ALEKSEY ISIDOROVICH KULAK, a KGB scientific and technical officer, may have been the only KGB or GRU source who outwitted the KGB, Robert Hanssen, Rick Ames, and author Jay Epstein. He did so by reportedly dying of natural causes before the KGB reacted to knowledge of his fifteen years of spying for the United States. That he was a Hero of the Soviet Union recipient, the Russian equivalent of a Medal of Honor, and was a legendary figure within the corridors of the First Chief Directorate were believed to have also played a role in delaying the arrest.
In March 1962 Kulak, later encrypted FEDORA by the FBI for internal use, and JADE for correspondence to and from the CIA, walked into the FBI field office in New York City and volunteered his services to American intelligence in exchange for cash. An odd duck in the world of espionage, he was more scientist than KGB case officer, and later asked the FBI for assistance in the form of double agents. (On occasion the FBI and CIA provided double or “controlled” agents to their recruited KGB and GRU sources to enhance the source’s operational record with his parent service. The double agent ostensibly agreed to cooperate with and provide information to the source and his organization, but in actuality was under the direction and control of the CIA or FBI. Such operations were always handled with the source’s input, and the double agent was never aware of the source’s clandestine relationship with American intelligence.)
What caused this bureaucratically polite but distant relationship between the two organizations on the Kulak case? It could be summed up in two words: bona fides. As with Polyakov, Kulak was a target of Angleton’s and his cadre of Monster Plot theorists, initially simply because he was a KGB officer who volunteered within months of Polyakov’s approach. As they viewed it, this could not be a coincidence; this was the hidden hand of the KGB directing the operation. Conversely, Hoover and his special agents believed that Kulak (as Polyakov) was the genuine article, and resented Angleton’s, ergo the CIA’s, intrusion in an FBI operation about which they knew little. The rift only widened following the defection of KGB officer Nosenko in 1964 and subsequent reporting by Kulak that supported Nosenko’s legitimacy, a position Angleton never accepted.
Following the removal of Angleton as Chief of the Counterintelligence Staff in December 1974 and his subsequent retirement in 1975, the official CIA position on Kulak’s bona fides began to take a 180-degree turn. Angleton was replaced by George Kalaris, who brought in career SE Division reports officer Leonard McCoy as his deputy. Earlier in his career McCoy, a renowned authority on Soviet military and political matters, had incurred the wrath of the Angletonians for his support of the bona fides of Nosenko, Polyakov, and others. He also believed that Kulak’s bona fides were supported by the information the FBI had supplied to the CIA, even though it was limited in volume and scope.
At the time the CIA began to rethink its official position on Kulak, so too did the FBI. In a bizarre twist senior FBI Special Agent and counterintelligence expert James Nolan conducted a review of the Kulak case and concluded that it had been a KGB-controlled operation from inception. The FBI now believed that Hoover’s premier source was a phoney. At CIA headquarters news of the Bureau’s about-face was greeted with disbelief and bewilderment. McCoy decided to challenge their findings and requested CIA access to the FBI files on the Kulak operation. In an unprecedented move, the FBI agreed. McCoy selected Cynthia Hausmann, a senior division case officer and counterintelligence specialist, and Sandy as the members of the CIA team. Issued FBI non-escort visitor badges two and three, the women spent four months reviewing the Kulak material at FBI headquarters under the watchful eye of Larry McWilliams, a crusty outspoken special agent and supporter of Nolan’s theories of the case.
Cynthia and Sandy were provided with summary statements of Kulak’s reporting, which included agent leads, KGB organization, and modus operandi. Repeated attempts to see meeting transcripts with verbatim source comments were met with a polite but forceful no. According to McWilliams, they would serve no useful purpose. The Bureau had accurately reflected Kulak’s remarks in the summaries. After several months McWilliams acceded to the request and gave them partial transcripts of discussions of selected sensitive counterintelligence issues. However, to their chagrin they learned that many meetings had not been taped and others had either not been transcribed or the tapes were no longer available. In sum, a complete record of Kulak’s reporting in his own words did not exist even at the FBI.
Early congenial discussions among the three began to disintegrate into daily lectures from McWilliams that Kulak was bad because almost every operation he described was handled contrary to standard FBI procedure. “The FBI would not do it that way,” was his comment and appeared to be a large part of the FBI’s or at least McWilliams’ basis for concluding that Kulak was a controlled source. Despite numerous attempts to convince him that the KGB was not the FBI and had different rules and regulations for engagement, McWilliams refused to concede the point. The KGB had fooled the FBI for years, but no longer. That McCoy sent two women to review his and Nolan’s work only inflamed him more. As he often pointed out, the CIA could do what it wanted with respect to female professionals, but he was from the Hoover school and women did not belong in such ranks.
Upon the ladies’ return to CIA headquarters, Cynthia drafted a report of their findings and conclusions regarding Kulak’s bona fides. Specifically, Kulak had been a legitimate penetration of the KGB from his walk-in in New York in 1962. Of equal importance, the FBI had failed to recognize Kulak’s value and importance as a source of positive intelligence, viewing him primarily from a narrow counterintelligence perspective. In early 1976 senior Agency management accepted the paper as the official CIA position on the bona fides of Kulak. The CIA and the FBI were still on opposite sides of the case.
Spring of 1976 brought a major change in the operation. Kulak, now fifty-six, was departing New York and returning to Moscow. The FBI and CIA believed that he would not be assigned abroad again because he was approaching mandatory retirement. SE Division officers Ben Pepper and Gus Hathaway, the latter scheduled for assignment to Moscow as Chief of Station, decided to take a stab at convincing the FBI to turn Kulak over to the CIA for internal handling. The FBI denied their request, claiming that Kulak had refused contact with the Agency in Moscow. The SE officers persisted and finally convinced the FBI to let Hathaway meet with Kulak and attempt to persuade him to communicate inside the Soviet Union.
