The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  In my last meeting with Hamid Gul, the plucky little general had high hopes for both Pakistan and the United States jointly building a new Afghanistan, adding stability and strategic depth to Pakistan’s rear area as the Islamic republic turned its attention once again to India, its permanent foe to the east. As a parting gift, I would present Gul with a U.S. cavalry sword, and during my last days in Islamabad, I would help him choose an American university for his oldest son. Together we decided on Texas A&M University. It would be just right for the boy, I thought. But it wouldn’t happen. The man Arnie Raphel dubbed “the PLG” would soon turn against us, convinced that we had used and then betrayed Pakistan and its people. In a way, he would be right. And some years later, the CIA would describe the plucky little general as “the most dangerous man in Pakistan.” And that, too, would be right.

  But for now, the time and place for the endgame of the contest with the USSR had shifted far to the west of the Eastern Mountains. The action now was closer to home for the Soviets.

  PART THREE

  ENDGAME

  1

  Vienna, Austria, April 27, 1989

  Patience is sometimes rewarded, Ted Price thought with satisfaction. The quiet little Austrian home, complete with hausfrau, looked innocent enough. But every so often, unnoticed by neighbors, the little house had a strange visitor who would make an important telephone call and then leave again. The stranger was a man named Reino Gikman, a KGB “illegal,” or deep cover operator, and once the CIA discovered this pattern, they began to watch the house and listen to the telephone—and, with great patience, to wait.

  When Gikman arrived on April 27, he dialed a telephone number in the United States—in the 202 area code for Washington, D.C.—and Ted Price, deputy chief of the counterintelligence center at CIA, knew that he finally had his man. A quick check revealed that Gikman had dialed the home telephone number of Felix Bloch, the State Department’s director of European and Canadian affairs and the former deputy chief of mission in the American embassy in Vienna. Price was not a Soviet expert—he had learned the craft of intelligence along the streets of Hong Kong and Beijing and in Third World postings like Addis Ababa—but he recognized instantly that he had a bombshell on his hands.

  An arrogant and stiff man who affected old-world European mannerisms as he moved smoothly through diplomatic circles, Bloch was, on the surface at least, the embodiment of the State Department’s tradition-bound culture. He was a man to whom custom and position were all important and hardly seemed to be the type to take the risk of leading a double life as a Russian spy. But the phone call from Gikman suddenly changed everything; Bloch was about to become one of the highest-ranking State Department officials ever to be investigated for espionage. Price knew his spy hunters would have to proceed carefully—and quietly.

  Once Bloch was in their sights, the CIA and FBI moved quickly. After opening their investigation, they gained the help of French intelligence, which tracked Bloch to a meeting in Paris with Gikman on May 14. By now there was little doubt at Langley that Bloch was working for the Soviets. As counterintelligence teams handling the case dug into Bloch’s background, they discovered that the outwardly dignified diplomat had a hidden penchant for S&M and had even gone so far as to hire his own dominatrix in Vienna. He seemed to have been working for the Soviets since at least 1974. He did it, by all appearances, for the money. His wife was totally oblivious to his secret life.

  Yet there was still little hard evidence to take to court. The FBI didn’t have absolute proof that Bloch had passed classified materials to Gikman and the Soviets. John Martin, the Justice Department’s unsparing chief attorney on espionage cases, would demand a better case. Ted Price and his colleagues at the counterintelligence center would have to keep watching.

  Idylwood Park, Fairfax, Virginia, May 22, 1989

  Felix Bloch meant nothing to Robert Hanssen—less than nothing, really. Bloch was a State Department dandy who had sullied himself and deserved to be arrested. From what Hanssen had seen of the Bloch file, the diplomat was an urbane Europhile, just the sort of man the FBI special agent would love to put in handcuffs. Yet the other Robert Hanssen, the Soviet spy code-named B, could understand this other man with a secret life. What’s more, he believed that he owed it to the KGB to warn them one of their agents was in trouble. Gikman was a KGB professional, operating without diplomatic immunity; if caught, he would face serious prison time. “Bloch was such a schnook,” Hanssen later wrote to the KGB. “I almost hated protecting him, but then he was your friend, and there was your illegal I wanted to protect.”

