THE CIA HAD NO MONOPOLY on running good cases against the KGB during the Cold War. As has been mentioned separately, the British SIS handled Oleg Gordievsky in place for many years. There are other examples not mentioned in this book run by other services. The following story outlines how the French were able to maintain frequent contact with a KGB scientific and technical specialist in Moscow for a couple of years, thereby acquiring a large amount of very valuable documents, until the asset caused his own downfall.
In November 1980 a French businessman telephoned Raymond Nart, a senior officer of the French internal service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, or DST. Nart and the businessman were friends and the businessman wanted Nart to come by his office. When the two met, the businessman showed Nart a postcard, mailed from Eastern Europe. The writer, a KGB officer named Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, had been stationed in Paris from 1965 to 1970 and, while there, had been acquainted with the businessman. Now, after a hiatus of several years, Vetrov was trying to renew the contact and stated in his card that he hoped to see the businessman as quickly as possible.1
Both Nart and the businessman recognized the possibility that Vetrov, who had become enamored with France during his assignment there, wanted to work with the French. However, while they were working out a secure recontact plan, Vetrov made another move. In February 1981, he attended a commercial exhibit in Moscow and, like Penkovskiy and Tolkachev before him, passed a note to a Westerner. The recipient on this occasion was a Frenchman. The note requested a meeting and included Vetrov’s telephone number. Luckily, the Frenchman duly passed the note to the DST when he returned to Paris.
In response to the note, Nart and his colleagues dispatched a French engineer known to them by reputation. He was asked to go to Moscow and to telephone Vetrov, which he did. The two met in early March and Vetrov provided both information and documents. He continued to do so during subsequent meetings. In April, however, realizing the danger to the engineer because he of course did not have diplomatic immunity, the DST arranged for the military attaché at the French embassy in Moscow, an individual favorably known to Nart, to take over the case. Highly fruitful meetings between Vetrov, who by now had been encrypted FAREWELL by the DST, continued until late 1981. The attaché then left for Paris on Christmas leave. He had an appointment with Vetrov after his return but Vetrov did not appear.
When Vetrov started producing reams of Russian-language documents, the DST was faced with a problem. They did not have a cadre expert in both the language and the technical substance. Furthermore, they wanted to provide Vetrov with a miniature camera to minimize the risk of his document photography and did not have state-of-the-art equipment. Therefore, they decided to approach the CIA, which provided the requested technical and non-technical translations and analytical support but did not participate directly in the operation. Jeanne remembers a cart piled high with photocopies being rolled past her door in SE CI in the summer of 1981, and soon she became involved with editing some of the translated material.
In all, during the life of the operation Vetrov produced more than three thousand secret and top secret documents emanating not only from the Directorate T (Science and Technology) of the KGB, but also from the Military-Industrial Commission (VPK) of the USSR Council of Ministers. As explained in the section on Polyakov, the VPK coordinated and controlled all research, design, development, testing, and production of Soviet military equipment and systems. An integral part of the VPK’s responsibility was the issuance of collection requirements on military matters for all Soviet government agencies from the KGB and GRU to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade. VPK documents were highly valuable to CIA and Department of Defense analysts because they showed the gaps in the Soviet Union’s military and industrial might. Polyakov produced some for us, as did Kulak. We also got some watered-down requirements from an East European source. The KGB operational documents, on the other hand, showed what clandestine activities the KGB—and the GRU and the East European services—were undertaking to close those gaps. In other words, they contained a vast number of espionage leads. Those leads were still being investigated several years after the case came to its untimely close.
Considering the circumstances of the meetings with Vetrov, it is understandable that we do not have a clear view of his motivations. He was undoubtedly a Francophile, but he did not want to defect and spend the rest of his life amusing himself in Parisian cafés and restaurants. Revenge was a definite factor, but he was an undisciplined individual who could have butted up against the KGB bureaucracy in any number of ways. According to Yurchenko, who participated in his interrogation, Vetrov wrote a long document vilifying the Soviet system as a whole and the KGB in particular, saying that the system was totally rotten.
