After the endless compartmented staff meetings that first morning back on the job, I shuffled back to my new corner office and took in the lay of the land. Though the surroundings were different—modern steel and blue glass as opposed to the more Gothic architecture of the old building—the props were much the same: the same Federalist furniture, the couches arranged for small meetings, the secure STU-III phone on the credenza. But on the two-drawer safe behind my desk was something I’d never had before—a plain black telephone that linked me to KGB headquarters in Moscow—the Gavrilov channel. Inside the safe was Gerber’s file on the link with Lubyanka, explaining in great detail how the communications pipeline had been opened in the early 1980s. Over the coming two years, Gavrilov would be used more than ever before.
I looked over the briefing papers that had been prepared for me, each sealed in a separate envelope. We were in the process of vetting about a dozen new volunteers from a wide variety of ministries and technical institutes. Business looked pretty good. Whatever had happened to us in the past was clearly not at work now.
As I settled into my new job in the summer of 1989, I had to take stock not only of the new surroundings in SE Division, where, as Redmond put it, nothing really ever changed, to the world in which we operated, where changes were happening faster than they could be assimilated. By the time I arrived at Langley, the real beneficiaries of the end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan were emerging—not the people of Afghanistan, but the people of East-Central Europe.
The first word of looming change came in May, a scant ninety days after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when the German chancellor was told by Gorbachev on the Soviet leader’s first visit to West Germany that force was no longer a viable means for holding the Warsaw Pact together. Gorbachev reaffirmed his policy, first hinted at late the previous year, that in effect the Brezhnev Doctrine had been scrapped.
That same month, the Hungarians made an overt move that would send tremors through the Soviet empire in East-Central Europe—they began dismantling the barbed-wire span of the Iron Curtain on their frontier with Austria. The stringing of that barbed wire tripped off the Cold War, prompting Winston Churchill in May 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, to declare, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” For over half a century the world had accepted this shaky demarcation as a boundary between East and West—between the Communist sphere and Western Europe—and now, with a few snips, the landscape of the Cold War had changed overnight. Since then, people had begun to stream across that old line in growing numbers, and nobody seemed to be prepared to stand in their way.
Convinced that the Soviets had neither the stomach nor the means to do anything about it, Budapest took another fateful step in June. The Hungarian government rehabilitated the hero of the 1956 revolution, Imre Nagy, hung two years after the revolt was crushed by Soviet tanks, and reinterred him as a national hero. The probes in Hungary were the first acts of defiance by a member of the Warsaw Pact. But others would follow in breathtaking succession.
On June 5 the people of Poland elected Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Party to a stunning majority in the Polish parliament. Communism was dealt a body blow at the very core of the Warsaw Pact, though most of America was transfixed by the images coming in from Tiananmen Square of the revolution that had exploded one day earlier.
And all through the summer of 1989, small knots of activists in the German Democratic Republic began gathering in the churches and coffeehouses of Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin to talk of change and demand more travel rights. Their numbers were tiny at first, but then they grew, and by the time I checked in at headquarters, there was no longer any doubt that something truly historic was afoot in the Soviet Union’s Eastern European empire.
First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, July 10, 1989
Leonid Shebarshin ought to have felt at the top of his game. Comfortably settled in his corner office on the second floor in the leadership suite at Yasenevo, he took stock of his career and his world and decided they were heading in opposite directions. His promotion to head of the First Chief Directorate, a job that put him in charge of KGB foreign intelligence operations worldwide, had been the source of some solace. He was more than a little relieved to finally be done with the betrayals and false promises of the Afghan enterprise that had consumed his professional and, in some ways, his personal life for the last five years. The fact that his old boss, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had moved downtown to take over as Chairman of the KGB made his position all the more secure. An ordinary general officer in the KGB might have just settled into this snug perch to mark time until he could start thinking about the corner suite at Lubyanka and maybe a seat on the Politburo. But Shebarshin felt no such satisfaction. On the contrary, in the five months since he had been on the job, he had become convinced that the world he had lived and worked in over the last three decades was coming to a crashing end.
It all began with the march out of Afghanistan on February 15, a fateful end to an adventure that, to his mind, had been doomed from the start. The troika of Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and Aleksandr Yakovlev, the old Party propagandist who’d gone liberal and was now glued to Gorbachev’s side, had in a few short years undermined the foundation of socialist unity that had been so carefully reinforced over the previous forty years. Gorbachev and his cohorts had almost flippantly declared that the USSR should abandon its paternalistic responsibility for the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. From now on, they’d have to stand on their own. It was every man for himself, the new policy troika had decided, and it didn’t take long for things to start coming apart at the seams.
Shebarshin had seen it coming even before he’d moved to the top job at Yasenevo. The Afghan calamity had been the first breach of the Brezhnev Doctrine, the long-standing principle that Moscow would never abandon a fraternal socialist country. Before General Gromov marched his last column across Friendship Bridge, a telegram had been sent to all diplomatic posts and KGB Rezidentura abroad announcing the new policies of noninterference.
