Then the story began to change. The supposed mistress turned out to be a notorious First Directorate sex groupie who had bedded down as many KGB foreign intelligence officers as she could chalk up in the few years she had been hanging around the gates of Yasenevo. Then the murdered “vagabond” was transformed into another KGB officer, a jealous lover who happened upon the couple locked in an embrace and fought with Vetrov. But neither was available to tell her or his own story—the woman disappeared, and the man Vetrov killed was never named. Then in 1984, the other shoe dropped when the story of Vetrov’s arrest and execution for spying for the French flashed through the First Directorate.
Whispers and speculation began immediately. In the end, Aksilenko began to doubt the entire Vetrov legend, with the notable exception of his execution. He already dismissed the murder in the park as contrived, and the idea of Vetrov betraying his treason in letters to his wife or to a prison snitch didn’t pass the most basic test of logic. No KGB man would have poured his heart out in a letter. He would have toughed it out in prison for ten or twelve years; it was long, but nowadays there were worse places to be. Something else must have happened to Vetrov—of this, Val Aksilenko was now convinced.
Now, against the backdrop of all the other revelations of treason in Yasenevo over the last year, it finally seemed to fit. The Vetrov story was part of the grand deceptions, the elaborate smoke screens, surrounding the betrayals of so many Yasenevo officers in the last two years.
What the hell was going on? Aksilenko asked himself. What were they hiding?
Then came the biggest shock of the year.
Walking into Dmitri Yakushkin’s office in mid-July, Aksilenko found the KGB general engrossed in a report. He could see from across the desk that it was top secret. Aksilenko muttered a familiar greeting, but Yakushkin didn’t respond, and he sat in awkward silence until Yakushkin finally lifted his eyes. After staring vacantly at Aksilenko for a moment, Yakushkin handed the paper across his desk.
Aksilenko began to read a summary of the arrest of GRU General Dmitri Polyakov. As he read, Aksilenko glanced self-consciously over the top of the paper at Yakushkin, who seemed to be disoriented and devastated by the report of Polyakov’s treachery. Finally, his voice shaking, Yakushkin spoke.
“This man is a general, like me, Valentin. Who are we to trust? If we can’t trust a general, who can we trust?”
Aksilenko had no answer—the question didn’t demand one. He felt uncomfortable, not only because of Yakushkin’s strange demeanor, but because the document he had been handed was so clearly restricted to a level of access high above his own.
New York, August 23, 1986
There were two unique characteristics to the FBI’s operation that led to the arrest of Soviet scientist Gennady Zakharov on espionage charges during the dog days of August 1986. The first was that the entire operation had, from the outset, been a sting designed to entrap Zakharov, a physicist assigned to the United Nations in New York, into committing acts that would get him arrested. The second was that Gennady Zakharov was living and working in the United States as a UN employee without diplomatic immunity.
The KGB interpreted this operation as a profound breach of etiquette. There would have to be payback. It wouldn’t take the Soviets long to identify an American living in Moscow without diplomatic immunity who could serve their purposes.
Moscow, 1220 Hours, August 30, 1986
Nicholas Daniloff, Moscow correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, had just left his last meeting with Mikhail Luzin, his “Misha from Frunze,” a young Russian who in the past had provided insights into the heavy toll that the war in Afghanistan was taking on the Russian boys who were being sent out to the front. After five years as the newsmagazine’s Moscow bureau chief, Daniloff was closing out his tour in the Soviet Union and was about to head home to Washington. His successor, Jeff Trimble, was already in Moscow.
On the embankment near the Moscow River, Daniloff gave Misha a package of Stephen King novels—works by the master of horror were hard to come by in the Soviet Union. In return, Misha handed Daniloff a tightly wrapped package that he said included photographs taken in Afghanistan. Misha had given Daniloff photographs taken by Russian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan before, and though the pictures had been of such poor quality that they’d been of little use for the magazine, Daniloff still felt that Misha had helped him understand the terrors that were haunting Russian soldiers being sent off to fight the Afghan rebels.
