by Bryan Denson
“So, you hang on and stay happy. We’ll count on God to give us a hand if we need it, but he’s already let me see the bully’s medical charts. Lots of problems to keep him flinching and smarting when I hit them.”
Government lawyers, FBI agents, and CIA analysts read the letter before it ever reached Star, keenly aware Jim’s threats were meant for them.
Jim scribbled sweet, sentimental letters to his family from the hole. He often spoke of dreams and his deepening Christian faith. The previous fall, he wrote of closing his eyes in his bunk and joining God and Jesus for coffee at a beachside café: “I plan to keep this practice of meeting God for coffee even after I leave prison.” Sometimes, the dreams Jim described sounded like the musings of a man coming unhinged. He shared a dream in which he sat in the witness box of a federal courtroom as a court officer sloshed kerosene all around him. “As soon as I was sworn in,” Jim wrote, “the person doing it struck a match. I warned him not to drop it but he did. At that moment, a protective bubble circled me and kept me from being burned.” The courtroom burst into flames as if made of cardboard, and he now saw other buildings—the headquarters of the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice—all aflame.
“I do have the occasional nightmare in which hit teams from the USG try to kill me,” Jim recounted in a March 2010 letter to me. “I am more bothered by nightmares of trying to swim against a riptide to reach my young son stranded on a rock and calling for me. I have awakened after slamming my hand into the cement wall at the head of my metal bunk, trying to reach out to him. Intense.” He added, “Although these walls close in on me, I am what they molded me into and my training keeps me relatively sane, I think. Relative, that is, to any held this long in solitary who haven’t had my training.”
Jim’s correspondence mourned the distance that his isolation put between him and his children. Star wrote only occasionally, he complained. She sometimes passed indirect greetings from Jeremi, who never wrote. Jim blamed the government, as an Orwellian “Big Brother,” for holding his oldest son under the microscope. To his parents he wrote, “I can’t let the government take another one of my kids from me.”
Jared Garth had gone back to Washington in February, where he met up with FBI agents he knew from his counterintelligence days. They gathered for drinks at an Asian fusion restaurant called TenPenh, which occupied a building next door to the Hoover headquarters building. Joining them were a few retired agents. One of the tipplers was Mike Rochford, who had served for decades as one of the FBI’s most devout spy hunters. Graying and growing corpulent at fifty-five, Rochford had once served as chief of the bureau’s Counterespionage Section, and he played key roles in the arrests of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. He had a great reputation, but he wasn’t perfect. He’d been accused by some of tunnel vision in the Hanssen case for imposing two years of surveillance on the wrong man—CIA officer Brian Kelley—before learning the real turncoat was a fellow FBI agent.
Prosecutors in the Nicholson case had been looking for an expert witness to tell jurors why Russia remained faithful to Jim so many years after his arrest, and why Jim contacted the SVR. Garth’s chance meeting with Rochford at TenPenh was just what they needed. Rochford had an uncanny knowledge of Russia’s spy apparatus, its characters and complexities. His recall of the previous three decades of Washington-Moscow spy wars would be gold on the witness stand. Rochford slipped Garth his business card.
Holsinger and Knight knew that Rochford’s universe of knowledge could deliver killer testimony about the SVR’s fealty to Jim and the reserve fund they were holding for him in Moscow. They were happy to hear that Rochford, who retired from the bureau in 2004, still held a security clearance. They quickly hired him as their chief expert.
The former FBI man had joined the bureau in 1974 as a lunch-bucket file clerk making $5,200 a year. He studied Russian and became a translator before entering duty as an agent in 1979. He was working as a counterintelligence supervisor in the Washington Field Office in the mid-1990s when the FBI arrested Jim the first time. Now he was retired from the bureau and serving as counterintelligence director at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a ten-thousand-acre secret city in the heart of Tennessee. The U.S. Department of Energy operated the facility, which played a key role in the Manhattan Project and held some of the nation’s most closely guarded science and technology secrets. Rochford’s job, which occasionally brought him to D.C., was to keep Oak Ridge’s secrets under wraps. He welcomed the chance to help the government win the second game of its doubleheader against Jim Nicholson.
