The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  As it turned out, there was no more substance to the Brazzaville episode than there had been to the pitch in East Berlin. The CIA was unable to make much sense of these approaches to its female officers. Some wrote it off as another ploy by the KGB, a brainstorm similar to the one a few years back that had the KGB mounting crude recruitment approaches to black CIA officers. The KGB had hoped that they would be bitter about CIA racism and thus receptive to their overtures. That ploy hadn’t worked any better than the approach to the two women. Others wondered if the new tactic was aimed at sowing distrust within the CIA of its female officers. The theory was that if two had turned down and reported KGB pitches, might there not be another one out there who had not rejected Moscow’s overtures?

  None of these theories was particularly compelling, but on the heels of the anonymous letter from Bonn, yet another mystery was added to the strange occurrences of the last year. No one had a clear idea of what was happening to the CIA’s Soviet sources. The only thing on which everyone could agree was that there had been a cataclysmic failure somewhere in the system. By the spring of 1986, a new, whispered term had entered the lexicon of the inner circle of SE Division—“the 1985 losses.”

  Langley, May 8, 1986

  Looking down at the Moscow cable on my desk, I read again the spare language reporting that a Moscow case officer had been arrested the previous evening while on an operational run to meet EASTBOUND. The cable read exactly like the others following the arrests of SPHERE and COWL. But then what else was there to report beyond the fact that a Moscow officer had walked into an ambush, had been taken to #2 Dzerzhinsky, and then had been released a couple of hours later? The cables always ended with the promise that details would follow.

  I flipped through the stack of follow-up cables, pausing to look over the final one, where the Moscow officer requested that his father be asked to reserve rooms for him and his wife at their club in Maryland. That one would set Gerber off again. Gerber had taken a dark view of this case officer’s operational judgment after he’d been detained some weeks earlier on a nighttime run in the far suburbs of Moscow. The officer became disoriented and took a wrong turn, ending up at the main gate to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate headquarters at Yasenevo. He was detained for a few minutes, questioned, and then released.

  When the cable reporting the incident arrived the next morning, Gerber exploded. He had a simple rule: A case officer should know his city. If he could get lost and end up driving through the main gate of the enemy’s foreign intelligence headquarters, what other mistakes might he make?

  Now, reading the cable asking for comfortable accommodations at his father’s club in suburban Maryland, I wondered what was going through Gerber’s mind. Gerber was not a clubby man and didn’t have much patience for those who were.

  KGB Headquarters, Moscow, May 8, 1986

  Krassilnikov was quite pleased with the way the last ambush had worked out. The Second Chief Directorate had been given a tip about a radar scientist and had ultimately identified the man. Rather than simply arresting the scientist, however, Krassilnikov had taken pains to turn the spy operation back against the Americans. He’d planted a story in the man’s design bureau that the American special services were suspected of having penetrated the establishment and that the subject could enjoy a “certain amnesty” by turning himself in. It worked. The man came forward and cooperated fully, up to the point of setting up the ambush of the American special services officer in a courtyard in an apartment block on Moscow’s Malaya Pirogovskaya Street.

  Krassilnikov’s men watched from a distance as the case officer left for home at the end of the day and began his long and laborious surveillance detection run. When he was convinced that he was black, he began an elaborate foot run. He walked straight into Krassilnikov’s trap.

  Later, in the holding room at Dzerzhinsky, a pale and subdued CIA officer watched without comment as the contents of his bag were laid out on the table. There was a “Kharkov” razor concealing a subminiature camera and a number of prewritten letters, ostensibly from American tourists to relatives and friends back in the United States. The scientist was to use these to correspond with his handlers, using secret writing on the backs of the letters. Concealed inside a notebook were the intelligence requirements—the CIA’s questions—about the spy’s defense design bureau. Krassilnikov was very pleased with himself. He had caught his spy without jeopardizing the sources of the tips that were coming his way.

