Monday, May. 22, 1995

VICTIMS OF ALDRICH AMES

In late 1985 and early 1986, as a result of information Ames provided to the KGB, the CIA lost almost all its agents in the Soviet Union. In time the agency would learn that 10 of them had been executed; a complete list of their names and code names appears below for the first time. Many others were sent to prison. In all, three dozen agents were lost. The following excerpts from Nightmover describe six of them.

Sergei Motorin: During the summer of 1980, Motorin was posted to Washington as a third secretary to the Soviet embassy. A young major in the KGB who was married, he attracted the attention of the FBI when the bureau got a telephone call from a friendly insurance adjuster informing them that Motorin had been in a car accident. There was a hooker in the car. Not long afterward, the FBI watched Motorin walk into a store in downtown Washington and barter his operational allowance of vodka and Cuban cigars for stereo equipment. Using these indiscretions as leverage, the FBI persuaded him to begin spying for the U.S. He identified for the FBI the name of every KGB agent in the Soviet embassy in Washington. At each of its meetings with Motorin, the FBI gave him a modest cash payment, at first $100, later $200. After each meeting, the bureau also put aside $500 in an escrow account, to be held for Motorin against the day that he might defect.

At the end of 1984, Motorin returned to Moscow. Six months later, Ames handed over his identity, and the agent was doomed. A Soviet court that heard the evidence against Motorin said he had received $20,000 from the FBI, citing his purchase of a water bed as proof of his Western decadence. Soon after, he was shot.

Adolf Tolkachev: On June 13, 1985, the same day Ames turned over his cache of secret CIA documents to Sergei Chuvakhin in Washington, the KGB arrested one of the CIA's key assets in Moscow. A defense researcher who was a leading expert on stealth aircraft technology, Tolkachev was identified in the documents Ames turned over. The CIA later concluded that Tolkachev had first been betrayed by renegade CIA officer Edward Lee Howard, but that Ames' identification helped to seal his fate. Tolkachev was executed on Sept. 24, 1986.

Valeri Martynov: In November 1980, Martynov arrived in Washington with his wife Natalia to take up his duties, ostensibly as third secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington. He was actually a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. In the spring of 1982, however, he was recruited through a joint FBI-CIA courtship program and began feeding information to the Americans.

From the CIA's point of view, Martynov's importance lay in his potential as a sleeper agent who might rise through the ranks and prove useful in the future. After Ames betrayed him, however, the KGB ordered him to return to Moscow in November 1985. Martynov told his wife and his two young children that he would be back in Washington shortly. Ten days later, Natalia received a note from her husband asking her to come back to Moscow with their son and daughter. As soon as their plane landed, Natalia realized that her husband was in trouble.

Officials took the children to her mother's apartment and brought her to Moscow's Lefortovo prison for interrogation. The KGB questioned her repeatedly. During the next two years, as KGB counterintelligence officers investigated the case, she was allowed to see her husband only four times. The last time she brought her son with her, knowing Martynov had been sentenced to death. He was executed by a firing squad on May 28, 1987. He was 41 years old.

Vladimir Potashov: To know what it was like to be betrayed by Ames, one has only to listen to Potashov recount his ghastly experiences. A young disarmament specialist who fed information to the CIA while working in Moscow for the prestigious Institute of U.S.A. and Canada Studies, he was arrested on July 1, 1986.

After being interrogated about a hundred times at Lefortovo prison, always under bright lights, Potashov was sentenced to 13 years and shipped east to the notorious Perm-35 prison camp in the Urals. "After Lefortovo," he said, "there was a 17-day trip in a cage with 15 murderers, all with TB. In Perm I was a transport worker hauling 500 lbs. of metal parts in a handcart. I had to push the cart, and my right shoulder joint broke." Potashov and the other prisoners worked 10 hours a day, six days a week. Although only 37, Potashov aged rapidly in the Gulag. "I was in Perm five years and seven months. The doctor told me I had bones like a 65-year-old man. I lost all my teeth from bad or radioactive water in the camp. I was beaten with iron rods by KGB agents; my bones were broken."

In 1992 Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian President, granted Potashov amnesty. His young wife had been frightened by his arrest, and prison had cost him his marriage. With the help of the CIA, Potashov came to America and remarried. He now lives in the Southern part of the U.S.

Boris Yuzhin: A KGB officer working under cover as a San Francisco correspondent of the Soviet news agency TASS, Yuzhin began providing valuable information to American intelligence in 1978. He revealed the existence of the KGB's Group North, an alite unit of senior Soviet intelligence officers who specialized in recruiting American and Canadian targets worldwide.

In 1982 Yuzhin went back to Moscow, and in 1986, after Ames identified him as a CIA source, the KGB took him into custody. He was sentenced to 15 years for high treason. On Feb. 7, 1992, after six years under harsh conditions in the Gulag, he was another of the 10 political prisoners released from Perm-35 under Yeltsin's amnesty. Gray-haired at 53, he now lives in northern California with his wife Nadia and daughter Olga.

Dmitri Polyakov: The most important CIA source whom Ames betrayed was Polyakov, the legendary top hat. So valuable was Polyakov, a general in Soviet military intelligence, that the CIA provided him with special high-tech equipment that it reserved for its most important agents. He was, for example, given a high-speed "burst" transmitter and a clock for his Moscow apartment that lit up in response to a radio signal to inform him that a dead drop, or hiding place, had been cleared by the CIA. Over the years, Polyakov provided the CIA with data on Soviet strategic missiles, antitank missiles, nuclear strategy, chemical and biological warfare, crop diseases and civil defense. In 1980 Polyakov returned to Moscow, having successfully spied for the U.S. for two decades. Approaching retirement age, he could look forward to living out his years peacefully in Moscow with his family.

Until Aldrich Ames turned him in. In 1990 the Soviets announced that Polyakov had been caught; they later said he had been executed in 1988. Polyakov had been one of a kind. "He didn't do this for money," the CIA's Jeanne Vertefeuille told a colleague. "He insisted on staying in place to help us." Tears came in her eyes when she spoke of the general.

"It was," she said, "a bad day for us when we lost him."