The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  The Soviet delegation entered the plush reception room and quickly took their seats. Yurchenko, dressed in a new gray suit and matching tie, was accompanied by the embassy minister, Viktor Isakov; press counselor Boris Malakhov; and Vitaly Churkin, their interpreter. The American side was represented by Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Rosalyn Ridgeway, and two officers from the European bureau. Yurchenko glanced around the room for a familiar face. When he saw me seated across the room, he held my gaze for a split second’s recognition.

  Whitehead dispensed with the formalities and quickly got down to business. “The purpose of our meeting here tonight is to determine whether Mr. Vitaly Yurchenko has chosen of his own free will to return to the Soviet Union.”

  Isakov, barely waiting for Whitehead to finish his opening remarks, responded in his annoying, almost cloying, manner of speech. “Mr. Yoorchinka is for the first time exercising his free will in your country. His decision to return to his home has certainly been freely made. Mr. Yoorchinka”—Isakov again stressing his own pronunciation of the defector’s name—“was never in the United States of his own free will—”

  Cutting Isakov off, Whitehead said, “We’re here to determine only that Mr. Vitaly Yurchenko desires to leave the United States. We have more than ample evidence of Mr. Yurchenko’s freely made decision to come to the United States in August this year. We’d like to hear directly from Mr. Yurchenko.”

  Yurchenko seemed agitated and energized, much as he had been the first time I had seen him. He spoke in English. “I am returning to the Soviet Union after more than three months that American special services have taken me in Rome. I escaped from your special services after they have drugged me.” Turning toward me, he said, “This man, Tom Fountain, is from your special services, but I don’t think Tom knows they used drugs with me. But now I am going home.”

  I said nothing, and Whitehead ended the meeting as quickly as he began it. “Then it is clear that Mr. Yurchenko has chosen to return to the Soviet Union,” he said. “We will respect that decision, regardless of how it was reached. Thank you, gentlemen, for coming here tonight.”

  Dulles Airport, 1615 Hours, November 6, 1985

  The cameras followed Yurchenko in his Burberry raincoat as he climbed the stairs to the chartered Aeroflot jet, paused for a moment, then turned and waved, more in defiance than as a farewell. FBI agents Rochford and Broce were conspicuously present with the ground maintenance staff at the foot of the stairs, but again, there was no turning back for Yurchenko. He spotted both agents with whom he had become close over the last three months and broke his stride for a second to greet them with a smile. He seemed to be contemplating extending his hand, but he checked himself and then continued up the stairs without a halt.

  Back at CIA headquarters, while all eyes were locked on the departing Yurchenko, Rod Carlson was looking intently at the “honor escort.” He turned to Paul Redmond.

  “There’s PIMENTA.”

  “Which one?” Redmond asked. He had been with Carlson the night before when PIMENTA had telephoned to say he’d be doing “escort duty” to Moscow for a week.

  “The second one, the young-looking one.”

  Later, in Gerber’s office, Redmond had a sense of foreboding about the presence of yet another spy for the American side taking an unexpected trip back to Moscow.

  “I’m worried,” Redmond said. “PIMENTA going back bothers me.”

  “Did Howard know about the PIMENTA operation?” Gerber’s question was directed at Redmond.

  “PIMENTA wasn’t being geared up for internal handling. I’ll check for paper, something Howard could have seen, but that won’t tell us much. You know how secrets work their way around this place.”

  “What about our debriefing of Yurchenko?” I asked. “Did we spend too much time on Line X?” Was it possible that Yurchenko had gleaned from the questions he was asked by the CIA and FBI that the Americans had a source in Line X, which conducted scientific and technical espionage? PIMENTA was a Line X officer in the KGB’s Washington Rezidentura.

  “Always possible,” Redmond answered. “Rod can run it by Ames and the others and see what they think. But none of this is going to make much difference. We’ve got another compromise.”

  “I’ll check it out,” said Carlson, who was the supervisor of the two men assigned to debrief Yurchenko. “Ames checks in on Fridays from language school.”

