Circle of Treason (15 page)

For those who participated in the Viktor Ivanovich Sheymov operation, regardless of their role, it was the operational experience of a lifetime—a roller coaster ride of exhilaration and intense anxiety. The story began on Halloween night 1979 in Warsaw, Poland, when Sheymov walked into the American Embassy and offered his services in exchange for the exfiltration of his wife, their young daughter, and himself from the Soviet Union and resettlement in the United States.
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Warsaw's cable to Washington was a correct statement of the facts, but they did not have the background to comprehend fully the significance and the impact this man would have in the world of intelligence. Sheymov was an officer of the KGB's Eighth Chief Directorate, representing and working in the heart of the organization—its cipher communications. The employees of this directorate, and their activities, were so protected and secretive whether at home or abroad that the U.S. government had only a general knowledge of their professional lives and duties.

Simply stated, initially Sheymov could have told us anything about the inner workings of the Eighth Chief Directorate because we had no collateral information against which to check his statements. However, given his comments about his position and access, and the personal documents and information he provided, his bona fides were immediately established. Sheymov was one of the KGB's most valuable assets and we knew that he represented the ultimate prize for us. We acknowledged his worth by giving him the CIA cryptonym CKUTOPIA (later changed to CKQUARTZ) and the interagency designation TIEBREAKER.

The thrill of that first day did not diminish, but our focus immediately became the seemingly impossible pledge we had made to him, which we were determined to honor. The hurdles were many and monumental. First, few could be made aware of the very existence of Sheymov, but many had to be included to effect his request. Worse, he had demanded exfiltration not for one person but for three, including a five-year-old child. (As detailed earlier, we had planned Kulak's removal from the USSR but had not had to carry it out.) To add another element of danger, primarily for Sheymov, we had to conduct face-to-face meetings with him in Moscow to work out the details of the exfiltration. He had rejected a series of dead drops to exchange information because of time constraints and the magnitude of the operation. Finally add the frigid Moscow winter to a number of the personal meetings, Sheymov's work schedule for the
KGB, to include travel to Yemen and possibly other trips, and a five-to-six-month window to complete the operation.

A day or two after his walk-in in Warsaw Sheymov returned to Moscow and shortly thereafter left for Yemen on KGB business. At CIA headquarters cable traffic flew back and forth to Moscow Station and meeting after meeting was convened to find answers to the most basic operational questions. What border should we use for the crossing? How should the family get to a pick-up point with our officer or officers? What type of conveyance should we use to attempt the border crossing? How should we secrete the family members in the vehicle? Slowly the framework of a plan emerged. Next we had to address the personal details related to the Sheymov family. These numbered in the hundreds, were equally critical, and were often debated ad nauseam. Many of them required that Sheymov and his family maintain a normal pattern of activity.

One caused great consternation. The problem was simple. How do you keep a five-year-old quiet in cramped quarters on a trip that could last a number of hours? In a bureaucracy, the solution was not straightforward. A disagreement erupted between SE Division and a support component that could not be resolved. Thankfully, without communication with us Sheymov understood the problem and he alone came to the rescue. As he relates in his book, he had a conversation with his wife Olga: “Elena could be a major problem during the operation. I'm afraid we have no alternative but to sedate her with some kind of sleeping pill during the actual border crossing. . . . By definition, a five-year-old child is completely unpredictable and we can't hope for the best. There's too much at stake.”
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We have chosen not to relate the details of the spring 1980 exfiltration nor Sheymov's ultimate contribution to the U.S. government. Suffice it to say that the former was flawless and the latter extraordinary. What was and remains important is that three human beings risked all. Everyone involved in the operation from the CIA to the Sheymov family deserves credit for the success of such a perilous operation, including the gods of good luck and good fortune.

LATER MAJOR CASES

T
HE
CIA
HAD NO MONOPOLY
on running good cases against the KGB during the Cold War. As has been mentioned separately, the British SIS handled Oleg Gordievsky in place for many years. There are other examples not mentioned in this book run by other services. The following story outlines how the French were able to maintain frequent contact with a KGB scientific and technical specialist in Moscow for a couple of years, thereby acquiring a large amount of very valuable documents, until the asset caused his own downfall.

In November 1980 a French businessman telephoned Raymond Nart, a senior officer of the French internal service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, or DST. Nart and the businessman were friends and the businessman wanted Nart to come by his office. When the two met, the businessman showed Nart a postcard, mailed from Eastern Europe. The writer, a KGB officer named Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, had been stationed in Paris from 1965 to 1970 and, while there, had been acquainted with the businessman. Now, after a hiatus of several years, Vetrov was trying to renew the contact and stated in his card that he hoped to see the businessman as quickly as possible.
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Both Nart and the businessman recognized the possibility that Vetrov, who had become enamored with France during his assignment there, wanted to work with the French. However, while they were working out a secure recontact plan, Vetrov made another move. In February
1981, he attended a commercial exhibit in Moscow and, like Penkovskiy and Tolkachev before him, passed a note to a Westerner. The recipient on this occasion was a Frenchman. The note requested a meeting and included Vetrov's telephone number. Luckily, the Frenchman duly passed the note to the DST when he returned to Paris.

