Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Theoharis, Athan. FBI: An Annotated Bibliography and Research Guide. New York: Garland, 1994.

  Wannall, Ray. The Real J Edgar Hoover: For the Record. Paducah: Turner, 2000.

  Weiner, Tim, Darid Johnston, and Neil Lewis. Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy. New York: Random House, 1995.

  Weisberger, Bernard. Cold War, Cold Peace: The United States and Russia Since 1945. New York: American Heritage; Boston, 1984.

  Wise, David. Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.

  . Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America. New York: Random House, 2002.

  . Spy Who Got Away: The Inside Story of Edward Lee Howard, the CIA Agent Who Betrayed His Country’s Secrets and Escaped to Moscow. New York: Random House, 1988.

  Unpublished

  The Prison Diary of Gennady Vasilenko

  The Jack Platt Journals

  It Was Worth It—the memoir of Polly Platt.

  Additional Sources

  Interviews (see Acknowledgments)

  FBI

  Robert Hanssen file (obtained under FOIA)

  Operation Ghost Stories file

  Online Resources

  SpyCast (The International Spy Museum)

  C-SPAN Archives

  WikiLeaks

  National Law Enforcement Museum (FBI Oral History Collection)

  The Vault (FBI FOIA Archives)

  Crest (CIA Records Search Tool)

  CIA Electronic Reading Room

  Center for the Study of Intelligence (CIA)

  The Black Vault

  CI Centre

  National Security Archives

  Geneology.com

  Ancestry.com

  Interfax (Russia News Service)

  Photos

  All photos courtesy of Jack Platt and family, Gennady Vasilenko, and Dion Rankin, unless otherwise noted.

  * Most of the dates and specific locations (such as prisons) referenced in this book are based upon the personal recollections of Jack Platt and Gennady Vasilenko. CIA officers and KGB agents are not permitted to remove files and notes upon retirement; therefore the authors worked with the book’s principals to portray relevant dates as accurately as possible.

  * Credits include The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, What’s Up, Doc?, The Bad News Bears, and Terms of Endearment (as production designer); Pretty Baby (as screenwriter); and Broadcast News, The War of the Roses, and Bottle Rocket (as producer). The 1984 movie Irreconcilable Differences is loosely based on the story of Polly’s marriage to Bogdanovich in the 1960s.

  * Leigh authored a wonderful memoir of her family’s adventurous overseas tours entitled Sticky Situations: Stories of Childhood Adventures Abroad (Infinity, 2003).

  * “CI” stood for counterintelligence, while the number denoted a specific target. In this case, “4” represented Soviet counterintelligence, or Line KR.

  * An offshoot of the joint operation, called Operation Courtship, would soon be based in Springfield, Virginia. The name was said to have had a double meaning: “court” for FBI director Judge William Webster, and “ship” for CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner.

  † A year after the building opened, an accident there took the life of DC postmaster James P. Willett. On September 30, 1899, Willett fell ninety feet (twenty-seven meters) down an open elevator shaft. Nothing more than a flimsy wooden barrier had prevented access to the shaft. Willett died a day later.

  * Although many conclude that Piguzov was outed by another still-in-place traitor, Jack was adamant that Howard was responsible.

  * This period was followed by a string of Carlos-inspired attacks against Western targets in the 1980s that killed 11 and injured 150 people. For many years, Sánchez was among the most wanted international fugitives. He was ultimately captured in Sudan in 1994 and is currently serving a life sentence in France.

  * In a recent interview, Schwinn asserted that he wasn’t drunk that night and, in fact, didn’t have a drinking problem. He says he did black out from about 9 p.m. until 4 a.m., but he believes it was because someone slipped him a “mickey.” Further, he says he wasn’t transferred because of the incident but because he threatened to hire a lawyer—a no-no in FBI land—after he was put on probation for the incident. Jack, Mad Dog, and Gennady stand by their version of events.

  * Powstenko founded the three-day Festival of the Art of Ukraine, held at DAR Constitution Hall and attended by twenty thousand. The Washington Post referred to the “rugged” Powstenko as an “indefatigable impresario of the art, song, poetry, and dance of his native land.”