  During his debriefings, Yurchenko had said that Edward Howard had told the KGB that there was an “angry colonel” who had volunteered to the CIA in Budapest. That had to be GTACCORD.

  In mid-September, Moscow reported that GTACCORD had signaled that he had information to pass. But now the SE Division was worried that the KGB had identified GTACCORD as GRU Colonel Vladimir Mikhailovich Vasilliev. There was a good chance of an ambush if the CIA responded to GTACCORD’s request for a meeting in Moscow.

  So before Moscow was given the green light to meet with GTACCORD, I was asked to talk with Yurchenko to try to determine how much progress the KGB had made in identifying the “angry colonel” whom Howard had mentioned.

  “What can you tell me about the angry colonel Edward Howard betrayed?” I had asked him during a meeting at the Coventry safe house.

  Yurchenko bristled for a moment. “Tom, I have told the story of the angry colonel many times. It is always the same.”

  “I know, but this is important now.”

  “You are meeting him now?” Yurchenko became more interested.

  “We are trying to decide what to do. And you can help. I want you to tell me again how far you think the investigation of the angry colonel had gone when you came to us in August.”

  Yurchenko was thoughtful. “We were looking at every KGB colonel in Hungary, including every KGB colonel assigned to the Southern Group of Forces of the Red Army. But we had no leads. It was very slow. But they will find him, with patience.”

  I focused again on the fact that Yurchenko had assumed that GTACCORD was a KGB colonel, not the military intelligence colonel he in fact was. Howard must have misidentified GTACCORD to the KGB, sending them off in the wrong direction, screening the KGB in Hungary, not the army.

  “If they had found the colonel, and brought him under control, do you think they would set up an ambush this soon?”

  “Maybe. It’s Dzerzhinsky politics. A colonel is important. But I think they have not found him. I think you can meet him. I would do that.”

  The next day, Moscow was told to unload GTACCORD’s dead drop. The operation was pulled off without a hitch a week later, with operatives at the dead drop site finding valuable photographs of Soviet military documents wrapped in plastic and then again in dirty rags to look like trash. There was relief in SE when Moscow’s report of the successful outing was received. But it was short-lived.

  Langley, 1000 Hours, November 19, 1985

  “The other shoe dropped on PIMENTA.”

  Paul Redmond was standing in the doorway to my office.

  “What!”

  “The bureau just let us know that PIMENTA’s wife got a call from Moscow—they’re not sure who called—saying that he’d hurt his leg, some sort of a deep cut when he arrived in Moscow with Yurchenko, and that it required some very tricky surgery to repair some nerve damage. The caller said it was serious enough for her to pack up the children and come home. She’s getting ready to go now.”

  “Shit!” was all that I could muster.

  17

  Langley, 0830 Hours, November 20, 1985

  The cable from Bonn was a routine notification of a “no show.” Under normal circumstances, it would have generated only mild concern. But circumstances in SE Division were by now no longer normal. There was an unshakable foreboding hanging over the division, and the loss of contact with any agent added to the dread.

  Bonn reported that KGB Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Varennik, working under Tass cover in the Soviet embassy in Germany, had failed to
show for his last scheduled meeting and had also failed to signal for an alternate. Varennik, encrypted as GTFITNESS, had last been met in a Bonn safe house on November 4, at which time he’d reported that he’d been asked to take part in an unscheduled planning session in Karlshorst, the KGB’s regional headquarters in East Berlin. The purpose of the Karlshorst meeting, Varennik assumed, would be to refine a KGB plan to sow terror among U.S. Army troops and their families through coordinated attacks against targets frequented by U.S. personnel in Germany. The aim behind the terror campaign, Varennik had reported earlier, was to throw the U.S.-German relationship into turmoil by making it look as though the bombings were the work of domestic German terrorist cells—the aging remnants of the Baader Meinhof gang or the more modern and active Red Army Faction.

