Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  While the word “paranoid” is often wrongly invoked to describe the sentiments of the mighty, paranoia is defined as an irrational fear. What the KGB was feeling as news of the Soviet coup spread was a completely rational fear of their secrets being exposed.

  Mindful of the sheer terror East German officials had felt when the oppressed masses stormed their headquarters, the KGB began surrounding their own buildings with guards, especially Lubyanka and the Yasenevo headquarters. They proceeded to load their files onto trucks for transport to a temporary “safe” storage facility in Smolensk. There was little or no supervision, not to mention a complete absence of inventory. There were thousands of archival storage boxes of files being loaded into trucks, with hundreds of KGB officers involved in this frantic exercise.

  One of the transporters at Yasenevo was Anatoly Stepanov, who felt there was a good reason why people hid things: because there were terrible things they did not want you to know!

  At the time of the coup, Stepanov had a lot on his mind, one being the outrage of having been passed over for a recent promotion. He was also worried—not about the Russian mob, but about his future, as were most of the newly unemployed KGB agents he knew, who were scrambling to get out. All his comrades were now his competition. What would an erstwhile KGB officer do under a new regime? Be indicted? Executed? Flee the country for a new life someplace? And where would that someplace be? Perhaps someplace that wanted to better understand the inner workings of the KGB. Someplace like the United States.

  Anatoly Stepanov needed an edge.

  At the Yasenevo facility, Stepanov was one of many soon-to-be-former KGB officers moving files from storage vaults onto rolling carts, then down endless corridors to loading docks, and finally onto transport trucks. As he was loading one cart, his eyes caught a particular box of material labeled in Cyrillic, which translated to English as LINE KR/US TOP SECRET. In the box were envelopes with US postmarks, smaller boxes containing floppy disks of US manufacture, a reel-to-reel tape box labeled RAMON GARCIA, and two dark green plastic trash bags of the type usually used for clandestine drop-offs. Whether it occurred to him in the moment or he had it planned all along, Stepanov decided that this particular box would stay with him for closer observation. It might hold valuable information that he could ransom off for a new life far away from the Russian Mafia and the disintegrating USSR. In the chaos, as he pushed the rolling cart slowly down the hall, he needed to come up with a plan.

  Perhaps he waited until he was alone in the hallway to quickly move the box into a janitorial closet for later removal, or he pretended it was part of his personal belongings, which he cleared out of his desk as many did that night. In any event, the treasure made its way into his car trunk before dawn and eventually to his vacation cabin in the country. When he had the box safely inside his dacha, Stepanov read the detailed letters and knew what he had, and the implications of it were consequential in the extreme.

  Stepanov haul was the equivalent of winning the international espionage’s lottery: the KGB’s official file on their prized second traitor inside US intelligence. But wanting to sell off the incendiary material and doing it were two very different things—getting caught would likely mean a year of torture in the gulag, followed by a bullet to the skull in the basement of Lefortovo. And who knew what would happen to his wife and children?

  So Stepanov cogitated, and waited. For eight years. After almost a decade of keeping his treasure in storage, he put his Machiavellian scheme into high gear when he saw the relationship between Jack and Gennady, in late 1999, when Stepanov met Jack Platt in Moscow. Stepanov knew that in order to market his jackpot he would need to make his way to the United States to speak with the American authorities. He also knew that Cowboy Jack was just such an American authority.*

  At the end of their two-week New York courtship in the spring of 2000, Rochford and Stepanov finally agreed on the terms of their deal. Rochford explained that he would need a signoff from the directors of the FBI and the CIA, and a legal contract would have to be drawn up for payment for Stepanov’s services. While the terms have never been made public, and Rochford won’t discuss them, sources have said that Stepanov negotiated himself into a fat $7 million payday—much more than the ascribed $1 million bounty. He and his family also were to be relocated to the US and receive new identities.

