Farewell (43 page)

The Rogatins’ country house was searched skillfully. Their phone was tapped twenty-four hours a day. When they went outside to walk their dog, they could see shadows stamping their feet in the building courtyard. If Galina took the trolley to go to work, a well-dressed man with cropped hair inevitably got on board with her. Alexei could see a black Volga in his back mirror, tailing him at all times.

In the beginning, the Rogatins tried to take it well. They even started the habit, when leaving for the countryside, to drop their apartment key with the building caretaker, under the pretext that she could have a look and make sure everything was fine and clean up every once in a while. Actually, this was a gesture to prove they had nothing to hide, since the caretaker like all her colleagues was a KGB informant. The KGB must have used this opportunity more than once to search their apartment at will.

Over time, however, it became irritating. Many of their acquaintances had stopped calling them. Like Svetlana, Galina had the good Soviet reflex not to call their true friends, not wanting to compromise them. Finally, the UPDK told Alexei he could no longer work as a chauffeur for the embassy of a capitalist country. He protested. He wanted to know why they were blaming him, but to no avail. After having driven the Swedish and Luxembourgian ambassadors’ cars, a job he viewed as the high point of his career, Alexei was forced to drive a coach for the Hungarian trade mission.

Strangely, the Rogatins were placed under surveillance as early as the spring of 1982, although there was no suspicion of espionage at that time. They were never bothered during the second investigation. It was only years later, having run into Svetlana by chance in the street, that they learned about Vetrov’s execution by firing squad for high treason.

Things got tougher for Tokarev, who had been posted in Paris and had handled Bourdiol. When he returned to Moscow in April 1982, he had accumulated a vacation backlog for the last three years. So, he did not resume working at Yasenevo until September. Then he got a phone call from Yuri Motsak, the head of the French section, with whom he had worked in the Second Chief Directorate (counterintelligence). At first he did not see reasons to be alarmed. A man he had met only once, at a birthday party for Alexei Rogatin, committed a murder. It had nothing to do with him! He had just received a decoration, and his résumé was impeccable.

Being a good professional, however, Tokarev realized immediately that he was being tailed. This meant his phone was also tapped. He went to talk about it to his superior, but the man dodged his questions. So Tokarev told his friends to stay away from him for a while; but some of them, like Karavashkin, called him regularly to make it clear they did not believe he was part of the treason case.

Months went by with no relaxation of the surveillance. It is irritating to be suspected by your own people. Tokarev routinely went to his internal counterintelligence colleagues and said, “Cut the crap, dammit! Aren’t you fed up with this nonsense?”

His friends tried to comfort him: “Come on, let them investigate! You’re clean. They’ll end up coming to the same conclusion themselves.”

This was eventually the case, but not before 1987. Because of the Farewell affair, however, Tokarev’s career was in double jeopardy. In the KGB first, where he was sidelined for years, then with the DST, since Vetrov had revealed he belonged to the PGU. Starting in 1983, they denied him French visas. He had changed direction and gone into business for years by then, yet main Western countries did not grant him free movement to conduct his business with clients or suppliers. The KGB was more forgiving. Even foreign intelligence officers declared
personae non gratae
and expelled from the USSR could come back to Russia ten years after having resigned from their service.

Yuri Motsak paid a higher price for his friendly relations with Vetrov. His case was more understandable. Motsak had enjoyed a few too many drinks with the traitor he was paid to unmask and, for that reason, counterintelligence did more than keep a close watch on him around the clock.

One day he was picked up by the police with a colleague, both unconscious. Motsak could hold his liquor. Even after gulping down a liter of vodka, he did not let anything show. Everyone who knew him concluded Motsak had been drugged. His comrade had simply had the bad luck to share the same bottle. Drugged meant interrogated. Apparently the “induced” confession proved Motsak’s innocence in the espionage case. He could be blamed only for his lack of vigilance, but he was transferred to the Tenth Department (currency trafficking, smuggling) of the Second Chief Directorate. He was eventually rehabilitated, nominated department head, and promoted to colonel. Today he is also a businessman.

Other PGU acquaintances of the Rogatins—Rudian, Komisarov (who succeeded Vetrov in Paris)—found themselves under the KGB’s magnifying glass. They all got out of it with varying degrees of damage.

Why target the Rogatins and the people around them? The answer is obvious. If there had been a Vetrov network, Alexei would have been the ideal living mailbox. Under the pretext of car repair, a good half dozen KGB officers would have routinely come to drop their batch of secret information, and Vetrov would have stopped by to take delivery before transmitting the information to the French.

