The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  6

  East Berlin, June 1990

  David Rolph had been through this routine at least a dozen times over the last few weeks, and it was starting to get a little tedious. It seemed that every Soviet who had managed to buy a ticket for a bus vacation in East Germany now wanted to defect to the West. Over the years there had always been a small handful of Soviet walk-ins, but now the floodgates had opened. Rolph was screening as many as four a week, all seeking political asylum. Most were simple tourists, with no special knowledge of interest to the CIA. Rolph and other officers took turns with the screening and politely directed them to seek refugee status through the normal immigration channels. One look at the young Soviet in the waiting room and Rolph sighed and began to think about how soon he could send him on his way. He was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and a baseball cap and had approached one of the Marine guards, who called to tell Rolph that another walk-in was in the waiting room. As he took him in, Rolph saw a young man in his early thirties and quickly dismissed him as a Russian tourist, just another unhappy factory worker from Leningrad or Moscow.

  Rolph was too tired of these sessions to go through the standard, highly structured debriefing process with yet another tourist. He figured he would cut it short and have the guy out the door in a couple of minutes.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked far too casually. He didn’t even bother to sit down.

  “I want to go to America,” the man answered.

  How many times had he heard that line? “Well, that’s very difficult,” Rolph said. “There is a lot of paperwork, and we really can’t help you here.” Time to get rid of this stiff, he thought.

  “Oh, I thought it might be possible, because I am a Soviet officer.”

  Rolph stopped short. “What did you say?”

  “I am a fighter pilot.”

  Rolph eased into a chair across from the young man, realizing with a jolt that he had nearly managed to throw a good prospect out on his ear.

  Rolph’s Russian tourist turned out to be a major in the Soviet Air Force, a decorated veteran of the Afghan War and now a flight instructor teaching new Soviet pilots how to fly the latest, nonexport version of the Soviet Union’s most advanced fighter, the MiG-29. He was stationed at a Soviet air base not far from Leipzig, deep in East Germany, and had come to East Berlin on his day off in order to contact the Americans.

  Quickly trying to make amends for his earlier casual approach, Rolph asked the Soviet how long he could spend before he had to leave. About forty-five minutes, he replied. Rolph handed him a legal notepad and told him to write down as much as he could remember about the MiG-29 that he believed was considered secret. “I don’t know anything about MiGs,” Rolph said. “But we have people in Washington who do. If they are interested in what you write down, then we can work with you.”

  Rolph left the Soviet alone for the full forty-five minutes, and when he returned, he found that the Soviet had filled a dozen pages with notes and drawings. He took the notes and told the pilot that if Washington was interested in what he had provided, he would meet him in an East Berlin park the following Saturday. He also told him never to come back to the embassy.

  Rolph sent the Soviet’s handwritten notes to CIA headquarters by a secure fax, and the next day Langley cabled back that the pilot was the real thing. His notes had already revealed details about the MiG-29 that American military experts hadn’t known and were very much worth pursuing.

  When the two men met as scheduled in an East Berlin park the next Saturday, the pilot agreed to stay in place and spy until the CIA could arrange for his escape. Rolph told him they could meet in a park in Leipzig, which was only a half-hour bus ride away from the Soviet air base where he was stationed. Rolph gave him a camera so that he could secretly take photographs of MiG-29 manuals and other classified materials stored at the base. If he ever missed a meeting, the fallback plan called for Rolph to wait for him two nights later in a small German village about three kilometers from his base.

  The MiG pilot took to espionage with relish and began to hand over dozens of photographs of Soviet Air Force manuals. Soon he started asking Rolph to tell him what his CIA code name was. Revealing a crypt to an agent was frowned upon, but the pilot kept asking, and in the end Rolph gave in.

  “You are SPANIEL.”

  “Spaniel, like a dog?” asked the incredulous pilot. “You call me a dog!”

