Meanwhile, the CIA revamped its security procedures, tightening rules about sending communications, cutting down the volume of sensitive information broadcast electronically and reducing files on new agents that a mole might intercept. In May 1986, Hathaway asked Jeanne Vertefeuille, station chief in Gabon, to head a special task force to investigate the 1985 and 1986 losses. But the Iran-Contra affair soon distracted the CIA from its search for a leak. The scandal blew up after Nicaraguan troops shot down a U.S. military cargo plane carrying weapons to the Contra rebels seeking to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government. The news exposed the CIA’s—and especially Casey’s—violation of a Congressional ban on supplying arms to the rebels.
In December 1986, Casey was hospitalized with a brain tumor after suffering a seizure in his office. His acting replacement, Robert Gates, later said he was never told about the importance of the 1985 losses. The agency failed to put together the evidence about its exposed operations—and continued to do so until a Russian betrayed Ames to the CIA. Meanwhile, as the FBI formed its own group to investigate the losses of bureau agents Motorin and Martynov, the CIA continued learning about yet more disappearances.
7
Of the agents and operations Ames betrayed, I can confirm only those he exposed through the rezidentura when I was stationed there. As I’ve said, he provided circumstantial evidence about many spies, often not giving names because he didn’t know or wasn’t yet prepared to provide them. He also identified agents already implicated by others. Because new handlers ran Ames after I left Washington in 1986, I can’t say exactly how many agents he fingered.
In early October 1985, the CIA pulled Ames off the Yurchenko case to begin studying Italian in preparation for his new posting as Soviet branch station chief in Rome in 1986.
Meanwhile, late in 1985, the Center planned a meeting with Ames outside the United States. He suggested Bogotá, where he and his wife, Rosario, planned to spend Christmas. Ames met a KGB operative introduced to him as Vlad in the Colombian Soviet embassy.16 Ames learned his KGB cryptonym was LYUDMILA and agreed to sign his notes to the KGB as KOLOKOL, after the nineteenth-century liberal journal published by philosopher Alexander Herzen.
In July 1986, after passing his lie detector test, Ames took up his new post in Rome. Now he and Rosario began spending their KGB money liberally—although both purport she didn’t yet know the source of the funds. Vlad flew to Rome to introduce Ames to his new go-between, Rome diplomat Alexei Khrenkov. Ames then exposed Sergei Fedorenko and Soviet scientist BYPLAY, whom he’d briefly handled in 1978.
Fedorenko had been rotated back to Moscow in the late 1970s after spying in New York, where Ames had handled him. The Russian cut off contact with the CIA after the 1977 arrest of TRIGON, another agent Ames had handled. However, Fedorenko wasn’t arrested after his exposure by Ames. The KGB never found evidence of his espionage, despite heavy surveillance and searches of his apartment. Fedorenko was sent back to the United States in 1989 after working on a committee advising Mikhail Gorbachev. Ames met him in Washington and then informed on his old friend to the KGB once again, but Fedorenko defected before we had time to act on the information. He began lecturing at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, near where the FBI bought his family a house.
In December 1986, the SCD arrested another agent Ames fingered. KGB Lieutenant Colonel Boris Yuzhin was a nuclear scientist sent to study at the University of California–Berkeley in a 1975 exchange program. Tasked with recruiting agents and gathering science and technology intelligence, he was instead recruited by the FBI under the cryptonym TWINE. Yuzhin gave the bureau information about KGB recruiting efforts and described what kind of information we were seeking on the West Coast. In 1978, three years after his exchange program ended, the KGB sent him back to San Francisco to operate under cover as a journalist.
One evening, a cleaning woman found a cigarette lighter on the floor of a Soviet consulate office in San Francisco. It contained a miniature camera. The device belonged to Yuzhin, who’d left it by accident. Naturally suspecting the Americans had recruited one of our officers, we launched intensive investigations. Having narrowed the possibilities to Yuzhin and another officer, we sent both back to Moscow in 1982. Installed as an analyst in a research institute, Yuzhin was kept under close watch.
