After more than two hours of talk and vodka, Hathaway and I left for our hotel on the Helsinki waterfront. After we had been walking through a deserted park for about ten minutes, we heard a voice calling from the road fifty yards away. “Mister Gataway, Mister Gataway . . .” The Russian pronunciation of Hathaway’s name was unmistakable. In a moment we were joined by the Soviet driver, who handed Gus his wallet. “Must fall out your pocket,” he said, his breath streaming in the cold of the night, and quickly returned to his car.
Hathaway’s look sent an unmistakable message: It wouldn’t be good form for the new SE Division chief to spread the story around Langley about how the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence had lost his wallet at a drinking party with a bunch of KGB hoods.
I stared at Hathaway’s oversize and fully stuffed wallet. “Jeez, Gus, whatcha got in there?” I said. “Every phone number of every contact since you were in high school? Christ, the thing’s probably radioactive from all the photocopying!”
Hathaway ignored my comment, and we walked the rest of the way in silence, both of us trying to make some sense out of the Alice in Wonderland evening we had just spent with our adversaries.
4
Langley, 1130 Hours, December 27, 1989
The revolution that swept through the northern tier of Eastern Europe had finally reached the Balkans, where it played out darkly in Romania. Over the course of the month of December, a rapidly spinning cycle of riots and government-fomented counterriots grew in intensity until all semblance of order simply evaporated. The U.S. embassy was forced to evacuate its personnel overland to Bulgaria, and for Washington the lights went out in Bucharest.
Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, escaped a step ahead of the mobs three days before Christmas, but they were soon captured, and on Christmas Day they were tried and executed by firing squad. Two days later, after a short Christmas break, I met with William Webster to bring him up to date on the Balkans.
“The Army went over to the opposition on the twenty-second,” I said, “the same day the Ceausescus escaped by helicopter. We’re still not clear on the precise sequence and timing, but we think they were captured within a day or so. Over the next two days they were tried, and on Christmas they were executed.”
Judge Webster perked up and, with a reflective expression on his face, said, “What does that tell us about the appeals process in Romania, Milt?”
I had gotten to know Webster from his visits to Pakistan and had witnessed his dry humor in action before. I didn’t break a smile when I answered.
“I think that would be a good subject for the Directorate of Intelligence to check into, Judge Webster,” I said. “And while they’re at it, they might look into the reports that Ceausescu had a hundred bullets in him after his execution. What does that tell us about Romanian firing squads?” For good measure, I threw in the final bizarre tidbit we had gleaned about the last hours of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. “We’ve also heard reliably from London that Her Majesty’s government was able to withdraw Nicolae’s honorary knighthood, bestowed years ago for his staunch opposition to Moscow, a few hours before he stood before his firing squad. I’m sure there was great relief in Buckingham Palace.”
Webster smiled and asked the real question that had been on his mind for the last several weeks. “What are you doing in Eastern Europe?”
“We’re focusing on East Germany right now,” I said. “That’s where the opportunities are. I expect to see some results pretty soon, but to be completely frank, I’m not sure there’s much we ought to do in the northern tier—in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest.”
“Why’s that?” Webster asked, furrowing his brow. The DCI had been deeply interested in the region since he’d visited Europe a few weeks earlier and had called the collapse of the Wall ahead of most in the President’s cabinet. Now he was following events in close to real time.
“Aggressive collection could backfire. I think we should plan to move in quickly with the new governments and see what we can do to shore them up and keep them on track.” I’d been keeping a close eye on events in Prague and Warsaw and had come to the conclusion that stealing secrets might not make as much sense as linking up with the new intelligence services and helping them work with their new governments.
“What about East Germany?” Webster asked.
“We go after them hammer and tongs,” I said, “whenever and wherever we can. They have nowhere to go. As the process moves along, we’ll be all over them.”
“You got a timetable for all this?”
