The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  Tolkachev’s capture some two months earlier had been brutally efficient. A team from the KGB’s Seventh Chief Directorate, led by the short fireplug Vladimir Sharavatov and backed up by the elite Group Alfa special commando unit, had arrested the scientist on the lonely Rogachevskoye Shosse near his dacha twenty-five kilometers outside Moscow.

  There had been no resistance. The CIA’s superagent had gone limp, his knees buckling under him. In those first seconds, Tolkachev’s arms were pinned to his sides and Sharavatov deftly forced a thick rope between his teeth to prevent him from swallowing or biting down, in case he had a suicide pill hidden in his mouth. His jacket and shirt were roughly stripped from his shoulders, in case a poison pill had been sewn into his collar. He was then dragged to a windowless bus, where he was expertly stripped, with gloved hands probing his body cavities, and dressed in a blue KGB running suit.

  The KGB’s fear of the CIA’s “special preparations,” as the suicide pills were darkly known, had its roots in a case that had gone bad eight years earlier. Alexander Ogorodnik had been a fast-rising young diplomat, an assistant to the Soviet ambassador to Colombia, when he began a secret affair with a Spanish woman living in Bogotá. Thanks to a well-placed wiretap at the Soviet embassy, the CIA was able to eavesdrop on conversations between Ogorodnik, who was married, and his Spanish lover. The CIA’s Bogotá chief approached the woman, and she agreed to work with the agency to win Ogorodnik over. She even showed the CIA a secret journal he had entrusted to her, his “testament,” which revealed his hatred of the Soviet system. The woman was willing to cooperate because she hoped that if her lover began to spy for the CIA, he would stay with her in the West. But the CIA had other plans.

  Ogorodnik agreed to switch sides. Before long, he was allowing the Americans to photograph documents shipped by diplomatic pouch between the embassy in Bogotá and the Foreign Ministry in Moscow. At the CIA’s urging, Ogorodnik, now code-named TRIGON, accepted a transfer to the Foreign Ministry’s operations center. He received secret training in Bogotá on how to use dead drops to communicate with the CIA in Moscow.

  Before leaving Bogotá, Ogorodnik demanded to meet the CIA officer who would be handling him in Moscow. Jack Downing, who was slated to be the next deputy chief in Moscow, flew down to Colombia in the summer of 1974 to reassure him. The two men, both in their thirties, developed a quick rapport, and Ogorodnik soon trusted Downing enough to tell him that he wanted the CIA to give him the means to end his life on his own terms if he was captured. In dramatic meetings, Ogorodnik told Downing that he wouldn’t go back to Moscow unless he was “treated like a man” and given suicide pills. The CIA reluctantly complied, and Ogorodnik returned home. He divorced his wife after returning to Moscow, but he never saw his Spanish lover again.

  From 1974 until 1977, Ogorodnik served as one of the CIA’s most valuable spies in Moscow. He gained access to much of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s overseas cable traffic and was able to hand over top-secret Soviet diplomatic documents that gave the United States unprecedented insights into Moscow’s negotiating positions during the strategic arms talks of the 1970s. But he was remembered within the KGB mostly for what happened during his arrest. While the precise details of the incident remain murky, it is clear that soon after his arrest, Ogorodnik took the modified Montblanc pen Downing had given him in Bogotá and used the suicide pill hidden inside. He must have slipped the pen into his mouth and, while cupping his hands over his face, bit down through the stress-weakened barrel and into the cyanide capsule concealed inside it. Still cupping his hands over his nose and mouth, he would have taken three quick breaths, as Downing had instructed him. Before his stunned KGB captors could react, TRIGON was dead.

  Near panic broke out in the Second Chief Directorate, and careers were very nearly ruined as a result. From that moment forward, new arrest procedures were put into effect.

  Krassilnikov’s radio crackled again. “Narziss is in the operational area. He made a quick pass by Olga and is now on a bench five hundred yards away.” Olga was the name the CIA’s “poets”—the men and women in Langley who carefully prepared the instructions in Russian for Tolkachev—had used for tonight’s meeting site on Kastanayevskaya Street. Now, their own communications plan was being used for a KGB ambush.

