Farewell (29 page)

Every move she made after that was an automatic reflex. When Vetrov was distracted by the man knocking at the window, Ludmila’s hand found the door handle, and once outside, her legs carried her in the direction of the bus stop. When Vetrov’s car chased her, she did not change course. Then, when the truck appeared and Vetrov’s Lada roared past her, missing her by a meter, she collapsed.

She had just enough time to give Vetrov’s name and his car plate number to the woman who found her. Then she lost consciousness. At the emergency ward where she was taken, doctors said that another ten minutes and she would not have survived.

We learned that the PGU did not like for its members to stay in the hands of civilian authorities. As soon as Ludmila could be moved, a few weeks later, she was transferred to the KGB hospital. With twenty-something stab wounds and multiple internal injuries she was not given a bed in the surgery department, but in OB-GYN.

She shared the room with a woman undergoing tests. This woman was nosy and did not stop talking. Because of the painkillers, Ludmila was barely aware of what was going on around her. She could, nevertheless, remember later on that the woman in the other bed was insistently questioning her about a certain fur coat. It was only after the cross-examinations had started that Ludmila understood she had not been sharing the room with that woman by accident.

The first visit she got at the hospital was not from a military investigator, but from a Directorate K officer (internal counterintelligence). It was around May. After undergoing several operations, Ludmila had just started getting up again. She remembers how it took her at least fifteen minutes to walk the twenty meters from her room to the department head office, leaning against the wall. A fit, dark-haired man about fifty was waiting for her. All he wanted to know was if Vetrov had tampered with secret documents. It is probably then—Ludmila does not really remember—that she mentioned how, one day, Vladimir had taken a file to work on at home.

After this visit, Ludmila had to deal only with the examining magistrate Belomestnykh. She did not know yet what was in store for her.

By her own admission, in all this story, the most painful blow dealt to her was not the betrayal of the man she had loved, not even the memories of his murderous blind rage when he was trying to pierce her like a piece of meat; it was the mudslinging she had to face during the investigation.

The governing idea was simple: to save the honor of the uniform. Whether this was Vetrov’s idea or from a PGU creative mind, it suited everyone involved. Facing the law, of course, there was one criminal and his two victims. But to all, there was on one side a KGB officer—admittedly weak and of dubious morality, but deep down a good guy—and on the other side two individuals fearing neither God nor man who ensnared him. It is while struggling to extricate himself that he tragically committed acts of madness, killing one and seriously wounding the other.

We know the minor importance attached to a translator, even by the KGB; a translator was seen as just a little more than a typist, and more sassy because she was contaminated by the West. A slut who exchanges her favors for gifts. It was essential to demonstrate that Ochikina kept asking for more, never having enough.

Ludmila and Vetrov were brought face to face only once. She had thought about it over and over, days in advance. Would she be able to stand the sight of him? Would he have the courage to look at her in the eyes? Her legs gave way under her when she stepped into the room where Vetrov already was. Vladimir showed no remorse, no embarrassment when he saw the woman he had loved and tried to kill. He welcomed her with these words: “Why won’t you admit that I gave you presents?”

Ludmila could not believe it. It was only later that she understood his line of defense, adopted by the investigation for its own purposes. One day, Belomestnykh even told her, “How could you accept expensive gifts? You were aware, weren’t you, that it was at the expense of his family?”

Ludmila failed to convince him that she had received only two presents. There was first a pendant with a nephrite ring (which Ameil had bought at Vetrov’s request). Vladimir gave her this costume jewelry in his car. This was at the beginning of his courtship, and Ludmila did not want to take the gifts; so Vetrov crammed them in her purse. Another time, he gave her three small bottles of French perfume, packaged together in a presentation box. For some obscure reason, the Soviet trade officials had decided to spoil the population. Ludmila is adamant: she never received the fur coat the PGU started looking for as soon as she was able to speak again. Which is obviously a lie since Patrick Ferrant even had his wife try it on before giving it to Volodia.

