Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [128]
The advent of perestroika allowed Koshkin to leave the military before completing the customary twenty-five years of service. In 1989 he became a civilian, working for an American documentary film company in Moscow. From there he bounced into a job at a public relations firm in San Francisco, where he says he first spotted a big gap in perception between American and Russian businesspeople. “I saw lots of companies that were going into Russia didn’t really know who they were dealing with,” Koshkin says. “They couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
Trident once represented Kenneth Dart, an American investor who is heir to the Styrofoam cup fortune generated by his family’s Dart Container Corporation. For several years in the late 1990s, Dart battled with the Russian oil giant Yukos in a dispute over the dilution of shares of Yukos subsidiaries in which Dart held an interest. That fight ended in a confidential settlement.
It was the kind of battle that can become physically dangerous in Russia. Koshkin says Trident was threatened so many times during its work with Dart that one of the firm’s employees was getting ready to evacuate his family from Moscow when the two sides settled the dispute in 1999. The Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was the founder of Yukos, later ran afoul of the Russian government and is now serving an eight-year jail term for tax violations.
Today, Koshkin says, Trident has fifteen employees, including Vladimir Joujelo, a KGB veteran who helped the Russians provide security for world leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Ronald Reagan; Alexander Trifonov, a former KGB officer; and Alexander Vinogradov, a retired Russian army colonel who specialized in military intelligence. “They’re good at what they do, but they charge a lot of money to do it,” says Raelynn Hillhouse, who blogs about corporate intelligence for thespywhobilledme.com. “Legally, Russia remains the Wild West. It’s convenient to be able to hire people who have experience in that environment.”
Koshkin won’t discuss most of Trident’s clients. Nor will he reveal the firm’s billing rates or annual revenues, but he seems to have made a good living from it. He bought a house from a former executive of AOL, Bob Pittman, in Great Falls, Virginia, and an apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan.
From his office in Arlington, Virginia, high above the Potomac, Koshkin can see the glint of the white walls of the Russian embassy across the river in Georgetown. “Sometimes I sit back and contemplate and wonder about the quirks of life,” he says. “We were trained that the United States was enemy number one.”
Koshkin’s old enemy is now his number one client.
EPILOGUE
In from the Cold
I first met Yuri Koshkin over coffee at a Starbucks in suburban Rosslyn, Virginia, just a few blocks from the Key Bridge over the Potomac River into Georgetown. He’s a charming and fascinating character, and I enjoyed our wide-ranging discussion immensely. Our meeting got me thinking about the implications of the industry Koshkin came from and the one he’s in now.
Washington, D.C., has always been a special target for spies—the first ones probably arrived soon after the capital was founded on July 16, 1790. Their stories are epic, sometimes bizarre, and frequently tragic. This is the city where Allan Pinkerton chased after the confederate spy “Rebel Rose” Greenhow during the Civil War. And it’s also the city where Allen Dulles oversaw the CIA’s surreal experiments with amphetamines, sleeping pills, and LSD to develop new interrogation methods for the cold war.1 It was here that the veteran FBI agent Robert Hanssen betrayed his country to the Russians, and the young FBI agent Eric O’Neill helped bring him down.
Today, intelligence services from all over the world send operatives to Washington, D.C., to try to pry secrets out of the government. Spying