Only after Ames named him did we finally pinpoint our man. He was arrested and tried but not executed. A court sentenced him to fifteen years hard labor, perhaps as a reward for his quick confession, or because Kryuchkov was feeling generous. Boris Yeltsin granted Yuzhin amnesty in 1992, and he moved to the United States.
Among the other agents Ames is credited with unmasking after I left Washington was a radar scientist the CIA code-named EASTBOUND. He fell into a KGB trap by accepting an offer of amnesty and then helped set up his CIA handler, Erik Sites, who was arrested in May 1986.17 In 1989, Ames identified MOTORBOAT, a Bulgarian he had recruited after the agent volunteered at the Rome embassy.
Ames is said to have exposed as many as twenty-five U.S. agents, a claim nearly impossible to verify. Some of the names chalked up to him were double agents—loyal KGB officers who made the CIA and FBI believe they spied for them. One particularly interesting case involved Alexander Zhomov, an SCD officer who staged an elaborate double-agent operation in Moscow in the late 1980s to protect Ames. The CIA gave Zhomov the cryptonym PROLOGUE.
To give the impression it had solved its problems and to rationalize its failures, the CIA also accused Ames of betraying agents about whom he couldn’t have known. Other names incorrectly attributed to him in the press may be of agents the FBI and CIA had invented to obscure the number of spies they actually ran and to control the information about Ames filtering into the public domain.
Those kinds of actions were hardly unique. The SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence agency that replaced the FCD after the Soviet collapse, did the same. Organizations on both sides of the Atlantic continue to play complex propaganda games, making the task of confirming details about the agents Ames betrayed—even for someone heavily involved, like me—almost impossible at this time. However, my best knowledge leads me to concur with published reports that Ames was the first to provide the names of eleven U.S. agents: Leonid Polishchuk, Gennady Smetanin, Gennady Varennik, Sergei Vorontsov, Valery Martynov, Sergei Motorin, Vladimir Potashov, Boris Yuzhin, Vladimir Piguzov, Dmitri Polyakov and Vladimir Vasiliev.
Some of those names were already known to us, as I’ve said. Others were found only after the Center tracked them down from indirect information provided by Ames. For example, the KGB was already looking for Gennady Varennik when Ames offered information about him. And there were others named by Ames during the time I handled him who were already in our sights. I knew Gordievsky was a British spy when Ames fingered him (which he did after we asked him to provide more information about the suspected SIS agent).
8
I met Ames for the last time on June 13. I continued handling his case in Washington until he left for Rome—and I returned to Moscow—in the fall of 1986. During a meeting with Vlad in Rome, Ames expressed dismay at the sudden spate of arrests that followed our meeting in Chadwicks. He was angry but not livid because he understood we had to do something about the moles in our system. Still, he rightly felt that arresting the agents posed a major threat to his safety.
To assuage his displeasure, he was told that the arrests were the direct result of a Politburo decision over which the KGB had no control. While that explanation may have technically been true, I’ve never seen a directive confirming the claim. But I also doubt the arrests were truly at the Politburo’s bidding. If Kryuchkov had reported to his political bosses what had actually happened—that a Soviet spy had exposed more than ten CIA agents passing Washington reams of information—the Politburo would have likely fired the KGB leadership immediately, depriving its members of their pensions. The news represented total disgrace. What, after all, was the KGB paid for if not to prevent such stagger
ing security breaches?
But far from losing jobs, the KGB leadership handed out dozens of medals. That differed markedly from the CIA shakeup after Ames’s disclosure in 1994. The KGB issued no censures because, as already noted, Kryuchkov refused to tell the Politburo that a KGB agent in Washington was responsible for all the exposures. Instead, he said the KGB’s own hard work had uncovered the agents—which reflected much better on the top brass. By that logic, it was a shame we’d been penetrated by so many moles, but at least KGB counterintelligence officers were obviously doing their jobs well. Still reeling from Yurchenko’s defection and other problems, Kryuchkov was able to serve up a string of huge successes instead of one massive failure. Ames could have sunk Kryuchkov’s career—but the FCD chief saved it with his manipulation. Naturally, the disinformed Politburo responded by approving plans for arresting the exposed agents.
