Spy Handler

by Victor Cherkashin

  (Credit: David Major)

  The entrance of the Soviet Embassy compound in Washington, where Vitaly Yurchenko showed up after leaving behind a CIA guard. (Credit: Victor Cherkashin)

  The first page of a nine-page June 1989 note from the KGB to Ames.

  (Credit: FBI)

  A torn September 15, 1993, note from Ames to the KGB recovered from his garbage and pieced together by the FBI. (Credit: FBI)

  An Ames dead drop site in Little River Branch Park, Bethesda, Maryland.

  (Credit: Cindy Kwitchoff, CI Centre)

  FBI agents arresting Ames on February 21, 1994. (Credit: FBI)

  KGB Chairman Vadim Bakatin, who helped dismantle the service after the Soviet collapse.

  (Credit: Itar-Tass)

  Gennady Vasilenko (third from left)—who was imprisoned for six months as a suspected spy—and me (fourth from left) with managers of my Alpha-Puma security company. (Credit: Victor Cherkashin)

  At Alyona’s California wedding, with grandson Ivan at bottom left.

  (Credit: Victor Cherkashin)

  Former adversaries: (From left) The CIA’s Milt Bearden, me and Leonid Shebarshin in Moscow.

  (Credit: Victor Cherkashin)

  I did everything I could to indicate utter disinterest in Smith’s approach. Of course I knew who he was, but I wasn’t going to give the Americans an inch. It was better to let them have their work cut out for them.

  3

  Yurchenko, head security officer of the rezidentura, was reassigned to Moscow in June, a little over a month after Pelton’s recruitment. I wouldn’t see him for five years. When we’d meet again, it would also be in Washington—under circumstances I’d never have predicted in a million years.

  Now that I was sure Pelton was a legitimate agent, I decided to meet him myself. One morning I left the embassy compound by car with two other officers. We headed north, turned west on P Street, circled around Dupont Circle and drove toward Georgetown. Our driver spotted an FBI car following us. They were hard to miss because they were always the cheapest American models.

  I decided to use a backup plan, which was to drive to the nearest supermarket. One of the officers got out and returned with a six-pack of beer. Then we turned around and headed back to the embassy. Half an hour later, I tried again—this time in a different car with two other officers. As we turned a corner onto 21st Street, the driver slowed and I jumped out, taking a bag I’d brought. It was one of the few times I was out on the streets myself. I walked to the Dupont Circle metro station, took a train north to Cleveland Park and hailed a taxi on Connecticut Avenue. Inside, I checked to see if I was being followed. Then I pulled a jacket out of my bag and put it on. I unknotted my tie and donned a hat and sunglasses. An hour later, I was face-to-face with balding, stocky Pelton. He was nervous but clearly earnest, which was important for my own confidence.

  In subsequent meetings, Vasilenko usually met Pelton or loaded and collected dead drops by car, which was the easiest way to do it. The best places were remote—alongside a road or in a field. After loading a drop, Vasilenko would call Pelton from a pay telephone. When Vasilenko had to meet him in person, it was often in a crowded shopping mall. Vasilenko’s wife, with whom he’d ostensibly be shopping, often helped him watch Pelton arrive for meetings or unload dead drops.

  Six months after his first approach, Vasilenko helped spirit him abroad for the first of several long meetings with top Directorate K officers in Vienna, where they felt safe debriefing foreign agents. I admired Pelton for his bluntness, but running him wasn’t always smooth sailing. He disappeared after some months—presumably he felt he’d earned enough money—and turned up again only in 1981 after we found him living in the Virginia suburb of Vienna. Since Vasilenko was one of the few people who knew what he looked like, Androsov had to dispatch him there to find the errant agent.

  In one typical rendezvous that followed, ten cars drove out of the Soviet embassy compound in Washington, one after another. Each took a different route. Sitting behind the wheel in one of them, Vasilenko headed north on 16th Street, then turned west on M Street. He turned south on 24th Street and east on K Street before doubling back. After driving three hours that way to shake off any FBI tail, he turned south and headed for Tysons Corner Center, a shopping mall in suburban Virginia. Pelton was waiting for him in the mall’s parking lot.

