Gerber seemed to want to avoid confrontation. He opened the meeting with a statement on the parallel nature of our interests and the fact that we all worked for the same leader, the DDO. He was certain that we could work something out, perhaps move incrementally toward a realignment of responsibilities.
“Burton,” I said after listening for a few moments, “why screw around with all this? In eight days there will be one Germany. It will be in Europe and in NATO. It belongs in Europe Division. If you want it, it’s yours. Have your personnel people talk to mine and let’s work out a handover without any silliness.”
There was a prolonged silence as my words sank in. Then Gerber, always the gentleman, thanked me for my suggestion and said he would check with the DDO and set things in motion. I didn’t tell him I’d already told Dick Stolz that I planned to hand over East Germany. He would be responsible for a united Germany while I’d be watching over the Soviet Western Group of Forces still garrisoned in the eastern zones.
Paul Redmond was traveling when the meeting took place, and I hadn’t briefed him on my plans before he left. When he learned what I’d done, he exploded. “Why the fuck did you give Burton East Germany?” he said. “We’ve got a lot to do over there.”
“Because it was the right thing to do,” I snapped. “For chrissakes, Paul, in a week it’ll be part of the Federal Republic. Why do you want to hang on to it?”
“Because it’s fun, that’s why.”
I could see that Redmond meant it. He wasn’t just being his usual prickly self, this was deeply important to him. That exchange summed up the growing rift between me and my deputy. In the year since I had returned to the SE Division, I had begun to worry that Redmond and some others on the division staff were stuck in a time warp. Couldn’t they see that the revolutions that had swept across Eastern Europe would inevitably change the CIA’s mission? The sad truth was that the SE Division’s insular subculture didn’t want to let go of the Cold War. As Redmond said, it had been too much fun.
My problems weren’t limited to Paul Redmond. I’d picked up enough of the rumblings from Steve Weber and John O’Reilly to know that not everyone had been happy to see me take over from Gerber. The hard-liners in the division were dug in, Weber told me. They didn’t believe the changes in Eastern Europe would hold, and when the pendulum swung back, they were convinced we’d be caught off base. Weber counseled patience with the East Europe group. Most of them were feeling that the world they’d lived in for so many years had ended—they were sitting next to a safe full of dead drop site diagrams for Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw, and I was telling them those folks were our new friends. They’d come around, he said, just give them time.
O’Reilly was less sanguine about the hard-liners handling the Soviet Union. Get rid of them, had been his summary advice. Send them off to counterintelligence, where they’d be happier.
Both men were right. And I decided I’d have to start with Redmond.
Karlshorst, East Berlin, October 2, 1990
The leaves, caught in an eddy, swirled over the cobblestones and into the courtyard beyond the sullen Red Army soldier standing guard at the entrance to the Museum of Capitulation in Karlshorst, the heart of the huge KGB detachment in East Berlin. Once a fashionable residential district, Karlshorst found its place in history when the German Wehrmacht signed the documents of surrender in May 1945. The museum building itself, the site of the historic unconditional capitulation by Field Marshal Keitel, Admiral von Friedenburg, and General Stumpf, had in the early days of the Third Reich served as a Wehrmacht officers club, but for the last forty-five years the word Karlshorst had become synonymous with the Soviet Committee for State Security. And now I was walking along the quiet Rheinsteinstrasse with Rem Krassilnikov on a brilliant fall day in Berlin forty-five years after the German surrender and one day before the reunification of East and West Germany. Ted Price, who had succeeded Hathaway as counterintelligence chief, was with me for the Gavrilov meetings, as was Moscow chief Mike Cline. I had left my colleagues back in the KGB safe house with Leonid Nikitenko, the First Directorate counterintelligence chief, while I took a walk with Krassilnikov.
“Milton, do you know how many people died in the Great Patriotic War?” Krassilnikov said, inspired, I assumed, by the solemnity of the setting and the historical shift that was just a day away.
“Russians or total?” I asked, wondering where he was headed with his question. I did not yet know the man well, but each time we had met he had revealed a little more of himself. I had been surprised to learn earlier that he was an admirer of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but not necessarily Robert Browning, he’d insisted with a smile. Now, I sensed, I would be catching another glimpse of this complex man, something less poetic than either Elizabeth or Robert Browning, something closer to the suffering Russian soul.
“I’ll give you both numbers. It was more than twenty-one million Russians, and about fifty million people worldwide. All because of what started here in Germany before you were born.” Krassilnikov, always careful with his choice of words, seemed preoccupied. Something was clearly bothering him, something beyond the casualty figures for the Second World War.
“How many troops did you lose in the battle of Berlin, Rem?” I asked, probing.
“More than you lost in the whole war. You Americans were clever, as usual, to let us take Berlin. For every German we killed, Marshal Zhukov lost four men. And do you know what happens tomorrow? Do you know why I wanted to have the meetings here start before tomorrow?”
