Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (6 page)

As to Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy, our analysts were complaining that he didn't care about the information and recommendations
provided by the KGB. Gorbachev seemed to be listening only to the Foreign Ministry and its head, Eduard Shevardnadze. At every summit he
made concessions, first to Ronald Reagan, then to George H. W. Bush,
and Soviet foreign and defense policy was collapsing. I was useless, and
the whole KGB intelligence service seemed useless too.

When a young and ambitious intelligence officer spends eight hours
a day shuffling stupid papers in "the Forest" (that's what we called the
service's headquarters in Yassenevo, on the outskirts of Moscow), he starts
thinking about big issues, and it's dangerous. Here is what I thought: suppose I get a chance to spy in the United States. Suppose I even recruit a
source in the Pentagon or the State Department (one chance in a million,
but I am optimistic by nature). Suppose my source's information goes
straight to Gorbachev's desk. Will he take it into account? Will he even
read it? I had my doubts. And what will happen to my source? Sooner or
later he will get caught (it happens to almost everyone), he will get a
prison term, and his family will be destroyed like the families of the KGB
officers executed for cooperating with the CIA. And for what? Espionage is a crime; it destroys innocent people's lives. In 1985-87 I could easily
justify this crime to myself. By the end of 1989 I couldn't.

I began thinking about retirement. The problem was I had never
heard of someone who had retired from the KGB intelligence service of
his own free will before reaching the pensionable age. Apparently there
was no such precedent in the U.S. department. I knew about defectors,
but I had no intention of being one. I wanted to leave quietly and decently. I had no grudge against the service. I respected it-I just didn't
want to be part of it.

Later some of my former colleagues asked me: Were you afraid? No,
I wasn't. It was a calculated risk. I was convinced that if I didn't create a
scandal, the service wouldn't either. Besides, it was 1990, and I could go
to liberal newspapers and tell them my story. The service wouldn't want
such exposure. So one day in February 1990 I wrote a short memo to the
KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov: "I, Vassiliev Alexander Yurievich,
operative of the First Department of the First Chief Directorate of the
KGB of the USSR, captain, am asking you to dismiss me from the KGB
of the USSR because I do not support the policy of the current leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and do not consider it
necessary to defend it." My note explained only part of my motives, but
I wanted it to be short and crisp, and I didn't want to get into Dostoevskystyle discussions with the chairman of the KGB.

I kept this memo in my safe for a couple of days, still thinking about
it. I decided to send it on the day when we were informed that Russian
opposition parties were planning to hold a demonstration at the gates of
our headquarters in Yassenevo and that we were going to get guns to defend it. That was the last straw. I signed my memo and gave it to my immediate boss. Very soon I was called in to see the head of the U.S.
department, a general in the KGB's officer rankings. The general was
calm and polite. He asked why I wanted to leave; I explained my reasons.
He asked if I had any requests of him. I said that since I was going to
continue in my civilian profession-international journalism-I would
appreciate it if I were allowed to travel abroad. The general said there
would be no problems with traveling to socialist countries, but as far as
capitalist countries were concerned, I would have to wait for a few years.
I was astonished: it was iggo-socialism in Europe was dead! Still, I decided to keep mum. I realized I was getting off the hook easily. The
process of my dismissal took several hours. I was led out of the gates of
the headquarters, my pass was taken from me, and I went home.

A week later in the middle of a working day I went to central Moscow to see a new movie. I came out of the subway station at Pushkin Square,
took a deep breath of fresh, frosty air, and said to myself, "You are free!"
Life in the USSR was coming to a boil. I had missed a lot in "the Forest"
behind the fence, but I was going to catch up. The fence went down for
me like the Berlin Wall.

