Farewell

by Eric Raynaud

  The Farewell dossier laid bare the fragility of Western societies and the weaknesses in their defense and secrecy protection systems. Thus the Pentagon learned that it was not the only one who knew about the anti-missile defense system supposed to protect the U.S. territory; Congress learned that their budget documents were very informative on highly sensitive matters, and the White House that its electronic security system was no secret to the KGB. The Americans now knew that it was possible to get information on their space shuttle in Bombay, or that their stolen satellite pictures were closely examined by the Soviets (who, for instance, could thus detect oil fields in Ethiopia). The French were astonished to discover that it was in their country that Soviet intelligence collected the largest volume of information on chemical and biological weapons. The Germans realized the USSR knew everything about their 1980–1990 development plan for new space and missile technologies. The military forces in NATO countries could no longer ignore the Soviets’ ability to immobilize European tanks by injecting quick-polymerization polyurethane foam into their exhaust pipes. And so on and so forth.

  Finally, the documents supplied by Vetrov were an eye-opener for the West regarding the implementation of vast military programs in the Soviet Union. Their analysis revealed that the USSR was preparing along the lines of the American SDI program. Thus, the Energia super rocket, a booster with a payload that was supposed to allow the building of orbital space stations, turned out to be also a “Star Wars” component. It was intended particularly for other space weapons, some of which would have been controlled from the Buran shuttle. Many space projects were actually doubled with military programs.

  It is precisely on this last point that Vetrov’s role in the ending of the Cold War should be appreciated and, depending where one stands, his stature as a free world hero or a traitor to his country be assessed.

  In chapter 28, it was mentioned how the Reagan administration had launched a vast offensive to strangle the Soviet economy, with SDI supposedly being the coup de grâce.

  Once again, this was initially the result of Reagan’s intuition. This idea of a space shield protecting the American territory was inspired while visiting NORAD in 1979. In this Colorado military base, Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham gave Reagan a presentation of the High Frontier project, the precursor of Star Wars.6 The ballistic missile interception system, based on the use of laser technology, was to be placed in orbit with the space shuttle. As recounted, Vetrov had told Ferrant about being present in a KGB meeting in Kaliningrad where the space shuttle project was on the agenda and talked about with great concern by Brezhnev in person.

  The Star Wars initiative was launched in March 1983, and it was developed within the NSC and the DOD by Admiral James Watkins and Robert MacFarlane, who later described it as “the greatest sting operation in history.”7 Was he suggesting this was a monumental bluff in the economic poker game the president had started with the USSR immediately after he took office in the White House? One is tempted to believe so, in retrospect.

  Many witnesses confirmed that Reagan sincerely considered this defense as being, above all, a means to protect the American people from Armageddon. The fact remains that SDI became part of Reagan’s global strategy of putting pressure “by every means,” emphasized Richard Allen, on Soviet economy. In that respect, SDI was the project the president felt the most strongly about. McFarlane and Thomas Reed, the other defense expert on the NSC staff, put together a team dedicated to working on the subject in the framework of the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces. The following years demonstrated its key role in ending the Cold War.

  Gorbachev’s rise to power in March 1985 opened a new détente period. Within the context of the 1985 Geneva Summit, American and Soviet administrations opened a new round of negotiations on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The international community greeted the renewed dialogue between the two superpowers with great relief. The negotiations were to ratify a reduction in traditional nuclear arsenals, mainly in the thousands of nuclear warheads both blocs pointed at each other. During each round of negotiation, the Soviet efforts were mostly to include in the agreement devices in orbital space such as SDI. The Americans, at first, opposed it, arguing that those were not nuclear weapons, and that such programs were strictly defensive. Subsequently, opposition remained vague until Reagan personally, in a press conference on September 7, 1985, excluded SDI from the scope of the treaty.

  The American president was very well aware, thanks to the Farewell disclosures in particular, that technology research was precisely the Soviet regime’s weak point.

  Furthermore, as already mentioned, the launch of the Star Wars program was concomitant with the operations of systematic sabotage of Soviet advanced industries by Gus Weiss’s teams.

  Thomas Reed, who worked with Robert McFarlane on the SDI project, revisited in his memoirs the role played by the Farewell dossier in the significant weakening of the Soviet military-industrial complex at this critical point in time:

  “[As a grand finale,] in 1984–85 the U.S. and its NATO allies rolled up the entire Line X connection, both in the U.S. and overseas. This effectively extinguished the KGB’s technology collection capabilities at a time when Moscow was being sandwiched between a failing economy on one hand and an American president—intent on prevailing and ending the Cold War—on the other. […] Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or a nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end.”8

  Reed even made a point to give the credit to President Reagan, explaining that many in his entourage did not know what he knew about the Soviet vulnerability: “As it was they remained ignorant while the president was playing his trump card: SDI/Star Wars. He knew the Soviets could not compete in that league because he knew the Soviet electronics industry was infected with bugs, viruses, and Trojan horses placed there by the U.S. intelligence community.”9

  The disclosure of those events, which had remained secret until fairly recently, unquestionably puts Vladimir Vetrov’s role in accelerating the course of history in perspective. One can only be taken by the coincidences that precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. Would Vetrov’s actions have had the same impact had he chosen to begin his betrayal a few years earlier, during détente, instead of the very month when a new American president, determined to put an end to the Cold War, was elected? In that regard, the end of the Soviet Bloc seems to have been written by an invisible hand.

