His task that bone cold afternoon was a mix of high risk and high gain—he was trying to deliver a letter from the CIA to Father Roman. As he struck out for a public telephone booth, Stombaugh concentrated on the elements of his operational outing.
He had carefully handled the letter for Father Roman, keeping it free of fingerprints or other contaminants that might lead the KGB back to the CIA. The letter’s text was the carefully crafted product of a lengthy debate at CIA headquarters and at Moscow, all of which had been triggered by Nicholas Daniloff’s visit to the U.S. embassy eight weeks earlier.
Daniloff’s decision in January to go the American embassy with his envelope had quickly caught the CIA’s attention. Inside the CIA’s secure enclosure on the fifth floor of the embassy building, station chief Murat Natirboff and CIA case officer Michael Sellers spread the pages of Daniloff’s letter across a table and began a rough initial translation.
At first, the densely written pages seemed to be filled with breathless rantings—there was a slightly crazed quality to them. But as they read on, the two CIA officers realized that the letter also contained some tantalizing information. Was this a message from a verbose—yet very real—volunteer? Hard to tell, but after Tolkachev, Moscow could no longer dismiss the possibility. Natirboff decided to send the letter on to Langley, thinking it might be the last they would hear of it.
But the response from headquarters was instantaneous and explosive. The handwriting, along with many of the themes touched on in the letter, had convinced Langley that it had been written by the same mysterious volunteer who had provided the tantalizing strategic material four years earlier. Natirboff was told that reestablishing clandestine contact with the author was now a top priority. He was authorized to meet with the man who had brought the letter to the embassy, Nicholas Daniloff. While the CIA was prohibited by presidential order from using American journalists in their intelligence operations, the agency just wanted to ask Daniloff a simple question: How can we find the person who gave you this letter?
In March, Natirboff asked Curt Kamman, the embassy’s deputy chief of mission, to invite Daniloff to the embassy. By then, Daniloff was busy covering the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, but he agreed to stop by. When he arrived, Kamman steered him to an acoustic conference room, the soundproof “bubble” in the embassy’s political section. Just as Daniloff was explaining to Kamman what he remembered about Father Roman and the letter, repeating what he had told Benson the first time he had come to the embassy, Natirboff joined them. Daniloff recognized him only as an obscure embassy counselor for regional affairs, but the reporter quickly surmised from his questions that the swarthy man with thick black hair combed straight back and a deeply lined face was CIA. Only later did he learn that Natirboff was the CIA’s Moscow station chief.
The conversation was unsettling for Daniloff. Natirboff focused on the letter he had received in January. It appeared, Natirboff explained, to be a letter from a dissident scientist trying to contact the CIA. Daniloff said he found that hard to believe. He was convinced Father Roman was working for the KGB, and he assumed that the letter had come from him. Natirboff asked the reporter to tell him everything he knew about the apparent courier, and Daniloff ended up giving him a physical description of the young Russian, along with his telephone number. The CIA turned Father Roman’s telephone number over to the National Security Agency, the secret code-breaking and eavesdropping arm of the U.S. intelligence community. The NSA matched a likely address in Moscow with the telephone number.
Stombaugh was sent out to try to track Father Roman down and, through him, to establish contact with the elusive scientist.
Stombaugh located a public telephone booth not far from the address Langley had provided for Father Roman. Convinced he was still surveillance free, he quickly slipped an induction loop over the telephone’s earpiece to record the conversation on his body-worn miniature cassette tape recorder. He dropped his kopek coins into the slot and dialed Father Roman’s telephone number. He dialed slowly, so that the rickety Moscow telephone switching system would route the call through on the first attempt.
A woman answered on the third ring. “Allo . . .”
“Is this the home of Roman Potemkin?” Stombaugh asked in practiced Russian.
“I am his mother. Roman is not here.” The woman’s tone of voice sounded natural and unrehearsed.
“Do you know when he might return?”
