Spy Handler

by Victor Cherkashin

  Meanwhile, the meeting between MOLE and Yakovlev went ahead. Having decided to meet the American myself to try to discern his real intentions, I introduced myself as a USA and Canada Institute member. We spoke about U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, ostensibly his main field of inquiry. Since he clearly didn’t know much about it, I decided the main purpose of his visit was to meet Yakovlev.

  After their first meeting, MOLE continued to travel to Moscow regularly. Gulyayev informed me about the frequency of his talks with Yakovlev, but MOLE never indicated to Gulyayev what he and Gorbachev’s top adviser discussed. Kryuchkov, meanwhile, did nothing. Together with other hard-line Politburo members, he would soon help lead an attempted coup d’état against Gorbachev to put an end to the reform policies Yakovlev was helping implement. After the Soviet collapse, Kryuchkov accused Yakovlev of collaborating with the CIA as an agent of influence, the term for someone in a consequential position secretly working to affect policy. Yakovlev has denounced Kryuchkov’s accusations as baseless.

  5

  Gennady Vasilenko was posted to the Center after leaving Washington in 1981, when he said good-bye to his friend Jack Platt at Dulles airport. Two years later, Vasilenko was assigned to the South American backwater of Guyana.

  Back in Washington, Platt was running the Internal Operations training program instructing young CIA officers to work in Soviet Bloc countries. Receiving news of Vasilenko’s new posting, Platt started lobbying for permission to visit him. SE chief Gerber was against the idea, so Platt pitched his proposal to Bearden, the SE division deputy with whom he had a special rapport. In May 1986, with Gerber out of the office, Bearden gave him the go-ahead to meet Vasilenko.2 Platt retired from the CIA in May 1987 but returned temporarily to work on the case. In October he boarded a plane to Georgetown, the Guyanese capital, toting a Winchester hunting rifle as a gift.

  Vasilenko was happy to see his old friend. He assumed his association with the CIA officer could cause unpleasantness for him in the KGB—a reprimand at most, certainly nothing he couldn’t handle. He continued secretly meeting his pal over his wife’s objections but never became an American agent. Platt stayed in Guyana for several days. Back in Washington, he reported on his meeting. A copy of his account was sent to the FBI.

  6

  Two months after meeting Platt, on January 11, 1988, Vasilenko was on a plane to Cuba, accompanied by the Soviet ambassador to Cuba, with whom he got on well. The two ordered drinks during the flight. By the time the plane landed, Vasilenko was heavily intoxicated. He’d arranged to be picked up at the airport by a colleague with whom he usually stayed during his trips to Havana. But this time, another KGB officer greeted him. He told Vasilenko his friend was attending a reception he couldn’t miss.

  It was dark when they arrived. As soon as Vasilenko entered the house where he would be staying, two men grabbed him on either side. The beefy security guards wrestled him to the ground, violently twisting his arms behind his back.

  Is this a bad joke? Vasilenko thought. “Let go of my arms!” was all he could manage to say. “You’re going to break them!” Despite his drunkenness, the pain was incredible. One of his arms felt dislocated. Dragged into a side room, he was stripped and made to put on a track suit. A KGB investigator was waiting in the room. He seemed small compared to the hulking guards. “Do you know Jack Platt of the CIA?” he asked.

  “I met him two months ago in Guyana,” Vasilenko said. “So what?”

  “You had no right to do so,” the investigator snapped. “Are you an American agent?”

  “Nyet,” Vasilenko replied. Desperate for sleep, he wondered what Platt could have done to compromise him.

  Several days later, Vasilenko was on a Soviet freighter heading for the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa. He thought of plunging into the dark Atlantic waters, but would that be tantamount to admitting guilt? Would his family really be better off and less ashamed of him if he killed himself? Probably not, he decided.

