Spymaster, page 35
In the late 1970s, one of our double agents in Germany, who was really working for us but had tricked the CIA into thinking he was cooperating with the Americans, managed to win the trust of his U.S. handlers. Our double agent was preparing to return to work in the Soviet Union, and his CIA contacts had given him a featherweight, palm-size radio device so they could contact him inside the USSR. The gadget greatly enhanced the audibility of radio transmissions, so that when our double agent used his receiver on a certain wavelength, he would be able to pick up communications from the CIA that would be all but inaudible to us.
I knew that Andropov was fascinated with spy technology and the intricacies of the double agent game, so I brought him the small, elegant transmitter and reported on our success in running the double agent. We had scored a major coup, because this was the first time the KGB had gotten its hands on this latest piece of CIA hi-tech wizardry. Andropov turned the tiny “toy” over and over in his hands, obviously impressed with the engineering. He then asked the head of domestic counterintelligence, who was in the room, whether we had anything comparable. The counterintelligence man hemmed and hawed, finally saying he knew how the device worked and claiming that domestic counterintelligence was using similar receivers. But the experts at the equipment operations directorate had just informed me that they had never seen anything like this. I told Andropov so, and he seemed distressed.
The chairman then summoned his deputy for scientific and technical research, Nikolai Yemokhonov.
“Have you ever seen anything like that?” Andropov asked Yemokhonov.
“No,” Yemokhonov replied.
The research director asked me to describe what it did. Then Yemokhonov said casually, “It’s nothing special. We have similar devices. We could make one like that.”
Andropov shot Yemokhonov a look of displeasure and bored in on him.
“But you said you’d never seen one like that.”
“Well,” replied Yemokhonov, “we don’t have devices this size.”
“What size have we got?” asked Andropov.
“Ours weighs about a kilogram,” said Yemokhonov.
The American device weighed only a few ounces; everyone in the room knew that the bulky two-pound Soviet transmitters and receivers were a great hindrance in clandestine work.
Andropov had had enough.
“We spend so much money on technology and we still can’t produce modern equipment!” he exclaimed. “Can we at least reproduce this thing here?”
“No,” said Yemokhonov.
“But why not?” asked Andropov. “What is it that you don’t have?”
“We just don’t have the technology,” answered Yemokhonov, keeping his cool. “That is the reason our missiles are twice as heavy as the Americans’ and why if we wanted to reproduce a Mercedes car we’d have to hand-assemble it.”
Andropov’s reaction was surprisingly meek, and his recommendation for action utterly futile: “Let’s send a memo to the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers. How far behind we’ve lagged! We’ve got to put things right!”
The fact is that I admired Andropov’s actions in my own field but was dismayed at his and the KGB’s reaction to our domestic situation. Andropov oversaw the KGB at a time of intense persecution of dissidents. Though he occasionally would allow the production of a banned play, there were many more instances where he toed the conventional line and ruthlessly repressed dissent. During his fifteen years in power, the KGB’s reign of moral terror was at its height in post-Stalinist Russia: nonconformists and dissidents were tossed into psychiatric hospitals and nearly every citizen felt the presence of the KGB’s domestic organs. It was Andropov, after all, who at a 1976 meeting of the KGB Collegium branded the scientist Andrei Sakharov as “domestic enemy number one.” It was Andropov who supported the move to strip dissident director Yuri Lyubimov of his citizenship. It also was Andropov who decreed that countless thousands of new documents, from reports on factory clean-ups to issues of Newsweek magazine, be declared top secret. Under Andropov, new secret departments and directorates sprang up in factories and ministries. Tens of thousands of acres of good land were taken out of circulation to enhance border protection. Yachts and sailboats were forbidden to sail in Soviet waters, Soviet citizens were not allowed to meet alone with foreigners, and anyone whose behavior or utterances seemed slightly out of the ordinary was viewed as a potential spy. Everything was done to mold the Soviet masses into a bland, passive army of happy, hardworking comrades.