Hathaway was successful. Kulak departed the United States in August 1976, trained in internal communication, equipped with a series of dead drop and signal sites, and ready to provide intelligence to the U.S. government.
Having had no operational history with Kulak and only a handful of meetings with him before his return, it was impossible for the CIA to predict whether he would communicate as promised or simply decide to destroy his package. To everyone’s astonishment, on his first scheduled recontact in July 1977 he signaled that he was ready to load one of his dead drops. The package was retrieved and its contents were startling, not so much in the material passed but in what his note promised. Among the items was a list of Soviet officials in the United States working against the American scientific and technical target. The list was neatly hand printed and its detail would have taken Kulak hours to amass and prepare. Further, he stated that in the next exchange in the fall he would include the following: the identities and targets of all Soviet officials and scientists worldwide involved in the collection of U.S. scientific and technical information and the five- and ten-year operational plans of the KGB Scientific and Technical Directorate. The eccentric old scientist was prepared to provide the United States with the KGB blueprint ten years in advance on the top priority intelligence collection requirement of the day—technology transfer. All we had to do was wait for his signal, retrieve his package, and reap the intelligence bonanza, or so we believed.
On 15 July 1977, about a week after the recovery of Kulak’s package, the KGB ambushed Moscow Station officer Martha Peterson while she was trying to communicate with CIA source Aleksandr Dmitriyevich Ogorodnik, a Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs officer recruited in Bogota. Two weeks later without incident the station picked up a package from Polyakov filled with hundreds of pages of documents. August was calm, but the first of September brought a second compromise. Station officer Vincent Crockett was arrested servicing a dead drop for CIA source Anatoliy Nikolayevich Filatov, a GRU officer recruited and handled in-place in Algiers. Shortly thereafter CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner ordered a stand-down of all Moscow Station operational activity. There would be no additional embarrassments to the administration. Moscow was closed for business until further notice.
Turner’s edict was met with an uproar from SE Division and others in the Directorate of Operations. He could not be serious. No one, including the director, could or would shut down the collection of high-level intelligence from the Soviet Union. But Turner stood firm, only adding to the pandemonium when he set the parameters for reconsideration of his decision. Unless or until the directorate could guarantee that there would be no further compromises, the ban would remain in effect. Did we really have a director who did not understand basic tenets of espionage activity? It always involved calculated risk and always violated the laws of the target country. The director’s demands could not be met.
Kulak became the central figure in the firestorm between the director and SE Division. In another month or so, we would know the KGB’s shortcomings, their strengths, their specific targets, and the identities of all who were targeted against us in the scientific and technical field. At a minimum it would save untold millions in expenditures that would otherwise be necessary to uncover and counter Soviet efforts. These arguments did not impress or dissuade Turner. We had no recourse and only one option—wait to hear from Kulak and then do nothing.
Kulak signaled his intention to fill his dead drop right on schedule. Bound by Turner’s directive, Moscow Station did not respond with a sign that it was prepared to retrieve the material. Again on schedule Kulak marked his signal site for a second time. Once more the station took no action. The CIA phase of the Kulak operation that had begun with such promise appeared to have ended in silence. The director had been obeyed, and the files were closed.
In 1983, while writing The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, author John Ranelagh interviewed Turner, who is quoted as stating: “My feeling with the DDO was to tell them I wanted to know when they were planning to take a risk above a certain threshold. And when they did, I’d ask what was the percentage risk of them or their agent getting caught. I wouldn’t say ‘use a different technique.’ I didn’t know techniques. But I would say I was willing or unwilling to take the risk.”1 On 11 December 1985, Turner wrote to Ranelagh as follows: “You suggest I was cautious about taking risks in the clandestine collection process. In four years there was only one risk the espionage branch asked me to take that I did not approve—sometimes we debated and refined the operation—but the spooks got all the support they asked for. The problem was they didn’t have enough risky proposals.”2
In his own book, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition, published one year later, Turner stated, “the question, though, was which of the more sensitive operations I should personally control. Espionage operations came in such different forms, often of a kind that I found it almost impossible to write specific rules. I was able, however, to define certain categories of actions to be cleared with me. These included payments to agents when they exceed certain dollar amounts; recruitments of foreign agents at Cabinet level or above; dispensing any lethal material, such as explosives or poison requested by an agent who might feel he would be tortured if caught; any operation where the risks were high and exposure could seriously embarrass the United States.”3
It was apparent to those involved in the Kulak operation that “exposure” was the operative word to Turner when he shut down Moscow Station activities. He had no problem with the earlier and successful Kulak and Polyakov dead drop retrievals in July, but after the Peterson and Crockett arrests the collection of intelligence in Moscow had become too risky.
In March 1978 Turner did an about-face and temporarily lifted his ban on Moscow Station to conduct the most daring and dangerous of operational acts—an attempt to establish personal contact with an asset and exfiltrate him from the Soviet Union. Kulak was that agent.
Distrust and dislike of Turner’s decisions had reached such a level that many in SE Division were surprised at his sudden reversal of policy. However, in what may be a sanitized reference to Kulak, the rationale for his blessing of the impending operation can be found in his book: “The most daring exploit I witnessed in my four years as DCI was a successful effort by the Agency to protect the life of an agent who thought he was about to be arrested. In part this is a moral obligation; in part, it is a pragmatic matter, because it assures future agents that they will be taken care of if at all possible.”4
In early 1978 Edward Jay Epstein published Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. In the book Epstein described FBI source FEDORA in sufficient detail that KGB counterintelligence would be able to put him on a short list of suspected American spies. Among the facts Epstein presented were the following: FEDORA was a KGB First Chief Directorate officer; he specialized in scientific and technical intelligence collection against the United States; he was assigned to a cover position at the United Nations in New York; he volunteered to the FBI in March 1962; for more than six years he provided the FBI with information about Soviet espionage activities; in 1971 he told the FBI that Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers had been provided to Soviet intelligence; and at the time of Colby’s removal of Angleton and McCoy’s appointment to the CI staff (1974–75) FEDORA was still providing the FBI with information.5
News of Epstein’s book stunned SE Division. It was incomprehensible that the existence of, let alone details about, a valued penetration of the KGB would appear in the public domain. While the investigation of such a leak was an FBI responsibility, an agent’s life was potentially in grave danger and the CIA had to act immediately.