  Moscow, 2010 Hours, June 13, 1985

  Paul Stombaugh sat alone on a bench in the dark, trash-strewn courtyard of a concrete apartment block. The smell of dog feces assaulted him. He had stopped his final run a few hundred yards short of the site where he was to rendezvous with Tolkachev for a brief encounter, known inside the CIA as a “bren.” Unfamiliar with the lay of the land in this area of Moscow, Stombaugh had come to the quiet residential street twenty minutes early. He made one quick pass, saw everything was normal and as described in the casing report, and left the area to stage for the meeting. The only thing that seemed unusual was a large trailer parked on Kastanayevskaya Street about fifty yards from the meeting point, its hitch propped up on cinder blocks. He thought the trailer seemed out of place in a residential neighborhood, but he decided to go ahead with the meeting anyway and settled on the bench to prepare himself.

  Killing time without attracting attention was a challenge in a Moscow neighborhood. Stombaugh leaned back and sipped water from a vodka bottle, hoping he looked like just another tired Russian worker escaping reality on a summer evening. He ran through a mental inventory of what he had to accomplish in the next half hour. He quickly checked his miniature tape recorder—all meetings with Tolkachev were recorded, so that every tidbit of the conversation could later be mined by the CIA—and found it was working properly.

  In one large, double-lined plastic shopping bag, Stombaugh carried cash bundles totaling 125,000 rubles in small notes, equivalent to almost $150,000. The bag also contained five new compact subminiature cameras concealed in key chain fobs, all preloaded with microfilm, sealed, and set to a precise focal length. The cameras and their settings had received extra attention for this meeting, after the last series of documents failed to develop properly. The problem with the last batch raised the tension for tonight’s meeting considerably.

  The second shopping bag was packed with American medicine and glasses for Tolkachev and his wife, English-language tapes for their son, books with concealed messages, “intelligence-reporting requirements”—Soviet secrets the CIA wanted Tolkachev to try to steal—and communications plans, printed on water-soluble paper for added security. The bags were so heavy that the plastic handles had started to stretch during Stombaugh’s long run, and he was beginning to worry about them. Everything he carried was compromising—fatally so for the man he was to meet.

  Stombaugh thought his SDR—surveillance detection route—had gone well. Neither he nor his wife, Betsy, had seen anything threatening during their run. After Betsy dropped him off, he continued on his long SDR. By the time he arrived, Stombaugh was confident that he was now “black”—free of surveillance: Moscow was his.

  Moscow, 2025 Hours, June 13, 1985

  Five minutes, Krassilnikov thought. And then, with lights suddenly blazing, the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate would once again capture an American spy trawling Moscow’s streets, gravely threatening the security of the USSR. Another in a remarkable string of successes for Soviet counterintelligence.

  Krassilnikov had never been a man of doubts, not about himself, not about the Soviet Union. He was the son of an NKVD general, a true believer in Lenin’s dream. Flush with revolutionary zeal in the 1920s, his parents had named him Rem, an acronym for the Russian phrase Revolutsky Mir—the Soviet system’s loftiest goal, World Revolution. Rem Krassilnikov had proudly followed his father’s footsteps into the NKVD’s successor organization, the KGB. After training in En-glish and in the crafts of Soviet intelligence, he had been sent abroad as an officer in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, responsible for the KGB’s foreign intelligence operations.

  Along the way he had married a woman of stout Communist Party pedigree, w
hose parents had named her Ninel—a popular name in the 1920s, fashioned by spelling Lenin backward. Krassilnikov was moving up in the KGB after stints in Ottawa and Beirut. In Beirut, he had been aggressive enough to try a “cold pitch” recruitment of a rising CIA star, John MacGaffin, who dismissed the attempt. But Krassilnikov eventually came home to Moscow and the world of counterintelligence in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. By the mid-1980s, he had established himself as a legend, a man of exquisite patience, adept at the hidden art of blunting the attacks from Glavniy Vrag, the Main Enemy, the KGB’s term for the United States and the CIA. Within the KGB, Krassilnikov was now called, with some reverence, the “professor of counterintelligence.”