The unfortunate denouement of the FAREWELL operation cannot be attributed to a Western traitor or to clever KGB scrutiny. Alas, Vetrov caused his own downfall. The story is a sensational one. Because it was the subject of much corridor gossip in the KGB, several versions have come down to us. Therefore, the following details may not be entirely correct, but the gist of the story is pretty clear. Vetrov was having an affair with a KGB secretary named Lyudmila. One cold night they were in his parked car, indulging in some dalliance. Someone knocked on the window. It turned out to be a militiaman (or Lyudmila’s husband or some other lover of hers). Vetrov, who was drunk and who had a gun, shot and killed the man. He also tried to kill Lyudmila, but failed. She was able to testify against him. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. While there he said something to a fellow inmate or a guard about his espionage activity on behalf of the French. According to one story, the fellow inmate was about to be released and Vetrov wanted him to contact the French embassy in Moscow. In any event, Vetrov was tried again, this time for espionage. He was sentenced to death and duly executed early in 1983.
In 1982 GRU colonel Vladimir Mikhaylovich Vasilyev, under cover as a Soviet military attaché, volunteered to a U.S. military representative in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the Soviet Bloc. The military turned him over to the CIA to handle, a particularly delicate job in a Communist country where all Western representatives, and particularly intelligence officers, were under considerable surveillance. The CIA encrypted him GTACCORD. The turnover did not please Vasilyev who, as a military man, preferred to deal with his uniformed counterparts, because he knew them personally and had contact with them as part of his normal duties. That the CIA officer who became his new handler was a woman and a civilian probably did not help matters. Nonetheless, the CIA—with substantial U.S. military assistance—managed to keep in limited but productive contact with Vasilyev until he returned to Moscow on a routine change of station in the summer of 1984.
Vasilyev provided a variety of intelligence to the CIA. However, because communications with him were difficult and infrequent, we did not always understand the nature of his access nor do we have a clear view of his motivation. Among the most significant items he passed were copies of top secret documents emanating from the U.S. Army in Germany. Since 1978 the CIA had been aware, from East European sources, that there was massive leakage from U.S. forces in Germany to the Hungarians, but our sources’ reporting was oral. The anecdotal and somewhat vague information had duly been passed to our military counterintelligence and to the FBI. An investigation had been opened but had not borne fruit. Now we had the actual documents, and they were chilling; they outlined in detail what the Western response would be to a Soviet invasion. Vasilyev had no idea who the source of the top secret documents was, but he knew that Hungarian military intelligence immediately passed the documents to the GRU in Budapest, that the GRU had them flown to its headquarters in Moscow on a priority basis, and that the GRU was footing the bill for the operation.
In brief, the information provided by Vasilyev dealt the final blow to the espionage activities of former U.S. Army sergeant Clyde Conrad and his partners in crime. Conrad was arrested in Germany, where he had retired, in August 1988 thanks to cooperation between U.S. military counterintelligence and the German criminal police. He was tried in a German court in early 1990 and sentenced to life in prison. This case, probably because it was run by East Europeans and not by the Soviet Union, has never received the attention it deserves. As former CIA Associate Deputy Director for Operations (ADDO)/CI Paul Redmond is fond of remarking, if there had been a hot war we would have lost because Conrad had compromised all the plans for the defense of Western Europe.2
Vasilyev was compromised in two stages. His first betrayer was Edward Lee Howard. According to Yurchenko, during Howard’s first meeting with the KGB, which took place in Vienna probably in late 1984, he reported on an unnamed “angry colonel” who was being run by the CIA in Budapest. Howard was accurate in that Vasilyev had complained angrily about the way we were handling him. Whether Howard was under the misapprehension that Vasilyev was from the KGB, or whether the KGB made an unwarranted assumption, is unknown. In any event, this report unleashed an investigation of all the KGB colonels in Budapest, of which there were several. As far as we know, no special attention was paid to GRU colonels. And, as it happened, Vasilyev had already left for a new post in Moscow by the time the investigation got under way.