  Rolph tried to explain that the code names were generated randomly by computers and that the name was not a reflection of what the CIA thought of him. That didn’t soothe the infuriated Soviet, who demanded that his code name be changed immediately. Soon, GTSPANIEL became GTMACRAME.

  The MiG pilot’s pique over his cryptonym didn’t deter him from becoming a major league spy. His bitterness toward the Soviet system—and the hierarchy of the Soviet Air Force in particular—drove him on. He was soon photographing thousands of pages of Soviet Air Force documents, virtually everything of value in the classified library at his base.

  He worked so fast that he complained that the CIA’s tiny cameras, built to look like Bic cigarette lighters, slowed him down. Rolph gave in and gave him the money to go to Leipzig and buy a 35 mm camera on his own. The pilot’s photographic production surged. Ingeniously, the Soviet made a big show of his fancy new camera and soon became the base’s unofficial photographer, taking photos of his fellow pilots—and even his commander—so they could send them back home to their families.

  Langley, July 10, 1990

  The tension had finally begun to subside. The PROLOGUE exfiltration had been launched.

  Technical Services had created an elaborate American identity for Sasha Zhomov—a passport and travel history, along with the usual pocket litter, had been painstakingly assembled and sent off to Moscow. It would be dead dropped to Sasha Zhomov, and then it would be up to him to get out of the USSR using the identity of a West Coast professional traveling from Moscow to the Baltic states.

  Zhomov’s American passport would show prior travel, entries, and exits from a variety of countries that backed up his new identity as an American on private travel. After the usual tours in Moscow and Leningrad, the traveler would proceed to the Baltics and eventually board a ferry in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, for the run to Helsinki. The package was dropped in Moscow, and the rest was up to Zhomov. I dispatched my team to Helsinki to wait for the ferry from Tallinn. There was no turning back. Now we’d have our answer.

  Helsinki, July 12, 1990

  The ferry from Tallinn docked on schedule in Helsinki, but there was no sign of PROLOGUE. The team waited another day. Then another. Still, it was no show. By day four I called them home. We asked Mike Cline and his wife, Jill, to book a compartment on the Red Arrow to Leningrad, to see if PROLOGUE might show up, and if he did, to get his explanation.

  On the Red Arrow, July 14, 1990

  Mike and Jill Cline had slept fitfully on the overnight run to Leningrad, but then they never slept well on these runs—never more than ten-minute catnaps. Mike was always concerned that he’d oversleep and miss the early morning brush pass with PROLOGUE.

  At 0640 hours, Cline quietly left the sleeping compartment and made his way down the passageway of the rocking train to the smoking vestibule between cars. He lit up and waited. Each time he took a drag of his cigarette, he checked his watch. Ten, then fifteen minutes passed. No sign of him. Cline decided it was a no-show and returned to his compartment. He just shook his head to Jill, indicating that there had been no contact, and said nothing. Then Jill cheerily announced to Mike and the microphones that it was her turn to take a smoke and made her way to the smoking vestibule.

  While she was standing there smoking her cigarette, she saw a young man she thought was PROLOGUE pass between cars and then go by again in the opposite direction. Odd, she thought, and decided to return to the compartment to tell Mike what she had seen. But in the passageway of the sleeper she got caught up in conversation with some American tourists traveling to
Leningrad. She was still speaking to them when out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man she thought might be PROLOGUE enter the sleeping car from the rear of the train and walk briskly toward her along the passageway. As he passed behind her, while she was still talking to the American tourists, the man thrust an envelope into her hand and proceeded forward into the next car. Jill Cline turned her head to watch him as he disappeared into the next car. The tourists kept chatting, never noticing the brush pass that had taken place right under their noses.

  Langley, July 14, 1990

  “Fuck!” I exclaimed in exasperation as Redmond and I read our copies of Cline’s cable. The note PROLOGUE had passed to Jill Cline was written with a combination of exasperation and rage. He said that we had been dangerous and foolhardy in preparing the identity switch—for him to try to exit on that identity would have been suicide. Now, he declared, he would have to lie low for a while. He’d get back in touch when the time was right.

