Spymaster, page 38
As it turned out, our meeting on that cold January evening would be my last with the KGB chairman. Nearly three years later he would become the leader of the Soviet Union, following Brezhnev’s death. Eighteen months after that, Andropov himself was dead. He may indeed have wanted to help me, for I was undeniably one of his protégés. But I had made too many waves in Moscow, and Andropov wasn’t about to take on Alidin and other Brezhnev associates just to salvage my career. Though it took me a while to accept it, my career in the KGB would never get back on track. I had broken the rules of the game, and it would prove to be fatal.
That night, as I sat with my wife and waited to head to the Leningrad station for the midnight train, I turned the events of the last few months over in my mind. I had been a loyal and successful professional, and until the Cook affair my career had been on a steady upward curve. It would have been safer to ignore his predicament, to have told myself, “He did a good job once. But he’s violated the law, and to hell with him now.”
But I felt personally responsible for Cook, felt that I was the one who had put him in this situation. A man never knows his fate; had I kept silent about Cook, I might have risen even higher in the KGB. But I acted according to my conscience, and I can live with myself far more easily today because I did not let my ambition get in the way of the right choice in the Cook case.
Waiting that evening to go to Leningrad, I felt there had been a fundamental shift in my outlook on life as a result of Cook. The metamorphosis began with the warning from the Moscow KGB to stay away from the case, a warning that filled me with premonitions. That January night, it was clear I had experienced a break with the KGB, but the extent of the rift was uncertain and I held out hope that my collision with the organization could be set straight. I now realize that the Cook affair was a watershed. I had felt growing disillusionment with the Soviet system after the ouster of Khrushchev in 1964, after the Czech invasion in 1968, and after watching the creeping senility of our leaders in the 1970s. But I still believed in the system, thinking all we needed to do was replace the bad apples like Kryuchkov and Alidin and Brezhnev, and everything would be better.
In Leningrad, as the effects of the Cook case set in and as my colleagues gradually revealed to me the extent to which I was suspected of being a CIA agent, my views changed radically. It was one thing to sit back and dissect the problems of our system. It was quite another to experience firsthand the cruelty and injustice of our totalitarian state. It took my own personal collision with the KGB hierarchy—and the subsequent derailing of my career—to make me see the light. Before, all the suffering and injustice of our system had been an abstract thing to me. I didn’t really understand until I too had suffered at the hands of the Soviet system. That may not be admirable, but in my case it was the truth.
I saw Cook once more. Nine years later, after he had served his full eight-year term, after Gorbachev and perestroika, after I was utterly disillusioned with the KGB, I spotted Cook in 1989 on a Moscow street. We passed each other, and at first I didn’t stop. Then I realized it was Cook and ran after him.
“Anatoly!” I cried.
He turned around and recognized me instantly.
“Oleg, hello,” Cook said, managing a smile. “I hear you’ve had troubles because of me.”
“Yes,” I replied. “But that was of my own doing.”
I asked him how things had been in camp, and he replied, “Bad. They released me a year ago.”
“Can we do anything?” I asked. “Can we team up and tell your story? We could fight back, I’m sure.”
“No, Oleg,” said Cook. “I’ve had enough. I don’t want to be reminded of it. I don’t want to get involved in anything anymore. I just got my pension back, and I don’t want them to take it away again.”
I never saw Cook again, though the last I heard, he was still in Moscow. But I am getting ahead of my story.
The Red Arrow train left that January 2, 1980, at 11:55 P.M. About fifteen colleagues and relatives came to see me off in the 10 degree weather. As always, the Leningrad station teemed with people. The long, green trains were lined up on several platforms, the pungent smoke from their coal fires drifting across the tracks. Bundled-up figures careened into one another, some dragging suitcases over the ice. My colleagues assured me that I was being sent to Leningrad to replace the ailing chief there and that I would be back in Moscow soon in an even higher position. I no longer knew what to believe, and at that point was merely anxious to open a new chapter in my life.
