Spymaster, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 - A Stalinist Boyhood
CHAPTER 2 - Initiation
CHAPTER 3 - America
CHAPTER 4 - Washington Station
CHAPTER 5 - Philby
CHAPTER 6 - The Spy Game
CHAPTER 7 - Collision
CHAPTER 8 - Exile
CHAPTER 9 - Rebirth
CHAPTER 10 - KGB on the Run
EPILOGUE
INDEX
Copyright Page
PROLOGUE
The ones whose souls and hearts are filled
with high purpose, these are living ones.
VICTOR HUGO
The sun was going down as I finished my meal in a posh eatery on the edge of Montego Bay in eastern Maryland. Mesmerized by the changing glow of the sunset, I fell into a pensive mood, sad and yet inwardly content. My thoughts wandered to my youthful years and then returned to the chores of my new life. Matthew Arnold’s lines of poetry, recalled from yesteryear, cheered me: “Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?”
My journey through time is not over, and yet . . . My God! Did I ever think or imagine that I, a devout Communist and KGB general, would turn against the Soviet system, confront and challenge it openly, and then come to live in America and stay here for the rest of my life? How did it happen? Why?
In the summer of 1959, I found myself in New York City, having just completed a year of study at Columbia Journalism School. For a twenty-four-year-old Soviet kid, it had been a dream year, capped by a three-week trip across America. My presence in the United States at the height of the cold war had generated a lot of interest. The New York Times even wrote a profile of me entitled “A Popular Russian.” The piece described me as “a real personality kid” and went on to say that I was the son of a Leningrad city clerk and was chosen for the Fulbright student exchange by my professors at Leningrad University and “Soviet educational authorities.” I had to chuckle, of course. It was all a lie.
The Soviet educational establishment had not sent me to America for a year. The KGB had. I was not, as the article described, a bright young Soviet journalist. I was a green KGB officer, the son of a man who also had worked for the Soviet secret police. And in August 1959, I was on the verge of plunging into my first espionage case, a tangled affair that would launch my career in the spy game but would later return to haunt me, eventually leading to a falling out with the KGB.
That August, just a few weeks before my return to the USSR, Soviet officials asked me to host an exhibit of Soviet achievements in technology and culture. I was happy to do it, in part for the money, but also because I was a true believer in Communism and the Soviet cause. It was the peak of Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s liberalization of Soviet society. Our military might was growing, and our sciences were roaring ahead. Just two years before, we had launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. This achievement convinced us and the world that we were closing fast on Khrushchev’s oft stated goal of catching and overtaking America.
The exhibit at the Columbus Circle Coliseum on 59th Street featured luxurious Soviet limousines, the latest furs, fashionable footwear, and row upon row of radios, tape recorders, and cameras. I knew the show was something of a Potemkin village, but I overlooked that and figured it would demonstrate to America what the Soviet Union, just fourteen years after the war that had devastated our country, was capable of doing. I was assigned to the cultural section where, surrounded by books and paintings, I was to expound on the glories of socialist realism. One of my first visitors was Vice President Richard Nixon. He came on opening day and wandered into my section, a jowly, glum-looking man who was not particularly friendly. Once I overcame my confusion at seeing this celebrity, I buttonholed him and began my spiel. Soon, however, I was elbowed aside by a phalanx of aides, bodyguards, and Soviet officials.
I spent several weeks preaching the Soviet gospel to an occasionally hostile American public, and by the end I was worn out and hoarse. One hot, muggy evening in late August, I shuffled out of the exhibition hall and began making my way up Broadway, heading for my dwelling. It was about seven o’clock, and I was barely two blocks from the coliseum when a bespectacled, gray-haired man accompanied by an attractive Chinese woman approached me.
“We saw you at the exhibition,” said the man. “May we talk to you?”
With those words began my fateful relationship with the spy the KGB soon came to call “Cook.”
Cook spoke to me in English, but I immediately recognized his Russian accent. Though I was exhausted and hardly wanted to become embroiled in another debate, I answered in Russian that I could talk with them. And when this tall stranger, who introduced himself as Anatoly, began to speak, my interest was piqued. After complimenting me on my English, he criticized me for not being staunch enough in my defense of Communism.
“Don’t you feel the Soviet Union is going astray, trying to emulate America?” Anatoly asked, as the three of us stood on the Manhattan sidewalk in the summer twilight. “Your country is a great one. It has its own path. Socialism should be free from all this bourgeois stuff.”
It was a rarity, of course, to hear someone in America criticizing Soviet Communism for being insufficiently orthodox. Nevertheless, I was not interested in listening to his political philosophy, so I decided to steer the conversation in a different direction, more in line with my professional training.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I work for Thiokol,” Anatoly responded, referring to the giant chemical company.
“Really?” I said. “And what’s your line of work?”
“I am a rocket engineer,” he replied.
My fatigue disappeared immediately.
