The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  “Technical? You think they’re reading our mail?”

  “Maybe,” George answered. “We’ll run some traps to see if it’s our commo. And we’ll run some more traps to see if they’ve technically penetrated our Moscow setup.”

  “What about the human penetration? You think there’s a spy in here?”

  “That’s the other possibility,” George said. “There’s only two, human or technical.”

  “Whacha gonna do about that?” Casey grumbled.

  “Run some tests to see if the people on the bigot list for these kinds of operations might be the problem,” George responded.

  “How big’s the list?”

  “Don’t know yet. We’re looking at it. Certainly all of us in this room, plus a lot more.”

  Casey grinned. “You got me on the list?”

  “Right at the top,” Clair George shot back.

  “It’s easy enough,” Redmond said. “We create an agent someplace and begin reporting on him by cable. We create another phony agent and send someone to Moscow to talk it up.” Gerber had called Redmond into his office to work out a strategy for running the traps to try to detect a penetration somewhere along the line. He asked me to join them. “Then we wait to see if anything happens. If either one gets rolled up, we’ve got a problem on the line we’re testing. If they don’t, we’re no better or worse off than we are now. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth it.”

  Gerber agreed and told Redmond to start setting things up. He would create two Soviet spies who never were.

  Nairobi, Kenya, December 1985

  I flew to Kenya under an alias and took a room opening onto an inner garden at the venerable Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. An hour after my arrival, there was a light knock at the door and I quickly ushered in the CIA chief in Nairobi, the agency’s preeminent Africa hand, Bill Moseby, and his deputy, Dave Lameroux. Moseby had been alerted through a back channel that I would be “passing through” Nairobi and that I’d be staying at the Norfolk under an alias. He’d been told to contact me there.

  A descendant of the Confederate cavalryman who led Moseby’s Raiders in the Civil War, Bill Moseby had spent most of his career in Africa. With his tailored safari suits and his waxed and twirled mustache, he looked more like a colonial plantation owner than one of the most accomplished CIA managers on the continent. Blind in one eye and deaf in one ear from two different accidents, Moseby was nevertheless an avid hunter, and he often sported a faint half-moon indentation on his forehead, caused by the kick from a recoiling telescopic sight lined up awkwardly with his good eye.

  “What can I do for you, bwana?” Moseby said, using the greeting he reserved for fellow veterans of the CIA’s African operations, of which I was one.

  I silently shook hands with Lameroux, a former Air Force navigator with whom I’d entered on duty two decades earlier, and turned up the volume on my television set. After pulling chairs together, we leaned in close and I began my whispered briefing.

  “I’ll give you the facts. We’ve been losing assets in Moscow, and Soviet assets around the world, one by one for the last seven or eight months. It can’t be natural attrition. It’s got to be something else.”

  “What’s Nairobi got to do with it?” Moseby asked.

  “Nothing really, except that you’ve got an obnoxious colonel running the GRU Rezidentura. And we’d like to use him for a little test.”

  Moseby and Lameroux looked at each other quizzically. “That jerk? He’s all yours. But how?”

  “You’ve had enough casual contact with the colonel for it to be common knowledge both here and back at Moscow Center. You and I are going to create an operation over the next few days that will make it look like he’s decided to work for us. When we’re finished, it will look like he’s a CIA asset.

  “We’re going to kick this off with a restricted handling cable, reporting that you arranged for me to contact the colonel. We’ll say in the cable that he approached you and wanted to talk to someone from Langley. You accommodated him. I came out here to make the pitch. Then we send the next RH cable reporting the pitch, saying he accepts. From that point on we start a tightly controlled and graduated operation using special communications channels to test for a penetration at key points along the line back to Gerber and SE.”

  “How will you know when your trap’s been sprung?” Moseby asked.

  “When they throw your colonel on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow with his hands tied behind his back.”

  “How many people are going to read the traffic on this?”

