Farewell (37 page)

An individual who prepares a crime as serious as a murder must think of the most minute details and define a backup procedure for every possible thing that might go wrong. What if I cannot kill Ludmila first time around? What if she doesn’t pass out and starts screaming, struggling, and calling for help? What if somebody intervenes before she dies? Even very intelligent people cannot anticipate everything. Criminologists know it: the state of excitement that goes with the planning of a crime has an inhibiting effect on intellectual faculties.

Vetrov clearly did not have a critical mind; he did not know how to think through an operation (for a pro this one was definitely an operation), how to execute it as planned, and above all, he had no self-control. The first unexpected incident turned into a disaster.

After having hit Ludmila with the bottle, Vetrov understands he will not be able to take care of her that way. But he cannot backtrack. Ochikina alive will spoil his story. Soon the situation is beyond his control and takes an unexpected turn. Vetrov panics. In a way, he truly is not in his normal state. He grabs the pique and starts stabbing Ludmila; she must die for his plan to succeed. Senseless stabbing is all grist to his mill for that matter. A high number of blows can attest to the fact that the criminal was out of control.

It is at that very moment of total disarray, when Vetrov felt he had burned his bridges and had to go on killing Ludmila no matter what, that a man appeared. He was the witness he needed, but unfortunately intervening sooner than expected. Having suddenly appeared out of the darkness, the man was now an impediment he had to get rid of immediately. Vetrov did not believe the murder of the witness changed the situation much. What mattered the most was to finish off Ludmila.

This version of the events would also explain the visit Vetrov paid to the Rogatins immediately after the crime. The reader will remember that Galina had always been puzzled by Vetrov choosing her as his confidant. She still does not understand why, that evening, instead of going to see close friends, he came to see them, fairly remote acquaintances. Vetrov could not reasonably hope that the Rogatins would provide him with an alibi, thus becoming accomplices to a double murder.

Vetrov went to them because he planned to have them appear in court as unaware, and therefore more credible, witnesses for the defense. In the eyes of the judges, depositions by people close to him, like Svetlana, would not have the same weight. Similar to Vetrov’s PGU colleagues, Galina had been conditioned by his agonies, having seen the man torn apart between his wife and his mistress. She would testify to the fact that one hour after the crime, he still was not his normal self. He talked about a hammer that did not exist, a poked eye that was not. He believed he had run Ludmila over with his car, projecting her several meters away. Once it would have been determined that all those details were fantasy, the judges would conclude that Vetrov was delirious, or close to delirium. In case no passersby had been present at the crime scene, the Rogatins would have served as backup witnesses.

Vetrov’s ease in giving these fanciful details is not surprising. Premeditated or not, committing a murder alters the consciousness of the individual not used to killing, and not an insensitive brute by nature. Evidently, Vetrov could not keep his cool while stabbing a woman he had loved. He knocked a tooth out and pierced her upper lip; he could have seen an eye hanging out of its socket. He said he had run Ludmila over with the car to finish her off; it may be because that’s what he intended to do, but he could not tell for sure whether it happened or not. In his mental state, intentions became confused with real actions, not to mention that a man his age, with his personality type and his drinking tendencies, was rather psychologically inflexible.

Thus, Vetrov’s initial plan had not worked. Ochikina was not dead, but in the meantime he had killed a passerby. All the same, this plan showed through, here and there, in Vetrov’s behavior that evening of February 22. He would have planned, for instance, to tell his son they were not to meet again. After the decision he had made, he was expecting to spend the upcoming night at the police station.

After his arrest, Vetrov tried to salvage everything he could of his plan. Ludmila the survivor claims the contrary? He put pressure on the investigation by repeating his version a hundred times. She affirms she never threatened to go to the Party committee? He repeats that she was constantly blackmailing him on that pretence. She says he hit her although she had not said a word, just when she was about to have a sip of champagne? He manages to have the version about an alleged provocation in the car accredited. Vetrov quickly understood the KGB did not want scandal and was more likely to side with him than with a simple translator.

