by Eric Raynaud
A few authors8 mention a confession written by Vetrov shortly before his execution, which was a true indictment of his service. “I am adamant: there was no ‘last letter,’” protested Igor Prelin.9 “I understand that the French and the Americans would like their agents to be their friends out of ideological beliefs, fighting the power of the Soviets. It would embellish their efforts. It’s one thing to recruit an agent through blackmail and corruption, but it’s another to win over a soul mate. There is nothing of the sort in Vetrov’s case.”
All the same, the existence of such a document seems plausible. It would be totally in line with his French handlers’ testimony regarding Vetrov’s hatred of the regime and of the KGB. Moreover, this confession, which told too many truths to be popular among the PGU readership, might very well have been buried in the safe of the Department 5K chief, Vitaly Yurchenko.
It would certainly have gone unheeded if Yurchenko had not decided to go for his short-lived defection to the West. An account of his testimony about this famous indictment was supposedly transmitted to the DST by the CIA as early as October 1985. The document appears to remain classified to this day. The DST, who would benefit from making the document public, denied us access to it and kindly invited us to come again, fifty years from now.
Certainly such a document would make Vetrov sound like a hero from an ancient classical tragedy, accusing his executors from a rostrum for all to be judged by history. The existence of this confession may sound too good to be true. Yet, after a few more weeks of research, repeatedly lodging requests with another fully credible source, we eventually found a copy of Yurchenko’s testimony; a few excerpts are reproduced here (see Figure 9).
Upon reading this CIA memo, it becomes clear why the KGB had all the reasons in the world to get rid of Vetrov’s confession.
It all began with one of Vetrov’s investigating magistrates asking him to write a letter in which he would express his regrets for having betrayed his country. By way of regrets, they received a last and exceptionally violent salvo. Although Vetrov’s last words are read here through the softening prism of a CIA memo, one can nevertheless sense his anger.
“[According to our source (Yurchenko)] Subject appeared almost totally committed to his relationship with the French Intelligence Service. […] During the investigation and interrogations he never expressed regret for the damage he had done to the KGB and the Soviet system. […] He was induced by his interrogators in the First Chief Directorate to write a confession of his ‘treason.’ He did so, producing a sixty-page handwritten document entitled ‘Confession of a Traitor.’ At first pleased that Subject had been ‘broken into writing a confession,’ the leadership of the First Chief Directorate upon reading the ‘confession’ became deeply disturbed that the confession, in effect, was a scathing and devastating attack on the corruption, bribery, incompetence, cynicism, and criminality of the First Chief Directorate which Subject characterized as a ‘sick old whore.’
Figure 9. CIA memo sent to the DST in October 1985. In his testimony, Yurchenko (former head of Soviet counterintelligence, who had temporarily defected to the West) gives a gripping account of the end of the Farewell affair, casting a vivid light on Vetrov’s last “Confession of a Traitor.”
“[…] Our source commented that when he read the confession he found himself fascinated by the accuracy of Subject’s indictments of the KGB and the Soviet system […].
“[…] Our source commented that Subject went to his death with only one regret, that he could not have done more damage to the KGB in his service for France. […]”
If, according to the investigation file, Vetrov never stopped prevaricating to reduce his sentence, this letter seems to bear the stamp of sincerity. With no hope left, he had nothing to lose. It is thus reasonable to consider his last cry for revenge as his legacy.
An exceptional event like treason in the ranks of the PGU required them to “bustle about” and “report about the progress made on the case.” Considering the extensive damage caused by Vetrov, it was concluded that he could not have possibly acted alone; there must have been a network.
And so, off went the KGB, launching a sweeping operation aimed at monitoring the main “suspects.” They were the Rogatins and a few individuals among their friends and relations. The campaign lasted over a year.
The Rogatins’ country house was searched skillfully. Their phone was tapped twenty-four hours a day. When they went outside to walk their dog, they could see shadows stamping their feet in the building courtyard. If Galina took the trolley to go to work, a well-dressed man with cropped hair inevitably got on board with her. Alexei could see a black Volga in his back mirror, tailing him at all times.
In the beginning, the Rogatins tried to take it well. They even started the habit, when leaving for the countryside, to drop their apartment key with the building caretaker, under the pretext that she could have a look and make sure everything was fine and clean up every once in a while. Actually, this was a gesture to prove they had nothing to hide, since the caretaker like all her colleagues was a KGB informant. The KGB must have used this opportunity more than once to search their apartment at will.
Over time, however, it became irritating. Many of their acquaintances had stopped calling them. Like Svetlana, Galina had the good Soviet reflex not to call their true friends, not wanting to compromise them. Finally, the UPDK told Alexei he could no longer work as a chauffeur for the embassy of a capitalist country. He protested. He wanted to know why they were blaming him, but to no avail. After having driven the Swedish and Luxembourgian ambassadors’ cars, a job he viewed as the high point of his career, Alexei was forced to drive a coach for the Hungarian trade mission.
