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

cocktail reception at the former palace of Count von Radzivill in Warsaw, Kohl spoke animatedly with his Polish hosts, including Lech Walesa, but he was distracted by events in Berlin and kept his ear cocked for the next fateful announcement.

When it came it was almost anticlimactic. An aide whispered in his ear, “The Wall is open!”

Later that night at Warsaw’s Marriott Hotel, the German chancellor told the gathered press, “Now, world history will be written.”

That evening in his hotel suite, Helmut Kohl, like the rest of the world, turned to the only functioning source of information on the most historical moment in the second half of the century: CNN.

Langley, November 9, 1989

Burton Gerber, now chief of the European Division, which was responsible for CIA operations in Western Europe, was in the midst of a quiet lunch with CIA Director William Webster and a small group of visiting West German intelligence officials in the Director’s private dining room when he was told that he had an urgent message. Gerber excused himself from the table and went outside, where he was given electrifying news—the Berlin Wall had just been opened. Gerber went back into the dining room and broke the news to the CIA Director and his ecstatic German guests.

After lunch, Gerber went to see his counterparts in the Directorate of Intelligence to find out what the analysts could tell him about the situation, and then returned to his office to watch the latest news from Berlin. For Gerber, who had just spent five years running the SE Division and had devoted so much of his life doing quiet battle with the Soviet empire, it was a deeply emotional moment. As he sat and watched history unfold on television, Gerber exulted as he realized that Berlin, the original Cold War battlefield, had just been won.

Langley, 1830 Hours, November 9, 1989

I flipped back and forth between CNN and the CIA’s satellite downlink of the East and West German channels covering events at the Berlin Wall. No one had predicted it would happen when and how it had. No one, not the CIA, not the State Department, not the Bonn government. No one was prepared for the events of November 9 and 10. Where was the human intelligence? I would be repeatedly asked that question. What were our spies telling us would come next?

The CIA had no human intelligence on the events as they were unfolding. None of our human assets in the capitals of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were in a position to tell us what was going on; most were asking us what was happening. They were all watching the drama play out on television and wondering what the hell would happen next. Even the best agent couldn’t tell what a government was going to do when no one in that government knew what it was going to do.

All of Washington had their television sets tuned to CNN. And as I watched the pieces of that despicable structure being pulled down, I thought back almost a quarter of a century when I had first seen the reinforced concrete barrier as a new CIA case officer in Germany. I had seen escapes to the West fail and a few succeed, but always the Wall seemed to get stronger, both as a physical barricade and as a symbol separating the minds of the human beings who lived on either side. More than any other structure, the Berlin Wall symbolized what had brought me to the CIA.

Now it was coming down, and I felt strangely dissociated from the process. I decided to send a cable to all hands in the field the next day to tell them to leave to the international media what it could best do, but to let us know if they saw things differently from the television coverage. Get out on the streets, I said, and keep the situation reports coming.

East Berlin, November 10, 1989

Thursday night had been crazy enough, but when Rolph and his wife went to Checkpoint Charlie the next day to see what was happening for themselves, it seemed as if all of Germany were there. Mixing in the crowd with the thousands of East Germans waiting to make the crossing, the CIA station chief found himself in the midst of the greatest party he had ever seen, the most indescribable, unforgettable moment of his life. Lost in a sea of champagne and open arms, Rolph was an elated Cold Warrior watching Germany come together. He made his way to the West Berlin side and saw that the East Berliners were being treated like returning heroes, lost in the wilderness for nearly thirty years.

Yet Rolph still wasn’t sure he understood the dimensions of what was happening all around him. When he returned home to his East Berlin neighborhood of Pankow, there was a strange air of normalcy. Away from the massive block parties near the border checkpoints, Rolph was struck by how East German life was still grinding on. The Stasi is still here, he told himself, and they are still a fearsome intelligence service. The surveillance teams are still here, too.

The Kremlin, November 11, 1989

It was over. Of that, Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign-policy guru, was certain. The entire seventy-year era of the socialist system was over. First Poland had gone over, then Hungary, then, suddenly, East Germany. All had gone peacefully. China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, and Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov had announced their retirements. That left only Fidel Castro, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Kim Il Sung. And they hated the Soviet Union’s guts! Yes, it was over, Chernyaev decided.

The main thing had been the Berlin Wall. Its fall would have a profound effect not only on the final course of socialism, but also on the balance of world power. It meant the end of Yalta, the end of the legacy of Stalin, and the end of remembrance of the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. It was all over.

And that, Chernyaev concluded with an ironic