  The ship arrived in Odessa two weeks later. Deeply depressed, his arms still aching, Vasilenko boarded a train to Moscow and Lefortovo prison. He knew that colleagues of his, including Martynov and Motorin, had recently been executed. What was the nature of their espionage? he wondered. The only conclusion he could reach regarding his own predicament was that his friend Jack Platt had somehow framed him. Vasilenko faced grueling interrogations over the next six months. Because his investigators didn’t have enough evidence to try him, they relentlessly pressured him to confess.

  Two months after his arrest, the lead investigator summoned me to Lefortovo for questioning. I told him it was highly unlikely Vasilenko was an American agent when he worked under me in Washington running Ronald Pelton. Had he been a spy, the FBI would have found out about the former NSA employee sooner than it did—in 1985, when he was exposed by Yurchenko. In the end—in June—Vasilenko was released. But he was also stripped of his rank, fired and deprived of his pension. The only charges against him were conducting an adulterous affair and illegally owning firearms. The KGB confiscated ten knives and sixteen guns, including the Winchester he’d received from Platt.

  7

  When Vasilenko first spoke to Platt after his release, the latter did his best to convince his friend he’d done nothing to harm him. Vasilenko believed he’d been the victim of a mistake—that there had never been enough evidence to arrest him. Platt says he and Vasilenko eventually agreed that the Russian’s failure to report their meetings would have provided adequate reason, however mistaken. The KGB’s heightened suspicions following the arrests of the agents Ames betrayed made it even less likely that he’d be believed.

  It was 1987 when the Center first learned that Vasilenko had disobeyed the orders of Washington rezident Dmitri Yakushkin almost a decade earlier to drop his contact with Platt. The news came in a package of materials left in a Virginia dead drop by the Source. Among the other items was the FBI copy of the report Platt had written after his trip to Guyana. The following February, the Center dictated a message to the Source asking for more information about Vasilenko—who was jailed in Lefortovo. Ransacking his belongings over the next six months, the SCD could find no signs of espionage—no communications, equipment, instructions or anything else damning.

  What was in Platt’s report that got Vasilenko arrested? Platt maintains his description of his last meeting with Vasilenko was pro forma, clearly stating, as he recalled, that the target wasn’t recruited. But it’s highly doubtful that the KGB arrested Vasilenko just because he met Platt to talk about women, go hunting and fishing and cook out—and only to release him six months later. It’s more likely that Platt’s report really did compromise Vasilenko. Either he acted suspiciously or the report incorrectly represented his words. Vasilenko and Platt deny both possibilities, but until the report is declassified, the question will remain unanswered.

  The FBI discovered that the KGB possessed a copy of Platt’s report in 1998. Since it was clear the information hadn’t come from Ames, another mole hunt was launched. Two possibilities explain the tip-off. The most likely is that Vasilenko told Platt about it following his release. (The retired Platt, in turn, informed the FBI.) But it’s also possible that the FBI found out about the KGB’s possession of the report through an agent inside the KGB.

  8

  Directorate RT was staffed by many officers deemed unfit to serve abroad. Disciplinary trouble, alcohol, family problems or other difficulties blotted their records. Such factors had an impact on morale, which in turn made it even less likely that contacts with foreigners would develop into anything serious.

  Toward the end of 1987, a section head in my department named Leonid Beresov asked me to intervene in the looming dismissal of a young officer, Yuri Shvets, who’d just been sent back from Washington. Shvets had been assigned to Washington in 1985 under cover as a Tass correspondent. I barely remembered him because he was hardly ever in the rezidentura.

  “He had drinking problems,” Beresov said. �
��That’s why he’s being relieved. But he has very good writing skills,” he added. “At the very least, we could use him to do analysis.” That was indeed true—we were always short of capable staff.

  I convinced the skeptical personnel deputy to assign Shvets to my department on condition that I’d be responsible for his behavior. Shvets began work soon after—and did well in his writing reports for the KGB information service. I liked the pleasant, dark-haired officer and congratulated myself on doing a good deed.