In response to the note, Nart and his colleagues dispatched a French engineer known to them by reputation. He was asked to go to Moscow and to telephone Vetrov, which he did. The two met in early March and Vetrov provided both information and documents. He continued to do so during subsequent meetings. In April, however, realizing the danger to the engineer because he of course did not have diplomatic immunity, the DST arranged for the military attaché at the French embassy in Moscow, an individual favorably known to Nart, to take over the case. Highly fruitful meetings between Vetrov, who by now had been encrypted FAREWELL by the DST, continued until late 1981. The attaché then left for Paris on Christmas leave. He had an appointment with Vetrov after his return but Vetrov did not appear.

When Vetrov started producing reams of Russian-language documents, the DST was faced with a problem. They did not have a cadre expert in both the language and the technical substance. Furthermore, they wanted to provide Vetrov with a miniature camera to minimize the risk of his document photography and did not have state-of-the-art equipment. Therefore, they decided to approach the CIA, which provided the requested technical and non-technical translations and analytical support but did not participate directly in the operation. Jeanne remembers a cart piled high with photocopies being rolled past her door in SE CI in the summer of 1981, and soon she became involved with editing some of the translated material.

In all, during the life of the operation Vetrov produced more than three thousand secret and top secret documents emanating not only from the Directorate T (Science and Technology) of the KGB, but also from the Military-Industrial Commission (VPK) of the USSR Council of Ministers. As explained in the section on Polyakov, the VPK coordinated and controlled all research, design, development, testing, and production of Soviet military equipment and systems. An integral part of the VPK's responsibility was the issuance of collection requirements on military matters for all Soviet government agencies from the KGB and GRU to the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade. VPK documents were highly valuable to CIA and Department of Defense analysts because they showed the gaps in the Soviet Union's military and industrial might. Polyakov produced some for us, as did Kulak. We also got some watered-down requirements from an East European source. The KGB operational documents, on the other hand, showed what clandestine activities the KGB—and the GRU and the East European services—were undertaking to close those gaps. In other words, they contained a vast number of espionage leads. Those leads were still being investigated several years after the case came to its untimely close.

Considering the circumstances of the meetings with Vetrov, it is understandable that we do not have a clear view of his motivations. He was undoubtedly a Francophile, but he did not want to defect and spend the rest of his life amusing himself in Parisian cafés and restaurants. Revenge was a definite factor, but he was an undisciplined individual who could have butted up against the KGB bureaucracy in any number of ways. According to Yurchenko, who participated in his interrogation, Vetrov wrote a long document vilifying the Soviet system as a whole and the KGB in particular, saying that the system was totally rotten.

The unfortunate denouement of the FAREWELL operation cannot be attributed to a Western traitor or to clever KGB scrutiny. Alas, Vetrov caused his own downfall. The story is a sensational one. Because it was the subject of much corridor gossip in the KGB, several versions have come down to us. Therefore, the following details may not be entirely correct, but the gist of the story is pretty clear. Vetrov was having an affair with a KGB secretary named Lyudmila. One cold night they were in his parked car, indulging in some dalliance. Someone knocked on the window. It turned out to be a militiaman (or Lyudmila's husband or some other lover of hers). Vetrov, who was drunk and who had a gun, shot and killed the man. He also tried to kill Lyudmila, but failed. She was able to testify against him. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. While there he said something to a fellow inmate or a guard about his espionage activity on behalf of the French. According to one story, the fellow inmate was about to be released and Vetrov wanted him to contact the French embassy in Moscow. In any event, Vetrov was tried again, this time for espionage. He was sentenced to death and duly executed early in 1983.

In 1982 GRU colonel Vladimir Mikhaylovich Vasilyev, under cover as a Soviet military attaché, volunteered to a U.S. military representative in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the Soviet Bloc. The military turned him over to the CIA to handle, a particularly delicate job in a Communist country where all Western representatives, and particularly intelligence officers, were under considerable surveillance. The CIA encrypted him GTACCORD. The turnover did not please Vasilyev who, as a military man, preferred to deal with his uniformed counterparts, because he knew them personally and had contact with them as part of his normal duties. That the CIA officer who became his new handler was a woman and a civilian probably did not help matters. Nonetheless, the CIA—with substantial U.S. military assistance—managed to keep in limited but productive contact with Vasilyev until he returned to Moscow on a routine change of station in the summer of 1984.