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

documents out of windows and onto the streets below. Others broke into a more valuable secret cache of imported wines and gourmet food reserved for Stasi officers. Forty years of pent-up hatred of the secret police—a security service that for generations had silenced all dissent—suddenly erupted into the streets of East Berlin.

For the people of East Germany, looting Normannenstrasse was an act of political catharsis, as if throwing the files out the windows would somehow purge the national bloodstream of its culture of suspicion and paranoia. They were turning on the security police with a vengeance born of resentment at being forced to spy on neighbors, on husbands and wives, on mothers and fathers.

It was one of the most dramatic moments of a frenzied few weeks that had transformed East Berlin from a Communist backwater to the hub of a historic revolution. And, as with so many of the other history-defying events since the Berlin Wall had come down, footage from Normannenstrasse was broadcast on CNN and the other networks back into American homes. The television coverage of the storming of Normannenstrasse caught the eye of the President, and he apparently made a casual, offhand remark to his daily CIA briefer about the incident. President Bush wondered aloud whether the CIA was getting its share of the documents floating down onto East Berlin’s streets. Judge Webster heard about the President’s interest, and soon what had started as an off-the-cuff remark at the White House turned into a scramble at the CIA.

Webster asked if the CIA was getting its hands on any of these Stasi documents. The answer was no, and the CIA Director then asked whether we needed new people in Berlin. Webster’s message was clear. After that, I put Redmond on a plane for Germany to light a fire under Rolph.

West Berlin, Late January 1990

Paul Redmond looked across the table and saw two angry case officers. Redmond had come to Berlin to pass on an unpalatable message to David Rolph and the East German station. And as Rolph and his deputy sat in a West Berlin restaurant listening to what Redmond had to say, they didn’t like it one bit.

In all bureaucracies, bad news tends to start at the top and flow downhill, and the CIA was no exception. It just so happened that in this case, David Rolph was at the receiving end of a message that had started at the White House with the President of the United States.

President Bush had seen the looting of Normannenstrasse on CNN and had asked whether the CIA was getting its hands on the documents floating out onto the streets of East Berlin. The answer was no, and Langley realized that was a bad answer to have to give to the White House. So that meant the East Berlin Station had to be put on notice, and Paul Redmond was the one to do it.

Redmond tried to be polite and collegial, but there was no mistaking the message from headquarters: You are on notice that Washington is watching the revolution and wants results. For Rolph’s part, he didn’t believe Redmond was there to scold him for past mistakes, but rather to make it clear that the attitude in Washington about what a CIA station in Eastern Europe should be doing was changing—and changing fast. Overnight, the rules on how to run a bloc station were being rewritten. And whether Rolph and other case officers trained in the traditional clandestine arts of the SE Division liked it or not, they had to change the way they operated, use more openly aggressive tactics, or risk becoming irrelevant.

Rolph resisted. He didn’t like headquarters telling him that he wasn’t being aggressive enough and didn’t think that Langley understood the realities facing CIA case officers in East Berlin. The Stasi wasn’t dead, Rolph told Redmond insistently. We still have to be careful and prudent, or the Stasi will eat our lunch.

His caution was a reflection of his Cold War training and experience. Like many SE Division officers, he had grown up fighting the KGB and the Eastern European intelligence services when they were at their peak, and he had learned to respect their power. Although he had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall with his own eyes, Rolph wasn’t convinced that the old order in East Germany was dead. The MfS, he believed, still might be able to ride out the political turmoil. If CIA officers abandoned their traditional stealthy “denied area” tactics and began to operate more openly, the MfS might strike back. The CIA would then find itself in an even smaller box in East Germany.

So for weeks after November 9, Rolph and his deputy were uncertain whether they could operate more boldly in East Germany. True, Stasi surveillance was beginning to ease up; there were now times when there was no one following them at all. But could it last? Rolph still didn’t know. When the crowds stormed Normannenstrasse, Rolph suspected that the whole thing had been staged by the Stasi. He didn’t believe that it was part of a popular uprising. He thought it was street theater concocted by the Stasi in a last-ditch effort to prompt an outcry from the East German people for a restoration of order and stability. It was, he believed, a modern-day equivalent of the burning of the Reichstag. People back in Washington were watching too much television if they thought that any real secrets had been tossed out of the Stasi windows. So over lunch at a restaurant in Mexico Platz in West Berlin, Rolph told Redmond that the Stasi wasn’t dead.

Sitting in the Berlin restaurant that January, Paul Redmond didn’t argue with Rolph. He tried to be understanding. He said he knew that perceptions in Washington weren’t always the same as reality on the ground.

“But sometimes perception is reality,” he said. “And the perception is that we are missing out.”

Redmond then made it painfully clear that East Berlin Station was going to have