When I first arrived at Langley in 1964, the CIA was still at the low end of its learning curve. The young men and handful of women who came to Washington that fall to become part of the class of OC-19 were a new generation of CIA officers, most born just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Many of their fathers had gone to college on the GI Bill after the war, some the first members of their families to climb that once tightly restricted ladder. OC-19, to be sure, had its share of graduates from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but most of its members came from dots on the map spread farther afield. They came to serve as officers of the CIA’s elite clandestine service—the DDP, as the spying side of the agency was then known. It stood for Deputy Directorate for Plans, an enchantingly vague name that could apply either to the organization or to its chief.
I’d served four years in the Air Force and spoke both Chinese and German when I first reported for duty at Langley. After a year of training, my first field assignment was in Bonn. By then, the most active arena for the Soviet-U.S. contest had shifted quietly from Germany to the Third World. The Berlin Wall had made it far more difficult to conduct espionage operations along the front lines in the divided city. Berlin was now a training ground for newly minted case officers, rather than the hub of espionage operations that it had been in the early days of the Cold War. Old German hands had taken to sarcastically calling Berlin “Brandenburg’s school for boys” and longed for the old days.
I was transferred to Hong Kong in 1968 for a tour of China watching, then rotated back to Europe in 1971 for four years in Switzerland. Intelligence collection requirements during this period had made a subtle shift from gathering information that might help win the war in Vietnam to gathering information on the Paris peace talks and parallel deliberations in Geneva that would help the United States cut its losses and get out of Vietnam. While in Switzerland I saw us lose our cockiness as a nation and as an agency; it seemed a short journey from the hopeful early 1960s to America’s withdrawal from Vietnam without victory, the self-destruction of Richard Nixon’s presidency, and the fall of Saigon.
My arrival back in Washington in the summer of 1975 coincided with new attacks on the agency by a post-Watergate Congress. The CIA in 1975 was anything but the self-assured organization with an unchallenged mission I had joined. The DDP had been renamed, this time in plain vanilla, as the Directorate of Operations. It was awash with men and women who’d been run out of Southeast Asia by the North Vietnamese Army and were walking the halls looking for jobs.
After one year at headquarters, I was sent back to Hong Kong—mercifully, I thought at the time. President Carter’s new DCI, Admiral Stansfield Turner, brought the President’s moralistic sensibilities to Langley with him, and soon field case officers were tasked with transforming the often ugly business of espionage into a “morally uplifting experience” for both case officers and their foreign agents. The President thought that America had an “inordinate fear of Communism,” and his DCI agreed. Within a few years, Turner had dismantled many of the capabilities the CIA had built up over the decades, dismissing them as Cold War relics. By the time Iranian revolutionaries took sixty-six Americans hostage in Teheran in November 1979, there was precious little the CIA could do about it with the resources it had in place at the time. To add insult to injury, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad was sacked and burned by a howling Pakistani crowd the same month. As 1979 closed out, the United States seemed on the run across the globe, and the Soviet Politburo apparently decided that it could tidy things up south of its border without much trouble from a besieged America. On Christmas Eve in 1979, the USSR took the plunge into Afghanistan and within a month seemed in full control of the cities.
The year 1980 was no kinder to the United States or the CIA. The humiliation in Teheran was compounded by the disaster of Desert One, when eight Americans died in the ill-fated attempt to rescue the American hostages who were still held in Teheran. The year ended with the election of Ronald Reagan as President, and moments after his inauguration, the American hostages were released by Teheran.
Before Reagan’s new Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, arrived at Langley, I was off for what would turn out to be a four-year interlude in Africa. By 1985, Casey decided he wanted me back in Washington, either running his pet project in Central America or working on the Soviet Union. After four years on the job, the DCI had decided that the CIA had to deal aggressively with the “Evil Empire,” Ronald Reagan’s term for the Soviet Union. Casey had taken a demoralized agency and pumped it up with people, money, and, most important, a mission. I thought things were beginning to look bright again at Langley.
