I’ve been a journalist for more than three decades, but I’ve never had a day like yesterday.
My morning began at 5 a.m. when I announced on my blog that my good friend, Sergei Tretyakov, had died unexpectedly on June 13th. We became good friends while collaborating on Comrade J. I posted this news after speaking several times during the week to Helen, his wife, and to several sources in the U.S. government familiar with his case.
I had learned about his death from Helen shortly after it happened and she had asked me as a family friend to keep silent about it. She was worried that Sergei’s former colleagues in the Russian intelligence service — the SVR — would somehow use his death for propaganda purposes and attempt to embarrass and discredit him. She also was understandably devastated by his unexpected death, in mourning for her beloved husband, and did not want the media attention that she knew the news would bring on her family.
Of course, I agreed. As an author and not a daily journalist, I felt I had the luxury of keeping silent.
I should have known a fundamental rule about news. No one, no matter how well-intentioned or experienced, can control it.
At the time, neither Helen nor I were aware of the pending arrests of 10 Russian “illegals” and when that story broke nationally, it wasn’t long before Sergei’s name began being mentioned.
Several reporters who cover the FBI and CIA began speculating that Sergei had tipped off U.S. officials about the Russian “illegals” ring because several of the spies had entered the U.S. in the late 1990s when Sergei was the second-in-command of the SVR in New York City but was secretly working as a U.S. spy.
I first learned about this speculation when a New York Post reporter telephoned me and asked if I thought Sergei was the source. Based on what I knew at the time, I said that Sergei probably was. It seemed logical.
Within hours, I was getting calls from NPR, the BBC, and the major news networks. Everyone was searching for Sergei.
At that point, I told Helen that it was only a matter of time before his death would be discovered, but she wasn’t ready emotionally to tell the world that Sergei had died. I began telling callers that Sergei was “unavailable.”
Meanwhile, the illegals story continued to mushroom, especially after one of the “illegals” — Anna Chapman — was dubbed the “Russian Femme Fatale.” Suddenly, her face was everywhere and I began receiving more and more telephone calls.
Where was Sergei Tretyakov? How can we reach him? Was he the source?
DATELINE called and I agreed to an interview. I began contacting sources of mine in the FBI and CIA to learn more about the “illegals” and to my shock, I was told repeatedly that Sergei had nothing to do with the case. Yes, it was true that he had briefed the government after he had defected in October 2000 about SVR “illegal” operations in New York City. But I was told that he did not know any of the names of the Russians who had been arrested and had not tipped off the FBI about the spy ring.
During these conversations, I also learned that individuals involved in Sergei’s case wanted Helen to reveal that her husband had died. I was told that it would be more difficult to dismiss the conspiracy theories that always seem to surface in spying cases if Sergei continued to be “unavailable.”
On Thursday afternoon, I told DATELINE during a taped interview for a program that was to air on Sunday that Sergei was not the FBI’s source for the arrests of the “illegals.” The producer who interviewed me was surprised and clearly disappointed.
Late that night, Helen and I agreed that it was time to go public with Sergei’s death. I greatly admired her courage and told her to gird herself for a media onslaught.
I posted my blog at 5 a.m.and sent word to several reporters.
Not much happened for several hours until J.J. Green, a reporter at WTOP radio in Washington D.C., interviewed Helen. Green had broadcast an excellent series about Sergei Tretyakov on WTOP earlier and like me, Helen had liked and trusted him. She had told him about Sergei’s death and had given him an exclusive interview when he called her.
The Associated Press picked up Green’s story and then called me for information.
It was then that things began getting strange.
An AP reporter wrote a story that said WTOP was the first to break the news of Sergei’s death. Obviously, that was wrong. Later during the day, that same AP reporter sent me an email explaining why he had credited WTOP instead of my blog. “WTOP is an AP member and the first media outlet to tip us off and report the story. That’s why we’re giving them credit.” Apparently plugging AP members overrode being accurate. But the slight was a minor irritant. There were other mistakes in the AP story that was now spreading news of Sergei’s death across the nation and world.
Within two hours, I had received more than fifty emails and dozens of telephone calls from reporters. It didn’t help that I was out of town conducting an interview and didn’t have enough juice in my cell phone to return all of the calls to answer questions.
I also realized that I had made a mistake too in my blog. Or it appeared that I had.
I had been told that the FBI had supervised an autopsy of Sergei’s body to insure that there was no foul play involved in his death. However, a reporter tracked down the coroner, who was actually doing the autopsy, and the coroner said the final results would not be available until late July. Then the FBI took the unusual step of issuing a statement saying that it had not supervised the autopsy as I had reported.
I felt both angry and betrayed because my sources had told me that an autopsy had been done under the direction of the FBI and it had showed no foul play. I felt the FBI was distancing itself from Sergei’s death and I didn’t know why. When I confronted my sources, I was told that the government did not want to officially acknowledge that Sergei was a spy.
What? I exclaimed.
In the first chapter of my book, Comrade J, I had explained that it was the FBI and CIA who had first introduced Sergei to me.
Within a few hours, The New York Times was reporting that the coroner was now saying that an autopsy had been completed and that the FBI was monitoring the autopsy.
