Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Yet back in 1988, the central antagonist in Sasha Zhomov’s already years-long engagement was Gennady Vasilenko.

  After six months in prison, Gennady hadn’t changed his story once. The slew of “cellmates” the KGB had sent in to befriend him had yielded squat. Nor had the KGB found any evidence in the form of equipment or data to indicate Gennady was a traitor. No one in the KGB, in fact, actually believed Gennady had turned. Well, then, what was he still doing in Lefortovo? He knew that those who committed acts of treachery didn’t last long in the Soviet prison system. If they were lucky, within a day or two of arrival, they were “tried” in a kangaroo court and dispatched to the Lefortovo basement, and after a few short steps… Yet Gennady’s captors had done the unthinkable. They had kept him alive.

  After all the interrogations and beatings, Gennady started to reason with his captors, and after one particularly sleepless night, he thought of an unimpeachable argument: “If I was cooperating with Platt, wouldn’t I have given him Pelton? Check the Pelton file. I was his handler!” In fact, Ronald Pelton, the ex–National Security Agency employee/turncoat, had been a functioning Soviet asset for Gennady while Gennady was associating with Jack in the US—one of the most valuable assets in years. The KGB had no good answer for Gennady.

  To Gennady’s surprise, another thing that helped save him was the very thing he hated most about the KGB: its stifling bureaucracy. It was a strange new time. Glasnost. Perestroika. Gorbachev. “I was lucky Gorbachev was in charge now; otherwise, I’d have been killed instantly,” Gennady says. Apparently, before one could pop somebody in the Lefortovo catacombs, he had to fill out new forms, neatly typing out the evidence against the accused. Maybe the KGB was going soft, Gennady reasoned. Or maybe everybody was just getting tired of the killing.

  As the KGB was finalizing its Gennady Vasilenko file, another interesting thing happened: Gennady’s fellow KGB officers unanimously spoke out on his behalf. The popular colleague was a patriot to his core, they professed. Finally, it wasn’t lost on the KGB brass that Gennady was the son-in-law of a big shot. If the KGB could drag Gennady to the Lefortovo basement and put a bullet in his head with no evidence, what would they do to other worthy operatives without such connections? No one wanted to find out.

  The good news was that Gennady would be freed—alive. But it wasn’t as if he’d be leaving Lefortovo with a gold Rolex and a Montblanc pen. In July 1988, after six months in stir, the KGB cited him for a vague charge of not filing the proper reports while meeting with hostile parties (Cowboy and Dion). In one last cruel joke, his captors dressed him in a fresh KGB uniform and marched him out to Lefortovo’s killing courtyard. They lined him up against the wall that held so many firing squad bullet scars. After a long minute of silence, the guards walked up to him and ripped his ceremonial epaulets from his uniform, before escorting him to the prison’s exit gate and throwing him out on the street—with literally nothing but the clothes on his back. On October 14, he was officially fired from the KGB. His hard-earned pension was taken away: “A couple of months after my release they called me back for a private meeting,” Gennady recalls. “They didn’t want all my KGB colleagues to know what they were going to do. They demoted me, then they fired me.” Gennady knew that it wasn’t just Gorbachev who had saved him; it was the incontrovertible fact that Gennady had never told Jack about the KGB’s prized American turncoat Ronald Pelton. In fact, when he returned to Moscow in November 1985, Yurchenko admitted to the KGB that it was he, not Gennady, who had sold out Pelton. “Ronald Pelton saved my life,” Gennady concludes.

  Gennady had nothing now, except a family to support. On the one hand, he savored freedom. On the other, he was going to do what he had to do. While he didn’t want to believe that Cowboy had betrayed him, he resented the pain and suffering their friendship had caused him. Nor was he certain that Cowboy or someone close to him hadn’t been sloppy with the knowledge of their friendship.

  As the months lurched by without contact from Gennady, Cowboy sat in his private study, glancing at the photo of Gennady and himself back in the day when they both drank themselves silly; a twelve-pack seemed to be whispering in his ear, I’m here if you need me. His conscience was clear in the sense that he hadn’t sold Gennady out, but he knew their friendship had played a role in his disappearance, and he strongly suspected Gennady would blame him somehow. “He was absolutely distressed after Guyana,” Paige recalls. “But his Marine training kicked in,” and Cowboy concentrated his energies on constructive pursuits, things he could control. “I really think his Marine training stopped him from drinking. All that discipline.”