  * Although they are staples today, Scates’s ideas about quick sets to inside hitters and sophisticated combination sets, in which two hitters are sent to the same area, overwhelming the opposing blocker, were considered revolutionary in the ’60s.

  * This was in 1980, when the concept of refugee resettlement bore a much different connotation than today, when those fleeing war-torn countries were welcomed into the US. According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, after the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act, “refugees were seen as people who ‘voted with their feet’ as they escaped from countries ruled by oppressive Communist regimes; hence, such ‘freedom fighters’ should be welcomed into the United States.” And they were definitely welcomed by Cowboy Jack Platt, an old-school Republican.

  * Denton finds it amusing that a hippie had just dissed three government agencies at once (CIA, FBI, and KGB) and didn’t even realize it. “It was what I would call a grand slam,” laughs Denton.

  * In 1971, the US national table tennis team was in Japan for the world championships. US player Glenn Cowan made friends with the Chinese team, which led to the US team visiting China a week later, easing tensions between the two countries. The “Ping-Pong diplomacy” led to the restoration of Sino-US relations, which had been cut for more than two decades, formalized by President Nixon’s trip to China a year later. This triggered off a series of other events, including the restoration of China’s rights in the United Nations, and the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and other countries.

  * Conrad died of a heart attack in prison in 1998. By coincidence, Cowboy Jack wasn’t the only Musketeer whose skills influenced the Conrad roll-up. In December 1988, FBI director Louis Freeh gave Dion Rankin an incentive award for his stateside work apprehending Conrad’s cohorts. Dion’s expert back-and-forth interrogations between suspects led to a full confession by Kelly Church, who, while stationed in Germany, funneled classified intel to Conrad over an extended period of time. She was sentenced to fifteen years.

  * The FBI rolled up Pelton soon after the Yurchenko disclosure. He was convicted of espionage and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences and a hundred-dollar fine. However, he was released from federal prison in 2015 at age seventy-four.

  * This was a mild prelude to what Gennady would face in the years ahead, when the FSB would move him from prison to prison, forcing him to constantly renegotiate sleeping arrangements with a fresh host of thugs. The choices weren’t pretty: thin, coarse, puke-stained mattresses versus urine-puddled concrete floors.

  * The difference between the two surveillance groups is that SOG agents are armed and have law enforcement authority. They are assigned surveillance of targets who are considered armed and dangerous.

  * The colorful Powstenko died shortly after this call was made, at age sixty-four, of sepsis.

  * After the case had been closed out successfully, FBI director Louis Freeh once again recognized Dion, among others, with an incentive award for his role in pruning the list, saying in part, “Through your intense examination of numerous files, you were able to refine the list of suspects and identify six individuals whose activities warranted further probing. You exhibited a tremendous amount of expertise and patience while painstakingly collecting and piecing together details, and your sheer determination and keen awareness w
ere vital to the establishment of credible evidence. The closure of this significant investigation was undeniably achieved as a result of your hard work, and I want to extend to you my deepest thanks for your invaluable contributions.”

  * One new mole hunt at Langley was headed by Ed Curran of the FBI. His Special Investigative Unit (SIU) comprised seven CIA and four FBI agents. Elsewhere, the CIA’s Mary Sommer and the FBI’s Jim Milburn coordinated an investigation. Fifty FBI agents toiled at Buzzard Point, while Bob Wade, Tom Pickard, and Tim Caruso held court in New York and FBI headquarters. Others of note were Sheila Horan, Neil Gallagher, and Timothy Bereznay.

  * The informal Shoffler Brunch continues to this day, in honor of its namesake, who passed away in 1996 at the untimely age of fifty-one.

  * According to Jack Clarke of Chicago Police Department’s C-5 anticorruption spy unit of the 1970s, where the mole worked previously, the mole knew of an agent code-named “Ramon” who spied on the Mexican Mafia. Even then, the mole was suspected of being a “counterspy,” so Clarke “kept him on a short leash.”

  * That same year, Bearden wrote some dialogue for De Niro when he shot Ronin (1998). De Niro and Bearden worked together on Meet the Parents (2000), too, in which De Niro played a retired CIA agent. Bearden was also a consultant on Charlie Wilson’s War (2007).

