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

Warsaw, July 20, 1989

Gromoslaw Czempinski had seen it coming for months. As a professional intelligence officer, Gromek, as his friends called him, was an astute judge of politics and people, and he could tell that the regime he’d worked for since he’d joined the service in 1972 was finished. Beset by economic stagnation and increasingly militant strikes, Poland’s Communist rulers had grudgingly opened roundtable negotiations with Poland’s burgeoning democratic movement—Solidarity—and had finally agreed to hold elections in June. The Party seemed to think it could manage the outcome and limit Solidarity’s political influence. The fix, they thought, was in.

But Czempinski knew better. Poland’s foreign intelligence service had well-placed spies inside Solidarity—better than those reporting to the SB, the internal security service—so Czempinski and his colleagues had a pretty good inkling that Solidarity was on the verge of a sweeping victory. The Communists were in for a surprise.

The foreign intelligence service decided not to wait for the final results. Months before the elections, officials throughout the Intelligence and Counterintelligence Bureau, where Czempinski worked, started to destroy documents in anticipation of the end of Communist rule. The destruction of the files, mainly those involving individual agents and informants, started in January and was conducted on a massive scale before the first vote was cast in June.

Among the most sensitive files were those dealing with Solidarity. When the trade union movement first burst onto the scene in the early 1980s, the foreign intelligence service had created a special branch to monitor ties between Solidarity and the CIA and other Western organizations. They had developed a network of agents inside Solidarity to help gather information about financial connections with the CIA, and by 1989, Polish intelligence was convinced that the links between Langley and Solidarity were extensive. The problem was, they overstated the case. While the CIA had provided covert assistance—printing presses, money, and some specialized equipment—so did the AFL-CIO and the Catholic Church. In any event, Western support was not the crucial factor in Solidarity’s ultimate triumph.

Still, key Polish intelligence officials were convinced that the CIA would continue its covert actions for as long as it took to topple the regime, and they didn’t think there was anything their government could do to stop it. Their belief in the intimidating power of the CIA sapped their confidence and played into their fatalistic conclusion that the downfall of the regime was inevitable. So by the time of Solidarity’s stunning and sweeping victory in June, Polish intelligence had destroyed virtually all of the files of the special branch devoted to spying on Solidarity. Aleksandr Makowski, one of the officers running the special branch, wanted to be able to say truthfully, when the new Solidarity government took over, that “the files were apparently gone.”

Even with the most sensitive and incriminating files now destroyed, Czempinski and his colleagues had no idea what their fate would be under the new government. A tall, hawk-nosed man with a piercing stare, Czempinski had, until this revolution, enjoyed a rapid rise through the ranks of Polish intelligence. He’d studied economics in college before he was recruited to join Polish intelligence in 1972. He took some pride in the fact that he was one of the first graduates of Poland’s new espionage training school and that his first assignment, a tribute to his performance in school, had been to Chicago, at the heart of the American empire. In 1976, a defector gave the CIA and FBI the identities of the Polish intelligence officers stationed in the United States, so Czempinski was recalled to Warsaw before the Americans had a chance to kick him out. He then moved into counterintelligence and by 1989 had become chief of the counterintelligence branch of the foreign intelligence service. He had always been praised for his boldness and imagination, but now his career was in the hands of the steelworkers, union leaders, and former lawyers who had spent time underground or in prison for their defiance of the regime he had served. Czempinski was an optimist and a survivor, but even he had doubts about the future.

Langley, September 18, 1989

“What’s going on in Leipzig?” I said to no one in particular at the morning staff meeting with the group managing Eastern Europe. It was the third week in a row that the East Germans had held their Mon-day demonstrations setting off from the twelfth-century St. Nicholas Church in the old city. They’d kicked off the demonstrations on September 4 with fewer than a thousand marchers chanting, “Down with the Stasi”; three weeks later, their numbers had swollen to around ten thousand. The Stasi had tried to crack down, but they’d been too timid and it didn’t seem to be having any effect.

“Who knows,” Redmond answered curtly. “But it’s pretty clear Honecker’s losing control.”

The harsh truth was that we didn’t have any spies in place who could give us much insight into the plans of the East German government or, for that matter, the intentions of the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin. Still, it was pretty clear that Eric Honecker, secretary general of the German Democratic Republic, was in a bind. When the Hungarians snipped the barbed wire and opened a route to the West, thousands of East Germans made their way to Hungary and streamed across the border into Austria. Honecker had blocked travel to Hungary, but that had only convinced the desperate East Germans to try to get out through Czechoslovakia. The West German embassy in Prague was now swamped with asylum seekers.

“Honecker knows Gorbachev won’t bail him out,” said Steve Weber, the division COPS, or chief of operations. “Sees him as worse than Brezhnev—part of the problem, not the solution.”

The Soviet Union still had more than half a million troops in Eastern Europe, including about four hundred thousand in East Germany, the rest mostly in Hungary. But Gorbachev didn’t seem to want to use his troops to restore order. Honecker had apparently told him that if it was up