But what else could we expect from a man like Andropov, who once said, “No sane individual will oppose a regime that wants so badly to make the lives of its people better.”
Despite his reputation inside Soviet society as a man who fiercely fought corruption by going after petty corruption in factories and shops, in fact Andropov shied away from taking on the systemic corruption at the top levels of the Communist Party. When the KGB chief in Uzbekistan presented evidence that the republic’s leaders were extremely corrupt at an annual meeting of KGB top brass, Andropov did nothing to investigate. Indeed, the only casualty of the revelations was the Uzbek KGB chief himself, who was sacked and transferred to Czechoslovakia as a minor KGB adviser at the Soviet embassy.
Thankfully, I was far removed from the dirty work of my domestic counterparts. These days I recall not only Andropov’s follies and shortcomings but also, with admiration and a half smile, that in the espionage wars the KGB chairman had a flair for the unconventional.
In 1979, I worked with the USSR’s Central Documentary Studio on a film about the CIA entitled The Quiet Americans. First and foremost, it was a propaganda movie designed to show the CIA in an unfavorable light. But I also knew our citizens were sophisticated enough not to swallow the old anti-American propaganda, and so I made sure the film painted a fairly realistic portrait of CIA officers as dedicated, intelligent, and dangerous professionals bent on weakening the Soviet Union and stopping the spread of Communism. We used Western footage of CIA Director Stansfield Turner, for example, which showed him working long hours at his desk and playing with his dogs at home. I was proud of the film, and considered it a realistic, tough-minded view of the CIA that would score us points at home and abroad.
We screened The Quiet Americans at Lubyanka for a dozen top people of the KGB. As the house lights went on at the end of the film, I expected kudos. Instead, I was bombarded with criticism as one top KGB man after another came up to me and accused me of being soft on the CIA.
“Oleg, what in the hell are you doing showing these bastards as nice-looking guys, playing with dogs and everything?” asked one KGB boss. “Carter looks like the father of his country. Turner looks like a great guy. Russians won’t understand this kind of film.”
Other KGB big shots wanted to know why the film showed someone unscrewing a telephone and finding a CIA bug inside. Now our citizens would start doing the same thing, the KGB boss said. And yet another asked why we depicted the CIA as a rich organization that paid its agents well. Such information could subject Soviet citizens to unnecessary temptations.
The upshot was that I should go back to the drawing board and redo the film. I was despondent as I walked out of the screening room. Just then, Andropov’s personal assistant walked up to me, put his arm on my shoulder, and said quietly, “The chairman saw the film and liked it. Go ahead with it.”
We released it several months later, with our favorite journalist, Genrikh Borovik, doing the narration and the Central Documentary Studio getting the credit for what was, in essence, a KGB film. The movie was well received inside the USSR, and even won first place in a documentary film contest for socialist countries in Berlin. It wasn’t Cannes, but by our standards it was quite an honor.
Andropov exhibited similar flexibility in another, fascinating case that involved a Soviet citizen and Christina Onassis, daughter of the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
The Soviet in question was a man named Sergei Kauzov. He worked in the Soviet merchant marine offices in Paris, and in the late 1970s the KGB’s domestic counterintelligence directorate had gotten wind of the misappropriation of large sums of money by merchant marine officials in Switzerland and France.
All of this mildly interested us in foreign counterintelligence since Kauzov was a Soviet citizen working abroad who reportedly was involved in a sophisticated economic crime. But what really intrigued us were reports from our stations in Brazil and France that Kauzov was having an affair with Christina Onassis, whose father had made billions of dollars in the shipping business. We first got wind of the affair through the strangest of channels: a Brazilian society columnist wrote that a Soviet merchant marine official had been seen on Copacabana Beach with Christina. Our Brazil station did a little investigating and found out that the official was Kauzov. Later, officers in our Paris station confirmed that Kauzov, who was married, was indeed deeply involved with Onassis.
