Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

When one arrives as a secret services agent in another country, one quickly enters into an unspoken arrangement with the other side – a prickly kind of modus vivendi. Our end of the bargain was that we had to ensure that we behaved in such a way that we never unnecessarily inconvenienced or endangered our American counterparts, or, worse still, humiliated them. So if you noticed you had a couple of men from the other side on your tail, you did not make any efforts to lose them… unless you had very good reason to do so. Otherwise you’d face very severe consequences – at the very least, you’d return to your car and find all your tyres punctured.

But even if there was a certain amount of respect between the two sides, I knew it would be fatal if that relationship evolved into something resembling friendship. They could be small things in themselves – birthday cards thrown through the car window of an American counterpart, or those occasions when agents would approach their tails in a café and inform them that they did not need to think about moving for at least an hour since the agent was going to lunch with his family. I completely prohibited this kind of communication, because I knew how amity could shade into compromise. Be polite, behave appropriately, but never cross the line.

In those circumstances, you develop an extreme sensitivity to the world around you. By the end of my stay in New York I could tell within a split-second whether a car was following me – something about it, some minuscule detail, always gave it away. You were so energised and concentrated all the time that you got into the habit of hoovering up every bit of information the environment around you could provide. If you had even the slightest feeling that something was awry, then you cancelled the mission immediately, and nobody would challenge you for doing so; our instincts were trusted.

This meant that you also gained the ability to read people as if they were a book. By closely observing the expression in their eyes, or the tiny gestures that they did not even realise they were making, you could discern the motives or plans they were trying to conceal. Sometimes your own life, or the safety of your colleagues, depended on your ability to deploy this level of intuition. The ability to read body language, to read all of the signs that other people communicate unconsciously, has been a great advantage in my subsequent career. And, conversely, I can use my demeanour almost like an instrument to help me persuade and manipulate. We were taught how to subtly change the expression of our eyes, the tightness of our skin, the cast of our jaws. At times I can be all soft and full of laughter, at others I can be like a beast, but I never lose control of my emotions.

Because our true identity was soon known to the FBI, as well as all the other Soviet citizens working in the Mission, it would not be precisely true to say that I led a double life (though to this day two profoundly different incarnations of my curriculum vitae exist, very few people have ever seen the unexpurgated version). But I learned early on that to survive for any length of time in intelligence it was crucial that you found a way to separate your professional and private identities. I became like an actor who slips out of his character the very same second that he steps off the stage.

The life of a field officer is one devoted to trying to detect the weaknesses in others – weaknesses they then have to exploit. This is true of every country’s special services. Agents must learn quickly that any exceptional, or abnormal, feature in another person’s personality is the foundation of every attempt to recruit them. A married man who cheats on his wife. A gambler up to his eyes in debt. A devoted father who discovers that his daughter is sick. They are always interested in the sorts of desires that people work all their lives to hide in the shadows. When they look at a man, it is because they want to know what his weakness is: money, women… men. (When we ourselves were first targeted for recruitment by the other side, we were scrutinised for traits in our characters that might be used by a hostile counter-intelligence organisation looking to expose us. Any exceptional feature – whether good or bad – in a candidate’s personality was considered dangerous. Bright stars were generally not welcome in the KGB – if nothing else, there was a danger that you might think too much about the nature of some of the work you were expected to undertake. Loyalty and readiness to obey were considered the most desirable qualities.)

Those who exist in a world of manipulation and deception know that it requires an incredible effort to ensure that you do not yourself become infected by the cynicism and cunning involved. I realised one day, during the months before I was relocated to the United States, that I had lost the ability to look at women normally – I could only see them from a professional perspective, as people who I might be able to persuade to participate in an operation. It hit me with the force of a revelation.

A little later on I went home and started watching the news on television, but I do not think I had realised the extent to which my work in the secret services – which should have remained a discrete element in my life – had begun to seep into every aspect of my existence. I started to make remarks inspired by the worldview that I had absorbed unquestioningly from my teachers and colleagues. We had been stuffed full of ideology, like geese being fattened for foie gras, and for a long time I swallowed it whole. I was just getting into my stride when my wife Natalia interrupted me: ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I can see some changes in you, and I cannot say that I like these changes.’ She did not need to say anything more. I realised I was in danger not only of losing the person I loved above all others, but also my identity, and that was the most effective inoculation I could have received. Ever since then I have divided my personal and professional lives, and in doing so I have preserved my human individuality from being swallowed up by my professional personality. Those who could not locate this balance did not last long. (I was also required to hide much from my wife: she could not know where I was going, or who I was with, or for how long I would be gone. I had thought it was a burden I carried alone; only later would I see that care and worry had eaten away at her. After six years in the United States, the woman who had departed looking like a model returned with her steadily accumulated anxieties etched onto her face.)

We had to deal with the usual diet of traitors and defectors, but the most awkward situation came when one of our undercover officers was detained by the FBI. He possessed a diplomatic passport stating that he was an international servant of the United Nations headquarters, but the Americans did not care about this. Without much ceremony he was thrown into jail, and shortly after the whole contretemps was resolved, if you can call it that, by the expulsion of around thirty Soviet diplomats from the United States. (The agent who was caught was bailed for $2 million and then left the country having agreed to plead the specially agreed formulation ‘no contest’ to the charges levelled against him. This was an arrangement that interested one of the small-time mafioso he met in jail, who wondered whether the Soviet Union might pay to spring them out too if he promised not to engage in any criminal activity once he had moved to the USSR. His plea was, of course, ignored.) Unsurprisingly, the heads of the Soviet station posted out there were first on the list, which meant that suddenly I became one of the highest-ranking agents on the ground. I had hitherto been just a regional officer, and nothing in my career had prepared me for this overnight elevation. More than anything, it was strange to observe how the people around me changed. I stayed the same, but I was surprised to find that I would never be treated the same way again.