Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Gennady turned around and saw his old volleyball-playing friend from Yasenevo, Aleksandr Zaporozhsky.

  Gennady hugged Zaporozhsky so hard he nearly knocked him over. “What is a nice guy like you doing in a dump like this?” Gennady asked affectionately, the first time he could recall being playful in a very long while.

  “I figured you were dead by now,” Zaporozhsky said, piquing Gennady’s curiosity. What exactly had he heard?

  Gennady cut his coaching short and sat with his old friend against a fence in the prison yard. Zaporozhsky told Gennady that he had likewise been tortured by order of Sasha Zhomov. Gennady asked him why he had been imprisoned.

  “They found me guilty of helping the CIA,” Zaporozhsky answered.

  “Did you?”

  Zaporozhsky offered an ambiguous expression and shrugged. “Who knows what to believe?”

  “I wonder how much that cost the CIA,” Gennady said.

  “I’m guessing around two million dollars, but I’m just guessing. So why exactly are you here?”

  “I kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. After I stabbed Julius Caesar to death.”

  “Seriously,” Zaporozhsky pressed.

  “Hanssen.”

  “You son of a bitch. How—?”

  “But I didn’t… It’s complicated. I helped a guy get a passport. One thing triggered another…” Gennady tried to explain.

  “And what did you get for it?”

  Gennady looked around, gesturing to the prison. “You’re looking at it.”

  “I was such an idiot to come back for that reunion.” Zaporozhsky sighed, referring to the KGB old-boys gathering.

  “In 2001? I was there, but I didn’t see you.”

  “I didn’t make it—Sasha grabbed me at the airport.”

  Ah, Sasha. “You’re lucky,” Gennady said. “At least he didn’t torture you.”

  “Oh no?” Zaporozhsky lifted up his shirt, revealing a hopscotch of what appeared to be cigarette burns.

  Gennady gasped. “Motherfucker.”

  It turned out that Zaporozhsky worked in the prison canteen, a fact that made the reunion extra special. “He smuggled out some decent food for me, vegetables,” remembers Gennady. “It was the best present I got in prison.” Pretty soon they would be back to playing volleyball together.

  The two men sat and talked about their home lives and the state of their erstwhile country, which, as far as both men were concerned, didn’t exist anymore. “Our country is past,” they agreed, invoking a phrase Gennady uses often. Zaporozhsky didn’t press Gennady on the intricacies of his two families, and Gennady didn’t press his friend on the details surrounding the takedown of Jack’s colleague Rick Ames. The last thing he needed was more information that could be beaten out of him by Sasha’s jackals. Better to be bloody and ignorant, Gennady reasoned, than bloody and insightful.

  Zaporozhsky said that he missed the US, specifically how much he had enjoyed living in Northern Virginia. On one hand, it was close to Washington. On the other, it was its own country. The US, Gennady thought, was actually many countries.

  “I once knew someone who lives there.” Gennady teared up, thinking of Jack Platt and their days roaming the Virginia woods, shooting guns at whatever seemed to scurry along the ground, and sometimes even things that didn’t. “I miss him,” Gennady said. “Our country is past, and some friends are past,” he added, his eyes wandering from fence to fence, and wall to wall.

  By 2008, Jack had heard nothing from Gennady for over a year. He approached his former CIA colleague and fellow De Niro consultant Milt Bearden for help in putting pressure on the Russians to treat Gennady gently. Jack’s core argument was that Gennady should be freed since he had never been a traitor and had not knowingly given up Hanssen. According to Jack, Bearden turned him down, and Jack would never speak to him again. Bearden, however, explains that he wasn’t being merely contrarian; De Niro’s loyalty to his many friends can overwhelm him with favor requests, and Bearden was trying to shield him from getting involved in a murky situation. “What did he want Bob to do?” Bearden asked recently. “At the time, Jack didn’t even know exactly why Gennady had been arrested. Yet he wanted Bob to make it ‘a cause.’”

  Bearden’s observation came with an unspoken implication: even if Gennady hadn’t actually become a traitor, his relationship with Jack had been insanely reckless and had provoked the Russians into taking an understandable, if draconian, retaliatory action. Had these two espionage cowboys actually thought they could carry on the way they had and the vindictive Sasha Zhomov would do nothing?

