Spymaster, page 9
The country to which I had returned was in an odd state of limbo. Khrushchev’s efforts to liberalize Soviet society had run into implacable opposition from countless Party bureaucrats throughout the USSR’s fifteen republics. His bungling of the Cuban missile crisis, his unceasing shake-ups of the Soviet Union’s massive bureaucracy, and his general unpredictability had, by 1964, earned him powerful enemies. One of them was the KGB head, Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny, who played a major role in the bloodless coup that would unseat Khrushchev a few months later. Semichastny had been a Khrushchev protégé—a young, non-KGB, Communist Party official brought in to take firm control of the secret police—but he turned out to be a hard-liner who gradually turned against the Soviet leader. We didn’t know it then, but our country was about to take a giant step backward, entering a period of retreat and stagnation that would last until Mikhail Gorbachev came on the scene two decades later.
I too was in a strange, suspended state. I was back in Lubyanka as a “burned” officer—one who had to leave a foreign station for fear of exposure. As it turned out, Nosenko knew nothing about me and I could have remained in New York. But we didn’t know that at the time, and so I returned to KGB headquarters, where I renewed old acquaintances and waited for my next assignment. I dreamed often of New York, of the bustle of Broadway, of the beatniks and underground life of Greenwich Village, of the emerald lawns of Riverside and of Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, which overlooked the Hudson River. I longed to return to America.
For the time being, I was officially stationed back at the State Radio Committee, on the foreign news desk. Just before I resumed work there, a group of the First Chief Directorate (Intelligence) was asked to participate in a little war game with officers from the Seventh Directorate (Surveillance). I had to carry out three tasks while being tailed: meet an “agent”; carry out a “drop” of documents; and receive a package of materials from another agent. Luckily, I pulled off all three assignments without the rendezvous or the document exchanges being noticed by my opponents from the Surveillance Department. They threw everything they had at me, but by darting in and out of crowded stores, subway stations, and underground pedestrian walkways I was able to lose the surveillance teams assigned to me.
No sooner had I settled into my work at the Radio Committee than I was summoned by the Personnel Department and told I would be attending what amounted to a training school for future KGB station chiefs. It was an honor to be chosen, since those selected for the advanced training were being groomed to head KGB operations around the world. I had reached the rank of major, and in September 1964, I joined thirty other young officers at a small, secluded compound just outside Moscow on the road to Gorky.
The head of the nine-month school was Ivan Zaitsev, a kind, savvy, and experienced officer who had served as KGB resident in Israel and Germany. We were well cared for: the food was excellent, our cottages were clean and cozy, and the school supplied us with cars to drive to Moscow whenever we wanted. We were taught psychology and other skills necessary to run a KGB station of anywhere from five to one hundred people. We also received instruction in the latest spy technology, be it long-range listening devices, miniature cameras, or sophisticated radio transmitters. There was a course in recent advancements in coding and decoding. But by far the most valuable aspect of the school was listening to instructors such as Zaitsev—and our fellow students—describe their on-the-ground experience in countries around the world. We discussed successful recruitments as well as those that had gone awry. We analyzed the work of the CIA and other intelligence services. And we talked about what the KGB could do to improve its performance in the spy war.
On the morning of October 14, I was heading to class when Alexander Feklisov, former head of the Washington station and now an instructor at the school, pulled me aside. Feklisov, who had known me since sending me off to Columbia five years before, confided that something strange was happening in Moscow.
“I just heard from Lubyanka that they’re taking down all of Khrushchev’s portraits at headquarters,” he said in a whisper. “It looks as though it’s curtains for him.”
We listened all day for news of Khrushchev’s removal, but there was silence until the following morning. Then it was announced that the Soviet leader was stepping down because of ill health. The real reason, of course, was that the powerful members of the ruling Communist Party Politburo had grown tired of his helter-skelter efforts at reform and wanted to get Soviet Communism back on track. The Politburo summoned Khrushchev home from a Black Sea holiday and—with the heads of the KGB and the military lined up against him—informed the Soviet leader that his decade-long reign had ended. Khrushchev acquiesced and was sent into a comfortable retirement. As far as the Soviet masses were concerned, he might as well have died. There was no mention of him in the Soviet media until his death six years later, when Pravda published a small item saying that a pensioner, N. S. Khrushchev, had passed away.
