Spy Handler

by Victor Cherkashin

  I told Shebarshin about the entire episode as soon as I returned to Moscow. We agreed that the FBI had very likely found out about the Source and was digging to flesh the story out. I wrote a full report and submitted it to SVR chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov. Several days later, Shebarshin and I made an appointment to meet him at his house outside Moscow. The meeting was friendly. I described my trip to Virginia and FBI attempts to pitch me. He agreed with my view that the Source was in danger. Some measures were taken—but it’s clear they weren’t nearly enough. It took a little over two years for the FBI to nail down the target. All the while, the bureau continued to pitch me.

  4

  In June 1999, Alyona, returning from Monterey to spend the summer at home, told us she’d fallen in love with an American. That wasn’t good news. My first thought was that her love interest might be an FBI agent. I convinced Elena to help me try to temper our daughter’s feelings. We stayed up until three o’clock in the morning, trying to persuade her that Americans differed from Russians in culture and mentality. “It would be best for you if you forgot him,” I said. “You’ve one more year to go. Then you’ll be back in Moscow and everything will be fine.”

  Alyona said she met her new boyfriend during their second semester in German language classes. They became friendly after he told her he’d been to Moscow and studied Russian. He invited her out for coffee and a talk about Russia. Then he drove her around sightseeing. They became involved a week before Alyona was due to come home.

  There was a good chance the FBI had set the whole thing up. I’d hoped the Americans would leave Alyona alone. The unwritten but strict code among the intelligence officers of opposing services was that while they pitched one another, children were kept out of it. If Russian children were targeted in the United States, there was nothing to stop us from approaching the sons and daughters of our counterparts here in Moscow. Nonetheless, I couldn’t rule anything out.

  In July, I took Elena, Alyona and my grandson Ivan on vacation to Cyprus. One afternoon, a young man wearing shorts approached me as we returned from the beach.

  “Victor?” he asked politely. It was Michael Rochford.

  “Michael!” I said, feigning pleasure. “What are you doing here?”

  Elena and Alyona went inside while Michael and I found a bench to sit on. It wasn’t a complete surprise to see him, although I’d never expected it would be in Cyprus. These FBI agents are serious guys, I thought. They don’t give up easily.

  Rochford’s answer to my question about how he found me was laughably predictable: “We have ways of finding out such information.”

  When Elena emerged to call me in for lunch, Rochford asked me to meet him again in his hotel. I doubted he was alone on his trip but agreed nevertheless. Knowing everything would be recorded, I decided to try to play a psychological game as best I could. Arriving at Rochford’s hotel the following day, I offered to drive him around. The question caught him off guard, but he agreed.

  We spent two hours in the car, talking about nothing of substance. Rochford knew what he could get from me and I knew what he wanted from me. Back at his hotel, we took a table in a restaurant. Rochford had performed well the last time I saw him in Virginia. Now that he was no longer on home turf, he was having trouble. Meanwhile, I was learning the FBI had nothing new on Ramon. Rochford repeated the same names and stories—and the same offer to me. I refused, leaving him on the same terms.

  5

  Rochford tried to dismiss my question about how the FBI located me in Cyprus. Surely, it could have found out in Moscow, but I suspected another source. When Alyona admitted her boyfriend had asked for her summer address to send flowers on her birthday, I had little doubt what that was.

  So the following September, when Alyona called us from Monterey, I was shocked to hear her say the boyfriend had proposed and she’d accepted. I could do nothing. The decision was Alyona’s to make. Since she was resolute, I could only be happy for her and hope for the best. We accepted her invitation to travel to California for the wedding.

  Both Elena and I took an instant liking to Alyona’s fiancé. He knew who I was and didn’t seem to care. The oceanside wedding was a beautiful affair. Elena and I felt as if we were taking part in a Hollywood film. After the reception, we drove out to Alyona’s apartment. Half an hour later, there was a knock at the door. It was Michael Rochford. I cursed him under my breath for not picking a better time but agreed to meet him in a bar the following day. I didn’t want to cause trouble for my family.

  Arriving fifteen minutes early the next day, I waited with a beer, rehearsing my replies to the questions I anticipated. When Rochford showed up, however, he didn’t ask for my help or mention our previous meetings. Instead, he said he was concerned that I’d persuade Alyona’s new husband to work for Russian intelligence. I replied that he was now a member of my family. I wouldn’t do anything to harm my own daughter.

  I left the bar feeling—perhaps for the first time in forty years—that I was no longer an intelligence officer. I was a pensioner who had traveled to the United States as a tourist to visit his daughter and new son-in-law. I no longer felt the shadow of a massive secret organization. No one was watching over me any longer. And if they were, I no longer cared. It was a rare sense of liberation.

  Soon after graduating from their two-year program the following June, the newlywed couple gave birth to a son, Victor—named after me—and flew to Moscow to spend the summer with us. They planned to return to California in August. Then our beloved dacha caught fire. Workmen putting up a new roof wired a cable badly, causing sparks. We were outside grilling kebabs as the entire structure burned to the ground. The incident prompted Alyona and her husband to stay in Russia to help us rebuild. My son-in-law now works in Moscow, while my new grandson, Vitya, and I are inseparable.

