The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  Finally, there was the case of FAREWELL, the French spy Vladimir Vetrov, arrested in a sensational but highly suspect Moscow murder case in 1982 and then supposedly uncovered as a spy in prison two years later. While the CIA did not know Vetrov by name, the agency had been briefed on his intelligence by the French as early as 1982. This means that someone at the CIA was in a position to report to the KGB that one of its science and technology collection officers was working for French intelligence. Any list of suspects in the KGB’s S&T collection directorate would have quickly narrowed to Vetrov. FAREWELL was executed in 1984, at least a year before Howard, Ames, and Hanssen volunteered to the KGB. (It is true, of course, that Hanssen spied for a year or two for the GRU beginning in 1979 and then resumed his espionage career with the KGB in October 1985, but it doesn’t appear that he betrayed any of these unresolved cases during his earlier stint as a GRU agent.) Viewed against the pattern of betrayal and misdirection, it is possible, if not probable, that Vetrov was betrayed—like Bokhan, Polyshchuk, and possibly Gordievsky—by an American who has still not been identified.

  Could the KGB have caught some or all of these men as a result of its own extensive counterintelligence efforts? Possibly, but then there would not have been any reason for the Soviets to create elaborate cover stories to lure Bokhan and Polyshchuk back home. There also would not have been any reason for the Soviets to create the even more elaborate murder story to cover Vetrov’s demise. Gordievsky could have been compromised by his own operational mistakes, but the prospect of betrayal still looms large. The conclusion is almost inescapable that there was a fourth man—an as yet unidentified traitor who may have left Langley or simply stopped spying by 1986.

  It is because of suspicions that there are further spies to be uncovered on both sides that mole hunts still quietly grind on in Washington and Moscow, more than a decade after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

  Aldrich Ames’s betrayal and arrest played a major role in the evolution of the CIA in the post–Cold War era. The initial after-action investigations, which revealed the shocking ease with which Ames had eluded detection for nine years, prompted bitter recriminations at Langley, and the CIA’s inept security soon became fodder for late-night comedians. Just about everyone who’d had a hand in running the show at SE and in the counterintelligence center received letters of reprimand from CIA Director R. James Woolsey, which unnerved an already rattled agency. The finger-pointing erupted just as the CIA was trying to deal with budget cuts, an exodus of experienced officers, and a post–Cold War identity crisis. Woolsey would soon be gone, too, and by the mid-1990s, turnover at the top of the agency was so bad that each new DCI seemed to come in and out through a revolving door.

  Though it had long been suspected in counterintelligence circles that Langley had been penetrated by Moscow, investigators had been hampered by a deep resistance within the agency to a return to the witch-hunting days of the Angleton era. After Ames’s arrest, the pendulum swung hard in the other direction. Hundreds of officers were made to endure torturous polygraph reexaminations. Some were forced to stand idle, unable to perform their jobs, while awaiting the resolution of phantom security issues that prevented them from taking part in classified activities. Senior officers with long records of successful clandestine operations were subjected to wasteful and demeaning scrutiny based on the flimsiest of evidence. Since Ames had skated through his last polygraph examination so easily, the CIA’s Office of Security became wary of giving its seal of approval to any polygraph. Security officials even reopened scores of old investigations after reviewing past polygraph examinations. If Ames had beaten the machine, how many others might also have defeated it in years past?

  Pressure from the outside was building, too. With the Cold War’s end, public and congressional scrutiny of the agency’s operations increased, and the nation’s tolerance for expensive and dangerous in-telligence activities waned. New political considerations intruded at Langley as a result, and a cautious, risk-averse climate took hold. The CIA sought desperately to be “correct”—to look like the rest of America. Convinced that the agency was lost and drifting, many of the CIA’s best managers and field officers, the people who had fought the Cold War, headed for the exits. The CIA of the late 1990s had become like the U.S. Army of the 1930s: a peacetime service mired in petty bureaucratic battles and drifting without a clear mission.