But even then, few insiders knew what the old man was really up to. People seemed to think he had a hand in every action that might put pressure on the Soviet Union, forcing the already visible cracks to open a little wider. There were rumors about his discreet meetings in the Vatican with the Polish pope, his deals with the Saudis to keep oil prices down so that the Soviets couldn’t reap windfall profits from their oil sales, and his efforts to block a proposed Soviet oil pipeline to Western Europe. And to be certain, Casey had discovered the Soviet Union’s Achilles’ heel in Afghanistan. Far from having the situation cleared up in a few months, the Soviets, by 1985, had become bogged down in Afghanistan. Their casualties were mounting, and now there seemed no end in sight for their 120,000-strong army. What had begun as a short-term operation in 1979 had exploded in their faces. They were paying for their adventure on a grand scale, not in small part because of Bill Casey’s CIA. It seemed it was the Soviet Union’s turn to be on the run. I was settling in at Langley to be part of what Bill Casey thought was the endgame.
I eased back in my recliner and examined my desk. It had three stacked wooden document trays, all empty, a large cut-glass ashtray, and a gallon-size, clear plastic container with the word BURN emblazoned in bold red on either side. When I slid open the top drawer, I found two pencils, both freshly sharpened, two government-issue ballpoint pens, and a dozen paper clips. There was nothing else, at least at first glance. But as I pulled out the drawer a little farther, I saw what must have been my predecessor’s tools for coping with the job of being Burton Gerber’s deputy: three empty Excedrin bottles and a bulbous rubber thimble that slips over the thumb, enabling a conscientious reader to flip quickly through large stacks of documents. Examining the rubber thumb closely, I noted that it was worn and blackened by ink. Some job, I thought as I tossed the Excedrin bottles in the trash can and put the rubber thumb back in the drawer.
“The last guy almost wore that out,” said a voice from the open door. I looked up to see a man of medium height with a slight paunch and brown hair just beginning to gray at the temples. His complexion was flushed and offset by deep blue eyes that betrayed little of what was going on behind them. He was coatless, the sleeves of his shirt rolled above his elbows, and he wore a neatly tied bow tie.
“Paul Redmond,” the man said, confirming the earlier suggestion of a Boston accent. “I run USSR operations.
“I meant it about the rubber thumb,” he added. “You’ll wear it out working your way through all the cable traffic here each morning.”
“Everybody reads everything?” I asked.
“Everybody reads everything he reads, if they can get their hands on it.” Redmond gestured to Gerber’s corner office just beyond the adjoining wall. “And he starts an hour earlier than the rest of us.”
I leaned back in my chair. “One of those, huh? Is there a test at the end of the day?”
“Yeah, but it’s multiple choice, so a cowboy from Africa Division can probably just pass it.” No smile yet—Redmond was still sizing me up. “Let me know if I can help you settle in.”
“How ’bout we start with you telling me what you’re doing in the USSR, say, in an hour?”
“Easy,” Redmond said, “our branch runs the division’s spies in Moscow.”
“How’s business?”
“Getting a little s
lack. Everybody’s getting rolled up. This whole place is falling apart. And not just Moscow. You heard the bureau just arrested a secretary in Africa Division for spying for the Ghanaians? For chrissakes, the Ghanaians can penetrate this place!”
Redmond was gone before I could respond or even make up my mind if I was going to like the guy or not. I thought I would.
7
Viborg, USSR, 1450 Hours, July 20, 1985
Oleg Gordievsky pressed his face into the underbrush as a military bus carrying female dependents from a nearby army base passed the spot where he was hiding a few dozen yards off the narrow road. He had spent the last two nightmarish days traveling by train, bus, and truck from Moscow to the rendezvous point his SIS handlers had chosen near the village of Viborg, not far from the Soviet-Finnish border. And at this moment the fear of being caught had been temporarily displaced by a relentless attack of mosquitoes infesting the marshy wood where he was awaiting his rescue.
Checking his watch for what must have been the hundredth time in less than forty minutes, he heard the whine of an engine. Looking up, he saw two cars pull to a halt just opposite his hiding place. Two men jumped out and looked around expectantly. Gordievsky’s spirits soared as he recognized one of the men as the officer from the SIS station who had confirmed to him in a brush contact in Moscow a week earlier that the exfiltration plan had been set in motion. Much later, Gordievsky would learn that the second man was Raymond Lord Asquith, grandson of Britain’s legendary Prime Minister and a promising Russian specialist in the British SIS.
