The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  The CIA became the primary agency handling Dmitri Polyakov during his assignment to Burma in 1966. As with so many before him, his decision to take a stand against the Soviet system would ultimately bring him before the executioner in a darkened Moscow sub-basement.

  Polyakov was promoted to the rank of general in 1974, an upward move that gave him access to a wealth of information on everything from long-range military planning to nuclear strategy to research and production of chemical and biological warfare agents. By the time he dropped from sight in 1980, Dmitri Polyakov had provided American intelligence with the most voluminous and detailed reporting on the Red Army of the entire Cold War.

  Polyakov gave his interrogators details of his work as a spy without signs of regret, and his demeanor soon became a source of discomfort for some within the KGB’s inner circle. He had not been motivated by greed. Polyakov had accepted only small gifts from the Americans—a few shotguns and rifles, some woodworking tools, and what amounted to little more than pocket money. He hadn’t done it for revenge, either. He had done his part, he maintained to the end, because he could not allow the USSR to win its war against the Russian people.

  21

  Moscow, 1500 Hours, October 22, 1986

  The announcement was in the standard language of the Soviet apparatus:

  Tass is authorized to announce that as already had been reported, the USSR State Security Committee exposed Adolf Tolkachev, an employee of a Moscow research institute, as an agent of U.S. intelligence and started criminal proceedings against him.

  It was established during the course of the investigation that Tolkachev, in pursuit of selfish ends and on account of his hostile attitude to the Soviet state, had maintained espionage contacts with U.S. intelligence agents who had been in Moscow under the guise of U.S. embassy personnel.

  The military collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, which examined the criminal case filed against Tolkachev, found him guilty of high treason in the form of espionage, and, considering the gravity of his crime, sentenced him to the exceptional measure of punishment, death.

  The presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet rejected Tolkachev’s appeal for clemency.

  The sentence has been carried out.

  Langley, 1530 Hours, October 30, 1986

  It was anticlimactic, Paul Redmond thought as he read the report confirming what he had known all along. Valeriy Martynov and Sergey Motorin had been arrested, the report said. They had been tried and convicted and were to be executed for espionage. The report stated that the men had been arrested in 1985, almost a full year earlier. The FBI told Redmond a few months back that Motorin had called his girlfriend in Washington to let her know he was fine. That had knocked Redmond off balance momentarily, but now he was more convinced than ever that an elaborate deception was under way designed for just one purpose—to protect a valuable source.

  In the last eight months, the strange case of “Mr. X,” the KGB volunteer who had dropped a letter in a Bonn case officer’s mailbox in March, had played out without leading to any firm answers. Langley reacted quickly to his initial approach, and the $50,000 he had demanded was laid down for him in a German dead drop. The possibility that the CIA’s communications had been compromised—Mr. X had suggested just such a technical penetration in his first letter—had been thoroughly checked out, without results. In his subsequent letters, Mr. X had attempted to raise suspicions about one CIA case officer, Chuck Leven, who had been handling Gennady Varennik. Leven was fabricating his financial dealings with Varennik, skimming, the author of the mysterious letters had charged.

  Redmond thought the ploy was too cute by half. Of all the case officers on the street, Leven would be the last to start fooling around with his cash box. Feeding the CIA disinformation about its case officers was an old KGB trick, and Redmond wasn’t falling for it. Clair George also thought the operation was bad from the start, and when Redmond had the handwriting on the Mr. X letters carefully examined, it seemed there was a faint resemblance to the handwriting in the communications plans the KGB had provided John Walker over the years.

  The information Mr. X provided about how Gennady Varennik had been compromised still bothered Redmond. In his second letter, Mr. X said that Varennik’s father had come across some material evidence of his son’s betrayal, and as a good and loyal former counterintelligence officer of the KGB during the Great Patriotic War, he had turned his son in to the authorities. The father was convinced that his son would ultimately be set free, after having served some jail time.