“In about an hour.”
“Thank you. I’ll call back then.”
Stombaugh gathered his thoughts. He had established that the telephone number was, in fact, that of Roman Potemkin, but he knew there was still plenty of danger. If Father Roman was a KGB provocateur, a real possibility, the telephone could be a KGB-controlled “answering service.” He’d have felt better if Father Roman himself had answered rather than a woman claiming to be his mother with the message that Potemkin would return in an hour. That could give the KGB time to get Father Roman to the phone, but again, only if the operation was under their control. The risks hadn’t really increased, Stombaugh thought. He decided to wait the hour and then make the second call. He set off on foot to keep moving while he searched for a second public telephone.
Just over an hour later, Stombaugh dialed Roman Potemkin’s number for a second time. A man picked up after the second ring.
“Allo.”
“Are you Father Roman?” Stombaugh said in accented Russian.
“Da . . .”
“I have information from our mutual friend, Nikolai. I have something for you. Can you confirm your address is as follows?” Stom-baugh read the address he had been given.
“No, that’s wrong.”
“Can you tell me your correct address? Please speak slowly.”
The man repeated the address, and Stombaugh wrote it down carefully, the wire loop leading from the earpiece to the recorder in his coat pocket serving as a backup.
“Thank you, I hope to be in touch soon.” Stombaugh put the phone back in the cradle and quickly replayed the recording of the conversation and confirmed the address. Checking the map, he calculated that it was a forty-five-minute walk from where he had made the call. Stombaugh weighed the variables in his mind. He had now made two phone calls to a religious activist who had contacted an American journalist, just the type of person who would attract KGB attention, even if he wasn’t already under their control. If the phone was tapped, it would be clear to the monitors that a foreigner had called Father Roman twice, but thus far nothing more incriminating than that. And it was unlikely, Stombaugh thought, that Father Roman’s phone would be live-monitored in a city where routine telephone taps numbered in the tens of thousands. He concluded that if he moved quickly, he could get to Father Roman’s address and deliver his letter without walking into KGB surveillance. All bets were off, of course, if Father Roman was already under KGB control.
In what the CIA called “light disguise”—mustache, glasses, hat, and Russian clothing—Stombaugh walked for nearly an hour before arriving at Father Roman’s apartment block. He entered the building and located the apartment number Father Roman had given him. His knock was answered by a young man in his late twenties or thirties, with long hair and what Stombaugh would later describe as a “soft look.”
“Are you Father Roman, and did you deliver an envelope to someone?” Stombaugh asked.
“Da,” the man answered, but Stombaugh could not read deeper meaning into his positive response to the key question. Nevertheless, he slipped the letter into his gloved hand and handed it to Father Roman. He then nodded a good-bye and quickly left the apartment.
As he made his way back home by foot and public transport, Stombaugh took inventory of what had been given up so far. He had probably exposed himself as a CIA officer, though he’d been in disguise and had been careful not to leave fingerprints on the letter. And he had identified “Nikolai” as an intermediary in his call to Father Roman. There had been no mention of the word journalist in
conjunction with Nikolai. This had all been discussed with Washington before the operation was undertaken and considered an acceptable risk. If the letter fell into the wrong hands, there would be no easy way to link Nikolai with Nicholas Daniloff—unless, of course, Father Roman had been under the control of the KGB from the start. But that would give the KGB nothing beyond the confirmation that the package they had prepared for William Casey had actually been delivered by Daniloff, according to their own plan. Stombaugh arrived at his apartment just as darkness fell over Moscow, drained but still convinced that he had been “black” for the entire day.
The letter Stombaugh handed to Father Roman had included instructions on how the scientist could contact the CIA. Those instructions included directions on how to arrange a meeting with a CIA officer that could be fully understood only by the person who had written the original 1981 letter to the CIA. Stombaugh began waiting each Thursday at the meeting site, located near the Kiev station not far from Moscow’s city center. But no one appeared to make contact.
