Chadwicks, a small local happy-hour place, was almost empty. Wells and Chuvakhin were sitting at a round table in front of a window when I entered—the American looking calm as well as smart in a dark suit. He showed no sign of the nervousness of our first meeting in the rezidentura. More than that, he seemed pleased to be meeting us, which I read as the necessary trust.
Soon after our April recruitment of Wells—or vice versa, considering the initiative was all his—I’d flown to Moscow on another case, that one concerning the KGB London rezident, Oleg Gordievsky. A Washington-based British journalist who occasionally provided us with information had tipped me off that Gordievsky was spying for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and I had to report about that personally. I did so to Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the First Chief Directorate (FCD), the agency’s pride and joy in charge of foreign intelligence. When we’d finished about Gordievsky, Kryuchkov inquired about problems and prospects in the United States. My mention of Wells interested him, but there was little to report about the potentially positive development to prompt any great enthusiasm. At another meeting before I returned to Washington, however, Kryuchkov gave instructions for running Wells. One of my tasks would be to discover his real identity.
It took me several weeks to puzzle it out. Painstaking study of a directory of CIA officers helped narrow the list of operatives to one “improbable probability,” and when I reported my conclusions to the Center, Kirpichenko flatly declared me wrong. Despite my confidence in my detective work, his reaction was understandable. Even at Chadwicks, it was hard to imagine that the person sitting with Chuvakhin could be the man leading the effort to foil us—the CIA’s chief of Soviet counterintelligence!
“Sergei, would you give us a couple of minutes, please?” I asked Chuvakhin, who immediately got up and left for a short walk. Then I began to work on Wells.
“We have good relations with you,” I said, trying to be as warm as I could. “We trust you. But our relationship seems one-way.” I brought up one of the two FBI agents in the Soviet embassy Wells had already helped expose. “It’s not enough for you to say simply that agent number 1114 met a CIA officer. We need more information.”
Wells was quick in replying. “I understand whom I’m working with,” he said. “But at the same time please realize that I’ve put myself in a very difficult situation by meeting with you.”
Over the years, I had found that when a level of trust has been reached, direct questions sometimes work best. I began with the simplest one. “I know you aren’t Rick Wells. Are you Aldrich Ames?”
He maintained a poker face. The trust evidently wasn’t there. Chiort [damn]! I thought. From the moment he’d handed over his letter to Chuvakhin, I had kept all pressure off Wells. I’d asked nothing of him and expressed only profuse gratitude for the largely uninteresting material he’d been giving us.
“Look,” I continued, exaggerating, but not really dissembling, “our main concern—our one concern—is your security. I want you to know that for certain. Everything else is secondary. You tell me what you want us to do and we’ll do it—we’ll play by any rules you give us.”
I sensed Wells relaxing. He sat back in his chair. I pressed on. “But for us to be able to protect you, we need to know as much as we can about you. If your name is Ames, but you tell us it’s Wells, how can we watch out for you? We’ll be doing our best to watch for FBI communications about Wells. Something about Ames would slip right by.”
Wells thought for a moment. “Okay,” he sighed. “You’re right. I’m Ames.”
Of course I was pleased—but there was much more to find out. When it comes to volunteer agents—and often even those coerced into spying—someone who doesn’t actually want to engage in espionage rarely becomes a spy. Intelligence officers might think they’re chiefly responsible for recruiting agents, but most of the work really consists of finding people who want to be recruited. I pressed Ames about why he decided to spy for us.
To undertake the risk and expenses required to run an agent, you have to trust him to a certain extent. A large part of that trust comes from knowing his motives—his real ones. The standard answers are hardly ever the real ones. Say someone needs $50,000—he spent money on a lover or gambling or something else and he needs to cover it up so his wife won’t find out. He’s never going to tell that to the KGB. He’ll say, “Well, you know, I want world peace.” Or “I’m for mutual understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union.” Agents always say that—always.
