the nation’s spies. Like Jack, Sulick was old-school and suspected a Kremlin setup with the alleged “reset.” He knew Putin as a dyed-in-the-wool KGB man who wanted nothing less than to reconstitute the old USSR. As Panetta later wrote in his memoir, Sulick and those who shared his philosophy warned that “[t]he Russians would never share, and they’d use the whole thing to get close to our officers and try to recruit them as spies.” But Panetta thought differently, and the administration was already committed to the reset.

  Internal objections aside, in 2009 Panetta hosted Fradkov at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Afterward, they had dinner at the acclaimed Embassy Row organic eatery Restaurant Nora, where Fradkov uttered an unending series of incoherent Soviet-style platitudes that left both Panetta and his chief of staff Jeremy Bash dumbstruck. “What the hell was that?” Panetta asked Bash later as they walked to their cars. In 2010, Fradkov reciprocated as host, showing Panetta and Bash around the Center at Yasenevo. Panetta then met his FSB counterpart at Lubyanka, where Jeremy Bash whispered to him, “I think I can still hear the screams from the basement.” It was a reminder that the trip was taking place under extraordinary circumstances that only the Americans knew about. The Musketeers were also unaware of certain developments in the world of espionage and how they were fomenting a chain of events that would ideally lead to Gennady’s freedom.

  What was going on? Just prior to his Russian excursion, Panetta had received intel that threatened to upend whatever diplomatic progress had been made up to this point: in the ongoing nine-year FBI surveillance of the Illegals, called Operation Ghost Stories, things were heating up. The FBI had been quietly watching the Russian plants since Aleksandr Nikolayevich Poteyev had given them up in 2001, and in the spring of 2010, the Bureau learned that some of the Russian spies were planning to return to the Motherland. FBI sources add that there was more to the heat-up, but those details are still secret. However, it is widely believed that Russian intelligence had ordered the Illegals to escalate their espionage activities—with special attention to various federal institutions, like the CIA and the State Department—before returning to Moscow. The change in operational status became a political conundrum: Should the US allow the Illegals to leave and share all their intel and inside knowledge with their bosses, or arrest them and derail the reset?

  Panetta briefed President Obama in February 2010 about the broad strokes of the Illegals story, triggering weeks of meetings at the White House about how to proceed. On June 11, Panetta again informed Obama and the National Security Council, convincing them that the arrests should be made and the reset would survive. Although the Obama administration worried that the much-hyped reset might be re-reset in the wake of the Illegals’ arrests, they hoped such a reversal might be averted by instantly proposing a swap, in place of a scandalous trial that would embarrass the president’s new best buddy, Medvedev, who would arrive in the US in a mere two weeks. The arrests had not been planned to facilitate a trade, but since the Bureau had concluded that the spies hadn’t yet caused serious injury to US security, it was determined that Washington, and the reset, could benefit more from using them for barter than as prisoners to be locked up for years. Obama and Panetta agreed to the plan. Fortunately, the FBI’s Alan Kohler, who had moved on from the Washington Field Office and was now chief of the Russia unit in the New York Field Office, had had a detailed swap contingency plan in the works as far back as 2004. Soon the Bureau and the CIA would learn whether the Russians would agree to the swap.

  On June 24, after productive meetings on trade with US businessmen in California, Medvedev arrived in Washington and met with Obama.* “Russia belongs in the WTO,” Obama said as the two leaders stood side by side in the East Room, smiling after several hours of meetings. Obama then took Medvedev and Vice President Joe Biden for hamburgers at one of the president’s favorite burger joints, Ray’s Hell Burger. Later that day, before returning to Moscow, Medvedev traveled to Toronto for a G20 Summit, content with the results of his US diplomacy. Yet those living in the shadow world made moves that would have removed any and all smiles from the faces of the Russian contingent.

  On the very same day that Obama and Medvedev grabbed the headlines, SVR colonel Aleksandr Poteyev, the man who had betrayed the Illegals nine years earlier, was quietly exfiltrated to the US and resettled with a new identity. Leaving his wife, Mary, behind, the fifty-eight-year-old Poteyev fled through his native Belarus and was placed under the protection of US intelligence agents.