  “We’ve got our answer, don’t we?” Redmond was matter-of-fact.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got our answer.”

  “You win some, you lose some,” said Redmond. I could see his disappointment equaled mine.

  Neither of us believed PROLOGUE’s plaintive cry. He was protesting too much. The KGB was good, but there had been no mistakes in the documentation package. The story just didn’t fly. And that meant PROLOGUE was controlled.

  Cline also reported that he and Jill had taken a walk through Leningrad and had noticed that they were under particularly heavy surveillance, something a little out of the ordinary for their visits to Leningrad. They understood a few minutes later when they spotted PROLOGUE with the surveillance team. Nice trick, they thought.

  “No guts, no glory,” I said without conviction, and picked up the phone to call the DDO before he called me. Neither Redmond nor I did a very good job of hiding our disappointment. I would admit later that the odds of the PROLOGUE operation were never better than trying to fill an inside straight, but that was what all but the most cautious poker players always tried to do. They got our passport and a pretty good plan that we wouldn’t be using again, at least not there.

  Now we were going to have to come to grips with what kind of game the KGB was playing. They had broken their cardinal rule: Never dangle KGB staff officers. We’d have to figure out what it meant for our other operations against them.

  Berlin, August 1990

  Interest in the Soviet MiG-29 pilot suddenly intensified in August, when the Iraqi Army of Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, setting the stage for war in the Persian Gulf.

  Iraq’s Air Force was equipped with Soviet-built fighter jets, and its pilots had been trained by the Soviets. The Pentagon’s desire for more information about the MiG-29 was no longer academic.

  The Soviet pilot upped the ante—he was photographing not only documents about the MiG-29’s design specifications, but also air combat tactical manuals, giving the U.S. Air Force timely insights into the methods the Soviets had taught the Iraqis.

  As he was examining the Soviet pilot’s latest batch of photographs in early August, Rolph noticed that another pair of hands could be seen on the edges of some of the pictures. They appeared to be a woman’s hands, holding open the pages of the manuals as they were being photographed. Someone else obviously knew about the pilot’s espionage, and that was something he had never mentioned to the CIA. Who else was in the operation? At their next meeting in the Leipzig park, Rolph asked the Soviet about the hands on the pictures.

  “That’s my wife,” he said. “I take the manuals home and she helps me photograph them.”

  “So she knows what you’re doing?” Rolph’s mind was racing. He thought for a second and then said, “Why don’t you bring her to our next meeting?”

  At their next scheduled meeting in the park, the pilot brought his wife for Rolph to meet. She was a lovely young brunette, and while they sat in the park, she convinced Rolph that she fully supported her husband’s decision to work for the CIA. She said that they were both eager to move to the West with their two young children, and she would help her husband commit espionage if that’s what it took to start a new life in America.

  Langley, August 16, 1990

  Sergei Papushin, who’d been picked up by the FBI after a drunken spree in New Jersey in late 1989, was still living in a CIA safe house, but interest in his case had gradually waned. Initially, the KGB had been so concerned about his defection that the Soviets had sent his father, the Rezident in Sofia, Bulgaria, to the United States to try to talk his son into returning home. But Papushin had stayed put. Now, nine months later, Papushin had been fully debriefed by the CIA and FBI, and it had become obvious that his knowledge of KGB counterintelligence operations against the United States was limited. He had worked in the unit that targeted British intelligence officers working in Moscow, so London had been interested in what he had to say. But he didn’t have much for us, and the tedium of day-to-day life as a talked-out defector was starting to get to Papushin. He’d turned again to heavy drinking.

  The CIA had tried counseling, but he wasn’t much interested, and in the end he just settled into the routine of an on-again, off-again drunk, a former KGB officer who found himself of little value in his new setting.

  During his sober moments, Papushin was clearly frustrated by the fact that he was largely being ignored by the CIA and FBI. So he did something he knew was guaranteed to once again grab attention: He gave one of his handlers an urgent message to be taken immediately to the top levels of the CIA. There is a mole in the agency, Papushin declared. The KGB has one of your people.

