Spy Handler

by Victor Cherkashin

  The Middle East situation continued to deteriorate as my tour neared its end. While Moscow tried to do what it thought best there, neither it nor Washington could fully predict the consequences of using proxies in the larger Cold War confrontation. The region’s current deplorable stalemate in no small part represents fallout from the failure to address the needs and aspirations of local groups amid a global struggle for influence.

  4

  TREASON

  1

  On my return to Moscow in 1970, I was promoted to my first major desk job at the Center, evidently thanks to the KGB leadership’s approval of my efforts in Beirut. As chief of the Middle East section in the FCD’s Directorate K, I’d be overseeing foreign counterintelligence in the region. Instead of operating in the field, often alone, I’d be running an entire division from a Lubyanka office. The Middle East was a growing hot spot. In particular, political tensions in Lebanon were becoming worse, as was the border standoff between Israel, Jordan, Syria and Egypt. It would require diligent monitoring and many trips to the region.

  The new job meant that I could afford a bigger apartment. We looked forward to moving out of the two-room flat in the decrepit five-story Khrushchev-era building in which my family and mother-in-law had lived between my foreign postings for over a decade. But the following year, FCD chief Grigory Grigorenko sent me abroad again. I’d be going to India as head of Line KR.

  The Soviet school in India only reached to the sixth grade. My son Alyosha, who was about to enter the seventh, had to remain in Moscow. Grigorenko dismissed that concern. So did the rezident in India, Yakob Medyannik, who’d asked Grigorenko to assign me to the New Delhi rezidentura. But as much as I hated leaving Alyosha behind, I put emotions aside and carried out my duty. Elena had a harder time. She cried for days.

  India was impressive but strange. Delhi, with its jumble of cars and bicycles pushing past pedestrian hordes streaming in all directions, felt like the inside of an ant colony. Stray dogs and cows roamed the streets. I was caught up by its energy and that of Bombay and Calcutta. The country’s ancient culture could be awesome. Scenes of great beauty were often breathtaking. Agra’s hanging gardens and the Taj Mahal, that memorial to undying love. The lost city of Fatehpur Sikri, built in red sandstone by Emperor Akbar.

  Although the KGB had a network of contacts there, friendly relations and economic ties between Moscow and Delhi precluded us from running many agents. Quick to display their independence, the Indians often expelled Soviet diplomatic and intelligence staff. When a Line KR officer accidentally grazed Indira Gandhi’s parked car, he was immediately sent home. But although the Indian government condemned Soviet spying from time to time, expulsions rarely carried political overtones.

  Our embassy complex stood on a main road, sometimes blocking the view of a small sea of squalid shacks. The hardworking rezident, Yacob Medyannik, had previously been a deputy director of the FCD and went on to become a top aide to directorate chief Vladimir Kryuchkov. Like Krassilnikov, the demanding yet understanding Medyannik proved to be an excellent mentor.

  Number two in the rezidentura was Leonid Shebarshin, deputy rezident in charge of political intelligence, Line PR. I didn’t immediately take to the dark-haired, solemn-looking Shebarshin, who was evidently close to Medyannik. Before joining the KGB, he graduated from the prestigious Moscow diplomatic institute and worked in the Foreign Ministry. Curt and intense, he struck me very much as a career man—until I saw more of him. Then I realized his demeanor, which could easily be perceived as rude, actually indicated he was a determined officer with little patience for superficial niceties. Although he sometimes seemed unwilling or unable to relax, Shebarshin became my close confidante. Soon he’d replace Medyannik as India rezident and would continue rising, eventually becoming a long-serving head of the FCD. Much later, his levelheadedness was credited with saving the directorate during the August 1991 hard-line coup d’état attempt against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev led by hardliners including then-KGB chairman Kryuchkov. Afterward, Gorbachev briefly appointed Shebarshin acting KGB chairman.

