| Perspective Volume XVI Number 1 (October-November 2005) |
Book Review:
Sympathy for the Devil
By Chandler Rosenberger
Spy Handler: Memoir of a
KGB Officer by Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer. (Basic Books, 2005).
In December 1961, Victor Cherkashin
was a freshly-minted KGB officer working in Moscow for the Second Directorate,
the division dedicated to thwarting British intelligence on Soviet soil. Wrapping up his work before the New
Yearıs celebrations were to begin, Cherkashin got a call from a subordinate reporting
that the wife of a British diplomat appeared to be having clandestine meetings
with a Soviet officer. After a few
cat-and-mouse chases, Cherkashin and his colleagues figured out whom they were
tailing. Oleg Penkovsky, military
intelligence officer and member of the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the
General Staff, had betrayed the motherland.
It took nearly a year for the
Soviets to be sure, but by October 1962 the KGB felt confident enough to arrest
Penkovsky. By that time, Penkovsky
already had been able to play a part in the unfolding crisis in Western-Soviet
relations prompted by the building of the Berlin Wall and the revelation of
Soviet missiles in Cuba. Penkovsky
had revealed that the Cubans were armed with tactical nuclear warheads that
could be fired without prior authorization from Moscow. According to former National Security
Council member David Major, this information kept Kennedy from invading Cuba as
soon as the missiles were exposed.
For preventing a nuclear exchange, Major and others have dubbed
Penkovsky "the spy who saved the world."
Victor Cherkashin isnıt so
sure. Even while under arrest in
Moscow, Penkovsky had managed to signal to his British and American handlers
that the Soviet Union was preparing a nuclear first strike. But in Spy Handler, his memoir of his
years in Soviet intelligence, Cherkashin argues that this bit of intelligence,
far from staying Kennedy's hand, would have inflamed the situation. Fortunately, Cherkashin recalls,
"Penkovsky's threat of a nuclear strike wasnıt conveyed to Kennedy, relieving
him of the pressure to react."
Itıs a small but telling moment in
Cherkashin's fascinating account of his years in Soviet intelligence. Cherkashin praises the CIA for steering
Kennedy away from information that they worried would force him to react. To Cherkashin, the heroes of the Cuban
missile crisis were not the leaders on either side but rather their
intelligence officers, who chose not to pass on information that they felt
their bosses were not prepared to digest.
Cherkashin's assessment of the role
intelligence played in diffusing the Cuban missile crisis is as revealing of
the mechanisms of the Cold War as anything he recounts in his tales of running
Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames.
As his record makes clear, Cherkashin was perhaps the greatest spy
handler in the Soviet Union's history, shrewdly manipulating the informants in
his care and the U.S. counter-intelligence officers determined to capture
them. But at a time when Russia is
governed by a president who himself emerged from the KGB, it is Cherkashin's
attitude toward Soviet history that is perhaps even more interesting. Cherkashin was good at his job because
he believed in it. A reader
doesnıt have to share those beliefs to recognize how they motivated men like
Cherkashin to defend the power of the Soviet state for its own sake –
even in disregard, if necessary, of that stateıs subjects and its leaders.
Ironically, Cherkashin, a man
gripped to his soul by Soviet ideology, proved to be an excellent spy handler
precisely because he discounted the role of political beliefs in motivating
traitors. Both Aldrich Ames and
Richard Hanssen were men who felt their skills hadnıt been appreciated by their
superiors. Ames was motivated by
money more than Hanssen, Cherkashin concluded, but neither betrayed the United
States because they believed Soviet Communism was a genuine alternative. This, Cherkashin argues, is what
convinced him of their sincerity.
Only FBI "dangles," i.e., fake traitors designed to ensnare Soviet
operatives, ever lamented the evils of capitalism.
Cherkashin's frank assessment of his
clients makes Spy Handler an invaluable guide to the soul of a traitor. He modestly argues that only sheer luck
could have brought both Ames and Hanssen to the Soviet embassy during his tour
in Washington, D.C. But it was
more than luck that got both spies on the Soviet hook and made both
productive. Cherkashin's account
of his early manipulation object, Ames, for example, reveals how well the
Soviet spymaster used Ames' own approach to ensnare him. Ames, then the CIA's chief of Soviet
counterintelligence, had contacted the Soviets under the pseudonym Richard
Wells. Meeting "Wells" in a
suburban bar, Cherkashin quickly convinced Ames to reveal his true
identity. How can we protect you,
Cherkashin argued, if we donıt know who you are?
Having successfully secured Amesı
name, Cherkashin then used Amesı strong instinct for self-preservation to pry
loose the names of CIA moles within the KGB. "How can we protect you," Cherkashin argued, "if we don't
know who's in a position to inform the CIA about you?"