On April 5, Father Roman called Daniloff again and gave him a curious message: The March 26 meeting had not been possible. The message to Daniloff was, “Your guys behaved in such a way as to prejudice the meeting.” Sensing danger, Daniloff immediately told Father Roman he didn’t know what he was talking about—and hoped that the KGB eavesdroppers on his telephone line had picked up his response.
Six days later, at a press conference held by visiting House Speaker Tip O’Neill at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, Daniloff once again met Kamman. As they walked through the grounds of the ostentatious villa just one mile west of the Kremlin, Daniloff told the American diplomat about the latest message from Father Roman. The journalist stressed again to Kamman that he wanted to be kept out of whatever was going on.
Each Thursday, meanwhile, Stombaugh made his pass by the meeting site near the Kiev station, searching in vain for the scientist who would never appear, until word came from a new and unexpected quarter that the Father Roman operation had gone awry.
On April 18, Michael Sellers made contact with a KGB officer who had offered to spy for the CIA a few months earlier by dropping a sheaf of documents through the car window of a political officer assigned to the American embassy. While the Americans didn’t know the KGB officer’s identity—he insisted on anonymity—it was clear from the information he had supplied in his initial drop that he was a KGB officer, possibly from the counterintelligence directorate, although there was debate over whether he was from the Second Chief Directorate or from a Moscow district office. The CIA encrypted him GTCOWL and set in motion the means to try to handle him in Moscow.
Sellers was the second CIA officer to meet COWL. The first meeting had gone poorly because the case officer who’d been sent couldn’t understand COWL’s rough Russian dialect.
During his meeting with Sellers, COWL provided confirmation that the KGB was using a special tracking substance against American case officers in Moscow. COWL told Sellers that chemicals were being used against them and sprayed a sample of the chemical into a plastic bag. Sellers, whose Russian language was at the high end of CIA fluency ratings, had an easier time with COWL than the first officer, but even he found it hard to understand his guttural Russian. COWL turned out to be a hard-bitten, streetwise officer in the local Moscow branch of the KGB. He had little patience for an American who couldn’t catch his colloquialisms.
Having shaken KGB surveillance during his long run before the meeting, the six-foot-five-inch Sellers spent hours walking the streets with COWL during that first contact. COWL surprised him by revealing that the KGB knew about the CIA’s letter to Father Roman. As they wound through alleys and side streets, with the Russian looking continually over his shoulder to check for KGB surveillance, he explained to Sellers that the CIA had given the letter to “the wrong guy.” Eventually, Sellers came to understand that the person Stombaugh had given the letter to was working for the KGB and had turned the letter over to the authorities. COWL did not suggest that the Daniloff affair had been a frame-up from the beginning. COWL made it sound as though the CIA had simply assumed too much by accepting Daniloff’s guess that Father Roman was the one who had left him the anonymous package. By handing the letter to Father Roman, the CIA had handed it to the KGB.
The meeting with COWL effectively shut down the mystery-shrouded Father Roman operation, setting in motion the beginnings of finger-pointing that would not play out until more than a year later. After COWL told the CIA that Father Roman was working for the KGB, there was a plan within the CIA to warn Daniloff that he had stumbled onto a KGB provocateur. But Daniloff never received the warning.
CIA Headquarters, 1345 Hours, June 18, 1985
Stombaugh sensed Gerber’s agitation as he finished the account of his March 23 run. In fact, Gerber was furious with Stombaugh. He felt that Stombaugh had violated his orders to keep Daniloff’s name out of the operation by using the name “Nikolai.” Within days of Stombaugh’s March meeting with Father Roman, Gerber had cabled a sharply worded reprimand to Moscow, upbraiding Stombaugh for identifying “Nikolai.” But this was Gerber’s first chance to meet with Stombaugh and hear his explanation in person.