I made my first trip as a reporter for the Komsomolskaya Pravda in
the summer of 1990 to the Black Sea to cover the first all-Union festival
of erotica and striptease. My second trip was to Tallin to write a story
about a new nightclub called Cockatoo. I covered Richard Nixon's visit to
the Central Market in Moscow. To my amazement, traders from Georgia
and Armenia immediately recognized him and wanted to give him
brandy, fresh meat, and fruit; Nixon accepted a bottle of brandy and some
fruit. Then a tipsy Muscovite mistook Richard Nixon for a big muck-amuck from the Moscow administration and started complaining to him in
Russian about the hardships of life in the city. I wish I had asked Nixon
his opinion of Alger Hiss, but at the moment I had no idea who Hiss was.

In August 19go I was sent to South Yemen to report on Soviet fishermen kidnapped by Somali bandits and released thanks to the combined
efforts of Soviet diplomats and KGB officers in Aden and Cairo. I got my
Soviet foreign passport within twenty-four hours; the country was in such
a mess that even the passport system wasn't working. And in September
I went to Saudi Arabia for a month to cover Operation Desert Shield.
The following year it was Israel, NATO headquarters in Brussels,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan. No problems; no looking back.

Ironically, I was meeting people not many KGB intelligence officers
could dream of meeting: Shimon Peres and Adel Sharon in Tel Aviv (I've
got Sharon's book with his autograph), Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem
(got his book too), and leaders of the Afghan mujahideen in Peshawar
(they didn't write books). I went to talk to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at his
military camp in Afghanistan; I believe I was the first Soviet journalist
who met Afghan mujahideen on their turf. I played ping pong with one
of the nephews of King Fahd in Riyadh and went to see his camels.

After two and a half years of misery in "the Forest" I found happiness
in the desert. For a week I was the only Soviet journalist in the international press corps in Dhahran during Operation Desert Shield (got a
T-shirt from there-a technician from an American TV crew was doing
business on the side). I was going places and meeting people just because
I wanted to, with no need to ask permission from KGB mandarins who
would spend weeks weighing the pros and cons of every trip and interview.

Then in August 1991 there was a coup attempt in Moscow against Gorbachev, and I got nervous. I didn't expect anything good from a conservative regime as far as my professional life was concerned, and I was
sure it would strip me of my foreign passport if it won. It lost.

After the failure of the coup, hundreds of my former colleagues retired from the KGB, and I stopped looking like a weirdo and traitor to
them. The KGB itself ceased to exist, and new people came to the top in
"the Forest." In December 1991 Yevgeny Primakov was appointed head
of the Foreign Intelligence Service and Yury Kobaladze its press officer. I
believe it is impossible to overestimate the role of Primakov and Kobaladze in saving the service in the political tempest that followed the August coup and collapse of the USSR. Suddenly it became a must for almost
all Russian journalists to express opinions on every issue concerning the
special services, including those who had no idea of what they were talking about. I expressed some constructive criticisms myself but never suggested disbanding the service or asking the CIA to spy for Russia.

For a while I came under criticism in the Russian liberal media because of my articles on international politics and espionage. One of my
colleagues at the Komsomolskaya Pravda even wrote a memo to the editorial board accusing me of being an agent of conservative forces, planted
at the newspaper. After that I went on strike for a month, spending it
making my TV shows. At the same time my stand won me some respect
among espionage practitioners, and it led to that telephone call from Yury
Kobaladze in the summer of 1993.

In 1994 I was even invited to come back to the service as an opera
tive, but I politely refused. I had tasted freedom, and I loved it. However, I must admit I was tempted for about a second because the idea of
serving my country in difficult times wasn't totally lost on me. Besides,
people I met in the SVR press bureau-Yury Kobaladze, Tatyana Samo-
lis, Oleg Tsarev, Boris Labusov, Vladimir Karpov-were the nicest people I had ever met, and the office at 13 Kolpachny Street seemed at the
moment the friendliest place I had ever worked.