  “Not too many at first. A handful. We’ll start with the short list. Then we’ll broaden it out.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Yes, bwana”—Moseby smiled—“if you get lucky, the colonel’s luck runs out.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “But if you tell us he’s been dragged back home, we’ll start moving pretty fast on our end. We’ll find our problem before they do anything permanent. If we find our penetration, we’ll tell ’em. Gerber and Hathaway will go see the KGB and say, ‘Oh, by the way, your GRU colonel from Nairobi is actually an okay guy. We just had to set him up for this little experiment.’”

  “Will they buy that?” Lameroux asked.

  “Probably. They’re picky about those things. We’re assuming that your buddy wouldn’t confess. And without a confession they don’t move all that fast. This isn’t going to be a career enhancement for him, but he’ll be okay.”

  “When do we start?” Moseby asked.

  “How about now?” I said, taking a legal pad from my suitcase.

  Langley, Mid-December 1985

  Paul Redmond read the cable from Nairobi carefully. It was a three-page account of the meeting Moseby had ostensibly arranged for me with the GRU Rezident in Nairobi. The cable arrived at the special communications center just before the opening of business, and two copies had been couriered to Gerber’s office. Redmond had been called to the front office to read one of the two copies reserved for the chief of the SE Division. Beyond that, only two other copies of the cable from Nairobi had been couriered to the seventh-floor office of the DDO, where they would be read by the DDO and his two executive officers. The total count of people with access to the cable traffic this first go-round would be limited to seven, including Gerber’s secretary. Then Redmond would slowly begin casting the net wider.

  18

  Moscow, Early January 1986

  Rem Krassilnikov had another “guest” in Lefortovo Prison, a KGB major from a local Moscow city district. The lead to this new spy had been handed down from above, providing Krassilnikov with just enough information to allow him to launch a methodical search that ultimately led him to Major Sergey Vorontsov, a tough KGB officer working in Moscow’s Lenin Hills district. Vorontsov hadn’t been cooperative at first, but like the others, he came around. Krassilnikov had the full story, but neither he nor his superiors were eager to take the next step and reel in an American to close the case. That could wait a little longer. Patience.

  In the meantime, Krassilnikov was on another exciting hunt. He had been alerted, again discreetly from above, that the Americans were planning a technical probe of some sort across the entire expanse of the USSR, from the port of Nakhodka in the Far East.

  Technical sensing equipment would be concealed in a custom-rigged shipping container loaded aboard a freighter in Japan and delivered to Nakhodka. From there it would be transferred onto the trans-Siberian railroad for the long journey to Leningrad, a route that was becoming increasingly attractive for the export of goods from Asia to Western Europe. Krassilnikov hadn’t questioned the source of the tip when he received it. He cast his net wide for the technical probe and knew that the officers of the Second Chief Directorate would reel it in as soon as the equipment entered Soviet territory.

  Embassy of the USSR, Washington, D.C., January 1986

  Colonel Viktor Cherkashin suppressed his rage as he sat in his tiny cubicle in the KGB’s cramped, wi
ndowless Rezidentura on the fourth floor of the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. He’s going to get him killed, Cherkashin told himself. Kryuchkov is going to get our man killed. He can’t resist wrapping up the American spies in Moscow, and the CIA is going to figure out something’s wrong, that someone has talked.

  Cherkashin had been at his post as chief of counterintelligence in the KGB’s Washington Rezidentura when Aldrich Ames had downed a few extra drinks at the Mayflower Hotel and walked into the Soviet embassy to volunteer to become a spy. He knew he had a real catch—and he’d taken extreme measures to protect his new spy. Fearful of leaks, he decided against sending a cable back to Moscow Center. Instead, he flew back to deliver his message personally to Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which handled foreign intelligence operations.

