Best of Enemies by Eric Dezenhall & Eric Dezenhall

Author:Eric Dezenhall & Eric Dezenhall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

After six months in prison, Gennady hadn’t changed his story once. The slew of “cellmates” the KGB had sent in to befriend him had yielded squat. Nor had the KGB found any evidence in the form of equipment or data to indicate Gennady was a traitor. No one in the KGB, in fact, actually believed Gennady had turned. Well, then, what was he still doing in Lefortovo? He knew that those who committed acts of treachery didn’t last long in the Soviet prison system. If they were lucky, within a day or two of arrival, they were “tried” in a kangaroo court and dispatched to the Lefortovo basement, and after a few short steps… Yet Gennady’s captors had done the unthinkable. They had kept him alive.

After all the interrogations and beatings, Gennady started to reason with his captors, and after one particularly sleepless night, he thought of an unimpeachable argument: “If I was cooperating with Platt, wouldn’t I have given him Pelton? Check the Pelton file. I was his handler!” In fact, Ronald Pelton, the ex–National Security Agency employee/turncoat, had been a functioning Soviet asset for Gennady while Gennady was associating with Jack in the US—one of the most valuable assets in years. The KGB had no good answer for Gennady.

To Gennady’s surprise, another thing that helped save him was the very thing he hated most about the KGB: its stifling bureaucracy. It was a strange new time. Glasnost. Perestroika. Gorbachev. “I was lucky Gorbachev was in charge now; otherwise, I’d have been killed instantly,” Gennady says. Apparently, before one could pop somebody in the Lefortovo catacombs, he had to fill out new forms, neatly typing out the evidence against the accused. Maybe the KGB was going soft, Gennady reasoned. Or maybe everybody was just getting tired of the killing.

As the KGB was finalizing its Gennady Vasilenko file, another interesting thing happened: Gennady’s fellow KGB officers unanimously spoke out on his behalf. The popular colleague was a patriot to his core, they professed. Finally, it wasn’t lost on the KGB brass that Gennady was the son-in-law of a big shot. If the KGB could drag Gennady to the Lefortovo basement and put a bullet in his head with no evidence, what would they do to other worthy operatives without such connections? No one wanted to find out.

The good news was that Gennady would be freed—alive. But it wasn’t as if he’d be leaving Lefortovo with a gold Rolex and a Montblanc pen. In July 1988, after six months in stir, the KGB cited him for a vague charge of not filing the proper reports while meeting with hostile parties (Cowboy and Dion). In one last cruel joke, his captors dressed him in a fresh KGB uniform and marched him out to Lefortovo’s killing courtyard. They lined him up against the wall that held so many firing squad bullet scars. After a long minute of silence, the guards walked up to him and ripped his ceremonial epaulets from his uniform, before

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