“Why should we stand here talking on the street?” I said. “Let’s go to a cafeteria.”
We drank coffee and ate pastry at a cafeteria on 63rd Street, and I tried to appear nonchalant as I questioned Anatoly and his wife. He told me he was from a peasant family in the Kuban region of southern Russia. After working as a translator for the German army, he had retreated with Nazi forces and eventually emigrated to America. He studied to be a chemical engineer and landed a job at Thiokol.
His wife, the daughter of the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was a Maoist who had convinced her husband of the righteousness of the Communist cause. She had persuaded him that it was repulsive to work for a company so closely tied to the military-industrial complex. My hopes were rising steadily, and then Anatoly dropped this piece of news: Thiokol was involved in the production of solid rocket fuel, and he was working on the project.
I could barely contain myself as I got their phone number and suggested that we meet again. But before we parted, I returned to Anatoly’s critical remarks about Khrushchev’s reforms. “You denounce the Soviet leader for deviating from the true path of socialism,” I said. “But look, the Soviet Union is way behind the United States in economic might, scientific and technological prowess. We have to adjust to the realities of life. If you are a true believer in socialism, why don’t you help us catch up with the U.S.? That’ll be your contribution to the eventual triumph of the socialist system.” Anatoly looked up at me, puzzled: “How can I help?”
“Why don’t you share what you have access to, with our scientific community?” I asked with my heart beating wildly.
To my relief and delight Anatoly did not hesitate. “Okay,” he said. “I’m ready.” The next morning I skipped work at the exhibition and went to see Fyodor Kudashkin, our KGB contact at the Soviet mission in New York. He was interested but skeptical. “This may be an FBI setup,” he said. “You have no diplomatic immunity. They will arrest you on the spot. It will not only end your career, but will lead to embarrassing complications for our country.” It was difficult for me to argue with an experienced intelligence officer like Kudashkin. Who was I, after all? Just a trainee, a rookie. But one argument seemed to impress my supervisor. “You may be right,” I said. “But Anatoly was so knowledgeable about Marxism, so eloquent and passionate in his advocacy of socialist ideas; that, I’m sure, no FBI agent can do.”
My report set off a furor at the KGB headquarters, which Kudashkin notified urgently, seeking clearance to hold the meeting with Anatoly and take the documents. My higher-ups in the intelligence branch thought I was naive and reckless, and yet they authorized the meeting. In an urgent ciphered cable they emphasized the importance of my mission to obtain secrets that could be a tremendous boost in our competition with the United States to build better military and space rockets. The only caveat from KGB headquarters was that I be accompanied by a more senior KGB officer with diplomatic immunity; if Anatoly was an FBI plant, the senior agent would take the fall and face nothing worse than expulsion. When Moscow cabled its okay for our meeting with the Thiokol scientist, headquarters also gave him the code name “Cook.”
We met Cook several days later near Columbia University. With my KGB colleague at the wheel, we drove to Cook’s home in the suburbs of northern New Jersey. My stomach was churning. My young career in the KGB was about to take a remarkable turn for the better, or else we were driving into an FBI trap that could create an international incident and doom my chances of working effectively overseas in the future.
When we arrived at the tiny, nondescript house, Selena was busy preparing a Chinese dinner. We sat in the living room with Cook, sipping cocktails. The scientist stood up and walked
I fingered the test tube. My fellow officer and I sat there in silence, holding our breath as we half expected a squad of FBI agents to burst through the door. But no one came. We moved to Selena’s table and ate her delicious Chinese food. We made small talk. But I wanted nothing so much as to flee that house with our booty. I was an ambitious young officer, and I knew the test tube and documents I held in my hands were an extraordinary coup for someone just starting out in the KGB.
The next day, word came down from the KGB’s technical staff in New York that the papers and the fuel were a great find. Moscow showed immense interest in the Thiokol scientist and, after one more meeting, I handed over my catch to higher KGB officials in New York. I received a commendation, and as I returned to Moscow that August 1959, I felt happy and yet nervous. I heard some rumblings from Moscow. Headquarters was still checking the stuff received from Cook, and some believed the whole case was an FBI attempt to plant a double agent to disinform and mislead the Soviet scientists, to stall Soviet progress in its space program.
Yet in a month or so, I was told everything was all right. Cook’s information was priceless. I received my first promotion and was portrayed among my colleagues as a model of a brave and enterprising officer. I never expected to see Cook again.
Twenty years later, however, I did see him again, this time in Moscow. And when we crossed paths again, Cook, the man who so auspiciously launched my career in the KGB, would set in motion its undoing. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Within months of leaving New York that summer, I returned to the United States and began my career in earnest. Over the next twenty years, I found myself at the very heart of the cold war spy game. I ran agents out of New York. I oversaw the work of the American spy John Walker in Washington. My officers even tried to bug the U.S. Congress. At age forty, I became the youngest general in the postwar history of the KGB, and for ten years matched wits with the CIA around the world.