The operational plan called for Hathaway to “get black,” that is, evade KGB surveillance and call Kulak at his home, hoping that he was there and that he would answer the phone. Hathaway would then briefly describe the situation and offer Kulak safe exit from the Soviet Union and asylum in the United States. Assuming Kulak’s acceptance of the proposal, the actual exfiltration would begin. Everyone involved knew that under the circumstances the odds for success were not in our and our agent’s favor. Such operations required months of detailed preparation and even then luck played an important role in any success. Moreover, Moscow Station had never attempted an exfiltration. Kulak would be the first.
The night before the operation’s onset, a massive snowstorm hit the Washington, DC, area and a late evening at the office turned into an all-night stay. Weather in Moscow was no less harsh. With frigid temperatures and snow, Hathaway spent hours on the dark streets trying to lose KGB surveillance. He was forced to abort. The next evening he made a second attempt and this time he was successful. Kulak was home and immediately recognized Hathaway’s voice. He was given the news and quietly responded without hesitation or fright. He thanked Hathaway for the notification and the offer, but said that he would be fine. The call ended.
Despite Kulak’s conviction that he would be safe, we continued to be fearful that it was just a matter of time before he was arrested due to Epstein’s revelations. However, that did not take place; for years we heard nothing, although we had a variety of sources. It was not until the early 1990s, long before we were aware of Hanssen’s treason and before the case against Ames had been proven, that we received word about Kulak. He had died of natural causes about a decade earlier and more recently his portrait, which was prominently displayed because of his status as a Hero of the Soviet Union, had been removed from the hallways of the KGB. Kulak had been correct in his pronouncement to Hathaway. He knew that it would take more than his exposure in a book written by a Western author for the KGB to take action against a Hero of the Soviet Union. What he would have been unable to fathom, we suspect, was that the KGB would continue to conceal knowledge of his treason despite reporting from Hanssen and Ames. In the end the only price Kulak paid was the loss of his place on the KGB’s wall of heroes.
Whether inside or outside of the world of espionage, seemingly insignificant events may later have profound impact. The following is such a story.
During Polyakov’s home leave in 1968 Sandy was asked to inventory the contents of a large bank of five-drawer safes in her branch. Dust covered the files, which contained only non-record copies of official documents and therefore should have been destroyed years earlier. However, one folder caught her attention. Wedged among the inconsequential material in the bottom drawer of one safe was an official DO operational file (a 201) on a Soviet official named Nikolay Chernov. It contained only a few documents, including a visa request for temporary travel to New York in the 1960s and a reference to sensitive-source information identifying Chernov as a GRU officer. Who was this man and why was his seemingly forgotten 201 in a branch that did not retain such records and obviously had not looked at the file for years? Perplexed, but a new employee recently schooled in the need-to-know principle, Sandy simply took note of the Soviet’s name, finished her task, and handed the pages of her inventory to the deputy branch chief.
One morning four years later, in 1972, an employee of Jeanne’s in the division’s Biographics Branch appeared in Sandy’s office holding the file of a Nikolay Chernov and asking for a copy of the sensitive-source reporting referenced in the file. Chernov had requested a visa for a short trip to the West, including a stop in New York City.
Sandy immediately recognized the name as that of the subject of the mysterious 201 she had inventoried years before. This time she had the courage to tell her boss about the strange story of Chernov and his official file, which someone must have returned to the directorate’s main files after her inventory. Later that day her chief related news shocking not only to her but also to him and a number of others in their chain of command. Chernov, code-named NICKNACK by the Bureau and later PDCLIP by the CIA, was a GRU technical officer who had volunteered to the FBI in the early 1960s and whose cooperation had been known only to a few former senior SE Division officers, obviously someone in the old branch that followed GRU cases, and, of course, Angleton.
The division immediately phoned the FBI to ensure they were aware of Chernov’s planned travel, scheduled for the following week. They were not. A copy of the identical visa request had not yet made its way through their bureaucracy. Thankfully, the CIA had given the FBI sufficient time to plan and attempt to recontact Chernov, with whom they had not been in touch for about ten years. We were proud we could assist and they were appreciative of the help.
Several years passed before SE Division learned that the FBI had a successful exchange with Chernov and just how important that exchange had been. During a brief encounter with the FBI in the New York area Chernov turned over documentary material containing thousands of leads, known to the CIA and FBI as the MORINE leads, to heretofore unknown GRU agents abroad. The FBI, in turn, quickly and properly forwarded the material to the CIA through established channels at that time—directly to Angleton and his counterintelligence staff.
Unconscionably, Angleton ensured that for three years Chernov’s gold mine of information remained buried and uninvestigated in the staff’s files, because he was believed to be a Soviet-controlled source and part of the Monster Plot. The voluminous reporting was discovered by an individual working for George Kalaris, Angleton’s replacement, after Angleton’s 1975 departure.
The volume of the material was so great that Kalaris sought the assistance of SE Division’s Counterintelligence Group in the research and dissemination of the reporting to intelligence services worldwide, a project still being carried out in the early 1980s. The information included but was not limited to the Serge Fabiew GRU spy ring that had been operating in France since 1963, and the former head of the Swiss National Air Defense forces, Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire, who became a GRU agent in 1961.6
In the early 1990s, some twenty years after his last contact with the FBI, Chernov was arrested in Moscow. In the more permissive post–Cold War atmosphere, he was sentenced to eight years but amnestied after less than a year. He was known to Ames and, presumably, Hanssen. One or both of them no doubt fingered him to the KGB. However, because this was a long dormant case, and Chernov had left the GRU many years earlier, the authorities delayed arresting him until they no longer faced a source-sensitivity problem.