What Vetrov had not anticipated when planning his crime, and particularly when executing it, is that as he departed from the initial scenario, he came under another article of the penal code. Even if Soviet authorities easily bypassed or ignored the law altogether to convict opponents to the regime, when it came to sentencing ordinary criminals—and in a large part Vetrov belonged to this category—the bureaucratic machine of the judicial system worked rigidly. Consequently, his crime no longer qualified under the lax article 104 as “homicide in a state of intense psychological agitation,” but was now described by the very stern article 102 as “aggravated murder.” Its clauses listed a series of aggravating circumstances, three of which at least applied to Vetrov’s case; c) murder of a person in the exercise of his or her professional or social duties (since the victim belonged to the police); d) murder perpetrated with unusual cruelty, and h) murder of two people or more (a failed attempt at murder despite the criminal’s explicit intent to kill is often considered as equaling an accomplished murder). The sentence for such a crime is eight to fifteen years of imprisonment, or an “exceptional” sentence (capital punishment). During the investigation, therefore, Vetrov could not expect a deferred sentence or imprisonment for a symbolic term, but at a minimum an eight-year sentence. Even with this verdict, he could, nevertheless, be released after serving four years. Apparently, his judges had encouraged him to collaborate with the investigation to the point that he was almost sure his sentence would be minimal. Hence, his despondency and disappointment after the sentence was passed.

However, Vetrov’s letters show that his common sense convinced him in the end that his fate was not so terrible. Certainly, he paid a higher price than expected, but he had played his game well. The espionage story seemed forgotten, and he was far away from Moscow in a camp for the privileged where no one had an interest in him. The most important thing from that point on was to do everything possible to obtain a review of his case. This is shown in each of his letters, where he asks Svetlana to keep fighting for him. With time and a good lawyer, Vetrov could start bombarding the authorities with requests asking for the application of article 104. In many cases, this approach worked.

A bold hypothesis, as we saw, that cleared up all the contradictions summarized at the beginning of this chapter. However, like any hypothesis, this one raises other questions.

In fact, thirteen years after having written these lines, even Sergei Kostin no longer believes it. For one thing, if Vetrov had wanted to extricate himself from the situation, he could have done it in a less costly manner. A crime as serious as murder would inevitably trigger a very thorough investigation—actually, a complete study of his personality. Based on depositions by his close and distant relations, the judges would soon look more closely at the money coming from Leningrad, the cars “the French would buy him,” and so many other imprudent comments he could not help making. Vetrov should have hit a pedestrian with his car, being perfectly sober on that day. Then, as in Rechensky’s case, it would have been viewed as a terrible thing that could have happened to anyone. His family, his colleagues, and the entire service would have been on his side. He would have been sent down for five years, would have served two, and would have come out of jail with his head held high.

What do we make, then, of Ludmila Ochikina’s testimony, claiming Vetrov hit her with the bottle first, before she could say anything? When trying to resolve contradictory facts, the logical solution is to doubt the weakest link in the chain. However sincere and reliable Ludmila might have appeared to be, her account seems questionable, to say the least. For Vetrov to act the way he did, she must have said something that was beyond an offensive remark, something that imperiled his entire life. It had to be about his espionage activity. This theory agrees with the opinion shared by many of the actors in this affair, starting with Raymond Nart, whose opinion is based on the testimony of defector Vitaly Yurchenko. When debriefed by the CIA, the former head of the PGU Department 5K (internal counterintelligence related, inter alia, to France) was in complete agreement with this interpretation.

We continue to trust, nonetheless, most of Ochikina’s testimony, including the reasons why it was not in Vetrov’s interest to tell his mistress he was a mole. We have learned, however, that she had entrusted him with secret documents so he could write his famous report and demonstrate his merits to his department. Better still, when Vetrov was on duty on Sundays, without having the faintest idea of who was the actual recipient of this precious information, she left him the key to her safe so he could continue his work.

Here is yet another version that organizes the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent picture. Without really threatening him to go to the Party committee, Ludmila did give Vetrov a deadline: either he leaves his wife, or she leaves him. She claims that by then she was disgusted with him, but if so, she would not have gone with him to drink champagne in the car. For his part, Vetrov had no intention of being so harsh with her, certainly not in the way meant by his son. He simply wanted to settle the conflict amicably.