  By 1972, Brezhnev and U.S. President Richard Nixon were groping for détente. Wary of upsetting improving relations—and keen on strengthening trade and foreign policy ties with Delhi—the Politburo ordered the Center to turn down most proposals for operations in India. As deputy rezident in charge of counterintelligence, I headed security in the Soviet diplomatic community. In addition to my usual counterintelligence work against the CIA, I’d keep an eye on our diplomats’ conduct—making sure they didn’t defect and that none of their foreign contacts posed a threat of recruitment. I was also responsible for watching the over four and a half thousand nonofficial Soviets in India, many of whom were working on joint construction projects.

  Prying into the personal affairs of my fellow countrymen and reporting the inevitable drunkenness and adultery wasn’t to my taste. I left that to the other counterintelligence officers, the better to concentrate on operations against the CIA. They were in a mess. Officers scattered all over the country ran a myriad of badly connected sources and agents. My first order of business, approved by Medyannik and Shebarshin, was to shed at least half of our informers.

  Shortly before my arrival, the rezidentura conducted a recruitment campaign against an ambitious young CIA officer who’d been observed contacting local agents. Some were politicians and military officials, from whom the American was trying to obtain intelligence about Indian political affairs. Oleg Kalugin, then chief of Directorate K in the Center, flew to Delhi to head our pitch, based on threatening to expose the target to Indira Gandhi’s government. Refusing to cooperate, the operative informed the CIA of our pitch, prompting U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Keating to protest our activities to the Indian Foreign Ministry.

  Of course Keating’s objection was disingenuous. In the game we were playing, American intelligence tried no less hard to recruit Soviets. Soon a Russian engineer showed up at our embassy. He worked at a Soviet-constructed steel plant in the industrial city of Bokaro, in the northern Jharkand state—and wanted to report a suspected CIA recruitment attempt. In my office, Sergei described his work overseeing Indian engineers and steelworkers. He’d grown close to his translator, Raj. The two often went out together in the evenings to let off steam.

  Sergei didn’t hide the fact that he had come to India to make money. Many Soviets who had a chance to work abroad grabbed it, not least because it allowed them to buy coveted foreign goods, some of which they brought home and sold illegally. Sergei’s dream of saving enough money to buy a car didn’t escape Raj’s attention. Offering to help him find moonlighting work, he recommended an American trade representative in New Delhi.

  Naturally Sergei was suspicious. Naturally I was too. Although Indians rarely helped recruit Soviets for U.S. intelligence, I knew the CIA had agents in the Bokaro plant. Perhaps Sergei would help. He seemed honest enough, and with no access to secret information, posed a negligible security threat. Those were ideal characteristics for double agents, or dangles. There was no reason, I decided, not to try to find out if the CIA was really trying to pitch him.

  Preparing double agents requires painstaking work. Some cases, like Sergei’s, arose spontaneously. Most, however, called for meticulous planning long in advance, including research to make sure cover stories were convincing and that any “intelligence” handed over to the other side was correct—if verifiable—but also harmless to Soviet security. To make dangles into attractive targets, we tweaked their résumés, worked on strengthening or playing down various character traits and adjusted the amount of information to which they had access. It was as expensive as it was time-consuming.

  Sticking as closely as possible to the truth gave the best results. I told Sergei to be as sincere as he could with potential CIA handlers. “You’ve nothing to hide about your work—there’s nothing classified you can give them. So behave as normally as you can. Answer any questions you’re asked and deliver any information
you have access to.”

  I told Sergei to play up his desire to make money and, if it came to that, negotiate hard about what he’d be paid. The savvy engineer made me repeat my instructions. “I want to be absolutely sure I’m getting this right,” he said with a measure of incredulity. “You want me to try to establish a contact with the CIA. You want me to work for them as an agent, right?”

  “You’ll be providing a great service to the Soviet Union,” I replied. “We’ll be very grateful.”

  “Khorosho [okay].”

  Two months later, Sergei returned to Delhi to meet the man his translator had recommended.