Shebarshin had been tracking the first whispers of rebellion in the Soviet Union’s “near abroad” since early spring: the defiant moves in Hungary, the devastating elections in Poland, and, even more ominous, the growing restlessness in the German Democratic Republic. The stage was set for a total breakdown, he concluded darkly, and he decided he’d better call home his Rezidents from Eastern Europe. He’d need their assessments to draw a new road map for Eastern Europe, and a quick conference should help.
He may not have bargained for the frankness he got. The gathered KGB chiefs drew a dismal picture of events in their countries. Their collective judgment was that socialist unity was coming to an end, and rapidly. The economic position of the USSR, it was reluctantly agreed, was so weak that meaningful aid to the countries of Eastern Europe was no longer possible. They would have to tailor their activities accordingly.
A consensus was reached early in the conference that the ideological commitment in the fraternal socialist countries, never strong, was weakening to the point at which the collapse of socialism throughout the Warsaw Pact was likely, if not imminent. In Poland, over forty years of socialism had been wiped away at the polling stations just a month earlier. Less sensational, but equally irreversible, was the shift away from the principles of socialism in Hungary; and in Czechoslovakia, there was talk of a return to the Prague Spring of a generation ago. The key, of course, would be the German Democratic Republic. If the troubles took root in Germany, the results could be disastrous.
The belief in the common threat from the United States that had held the alliance together for forty years had suddenly given way to a race for rapprochement with the Americans. Shebarshin placed an equal share of the blame on Gorbachev and his two key political advisers, though his deepest distaste was reserved for Shevardnadze. It seemed that the Georgian Foreign Minister spent hours on end alone with his American counterparts, first George
Shultz and now James Baker, without interpreters or note takers watching over the proceedings. There was no telling what sort of devil’s deals he was cutting with the Americans when nobody was watching.
Shebarshin’s last job had been cauterizing what Gorbachev had described as the “bleeding wound” of Afghanistan. This new job involved greater stakes, and he was afraid the outcome had already been decided.
Langley, 0900 Hours, July 12, 1989
I arrived a few minutes early for my first DDO staff meeting. Standing alone in the sixth-floor conference room where the DDO had been holding his weekly meetings for as long as I could remember, I felt surrounded, as I always had in that room, by the history of the Directorate of Operations. Punctuating the gray, sound-absorbing walls were the photographs of the men who had charted the history of the directorate for the forty years of its existence. At one end were the fading but somehow still dashing black-and-white snapshots of Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, the establishment men who’d run the directorate from 1951 to 1959, when it was more mysteriously known as the Deputy Directorate for Plans. At the other end were the posed and somber color shots of the “citizen DDOs,” ending with John Stein and Clair George, the Stars and Stripes hanging proudly in the background. In between were the directorate’s icons—Dick Helms, Des FitzGerald, and Bill Colby—and its oddities like Max Hugel, who lasted just two turbulent months in 1981.
There were thirteen photos on the wall—that dangerous number again—and whenever I scanned them I would note the unsettling proportion of them who had come to grief. Dulles had been fired by JFK over the Bay of Pigs fiasco; Wisner had died by his own hand, tormented by demons; Helms had pleaded “no contest” to charges of failing to testify fully to Congress regarding CIA activities in Salvador Allende’s Chile. He was fined a few thousand dollars, a token sum paid in full by loyal colleagues who passed the hat, and then confirmed by Congress as ambassador to Iran. The last photo was of Clair George, Dick Stolz’s predecessor, who had retired under the pressure of the Iran-contra affair two years earlier and was now under federal indictment.
As I waited for the meeting to begin, I wondered how many of the men who would be here this morning would want the DDO’s job. Probably all of them, I decided.
“Welcome back, Milton.”
I turned to find Burton Gerber walking toward me, hand extended.
“Settled in?” he asked.
“You left it all nice and tidy,” I said. “And yes, thank you, I’m settling in fine.”
Before the moment could become awkward, the other DO chiefs filed in, followed by Stolz and Tom Twetten. Stolz and his deputy took their seats at the end of the table nearest the entrance; the opposite end was occupied by the counterintelligence chief, Gus Hathaway. The rest of us fanned out along both sides of the table, according to a rigid territoriality—I took the seat that had been occupied by SE chiefs ever since the DDO staff meetings had been taking place in the room. The dozen chiefs at the table were known as the “barons.” The chiefs of the smaller staffs took straight chairs along the wall.
Today’s staff meeting was the season opener for those of us who’d just returned from the field. I spotted Bill Moseby, who controlled Africa, a man I hadn’t seen since we’d run our probe involving the phony recruitment of the GRU Rezident when he was chief in Nairobi in 1986. Jim Higham ran the Near East, and I’d worked with him closely in Islamabad. A professorial man with a faint British accent, Higham had spent much of his career in the Middle East. Jack Downing had returned from Moscow earlier in the year to take over East Asia, which was his original home division. After spending the last three years as Moscow station chief, Downing had been astounded when he’d returned to headquarters that so little was being done to investigate the 1985 losses. But now that he was out of Soviet operations and was East Asia Division chief, he no longer felt it was his place to push for more action.