I put the question to Ames. “You know the situation, the danger you’re in. You said it yourself. You know the FBI monitors everything we do—yet you still decided to give us information.”
Ames laid out his rationale. “I have financial problems, as you know,” he said, sighing. “But that’s not the most important thing. It’s that I work for an agency that’s deliberately overestimating Soviet capabilities to wrangle more money for its own operations.”
Ames directed his criticism at the CIA leadership. Some of his dislike for the agency’s top brass had come from his father, a less-than-successful CIA officer in Burma in the early 1950s. Ames said he began to object to the leadership when he started to realize it was pulling one over on Congress and the American people. He thought the Soviet Union was less powerful than the agency made out—that the USSR didn’t have the economic or military potential to back up its public threats. The CIA knew that but said the opposite, which he felt constituted lying. He was certainly right in that respect.
Ames also made it clear that he was against communism, that he felt patriotic about the United States—but that he respected the Soviet Union too. His explanation was businesslike but friendly. He appeared sincere and decisive. It seemed he’d made a crucial decision in his life and was now living with the consequences. Impressed by his courtesy, I responded in kind. Most important for me was his apparent acceptance of my suggestions—a crucial factor for working productively together.
I steered the conversation back to Ames’s security. “It’s in your interest to tell us as much as you can about any of your agents inside the KGB,” I said.
“I know we have agents there,” Ames replied. “But what I don’t know is how you would apply the information if I gave it to you. I don’t know who else knows about our meetings. The difficult situation I’m in is making me tell you we have a lot of agents—but that makes my situation even worse.”
“How many agents?”
“There’s a very big network.”
“How can we protect you if we don’t know who’s in a position to inform the CIA about you? If you’re concerned about your security, it’s up to you and us to minimize the danger for you. We need to know whom to protect you from.”
Then began the second chapter of Ames’s spy career. He hesitated, then took out a notepad and paper and began writing down a list of names. He tore out the page and handed it to me. I was shocked. That piece of paper contained more information about CIA espionage than had ever before been presented in a single communication. It was a catalog of virtually every CIA asset within the Soviet Union. Ames said nothing about whether the men he’d listed should be arrested or removed. “Just make sure these people don’t find anything out about me,” he said.
The conversation had lasted over half an hour. When Chuvakhin sauntered back into Chadwicks, I got up, leaving Ames and Chuvakhin to discuss U.S.–Soviet relations. My mind was racing and reeling. I was going back to the embassy and offered to take a plastic bag Ames had brought with him for his meeting with Chuvakhin. Back in my office, I saw that it contained intelligence reports disclosing even more about CIA operations.
I sat down to write a cable to Kryuchkov to be sent on my private channel to him. It was his turn to be shocked.
It was a stunning coup. In all my years in counterintelligence, I’d never hoped for anything so rich. That was only natural, since no counterintelligence officer can set concrete goals for recruiting agents and unco
vering secrets. Yes, a handful of the talented and skilled had managed to secure access to valuable secrets needed at a given time. But—except in rare exceptions, such as the scientists and others who stole A-bomb secrets from the United States during the war—those officers hadn’t been instructed to obtain that data. They merely turned over what happened to come their way.
Some information comes easily. Plans for the U.S. space shuttle cost the charge for photocopying them in the Library of Congress: five dollars. But we could hardly have set ourselves the goal of identifying the CIA agents inside the KGB. With huge patience and effort, limited information about particular agents could perhaps be acquired. But establishing contact with CIA officers, let alone any who might be remotely recruitable, was always difficult. It required finding a likely candidate, getting to know him personally, ascertaining his interests, uncovering his vices and possible Achilles’ heel. If and when all that was accomplished, the “find” would still be unlikely to collaborate with us. Even the worst bastard, wife beater and cheat doesn’t necessarily betray his country.