  In 1988, Dion Rankin was transferred to Houston’s FBI office, but the two American Musketeers stayed in close touch. Both men gamed out Gennady’s disappearance. They had never, in fact, recorded their discussions with their Russian friend, nor had they gilded the lily in any of the reports they had filed. Cowboy and Dion came to consider the possibility that there was a double agent somewhere in the US intelligence establishment who had fingered Gennady. This traitor would have to be a special kind of son of a bitch, because not only was he capable of an act of treachery against his own country; he also was willing to finger a completely innocent man to appease his Soviet client.

  Cowboy considered his own nature. He was no longer under the thumb of alcohol, but the bottle perpetually beckoned, as it had for his beloved father and mentally ill mother. Why did people drink? Cowboy wondered, Is nobody responsible for their actions anymore?

  Since Gennady’s disappearance, however, something else had taken the place of Cowboy’s addiction, and to his surprise, he felt no shame for this dark impulse. It was the Texan pull toward frontier justice. Cowboy Jack Platt was going to personally hunt down whoever was responsible for Gennady’s disappearance, and when he found him, he was going to light the bastard up.

  10

  AN OLD ENEMY

  Guess who’s alive?

  September 2005

  Krasnaya Presnya Transit Prison

  The next ring of hell for Gennady was the Russian mythic prison known as “Gulag Junction,” the hub from which all prisoners would eventually be transferred to work camps spread out across the country. Krasnaya Presnya was an overcrowded, overheated, rat-infested hole, infamous for its wrongful 1940s imprisonment of dissident Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who later exposed the gulag system to the world.

  Gennady joined the ranks of the wrongfully imprisoned still wearing Dion’s bloody FBI Academy sweatshirt. He was ushered into an interrogation room, seated on a metal chair, legs shackled and hands bound behind his back, and sat there for what seemed an eternity with a high-wattage bulb in his face. Then he walked in, the man behind it all: Sasha Zhomov, the obsessive Russian mole hunter whose investigation had broadened in 2001. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, when the KGB split into domestic counterintelligence (FSB) and foreign spying operations (SVR), Sasha had been tapped to run the North America division of the FSB.

  With Sasha involved, it was clear to Gennady that his latest false imprisonment had nothing to do with a weapons charge. In truth, his country suspected him of either being a traitor or selling one out.

  At first, mole-hunter Sasha played a Russian version of “good cop.” He creepily told Gennady, “I’m putting you in prison to protect you.” When that had no impact on the prisoner, Sasha reverted to his true form and a menacing tone. “These FBI men were trying to buy the file on our source. They approached many FSB, GRU, and ex-KGB until they got it. And they were there with you, in America, again.”

  Gennady protested his innocence. Begged for water. “Can I just call Masha to tell her I’m alive?”

  “And then there’s these…” Sasha flung onto the table intelligence reports of Gennady with Dion in Macon and Atlanta. He showed Gennady grainy photos—taken from Gennady’s now ransacked apartment—of him with Rochford, Dion, and Cowboy, even their families. “Now, here’s what I don’t understand: you lost your pension
, yet you are able to support two wives and two housefuls of kids—that we know of—a nice dacha in the country, and vacations in America, and right after someone sold our most precious files to the main enemy.” He paused. “You’re wearing the fucking FBI shirt he gave you! Do you think I’m a fool?” He slapped Gennady twice, and hard.

  “I worked hard for my money. I sold no files! How would I even get such a file? I had been in fucking Guyana for four years before you threw me out of the service.”

  Summer-Fall 1989

  One year removed from his Lefortovo ordeal, Gennady struggled to pick up the pieces of his life; Cowboy Jack—his perceived betrayer—was dead to him. After initial, albeit fruitless, attempts at the import-export game (vodka, food, clothing—anything), Gennady found his salvation in the form of tremendously good timing.

  Help for Gennady’s plight arrived courtesy of new Party chairman Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika. In June 1987, at Gorby’s urging, the Kremlin passed the Soviet Joint Venture Law, which allowed and encouraged Soviet citizens to partner with Western businesses. In practice, the Soviet partner would supply labor, infrastructure, and connections to a potentially large domestic market while the foreign partner supplied capital, technology, entrepreneurial expertise, and, in many cases, products and services of world-competitive quality. Soon the Americans signaled their interest in the idea.