  Varennik’s previous reports on the KGB’s proposed terror campaign had generated an intense debate in both the operational and the analytical sides of the CIA. Some discounted them as outright fabrication or at a minimum the product of an overactive imagination. Others, and that group included Bill Casey, zealously believed the KGB was capable of such atrocities. Casey and the hard-liners were convinced that the Soviets had been behind the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II, so what would stop them from this? The debate was inflamed by the fact that there had recently been terrorist attacks in Germany that had taken three American lives. Those attacks seemed to fit the MO described by Varennik, so Varennik’s reporting captured the attention of the highest levels of Washington readership, including President Reagan. His disappearance would draw a similar level of interest.

  Paul Redmond wasn’t particularly interested in the debate over how evil the “Evil Empire” was or wasn’t. He’d leave that to others. His focus was down in the trenches, the hand-to-hand combat of the spy business, not where it all fit in the grand scheme of things. He just wanted to find out what had happened to Gennady Varennik, who seemed to have just fallen down the same hole that had swallowed up so many of SE Division’s Soviet agents over the last six months. Redmond’s mood was foul as he briefed me on the operation.

  “He came to us in April this year. That’s important,” Redmond said. “That was after Ed Howard left the division and the agency . . . and even after Mary Howard left, for those who want to believe Howard was still getting pillow talk stuff from Mary. Whatever happens, we can’t pin this one on Howard.”

  “How’d we get him?”

  “He got us. Called one of our guys in Vienna, someone he knew when he was posted there, said he needed to talk to him right away.”

  “All this on the phone?” I was surprised that a KGB officer would go operational on the phone in Austria, where the KGB’s ability to monitor CIA activities was extremely good.

  “Yeah, I know. But if FITNESS is in trouble, it’s not because of that phone call. Anyway, after that first contact, we shifted this out of sight right away. We had Chuck Leven get in touch with him in Bonn—safe house meetings, full controls. Chuck was in Moscow with Burton, he can run a tight op.”

  “What was the motivation?” I asked.

  “Mixed. Said he was in trouble with money. Not much money, less than ten grand, but the usual story—he needed to get it back in his cash box right away. New baby, tough time with the expense of living in Germany. But he told Leven he was more interested in warning us, and maybe the world, about the wacky plot Moscow and Karlshorst were hatching to blow up targets in Germany, kill some Americans, and drive a wedge between the U.S. and the Germans. Maybe start World War Three in the process.”

  “You believe it?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I believe. Everybody’s trying to pin everything on the Sovs. You know who the believers are. Your buddy—” Redmond motioned toward the ceiling, a shorthand gesture to Casey’s office on the seventh floor. Casey did take the darkest stories of the Soviets at face value. Arguing against him could be dangerous for a CIA officer’s career. “Besides,” he said, “that buffoon Gennady Titov is running things at Karlshorst these days, and he’s capable of anything—even this dumb idea.”

  I nodded, wondering why every time Titov’s name came up it set Redmond off. A streetwise KGB officer, Titov had been expelled from Scandinavia in an infamous spy scandal involving Norwegian Labor Party leader Arne Treholt. He was now directing KGB activities in East Germany, and the involvement of a man called “the Crocodile” within the halls of Lubyanka in German operations lent some credence to Varennik’s reports.

  “What else did he give us?”

  “Some stuff on KGB penetrations of the Germans. Hasn’t checked out yet.” He added darkly that a KGB officer working for the CIA had to have a death wish. Especially these days.

  Our conversation lingered in my mind after he left. Redmond had captured one of the cardinal truths of the spy business, that it took a special personality to commit high treason against the USSR. Trouble was, there weren’t many old Soviet agents in “retired” status to run a behavioral theory against. And the CIA’s meetings with agents were so brief and intense that there was almost never time to ask the Russian spies why they did it. Some never wanted to talk about it. Others expressed a hatred of the Soviet system, saying they wanted to damage it as much as possible. Those agents required special handling to ensure that they didn’t become overeager and wind up in prison. Some called it a kind of patriotism—for Russia instead of the Soviet Union.

