All of a sudden, Service A became so precious that Shebarshin felt he personally needed to safeguard its existence. To accomplish this, he chose the usual tactics: denial and deceit. “There is no Disinformation Directorate within the foreign intelligence,” he assured the public that same year in an interview.10 “We completely rule out violence, brutality, and interference in the internal affairs of other countries.”11
Shebarshin secured the approval of his colleagues and dismissed the meeting. Now he could turn to the document that was lying on his table. It was a draft titled, “On the active measures of the foreign intelligence service of the KGB,” prepared by his old friend, the head of Section A. Shebarshin read the paper very carefully. Several ideas were forming in the back of his mind.
Eight months later, in August 1991, KGB chairman Kryuchkov led a military coup d’état against Gorbachev, who was vacationing in Crimea. Three days of the standoff on the streets of Moscow followed. Then, on August 21, inspired by the charismatic Boris Yeltsin, the democratic crowds of Muscovites defeated the putschists. Shebarshin played his cards well during the putsch, distancing himself from his boss and from Lubyanka. When Shebarshin returned to Moscow, Gorbachev made him temporary chairman of the KGB. He had the job for one day: on August 23, he was replaced by a liberal outsider. But Shebarshin held on to his position as chief of foreign intelligence for another month. Then he left—after all, this new democratic Russian government was determined to reform the KGB.
Two months later, as part of the same effort, foreign intelligence was split from the KGB. In December, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Foreign intelligence got a new name, the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or Foreign Intelligence Service), and a new chief, Evgeni Primakov, an imposing, heavy-set, high-ranking Communist Party official with the looks of a respectable academician.
Primakov was an expert on the Middle East, just like Shebarshin. Cunning and cautious, Primakov was the Soviet answer to Henry Kissinger; he had spent decades shuttling between Moscow and the regimes in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Israel.
It was an uneasy time for many generals in Yasenevo. The threat of being completely disbanded still loomed large: the new democratic Russian government under Yeltsin had begun investigating the KGB’s role in the failed coup d’état. Foreign intelligence, or SVR, badly needed to rebrand its public image. The goal was to do that without actually making any internal changes—which meant that Shebarshin’s plan of action still looked like a valid option.
Primakov immediately invited Shebarshin back to Yasenevo to serve as his deputy. Shebarshin politely declined—he was too ambitious to accept a subordinate role. Undeterred, Primakov set off down the path that strikingly resembled the one Shebarshin had laid out just a few months earlier with his Service A team.
To implement the plan, Primakov first created several new organizations devised by the Service A specialists. He green-lighted Shebarshin’s initiative to set up the Association of Veterans of Foreign Intelligence, an old-boys network of former generals of the PGU (Pervoye Glavnoye Upravlenie) and KGB, as a front organization. This “veterans association” formed the unofficial channel of communication for outsiders—journalists and historians—with the team at Yasenevo.
Next, a few easygoing officers were chosen to man the newly established Foreign Intelligence (SVR) press office, which occupied a blue-and-white mansion on quiet Kolpachny Lane in central Moscow. There, the press officers would welcome Russian and foreign journalists. After that, with the help of the veterans association, these press officers set off to promote a remarkable four-part narrative.
The first part of the message was that, given that intelligence methods had never varied, from biblical times to the CIA to the KGB, there was no need to reform Russia’s foreign intelligence.
Second, during the Cold War, the KGB’s spies spent the bulk of their time in the West. Thus, according to the message, it was only logical that they were more open-minded than the rest of the KGB. With their broader frame of reference, Foreign Intelligence officers were also much more critical of Soviet reality than their in-country KGB counterparts.
Third, as spies based abroad, they couldn’t, and therefore didn’t, take part in the disgusting business of prosecuting dissent in the Soviet Union.
Fourth and finally—went the narrative—Soviet intelligence ceased the practice of carrying out assassination operations abroad as early as the late 1950s. In fact, claimed the press officers with bold specificity, the very last operation was the cyanide gas poisoning of the head of the military wing of a Ukrainian émigré organization on the streets of Munich in 1959.
This narrative was, to say the least, fantastical. Nonetheless, the SVR used it successfully, skillfully cultivating an image of the agency as the natural embodiment of the old KGB’s most liberal elements.
Primakov added his own touch as well: in January 1993, he made a public presentation of the first-ever “SVR Analytical Report.” The report, reflecting on the global threat of the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction after the end of the Cold War,12 constituted an effort to make the SVR look like a sort of foreign policy think tank. That, of course, was the reason Primakov made the report nonclassified. He also renamed officers at Yasenevo: instead of “operatives,” they were “referents”—consultants. The SVR even ceased, officially, to treat the United States as the Main Adversary; Primakov merged the first, North American section, which dealt with the United States, with the section that covered Latin and South America, signifying that now things were no longer political—it was just about geography.
The rebranding operation was a success. This new image of foreign intelligence was even accepted by many of Russia’s liberal journalists. The use of active measures within Russia proved effective, just as Shebarshin had imagined.
Now it was time to try to promote this progressive, new image abroad, namely, in the United States.