  Most of Pelton’s information concerned general NSA activities. There was only a little top secret intelligence until he dropped his first bombshell during a trip abroad soon after we reestablished contact with him. It was then that he handed over documents about an NSA operation called IVY BELLS.

  Reading about it in the rezidentura, I found the information almost too incredible to be true. IVY BELLS was the code name for a highly ingenious, wildly expensive and risky U.S. Navy operation that tapped into a secret Soviet communications cable at the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk, which separated the Russian mainland from the Kamchatka peninsula. The cable connected a submarine base at the peninsular city of Petropavlovsk to Pacific Fleet headquarters in Vladivostok.

  Operating from a specially outfitted submarine in August 1972, U.S. Navy divers clamped a tap containing a battery-operated recording device onto the cable.1 During the following eight years, American submarines made regular trips at six- to eight-week intervals to replace the tapes, which recorded conversations between the submarine base and naval brass who thought they were safe from prying American satellites and listening posts. The tapes provided intercepts of military command messages and gave technological information, command procedures and operational patterns. IVY BELLS was a major success and Washington—which had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the operation—was in the process of developing it further. Pelton shut down the whole project for $35,000.

  4

  As a Soviet naval survey ship searched the Sea of Okhotsk for the American eavesdropping device, Moscow’s relations with Washington went from bad to worse. American newspapers directed a constant barrage of criticism at the Soviet Union. Aeroflot had stopped flying to New York after we invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Protestors demonstrated against Soviet policy, often over Moscow’s treatment of Jews, and pressured us to let more people emigrate. Every Soviet defection to the United States ratcheted up the tension.

  Looming over everything was the possibility of nuclear war. The election of hard-line right-winger Ronald Reagan in 1980 helped convince KGB chairman Yuri Andropov that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. He ordered most KGB foreign stations to take part in a large-scale operation called RIAN (after an acronym for “nuclear attack”) to find evidence of a U.S. plot. Andropov’s fears intensified after he became Soviet leader in 1982.

  As part of the operation, KGB officers routinely drove past the Pentagon, the State Department and other national security institutions to look for outward signs of heightened activity.

  By the following year, RIAN had become an intelligence-gathering priority. No evidence of a U.S. nuclear first strike plan was ever found, but fears ran especially high in 1983, when NATO carried out a nuclear launch exercise called ABLE ARCHER. The program was reported to the Center as a real NATO alert, and Soviet nuclear forces were placed on the highest alert since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.2

  Despite the tensions, reports that Washington and Moscow came close to nuclear war are exaggerated.

  Apart from the daily stress of operating on the territory of the Main Adversary, I grew to like the United States. I enjoyed traveling most of all. My family was relatively well-off after my many tours abroad. With money to spend, Elena, Alyona and I visited various cities, amusement parks and the Delaware coast to swim in the Atlantic. We drove to New York City and Niagara Falls. I’d sometimes combine such trips with work. Before the 1984 Olympics, the Center requested statistical and performance evaluations of American athletes training for competition. The Politburo wanted the information to help decide whether or not to partici
pate in the event. (Washington had boycotted the 1980 winter Olympics in Moscow to protest our 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.) That prompted a visit to Lake Placid, where obtaining the information wasn’t difficult since everything was publicly available. I had plenty of time left over for sightseeing.

  I also enjoyed meeting the American capital’s interesting cast of characters. Among our acquaintances was Elena Kamkina, who ran a well-known Russian-language bookstore in Rockville, Maryland. The shop was called Victor Kamkin, after her husband, who’d opened the store. Elena took over after he died in 1974. That Cold War institution—which was subsidized by the Soviet government but nevertheless sold books banned in Russia—attracted all types from students and academics to Russian émigrés and U.S. government officials. Although Kamkina was never in any way connected to my intelligence work, she provided a social outlet, throwing dinners and Christmas parties for the Soviet community. She came from a wealthy Russian family that fled the Revolution in 1917. Although an American through and through, she always remained interested in Russia and enjoyed meeting Soviets.