Likewise, she claimed she never saw the ten-by-five-centimeter calculator nor the nine-by-four-centimeter electric alarm clock, items Ameil had given Vetrov, which are minutely described in the investigation file. This too could be true. For Vladimir could very well have thrown in the approximate dimensions of the objects; once recorded in the report, the items acquired a physical reality. In fact, Vetrov had probably given those trinkets to someone else. They were not gifts suited to a woman one was courting.

Despite Ludmila’s vigorous denial and the absence of evidence, the “gift-taking” version was largely substantiated not only in the investigation documents, but also in the corridors at the PGU. Disinformation had always been the institution’s strong point. By firmly establishing Ludmila’s greed, they improved Vetrov’s image in the eyes of his colleagues. It came as a surprise to see how easily well-informed and rational men such as intelligence operatives accepted this version, which was a complete fabrication. Was it male solidarity? Rejected men, many of whom had courted Ludmila to no avail? It is plausible.

The disinformation campaign launched within Directorate T seems to have succeeded. Today, its officers admit that Ludmila’s image had been made up following Vetrov’s case. As far as Ludmila was concerned, nothing had changed. Bright, cheerful, good-looking, she thought she was surrounded by well-meaning people showing her affection and friendship. She must have been bitterly disillusioned when reading their opinions and accusations in the investigation file. At best, they were neutral. Not a single one of her colleagues had found a positive word to say about her. Overall, her colleagues’ opinions were very damaging. She appeared in the file the way the investigators wanted to represent her.

It was the same for the man in the parking lot, this unfortunate Krivich. In Russia, moral judgment prevails over the law. This is why the country is not likely to ever become a constitutional state. Even though in the eyes of the law Vetrov committed a homicide, to many people he had simply taken care of a creep. He had to pay for his crime, but sympathies did not go to the victim’s side. If at the time the Soviet Union had been a jury system, and if Vetrov had had a good lawyer and orchestrated a clever media campaign, he would have had a chance to be declared “not guilty.”

Even Vitaly Karavashkin, French section head in KGB counterintelligence and trained as a lawyer, who studied the Vetrov case in depth, claims he would have been ready to be his defense lawyer. A stunning statement, since Karavashkin was intolerant of any kind of treason. The officer explained that he would have done it to defend Vetrov and have the opportunity to present an indictment of the general atmosphere then prevailing at the PGU. Apart from holding the rival service in contempt, Karavashkin was ready nonetheless to understand this good chap who was drinking because he was intelligent (a commonly accepted fact in Russia), a man who had a violent fit because he was weak, and who sold his service secrets because he was poorly treated. A very Russian approach, too.

By the most extraordinary coincidence, the slain policeman lived on the same street as Ludmila. No matter how much Ludmila repeated that their respective buildings were almost a mile apart and, therefore, the dead man could not have been her neighbor, the investigators kept trying make her admit she knew the man. Without a particle of evidence, they had to drop the idea. Yet, it would have suited the investigation just fine: a woman who was blackmailing the KGB officer, and her accomplice, a voyeur and also a blackmailer, set a trap in a parking spot to force the officer to accept their conditions. With just a little more luck, Vetrov could have claimed he acted in self-defense.

Ludmila’s account is by no means a model of completeness and consistency. Actually, it probably raises more questions than it answers. It may be due, however, to our angle of vision, preventing us from seeing an entire side of this affair. We were desperately looking for a hypothesis, however fanciful it might be, that would resolve all the contradictions. We believe we found one (see chapter 30). For this hypothesis to be more readily understandable, though, one needs to know the events that followed Vetrov’s arrest.

Valery Andreevich Rechensky was a KGB officer. Better, he was part of the intelligence service. Even better, he was an officer in PGU internal counterintelligence and, thus, a member of the elite secret unit of the KGB. That ends the list of the advantages he had. Worse, he no longer enjoyed them. Even worse, in the spring of 1981, he was sitting in a cell for three in the Lefortovo prison.

