Best of Enemies Page 9

  Operation DOVKA now officially included the acknowledged cowboys from their respective agencies—the CIA, FBI, and KGB—although Cowboy, Dion, and Gennady preferred to call themselves the Three Musketeers (and even had matching shirts made to that effect). Mad Dog, soon to be transferred, was an “honorary” Musketeer. Driver Rochford soaked up their collective “spook wisdom” like a sponge. “All these type A personalities together,” recalls Rochford. “How they all got along was fuckin’ beyond me.”

  Rochford bonded with all the men but grew to love the externally gruff Marine Cowboy Jack. “The first time I met Jack’s family told me a lot about him,” says Rochford. “It was a Christmas party at his house. Jack noticed that my three-year-old, Megan, was all alone, shy. He sat beside her and held her hand, takes her over to the tree. ‘Anything there you like?’ Jack asked her. Megan pointed to a stuffed bear as big as she was. Jack grabbed it and gave it to her: ‘Merry Christmas.’ It was his daughter Michelle’s bear. Megan has it to this day, thirty-eight years later.”

  The California trip, Mad Dog’s last CI-4 assignment before his transfer, was perceived by Crocker—and especially Jack’s current SE boss Dave Forden—as a pitch operation. The Musketeers promised their superiors they would put recruitment, or at least defection, on the table in San Diego.

  Gennady and Welch took a red-eye flight in order to have a full day available when they got off the plane. On the first day, after checking into a hotel in Santa Monica, the duo headed straight for the beach and took on its local two-man volleyball hotshots. Gennady crushed them. “He told me, ‘Move over,’” says Welch. “He took over ninety percent of the sand court and destroyed the locals almost single-handedly.” That night, Welch threw a welcome party for Gennady—courtesy of the FBI—at a swank Beverly Hills restaurant with about fifty attendees.

  Meanwhile, on their plane to San Diego with Mad Dog, Dion and Cowboy strategized about just when and how they were going to pitch Gennady. The Musketeers quickly agreed to defy their marching orders. “Fuck Forden,” Cowboy said. “Let’s just do it like the Russians—take your time, be patient.” One of the many things that bonded Cowboy and Dion was their shared impunity regarding rules from above.

  “We both concluded that it was easier to ask forgiveness later than to ask for permission in advance,” Dion recalls. Thus the only plan they hatched was to introduce Gennady to Dion and Mad Dog, and do everything possible to create a lasting bond, all the while showing Gennady how much fun he could have in the US of A.

  Mike Rochford summarizes what was happening between the team and their target, Gennady: “It had nothing to do with recruitment. We didn’t care if he got recruited. It was simply that access meant opportunity. The Russians have a word for it: blat. It means ‘favors through networking,’ the magic of relationships. Bureaucrats push for recruitment, like it’s a quota thing. But that’s stupid. It’s about trust, friendship, and patience.”

  Jack agreed, adding, “I knew he loved his country, but perhaps he didn’t love his government.” With that calculus, it was decided that recruitment was unlikely, but perhaps Gennady would one day relocate to the US and help in ways yet unforeseen.

  The Musketeers checked into the high-end Hotel del Coronado on San Diego Bay. Regarding the first-class accommodations, Dion explains, “This operation was a high priority for the Squad. They spared no expense.” No sooner had Jack thrown his suitcase on his room bed than he called Gennady at his Santa Monica hotel and set up a get-together for the next day—no time to waste since Gennady had only a seven-day pass. Jack next called Welch and arranged a tête-à-tête for later that day, with Jack and Mad Dog making the drive north.

  Welch took Gennady back to the beach, where he rightly assumed he would become engaged with a bikini or two, affording Welch the opportunity to sneak away to meet Jack and Mad Dog at the well-known Santa Monica burger joint Father’s Office. “Jack wanted to know how it was going,” says Welch. “I told him that Gennady was having a blast.” The trio made plans for the handoff in La Jolla after Gennady gave his clinic at the camp.

