Requiem for a Russian Spy

[Draggingtree]

Requiem for a Russian Spy

 

A CIA veteran remembers his Soviet counterpart.

BY MILTON BEARDEN |JULY/AUGUST 2012

 

 

On the second-to-last day of March, Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin, the former head of the KGB's foreign intelligence arm and chairman of the KGB -- for a single day in the turmoil of the August 1991 coup attempt against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev -- died in his central Moscow apartment, apparently taking his own life. According to Russian media accounts, the last entry in his diary found at the scene was: "March, 29 - 17.15, left eye failure. 19.00, went completely blind. Foreign Intelligence duty officer 4293593." Beside his body was a service pistol presented to him upon his retirement from the KGB, and media reports said there was a suicide note. Shebarshin, my longtime adversary and, later, a helpful collaborator in chronicling the slice of history we shared, was 77.

 

His death marks the end of an era, the passing of one of the most thoughtful, cultured, and effective leaders of the redoubtable Cold War KGB. He was a master spy, a central figure in the tumultuous half-century contest between the CIA and the KGB, and a true believer in the Soviet dream until the very end. He never wavered; he never apologized.

For much of the last decade of my CIA career, Shebarshin was the closest thing I had to a main adversary in the Soviet spy apparatus. (For youJohn le Carré fans out there, he was my Karla.) I met him only after we had retired, when our respective organizations were still trying to sort out all the body blows of treachery and betrayal we had taken in those last desperate years of Cold War rivalry.

We first met in Moscow in 1997 at his offices in the KGB's sports facility, Dynamo Stadium. Although the Soviet Union had ceased to exist half a dozen years earlier, Shebarshin's office walls were covered with eerie, almost surreal murals of revolutionary scenes featuring Joseph Stalin and Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the feared founder of the Soviet secret services. It was clear Shebarshin Read More http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/06/18/requiem_for_a_russian_spy

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

That same year, Shebarshin became head of KGB foreign intelligence, the FCD, where he had been among the handful of key KGB men behind the lingering mystery of the deadly compromise of the CIA's Moscow assets, beginning in 1985 -- a saga that ended, the CIA thought, with the 1994 arrest of CIA veteran Aldrich Ames on charges of spying for the KGB. Although Ames's betrayal seemed to unscramble the riddle of the Moscow losses, some still believe that another traitor was in our midst in the 1980s and that he is still out there. It's just another secret Shebarshin took to his grave.

 

This is a story just crying out for a book!

 

I'm a huge fan of le Carré i9n spite of his moral equivalency between the two systems.

 

The Sword And The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive And The Secret History Of The KGB url=http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Was-Going-Our/dp/B000MKYKEK/ref=pd_sim_b_1]he World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for The Third World[/url] Are reads.

 

FYI

 

The Sword and the Shield The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Excerpt.