  September 11, 2001, changed everything. When the terrorists struck, the CIA did, indeed, look like America. The percentage of DO officers with prior military service was only a tiny fraction of the organization, and its WASPish adventurers had disappeared. Officers and their families, like most Americans, were in no hurry to rush off to places where you had to boil your drinking water and check under the car for bombs—let alone keep an eye in the rearview mirror not for local surveillance teams, but for the guy back there on the motorcycle who might want to kill you. Risk aversion had replaced the boldness and romanticism of the old guard. The DO had no bench to draw from when things heated up.

  But ready or not, the CIA was thrown back into the game. Less than a month after the twin towers collapsed, the CIA, in tandem with the United States military, was in Afghanistan. Its mission this time was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his cohorts—and to neutralize and punish those who protected them.

  To meet the immediate challenge, the agency began making badly needed changes. It brought in new officers from the military, cross-training them in the trade and craft of human intelligence and the languages needed, and tried to get them out to the field as soon as possible. The agency got off to a reasonable start, but the challenges in Afghanistan are far from squarely met. Afghanistan is an unforgiving land, a graveyard of empires, and it will be there that a reinvigorated CIA will pass or fail its most difficult test.

  To observers unfamiliar with the martial history of the land between the Indus and the Oxus, America’s foray into Afghanistan—Operation Enduring Freedom—seemed to be a textbook example of how to mount an insurgency using indigenous forces. CIA officers, along with U.S. and allied special operations forces, moved quickly and quietly into Afghanistan, where they reestablished old contacts and linked up with the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban force that had shrewdly been cobbled together by the late Ahmed Shah Massoud. With U.S. airpower clearing the way, they raced to Kabul. In less than five weeks, the Taliban had been routed and the Afghan capital liberated—with more casualties among journalists covering the war than in the U.S. military in that first blitz. It wasn’t until November that American forces took their first casualty, CIA officer Johnny Micheal Spann, killed during the revolt at Qala-i-Jangi prison fortress.

  Enduring Freedom looked easy—maybe a little too easy, like the British march on Kabul in 1839 or the Soviet Christmas invasion in 1979. All three enterprises had a common thread—getting in was almost painless. Then Afghan history always kicks in. The British would founder and be forced into retreat in January 1842, three years after their fluid entry. They marched out of Kabul with a column of 16,500 souls, headed east to their garrison at Jalalabad, a distance of 110 miles. A single British officer made it to safety. Almost a century and a half later, the Soviets faced a similar fate. After a flawless invasion, the Red Army bogged down, and a decade later it limped home across the Oxus after giving up almost 15,000 dead. Their Afghan misadventure would also cost the Soviets an empire.

  Now, in the second year of America’s Afghan enterprise, there is less talk of things being easy. The accounts of Operation Enduring Freedom and Leonid Shebarshin’s sobering analysis of Soviet operations in the Panjshir in 1984 have begun to sound hauntingly familiar: crisp military briefers giving cheerily optimistic but unconvincing accounts of a beaten enemy, of high enemy body counts, but again without the bodies. “How can thirteen hundred rebels carry off seventeen hundred of their dead—and their weapons?” Shebarshin naively asked the 40th Army briefing officer in Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Panjshir Valley in 1984. Those same question
s have already been asked by journalists briefed on the battles of Tora Bora and Shah-i-Kot. And more are now asking how it is that those we have liberated seem to shell and rocket our troops with such regularity.

  According to the premier historian on Afghanistan, the late Louis Dupree, four factors contributed to the British disasters in Afghanistan: having troops there in the first place; installing an unpopular emir on the Afghan throne; allowing “your” Afghans to mistreat other Afghans; and reducing the subsidies paid to the tribal chiefs. These fatal miscalculations, barely altered in form, were committed by the British in 1839 and again in 1878, and a century later by the Soviets. They are being committed today, and how we deal with them will determine the ultimate outcome of the American undertaking in Afghanistan.

