Earley - Comrade j : the untold secrets of russias master spy in america after the end of the cold war

T HIS IS A BOOK I almost didnt write.

It began with a telephone call from a lawyer who said he represented a Russian defectora former intelligence officerwho wanted to tell his story.

Whats his name? I asked.

Id rather not say on the phone.

Id been approached before by former Soviets. Most exKGB officers believed their life stories would make compelling reading. But few, if any, really did.

Im sorry, I replied after a few more moments of evasive chatter. Im not interested.

Two months later, an FBI agent called. Wed first met when I was writing about Aldrich Ames, the CIA traitor responsible in the mid-1980s for the execution of at least ten U.S. spies and the arrest of a dozen more.

You should talk to this defector, he explained. Hes read your book about Ames and really wants to meet you. Trust me, hes the real deal.

I agreedreluctantly. My FBI contact said hed call me on a Thursday with details for a meeting. When Thursday arrived, he told me to drive to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. Two FBI agents were in the lobby. They escorted me to a suite where snacks, soft drinks, and two CIA officers, who told me only their first names, were waiting. Seconds later, a tall, balding Russian dressed in a well-tailored suit entered from an adjoining room and extended his hand.

Im Sergei Tretyakov, he announced.

I suddenly understood why he merited a four-person, joint FBI and CIA escort, and a Ritz-Carlton rendezvous. He was not a Cold War leftover from the old KGB. His story was ripped from the front pages, the Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin presidencies.

Tretyakov had been a colonel in the SVR (Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki)the Russian foreign intelligence service that replaced the KGBs overseas armbefore he disappeared with his wife, Helen, and their daughter, Ksenia, from the Russian residential compound in New York City. Although he vanished in October 2000, neither the U.S. nor the Russian government revealed his disappearance for nearly four months.

In late January 2001, an unnamed State Department official told the Associated Press news service that a Russian diplomat named Tretyakov had been granted asylum in the U.S. That tiny disclosure ignited a firestorm in Russia. Yevgeny Voronin, a deputy director in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, lambasted the State Department for telling the media about Tretyakov before it officially informed the Kremlin. Voronin said his government had been trying through diplomatic channels to learn about Tretyakovs whereabouts since October, but the U.S. had refused to even acknowledge that it knew the missing diplomat. Voronin demanded the U.S. arrange a face-to-face meeting between a Russian delegation and Tretyakov to ensure that neither he nor his family were coerced in any fashion and that they are okay. Without public comment, the State Department refused.

A week later, The New York Times revealed that Tretyakovs diplomatic titleFirst Secretary in Press Relations at the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Stateshad been a cover. The newspaper quoted unnamed U.S. sources saying Tretyakov was actually a top Russian intelligence officer.

Because the U.S. and Russia were no longer considered formal adversaries, the Bush administrations decision to grant Tretyakov asylum suggested he was an extremely valuable catch for U.S. intelligence, the newspaper noted. Otherwise, the White House would not have risked irritating the Kremlin. The newspaper explained that the CIA had become selective about accepting defectors in its resettlement program because of the expense involved in relocating, protecting, and financially supporting them. But Tretyakov and his family had breezed through the processanother tip-off that he was important.