Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Years later, it would hit him that it might even have been a misinterpreted book. There is no way to know if Gennady’s misinterpretation theory is correct, but it is certainly a possibility. In 2002, award-winning espionage author David Wise published his volume on the Hanssen saga, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America. When the book finally made its way to the North America section at Yasenevo, the translators’ eyes lit up when they read three unfortunately worded sentences here of the paperback edition. Regarding the FBI’s quest to find someone to sell them the KGB’s file on the second traitor (Hanssen), Wise wrote:

  The FBI counterspies began to focus more and more on one former KGB officer. When he was stationed in Washington, he had been of interest to the FBI. The Russian had gone into private business after he retired from intelligence work and was living in Moscow.

  Of course, that description fits the real traitor, Anatoly Stepanov, to a T, but it coincidentally fits Gennady Vasilenko even better: the former Washington-based KGB officer who was so close to the traitor Motorin; the Muscovite friend and private business partner of Jack Platt; the Line KR officer of such unending interest to FBI man Dion Rankin; the third Musketeer now convulsing on a concrete jail cell floor.*

  How else, his tormentors must have wondered, could this outcast, stripped of his pension, have prospered so well that he could afford two families, a half-dozen children at least, a business office in the US, and a dacha in the countryside? What other gifts had the CIA or the FBI given him? While his main tormentor was the FSB’s obsessive mole hunter Sasha Zhomov, elsewhere in Moscow, Sasha’s minions destroyed the Vasilenko apartment, just as they had his dacha. They were busy looking for—and planting—evidence of betrayal.

  Gennady lay in agony on the floor of his prison cell—wearing the FBI sweatshirt Ilya had brought for him after being told the clothes he had been wearing during his arrest had been soaked with blood. As he anticipated his next beating, a different kind of torture was unfolding in an area of the prison that was meant to be more civilized. In the waiting room, Masha was seated at a stark table, desperately trying to occupy her two young sons, Ivan, ten, and Alex, seven. The boys were grabbing at her, grabbing at each other, crying. There wasn’t a couch to lie down on, a television set, a magazine, or even a pencil and paper for the boys to draw on. Didn’t any of these police people have children of their own? Did they know what it was like to try to distract small children even when you had rudimentary entertainment at your disposal? They not only had been terrified by the violent Spetsnaz raid on the Vasilenko dacha but also had no idea what was coming next. Besides, they were hungry, having been pointedly deprived of food and water. The authorities had told them that they must wait, but for what? As the hours passed, the three were miserable. When Masha inquired, she was told to wait. Wait. Wait. As if they had something very special in store for her.

  And they did.

  A few hours later, another family was escorted into the waiting room. It was Gennady’s wife, Irina, along with Ilya. They recognized one another immediately; after all, Masha had been a close friend of both Julia and Ilya, Gennady and Irina’s children. So, Irina thought, what was Masha doing in the waiting room of a prison with two small boys who bore more than a passing resemblance to Gennady? Ilya found himself gazing into the eyes of his younger selves, a betrayal he would come to not easily forgive. His father’s ordeal would give him additional reasons to be angry in the years ahead.

  It didn’t take a graduate degree in genetics or psychology from Moscow State for Irina to figure out what was going on here—what had been going on for a long time, evidently; Masha’s facial expression was not exactly that of a seasoned spy. It was one thing to know her husband was a serial philanderer, which Irina had come to terms with years ago, but his supporting a second, secret family was more than any wife should be asked to accept.

  A sniggering guard closed the door to the waiting room, and no one else was allowed to enter the seething human cauldron.

  Gennady never found out precisely what words were exchanged during the kind of reunion only Sasha Zhomov and the FSB could coordinate, but the showdown was so terrible that virtually no one who was present will talk about it, even years later. As Gennady lay writhing on a concrete floor, an FSB operative paid him a visit to let him know the wonderful news: there had been a family reunion only a matter of yards away. He was left in isolation to imagine what had taken place.