Did the KGB come to this theory on their own? Vladimir could have, indeed, told Ferrant that he was heading a “network,” so the French would not doubt his ability to single-handedly provide such a large amount of very important documents. Perhaps, in order to woo his silent partners, he also tried to impress them with his organizational skills. It is very likely that Vetrov talked to “Paul” about their common main enemy, Yuri Motsak.

After the August 1991 coup, Vitaly Karavashkin, though having resigned from the KGB, was willing to do a last favor for his colleagues, pretending to probe a French secret agent whose code name was “Thermometer.” He told him he was willing to accept a job in the Moscow offices of a French company delegation. The Frenchman, naturally, seized the opportunity to regularly “milk” the man who best knew the Moscow French colony, and came from the Soviet counterintelligence service that had been monitoring it closely. In his first round of questions, in order to make sure he did intend to be useful to the French services, “Thermometer” asked Karavashkin about Motsak. How did his career go? What happened to him? Since the Second Chief Directorate had no known traitors in its ranks after Yuri Nosenko, French special services should not even have known Motsak’s name. Karavashkin concluded, therefore, that Motsak’s identity must have been revealed to them by Vetrov.

After executing Vetrov, and having gone through the mole’s entourage with a fine-tooth comb, the KGB needed to rebuild on the ruins of an entire division. Before doing so, it had to analyze the errors and shortcomings that allowed this incredible and surrealistic operation to succeed.

In chapters 10 and 11, we attempted to draw the psychological portrait of a man as full of contradictions as Vladimir Vetrov. Naturally, his PGU colleagues, and the entire KGB, tried to understand a traitor’s personality and motivations. Those analyses, and there were several, give another perspective on the Vetrov case. They may not be as impartial as the authors’ approach, but they are more technical.

With respect to Vetrov’s motives, the investigation file did not mention any links to politics. There are moles who profess a global vision of the situation and strive to influence its evolution. Collaborating with Soviet intelligence during World War II, the Cambridge Five were convinced they were contributing to the Allies’ common war effort. Klaus Fuchs thought that by passing the atom bomb secrets to the USSR, he contributed to averting the danger of an imbalance between the blocs, which presented a mortal threat to all of humanity. On a less intellectual level, George Pâques, who was handled by the PGU, was certain of playing a crucial role on the international scene. For Vetrov, however, it was more a question of getting emotionally even with the KGB than an elaborate plan to fight the Soviet system.

His investigation file clearly shows, in conversations with other Gulag inmates, or in letters to Svetlana, his criticism of Soviet life’s downsides, with nepotism, corruption, shortages, and so forth. The investigating magistrates used the phrase “embarked upon the path of treason as a result of ideological degeneration,” which strangely echoes the term “detachment” used by Raymond Nart to explain Vetrov’s behavior. What else would explain that a former young pioneer of the Soviet Union, a Communist Youth and a Communist Party member, could betray his country?

Was it out of greed? We know this was not a dominant trait in this case. For the KGB members, presenting Vetrov as a corrupt character or a Judas was very tempting. Vladimir Kryuchkov
¹
considered that if the greed element did not prevail, it was because the traitor, having no legal possibility to spend the money in the Soviet Union, owning significant amounts of money would have been risky. In his opinion, Vetrov intended to enjoy his wealth once in France.

He cannot be proven wrong. Adolf Tolkachev, for instance, was an American mole who, in those same years in the eighties, passed information on Soviet fighter aircraft to the CIA. On top of the two million dollars he had in his bank account in the United States, he had almost eight hundred thousand rubles in Moscow. This was a huge fortune, enough to buy at least fifty three-room apartments in the heart of Moscow. When he thought he was being watched, Tolkachev burned half a million rubles. As he watched the flames get bigger, he later admitted, he thought to himself, “It is for all this money that I gambled with my life!” He was executed by firing squad in the fall of 1986.

All French testimonies, and even the Soviet investigation file, stated the same fact: in the beginning, Vetrov’s purpose was not to get rich. It was only later, and encouraged by the DST, that he asked for remuneration, thirty or forty thousand rubles, a sum he was never to receive. A detail worth noting in his deposition, Vetrov admitted that no sooner had he made his request, he stopped, suddenly realizing that he had reached a point of no return. From now on, he would be a mole paid by an adversarial service.

