Thousands of miles away on that same Monday in August, there was proof that Shebarshin’s First Chief Directorate was still in the game. An American intelligence officer went for a walk to a park only a few miles from the headquarters of the CIA in Virginia. He liked Mondays as he knew there were fewer FBI surveillance teams operating. Underneath a footbridge he left a package containing highly classified information about intelligence operations the United States was mounting against the Soviet Union. He retrieved another package containing twenty thousand dollars in cash and a message. He was one of two spies the KGB had deep inside its opponent’s intelligence services. This spy had been active for more than a decade but not even the KGB knew his real name. And the pair were not the only spies the KGB had in America—they also had their own officers, living as sleepers.
HIGH IN YASENEVO’S tower, those who controlled the KGB’s most prized spies had also been watching the tanks. Floors fourteen to twenty on the main tower were home to Directorate S. Its work was kept secret even from other colleagues in the building because this was where the KGB ran deep-cover agents who lived abroad under false identities—illegals. Traditional spies work under diplomatic cover in a foreign country—posing as something like a second counselor for trade. If such a spy is caught, they have diplomatic immunity and can only be expelled. Other spies work under nondiplomatic cover, as, say, a businessman. They have no diplomatic immunity. In the Russian terminology, they are “illegal.” Many countries undertake this kind of spying but Directorate S takes things a step further. A deep-cover Russian illegal can be not just operating under cover of a different occupation but can take on an entirely different nationality. The Russian will not—to all appearances—be Russian but instead be German or Canadian or even American. They can spend decades undercover in a different country, burrowing deep into their target society—sleepers. Some will live and die in a foreign land, buried in a graveyard under a name that was never truly their own. Illegals are the pride of Soviet and then Russian intelligence—having assets deep inside enemy territory provided a sense of power and reassurance and an edge over their adversaries. Were they worth the vast investment? “My experience tells me that this practise quite justified itself,” Leonid Shebarshin said.
When the 1991 coup began, a legendary figure made a surprise reappearance in the corridors of Directorate S. Yuri Drozdov had retired a few months earlier as the head of the directorate. But in August as the tanks rolled, he returned to the duty room, with a sparkle in his eye. “We’ll restore order in the country! We’ll clear up the mess. It’s about time!” he told surprised staff. Lean, with a long face, Drozdov had entered Berlin with the Red Army at the end of World War II and by 1962 was a KGB illegal in Germany. Drozdov escorted American lawyer James Donovan across East Berlin to organize one of the most famous spy swaps of the Cold War, when the illegal Rudolf Abel was exchanged for captured American U2 pilot Gary Powers. He then spent four years in New York before in 1979 becoming head of Directorate S, where he ran the illegals for more than a decade. But in his final months in charge, he had found the uncertainty and confusion surrounding the Soviet Union deeply unsettling.
The illegals around the world had become agitated as they watched news of the political divisions and disarray back home. These men and women had dedicated their lives to an idea that communism would transform the world. But what if that was now disintegrating? At an operational meeting before his retirement Drozdov had revealed the depth of their concern. A few illegals, he said, had broken every rule and written directly to him asking what was going on. “Personal letters are being written to me,” he told his astonished subordinates. “They ask what is happening in our motherland. They say they can’t understand anything! They ask who it is they are working for. Is it for the Soviet Union or for Russia? For the Communists or for the ‘new democrats’?” He explained that the illegals feared that the new political leaders might betray them. Some said they would not maintain contact with the center for their own safety until the situation was resolved. They would continue with their long-term missions but avoid short-term scheduled contacts. “I have received not just one letter like this but several,” an exasperated Drozdov explained. “What have they been doing? Have they held their own Party congress?” he joked.
The illegals were the glory of the KGB. Drozdov’s greatest nightmare was that this intelligence capability—so prized and so patiently built—could be lost. He was sufficiently worried that he began destroying some of the documentation so it could not fall into the wrong hands. Fear may have driven him to back the August coup. But Drozdov’s return, like the coup itself, would be short-lived.
Out in the city, the CIA officers sent out by their chief of station began reporting back. They realized their KGB minders were absent and so for the first time, they took the risk of meeting contacts quickly on street corners without the usual careful preparation. They visited the airport and TV stations—all the places you would seize first in a well-planned coup. But no one had secured them. The whole thing was starting to look like something a group of desperate men had cooked up quickly after too many vodkas rather than a well-oiled operation. Crowds of ordinary people were taking to the streets as a light drizzle fell. Barricades were going up. The plotters had failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin and he would become the focal point of opposition. After decades of the tightest control, everything seemed to be unraveling at bewildering speed. The CIA officers could see the army waver. The coup was a last, desperate attempt to prevent the demise of the communist system. Instead the plotters had hastened its death. Gorbachev flew back to Moscow to reassert control. The plotters were arrested. But the chaos did not end as the state seemed to unravel.