  Cherkashin circumvented his entire chain of command, including Dimitri Yakushkin, chief of American operations, and Vitaly Yurchenko, a top security officer in the American section. Both men had served at the Soviet embassy in Washington, and both would most likely have been on the distribution list for any cables he might have sent from Washington. But the KGB, like most professional services, had a standing procedure allowing officers to go directly to the top whenever they learned the identities of traitors within the ranks. Ames had handed over the names of KGB moles. Cherkashin told no one in Moscow about his new recruit except Kryuchkov and his immediate circle of lieutenants.

  But Kryuchkov had broken one of the cardinal rules of counterintelligence. He was moving quickly—and stupidly, in Cherkashin’s view—to roll up agents identified by their new volunteer. Kryuchkov had been feeling increasingly insecure about his position since his longtime mentor, Yuri Andropov, had died. Whatever political infighting was going on back in Moscow, Cherkashin worried that the Americans would realize their security had been breached and would launch a mole hunt.

  Now, sitting in the Rezidentura, with electronic white noise whirring silently between the double walls specially constructed by KGB technicians, Cherkashin knew that the most valuable agent the KGB had ever had inside the CIA was at grave risk. He was not at risk because of any mistake they had made in Washington. He was at risk because Vladimir Kryuchkov wanted to knock KGB Chairman Viktor Chebrikov off balance and steal his job.

  Langley, January 1986

  Bill Casey’s secretary smiled up at John Stein as he entered the DCI’s outer office. “You can go right in, Mr. Stein. Mr. George is already with him.”

  Pushing through the heavy, soundproof door to the DCI’s office, Stein saw Casey and the DDO seated at the conference table at the far end of the room.

  A burly man in his mid-fifties with salt-and-pepper hair, John Stein had risen through the ranks of the clandestine service. After a stint in the early 1970s as deputy chief in the SE Division, he had survived the bureaucratic chaos of Casey’s first year as CIA Director, when Casey made the disastrous decision to appoint Max Hugel, one of his Republican fund-raising pals, as DDO. Stein emerged as DDO himself after Hugel was forced to resign amid a scandal following a few months at the CIA. Two years later, Casey moved Stein out, replacing him with Clair George. Stein became inspector general. He was just leaving that post for language school and was on his way to becoming chief in South Korea when he was called into the meeting in Casey’s office.

  Bill Casey spoke first. “John, we’ve got a problem,” he said. “Clair can lay it out for you.”

  Stein glanced over at Clair George and realized his somber mood was genuine, not one of the theatrical plays for which the DDO was famous.

  “We’re losing Soviet assets, a lot of them. You still know all the big cases, don’t you?”

  “Sure. I was DDO during a lot of them. Howard?”

  “Howard accounts for some of the losses, but not all. We think there’s still a problem. Maybe technical—something to do with communications—maybe human. Could be here, or maybe Moscow. We want you to take a look. A fresh look. Don’t count anything in or out. And keep it between us. No one else is to know you’re doing this. Understood?”

  Stein hesitated a moment. “I’ll need someone in SE to help me, to get me the files. Is Redmond okay?”

  “Okay,” Clair George said. “Just keep it quiet.”

  Later that day, Stein called Redmond. The two men had worked together in the past, and Stein was pretty sure Redmond could be counted on to take the problem seriously and keep his mouth shut. Redmond knew his way around the SE file system and wouldn’t have to ask anyone where to find what he needed. He could check out the files without drawing attention to himself, pass them to Stein, and take them back for safekeeping.

  With Redmond’s help, Stein spent the following six weeks poring over the division’s secret files. He was looking for any pattern, any clue that might connect the losses to a single weakness—human or technical—somewhere in the system. At the end of his review, Stein wrote a précis of each case and then a final paper for Casey. He concluded that the CIA had a leak of some kind.

  In March, Stein took the paper to Casey and briefed the Director in person on his findings. He told Casey that he believed there could be a communications breach somewhere—“and that is between you and NSA to find out.” Then he said the other possibility was that there was a mole inside the CIA. “And that we can do something about,” he said. “I would recommend that you start by looking at Moscow, which is smaller and a more manageable place to start an investigation, and then look at headquarters. But I would try to make sure it’s not in Moscow first.” The bottom line was that it was time for the Director to “put some people together to work on the problem.” When Stein raised the possibility that there was a spy inside the CIA, Casey was less than forthcoming in his response.