“We’re working the East German problem pretty hard now. And in the northern tier we’re putting out our probes.”
“Just keep me posted, Milt,” Webster said. “There’s a lot of interest in this downtown, I’m sure you know that.”
“I do, Judge Webster. I’m on the phone with them most days.”
The Kremlin, December 27, 1989
Val Aksilenko had seen events since the breach of the Berlin Wall through eyes sometimes blurred by tears of joy. A year earlier, the troubled KGB colonel had arranged to have himself seconded from Yasenevo to the office of the State Foreign Economic Committee in the Council of Ministers. It was his way of moving away from the KGB, one step at a time. The new post was pretty much a nothing job—his office was actually outside the Kremlin Wall—but it got him off the firing line.
Few of his colleagues in the Council of Ministers, and even fewer at Yasenevo, appreciated the fact that socialism had been dealt a death blow. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the most Stalinist state of them all, the DDR, had fallen, all pretty much peacefully. And now, in the Balkans, the ruthless Ceausescu had been toppled and killed. But those around him were too involved with their own increasingly desperate fates, Aksilenko thought, too preoccupied with what was happening inside Mother Russia, to become energized one way or another by events on the perimeter, or even to take much note of them.
The ideological and moral reevaluations under way inside every structure of the Soviet establishment were overwhelming; they were setting in motion nothing less than the collapse of the authority of the Communist Party and of the Soviet system. Better to look around for a soft landing, most of his colleagues thought, than to fret over what was happening in Berlin or Bucharest. And they had the best of it, the guys in the Kremlin and the KGB. For the poor slob in the streets of Moscow it was a different matter—the daily distress of scratching out a subsistence living was simply crushing.
Events were proceeding according to a grand scheme Aksilenko had decided was essential, despite the pain it caused around him. And that temporary pain Mother Russia felt was the source of his tears of joy. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the indispensable spark that had allowed change finally to come to the USSR. It had to happen this way, Aksilenko concluded; the world-shaking changes had to start in the satellites of Eastern Europe and roll inward, toward the center of socialism, toward Moscow itself. He knew that no change of any consequence would ever originate in Moscow. It had to come from the outside.
Aksilenko’s frequent visits to FCD headquarters to measure the mood of his KGB colleagues were always enlightening. The temper at Yasenevo was dark, with opinion divided between the so-called liberals, like himself, who welcomed the coming changes and the conservatives who were scrambling to hold them back. Yasenevo was splitting between the hopeful and the fearful. He was in no doubt that trouble was brewing for the men of the KGB. Sooner or later there would be a showdown. And that conclusion made him all the more grateful that he was away from Yasenevo, off in his snug cubbyhole in the Council of Ministers.
East Berlin, January 15, 1990
The atmosphere was festive, at least at first. Then it became tinged with the fury of revenge as Berliners tore into Stasi headquarters in the vast Normannenstrasse complex and began ripping the place apart, spraying secret documents out of windows and onto the streets below. Others broke into a more valuable secret cache of imported wines and gourmet food
reserved for Stasi officers. Forty years of pent-up hatred of the secret police—a security service that for generations had silenced all dissent—suddenly erupted into the streets of East Berlin.
For the people of East Germany, looting Normannenstrasse was an act of political catharsis, as if throwing the files out the windows would somehow purge the national bloodstream of its culture of suspicion and paranoia. They were turning on the security police with a vengeance born of resentment at being forced to spy on neighbors, on husbands and wives, on mothers and fathers.
It was one of the most dramatic moments of a frenzied few weeks that had transformed East Berlin from a Communist backwater to the hub of a historic revolution. And, as with so many of the other history-defying events since the Berlin Wall had come down, footage from Normannenstrasse was broadcast on CNN and the other networks back into American homes. The television coverage of the storming of Normannenstrasse caught the eye of the President, and he apparently made a casual, offhand remark to his daily CIA briefer about the incident. President Bush wondered aloud whether the CIA was getting its share of the documents floating down onto East Berlin’s streets. Judge Webster heard about the President’s interest, and soon what had started as an off-the-cuff remark at the White House turned into a scramble at the CIA.