  Jack’s guilt was eating away at him; he knew he had put Gennady in a position where it appeared to the Russians that he had betrayed them. Consequently, Jack was determined to locate and help Gennady in any way possible—wherever he might be.

  Around this time, Gennady got into trouble for having a cell phone and was transferred once more to a strict facility. Fino tried to help him again, but by this time fluctuating relations with the US were at a low point, and no one would assist.

  Jack then concocted a backup plan to get a message to Gennady and, more importantly, his tormentors. He went around Bearden and paid a visit to De Niro in New York, and De Niro readily agreed to help by passing one of De Niro’s annual Christmas cards to Gennady via De Niro’s friend, revered Russian film director Nikita Mikhalkov. The director, through his contacts in the Kremlin, should be able to determine what had become of Gennady and have the holiday card forwarded to him. Mikhalkov agreed that if he located Gennady, he would pass along De Niro’s card to him. Since De Niro was (and still is) revered in Russia, the thinking was that both the inmates and the prison officials would never treat a friend of his badly.

  A few weeks later, the famously laconic De Niro called Jack with good news in the form of just two words: “He’s fine.” De Niro’s Christmas card—with a photo of him with Gennady—was his prison Teflon, not to mention the kind words passed down from the very real Slava, whose main contribution was permitting Gennady to invoke his name. From that point on, Gennady was treated humanely. Russian guards and inmates alike, all of whom respected tough guys, real and fictional, wanted a piece of the man who knew young Vito Corleone, Jimmy “the Gent” Conway, Al Capone, Paul Vitti, “Ace” Rothstein, “Noodles” Aronson, Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, and so many other characters De Niro had brought to life.

  More protection came in the form of fellow prisoner Aleksandr Kuptsov, brother of famed composer Vladimir. Aleksandr successfully protected Gennady by telling him to mention that he was friendly with fearsome Moscow mob boss Slava, and he would be left alone. The ploy worked.

  Now, at least, Jack could sleep at night. But how to get his friend’s sentence commuted? Even De Niro couldn’t help with that one.

  As he tumbled through the kaleidoscope of prisons, Gennady scribbled furiously in his diary. Entries such as “There is no justice in this fucking country,” “Black day of my life,” “Nobody wants to take responsibility,” and oblique references to Slava abound, but so does Gennady’s more optimistic spirit with notes like “Let’s celebrate another day of living” and “Happy Birthday little son!!! 9 years!!! Big Boy!!!”

  But Sasha, unimpressed with Gennady’s big Tinseltown connection, hadn’t given up. He had his jailers tell Gennady that they had incarcerated Ilya, promising, “Your son will spend all his days and nights in Lefortovo until you confess to the Hanssen thing.”

  “I knew nothing about Hanssen!”

  “Poor little naïve KGB officer,” one interrogator told Gennady, patting his head like a schoolboy. “Just taken advantage of against his will. Hanging around with FBI agents and CIA officers—with no idea that they could possibly be up to something.”

  Gennady repeated that he had known nothing about the endgame of Hanssen’s capture.

  “Are you feeble-minded, Vasilenko?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then you’re either a smart, seasoned KGB officer or an idiot,
” the interrogator told him. “You cannot be both! You expect us to believe that an elaborate operation by the Americans to expose and shut down one of the greatest assets we have ever had was one big comedy of errors?”

  “All I know was that I played no role in the operation.”

  “But you signed the paperwork for the passport for [Stepanov]?”

  “I signed lots of paperwork for lots of passports!”

  “Then if you signed the paperwork,” the interrogator said, “how can you claim you played ‘no role’—your exact words—in the operation?”

  “I didn’t play any role knowing what they were doing,” Gennady explained.

  “Ah. And you think these men, Platt and Rochford, are your friends.”

  “Yes, they were my friends.”

  “Are or were?”

  Gennady was devoid of words.