In a matter of seconds, Gordievsky was curled up in the trunk of one of the cars, a thermal blanket pulled tightly around him, a mild sedative already beginning to work at his raw nerves. Beside him was a flask of cool water and an empty bottle in case he needed to urinate. There was nothing more for him to do now but wait calmly for success or failure. As his body began to surrender to the sedative, he heard the strains of pop music filtering from the car’s sound system into his hiding place. It was not his kind of music, Gordievsky thought, but it was his link to those who controlled his fate.
The Soviet-Finnish Border, 1530 Hours, July 20, 1985
Gordievsky had calmed considerably since he had taken his place in the trunk of the car. For the first time in three days he could no longer hear his own fear-driven heartbeat. Though the heat was stifling in the cramped quarters, he was thankful that the mosquitoes had been left behind in the marsh. Counting off each stop the car made at the Soviet border checkpoints, he controlled his breathing and hoped that the thermal blanket would effectively conceal his body heat from prying KGB sensors. As the car pulled to a halt for the fifth and what he thought would be the final time on the Soviet side of the border, he heard the voices of a couple of Russian women and assumed that he had cleared the KGB checkpoints and that the car was now passing through Soviet customs. Gordievsky held his breath as he heard the whining and sniffing of dogs near the car. From inside the car’s trunk he couldn’t know that the wife of one of the British SIS officers was busily popping potato chips into the drooling mouth of the customs dog, keeping it away from the rear of the car.
After two minutes that seemed like an eternity, the car began to move, and the pop music from the tape deck once again filtered into Gordievsky’s cramped quarters. As the car accelerated, the pop music stopped abruptly, replaced a moment later by the strains of Sibelius’s Finlandia, the signal that the car had crossed over the Finnish frontier.
The KGB later suspected that the CIA had played a role in Gordievsky’s exfiltration, but it was entirely a British-run operation. Thanks to analysis conducted by Aldrich Ames, the CIA had learned on its own that Gordievsky was spying for the British, but London didn’t officially tell the CIA that Gordievsky was a British agent until well after he was safely across the Soviet border.
Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow, 1000 Hours, July 24, 1985
Vitaly Sergeyevich Yurchenko struggled to calm himself as he stood before the passport control booth while the young KGB border guard on the other side of the glass flipped through the pages of his freshly issued Soviet diplomatic passport. He doesn’t look more than seventeen, Yurchenko thought, fighting off the urge to bang on the window and tell him to get a move on. He’d done that enough times in the past, but this time leaving the USSR was different.
The border guard looked up at Yurchenko. The KGB colonel was a tall, athletically built man with blond hair, deeply set slate gray eyes, and a broad Slavic face offset by a blond, scraggly mustache curving below the corners of his mouth.
“Let’s not take all day, young man. I’ve got a flight to catch.” Yurchenko hoped he sounded cool and on the friendly side of authoritative. But inside he was in turmoil. He kept telling himself he was absolutely safe—there was nothing anyone could know. Only he, Vitaly Sergeyevich Yurchenko, senior colonel, soon to be general in the First Department, First Chief Directorate of the KGB, could possibly know what demons had been raging inside his head in the weeks since cancer had taken his mother in May. No one could know he had been quietly engineering an opening to travel abroad. No one could know what he was planning. Breathe deeply and calm down, Yurchenko told himself. Nobody can possibly know.
Finally the border guard reached for the telephone, talked for a few seconds, then stamped Yurchenko’s passport and slid it back to him without comment. Yurchenko snapped it up and turned toward the international departures lounge for his flight to Rome.
South of Rome, 1030 Hours, July 28, 1985
The man’s demeanor raised a red flag. Here was Thomas Hayden, a U.S. Navy radioman with a top-secret clearance, sitting with two KGB officers in the woods near a secluded beach south of Rome, drinking Pilsner Urquell. The gathering itself was no less than an act of high treason for Hayden, yet he was hardly sweating. At least not any more than he was, thought Vitaly Yurchenko.