In 1974 during his first tour abroad Leonid Georgiyevich Poleshchuk,7 a young KGB political intelligence officer assigned to Kathmandu, Nepal, became a CIA asset. He was encrypted CKRUN at the time, with a later change to GTWEIGH. To some degree the circumstances of his recruitment mirrored his impulsive personality. A CIA case officer with whom he was in contact had developed him almost to the point of recruitment, but had to leave Nepal before he could make the formal offer. Subsequently, Poleshchuk volunteered his services to his CIA friend’s replacement. In a strange twist of fate it was Poleshchuk’s boss, KGB Resident Seliverstov, who deserves the credit for pushing the junior officer over the edge and into the camp of the Main Enemy. He insisted that Poleshchuk pay for a bottle of whisky the latter intended to use with one of his developmental sources. This was the last straw for the rash Poleshchuk, who saw the resident as a tyrant—a habitual abuser of the system who left his subordinates to fend for themselves. Poleshchuk abruptly left the residency and contacted his acquaintance at the U.S. embassy. He later commented that but for a bottle of booze he might not have sought the American’s counsel and assistance.
We later learned that Poleshchuk’s motivation apparently went far beyond anger at a domineering boss, a view reportedly also held by a number of Seliverstov’s subordinates over the years. In November 1973 Poleshchuk’s father passed away after a long, painful struggle. Poleshchuk wanted to return home to attend the funeral. The KGB denied his request. The following month his only child, eleven-year-old Andrei, became ill, requiring hospitalization until early 1974. Poleshchuk again asked permission to leave Nepal. Once more the answer was no. It could easily be argued that the KGB itself deserves a great deal of the credit for Poleshchuk’s decision to seek out the Americans, an action that he took within a year of his father’s death and his son’s illness.
Sandy was supporting the nascent Poleshchuk operation at headquarters when in early December 1974 Ben Pepper, chief of the Operations Branch in the division’s Counterintelligence Group, popped into her office and asked if she would like to spend Christmas in Nepal. Local CIA Chief John B, who was Poleshchuk’s new case officer, had requested headquarters’ assistance. He wanted someone who knew the KGB, could set up case files, refine the guidance on requirements, author cables, and provide other support as required. Thrilled at the prospect of her first overseas assignment and with the blessing of her family, one week later she was on her way to Nepal.
Three days later Sandy arrived in Nepal anxious to meet John B, a man she had never seen and with whom she had no contact instructions. But how hard could it be to identify an American official from those greeting the daily Air Nepal flight from New Delhi? This was the end of the world, after all. Unfortunately, it was more difficult than expected and almost resulted in an operational disaster before she had been on the ground five minutes. Upon deplaning Sandy immediately saw a well-dressed Caucasian man in the mostly Nepalese crowd, who obviously had to be John B. She uttered a faint hello, but before she could identify herself by name the stranger began shouting greetings in Russian to a group behind her. Briefly wondering how she could mistake a Russian for an American diplomat, she quickly extricated herself from the Soviet contingent and bolted for the terminal building. There the elusive CIA chief suddenly appeared, introduced himself, and explained that they had to leave the airport immediately. He mumbled that he must avoid an acquaintance he had just seen. The mystery man turned out to be KGB Resident Seliverstov who was instrumental in our recruitment of Poleshchuk and who was none other than the Soviet gentleman Sandy had earlier approached. As luck would have it, they did not escape the KGB chief; he accosted John near his parked car and bluntly asked the identity of his visitor. Thinking on the fly, John introduced Sandy as a guest of the U.S. ambassador’s wife. This appeared to satisfy Seliverstov and they all went their separate ways. What a way to start Christmas in Nepal.
For the Kathmandu officers involved with Poleshchuk and his various antics, the next month was a whirlwind of activity. This included meeting preparations, debriefings, initial planning for internal communications, and refinement of an exfiltration plan should Poleshchuk decide to defect rather than return to Moscow. The latter possibility was a daily concern. Poleshchuk was prone to act before he considered the consequences. It was well within the realm of possibility that he would get drunk, drive his KGB operational vehicle to John B’s house, and say “let’s go, I’ve just punched my resident in the nose.” The office had spent considerable time and effort planning for such an event, taking into account the fishbowl-operating environment of Kathmandu and the limited available options even in a nonemergency situation. That plan was soon to be tested as part of a surprise birthday party John B’s officers had planned for him, fitting his reputation as a legendary prankster.
Late one afternoon the pregnant wife of the deputy chief notified John that she had an inebriated Poleshchuk in her living room demanding to be taken to the United States. The chief flew into action, initiating each step of the exfiltration when he suddenly realized that there were flaws in the original plan and he would be forced to improvise. An hour later he appeared at his deputy’s home to collect what he assumed was an even more distraught and anxious Poleshchuk. To John’s officers’ delight and his own anger, he was greeted with cheers of Happy Birthday. After a tirade of expletives, he soon calmed down when it was pointed out that, while he had been duped, the weaknesses of a flawed operational plan had been exposed and could be corrected.
Fortunately for all involved in the case, the revised exfiltration plan was never implemented for “the wild one,” as Poleshchuk was affectionately dubbed. Rather, he left Kathmandu in 1975 with diamonds as payment for his services, an internal communications plan, and a promise to resume contact in the Soviet Union. For ten years there was no word from Poleshchuk until early 1985, when Sandy’s and his paths again crossed.
One morning Sandy, then chief of SE External Operations for Africa, received a cable from Lagos describing a walk-in who said, “I come from the land of the tall mountains.” The walk-in requested that this message be sent to Washington and promised they would know who he was. Sandy immediately recognized that it was Poleshchuk, the young KGB political intelligence officer whose case she had supported in Kathmandu in 1974. What were the odds that eleven years later they would be on the opposite ends of the same cable? Even more incredibly, Jeanne in Libreville received a copy of the cable and, like Sandy, recognized the case. As it happened, the CIA chief from Lagos was vacationing in Libreville to enjoy the beach and some French cuisine. His deputy thought he should be advised of the walk-in.