  Meanwhile, my wife, Elena, slowly overcoming her suspicion of Americans, was able to speak to those we knew without worrying about being compromised. But certain incidents put up her guard again. One involved People magazine, which Elena enjoyed reading. One day, she received a letter from the magazine saying she’d won $1 million in a lottery. When she told me about it, I joked that a million dollars wouldn’t be enough for us. But after that, convinced that the letter was part of a provocation, she wouldn’t leave the residential compound without me.

  Another incident took place at the same Tysons Corner Center mall in Virginia. When we returned to our car after shopping one day, I noticed a letter behind a windshield wiper. It offered $1 million for my cooperation and provided a telephone number. Knowing I was in plain view and being watched, I tore the paper into little pieces and dropped them into a garbage bin.

  That wasn’t the only such letter I received or approach by other means. One day, Elena and I were on a Delaware beach with some other embassy couples. When I got up to walk along the sand, several men who had been sitting behind us followed me. We later noticed they were carrying eavesdropping equipment. After that, we swam only at the embassy’s country house on the Chesapeake Bay, where no one ever harassed us.

  5

  Soviet intelligence was the best in the world. Of course in terms of the number of personnel and the amount allocated in budgets, the KGB couldn’t compare to the CIA. In 1989–90 the CIA’s budget was $30 billion. The KGB’s was 5 billion rubles [around $8 billion]. And the KGB included not only foreign and domestic intelligence, but also border guards and other troops. And yet the two agencies went head to head—and the KGB did a better job. Why did we have such an advantage? Because most of our officers were passionate about what they were doing. We were paid good wages compared to the average Soviet citizen, but they still weren’t that great. We made slightly more than Soviet diplomats but much less than our colleagues in the CIA. The KGB was really about enthusiasm and patriotism.

  —Leonid Shebarshin, former FCD chief and acting KGB chairman

  In the summer of 1983, the Soviet embassy in Switzerland received a letter accompanying an application for a tourist visa to Moscow. The writer, an American, proposed meeting a KGB representative to hand over information we might find “interesting.” As a rendezvous site, the visa applicant suggested Washington’s Capitol building—a bold choice but not necessarily a bad one, since the FBI was unlikely to suspect the tourist-clogged site as a KGB venue for meeting agents. The American’s name was Edward Lee Howard.

  After the Center forwarded us Howard’s letter, I discussed his offer with Washington rezident Stanislav Androsov. We decided against the meeting because there was no way to be sure it wouldn’t be an FBI trap. In the ongoing U.S.-Soviet propaganda war, exposure of a KGB recruitment in no less hallowed a site than the Congress building would go down poorly. We informed the Center, and Howard was turned down.

  That, however, wasn’t the last I heard of Edward Lee Howard. The former Peace Corps volunteer joined the CIA after working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Selected for a deep cover Moscow assignment in 1982, the thirty-one-year-old enrolled at the Farm in the most advanced CIA operative training program, the Internal Operations course run by brash ex-marine Jack Platt. Howard’s wife, Mary—also a former Peace Corps volunteer in Latin America—was trained to help him.

  Howard had a problem, however, which he failed to mention when he signed up with the CIA—heavy drinking and drug use. Instead, he resolved to use his glamorous new job as a CIA operative to turn over a new leaf. According to Platt, Howard, who wanted to be a hero, took his training seriously and diligently. Mary Howard would later tell Platt that the six-week course was one of the few periods her husband abstained from drugs and alcohol because he didn’t want to damage his chances of going to Moscow. He relied heavily on his wife and unleashed his frustrations over the exacting training program on her.

  To prepare him for running agents and conducting eavesdropping operations, Howard was trained to load dead drops, operate complex eavesdropping equipment and evade surveillance. He was also briefed about several highly sensitive operations in Moscow. After he’d all but completed his training, however, he failed a routine polygraph test, revealing he’d lied about his past drug use. There were other complications too. He’d been caught stealing and cheating on a training exercise. He was fired the following month, in May 1983.