On a pretext, Kauzov was recalled to Moscow, where his financial dealings in Paris were officially investigated. He was miserable: his marriage was on the rocks, he was separated from his wealthy mistress, and he was under threat of being sent to Soviet prison. My officers in Paris thought highly of Kauzov and said he had always been cooperative with them. It quickly became clear to me that Kauzov could be of far more use to us as a free man in Europe, married to Christina Onassis, than as a Soviet convict wasting away in a Siberian labor camp.
I arranged to meet with Kauzov privately, convinced that if we showed him lenience in the financial scandal, he might become a loyal operative for us in the West. When we met, I told him bluntly that my domestic counterparts wanted to throw him in jail. A short, energetic man who had lost one eye in a childhood accident, he impressed me with his quick mind and vitality.
“I want you to tell me everything,” I said. “If you’re honest with me. I’ll help you. If you lie to me, you’ll never leave the country again.”
Kauzov began to tell his story, recounting how he had met Christina in Paris while discussing a shipping deal and fell in love with her instantly.
“You wouldn’t have been able to resist her seductiveness either,” he told me. “I swear it. She was so sexy I couldn’t resist her.”
He went on to say that he and Christina planned to wed after he divorced his wife. When our meeting ended, I felt he had not held back and would be a useful operative for the KGB. For his part, Kauzov seemed impressed by our talk and hopeful that he might find a way out of his predicament. He later phoned his mother (we had tapped his telephone), and I saw a transcript of that conversation.
“I simply had to tell this [KGB] guy everything,” Kauzov told his mother. “He was so persuasive.”
I returned to Yasenovo, telling Kryuchkov and others, “Let’s make the best of it. Why jail the man or dismiss him from his job if he is planning to marry the Onassis woman? If we disrupt this marriage, it will be represented as another human rights violation on the part of the Soviets. Let’s capitalize on it. It’s better than having another scandal on our hands.”
But my domestic counterparts wanted to show Kauzov no leniency. Given the sensitivity of the matter, it was referred to Andropov. He summoned me and Kryuchkov, as well as two top officials from domestic counterintelligence, and asked us to make our respective cases.
Internal counterintelligence portrayed Kauzov as corrupt and lazy, a fan of the high life who would certainly be a witness in an upcoming corruption trial, if not actually a defendant. I agreed that Kauzov appeared to be deeply involved in the merchant marine scandal and would probably be found guilty. But who needed the international brouhaha if we tried to separate Christina Onassis and her Soviet fiancé?
“So,” I told Andropov, who was listening attentively, “wouldn’t it be better to give Kauzov total freedom of action, help him marry the woman, create a favorable atmosphere, persuade them to stay in Moscow, maybe even give them an apartment? We’ll make the Onassis woman, if not exactly a friend, at least a grateful person who will repay our favor when we need something. And Kauzov will be all ours, because he understands perfectly well that he’ll have to pay us back someday. He’ll always be grateful to the KGB for what we’ve done for him. We just shouldn’t push too hard. Don’t forget about the Onassis billions and the fact that if she bears him a child, all those billions will belong to a Soviet citizen. That is if we don’t spoil our opportunities now by hasty action.”
There was silence in the room. My adversaries were thinking of a rebuttal when Andropov spoke up.
“Kalugin is right,” he said, addressing the bosses from domestic counterintelligence. “Your approach is too standard. Enough of trying to grab everyone by the scruff of the neck without thinking about the repercussions. Our country’s leadership is doing a lot to defuse international tension, and we were just about to set those efforts back again. Give the Onassis woman the red-carpet treatment. We will find the newlyweds a decent apartment, and let Chief Directorate One [foreign intelligence] look for any good opportunities that could arise from the situation.”