Yurchenko had been interrogating the man, in the breezy way that intelligence officers like to chat up agents, with a patter of sometimes linked and sometimes disjointed questions designed to pin him down, ferret out a detail, or simply knock him off balance. But Hayden handled the probes well, occasionally breaking the pace by holding out his empty glass for a refill of the cool Czech beer. At the end of the opening round of vetting, Yurchenko threw the voice analysis scam at Hayden, asking him if he could record his responses to his questions for later screening in the KGB’s technical lab. A kind of voice polygraph, Yurchenko explained.
With no other choice, Hayden easily agreed, and Yurchenko reached into his shopping bag filled with picnic supplies and pretended to switch on a recorder. There was none, but Hayden couldn’t know that.
Yurchenko’s KGB colleague, Aleksandr Chepil, watched the visitor from Moscow center probe his trophy agent with some apprehension. Personally, Chepil had no doubts about Hayden—he was the prize of his career, the kind of agent an enterprising intelligence officer could easily parlay into an Order of Lenin, if he made certain to share the “success” up the ladder.
What’s more, Hayden had taken on new urgency for the KGB. Just two months earlier, John Walker, head of the KGB’s Navy spy ring, had finally been arrested after an espionage career that dated back eighteen years. The Walker ring, which included Walker’s brother Arthur, his son Michael, and his old Navy friend Jerry Whitworth, had provided the Soviets with an invaluable window into the U.S. Navy’s communications and codes since the Vietnam War. Moscow was desperate to find a replacement, and Hayden was a promising candidate. Chepil felt good about his agent, but he knew that others at Moscow Center were beginning to question Hayden’s bona fides. The best that could happen here today was that Yurchenko would declare the case a good one and then take some credit for getting it on track. Chepil had no problem with that. It was the way things worked in the KGB.
What Chepil and the others in the Rome Rezidentura didn’t know was that Yurchenko had been the one who had seeded doubts about the Hayden case back in Moscow. It was his gambit to set up this trip t
o Italy. Yurchenko had made it clear back in Moscow that he had to go vet Hayden and make sure Rome wasn’t being taken for a ride.
Now, here in the secluded picnic area near the beach, Yurchenko was convinced that he’d called the case right. Hayden was, his instincts told him, quite probably a dangle. After he’d gone over his list of questions, Yurchenko slipped his hand back into the picnic basket, ostensibly switching off the recorder.
Glancing up, he caught Hayden studying him, probably for his report to his counterintelligence case officers, he concluded. He saw the American’s eyes return a couple of times to his right hand, looking at the missing joints on his middle and ring fingers, scars left by a winch accident when Yurchenko was an ensign in the Soviet Navy. That will be enough for his Office of Naval Investigation handlers, Yurchenko thought. They’ll have plenty of clues when they try to identify me. But by the time they put it all together, they’ll be coping with a bigger surprise. Yurchenko smiled to himself and saw that that seemed to unsettle Hayden just a little.
Yurchenko told Hayden that after cooling off for a few months—enough time to let the Walker thing die down—they would pick up contact again. Then they could get down to the job of prying secrets out of the U.S. Navy communications center in Naples, where Hayden worked.
As Hayden prepared to leave, Yurchenko looked him in the eye and said, “Tom, you are very clever, and I admire your bravery and courage.”
Chepil left the meeting with a sense of relief that his agent had passed muster. Hayden left wondering what Yurchenko’s last words really meant. Whatever doubts he may have had about Hayden, Yurchenko kept them to himself. No sense in making extra work for himself by declaring Hayden a dangle—he had plenty to do in Rome over the next few days without another distraction.
During his stay in Rome, Yurchenko grilled the officers in the Rezidentura on their knowledge of the rank and file CIA officers in Rome. He found varying degrees of understanding of the nature of the adversary, along with more than the usual inflation of the CIA’s numbers in Italy. Checking the Rezidentura’s diagram of the CIA presence in Rome, Yurchenko skipped over the name of the CIA’s Rome chief, Allan D. Wolf. The diminutive but legendary Wolf was well known in Middle Eastern intelligence circles, where he had earned the nickname “the Golden Wog”—a name he owed as much to his flamboyance as to his thick mane of blond hair. In his days as the CIA’s Near East Division chief, he had once famously declared that he ruled an espionage empire “from Bangladesh to Marrakech.”
The Main Enemy Page 8