Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  That’s when his interrogators started reading aloud from a document they wouldn’t show Gennady. “They knew exactly what I told Jack, word for word,” Gennady says. “That’s why I came to suspect Jack had lied. Either that or someone in the CIA sold the report to the KGB.” Gennady thought Jack may have stabbed him in the back. “I was angry at Jack, but at the same time I didn’t want to believe it.”

  Gennady recoiled at the alternating silence and strange sounds he perceived from his cell, coming from the dreaded Lefortovo catacombs where his friends Martynov and Motorin had been executed not long ago. He was hearing their souls scream. Was this what he was hearing or was the nightmare all in his head? His nerves were fraying.

  Weeks went by. New cellmates came and went. Gennady considered that his disobedient attitude and contempt for bureaucracy had finally caught up with him. Did he really have to tell his bosses to “fuck off”? Had it been absolutely necessary for him to go target shooting on a public seawall with a CIA officer and an FBI agent, flashing an American hunting rifle? He could have been seen—and filmed—from every direction by the KGB. Probably was.

  As he stared at the gray ceiling in the small hours of one morning, it occurred to him that there was a flaw in human self-perception that had not exempted him. That flaw was believing others saw you as you saw yourself; believing that because you knew you were a patriot, this self-image could be transfused to others. Not only did this quirk of logic fail to account for differences in perception from person to person; it also failed colossally to factor in the role of organization agendas and political crosscurrents. For the first time, he considered the awful possibility that perhaps his captors didn’t give a damn whether he was a stalwart Leninist or a snake-in-the-grass capitalist. Maybe they just needed some poor jackass to take the pinch. Maybe he was that jackass.

  Once the KGB realized that Gennady’s story wasn’t changing and that the cavalcade of “good listener” roommates didn’t fool him, the beatings decreased, as did Gennady’s weight. In the six-by-twelve-foot cell he shared with another prisoner, he began thinking of his family again. The only thing steady in Gennady’s mind was a memory of Cowboy specifically stating that he would never record their meetings. Honor was a big thing with Chris/Jack/Cowboy—regardless of what he called himself. He had come clean about being CIA, and when Gennady had told him to back off, he had. When Cowboy came back at him with a proposal to come over to the Americans and Gennady pushed back, Cowboy had held his hands up in surrender. Not once had Cowboy ever tried anything with Gennady besides a front-door pitch topped with a cool toy, like the Marlin or the San Diego gun extravaganza.

  But the worst possibility kept entering his mind: Had Cowboy’s friendship been a swindle all along? Gennady considered his own possible stupidity: a KGB officer betting his life on the trustworthiness of his nemesis, the CIA. He knew that for men like Cowboy, patriotism trumped friendship. And what about Dion? Dion’s job, after all, was to unmask KGB men so they’d never return to the United States.

  Although these questions tore at him, Gennady was certain of one thing: his comrades couldn’t have a damned thing on him—because he hadn’t done anything. Regardless, the KGB was under its own searing bureaucratic strain and needed to put Gennady through the wringer because they had to show they were doing everything to stop their own internal hemorrhaging of assets. What was the downside for them? Nothing. When in doubt, they would do something tough and somebody was bound to be impressed with the sheer theater of it all. What did those Wall Street guys call it? Being a “big swinging dick.” Gennady would stick to his position that nobody had a recording of anything, because there had been nothing to record.

  9

  SASHA

  Look at your enemy and give them what they want.

  Gennady was in hell, precisely where Baba Yaga wanted him. In the twilight of the Cold War, he had come to think of his tormentor as a ghost, like the Baba Yaga he had been told of as a boy. Baba Yaga was, in Russian lore, a witch—a grotesque one-eyed death goddess of the countryside who could turn small children into stone with one glance and would later thaw them out and eat them. In his rational moments, however, Gennady never imagined Baba Yaga would be an actual being, let alone a man—one man—and a bureaucrat no less, the singular puppeteer of his crucible: Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov.