  Gennady’s mind bounced between three things: the raw, physical throb of his injuries; the horror of what might await him now that the FSB firmly believed he had given up Hanssen (not to mention having been accused of terrorism); and what would become of his two families. How would he continue to support Irina, let alone look her in the eye? How would he face his older children, whose childhood friend had borne him two children? How would he take care of Masha and the boys?

  Even in the throes of unimaginable adversity, Gennady maintained a childlike capacity for fantasy and wishful thinking. He had always figured he could pull off his two-family caper. Why would it be that difficult? He and Irina hadn’t had any connection for years. Gennady loved his children, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. He had always taken his pleasures as he found them. Was that so wrong given all he had been through in his life? Besides, he was a spy. Spies were stealthy and clever. If he could tiptoe in the shadows on behalf of a superpower, why couldn’t a superspy keep his other family a secret? “Shit happens” is still how Gennady answers these questions today, without a modicum of reflection. But in that moment, since he didn’t know what his future held, he knew that his marriage to Irina was over.

  Sasha Zhomov personally interrogated Gennady during his early imprisonments in and around Moscow. “I’ll keep you in prison in order to protect you until I find [the traitor],” Sasha vowed. He was very aggressive and went nose-to-nose with his captive but left the actual physical work to others. People lower down on the FSB food chain roughed up Gennady out of Sasha’s earshot. Gennady, of course, never passed up an opportunity to goad Sasha by wearing either the FBI sweatjacket given to him by Dion Rankin or his YOU DON’T KNOW ME/WITNESS PROTECTION T-shirt, depending on the weather. When Sasha harassed Gennady about his inflammatory sartorial choices, Gennady earnestly told him, “It’s comfortable and warm. If you bring me a comfortable FSB shirt, I’ll wear it if it would make you happy.” Would a genuine Russian traitor be so brazen as to wear FBI gear? Sasha must have asked himself. Or was it that he just didn’t care?

  After five days in the police jail, the FSB made a point of humiliating Gennady by moving him from one awful prison to another—first, a week at the Solntzevo police prison, followed by two months in the infamous Krasnaya Presnya, “Gulag Junction.” In the five years ahead, he would find himself in a blur of more than a dozen prisons and detention colonies—sometimes doing multiple stints in the same hellhole. Given that Gennady was tortured, often mentally and physically unwell, and disoriented from being held in occasional solitary confinement, it is challenging to say precisely what happened where, when, and how. The authors have attempted to reconstruct and streamline, with Gennady’s input and scattershot documentation, the highlights and lowlights of his incarceration between 2005 and 2010.

  The impromptu transfers from prison to prison were conducted in the hope that incarcerated criminals would torture the new guy, the worst of turncoats, until he couldn’t take it anymore. But Gennady possessed the superbly toned physique of the elite athlete he was, and he hoped it would help him survive. The irony wasn’t lost on him that it was his facility in sports that had brought him, three decades prior, to the attention of Cowboy Jack, the man whose friendship had again landed Gennady in this position.

  Back in New York in 2005, Robert De Niro, not knowing of Gennady’s arrest, was ready to turn the charismatic Russian into a movie star. In the very month that Gennady was taken into custody, principal photography began, after years of delays, on De Niro’s T
he Good Shepherd. Apparently, Gennady had passed his audition. “I wanted Gennady to play Ulysses,” De Niro recently said. “But we couldn’t find him.” (The part ultimately went to Ukrainian actor Oleg Shtefanko.)*

  In Virginia, Jack was in distress. He had quickly located articles about Gennady’s arrest on the Internet. He felt responsible for putting his friend in harm’s way, and now he could only imagine the horrors Sasha was inflicting on him in Russia’s torture-chamber prisons.

  More than once, Jack pulled his inscribed copy of Jacques Rossi’s chilling memoir, The Gulag Handbook, off the shelf. The book Jack had convinced Rossi to write decades ago now replaced the Walter Matthau comedy Hopscotch as evening diversion. With his friend Gennady in mind, Jack read about the grim, overcrowded, and unsanitary dungeons—what Rossi called his “intimate nightmares.” Included among those nightmares were tales of a prisoner roasted alive on a red-hot sheet of metal and a young escapee slaughtered in the snow, who then became the only food for prisoners trying to run away across the tundra. The thought of similar punishments being inflicted on Jack’s charismatic, happy-go-lucky best friend was unbearable.

