Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [126]
Being friends with a CIA officer wasn’t a good career move in the KGB during the Soviet era. Neither man could know it, but as their friendship was growing, a corrupt FBI agent, Robert Hanssen* was passing tidbits of inside information along to his Russian handlers. One of those tidbits was the name of Gennady Vasilenko. Hanssen thought Vasilenko had been spying for the Americans, because he had seen CIA references to Vasilenko with the code name “Glazing.”
By 1988, the situation was coming to a head. Oblivious of Hanssen’s treachery, Vasilenko was ordered to Cuba for what he thought would be a run-of-the-mill meeting. But as he stepped onto the veranda of an apartment building in Havana, two men jumped him. “They beat the shit out of him,” Platt recalls. Vasilenko was packed off to the KGB’s Lefortovo prison in Moscow, where he was accused of being a traitor. He waited to be executed. But there was no evidence that he had passed any evidence to Platt—Platt says this is because he never passed any—and the Soviets let him out of prison after six months. “He talked his way out of there,” Platt says, with a note of pride.
When the cold war ended, Platt reconnected with his old friend Vasilenko, who had been fired from the KGB and had struggled in his career since his arrest in Havana. They went into business together—this time as spies for hire to western businesses that wanted to operate in Moscow. Amid the rush toward privatization in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia in the mid-1990s, companies needed intelligence. What’s going on? Who should we deal with? Where are the best deals? Together, the two ex-spies profited, offering services ranging from investigations of global criminals to checking out the credentials of potential business partners for their clients.
Business was good, until recent years, when Vasilenko ran afoul of Putin’s government. Former KGB men dominate the current Russian hierarchy. Actually, as Vladimir Putin himself told a gathering of Russian spies in 2005, when he was president of the Russian Federation, “There is no such thing as a former KGB man.”4 Many of these officers never gave up their dark red KGB identity cards when the Soviet Union collapsed. To this day, Platt says, they can flash the cards to win all sorts of special favors in Russian society—from getting a speeding ticket fixed to being offered career opportunities. The powerful ex-KGB men never quite gave up the idea that Vasilenko had been a secret spy for the Americans. “There were those that never believed that I didn’t recruit him,” Platt says. Vasilenko was arrested in Russia and sent to prison. He’s still in jail today, and Platt says it is once again just a misunderstanding. “He didn’t spy, no matter what they said about him. He just got caught in a power struggle.”
That leaves Platt without a valued colleague at his firm, the Hamilton Trading Group. Today, Platt works primarily for corporate clients, law firms, financial firms, and hedge funds. Mostly, the work involves figuring out who the people on the other end of a business transaction are. Who are the owners of the firm? Who do they know? Platt explains this with a Russian metaphor, krysha, meaning “roof.” In the old days, Russian intelligence services used it as slang to describe the cover story of a spy operation. Today, though, the Russian Mafia uses krysha in a different way, to mean “godfather” or, more loosely, “protection.” Krysha can thus refer to a network of musclemen who protect a businessman, or a company that has paid protection money to the mob. Platt says he’s in the business of finding out who provides a company’s krysha—who backs the firm, who’s connected to it, who’s looking out for it.
Depending on the case, this service is not always expensive. Corporate investigators like those at Hamilton Trading Group might charge as little as $75 per hour, plus expenses and a premium for difficult work. They know, of course, that the law firms pass those