  In December 1987, while Gennady had been enjoying his last month of freedom in Guyana, Ronald Reagan had met with Gorbachev in Washington for a continuation of their ongoing summit. In a joint statement released after the meeting, one sentence played a major role in Gennady’s fortunes after his 1988 release: “[Reagan and Gorbachev] agreed that commercially viable joint ventures complying with the laws and regulations of both countries could play a role in the further development of commercial relations.” It was the first Moscow-Washington “reset.”

  Almost overnight, some five hundred startups took out business licenses, although few would actually see a profit. One such company, conceived by an ex-KGB and volleyball friend of Gennady’s named Alexey Morozov (KGB Department 19), was formed in 1988 with a California entrepreneur named Martin Lopata. It was called Sovaminco, which stood for SOViet AMerican INternational COmpany. Not only was Morozov involved, but also one of the senior executives was Elena Cherkashin, wife of Gennady’s former DC rezident, Victor Cherkashin. The company hired Gennady to head up security.

  Sovaminco’s business plan started out with the idea of supplying photocopying services to Soviet citizens at public kiosks—until this point, all photocopiers, duplicating machines, and printing presses had been owned by the state. Consequently, Sovaminco was one of the first companies to facilitate printing for the average Soviet, with facilities also located at hotel gift shops in Moscow and Leningrad designed specifically for Western visitors. Larger commercial jobs were shipped to a central printing plant for overnight service. The company, which is still in existence, branched out into printing (T-shirts, business cards, and bumper stickers), publishing, and distribution, reaching a deal with USA Today to distribute the newspaper in Moscow and Leningrad on the same day of publication. As the company expanded, so did its need for security, and Gennady was just the person to oversee it.

  Back in McLean, Virginia, Jack ran his company HTG and assumed that Gennady was actually dead, having likely suffered a terrible execution in Lefortovo. It had now been over a year since Jack had had any contact with his former friend in 1987, and he was plagued with guilt.

  The CIA and FBI had been hard at work attempting to comprehend the leaks that had led to so many tragic losses over the past decade. They were in it for the long haul. Locating possible KGB surveillance of Agency communications or, worse, finding a double agent (or agents) inside US intelligence is painstaking, and often fruitless, work. Both John Walker Jr. and Edward Lee Howard had been uncovered in 1985, but their level of knowledge couldn’t account for all the losses, especially those of Motorin and Martynov.

  The investigative units went back at least to 1986, when the CIA’s Hathaway had assembled the mole-hunting task force. By now, team member Jeanne Vertefeuille was facing a forced retirement, but she asked to stay on because she felt guilty about her lack of success so far. “She wanted one more shot at it before retiring,” Grimes recalls. As for Sandy Grimes, she had been distraught since the loss of her Moscow asset Dmitri Polyakov. Of course, one of the reasons the investigation had dragged on for so long without success was that the Americans had been hoodwinked for years by Sasha’s campaign of misdirection.

  It finally dawned on FBI supervisor Bob Wade that the KGB historically had one huge advantage in the game of spy wars: money. Yurchenko had told the Bureau that the KGB had long ago determined that bribery was the easiest way to obtain intel. Wade concluded that it was time to compete on an even playing field and just buy the damn information. Thus in 1987, Wade created the appropriately named BUCKLURE program, wherein the US made it known that it would pay $1 million for any evidence showing how US intelligence had been compromised. The CIA, thanks to senior counterintelligence officer Paul Redmond, teamed up with Wade and agreed to split the cost of any future payout.

  FBI supervisors Jim Holt—who, like Grimes, hoped to avenge the loss of his asset Martynov—Jim Milburn, and R. Patrick Watson played key roles in creating lists of targets, KGB agents who might have access to the precious knowledge. One list, called the “Pennywise” (pound foolish) list started at 198 suspects, including 60 to 70 KGB officers. Jack, who maintained regular contact with his FBI and CIA colleagues, if only to facilitate his security consulting business, was most concerned with the one loss that did not involve betrayal: Gennady.