  Ira Silverman, the dean of network TV investigative producers, was a friend of Jack’s and recalls many an evening spent commiserating at Jack’s Great Falls hangout, the Old Brogue Irish Pub—where Jack kept himself regimented to near beers and soft drinks. “Jack talked about it every day,” Silverman remembers. “He couldn’t forgive himself. He was desperate to help Genya and was asking everybody for advice.” Likewise, Harry Gossett remembers Jack asking everyone, anyone, “What else can we do to help Genya?” Gossett says that Jack was in regular contact with Ilya and passed on Ilya’s awful updates to the Brogue gang. “I remember once Jack said that Genya had a vascular problem in his leg,” Gossett says. “He thought his friend was dying.”

  Immediately after Genya’s arrest, Cowboy began sending him messages of support, via Ilya. But his imprisoned friend did not—most likely could not—respond. Cowboy’s frustration and anger only intensified, and he would repeat the refrain to anyone who would listen: “Genya’s arrest was pure damage control. They needed someone to arrest in response to Hanssen.”

  By the spring of 2006, Jack’s concerns had reached a breaking point, and he decided it was time for action. As a seventy-year-old retired CIA officer, he was well aware that he would need help from younger men still in the game. But by this time, Jack was so disgusted with the CIA and its nonresponse to Gennady’s predicament, that route wasn’t even an option. Thus the best conglomeration of the needed skills clearly resided in the members of the Shoffler Brunch, with its diverse attendees, which included CIA officers, FBI agents, DC police, congressional investigators, mob informants, and private investigators. This crew either knew how to tackle the most sensitive operations or knew someone who could.

  One Shoffler mainstay was fifty-six-year-old investigator-author Dan Moldea. The Akron, Ohio, native and former president of the Washington Independent Writers association has a storied and respected history of taking on some of the most powerful people (the mafia, corrupt teamsters, President Ronald Reagan) and institutions (the NFL, MCA, the New York Times) in America. His prodigious and indefatigable investigative skills, combined with his congenial and scrupulously loyal manner, have made him arguably the most connected insider in the nation’s capital. For over thirty years he has coordinated the DC Authors Dinner, which twice yearly brings more than one hundred of the country’s best writers to Georgetown for an informal networking bash. Jack, who had been introduced to Moldea a dozen years earlier by the eponymous Carl Shoffler, sought his advice regarding Gennady’s predicament.

  “After Gennady disappeared again, Jack called me,” Moldea says, remembering that Jack’s usual jovial voice sounded uncharacteristically somber. Moldea had met Gennady twice before at Shoffler Brunches in 1997, when Gennady and his ex-KGB pals like Cherkashin had been visiting Jack on HTG business.

  “Meet me ASAP,” Jack said. The next day, at the Marriott Hotel restaurant in Rosslyn, he pleaded with Moldea. “Can you help Gennady?” He told Dan that Gennady’s situation stemmed from how Gennady had assisted the FBI with a huge security problem. “Without even knowing it, he led the FBI to Hanssen,” Jack whispered.

  “I had never heard of Vasilenko’s role in this matter before,” Moldea says. “In effect, I considered it my patriotic duty to help free him.” After a nanosecond of consideration, Moldea replied, “I think I got a guy.”

  Moldea’s recommendation was his longtime friend and source Ron Fino, a former officer in a mobbed-up union in Buffalo, New York, who had secretly worked as an undercover consultant for the FBI and the CIA for many years, helping put scores of major mafia figures in prison. Fino would eventually work in Russia, importing vodka into the United States while developing information about Russian mobsters, among many others, for US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

  The next day, Moldea approached Fino. “During this meeting, Fino and I discussed the Vasilenko situation,” says Moldea. “He suggested that we raise the necessary money to bribe a Russian government official who might be able to get Vasilenko out of prison.” Jack remembered Fino from years earlier, but only by his code name, GORKY, from when the two of them had helped legendary CIA officer Dick Stolz on arms-smuggling investigations. Jack recalled the reintroduction years later: “Moldea introduced me to Fino because his wife’s family, which owns a meat-packing factory in Belarus, are in contact with Russian mobsters who might be able to help.”

