The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

MONOLITE case was still considered a joint CIA-FBI operation. Platt retired from the CIA in 1987, but he returned immediately as a contractor in order to try to finish the case. He was planning to return to Georgetown in February to see his old friend once again.

As he tried to compose himself for further interrogations, Gennady Vasilenko could only think again, Jack, Jack, what have you done?

Aboard a Soviet Freighter Bound for Odessa, January 1988

Gennady Vasilenko had said little to his inquisitors in Havana, so they had thrown him on board a freighter headed back to the Soviet Union, where the KGB would have plenty of time to convince him that he should talk. Gennady was not confined on board; the KGB figured he had no place to go. But as he paced the deck, he began to seriously consider jumping overboard in the middle of the Atlantic, ending his life and the pain that he knew was now descending on his family. Yet as the ship trudged through the waves, bearing him back to an unforgiving future, Vasilenko finally rejected suicide. He was not a spy, he shouldn’t have been arrested, so he would fight for his life.

Lefortovo Prison, Moscow, June 1988

The interrogations of Gennady Vasilenko had been endless, covering the same ground time and again, focusing on Platt’s October trip to Guyana, prompting the same responses from Vasilenko each time. Yes, I knew Platt. Yes, I continued to see him even though I had been told to break off contact, but I thought I could recruit him. No, I never spied.

Vasilenko knew just how deadly this game of endless questions and repetitive answers really was. Inside Lefortovo, if a decision was made by a tribunal for the verdict of death, the execution could be carried out right on the premises. Men he knew and had worked with in Washington, Motorin and Martynov, had been shot inside these same prison walls. There would be no public trial, no appeals.

But the KGB was strangely legalistic, and Vasilenko soon realized that the investigators had very little hard evidence against him. They had apparently arrested and jailed him based on reports of Platt’s visit to Guyana, but that didn’t seem to be enough for a tribunal to order his execution. Fortunately for Vasilenko, Platt had never exaggerated his success with Vasilenko, even in his internal CIA reports. The trip report Hanssen had provided to the KGB showed only that Vasilenko had held an unauthorized meeting with him in Guyana.

But the KGB inquisitors decided to fill in the blanks and skillfully sought to convince Vasilenko that they already had enough evidence with which to convict him. During his first interrogation in Lefortovo, the investigators claimed that Cuban intelligence had discovered a tape recording of his October meeting with Platt in Georgetown. Platt, they said, had left it behind in his hotel. Confess, they said. We have the smoking gun.

But Vasilenko remembered that Platt had promised him he would never tape-record their conversations, and he decided to trust his friend and call the KGB’s bluff. He realized that they were lying, trying to frighten him into a false confession, and that realization saved his life. Vasilenko became convinced that the KGB’s questioning was so intense only because the investigators needed him to implicate himself.

So he refused to cave in to the pressure, refused to confess to espionage that he had not committed. After each session, his frustrated inquisitors sent him back to his cell, where they relied on informers they had planted as his cellmates to determine whether he would admit to guilt during unguarded moments. From January through June, the KGB sent three different informers in to share a cell with Vasilenko; each came back saying that he had not confessed and did not appear to be a spy.

Complicating the investigation for the KGB was the fact that they couldn’t find any of the “spy gear” or communications plans that they typically discovered when they uncovered a CIA mole. Did that mean he was innocent, as he proclaimed? Or did it just mean that he was very clever?

The investigators were running out of time to prove their case. Vasilenko’s arrest had touched a raw nerve within the ranks of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, where the psychic wounds from so many arrests, executions, and defections of friends and colleagues over the past three years were beginning to take their toll. First Directorate officers had been stunned at first, but now the arrest of a popular and unpretentious officer wasn’t going down well at Yasenevo. In an informal and secret KGB poll of his co-workers in counterintelligence, none of his colleagues said they believed he was a traitor. Vasilenko was also aided by the fact that his wife was from an influential family; so the KGB had to prove that it had an ironclad case before it ordered his execution.

But the KGB lacked convincing evidence, so its secret tribunal decided not to prosecute Vasilenko on espionage charges. Instead, the tribunal ordered Vasilenko cashiered for failing to report unauthorized contacts with the Americans and for illegally smuggling the hunting rifle Platt had given him into the Soviet Union. He was released from jail in June, simultaneously stripped of his rank, and thrown out onto the streets of Moscow without a pension and without a job. Eventually, Vasilenko’s contacts in the KGB’s old boy network slowly helped him pick up the pieces of his life.

Back in Washington, Jack Platt was distraught. All he knew was that Vasilenko had disappeared, and he had no idea whether his friend was alive or dead. With no sign of life, Platt quit his contract job at the CIA in 1988, quietly simmering over the fact that something had gone wrong on an important case and no one at the agency seemed to be doing anything about it. He bitterly warned friends who were still in the CIA’s Soviet/East European Division to “watch their backs.” But the truth of