  The United States may not have placed a wildly unpopular emir on the throne—indeed, America’s choice for an Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, was the least objectionable of the possible candidates—but Afghan politics, always murky, is as much defined by the contenders to the throne as by the occupant. The real power in Kabul after the rout of the Taliban is not Hamid Karzai but Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the successor to the murdered Ahmad Shah Massoud. Fahim is a Tajik, a Panjshiri with a reputation for ruthlessness. He has, to be sure, violated Dupree’s third dictum by grossly mistreating other segments of the Afghan population, notably and most dangerously the majority Pashtuns. As each day passes, Fahim is increasingly viewed by the Pashtun population and some other ethnic groups as the unpopular emir America has placed on the throne. Finally, the continued failure of the United States and its allies to make good on the pledges of massive reconstruction assistance—more than $4 billion pledged but undelivered—amounts to the same as the reduction of tribute paid by the nineteenth-century British to the tribal chiefs. This failure of the United States and its allies to engage in nation building is behind much of the unrest in the provinces.

  Afghanistan, a year into its “American era,” is troubled and dangerous, but it is not hopeless. The success or failure of the Afghan enterprise will depend in large measure on how the United States manages to build alliances with the inhabitants of all of Afghanistan, not just the Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley. The CIA will have to rekindle and nurture old relationships with the dominant Pashtuns of eastern Afghanistan and undertake measures to convince the broader population to take a stake in a new Afghanistan and join in its reconstruction. It is a daunting task and the learning curve is short. But failure could allow the country to become a haven for international terrorists once again. Afghanistan will thus be the ultimate testing ground for the new CIA as it seeks to remake itself for the global war on terrorism.

  More than ten years have passed since we left off this story, and a vastly different set of struggles consumes our protagonists these days.

  Of the Russians, Rem Krassilnikov retired from the KGB with the Order of the October Revolution for his brilliant work against the Americans. He lives in Moscow with his wife, Nellie, and has written two books covering his years in counterintelligence. One is about his CIA adversaries, The Phantoms of Tchaikovsky Street, and the second deals with his years of tracking British intelligence.

  Leonid Shebarshin lives in Moscow, where he heads the private Russian National Economic Security Service with its offices in Dynamo Stadium, home of the old KGB soccer team. He has written his memoirs and remains philosophical about the collapse of the Soviet Union. A mural on his office wall hints at his lingering sentiments, with its heroic scenes of Stalingrad and the Bolshevik revolution. He has traveled in Eastern Europe, but has politely declined invitations to visit the United States for what he terms “obvious reasons.”

  Viktor Cherkashin retired in 1995 and settled down in Moscow. He is a proud grandfather, whose most recent progeny is a grandson born to his daughter and the American husband she met while studying in California. Cherkashin has traveled to the United States on several occasions but has steadfastly resisted approaches by the FBI. He now splits his time between international consulting and relaxing with his growing family at his dacha outside Moscow.

  Vitaly Yurchenko miraculously survived his defection and redefection and has since worked in Moscow as a bank security officer. He refused all requests for an interview. He is uniformly despised as a traitor by his former KGB colleagues, some of whom believe that at an appropriate moment “justice” will be meted out to the traitor Yurchenko somewhere along the Moscow River.

  Valentin Klimenko rose from counterintelligence supervisor in the Second Chief Directorate to become chief of Russia’s new internal security service, the FSB. He is currently Rezident in Israel.

  Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov, whom Klimenko launched against Jack Downing as PROLOGUE, is chief of the FSB’s American Department. He admits he is obsessed with finding the man or men who he is convinced betrayed Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen and has pledged to stay with the hunt until he has found his man.

  Oleg Gordievsky lives in the United Kingdom. He and his wife, Leila, have divorced, though she and their daughters, Anna and Maria, were finally allowed to resettle in England. Gordievsky has written two books with British author Christopher Andrew detailing his life working for Moscow Center: KGB and Next Stop Execution. He is mulling over the idea of a Russian cookbook.