  Six months after he joined the department, Shvets told me an American journalist he’d met in Washington was due to visit Moscow. The man, John Helmer, was sympathetic to the Soviet Union; Shvets suggested it might be a good idea to see him again. Helmer had been an adviser in the Carter administration and wrote critically about the Vietnam War. I agreed with Beresov that Shvets could meet him again, this time posing as a Foreign Ministry official responsible for Soviet–American relations.

  The meeting took place in a downtown hotel, and Helmer soon returned to the United States. He reappeared in Moscow sometime later, and I asked Shvets to speak to him again. This time, informers among the waiters in the restaurants and cafés where the two met complained that Shvets seemed drunk and out of control. Confronted with the reports, I asked Beresov to accompany Shvets on his next date with the American.

  When they had a moment alone, Helmer told Beresov that Shvets was difficult to communicate with. He was rude and almost always drunk. The next day, I took Shvets off the case, forbidding him to see Helmer again. Although Beresov continued meeting Helmer, he soon reported the journalist wasn’t a good prospect for recruitment. When Helmer left Moscow, I thought the case was over.

  In 1990, I attended an international conference in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, taking Shvets with me. As soon as we arrived, he got drunk and remained in his room until the event ended several days later. On returning, I admitted my mistake and told Beresov to convince Shvets to quit before he was fired, which would enable him to keep his pension. He indeed left the KGB soon after.

  Shvets moved to the United States in 1993 and published a book about his KGB career, claiming to have recruited Helmer as KGB agent SOCRATES in Washington. In the account, he met Helmer through his journalist wife, Claudia Wright, whom he also recruited, as agent SPUTNITSA. Using pseudonyms for both in his book, Shvets wrote that SOCRATES proved to be a valuable agent but criticized jealous KGB superiors of failing to capitalize on his good work. The book contained many other exaggerated claims and caused a stir, not least with Helmer, who was then working in Moscow as correspondent for The Australian. Contacting Yuri Kobaladze, spokesman for the SVR, he complained bitterly. Helmer said he had no idea that Shvets had been a KGB officer. Although I was by then retired from the KGB and in the hospital recovering from a minor illness, Kobaladze insisted on seeing me. When he appeared at my bedside with Helmer, I assured the American he’d never been considered an agent or even a target.

  9

  The Soviet Union was changing fast. Newspapers published critical stories about the government and television programs dropped their rote recitation of the day’s official news in favor of real debates about the state’s plight. Western companies began setting up offices in Moscow. Increasing numbers of foreign cars sped along the streets. When a McDonald’s opened on Pushkin Square, the entire city buzzed. But the outward signs of openness signaled something much more significant—and dangerous.

  As it turned out, the dynamic unleashed by Gorbachev eventually turned against him. Saying he never wanted the Party to collapse, he did everything to ensure it would lose its grip on power. During a visit to Bonn in May 1989, he told West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that he wouldn’t block reforms in Warsaw Pact states, effectively ending the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine under which Moscow put down the Prague Spring in 1968.

  That gave a green light for opposition forces in Eastern Europe to stage open confrontation. The Polish Solidarity movement emerged from underground, demanding a hand in government. Gorbachev refused to intervene, leaving Polish communist officials to hold elections that swept Solidarity into power. Following the example, Hungary scheduled elections for 1990, and in September 1989 opened its borders to thousands of vacationing East Germans to flee to West Germany through Austria. Following massive protests in Leipzig and other cities, the East German government also gave in, opening the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

  In Czechoslovakia, weeks of protest in Prague by hundreds of thousands forced the fall of the communist regime, also in November 1989. Bulgaria followed in the same month. In December, angry mobs executed longtime Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. Once started, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact took less than six months. The following year, the unthinkable took place: Germany was unified.

  The frenzy of 1989 unleashed an anti-Soviet campaign. I watched in dismay as decades of hard work and sacrifice by dedicated Eastern European communists were cast aside like dirty laundry. But none of that came as a surprise to the KGB. We knew better than most exactly what was affecting the Soviet Bloc: a disease spread by Gorbachev, his close adviser and ideologue Yakovlev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.