  Driving south to La Jolla the next day, Gennady told Welch that a friend had called and that they were going shooting together after the camp broke. Welch feigned surprise; at this point Gennady wasn’t aware that Jack even knew Welch. On the way to the camp, there was a massive Marine amphibious exercise on the beaches and just offshore at Camp Pendleton. “Gennady yelled, ‘Stop the car! Stop the car!’” For the next ninety minutes, he photographed the exercise from a promontory for his boss, Yakushkin, his California getaway now justified.

  Back in the car, Gennady sought to reassure Welch.

  “Tom, you’re a good man,” he said. “No worries. America is a great place. You don’t have to worry about Russians. Worry about Chinese.”

  At Scates’s camp, Gennady found himself in volleyball heaven, giving a clinic and scrimmaging with future Olympic legends Sinjin Smith and Karch Kiraly, who were working as assistants to Scates. After the clinic, Cowboy showed up, and Tom handed Gennady off before driving back to LA. “And these guys have the most amazing toys!” Cowboy said, contorting and shaking his arms to mimic an automatic weapon. “Puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh.” Gennady’s eyes lit up. He was in; the combination of a guilt-free conscience and the chance to hang with American gunslingers was sheer bliss.

  Volleyball legend Al Scates (l.) with Gennady (c.) and unidentified assistant coach.

  The next morning, Cowboy, Dion and Mad Dog climbed into a Bureau sedan and set out from their hotel north on I-5 to the UCSD dorms in La Jolla. Denton remembers that Cowboy, mindful of his recruitment scheme, was so anxious to see his pal again that he rushed out without his one black glove. Halfway to La Jolla they had to turn around and retrieve it. “The glove never made any sense to me,” observes Mad Dog. “It was just as good an identifier as the missing finger. Go figure.” Still using his “Chris” cover, Cowboy introduced Dion and Mad Dog as the FBI agents they were. “The fewer lies the better,” Cowboy said.

  “Gennady was guarded and a little nervous on meeting us,” says Dion. “But we loosened him up real quick.” That night the foursome wined and dined at a swanky oceanside Mexican restaurant, where Dion concluded that “it is impossible to get Gennady drunk.”

  The two new FBI guys on the case soon realized why Gennady had been seen as a possible recruit. According to Denton, “He was different from most Russians—Western tastes and a sense of humor. Cowboy called him ‘the KGB’s oldest teenager.’” He loved Western clothes, guns, and especially Western women. But unlike clothes and women, guns were all but prohibited in the USSR. Denton made a call to the San Diego Field Office to see what armaments he could line up for the KGB spy, a request he was certain he had never made before.

  Soon the Musketeers were driving back down to the Coronado, where a Bureau Chevy Blazer had been left for them, and off they drove into the desert toward the Escondido Police range. Mad Dog remembers, “On the shooting range, we laid guns out on a table like a smorgasbord for Gennady. His eyes were the size of baseballs.” Dion also noticed the first sign of unease from the Russian. “He seemed a little nervous to be around all these armed FBI guys,” Dion says. “He calmed down when we all started obliterating the targets. It broke the ice.”

  Gennady appears to be a KGB assassin taking aim at Dion.

  After blowing the targets to smithereens with some of the highest-powered weaponry at the Bureau’s disposal, the guys piled back into the Blazer and attacked the desert sand dunes with childlike abandon. Cowboy took a photo of Gennady wearing Mad Dog’s FBI badge. They sensed that the Russian felt totally free for the first time in his life.

  Denton recalls that the craziness subsided the next day, when Cowboy asked to be driven to the City Heights area of San Diego, known to locals as Little Cambodia. “I’ve got to go see some people,” Cowboy said. He had an address that took them to a two-story apartment complex that held perhaps twenty units. “It was full of Cambodians a
nd Laotians that Jack had helped relocate after the war,” Mad Dog Denton says. “The entire complex emptied and rushed out to hug him. It was Christ-like, or like a scene out of the movie Lord Jim.”*

  Later that day, all four Musketeers met up with a retired local FBI agent who owned a deep-sea fishing boat. While on the excursion, Dion did a little bit of his own human reeling in. He purposely sat by himself on the bow, hoping that Gennady might get curious. “Twenty-five miles out to sea, Gennady approaches me on the front of the boat—he wants to talk,” Dion says. “He was nervous. He just wanted to get to know me, feel me out. ‘Where are we going with this?’ he asked. Just fun, no business, I told him. So we just talked about family.” It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

  John “Mad Dog” Denton, Cowboy Jack, and Dion.

