Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer - The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames

368 Pages·2005·5.17 MB·English

by  Victor Cherkashin

SPY HANDLER
SPY HANDLER
Memoir of a KGB Officer
THE TRUE STORY OF THE MAN WHO RECRUITED ROBERT
HANSSEN AND ALDRICH AMES
VICTOR CHERKASHIN with GREGORY FEIFER
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Copyright © 2005 by Victor Cherkashin
Hardcover first published in 2005 by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Paperback first published in 2005 by Basic Books
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Designed by Trish Wilkinson
Set in Goudy by the Perseus Books Group
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cherkashin, Victor, 1932–
Spy handler: memoir of a KGB officer : the true story of the man who recruited
Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames /Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer.
p. cm.
“A Member of the Perseus Books Group.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
HC: ISBN 13 978-0-465-00968-8; ISBN 0-465-00968-9 (alk. paper)
HC: ISBN 13 978-0-465-00968-8; ISBN 0-465-00968-9 (alk. paper)
1. Cherkashin, Victor, 1932-2. Intelligence officers—Soviet Union—Biography.
3. Espionage, Soviet—History—20th century. 4. Soviet Union. Komitet
gosudarstvennoæi bezopasnosti. 5. Intelligence service—Soviet Union 6. Spies
—Soviet Union. 7. Soviet Union—Foreign relations. I. Feifer, Gregory. II. Title.
JN6529.I6C49 2005
327.1247'0092—dc22
2004017609
PB: ISBN 13 978-0-465-00969-5; ISBN 0-465-00969-7
05 06 07 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my family—my wife,
children and grandchildren—
to whom I have dedicated my life
PREFACE
Publication of this book comes against great odds, the result of a path on
which I embarked at the height of my career. It eventually led me to decide that
telling my story was important—for the debate over Cold War espionage as well
as for my sake. In addition to my initial reluctance, I had to confront the fact that
intelligence work doesn’t lend itself to memoir writing. A political tool since
ancient times, intelligence doesn’t normally play an independent public role in
affairs of state. Its essence is secrecy. For those like me who have spent their
careers in espionage, publicizing its details goes against instinct and tradition.
Usually the public learns the identity of intelligence operatives only when
something goes wrong. When operations fail, intelligence officials are often
loudly arrested, exposed, or made the subject of a successful setup by the
intelligence services of an opposing side.
My name became known in Russia following the arrests of CIA officer
Aldrich Ames in 1994 and FBI special agent Robert Hanssen in 2001, both in
the United States, several years after I retired from the KGB in 1991. The press
in Russia and the United States covered some aspects of my involvement in both
espionage cases, but most reports lacked key details and misrepresented facts to
fill in the gaps. Meanwhile, my experience (actually, my lack of it) in speaking
to journalists who tried to interview me led to an even greater mess. American
writers read their own preconceived notions into my words (I purposely left
many details vague), while Russians came up with their own explanations.
Eventually I stopped giving interviews to the media, and I’m only now ready to
tell my full story.
For most of my career, I conducted operations against the Main Adversary—
as KGB terminology designated the biggest strategic threat to the Soviet Union.
Until World War II, that honor belonged to Great Britain, after which it went to
the United States. I operated against both until 1965, when my efforts became
solely directed at counteracting CIA activities against the USSR. During those
dangerous years, U.S. and Soviet intelligence services often fought on the front
lines of the Cold War.
I joined the KGB in 1952, just as that war was heating up and a year before
Joseph Stalin died. I retired almost forty years later in 1991, days after the
attempted August coup d’état against Mikhail Gorbachev that did so much to
help bring down the Soviet Union. My career encompassed Russia’s
help bring down the Soviet Union. My career encompassed Russia’s
transformation from a totalitarian dictatorship to a country opening its arms to
democracy.
I must warn readers expecting to read about James Bond–style exploits in
these pages that I undertook none in my career. Intelligence consists chiefly of
workaday routine and, with luck, rare successes. In my many years with the
KGB, I met officers, spies and others who subsequently became well-known.
But that came in the course of normal duties. I never parachuted out of an
airplane, learned how to kidnap or assassinate or how to crack safes. I never took
a course on espionage tradecraft. I joined KGB counterintelligence after
studying foreign languages and was sent abroad to learn through experience.
What follows is the account of a real KGB career.
I have changed some names and omitted others. I’ve tried to be as accurate as
possible, but in such accounts it’s not possible to reveal everything. Many of the
agents I handled and operations I ran in my career have never been exposed.
While I discuss them here, the real names of some must remain secret. I’ve
drawn my story almost entirely from memory, and while I’ve done everything
possible to ensure that the basic facts of each episode are correctly portrayed,
some of the dialogue and actions describe events as they likely happened.
Although I make my views about the KGB, the CIA and Soviet and American
politics and affairs clear, I tried to avoid falling into the trap of polemics. This
account is not KGB propaganda. Other memoirs and tales of Cold War
espionage carry disinformation either purposely or unwittingly gathered from
interviews with intelligence officers still intent on misleading the other side.
Serving and retired operatives often refrain from correcting bad information—
making it seem that they agree—while disseminating more of their own skewed
narratives to blur the facts. The nature of espionage makes a certain degree of
that inevitable. I try to get beyond the circle of purposeful misinformation to
simply tell my own story as I remember it.
I didn’t undertake to write about myself in order to aggrandize my career or
the KGB—enough fuss has already been made about my part in Cold War
espionage. Aside from the new details in this account, intelligence professionals
generally know who I am and understand the significance of my role in KGB
history. I wrote for a general Western audience, which has shown more interest
in the real facts—the good and the bad of intelligence history—than Russians
have. In the past, I’ve been interviewed for several accounts of Cold War
espionage. In most cases, my actions and words haven’t been portrayed entirely
correctly—not necessarily as a willful decision on the part of the writers, but
because they didn’t have all the information. Here is my attempt to correct the
record.
I continue to care deeply for the KGB’s reputation. My goal is to clear away
some misperceptions about Soviet intelligence, to try to communicate that the
KGB was staffed by human beings who made the same mistakes and held the
same feelings others did. Most intelligence officers are able to separate their
professional and personal feelings. The many years I spent working against the
CIA were my contribution to the maintenance of my country as a great power.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t respect Americans or enjoy the United States. I
always believed Americans were trying to do for their country what I was doing
for mine.
Finally, I don’t intend this chronicle to be published in Russia, where
intelligence professionals are now generally seen more as suspicious “spies”
than dedicated officers serving the interests of their country. Many former KGB
officers have published memoirs claiming to address public curiosity, where
none really exists. Most of these books were vanity projects, presented as the
official versions of events. Some of those accounts have tarnished my reputation
and those of other former KGB officers, reflecting the politics at work in any
bureaucracy. Instead of waiting for future historians to write more balanced
analyses of the claims and counterclaims, I decided to tell my story now and
enable readers to come to their own conclusions.