Yet, he did not need money to survive or to live better. He had everything a Soviet citizen could dream of, with a luxuriously furnished apartment in an upscale district, a house in the countryside, a car, free medical care for the entire family, and his son’s higher education paid. The “island” is what he thought he would be able to buy in that life awaiting him on the other side of the border. In his current life, a bottle of scotch for him or cheap jewelry for his mistress was all he needed.

The value of Vetrov’s confession on this account is relative. No one wants to be seen in an unflattering light, appearing greedy, corruptible, and servile. “In all of those stories, nothing gets uglier than the money part,” says Igor Prelin. “One can betray out of hatred for the regime, this is not demeaning, and hatred for one’s boss is nothing to be ashamed of, but Judas’s thirty pieces of silver is the last straw!”

Svetlana was convinced that her husband had a bank account in France, in which the DST was regularly depositing his salary. This was probably not the case. At the most, like many Russian defectors, he would have been provided a place to live, the opportunity to give interviews for a fee or to write a book, and in the best-case scenario, he would have received a monthly allowance. It is acknowledged that even the Americans, who could afford it, promised more than they intended doing. In the nineties, after President Yeltsin pardoned Russian moles who were serving their time in jail, most of them ended up in the United States. Those men received an indemnity and a monthly allowance that, at some point, was reduced. So, the former spies organized into a kind of union to sue the American administration over unkept promises.

In the KGB’s opinion, shared by the authors, Vetrov’s main motive was revenge. Although not mentioned in the investigation file, the mole’s colleagues did not like the way he extended his hatred of his superior to his country. “If he had punched him in the nose or tripped him, that’s one thing, but to take revenge on all of his comrades, on the entire service, and on the State!” Igor Prelin cried out, indignant. “I did not meet a single person among our people who thought that Vetrov’s punishment was too harsh.”

Prelin should have been asked, “Who could have taken the risk to openly stand up for Vetrov?” From Yurchenko’s testimony we learn an entirely different version of the scandal’s internal impact. At the end of the CIA memo, the double defector, still amazed at the virulence of Vetrov’s confession, admits “to the dramatic nature of his characterization of Subject,” but immediately adds that he did not overestimate “the profound effect Subject’s commitment to attack the KGB had on him personally and upon the KGB hierarchy.”

Another source, this time from the French DGSE (the General Directorate for External Security, as the SDECE was renamed in 1982), assured us that KGB officers secretly admired Vetrov’s courage and determination to fight nepotism. In 1988, discontent eventually filtered through, with a first incident occurring during the opening of a meeting convened to elect the executives of the PGU Party committee. Three brilliant officers challenged the presence on the stage, next to General Fillip Bobkov,
²
of a “well-connected,” competence-and efficiency-deprived individual. Taken off guard, the PGU could only beat a retreat. The breach opened that day would inexorably widen until, during the following year, over two hundred KGB officers in Sverdlovsk signed a petition addressed to their top management.

The jolt that shook the KGB as an aftershock of the Vetrov “earthquake” was felt all the more painfully because it occurred in a zone of “low seismic activity,” so to speak. The KGB could not have anticipated actions from a service (the DST) it did not suspect of operating in the USSR. Had the captured spy collaborated with the Americans, the British, or the Germans, that would have been one thing, but this? As the joke had it, circulating in the hallways of Soviet counterintelligence services, the last time secrets had been revealed to the French before the Farewell case was during the “Lockhart plot”!
³

To explain the unprecedented success of the Farewell operation, the DST put forward its deliberate intention to act contrary to all rules, but this is only partially true. Two circumstances made this anomaly possible.

The first one was the belief, put to the test through a long period of checks, that French services had given up agent manipulation. “With an American or a British handler, Vetrov would have been caught red-handed within a month,” claims Igor Prelin.

The second one is the fact that all the contact terms and conditions were devised by Vetrov in person. “Myself, when I was dealing with a competent foreign agent, I would trust him,” recalls Igor Prelin. “It would have been stupid to impose any elaborate scheme, in Moscow, on an individual operating on his own turf. I always played the innocent with him, pretending I had nothing to do with secret services, that I was only a transmission belt, and I listened. If he had a shrewd plan, I’d say ‘Bravo!’ and the agent was all happy to be so smart. If I realized the risks involved, I tweaked the plan ever so tactfully, asking questions rather than giving instructions.

“Throughout this book, we have seen that the plan Vetrov proposed to the French left very little room for the unexpected. There were always good reasons for the presence of the protagonists in the various rendezvous places. Vetrov was not taking huge risks in borrowing documents in Yasenevo, and Ferrant even less in shipping the Farewell documents in the diplomatic pouch (the contacts with Xavier Ameil were more risky, but they were never expected to last). The only real danger was if Directorate T urgently needed a missing document. During the weekends, those risks were minimal.