  6

  Many stories have emerged about how the CIA tracked down Ames and Hanssen. One theory was that it happened after Bakatin ordered an investigation into the FCD’s finances to try to ascertain whether the directorate had been involved with the GKChP. No improprieties were found, but some thought investigators could have stumbled on records of money paid to Ames and Hanssen and possibly figured out where the transfers were going.

  In fact, it would have been almost impossible to do that. When I ran the agent I knew as Ramon Garcia, I’d propose a payment amount for him along with a report about his latest operation. I’d cable the information to the chief of Directorate K, who would in turn take it to Kryuchkov for approval. If he agreed, Kryuchkov would write “approved” on my report, which would be sent back to the rezidentura. I’d then apply for the payment to the KGB financial department, which would send the rezidentura an invoice to fill out. Neither the agent’s code name nor the country in which he operated would be written down. The only evidence would be that “according to the approval of the head of the First Chief Directorate, we would like to receive payment of $1 million.” I’d sign the paper and send it back with no reference to my location. The financial department would then receive cash from the treasury, package it carefully—removing all fingerprints—and send it to the rezidentura via diplomatic pouch. There would be no paper trail indicating where the money was disbursed—other than that I’d asked for it. A cable would be sent confirming the agent received payment, but there would be no formal receipts. To some degree, the system operated on trust.

  In November 1997, three years after AVENGER exposed Ames, Kirpichenko made his accusation that I’d been the cause of his betrayal—a view that still holds currency for most Russians who know anything about the case. In his article, Kirpichenko accused Kalugin of betraying Ames to the Americans after obtaining his information from a “friend” named Victor who’d been assigned to handle Ames. The text was riddled with inaccuracies, including a claim that Kalugin brought me into the FCD in addition to its flawed basic premise. In his rush to smear us, Kirpichenko didn’t even bother to find out that I’d worked for the FCD since 1963, when K
alugin was stationed in the United States. Despite my outrage, however, I followed Shebarshin’s advice and did nothing about the accusation.

  Two years later, a former KGB officer named Alexander Sokolov published a book called Superkrot (Supermole). It was subtitled “The CIA inside the KGB: General Oleg Kalugin’s 35 Years of Spying.” Sokolov trotted out the same story about Kalugin, identifying me for the first time by my surname.

  Other versions of the accusation against me surfaced. One, published in June 2000, came from a young reporter named Alexander Khinshtein, whose good connections to the intelligence services were often wasted in sensationalistic writing. He accused me of fingering Hanssen through a former KGB colonel called Valentin Aksilenko.

  Aksilenko, whom I liked, had worked as a political intelligence officer in the FCD’s American department. I met him when he was stationed as a Line PR officer in the Washington rezidentura in the early 1980s. After he returned to Moscow in 1983, however, an extramarital affair with a woman who also worked for the KGB caused him problems with his bosses. Aksilenko was eventually demoted to the American department of Directorate RT, which I took over in 1987. He later divorced his wife and married his mistress. In 1991 he retired and two years later moved to the United States along with Yuri Shvets.

  In 1999, I was surprised to learn that the intelligence officers veterans association planned to hold a meeting to discuss Sokolov’s book, recently released by a publishing house connected to the SVR. I decided to attend. Kirpichenko was there and gave an emotional talk supporting the book. That was the last straw. I stood up to say the book contained lies about me originated by Kirpichenko himself. I promised to go to court to defend my name.

  Many members of the veterans association telephoned during the following weeks asking me to reconsider. I was told the accusations against me shouldn’t be construed as insulting, that it was well understood they reflected only their authors’ opinions. I found those entreaties almost as insulting as the accusations themselves. Several months later, I filed a case against Sokolov and his publisher in a Moscow court.

  During the litigation, no one from the SVR or its publishing house contacted me to try to settle the matter out of court. No one apologized. It was more than clear that the intelligence establishment supported Kirpichenko. Sokolov, however, did apologize. He said he’d conducted additional research and was ready to publish a new version of his book minus the accusations against me.

  Ruling in my favor, the court found Kirpichenko guilty of negligence for publishing groundless accusations. The verdict said that my reputation had unjustifiably suffered, and it fully cleared my name. I forwarded a copy to the SVR, but again received no response.

  I would have preferred to ignore Sokolov’s book, dismissing it as ranting that would be proved wrong in time. But I wasn’t so sure my children and grandchildren would react the same way. Why should their name too be sullied for something that had nothing to do with them? So I went to court to provide a record. I’d never spoken much about my work in intelligence—perhaps wrongly, I now felt. Why should those who spilled dirt on my work be allowed to give lies as the last word?

  EPILOGUE

  Lessons of Cold War Espionage

  1

  Yeltsin and the leaders of the new, supposedly democratic Russia that emerged in 1991 knew that the KGB was the country’s most disciplined institution, with the most potential to influence internal affairs. After all, it had kept tabs on society. Therefore its leadership knew perhaps better than anyone the full extent of the state’s decay. However, far from helping drive policy, as some thought, the KGB was utterly loyal to the political administration—the Party’s Central Committee. That perception remained true in 1991 and shouldn’t be diminished by Kryuchkov’s part in the coup. Ideological faithfulness to the Party underpinned the very foundation of that main pillar of communist rule.