Daniloff was walking back to his apartment in Leninsky Prospekt, with the package of photographs from Misha in a white plastic bag dangling at his side, when a van suddenly pulled up next to him and a group of men in civilian clothes quickly enveloped him. Without a word, two of the men grabbed him, forced his arms behind his back, handcuffed him, and pushed him into the van. As the van sped off, Nicholas Daniloff felt like a disembodied observer who had just witnessed his own arrest. He was still trying to sort through the fog of what was happening to him as the KGB van pulled into gate of Lefortovo Prison.
Daniloff’s arrest immediately generated international headlines as the Western press corps railed against the Soviet decision to hold a foreign correspondent. The incident ballooned into a diplomatic crisis, one that threatened an upcoming summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviets quickly made it clear to the Americans that the Daniloff and Zakharov cases were linked, further complicating the Reagan administration’s efforts to free the journalist. Public diplomacy was set in motion: U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze met to try to reach a compromise in time to save the summit.
Meanwhile, Daniloff, in jail and facing repeated interrogations, soon realized that “Misha from Frunze” wasn’t the KGB’s only concern. Before long, the Soviets began to ask him about Father Roman Potemkin—and the CIA.
Knowing that it had left Daniloff exposed as a result of the botched Father Roman affair from the year before, the CIA secretly contacted the KGB while Daniloff was in prison and set up a quiet meeting in Vienna to talk about the case. To contact the Soviets, Burton Gerber activated the “Gavrilov channel,” a secret communications line first established between the CIA and KGB in 1983.
The Gavrilov channel, named after a nineteenth-century Russian poet, had been the KGB’s idea. The Soviets had approached the Americans in the most straightforward way possible: They knocked on the apartment door of Carl Gephardt, the CIA’s Moscow chief in 1983. But Gephardt wouldn’t open the door, so the KGB’s message initially went unanswered.
When Gephardt reported the contact to Langley, however, the KGB’s proposal reached Bill Casey. Burton Gerber, who’d returned from Moscow the year before and was then serving as deputy in the European Division, was called into a meeting with Casey and others to decide whether to respond. Gerber told Casey that he thought they should meet with the KGB. The agency had nothing to lose by hearing what the Soviets wanted to talk about. Casey came around and asked Gerber to go do it himself.
Gerber wanted another CIA officer as a witness, so Gus Hathaway, the head of counterintelligence, went along, too.
The first meeting took place at the Soviet embassy in Vienna and opened with a scene straight out of the movies. As Gerber and Hathaway walked up to the entrance, the front gate to the embassy compound slowly swung open, before they’d even had a chance to ring the bell.
Soon, Gerber and other CIA officials were meeting on a semiregular basis with their KGB counterparts, usually in Vienna, a city where the Soviets felt particularly comfortable. The two sides used the Gavrilov line to tamp down potential crises between the two intelligence services, as well as to discuss ways they might actually find some common ground. One area the CIA pursued was counterterrorism: The Americans asked the Soviets for help in trying to find out what had happened to William Buckley, the CIA chief in Beirut who had been kidnapped and tortured. Buckley eventually died in captivity, and the Soviets never provided a
ny help on the matter.
The Gavrilov channel remained open until the Reagan White House tried to exploit it for political and diplomatic purposes, over Burton Gerber’s strong objections. When Gerber was told to activate the Gavrilov channel to talk to the Soviets about a particularly sensitive diplomatic issue, he at first refused, arguing that Gavrilov had been established purely for the two professional intelligence services to hash things out. He knew that the KGB would object to its use as a diplomatic back channel. But he was told that the National Security Council had issued orders for him to do it anyway. In the end, he went to the meeting with the KGB in Vienna and passed on the message as he was directed. But just as he had predicted, the Soviets responded badly, and the Gavrilov channel was suspended for years afterward.