  Now the question was How the hell would they get the material to the US? Arrangements were made for Stepanov to return to Moscow, retrieve the goods (Cowboy theorized he had been keeping it in his dacha), and make a handoff in a neutral country. During this time, the CIA’s Mike Sulick authorized a hefty deposit into Stepanov’s new US bank account while other CIA case officers made plans to pick up the package in the neutral country and send it to a third country via diplomatic pouch, then on to the United States by chartered plane. Pulling off the delicate transmission would take months of planning and execution. In one heart-stopping instance, the CIA thought it had been the victim of another brilliant Russian con, when Stepanov failed to show for the exchange. The Bureau established a reconnection, likely with Jack’s assistance, and the transmission was back on track.

  In October 2000, while Rochford and his team set about having Stepanov’s material arrive safely in the US, Jack made his last HTG trip to Moscow. While visiting Moscow’s KGB Museum inside the Lubyanka, a young military type approached Jack, and Jack could tell right away he was FSB.

  “I work for the Russian government,” said the stranger.

  “Cut the shit and save both our time,” Jack responded in his best Cowboy mode. “Who do you really work for?”

  Jack’s last visit to Moscow: (l. to r.) Vitaly Teperin (KGB), Gennady, Victor Popov (KGB), Jack.

  The man then smiled knowingly, showed Jack his Ministry of Internal Affairs ID, and asked, “Can we talk?”

  “Sure, but not here. Tomorrow at the Securitar office.”

  Later that night, Gennady took Jack on a sightseeing tour of Moscow. While Gennady wandered off, likely to flirt with an Intourist guide, Cowboy was taking photographs of Red Square when a group of thugs approached. Emboldened by the sight of an older man wearing cowboy boots, a Stetson, and a black vest, they pointed to his camera, expressing their annoyance of his clicking shutter noise. The Muscovites lumbered toward Cowboy, knives drawn. Cowboy hadn’t lost his vanity, his self-perception that he was a Marine who could handle himself, and while he wasn’t afraid, he was at a loss for tactics. What would he actually do, a sixty-one-year-old, against four twenty-something Neanderthals? One of them knocked the camera out of Cowboy’s hand, and it fell to the ground, parts scattering. It was the only time in Cowboy’s life when he wished he had carried his .357.

  “I guess somebody’s got a guilty conscience,” Cowboy said. He didn’t know why he had said it, but people seldom know why they do what they do under siege.

  The assailants looked at one another in disbelief. A leather-clad unibrow reached to grab Cowboy by the collar with his free hand, but all the air retreated from Unibrow’s lungs and he felt sharp spiderwebs of pain radiating from below his neck as if a missile had hit him high on his back. His knife fell to the ground. Unibrow staggered as the man to his right turned and found his chin briefly but decisively attached to the end of an implement that was not meant to intersect with a human jaw. This man was the second to be put out of commission by the primal, bat-wielding Gennady, firing Russian epithets from his mouth as if it were the barrel of one of his cherished guns.

  The third goon stood in shock, seemingly more at the alien language than the prostrate condition of his cohorts, and Gennady banged him just hard enough on the mouth with the end of the bat to make him spit teeth onto the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the fourth man suddenly found himself a solo operator. “I think you are my favorite,” Gennady told the terrified mook in accented English. “When you got up this morning, you didn’t plan on being alone, did you? It’s easy to have confidence when you have friends.”

  Gennady head-fak
ed the last man a few times. After the fourth or fifth fake, a “Fuck this shit” expression fell across the man’s face, and he tore away to parts unknown.

  Gennady looked at a thunderstruck Jack Platt and pointed to his camera. “Get your camera, Jack. We go now.”

  They ran to their car and drove off.

  “Genya, you saved my life.”

  Gennady was philosophical. “Okay, then. You will someday save mine.”

  Jack did not tell Gennady that he had once dreamed that all this would happen.

  Back at Securitar the next day, the FSB man arrived on time, and he and Jack walked outside for a tête-à-tête.

  “Okay, why are we here?” Jack asked.

  “We’re interested in you,” the FSB agent responded. “We saw that mafia report you did in Virginia Beach. Why don’t you make a contract with us, like you have with Gennady?”

  The poor guy had no idea that he was dealing with one of the most patriotic Marines imaginable. Jack knew exactly what the agent was pitching.

  “Take this back to your bosses,” Jack said. “Fuck no! And I never got a contract with Gennady!”

  The poor guy jumped, Jack later said.

  As a result of these encounters, Jack decided never to return to Russia.

