The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

For Downing, the Russian’s sudden appearance couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. Since his return to Moscow in November, Downing had become increasingly worried and depressed by the state of the CIA’s operations in Moscow. The 1985 losses had left the CIA with virtually no assets left to run inside the Soviet Union. The PNG war that had erupted following the Daniloff affair had further reduced Moscow’s effectiveness, delaying Downing’s arrival by several months while several experienced CIA case officers were expelled in the tit-for-tat game with Washington. Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s decision to withdraw Soviet administrative and clerical personnel from the U.S. embassy in October in retaliation for President Reagan’s decision to oust hundreds of Soviets from the United States had paralyzed the embassy’s operations. U.S. embassies, regardless of location, were notoriously more dependent on their local workforce, their so-called foreign service nationals, than were Soviet embassies.

The Clayton Lonetree case in December further shook the CIA; the agency feared that the Marine guard had given the KGB access to Moscow Station. At first, CIA counterintelligence experts believed that Lonetree could not have done much damage by himself; there were always at least two Marine guards on duty at the embassy. But in March, while Downing was in Frankfurt for a meeting with DDO Clair George, the CIA discovered that a second Marine guard, Arnold Bracy, may also have aided the KGB. If Lonetree and Bracy had been conspiring together for the Soviets, it was quite possible that they had given the KGB access to SE Division’s crown jewels.

No wonder, then, that CIA officers in Moscow, suffering through such an extended losing streak, were beginning to second-guess themselves and their methods. In its best days, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Moscow operations had a certain cachet within the CIA, and Moscow case officers walked with the swagger of those who believe they are the best of the best. They had reason to preen: Moscow was then running the most dazzling inventory of agents in CIA history.

But now, everything that had been built in the late 1970s and early 1980s had been swept away, and with it, the confidence of the case officers in Moscow. Murat Natirboff left Moscow in the summer of 1986, just as the KGB was rolling up the last of the CIA’s agents; Gerber wanted him replaced. But for the next five months, while Downing cooled his heels waiting for a truce in the PNG war, Moscow went without a chief, and the drift took its toll. There had been too many arrests, too many blown operations, so CIA officers were beginning to see shadows and ghosts.

The American case officers came to believe that it was no longer possible to break free of the KGB in order to conduct operations. They began to mutter about the mysterious, almost mystical capabilities of the KGB to follow their every movement and began to believe the KGB had developed “ultradiscreet surveillance,” a new layer of surveillance that kicked in just when you were certain you were free. You could never see this new surveillance, so there was no way to prove it didn’t exist. Case officers began to second-guess their instincts on the streets of Moscow, aborting missions at the slightest sign of casual Soviet interest. The new, unspoken mantra in Moscow was that there was no way to beat the KGB.

Downing was eager to snap Moscow out of the doldrums, but even he was beginning to wonder what was going wrong. After Bracy’s revelations, Downing was ordered to put Moscow on a new kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day alert status. A CIA officer would have to be in the office at all times, just to make certain no one could get in. Downing decided that he and two other officers would take turns sleeping in the office at night, so that the secured space was never unattended. For this arduous new duty, he picked officers whose cover had already eroded so badly that the KGB had probably identified them as CIA officers; the fact that they were not going home at night wouldn’t suddenly compromise their identities as spies to the KGB.

But even this new precaution wasn’t enough. Langley soon ordered that every single piece of paper, every fake rock used in dead drops, every piece of equipment and furniture inside the CIA area, be packed up and shipped back to the United States for examination. So for a time, Moscow was stripped to the bare walls while the CIA tried to determine whether the Marines had given the Soviets access to the office.

A close examination of the security measures in Moscow suggested that the KGB had not gotten in. The main door was a vault with a combination lock, and there were two inner doors with locks as well. The Marine guards didn’t have the combinations to any of them. The locks also had special counters that revealed how many times they had been opened, and officers were required to keep a log that noted the count on each lock. Similar locks on safes were logged as well. To be sure, the counters on the locks sometimes skipped, causing slight anomalies in the numbers logged. But those anomalies weren’t consistent enough to suggest that the KGB had broken in.

What’s more, Moscow was equipped with a hidden camera that revealed who had been inside, and an in-depth review of hours of videotapes never showed any KGB entry into the premises. While there were brief gaps when the camera hadn’t been working, those gaps were never deemed significant. Despite the CIA’s initial concerns, senior CIA officials were soon convinced that the Marines hadn’t let the KGB into the CIA’s Moscow office.

In the end, the Marine guard spy scandal died away, as the investigation petered out amid heavy criticism of the way the case had been handled by the Navy and other agencies. Officials were never quite sure what Lonetree and Bracy had done and whether