The story he told was pretty close to the one disclosed by his friends. Rechensky was posted in Warsaw. The colony had organized a party for a holiday, and there were not enough plates and flatware. Rechensky volunteered to go get more, and he drove off with the wife of a colleague KGB officer. On the way back, the woman, who was in the passenger seat, held a stack of plates on her lap. Rechensky took the wrong road and decided to make a U-turn in front of a tunnel (crossing a double yellow line, his friends pointed out). Another car, driven by a Pole, emerged from the tunnel and crashed headlong into Rechensky’s car. The woman was hit the hardest; as they broke, the plates ripped her belly open. She died instantly. Rechensky argued that the Polish driver was blinded by daylight when he came out of the tunnel, and was driving much too fast. His well-informed friends claimed that Rechensky had had a drink or two before sitting at the wheel, which at the time in Poland was strictly prohibited. Wherever lies the truth, Rechensky was called back to Moscow, suspended, and after a few months of questioning, was imprisoned in Lefortovo.

This prison was a far cry from prisons where ordinary criminals were kept. Actually, the “residents” were split into two categories. One was comprised of “regime elected” officials: apparatchiks, members of the nomenklatura involved in sex or corruption cases, and all KGB members systematically. The other was comprised of everyone else convicted of State crimes, and exclusively under KGB jurisdiction: high treason, forgery, foreign currency or precious metal trafficking, and in general, all crimes significantly detrimental to the State’s economic interests. That’s the way it came to be that put together in a Lefortovo cell were Valery Rechensky, a former PGU counterintelligence officer, and a certain Vasily, a recidivist caught red-handed with a fifty-kilogram bag containing gold-bearing sand, getting ready for his fifth or sixth term of imprisonment in Siberia.

First, a few words about Valery Rechensky. He was a lean man of medium height, with an affable and very sharp expression. In his small apartment located in a residential neighborhood quite far from downtown Moscow, there was an entire wall of bookshelves. All those books did not prevent him from using, here and there, colorful expressions that cannot be printed here but are so numerous in the Russian language. Even though his life was turned upside down by the unfortunate car accident, jail had not made him bitter. He found amusing the idea that Vetrov could be of interest, but he willingly testified, never trying to show himself in a good light or to denigrate others; all in all, he was a good witness.

The crime committed by Rechensky was considered the result of a tragic set of circumstances, and he was on good terms with his investigator. On a February day, before sending him back to his cell, the man said, “Don’t be surprised, you’ll have another companion tonight. Also a former KGB member.”

“What do I care?”

And indeed, a few hours later, the cell door opened to let in a handsome, very clean-cut, impressive man, according to Rechensky. The three men greeted one another. Vasily asked the unavoidable question: “What are you here for?”

“For nothing, pure coincidence.”

Everyone said the same thing in prison, commented Rechensky.

“But more precisely?” insisted Vasily.

“And you, why are you here?” asked Vetrov, on the defensive.

“Me, it’s for gold-bearing sand; and him,” he added, pointing to Rechensky, “he is a former KGB spy.”

“Ah, me too,” Vetrov revealed immediately.

Rechensky, who had no intention to show he already knew about it, joined the conversation.

“I am here because of a car accident, and you?”

“I hit a woman with a bottle.”

“What do you mean?”

Vetrov told his version of the events. Considering the repercussions the affair would have later, Rechensky remembers it very well. In fact, Vetrov did not tell the whole story on that first evening. They lived together about a month and a half, and three men in a ten-square-meter cell spend the time mostly talking. Asking questions is a normal thing to do in jail; it was even Vasily’s preferred occupation since he did not care much for reading. One needs to know when to stop, though, even when the questioned individual is trying to make you swallow a blatant lie. Vetrov was quick to assimilate the prisoners’ code of conduct and simple rules, like knowing how to pick the appropriate time to use the toilet (a simple bucket) in order to not bother his companions in misfortune.

Vetrov’s version as such is not that important, except for showing once more how much he wanted to be viewed as a victim—a victim of circumstances, not of his temperament or his calculations.