The reporting from Ames was much more definitive. Ames would have had his facts straight because much of this case was handled by SE CI, where he worked, and he would have had access to the cable traffic. One of his subordinates had been responsible for the translation of the written messages we exchanged with Vasilyev. The most probable date for Ames’ initial betrayal of Vasilyev is 13 June 1985. However, according to everything we have heard, Vasilyev was not arrested until early June 1986. Like others, he was subsequently tried and executed.
Much has been made of the one-year gap between Ames’ reporting on Vasilyev and his arrest. When he left for Moscow, Vasilyev had a detailed plan for internal communications, which he began to implement. In August 1985, when we had the benefit of Yurchenko’s reporting and when we began to realize that we were having other difficulties in our Soviet operations, a debate opened as to whether we should continue to receive materials from Vasilyev. However, after receiving our green light, on 11 December he dropped a package to us. This was our last contact with him.
There are some, for instance the interagency Ames Damage Assessment Team convened after Ames’ 1994 arrest, who have concluded that the documents in this package were manufactured by the KGB to mislead us as to Vasilyev’s well-being and continued access. To be sure, as described elsewhere in this book, the KGB undoubtedly did undertake such deception operations. However, this package contained valuable intelligence covering a broad range of topics and emanating from a variety of Soviet official institutions. It was not CI-related and did not contain any material that would mislead us in our investigations.
Some will say that it would have been impossible for Vasilyev, who had been compromised several months earlier, to put down a genuine drop without being observed and arrested by the KGB. Yet even the KGB had its limitations. Because of reporting from Howard, Ames, and Hanssen, they were forced to open perhaps as many as twenty espionage investigations against U.S. penetrations of their country’s secrets. Resources must have been strained to the limit. Furthermore, they would have had to establish some sort of priority list. In retrospect, we can see that the highest priority was given to our KGB and GRU assets abroad, who were out of their control. It was necessary to lure them back to the Soviet Union, so they could be arrested, and this had to be done using various believable pretexts. If the KGB had started mass arrests in Moscow, our assets abroad would presumably have learned of these actions and asked us to arrange their orderly defections. Only when the KGB’s first priority task was accomplished, which happened in mid-November with the orchestrated departure of Varenik from Germany, could it start giving undivided attention to the second priority—persons inside the Soviet Union who had some means of communicating with us. Vasilyev belonged in this group.
By way of comparison, when the FBI opened its full-scale investigation of Rick Ames in the spring of 1993, this was the major undertaking of the Washington Metropolitan Field Office and much of the local FBI’s resources were allocated to it. Yet the FBI did not surveil Ames twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. First of all, surveilling a trained intelligence officer is no easy job. If the suspect, because of his training and experience, detects that he is under surveillance, he might flee the country. At best, he might just cease any operational activity. Obviously, the FBI did not want this to happen, so they hung back at times, depending on telephone coverage to keep abreast of Ames’ comings and goings. They made one mistake, however. On 7 September the surveillance team deployed to Ames’ residence early in the morning as usual. However, when they got there shortly after 6:30, they saw that Ames’ car was sitting in the driveway instead of the garage. They deduced that he had gone out, and they were right. It was later ascertained that he had signaled to his KGB handlers by making a chalk mark on a mailbox. Later that day they lost him again for an hour when their radio system broke down. We do not find it surprising that the Moscow KGB, with all the investigations being handled, might have had the same sort of problems and limitations that the Washington FBI did.
Gennadiy Aleksandrovich Smetanin, a GRU officer under military attaché cover in Lisbon, Portugal, volunteered to the CIA in late 1983. He was handled by our Lisbon office, which had personal meetings with him under the guise of tennis dates. There are two unusual aspects to this case. First of all, it is a rare example of a spouse also cooperating with the CIA. Mrs. Smetanin, who worked in the consular section of the Soviet embassy, did not have access to real state secrets but she shared with us the information that came across her desk. She also participated in at least one meeting with her husband’s CIA handlers.