  Simultaneous institutional dissolution within the Soviet Union resulted from a deliberate effort by Gorbachev and his team to bring the system down in the name of reform. In the first open election in decades, the Congress of People’s Deputies, a new legislature set up by Gorbachev, was chosen, partly as a bulwark against Kryuchkov and other hard-liners in his government. Meanwhile, to turn society against the KGB, the self-professed democrats claimed that Soviet intelligence supported corruption in the Communist Party.

  Unpopular economic decentralization led to shortages of sugar and other staples. With that came Gorbachev’s drive to wipe out alcoholism by slashing alcohol production, a campaign immeasurably harmful to the Soviet state. Decreasing state vodka production meant more people would die from drinking samogon, moonshine, while slashing the government’s top domestic source of income.

  The country was also suffering the devastating effects of the war in Afghanistan. The decision to invade a decade earlier had exposed the convoluted psychology of the aging Brezhnev elite, which was too involved in its own petty interests to reflect on the effects of its policy. The Politburo members who pushed for invasion had learned nothing from the Vietnam War or from attempts to impose communism on tribal groups like the Mongolians, who continued to live as nomads in their traditional yurts despite the best efforts of urban planners in Moscow. The Kremlin fantasy was that a great breakthrough would demonstrate its effectiveness, showing the world that communism was the ascendant political system.

  After Washington began to train and supply the Afghan rebels with shoulder-launched Stinger surface-to-air missiles, the conflict turned decisively against our troops. The protracted hostilities began demoralizing Soviet society. After much debate, Gorbachev overcame hard-line opposition and started pulling out our forces in May 1988. The humiliating decision drew attention to the Soviet Union’s weakness—but it was necessary.

  10

  With the birth of my grandson Ivan—named after my father—seven of us were living in my apartment. In early 1991, having tried to find a new place for more than four years, I turned to an acquaintance on the Party’s Moscow city central committee. Following an appeal from him, the committee’s housing chief told me I’d be considered for a new apartment provided I produced a request from my bosses. That took months to acquire, but I persevered. In April 1991, my family was allotted a new, bigger place, where it still lives. I was also able to keep my old KGB-allocated apartment for my son Alyosha, his wife and his son.

  I also had my dacha, which I’d built after wrangling a new plot of land in the KGB dacha compound. We spent our first summer there in 1988 and returned each subsequent summer. On weekdays, I’d wake early to drive into the city to work.

  On Monday, August 19, 1991, I left the dacha as usual to drive toward Kievskoe
Highway, which would take me northeast into Moscow. Merging onto the thoroughfare, I was surprised to see a column of tanks rolling toward the capital in what I took to be a military exercise. Whoever ordered them out was an idiot, I thought. They were churning up so much asphalt that the road would have to be repaved. Entering the city, I saw tanks on the streets. It began to dawn on me that something serious was taking place.

  At work, about ten of us—department bosses and deputies—assembled. We were informed that Gorbachev, who was vacationing in Crimea, was sick, that a state of emergency had been declared and an emergency committee (GKChP) was running the country. A wave of joy washed over me. Finally something was being done to stop Gorbachev’s destruction. “Maybe it’s for the best,” I told the group. Most nodded in agreement. No one believed Gorbachev was really sick.

  In a couple of hours Muscovites were calling the developments a coup d’état. I never really saw it as such. It was a last attempt to keep the Soviet Union together despite Gorbachev’s moves to dismantle it. As the 1980s drew to a close, his decentralization of the economy and political system had caused a breakdown in management. Instead of working more productively, economic managers and regional political bosses grabbed control for themselves. As the economy crumbled, Gorbachev shored up his position against emerging liberal critics by appointing hard-liners to positions of power, including Kryuchkov as KGB chief, Valentin Pavlov as prime minister and Dmitry Yazov as defense minister.