Shebarshin was summoned to see Gorbachev. He was offered the temporary chairmanship of the KGB. As he walked out of the meeting, he could hear protesters outside. He knew what a revolution sounded like from his time in Iran in 1979. He took an underground tunnel to the Lubyanka in central Moscow—the imposing headquarters of the KGB. It was eerily quiet inside. As the light faded, Shebarshin could see Dzerzhinsky Square out of the window. After the 1917 revolution Felix Dzerzhinsky had led the Cheka. Its mission had been to use whatever means necessary to preserve the hold of the Communist Party against domestic and foreign counterrevolutionary forces. Dzerzhinsky led a “Red Terror” in which countless were killed and yet the KGB had built a cult of personality around him. To this day his successors—who portray themselves as guardians of the state battling against subversion—are known as “Chekists.”
That August evening protesters gathered around the ten-ton statue of Dzerzhinsky in the square. For them it was the symbol of oppression. There were excited speeches and slogans, an air of the impossible suddenly becoming possible. The crowds maneuvered a crane into place. “Death to the KGB,” some shouted. There was at least one undercover CIA officer among the crowd. Despite the suspicions of the KGB that they were manipulating events, the Western spies in Moscow were doing no more than observing, astonished as history unfolded before their eyes. Shebarshin forced himself to watch from a fifth-floor window as Dzerzhinsky was taken firmly by the neck. The man who had overseen countless summary executions remained expressionless as he prepared for his own. His iron legs seemed to give one last shudder and then he toppled. A man in a white shirt stood on the empty pedestal and shook his fist triumphantly in the air. For the crowd it was a moment that signified the end of the old order. The KGB was dead. Wasn’t it? In the early hours of the morning, a few KGB officers snuck out of the Lubyanka and left a message on the empty pedestal. “Dear Felix, we are sorry that we couldn’t save you. But you will remain with us.”
The next day, staff inside KGB headquarters were ordered to seal the doors. Knowledge is power for a spy service, and for the KGB it resided in its files that listed the names of informers and agents at home and abroad. These had to be protected at all costs. When East Germany had seen its revolution in 1989, the offices of its security service,
the Stasi, had been overrun. There had been frantic shredding of documents. In Dresden, a young KGB officer on his first foreign posting had watched in fear as the crowds gathered outside his office. He had dreamed of joining the KGB since he was a teenager. He called a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection. He expected them to crush the protests, but they explained they were still awaiting orders. “Moscow is silent,” he was informed. He was shocked. It was time to destroy the files. “I personally burned a huge amount of material,” the KGB officer later recalled. “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.” That officer’s name was Vladimir Putin. He would never forget what happened when crowds rose up and Moscow was silent.
In August 1991, the KGB in Moscow feared the same fate as the Stasi. Shebarshin opened his safe and pulled out incriminating papers so they could be destroyed. He also took out his service pistol—a Makarov 9-millimeter semiautomatic. He carefully oiled and cleaned it. He gave the order to ship files out to a secure location. Shebarshin was then informed that his time as head of the KGB would be only a single day. Gorbachev returned him to head of the First Chief Directorate and installed a liberal reformer as his superior, with a mission to break up the KGB.
Thousands of miles away, in Langley, Virginia, the cables from their team on the ground were being pored over for every detail. No one in the CIA had seen the coup coming and now their opponent was down. But were they out?
“Their dicks are in the dirt,” the head of the CIA’s Soviet division, Milt Bearden, used to tell his staff. Bearden was a straight-talking Texan with a swagger to match who was head of the CIA’s Soviet and Eastern Europe division. The division was the powerhouse of the agency. Its inner sanctum would become known as “Russia House”—a reference, like so much in the spy world, to a John le Carré novel. But at the moment of triumph, it was a house divided. Many officers had spent their entire career having been working against the Soviet target, but Bearden was an outsider, his last job running operations in Afghanistan. That meant he was viewed with suspicion by the insiders. There were deep divisions over how to deal with the old enemy. Bearden’s view was that times had changed and that liaison—sitting down with the other side’s spies—offered new opportunities. That view was met with deep resistance from those who thought it was naive to think their adversary was changing. The “insular subculture didn’t want to let go of the Cold War,” Bearden would later write of his critics; “it had been too much fun.” Over the decades to come, and even as it moved away from the center of CIA operations, Russia House would always retain its own unique identity, its work sealed off from everyone else behind walls of secrecy. Its critics would say it was trapped in the past, but inside its walls, its inhabitants believed they were the only ones who understood that, whatever changed on the surface, the opponent they faced off against was patient, persistent, and aggressive, and only they fully appreciated the danger. At the time of the coup they thought Bearden did not get it.