  Sasha, the KGB’s thirty-four-year-old chief mole hunter in the Second Chief Directorate (internal counterintelligence), could throw a man’s life into suspended animation as easily as a telephone operator could put a call on hold. Sasha’s CIA counterpart, Milt Bearden, wrote, “Aleksandr Zhomov directly supervised the people who watched the Americans twenty-four hours a day,” and he “vowed to stay on the job until he [had] his quarry in shackles in Lefortovo Prison.” He was a hands-on boss known to supervise interrogations of Soviet traitors. The CIA’s Burton Gerber mused that the Agency would occasionally hear something about Sasha’s rise through the KGB ranks and then hear nothing about him for years.

  From the 1980s to the dawn of the Age of Putin, Sasha would come in and out of Gennady’s life in terrible ways, although Gennady did not know his name until 2005. In the meantime, the CIA was hemorrhaging assets, knew there had to be a reason for it, and was hell-bent on finding out what that reason was.

  And there was a reason, a big one. Sasha Zhomov’s job was to make sure the Americans never found it. Bearden once noted Sasha’s piercing gray eyes, thick black hair, and caterpillar eyebrows, so bushy they would have been comical if the eyes beneath them didn’t have a way of flickering out into blackness when engaged on his favorite subject: destroying US spies by any means necessary. “He was a shorty,” says Gennady, with a round face that at first glance feigned softness. Sasha’s nervous tic was fingering a silver crucifix when deep in thought or when interrogating a suspected traitor. In the only known photo of Sasha, he is cuddling a cocker spaniel. A hint of a smile has descended across his lips. The dog looks worried.

  Panicked in the wake of the 1985 Year of the Spy losses, the CIA assembled a mole-hunting team to investigate how and why they were losing valuable assets. Gus Hathaway, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, tapped Jeanne Vertefeuille, Sandy Grimes, Dan Payne, and Diana Worthen. On a whiteboard in the basement at Langley, they drew up three possibilities for the debacle:

  1. Tradecraft (The skills and techniques employed by the CIA somehow were faulty.)

  2. Communications (The Soviets were intercepting CIA correspondence through technical surveillance.)

  3. Double agent (There was a traitor inside the US intelligence services.)

  Sasha didn’t need to have a spy in the CIA’s basement to know which possibility the Agency was leaning toward. He did, however, understand the CIA’s institutional vanity and intuitively appreciated what they wanted to believe, which was that the first two options were far more desirable than the possibility that one of their own was a traitor.

  The young and ambitious Sasha received his formal orders in a Moscow bar in 1987: his boss, Valentin Klimenko, ordered him to disabuse the CIA of any notion that they might have a double agent in their midst. Klimenko also wanted the playbook on how the Americans exfiltrated their assets. This extraordinary opportunity appealed to both Sasha’s hatred of the decadent capitalists and his desire for advancement. If he could pull this off…

  After dawn one morning in 1987 on the Red Arrow Express, a train that traveled from Moscow to Leningrad, seasoned CIA case officer Jack Downing went to the caboose for a cigarette. He had done this countless times before and enjoyed the respite from sitting in his cramped compartment. It was May and just pleasant enough in the Soviet Union to smoke outside in the fresh air as the train whooshed through the countryside. As he exhaled, a smallish man with penetrating eyes emerged through the smoke and handed Downing an envelope. The man then disappeared back into the caboose. Downing thought, KGB. The man’s eyes had been old enough to betray experience, but his movements had been fluid, vital, youthful.
Such a man might actually know something.

  Sasha Zhomov was not yet in the delegating chapter of his career. Besides, this mission was so important that even if he could have delegated it, he wanted to handle it personally. He wanted to be on that train. Plus, he enjoyed the tactile pleasures of screwing with the Americans himself.

  Downing did not remove the envelope from his pocket while on the train, knowing full well that the KGB almost surely had surveillance equipment in his compartment. He was heading to the CIA’s office in Leningrad. The suspense was excruciating. With all the losses the CIA had endured, perhaps this envelope contained some long overdue answers. Incredibly, the Year of the Spy had left the CIA without any working assets in the Soviet Union.