The second unusual aspect of the case involves the polygraph. It was not customary to polygraph our Soviet assets. However, early in our relationship with Smetanin he demanded the sum of $330,000 saying that he had embezzled it from GRU funds in Lisbon. (As an aside, neither Sandy nor Jeanne was around when that happened. Both were very familiar with GRU regulations and practices, and knew that it was totally unlikely that the GRU would have anywhere near that amount of cash locally. Only a few years earlier, Polyakov’s large residency had a limit of $10,000.) Anyway, this was during the Casey era. He was consulted and decided that Smetanin could have the money if he passed a polygraph. A polygrapher was duly summoned to Lisbon, Smetanin submitted to the examination, the polygrapher was satisfied with the results, and Smetanin got his money.3 Sad to say, Smetanin’s request for a large sum was just his way of testing us. He never spent the bulk of the money.
In the summer of 1985 Smetanin and his wife were due for a normal home leave. He was supposed to meet his handler in Lisbon on 4 October, after his return, but never showed up. According to stories we heard later, he was arrested as he was about to take the train back to Portugal. As was the norm, he was tried and executed. His wife was sentenced to five years in prison. His downfall is directly attributable to Ames, who knew the case well and compromised it in the “big dump.”
Ames did not confine his identification of American assets simply to those recruited and handled by the CIA. Two important FBI sources in Washington, DC, were also among those he chose to sacrifice. According to his own statements, in June 1985 he informed the KGB that Valeriy Fedorovich Martynov, a KGB scientific and technical officer, and Sergey Mikhaylovich Motorin, a KGB political intelligence officer who was an “active measures” specialist, were spying for the Americans. (Active measures is the Russian term for what is called covert action in the West, and entails, among other things, disseminating rumors and lies designed to discredit or disrupt governments and individuals hostile to the USSR.) Approximately four months later, in October 1985, Ames’ reporting on Martynov and Motorin was confirmed by a write-in to the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC—FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen.
Martynov arrived in the United States in the fall of 1980, assigned to the cover position of an embassy third secretary. A year or two after his arrival he caught the attention of a CIA case officer working in the Agency’s Washington field office. The case officer had met Martynov at a series of scientific presentations and immediately concluded that he was far from the typical standoffish, stern-faced Russian diplomat serving on the territory of the Main Enemy. Quite the contrary—he was affable, self-confident, and socially comfortable among strangers. The case officer felt he deserved further attention from U.S. intelligence.
The CIA case officer’s assessment was provided to officials in the newly created FBI/CIA joint operations unit known as COURTSHIP, one of whom was Diana Worthen, a major player in the future Ames investigation. Martynov became one of the unit’s primary targets and after approximately a year of pursuit he was recruited as a penetration of the KGB.
Code-named GTGENTILE by CIA and PIMENTA by the FBI, Martynov was handled jointly by the two services. (As an aside, the FBI chose the code name PIMENTA in honor of Ben Pepper, a CIA officer who had been a driving force in setting up the joint unit.) His FBI case officer was Jim Holt, who six years later would join the CIA/FBI task force to search for the answer to the compromise of his agent as well as others. Martynov’s CIA case officer was Rod Carlson, a senior officer with a great deal of experience working against the Soviet target. As we explain later in this book, Carlson later became Ames’ chief when Ames was assigned as Soviet branch chief in SE Division’s CI Group, a position that allowed Ames access to and intimate knowledge of the sources he would later betray, obviously including Carlson’s.
