136 AMERICAN SPYrecruiting foreign officials who could provide the CIA with access to their
country’s most sensitive secrets.
One day over lunch, a trusted and well-traveled American buddy of
mine named “Dave” told me about an interesting friend of his: a high-level
Russian government official who was recently promoted into a position with
access to information potentially of importance to US national security.
Dave told me that he and “Sasha,” besides enjoying a years-long working
relationship, had also become close personal friends and golfing buddies.
I extensively debriefed Dave on his Russian friend Sasha and wrote up
an initial trace cable. Headquarters responded with a surprisingly detailed
trace response, while validating Sasha as a high-priority recruitment target.
The CIA had an extensive file on Sasha and gave me the green light to
proceed. The next step was to engineer a “chance” encounter with him
under benign circumstances, not unlike the approach I took with Boris in
Latin America. The difference was Sasha would not knowingly run any
risks by meeting with me, since he would know me only as a friend of our
mutual friend Dave. Neither Dave nor I would tell Sasha of my CIA affili-
ation. Sasha’s guard would be down, and he’d have no reason to suspect I
was in fact a CIA ops officer whose objective was to convince him to betray
his country. At least not initially. The fact that our mutual friend vouched
for me would bestow upon me almost instant bona fides in the Russian’s
eyes. This was the key to our initial contact.
In the early 1990s, when I was planning my approach to Sasha, the Russian
government was in disarray and could not afford to pay its top nuclear,
rocket, and other scientists basic living-wage salaries. Iran took advantage
of the chaotic situation facing the former Soviet Union and successfully
transferred significant amounts of nuclear technology from Russia to Iran.^3
Many economically desperate Russian scientists felt forced to sell secret
Soviet technology to outlaw countries like Iran and North Korea. Although
they could barely afford to pay their bills, Russian officials did enjoy greater
freedoms than before when it came to foreign travel. I once met a top
Russian stealth scientist for drinks at a dive bar in Washington, an unimagi-
nable concept (for both of us) just two years earlier. He lamented the fact