As deputy chief and then chief of the KGB’s foreign counterintelligence directorate, I was immersed in the world of espionage, a job that was at times exhilarating, at times depressing, and often messy. My unit ran moles deep inside French and Italian intelligence and tried to recruit CIA agents from Beirut to Helsinki. We played a key role in rehabilitating the famed British spy, Kim Philby, who had been tossed aside by my predecessors and was living a dejected, drunken life in Moscow. We also had a hand, unfortunately, in the assassination of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov. Foreign counterintelligence had to step in when we learned that an Asian country was preparing to blackmail a top Soviet military intelligence man. The material to be used against him? Proof that his wife was having sex with the family dog.
I served for ten years at the KGB’s headquarters buildings in Moscow, and worked closely with the men who ran the world’s largest secret police organization. I came to respect Yuri Andropov, the hard-nosed chairman who briefly led the Soviet Union. And I worked intimately with—and grew to loathe—Vladimir Kryuchkov, who took over the KGB when I left Moscow and played a decisive role in the failed coup of August 1991. I saw firsthand how the buffoons from the Communist Party politicized the KGB and blindly did the bidding of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Some of my colleagues predicted I would one day become chief of Soviet intelligence, perhaps even head of the KGB. Indeed, until 1979 my career seemed unstoppable. But then, as I attempted to come to the aid of the man who had been my first intelligence asset—Cook—I had a collision with the system I had served so faithfully. In 1980, I was sent into high-level bureaucratic exile in Leningrad, where for seven years I saw at close range the rot of the Brezhnev era. In 1990, thoroughly disenchanted with the agency and the system to which I had devoted my life, I went public and became the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to expose the inner workings of the organization and still remain in the Soviet Union.
I was charged with treason and would have landed in jail, had it not been for the people of Russia, who elected me to be their representative in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (Soviet parliament).
Totally rehabilitated by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, I continued to work for reform in New Russia.
In 1995 I came to the United States as a senior official of a Russian telecommunications company to work with my American counterpart. I never went back because Russia under President Putin reversed its course, and in 2002 I was again charged with treason and convicted at a secret trial in Moscow.
Eventually I settled in America and became a U.S. citizen.
This book, then, is the story of the journey of a warrior in the cold war. On one level it is a story of espionage, as seen through the eyes of a man who battled the United States and the West even as his nation’s empire was, with 20/20 hindsight, in its death throes. But this is more than a spy story. It is the story of one man who, like so many of his compatriots, started off with a deep, even fanatical belief in his country and its Communist cause. When I headed to New York as a young man of twenty-four, I was confident we were not far from the “shining future” that our leaders from Lenin to Khrushchev had promised us. That blind faith carried me forward for years, helping me to overlook the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia, the growing isolation and senility of our leaders. I myself spread a string of lies and disinformation to further our cause in the cold war.
Like most of my countrymen, I thought our system could be fixed. And then I collided with the KGB itself, and realized that what we had built was rotten beyond salvation. The road to my conversion was unique. Yet tens of millions of other Soviets reached the same point by a different route. Like countless other Soviets, I became a radical critic of the system which had nurtured me and brought me success. That may be difficult for many readers to understand.
But then they have not lived my life . . .
CHAPTER 1
A Stalinist Boyhood
I NEVER SAW MYSELF AS A RENEGADE, AND EVEN NOW, AS I MULL over the reasons for my split with the KGB, I ask myself half seriously: Was my grandmother to blame? It was she who, unknown to my parents, spirited me away to a Russian Orthodox church shortly after my birth and had me secretly baptized. In 1934, just as Stalin’s repressions were gaining steam, that was a heretical and dangerous act. And though I am not a religious man, I sometimes like to think it was my mother’s mother who sowed the seeds of the rebel who would emerge a half century later.
At the time of my birth, September 6, 1934, my father was a guard at Leningrad’s secret police headquarters. When he found out that my babushka had me baptized, he was angry and scared. My mother would later laugh when she told that story, but at the time my father thought it a careless and stupid move. After all, his job was to stand in front of the secret police’s imposing, concrete Big House on Liteiny Prospect, guarding the headquarters and the adjacent jail. The Big House, completed in 1933, occupied a square block, and its basement and courtyard saw the execution of countless victims of Stalin’s purges. Later my father would tell me how he used to stand guard outside and listen to the screams of those being tortured and murdered by Stalin’s goons in the Big House.
My father, Daniil, was born in 1905, the son of peasants from the Oryol region of central Russia. He survived the chaos and famine of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war and was drafted into the Red Army in the early 1920s. After his discharge, he had no desire to return to the countryside and moved instead to Leningrad. There, in the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution, this poorly educated man—dark-haired, handsome, and with a trace of Tatar blood—found work as a guard for the secret police, then known as the NKVD.