June 13, 1985, was one chance in a million. That’s how rare it was to find someone who had sensitive information and a willingness to provide it to Soviet intelligence—and, no less important, the opportunity to establish contact and communicate with us. Considering the importance of Ames’s information, maybe one in a million is an understatement. It was unimaginable but true. One brief meeting had dramatically altered the landscape of U.S.–Soviet espionage.
I was living in a new reality. So why wasn’t I ecstatic? What kept me from being at least contented as I relived the events two months later in Yasenevo? Maybe I was wondering whether my massive contribution to the KGB would earn me a major promotion. But what I actually felt was a major burden. The information Ames provided was almost too upsetting to digest. It showed that our intelligence community was rotten through and through.
I knew many of the people on Ames’s list. I’d talked to them, worked with them. Some would now be taken to an execution room and made to kneel for the delivery of a bullet to the back of the head. I was as responsible as anyone else for what was inevitably going to happen. Later I myself put one of the men on a plane back to Moscow. I was only doing my job, but the moral dilemma weighed heavily. As far as I was concerned, officers who turned traitor should be fired and deprived of their pensions. That’s enough. There’s no need for execution.
The telephone on my desk rang. Cutting off my thoughts, it brought me back to the small office in Yasenevo. “Kryuchkov wants to see you now.”
The appointment had been scheduled to discuss operations in the Washington rezidentura. To keep Ames’s recruitment as secret as possible—especially after learning the extent to which the CIA had penetrated our operations—no one in the Center was to be given the slightest hint that anything had happened. I would not be linked in any way to the forthcoming spate of arrests of KGB and military intelligence (GRU) officers.
My attempt to hide my depression evidently didn’t pass muster. Bald, bespectacled Kryuchkov seemed pleased when I entered his office, but his usually stern eyes went quizzically narrow as I sat down.
“What’s wrong?”
I had to be careful about what I said to the foreign intelligence chief. The fate of others—chiefly Kalugin—was an object lesson in the importance of appearances in Yasenevo. My association with the departed Kalugin hardly recommended me to Kryuchkov. Susceptible to rumors fanned by his own associates, he formed opinions about people quickly and seemed unable to change them—which explained why deputies like Kirpichenko had so easily influenced him. My every word would be important.
As head of foreign intelligence, Kryuchkov reaped the greatest praise for obtaining Ames’s intelligence, and that praise further whet his appetite for reaching the top of the heap—the KGB chairmanship. The reverse implication—that the KGB’s penetration by so many American agents reflected badly on the leadership of foreign intelligence—was obviously less good. But the many arrests immediately following Ames’s exposures enabled the leadership to applaud its new determination to eliminate the moles.
As for me, I knew my dark thoughts weren’t appropriate. But in the end, Kryuchkov was a fellow officer. Surely he’d understand. “What’s there to be happy about,” I replied, “when there’s so much rot around us?”
Kryuchkov lowered his eyes, then looked away. Evidently the thought of so many KGB officers busily aiding the Americans until a walk-in identified them for us did disturb him. In any case, he frowned. “Eh! What can you say about it?”
But that was all he managed to pronounce about our colossal failures. Waving his hand in dismissal, he changed the subject.
Had I learned nothing? Hide your feelings! Never let the foreign intelligence chief, of all people, see you depressed! Why didn’t I tell myself to go into Kryuchkov’s office gleefully boasting of my great success? Remember never to show my cards, never give a true opinion—positive or negative—about the state of KGB affairs. But I was depressed, and that rare condition for me surely did me no good. Anyway, the importance of the should haves would make itself clear only later.
Kryuchkov and I moved on to discuss Washington operations and my further handling of Ames, which he personally headed at Yasenevo but left largely to my discretion in Washington. “Just continue working as you have,” he said. “Make sure there are no slipups.”
Of course that was the trick. On my way back from Moscow, I tried to put its politics behind me and concentrate on my operations. As far as Ames was concerned, the most difficult tasks—finding an agent, establishing means of communication and building up a personal relationship and feelings of mutual trust—had been accomplished. But in my trade, eternal vigilance was no empty slogan. A single mistake can cost many years of work and many millions of dollars. I’d spent an entire career learning that.
