Spy Handler

by Victor Cherkashin

  Gennady Vasilenko also landed on his feet. After his 1988 release from six months in Lefortovo, he retreated to his dacha for two months to mull over his future. Some KGB friends who never believed he’d spied for the United States helped find him a job in a KGB cover enterprise, a publishing house run by a former intelligence officer. Soon he reestablished contact with Jack Platt and began picking up the other pieces of his life. After setting up a company that traded in sugar and cigarettes, he went into the security field in 1991.

  2

  The SVR refused to acknowledge my claim to a pension until April 1993. Even then, the amount wasn’t indexed to the skyrocketing inflation, so that by the time the paperwork was processed, it didn’t cover the cost of the gasoline needed for the drive to Yasenevo to sign for it. By then, I’d begun making my own difficult adjustment to Russia’s new society.

  Soon after retiring in 1991, I accepted an offer from the deputy minister for light industry to help open a leather and fur company as part of a plan to spin off private companies from state enterprises. I soon realized that the organization would be run by ministers and their deputies. Having just resigned from a state institution and not wanting to work for another one, I instead joined an acquaintance trying to buy and sell anything he could lay his hands on, including surplus military gas masks and uniforms. We signed contracts worth billions of rubles for the import of containers of cigarette cartons. We never saw the cigarettes and didn’t pay any money for them, but continued agreeing to anything that was offered us. In short, we spread our resources too thin to be effective at anything.

  My business associate was also setting up a bank with an American partner under the auspices of a nuclear weapons research enterprise. It was in the formerly closed city of Sarov east of Moscow, where Andrei Sakharov helped design the first Soviet atomic bomb. Agreeing to head security for what would be called the First Russian Bank, I joined it in October 1992.

  In the lawless conditions of the time, fast-growing organized criminal groups were targeting a vast array of banks established to process the huge profits generated by the give-away sales of state property. Like many other former KGB officers, I exchanged the Cold War cat-and-mouse game for a cutthroat new conflict between hundreds of emerging interests battling to grab a piece of the Soviet infrastructure. Bankers were regularly gunned down in the struggle for control. Successful organizations relied on information that former intelligence personnel were well positioned to procure.

  The First Russian Bank became one of the country’s largest. Its security service for guarding the main office and various branches eventually grew to 150 men. We found ourselves targeted by the Izmailovo criminal group, one of the country’s most notorious, named for a sprawling suburban area in northeastern Moscow. We often feared for our lives, especially after a man we hired to help negotiate with criminal groups was found shot dead in his office. Shaking banks down themselves, police solved almost none of the assassinations. Perversely, criminal groups were the only organizations capable of providing any kind of real “protection.” I eventually called on the services of the SVR’s Alpha special forces group, originally set up by the KGB for special foreign operations.

  In 1995, the First Russian Bank ran into serious trouble. Money was being siphoned out of its accounts; news broke that $70 million invested by an oil company was missing. It was clear the bank would collapse. When one of the founders died in a suspicious car crash, I decided to leave. By then—in January 1996—I’d completed the registration of my own private security company, which I named Alpha-Puma, after the special forces squad. Soon I had a string of clients, including banks, food markets, offices, shopping malls and film studios. I hired former KGB and military officers and trained guards—over one hundred people in all, who watched over fourteen locations.

  Now, as Vladimir Putin serves his second term as president, the country continues to adjust after almost a decade and a half of chaotic post-Soviet development. But stability doesn’t necessarily mean rule of law. In this case, it comes more from Russia’s new political bosses, who are increasingly calling the shots. Once an intelligence officer himself, Putin has elevated many former KGB officers to positions of power. However, it isn’t entirely correct to talk about ex-KGB personnel as part of a unified community that has adapted to Russia’s new conditions. Many former Soviet intelligence officers condemn Putin for the way he came to power—as a tool to protect the interests of the close-knit Yeltsin-era elite. Although he has done much to shut down individual purveyors of influence under his predecessor, corrupt insider politics have grown.