  The CIA now gave Papushin their full attention and listened carefully to his story. He said that the KGB had a penetration of the CIA in Moscow. He had friends in the American Department of the Second Chief Directorate, and he’d overheard enough from his colleagues to conclude that they had an agent in the CIA station.

  But as he was questioned further, it became apparent that he was scrambling with a fabricated story. Nothing he told his debriefers checked out, and eventually we concluded that he had come up with his story out of desperation. Another dead end in the search for an answer, any answer, to the problems five years earlier.

  Warsaw, August 1990

  When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, a handful of CIA and American military officers stationed in Kuwait City were forced to move to Baghdad and into hiding without diplomatic immunity. With the very real possibility that the men could become hostages, the CIA began to look for help in arranging a rescue. After being turned down by other allies, the agency turned to the Poles.

  General Henrik Jasik, Gromek Czempinski’s immediate chief in the foreign intelligence service, thought that any attempt at a rescue was too risky. There were still about four thousand Polish citizens in Iraq, and if Poland’s assistance to the CIA was exposed, they could be targeted by the Iraqi regime. But Czempinski realized that this was an opportunity for the Poles to prove to the CIA that they could become trusted partners and wanted badly to give it a try. Andrzej Milczanowski, the minister overseeing the intelligence service, overruled Jasik and approved the operation. But he decided not to inform his political superiors, including the prime minister, about the plan. He feared the operation might be vetoed, so he decided that he and Czempinski would sink or swim with the Americans.

  By the end of August, the six Americans were still in Baghdad, staying in communication with Langley and a step ahead of Iraqi security. Warsaw and Langley were in constant contact, as Czempinski and his officers tried to figure out ways around the Iraqi domestic security apparatus, which was now assumed to be hunting for the Americans.

  It wasn’t going to be easy.

  7

  Langley, September 25, 1990

  The meeting was a setup, but I was probably the only person who knew it. Over the last few weeks, there had been rumblings about what to do with East Germany once it was reunified with the Federal Republic of Germany. Politically, th
e Bush administration had made the cold calculation that it would drive for the absorption of East Germany into West Germany—with the new Germany solidly in NATO—even if it harmed Gorbachev’s standing at home. If hard-liners returned to power in Moscow, at least German reunification would already be a fact of life. Now we were faced with the administrative challenge of working out a division of labor in a reunified Germany.

  Now that a final agreement had been reached and the date for formal reunification was set for October 3, just days away, bureaucracies all over the Western world were scrambling to catch up with the new reality in Germany, and the CIA’s Directorate of Operations was no exception. Throughout the Cold War, East Germany had been SE Division’s turf, and West Germany had always been handled by the DO’s European Division. Reunification raised a bureaucratic dilemma: Which division should be in charge of intelligence operations in the new Germany?

  There was, in fact, no solid rationale for keeping East Germany under my purview, beyond the fact that the Soviet Western Group of Forces still had almost four hundred thousand troops on East German soil. But few people in SE saw it that way—especially the ones working on East Berlin.

  Burton Gerber was known to be the most fastidious of DO barons when it came to matters of turf and responsibility. He neither encroached on another’s turf nor allowed encroachment on his. He and I hadn’t spoken much since I’d taken over the SE Division, though we’d had cordial, if stiff, exchanges at the weekly DDO staff meetings. He’d shared with me the deep emotional impact November 9 had had on him as he’d seen the Wall coming down, and I’d shared my own, similar feelings about that night in Berlin. Now he’d called a meeting to discuss how he and I could pursue our separate and legitimate tasks in East Germany after reunification less than ten days off.

  Gerber had about four European Division officers with him, including line operations officers and administrative specialists. I brought John O’Reilly, whom I’d moved into the front office to manage division resources and plans. The atmosphere was expectant rather than tense as we exchanged cordialities and took our seats across from one another.