  Many will consider that this affair is just one aspect of the end of the Cold War, and they will be probably right. “Reagan himself did not consider that he won the Cold War,” reminds Richard Allen. “He believed that it was linked to a correlation of widely different factors, including people protests in Eastern Europe, and, above all, the fundamental corruption of the communist system.”10

  It is more than likely that the corruption Vetrov intended to avenge by giving himself to the DST was less fundamental and more concrete than the one Reagan was talking about. The target of his revenge was the KGB, but we have to admit that he committed to it with such a destructive determination and passion that it shook the entire edifice.

  Among the American protagonists who had developed the “take-down strategy” toward the Soviet Union, many had access to the Farewell documents, but very few had heard of Vladimir Vetrov, let alone of the French connection at the source of those documents.

  This makes it difficult to assess accurately the impact of the Farewell dossier on the end of the Cold War. There is enough material available, however, for deductive reasoning and clue analysis. We saw in chapter 28 that the NSC directive NSDD 75 was used as a road map for strangling the Soviet economy. Reagan in person launched this strategy soon after his arrival at the White House in January 1981. Among the NSC members who were the first to work on the plan under Richard V. Allen’s leadership were Richard Pipes, Norman Bailey, and the indispensable Gus Weiss.

  Thus “Monsieur Farewell,” as he was known by the American administrat
ion, was closely associated with the elaboration of a plan that led to the end of the Cold War. This in itself gives a more precise idea of the unprecedented historical significance of this espionage affair.

  In a very witty and rich memoir written soon before his death in 2003,11 Gus Weiss emphasized, using his own imagery, the key role played by the dossier in the peaceful outcome of the Cold War: “Farewell’s curtain call never caught the attention of the Marine Band or the Rawalpindi String Trio (there were no curtain calls). Nonetheless, at stake were weapons and industrial superiority in an era dominated by technology, Moscow Center’s campaign and Farewell’s counterpoint dance macabre performing at the center of all-out virtual combat. Were it not for Vetrov, Mitterrand, some outlandish coincidences and odd characters, part of the Cold War would have taken a different and darker course.”

  Executing traitors, Vetrov included, always has a whiff of political or ideological assassination. Under the Soviets, this was the best method to show contempt for and rejection of individuals who had dared to give preference to values other that those instilled by the State. It was also an efficient way to dissuade others from choosing this path. A more pragmatic society would not have allowed itself such a wasteful policy. One of the new executives at the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), the agency that replaced the PGU, considers it a professional mistake, more than a crime, to kill spies in peacetime. Every year, new facts are disclosed that only very few individuals can shed light on. The arrest of a secret agent abroad, the deciphering of a coded wire, the testimony of a man who eventually decides to talk, all are new elements which only those great moles can help confirm. Without them available in a jail somewhere, this new information with the potential of being extremely valuable runs the risk of remaining unusable forever. Had he stayed alive a few more years, Vetrov would probably have been pardoned, as were so many of his colleagues.

  So, traitor or hero? The answer to this question cannot be the same from the French or the Russian perspectives. A traitor and a totally amoral murderer on one side, a freedom hero on the other, even thirty years after the facts, it seems still difficult to reconcile those two views. Patrick Ferrant, who broke his silence mainly to rehabilitate his friend, proposed the following analysis:12 “True, he committed treason, but to me he is, in fact, a patriot. A traitor would have run down his country and would have defected. Here you have a guy with his dacha, his friends, his Russian homeland. His grudge was against the KGB. He was a patriot who wanted to protect his country, the population of his country, against evil people. Was Klaus von Stauffenberg accused of being a traitor after his assassination attempt on Hitler?”

  Almost thirty years later, Jacques Prévost also remains astonished by what Vetrov accomplished: “I knew a lot of Soviet people, and I was certain that one day or another, one of them would take the plunge and blow up everything. But I would never have thought it would be Volodia; I did not imagine him having the courage of doing such a thing. It takes a lot of guts. It’s quite remarkable what he did.”13

  To those who see Vetrov only as a common murderer one can reply that, having acquired a historical dimension, this man can no longer be judged in the sole light of a trivial crime, cruel though it may be for the victims. Strangely, moral judgments often lose their weight when applied to historical figures who have been eventually proven right by events. When reflecting upon Vladimir Vetrov’s path, one is reminded of Madame de Staël’s words: “If the Russians do not hit the mark, it is because they overshoot it.”14 Farewell, with his Russian excessiveness, unquestionably overreached his goal, since the KGB was dismantled in 1991.