  After several encounters, the American confessed he was a CIA officer and told Sergei he wanted him to continue working for the United States after his return to Moscow. Sergei agreed and was soon working as a double agent. We fed him false information in the hope it would tie up the Americans in fruitless fact checking. That was the extent of the operation. As with many others at the time, we had orders to make sure it didn’t harm U.S.–Soviet relations.

  Double agents often provided valuable windows onto adversaries’ motives and intelligence-gathering methods. I scrupulously pored over Sergei’s reports for each tactic used in handling him. I learned the identity of his handler and the kinds of information that interested him. We used many double agents like Sergei, and so did the CIA. The dangerous business sometimes created havoc in operations because it opened intelligence services to enlisting double and triple agents. But it was also unavoidable because recruiting and running agents was ultimately a case officer’s raison d’être. It was also interesting work. Making the other side believe your agent was sincere and accepting the disinformation he fed was challenging. Still, dangles were a double-edged sword, whose specter overshadowed every decision to recruit agents we believed to be real.

  The need for intelligence forced me to take risks, but when Ames and Hanssen approached the KGB in Washington years later, it was inevitable that I’d suspect the two men, who later became our most valuable spies, of being double agents. Fear of them caused both the KGB and CIA to turn away countless volunteers. Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet scientist who became the CIA’s top spy in the 1980s, had to approach the Americans more than six times in Moscow before they finally put aside their suspicions and met him. Even after the other side recruited one of our dangles, the possibility always remained that it would find out and re-recruit him to work against us as a triple agent.

  CIA paranoia about double agents reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s under counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who was convinced the agency had been penetrated by Soviet spies. Launching a mole hunt operation called HONETAL, he all but destroyed the agency’s ability to recruit and handle agents. His natural suspicions were reinforced when a KGB defector called Anatoly Golitsyn told Angleton in 1961 that every Soviet defector after him would be a double agent. Golitsyn made that claim because he’d soon run out of secrets to tell the Americans and wanted to enhance his importance. Angleton swallowed it.

  When Yuri Nosenko defected three years after Golitsyn—the incident that forced the premature end of my Australian tour—Angleton became convinced that Nosenko was a double agent. In fact, he was a genuine defector who had already told the CIA the Soviet Union wasn’t behind the assassination of either President John F. Kennedy or Lee Harvey Oswald. Nevertheless, Angleton ordered him jailed for almost three years without charge. Locked in an attic room, the Russian was fed only weak tea, watery soup and porridge.1 He was then transferred to a tiny concrete cell at the Farm, the CIA training center at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Virginia. His complete isolation included being deprived of all news of the outside world. Lights were kept on to disorient him. More than that, he was given psychotropic drugs.2 He was also forced to endure rigged lie detector tests and once sat strapped in a chair for seven hours with polygraph equipment attached.

  Angleton ruined many careers and all but paralyzed the agency because the paranoia he stoked made recruiting agents—highly risky under any circumstance—nearly impossible. The CIA virtually stopped seeking out Soviet agents and turned away many volunteers, even when the Americans almost certainly knew them to be genuine—because the KGB was too wary to use its own staff officers as double agents. (In the 1980s, the SCD would exploit that perception to great advantage when protecting Ames, feeding the Americans a staff officer double agent who kept them guessing for years.) Dissent against Angleton’s policies was drowned out.

  CIA failures were legion. When a former KGB case officer in the SCD American department handed over a package of secret documents to the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1963, the State Department photocopied the documents but returned them to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. The Americans suspected the would-be spy, Alexander Cherepanov, was a double agent offering disinformation. He wasn’t: Cherepanov was arrested and executed.