It is during the conversation in the car, probably when Vetrov poured the champagne in the only cup, after one of those imprudent comments Vladimir was so prone to let out, that Ludmila realized her lover was a spy. Vetrov read it immediately on her face, and all the violations, minor or more serious, his mistress committed for him passed through his mind in a flash. The thought that Ludmila risked being considered his accomplice, if she were to denounce him, did not even cross his mind. Only one thought prevailed: this woman could cause his downfall, so she had to be eliminated on the spot! Following his impulse, he made his first move, in an inconvenient position with an inadequate tool.

It is only after the fact, having become a murderer, that Vetrov understood how he could benefit from the situation.

As mentioned earlier, the KGB suspected that the murder committed by Vetrov hid an espionage affair. Hence, the story about the painting offered to Vetrov by French people, discussed in the cell at Lefortovo; the question Belomestnykh asked Svetlana and Vladik about possible secret documents brought home by Vetrov; the awkward scene during Vetrov’s trial, when Rogatina mentioned in her deposition that Vladimir asked to borrow money to buy a painting; or the questioning about the fur coat by a woman in the bed next to Ludmila, in the KGB hospital. Those strange events are no longer mysterious today; Vladimir Kryuchkov, the PGU chief at the time, confirmed all these suspicions.

The KGB needed irrefutable evidence to confound an experienced operative like Vetrov. Time had stood still at Lefortovo, and this was the right opportunity to give Vetrov a good jolt by sending him to the Gulag, along with special instructions regarding his case. Probably not due to luck as much as effort, the KGB eventually came across a determining piece of evidence.

Dates are essential here. It happened sometime between March and September 1983. In March, Vetrov was sent to a camp in Irkutsk. His last letter, among those kept by Svetlana, was dated July 10. He probably wrote more after that date, but in the middle of the summer of 1983 Vetrov was miles away from thinking his espionage affair would be uncovered. Svetlana too hoped this “skeleton” was securely locked up in its closet. By September, Vetrov stopped writing.

Svetlana was used to receiving one or two letters a week. She had an entire stack of them in her linen wardrobe. Suddenly weeks went by with no news from her husband.

She telephoned Lefortovo to no avail and wrote to the director of the Irkutsk penitentiary, with no response. She imagined the worst. Disappearing in the Gulag was not so unusual.

When Svetlana understood that Vladimir had not disappeared, the feeling was not one of relief, because the phone call she got on November 17, 1983, after over two months of silence, came from Lefortovo.

“Could you come see us tomorrow?”

In a flash, Svetlana realized that the KGB had found out what had been going on. She wasted no time in destroying the letters that might compromise her husband during the new investigation. She also got rid of the note he had written to Prévost, which she had kept.

It was in vain! The first thing the investigation magistrates did was to show her an exact copy of the note. Same handwriting, same squared paper folded in four, same length, same words that she knew by heart.

Svetlana tried to hedge, but lacked conviction. She was quick to understand that the note could not have been reconstituted without Vladimir’s collaboration. She thus decided not to hide what was obvious. It was just a call for help, she said, sent to a French acquaintance, and she added she did not know what the link was with her husband, other than an old friendship.

Then, the investigators gave her another note written by Vetrov, this time addressed to her. If Svetlana wanted to help him, he wrote, she must do as she was told by the investigators. She began by answering questions regarding the note to Prévost, its content, presentation, paper, and so forth. Two certainties emerged in her mind: first, the KGB knew her husband had collaborated with the DST; secondly, it was preparing a deception operation.

According to a now well-established ritual, they all went from Lefortovo to the apartment for a new search. The investigators found only the letters that were neither destroyed nor hidden. But their tone had changed; espionage within the KGB was no laughing matter.

Not one of the investigators present that day, however, thought about questioning Vladik, the only person who was familiar with Vetrov’s secret side.

One wonders what gave the traitor away. The PGU investigation file, naturally, does not say a word on the subject. This rule is common to police and security services all over the world: never reveal the source, whether it is an agent or a device like a microphone. Two key testimonies, though, Vladimir Kryuchkov’s and Igor Prelin’s,
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allow us today to establish with certainty the source of three exhibits, all equally fatal for Farewell.