  When he got to the CIA station in Leningrad, Downing carefully opened the envelope and found a photo and a letter. The photo was of Downing himself and his wife in Moscow. All right, Downing thought, Mr. Caboose has some surveillance chops. I’ll give him that. The letter confirmed that Mr. Caboose was indeed KGB and that he was unhappy in the USSR, had vital information to share, and wanted to defect to the United States. He didn’t give his name, but there was enough information in the letter to lead Downing and his CIA colleagues to be almost certain that the man they soon knew was Sasha Zhomov was a heavy hitter inside the KGB. But was he a traitor or a “dangle,” a too-good-to-be-true disinformation agent?

  So began the CIA’s adventure with PROLOGUE (the code name given to Sasha), which quickly yielded an astonishing explanation of the Agency’s string of losses. Wrote Grimes, “It was a rundown of the activities of our Moscow Station in the 1984–86 period, and it indicated that those losses that had taken place in Moscow were the result of our poor tradecraft.” Of distressing interest was Sasha’s information about the fates of CIA assets like Martynov and Motorin. Still, rather than reacting with a sense of closure, Grimes and her colleagues remained suspicious. For one thing, Sasha was telling the CIA things they already knew: both that there indeed had been serious losses and the specific names of those lost assets. While Grimes hadn’t had confirmation of the assets’ executions, was Sasha’s intelligence really that helpful? Besides, Sasha was ascribing these losses to lousy CIA tradecraft without providing any specifics. What exactly had the CIA been doing wrong that had led to their assets being exposed? For somebody who supposedly knew so much, Sasha didn’t have any answers.

  Despite Grimes’s skepticism, the desperate CIA became enthralled with a resource who had all—or most of—the answers. But Grimes and her cohorts kept thinking, Why does Sasha want the CIA to believe so badly that it had botched its tradecraft?

  Grimes proposed asking Sasha questions that would get to the core of what was important to the KGB—security issues—rather than swimming around in a soup of things the CIA already knew, or would have found out soon enough. Put differently, she wanted his handlers to force him to betray intelligence that would strike at the core of what the CIA wanted to know about KGB operations. The answer she got from her superiors depressed her: “We don’t want to make him mad.”

  It wasn’t as if Grimes didn’t understand the Agency’s logic. Cowboy Jack Platt had often stressed the importance of caution and the “long game,” which is how the Russians played things. The Russians, to the ceaseless frustration of the Americans, seemed to have all the time in the world. After all, as Cowboy admonished, “they’ve had eight hundred years of war.” But what bothered Grimes and Vertefeuille was that the CIA had reacted with childlike enthusiasm to Sasha because of the convenient conclusion he had reached about the Agency’s losses rather than any actual data he was providing.

  And then Sasha did something that stumped the CIA and hardened its position in his favor: he said he wanted to be exfiltrated to the United States. This was huge. After all, if Sasha wanted to leave the Soviet Union, this strongly suggested that once he was in the US he would deliver the mother lode of information about KGB operations. See, Bearden thought, this guy has been a diamond in the rough all along. Furthermore, Sasha’s desire to defect validated the possibility that he hadn’t been lying about poor tradecraft being to blame for the CIA’s losses. Why would someone lie to the very handlers who would be fully responsible for the well-being of him and his family? Maybe it had been poor tradecraft all along, and the CIA had been chasing its own Baba Yaga with their paranoid double-agent theory.

  The seduction dragged on and on, with Sasha promising that fresh agents were about to descend upon the CIA. In a matter of months, it seemed as if everybody with a Russian accent had decided to betray the KGB. This ploy had the effect of jamming up the Agency so much in the vetting of new recruits that it couldn’t differentiate between the fake walk-ins and the real ones.