Before that breakdown, however, Gerber was able to use the Gavrilov channel to arrange a meeting in Vienna with Anatoly Tikhonevich Kireyev, the formidable chief of counterintelligence for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Gerber needed to talk with Kireyev about the Daniloff mess.
Gerber’s message to Kireyev was simple: Daniloff was not a spy and had nothing to do with the CIA. At the end of the meeting, Kireyev casually asked Gerber a telling question.
“Did you ever meet Father Roman?”
“No.”
“You’re lucky.” Kireyev sighed. “He was a pain in the ass.”
It was just one more confirmation that Father Roman had been a KGB agent.
Eventually, the logjam in the Daniloff case broke. On September 12, the two governments agreed to arrange for both Daniloff and Zakharov to be released from prison and held in the custody of their own embassies. Finally, on September 29, Daniloff was allowed to leave the Soviet Union without facing trial. He quickly left for Frankfurt and then the United States. Zakharov was released by the United States the next day. The Reagan administration faced a brief spate of criticism for allowing the Soviets to link the two cases, but the crisis had been defused.
With tensions rising in the wake of the Daniloff-Zakharov showdown, the intelligence war between Washington and Moscow finally burst into the open and took on a diplomatic life of its own. On September 17, the United States ordered twenty-five Soviet diplomats at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations to leave the country; the Reagan administration said they were intelligence officers. On October 19, the Soviets ordered five American diplomats out of Moscow in retaliation. The tit-for-tat expulsions and declarations that spies were persona non grata soon escalated into what became known inside the CIA as the “PNG war.” By the end of October, fifty-five Soviet diplomats had been ordered out of Washington. Since the CIA presence in Moscow and Leningrad was so much smaller than the KGB’s staff in Washington, New York, and San Francisco, the Soviets had a hard time retaliating in kind.
But they finally responded by pulling out the 260 Soviet employees who handled cleaning, cooking, and other day-to-day chores at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The KGB’s move was inspired; it virtually paralyzed the embassy. Even though the Americans knew their local employees reported back to the KGB, they still relied on their Russian servants to help them navigate the nightmarish Moscow bureaucracy and keep the embassy functioning.
The retaliatory expulsions had a dramatic effect on the CIA’s ability to conduct operations in Moscow. With the departure of Murat Natirboff, Gerber asked Jack Downing to return to Moscow as the new chief. Downing had been deputy chief in the late 1970s and had handled the TRIGON case, and Gerber wanted someone with extensive experience in Moscow to help rebuild after the 1985 losses. Downing had already served as Beijing chief, so he would now become the first man in CIA history to run CIA operations in the two capitals of world Communism.
The PNG war forced Downing to delay his transfer; the CIA didn’t want him to arrive just in time to be expelled. After months waiting out the battle at headquarters, Downing finally moved to Moscow in November, only to find that the withdrawal of the embassy’s Russian staff made it nearly impossible to get anything done. Before long, Downing was spending his days washing the ambassador’s car and handling other cleaning chores rather than spying on the KGB. With virtually all of its agents rolled up and the CIA chief running errands for the ambassador, the CIA’s Moscow operation was all but out of business.
First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, Late August 1986
The hall talkers out at Yasenevo agreed on one thing about their chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov: He had “grown taller” in the last few months. And he had grown bolder. Kryuchkov seemed to have new confidence in his stewardship at Yasenevo. And his growing relationship with the new General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, was also part of the buzz. The lackluster First Directorate chief of the last several years was beginning to look to some like a new force.
Evidence of Kryuchkov’s new operational energy began to manifest itself in small but important ways. For as long as he had been engaged in intelligence operations against Americans, Val Aksilenko had known that there was a hard-and-fast rule of thumb inside the KGB. If your American agent was polygraphed by the CIA or FBI, you could write him off. He could never be trusted again, because chances were he’d been broken and then doubled back against you. This view had been unyielding dogma for decades. Now, word was filtering down from above—Aksilenko first heard it from his boss in the American Department, Anatoly Flavnov—that the polygraph policy was no longer hard and fast. It had evolved to the point where under the “right conditions,” an American could go through the polygraph grinder and still be trusted by Moscow Center. Aksilenko was taken aback by the course change on the polygraph. What had prompted the change? he wondered. Had the technical people come up with a way to beat the polygraph? Had someone actually beaten the machine?