  “Mary, try to take this calmly: I am leaving not for a short time but forever,” Colonel Poteyev wrote in a text message sent to his wife as he fled Russia. “I did not want this but I had to. I am starting a new life. I shall try to help the children.” It is known that one daughter, Marina, lived in the US. It was later learned that Poteyev had used a stolen Russian passport and identity (“Victor Dudochkin”) to facilitate his travel to the US. The Russians located the real Victor Dudochkin, who explained that when he had previously applied for a US visa, he had turned over his passport to the US Embassy in Moscow while the visa was being processed. The Ru
ssians concluded that CIA agents stationed in the embassy had made a copy of Dudochkin’s passport and given the forgery to Poteyev for his escape. It is believed that Poteyev was paid as much as $5 million in return for his files.

  On June 27, 2010, within minutes of Medvedev’s plane leaving Canadian airspace, and with Poteyev safely ensconced in the US, the FBI rounded up the Illegals. It was an anxious June 26 phone call, monitored by the FBI, between Illegal Anna Chapman and her KGB father that supposedly prompted such a quick seizure. In the call to Moscow, Chapman had voiced suspicions that she might have been “made.” An FBI plant inside the Illegals’ clique had requested a face-to-face meeting with Chapman earlier that day—it was something that was just never done; previously, all contact between Illegals and their controllers had been through encrypted private computer networks only. Gennady says the consensus today is that the Illegals should have known much earlier that they were being watched. “They were enjoying life in US too much and had lost their vigilance,” he explains.

  In the New York area, where many of the Illegals lived, the FBI’s Alan Kohler helped coordinate the roundups. “The arrests were uneventful,” Kohler recently said. “They knew their time was coming.” Kohler added that the arrestees’ only seeming concern was the welfare of their children, who had no idea that their “American” parents were even Russian, let alone Russian spies. But thanks to years of planning, the Bureau descended on the scene fully equipped with a battery of social workers and child therapists, who assured both parents and children that they would be together very soon.

  The Bureau alerted the press, and the operation instantly became front-page news around the world, with the arrestees named:

  • “Richard and Cynthia Murphy,” real names Vladimir and Lidiya Guryev

  • “Michael Zottoli” and “Patricia Mills,” real names Mikhail Kutsik and Natalia Pereverzeva

  • “Donald Howard Heathfield” and “Tracey Lee Ann Foley,” real names Andrey Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova

  • “Juan Lazaro,” real name Mikhail Vasenkov, and Vicky Pelaez (her real name)

  • “Anna Chapman,” real name Anna Kushchenko (or “Irene Kutsov”) and Mikhail Semenko (his real name)

  But whom to swap for? After researching their SE files, the Agency could come up with only three apposite assets held by the Russians:

  • Aleksandr Zaporozhsky—Gennady’s friend since 1975, the former colonel in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) had been charged with treason and sentenced in a secret 2003 trial to eighteen years of hard labor for espionage on behalf of the United States. Author Ronald Kessler wrote that, according to the Russians and a number of highly placed US intelligence sources, Zaporozhsky was indeed the man called AVENGER, the asset who had given Sandy Grimes’s team the final piece of the Ames puzzle back in 1993, the piece that convinced the FBI to make the Ames collar. As noted, upon retirement in 1997, Zaporozhsky/AVENGER moved to the United States, where he was suspected to have shared more classified information with Western intelligence agencies. But Zaporozhsky was arrested upon returning to Russia in 2001 and was convicted in 2003.

  • Igor Sutyagin—a forty-five-year-old arms researcher convicted of spying for the United States, sentenced to fifteen years in 2005. He had told relatives that he was loath to leave his homeland, but the deplorable Russian prison conditions and the possibility that he would prevent the release of others left him no choice but to go along with the swap.

  • Sergei Skripal—a former colonel in Russian military intelligence who was found guilty of passing state secrets to Britain and sentenced to thirteen years in prison in 2006.

  Mike Sulick says that there was a desire to even up the exchange a bit more, so the Agency pondered who else might be added to the US list. “We had ten of theirs. They really didn’t have any of ours to swap for, but we wanted to balance out the trade,” he recalls. “I suggested to Panetta that Gennady be placed on the swap list. I felt that [the] CIA bore some responsibility for his situation. It was a leaked CIA memo that was misinterpreted that put him under suspicion in the first place.” When asked if Cowboy Jack had any input into this addition, Sulick replied, “This was a ‘close hold’ negotiation. Jack had no idea.”

  Relying on their “sound relationship,” Panetta, surrounded by Sulick, Counterintelligence chief Lucinda “Cindy” Webb, and other Russia experts, placed a speakerphone call to Fradkov, which Panetta recounted in his memoir:

  “Mikhail, we have arrested a number of people, as you saw in the press. Those people are yours.”