According to Vetrov, he and Svetlana were deeply in love. Then, one day, he was kind enough to give a translator colleague a lift home. They started dating and then became lovers. Ludmila, he said, fell in love with him and requested he divorce his wife. Instead, Vetrov preferred leaving his mistress, but he wanted to do so in an amicable way. He bought a bottle of champagne for a final explanation in an isolated parking area. Although a sweet girl, Ludmila threatened to complain to their boss and to the Party committee, which would have put an end to his career. Vetrov saw red and hit her several time on the head with the bottle. In his account of the events, he never mentioned any knife. But Ludmila managed to get out of the car; Vetrov tried to catch up with her, when he bumped into a man who had appeared out of nowhere. He hit him, he said (again, without saying he stabbed the man with a knife). Then, panic-stricken, he got back into his car and fled, covered in blood. After that, he visited a friend, but like the rest of it, it all happened in some kind of a trance.

Not bad, for a story! With omissions cleverly interwoven with facts, this must have been the version he wanted his investigator to buy. He, somehow, was rehearsing it in front of his cellmates.

Time was going by slowly, as it does in jail. What stuck in Rechensky’s mind after the first three weeks with Vetrov was that he was stingy. Since jail food was not a gastronomic experience, each inmate was officially authorized to receive one food parcel per month. Actually, in this prison for VIPs, there were a lot of exceptions to the rules. Rechensky, for instance, regularly received filter cigarettes, not allowed in theory, and three packs of tea instead of the one authorized. Likewise, the inmates were receiving parcels more often, once a week on average.

Custom required that each prisoner unpack and lay out the content of his parcel on the table, in full view of his cellmates. He was then the one to decide what should be eaten in priority or whether, for instance, the lard could be kept for later. In principle, the whole contents were equally shared between the prisoners in the cell. Vetrov sorted out his parcel on his bed and then put on the table only what he was willing to share. When he was about to proceed in the same manner with his second parcel, Vasily told him in no uncertain terms, “Unpack in front of us or piss off!”

Vetrov decided to stay. Besides, he had nowhere else to go; for Vasily, it was just a figure of speech.

The monotony of life in prison was broken by a new development in Vetrov’s story. One day, approximately three weeks after his arrival, he came back from a questioning haggard and down. Instead of sitting on his bed, he started pacing the cell.

“Stop that, you’re making me dizzy,” said Vasily, exasperated.

Vetrov sat on his bed and said out loud what he had kept turning over in his mind.

“How could they know about the painting? It has nothing to do with it. It was a gift; I could just as well have bought it myself.”

“It immediately triggered something in my mind,” recalls counterintelligence officer Rechensky. “Why a painting? What does that have to do with his sexual exploits?”

So he asked Vetrov with a false naïveté, more out of a professional reflex than curiosity, “It’s your girlfriend who spoiled you rotten, giving you a painting?”

Just the thought of it made Vetrov loosen up.

“Not likely! It was a gift from the French. My wife and I, we appreciate antiques, paintings…”

“It is at this very moment that I understood in a flash,” said Rechensky. “As it happens in the course of an investigation, it was a certitude. After that, gathering evidence was just a matter of time.” Rechensky had almost forgotten that he was a prisoner himself.

“They claim you collaborated with the French?” he asked.

“What collaboration? What are you talking about?”

The stress from cross-examinations was taking its toll. When coming back to the cell, Vetrov needed to release the tension, if not to open his heart. Clearly, his investigator was suspecting him of treason and was trying to make him own up to it. Vetrov was despondent.

One statement is in order. As everyone knows, in important cases, the investigation planted an informer in the cell to worm information out of a recalcitrant convict. Furthermore, the cell could be equipped with a hidden bugging device. A KGB officer himself, Vetrov knew very well about such practices. And yet, he could not help talking.

One day, clearly emerging from a long internal dialogue involving his investigator, he exclaimed, “Collaboration, no chance! If I had collaborated, I’d have stayed in France. Nobody made me such an offer.”

“Maybe they wanted you to be promoted. You’d have been more useful to them in Moscow,” objected Rechensky.