Holt and Carlson met with Martynov twice a month for the next three years, during which time he provided information on the residency’s scientific and technical officers, including their activities and targets, and identified other members of the local KGB contingent. In his book Spy Handler, Viktor Ivanovich Cherkashin, KGB CI chief in Washington at the time and the individual to whom both Ames and Hanssen volunteered, stated that Martynov turned out to be the mole he began looking for in 1984. Early in that year Cherkashin began to conclude that someone in the residency was telling the FBI who was KGB and who was not. He based his conclusion on his analysis of FBI radio intercepts, which showed that the FBI had changed its surveillance patterns and was following only KGB officers, allowing non-intelligence officials to go about their business without coverage. To Cherkashin’s irritation, KGB higherups found his analysis unconvincing.4
Despite Martynov’s compromise by Ames before mid-1985 and by Hanssen in October of that year, the KGB was forced to keep him at his post in Washington for a period and let him carry out his normal duties. Again, according to Cherkashin’s memoirs,5 this was not from a lack of trying. They faced a dilemma. The KGB desperately wanted to return Martynov to Moscow, but they had to do so without raising his suspicions, which would surely result in his and his family’s defection. Home leave was not an option. He had just returned from Moscow in the spring. Using ploys such as fictitious family problems in Moscow or an awards ceremony would not work. As an intelligence officer, Martynov would recognize them for what they were—ruses indicating that he was in serious trouble. On 2 November 1985 Cherkashin was presented with the solution to the KGB’s dilemma. Vitaliy Sergeyevich Yurchenko, the senior KGB counterintelligence officer who had defected in August 1985, appeared at the gate of the Soviet embassy residential compound wanting to return permanently to the Soviet Union. Yurchenko would be accompanied to Moscow by an honor guard of four, and Martynov would be one of the privileged.
On 6 November Martynov boarded the Aeroflot flight for Moscow. Immediately upon arrival he was arrested and taken directly to Lefortovo prison. His wife and children returned to Moscow several weeks later, after being told that he had injured his leg. A similar tale was put out by the KGB to cover what had really happened, and a version came to the CIA’s attention. Specifically, the story was that Martynov was unable to travel and would remain in Moscow due to the flare-up of an old soccer injury that required surgery.
Martynov was tried and sentenced to death in the spring of 1987. He was executed later that year. By virtue of his position, Cherkashin was the central figure in the wrap-up of Martynov. He later wrote that he knew that Martynov, a gentle man whom he liked, was boarding a flight to his death. For Cherkashin personally, “It was one of the events in my career I most questioned.”6
The recruitment of Sergey Mikhaylovich Motorin combined all aspects of a classic FBI counterintelligence operation—persistence, opportunism, and exploitation. He was not a volunteer and we submit he had probably never dreamt of committing treason.
Motorin’s arrival in Washington on his first overseas tour coincided with that of Martynov, but they took different paths to cooperation with the Americans. Motorin’s was caused by personal weaknesses that came to the attention of the FBI and that they used as leverage to convince him that he had no choice but to accede to their requests. As he came to understand, his only alternative was return to the Soviet Union where he would face disgrace, certain dismissal from the KGB, and possible criminal charges. In late 1982, after a lengthy period of FBI cajoling and prodding, he agreed to cooperate.
The FBI had to strike a delicate balance in the recruitment process of Motorin. In some circles exploitation of an individual’s shortcomings is viewed as blackmail. The moral debate aside, such tactics often result in an uncooperative and unreliable asset, because participation has been coerced, not offered. In this particular case the FBI was fortunate. Motorin, although a junior officer with limited access, provided all within his purview. As an organization, the FBI deserves complete credit for the success of this operation.
What were Motorin’s vulnerabilities? A tall, handsome man, Motorin loved to party and was not always discreet in his relationships with members of the opposite sex. However, this behavior alone did not result in his eventual recruitment. The FBI observed him trading his KGB operational allowance of vodka and other items for stereo equipment. At this point in the operation they inserted Special Agent Mike Morton, who identified himself as a government employee. Motorin flippantly dismissed the picture Morton painted of his situation, and so began Morton’s relentless pursuit of the KGB major. All around Washington, and at every possible opportunity, Morton appeared unexpectedly in Motorin’s path, showing him photographs and reminding him that the FBI knew about the women and the vodka.
The FBI selected Special Agent James Stassinos as Motorin’s case officer. Stassinos assigned him the code name DIONYSUS, the Greek god of wine, fertility, and orgies, which was later changed to MEGAS. At CIA he was known as GTGAUZE. The CIA did not have any operational involvement in this case, which was handled solely by the FBI. However, we were responsible for disseminating his production to the intelligence community.