  That same month, after some time away, Anatoly Stepanov stopped by the Securitar office and explained his absence to Gennady by saying that he had just been very busy. Gennady remembers that he then “just disappeared, for good.”*

  Soon after Jack’s return from Moscow, Stepanov’s box of material completed its circuitous route to FBI headquarters in Washington. At least one highly placed member of the FBI’s mole-hunting team says that the “coincidence” of Jack’s return and the appearance of the prized file was anything but. “Jack and an FBI agent went to Vienna to retrieve the cache,” says the source, who requested anonymity. It would make sense that the Bureau would want the master of surveillance avoidance to retrieve the precious bounty. Also, Jack had been stationed in Vienna, so he was familiar with the city’s best handoff and dead-drop locations. It is also a reasonable assumption that Jack made the Vienna side trip after his Moscow excursion. Or perhaps the Moscow trip had been an elaborate cover for the real reason for Jack’s overseas travel. If Jack indeed acted as courier for the coveted mole file, it would add weight to his reason for never wanting to return to Russia, where the vindictive Sasha Zhomov might see to it that the next group of thugs was much more adept than the ones Jack had recently encountered.

  Whatever the details about the handoff, the cache arrived safely and FBI analysts got to work. Included among the paperwork and floppy disks were two of the traitor’s plastic dead-drop bags, which, after being powdered, revealed two telltale prints. There was also a taped conversation between the traitor, who used the pseudonym “Ramon Garcia,” and his KGB handler. What the analysts heard stunned them. They had been expecting to hear the voice of the CIA’s Brian Kelley. But instead they heard the voice of one of their own, FBI agent Robert Hanssen. When the prints were analyzed, they also belonged to Hanssen.

  There was a war going on inside Mike Rochford’s gut. They got him! But “he” was an FBI man. Nobody had thought the bastard would be FBI, let alone the straitlaced, low-key Bob Hanssen. Hanssen was no Rick Ames, he of the newly capped teeth, young wife, shiny Jaguar, and cash-paid suburban house with the fancy curtains.

  On his birthday, February 18, 2001, Jack received a call from someone at the Bureau whom he later would only identify as a friend. “Listen to the news tonight. Happy birthday.”

  Jack tuned in the evening news and learned that Hanssen had been arrested in Northern Virginia. It was soon determined that he had sold out not only the United States’ most hard-won spies but also its billion-dollar tunnel underneath the DC rezidentura. As a result, the Russians had been feeding disinformation into the tunnel for years. The tunnel had been the penetration that Stepanov had alluded to during his negotiations with Rochford, the one that had knocked him off-balance.

  To say that Robert Hanssen was an odd duck would be an understatement. He surely was no exotic “Ramon Garcia,” the name he gave his Soviet handlers. The son of an overbearing Chicago policeman who reminded young Bob of his inadequacy at every turn, Hanssen was, on the surface, a convert to Catholicism who lived with his wife and four children in suburban Virginia. Some described Hanssen as a dour and pale office dweller with a gloomy appearance. These colleagues referred to him behind his back as “the Mortician.” Indeed, in his mug-shot photo, a black-clad Hanssen resembles the cadaverous Lurch in the television serious The Addams Family.

  This portrayal, however, may be driven too much by hindsight and the self-serving human instinct to proclaim, “I knew it!” Other coworkers thought of Hanssen as a shy but pleasant intellectual who enjoyed engaging with others with whom he was comfortable. His arrest, in fact, struck younger colleagues with horror, as they had come to think of him as a mentor. If they had failed to flag Hanssen as a traitor, what other fundamentals about their universe were they getting wrong? This was a question that pierced the vanity of the FBI as an institution. There was a reason Hanssen was such a devastating spy: he was very, very good at fooling the best of the best.

  Hanssen was a member of Opus Dei, a cultlike offshoot of Catholicism that demanded extraordinary and even self-punishing ritual demands of its practitioners. In his soul, he was the mirror image of what he projected to the world. He visited strip clubs and secretly—and routinely—videotaped himself with his wife, Bonnie, having sex. He even alerted at least one friend to his amorous schedule so that the friend could observe the Hanssens in bed from a perch outside their window.