  “Think about this, Vasilenko. First you say that you played no role. Then you say that you played no knowing role. You sound like an American lawyer, not like a KGB officer. Then you tell us you’re not feeble-minded. Then you don’t seem to be able to distinguish between whether men are friends or enemies. Or maybe you want to talk tricky like an American lawyer and say you were all the best of enemies. At worst, you are a traitor. At best you are a traitor who is also a fool—and because of your foolishness became a traitor. Men can be treacherous and men can be foolish. Either way, it ends up at the same place.” The interrogator paused. “No matter: we have your son.”

  It was too much to bear—either to lie and say he was a traitor to his beloved Motherland or to know that his son was being tortured because of his choice. Whatever reprieve he had benefitted from during his imprisonment had now passed. And meanwhile, the men who had actually betrayed Russia were millionaires living in the US. That’s when it occurred to sixty-six-year-old Gennady, wasting away inside the bowels of Russia’s decrepit prison in Smolenskaya, that only his death could solve the conundrum.

  Death might be a sweet escape for reasons other than Ilya’s welfare. The prison floors in Smolenskaya were made of sticky, uncleanable asphalt covered with insects. Gennady and his fellow inmates had to sleep on these floors, in small cells where ten people had to take turns sleeping, sitting, and standing. Even when Gennady managed to fall asleep, he was perpetually anticipating when the next guy whose turn it was would kick him awake and tell him it was time to go and stand somewhere. He never knew what time of day or night it was.

  Gennady may have been knocking on sixty-seven years of age, but he felt more like one hundred. How would he feel in a few short years? Certainly not better. Moreover, if he ever got out, he’d be an old, sick man who would feel like an ancient, dead man. Of what use would such a zombie be to his family, to the world? Never was there a more apt deployment of the cliché “better off dead.”

  Gennady considered how best to kill himself. His two best options were hanging himself with a bed sheet or using a metal rebar pole sticking out of a concrete pillar. He figured he could get a running start and impale his head on it. Perhaps he could line himself up so that the point of impact would be the soft gelatin of his eye; that way the spike could pierce his brain directly rather than have to penetrate his hard skull. Gennady bent down and lined himself up in a practice run at the rebar, but as his eye approached the spike he found that his instinct was to flinch as he got within a foot of it. He decided against the impaling because if one thing went wrong he could simply find himself alive and in a coma, which would give Sasha the opportunity to take a wait-and-see attitude toward Ilya’s fate. No, there had to be a better way than spiking his skull on some wayward rebar.

  Gennady sobbed as he stared at his left wrist. In his right hand, the one that had guided countless successful handoffs and dead drops with fellow spies, he held a razor blade that he’d had smuggled to him by his new prison friend Aleksandr. If only I hadn’t helped another KGB alumnus by countersigning his passport application eight years ago, he thought.

  Before he could do the deed, from the adjacent cell Aleksandr motioned for him to take a loaf of bread he was squeezing between the bars. “Eat the bread,” Aleksandr whispered.

  “I’m not hungry,” Gennady said.

  “Eat. The. Bread,” Aleksandr repeated, giving a serious glance at the snack.

  Gennady stared at his fellow inmate as he took the bread and tore it apart. There was a note inside. The terse missive contained just five words that changed everything: “Your son has been freed.”

  Gennady now knew that he could survive any trumped-up charges and sentencing extensions the authorities threw at him. His thoughts drifted to that night in 2000 in Moscow, when he had saved Jack from a group of Russian toughs.

  C’mon, Jack. Don’t forget me, he thought. I once saved your life. Now you can save mine.

  When Gennady eventually found his way to the terrible prison in Bor, he was placed in quarantine for two weeks. That is, after rabid dogs barked and sniffed at him while he was in a barren room with one hundred other men and a single hole in the ground in which to urinate and defecate. The Bor authorities were given extensive background on the inmates before they came to the prison, largely because it was an institution specializing in military spies and traitors. Before prisoners could get settled, the guards demanded money from them in what amounted to be a massive enterprise. It was clear that these bosses hadn’t gotten the memo about De Niro’s good friend Gennady. Or, more likely, they didn’t give a damn.