Webster asked if the CIA was getting its hands on any of these Stasi documents. The answer was no, and the CIA Director then asked whether we needed new people in Berlin. Webster’s message was clear. After that, I put Redmond on a plane for Germany to light a fire under Rolph.
West Berlin, Late January 1990
Paul Redmond looked across the table and saw two angry case officers. Redmond had come to Berlin to pass on an unpalatable message to David Rolph and the East German station. And as Rolph and his deputy sat in a West Berlin restaurant listening to what Redmond had to say, they didn’t like it one bit.
In all bureaucracies, bad news tends to start at the top and flow downhill, and the CIA was no exception. It just so happened that in this case, David Rolph was at the receiving end of a message that had started at the White House with the President of the United States.
President Bush had seen the looting of Normannenstrasse on CNN and had asked whether the CIA was getting its hands on the documents floating out onto the streets of East Berlin. The answer was no, and Langley realized that was a bad answer to have to give to the White House. So that meant the East Berlin Station had to be put on notice, and Paul Redmond was the one to do it.
Redmond tried to be polite and collegial, but there was no mistaking the message from headquarters: You are on notice that Washington is watching the revolution and wants results. For Rolph’s part, he didn’t believe Redmond was there to scold him for past mistakes, but rather to make it clear that the attitude in Washington about what a CIA station in Eastern Europe should be doing was changing—and changing fast. Overnight, the rules on how to run a bloc station were being rewritten. And whether Rolph and other case officers trained in the traditional clandestine arts of the SE Division liked it or not, they had to change the way they operated, use more openly aggressive tactics, or risk becoming irrelevant.
Rolph resisted. He didn’t like headquarters telling him that he wasn’t being aggressive enough and didn’t think that Langley understood the realities facing CIA case officers in East Berlin. The Stasi wasn’t dead, Rolph told Redmond insistently. We still have to be careful and prudent, or the Stasi will eat our lunch.
His caution was a reflection of his Cold War training and experience. Like many SE Division officers, he had grown up fighting the KGB and the Eastern European intelligence services when they were at their peak, and he had learned to respect their power. Although he had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall with his own eyes, Rolph wasn’t convinced that the old order in East Germany was dead. The MfS, he believed, still might be able to ride out the political turmoil. If CIA officers abandoned their traditional stealthy “denied area” tactics and began to operate more openly, the MfS might strike back. The CIA would then find itself in an even smaller box in East Germany.
So for weeks after November 9, Rolph and his deputy were uncertain whether they could operate more boldly in East Germany. True, Stasi surveillance was beginning to ease up; there were now times when there was no one following them at all. But could it last? Rolph still didn’t know. When the crowds stormed Normannenstrasse, Rolph suspected that the whole thing had been staged by the Stasi. He didn’t believe that it was part of a popular uprising. He thought it was street theater concocted by the Stasi in a last-ditch effort to prompt an outcry from the East German people for a restoration of order and stability. It was, he believed, a modern-day equivalent of the burning of the Reichstag. People back in Washington were watching too much television if they thought that any real secrets had been tossed out of the Stasi windows. So over lunch at a restaurant in Mexico Platz in West Berlin, Rolph told Redmond that the Stasi wasn’t dead.
Sitting in the Berlin restaurant that January, Paul Redmond didn’t argue with Rolph. He tried to be understanding. He said he knew that perceptions in Washington weren’t always the same as reality on the ground.
“But sometimes perception is reality,” he said. “And the perception is that we are missing out.”
Redmond then made it painfully clear that East Berlin Station was going to have to start taking risks, get some new cases going—or else.