Headquarters immediately informed Lagos that they did indeed have a new source, provided them with the history of the case, and advised them to hold on for the ride of their life. This asset would try everyone’s patience and the operation would require careful, detailed planning to ensure his safety.
After the first sit-down meeting with Poleshchuk it was clear that he was a changed man. Thankfully for all, headquarters’ initial warnings were wrong and history had not repeated itself. Erased from Poleshchuk’s personality were his earlier brashness, impulsiveness, immaturity, and self-centeredness. In its place his new handlers found a soft-spoken, reflective, cautious individual whose drinking had moderated and who would never consider a precipitous operational act that might compromise himself or his family. The “wild one” had metamorphosed into an ideal agent. Additionally, he was no longer a political intelligence case officer but had switched to the counterintelligence line of the KGB, a specialty that would allow him fairly wide access to information on KGB penetrations of and operations against members of foreign intelligence services, particularly upon his reassignment to Moscow from Nigeria.
In late May 1985 a discussion took place at headquarters that would have a profound effect on the future of the Poleshchuk case. It involved his request for the $20,000 he was owed, his desire to take the money with him on his upcoming Moscow vacation, and his concern about smuggling the money past the KGB border control. Sandy and several others argued that the situation was a perfect opportunity to convince Poleshchuk of our ability to communicate securely inside the Soviet Union during his eventual permanent reassignment there, rather than sit back and wait another five or ten years before he was reassigned in the West.
The argument was straightforward. Just pass him the money via a dead drop that contained no spy paraphernalia and no secret messages. In a worst-case scenario, if he were caught with the money, the KGB would suspect criminal activity, but they would have no proof of espionage. There would be nothing to connect Poleshchuk to American intelligence assuming, of course, that the designated Moscow Station officer did not place the drop until he or she was surveillance free.
Rick Ames, as chief of the Soviet Branch of the Division’s CI Group, had an advisory role in operational decisions involving division sources and developmental cases outside the Soviet Union. For the first time in Sandy’s experience in the Africa Branch, Rick not only exercised his role on one of her cases, but did so forcefully. He was adamant in his disagreement on the passage of funds in Moscow and repeatedly argued that the potential risk of compromise to Poleshchuk was too great. Division chief Gerber sided with Sandy, and Poleshchuk agreed to retrieve his money via a Moscow dead drop.
In July 1985 Poleshchuk and his family departed Lagos for their vacation with an anticipated return to Nigeria in September. Poleshchuk failed to appear for his first scheduled recontact in late September. He was also a no-show for number two. Worry set in and on 2 October Milt Bearden, then deputy chief of SE Division, called Sandy to his office and showed her an excerpt of a cable from an unidentified field station. The reporting was obviously from a sensitive source and it was a DO officer’s worst nightmare. Poleshchuk had been arrested. It would be Sandy’s job to inform his field case officers.
How do you convey the sense of loss and the fear that we individually or collectively may have made the mistake or mistakes that cost this man his life? After much thought, anguish, and inability to say anything else, the message was simple and pointed. “There is no easy way to say this. GTWEIGH has been arrested.” Everyone involved in the case from Lagos to Moscow to Langley remembered the day they learned of the tragedy. As we assumed at the time and learned later, the unmentionable consequences became a trial, a conviction on 12 June 1986, and a bullet to the head on 30 July 1986 for the thoughtful, reasoned man who by the time of our contact in Lagos had truly come to understand the risks on his path of treason.
What had gone wrong? The analysis began the next day. After a review of all aspects of the operation we concluded that the Moscow Station officer had been under KGB surveillance when he put the money down. Thus, the KGB was able to establish the link between Poleshchuk and the CIA. Ames had been right; the risk was too great. Nine years would pass before Sandy, the Moscow Station officer, Poleshchuk’s Lagos case officers, Gerber, and others could publicly unload their burden of guilt for their agent’s compromise. Poleshchuk’s death was the direct result of Ames’ treason. Early in his treasonous activities he informed the KGB about Poleshchuk’s relationship with the CIA. Long before the Moscow Station officer loaded the dead drop, the KGB knew for whom it was intended, where it was located, and approximately when it would be retrieved.
General Rem Sergeyevich Krasilnikov, who directed KGB operations against CIA personnel and agents in Moscow from 1979 to 1992 while serving as chief of the American Department of the Second (Counterintelligence) Chief Directorate of the KGB, discusses the compromise of Poleshchuk in a recent book. Krasilnikov assigns initial responsibility for the loss of Poleshchuk to the CIA Moscow Station, which failed to note KGB surveillance and led them right to the spot where he placed a secret container for an unknown individual. On 2 August 1985 a heavy-set man of middle age, who turned out to be Poleshchuk, cleared the dead drop. In a subsequent investigation and trial, the details of Poleshchuk’s treason were revealed. Not surprisingly, Krasilnikov makes no mention of Ames’ role in Poleshchuk’s capture and, to the contrary, calls Ames a “scapegoat” for the failures of Moscow Station.8
However, Viktor Ivanovich Cherkashin, the senior KGB counterintelligence officer in Washington in 1985 and Ames’ first case officer, contradicts Krasilnikov’s account of the Poleshchuk loss. According to Cherkashin, Ames betrayed Poleshchuk. The KGB’s story of the latter’s unmasking was nothing more than an ornate fabrication by the Second Chief Directorate.9 Ames, of course, freely admits that he betrayed Poleshchuk to the KGB.
Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Mikhaylovich Piguzov, a KGB political intelligence officer code-named GTJOGGER, was recruited by the CIA in Indonesia in 1978 through a bizarre chain of events. A CIA case officer had developed a close friendship with Piguzov that subsequently led to a recruitment approach. Piguzov agreed to cooperate with his CIA friend, and headquarters and the field geared up to handle the new source. Then everything fell apart. Amid photographers and the local press, the Soviet ambassador to Indonesia lodged an official protest with the Indonesian government, accusing the United States of attempting to subvert Soviet diplomat Vladimir Piguzov. There was shock and disbelief in our office in Jakarta and at CIA headquarters. How could we have been so wrong about the nature of our officer’s relationship with Piguzov and his commitment to cooperate?