  Suspicions about double agents drew the KGB into many mistakes too. In 1976, Edwin Moore, a former CIA officer, left several unanswered notes for Washington rezident Dmitri Yakushkin, then threw a packet of secret documents over the Soviet embassy residential compound fence. Suspecting Moore of trying to create a provocation, the embassy’s chief security officer, Vitaly Yurchenko, handed the package to the Washington police as a possible terrorist bomb after consulting with rezident Yakushkin in his office. Moore was promptly arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Back at Yasenevo the incident became notorious as a glaring example of unprofessionalism. Both Yakushkin and Yurchenko were at fault for not first sounding out the Center about how to proceed. (Yurchenko would next appear on the CIA’s radar screen nine years later, when he defected to the United States. Having provided the CIA with some of the KGB’s most sensitive information, he then “redefected” back to Moscow.)

  In the end, even the most valuable double agents were rarely worth the intensive efforts it took to run them. Taxpayers on both sides of the Atlantic paid huge sums for very little. More often than not, double agents were scarcely more than balls in the games played by intelligence agencies. Some of the best-known Cold War espionage cases were more about spy versus spy than real issues of national security. Aldrich Ames would arouse great emotion in the United States, not least because the information he gave us led to the deaths of ten U.S. agents. But with few exceptions, most of those executed were intelligence officers involved in the narrow tasks assigned to them, with little knowledge about what was going on in the rest of the KGB, let alone the country. In fact, most of Ames’s information concerned secret CIA work against the KGB. It was thieves stealing from thieves, which again raises the question of whether all the years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars were worth it. Any operation, however well protected, could come crashing down the moment a single person—a Hanssen or a Penkovsky—decided to walk into the offices of the adversary and betray his country.

  2

  The KGB and CIA used roughly the same methods, exploiting the same human weaknesses, and sought to achieve similar goals. But of course, officers on each side were brought up in different systems. The average American and the average Russian behaved themselves differently—that’s especially true for intelligence officers. Americans smile too broadly. They laugh too loudly, and often unnaturally. We don’t call people we don’t know “Mike” or “Bill.” We use the full name and patronymic.

  —Leonid Shebarshin, former FCD chief and acting KGB chairman;

  served in India and Pakistan, 1964–1977

  I’d have a great deal of difficulty saying, “Okay, we’re the CIA and there’s a branch of the CIA that runs these political prison camps and historically they’re responsible for killing 20 million of my citizens. But that’s okay, I’ve adjusted myself to that.” There’s where I find the difference between the CIA and KGB. The position that the CIA and the whole intelligence community plays in this is far, far different from being called the “sword and the shield” of the Party that runs the country.

  —J
ack Platt, former CIA case officer

  Much has been written about the antagonism between the GRU and the KGB. I myself saw little competition between them. The relatively rare intrigues of the 1950s and 1960s usually took place in Moscow. Out in the field, the two services cultivated their own cases and usually didn’t interfere with each other. The KGB simply stayed out of military intelligence. While that separation sometimes led to conflicting operations and contradictory intelligence sent to Moscow, both agencies were encouraged to exchange political intelligence.

  The GRU played a large role in India. The Soviet Union sold India much military technology, and Moscow had good contacts in the Indian Defense Ministry. Military attachés were among the Soviet embassy’s highest-ranking staff. Although the KGB rezidentura usually didn’t know what GRU officers were up to and whom they were meeting, we kept in regular contact about general issues. Officers of the two agencies socialized with one another at parties or played soccer or volleyball together.

  The GRU rezident in India was a ruddy-faced man named Dmitri Polyakov, a colonel (soon promoted to general) who stood out—or rather stood back—because he hardly ever mingled with KGB personnel or others in the diplomatic community, even though he lived on the embassy compound. Although intense, Polyakov was generally calm and unemotional. I saw him blow up in anger at a colleague only once.

  Polyakov suspected his own deputy’s friendship with Medyannik and Shebarshin, warning him to be guarded about what he told the KGB rezidentura. I attributed the colonel’s attitude to his natural demeanor. Little did I know that he had concrete reasons for being careful. By the time I met him in 1972, Polyakov had been spying for the CIA for more than ten years as agent BOURBON—and for the FBI as TOPHAT.