The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  “Did he have a name?” I asked, leaning forward to show my deep interest.

  “No name,” he said, “but he said he thought the guy’s name began with the letter K.” The man sitting across from me was still reluctant to make lasting eye contact, though he didn’t seem otherwise overly nervous.

  “Do you think the K is for his true name or his code name?” I asked.

  “You know, I didn’t even think to ask,” he said, livening up a little. He then set off on a rambling but rich and informative yarn full of color and detail.

  The trouble was, I’d heard his stories before. The CIA had never been able to catch him in an outright fabrication, but he’d come damn close one too many times. In one of those earlier cases, we’d tried to get him to let another case officer meet with his foreign agent to verify his information, but something always seemed to get in the way, and no one ever managed to meet him. Now, sitting across from him in the soundproof room, I decided that I still didn’t trust him one bit.

  When he had finished his long and elaborate story about the KGB penetration of SE Division, I kept quiet, saying nothing, but with what I hoped was a friendly if expectant look on my face. The painful silence lasted about half a minute, until he started telling more of the story. This time there were new details that he hadn’t included in his original report or in his follow-up report to Redmond.

  When I returned to Washington a week later, I met with Burton Gerber and his station chief at the Farm for a private talk about the case officer and his sensational reporting.

  I made it clear that I thought he was making up the whole thing.

  “Have you written it up?” Gerber asked, always one to focus on procedural protocol.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “I haven’t seen it,” he said with a touch of irritation in his voice.

  “It’s a memo for the record right now,” I said. “I haven’t sent it forward. But I will now that we’ve talked.”

  “Now what?” came the third voice in the room, bringing our tense exchange to a merciful end. “You’re saying that there’s nothing there? That this guy’s sitting on the curb and making this stuff up?” The station chief was incredulous.

  “Yes,” I said. “That about sums it up. But we’re going to need more than my gut reaction to this guy. We need to talk to the KGB officer.”

  Gerber suggested using the former deputy in Moscow, whose pseudonym was KLETTERING. (The CIA makes an important, if little understood, distinction between a pseudonym and an alias. A CIA officer is assigned one pseudonym for use in internal agency cable traffic and usually keeps the same one throughout his or her career. CIA officers use their pseudonyms to sign cables sent back to headquarters and are sometimes even referred to by their pseudonyms in internal discussions. By contrast, CIA case officers use many aliases during operations in the field to mask their true identities. A case officer never uses a CIA pseudonym as one of his or her aliases.) KLETTERING had the expertise needed to talk to the KGB officer and figure out whether there was anything to the story we had been told.

  In a European Capital, August 1, 1991

  KLETTERING had a doctorate in Russian studies and was counted among a handful of the best operations officers in his generation at SE. He’d served as Mike Cline’s deputy in Moscow and was now back at Langley handling our internal operations; but at the moment he was sitting on the verandah of a riverside restaurant in Europe, engaged in one of the more bizarre conversations of his career. It had taken him several days to arrange the meeting, but in the end he had succeeded. Across from him was a smooth, urbane Soviet intelligence officer, the source to which the case officer had attributed the counterintelligence yarn that had gotten Redmond so spun up, at least initially. KLETTERING had explained to him in detail the information he had supposedly passed on to us about a penetration of SE Division. The Soviet took it all in, registering deep interest. “There is, indeed, a serious problem,” he said at last. “But it has very little to do with me. It has everything to do with your own officer. I have met this man, but I am saddened to say that everything he has told you is sheer fantasy. But excellent fantasy!”

  The case officer had already been transferred back to Washington, and when he was confronted with a more hostile interrogation, both he and his story began to fall apart. But the case officer still scrambled to explain himself, never admitting that he had fabricated the whole story. In the end, the errant case officer decided he’d had enough with the CIA and simply resigned. It was another chapter closed in the search for the truth, and it had itself involved nothing but lies.