  When Yeltsin and the other “democrats” suddenly found themselves in power, they didn’t expect the Soviet institutions they’d worked against to seem so politically powerless. Bakatin wasn’t appointed because he was the most qualified to run the KGB. Indeed, he had almost no experience. His task was to destroy the intelligence service, starting by disbanding the Fifth Directorate, which had cracked down on internal dissidents. (The former head of the Fifth Directorate, General Fillip Bobkov, took a job as head of security for Most Bank, founded by tycoon and former Fifth Directorate target Vladimir Gusinsky.)

  The new leaders wanted to show their American allies that they no longer posed a threat. Hence the decision to hand over the plans for bugging the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The SVR leadership set another major precedent by opening its archives to two authors writing a book about Cold War espionage from the 1930s to the 1950s: American historian Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer.

  In Moscow, the writers negotiated through the foreign intelligence veterans association, represented by Kobaladze and Kirpichenko, who helped push the deal forward. They said Random House ended up paying the association $1.2 million. Kobaladze believed the project would become a major contribution to understanding Cold War history. Like many of his colleagues, he felt that since the United States and Russia were no longer enemies, they should cooperate on key issues such as antiterrorism, narcotics smuggling and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Kobaladze was SVR spokesman and knew very well that both sides still conducted intelligence operations against the other. But he saw no reason why facts about important historical events, such as the Cuban missile crisis, shouldn’t be made public as a way of increasing the atmosphere for cooperation.

  SVR chief Yevgeny Primakov gave Weinstein and Vassiliev unprecedented access to a number of KGB archives in 1993. By 1995, however, things began to sour. As the writers pored over KGB documents, it turned out that the American intelligence community had no intention of opening up its files beyond the results of an NSA signals intelligence operation called VENONA, which lasted from 1946 to 1980 and deciphered Moscow’s communications to Soviet representative organizations in the United States intercepted from 1942 to 1946. Ames’s exposure in 1994 effectively put a stop to the public pretense that both sides were cooperating. The American government acted outraged, as if it truly believed espionage between Moscow and Washington had ended—even while CIA operations in Russia were continuing at full steam. The perception of betrayal was heightened by Russia’s economic aid from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other U.S.-dominated organizations. Americans naively felt duped by a country they thought they were helping.

  By 1995, the SVR, realizing the project wasn’t going to be a joint SVR-CIA effort after all, decided to abort. But it was too late. The writers had collected enough material for a book, The Haunted Wood. According to Kobaladze, Vassiliev simply disappeared with his research materials in 1996, taking off to live in London and cutting his contact with the SVR. In fact, there was no reason for him to stay in Russia. He’d been given permission to do his work. Now that the SVR had reconsidered, he knew he’d be made a scapegoat. In fact, the blame lay with Kirpichenko and the SVR leadership. Providing information that revealed details of agents that should never have been declassified—like Bakatin’s decision to hand over the blueprints for the U.S. embassy bugs—dealt Russian intelligence an irreparable blow. It was absurd to think we’d entered a new era of brotherhood and cooperation with the United States. The fact that the CIA didn’t cooperate with The Haunted Wood project showed the Americans weren’t ready for such friendship.

  2

  With Russian and American intelligence agencies again gearing up after the brief if partial truce following the Soviet collapse, what lessons can be learned from the Cold War espionage game?

  Anyone who has read this far knows my conviction that intelligence work is less politically important than it may seem. During the Year of the Spy, CIA and KGB operations represented little more than intelligence games. Their connection to real issues of national security, s
uch as stealing military/technological secrets—let alone to the larger national interest as a whole—was often peripheral. Mostly they tried to ferret out moles and recruit enemy intelligence officers.

  Perhaps nowhere has the subordination of intelligence to politics recently been more clearly demonstrated than in the current war in Iraq and in CIA claims (or lack of them) about weapons of mass destruction development during Saddam Hussein’s regime. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a single superpower able to exert its will almost anywhere on the globe, a vital geostrategic balance has come undone. During the Cold War, American decisions to go to war had to be weighed against a response from Moscow, which maintained close relationships with many countries, including Syria, Egypt and Cuba, as well as Iraq. While we didn’t approve of Saddam Hussein’s treatment of the Kurdish population or his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, we had many economic interests in Iraq (as did the Americans). In today’s monopolar world, a mighty United States finds itself alone in a world of states with massive economic, social and political problems. No wonder it often does the wrong thing by them.

  In this environment, the CIA became a political tool for the White House as perhaps never before. Despite the many claims to the contrary, I strongly believe the CIA and the administration of President George W. Bush must have known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Much of the so-called intelligence about it came from analysts in the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, set up by neoconservative Douglas Feith, third ranking official in the Pentagon, to bypass the CIA and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency. Its feeble and flawed “evidence” of WMD served as the publicly declared basis for war.