Rolph and his deputy didn’t like it, but they got the message. Almost immediately, they responded by launching a campaign to pick over the remnants of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. To their surprise, the CIA officers would quickly discover that, beneath the surface, there was little left of the once mighty MfS. As in Warsaw and Prague, the old order in East Berlin was beginning to crack.
Warsaw, 1990
Andrzej Milczanowski, a rough-hewn and tough-minded provincial lawyer and longtime dissident, had paid his dues to Solidarity. Born in 1939 in a section of eastern Poland that was later absorbed into the Ukraine, Milczanowski came by his hatred for the Communists early on. Soon after the Soviets invaded eastern Poland following Stalin’s disastrous pact with Hitler, Milczanowski’s father, a local prosecutor known for his anti-Communist beliefs, was dragged away by the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB. His family later learned that he had been taken to Kiev and executed, along with other local Polish government and military leaders.
His mother took Andrzej and his sister and fled to Lvov and then to the countryside, and finally after the war they were able to settle in western Poland. Milczanowski studied law in Poznan and like his father became a local prosecutor, working, and chafing, under the Communist regime.
Milczanowski eventually left the prosecutor’s office in Stettin to become a defense lawyer, and in 1978 he took on the case of a pair of local dissidents. The case had a major influence on Milczanowski, so when Solidarity emerged in 1980, he was ready to take on a leadership role in the local movement in Stettin. He served as a member of the Solidarity strike committee in the city. At the beginning of martial law in Poland in 1981, Milczanowski was leading a strike committee at Stettin’s dockyards, and he was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. An amnesty decree cut his sentence to two and a half years, and when he emerged from prison in 1984, Milczanowski went right back into dissident work, becoming head of the underground Solidarity movement in Stettin. In August 1988, he led a strike against the local public transit company, one of the many labor actions around the country that so bedeviled the Communist regime in the months before it finally agreed to roundtable talks with Solidarity.
After Solidarity took control of the government, Milczanowski was put in charge of intelligence matters and soon had to decide what to do with the Communist-era service.
Initially, Milczanowski was frustrated by the fact that so many files had been destroyed. When he asked to see the files from one particular department, an officer came and laid a few pieces of paper on his desk. “Is that your whole file?”
Milczanowski asked in exasperation.
“Yes,” the officer said matter-of-factly and with little embarrassment.
Despite his own tragic personal history with the Communists, Milczanowski approached the issue of what to do with Poland’s foreign intelligence officers with hardheaded pragmatism. Poland had undergone a sudden and radical political transformation, but the Soviet Union still lurked next door. The new democracy, Milczanowski believed, was still vulnerable to external threats. He decided that Poland couldn’t afford the wholesale dismissal of its most experienced spies. Milczanowski later watched in disgust as the new government of Václav Havel fired its intelligence service and started with greenhorns. It was nothing less than unilateral disarmament, Milczanowski believed, and he eventually told the Czechs so in what the Czechs recalled as a very unpleasant meeting.
One of Milczanowski’s new duties was to head a special vetting committee to determine which foreign intelligence officers should be kept and which ones let go. Gromoslaw Czempinski was chosen by the foreign service to serve as an advocate for its officers in front of the vetting committee, and soon the ex-Communist spy had developed a close relationship with Milczanowski, the ex-dissident who was now his boss. Czempinski was eventually named deputy chief of the foreign intelligence service and became, in effect, Poland’s DDO.
But they sometimes fought fiercely over which officers should be retained. The vetting committee was particularly suspicious of officers who had been extremely active under the Communists and often let those who lacked much of an operational track record slip through. In the end, the committee agreed to keep about six hundred of the approximately one thousand officers from the foreign intelligence service, although Milczanowski later regretted some of the individual selections. He discovered that many of those who had been the most active—and who thus came under the most scrutiny from the vetting panel—were also the best and most efficient. The officers who had done little under the Communists were not closet dissidents or secret Polish heroes, but simply lazy.
The Main Enemy Page 46