  It’s more accurate to see ex-KGB officers as a social group—a collection of former Soviet citizens generally picked for their promise, educated better than most, and given an opportunity to study human nature, a central part of intelligence work. Former KGB officers just happened to be better positioned to provide services that were in demand. It’s true that some used their positions to profit handsomely from the state financial structures under their command as government control disintegrated. But that’s a minority that had counterparts in each state sector. Although much of the population denounced the KGB in 1991, even some prominent liberals have since agreed that intelligence officers were actually among the least corrupt members of Soviet society. It’s ironic that after having been so thoroughly criticized, former KGB officers have ended up in demand in the very private sector they were accused of trying to thwart.

  3

  In 1997, I made my first trip to the United States since leaving my post as Line KR chief a decade earlier. I’d been invited by one of the men I operated against in the 1980s: Jack Platt, now vice president of a company called Hamilton Trading Group. He asked Vasilenko and me to attend a conference on nuclear waste security at Washington’s Georgetown University.

  Returning to the United States presented a kind of psychological barrier I was eager to cross. I no longer worked in intelligence. Indeed, I felt I was living a completely new life, this time traveling solely for my private interests. But knowledge of top secret information keeps former intelligence officers from being like ordinary retirees. That was why I called SVR spokesman Yuri Kobaladze to make sure the foreign intelligence service had no problems with my going, despite the many years that had passed since I’d been involved in highly classified work. Although Ames had been exposed three years earlier, other agents I knew about hadn’t, including the Source. After speaking to Kobaladze, I drove out to Yasenevo to emphasize my concern that since U.S. newspapers had reported my involvement in the Ames case, there was a distinct possibility I’d be a target for recruitment. But an officer told me I wouldn’t be able to compromise any active cases and there was no reason I shouldn’t go.

  Washington was even more beautiful than I remembered. Although happy to be back, I couldn’t shake an upsetting feeling that I was no longer part of the city. At the conference, I was introduced to Brent Scowcroft and Ray Mislock, who headed the national security section of the FBI’s Washington field office. I found out later that it was Mislock’s computer Robert Hanssen had hacked in 1992 to prove the FBI system wasn’t secure. Mislock was chief of counterintelligence operations against Russia at the time.

  Now he didn’t appear interested in my conversation with Scowcroft—but did chime in with support for Scowcroft’s suggestion that the three of us have dinner. I wasn’t particularly thrilled at the prospect of being grilled about my knowledge of Ames but agreed to go along. I was eager to talk to Scowcroft, who’d done his part in the American fight against the Evil Empire.

  At the table, the conversation was friendly; Scowcroft seemed genuinely interested in finding out why Ames had decided to spy for Moscow. But I realized my invitation had one main purpose: to allow the coy seeming Mislock to get to know me. Afterward, he drove me to my hotel. When I told him I probably wouldn’t be seeing him again, he insisted on picking me up the next morning. I called Platt to remind him of his promise that I wouldn’t be subject to any pi
tches. Platt assured me he’d take care of my concern and I wasn’t approached for the rest of my trip.

  I had a feeling the conference wouldn’t be my last brush with the FBI. A year later, I was back in the United States for another symposium, this time on tactics to combat organized crime. The affair was held in Virginia Beach. Vasilenko and I again flew to Washington, where Platt put us up in his house for two days before the conference.

  I agreed to go on the trip partly because I wanted to visit my daughter Alyona. She was studying at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, on a two-year exchange program run jointly with Russia’s most prestigious university, MGIMO, from which she’d just graduated. Surely the FBI had considered and sanctioned the enrollment of the daughter of Aldrich Ames’s handler in an American institution. While I was happy for her chance to experience another culture, I couldn’t help worrying that the bureau might lean on her.