Aside from his motivations, Kryuchkov can’t be entirely faulted for the arrests he authorized. He had to do something about the moles—he couldn’t allow them to remain in place and pass information to the Americans. Of course the arrests got the Americans thinking. The FBI and CIA formed commissions to investigate their leaks, which gave us some tense moments, to be sure. But if we’d allowed the U.S. agents to remain in position, what would have been the point of all my counterintelligence work?
Some arrests were covered up. Others were hushed up while we carried out a number of separate operations to protect Ames. Ultimately, the stories and operations were successful. After launching its mole hunts, the CIA concluded it hadn’t been penetrated by the KGB—despite much evidence to the contrary. Our own mistakes notwithstanding, Ames—and later Hanssen—weren’t exposed by detective work and continued to spy until they were betrayed by CIA agents.
If the Politburo had reacted differently—if it had asked why there were so many spies inside the KGB in 1985—it would have concluded that Soviet intelligence was riddled with major human resources problems. Any intelligence service has elements of patronage. At the KGB, however, the problem was especially serious. The awards given to tens of KGB officers in the face of obvious failure spoke to the substantial impunity officers like Kyruchkov enjoyed.
Although the KGB had many honest and decent officers, it protected those whose good relations with their bosses enabled them to get away with almost anything. Why weren’t measures taken to stop risky activity, which in the end compromised not only a single individual but the entire agency?
Some KGB officers landed their jobs and promotions through patronage. Good connections often came with immunity to bad evaluations. Thus a number of potential traitors weren’t stopped before it was too late. Perhaps just as damaging, however, some hardworking officers who saw others wrongly favored found justification for committing treason.
In Washington at the time, I found out about many of the arrests of agents Ames exposed only in 1986. Some have said I reacted angrily. I know I was upset that wrapping up almost the entire network of CIA agents in Moscow might have easily led the Americans to Ames. In fact, I said nothing about it then. I did—and do—disagree to some extent about how the moles were seized. But it wasn’t my place then to criticize the arrests, which were carried out by another department with different responsibilities than my own. There were also unspoken rules. It was up to the Center to decide how to use the information I provided from our agents. I was never asked what I thought and I never volunteered to make it known. My criticism came much later.
In the final analysis, while it would have been absurd to let CIA agents in the KGB continue providing the Americans with intelligence, not all of them should have been arrested. Some moles could have been recruited as triple agents to pass along disinformation to the CIA. In other cases, officers could have been demoted and assigned to jobs that would have cut off access to classified information. Still, the exceedingly difficult job of turning double agents into triple agents could have worked only in a few isolated cases. Despite his motivations, therefore, from an operational point of view, Kryuchkov didn’t commit a serious mistake in arresting the agents Ames betrayed.
Another question altogether is what happened to them after arrest. Maybe it’s worth repeating that I think execution was wrong and entirely unnecessary. Martynov may have damaged us by exposing John Walker. But what about someone like Motorin, his colleague in Washington, who also was shot? He knew practically nothing. He couldn’t have told the Americans much more than that I was a counterintelligence officer and Stanislav Androsov was the rezident in Washington at the time—which the CIA already knew. I remained deeply convinced that the spies Ames betrayed should have been fired and deprived of their pensions, but no more. What further harm could they have done?
Ames, meanwhile, ended his tour in Rome and returned to Washington in 1989 to head the western branch of the SE division. In October 1990, he became an analyst at the CIC, the CIA counterintelligence center. After the Soviet collapse in 1991, he continued spying for Russia until his arrest on February 21, 1994.