Meetings between Stassinos and Motorin continued until the latter’s return to Moscow in January 1985. He did not have any internal communications, but the FBI did have discussions with the CIA as to whether he should have that capability. Fatefully, Ames participated in these talks and, therefore, knew the case quite well. As noted previously, in October 1985 Hanssen followed Ames’ lead and identified Motorin as an FBI penetration of the KGB. With no hope of extraction, his fate was sealed.
Motorin was arrested in mid-January 1986, but later made phone calls to a former girlfriend in Washington at the behest of the KGB. These calls were simply another attempt by the KGB to deceive the CIA and FBI regarding their lost agents. In Motorin’s case, he was alive but certainly not well. Under arrest and facing trial, he was later executed as punishment for treason against the State.
Cherkashin addressed the KGB’s killing of Motorin specifically, and the others generally, stating that he believed that “execution was wrong and entirely unnecessary.” Motorin appears to bother him particularly, because this young officer knew almost nothing of significance and therefore did little damage to the Soviet Union. In Cherkashin’s own words, “I remain completely convinced that the spies Ames betrayed should have been fired and deprived of their pensions, but no more. What further harm could they have done?”7
When we began our investigation of the 1985 compromises, one of the most baffling cases that we had to look at was the operation involving Gennadiy Grigoryevich Varenik. The case only lasted a few months. It was run tightly and professionally by CIA officer Charles (Chuck) Leven, and documented in detail. How could it have gone wrong?
Varenik was stationed at the Soviet embassy in Bonn, serving as a KGB Illegals Support officer. During his tour, he had become acquainted with a CIA case officer also stationed in Bonn. They had a cordial friendship, but this did not develop into a clandestine relationship. Eventually the CIA officer was reassigned to another European post. In March 1985, Varenik made a telephone call to this officer at his new post and said he wanted to arrange a personal meeting. This overture soon resulted in Varenik’s recruitment in Bonn and extensive debriefings on the KGB’s Illegals program and related matters. He was encrypted GTFITNESS.
One of the first items Varenik was eager to impart to us was the story of the KGB’s “mini-bombs” operation, in which he was a participant. The operation, which was still in the planning stages, involved planting small bombs in venues such as restaurants and bars frequented by U.S. servicemen. As he understood it, this would result in the deaths of innocent men, women, and children, which he found totally unacceptable. The KGB’s plan was to blame the bombs on German terrorists, thereby leaving the impression that the U.S. military was unwanted, and that the German government could not protect them. The hoped-for result was to sour U.S.-German relations.
When this reporting arrived at CIA headquarters, Director Casey immediately brought it to the attention of President Reagan, who saw it as further proof that the Evil Empire really did exist. While Varenik and Leven both believed that the KGB’s operation would result in a loss of life, in retrospect one wonders a bit. Jeanne, who read the reporting with care, feels that it is susceptible to a more benign interpretation. These were indeed mini-bombs, which might only be capable of scaring people or at most inflicting superficial injuries. It seems strange that the KGB would run such a high-risk low-gain operation in a NATO country. The political fallout, were it to be discovered that the KGB was deliberately killing U.S. and German citizens, would be immense. In any event, it was a hare-brained scheme that the KGB planners should never have seriously entertained.
In early November Varenik was asked to attend a conference in East Berlin. He was also told that the mini-bomb project had been shelved for the present. (Of course, by this time the KGB had the benefit of Ames’ reporting and knew about the fury with which the story had been received at the highest levels of the U.S. government. No doubt they assumed that Varenik would immediately pass to his CIA contact anything he learned about the mini-bomb project. They thus had a perfect vehicle for calming the situation.)
A few days later, after a short meeting with Leven to pass his information, Varenik left for East Berlin. He was immediately bundled on board a plane for Moscow. Needless to say, he never returned to Bonn. His wife and small children eventually followed him to Moscow. Like the others, he was tried and executed.