As the coup collapsed, Bearden summoned one of his officers into his spacious office. Mike Sulick was a Bronx-born former marine who had served in Vietnam and had a PhD in Russian studies. He joined the CIA in 1980 and had already done one undercover tour in Moscow. He would eventually rise to be the head of the CIA’s clandestine service and a central figure in the intelligence war with Russia, one of the key players in the Vienna spy swap. Sulick that day had his bags packed to head off to Lithuania, one of the Baltic states that had sought independence from the USSR, in order to make contact with their intelligence service. “As I entered Bearden’s office, he eased back into his chair, propped his leather cowboy boots up on his oak desk, and broke the news: ‘Sorry, trip’s off, young man,’” Sulick later wrote. Then Bearden broke into a grin. “But look at it this way. It’s not every day the president puts you on hold,” he explained. The White House had delayed Sulick’s trip while they worked out whether or not to recognize the Baltic states. A few days later Sulick was allowed to travel to meet the Lithuanian spies. Once there, he walked around the local KGB office, a grand building that had been stormed while the coup had been taking place in Moscow. It was littered with documents half burnt and shredded by frantic KGB officers a few days earlier. A portrait of Dzerzhinsky had been slashed with a knife by the protesters who had forced their way in. Sulick went down into the grim, dark cellar in which prisoners had once been tortured in tiny cells. There was even a padded, soundproofed room for those sent mad by their punishment. “The empty cells still seemed faintly to echo the screams of tortured prisoners,” Sulick later remembered. He felt a tightness in his chest, an inability to breathe, and he could only stay inside for a few moments. This was the type of memory that stayed with those who battled against Russia in the spy wars and made them determined never to relent.
A few days later Bearden was in Moscow and sat across from the new, reformist head of the KGB. The KGB chief explained he wanted to end the Cold War mind-set. Too much effort and money had been wasted, for example, by putting listening devices into the new US embassy. Bearden slipped the US ambassador a note: “Ask him to give you the blueprints.” To the amazement of the Americans, the new KGB chief would soon hand over not just the plans but some of the actual transmitters that had been buried inside the American embassy being built in Moscow. Bearden took it as proof that his new ways of liaison might bear fruit. The KGB chief hoped the Americans would reciprocate with details of their bugging operations on Soviet missions in Washington and New York. He would be disappointed.
The handover of the plans by their new boss stunned the hardened operatives of the KGB. They thought it was madness. “How naïve to believe the fall of the Soviet Union meant foreign intelligence would no longer be needed,” thought one officer who had battled America. The KGB’s old guard, like those in the CIA’s Russia House, were not yet ready to give up the game even if their bosses were sitting down together. And their dicks were not quite in the dirt as much as it looked. One thing the KGB had not revealed was that even as their country fell apart, they had a pair of aces up their sleeve—two spies in the heart of American intelligence. But the reforms were too much for some. Shebarshin resigned soon after. “The Soviet Union is no more but eternal Russia remains. It is weakened and disorganised but the spirit of the Russian people has not been broken,” he wrote.
By the end of that year, republics including the Baltics had their independence, Gorbachev was gone, and the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. And so was the KGB, broken up in early December, to reduce the concentration of power. The old First Chief Directorate—the sword—became the SVR, with the task of spying abroad. Even though his statue had been torn down outside, inside the Lubyanka, Dzerzhinsky’s picture was still up on the walls, and small statues stood in rooms and corridors like shrines. The domestic security arm of the KGB—the shield—would go through various names in the coming years before eventually becoming the FSB. The names changed and the organizations underwent a crisis of morale in the following years. But what was preserved among a small cadre of KGB officers was a mind-set—the one that Shebarshin had articulated in 1991, in which Russian nationalism supplanted communism and in which spies had a duty to preserve the state to protect the motherland. That would be passed on to a new generation and when Shebarshin, decades later and in ill health, shot himself in his Moscow apartment using his ceremonial pistol, he would be living in a country run by one of his former KGB officers.
The KGB was dead. But it would rise again as something else. Only a few people understood that less had changed than at first sight. They included the small group of Western spies operating in Moscow at the time of the coup. In August 1991, their respite from surveillance had not lasted long. Precisely three days after vanishing in the park on a Sunday afternoon, the young MI6 officer’s minders from the KGB were back on his tail as if nothing had happened. The game went on.
On December 26, 1991, a married couple sat in a hotel room in Buffalo. They watched on CNN as the flag of the Soviet Union was lowere
d for the last time and they wept. The pair, with a newborn son to look after, were far away from home. He used the name Donald Heathfield. She was Ann Foley. The trauma they had felt over the last few months as they watched their country collapse had to be buried deep down and internalized. Ann had developed a nasty skin inflammation. It baffled the doctors since it seemed stress-related in origin. And yet on the outside she gave off the impression of a young woman without a care in the world. The couple had to hide their reaction to events in Moscow because they were KGB sleepers living under deep cover in Canada, pretending to be Canadians. Their long-term target was the KGB’s “main adversary.” But now the regime they had served and sworn an oath to was gone, along with the KGB that had trained them. Some illegals would use this moment to disappear, discarding their true selves and melting into the West as their adopted selves. But this couple chose to continue with their mission. They told themselves that their country—Russia—still retained their loyalty. “For me, my country is more than just a government or a certain political arrangement. I was serving my country, my Motherland,” Ann says. But as they watched the ceremony dissolving the Soviet Union and cried, they felt alone. What was their future now?
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