Gerber had been Moscow chief when the original package from the anonymous scientist had been handed over to the CIA, so he had lived with the case for years. He was convinced that the original package had contained some of the most important material the CIA had ever obtained from the Soviet Union and had immediately recognized the importance of Daniloff’s letter. As with all Moscow operations, he had tried to choreograph the efforts to contact Father Roman. The letter Stombaugh had handed over—which Gerber insisted did not include the name “Nikolai” or any reference to Daniloff—had been written to his specifications.
This case was so important—and Stombaugh’s actions so troubling to him—that Gerber focused on the Father Roman affair even as Stombaugh and the rest of the SE Division were trying to deal with the final collapse of the Tolkachev case. For Gerber, Stombaugh had committed an unpardonable sin by placing Daniloff at risk; Stombaugh, on his end, felt that Gerber was trying to shift the blame. He believed that by mentioning Nikolai, he had done nothing more than use a reference that was already included in the CIA’s letter to Father Roman. Stombaugh disputed Gerber’s assertion that there was no reference to a Nikolai in the letter that Gerber had approved.
It soon became clear that the Father Roman affair would make it difficult for Gerber and Stombaugh to work together in the future. The dispute with Gerber never hampered Stombaugh’s career, however; he was a rising young star within the Directorate of Operations and would find plenty of opportunities outside of Gerber’s orbit.
6
Langley, 0830 Hours, July 10, 1985
Furnished with a by-the-book faithfulness to the rank and seniority of its long string of occupants, the office of the deputy chief of the Soviet/East European Division was dominated by a scuffed Federalist-style wooden desk and matching credenza. A pair of ancient straight-backed leather chairs were lined up against one wall, and a sofa and a side chair in tired blue fabric were propped up against the other. The office seemed to declare that it had just been vacated, possibly in a hurry.
It was my first day on the job, and I was still wondering how I had ended up as deputy in SE Division, the most insular subculture in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. I had received a terse one-paragraph cable in Khartoum, my last post, advising me that upon arrival at headquarters in July, I would report in as deputy chief of the Soviet/East European Division. I knew the decision had been made by Clair George, the Deputy Director for Operations, with Bill Casey’s hand in there somewhere.
Clair George liked to say that he had plucked me out of obscurity in Texas, where I was running the CIA Dallas office, and sent me off to ride the whirlwinds of Africa, first in Nigeria and then, more significantly, in the Sudan, shepherding the Ethiopian Falasha Jews on their long trek to Israel and then protecting
a team of Mossad agents on the run in Khartoum. The operation to spirit the Israelis out of Khartoum just as the new Sudanese government was closing in had caught Bill Casey’s imagination. But it was Clair’s deputy, Ed Juchniewicz, who was really my mentor. Juchniewicz had pushed for my new assignment as a way of stirring things up in Burton Gerber’s SE fiefdom.
Juchniewicz knew that Gerber and I were as different in temperament, experience, and skills as any two officers in the Directorate of Operations. I had a reputation for working in crisis situations in remote corners of the world. To some back at Langley, in fact, I was considered too much of a Third World cowboy, better suited to dusty covert operations than quiet “denied-area” spy cases.
By contrast, Burton Gerber was, in CIA parlance, a “sticks and bricks” man—the master of carefully plotted clandestine operations behind the Iron Curtain. There was a foreboding in his eyes that conjured up the Cold War—the glare of floodlights on the Berlin Wall on a cold January night. Gerber was the closest thing the CIA had to George Smiley. Between us, we seemed to embody the two archetypes of the DO: the Third World operator who toppled governments and ran covert wars, and the clandestine intelligence collector who moved softly through the Soviet empire, meeting agents and unloading dead drops. The best CIA officers could do both, but Khartoum and Lagos required a different set of skills and a different personality type from Moscow. So when I was teamed up with Burton Gerber, a culture clash of sorts was inevitable.
The Main Enemy Page 7