  Krassilnikov had for a time been chief of the Second Chief Directorate’s Second Department, which investigated the activities of British intelligence in the USSR. He had become close to two of Britain’s most notorious spies who had defected to Moscow, the legendary Kim Philby and the lesser-known but nearly equally damaging George Blake. His contacts with Philby and Blake gave him a new understanding of his adversaries; lessons he learned from them would serve him well when he moved up to head the Second Chief Directorate’s First Department, the counterintelligence arm responsible for thwarting American operations against the USSR.

  For the past six years, Krassilnikov had been engaged in a laborious chess match with American intelligence. But over the past few months, the battle had intensified, and Krassilnikov felt he had begun to clear his opponent’s board. Suddenly the Second Chief Directorate was marching from victory to victory, and there was a new excitement in counterintelligence.

  Krassilnikov believed, with all his heart and soul, that these successes were due largely to the brilliant investigative techniques of the Second Chief Directorate along Moscow’s streets. His men had the CIA in Moscow on the run.

  Of course, he admitted grudgingly, they had received some help from the First Chief Directorate. The foreign intelligence boys at Yasenevo seemed to have lately come into some remarkably accurate information. He never questioned the First Chief Directorate about the source of its information—such things could be learned only over time from the “wall talkers” lined up at the urinals used by senior KGB officers—but it seemed obvious to him that the KGB had a mole somewhere inside the CIA’s inner sanctum. And a good one. Maybe even more than one.

  But even the best tips from foreign spies had to be run to ground, and fully investigated, by the men of the Second Chief Directorate. Only then could an American spy be caught. Krassilnikov was painfully aware of the fact that the Second Chief Directorate never got the credit it deserved.

  The First Chief Directorate’s insufferably smug attitude soon evaporated as stories about betrayals within its own ranks began to circulate. In May, the acting Rezident of the KGB’s London Rezidentura, Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, came under suspicion of being a spy for the British Secret Intelligence Service. He was lured back to Moscow by an elaborate ruse and was undergoing interrogation at a KGB safe house. The KGB rumor mill had it that Gordievsky’s interrogators were using drugs to get him to admit his treachery, but so far without success.

  Within days of the Gordievsky compromise, a GRU colonel, Sergei Bokhan, in the military intelligence Rezidentura in the Soviet embassy in Athens, came under suspicion of spying for the CIA. He, too, was asked to return to Moscow on an elaborate ruse, but he sensed he was in danger and made a run for it.

  Vladimir Sharavatov tapped lightly and opened the sliding door of the van. “Narziss is moving.”

  “It’s time to take the walk we practiced this morning,” Krassilnikov softly lectured his companion in the van.

  Washington, D.C., 1230 Hours, June 13, 1985

  At almost the exact moment that Rem Krassilnikov was waiting to spring his trap on the streets of Moscow, Aldrich Ames walked into Chadwicks restaurant, a smoky, down-home hamburger and beer joint crammed into an old storefront on the Georgetown waterfront, hidden under the shadows of the Whitehurst Freeway overpass.

  Ames was carrying with him a bag filled with classified documents. He had come to meet Sergey D. Chuvakhin, a Soviet diplomat whom Ames was supposedly trying to recruit as a spy for the CIA. In fact, their relationship was very much the other way around. Chuvakhin was now an intermediary between Ames and the KGB, a convenient cutout since Ames had CIA authorization to meet with him. Over lunch in one of Chadwicks’s long and darkly wooded booths, the two chatted quietly, and, when their meal was finished, Ames handed Chuvakhin his bag, which contained, among other things, a list of nearly every Russian agent working for the CIA and FBI. In exchange, Chuvakhin gave Ames a shopping bag filled with cash. It was at that moment that Aldrich Ames irretrievably crossed the line into a life of espionage.

  This was the third time Ames had contacted the Russians since he had decided to become a spy. On April 16, he had walked straight into the Soviet embassy in Washington and volunteered his services, and then he met Chuvakhin on May 17 for lunch. Ames later insisted that he hadn’t given the Soviets much of any value until this lunch at Chadwicks. At first, he said, he had tried to scam the Russians, feeding them information about their own double agents.