  During the closing dinner of the conference, I began feeling shooting pains in my right side, so I excused myself and went to my room. The next morning, the pain was worse. Platt drove me to be diagnosed at a local hospital, where I found it curious that doctors gave me an injection without examining me first. Back in my hotel room, I fell asleep for the rest of the day and through the night. I could barely rouse myself the following morning.

  It wasn’t until I became aware of an unpleasant taste in my mouth that I slowly began to suspect what had actually happened. The taste was similar to the kind I knew accompanied psychotropic “truth” drugs. Having used the chemicals myself more than once during my career, I knew the physical signs that accompanied them. Swallowers quickly entered trancelike states. They remained conscious and responded—earnestly—to all questions, but as if talking in a dream. When given antidotes, they’d snap out of the daze, thinking they’d nodded off by accident. Usually, the telltale signs went unnoticed: headaches, tiredness, depression—and the unmistakable taste.

  I reviewed the previous day. Could a drug I’d been slipped during the banquet have given me enough pain to ask to be taken to the hospital, where I was administered psychotropic drugs? I knew the KGB and FBI used similar methods. Why had I slept so long, which was unusual for me? And had I really been asleep? Platt firmly denied my accusations, blaming my pain on kidney stones. I’d indeed suffered from them before, but this time there were too many unexplained circumstances. I decided to take precautions. Buying bottled water, I refused to drink anything in the hotel.

  The day after my hospital visit, I took a book to read at the beach, where I found an empty chair. A pleasant breeze blew off the water. Feeling better, I closed my eyes and listened to the lapping waves. In my relaxed state, I ignored a young man with dark hair walking toward me from the direction of the hotel. He was smiling when he reached my chair.

  “Victor Cherkashin?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Michael Rochford,” he said casually. “I saw you at the conference. I thought the Russian participants spoke well.” I thought the Russians had contributed little of interest, but nodded. After a brief talk about the conference, Rochford changed his tone.

  “I have to tell you that I’m an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” I said nothing. He continued. “I work casing the Russian embassy and know a lot of people posted there over the years. I want to talk about your time in the United States.”

  I tried to betray no reaction. The Ames case was closed. I couldn’t add very much to what had been made public. Besides, I felt sure I could tell Rochford nothing that would be of much use, as the SVR had assured me before my 1997 trip. I didn’t think the FBI would be much interested in the routine of my work in Washington—about which it already knew quite a bit, thanks to Martynov. I’d later learn my confidence was misplaced.

  “I don’t think I can be of much use to you,” I said. “I’ve been retired for seven years. If you want to talk about Aldrich Ames—well, all I can say is that I learned about what happened to him from newspapers.”

  Rochford had clearly read my FBI files. I found out later that he’d helped debrief Yurchenko in 1985, along with Ames. “We’re looking for someone who delivered information even more useful than Aldrich Ames’s,” he said. “We believe you were involved in the case.” He listed names of KGB officers involved with handling the Source. The information was accurate, and I suspected the FBI got it from high-level Russian informants. On the other hand, I thought, all the names had been made public in the aftermath of Ames’s exposure, so it was difficult to tell what Rochford actually knew and what he was making up.

  “We know the agent informed Soviet intelligence about the U.S. agents Valery Martynov, Sergei Motorin and Boris Yuzhin,” Rochford continued. “He’s also compromised our satellite programs.

  “The FBI needs your help in getting more information about this agent,” Rochford went on. “We know he voluntarily offered his services to Soviet intelligence in the 1980s, either leaving a letter with a Soviet representative office in Washington or sending it by mail.”

  “Look,” I said slowly, “we received very many letters from various people. If you’re asking me to help you with something that happened fifteen years ago, I’m afraid I won’t be of much use to you. It’s difficult for me to remember that far back.”

  Rochford was persistent but also polite, even while making veiled threats. He was obviously a professional who knew what he was doing. “Victor Ivanovich,” he said, “we’ve collected almost enough evidence. He’ll be arrested within the next two months, I assure you. The only thing we need from you is a little help sorting the case out.”