“No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“Yes. Because even though we fought our way into Berlin forty-five years ago at great human cost, and even though we have been one of the four powers occupying Berlin since 1945, after tomorrow, I am told, I will need to apply for a visa to come to Berlin. Our military will have some arrangement until they formally withdraw, but my colleagues and I will need visas after tomorrow. Do you find irony in this?”
The truth was, I did. This was my third meeting with Krassilnikov in less than a year, and I had seen our personal relationship evolve from that of archadversaries ever wary of the other’s motivations to opponents being drawn by events into areas of common concern. The evolution was incremental, extremely hesitant on both sides, and nothing even approaching trust had yet developed. But there was a realization that our world was changing. The changing world was a new element in the relationship with this man so consumed by the counterintelligence challenge he faced from the CIA that he could spare no time to contemplate another reality—that his system was faltering. Rem Krassilnikov, the man whose first name was an acronym for “World Revolution”—Revolutsky Mir—could not see that it was over, except perhaps in fleeting moments that he could as quickly subordinate. He still seemed convinced that if only the CIA would stop undermining socialist unity and the USSR at every point of contact, the crisis would pass. In that moment, I thought Krassilnikov was trapped in the same time warp that had captured Paul Redmond. The two men ought to meet, I thought. They had much in common.
Krassilnikov and I had taken this little walk at his suggestion. I always kept in the back of my mind the possibility that, depending on the circumstances, I might one day offer him an alternative to his KGB pension. I was certain that he had the same thoughts about me. It was what we did for a living. So when he suggested a walk during a break in our Gavrilov meetings in the KGB safe house two hundred yards behind us, I agreed. Now, walking down the Rheinsteinstrasse with this white-haired KGB lieutenant general, I saw a man opening up for just a moment. With Germany about to be reunited in less than twenty-four hours inside the NATO structure, it was all but over for the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Western Group of Forces was still in place in East Germany, but that seemed as much because there were growing fears that the Soviet government wouldn’t be able to provide the returning soldiers and their families housing and support if they all returned at once. Here in Germany, where the Soviets had made the Western Grou
p a way of life, things were predictable, at least. Back in Moscow the future was a wide-open field of uncertainties.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course there’s irony in this. Would you have predicted it?”
“Would anybody?” Rem asked without sarcasm.
“Probably not. Germany is reunited tomorrow. The Warsaw Pact can’t last. It’s over. Now we’re both faced with trying to figure how we adjust to each other in the changed world. Maybe it was easier before all this change. Have you ever thought about that?”
“Who has time? I have a job to do, as I am certain you do. But we will have to start working toward a more rational relationship,” Krassilnikov said.
“You’ve said that before, Rem. I think I agree. I’m still not certain what is meant by a ‘more rational’ relationship,” I said. “But I’m willing to explore it.”
I didn’t try to recruit Krassilnikov during our little walk, and he didn’t try to recruit me, though we both had such thoughts as we walked through the streets of Karlshorst. I also wondered if he’d been thinking of how Lubyanka had aced Langley in the PROLOGUE operation a few months back, but if he had, he gave no hint of it.
Back in the KGB safe house, we got down to business. Leonid Nikitenko, the counterintelligence chief from the First Directorate, was gregarious and voluble and seemed to have loosened up even more since our first meeting in Helsinki. At one point during our lunch break I said to Nikitenko, “Leonid, you like this business of intelligence, don’t you?”
He smiled and thought for a minute, and then he said, “Milton, there is no business like it. We are politicians. We are soldiers. And, above all, we are actors on a wonderful stage. I cannot think of a better business than the intelligence business. But now that we are talking the philosophy of the intelligence business, I have a question for you.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“Why, Milton, are so many of our First Directorate officers going over to your side these days? I have looked into each case, and none of them, not one of them, demonstrated antisocial vulnerabilities before they went over to you. Most of them had honors diplomas from our universities—red diplomas with gold letters. They were our best officers, with good prospects. Was it their wives? Were the wives unhappy? What is happening to them?”
I thought before answering. We had indeed been bringing in a large number of young KGB majors and lieutenant colonels in recent months. Earlier in the morning, I had made my usual statement to our KGB hosts about the latest string of defections—they were safe and well and free, and if they wanted to talk to their old bosses, we’d be in touch. It was no longer what we used to call the “rummy rejects” of the system who were turning to us; we were getting their top officers now, who were coming to us with their own plans for making it in the West. We were delighted with the new quality of the defectors, and the KGB, not surprisingly, was troubled by it—and puzzled. Nikitenko, with his question, had given me an extremely informative window into the state of affairs in the KGB in those turbulent times. They were worried that their best officers were running for the door.
“Leonid,” I said at last, “let me answer your question with a story. Picture this. The scene is a boardroom of a large American dog food company. The CEO is haranguing his staff about the poor sales performance over the last quarter. He states with pride that his company’s product has the best nutritional values of all American brands. He says that the texture is the best and directs his staff to take a look inside the open dog food cans that have been set before each of them. He takes his own can and draws it to him. It even smells good, the CEO exclaims.” I paused for a moment to check the nearly blank faces of Nikitenko and Krassilnikov, both of whom were wondering where in the world I was leading them. Then I continued.
