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

I looked over the briefing papers that had been prepared for me, each sealed in a separate envelope. We were in the process of vetting about a dozen new volunteers from a wide variety of ministries and technical institutes. Business looked pretty good. Whatever had happened to us in the past was clearly not at work now.

As I settled into my new job in the summer of 1989, I had to take stock not only of the new surroundings in SE Division, where, as Redmond put it, nothing really ever changed, to the world in which we operated, where changes were happening faster than they could be assimilated. By the time I arrived at Langley, the real beneficiaries of the end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan were emerging—not the people of Afghanistan, but the people of East-Central Europe.

The first word of looming change came in May, a scant ninety days after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when the German chancellor was told by Gorbachev on the Soviet leader’s first visit to West Germany that force was no longer a viable means for holding the Warsaw Pact together. Gorbachev reaffirmed his policy, first hinted at late the previous year, that in effect the Brezhnev Doctrine had been scrapped.

That same month, the Hungarians made an overt move that would send tremors through the Soviet empire in East-Central Europe—they began dismantling the barbed-wire span of the Iron Curtain on their frontier with Austria. The stringing of that barbed wire tripped off the Cold War, prompting Winston Churchill in May 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, to declare, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” For over half a century the world had accepted this shaky demarcation as a boundary between East and West—between the Communist sphere and Western Europe—and now, with a few snips, the landscape of the Cold War had changed overnight. Since then, people had begun to stream across that old line in growing numbers, and nobody seemed to be prepared to stand in their way.

Convinced that the Soviets had neither the stomach nor the means to do anything about it, Budapest took another fateful step in June. The Hungarian government rehabilitated the hero of the 1956 revolution, Imre Nagy, hung two years after the revolt was crushed by Soviet tanks, and reinterred him as a national hero. The probes in Hungary were the first acts of defiance by a member of the Warsaw Pact. But others would follow in breathtaking succession.

On June 5 the people of Poland elected Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Party to a stunning majority in the Polish parliament. Communism was dealt a body blow at the very core of the Warsaw Pact, though most of America was transfixed by the images coming in from Tiananmen Square of the revolution that had exploded one day earlier.

And all through the summer of 1989, small knots of activists in the German Democratic Republic began gathering in the churches and coffeehouses of Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin to talk of change and demand more travel rights. Their numbers were tiny at first, but then they grew, and by the time I checked in at headquarters, there was no longer any doubt that something truly historic was afoot in the Soviet Union’s Eastern European empire.

First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, July 10, 1989

Leonid Shebarshin ought to have felt at the top of his game. Comfortably settled in his corner office on the second floor in the leadership suite at Yasenevo, he took stock of his career and his world and decided they were heading in opposite directions. His promotion to head of the First Chief Directorate, a job that put him in charge of KGB foreign intelligence operations worldwide, had been the source of some solace. He was more than a little relieved to finally be done with the betrayals and false promises of the Afghan enterprise that had consumed his professional and, in some ways, his personal life for the last five years. The fact that his old boss, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had moved downtown to take over as Chairman of the KGB made his position all the more secure. An ordinary general officer in the KGB might have just settled into this snug perch to mark time until he could start thinking about the corner suite at Lubyanka and maybe a seat on the Politburo. But Shebarshin felt no such satisfaction. On the contrary, in the five months since he had been on the job, he had become convinced that the world he had lived and worked in over the last three decades was coming to a crashing end.

It all began with the march out of Afghanistan on February 15, a fateful end to an adventure that, to his mind, had been doomed from the start. The troika of Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and Aleksandr Yakovlev, the old Party propagandist who’d gone liberal and was now glued to Gorbachev’s side, had in a few short years undermined the foundation of socialist unity that had been so carefully reinforced over the previous forty years. Gorbachev and his cohorts had almost flippantly declared that the USSR should abandon its paternalistic responsibility for the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. From now on, they’d have to stand on their own. It was every man for himself, the new policy troika had decided, and it didn’t take long for things to start coming apart at the seams.

Shebarshin had seen it coming even before he’d moved to the top job at Yasenevo. The Afghan calamity had been the first breach of the Brezhnev Doctrine, the long-standing principle that Moscow would never abandon a fraternal socialist country. Before General Gromov marched his last column across Friendship Bridge, a telegram had been sent to all diplomatic posts and KGB Rezidentura abroad announcing the new policies of noninterference.

Shebarshin had been tracking the first whispers of rebellion in the Soviet Union’s “near abroad” since early spring: the defiant