  So Hanssen set aside his qualms about Bloch. He laid down a “call-out” signal for an exchange, this time at the “Bob” dead drop under a footbridge in Idylwood Park, not far from his home. He left a package for his KGB handlers, and in the package was information revealing the existence of the FBI’s investigation of Bloch and warning that Reino Gikman had been compromised. Hanssen also left a diamond that the KGB had previously given him for services rendered; he wanted the Russians to reimburse him with cash. For good measure, he threw in a computer diskette containing classified information about several FBI technical intelligence programs, along with a note suggesting an account in Switzerland where the KGB could send him more money.

  After taking care of his business with the KGB, Hanssen eventually made his way home to his family. Over the years since she had stumbled onto his involvement with Russian intelligence in 1980, Bonnie Hanssen had repeatedly and pointedly questioned Bob as to whether he had fallen back on his old ways. He always acted hurt when she questioned him, hurt that she didn’t trust him to uphold his promise. Their growing family was living on a shoestring, so she came to believe that Bob was living up to his pledge never to deal with the Russians again. After all, she had no real evidence of unexplained cash; her brother and sister-in-law would later claim that they knew she had found a large amount of money in the house, but she would respond that she didn’t know what they were talking about.

  Of course, there had been those odd moments when Bob had engaged in one of his many fantasies. There were the times when he had insisted on taking Bonnie out to expensive stores to try on ball gowns. Bonnie thought it was all so silly, a mother of six being treated like Cinderella, and she made it clear to Bob that she wasn’t interested in buying one. In exasperation, she finally asked him where on earth did he expect her to ever wear such a fancy gown?

  Bob actually had an answer. Why, to a presidential inaugural ball, of course. He explained to her that he’d received invitations to Republican inaugural balls—apparently for the inaugural of the first George Bush, for one of the inaugurals of Ronald Reagan, or for both.

  A review of records at the Federal Election Commission did not turn up any evidence that Robert Hanssen ever made contributions to any presidential candidates or other campaigns. Still, inaugural invitations tend to be given to campaign supporters and contributors, so it is possible that he gave money to some organization or political entity. That raises an intriguing question: Did some of Bob Hanssen’s KGB money end up in Republican Party coffers?

  After her husband’s arrest, Bonnie reported to government investigators her belief that her husband had contributed money to Republican campaigns and conservative causes. It is unclear whether Bonnie had firsthand knowledge that her husband had contributed to political campaigns, but there is also no evidence that the government investigators followed up on her information.

  Washington, D.C., June 22, 1989

  Once again, the telephone rang in the middle of the night in Felix Bloch’s home. This time the caller identified himself as “Ferdinand Paul” and said he was calling for “Pierre,” who “cannot see you in the near future.” Pierre was “sick,” Paul said. He added that “a contagious disease is suspected.”

  Then, before hanging up, Paul added, “I am worried about you. You have to take care of yourself.”

  As Bloch nervously laid down the receiver, he knew that he
had to think fast. The call had been from the KGB. He knew that “Pierre” was Gikman and that the message meant that Gikman had been betrayed. The KGB was telling him that he was in deep trouble, too.

  Thanks to the warning in May, Gikman had already fled to Moscow, but the KGB had waited a month to warn Bloch after receiving Hanssen’s tip. For whatever reason, the Soviets had moved first to protect Gikman and only later Bloch. Felix Bloch was now on his own.

  When he arrived at the State Department the next morning, Bloch learned just how alone he really was. Confronted by the FBI, whose agents had been listening in on the call and were furious that the diplomat had been tipped off the previous night, Bloch found his whole world crumbling around him. Still, the warning from the KGB had been just enough to steel him against the FBI’s hostile questioning. He stood his ground, refusing to give the agents the self-incriminating statements they needed to make an arrest.