8
WASHINGTON STATION: HOW TO CATCH A SPY
1
The bombshell dropped on a typically mild autumn day in Washington. Leaving my apartment in the residential compound that Saturday morning in October 1985, I visualized the pile of work waiting in my office. The rezidentura was largely empty. With Androsov on vacation in Moscow, only his deputy and a duty officer were at their desks when I arrived. It fell to me, as the station’s second in command, to deal with the usual communications arriving from the Center. Other concerns were decidedly not routine. At the top of my list was how to handle fellow Washington KGB officer Valery Martynov, whom Ames had exposed as an American spy months earlier. I’d been agonizing over how to get him back to Moscow, but hadn’t figured out how to do it without risking him taking flight.
That problem was about to worsen—but in a way that marked the start of one of the KGB’s greatest successes ever. The cipher officer delivered the day’s cables. Several minutes after I sat down to read them, the deputy rezident knocked on my door. He held an envelope in his hand. “Degtyar received this by mail,” he said. “Have a look at it.”
The envelope was addressed to Victor Degtyar, a midlevel intelligence officer in the rezidentura. It had been mailed to his apartment in a Virginia suburb, dropped in front of his door by a letter carrier. It was postmarked “Prince George’s Co, MD.” A second envelope inside gave me a moment’s surprise. “DO NOT OPEN,” it read. “TAKE THIS ENVELOPE UNOPENED TO VICTOR I. CHERKASHIN.”
Nothing on the envelope indicated who had sent it, but clearly the writer understood something about KGB procedures. He must have known the FBI relaxed its otherwise unrelenting surveillance of our officers when they were at home—and used that to minimize risky direct contact. Addressing the envelope to me also revealed that the sender knew who was who within the rezidentura.
I silently removed the sensational letter that would come to shame and haunt the guardians of American security. I couldn’t help thinking that the surprise delivery revealed mistrust of me among some of my colleagues back at Yasenevo. That suspicion must have included someone in the Washington station, for despite the envelope’s strict instructions, it had already been opened.
“Dear Mr. Cherkashin,” the typed letter began. “Soon I will send a box of documents to Mr. Degtyar. They are from certain of the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the U.S. intelligence community. All are originals to aid in verifying their authenticity. Please recognize for our long-term interests that there are a limited number of persons with this array of clearances. As a collection, they point to me . . . ”
Our long-term interests? Who had sent the stunning message? What manner of entrepreneur was claiming an array of clearances for the U.S. intelligence community’s most sensitive projects? Obviously someone who knew something important. More than that, someone critically placed because—as I read further—the letter went on to betray several CIA and FBI moles inside t
he KGB: “I trust that an officer of your experience will handle them [the documents] appropriately. I believe they are sufficient to justify a $100,000 payment to me. I must warn of certain risks to my security of which you may not be aware. Your service has recently suffered some setbacks. I warn that Mr. Boris Yuzhin (Line PR, SF), Mr. Sergey Motorin, (Line PR, Wash.) and Mr. Valeriy Martynov (Line X, Wash.) have been recruited by our ‘special services.’”
The letter went on to provide information about recent Soviet defectors to the United States. It also discussed a number of highly sensitive U.S. technical operations against our spying in the United States. And it included data about the sums the American government was spending on intelligence, including the NSA, FBI, CIA and military intelligence. The following day, I learned the envelope also contained an attachment—removed by the deputy rezident—providing intelligence about espionage projects in the U.S. space program.
There was no signature.
It seemed too good to be true. The overriding question was whether the offer was real or a provocation to trap the KGB through a double agent. Recruiting Ames had been more than enough success for a lifetime in intelligence, justifying all my work as a KGB officer. Receiving such a letter just six months later was exceedingly improbable. Most likely Ames had sent it to cover his tracks. If communications from the rezidentura to the Center were intercepted, the “evidence” that we had more than one source, he may have thought, would prompt the Americans to lay less blame on him.
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