The first was provided by the well-publicized expulsion from France, in April 1983, of forty-seven Soviet citizens, KGB and GRU members operating under various covers, as well as authentic diplomats.

This exceptional measure was in fact a retaliatory one. In January 1983, during a repair he was performing for the French embassy in Moscow, a French technician discovered a shunt on a teleprinter used to communicate with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris.
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Five more devices—those were the Myosotis systems developed under Xavier Ameil’s management in his earlier Thomson years—were immediately checked. It was horrifying to discover that they had all been tampered with. Those ciphering machines had been in transit for forty-eight hours in Soviet territory in special sealed railroad cars, so-called “suitcase cars,” and were supposedly burglar-proof. They were not, however, KGB-proof. Starting in the winter of 1976–1977, the Russians had been reading in clear the content of every message transmitted to and from the embassy and the Quai d’Orsay.
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Informed of the situation, President Mitterrand refused to ignore the offense. In mid-March 1983, he asked Yves Bonnet, Marcel Chalet’s successor as head of the DST, for the list of KGB and GRU members operating in France. The list provided was especially comprehensive, since it was written by Vetrov. Out of the 160 names listed, Raymond Nart and his deputy Jacky Debain picked forty-seven. François Mitterrand gave them the green light. The banished people left France on April 5, 1983. The exploitation of the Farewell dossier in France had begun.

Wasn’t it a bit premature? The mole had disappeared from the picture over a year ago. How could one be certain this move would not be fatal to Farewell? The French obviously thought he was dead or had been uncovered.
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How is it possible to decide to fully exploit the information produced by a mole when there is no way to determine at what point in time the mole no longer risks the worst? It is now known that in the spring of 1983, the KGB had no concrete evidence yet against Vetrov. So either the DST had no doubt that Farewell had been executed, or Mitterrand’s desire to vigorously retaliate after the Myosotis scandal prevailed over any consideration for their best mole’s security; but the fate of the forty-seven Russians was sealed.

“The French expected complications, even the end of the friendly relations between our countries,” recalls Vladimir Kryuchkov.
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“Gromyko must be credited for having suggested retaliation, but his proposal was rejected. Andropov believed it was possible to maintain the good relations that existed between France and the Soviet Union, their degradation being beneficial to neither side. The French were quite surprised.”

The moment the Soviets learned about the expulsion, the first thing that came to mind was that there had been a leak. An investigation was initiated, not by the PGU internal counterintelligence this time, but by the KGB Second Chief Directorate (counterintelligence). Here again, the France department was not in charge of the inquiry, but Directorate A under General Rem Krasilnikov’s command was. The suspicion of this fearsome service was focused not only on current and former PGU operatives, but also on the staff of the France department within counterintelligence. So Yuri Motsak, Victor Tokarev, and many other spy hunters operating in Moscow found themselves in the same boat as intelligence officers. Casting a wide net, Vetrov was immediately listed among the main suspects.
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The expulsion of the forty-seven diplomats was such a sensational event that even the Soviet press could not keep it quiet. The fact was buried among other news and presented like an unfriendly provocation on the part of French authorities, but it was, nonetheless, reported. A Gulag informer, who was specifically monitoring Vetrov, waited for and reported Vetrov’s reaction at the news. An impulsive man, he could not help it: “Ah, the assholes! They burned me.”
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It was a remark that did not fool anybody in the KGB. But after all, the DST must have had, even without Vetrov’s help, a list of PGU officers operating in France—less accurate and less comprehensive, probably, but as impressive nevertheless. The KGB could start working from there, but the investigation was so wide that other pieces of evidence surfaced soon thereafter.

