134 AMERICAN SPY1989, there was no better place on earth to be deployed as a CIA officer
than Eastern Europe.
Not long after my arrival in Yugoslavia, a local contact introduced me to
a man who wanted to speak with an American official. After a quick intro-
duction, the man volunteered that he was a Soviet citizen who worked for
the KGB. (The KGB was replaced by the FSK in November 1991, and the
FSK was reorganized into the Russian State Security Service, FSB, in 1995;
meanwhile, in December 1991, the KGB First Chief Directorate became the
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, SVR.^2 ) I asked him what he wanted.
Like me, the man got right to the point: in a hushed voice, he said he wished
to work in place for American intelligence as a double agent against the
KGB, in exchange for hard currency; alternately, he would submit to a full
one-time debriefing and share all of his KGB secrets with me.
Having come of age in a CIA culture where recruiting a KGB agent—
or anyone with access to the KGB—was a high-priority but nearly impos-
sible task, I thought that I’d just hit the jackpot. Yes, the man could be a
“dangle,” sent by the KGB to identify CIA officers and see how far he
could run with this double agent ploy. But that seemed unlikely in light
of the turmoil engulfing the KGB at that moment in time. And yes, the
Soviet Union was clearly headed for collapse, but Russia would always be
Russia. Russian leadership would remain autocratic, and Russians would
always suspiciously view America and NATO as an ongoing threat to their
existence. I thought their Serb cousins in Yugoslavia perfectly summed up
the changing political situation in nuclear-power Russia with one of their
many folk sayings: “Vuk dlaku menja ali ćud nikada,” meaning “A wolf changes
its fur but not its temperament.”
I photocopied the man’s documents and jotted down a description of
his current job and access, and we arranged to meet again in a few days.
I wrote up an initial trace cable to learn if CIA headquarters had a file
or any other information on the man, and a request for an expression of
operational interest, thinking headquarters would be as intrigued as I was
about this potentially valuable CI asset. Although this Soviet walk-in would
have been even more attractive to us a year earlier, he still struck me as a
tantalizing lead.
Instead of giving me the green light, headquarters responded with a
curt “no operational interest” and refused to authorize any further contact.