  The longer Rochford went on, however, the more I realized he was making up stories. He was trying too hard to convince me the FBI already knew almost everything about the unidentified agent’s activities. If the bureau really had that kind of information, it wouldn’t allow him to advertise it.

  “Of course we don’t expect you to help us for free,” he said. “The FBI is ready to pay you $1 million.”

  Having been offered that amount before while serving in Washington, I didn’t have to think about my answer. “A million dollars is worth little compared to my honor, Michael. I’ve been made offers before, as you probably know. But I should tell you that I have enough money—I don’t need any more. What I want most is for my children and my grandchildren to be proud of me. Besides, do you think I’d have worked in Soviet intelligence my whole life only to turn now?”

  “We know you had contact with the agent in 1984,” Rochford insisted. That assertion couldn’t have been true, of course, but it piqued my curiosity. “You rode out to meet him on your bicycle,” he specified.

  So that was it—incredible. Rochford was right about riding my bicycle around Washington, but that had nothing to do with my cases. He must have been referring to a fall I suffered in July 1984. Alyona and Elena were on vacation in Moscow and, as on most Sundays when I was alone, I went for a ride along a former towpath next to Washington’s old C&O canal. (The path was too crowded with joggers and bicyclists to be suitable for conducting operations.)

  At one point, something must have stuck in my spokes. The front wheel jammed and I flew forward over the handlebars, onto the ground. My back was hurt and my face bleeding, but I’d narrowly missed a ditch that would have caused worse injuries. A passerby who saw the accident offered to drive me to the hospital, where I was given eleven stitches. No doubt the FBI found out about the accident from the hospital report, I now thought.

  But perhaps the bureau’s involvement was less innocent. Elena was convinced that the FBI was responsible for the accident, which I found laughable. But Rochford’s claim that I’d met Ramon in 1984 made me think maybe Elena was right. Maybe the bureau thought I conducted operations on bicycle and tried to foil me that time.

  I couldn’t rule out that the information in the Source’s letter had somehow leaked out of the rezidentura in the 1980s. I knew that at least two officers had secretly opened it and read the
contents. I finally settled on trying to throw Rochford off the same way I tried to prevent a security breach in 1985—by bringing up my invented story that the letter was simply part of a ploy to help the Bulgarian secret service protect one of its agents.

  I finally excused myself and went back to my room. My head was spinning. I needed time to recover from the continuing pain in my side, my bad mood and tiredness. Most of all, I had to think over what had happened.

  Rochford tried to speak to me several more times. Still suffering physically, I decided to cut my trip short. I telephoned Alyona to tell her I wouldn’t be flying out to see her, then booked a Moscow flight for Saturday. On Friday, my pain stopped as suddenly as it had started four days earlier.

  Back home, I mulled things over again. Clearly the FBI was looking for a volunteer who’d sent us a letter exposing Motorin, Martynov and Yuzhin and disclosing intelligence on spy satellites. Although I knew much of what Rochford told me had been made up, the information that was true could only have been provided by an informer. If the Source was still active, he was in danger.

  My main concern, however, wasn’t what the FBI did or didn’t know. It was why the SVR didn’t warn me about ongoing cases before I traveled to Washington the previous year. Why wasn’t I told that the agent who volunteered to me in 1985 still worked for Russian intelligence? My knowledge about the Source posed him great potential danger. To allow me to travel to the States without even telling me to be careful was inexcusably negligent.

  The SVR probably expected me to deal with any danger myself. I’d had no information about developments in any of my agents’ cases since being isolated from Yasenevo’s corridors of power in 1986. I didn’t know Ramon’s real name or identity, so I couldn’t expose him directly. Still, I knew a great deal. If I’d been given psychotropic drugs as I suspected, there was no way of telling what I might have revealed about KGB operations.