The death knell sounded in earnest for Vetrov a few weeks earlier, on March 28, 1983, while he was in the cattle car taking him to Siberia. It had just been decided to expel the forty-seven Russian diplomats. The minister-adviser Nikolai Afanasievsky, who actually was the KGB deputy resident in Paris (even if he denied it later), was summoned to the Quai d’Orsay. He was met by François Scheer, Claude Cheysson’s principal private secretary. Faced with the Soviet official’s protest, Scheer served him the “sledgehammer argument.” He showed him photocopies of a top secret document, the Soviet scientific and technical intelligence annual report for 1979–1980. Since the expulsion was clearly stretching the good diplomatic practices in force, the Quai d’Orsay had insisted the DST come up with “good stuff” to justify the measure. In the French side’s opinion, the nature of the document was one of the motivations for the Soviets to keep a low profile. With such incriminating evidence showing, among others, the signature of the new head of state and former KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, the Kremlin was well advised not to aggravate the situation.

Nonetheless, from a strictly technical standpoint, presenting such a document would have made sense only if the page had contained names of the individuals singled out for expulsion, or if it had been at least related to technological espionage in France. It contained none of that. In support of the presidential decision, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs simply wanted to demonstrate that the Soviets were involved in intelligence activities—as if it was not already well known.

However, this unwarranted and, in fact, pointless gesture had fatal consequences for Vetrov. Apparently, the French had dipped into a heap of documents to draw one with a chance to shock, stamped as it was with the VPK (Military Industrial Commission) header, signed by Leonid Smirnov, deputy prime minister and head of the VPK, and addressed to Yuri Andropov, at that time the KGB boss.

Unfortunately for Farewell, there were only very few copies of the VPK report. Like all classified documents, each copy showed the name of every person who had read it besides the author, the addressee, and the typist. Those names, along with the dates, were handwritten by each reader on the back of the first page, or on a separate sheet of paper stapled to the document. Moreover, this information was backed up by a record in a special registry allowing investigators to rapidly find all individuals involved, along with their functions and phone numbers.

From there, the rest was routine. Afanasievsky must have described the document to Nikolai Chetverikov, who was then the KGB resident in France, and he in turn transmitted the news to the Center. In Moscow, it took no time to put together a list of the people having had the VPK report in hand. This list could not have contained more than a few dozen individuals. Next to the names of ministers, directors, advisers, and other Soviet citizens beyond suspicion, Vetrov’s name, the name of a murderer serving his sentence in a prison camp, must have looked like Mount Fuji in the middle of a plain. With some help from the red tape, it took a few more months to find additional incriminating evidence against Vetrov. This takes us to the end of the summer of 1983, at which time he was back to Lefortovo after his stay in Irkutsk.

In France, Marcel Chalet was the first to denounce the imprudence of the expulsion measure.
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As stated, the former head of French counterintelligence (DST) had retired in November 1982. Before leaving his post, he had given his successor Yves Bonnet special instructions regarding the prudent exploitation of the Farewell dossier.

Clearly, the new DST director retained as a priority what had been a constant concern of the service even under Chalet, to drastically reduce the number of KGB operative officers in France. In his memoirs,
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Bonnet denied having caused Farewell’s downfall. He mentioned other causes, such as Vetrov’s imprudent correspondence, or Svetlana’s affair with the investigating magistrate. But we know that the magistrate was actually the hearing judge for the crime of passion.

Regarding the expulsion itself, Raymond Nart persisted in thinking that the chosen document could not lead to the identification of the source. During the meeting between François Sheer and Afanasievsky, as Nart specified, the doctored and postdated document remained in the hands of the Soviet diplomat only thirty seconds or so; it was impossible for him to identify the source since the attached notes with the signatures had been removed. When told that the mere nature of the document was enough to track back to Vetrov, Nart dismissed the argument out of hand and referred to the dilemma of exploiting the Farewell dossier: “Really, it was not for us to be the guardians of KGB secrets.”
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It goes without saying that a source is only useful to the extent it is possible to benefit from its disclosures. However, each measure taken to neutralize identified sources, expel or tail more closely enemy intelligence officers, or improve the protection of threatened infrastructures or projects runs the risk of blowing the mole’s cover. Using the information disclosed by an agent in place is juggling between the frying pan and the fire. Let’s not forget that during that same period the DST was still frozen in relative uncertainty about its mole’s fate. On the other hand, the treasure recovered in Moscow was very real.