2
THE TRAINING OF A KGB HANDLER
1
The sound began as a faint drone, growing louder until it became a thunderous roar and I could see the planes flying low in formation above the dark firs and tall birches. They flew as if in slow motion through the bright, cloudless summer sky, making their way steadily toward me from the northwest. I was nine years old, school was out and I was playing soldier with my friends, darting along dusty lanes and among the trees and bushes surrounding the wooden houses in which we lived. It was a typical Sunday in the tiny Ukrainian town of Kotovsk, north of Odessa on the Black Sea and just east of the border with Moldova, then part of Bessarabia. My family—mother, father, two brothers and sister—lived in one of the small, one-story houses near the railroad tracks that cut through town.
My father was Ivan Yakovlevich Cherkashin, a stout, broad-shouldered officer of the great People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), as the secret police was then named. He was away for several days, fighting counterrevolutionaries somewhere. My mother and some friends sat on benches gossiping. I clambered up a tree to get a better shot at the enemy. Looking up at the planes, I thought how fortunate it was for our game that they’d joined us. My fellow soldiers raised their stick guns in the air as the aircraft approached.
With no warning, a deafening explosion rang out. Then another, and a shock wave threw me from the tree. I lay on the ground, looking up to see my mother running toward me. She grabbed my arm and dragged me to our nearby yard, depositing me in a ditch. My ears were ringing. She threw a coat over me. “Vitya! Keep your head down! For God’s sake!” she screamed.
It was June 22, 1941, the first day of Hitler’s Operation BARBAROSSA, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. That was how the war began for us, hours after it started in general. The planes bombing the railway line were part of a massive Nazi force staging air strikes and blitzkrieg attacks along the Soviet western border. In time, I’d live through countless other bombardments. I’d see planes unloading their cargo, the bombs falling and spinning, slowly at first, then faster and faster until I couldn’t see
them anymore, just waited for the impact and the din.
My family had arrived in Kotovsk two years earlier. I was born in 1932 in the village of Krasnoe, meaning Red, in the fertile Kursk region south of Moscow. Half the village consisted of Cherkashins of one stripe or another. Like most other families of peasant stock, mine led a hardscrabble existence, and I remember feeling cold and hungry during that time. My father, a rebellious miller’s son, had fought for the Bolsheviks in the bloody civil war that followed Russia’s 1917 Revolution. As one of Krasnoe’s few literate inhabitants (having attended the village’s two-class church school), he was appointed to oversee the organization of a collective farm. He joined the NKVD in 1935 and was assigned to the Siberian town of Achinsk in the distant Krasnoyarsk region in 1937. Then, in 1939, he was sent to Kotovsk. (The secret police kept its officers moving around so they wouldn’t put down roots in any one area.)
I adored both my parents but especially my mother, whom I always felt, inexplicably, to be old, frail and near death. Father, whose talents included playing the piano and balalaika, was almost always at work. He started at ten in the morning and stayed until five in the afternoon. After a break until eight, he’d return until two in the morning. I never asked him, and he never told me, of what his work actually consisted. Meanwhile, much as I tried to please my hardworking parents, my constant transgressions—clambering on roofs and trees and joining any fight I happened to be near—earned me hooligan status. One teacher begged my mother to withdraw me from school.
My acquaintance with the means for war, if not war itself, began when military trains started passing through Kotovsk following the August 1939 agreement with Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The trains ferried soldiers into Bessarabia, ceded to the Soviet Union by Romania in the deal. Some of the men bivouacked in town, prompting the inhabitants to complain glumly of the town’s likely destruction if war actually broke out. But it was a grand time for me. It was a stiflingly hot summer, and soldiers would often shout to me to run and fetch them water from one of the wells. I did that happily. I found it all fascinating—the tents, the rifles, the troops. War was very impressive and exciting—a lot of men talking, playing cards and hanging about.
Spy Handler Page 4