  Langley, 1600 Hours, May 16, 1986

  I pushed through the blue door of the DDO’s seventh-floor office, wondering again whose idea it had been to paint all the doors at Langley in garish electric blues, canary yellows, and forest greens. It happened while I was assigned to Hong Kong in the 1960s. Upon my return one summer, I found the old battleship gray motif of CIA headquarters gone, replaced by off-white walls and brightly colored doors. It was supposed to be good for morale. When I walked into his office, Clair George went right to the point.

  “It’s Friday. I want you to think about it over the weekend, but I’m planning to send you out to Islamabad to take over the Afghan program.”

  In the months since I’d returned to Langley from Africa, I’d become aware that our covert action program with the Afghan resistance had taken a new turn and that Reagan had rewritten the ground rules. I had also heard that the chief in Islamabad running the Afghan program had fallen afoul of Clair’s deputy, Ed Juchniewicz, and that Clair and Casey were deciding on a change of leadership in Islamabad. What I had not heard a hint of was that I was being tipped for the job.

  “You really want to wait until Monday for an answer?”

  “Talk to your wife. Get her input.”

  “She’ll be ready to go. When do you want me out there?”

  “Go out and take a look this month, and then get out there by July.”

  Marie-Catherine, my wife, was indeed ready to move to Pakistan. A French pied-noir, born in Morocco, she had spent most of her life shifting between France and Africa, where we had met while she was teaching at the French School in Lagos. She had moved across the continent to join me in Khartoum in 1983, and we were married there in 1984. Bill Casey’s “wedding gift” had been telescoping Marie-Catherine’s naturalization process from seven years to about ten days. Pakistan would be no problem for her.

  Langley, 1015 Hours, May 19, 1986

  Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Jack Platt staking out my office, waiting for an opening to slip in on me as soon as I finished my conversation on the secure green telephone, an unambiguous signal for privacy that even Platt would hesitate to violate. But as soon as the handset was in its cradle, he slipped by the gatekeeper and dropped a handful of papers on my desk.

  “I need these signed pretty quick, chief. A real rush job.” Platt’s usual laid-back attitude seemed a little forced. I started looking for the flimflam, knowing instinctively that it was probably no accident that Platt was in need of some rush action just as Burton Gerber was away and I was acting division chief.

  “Sit down, Jack. You’ve got a minute for me, don’t you?”

  “Sure. But this is moving fast, and I saw you were pretty busy, and—”

  “It’s okay, Jack,” I said, picking up the sheaf of papers, “I’m not pressed.”

  The top document was a standard agency travel order for “operational travel” to Guyana using any mode of transport from “sea to air to surface.” It already had the requisite Latin American Division signatures, and I signed it without particular hesitation. After flipping to the second signature flag, I glanced at the document and set down my pen.

  “What the hell is this, Jack?”

  “It’s a requisition order for a Winchester thirty-caliber semiautomatic hunting rifle, with four-by-forty scope sight attached, with felt-lined carrying case and fifty rounds of match ammunition.” Platt recited the nomenclature on the requisition form in the stilted monotone of a mentally challenged government supply clerk.

>   “I know it’s a gun, Jack, but you’re just going to have to tell me who you’re going to kill before I sign off.”

  “It’s for MONOLITE. Rankin and I are going down to Guyana to work on him again. Nice gun might soften him up. Guy’s a big hunter.”

  “Is this thing going anywhere? Or are you and Rankin just jerking each other off?”

  “Who the fuck knows? You do what you can. And you really can sign that, so just go ahead and do it. Trust me.”

  I knew that MONOLITE had been a long-term joint developmental target of the FBI and CIA ever since he’d been assigned to the Soviet embassy in Washington in the late 1970s. Platt had been a street case officer then, and a good one, until his drinking problem had sent him to rehab. Sober for five years now, he hadn’t lost his need to continually test the system and those in charge of it.

  “And are you going to tell me why this is such a rush?”