  * When the 60 Minutes II episode finally aired in 2001, the topic had been shifted to cover the recent arrest of the mole. The episode title was “The Heart of Darkness.”

  * There are differing theories about whether Stepanov had been looking for this particular box or just got amazingly lucky. Cowboy Jack thought that the odds were too enormous for the Snake to have just stumbled on the treasure, whereas ex-KGB men like Gennady tend to call him “the luckiest man in the history of the Soviet Union.”

  * One would think that the new millionaire would tip his facilitators for their role in the acquisition of the largesse, but the Snake disappeared without so much as a thank-you.

  * Rochford never divulged or corroborated Stepanov’s name to the authors. His identity was learned from a number of other sources.

  * In some references, the source is also code-named SCYTHIAN by the CIA. Scythians were Eurasian nomads whose culture flourished from around 900 BC to around 200 BC. They were known for their barbarism.

  * Perhaps the most famous Russian Illegal was Rudolf Abel (see the 2015 movie Bridge of Spies). His legend was so perfect that, after a decade spying under many aliases taken from deceased individuals, when he was tried and convicted by the US in 1957, even the prosecutors were fooled: they believed his real name was Rudolf Abel. However, in 1972 American journalists visited “Abel’s” grave in Moscow and learned his actual birth name from the tombstone: William August Fisher. He had actually been born in the UK to Russian émigré parents. However, Fisher’s great lifelong sacrifice achieved nothing of real significance. During his years as an illegal resident he appears not to have recruited, or even identified, a single potential agent.

  * A recent study concluded that the top 1 percent of Russians controlled 74 percent of the nation’s wealth, despite Putin’s “reforms.”

  † During the period from 1992 to 1995, 18,000 foreign joint ventures had been formed, involving $10 billion in private foreign direct investment (FDI), with the number of Americans involved rising from 625 at the beginning of 1992 to 2,800 by the end of 1993.

  ‡ Putin had recently purged the company of its Putin-critical owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, forcing him to sell off the company to Kremlin-controlled Gazprom-Media.

  * The KGB had begun trolling Western spy books in earnest for such clues after some KGB colonels saw the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor, based on the 1974 CIA thriller written by James Grady, who would go on to become, ironically, one of Gennady’s many American friends linked to the Shoffler Brunch crew. Condor’s main character works in the CIA’s book analysis department. After the movie’s release, the KGB established the Scientific Research Institute of Intelligence Problems (NIIRP), which employed thousands of book/magazine/newspaper reader-analysts. Coincidentally, Grady’s book drew heavily on none other than David Wise’s seminal 1964 nonfiction book on espionage, The Invisible Government.

  * The movie finally premiered on December 22, 2006, to mixed reviews. It ultimately earned approximately $100 million at the box office. Cowboy Jack had “mixed feelings” about the final result, especially the typical filmic exaggerations that are a necessity in most docudramas.

  * Genya wrote the diary in English so as to keep as many prying eyes from reading it as possible.

  * The button also contained the Roman alphabet transliteration of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet word “перегрузка” (peregruzka). Unfortunately, the best translation of that word is “overload,” not “reset.”

  † The US has a habit of giving gifts to Lavrov. In May 2017, he would be treated to top secret terrorism intel as a parting gift inside the White House Oval Office, courtesy of President Trump.

  * Among other successes: a $4 billion deal was announced between Boeing and a Russian firm; Cisco Systems announced it was going to spend $1 billion in Russia, in part to develop a Moscow version of Silicon Valley; the Export-Import Bank of the United States announced a new deal to underwrite—with US taxpayer dollars—US business exports to Russia; lastly, Obama submitted a US-Russia nuclear cooperation agreement, backed by powerful business interests, to the US Congress.

  * Fradkov’s name resurfaced recently. Reuters obtained two confidential documents from the Kremlin’s Russian Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, which showed that the institute devised the initial cyber strategy to compromise the 2016 US presidential election. Fradkov was appointed by Putin to head the Institute in January 2017. Some believe it is gearing up to interfere in future US elections.

  * Grammar and spelling throughout the diary are faithful to the original.

  * On March 4, 2018 Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the Russian-made nerve agent Novichok. Their unconscious bodies were found on a park bench in Salisbury, England.

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