I was depressed and disturbed by the news of Khrushchev’s ouster. He had been far from an ideal leader. He was indeed unpredictable, getting caught up in harebrained schemes like his plan—dreamed up after his visit to Iowa—to plant corn the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. He had not done nearly enough to eliminate the Communist Party monopoly in all spheres of life or dismantle Stalin’s totalitarian system. Toward the end, he was sanctioning the creation of his own cult of personality—the inevitable deification of a Soviet leader.
But he was the man who ended Stalin’s reign of terror. It was Khrushchev who had tried to reform the lumbering, monolithic Soviet system. And Khrushchev, as well, who backed off the persecution of dissidents and ushered in an era of relative freedom in the arts and literature. And then, in the blink of an eye, the “Gray Cardinals” of the Kremlin had secretly met and decided to end Khrushchev’s little experiment. It was shocking. I tried to tell myself that maybe it was all for the best, and even remember saying that Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev—who succeeded Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Communist Party—looked like he might prove to be an energetic leader. How wrong I was!
Looking back, Khrushchev’s ouster was a clear sign that the era of our long decline had begun. We had lost most illusions that our society would soon catch up with America’s. Cynical jokes were already making the rounds, and by the time Brezhnev and Co. had gotten through with our country we would be left with little but cynicism. In a joke that poked fun at Khrushchev, one man asks another why the Khrushchevian mantra—We will catch and overtake America—could never come true.
“We couldn’t catch and overtake the Americans,” the joke went. “Then they’d be able to see our bare asses.”
Another limerick went like this:
We caught up with America in the output of milk,
But on meat, we fell behind: the bull broke his dick.
In retrospect, it was not only Khrushchev who faded away during that bloodless October putsch. Our optimism, our hopes for a “shining future,” went with him as well.
The KGB may not have been loyal to Khrushchev, but it remained loyal to the Communist Party, the Politburo, the Supreme Soviet—in short, to the Soviet state itself. Two months later, in an elaborate Kremlin ceremony, we were richly rewarded for our fealty.
In what can only be described as a big thank-you bash, our country’s leadership invited more than two hundred stalwart KGB officers to the seat of Soviet power for an awards ceremony and a lavish banquet. I was one of those being honored, receiving the Order of Merit for my recruitment of Cook and my work in New York. If the Soviet leaders had cynically calculated that our morale would be boosted by this show of pomp, they were right. It was the first time in years there had been such a ceremony for the KGB, and I, for one, was elated as I walked into the Kremlin. I had never before entered this former fortress of the czars, and standing under the vaulted ceiling of the Grand Kremlin Palace, waiting for a medal to be pinned on my chest, I felt a surge of pride and patriotism. Semichastny sat on the dais, as did Politburo member and former KGB head Alexander Shelepin. Representing the Soviet political leadership was Anastas Mikoyan, chairman of the Supreme Soviet. In a two-hour ceremony, we walked up to the stage, one by one, where Mikoyan’s chief aide pinned the medals to our chests and shook our hands.
At the end of the awards ceremony, we officers—most in full dress uniform—were ushered into the gilded splendor of St. George’s Hall. Row upon row of tables, laden with food and drink, awaited us. There was vodka and champagne, black caviar, sturgeon, and every imaginable kind of roasted meat. Semichastny, Shelepin, Mikoyan, and other leaders were there as well, and a hum of contentment and small talk filled the palatial room as we waded through the delicacies and drink. It was a splendid moment, and it is clear now that it was not only a thank-you for the KGB’s loyalty during the coup. It was also a coming-out party, meant to show the KGB that—after years of scorn and travails under Khrushchev—the security ministry once again was ascending to its rightful place at the heart of Soviet society. Under Brezhnev, the KGB would become the “Party’s faithful weapon,” its “sword and shield.” Our authority was, at last, on the rebound. And in 1967, when the forceful Yuri Andropov took over the KGB, our power would know no bounds.