  One afternoon in 1990, Jack received an unexpected phone call at the HTG office from Ukrainian George Powstenko, the man who had been like a father figure to Gennady. The first three words out of “the Ukee’s” mouth, Jack later said, almost brought the Marine hardass to tears.

  “Guess who’s alive?” asked Powstenko rhetorically.

  “How do you know?”

  “How the fuck do you think I know? He called me,” came the answer.

  Jack persuaded Powstenko to hand over Gennady’s new Moscow phone number and considered how to proceed.

  “I think he’s still pissed at you, and you can’t blame him,” said the Ukrainian. “They roughed him up pretty bad at Lefortovo, then threw him out on the street.” Powstenko explained that the KGB bosses had been overwhelmed by support from Gennady’s colleagues and underwhelmed by the lack of real evidence.*

  Jack recalled, “It occurred to me to call an old friend, Luigi Cohanek, an attaché I worked with in Vienna and who now was in Moscow.” When he did, he asked him, “Would you call Genya and ask him if he would talk to an old enemy?” Cohanek agreed and then got back to Jack with the go-ahead to call.

  Jack took a deep breath and punched in Gennady’s number. After a haunting silence came the familiar accented voice, but this time not as exuberant as before: “Chris, I’ve been expecting your call.” Another pause. “Perhaps I will see you when I come to America on business.” Gennady agreed to stay in touch with Jack. “I wanted to know the truth,” Gennady says. “That’s why I took the call. I was looking forward to grabbing him by the throat. I had lost everything, and I wanted to find out why he did it.”

  Eventually, Gennady concocted a plan to confront Jack in the US. He wrestled with alternative approaches. He could be confrontational, get in Jack’s face and exploit his height to bear down on the smaller man. But what would this accomplish? While Jack would deny his complicity regardless, provoking a KGB versus CIA showdown would only bring out the Marine in Jack. Alternatively, Gennady could exploit Jack’s conscience, which he knew ran deep. For now, Gennady decided to simply contact his old friend George Powstenko to let him know he might try to come to the US soon. Powstenko could inform Jack if he so chose, which he surely would.

  In late 1988, after his release from prison, an unemployed Gennady
was traveling through Poland by train to visit a friend in Warsaw and perhaps secretly boarding a flight to visit another old friend some 4,500 miles away, Cowboy Jack. Somewhere in the wilderness near Brest, Belarus, the train stopped for no apparent reason. KGB agents climbed aboard and coldly told Gennady that he had a telephone call waiting for him. Gennady glanced out the train window and saw only forests and fields. A phone call. Right. They took him off the train and made him stand beside the tracks. The KGB men boarded the train again and Gennady waited for them to return. He was disabused of that notion when the train began to chug away, leaving Gennady stranded.

  They will never stop screwing with me, Gennady said to himself as he contemplated being alone in nature. He suspected—rightly, it turned out—his old rezident comrade Victor Cherkashin. To hell with them. He reasoned, he had survived his childhood in the raw wilderness and he had survived prison. Tossing him off a train in the middle of nowhere was all they could think of to confound him? He could find his way out of the countryside with his eyes closed. Which he did, although he cannot remember precisely how he made his way to Warsaw.

  In Warsaw, he showed his passport to Soviet guards, who said he had to come with them. “You have to go back to work,” the guards said vaguely. Clearly, the KGB had sent down orders to keep inconveniencing Gennady in any way they could think of. So the guards sent him back to Moscow.

  “Cherkashin sold me out,” Gennady concludes. “He was still at the First Directorate. He was just doing his job. But I had had enough, so I quit the joint venture and started a new company called Bullit.” The idea stemmed from the fact that the most successful of the new Soviet startups were in the corporate security and consulting arenas. Since government (including KGB) wages were so low (equivalent to two hundred dollars per month), tens of thousands of KGB officers had taken early retirement to improve their lot in what one such retiree labeled “free enterprise espionage.” KGB recruitments had fallen off a cliff, and many of those who still enlisted saw Yasenevo as nothing more than a training ground for cushy private-sector jobs, and they retired immediately after the mandatory five-year stint was up. These nouveau capitalist operations offered electronic bug detection, intelligence gathering, bodyguards, and armored limousines to foreign businessmen looking to cash in on glasnost. Others merely convinced the CIA to pay for their defection to the West.