CHAPTER 19
COOPERATION AND REBRANDING
The CIA director rose from his chair, glass in hand. Robert Gates was just forty-nine years old in September 1992 as he looked at his audience—ten Americans facing ten Russians across a long table in the SVR’s villa on Kolpachny Lane in Moscow. He had spent twenty-six years of his life serving at the CIA and on the National Security Council, most of it dealing with the Soviet threat. “I would like to propose a toast,” he said.1
Among themselves, the Americans called the blue-and-white villa the Beria House—a reference to Stalin’s dreaded secret police chief. (In fact, that was not quite right; the villa had belonged to another minister of state security under Stalin.2) Now, it was used by the SVR for dealing with outsiders—the press and the Americans.
Gates had traveled to Moscow to establish a liaison relationship between US and Russian intelligence. In response, the SVR and the Russian counterintelligence agency that would soon be known as the FSB hosted a dinner on Kolpachny Lane in his honor. Gates continued his toast: “I am here today,” he intoned, “because the relationship between our two countries demands that our intelligence agencies work together in areas of mutual interest. It is time to turn a page in our history, without forgetting our past and present differences, in order to eliminate the threats we face in this new era.”
The Russian generals were obviously pleased. “Cooperation” was exactly the message the generals of the SVR wanted to promote.
The following year, Primakov made a visit to the United States. It was the first official visit of a head of Russian foreign intelligence since Kryuchkov had gone to the United States in 1972. That visit was different, though, in that Kryuchkov had traveled in the guise of an ordinary diplomat. This time the trip was official. Primakov had a meeting with James Woolsey, the Clinton administration’s head of the CIA.3 The following month, Primakov hosted Woolsey in Moscow.
At one of the meetings between the CIA and the SVR, Russian intelligence agreed to cease the practice of active measures. “It was a gentlemen
’s agreement between the American and Russian intelligence agencies,” a former SVR employee told us. Service A was officially gone.
“There was never a written agreement between us,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who headed Moscow’s CIA station in the early 1990s and who was present at the dinner on Kolpachny Lane. “But in the late 1980s there was a mutual understanding that it was better to be cautious so as not to undermine the talks between Gorbachev and Reagan.”4
Now the SVR began making every effort to win the trust of the Americans. For that to happen, the public image of the agency was to be improved.
They had a plan at the ready. The operatives at Yasenevo started working on it before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it came to fruition four years later in 1993.
This delay almost ruined the whole thing.
By 1993, the former Soviet Union had changed beyond recognition. It was a market economy, wild and brutal. Social guarantees for people employed by the state—including in foreign intelligence—had ceased to exist. The compound at Yasenevo, with its heavily guarded shops and masseuses, began looking shabby. Smart, cunning opportunists were leaving the SVR by the hundreds.
Among those who wanted to sell their skills elsewhere was an easygoing young officer named Alexander Vassiliev. Once captain of the North American section in the First Chief Directorate, he landed a prestigious job at the popular newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
In summer 1993, thirty-one-year-old Vassiliev, a moon-faced man with long blond hair and a ready laugh, published a big story. It was about the KGB’s most successful active measure ever: an article the KGB had planted in the mid-1980s in the Indian newspaper Patriot. According to this active-measure article, the Pentagon had developed the AIDS virus as part of a set of “experiments to design new and dangerous biological weapons.” The story went viral, and millions of people in Africa believed in the US military conspiracy.
Vassiliev’s story was not the first to expose this particular KGB measure. The West had known about the Soviet disinformation campaign for several years. Yet Vassiliev was the first to get the head of foreign intelligence, Evgeny Primakov, to confirm the story. And Vassiliev’s piece did something else, something far subtler. In it, he claimed that the AIDS scandal story had been planted by the KGB in response to the CIA spreading a false rumor that the KGB had masterminded an attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Vassiliev’s story thus made the two adversaries look alike—that they had simply exchanged strikes, and the KGB’s active measure was a perfectly reasonable response to the CIA attack that had preceded it. Foreign intelligence must have been pleased. This fit in perfectly with the master narrative they were pedaling.
The day after the publication, Vassiliev got a phone call from Yuri Kobaladze, an SVR spokesman. Kobaladze invited the colleague-turned-journalist to the blue-and-white mansion on Kolpachny Lane for a talk. Vassiliev went to the meeting. “I thought they would scold me for my story on active measures,” Vassiliev said. Instead, Kobaladze had an offer for him.5 Explaining that the foreign intelligence agency was supervising a very ambitious publishing project, he invited Vassiliev to join the team. The project was high profile: the Association of Veterans of Foreign Intelligence had just signed an agreement with Alberto Vitale, then chairman and CEO of Random House, for the publication of a series of five books that looked at the KGB’s Cold War operations.6
The KGB had initiated the publishing project before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It began with a contract for a book about Alexander Orlov, the most famous intelligence defector during Stalin’s regime, to be written by two authors—a KGB officer and the British historian John Castello.7 (Among other things, Orlov had supervised Nahum Eitingon in Spain.) After the book was successfully published, the SVR came up with an idea for five new books: The first would tell the history of Soviet spy operations in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. The second would cover the standoff between the KGB and the CIA in Cold War–era Berlin. The third would discuss operations in Britain before and during World War II. The fourth would be about the Cuban Missile Crisis (or, as the Russians call it, the Caribbean Crisis). The fifth and final book would tell the story of Leon Trotsky’s assassination.8 Each book was to be written by two authors, one Russian and one Western. The principal agreement with Random House had been reached in June 1992, and Kobaladze had been looking ever since for a suitable candidate from the SVR side for the first and most sensitive book about KGB operations in the United States. This was the book Vassiliev was invited to work on.