  Frustrated—both with Bloch’s refusal to talk and their own inability to obtain Justice Department approval to arrest and prosecute him—the FBI began tailing him openly everywhere around Washington. By July, the fact that there was a suspected spy at the State Department finally became public when ABC News broke the story. Now, the FBI agents following Bloch were joined by television news crews, and the investigation that Ted Price had wanted to keep secret had become a media circus. Footage of the bald-headed Bloch sitting forlornly on a Washington park bench surrounded by cameras and reporters almost engendered public sympathy for this very unsympathetic man.

  The scrutiny only hampered the FBI’s efforts to persuade the Justice Department to move against Bloch. Soon the case reached a stalemate, and a deep bitterness set in among the investigators at the CIA and FBI who thought they’d been so close to nailing Bloch and now had to watch him slip out of their grasp.

  Of course, Bloch didn’t escape punishment completely. He was forced out of the State Department for security violations and later moved to North Carolina, where he was reduced to working first as a clerk at a grocery store and later as a bus driver. His wife divorced him, and he spent his days mounting a last-ditch legal battle against the State Department for denying him his pension.

  The Bloch case remained open for years afterward, but Bloch himself was never arrested or charged with espionage. In 1992, after the end of the Cold War, a retired KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, defected to Britain and provided British intelligence with a cache of notes and transcripts he’d copied from secret KGB files, primarily from the illegals section of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Mitrokhin’s stash included notes about the KGB’s handling of the Felix Bloch case, according to sources familiar with the case. The Bloch fiasco quickly faded from the media’s attention, but at least a few counterintelligence experts at the CIA and FBI continued to wonder how their case had been exposed so quickly to the KGB.

  Must have been the French.

  CIA Headquarters, July 10, 1989

  After Boris Gromov’s melodramatic crossing of the Amu Dar’ya in February, Dick Stolz decided it was time for me to come back to Langley to take over the Soviet/East European Division from Burton Gerber, who’d held the job for the last five years. By May it was official, and I began preparations for a change of scenery—I would swap the Indus for the Potomac.

  When I arrived at headquarters after the July 4 break, the only small sign I saw that Gerber had hung on to anything associated with his old SE fiefdom was so subtle that it had attracted no attention at all.

  By tradition, the chiefs of the line divisions and senior staffs in the DO were assigned to thirteen reserved parking places just outside the southwest entrance of the Old Headquarters Building, with slot number one assigned to Chief, SE, and number thirteen to Chief Europe. My first day back, I spotted Gerber’s Toyota in C/SE’s slot, so I pulled into the vacant number thirteen. In my office, I found the parking permit for slot number thirteen among the welcome home items on my desk. I would never know whether it was the attraction of being in slot number one that had prompted Gerber to hang on to his old parking place or the possibly ominous portent of number thirteen. Either way, it didn’t matter much to me.

  SE had moved from its traditional real estate in the Old Headquarters Building to a new building that had gone up behind it while I was away. The new building was touted as a state-of-the-art affair, specially shielded to prevent electromagnetic attack and designed in every way for the needs of America’s intelligence services approaching the twenty-first century. There was a massive atrium with suspended models of U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, an airy court with a James Sanborn sculpture called Kryptos telling a story of information gathering and cryptography. The new building was linked to the old one with a gently curving tunnel called, ominously, a “wave guide,” which was supposed to prevent electromagnetic emanations from passing through from either direction.

  But with all the advanced technology, there were signs that it had been thrown up a little haphazardly. In my second-floor corner office, one of the outer walls just missed properly joining a connecting wall and had to be patched, much in the way a pair of pants might be expanded at the waist with a sewn-in strip of cloth. High-tech, low-tech, I thought. A pretty appropriate description of the agency.

  Paul Redmond, the deputy division chief, was waiting when I checked in.

