A number of these same officials, however, caution that staging a coup against the Russian mob would be very difficult. Part of the problem is the target, a hard-to-penetrate network closely tied to ex-Soviet of- ficials. Another obstacle is a wary CIA: burned by scandals from Iran-contra to Aldrich Ames, the agency’s veteran spooks are privately protesting that they are being set up for a fall.
The most eager warrior is FBI Director Louis Freeh. An empire builder who has unsuccessfully tried to take over the war on drugs, Freeh has vigorously warned against the Russian mob’s expansion and potential for nuclear smuggling. During a much-publicized tour of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in 1994, he was welcomed by foreign officials eager for the FBI’s help – but the CIA would prefer to keep Freeh’s Feds at bay. Traditionally, the old Soviet bloc was the Company’s territory. The FBI was supposed to catch Reds at home, not abroad. Lately, the CIA and FBI have begun to work more closely, but operatives from the two agencies can trip over each other. Approached by the FBI, one Eastern European on the CIA’s payroll asked his case officer, ““Who am I working for, you or them?''
More fundamentally, spies do not like to play cop. They seek intelligence, not arrests; they don’t want to blow the cover of carefully recruited agents to make a one-time drug sting. Some agency officials have argued for joining the war on drugs in part to justify the CIA’s $3 billion-a-year ““black’’ budget. Hanging on the wall of the CIA’s counternarcotics division at Langley are the mug shots of Cali-cartel kingpins captured in the summer of 1995. The CIA’s director, John Deutch, is eager to replicate these successes against the Russian mob. But his subordinates say Russia will be much tougher. In theory, the agency’s skill at wiretapping and computer hacking could be crucial to tracing the flow of dirty money out of Russia to the West. The CIA estimates that half of Russia’s 25 largest banks are linked to the mob, which exports $1.5 billion a month to Western bank accounts. In one type of sting operation, the CIA could work with the FBI and local law enforcement in Russia and Eastern Europe to set up a phony bank to lure the mob’s business. CIA cybersleuths could follow the money right back to the mafia bosses.
Since the end of the cold war, the CIA and its old rivals in the KGB have traded information about the Russian mob (the first meeting, in 1991, was held in a safe house that was once the dacha of Stalin’s secret-police chief, Lavrenty Beria). But the CIA doesn’t really trust the Russian intelligence service. KGB veterans – in one case an entire paramilitary unit – have joined the mafia. Russian businessmen have hired KGB snipers to snuff their competition. Most troubling, many commandos from Alpha Force, the Soviet’s answer to the United States’ Delta Force, have become mob freelances. During the cold war, an informal truce kept American and KGB agents from killing each other. The Russian mob knows no such inhibitions. Law-enforcement officials tell NEWSWEEK that a former KGB assassin has a mafia contract on a pair of New York-based FBI agents who helped nab Rus- sian ““godfather’’ Vyacheslav Ivankov in 1995.
Old CIA hands are perhaps more worried about failure than about fatalities. Morale is low in the agency’s directorate of operations. After Ames, veteran spooks say the agency cannot stand another fiasco. Some compare the CIA to the U.S. Army after Vietnam, reluctant to fight again without strong backing and a high likelihood of success. Impossible missions, these genuine spies say, should be for the movies.