  Like the alarm raised earlier by Sergei Papushin, the drunken defector who’d said he knew the CIA had been penetrated in Moscow, the case officer’s story had been debunked. It was just the latest in a series of dead ends in the hunt for a solution to the 1985 losses over the past few years. Nothing had come of the mysterious case of “Mr. X,” the anonymous volunteer in Germany who had warned earlier that the CIA’s communications had been compromised, and nothing had come of our gambit to test those communications by conducting phony recruitment operations of KGB officers, including my effort in Nairobi. There was no sign that the KGB was reading our mail, since the Soviets never moved against the KGB officers we had set up in our cable traffic. The investigation was back to square one.

  9

  Moscow, August 1, 1991

  It was still hard for David Rolph to comprehend. When he’d read the cable back in December notifying him that he was being reassigned as Moscow chief, he’d thought it was a joke. As chief of the small East Berlin operation, Rolph was only a GS-14 and too junior to be considered for the flagship field assignment in the Soviet Division. Moscow was a post that had always been reserved for a Senior Intelligence Service officer—the CIA equivalent of a general.

  But his assignment was no joke. Rolph had responded well to the stern message he had received from Paul Redmond, and now he was being rewarded for the remarkable success of the Berlin cold-pitch campaign. Promoting Rolph to Moscow was part of my effort to revitalize SE Division with young blood. For Rolph, it was a dream come true.

  Rolph knew that his promotion had irritated a number of more senior officers in the division who thought they deserved Moscow. But he was determined to prove them wrong. Still, he knew that Berlin would be a tough act to follow. “At least I’m going someplace that’s stable,” he’d joked at his good-bye party in Berlin in June.

  But just beneath the surface, Moscow in the spring of 1991 was anything but stable. By now, Gorbachev was walking a tightrope between the reformers he had once empowered and the Communist hard-liners who were convinced he was responsible for the collapse of the old order in Eastern Europe and their own diminishing powers. The Soviet leader had long since lost control over the pace of change, and his perestroika campaign now seemed quaint and outmoded even to many of his supporters. He had calculated that if he slipped the knots with Eastern Europe, a weight would be lifted from the Soviet Union. And he was convinced that the chaos would stop at the Soviet border.

  He was soon proved wrong. By 1991, powerful independence movements had sprung up in the three most western Soviet republics in the Baltics, finally forcing Moscow to crack down. In Lithuania, in January, fear made a fleeting comeback. In order to quash the growing independence movement, KGB and Soviet military units had moved into the capital of Vilnius in force, sending tanks against dissident crowds, killing fourteen protesters, and wounding many others as the military seized the city’s main television tower. The Soviets had moved into Lithuania just as the world was focused on the Persian Gulf crisis, so the incident received relatively little attention in the West.

  Yet Moscow’s attempt to turn back the clock failed miserably. Soviet troops failed to curb the independence movement in Lithuania, and their violent assault backfired at home, prompting a bitter outcry in Moscow among Russians who had come to believe that the time for such ruthless actions had long since passed. Journalists resi
gned from the Communist Party, Soviet radio and television broadcast the attacks and aired the angry recriminations of citizens, and members of the Soviet legislature marched in the streets of Moscow. The Supreme Soviet demanded to know how many protesters had been killed in Vilnius—it called for an investigation and demanded answers.

  Gorbachev was forced to distance himself from the military action, although few believed him. Shevardnadze had resigned as Foreign Minister in December 1990, warning darkly that a dictatorship was coming and telling those who would listen that the hard-liners were back in charge. Gorbachev had dismissed his old adviser’s fears, but the truth was that he was so close to the hard-liners that he didn’t recognize the contempt they had for him and his policies.

  Now, even in remote areas of the Soviet Union, far from the volatile and impatient Baltics, new nationalist and democratic tides were surging in. In June, Boris Yeltsin became Russia’s first popularly elected President, and the white, blue, and red flag of Russia began to appear at official functions. The emergence of an independent-minded Russian leader and government posed grave threats to Gorbachev and the Soviet order. By the time David Rolph arrived in Moscow, it was clear that something would have to give.