Vladimir did not answer. Had he known Rechensky had been part of internal counterintelligence, he would have been more cautious. For his part, Rechensky was convinced—and still was at the time of the interview in 2007—that Vetrov had been recruited while in France.

Days went by. The three cellmates took walks in a minuscule inner yard, twenty square meters or so, four walls, and a metallic grid cover crossing out the sky, on which a guard was walking back and forth, with mud dripping from his crude boots. For “fun,” Rechensky boxed the wall, karate-style, until the guard shouted, “Stop damaging the wall, for Christ’s sakes!” So he then joined Vetrov, who was pacing the yard, ten steps in each direction; the yard was truly small. The gold trafficker was smoking by himself, squatting down, although he could have stayed in the cell to smoke. Rechensky invited, “Come walk with us!”

“I’ll have plenty of time for that once in the zone,” answered the other, not moving. In convict and warden jargon, “the zone” was the accepted way to refer to prisons and penitentiaries.

Immersed in his thoughts, Vetrov from time to time would let out a “Damn!” that spoke volumes on his frame of mind.

Rechensky responded, “What do you expect? You’re receiving gifts from the French, you eat in restaurants, I don’t know with what money for that matter, and now you claim you did not collaborate with them?”

“It’s true, I am telling you! Maybe they got some information from me that they needed; if so, I was not aware of it!”

Then Vetrov would get a grip on himself again. He started talking about his mistress, his murderous rage, as if the rest was only a hiccup or an inept suspicion from an overzealous investigator. That’s when Rechensky said to himself that Vetrov wanted to use his crime as a smoke screen to hide another affair which could, this time, cost him his life.

Why would a painting be of such interest? It seems that it was then the only exhibit against Vetrov. After all, while in Paris, Vetrov was overseeing contracts amounting to hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, such as the Thomson-CSF TV-broadcasting equipment for the Moscow Olympic Games. It could have been viewed as a gesture of gratitude toward an employee too honest to accept money…

“Come on,” said Rechensky with a smile. “My job abroad was precisely to keep watch over intelligence operatives; I’ve heard it all before. This was strictly prohibited. A bribe is a bribe, in any shape or form. An officer greedy for material goods is easy prey! By accepting an expensive gift, you become indebted to the giver, who can later blackmail you. Besides, the instructions were clear. If you worked for intelligence services, you could not accept a gift without informing the station chief. Whatever the nature of the gift, large or small, precious or junk, it had to go through a technical control performed at the residency. You never know, it could have been bristling with hidden bugging devices. Furthermore, a painting is not a pen nor a pipe or a cigarette case. It’s a bribe. Clearly, Vetrov accepted this painting without his superiors’ knowing; it tells a lot about the character.”

Now, the investigation. One day, the investigator in charge of Rechensky’s case asked him to meet a colleague of his who was investigating the Vetrov affair. The conversation was rather formal. Rechensky repeated what Vetrov had said, and he shared his suspicion regarding his possible collaboration with French services. It did not go further. The investigator, as Rechensky learned later, also questioned Vasily. To Vasily, though, who was some kind of a boss in the underworld hierarchy, squealing on others was a no-no. So he just stuck to general statements.

However, there were two investigators working on the Vetrov case. One belonged to the Military Prosecutor’s Office, and he was concerned only with the murder and the murder attempt. Vetrov had confessed everything, he seemed to sincerely regret his actions, and he was fully collaborating with the investigation. This investigator, therefore, did not look further. The second one, whose name was Yuri Marchenko, was on friendly terms with Rechensky when they were working together at the PGU’s Directorate K.
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Marchenko took his former colleague’s suspicion more seriously. And Rechensky swore there was something in the wind; it was not just a hunch, it was a certainty. Due to the difference of their respective situations, Marchenko could not speak frankly with Rechensky, so he listened more than he talked. Years later, however, after Rechensky served his time, they both talked about the case again, sharing grilled meat skewers washed down with plenty of booze (their dachas were next to one another).