During his FBI career, Rochford earned a reputation as a pitch specialist, the guy who reached out to Russians in their native tongue to convince them to betray their countries. Rochford told me during one of our interviews that he pitched twenty-eight people to help the FBI uncover moles inside the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Perhaps his biggest entreaty came in the summer of 1999, when he hunted down legendary KGB officer Victor Cherkashin. The dashing spy had served as counterintelligence chief in the KGB’s rezidentura in Washington, one of Russia’s most active spy dens. Rochford tracked down Cherkashin in the beachside town of Larnaca, Cyprus, where he offered him $1 million in exchange for his help plugging intelligence leaks attributed to Robert Hanssen. But Cherkashin—who later admitted in a memoir that he recruited Hanssen and Ames—turned Rochford down cold.
Little did Rochford know that his foray into Oregon’s father-son spy drama would send him back in time to Cherkashin, Washington, and the ghosts of Reagan-era espionage. He flew to D.C. that spring to review the FBI’s classified case files in a secure room in the Hoover Building. While poring over surveillance images of Nathan’s meeting outside the T.G.I. Friday’s in Nicosia, Rochford made an eye-popping discovery: He recognized the short Russian who served as Nathan’s handler. The gray-headed Russian had replaced Cherkashin as chief of the KR Line (counterintelligence and internal security) in D.C.’s Soviet rezidentura. Back in the mid-1980s, he was a KGB colonel, a big hitter who would later become a general in the SVR. His name was Vasiliy Vasilyevich Fedotov.
Nathan knew him as George.
Rochford first heard the name “Fedotov” during the FBI’s 1985 debriefings of Soviet defector Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB colonel. Yurchenko steered U.S. spy catchers to two turncoats in their midst—former CIA man Edward Lee Howard and National Security Agency analyst Ronald Pelton—both of whom sold U.S. secrets to the Soviets. It was Yurchenko who told the FBI that Fedotov, a rising star, would replace Cherkashin as the head of KR Line. Rochford spent much of the sticky summer of 1986 tailing Fedotov. The FBI often followed KGB officers in the D.C. area to prevent them from running spy operations, or to catch them at it. But Rochford’s tails of Fedotov were overt and obnoxious. He often locked bumpers with the KGB man when his driver would take him outside the embassy’s rezidentura.
He kept eyes on Fedotov that summer and into the fall, doing a dozen or more shifts behind the wheel of his bureau car. He needed to make sure that Fedotov, a short, thick-necked man with dark hair and those big Clark Kent glasses popular in the 1980s, couldn’t run spy ops on his watch. The two men never formally met. But Rochford was certain Fedotov recognized him: He’d been the guy pulling ten-hour shifts in the Russian’s rearview mirror. One day, outside the National Air and Space Museum, the burly six-foot-two FBI man stepped out of his bureau car and planted himself next to the surprised Soviet. Rochford turned to Fedotov and said he was glad the Russian had gotten the chance to see D.C.’s great museums.
“Hope you enjoy them,” Rochford said, “because your stay here is obviously short.”
The United States sent Fedotov packing a few months later, in autumn 1986, and the D.C. chief of Soviet kontrazvietka wasn’t alone. Government agents expelled eighty Soviets as part of the FBI’s Operation Famish, a counterespionage probe that focused primarily on D.C. and New York. Some of the Soviet spies worked for the KGB under diplomatic cover, others for
Soviet military intelligence (the GRU). The White House’s National Security Council listed Fedotov persona non grata, which meant he was forbidden from turning up in any of the other fifteen NATO countries of that era. It’s unclear where he landed, although some U.S. counterintelligence officials think he worked in India before retiring from the SVR.
As Rochford looked into the new Nicholson case, he learned that the SVR had brought Fedotov out of retirement to handle Nathan. Fedotov had taken the contract job, Rochford knew, to help Moscow Center identify the Russian turncoat who’d betrayed Jim Nicholson.
18
A Spy Swap and Reparations
“You were sent to USA for long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house, etc.—all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels to C [intelligence reports to Moscow Center].”