  Genuinely smart, Hanssen saw himself as being intellectually superior to his FBI colleagues. Still, he was careful not to inflict his brain on others. But there was a confection of arrogance and insecurity baking deep—very deep—beneath the surface. He surely thought that never meeting his Soviet handlers face-to-face was a stroke of brilliance that would insulate him from capture, and for a long time he was right. Scholars of the case suspect that, in addition to the $1.4 million he received for his services, his grandiose and unrequited sense of destiny drove him voluntarily into the arms of the Soviets not long after joining the FBI. After all, the Soviets hadn’t seduced Hanssen: he had gone after them. No, the genius Hanssen had been too gifted to rise slowly through the ranks like the dullards around him. He had made his financial and psychic fortune on the side, undermining his employer and his country at every step—facilitating murder if he must—all the while living in a rich interior realm where he alone was king.

  When Gennady heard the news about Hanssen’s arrest so soon after he had signed Stepanov’s passport application, he had a sickening feeling that Cowboy had possibly jeopardized him yet again. The Russians already thought Gennady was too tight with the Americans. And Sasha was still lurking somewhere in the FSB shadows.

  When Gennady spoke to Cowboy, he was furious. He shouted, “You used me, you son of a bitch! I could have been killed.”

  Cowboy explained, “I handed him over, but no one really thought he had anything. I sure as hell didn’t think it would be Hanssen. He was the bastard that dropped the dime on you in Havana! The one who put you in Lefortovo!”

  “And you’re the one who might get me a bullet in the head! Why didn’t you tell me what you were after?” Gennady pressed. “I thought it was about caviar and some matryoshka doll bullshit!”

  “I didn’t know what we were gonna get, Gennady. And in the long shot that we’d get something big, I didn’t want to put you in jeopardy. But this is my country. I didn’t take yours away from you. Don’t take mine away from me! I’m an American; you’re a Russian.”

  “They’re going to think I knew!”

  “Nobody knew!” Cowboy said. “All you did was sign a passport application. A million things had to happen totally out of your reach, out of your knowledge, and out of your control.”

  “You know th
e CIA, but I know the KGB,” replied Gennady. “Here, evidence isn’t even needed for an execution.”

  Gennady might have made his worst ever mistake. But what could he do? He knew what he had done and what he hadn’t done. He saw no action for himself other than to hope that his old nemesis Sasha Zhomov would never differentiate between the passport application Gennady had signed for Stepanov and the scores of others he had routinely signed. No, all he could do was hold his breath.

  Ben Wickham says that both Cowboy and Gennady had had no idea they were getting the double agent by signing off for Stepanov. For Gennady it had been just a way to get the Snake out of his hair; for Cowboy it had been the longest of long shots. “It wasn’t terribly unusual to get a visa for someone,” Wickham explains. “Cowboy was almost [as] surprised as Genya when he heard that [Stepanov] actually had the file.”

  Both double agents had finally been taken down—Hanssen’s twenty-two-year traitorous career had cost not only lives but also over a billion dollars of electronic, computer, and spy-satellite information, while Ames’s nineteen years of espionage had killed at least nine CIA assets.

  Asked if he ever thought about getting Ames or Hanssen in a room, Cowboy said, “I think about it a lot… I’d say, ‘From now on your wife should never start the car. Look who you’ve put in jeopardy. Fuck you!’” Indeed, Matty Caulfield says, “The only times I saw Jack insanely mad was over the Ames and Hanssen betrayals.”

  The takedown of Robert Hanssen was an intersection of extreme patience, good luck, firewalls, and operatives—witting and unwitting—bumping into one another and exploiting one another as circumstances arose. Nobody fully knew what they had until Hanssen was arrested, not even Stepanov.

  The Hanssen takedown also prompts a few questions:

  Is it possible that Gennady truly knew nothing about what the endgame of the caviar caper had been? The short answer is that everyone involved with the operation insists Gennady was kept in the dark about its objective. This is supported by the claims of the players that no one—not even Stepanov—was fully aware of what was in those pilfered files. To believe that Gennady knew he was conspiring to take down the prized Russian asset is to accept that the multiple players in the enterprise knew from the beginning, in linear fashion, precisely what the payoff would be.