  Yet the man whose name will remain in the history of secrets services, if not in History with a big “H,” was a man of his time with an inglorious end. Will he ever be rehabilitated in his country? This is doubtful. For the Russians, betraying one’s caste and homeland is inexcusable.15

  NOTES:

  Introduction

  1 Gus W. Weiss, “The Farewell Dossier: Strategic Deception and Economic Warfare in the Cold War” (unpublished essay, 2002, “for the sophisticates and esthetes desirous of the consummate espionage experience of the Cold War”).

  Chapter 1. Proletarian Beginnings

  Source: Svetlana Vetrova’s memories.

  1 Happily, they died with this belief; Ippolit Vasilevich died in 1970, and Maria Danilovna in 1973. They are both buried in the old village cemetery in Nikolo-Arkhangelskoe, near Moscow.

  Chapter 2. Svetlana

  Source: Svetlana Vetrova’s memories.

  1 Pavel Barashkov was far from being the “very high-ranking military man” described in Marcel Chalet’s book Les Visiteurs de l’ombre (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1990), 158. Barashkov died in 1965.

  2 The date differs (May 12) in the false labor booklet delivered to Vetrov later by the KGB. Similarly, the plant is referred to as “organization 991.” It must have definitely acquired its status of “mail box,” meaning “official secret,” at the time when Vetrov needed to have cover papers.

  Chapter 3. Joys and Hopes of Ordinary Soviet Citizens

  Source: Svetlana Vetrova’s memories.

  1 Chalet, Les Visiteurs de l’ombre, 145.

  2 Alexander Khinshtein, a Russian journalist, published a long article about Vetrov under the title “The Lubyanka Werewolf” (Oboroten s Lubyanki) in Moskovski Komsomoletz 22 (September 13, 1998). Khinshtein, clearly, had access to internal details of the criminal investigation, which he often quotes. The version he refers to confirms some of the sources we have and invalidates others. Differences are about points of detail that may seem insignificant at first glance. Since the purpose of this book is to bring together the maximum information about Vetrov, and to report rigorously, we quote the relevant information from Khinshtein’s article throughout this work. The disclosure of other facts may give more emphasis to seemingly minor points.

  3 Both documents are kept by Vetrov’s family.

  4 Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), founder of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka (a precursor of the KGB).

  5 Since Kutuzov Avenue (Kutuzovsky Prospekt) remains to this day a thoroughfare for government officials’ autocades, one cannot become a tenant in that building without going through a security investigation. One could indeed decide to become a sniper and, from behind a curtain, shoot at the armored limousines driving by at breakneck speed, with the head of state on board.

  6 Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, officer of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate (counterintelligence), offered his services to the CIA in June 1962. In February 1964, he defected to the West. Later, suspected of being a “decoy,” he spent four years, under atrocious conditions, in a special CIA jail. Rehabilitated by the agency in October 1968, he became the CIA adviser for Soviet affairs.

  7 In the jargon of Soviet special services, the term residency (rezidentura) refers to all the secret agents settled in a country under various covers (the French use the word post, the Americans use the word station). The station chief is called the resident.

  Chapter 4. The Good Life!

  Source: Svetlana Vetrova’s memories and those of Vladimir Vetrov’s colleagues.

  1 Chalet, Les Visiteurs de l’ombre, 160.

  2 Stanislav Sorokin, interview by Sergei Kostin, March 29, 2007.

  Chapter 5. The Mysteries of Paris

  1 Bernard Lecomte, Le Bunker (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1994), 60–61.

  2 Ibid., 72, 269.

  3 Thierry Wolton, Le KGB en France (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1991), 408.

  4 We cannot reveal any details about this man, whose existence was mentioned to us by one of the interviewed witnesses, since there is a possibility that up to now he has remained unknown to the DST. At least, the witness had never heard of this mole being arrested and, for obvious reasons, we do not wish to be the cause of such an arrest as a result of this book being published.

  5 Chalet, Les Visiteurs de l’ombre, 160.

  6 Raymond Nart, interview by Eric Raynaud, Febr
uary 3, 2003.

  7 Depending on the sources, this episode has widely differing versions, despite a common thread. The story was first reported by Gordon Brook-Shepherd in The Storm Birds: Soviet Post-War Defectors (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 313. By the end of his posting in Paris, “drunk at the wheel of an official car, Vetrov smashed it up one night in the Paris streets.” There were no casualties, but there was significant damage to the car. Vetrov faced serious trouble if the embassy were to find out. He turned in desperation to one of his contacts, “a businessman who held a senior position in France’s advanced electronics industry…The latter, whether out of kindness or calculation, duly paid for a complete repair and, moreover, arranged for it to be done within hours. When he saw his resuscitated car, Farewell’s Russian soul got the better of his Communist indoctrination. The businessman later described how his friend had dissolved into tears of gratitude and literally thrown himself on his knees to thank his benefactor. His career as a Western spy, though still some years ahead, can in essence be dated from that moment.”

  Marcel Chalet adds that this “business executive’s kind gesture was probably not entirely without an ulterior motive” (Les Visiteurs de l’ombre, 160). He attributes it only to Prévost’s willingness to “get a member of the [Soviet] Trade Delegation in his pocket…Our compatriot initially had no way to know that Vetrov was a KGB member.”