  “I gotta go out and buy the gun and get it on its way to Guyana today. That’s the rush. MONOLITE pitched up there last year, and Rankin and I thought we’d go down and see if he’s had a change of heart.”

  “And you just discovered you needed to get a rifle into this operation this morning? Or maybe it’s because Burton Gerber took off this morning and you thought I’d be an easier touch?”

  “What do you think?” Platt cracked a smile for the first time.

  “I think you waited until Burton was out of here to bring this in. What is it? The gun, the operation, or the fact that you personally drive Gerber nuts with all your bullshit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “It’s the gun and the operation and me and all the fucking weird hangups our leader has. But this is worth doing.”

  “How long have you been trying to get this guy?”

  “Who? Gerber?”

  “Goddammit, Jack, quit dicking with me!”

  “We’ve been working this guy pretty steady for about six or seven years. I musta pitched him a hundred times.”

  “Did he give you anything?”

  “He still loves me.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means that he doesn’t run for cover like every other asshole in the KGB who sees me coming.”

  “He ever pitch you back?”

  “Once, maybe. Asked me how I’d feel if he asked me to come over to his side. I said, What for? To spend the rest of my life in a fucking breadline? And he never asked me again.”

  “What does Gerber think of the operation?”

  “Probably hates it.”

  “Why? Because of the operation or because it’s your operation?”

  “Five years ago he ordered me to pitch the guy—give him his last chance to come to the promised land—when he was out in San Diego at a volleyball tournament. Did you know he’s an Olympic-grade volleyball player? Once when we were both a little drunk, he told me volleyball got him into the KGB. Said some guys recruited him out of the university to play for a team at Dynamo Sports Complex in Moscow. He didn’t know who the hell they were until they told him he was playing for team KGB! After a while he stopped playing volleyball and started playing spy. He likes to say he’s the only guy who went to the First Chief Directorate on an athletic scholarship. Anyway, I didn’t pitch the guy like Gerber told me, but I kept the thing alive. Introduced the FBI guys to him, but he still told us to fuck off every time we hit him. The FBI wants to keep trying, and Gerber can’t stop it now with the bureau on board.”

  “How long have you been planning this trip?”

  “About a month.”

  “What does Gerber know about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How long have you known about Gerber’s travel plans?”

  “About a month.” Platt smiled again.

  I signed the requisition for the Winchester and handed the papers back to Platt. “Don’t go down there and get him killed.”

  “Like everybody else around here?”

  “Yeah, like everybody else around here. Might ask him what he’s hearing about that.”

  I watched Platt, wearing faded frayed blue jeans and beat-up cowboy boots, walk out of the front office area carrying his papers. Platt was the kind of guy the CIA wouldn’t touch today. And I thought that was too bad.

  First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, July 1986

  Val Aksilenko no longer had any doubts that something very strange was going on. The latest round began with whispers of the arrests of Valeriy Martynov and Sergey Motorin, who had both served with him in Washington.

  Martynov, a Line X officer responsible for scientific and technical collection in the Washington Rezidentura, had come back to Moscow with Vitaly Yurchenko as part of the defector’s “honor guard.” He never reported in at Yasenevo. At first, the word was that he’d suffered a serious accident that required surgery. He’d been taken to a sanitarium outside Moscow to recuperate. They’d even brought his family back from Washington to be by his side, the stories went.

  Aksilenko hadn’t seen Martynov since his return, and he had no idea what had happened to him until rumors of his arrest began to circulate in June. Similar stories started circulating about Sergey Motorin, another former officer in the Washington Rezidentura, now working in Directorate A, the active measures department responsible for black propaganda against the United States and its allies. Aksilenko’s boss in the American Department, Anatoly Flavnov, told him in confidence that Motorin had been arrested for working for the Americans.