  But on May 19, the FBI arrested John Walker, the longtime leader of a Soviet spy ring in the U.S. Navy, throwing a scare into Ames. Ames didn’t buy the FBI’s story that Walker’s ex-wife had turned him in; he figured somebody inside the KGB had fingered him. So, to avoid Walker’s fate, he decided he had to wipe out anyone who might betray him. He turned over to the Soviets the identities of virtually every Russian spy in the American inventory. Of course, he also betrayed agents who could never have endangered him, including Adolf Tolkachev.

  What Ames could not know as he walked out of Chadwicks with a bag full of cash was that the KGB already knew about Tolkachev; he was already in a Soviet jail. Paul Stombaugh was just about to spring Krassilnikov’s trap, and Ames’s decision to compromise the CIA’s most important spy had been irrelevant. Still, the KGB would soon begin to exploit the cache of secrets Ames had handed over.

  Moscow, 2030 Hours, June 13, 1985

  Stombaugh took in the street scene with a sweep of his eyes as he rounded the corner of the apartment block and stepped out on Kastanayevskaya Street. Fifteen yards ahead and on his left, an attractive young woman with dyed red hair was waving her hands in animated conversation in a telephone booth that had been marked as a “taxi phone” on the diagram of the meeting site. Tolkachev’s car, with its familiar registration number, was parked on the far side of the street. The parked car was the reassuring “safe, ready to meet” signal he was looking for.

  Stombaugh began to walk briskly now, covering the last few yards toward a bench on the far side of the street. Tolkachev was not yet in sight. The pretty redhead in the phone booth ignored him as he approached and kept talking. He was running over in his mind the inventory of actions he had planned for the next few moments when Tolkachev would step out, give the verbal parole, then walk with him into the recesses of a wooded area. There, he would quickly take the used cameras, still sealed with their microfilm inside, stash them in his jacket, and hand over the two shopping bags. If both men sensed it was safe, they could move to Tolkachev’s car, where there might be some time for the small talk that had always been so reassuring to Tolkachev during these dangerous meetings over the last six years. Then they would part, heading in opposite directions, each left to deal on his own with the adrenaline rush of clandestine espionage.

  As he passed the phone booth and turned toward the meeting point a few yards away, Moscow exploded around Paul Stombaugh. At least five men burst from the cover of trees and brush. Two grabbed his arms from behind as two others snatched the heavy shopping bags from his grip. A fifth man forced his head down as the men holding his arms lifted them high above his head in what had become known as the “chicken wing” seizure, a characteristic modus operandi of KGB arrests. He heard the tailgate of the parked trailer slam to the ground. The night air filled
with voices of the men who had been hiding inside, waiting for the trap to be sprung.

  Stombaugh almost blacked out from the pain in his shoulders. When he was allowed to stand again and look around, he found the immediate area bathed in light, cameras rolling and flash bulbs popping. Across the street, Stombaugh saw a small group of men quietly observing the arrest scene. Among them was Rem Krassilnikov.

  As he was loaded into a KGB van, Stombaugh glanced back to see the redhead in the phone booth, still talking, still showing no signs of having noticed the events taking place across the street. Two KGB men held Stombaugh’s arms over the back of the seat in the van for the long ride to Dzerzhinsky Square and the Lubyanka; by now the pain in his shoulders was almost blinding.

  Stombaugh never saw the man being roughly led off in the distance, the man carrying a book with a white cover.

  Langley, 1700 Hours, June 13 1985

  COPS—the SE Division’s chief of operations—was the first senior officer to read the cable from Moscow.

  IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR

  WNINTEL

  1. CASE OFFICER PLIMPTON ARRESTED 2130 HOURS EVENING OF 13 JUNE WHILE ON OPERATIONAL RUN TO MEET GTSPHERE. HE DETAINED AND INTERROGATED FOR FOUR HOURS AT KGB CENTER AT LUBYANKA; CONSULAR ACCESS GRANTED 0230 HOURS AND PLIMPTON RELEASED AT 0430 HOURS. DETAILS WILL FOLLOW WHEN WE REGROUP AFTER OPENING OF BUSINESS 14 JUNE.

  2. NO FILE. END OF MESSAGE.