Fortunately, all was not lost. Several days later Piguzov contacted our officer, informed him that he told his KGB security officer about our approach, and was now ready to work for the CIA. In explanation Piguzov reasoned that KGB counterintelligence would never suspect him of being an American spy because he had reported our advances, claiming that he had turned them down. He was now above reproach.
For the remainder of his tour in Jakarta Piguzov provided information on KGB officers and agent operations in Indonesia, to include those being run by the KGB residency in Jakarta and the sub-residency in Surabaya as well as in other Southeast Asian countries. One of the most important agent leads provided by Piguzov was that to David Henry Barnett. Barnett, a former CIA officer, had resigned in 1970 after completion of a tour in Indonesia. He remained in the area and, in late 1976, following the failure of a business venture and faced with large debt, he approached the KGB and offered to sell them classified information. During the period of his cooperation with the Soviets he provided details on a CIA collection program targeted against Soviet military weapons, and identified CIA case officers and assets. The KGB wanted him to re-apply to the CIA but, faced with the prospect of being polygraphed, he demurred. He had, however, put out feelers to other U.S. government components.
Barnett was indicted on espionage charges on 24 October 1980. He pled guilty and was sentenced to eighteen years in federal prison. He was paroled in 1990 after serving approximately ten years.10
After completion of his tour in Jakarta, Piguzov returned to Moscow, where he was assigned to the Andropov Institute, the KGB training academy. He eventually assumed the senior position of secretary of the Communist Party at the Institute, a position he held at the time of his February 1987 arrest. Having been given up by Ames in the summer of 1985, Piguzov was subsequently tried and executed.
Boris Nikolayevich Yuzhin, encrypted KAHLUA by the FBI and GTT WINE by the CIA, is one of the luckiest men alive. A KGB officer in San Francisco under TASS journalist cover, he was recruited by the FBI in 1979 and run by them for the next three years. The CIA played a subordinate but important role in this operation, because one of our officers, Colin T, participated in some of the meetings to obtain information for dissemination to the U.S. intelligence community. We also provided technical support in the form of a miniature spy camera that Yuzhin used to photograph documents. Alas, he was subsequently obliged to confess to his FBI handler that he had lost this camera somewhere in the Soviet consulate.
In 1982, Yuzhin returned to Moscow for a new assignment. His FBI handlers did not want the CIA to run him in the Soviet Union, and he had not been issued any means of internal communication. We heard nothing about him until the defection of KGB CI officer Vitaliy Sergeyevich Yurchenko at the beginning of August 1985. Yurchenko reported that the KGB had found the spy camera in a recreation room in the Soviet consulate and had launched an extensive CI investigation. This inquiry was later bolstered by some vague reporting from Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA officer who volunteered to the KGB in 1984. Eventually the field of suspects had been narrowed to a very few. One of those was Yuzhin.
Yuzhin was arrested in 1986, tried and convicted, and sentenced to prison. He was released in 1991 as part of Boris Yeltsin’s general amnesty. In retrospect, it is amazing that he survived. He was first compromised by his own carelessness, then by the treasonous activities of the CIA’s Howard and Ames, and the FBI’s Pitts and Hanssen.
Sergey Ivanovich Bokhan, a GRU colonel run by the CIA during two tours in Athens, Greece, was one of the few agents who survived the wholesale arrests, imprisonments, trials, and executions that began in the summer of 1985. That he was not among the missing or the known compromised can be attributed to his fear in late May 1985 that he was being recalled to Moscow on a ruse. Burton Gerber, chief of SE Division, and Dave Forden, our chief in Athens, agreed that something was amiss shortly after Bokhan signaled for an emergency meeting. He informed us that he had received a message from his brother in Moscow asking him to return to deal with some problems connected with his son, who was a cadet at a Soviet military academy. The brother knew of no issues and the CIA abetted Bokhan’s departure from Greece followed by his arrival in the United States, where he lives today.
To this day, however, as with Gordievsky, a mystery surrounds Bokhan’s possible compromise. (The Gordievsky riddle is described in Chapter 17.) Ames has insisted that he did not give up major CIA and FBI assets until 13 June 1985, which was about three weeks after Bokhan’s precipitate departure from Greece. Either Ames identified Bokhan to the KGB earlier than he admitted, or Bokhan and we incorrectly interpreted the message from Moscow. A third possibility exists, as it does with Gordievsky. Bokhan was betrayed by someone or something else and the KGB’s plan to bring him home failed. The truth remains unknown, at least to Sandy and Jeanne because we have no current access to information on the subject.
The story of Bokhan’s cooperation with the CIA began in Athens in the spring of 1976 during his first tour abroad. The circumstances of his recruitment could well have been titled “Foreign Language Mishaps Abroad” or “Sign Language Sometimes Works.” A CIA station officer had struck up an acquaintance with Bokhan, based on their mutual interest in tennis. They played periodically, but conversation was limited because the case officer spoke no Russian and only a little Greek. Bokhan spoke Greek but little English. After one such get-together, the CIA officer returned to the CIA station and reported: “I know I pitched him and I think he said yes and I think he pitched me and I know I said no.” A Russian-speaking officer attended the next meeting and so began the long relationship between Bokhan and the CIA. He had indeed said yes to the recruitment pitch. He was encrypted CKWORTH, later changed to GTBLIZZARD.
SE Division officer Dick C was sent to Athens in the summer of 1976 to handle Bokhan for the duration of the latter’s assignment. Meetings were overtly recorded and held approximately every other week in three or four different safe houses, according to a rotating schedule. Bokhan provided information on GRU operations and personnel in Greece and elsewhere in the region, photographed GRU correspondence to and from Moscow using a CIA custom-made camera that looked like a candy cane key fob, and furnished copies of the unclassified version of the Soviet publication Military Thought, not generally available in the West.