—Encrypted SVR message to U.S.-based spies
Vienna, Austria, summer 2010
On the morning of July 9, two airliners pulled side by side on a sunny tarmac at Vienna International Airport.
Four disgraced Russian spies—all of whom had secretly worked for Western foreign intelligence services—readied to disembark from a Yak-42 government plane. The Russian Federation had just released the four from prison. The other airliner, a Vision Airlines Boeing 767-2Q8 chartered by the U.S. government, carried ten Russian spies who had served under Moscow’s deepest cover on American soil. The Department of Justice had taken less than two weeks to round them up, charge and convict them of working illegally as unregistered foreign agents, and toss them out of the country. The Russian spies had spent the last decade assimilating as ordinary Americans, eight of them under assumed names—“legends,” in spy parlance—to lay the groundwork for SVR operations from Seattle to Washington, D.C.
President Barack Obama, briefed on the roundup sixteen days before the arrests, wanted to keep relations tidy between the U.S. and Russia. The administration backed a spy exchange, rather than imprisoning the Russians, as the best option to avoid unnecessary political drama between the two countries.
The competing spies walked across a gangway to switch planes, players in the biggest spy swap between Moscow and D.C. since the Cold War. The airliners roared off less than two hours later, a highly choreographed transfer approved by Obama and Russian president Dmitri A. Medvedev. The scene looked eerily similar to Cold War swaps on Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge, known as the “Bridge of Spies.” The ten Russians flew back to Moscow, where Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, later joined them in singing such patriotic songs as “From Where the Motherland Begins.” Two of the Western spies stepped off the Vision charter in London, and the others—former KGB officers Gennady Vasilenko and Alexander Zaporozhsky—flew on to Dulles.
Getting Zaporozhsky back to the U.S. was a major victory for the CIA. He began his well-decorated career in the KGB in 1975, rose to the rank of colonel in the Russian foreign intelligence service, served as deputy chief of the American Department, and headed the first department of the SVR’s counterintelligence directorate. A Russian security official told a newspaper that in the early 1990s, he double-crossed Moscow to work as a mole for the CIA, earning the code name “Scythian.” Zaporozhsky gave up information that helped point U.S. authorities toward Robert Hanssen and other Russian moles inside U.S. intelligence circles, including Aldrich Ames, according to published accounts.
It was Zaporozhsky, counterintelligence experts would later confirm to me, whose assistance to the U.S. government helped put Jim Nicholson behind bars in 1996. Zaporozhsky, three months older than Jim, pointed U.S. spy catchers in Jim’s direction. Other sources also helped put a target on Jim’s tail, but it was Zaporozhsky’s tip that helped them winnow the suspects to the CIA’s Batman.
Jim and Zaporozhsky weren’t all that different. They climbed to the higher rungs of their nations’ respective spy services, and picked their nation’s pockets to sell secrets to their competitors. The U.S. government reportedly rewarded Zaporozhsky with $2 million in housing and benefits to live in comfort on American soil. But, like Jim, he would go to prison for his betrayals, undone by hubris.
Zaporozhsky’s troubles began in 2001, while living in Maryland under the PL-110 Program (the CIA’s relocation program for spies and their families). The gray-headed Russian, who had retired from the SVR, was invited to Moscow for a KGB reunion party with old friends. He talked this over with his CIA handlers and FBI agents, and they begged him not to go. But he disregarded their pleas, apparently believing his comrades back in Russia hadn’t fingered him as a mole. When he stepped off a plane in the motherland, he was promptly arrested and put under lock and key at Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison to await trial. The district’s military court later found Zaporozhsky guilty of betraying Hanssen—the greatest mole Moscow ever ran inside the FBI—and sentenced him to eighteen years in prison for high treason. The court stripped Zaporozhsky of his military rank and all his decorations, and put him in a highly secure labor camp. His wife, Galina, living in the suburbs north of Baltimore, died while he was in prison.
