Victor Cherkashin - Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer - The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames

Publication of this book comes against great odds, the result of a path on which I embarked at the height of my career. It eventually led me to decide that telling my story was importantfor the debate over Cold War espionage as well as for my sake. In addition to my initial reluctance, I had to confront the fact that intelligence work doesnt lend itself to memoir writing. A political tool since ancient times, intelligence doesnt normally play an independent public role in affairs of state. Its essence is secrecy. For those like me who have spent their careers in espionage, publicizing its details goes against instinct and tradition.

Usually the public learns the identity of intelligence operatives only when something goes wrong. When operations fail, intelligence officials are often loudly arrested, exposed, or made the subject of a successful setup by the intelligence services of an opposing side.

My name became known in Russia following the arrests of CIA officer Aldrich Ames in 1994 and FBI special agent Robert Hanssen in 2001, both in the United States, several years after I retired from the KGB in 1991. The press in Russia and the United States covered some aspects of my involvement in both espionage cases, but most reports lacked key details and misrepresented facts to fill in the gaps. Meanwhile, my experience (actually, my lack of it) in speaking to journalists who tried to interview me led to an even greater mess. American writers read their own preconceived notions into my words (I purposely left many details vague), while Russians came up with their own explanations. Eventually I stopped giving interviews to the media, and Im only now ready to tell my full story.

For most of my career, I conducted operations against the Main Adversaryas KGB terminology designated the biggest strategic threat to the Soviet Union. Until World War II, that honor belonged to Great Britain, after which it went to the United States. I operated against both until 1965, when my efforts became solely directed at counteracting CIA activities against the USSR. During those dangerous years, U.S. and Soviet intelligence services often fought on the front lines of the Cold War.

I joined the KGB in 1952, just as that war was heating up and a year before Joseph Stalin died. I retired almost forty years later in 1991, days after the attempted August coup dtat against Mikhail Gorbachev that did so much to help bring down the Soviet Union. My career encompassed Russias transformation from a totalitarian dictatorship to a country opening its arms to democracy.

I must warn readers expecting to read about James Bondstyle exploits in these pages that I undertook none in my career. Intelligence consists chiefly of workaday routine and, with luck, rare successes. In my many years with the KGB, I met officers, spies and others who subsequently became well-known. But that came in the course of normal duties. I never parachuted out of an airplane, learned how to kidnap or assassinate or how to crack safes. I never took a course on espionage tradecraft. I joined KGB counterintelligence after studying foreign languages and was sent abroad to learn through experience. What follows is the account of a real KGB career.

I have changed some names and omitted others. Ive tried to be as accurate as possible, but in such accounts its not possible to reveal everything. Many of the agents I handled and operations I ran in my career have never been exposed. While I discuss them here, the real names of some must remain secret. Ive drawn my story almost entirely from memory, and while Ive done everything possible to ensure that the basic facts of each episode are correctly portrayed, some of the dialogue and actions describe events as they likely happened.

Although I make my views about the KGB, the CIA and Soviet and American politics and affairs clear, I tried to avoid falling into the trap of polemics. This account is not KGB propaganda. Other memoirs and tales of Cold War espionage carry disinformation either purposely or unwittingly gathered from interviews with intelligence officers still intent on misleading the other side. Serving and retired operatives often refrain from correcting bad informationmaking it seem that they agreewhile disseminating more of their own skewed narratives to blur the facts. The nature of espionage makes a certain degree of that inevitable. I try to get beyond the circle of purposeful misinformation to simply tell my own story as I remember it.

I didnt undertake to write about myself in order to aggrandize my career or the KGBenough fuss has already been made about my part in Cold War espionage. Aside from the new details in this account, intelligence professionals generally know who I am and understand the significance of my role in KGB history. I wrote for a general Western audience, which has shown more interest in the real factsthe good and the bad of intelligence historythan Russians have. In the past, Ive been interviewed for several accounts of Cold War espionage. In most cases, my actions and words havent been portrayed entirely correctlynot necessarily as a willful decision on the part of the writers, but because they didnt have all the information. Here is my attempt to correct the record.

I continue to care deeply for the KGBs reputation. My goal is to clear away some misperceptions about Soviet intelligence, to try to communicate that the KGB was staffed by human beings who made the same mistakes and held the same feelings others did. Most intelligence officers are able to separate their professional and personal feelings. The many years I spent working against the CIA were my contribution to the maintenance of my country as a great power. But that didnt mean I didnt respect Americans or enjoy the United States. I always believed Americans were trying to do for their country what I was doing for mine.