CHAPTER 13
HOW—AND WHY—
TO RECRUIT A RUSSIAN SPY
I
n November 1989, the Iron Curtain parted and the Berlin Wall was
demolished on the world stage, to stirring, thunderous applause. Repres-
sive Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe followed suit, crum-
bling one after another like so many decaying dominos. In Dresden, a
young KGB lieutenant colonel named Vladimir Putin was frantically
burning classified documents and single-handedly staving off an angry
crowd of freedom-starved East Germans outside the city’s dreaded KGB
headquarters. A few months later, a disillusioned Putin would return to
Mother Russia with his new East German washing machine.^1 The dis-
solution of the future Russian dictator’s beloved Soviet Union would soon
follow. The revolutionary movements gained momentum, liberating all of
the Warsaw Pact countries and eventually shattering the hegemonic Soviet
Union itself.
Less than two years after my final contact with Putin’s colleague, pri-
ority KGB developmental Boris Gudenov, I found myself caught up in this
historic change sweeping rapidly across Eastern Europe. After a year and
a half of specialized surveillance and language training in the DC area,
in October 1989 I made the first of many long-term TDYs to Belgrade,
Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia’s own unique brand of socialism was doomed to
fail, but not before a long and bloody civil war engulfed the entire country.
I wasn’t the only CIA operations officer fortunate enough to be working in
that part of the world. My predecessor in Latin America was covering the
bloody Romanian revolution from Bucharest like a seasoned war corre-
spondent, while my other CIA colleagues kept equally busy staying abreast
of rapidly changing events in other Eastern European capitals. In late133