When Zaporozhsky returned to the U.S. after the spy swap, he quietly slipped out of sight. I made a couple of trips to Cockeysville, Maryland, in hopes of interviewing him for this book. I knocked on the door of his two-story suburban home, nestled in a quiet cul-de-sac full of hardwoods and flowers and perfectly trimmed lawns. I heard quiet music upstairs, but no one came to the door. I left a letter urging Zaporozhsky to phone me. But it, too, went unanswered. The U.S. government has little to gain by allowing Zaporozhsky to go public with his story; he’s one of those spies who knows too much.
News accounts of the spy swap focused primarily on the ten Russian spies the U.S. sent packing for Moscow, not the four the West got in return. Many journalists referred to the Russian secret agents as “sleepers”—spies put in place by their governments for later activation. But that wasn’t entirely accurate. The Russians were active “illegals” working under Russia’s deepest cover. They reported to SVR headquarters at Moscow Center.
The illegals lived in the U.S. under their legends with a long-term goal to become so Americanized they could gather U.S. secrets and identify targets ripe for recruitment inside U.S. policy-making circles. For ten years, the illegals posed as yuppies as they inveigled their way into U.S. culture. They bought homes, took white-collar jobs. Some of them married and raised children who had no clue their parents were foreign spies. They ate American food, rooted for American sports teams, and befriended Americans in financial, political, and government circles. In time—had they not been betrayed by one of their own—they undoubtedly would have helped Moscow Center penetrate the seats of U.S. power. The illegals were the best of the SVR’s best, patiently gathering human intelligence and receiving codes by secure wireless.
News reports that summer suggested the illegals hadn’t gotten very far in their decade of spying in the U.S., a fiction promulgated by Vice President Joe Biden in an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The famously long-jawed comedian suggested in his talk-show interview with Biden that Russia appeared to have come up the better horse trader in the spy swap.
“We traded ten for four,” Leno said, sounding flummoxed. “Now, I know our math skills are not as good as they should be, but that doesn’t seem fair. Why did we trade ten for four?”
“Well,” Biden said with a toothy smile, “we got back four really good ones. And the ten, they’d been here a long time, but they hadn’t done much.”
A monitor on The Tonight Show set flashed a photo of one of the illegals, sultry redhead Anna Chapman. In the photo, Chapman strikes a pouty, bare-shouldered, Bond-girl pose in a blue spaghetti-strap blouse, a setup for Leno’s next question: “You would know, Mr. Vice President: Do we have any spies that hot?”
“Let me make it clear, it wasn’t my idea to send her bac
k,” Biden said. “I thought maybe they’d take Rush Limbaugh or something. That would have been a good move.”
A lawyer for at least one of the accused Russian spies downplayed their espionage, saying they hadn’t collected much, if anything, in the way of U.S. intelligence that couldn’t be obtained through open-source channels. Not long after the arrests, National Public Radio quoted Andrew Kuchins of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies: “The kind of information that these folks are coming up with, you can simply get from reading The New York Times, watching TV. You don’t need to be investing the tremendous resources to have people undercover for eight, nine, ten years. It really reflects, I think, an anachronistic mind-set.” But such comments, in hindsight, underestimated how close the illegals came to doing serious harm to U.S. interests.
On Halloween 2011, the FBI publicly released its criminal complaint against the illegals, the culmination of a highly classified investigation dubbed Operation Ghost Stories. The FBI documents, though heavily redacted, showed just how much communication infrastructure the illegals had established and what they were after: U.S. technology secrets, military and financial data, and inside information on political policy. Government officials later acknowledged the Russians were creeping ever closer to Americans in power.
One of the illegals, posing as Donald Heathfield, graduated from Harvard University in 2000 and attended the university’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which has trained a who’s who of U.S. policy makers. Another illegal went to work for a confidant of an Obama administration cabinet member. And another posed as Cynthia Murphy, a Montclair, New Jersey, financial planner who made a client of Alan Patricof, a venture capitalist who served as finance chairman of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Several days after the U.S. deported the ten Russians, they also expelled twenty-three-year-old Alexey Karetnikov, who had moved to Redmond, Washington, headquarters of Microsoft, to take an entry-level job with the software giant. The FBI established a link between the illegals and Karetnikov, described as a sophisticate deeply knowledgeable about the company.