Researching the KGB files for the book project turned into a full-time
job. The files were kept in the SVR archives at Yassenevo, and the press bureau employees used to bring them to Kolpachny Street at my request. I
came almost every morning to the bureau to sit in a room with Oleg Tsarev
and Boris Labusov, read, and make notes from the files into my notebooks.
The files and the notebook I was using were kept in the safe of one of the
officers. No one checked what I was writing in the notebooks, and I could
take them home after I filled them out and brought a new one.

There were several books on espionage and a file on the Center for Democracy, a Washington-based organization headed by my co-author,
Allen Weinstein, in the bookcase in the room. Allen, who made several
trips to Moscow while the project was under way, liked to talk about his
connections in Washington, D.C., particularly about his friendship with
James Woolsey, then the CIA director, and SVR officers liked to listen to
those stories-hence the file. They suspected Allen of cooperating with
the CIA and allowing the agency to use the Center for Democracy as a
cover for secret operations. Some of the press bureau employees expressed their concern with his participation in the project, but Yuiy
Kobaladze took a more reasonable stand: if the SVR wanted to go ahead
with the books, it didn't matter if CIA people were co-authoring them.
However, to be on the safe side they decided to give access to the files
only to the Russian co-authors. In the case of Allen Weinstein it didn't
matter because he didn't read Russian anyway.

Personally, I didn't care about the nature of Allen's contacts because
I had never seen him doing anything suspicious. But some officers' ideas
regarding my co-author became a major factor in early 1996.

Apart from the file on the Center for Democracy, the bookcase contained The FBI-KGB War, by Robert Lamphere, and After Long Silence,
by Michael Straight. At home I had Allen Weinstein's Per jury and KGB:
The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, by
Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, which had been published in
Russia. That was my historical background in the field of Soviet espionage
in the United States when I started my research in the files. Not much.
In the late ig8os operatives in the U.S. department had not been encouraged to learn the history of the intelligence activities of their predecessors. One needed special permission to get an old file from the
archives and had to explain why it was needed. Believe me, you would not
want to explain to the boss why you wanted to know more secrets after
some of your colleagues had been executed for high treason.

The same was true with the KGB library at Yassenevo. There were a
few Western books on Soviet espionage in a special depository, but to get
a book from there we needed permission. And why would one want to
read about the "lies of American propagandists and KGB defectors"? In
early 1994 my mind was almost a blank slate, and I thought that was good.
Starting from scratch gave me a chance to see things with my own eyes.

There are different types of KGB files, but for the purposes of our
book I needed primarily two of them: operational correspondence files,
which contained all correspondence between the stations and Center as
well as many internal documents, and personal files, which contained in formation on each agent. I asked for the earliest operational correspondence files and got materials from the early 1930s. Later they found some
files from the i9zos.

When I opened my first file, I was shocked: it was a total mess. Obviously bureaucracy hadn't been the forte of Soviet operatives of that era.
I would find a cable in one file and a response to it in another. Some documents had no dates. Many of them were typed on small pieces of yellowed paper and contained grammar or stylistic mistakes. Apparently
Soviet spies of the 1920s and early 1930s were so busy spying they didn't
bother to write long documents; the information was often quite sparse.
The most important drawback, however, was the lack of a cover sheet
listing the people and organizations mentioned in the file; such a cover
sheet was an obligatory part of any file in my time. I was initially unhappy
about that but subsequently realized how lucky I was that the names of
those mentioned in the files were not listed. I attacked the material like
any scrupulous journalist: I wrote down any name or cover name in the
hope of discovering a story behind it later; I made notes of almost every
description of an event or a person. Gradually I noticed that some cover
names were mentioned again and again while others disappeared.

In the early stages of my work I struck gold: in one of the operational
correspondence files I found a list of agents who could have been betrayed by Elizabeth Bentley, a courier and group handler who defected
in 1945 to the FBI. The list was composed by Anatoly Gorsky, a former
Soviet station chief in Washington, in December 1948 and contained the
names and cover names of American agents who had cooperated with
the Soviets. With Gorsky's list and a collection of often-mentioned cover
names I was able to ask for personal files.'