In February 1965 I was summoned out of the blue by Boris Solomatin, the veteran KGB officer. He informed me that he was heading to Washington, D.C., as the new chief of station and was putting together a team to go with him. He said he had heard good things about me, was impressed by my previous experience in the United States, and wanted me to accompany him as his deputy for political intelligence.
“You’re going with me,” he said.
“But what about my school?” I asked. “The course doesn’t end until June.”
“The hell with school,” said Solomatin, and my fate was decided. My colleagues agreed that Washington was the place to be.
“If you fail there, then having a scrap of paper saying you’ve completed this course won’t mean a thing,” one said. “If all goes well, no one will be interested in evidence of your qualifications.”
My cover for my next American assignment was even better than my previous one as a Radio Moscow correspondent. This time I would be heading to the United States as a Foreign Ministry press officer, thus giving me a diplomatic passport and diplomatic immunity. To those who had known me in my earlier incarnation as a Soviet correspondent, it would seem perfectly natural that I had decided to give up my career in journalism and begin working as a press attaché. And the KGB had infiltrated the Foreign Ministry to the same extensive degree that it controlled the Soviet media. Nearly half the Soviet diplomats stationed overseas were officers of the KGB or military intelligence. Some real diplomats strongly resented that the long arm of the KGB reached so deeply into their esteemed ranks. Although they quietly fretted and grumbled about the situation, they generally had to do what the KGB asked them to. Anyone who got too vocal about KGB control of the Foreign Ministry would not be sent overseas and might even be drummed out of the diplomatic service altogether.
Leonid Zamyatin, the head of the Foreign Ministry press section, took me under his wing during the four months I apprenticed there. He accompanied me to diplomatic receptions, where I occasionally saw Brezhnev—an energetic, bushy browed man who had not yet taken on the fossilized look of his later years. I once lunched with the British ambassador in Moscow, and I got to know scores of foreign correspondents in my capacity as a “handler” of the foreign press corps, then under tight control in the Soviet Union. When I accompanied a group of U.S. correspondents from the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, ABC News, and other media on a trip to the republic of Georgia, the hospitality of the Caucasus Mountain people made the trip more pleasure than work.
Before leaving for Washington in July 1965, I once again crossed Cook’s trail. My colleagues in Lubyanka informed me that in late 1964, the FBI, after receiving a tip from their source, brought Cook in for interrogation. As it turns out, they were just fishing, for they had no evidence against Cook other than their informer’s word that the scientist was involved with the KGB. The FBI accused Cook of being a spy, threatened to arrest him, and urged him to confess. Cook kept his cool, however, and insisted he was no spy. They showed him pictures of dozens of men they claimed were KGB officers and Soviet intelligence agents, but he could tell from the FBI’s questioning that the Americans were casting about and had no proof of his contacts with me and the New York KGB station. Years later, when Cook and I met in Moscow, he told me he had done his best not to look directly at the photographs out of fear he might recognize me or another KGB officer and let slip that he knew us. Cook hung tough; but the interrogation left him rattled.
The Thiokol scientist spoke to a lawyer, who advised him to leave the country for a while: he should purchase a ticket on Air France since, under de Gaulle, the French wouldn’t let American authorities look at the passenger manifest. Cook followed the attorney’s instructions and flew to Paris. There, he showed up at the Soviet embassy, explained his situation, and asked the Soviet diplomats to inform Moscow of his arrival. Word came back that Cook was indeed a valuable asset, and the following morning he was on a plane to the Soviet capital. Cook settled down in the USSR, peacefully at first. In 1979, however, fourteen years after his arrival, Cook’s case would develop into a full-blown scandal that ended with the scientist in jail and my career as a KGB officer in shambles.