I hugged my colleagues, embraced Ludmilla, and hopped on the train just before it lurched out of the station. As we bumped northward, my mind raced. Some colleagues had said I was leaving Moscow because Kryuchkov and others were upset over recent KGB defections; others said I had gotten into trouble after speaking at the KGB Higher School and implicitly criticizing Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko for the defection of his top aide, Arkady Shevchenko. Still others, like those who had seen me off at the station, said my star was still ascendant.
I pondered the successes in my seven years as head of foreign counterintelligence: We had recruited some top U.S. spies. Our spy network had grown threefold and reached over five hundred agents. We had penetrated fifty foreign intelligence and counterintelligence services. We had prevented dozens of Soviets from defecting, had gotten our hands on thousands of secret documents, and broken the codes of the intelligence services of several countries. We had done an admirable job and held our own in the cold war spy battle. I was convinced that I was not heading to Leningrad on the Red Arrow because of the poor performance of my directorate.
I tossed and turned, the scenes from the Cook affair running over and over again in my mind.
It was still dark when we rolled through the outskirts of Leningrad around 8:00 A.M. Peter the Great’s city was blanketed in a frigid mist, and I sat at the window of my stuffy compartment, my eyes red with fatigue, watching the shadows of my hometown emerge. I didn’t fully comprehend it at the time, but I was heading into exile. I would spend seven years in Leningrad, and while there I had a front-row seat on the ever quickening decay of the old Soviet system. In Leningrad, my doubts about my government finally exploded in a fit of disillusionment.
Just about that time, a man named Gorbachev came along, and I resolved that the path to our country’s salvation lay with him.
CHAPTER 8
Exile
AFTER MORE THAN TWO DECADES IN THE RAREFIED WORLD OF ESPIONAGE, after years of looking at life in the USSR through the windows of my chauffeur-driven Volga, I was brought back to earth in Leningrad. Returning to my hometown as a domestic KGB general was a depressing and sordid revelation, and it irreversibly changed me. I knew things had gotten bad inside the country, but not until I took over as the number two man in the Leningrad KGB did I realize how far gone the situation was.
I had a perfect vantage point from which to see the absurdity and advanced decay of Soviet Communism. At close range, I watched the top men in the KGB and the Communist Party in action, and I marveled at how puffed up and out of touch with reality they had become. They inhabited their own Byzantine world of privilege and power, fervently believing that the shadow game they were playing on Party plenums and conferences, staging sham elections, intoning the brittle mantras of our dead Communist leaders was really having an effect on the steadily deteriorating economic and political situation in our country. The local Communist Party structure continued to rule and siphon off vast amounts of money. Our KGB office in Leningrad (some 3,000 strong, half of them involved in reading other people’s mail and eavesdropping) continued to harass dissidents and ordinary citizens, as well as hunt futilely for spies. I can truly say that nearly all of what we did was useless. And we were operating in Leningrad, a cultured and enlightened place. The situation in the provinces was far worse. It was all an elaborately choreographed farce, and in my seven years in Leningrad I came to see that we had created not only the most extensive totalitarian state apparatus in history but also the most arcane. In seven decades our Communist leaders had managed to construct this absurd, stupendous ziggurat, this terrifyingly centralized machine, this religion that sought to control all aspects of life in our vast country. It was truly a wondrous creation. And as the coup of August 1991 showed, it was a house of cards. A few years of Mikhail Gorbachev, followed by the foolhardy coup attempt of Kryuchkov and other die-hard Communists, and the entire structure came crashing down, literally in a matter of days.
I was forced to stick my nose in the reality of Soviet life, and it was an enormous comedown. I passed through successive stages of astonishment, anger, depression, apathy, and finally liberation. I came to Leningrad in 1980 reeling from my clash with the KGB hierarchy, but somehow still hopeful that my career would one day rise from the ashes. I left Leningrad in 1987 utterly disgusted with the KGB and the Soviet system, and unconcerned how my increasingly rebellious stance would affect my future. By the end of my seven-year stint in the beautiful city on the Baltic, my KGB career was in ruins, but I was a free man for the first time in my life. Leningrad had launched me on a dissident path, and I left my hometown experiencing a heady sense of independence.