I met Kauzov the same day and told him the good news. He was ecstatic and invited me to their wedding. Several months later, the pair was married in Moscow. I did not attend for fear of being recognized. After their honeymoon in the West they settled into a spacious, four-bedroom flat in one of the nicest apartment houses in Moscow. Later the couple returned to Paris, but only after Kauzov had agreed to join the Communist Party and pay $150,000 a year in dues. By the early 1980s, Kauzov had handed over more than $500,000 to the Party, a sum that justified the leniency he was shown. Christina Onassis apparently suspected him of continuing to work for the KGB, and eventually the couple divorced. Kauzov received several million dollars in the settlement and now lives in London.
Around the time of the Kauzov affair, Andropov gave his blessing to another unorthodox operation that brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in hard currency to the Soviet treasury. One of our stations in Europe had been contacted by a Russian émigré who was, of all things, an international thief. He wanted to transfer money to his brother in the Soviet Union but had been thwarted. The thief approached one of my officers in Austria with a deal: he would be allowed to transfer hard currency to his brother and, in exchange, would give the KGB gold bullion, jewels, and other valuables he had stolen. I found the offer unethical, but decided we would accept it if the man would do something for us: burglarize a French firm that was working on a military project in which we were interested. Several weeks later the thief delivered to our embassy in Paris a station wagon loaded with classified documents from the French military contractor.
Andropov had reluctantly sanctioned the arrangement, and from then on the man occasionally delivered loot to us, which we turned over to the State Bank.
Once, after receiving a suitcase full of platinum, pearls, and gold bullion, I called Kryuchkov and suggested we show Andropov the treasure. In addition, my department had just finished compiling a massive directory listing the names of thousands of CIA officers and agents around the world. Andropov was in the hospital then, suffering one of his bouts of kidney disease, and Kryuchkov decided the visit would lift his spirits. The chairman was receiving only important visitors, but he agreed to see us, so we drove out to the Kremlin hospital in Kuntsevo, in western Moscow.
Andropov greeted us in his pajamas, looking frail and sickly. He had a three-room ward to himself, and invited Kryuchkov and me to join him for a cup of tea. After several minutes of small talk, the chairman asked us why we had come, and Kryuchkov launched into a short briefing on current affairs. Andropov seemed exhausted and bored. He was eyeing the large suitcase I had brought, and finally the time came for me to open it. I hauled it close to him, popped the latches, and watched his eyes grow wide. He fingered the French gold bullion, jewels, bracelets of Florentine design exclaiming, “What do you know! I’ve never seen anything like it in my life!”
He was like a child, his eyes agleam. But after a while he ordered, “You’ve got to send this to the State Bank, right down to the smallest stone.”
Kryuchkov argued that foreign intelligence should be allowed to keep some of the money to bolster its budget, but Andropov refused.
“You keep tempting me to try to make money for the organization on the side,” Andropov said with a sigh. “But I can’t, don’t you see? I can’t. Domestic counterintelligence has already talked me into something like this, but I’m not sure I was right to agree. Let’s put it off for a while. You’ve got to hand in the treasure.”
I then showed Andropov the handbook of CIA agents we had just compiled. He seemed genuinely delighted with that as well, humorously deflecting my half-joking suggestion that we publish the top secret document.
Leaving Kuntsevo that night, I felt gratified that I had cheered up my ailing mentor, a man I continued to admire and respect despite his shortcomings. To this day, I vividly remember the Soviet Union’s top spy, a look of delight spreading across his face as he dipped his hand into the treasure chest we had carted to his sick bed. It was one of the last pleasant memories I had of Andropov. Just a few months later, the conflict arose that would break my career in the KGB.
After two decades, Cook—the first spy with whom I was ever involved—came back into my life.
It was 1978. 1 received a call one day from Yevgeni Primakov, my longtime friend and top official at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow. (In 1991 he would become chief of Russian intelligence and later prime minister under Boris Yeltsin.) Primakov, who had close contacts with the KGB, had heard that a leading scholar at the Institute of World Economics—a man who had once lived in America but had been forced to flee following a spy scandal—was being investigated by Soviet authorities. I was wondering why Primakov was telling me all this and asked him the name of the man in trouble. Primakov gave me the Russian name, and I froze: it was Cook.