John MacGaffin was just in from Turkey and had taken over the powerful operational review and resource management staff of the directorate. I hadn’t met John before, but we’d be spending much time together in the next few years. Terry Ward was another senior who was new to me—he was the new Latin America chief.
The half-hour meeting was taken up with a welcome back talk by Stolz, the renewal of acquaintances, and little else, except that Burton Gerber and I had managed our handover of SE Division.
2
East Berlin, July 20, 1989
David Rolph had come a long way in his twelve years at the CIA. On his first overseas tour, in Moscow, he’d been lucky enough to handle some of the agency’s most important Soviet cases, including Adolf Tolkachev. Now, at forty-one, Rolph was back on the front lines of the Cold War, and this time he had been given his first command on the wrong side of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.
In many ways, the small East Berlin Station was a more difficult assignment for a CIA officer than Moscow. It wasn’t that the surveillance by the East Germans was any better or more effective. In fact, it was less comprehensive than the blanket coverage one had to deal with inside the Soviet Union. In Moscow, the KGB could put twenty cars out onto the streets to trail one CIA officer. The East Germans never went to that kind of trouble.
The problem was the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the MfS—infamously known as the Stasi. East Germany’s ubiquitous security service had such an iron grip on its people that almost no one dared spy for the Americans. The Stasi had, by one conservative estimate, 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—agents or full-time informants—and many more snitches in a country of just 17 million. With those odds, few people truly believed they could steal secrets and get away with it. The Stasi didn’t follow CIA officers as diligently as the KGB, but then again, maybe they didn’t need to.
By the 1980s, Berlin had lost some of its early Cold War status as a major hub of espionage operations. After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, the ability of CIA officers based in West Berlin to conduct operations in the eastern sector plunged. West Berlin came to be known as a training ground, rather than a real hotbed of active operations. It was mockingly called “Brandenburg’s School for Boys,” since it was now little more than a place to hone skills before being sent off to the new hot spots where real espionage was being conducted. The East Berlin Station, meanwhile, had never quite been able to establish itself as a major operational hub over the years; it too had come to be regarded as little more than a training assignment for the other capitals in the Warsaw Pact, where real business was being carried out.
Some thought the problems with East Berlin might stem from its movie set atmosphere. A CIA officer operating under the watchful eye of the Stasi, unlike his colleagues in Moscow, could always call time out and slip through Checkpoint Charlie to the west a few hundred yards away for a break. Whatever the reason, the small East Berlin Station that opened for business a dozen years after the Wall went up had remained something of a backwater.
When Rolph arrived in East Berlin in the summer of 1988, the CIA had no agents inside the internal security apparatus of the MfS, or in the HVA, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung, its foreign intelligence arm. It wasn’t for lack of trying. But every one of the men who seemed ready to change sides turned out to be a double agent; the CIA had had no luck in recruiting even the dullest functionaries.
Even so, there was plenty to keep Rolph busy. For some time, officers in East Germany had been secretly planting ground sensors near military bases. The sensors would measure the volume of traffic passing by a military installation and relay the data to a spy satellite in space. If the sensors suddenly detected spikes in traffic outside several military bases all at the same time, it might mean that the East Germans—and their Soviet allies—were mobilizing troops and preparing for war.
CIA officers were trained to install the shoebox-size sensors both at the Farm and in West Germany before they attempted to mount the operations in the East German woods. After making sure he was “black,” the CIA officer would slip on nightvision go
ggles and plunge into the underbrush closest to the military base. His job was to bury the sensor, leaving only its antenna above ground so that it could regularly signal a passing satellite.
It was such an exciting and productive operation that the U.S. Army decided it wanted to get in on it, too. And that was where the trouble began. The Army didn’t let its West German–based intelligence officers work in East Germany—it turned the task of planting the sensors over to German agents. One of the Germans turned out to be a double agent, and he immediately gave his sensor to the Stasi to examine. A flaw in the design quickly became apparent to the East Germans: All of the sensors had been assigned the same frequency. When they dialed in the frequency, they were able to intercept the transmissions from all of the sensors that had been planted at military bases throughout the country. In order to protect their spy, the Stasi left the sensors in place for a time. But the operation was blown.
Another technical operation was designed in response to recent agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union to gradually reduce the nuclear weapons both nations kept in Germany. To verify that Moscow was honoring the treaty, the CIA hit on the idea of hiding gamma radiation sensors next to the East German rail lines heading toward the Soviet Union. The Russians would have to ship their nuclear weapons back home on those rail lines, and the sensors could detect their radiation as they passed by. The CIA could then determine whether the Soviets were sending the missiles home, in compliance with their treaty obligations. It was valuable stuff, but still, technical operations couldn’t make up for the lack of spies.
East Berlin, July 1989
They called him Curly. The fuzzy-haired German was a member of one of the MfS surveillance teams that followed David Rolph and his case officers in East Berlin, day and night, from home to work and back again.
The Main Enemy Page 42