On January 3, 1980, when I stepped off the Red Arrow into a bitterly cold Leningrad dawn, I was met by the local intelligence chief and his deputy. They drove me to the Communist Party hotel (every town of any size had one and it was invariably the best hotel around), where I rested and then looked up some old friends. The next morning I showed up early at the Big House, the imposing gray stone KGB headquarters on Liteiny Prospect. The building had been constructed under Stalin in the 1930s, and my father had once worked there as a guard, where he occasionally heard the screams of some of the thousands of people who were tortured and murdered in the basement.
The first item on my agenda was a meeting with the man who would turn out to be my nemesis, Leningrad KGB Chief Daniil Nozyrev. I had heard only bad things about this imperious man, and my first few minutes with him confirmed what I had been told. Severe, pompous, and coldly formal, Nozyrev extended me his hand with an air of importance and uttered a few inanities. He was sixty-two, of average height, had gray, wavy hair, and the dull look of a smug provincial. Nozyrev had finished high school and graduated from a two-year Communist Party school, but that was the extent of his education. He had served in military counterintelligence during and after World War II, eventually transferring to the KGB. By the time I met him, he had risen to the rank of general. He was obsequious when dealing with Andropov and other bosses, but a high-handed bully with his subordinates in Leningrad. Clearly he had heard the rumors that I had been dispatched to Leningrad to eventually replace him, which may explain, in part, his immediate hostility toward me.
My new job, first chief deputy to Nozyrev, had been specially created for me, apparently out of Andropov’s concern that, though I was being shunted off to Leningrad, I shouldn’t be placed in a humiliatingly low position. But from my first few words with Nozyrev, it was clear he wanted to get me out of the way. The Leningrad chief informed me that my main responsibility would not be in the city itself, but that I would be supervising all KGB activities in the outlying towns and districts. I would also be in charge of the Information Department, the internal security section, and would sit on the Leningrad Foreign Travel Commission, a body that decided which citizens were sufficiently reliable and worthy to travel abroad. His words hit me like a blow, though by this time I was getting used to such humiliations. In the space of three months, I had gone from director of the KGB’s foreign counterintelligence operations to a petty bureaucrat deciding which of our unfortunate citizens would be followed or bugged or denied a trip overseas.
Nozyrev commanded a little army in Leningrad. Besides me, he had five other deputies: one who supervised work against dissidents, one for counterintelligence, one for surveillance, one for transportation and technical matters, and one for the government bodyguard. (The bodyguard section had more than one hundred men, whose main task was to protect the one Communist Party boss in the city and his headquarters.) Two of these men were former Communist Party bureaucrats, not KGB professionals, and they were unimpressive. The one deputy I took a liking to, Rear Admiral Vladimir Sokolov, was a man of some sophistication who went out of his way to be friendly with me. It would turn out that he was not at all the person I thought he was.
After several weeks, Nozyrev still had not found a suitable apartment for me. At the suggestion of one of his deputies, I moved temporarily into a flat that once served as a KGB safe house. It was, then, a shock when Nozyrev summoned all his deputies and launched into a bitter attack on me.
“Today I’d like to talk with you about the behavior of Comrade Kalugin,” announced Nozyrev. “He hasn’t been with us long, but he’s already acting in such a way that I’m beginning to wonder who’s boss here. He goes to Moscow without permission, he’s taken over a safe house, and he’s turning up his nose at the apartment he’s been offered. He offers to deliver a lecture at a seminar without asking me. What’s going on here? Who do you think is the chief of the branch?”
Fixing me with a hostile stare, he concluded, “I’ve been told that you had disciplinary problems in intelligence. That won’t do here.”