  Langley had been watching the warning signs for months. A source inside the Soviet military in Germany had told the CIA six months earlier that volunteers were being sought among Soviet Army officers for some sort of contingency operation in Moscow. Marshal Dmitri Yazov, the Defense Minister, was reported to have ordered the Soviet Western Group of Forces based in Germany to form units of reliable troops prepared to do whatever was necessary to preserve the union. The CIA had not seen any evidence that volunteers had actually been sent back to the Soviet Union, but the threat that the Soviet military might be used to deal with civil unrest hung in the air throughout the spring and summer of 1991.

  In June, Secretary of State James Baker passed on a specific warning to Soviet Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh that a coup was in the works, and he identified some of the key leaders of the plot. The information had originated with Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov, who had warned American ambassador Jack Matlock about the threat. When Gorbachev heard about the American warning, however, he dismissed it as fantasy.

  By mid-August, though, it was becoming clear to the CIA’s analysts that Gorbachev’s decision to sign the All-Union Treaty that month could prompt the hard-liners to act. In the President’s Daily Brief for August 17, the CIA warned President Bush that the scheduled treaty signing had created a deadline for the conservatives in Moscow. There was a strong chance that they would act within the next few days, before the treaty was signed.

  Termez, Uzbekistan, August 6, 1991

  Stepping out on Friendship Bridge was an eerie experience. I had spent three years assisting the men on the other side of the river in their fight against those on this side of the river, and now here I was looking across the bridge in what seemed like the wrong direction. With me was Jack Devine, who was now chief of the CIA’s counternarcotics center, and the purpose of our visit to Central Asia was to talk with the Soviets about ways to cooperate on the international war on drugs. Devine had been chief of the Afghan Task Force when I first arrived in Islamabad, and we both found it strangely unsettling to stand on Friendship Bridge looking into Afghanistan with our KGB escorts.

  We’d flown along the border between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan in a Soviet MI-8 helicopter, exactly the same chopper that the Afghan rebels had so frequently shot down with Stinger missiles that I’d helped supply them with during the war. As we flew low and slow along the north bank of the Amu Dar’ya, the pilot spoke into his intercom. Across from me, a KGB colonel became alert as he listened to his headset. Then he barked back a brief answer.

  “What did he say?” I asked the colonel.

  “He said to tell you that we are flying so low because the Afghan bandits across the river still have Stinger missiles. They are not supposed to work so well if you fly below three hundred meters. The pilot wanted me to tell you that.”

  “And what did you say to him?” I asked.

  The colonel held my gaze for a couple of seconds, then answered. “I told him you already knew all about that,” he said coldly.

  Moscow, August 7, 1991

  I was riding along in a rattling KGB Volga that smelled as if it had a leak in its fuel system. With me in the backseat was Rem Krassilnikov, who despite the changes and upheavals in Moscow over the last twenty-four months was still chief of the First Department of the Second Chief Directorate. His perch, as far as he was concerned, was unchanged and secure. For the last twenty minutes I had been watching the street pattern around us, and I thought I had detected surveillance teams following us.

  “Rem, do you think it’s possible that your boys are following us around town?”

  Krassilnikov glanced at me quizzically. “No,” he said, “that would not be possible.” His answer was definitive. One just did not argue with Rem Krassilnikov on his turf.

  But as we drove on, Krassilnikov began to look more carefully at the rhythm of the street. About two minutes later he said, “Perhaps it is, Milton.” He stared at a beige Zhiguli beside us. “Yes, it is possible.” He looked puzzled for a minute, then recovered without commenting further on the oddity of having KGB surveillance units trailing the guest of a KGB general in his own car.

  It was early August, and we had spent several days in Moscow trying to find areas where the CIA and the KGB could work together. The drug war and the spread of weapons of mass destruction were two seemingly fruitful options. Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and the republics of Soviet Central Asia meant the region was a leading source of heroin, and the Soviets had a growing drug problem in their cities. Meanwhile, the breakup of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was creating new fears in Washington about the security of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. We approached these topics with our KGB counterparts in the abstract, discussing them as looming problems but never tracing their origins to the breakup of the old order.