  With the arrival of Mr. X’s sixth letter a few weeks earlier, Redmond became convinced that the whole case was a ruse. But what kind of ruse? Either Mr. X was involved in a scam—he’d gotten a bundle of money from the CIA—or the KGB was running an elaborate deception game. But for what purpose? They had a spy to protect, Redmond concluded. A big one.

  The inventory of lost agents and operations over the last fifteen months was devastating. Now there were rumors of more damage, that two more assets had been rolled up. One, a KGB officer last seen in Indonesia, Vladimir Piguzov, code-named GTJOGGER, had reportedly been arrested during the summer. Vladimir Potashov, an officer in the Institute of the USA and Canada, encrypted GTMEDIAN, had been arrested about the same time, according to the latest reports. Nothing made sense these days, Redmond thought, except his conclusion that there was probably a spy somewhere.

  The phony recruitments in Nairobi and Moscow had been painstakingly played out for months without any sign of the bait being taken. Both Soviet intelligence officers set up in the fake operations remained in place, and Redmond concluded that the two probes had failed. But why? he wondered.

  Frustrated, he decided it was time to put all his thoughts on paper.

  Vienna, Austria, 2000 Hours, December 14, 1986

  Ambassador Ron Lauder’s Christmas party for the American embassy staff was an elegant affair. Lauder had a knack for combining the old-world grace of Vienna with the new money chic of his mother, who had transformed beauty into big business. The eggnog and glühwein had flowed, the Christmas carols had been sung in English and German, and a sense of camaraderie and celebrity had flowed throughout the ambassador’s residence.

  Jim Olson, the CIA chief in Vienna, was circulating from group to group along with his wife, Meredith, exchanging Christmas greetings, fulfilling the function that fell to senior members of Lauder’s country team. An old SE Division hand who’d done battle with the KGB in Moscow a few years earlier, Olson had been the first man “down the hole” in the CIA’s cable tap outside Moscow, and he knew his craft. He’d just arrived in Vienna, having lived through the nightmare of the last eighteen months in SE Division, and he harbored lingering doubts about the 1985 losses. Now, as he worked the ambassador’s Christmas party, Olson began to notice one of the Marine security guards hanging back slightly but following him from group to group. As the party began to break up, the Marine intercepted Olson and self-consciously said he needed to talk to him. His voice quavered as he spoke. Olson saw fear verging on panic in the man’s eyes.

  “I’m Clayton Lonetree. I know who you are, Mr. Olson. They told me when I got here.”

  “They told you?”

  “I served in the embassy in Moscow as a Marine security guard and got into something with the KGB. I’m in over my head.” The Marine was stiff. He spoke in stilted bursts, as if he were reciting lines he had carefully written for this moment of confrontation. To Olson, the young man appeared barely under control, almost psychotic. He took the Marine by the elbow and led him to a quiet corner where they could talk in private.

  “Did you give up classified information in Moscow?” he asked, trying to gain control of the conversation in the short time he knew they would have before the guests began to file out.

  “No, sir,” Lonetree responded.

  As he looked at the Marine, Olson suspected that he was lying. “Did they give you money?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Were you inv
olved with a woman?” Watching Lonetree closely, Olson wondered if he might break down right there. “Are you meeting the KGB here in Vienna?”

  “Yes, sir. They were the ones who told me about you.”

  “Who do you see here?”

  “George. That’s all I know.”

  “When is your next meeting?”

  Lonetree hesitated only a moment. “December 27.”

  “Where?”

  “At a church not far from here.”

  Olson quickly wrote a number on a piece of paper and handed it to the terrified Marine. “I want you to keep all of this to yourself,” he said. “You are to tell no one else that we have spoken. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When do you get off duty tomorrow?”

  “At noon, sir.”