One of Bokhan’s most famous agent leads was to an individual who provided the GRU with the top secret instruction manual for the U.S. spy satellite known as the KH-11. According to Bokhan, one afternoon in 1977 he walked into the GRU residency’s work space to find Mikhail Zavaliy, a fellow residency officer under naval attaché cover, working intently on a cable to Moscow. When Zavaliy was summoned to the resident’s office, Bokhan stole a peek at the message Zavaliy had begun to write. Zavaliy had just received a copy of the manual for the KH-ll. Bokhan could provide no further details other than that the word “Rugger” appeared in Zavaliy’s draft. Bokhan also did not know who or what Rugger was, but speculated that perhaps it was an individual’s last name. Bokhan signaled for an unscheduled meeting and passed the information to Dick C.
Bokhan’s lead was passed to the FBI, which eventually arrested William Kampiles, a former CIA entry-level employee assigned to the Directorate of Intelligence Watch Office, in August 1978 and charged him with six counts of espionage. As it turned out, Rugger was simply the logo that appeared on the shirt Kampiles wore during his meeting with Zavaliy in Athens. Kampiles was convicted and sentenced to forty years in prison. In the late 1990s he was scheduled to be released after serving nearly nineteen years of his original sentence.
While Bokhan always appeared for meetings on time and prepared for work, his love for and purchases of consumer goods with his CIA gains became legendary at headquarters and remained a constant tug-of-war between case officer and agent. Dick C often reminded Bokhan of the need to curb his spending so his unexplained apparent affluence would not attract the attention of KGB security, but Bokhan was equally steadfast in his numerous requests for more money. On one occasion he noted that, according to recent news accounts, trash workers in New York City were on strike with a demand for higher wages. As Bokhan correctly reminded Dick and those at CIA headquarters, the New York trash collectors already made more than he and “I’m not giving you garbage.”
Despite his protestations, Dick C limited Bokhan to a thousand dollars a month in cash, with another thousand deposited to an escrow account maintained at CIA Headquarters. However, true to form Bokhan continued to spend all that he was given on everything from expensive shoes to a fur coat for his wife, an exercise cycle, and gifts for his superiors at GRU headquarters.
Bokhan and his family left Athens by train in late summer 1978 en route to permanent reassignment in Moscow. He arrived at the railroad station laden with numerous suitcases containing the spoils of his CIA labor. There he and his family received a rousing send-off from members of the local Soviet embassy. Dick C, heavily disguised as a filthy, impoverished European hippie, silently watched the entire scene while sitting on the ground at the end of the station platform to ensure that Bokhan was free of KGB escort. He was.
Before his departure, Bokhan was trained in internal communications and issued materials that included a pre-arranged signal by which he could indicate that he was alive and well. He activated this signal about a year after his return to the Soviet Union but no further word was received from him until 1982, when he returned to Athens for his second tour, now a full colonel and deputy GRU resident. He followed his Athens recontact instructions perfectly, and Dick C, who was occupied with new challenges, was sent to Greece to make the initial contact and introduce Bokhan to a new CIA case officer. The operation proceeded smoothly and productively until May 1985, when the fateful cable arrived from Moscow that precipitated his escape, thus changing his life, that of the son whom he left in Moscow, and that of the daughter and wife whom he left in Athens.
The case of Adolf Grigoryevich Tolkachev demonstrates how it was possible for the CIA Station in Moscow to conduct regular personal meetings with a Soviet military electronics expert in the heart of Moscow and, in so doing, produce reams of high-quality intelligence. It also shows how easily such an important operation can be brought to an untimely end, with drastic consequences to the Soviet scientist in question, by the acts of a CIA traitor.11
Tolkachev (first encrypted CKSPHERE, later GTVANQUISH) made his initial approach in January 1977, by passing a note to then-Chief of Station Bob Fulton, who was filling his tank at a Moscow gas station. The note, while indicating the bearer’s wish for a confidential discussion with an American official, did not give any precise details about what the individual could or would do for us. Therefore it was decided not to reply to his overture.12
Tolkachev would make five more approaches, of increasing specificity, before CIA headquarters approved plans to respond to him. The CIA was well aware that the KGB Second Chief Directorate, which ran operations against our station in Moscow, had a well-developed program to place “dangles” or false volunteers in our path. This was done for several purposes: to tie up the slender resources of our small Station, to uncover our personnel and methods of operation, to get active officers declared persona non grata, and to increase our understandable reluctance to deal with such volunteers. The KGB knew full well that some of the most dangerous cases, among them GRU colonel Oleg Penkovsky and KGB officer Aleksandr Cherepanov, had begun in this way. Tolkachev himself realized the problem, telling us in a February 1978 note that he seemed to be caught in a vicious circle. For his own safety, he could not tell us too much about himself and his access. Yet without this information we appeared to look at him as a “provocation.”
More than twenty personal meetings took place in the next five years, either on the street or in Tolkachev’s car. There were several rocky periods, to include a major security investigation at Tolkachev’s place of employment, and the periodic inability of station officers to evade KGB surveillance. (Guilsher left Moscow in 1980.) During these five years, Tolkachev produced hundreds of rolls of film, some taken with a regular 35-mm camera, and some with CIA-manufactured equipment. Like Polyakov before him, he sometimes complained about problems with CIA-issued gear. He also passed hundreds of pages of detailed written notes. The reaction of U.S. military analysts was highly enthusiastic. Tolkachev provided details on Soviet military weaponry long before it was deployed, and thus long before information on the systems could be picked up by technical collection. It sometimes changed the direction of our own research and development and, by so doing, saved the U.S. government billions of dollars. Indeed, his production was so voluminous and so significant that it was still being exploited by a task force as late as 1990.