  Howard left feeling betrayed.3 Blaming the CIA for dashing his dream of becoming a hero, he resumed his heavy drinking and made prank phone calls to the U.S. embassy in Moscow. He also nursed dreams of revenge. The CIA kept an eye on him but failed—crucially, as it would turn out for U.S. national security—to inform the FBI that he posed a potential risk.4 Howard even told a CIA psychologist sent to evaluate him that after he was fired he skulked outside the Soviet consulate in Washington but resisted the temptation to go in.

  A year after his first failed attempt to contact the KGB, the Center reconsidered our rejection and issued instructions to contact him. Using the address from his old visa application, we traced him to a townhouse in the Washington suburbs. He’d since moved out and calls to the telephone numbers he supplied got us no closer. Assuming he’d sold his house, we began looking for a real estate agency that might have handled the transaction. Sure enough, we found it. I instructed an officer to ask for Howard’s new coordinates by posing as a long-lost friend. We soon tracked him down to New Mexico.

  With his new number in hand, I called to remind him of the letter he’d written a year earlier. Although surprised by his claim that he barely recalled it, I was encouraged by his enthusiasm about the prospect of working for us. I told him he’d have to travel to Vienna to meet his handler and that we’d contact him later to inform him when and how to go there. He agreed. The Washington rezidentura had finished its job; the Center would handle him from now on, arranging a system of sending postcards to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco for him to contact the KGB.

  6

  Many intelligence and counterintelligence operations find links, often to the surprise of those involved. Reenter Aldrich Ames. On June 13, 1985, I stepped into a blast of hot summer air, leaving Ames and the neon beer signs of Chadwicks bar beneath Washington’s elevated Whitehurst freeway. I soared with the knowledge that I’d just precipitated a momentous day in KGB history.

  I was yet unaware of its full significance. Later I’d learn that hours earlier, my old Beirut mentor Rem Krassilnikov—now the KGB’s domestic counterintelligence mastermind as head of the Second Chief Directorate’s American department—had orchestrated the arrest of a young CIA case officer back in Moscow. That operation too helped turn the tide of the intelligence battle in our favor.

  The officer’s name was Paul Stombaugh Jr. He was on his way to a park in southwest Moscow to meet a Russian scientist named Adolf Tolka
chev. Stombaugh saw him in the distance as he approached. Actually, the figure waiting for him was an actor. Tolkachev was already in Lefortovo prison awaiting a trial that would lead to his execution. He had given Krassilnikov the information needed to set up the sham rendezvous with Stombaugh, who was arrested carrying rubles worth $150,000, concealed miniature cameras, medicine for Tolkachev and other incriminating materials.5

  The intended recipient wasn’t just any scientist—or any agent. Adolf Tolkachev, an employee of a top secret design bureau developing new technology for fighter planes, was the CIA’s most important spy since Oleg Penkovsky. Code-named SPHERE (then VANQUISH), Tolkachev provided Langley with tens of thousands of pages of secret documents from the classified library in his office. Photographing them with miniature cameras, he supplied reams of information about Soviet avionics, radar, missile and other weapons systems for fighter aircraft. Using his intelligence enabled Washington to save billions of dollars and many years of research—and achieve superior technology. Tolkachev “paid the rent” at Langley because his services alone saved the U.S. government enough money to justify the expense of all other CIA operations.6

  All that nearly never happened. Having let Tolkachev slip through its fingers many times, the CIA finally accepted his services thanks only to his unbelievably tenacious and persistent efforts to be taken seriously. He made his first move in 1977. Approaching an American fueling his car at a gasoline station reserved for foreign diplomats near the U.S. embassy, he slipped the driver a note.7 That man happened to be CIA station chief Robert Fulton. Tolkachev’s anonymous message said its writer worked at an institute developing radar technology and promised to give important information.