“‘So why,’ the CEO asks with great emotion, ‘are sales going down, down, down?’ There’s a nervous shuffle around the boardroom, and finally the vice president for sales raises his hand and utters just five words. ‘The dogs don’t like it!’”
Nikitenko looked at me for a moment, the reluctantly polite expression gone, and repeated the punch line incredulously. “Dogs don’t like it? Dogs don’t like it? What can this mean?”
Ted Price interjected, “It means that the dogs just don’t like it, Leonid. They’re looking for something at least different.”
Price, Cline, and I wondered if Leonid ever did get it. His foreign intelligence directorate had taken most of the heat over the last several months, with defections of First Directorate officers running one about every six weeks. The trickle had turned into a torrent, to the point that my budget for defectors needed constant reprogramming. Old averages were thrown out the window as the young KGB officers continued to come over to our side. As Nikitenko was making his representations about his officers gone missing, I would glance over at Rem Krassilnikov to see his reaction. Nothing. There was no sign of smugness that the First Directorate was taking so many hits; nor was there any sign that he thought this was his problem.
We would not meet with Leonid Nikitenko again. Some weeks later I would receive a message from Krassilnikov, relayed through Mike Cline in Moscow, advising us that Nikitenko had died suddenly in a Latin American country. It seemed there had been no foul play, but Rem asked if we could discreetly check on it for him and for the First Directorate. We did, and to the best of our understanding Nikitenko had died of a heart attack. I sent this to Mike Cline, who passed it on to Krassilnikov. I would wonder much later what the English-speaking counterintelligence chief had been doing down in Latin America when he died. Could he have been off to see one of the men who was betraying us from within?
Berlin, October 3, 1990
Ted Price, Mike Cline, and I had spent the final hours of October 2 among the crowds thronging East Berlin’s main avenue, Unter den Linden. When the clocks finally struck midnight, shifting the center of gravity of postwar Europe from a small town near the German border with France to the reborn colossus of an undivided Berlin, I felt a lingering sense of discomfort, something I couldn’t quite pin down. I thought of Krassilnikov’s words earlier that morning and wondered where he might be walking in this new Berlin.
The next morning, a German tabloid ran a photograph of one of the previous night’s revelers holding a placard high above him. It read, “Und nun, Österreich?”—“And now, Austria?”—a thinly veiled reference to Hitler’s ambitions.
In the cold light of day, I still couldn’t shake the odd sense of discomfort that had nagged at me since I’d walked through Karlshorst the previous morning. We were winding down a century that was widely thought to be the “American century,” but the reality was that most of what had befallen mankind since 1914 had its origins in Germany. Would historians even think of calling the twentieth century the “German century”? I doubted it.
Baghdad, October 25, 1990
Czempinski had decided to run the rescue operation himself. He’d slipped into Baghdad with a team of Polish intelligence officers and was developing his plan on the fly, right there under the noses of Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus. Initially, he nearly despaired of finding a way to beat Iraqi surveillance. But finally, on October 25—two months after he had been approached by the CIA for help—Czempinski and his team, using false documents, were able to slip the Americans quietly out of Iraq before the Iraqis could find them.
Interior Minister Andrzej Milczanowski was greatly relieved by the success of the operation. He had taken a great personal risk in keeping it secret from his prime minister and gladly greeted the CIA officers with evident pride as they passed through Warsaw on their way home to the United States. Milczanowski’s decision not to keep his bosses in the loop was easily forgotten in the elation in Warsaw over the dramatic impact the Iraq operation had on relations with the United States. Suddenly, debt relief negotiations were far more positive, and Poland was now seen in Washington as a partner and reliable ally. The operation came at a time when many leading officials in the Solidarity government
were still wary of the intelligence agency and had voiced criticism over Milczanowski’s willingness to keep so many of the old officers. It effectively ended the debate within the Polish government over the fate of the service, and afterward few of Czempinski’s requests for resources were denied.
The American Consulate General, West Berlin, November 1990
The security officer at the American consulate in West Berlin wasn’t sure who the man in the waiting room was or what he wanted, but he’d said something about the Soviet military, so he figured he should notify the CIA.
By the time a CIA officer arrived to question the man, the walk-in had walked out. Undeterred, the CIA case officer ran out onto the street to catch him before he got away and asked him to come back inside to talk. If this man really had something to say about the Soviet military, the CIA was interested. You could never have too many Soviet military agents.
Once he sat the man down and began the debrief, the CIA officer discovered that he was not in the Soviet military at all. He was instead an unusual messenger. The man owned a sandwich and snack truck that served Soviet military bases in East Germany, and he had befriended a number of Soviet officers and soldiers over the years. One high-ranking Army officer had decided he could trust the snack truck driver and asked him if he ever traveled to the West. When the driver said yes, the officer asked him to take a message to the Americans. “Tell them I want to provide them with information and volunteer my services.”
The CIA officer arranged to meet the snack truck driver again, this time away from the consulate. By then he had a list of questions for the Soviet officer. He explained that the CIA might be interested in working with him, depending on his answers.
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