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Former agents take tourists by Washington espionage sites used by some of the nation's most infamous spies.
By PAUL DE LA GARZA
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 28, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Without even trying, Yuri Shvets is funny.
A one-time agent of the KGB, the spy agency of the former Soviet Union, Shvets cracks up his audience with very serious but often hilarious war stories.
Like this one, which shatters the myth of the KGB as remarkably adept at the art of recruitment. "Most human sources which KGB had in the United States walked in," he said. "They recruited themselves. It was a gift to the KGB.
"KGB officers were just sipping coffee. Smoking cigarettes. Reading the Washington Post. They're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "Hello, I'm yours.' "
On a recent Saturday, a group of mostly tourists boarded a bus downtown for a once-a-month tour known as "SpyDrive."
The tour features 30 Washington espionage sites -- mailboxes, restaurants, apartments -- used by some of the nation's most infamous spies during the past 50 years. It would seem that the spycraft would have dwindled with the end of the Cold War. The fact is: Washington is crawling with spies.
Last week, in response to the arrest of FBI Agent Robert Hanssen on charges of spying for Russia, the United States ordered the expulsion of 50 Russians it identified as spies. Russia retaliated, saying it would expel 50 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
Although tour organizers declare at the start that Hanssen has only been charged and not convicted, they do mention his name repeatedly. Also featured, among several Americans convicted of spying against the United States, are the CIA's Aldrich Ames, Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard, Navy Warrant Officer John Walker and National Security Agency employee Ronald Pelton.
Spy buffs almost certainly would find the spy sites fascinating, like Chadwick's, the pub in Georgetown where Ames gave his Soviet handler the names of 20 CIA assets in the Soviet bloc, 10 of whom were executed. Or Au Pied de Cochon, the French bistro where KGB defector Vitaly Yurchenko, Shvets' boss, humiliated his CIA handlers. He went to the bathroom, crawled through a window and walked to the Soviet Embassy. Analysts still wonder whether his defection to the U.S. was a KGB ploy.
But it is the war stories and the people telling them that make the nearly three-hour tour worth getting up early. After all, a mailbox is a mailbox.
Shvets was joined by Peter Earnest, a retired CIA officer, and by John Gaskill, a retired FBI agent. The trio works for the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, which sponsors the tour and provides training and research to the government and the private sector.
"You're getting veterans of the Cold War represented up here," Gaskill says. "We do not have a Chinese representative yet, but we're working on it."
Earnest introduces himself by offering his resume: "Intelligence collector. Recruiter and runner of agents."
Indeed, the language itself is enticing. Before the tour begins, organizers hand out a glossary of spy terms.
An asset, for example, "is an individual acting under the direction and control of an intelligence service to help collect information or provide another service of intelligence value."
A dead drop, meanwhile, "is a prearranged hidden location for depositing and picking up things, usually messages or money, which typically are hidden inside an object of no apparent value, like a crushed milk carton."
As the bus pulls out, Earnest says that Washington is the spy capital of the world, because of America's prominence. "There is espionage taking place as we drive through the city right now," he says. "People are meeting."
As they pass the microphone to one another, a friendly tension develops between the KGB man and his U.S. counterparts.
Shvets, for example, can't help getting in the occasional dig at Gaskill, who worked counterintelligence for the FBI for 25 years. In other words, like Hanssen, he was chasing people like Shvets.
Shvets, however, who gained notoriety in 1994 with the book, Washington Station: My Life as a K.G.B. Spy in America, said he and his colleagues routinely were surprised at the lax security by the FBI. What the government alleges about Hanssen, for example, that he used the mail to contact his Russian handlers, would never have happened in Moscow. He noted that while the FBI had 300 agents involved in counterintelligence work in Washington, the KGB had 15,000 in Moscow.
"Had a Soviet citizen sent via regular Soviet mail secret documents to his CIA handler stationed in Moscow, I can reassure you that this mail will never reach the destination and, next day, both men would be caught red-handed."
Almost immediately, Gaskill went on the defensive. In Hanssen's case, he said, no one was in a better position to know which surveillance techniques the FBI maintained on which Russian official than Hanssen, a high-level counterintelligence agent.
At one point, Earnest jumped in, noting that it takes so long to catch a spy because "when someone commits espionage, there's nothing missing. What they're stealing are secrets, but often the documents are left in place and there is no evidence of a crime."
In Washington, Shvets said two-thirds of employees at the Soviet Embassy were active-duty KGB officers. The rest were "real diplomats."
Even the diplomats reported to the KGB. "Even a tidbit of gossip from the right place were real important for political decisions," Shvets said.
As the bus passed the former Soviet Embassy, now the residence of the Russian ambassador, he said, "We were packed on the fourth floor of this building like a can of sardines, about 50 field officers in small cubicles."
At one point, Earnest said, the Soviets had developed such an extensive agent network within the U.S. government that it became almost comical. They were particularly successful at the Treasury Department. "The KGB," he said, "actually directed their network not to recruit anyone else at the Treasury. They were already running into each other."
Again, a lot of people simply walked into the Soviet Embassy. The top two reasons people volunteer to spy, based on statistical analysis of all cases, especially among Americans, Gaskill said, are money and revenge.
When somebody walked in to volunteer to spy for the Soviets, the trick was getting him out without FBI detection. "One way was to wrap this person in a rug or a garbage can and carry him over from the side door of the embassy. Then they would load the (cargo) in a van and take it to a remote place in Virginia or Maryland."
While the KGB sprayed the U.S. Embassy in Moscow "with all kinds of microwaves and electronic attacks trying to ferret out what was going on in there," Gaskill said, the FBI wasn't as lucky. "It was a little more ticklish about trying to use any of these electronic waves or whatever," he said, "because the building directly behind the Soviet embassy at the time was the Washington Post."
The United States still had its listening methods.
In fact, because the FBI was monitoring the embassy from across the street, Shvets said, "We never discussed in our station verbally the most important situations. We used to write small letters to each other. We kept our mouths shut."
At times, though, what Gaskill and company would have heard would have seemed odd. At the height of the Cold War, for example, in preparation for an attack against the United States, Moscow ordered its spy network in Washington to collect road maps. When Soviet paratroopers landed on American soil, they wanted to make sure they could get around.