Strangely, the Rogatins were placed under surveillance as early as the spring of 1982, although there was no suspicion of espionage at that time. They were never bothered during the second investigation. It was only years later, having run into Svetlana by chance in the street, that they learned about Vetrov’s execution by firing squad for high treason.
Things got tougher for Tokarev, who had been posted in Paris and had handled Bourdiol. When he returned to Moscow in April 1982, he had accumulated a vacation backlog for the last three years. So, he did not resume working at Yasenevo until September. Then he got a phone call from Yuri Motsak, the head of the French section, with whom he had worked in the Second Chief Directorate (counterintelligence). At first he did not see reasons to be alarmed. A man he had met only once, at a birthday party for Alexei Rogatin, committed a murder. It had nothing to do with him! He had just received a decoration, and his résumé was impeccable.
Being a good professional, however, Tokarev realized immediately that he was being tailed. This meant his phone was also tapped. He went to talk about it to his superior, but the man dodged his questions. So Tokarev told his friends to stay away from him for a while; but some of them, like Karavashkin, called him regularly to make it clear they did not believe he was part of the treason case.
Months went by with no relaxation of the surveillance. It is irritating to be suspected by your own people. Tokarev routinely went to his internal counterintelligence colleagues and said, “Cut the crap, dammit! Aren’t you fed up with this nonsense?”
His friends tried to comfort him: “Come on, let them investigate! You’re clean. They’ll end up coming to the same conclusion themselves.”
This was eventually the case, but not before 1987. Because of the Farewell affair, however, Tokarev’s career was in double jeopardy. In the KGB first, where he was sidelined for years, then with the DST, since Vetrov had revealed he belonged to the PGU. Starting in 1983, they denied him French visas. He had changed direction and gone into business for years by then, yet main Western countries did not grant him free movement to conduct his business with clients or suppliers. The KGB was more forgiving. Even foreign intelligence officers declared personae non gratae and expelled from the USSR could come back to Russia ten years after having resigned from t
heir service.
Yuri Motsak paid a higher price for his friendly relations with Vetrov. His case was more understandable. Motsak had enjoyed a few too many drinks with the traitor he was paid to unmask and, for that reason, counterintelligence did more than keep a close watch on him around the clock.
One day he was picked up by the police with a colleague, both unconscious. Motsak could hold his liquor. Even after gulping down a liter of vodka, he did not let anything show. Everyone who knew him concluded Motsak had been drugged. His comrade had simply had the bad luck to share the same bottle. Drugged meant interrogated. Apparently the “induced” confession proved Motsak’s innocence in the espionage case. He could be blamed only for his lack of vigilance, but he was transferred to the Tenth Department (currency trafficking, smuggling) of the Second Chief Directorate. He was eventually rehabilitated, nominated department head, and promoted to colonel. Today he is also a businessman.
Other PGU acquaintances of the Rogatins—Rudian, Komisarov (who succeeded Vetrov in Paris)—found themselves under the KGB’s magnifying glass. They all got out of it with varying degrees of damage.
Why target the Rogatins and the people around them? The answer is obvious. If there had been a Vetrov network, Alexei would have been the ideal living mailbox. Under the pretext of car repair, a good half dozen KGB officers would have routinely come to drop their batch of secret information, and Vetrov would have stopped by to take delivery before transmitting the information to the French.
Did the KGB come to this theory on their own? Vladimir could have, indeed, told Ferrant that he was heading a “network,” so the French would not doubt his ability to single-handedly provide such a large amount of very important documents. Perhaps, in order to woo his silent partners, he also tried to impress them with his organizational skills. It is very likely that Vetrov talked to “Paul” about their common main enemy, Yuri Motsak.
After the August 1991 coup, Vitaly Karavashkin, though having resigned from the KGB, was willing to do a last favor for his colleagues, pretending to probe a French secret agent whose code name was “Thermometer.” He told him he was willing to accept a job in the Moscow offices of a French company delegation. The Frenchman, naturally, seized the opportunity to regularly “milk” the man who best knew the Moscow French colony, and came from the Soviet counterintelligence service that had been monitoring it closely. In his first round of questions, in order to make sure he did intend to be useful to the French services, “Thermometer” asked Karavashkin about Motsak. How did his career go? What happened to him? Since the Second Chief Directorate had no known traitors in its ranks after Yuri Nosenko, French special services should not even have known Motsak’s name. Karavashkin concluded, therefore, that Motsak’s identity must have been revealed to them by Vetrov.
After executing Vetrov, and having gone through the mole’s entourage with a fine-tooth comb, the KGB needed to rebuild on the ruins of an entire division. Before doing so, it had to analyze the errors and shortcomings that allowed this incredible and surrealistic operation to succeed.
CHAPTER 34
The Farewell Affair Under the Magnifying Glass of the KGB and DST
In chapters 10 and 11, we attempted to draw the psychological portrait of a man as full of contradictions as Vladimir Vetrov. Naturally, his PGU colleagues, and the entire KGB, tried to understand a traitor’s personality and motivations. Those analyses, and there were several, give another perspective on the Vetrov case. They may not be as impartial as the authors’ approach, but they are more technical.