  As the sun beat down on their scalps, Jack appeared at the front of the boat and chimed in. “Look, Gennady, this has been a great trip, and it was a great trip because we weren’t screwing around with the mission. My view: there shouldn’t be a mission anymore, at least not with each other. The truth is, I’m CIA and you’re KGB. I still think you would be happy in America, but if you don’t know that by now, it’s not a car I can sell you.” Jack’s statement wasn’t pure virtuousness; one of the cardinal rules of tradecraft was “Don’t harass the opposition,” at least not to the point where you might chase away a target. If Gennady would come over to the American side, it would be evolutionary, not via tactical intervention.

  Gennady agreed. “Let’s have a good relationship. Let’s forget about the task. That is the agreement. That is our deal.”

  The deal was their friendship. More than three decades later, Jack and Gennady still referred to this trip as “the dealmaker.” They then turned their attention back to detonating marine life. They were having such a blast, literally, that they lost track of time while they were alternatively fishing and trying to blow up anything in the water that moved with firepower from the deck. Suddenly, Gennady realized he had to get to LAX. His boss had been explicit about his getting back to the rezidentura on time. At full throttle, they steamed the yacht back to the harbor. The four men climbed into Mad Dog’s FBI car and headed up the coast to Los Angeles.

  “On the way to LAX,” Denton recalls, “I thought we were lost, so I pulled up alongside a Cheech Marin hippie type in a VW microbus on my right.” Dion, in the passenger seat, rolled down his window and asked, “Do you know how to get to LAX?”

  “Yes,” the hippie answered cheerfully. Then he pulled away.*

  “That was it. I was burnt out,” Denton says. “Dion took over.” Dion clarified nearly four decades later: “Denton drove like an old lady.”

  Encountering traffic at a construction standstill on the 405, Gennady began to sweat. “If I don’t make my plane, I am in big trouble.” Dion, whom Jack was now calling Tracker, pulled a red police beacon from under his seat, plugged it in, and slapped it on the roof of the car. Blaring the horn, Dion pulled onto the shoulder and floored it.

  When they neared LAX, a police car spotted the vehicle roaring down La Cienega Boulevard and gave chase. “Shit! Cops!” Jack said. Employing an old favorite tactic of underworld wheelmen on the run from the Feds, Tracker Dion diverted the vehicle onto a side street and cut in front of a line of cars waiting at a car wash, waving his badge out the window. “Move!” As the other patrons surely wondered why the hell an FBI agent needed a car wash so urgently, Dion hid their car between two giant brushes and cascades of water. When they thought they had lost the cops (even though two of them were cops), the gang pulled out of the car wash and drew down on LAX, the engine beginning to overheat. With smoke whistling out of the hood, Dion barreled into LAX, popped the trunk, and they all got out.

  “We raced past the airport lines, screaming, ‘This is a diplomat! This is a diplomat!’” says Denton, who had earlier presented the diplomat with a parting gift. “I gave Gennady a clip of bullets to use as a paperweight. He got them on[to] the plane. It was a different time, that’s for sure.” Gennady used every bit of his athleticism to sprint to his plane, which he made just as the door to the gate was closing.

  “After he gets on the plane, we go back to the car, which is smoking, brakes wrecked,” says a chuckling Dion. No one remembers what happened to the abused FBI car or what excuse was given to headquarters as to its miserable state—but it was clean!

  Back in DC, the men reported to their various bosses and dutifully filed their operational reports. “In our shooting range report we called Gennady ‘orgasmic,’” remembers Denton. “We were promptly ordered to clean up our language.” Cowboy received a serious dressing-down from Forden for not pitching his Soviet target. But Cowboy knew he was playing the Russian right, and Forden’s tongue lashing didn’t register one whit.

  For his part, Gennady met with Yakushkin, who ordered him to end all contact with Platt and the others, a directive that also went in one ear and out the other. Soon thereafter, Gennady called his “uncle” George Powstenko for lunch—the same uncle who, unbeknownst to Gennady, helped set up the “coincidental” road trip.