I sat listening with my head down, barely able to contain my anger. I gave Nozyrev a forced smile and said, “Just as all of those present here, I have no doubt who is in charge here. All of your reproaches stem from misunderstandings. I have informed the appropriate deputies that I was traveling to Moscow, and it was [Deputy] Bleyer who suggested I move into the safe house. I didn’t bother getting permission to deliver my lecture because I’ve delivered it before the Central Committee of the Communist Party and why should I get special permission to deliver it here? As for the apartments I’ve been offered, I’m not a rookie investigator who will be happy with any bone you throw at him. I will only take an apartment I like.”
I stared hard at Nozyrev, making it clear I wouldn’t tolerate such a dressing down. Then I walked out of the meeting.
Back in my office, my outrage grew as I sat contemplating what Nozyrev had just done. The Leningrad chief was intent on browbeating me, on wearing me down, until I fell into line like the rest of his obsequious deputies. I considered writing Andropov and asking for an immediate transfer back to Moscow. In any case, I resolved to continue standing up to Nozyrev. I was jerked out of my reverie by my fellow deputy, Rear Admiral Sokolov, who appeared at the door. I was in no mood to speak with anyone, but Sokolov pulled a bottle of brandy from his pocket and began commiserating.
“Now, Oleg, don’t get upset about this,” he said. “To hell with Nozyrev. He can be so nasty. He gets on everybody’s nerves. I’ve known him for fifteen years and he still treats me like a boy. We’re all under his thumb here. You can’t imagine how he taunts me and orders me about, and I say, just like in the navy, ‘Yes, Comrade General! Will do, Comrade General!’ He likes that. I never argue with him. Don’t you argue with him, either. He heard from someone that you’re being considered as his possible replacement, so of course he’s jittery. Don’t pay any attention to him.”
Sokolov refilled my glass and told me several more stories about Nozyrev and the Leningrad branch. I started to unwind and was grateful for his attempt to settle me down. And then, both of us a little tipsy, Sokolov began discussing why I had been transferred to Leningrad. His words set me reeling.
“There’s all sorts of gossip flying around about why you were sent here from intelligence,” Sokolov informed me. “But I have it on good authority that you got kicked out of intelligence because you were trying to defend Cook. You were suspected of having CIA connections, and Cook was thought to be your accomplice.”
I knew the investigators had asked Cook questions about the possibility of my working for the CIA, but I had written that off as the paranoia of men trying to make a case against Cook. Now a relatively high-ranking and well-connected KGB officer was telling me that the scuttle-butt in Moscow was that I had been demoted on suspicion of working with Cook for the CIA. I had been under the impression that the Cook affair was a secret; yet it was clear that details of the case—and rumors about my being a spy—were circulating throughout the organization.
Sokolov went back to his office, leaving me dismayed. The system to which I had devoted my life, the system to which I had been boundlessly loyal, now suspected me of betrayal. I had been sullied by unproven allegations, allegations so amorphous that I didn’t even know how to fight back. I increasingly began to feel like millions of other Soviets who had been unjustly accused of crimes, though most of them had experienced a far worse fate. In our system, everyone was a suspect, including someone as fanatically loyal as myself. From that day forward, I realized that the system was essentially vicious. As someone once said, the Revolution devours its own children.
After that day, Sokolov became my closest confidant at the KGB office in Leningrad. We had tea together several times a week and talked about the situation in the agency and the country. But several years after I arrived, the head of counterintelligence in Leningrad approached me and asked, “Oleg, why are you so friendly with Sokolov?”
“Well, it started when he was the only one who came to see me after my run-in with Nozyrev,” I replied.
“Look,” said the counterintelligence officer. “Sokolov is smart. He’s talking to you expressly on Nozyrev’s orders. He’s been especially chosen to inform on you.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“Just look at it,” he replied. “Skip over the way he butters you up and look at the questions he asks you, what he wants to know, what he tells you.”