  “Welcome back,” he said, extending his hand. “You’ve been out there goofing off too long.”

  “You been goofing off, too? Or do we have some new business?” I hadn’t had any detailed briefings on what had been going on in SE since I’d left in the midst of the “1985 troubles”; I’d made a point of not overlapping with Gerber and hadn’t asked for a briefing from him.

  “We’ve got business,” Redmond said.

  That first morning back, Redmond brought me up to date on the cases that had been compromised after I’d left—FITNESS, MILLION, ACCORD, TOP HAT, JOGGER from Jakarta . . . the casualty list was long. The cause of the losses was still a mystery. Edward Lee Howard could account for some, but not all; and the Marine guard scandal in Moscow, though it had looked as if it might be the answer at the time, turned out not to be. Internal investigations at the CIA and FBI had turned up nothing, and our two probes had run dry. The fact that most of the losses seemed to have occurred in one brief but intense burst had prompted a review of obituaries of CIA employees, to see if someone who’d had access to the blown cases had died. The FBI had tried cold pitches of KGB officers in an effort to recruit a source who could tell them what had happened. But nothing worked—the investigation had gone cold. Redmond told me that Jeanne Vertefeuille was still looking at the problem in the counterintelligence center.

  But Vertefeuille, an experienced SE Division hand, had been looking at the 1985 losses since late 1986, and had not had any success in solving the mystery. Gus Hathaway, then the counterintelligence chief, had asked Vertefeuille, who had been serving as a station chief in West Africa, to return to headquarters to analyze the damage and try to solve the puzzle of why the CIA was losing its Russian agents. When she arrived back at Langley in the fall of 1986, Vertefeuille began a lonely and painstaking effort to find out if the damaged cases had anything in common. Working in such secrecy that she even refused to tell Redmond exactly what she was doing, Vertefeuille and her small staff spent months sorting through old files and interviewing key SE Division employees who had had access to the cases. It was all in a vain attempt to develop a cross-referencing matrix that might reveal a common denominator and unlock the mystery. With limited resources and virtually no high-level interest in the investigation, she was unable to determine conclusively whether there was a mole or simply a compromise in the agency’s communications. The best that Vertefeuille could offer was that Moscow Station had access to all but one or two of the cases. The FBI, concerned about the losses of its own Soviet agents, including Martynov and Motorin, consulted with the CIA and began its own probe as well in 1986, code-named ANLACE. But the bureau had no more luck t
han Vertefeuille, and both reviews had soon lost steam.

  The Vertefeuille investigation continued for years, but it was crippled from the start by the fact that Hathaway had made it clear that he didn’t want a full-fledged mole hunt, one that would have included polygraph examinations of all those who had had access to the blown cases. Instead, Vertefeuille worked her matrices and lists of names, but she lacked the evidence—or the bureaucratic power—to make much progress. Her inquiry was conducted at such a low level that top CIA officials were not aware that it had all but petered out.

  Redmond told me that he hadn’t been following what she was doing too closely since he was still on the short list of suspects.

  I smiled when he said that, until he quipped, “Don’t smile, you’re on the list.”

  I quickly got a feel for how Gerber’s security measures had changed the old routines. Back when I’d left in 1985, there had been one morning staff meeting, attended by all of the division’s seven or eight senior officers. Each one would be able to hear what was going on in other areas—counterintelligence, external operations, Eastern Europe, Moscow operations, intelligence production, personnel matters. All that was history. My first morning staff meeting was actually a series of small sessions. Along with Redmond, who continued as my deputy, and Steve Weber, the division’s chief of operations, or COPS, I met with each group chief one at a time. That way, the Eastern European group chief never knew what was going on in the Soviet Union, and vice versa. The only officers in the division aware of the full scope of our activities were the chief, the deputy chief, and the chief of operations. It was not the most efficient way to manage things, but it seemed to be keeping our agents alive, and that was undoubtedly a good thing.