  The more Grimes dug into Sasha Zhomov, the more skeptical she became that he was a turncoat. Despite his protests about leading a miserable life, other CIA assets began to report that he had a stable marriage with a daughter he adored. As a guideline, happily married and upwardly mobile KGB officers with children were unlikely to want to disrupt their rewarding lifestyles. Plus, there were indications that Sasha was a man on the move, not some low-level functionary destined for a windowless basement cubicle in a Moscow suburb.

  Grimes thought she knew exactly what Sasha was doing with this espionage version of Ding Dong Ditch: creating a distraction to buy time so the CIA would be further diverted from its real problem, an agency traitor, and get all caught up in its knickers as it searched for its tradecraft mistakes. Grimes seethed as the PROLOGUE/Sasha farce played out month after month, then into the years. The CIA might as well have named it Operation Sitting Duck, because that’s what Sasha was making of the CIA.

  By the spring of 1990, Sasha decided that he was finally ready for exfiltration. Maybe Grimes and Vertefeuille had been too antsy all along. The CIA proceeded to share with him its detailed plan for exfiltration, going so far as to provide him with a US passport complete with an extensive—and fake—travel history. CIA operatives descended upon Helsinki, Finland, to facilitate Sasha’s trip to the West. They waited for ferry after ferry, but he was a no-show. The Agency considered that something had gone wrong and Sasha had thought it better to wait for another opportunity. That signaled good judgment, and the case officers held out hope. They took a gamble that he might return to a familiar place, like the Red Arrow train.

  They were right. In July 1990, a little more than three years after PROLOGUE began, Jill Cline, wife of the new Moscow COS Mike Cline, thought she recognized Sasha (who by now had also earned the moniker “The Phantom”) on the Red Arrow. Indeed she had. Sasha walked toward her in a passageway. The operation was alive! As he approached, Cline’s sense of anticipation was piqued. In one deft and minimal move, Sasha handed her an envelope. Okay, Cline thought, perhaps just a change of plans. Sasha wouldn’t have bothered showing up at all if it was a complete goose egg.

  Back at the Leningrad Station, CIA personnel gathered to read Sasha’s furious and whiny letter, complaining that the Agency had put him in danger and that it was not safe for him to exfiltrate now. A black cloud of failure fell across the station, not to mention the rest of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence team.

  Finally, Milt Bearden and his colleagues reached the conclusion that Sandy Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille had come to much earlier: Sasha Zhomov had been the Lord of the Dangles. As the swindling of the CIA reached its desperate denouement, Grimes and company doubled down on their operating theory that not only did the CIA have a traitor in its midst who was responsible for the Year of the Spy but he was likely closer than anyone had imagined.

  Meanwhile, the victor, at least for now, Sasha Zhomov, was about to sink his teeth into another sitting duck.

  “It was wonderful!” Grimes remembers, the humor in her voice betraying a sense of the absurd. Sasha “read the CIA perfectly.” The CIA had evangelical faith in any scenario except that it had a traitor in its midst. “Look at your enemy and give them what they want,” Grimes says, summarizi
ng Sasha’s game plan. The KGB had long wanted to know precisely how the CIA exfiltrated its Soviet agents and now not only did the Communist spy service have the CIA’s plans; they also had the actual documents that would have facilitated Sasha—or any traitor’s—lawful emigration to the US. They would be in an unprecedented position to detect and foil Agency mischief going forward. The KGB was thrilled with Sasha’s performance, which helped him vault to the top of its ruling team and, says Grimes, “we were the ones who helped him get there.”

  But it wasn’t as if the CIA had learned nothing from Sasha. For one thing, they now knew that the KGB would stop at nothing to protect an asset, almost certainly a traitor, or traitors. That the Soviets so badly wanted the CIA to believe their leak was due to poor tradecraft confirmed that it was not. They also had been enlightened about the nature of their new nemesis: Sasha was an audacious son of a bitch more concerned with hurting the Americans than he was with any quaint notions of credibility or future collaboration. This guy was a bridge burner—and a cagey one at that.