  We met in a KGB safe house in a residential section of Moscow not far from Communist Party headquarters. The house had once been used by Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s ruthless and perverse henchman and intelligence chief. We held our meetings on the second floor, and during the breaks I was able to look around. I came upon a very large tiled bathroom with ancient fixtures and, inexplicably, a gynecologist’s examination table, complete with stirrups. I could only imagine what amusements Beria had found in that room.

  While in Moscow, I had a chance to glimpse anecdotal evidence of the diminished power of the KGB in Soviet society. My traveling companions and I, accompanied by a lively KGB colonel by the name of Kuzmin, attempted to get into the Kremlin courtyard to view the czar’s cannon. We were stopped at the entrance by a guard, who with great aplomb pointed to his watch and told us we had come too late. The courtyard had closed three minutes earlier. Kuzmin tried to sweet-talk the guard, saying we were an important American delegation, but the man would have none of it. Finally, Kuzmin winked at me and said, “Watch this.”

  With practiced flair, he whipped out his red KGB identity book, flipped it open, and eased it in front of the guard’s eyes. “Committee for State Security,” Kuzmin said. “Now please let us through.”

  The guard took the identity book, looked at it carefully, then folded it shut and handed it back to the KGB colonel. “I don’t care if you’re Vladimir Kryuchkov,” he said. “You’re not getting in here after closing time.” With those words he wheeled around and walked away. End of discussion. I would have to wait until my next visit to get a good look at the czar’s cannon, though watching the look of surprise on Colonel Kuzmin’s face had been a worthy trade-off.

  We left the Soviet Union on the morning of August 8. Although we could see that the Soviet system was under great stress, we saw nothing to alert us to what would follow only ten days later. The fact that we had been invited to Moscow by the KGB at that precise tim
e would later convince me that our hosts had no inkling of what was coming either.

  Langley, August 12, 1991

  As Soviet intelligence officers continued to volunteer to the CIA in growing numbers, there came the inevitable requests for the means to commit suicide to avoid arrest and interrogation. One such request had crossed my desk, and now I found myself sitting across the conference table from the chief chemist in Technical Services, who was explaining in more detail than one might ever want to know the inner workings of the L-pill, euphemistically called “special preparations.”

  He explained that cyanide was hands down the historically preferred means of exit. It was reliable, and it was quick—most of the dead in Hitler’s bunker had bitten down on the glass-encased cyanide capsules. The downside was that it took a large pill to hold a lethal dose, something that might not be easy for a spy to conceal in an everyday object he could carry about without attracting attention. There were other options nowadays in more discreet preparations, but they generally took longer to take effect, which could be quite inconvenient! If concealment size was not an issue, it was always best to go with the cyanide, because it was neat and quick.

  The chemist had a couple of demonstrator L-pills with him, inert gas capsules concealed in small trinkets. All you had to do was bite down on the concealment, break the capsule, and take a couple of deep breaths. It would be over in a matter of seconds. He slid one across the table to me. “Want to try it?” he asked, deadly serious.

  I picked up one of the concealment devices and felt its weight. “You’re sure this is a practice one?” I asked.

  “Sure it is. . . . No, wait a minute . . . I think it’s . . .” The chemist smiled for the first time as I dropped the device back on the table pretty quickly.

  I had asked for this meeting so that I’d be able to provide a detailed justification to Bill Webster when I hand-carried the memo requesting L-pills to him for his authorizing signature. Judge Webster was a cautious, thoughtful man, and I had voiced my concern to Dick Stolz, who thought Webster’s only problem with this would be the usual revulsion toward the concept, plus a recognition of the need for safeguards. He’d want to know that the special preparations were not being requested frivolously or for the purpose of killing another person. Stolz was in an expansive mood and told me the story of how he’d authorized the L-pill for TRIGON. In those less complicated days, he’d signed the authorizing memorandum himself to keep the DCI out of the process—to protect him. Those days were long past, Stolz said wistfully. Take it to the judge and tell him what he needs to know.