  The Bor guards lived like kings, comparatively. They had televisions and refrigerators, all subsidized by powerless prisoners. If an inmate didn’t pay, he was beaten. Gennady was told that any complaint about his beatings would fall on deaf ears, as investigating authorities would be told that he had simply stumbled and hit his head on rocks or loose boards. Given that these authorities were on the FSB payroll, they would be believed absolutely. If Gennady resisted paying a satisfactory amount, contraband would be planted in his cell—and he had already danced that polka. He was also told that if he became a smartass, he would be accused of assaulting inmates and guards. The worst offense would be if the guards should happen to find a weapon in his cell. And the guards kept plenty of knives around for precisely that purpose. They even showed him their impressive collection. So many options. “It was a hellhole,” Gennady says. He describes this prison as the “worst of the worst.”

  Each prison had a boss, or khozain (host), who controlled everything. He was a criminal businessman, like a head mobster up to whom the money flowed. Some bosses could earn as much as a million rubles a day on the food concession alone. There were other rackets, such as medical care, movies, and sundries. If you wanted any goodies, you paid. Big.

  At first, Gennady told his Bor persecutors that he didn’t have money to pay them. He was lashed with a chain. Then, ever defiant, he said, “I told the guards they would be sorry if they beat me.” That only made the guards get more specific. Gennady was told he needed to pay them between $5,000 and $10,000 or his stay in Bor would become very unpleasant. Eventually, broken, Gennady bought time by telling the prison bosses that while he didn’t have any money, he would see what he could do.

  As Gennady tried to figure out how he could come up with money, another inmate accused him of stealing his pen. Gennady remembered seeing a Seinfeld episode at Jack’s house with a similar plot. That’s what his life had become: a Seinfeld sketch written by Kafka. Prison snitches were no more beloved in Bor than they were in Sing Sing, so Gennady knew it was a scam perpetrated by the guards. He told the faux snitch during the inquisition that followed, “I have more good pens than your piece-of-shit pen!”

  This went over poorly with the guards, who claimed to have more “witnesses,” which surely they could conjure up. After this inquisition, the guards cozied up to Gennady and told him, as if they were on his side, that if he just paid them they could “get” the witnesses to recant—witnesses that didn’t exist in the first place. They added that if he failed to pay, they
would plant a knife on him and accuse him of attempted murder, and he would never get out of Bor.

  A guard demanded of the inmate, “Did Vasilenko do anything else to you besides steal your pen?”

  “Yes,” the inmate said. “When I didn’t give it to him, he beat me.”

  Another lie.

  Gennady observed that the FSB always seemed to level their charges against him when he was on the verge of being freed from prison, or at least being transferred to a friendlier koloniya. “My biggest mistake was my desire to go home,” Gennady recalled years later. Not only did Sasha want him in jail; the guards had been holding out for a payday from this former KGB big shot. Neither the FSB nor the prison brass had any incentive to free Gennady. Quite the opposite: “Harassing prisoners is big business.”

  Finally, after the latest round of harassment, Gennady said he could probably get his hands on some money to bribe the guards. He once again convinced Ilya to bring money, and when Gennady tried to give it to the guards, he was arrested for bribery. Sasha and company found witnesses to attest to this, while the guards feigned shock at the corruption.

  Gennady went on trial for the third time in 2009, in Bor, behind bars, on charges of bribery. He denied the charges but was predictably convicted anyway, attaching a couple of more years to his sentence.

  The year 2010 began with a despondent Gennady having lost all hope. There had been no correlation between his good behavior and the length of his sentence. Sure, he had provoked Sasha and mouthed off to the authorities, but he had also complied with their financial demands and been punished for that, too. Gennady had never paid much attention to religion—he had seen too much hardship to ever believe what so many Americans did, the notion that if you did as God wished, you would be rewarded with his grace—but he recalled a televangelist prattling on about a long-suffering character called Job. And what was the lesson there? That sometimes God tormented a certain individual for reasons only he knew? That this person should, nevertheless, keep believing in the monster that had done this to him? And what, exactly, had a millennium of war done for the Russians? Had adversity made them stronger? Perhaps, but who cared? It was still more war, more misery. And that’s what Gennady had in store for him.