In the eighties, however, such certainties had not yet been established. The main question was how this unbelievable operation could have taken place in the heart of Communist Moscow. Could the existence of secret services still be justified if an amateur, with no special training like Ameil, was able to fulfill a mission usually reserved for a professional? Or if a counterintelligence service like the DST demonstrated its ability to bring an operation to a successful conclusion, a task that is, theoretically, the prerogative of intelligence services? Or if a woman and three men had what it takes to brave many thousands of individuals who were part of the powerful KGB machine and, in the height of unlikelihood, prevailed? All this called for careful thought.

In 1986, the KGB Second Chief Directorate analyzed the mechanism used by the DST in the Farewell operation. The PGU certainly did the same thing, but the two services, designed to complement each other, did not show eagerness to share information. Lieutenant Colonel Karavashkin, at the time deputy head of the French section for counterintelligence, officially requested Vetrov’s investigation file.
⁴
It took the PGU a year to send the seven three-hundred-page or so gray volumes to their colleagues in counterintelligence. The first volume contained the interrogation reports, the second one the search reports, seizure reports, and crime scene inspection reports, the third one the witnesses’ depositions, and the fourth one experts’ reports, and so forth. The last volume ended with the sentence execution certificate and the death certificate.

It took Karavashkin three months to study all the paperwork. His main conclusion was that the Farewell case did not shed light on the working methods of the French secret services. Had Vetrov accepted the plan suggested by the DST, the operation would have failed in a matter of days. The procedures he imposed on his handlers were those applied by Soviet intelligence. “In the future, though,” said Karavashkin, “if the French are good students, one can assume they will benefit from this experience in agent handling.”

Karavashkin had adopted a businesslike approach and reasoned from analogy with the way KGB members operated in France. According to him, the manipulation of a KGB officer in the middle of Moscow required a whole set of technical measures, some of which were very complex.

Assuming an intelligence officer in Paris, such as Vetrov, goes to a secret rendezvous with an important agent, Pierre Bourdiol, for instance. On that day the entire residency is on alert. Only two or three men know what is supposed to happen. Others execute diversion and cover maneuvers, not having a clue about the particulars of the operation (names, circumstances, kind of operation). Several hours before the rendezvous, half a dozen officers leave the Soviet embassy, setting in motion one by one the DST’s tailing teams, hot on their heels. Each officer behaves in a manner intended to make the shadow believe the tailed officer is the one on his way to make a drop or take delivery from a dead letter box or to rendezvous with his agent. He runs errands, leaves his car somewhere, and goes down in the subway. In this way, each officer is dragging a maximum number of shadows in his wake.

It is only after the main body of the DST forces has been diverted onto other surveillance targets that the true “handler of the day” leaves his office or his home. Like all of his colleagues, he follows a long security route through town. He goes by places where another KGB member, sipping a beer at an outside coffee table, checks that he is not being tailed. This is what is referred to as physical countersurveillance.

The handler then performs unpredictable maneuvers. For instance, at 16:34, as he is driving his car in the right lane, he changes to the left lane at the last moment. If he was followed, the tailers cannot do the same last-minute maneuver. They are thus forced to inform their center, or another car, to take over. During this ploy, an operator listens to radio conversations on the DST frequencies. If at exactly 16:34 he intercepts any message, generally ciphered, it means the officer is under surveillance. If another message is intercepted at the same time as the next unexpected maneuver, scheduled for instance at 16:49, then there is no doubt left: the DST is hot on the officer’s heels. Then, a beeper alerts him that the operation is cancelled.

If countersurveillance and radio monitoring do not reveal suspicious activity after three hours of acrobatics, the officer arrives at the meeting place. There, he and his agent check once again that the way is clear. Only then do they get in contact.

Such are the basics of the trade, adopted by all special services worldwide, because this canonical
modus operandi
works. No one in the KGB doubted Vetrov had been handled that way in Moscow.

In particular, Soviet counterintelligence was convinced that during the mandatory three hours of driving around town before meeting with Farewell, Ferrant must have been backed up by the American embassy radio control service. At the time, the French embassy in Moscow was not equipped to perform this kind of technical operation. There was a close collaboration between Western special services in the USSR, particularly in military intelligence. At the time, contacts between American and French officers were very frequent. Therefore, reasoned Karavashkin, the Americans could very well have responded to Ferrant’s request to be covered, or they could have received the express order to do so from the CIA headquarters.