  “Tomorrow, after you are off work, leave the embassy and call this number from a pay telephone. I’ll answer. Don’t identify yourself. Just be friendly and tell me what time we can meet. The meeting place will be the McDonald’s on Spätenplatz. You know the place?” Olson kept the instructions simple. He doubted Lonetree’s ability to handle anything more complicated, more secure, in a city like Vienna, which the KGB still felt was their operational preserve.

  “Yes, sir. I know McDonald’s.”

  “We’ll meet there at the time we’ve agreed to on the phone. Then we’ll go somewhere to talk.”

  “Yes, sir,” Clayton Lonetree said.

  Olson saw that the panic was still in his eyes. “You’ll tell no one about our talk. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Olson left the Christmas party and went to cable CIA headquarters, outlining his account of the encounter with Clayton Lonetree. By early the next morning, he had received instructions from Langley to debrief Lonetree on the nature of his relationship with the KGB in Moscow. He was told to stay alert for the possibility of running Lonetree in place for a while, until the CIA could determine how much damage he had done. But Olson was convinced that Lonetree was too close to an emotional breakdown, too panicked, to function as a double agent and reported that observation to Langley as he prepared for the meeting with the Marine.

  Shortly after noon, the telephone rang. Olson picked it up before the third ring.

  “Sir, I could meet at two-thirty.”

  “Two-thirty is fine,” Olson responded. “I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

  Jim Olson selected a young counterintelligence officer with a good background on the KGB to accompany him to the initial debriefing. He hoped that the young officer would help calm Lonetree down and ease his fears.

  Lonetree was waiting at the McDonald’s on Spätenplatz when Olson and his colleague arrived. Quickly taking the Marine in tow, they drove him to a safe site, where they conducted their initial debrief. The instructions from CIA headquarters had been specific—Olson was to determine how much damage had been done.

  Langley, 1330 Hours, December 22, 1986

  Paul Redmond read the latest wrap-up from Vienna on Lonetree. Olson was not only a seasoned intelligence officer, he was also a lawyer, and his summary of the debriefing sessions with the Marine guard concluded that this was no longer a counterintelligence operation. It should now be a criminal case.

  As Clayton Lonetree talked, it became clear to Olson that he had fallen into the oldest KGB trap in the business. While serving as a Marine guard at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Lonetree, a lonely young Native American, had met a beautiful Soviet embassy employee, Violetta Sanni. Their affair was in violation of the embassy’s policy forbidding fraternization between Marine guards and Soviet women, so the two kept their relationship secret. But as the relationship with Violetta deepened, her “uncle Sasha” suddenly appeared, completing the classic honey trap. Lonetree began passing information to Violetta’s kindly uncle and responded to his directions to serve as his eyes and ears in the U.S. embassy.

  After his transfer to Vienna, Uncle Sasha appeared in the Austrian capital and introduced Lonetree to “George,” his KGB colleague in Vienna. Lonetree continued providing information to the KGB in Vienna and received occasional payments for his services, until he could no longer live with himself.

  Olson recommended in his summary report that the case be turned over to the prosecutors. He concluded that the CIA had reached the end of its proper involvement.

  Redmond didn’t like the idea, but he knew Olson was right. Clayton Lonetree was spirited out of Vienna on Christmas morning by a team of officers from the Naval Investigative Service, just eleven days after he approached Jim Olson at the ambassador’s residence.

  To assess the damage, Redmond decided he’d have to order a comprehensive review of all documents sent to Moscow in any way related to the agents who had been lost in the last eighteen months. If the KGB had a Marine guard on their payroll in Moscow, they might have gotten into the CIA area—and the agency’s files. Someone would have to look through every cable in Moscow’s files that mentioned the agents who had been arrested to see if a KGB break-in—possibly facilitated by Clayton Lonetree—could explain the 1985 losses. Redmond would ask Sandy Grimes and Diana Worthen to handle the investigation.