  A few defectors who’d jumped ship after a short stint emptying a safe here or there in a KGB Rezidentura were still around, living comfortably in America. But the members of that special breed who stood their ground, determined to make a difference by working against the system from the inside, were increasingly lying in unmarked graves. Penkovsky, Popov, Ogorodnik, and Filatov headed that list. And now new names were being added at a dizzying rate: Tolkachev, Polyshchuk, Smetanin, Martynov . . . and possibly Varennik. There should be a special section fenced off and set aside at Arlington Cemetery for all these men, I thought. Maybe then they could get the recognition they deserved.

  Two days later, a follow-up report came in from Bonn. Varennik’s wife had been called from Moscow and told that her husband had slipped on ice and injured himself badly. She and the children would have to return to Moscow immediately.

  Langley, December 1985

  Clair George kicked off the special briefing in the Director’s large, birch-paneled office on the seventh floor. Edward Lee Howard had now been gone for ten weeks, and six weeks had passed since Yurchenko had made his dramatic exit. Outwardly, Casey seemed to have put the deep personal embarrassment of both events behind him. The investigations were still under way, and a couple of seniors sitting around the table would take hits, but they would survive.

  “Bill, we have some unexplained losses in Moscow,” George said. “More than we ought to expect, even from Moscow operations.”

  “How many?” The old white-haired DCI looked deceptively disinterested. He was taking in every word.

  “Burton will give you the details.” George turned to Gerber, seated next to him at Casey’s conference table.

  Gerber began to brief Casey. “Last May we had a sudden recall of an asset from Athens to Moscow,” Gerber said. “GTBLIZZARD, a GRU colonel. The agent was convinced the recall was contrived, a trap, and we decided to pull him out. He’s here now, but that’s not how it worked out for some others.”

  Casey stared at Gerber without comment. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Juchniewicz glancing at the ceiling, willing Gerber to get on with it.

  “Then in June we had the arrest of Paul Stombaugh and the loss of our aviation engineer, GTSPHERE. That was followed by the arrest, probably in August, of a Line KR officer we were handling in Lagos, GTWEIGH. He was in Moscow on home leave, and we believe he was arrested unloading a drop of rubles we put down for him.

  “Then another GRU colonel was recalled from Lisbon unexpectedly in late August—GTMILLION. He hasn’t returned. On November 6, one of our assets in the KGB Rezidentura in
Washington, GTGENTILE—the bureau calls him PIMENTA—went home unexpectedly on the same plane as Yurchenko. And he’s vanished. His family was recalled a week later with the story that he’d had an accident and they should join him immediately.”

  Casey’s drooping eyelids flickered at the mention of Yurchenko, but he said nothing as Gerber continued.

  “Then later last month an asset in Germany, a KGB lieutenant colonel, GTFITNESS—the source of the reporting on KGB plans to bomb American targets in West Germany—was suddenly called to East Berlin. He’s disappeared, and his family has been brought home. Again, they said he’d had a serious accident.”

  “How many’s that?” Casey asked gruffly.

  “Six.”

  “Over how long?”

  “Six or seven months,” Gerber said quickly.

  “Jesus! How many you got left?”

  Gerber paused for a second as he mentally ran through the remaining inventory of Soviet assets, then he tentatively answered, “We’ve got two active cases in Moscow. Two or three more outside. And some inactive cases on ice, maybe three of those.”

  I ran the numbers mentally and tried to figure out whom Gerber had in mind. I came up with GTCOWL, the man who had provided the spy dust. Then there was GTEASTBOUND, a scientific source who worked at an institute far to the east of Moscow. The outside cases he was referring to probably included some scattered around Asia. The cases on ice must have included GRU General Polyakov and a few others who had been off the air for a year or more.

  Casey scowled and looked around the table. “What are you doing about this?”

  Clair George picked up from Gerber. “We’re looking at either a technical penetration or a human penetration.”