KGB Headquarters, Lubyanka, August 30, 1986
From the moment of his arrest on July 6, 1985, Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov had instantly understood that his long journey was finally over. There was no more need for evasion, no need to worry about the next knock on the door.
The original investigation of Polyakov was triggered by the first tip to the GRU from Robert Hanssen in 1979. Polyakov had been recalled and had been forced to retire, but a KGB counterintelligence general had intervened, arguing that a general in the Red Army simply could not be a spy. A proposal devised by Rem Krassilnikov to unmask Polyakov as a traitor had been turned down, and the investigation was put on ice.
The general went into retirement. And while questions lingered, the case gradually receded into the background. Polyakov settled into his new life puttering around his dacha, tending to his grandchildren, and engaging in one of his passions, woodworking and cabinetmaking.
Five years later, the last missing piece snapped into place. The KGB finally had the goods on the GRU general, straight from its new source in Langley, Virginia.
Polyakov had known instinctively that he was being called in for his final reckoning when he received a summons on July 4 to attend a retirement ceremony at GRU headquarters in Moscow two days later. He was suspicious of the pretext, and his son, Peter, now an officer in the GRU, heightened that suspicion when he told his father he thought he’d spotted stakeout surveillance on the narrow road near their dacha. Polyakov told his son to keep his concerns to himself. He didn’t want to spoil the weekend gathering of his family for his sixty-fifth birthday.
The arrest on Monday morning was full of well-practiced fury. As he entered GRU headquarters in full dress uniform, decorations arranged neatly across his breast, he was seized by five men. One held his head in a hammerlock while the other four stripped his tunic and shirt from his chest in case he’d hidden a suicide pill in a seam. Dmitri Polyakov put up no resistance. He simply stood there, leaning his weight against the men who held him in their viselike grip. Polyakov was stripped naked and quickly examined for concealed “special preparations.” He was then dressed in a blue KGB running suit, handcuffed, and advised of the charges against him. His sole request was that his wife and sons be spared any suspicion or
indignity.
As the interrogations began, Polyakov offered no apologies. He declared that he’d had ample opportunity to leave the USSR, but he’d never considered that an option. Everything he had done had been for the Russian people, not against them. Whatever was to become of him, he told his interrogators without emotion, was his own cross to bear. And he would bear it with honor. That, too, would be part of his contribution to bringing about a revolution in thinking in the USSR. He was a social democrat of the European sort, he said. That had been the reason for his struggle over the decades. Now his death would be another part of his struggle.
Polyakov’s story came out smoothly and without reservation. He told it all, in great detail, and with an element of pride that unsettled his interrogators. Never wavering from his conviction that he had done the right thing, he repeatedly said he would do it again, faced with the same choices.
Born in the Ukraine in 1921, Polyakov graduated from the Soviet Military Academy at Frunze in time to see combat as an artillery officer in World War II, an experience burned into his consciousness and which defined him as one of the generation that held back the Third Reich. After World War II, Polyakov shifted into military intelligence, serving an early posting to the GRU Rezidentura in New York in the 1950s. After a tour of duty at GRU headquarters in Moscow, Polyakov returned to New York in 1961 for a second stretch as a GRU spy. By this time he had concluded that the suffering and sacrifice of the Russian people during the Great Patriotic War had been betrayed by the corruption and sheer evil of the Soviet system. It was during this time that he crossed the line and volunteered his services to the FBI, launching a dual life that would span almost three decades—that of a rising star in the GRU and that of a man the FBI and CIA called TOP HAT, ROAM, BOURBON, and BEEP.
The Main Enemy Page 21