At those words, Cherkashin recalls,
Ames took out a pad of paper and wrote down a list of names – "a
catalogue of virtually every asset within the Soviet Union." Ames' impulsive revelation revealed
more about CIA operations than any single previous communication, but such was
the logic of betrayal that Cherkashin so skillfully manipulated. "Just make sure these people don't find
out anything about me," Ames said as he handed Cherkashin the list.
They didn't, of course. Dead men don't talk.
Because Cherkashin's career took him
from Australia to India to Lebanon to the States, Lubyanka and back, Spy
Handler is a genuine tale of international intrigue, one full of dead-drops,
microphones, "honey traps," double and triple agents and, of course, executions
– at least on the Soviet side.
Cherkashin and his co-author Gregory Feifer weave in these elements not
as ostentatious color but rather as props and scenery of a far more interesting
drama, one that reveals the nature of betrayal in a manner that would have done
Graham Greene proud.
In revealing Cherkashin's own
motivations, Spy Handler is also, if unintentionally, a disturbing account of a
mind so secure in its knowledge of others that it need not reflect on its own
failings.
Even the reader casually acquainted
with Soviet history will find Cherkashin's historical backdrop to be
grotesquely distorted. As a young
man, Cherkashin showed little curiosity about his father's work in the NKVD
beyond a comforting sense that "he was a decent person in all respects and that
whatever he did was honorable." As
a young intelligence officer during Khrushchev's thaw, Cherkashin was assigned
to destroy files documenting the 1930s purges, lest some reform-minded Party
official do to the NKVD what Khrushchev's secret speech had done to
Stalin. Cherkashin recalls coming
across evidence that peasants were wrongly accused of treason and unjustly shot,
but quickly puts this disturbing inside knowledge in perspective. "Although I found many of the mistakes
of the 1930s deplorable," Cherkashin remembers, "I also felt that they were
unavoidable in building the foundation of the Soviet state."
At every historical turn, Cherkashin
finds reason to put the power of the Soviet state ahead of the interests of
citizens of other nations, ahead of Soviet citizens – even, remarkably,
ahead of the Soviet Union's own leaders.
The brutal crushing of the Prague Spring was, Cherkashin writes, a
necessary fight against "Western attempts to turn socialist countries against
Moscow." The fall of Soviet Bloc
governments in 1989 prompts only dismay in Mikhail Gorbachevıs undoing of the
Brezhnev Doctrine. "I watched,"
Cherkashin recalls, "as decades of hard work and sacrifice by dedicated Eastern
European communists were cast aside like dirty laundry."
Some might have thought Gorbachev's
campaign against alcohol production and consumption was a decent attempt to
improve Soviet life, but Cherkashin saw only the loss of revenue and thus harm
done to the Soviet state. When
word of the 1991 coup spread, Cherkashin recalls, "a wave of joy washed over
me. Finally something was being
done to stop Gorbachevıs destruction."
When the coup failed and citizens rallied to pull down the statue of
Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet police state, Cherkashin saw only a
"senseless act – no better than the destruction of churches after the
1917 revolution."
Cherkashin's compelling accounts of
recruiting and manipulating spies appear, on the surface, to depend on a
certain moral relativism. Great
spies were not motivated by ideology, Cherkashin convincingly argues. In treating some of his opposite
numbers in the CIA with respect, Cherkashin sometimes appears to be a mere
engineer of human souls, interested in the mechanisms of power rather than the
political order at stake. But
Cherkashin's sincere laments at the loss of Soviet power, unblemished by a
single reflection on what that power was used to achieve, reveal a true
believer behind the engineerıs calculations. The Soviet machine should have been preserved, Cherkashin
argues, regardless of the purposes for which that machine had been used.
Cherkashin's faith in the power of
the Soviet apparatus gives his assessment of post-cold war politics a
chillingly totalitarian flavor.
The United States' "laughable liberation of Iraq," Cherkashin argues,
had been ginned up by corrupted intelligence agencies. The time has come, he concludes, for
states to "somehow ensure that their intelligence services direct their
activities toward achieving properly defined strategic goals instead of
following their leaders' political intentions."
At first glance, this statement
might win some nods in the West.
Who wouldnıt prefer that intelligence agencies make non-partisan
assessments? But that, of course,
is not what Cherkashin is saying.
He argues, instead, that the intelligence services should be setting the
agenda regardless of what democratically elected leaders might wish to
pursue. Writing fourteen years
after the failed 1991 coup, Cherkashin apparently has not reconciled himself to
a world in which the secret police are not in control of their fellow citizens'
lives.
Spy Handler is an extraordinary account of Cold War espionage in part because it shows that traitors were not motivated by ideology. It is also extraordinary, if disturbing, in the extent to which it shows the obverse is true as well. True believers in Soviet Communism would not, it seems, betray their country. They would, Cherkashin inadvertently reveals, betray their humanity instead.
_________________________________
Copyright ISCIP 2005
Unless otherwise indicated, all articles appearing in this journal have been commissioned especially
for Perspective.
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