  According to Michelle Platt, Jack made some kind of deal with Fino, the upshot of which was that Fino’s wife’s family would get their meat supplied at half price if, and only if, they could keep Gennady from getting killed in prison. (Either no one knows the particulars or they know and don’t want to elaborate.) Fino then supplied Jack with the names of major Russian mob figures; Jack, in turn, passed those contacts along to Gennady’s son Ilya and suggested Ilya make contact.

  One of the mobsters whose name Ilya received was a fearsome character based in Moscow’s Luberetskiy district known only as Slava. Slava got word back to Fino that he would help Gennady for $10,000. Ilya came up with the money, ostensibly from his family’s savings, and reached out to Slava’s minions. Meanwhile, Gennady was freezing in his prison cell. Notes made in his diary from around this time read, “Still no heat in sell [sic]. We are freezing.”*

  Recent interviews suggest that the next act played out something like this:

  Thirty-five-year-old Ilya tracked down Slava’s boys in the back of a run-down store. Ilya entered with a mix of terror and hope. Terror because he would be dealing with murderers. Hope because these murderers might be in a unique position to get his father freed, or at least treated humanely. One can’t expect the kind of men who can get big things done to be sweethearts, he reasoned.

  The store was one of those stores that didn’t sell anything. He had heard about places like these and seen them in movies about the mafia, where a vague sign out front masks the kind of activities taking place inside. He wondered if the Russians had borrowed this shtick from American cinema or if criminals all over the world had a viral understanding that this was how things were done.

  A young tattooed punk stood against a doorway and eyed Ilya up and down, sniffing as if he were unimpressed. Indeed, Ilya—lean, baby-faced, and looking like a university student—was visibly out of his depth, and the punk let him know it without saying a word. He just crossed his arms and smirked at Ilya, who supposed that nonverbal humiliation was what counted for amusement in the criminal underworld.

  Ilya explained that Slava had sent him. Tattoos wasn’t impressed. He gave Ilya a look as if to say, “Big man knows Slava. Please don’t hurt me, big man.”

  Ilya swallowed hard and pressed, emphasizing that he was here to help his father. As if this hoodlum has any empathy for a son trying to help his imperiled old man.

  Tattoos turned and went into a back room. He emerged in a
few minutes and waved Ilya back. Ilya moved cautiously into the dark, concrete-floored room. There he encountered two stocky, unshaven men sitting at two corners of a cheap table, as if they had been playing a game or counting money, but there was nothing on the table now.

  The older of the two men spoke. “You are Ilya?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ilya Vasilenko?”

  “Yes.”

  The gangster said with a smirk something about Ilya being the son of the famous superspy.

  Ilya said nothing. The lead gangster—we’ll call him Dr. No—didn’t ask Ilya to sit, and Ilya was not inclined to make the request. His instinct was to get the hell out of there, and fast. But he couldn’t run now. Between these two goons at the table and Tattoos on the other side of the doorway, Ilya didn’t see a viable way out. And assuming he could escape, the gangsters knew who he was and who his father was, and they could surely get to them. Having no good options, he had to stay and try to survive the encounter.

  Since passivity was getting him nowhere, Ilya decided to assert himself, at least a little. After all, he wouldn’t have been there if he didn’t know some interesting characters himself, men with their own unique capabilities.

  “I was told that Slava could help my father and was given this address to come to.”

  “How were you told Slava could help?” Dr. No asked.

  “My father is in prison. He was charged with terrorism, something he did not do—”

  “I was told he was a traitor,” Dr. No said.

  Ilya explained that Gennady was not a traitor, that he had been framed. Dr. No reasoned the situation out differently, expressing that if Gennady had been framed, then perhaps important people wanted it that way. Who was he to judge their motives and get mixed up with their plans?

  Dr. No asked again how Ilya was told that Slava could help. Ilya stated that the objective was very simple: given that Gennady had been wrongly imprisoned, his family wanted the court to understand that he was innocent and release him.