What was Tolkachev’s motivation for this intense, almost compulsive, desire to provide us with intelligence damaging to his own country? During the life of the operation he wrote us a number of personal notes. In them he explained that he was not a Communist, and that, if he had not had a security clearance, he would have been active as a dissident. In this connection, he mentioned that his wife’s family had suffered during the Stalinist purges. Another family factor was providing for his only son, to include items of Western manufacture not available in the USSR. In general, one gets the impression of a close-knit family. Yet money was an important factor. He requested immense sums from us, and was unhappy when we did not accede to his demands. To our explanations that we were concerned with his security, and did not want him to appear to be unduly affluent, he responded that he did not want the money to spend, but to reassure himself that we considered him of high value. (This theme also appears in the Smetanin operation.)
Our last personal meeting with Tolkachev took place in January 1985. We hoped to meet him in March 1985, but were unsuccessful in our attempts to arrange a contact. On 13 June station officer Paul Stombaugh was detained by the KGB and taken off to KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka, where he was held for some hours before being released. Stombaugh had been on his way to a scheduled meeting with Tolkachev. The inevitable conclusion was that Tolkachev had been arrested. This turned out to be the case. On 20 September 1985 the Soviet media reported on the event, describing Tolkachev as a staff member at one of Moscow’s research institutes who had been arrested in June trying to pass secret materials to the United States. The next year they issued a report that he had been executed for high treason.
It is a virtual certainty that Tolkachev was compromised by Edward Lee Howard, either in late 1984 or early 1985. Howard had been made aware of the operation in preparation for his planned assignment to Moscow in 1983. Ames knew almost nothing abut the case, certainly not enough to pinpoint Tolkachev before the latter’s arrest. Neither Sandy nor Jeanne knew anything about it either because it was the most carefully compartmentalized of all SE operations. Ironically, after the June arrest of Stombaugh, Ames was handed the Tolkachev files and asked to prepare an analysis of what had gone wrong. He never finished his task because he was diverted to the debriefing of Yurchenko, the KGB CI officer who defected at the beginning of August, and subsequently began Italian-language training. However, in the unlikely event that the KGB had any unanswered questions after Howard’s reporting, a search of Tolkachev’s office and residences, and revelations during his post-arrest interrogation, Ames would have been in a position to fill the gaps.
For those who participated in the Viktor Ivanovich Sheymov operation, regardless of their role, it was the operational experience of a lifetime—a roller coaster ride of exhilaration and intense anxiety. The story began on Halloween night 1979 in Warsaw, Poland, when Sheymov walked into the American Embassy and offered his services in exchange for the exfiltration of his wife, their young daughter, and himself from the Soviet Union and resettlement in the United States.13
Warsaw’s cable to Washington was a correct statement of the facts, but they did not have the background to comprehend fully the significance and the impact this man would have in the world of intelligence. Sheymov was an officer of the KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate, representing and working in the heart of the organization—its cipher communications. The employees of this directorate, and their activities, were so protected and secretive whether at home or abroad that the U.S. government had only a general knowledge of their professional lives and duties.
Simply stated, initially Sheymov could have told us anything about the inner workings of the Eighth Chief Directorate because we had no collateral information against which to check his statements. However, given his comments about his position and access, and the personal documents and information he provided, his bona fides were immediately established. Sheymov was one of the KGB’s most valuable assets and we knew that he represented the ultimate prize for us. We acknowledged his worth by giving him the CIA cryptonym CKUTOPIA (later changed to CKQUARTZ) and the interagency designation TIEBREAKER.
The thrill of that first day did not diminish, but our focus immediately became the seemingly impossible pledge we had made to him, which we were determined to honor. The hurdles were many and monumental. First, few could be made aware of the very existence of Sheymov, but many had to be included to effect his request. Worse, he had demanded exfiltration not for one person but for three, including a five-year-old child. (As detailed earlier, we had planned Kulak’s removal from the USSR but had not had to carry it out.) To add another element of danger, primarily for Sheymov, we had to conduct face-to-face meetings with him in Moscow to work out the details of the exfiltration. He had rejected a series of dead drops to exchange information because of time constraints and the magnitude of the operation. Finally add the frigid Moscow winter to a number of the personal meetings, Sheymov’s work schedule for the KGB, to include travel to Yemen and possibly other trips, and a five-to-six-month window to complete the operation.
A day or two after his walk-in in Warsaw Sheymov returned to Moscow and shortly thereafter left for Yemen on KGB business. At CIA headquarters cable traffic flew back and forth to Moscow Station and meeting after meeting was convened to find answers to the most basic operational questions. What border should we use for the crossing? How should the family get to a pick-up point with our officer or officers? What type of conveyance should we use to attempt the border crossing? How should we secrete the family members in the vehicle? Slowly the framework of a plan emerged. Next we had to address the personal details related to the Sheymov family. These numbered in the hundreds, were equally critical, and were often debated ad nauseam. Many of them required that Sheymov and his family maintain a normal pattern of activity.
One caused great consternation. The problem was simple. How do you keep a five-year-old quiet in cramped quarters on a trip that could last a number of hours? In a bureaucracy, the solution was not straightforward. A disagreement erupted between SE Division and a support component that could not be resolved. Thankfully, without communication with us Sheymov understood the problem and he alone came to the rescue. As he relates in his book, he had a conversation with his wife Olga: “Elena could be a major problem during the operation. I’m afraid we have no alternative but to sedate her with some kind of sleeping pill during the actual border crossing. . . . By definition, a five-year-old child is completely unpredictable and we can’t hope for the best. There’s too much at stake.”14
We have chosen not to relate the details of the spring 1980 exfiltration nor Sheymov’s ultimate contribution to the U.S. government. Suffice it to say that the former was flawless and the latter extraordinary. What was and remains important is that three human beings risked all. Everyone involved in the operation from the CIA to the Sheymov family deserves credit for the success of such a perilous operation, including the gods of good luck and good fortune.