  Gennady Vasilenko survived his interrogation at Lefortovo Prison from January to June 1988, though he was reduced in rank and fired without pension for misconduct in his association with Jack Platt. He and Platt remain close friends, and Vasilenko now works on private security investigations in Moscow when he is not hunting in Russia’s birch forests.

  Valentin Aksilenko broke with Moscow and resettled in Virginia, where he lectures on the Soviet Union and the KGB and engages in business consulting. Sasha Zhomov considers Aksilenko a short-list suspect in the betrayal of Aldrich Ames, but he is wrong.

  Among the Afghans, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary “Lion of Panjshir,” the man who was to strike a delicate balance between the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan and the Americans supplying the rebels, was assassinated on September 9, 2001. The CIA believes he was murdered by al-Qaeda, linking his killing to the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks against America two days later. Osama bin Laden almost certainly ordered his death because he knew that an American retaliation for the attacks on New York and Washington would rely on Massoud and his Northern Alliance.

  Abdul Haq was executed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in October 2001 as he sought to rally anti-Taliban forces to his side, just weeks before American-backed Northern Alliance forces surged to victory.

  Jalaluddin Haqqani, the fierce mujahideen commander of Paktia Province, reached an accord with the Taliban after their 1994 victory. By the time the United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001, Haqqani was on the U.S. wanted list. He is still at large.

  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was driven into exile in Iran by the Taliban in 1995. He returned to Afghanistan in 2001 to rally Pashtun resistance against American forces. The CIA launched a Hellfire missile from an unmanned Predator drone in Afghanistan in 2002 in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Hekmatyar. He is now a hunted man.

  Engineer Ghaffar, the team leader in the first stunning Stinger attack against Soviet helicopter gunships outside Jalalabad in September 1986, was killed late in the war when he stepped on a land mine.

  In Pakistan, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul retired from the Pakistani Army and went into politics. According to U.S. government sources, he has become linked to extremist groups both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, and after September 11, 2001, he was characterized by officials at the CIA as “the most dangerous man in Pakistan.” Hamid Gul described the September 11 attacks as an “Israeli conspiracy.”

  On the American side, Clair George was convicted in 1992 of giving false testimony before two congressional committees in 1986, during the Iran-contra investigation. He received a pardon from President George H. W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992. Later, he did consulting work for Ringling Brothers. He is now retir
ed and lives in the Washington area.

  Richard Stolz retired for a second time from the CIA in 1991 and now lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. He has been engaged in a number of consulting activities involving political and economic developments in Eastern Europe, in particular Bulgaria.

  Tom Twetten retired in 1996 and moved with his wife, Kay, to the “Northeast Kingdom” in Vermont, where he has become an award-winning bookbinder and successful seller of rare antiquarian books. He is also making the rounds on the lecture circuit.

  Jack Downing retired from the CIA in 1996 but was called back to serve as DDO from 1997 to 1999 to try to restore flagging morale in the clandestine services. He has since done work for both Congress and the Pentagon.

  Ted Price succeeded Tom Twetten as DDO and retired in 1996. He has since served at the executive level at several corporations involved in international security and risk assessment.

  After spending much of his career on the front lines of the Cold War battling the KGB, Burton Gerber retired from the CIA in 1995, four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He now does volunteer work in the Washington area and speaks publicly on the ethics of espionage.

  During a liaison visit between the CIA and Russian intelligence in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, David Rolph mischievously locked his new boss, John MacGaffin, out of a sauna at a KGB dacha, after MacGaffin had gone outside to experience the bracing effects of the Russian winter and snow. After Rolph finally let him back in, an unamused MacGaffin told Rolph, “You’re going to Botswana.” Rolph left Moscow in 1993 and returned to CIA headquarters for an assignment in the DO’s Africa Division. Rolph later served in Turkey and Bosnia and held other posts before retiring in 2000. For a time he worked with former KGB officer and defector Viktor Sheymov in a computer security venture; he now works with a Washington-area high-tech company.