  Moscow, 1940 Hours, December 22, 1986

  The waitress brought two more tumblers of gin to the two men at the corner table and took away the four empty glasses. As an afterthought, she dumped the overflowing ashtray on her serving tray and sullenly walked away. Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov and his boss, Valentin Klimenko, were seated at a low table in the bar of the Press Club at the Soviet Foreign Ministry near Moscow’s Old Arbat. They had been there, drinking imported English gin and smoking Marlboro filters, for about an hour before Klimenko dropped the bomb on his subordinate.

  “Sasha, I have a job for you.”

  Zhomov watched his boss expectantly. With thick, dark hair, the blue-eyed Klimenko was a small, wiry man in his early forties. Both men were American specialists in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, and both knew as much about the Americans in Moscow as anyone in Soviet counterintelligence. Valentin Klimenko was Rem Krassilnikov’s deputy, and Aleksandr Zhomov directly supervised the people who watched the Americans twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Zhomov’s people put their American charges to bed in the evening and woke them up each morning. Sometimes, depending on the particular American, they had the means to “watch” them while they slept.

  “You have one month,” Klimenko continued, “to come to me with a plan for something special for our American special services boys. One month.”

  “Something special?”

  “Yes. Something that will get us deep inside them, give us a window we’ve never had, something that will tell us what they’re doing to us, how they do it, maybe even how they smuggle their agents out.”

  Zhomov fell silent as he contemplated what Klimenko might be asking of him. Just thirty-two, Aleksandr Zhomov had spent most of the last ten years following the Americans in Moscow. Along the way, he had learned English well enough to converse in it with almost native fluency, even though he had never met any of his American targets. But he felt he knew them all. He had listened carefully to what they said to one another when they felt they were alone in their apartments. He knew when and how often they made love to their wives, or maybe even the wives of other men. He knew what problems they were having on the job in Moscow or back home when they received telephone calls on the Moscow-Washington tie-line. Zhomov and his people knew almost everything you’d want to know about the Americans, except what they might do next. And now Klimenko was asking him to come up with a way to deal with that.

  “How many people will I have on this?” Zhomov asked.

  “Just you.” Klimenko held up a single finger, and his expression, a sort of half smile, didn’t change. “You’ll be all alone.”

  “Rem Sergeyevich?” Zhomov’s question was clear. Was their boss Krassilnikov in on this?

  “You won’t need to discuss this with Rem Sergeyevich. He doesn’t need
to be bothered.”

  Klimenko’s answer spoke most loudly in what it did not say. Zhomov took the answer at face value, unable to decide whether Krassilnikov was in or out. Klimenko helped him understand.

  “You’ll report to me and I’ll report to the Chairman.”

  “So that’s it. You, me, and Viktor Mikhailovich.”

  “That’s it, Sasha. You, me and Chairman Chebrikov.” Klimenko finally smiled, flashing Russian gold.

  Later that night when he was alone, Sasha Zhomov thought deeply about the new requirement Klimenko had levied on him. He could do it. But it would have to be something bold, something that broke all the old rules. He poured himself another drink, this time Georgian brandy, and thought some more about his plan. Yes, he thought, it could work. The first thing he would have to do was start a few quiet interrogations of the traitors, the ones who had not been dispatched by a bullet. That would be a good place to start.

  PART TWO

  THE COLD WAR TURNS HOT IN AFGHANISTAN

  1

  Islamabad, June 1, 1986

  Two weeks after Clair George told me I was being assigned to Islamabad to run the Afghan covert action program, I made a quick visit to Pakistan for briefings and to take the lay of the land. The visit gave me a chance to meet the CIA’s man in charge, Bill Piekney, and to get his view on how the war was going, both politically and on the battlefield.

  Slender but not tall, well groomed and soft-spoken, Bill Piekney was a consummate CIA man who had enjoyed a rapid rise up through the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. The former Navy officer knew the rules, did as he was told, and did it well, and for two years running the covert action program in Pakistan, Piekney had played by the rules. Steady as she goes, had been the order. Don’t let things get out of control.