With respect to Vetrov’s motives, the investigation file did not mention any links to politics. There are moles who profess a global vision of the situation and strive to influence its evolution. Collaborating with Soviet intelligence during World War II, the Cambridge Five were convinced they were contributing to the Allies’ common war effort. Klaus Fuchs thought that by passing the atom bomb secrets to the USSR, he contributed to averting the danger of an imbalance between the blocs, which presented a mortal threat to all of humanity. On a less intellectual level, George Pâques, who was handled by the PGU, was certain of playing a crucial role on the international scene. For Vetrov, however, it was more a question of getting emotionally even with the KGB than an elaborate plan to fight the Soviet system.
His investigation file clearly shows, in conversations with other Gulag inmates, or in letters to Svetlana, his criticism of Soviet life’s downsides, with nepotism, corruption, shortages, and so forth. The investigating magistrates used the phrase “embarked upon the path of treason as a result of ideological degeneration,” which strangely echoes the term “detachment” used by Raymond Nart to explain Vetrov’s behavior. What else would explain that a former young pioneer of the Soviet Union, a Communist Youth and a Communist Party member, could betray his country?
Was it out of greed? We know this was not a dominant trait in this case. For the KGB members, presenting Vetrov as a corrupt character or a Judas was very tempting. Vladimir Kryuchkov1 considered that if the greed element did not prevail, it was because the traitor, having no legal possibility to spend the money in the Soviet Union, owning significant amounts of money would have been risky. In his opinion, Vetrov intended to enjoy his wealth once in France.
He cannot be proven wrong. Adolf Tolkachev, for instance, was an American mole who, in those same years in the eighties, passed information on Soviet fighter aircraft to the CIA. On top of the two million dollars he had in his bank account in the United States, he had almost eight hundred thousand rubles in Moscow. This was a huge fortune, enough to buy at least fifty three-room apartments in the heart of Moscow. When he thought he was being watched, Tolkachev burned half a million rubles. As he watched the flames get bigger, he later admitted, he thought to himself, “It is for all this money that I gambled with my life!” He was executed by firing squad in the fall of 1986.
All French testimonies, and even the Soviet investigation file, stated the same fact: in the beginning, Vetrov’s purpose was not to get rich. It was only later, and encouraged by the DST, that he asked for remuneration, thirty or forty thousand rubles, a sum he was never to receive. A detail worth noting in his deposition, Vetrov admitted that no sooner had he made his request, he stopped, suddenly realizing that he had reached a point of no return. From now on, he would be a mole paid by an adversarial service.
Yet, he did not need money to survive or to live better. He had everything a Soviet citizen could dream of, with a luxuriously furnished apartment in an upscale district, a house in the countryside, a car, free medical care for the entire family, and his son’s higher education paid. The “island” is what he thought he would be able to buy in that life awaiting him on the other side of the border. In his current life, a bottle of scotch for him or cheap jewelry for his mistress was all he needed.
The value of Vetrov’s confession on this account is relative. No one wants to be seen in an unflattering light, appearing greedy, corruptible, and servile. “In all of those stories, nothing gets uglier than the money part,” says Igor Prelin. “One can betray out of hatred for the regime, this is not demeaning, and hatred for one’s boss is nothing to be ashamed of, but Judas’s thirty pieces of silver is the last straw!”
Svetlana was convinced that her husband had a bank account in France, in which the DST was regularly depositing his salary. This was probably not the case. At the most, like many Russian defectors, he would have been provided a place to live, the opportunity to give interviews for a fee or to write a book, and in the best-case scenario, he would have received a monthly allowance. It is acknowledged that even the Americans, who could afford it, promised more than they intended doing. In the nineties, after President Yeltsin pardoned Russian moles who were serving their time in jail, most of them ended up in the United States. Those men received an indemnity and a monthly allowance that, at some point, was reduced. So, the former spies organized into a kind of union to sue the American administration over unkept promises.
Prelin should have been asked, “Who could have taken the risk to openly stand up for Vetrov?” From Yurchenko’s testimony we learn an entirely different version of the scandal’s internal impact. At the end of the CIA memo, the double defector, still amazed at the virulence of Vetrov’s confession, admits “to the dramatic nature of his characterization of Subject,” but immediately adds that he did not overestimate “the profound effect Subject’s commitment to attack the KGB had on him personally and upon the KGB hierarchy.”
Another source, this time from the French DGSE (the General Directorate for External Security, as the SDECE was renamed in 1982), assured us that KGB officers secretly admired Vetrov’s courage and determination to fight nepotism. In 1988, discontent eventually filtered through, with a first incident occurring during the opening of a meeting convened to elect the executives of the PGU Party committee. Three brilliant officers challenged the presence on the stage, next to General Fillip Bobkov,2 of a “well-connected,” competence-and efficiency-deprived individual. Taken off guard, the PGU could only beat a retreat. The breach opened that day would inexorably widen until, during the following year, over two hundred KGB officers in Sverdlovsk signed a petition addressed to their top management.