The majority of sources run by the CIA and FBI were met overseas, at least some of the time, and we were able to glean a fairly accurate idea of their motivation, access, and ability to withstand the rigors of espionage activity. Adolf Grigoryevich Tolkachev is an exception because he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union. However, there were numerous personal meetings with him, supplemented by lengthy written communications, over a long span of time. This was not the situation with Sergey Vorontsov. We had only two meetings with him. We did not even know his name, or his assignment within the KGB.
Vorontsov, encrypted GTCOWL, volunteered to the CIA Station in Moscow using a State Department official as an intermediary. The first meeting with him was held in early 1984. There was a second meeting with him shortly thereafter. The station officer who handled this meeting was Mike Sellers. There was then a long gap in contact.
When Vorontsov first established contact with the CIA, he refused to identify himself, preferring to be known simply as “Stas.” He intimated that he was from the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB, a high-priority target for CIA because this directorate was responsible for internal counterintelligence, to include operations against our CIA Station in Moscow. Some believed that he was exaggerating his access, and that in reality he was assigned to the Moscow City Directorate, a target that did not rank as high in the CIA’s priorities.
Paul Stombaugh, who had been expelled from the Soviet Union in June 1985 in connection with the Tolkachev case, was working in the SE Division internal operations group at the time. He wrote a memorandum supporting the theory that Vorontsov was from the Moscow City Directorate, which turned out to be the truth. This put him into conflict with Ames, who considered himself one of the Agency’s greatest experts on the KGB. Also, it was Ames’ job to decide such questions and he felt that Stombaugh was invading his turf. Ames disputed Stombaugh’s theory, and an argument ensued. The only importance of this minor dust-up was that it sealed Vorontsov’s fate because Ames studied the case carefully in support of his mistaken insistence that Vorontsov worked in the Second Chief Directorate.
During the short life of this operation, Vorontsov produced one item that resonated throughout the U.S. government. He gave Sellers a packet of what is commonly known in intelligence circles as “spy dust” and whose scientific initials are NPPD. This is an invisible chemical agent used by the KGB to track the whereabouts of CIA Moscow Station personnel. We had known about the substance since at least the 1960s, but now we had a sample that could be submitted for analysis. Early tests suggested that NPPD was mutagenic, or possibly even carcinogenic. The media picked up the story and had a field day. The State Department protested that its personnel were being poisoned. However, the story eventually died down as there was no evidence that anyone had been harmed, and the Soviets loudly decried the possibility.
For various reasons, we did not meet with Vorontsov after the spring of 1984. The next meeting was scheduled for 10 March 1986 in a Moscow alleyway. When Sellers appeared, he was arrested by a squad of KGB officers, and taken to the KGB central offices at the Lubyanka. A few hours later he was released, when the U.S. embassy was able to establish his diplomatic immunity to Soviet satisfaction. Sellers was declared persona non grata and expelled from the Soviet Union.
As an aside, when Sellers was arrested he had with him a list of questions to ask Vorontsov. Prominent among them was: “What happened to Raoul Wallenberg?” This was an unanswered forty-year-old question, which had long obsessed Swedish officialdom and some senior members of the U.S. government, including Director Casey. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat assigned to Budapest toward the end of World War II who was responsible for saving a large number of Jews. When the Red Army rolled into the capital, Wallenberg disappeared. Over the years there were persistent rumors that he was still alive in a Soviet prison, unlikely as that may have been. Anyway, Casey, perhaps more attuned to political realities than to current priorities, insisted that the matter be broached. That such a question might be asked of a defector who is being debriefed at length in a Washington safehouse is understandable. That precious time in a Moscow alleyway under highly dangerous circumstances was to be taken up by this venerable enigma is much less so. (As it happens, Wallenberg had died in 1947 in prison. The Soviet government finally admitted to this in 1989, although not everyone accepts their story.)
Vorontsov was executed. It was only through the protest note issued by the Soviet government that we were finally able to identify the mysterious Stas. The note provided Vorontsov’s true surname.