Shortly before I was transferred to Washington, the KGB’s chief of intelligence, Alexander Sakharovsky, called me into his spacious, high-ceilinged room in Lubyanka to give me some encouragement and advice.
“You did a very good job in New York. We all know about it,” said Sakharovsky, an energetic man who remained head of intelligence for fifteen years. “We’re putting you in charge of a lot of people now in Washington. You have to show them how to do a good job. Do not hesitate to set an example. By all means, don’t treat it as a desk job.”
And so in July 1965, off I went to Washington.
Solomatin and I found a disorganized and demoralized KGB station. We had heard from KGB officers serving in Washington that surveillance was so intense and security in our target institutions so tight that it was virtually impossible to work in the American capital. Indeed, when Solomatin and his new team arrived, the KGB station did not have a single American source supplying it with secret information. Solomatin set about to change that, and, with hard work and good fortune, he managed to do so.
The KGB operated in Washington out of the top floor of the Soviet embassy—an imposing stone mansion on 16th Street. Of the hundred or so people stationed at the embassy, about forty were KGB officers. We were packed into a warren of offices, and driving us all was the intimidating—and inspiring—presence of Boris Solomatin.
Before leaving for Washington, I had heard that the new station chief was a hard man—unforgiving, demanding, and curt. That was accurate as far as it went, but it did not go far enough. He also was a real workhorse with a keen intellect, a practical mind, and a talent for pulling off risky intelligence operations.
I will forever remember Solomatin wreathed in a cloud of smoke. He always seemed to have a cigarette in his mouth, and would sit in his small, bug-proof office from nine in the morning until nine at night, enveloped in a thick, choking fog of tobacco smoke. I can still see the smoke swirling over his desk and drifting slowly in front of the tall screens used to shield his office from FBI eavesdropping. If I ever develop lung cancer, I’ll know where it came from. (I tried smoking once as a teenager. I lit up in our communal apartment in Leningrad, not expecting my father to come home. But he walked in, giving me enough time to toss the butt out the window. He sniffed the air and asked me if I had been smoking. I said that I hadn’t, that the smell must have drifted up from the street. Without saying a word, my father marched downstairs, picked up the still smoldering butt from the sidewalk, and returned to our apartment. He walked up to me, still silent, and slapped me so hard across the face that my ears rang. I have never since put a cigarette to my lips.)
Solomatin, whose cover at the Washington embassy was counselor, was probably the best station chief I ever worked with in my thirty-two-year KGB career. He was a glum, moody, stern-looking man with piercing, intelligent eyes. Forcing a smile or a laugh out of him was a Herculean feat, though I was able to do so occasionally as we spent more time together. We hit it off from the start, and I admired his ability—evident especially in the John Walker case—to mobilize people and unite them in carrying out a job. He was undeniably intimidating and seemed perpetually unhappy with the way the station was run.
Solomatin’s spoken English was far from smooth, but his command of the written language was superb, and few people were better at poring over a classified U.S. government document and figuring out its significance. He constantly hounded me to stay on top of a host of unclassified written sources and reports as well, saying they were of invaluable help in intelligence gathering. His one weakness, if he had one, was that about once a month—in an effort to relieve the enormous stress of the job—he would get drunk. The following morning he would be back at his desk, apparently feeling fine. But occasionally during his drinking sessions his tongue would loosen and he would criticize some top Soviet officials. Several times, Solomatin—who held tough, anti-American views—attacked Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko for taking too soft a line with the United States.
His occasional drinking and ensuing outspokenness may explain why Solomatin didn’t climb higher in the KGB hierarchy. After leaving Washington, he became deputy chief of intelligence for Asia and Africa. Solomatin was being considered for the enormously powerful job of chief of intelligence, but the ruthless and cunning Vladimir Kryuchkov—who later became Gorbachev’s KGB chief—derailed Solomatin’s candidacy by whispering in Andropov’s ear that Solomatin had a drinking problem. Kryuchkov then maneuvered himself into position to become chief of intelligence, a job for which Solomatin was eminently more qualified.