By mid-morning, the tenor of the calls on my cell phone had changed. Now I was being asked about differences in the WTOP report and my blog. Why had Helen told me that Sergei had died from a massive heart attack when WTOP was saying that he had died from natural causes. Why had I said an autopsy had been done when the coroner was saying it hadn’t and then saying it had? And why had the FBI gone to the trouble of saying it had not supervised an autopsy when the coroner was now saying it had?
Meanwhile, a spy museum official in Washington D.C. was still insisting that it was possible that Sergei had tipped off the FBI about the “illegals.”
Late Friday afternoon, the Washington Post revealed that the White House had been briefed about the impending arrests of the “illegals” on June 11th — two days before Sergei’s death.
It was at that point when the conspiracy theories began surfacing on blogs, including this one.
A reporter from TASS — the Russian news service — telephoned and suggested that it was highly unlikely that Sergei’s death and the “illegals” case were unrelated and a coincidence.
The story was now taking on a life of its own.
When I wrote my first spy book about John Walker Jr. and his Family of Spies, I quickly learned a sad truth about espionage reporting. I was on a radio station talking about Walker and how he had betrayed our nation when an outraged caller came on the air and told me that I had it all wrong. Walker was actually a double agent trained by the CIA. Our government was going to swap him with someone in Moscow so that Walker could steal the Kremlin’s secrets. It was total nonsense, of course, but the caller was absolutely certain it was true.
Not long after that, I wrote about Aldrich Ames, the CIA traitor, and his involvement with Vitaly Yuchenko, a veteran KGB officer who defected to the US in 1985, only to change his mind a short time later and return to the Soviet Union. I interviewed the key players in both the U.S. and in Moscow about the Yuchenko case after the collapse of the Soviet Union, including retired KGB General Boris Solomatin who was directly involved in the Yuchenko investigation. There is no doubt in my mind that Yuchenko was a genuine defector who had simply gone home to Moscow after having his heart broken by the wife of a Soviet diplomat. He had foolishly believed that she would leave her husband in Canada and live happily ever after with him in America after he defected to the U.S. Instead, she had rebuffed him.
However, if you check the Internet you will see lots of conspiracy theories about how Yuchenko was a “fake” defector who was sent by the KGB to cast suspicion away from Ames. Even Wikipedia has fallen for the “Yuchenko was a fake defector” scenario that is constantly being pushed by the SVR.
Given the history of conspiracy theories in the CIA, dating back to James Jesus Angleton and the Nosenko affair, I will not be surprised if the SVR and conspiracy theorists jump on Sergei’s death.
No matter what I write about my good friend, there will be readers who will prefer to believe that he was murdered for speaking out against Russia. My heart goes out to Helen because this is exactly what she didn’t want to happen.
But I also have to smile a bit.
I can see my friend Sergei chuckling at the nonsense that many are writing about him. He always did like a good spy story.
About the author:
Dear Mr. Earley,
I am a reporter with the AP and I think that you have been unfair to our news service. You have written that the AP erred when our reporter credited WTOP for breaking the news about the death of Sergei Tretyakov. You pointed out that you announced his death at 5 a.m. which was hours before the WTOP report.
Why are you blaming the AP? It is WTOP and its reporter who you should criticize. Why didn't WTOP mention your blog in its story? All we did was pick up the WTOP story. Your complaint should be with the WTOP reporter for not citing your blog, not us.
if you use this logic in your work, then its no surprise, its the way it is
Mr. Earley — I am puzzled by your certainty regarding actual events.
You yourself stated that it was logical Tretyakov would be the source for the FBI's discovery of this sleeper cell yet later state that he was not, based upon several sources within the intelligence community. These same sources explain the US government refuses to acknowledge Tretyakov was a spy?
As usual in the world of counterintelligence, the only thing facts you can speak to authoritatively are the potential motivations behind the entities involved:
KGB/SVR has good reasons to enhance the perceived value of the sleeper cell. They have good reasons to want to maintain the suspicion that Tretyakov might have met his end through some kind of KGB/SVR retribution. The FBI has good reason to enhance the perceived value of the sleeper cell. The FBI has good reason to diminish the perception they couldn't or didn't protect Tretyakov from retribution. KGB/SVR (and FBI/CIA) would like us to simultaneously believe we've caught everyone and maintain a lingering fear that we have not. The alternative stories of Yuschenko's return serve both sides.
This is not to diminish the reporting in your fine books. I just think perhaps your personal relationship with Tretyakov in this instance has affected your objectivity towards the house-of-mirrors industry.
I read in an earlier article that said (that you said) that over 200 mourners paid their respects to Mr. Tretyakov at his funeral (or words to that effect). What church (OCA, ROCOR, GOA, other?) and where was the funeral held in? Were Sergei and Helen regular parishioners? If so many people attended, how could the “secret” be kept for so long? Or was he going by an assumed name?
ChickaBOOMer: The Perfect Spy
http://chickaboomer.blogspot.com/2010/07/perfec…
if Yuchenko would note 2 russian spies and then go back to russia, he would be sentenced to death. and he knew it, so…
James Angleton was not named James Jesus Angleton but James Angleton as any other person
what do you mean by “Given the history of conspiracy theories”?