  Aksilenko was incredulous. Two officers from the same Rezidentura! He was never close to Martynov, but Motorin had worked for him, and it pained him to see the young maverick officer in such trouble. Motorin was a rule breaker, a free spirit, but Aksilenko liked him. He’d sparred with Dmitri Yakushkin, the Washington Rezident at the time. Yakushkin plainly detested Motorin and did everything in his power to make his life miserable while he served under him in Washington. A Line PR officer, Motorin was miscast in intelligence work, but he was not the disaster Yakushkin believed. The Rezident saw him as just another privileged troublemaker, the son of a senior Party official from Archangel. Motorin had reinforced his political position even further by marrying the daughter of another senior Party man. Yakushkin thought he traded on that, too, and despised him all the more.

  It was no secret inside the Rezidentura that Motorin had girls on the side and that he had cut corners. But most of his transgressions were dismissed as small stuff, all acceptable enough within the context of the “new realities.” Toward the end of his Washington tour, when he seemed to be producing better political intelligence, Aksilenko had gone to bat for him with Yakushkin, telling the skeptical Rezident that Motorin was finally catching fire. It didn’t work. If anything, Yakushkin was even more negative, and Aksilenko found himself in an unpleasant tug-of-war over the young officer. In the end, he concluded that Yakushkin disliked Motorin so much that it was useless—and perhaps dangerous—to continue to defend him. Only later would Aksilenko learn that Motorin’s improved performance in Washington had come about because he was being fed intelligence by the FBI and CIA in order to improve his standing with his superiors.

  When Motorin was transferred from Washington back to Moscow, Yakushkin tried to bar him from serving in a sensitive post. He wanted him shunted off to a job where he could do no real harm. So he was assigned to Department A, responsible for black propaganda operations against the United States and its allies.

  Motorin’s arrest, coming on the heels of the arrest of Martynov, sparked a frenzy of rumors and gossip throughout the First Chief Directorate. Motorin simply disappeared, and for months no one knew where he was. During this period, he was forced to call a woman he’d had an affair with in Washington to tell her he “was fine and thinking of her often.” The call was intended to reassure the FBI.

  There was a grand deception game under way at Yasenevo, and the pieces of the game that were visible to Val Aksilenko were sharpening his senses
. From the First Chief Directorate, there had been four cases in the last year of officers crossing over—the acting Rezident in London, the counterintelligence officer in Lagos, and now the two officers from the Washington Rezidentura. Add to the mix the peculiar case of Vitaly Yurchenko, and you had five. As Val Aksilenko struggled with his thoughts, he thought maybe the number could go even one higher, to six. Yes, he’d add the convoluted case of Vladimir Mikhailovich Vetrov, the Line T guy executed for spying for the French two years ago. That was a case of clever misdirection if he ever saw one.

  Vladimir Vetrov was a wild man by First Chief Directorate standards. He was strong and physical, with a quick temper. Some thought him abusive—he’d been reprimanded in the past for his outbursts, one time for beating one of his bosses almost to a pulp. In addition to his abusive side, Vetrov was an unabashed Francophile who made no attempt to hide his admiration for almost all things French. It was an appreciation he’d picked up during his Paris posting in the late 1960s, and he still carried a case of French champagne in the trunk of his car, “just in case,” he always said.

  So it was no real surprise, at least at first, when in February 1982 word shot through Yasenevo that Vetrov had been arrested for the murder of a homeless vagabond in a Moscow park where he was having a “French liaison” with a woman described as Vetrov’s mistress. According to the initial story, Vetrov and his mistress were happened upon by a park denizen, who attempted to shake down the KGB officer. In a burst of temper, Vetrov set upon the man and killed him with a knife. Then, possibly fearing that his mistress would betray him to the police, he stabbed her and left her for dead. Then, incredibly, he returned to the scene of the crime an hour later and was spotted by his mistress, who was not seriously wounded after all. He was arrested on the spot, and in a particularly swift case of Soviet justice, he was tried and sentenced to twelve years in prison. Later, nobody would ever recall hearing the actual name of the vagabond Vetrov had murdered.