The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

Just across the street from Nottoway Park, a few yards away from where Hanssen was stooping in the dark, were tidy subdivisions filled with well-tended houses, home to dozens of CIA, FBI, and Defense Department employees and their families. One senior CIA counterintelligence officer in particular lived just two blocks away, and he jogged almost daily through Nottoway Park along a route that passed close to the Park dead drop site. Like Bob Hanssen, he specialized in Soviet matters, and years later, the eerie similarities in their lives would come to haunt the CIA man and his family and would nearly destroy his career and his life.

Havana, Cuba, January 11, 1988

The hands came out of nowhere, shadows reaching out to clamp Gennady Vasilenko’s arms to his sides, even as his body was being roughly dragged down and his head was slammed with a dull thud to the floor of the small Cuban house, opening a bloody gash. The KGB security agents had been hiding inside, waiting for Vasilenko to arrive from the airport on what he believed was a routine trip for KGB business. Instead, he had come to Havana only to find himself crumpled over and suffocating, caught up in a sudden and brutal KGB ambush.

Tall, athletic, and above all fun loving—too much so, perhaps, for his own good—Gennady Vasilenko was the KGB’s deputy Rezident in the Latin backwater of Georgetown, Guyana, where he was supremely bored, particularly after his last overseas assignment, a far more interesting tour of duty in Washington. He had little to do in Guyana besides think about hunting and women and drinking, not necessarily in that order, while providing some limited support for halfhearted Soviet and Cuban forays into the revolutionary politics of South America. Vasilenko had been ordered to Cuba so that he could use the KGB’s secure facility inside the Soviet embassy in Havana, where he was told he was to write the secret “counterintelligence annex” to the annual report for the embassy in Guyana. He figured it wouldn’t take long to document a year’s worth of desultory operations in Georgetown, where almost nothing of any consequence had happened since the members of the Jonestown cult drank their Kool-Aid and committed mass suicide back in the late 1970s. So he’d have plenty of extra time in Havana, and he hoped it would provide an opportunity to see old friends and catch up on KGB gossip. He had arranged for a KGB colleague to pick him up at the airport, and he was planning to stay at his friend’s home for a few days.

At the airport he was met instead by a local KGB security officer, who told him his friend had been suddenly called away. The security officer, thoughtfully, had found him another house to use during his stay. But as soon as he walked into the house, the ambush exploded around him. Vasilenko was given little chance to catch his breath before the interrogations began inside what he now realized was a KGB safe house.

“Do you know Mr. Platt of the CIA?” his questioners demanded.

Vasilenko shuddered quietly.

Jack Platt. So that’s what this is all about, he thought as he tried to recover from the brief beating. Yes, of course I know Platt, you bastards. Jack, what have you done?

Jack and Gennady. The American and Russian spies had been friends since 1977, nearly inseparable at times, breaking all the Cold War rules against fraternization with the enemy. Theirs was a friendship that helped put a human face on the Cold War battle between the CIA and KGB and showed that personal bonds of loyalty could overcome the ruthless games played by spies on both sides.

Platt, then a Washington-based officer in the CIA’s Soviet Division, was trolling for Russians to recruit when a Soviet defector, a former classmate of Vasilenko’s at the KGB’s training institute, had identified Gennady as one of the KGB officers working under diplomatic cover in the Soviet embassy in Washington. Gennady had never imagined that he would one day be a KGB spy. He had the soul of a jock, a Russian version of a frat boy with dreams of playing volleyball on the Soviet Olympic team. Born in 1941, he had been an engineering student at the Avtomotora Institute in Moscow and had by the early 1960s emerged as one of the best young volleyball players in the USSR. In 1964, he seemed assured of making the Soviet team that was heading to the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, until a shoulder injury kept him off the Olympic squad.

Despite his injury, Vasilenko kept playing volleyball on club squads in the city and eventually caught the eye of Dynamo, the powerful KGB-backed sports association, and was recruited for the Dynamo volleyball team. By the late 1960s, he found his way from the volleyball squad into the real KGB, and after attending the Yuri Andropov Higher KGB School, he was ushered into the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate. In 1976, he was assigned to Line KR, counterintelligence, and was sent to the Washington Rezidentura. Later, he would joke to Platt that he was the only Russian who had joined the KGB on an athletic scholarship.

Platt, by contrast, was an American Army brat who had attended a dozen different schools around the United States and Europe and had graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts before becoming a Marine officer in 1959. He left the Marines for the CIA in 1963, spending five years as a case officer in Austria, followed by another three in Laos. He liked to joke that he was transferred from Laos to Paris as a reward for helping the United States “take second place in the Asian war games.”

When Platt set his sights on Vasilenko as a potential recruit, he began maneuvering all over Washington in an effort to meet him in a seemingly casual and coincidental way. Platt had an intermediary arrange it so he could