  “Hmm,” he said noncommittally. “We got to put people on it.”

  Stein left for South Korea without ever hearing whether the DCI had followed up and actually launched a mole hunt. He never saw Casey again. Later, Stein would learn that Casey never launched a major mole hunt. Stein would also conclude that Casey didn’t tell anyone about his final briefing.

  By the time Stein was secretly recommending to Casey that he should start looking for a mole, Burton Gerber had already taken a series of defensive measures to make certain that the 1985 losses couldn’t happen again. He ordered a dramatic change in the way the SE Division handled its most sensitive cases. Gerber realized that the controls had become too lax. SE Division had been running more Soviet agents than ever before, and as a result more people were involved in handling them. He was determined to reduce the numbers. To do so, he created what he called the “back room.” It was a new system with special handling procedures for cables and other files on Soviet agents. Sandy Grimes and Diana Worthen, two trusted and experienced SE Division officials, were put in charge of making the new system work in early 1986.

  Initially, that meant handling agents without any cable correspondence between Langley and the field. When a new agent was identified and recruited, CIA officers would fly back and forth to Washington to discuss the case. The word went out to senior officers in the field that if they got a potentially important Soviet intelligence source, they were not to send any cables about the case: They should get on a plane and tell Gerber in person.

  Before resuming cable traffic on sensitive cases, Gerber insisted on adding a new layer of encryption. Normally, cables were decoded in the CIA’s communications center and then routed up to the division. But now, all cable traffic about Soviet cases was encrypted twice. The CIA officer handling the case would encrypt a message before turning it over to a CIA communicator, who then encrypted it again before sending the cable. At headquarters, the communications center would decipher the code added by the communicator, but that would reveal only the second layer of encryption. Just a small handful of top officials in SE Division had the keys to decipher that second code. In the field, often the only person with the code was the chief. Field stations were not allowed to keep pape
r files on the new cases, and they were not to be discussed within the station. Meetings between headquarters personnel and field officers involved in the cases were treated as if they were being held behind the Iron Curtain—Moscow Rules applied. The officers would meet in safe houses for the debrief or at CIA stations in the field.

  By February 1986, Gerber could see that the new system was working; the CIA developed two new Soviet agents, and they were not compromised or arrested by the KGB. Gerber still didn’t know what had caused the 1985 losses, but he knew that he had stopped the hemorrhaging.

  Moscow, January 1986

  Barry Roydon, the CIA’s deputy chief of counterintelligence, sat across from the Moscow chief; his mission was straightforward enough. He was going to brief the Moscow chief and his deputy on a new operational success against the KGB in Bangkok. Only there was no operation in Bangkok. The name of the new KGB recruit was real enough, but the rest of the story was a carefully crafted fabrication scripted for delivery to whatever technical penetration the KGB may have been able to set up inside the yellow submarine that served as the Moscow work spaces. The Moscow chief was slightly uncomfortable with Roydon’s direct verbal briefing. He’d been worried for months about the possibility that his enclosure had somehow been penetrated and had scribbled his haunting note to me just five months earlier: “Sometimes I think they’re in here with me.”

  Roydon was now testing that suspicion.

  19

  Moscow, February 21, 1986

  Rem Krassilnikov was shocked at what the KGB had found when the vessel Siberia Maru docked in Nakhodka with container #CTIV-1317221 aboard. The container was scheduled to be loaded onto the first available freight train bound for Leningrad, on a journey that would cross all eleven of the USSR’s time zones over a period of three to four weeks. According to the shipping manifest, the container was packed with a cargo of handicrafts bound for Leningrad, where it would be forwarded to an address in West Germany.