The SVR had a clear idea of what it wanted when it agreed to the publication deal. Namely, the agency wished to produce a sanitized version of its own bloody history geared specifically toward a Western audience. The project’s respectful American and British historians, they believed, would lend legitimacy to the Russian agency’s authorized histories. Western scholars would not get direct access to the KGB files—that was reserved for the Russian researchers, some of them former or active Foreign Intelligence officers. In other words, Russian Foreign Intelligence planned to control the narrative tightly. The project was supervised from the very top. “Primakov was running things out at Yasenevo during the final, protracted stages of negotiations,” remembered James O’Shea Wade, who was vice president of the Crown imprint at Random House at the time and supervised the project from the Western side.9
Not everyone was thrilled by the Random House publication plan. The British journalist and intelligence expert Philip Knightley, who was the first to expose Kim Philby in the 1960s, turned down Random House’s offer to write the book about the Cambridge Five. He feared, rightly, that the books would be propagandistic. When the book about Orlov was published in 1993, Knightley went further, denouncing it as “disinformation.”10
Sitting in Kobaladze’s office, Vassiliev considered the offer. He knew close to nothing about the KGB’s history in the United States. “Of course I knew about the Rosenbergs’ trial, but that was all. In my time in Yasenevo, you had to obtain special permission from your superior to get to the archives, which were all top secret, and given all the scandals about defectors and traitors in the late 1980s, nobody wanted to raise suspicions by asking for access to information above one’s pay grade.” But Vassiliev had a gut feeling: “I had a full impression it was another active measure; they just wanted to fool the Americans.” He didn’t want to be a pawn in an SVR operation. When he reminded Kobaladze he was not an officer anymore, Kobaladze assured him he would be given access to the real KGB files, not just spoon-fed whatever the officers now in charge decided to show him.
In that light, Vassiliev saw the offer as a chance to do something both important and well paid. He also believed Stalin’s operations in the United States had been a good thing and that the story deserved to be told. “There was nothing to be ashamed of. It was a glorious past. They stole the bomb and changed world history, and they didn’t participate in repressions,” Vassiliev said.11
That official version of the agency’s history was, of course, exactly the view the Foreign Intelligence Service now wanted to project to the public. And having been brought up through the ranks of the Foreign Intelligence Service, this narrative was what Vassiliev had been taught and expected the files to confirm. From Kobaladze’s point of view, the assignment was a perfect fit.
Vassiliev and Kobaladze shook hands.
For the next two years, Vassiliev worked from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. every day at the blue-and-white SVR mansion on Kolpachny Lane. He shared a table with another “historian,” who was also an SVR officer, and worked on the book about the operations in Britain. Each day, they read through file after file brought in from Yasenevo.
Vassiliev knew what to ask for; he was familiar with the KGB’s internal procedures from his days in Yasenevo. He began hunting for pale green or brown folders with aged yellow sheets inside—the files of agents’ correspondence, or DOPs (Dela Operativnoy Perepisky). Indeed, these files proved to be jewels. They consisted of decades o
f cypher telegram exchanges between Moscow’s Center on Lubyanka and Soviet spies in the United States—crucial, heretofore unknown parts of the story of Soviet atomic espionage. (The reports of Vasily Zarubin and Liza Gorskaya were among them, and it’s thanks to Vassiliev that we now know the details of the attempts made by Zarubin to bring Jacob Golos to heel.)
Vassiliev made notes in his notebook. Once he had filled a notebook to the end, he was allowed to take it home for safekeeping. He eventually stored eight notebooks full of information.
Kobaladze, trusting his former brother-in-arms, didn’t bother to have Vassiliev sign a nondisclosure agreement. That was the first mistake. The SVR had overlooked the fact that in the 1990s, they could no longer exert the kind of control over Vassiliev that the KGB had enjoyed for decades. This was not the Soviet Union anymore, and they couldn’t rely on intimidation and fear the way they used to. The SVR compounded this mistake by failing to offer Vassiliev any money for his work; the American publisher alone was supposed to pay him.
This left Vassiliev a free agent. In January 1996, the former spy realized he was in possession of a treasure trove—and that it was probably time for him to move. Vassiliev later claimed he could feel things heating up and referred to a cloak-and-dagger-type operation: “There was a hidden Communist Party cell in the SVR, and they became threatening to me.”12 The timing question might well be simpler than that, though. That same month, the SVR head Primakov was made foreign minister, so Vassiliev may have merely worried that, with his chief patron out of the agency, the SVR would cancel the project and want their files back.
The Compatriots Page 16