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

bump into the Russian at a Harlem Globetrotters game in Washington, and the two ended up sitting together and chatting throughout the game. By the end of the game, Platt realized, he actually liked Vasilenko. He was completely different from most of the KGB hoods he’d come across in the past—natural and disarming, a man who seemed to love life more than he loved Marx and Engels. But that didn’t mean that Gennady Vasilenko was going to be a pushover for a CIA recruitment pitch. Vasilenko may not have been a good Communist, but he was a proud Russian, and he wasn’t interested in betraying his country.

For Platt, Vasilenko was an intriguing challenge. The CIA officer, who was working the recruitment jointly with FBI counterintelligence agents, soon realized that Vasilenko loved the game as much as he did. Gennady seemed to think he could tease the Americans into showing him a good time without having to step across the line into becoming a spy. He could deflect Platt’s entreaties—which were sometimes vague, sometimes more explicit—by turning the tables and pitching Platt to work for the KGB.

“What in the hell could you offer me?” Platt chided Vasilenko. “A great new life in the socialist workers paradise?”

The case almost collapsed before Platt could get it going. In September 1979, Platt and an FBI agent working with him took Vasilenko out to drink at the Gangplank restaurant, one of Platt’s favorite haunts along Washington’s Potomac waterfront. At the time, Platt was a fourteen-to-sixteen-beer-a-day alcoholic, and he was trying to recruit the Soviet through a beery haze. On this night, his FBI colleague got drunk as well, and unlike Platt, he couldn’t function well while drinking. As they both sat with Vasilenko at the Gangplank, the FBI agent became loud and sloppy and late that night turned to the customers at the next table and began telling them exactly what was going on at their table.

“Hey, you know what we’re doing over here?” the FBI agent said through slurred speech over his shoulder. “I’m in the FBI, he’s in the CIA, and we’re trying to recruit this Russian.”

Unfortunately, the customers drinking at the next table were also CIA analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence, and the next morning they reported the incident to the CIA’s Office of Security. The FBI agent was taken off the case and transferred out of Washington, and Platt was confronted by his boss, who told him that he was a drunk who needed help. If he would admit his problem and ask for help, the CIA could arrange treatment for him, his boss told him. If not, it might be time to brush up his CV and start looking for another job.

Platt finally agreed to do something about the drinking and checked into a hospital. When he was admitted, he hadn’t had a drink in twelve hours, but his blood alcohol level showed he was still drunk. Released a month later after going cold turkey, a newly sober Platt asked his supervisors to let him renew his contacts with Vasilenko. At first they balked, saying the case had been irretrievably botched by that FBI agent at Gangplank. But Platt persisted, and in January 1980, he reestablished contact. As he expected, Vasilenko was happy to hear from him, and the two picked up where they had left off, except that now Platt didn’t drink with the KGB man.

Vasilenko dutifully reported his contacts with the CIA to his supervisors in the KGB Rezidentura and explained that he was hoping to turn Platt into a Russian agent. His bosses were not overly happy about the contacts, particularly when it became clear that Vasilenko and Platt were seeing each other quite frequently and there were no signs that Platt was edging closer to betraying the CIA. But Vasilenko argued that he knew what he was doing; besides, if KGB officers weren’t allowed to meet CIA officers, how could they ever hope to recruit them as spies? The KGB Rezident agreed, but Vasilenko was on notice that he had to tread carefully. Over time, the relationship between Gennady and Jack became a true friendship, over drinks at cafés and restaurants around Washington, over family dinners at their homes. Eventually they worked up the nerve to go out hunting and shooting together in the West Virginia forests. Still, Platt and his FBI colleagues could never move Vasilenko beyond what the CIA called a “developmental”—a target of a recruitment, but not yet a spy. He would sometimes talk about office gossip, but Platt couldn’t get him to betray his operations.

In fact, even as Vasilenko and Platt were meeting for drinks and dinner, the Russian was involved in the most important case of his KGB career. In January 1980, Ronald Pelton, a disgruntled former employee of the National Security Agency, had walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington, offering to sell information about the agency’s operations against the Soviet Union. Pelton told the KGB about a sensitive operation called “Ivy Bells,” in which American submarines had planted taps on undersea telephone cables used by the Soviet Navy in the Sea of Okhotsk on the Soviet Union’s Pacific coast.

Vasilenko was the first KGB officer to meet with Pelton. During his first visit to the Soviet embassy, it was Vasilenko’s job to spirit him out without being detected by the FBI surveillance teams that staked out the embassy. Vasilenko decided to dress Pelton in a disguise and put him on a bus crowded with Russian embassy employees going home for the evening in order to sneak him out through the back of the embassy building. After that operation, Vasilenko kept meeting with Platt without telling him anything about Pelton. But Vasilenko’s bosses gradually became more suspicious of his contacts with Platt and finally ordered him to break it off. Once again Vasilenko grew angry, but this time he didn’t try to argue. Instead, he continued to see Platt and simply stopped reporting the contacts to his supervisors.

Platt’s bosses, meanwhile,