  “Yes, they are my people,” Fradkov replied after a long pause. With just that utterance, Fradkov had made it possible to begin negotiations.

  “We’re going to prosecute them,” Panetta threatened. “If we have to go through with trials, it is going to be very embarrassing for you.”

  After another long pause, caused in part by distance and translation delays, Fradkov asked, “What do you have in mind?”

  “You have three or four people that I want. I propose a trade,” Panetta offered. The Russians considered the swap idea for two days and then agreed to negotiate. According to one officer who was very close to Panetta, when Panetta suggested adding Gennady to the list, Fradkov, likely in a nod to Gennady’s free-spirited lack of discipline, replied, “Be careful what you ask for.”*

  Over the next few days, Obama and Medvedev waited as their intelligence executives expedited an agreement, with Russia demanding signed confessions from their prisoners as a prerequisite to pardons from Medvedev. In the US, court appearances and similar plea deals were hastily arranged for the Illegals. The US required that no retaliatory steps be taken against Americans in Russia, that the Illegals agree never to return to the United States without permission from the attorney general, and that any money made from publication of their stories would be forfeited to the US Treasury. The Illegals who owned property, including real estate, further agreed to forfeit those assets to the US.

  Panetta and Fradkov sealed the deal on July 3. Three calls over the course of one week.

  As these prisoner exchange details were being finalized in the last week of June 2010, Gennady was incarcerated in prison 1K-11, in the Nizhny Novgorod region. He had heard about the arrest of the ten Illegals but had no idea that he was part of any swap. On the Fourth of July, Gennady celebrated the US holiday alone with a strong cup of Russian chifir’ tea (aka, prison tea) that he raised to silently toast his friend Cowboy Jack, who he knew was working on his behalf. It was his fifth year served of a three-year sentence.

  The next day began normally with a 6 a.m. rise, followed by exercises, breakfast, and a return to the barracks until noon volleyball. Gennady’s prison diary best describes what occurred next:*

  At about 1 o’clock, while on the volleyball court, I was given the order to pack my stuff within fifteen minutes and be ready for a transfer. It was a shock for me—I didn’t expect any transfers, and besides, transfers happened once a week on a certain day, but not on this day and not this time of a day. I was told by the administration that it was unexpected even for them. Now I was nervous.

  So I packed my stuff, was put through the traditional humiliating strip-search, and was put in the prison’s truck for the trip—to where, I had no idea. In about an hour and a half the truck entered the N. Novgorod prison, where I had spent more than a year, so I recognized it. I thought that I was brought over there for another round of interrogations, or for the court to consider one of my complaints. But I wasn’t moved into the prison. Instead I was told to move immediately to another car with all my things. In the prison yard, I noticed a lot of authority figures, and some of them were even taking pictures of me. It was strange and unusual.

  The car I was put in was not standard for moving prisoners, it was brand new VW van, but unfortunately inside the van was a freshly painted, small cage made of solid steel. It was like a gas chamber, especially if you take into consideration that outside it was about 85 degrees and
of course we had no air conditioning. I thought that I might be taken to the railroad station to be put on train for still another destination.

  I was wrong. I knew that the travel time from the prison to the railway station took not more than thirty minutes, but we had already been traveling more than forty minutes. Perhaps the destination was Moscow? I hoped I would survive the heat. After about an hour inside this moving gas chamber with little oxygen I started melting and panting. I started making noise and complaining, asking to open the door or stop for fresh air. The guards told me that they were in the same situation and they were not allowed to stop. Besides that, they were receiving calls with orders to reach the destination as soon as possible. I told them if they have to deliver my dead body, it’s OK, but if they have to bring me alive they have to give me a chance to get some fresh air. In about 30–40 minutes of bargaining the guards gave up and let me out of the car for a few minutes.

  While outside, I noticed two more cars with guards, one car in front and one behind. The rest of the trip I survived easier, since it became cooler. At about 2 o’clock in the morning I found myself back in Lefortovo prison, a very familiar place for me.

  For two hours I was put through the standard procedure: searches, fingerprinting, documentation, shower, and at 4 o’clock in the morning I was finally put in a cell. Of course I couldn’t sleep. I was trying to understand what could be the reason to bring me here again. I already knew about the arrest of the Illegals in New York and the only reason I was taken to Lefortovo, I guessed, was so that I could be a witness for the conviction of [Stepanov], whom I had helped to get a passport and visa to go to the US. I thought maybe he was involved also with helping identify the Illegals. That must be the reason I was spending a 6th year in prison on a three-year sentence.