  GENNADY: I just had a great time in California with FBI guys.

  GEORGE: Oh, really?

  GENNADY: You should meet them. We’ll get lunch and drink vodka.

  GEORGE: No way! We’ll get killed!

  After the lunch, Ukrainian George called Mad Dog Denton, imploring, “Don’t hurt [Gennady]. He’s a good guy.” From that point on, Dion used George as a conduit to reach Gennady at the embassy. When Gennady initiated the contact, he used a code, assuming he was being monitored. Dion recalls, “When Gennady wanted to get together with us, he’d call George and say, ‘Let’s go to the junkyard. I need car parts’ or ‘I need some Visine’ or ‘I want to go look at a Chevy Blazer that’s for sale.’” The references were all too clear to the Musketeers: the junkyard referred to Gennady’s actual trips with the others to get cheap car parts, the Blazer recalled their jaunt in the California desert with the Chevy Blazer, and the Visine was Jack’s joke, a treatment to “get the Red out.”

  Dion remembers a typical getaway with the Russian: “We were in Gennady’s car going to lunch in Arlington, where he was living. We were near the Washington Monument—I remember it like it was yesterday. All of a sudden, Gennady slows down and a car pulls along his driver’s side. I recognized the passenger as a KGB guy I’d been following. It was unclear if he recognized me. Still, I’m thinking, It’s a setup. We’re done for. Just then Gennady reaches into the back seat and grabs a paper bag and hands it to the KGB guys through the window. They pull away. It was an arranged handoff.”

  DION: What was that?

  GENNADY: Just a bag of bullets.

  On still another excursion, Jack, Dion, and Gennady were with Powstenko in his Mercedes, on the way to Powstenko’s house in Bethany Beach, Delaware, when a car bearing “R” diplomatic tags (KGB) approached them from behind. “This time it was Gennady’s face that went white, and he slumped down in his seat,” says Rankin. “But they didn’t stop. They just passed us without giving us a glance. It was just a coincidence. They were probably going to the Soviet retreat house on the Chesapeake. It was one of the rare times that Gennady didn’t shrug it off.”

  George Powstenko and his prized Mercedes.

  (Courtesy Tamara “Tami” Powstenko)

  “Jack’s wife, Paige, finally met Gennady at a Cherry Blossom Parade in downtown Washington,” remembers Dion, who was there with his wife, Jenny. “She posed as Jack’s girlfriend, using the bizarre masculine cover name ‘Thomas Gordon.’”

  Jack worried how they would find Gennady in the huge crowd. Paige had no such worries. “He’s a trained KGB spy. If we just stay in one place, he’ll find us—you know, like dogs do.” He did.

  Shortly thereafter, Gennady defied Yakushkin, who had forbidden him from seeing Dion, the nemesis of KGB agents like Alexander Kukhar, and showed up at the FBI man’s home in Crofton, Maryland, for a dinner party.

>   “Gennady’s wife, Irina, brought their kids, Ilya and Julia. This was before they turned fourteen and were forbidden from living abroad. Ilya found my credentials and badge on the microwave, put it on. ‘This is our secret,’ I told him, and he agreed. Of course, he immediately went down to the basement where everybody was visiting and announced, ‘Mister Rankin and I have a secret!’” Dion took Gennady outside and suggested, “You should talk to your son about this.”

  Introducing Gennady to the Platt family was fraught with a different sort of peril. Upon escorting Gennady into the Platt family residence for the first time, Jack reminded the randy Russian to stay away from his wife and three teenaged daughters. According to Jack, within three days Gennady had hit on all of them. Of course, in Gennady’s mind, he was just being friendly.

  But despite the growing mutual trust and Gennady’s obvious taste for Western culture, it was, according to Mad Dog Denton, also beginning to dawn on the Americans that Gennady would never be recruited. “The family would have to be sent back to Russia soon, and by Russian law at the time, they couldn’t come back with their kids. If it weren’t for that, we might have eventually gotten him,” says Denton. “In those days, kids over fourteen couldn’t join their parents overseas. They were like hostages to guarantee that their parents wouldn’t defect.”

  As the Musketeers steeled themselves for the departure of their great new Russian friend, they knew there was a good chance they’d never see him again.