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

and disappeared briefly. When he returned, he simply handed the passport back to Palevich and told him to leave.

“Would you be so kind as to have your secretary call me a cab?” Palevich asked the badly rattled intelligence officer, trying one last gambit to buy another few minutes.

“No!” Tomaszewski shouted. “Catch a ride with your backup team.” The Polish officer believed that Palevich was only the front man for an elaborate operation to entrap him, and he wasn’t going to fall for this American ambush.

Palevich flew back to Washington the next day, and when he reported in, he had to endure some jokes about the apparent failure of his mission. “It was a good plan, we just sent the wrong man.” Redmond, a Harvard graduate himself, good-naturedly said that he might make the next approach, this time in Rome. He was sure that two Harvard men could sort things out.

Two days later, as Palevich stepped out of the shower in his Maryland home, his telephone rang. It was Tomaszewski, calling from a pay phone in Lisbon. He had been careful not to call from the Polish embassy, in case eavesdroppers from the Portuguese security service overheard the conversation.

Speaking in “commercial terms,” Tomaszewski said he was terribly sorry for the misunderstanding of the previous week and that in fact his home office was very much interested in accepting the proposal. Could further discussions be arranged? It was obvious to Palevich that Tomaszewski had reported the contact to headquarters and had then been thoroughly chewed out for abruptly dismissing the CIA approach.

The opportunity would come quickly, and when it did, Gromoslaw Czempinski and Andrzej Milczanowski would make the most of it.

   5   

Langley, April 5, 1990

“We’re in the final stages of planning the PROLOGUE exfil,” I said. I was sitting with Dick Stolz in his seventh-floor office. Tom Twetten, the ADDO, was with us.

The case of the mysterious KGB volunteer who had approached Jack Downing on the Red Arrow so long ago had continued to plod along without any resolution of the doubts over whether it was a KGB double agent operation. We had, however, finally confirmed PROLOGUE’s identity, thanks to Sergei Papushin, the defector from the Second Chief Directorate who had been hauled in by the FBI in New Jersey. After he was shown a mug book, he gave us PROLOGUE’s name and position.

It was Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov, Papushin said. Zhomov was an officer in the First Department of the Second Chief Directorate, working under Rem Krassilnikov and his deputy, Valentin Klimenko. We decided to give Zhomov a small jolt by letting him know we knew his name. In one of our letters we passed to him on the Red Arrow we opened with “Dear Sasha.” But he was a cool customer and didn’t react.

By the spring of 1990, the handful of CIA officers involved in the case agreed that PROLOGUE was either the CIA’s most important spy in Moscow or an amazingly good KGB dangle. We would have to bring him in from the cold if we were ever to find out which one he was. So several weeks earlier we had told him we were beginning the necessary preparations for an exfiltration, and as part of the process he should give us a handful of passport-size photographs we could use to create an identity for his escape. Within two weeks we had our photographs and a face to go with a name. We could now start working on a detailed plan. But there was a catch. We couldn’t use any really elaborate methods of getting PROLOGUE out because of the likelihood it was a controlled operation with the specific goal of smoking out our exfiltration methods. We’d have to come up with a way of getting him out without revealing too much about how we did this kind of thing. It was against that backdrop that I decided to brief the seventh floor. I was still hopeful that the PROLOGUE operation was real, but I also had to share with Stolz and Twetten the doubts that many in the SE Division still harbored.

“What has he really given us?” Stolz asked.

“He’s confirmed a lot about the 1985 trouble. And he’s tipped us to some controlled cases they were going to dangle in front of us. And he’s given us some internal documents that tell us what they think of our last few Moscow chiefs.”

“Anything we know for certain would hurt them?” Twetten asked.

“No,” I said.

“Do you think he’s controlled?” Dick Stolz was being the case officer now, the old street man who’d been kicked out of Moscow in the early days and had been running operations against the KGB ever since. He knew how difficult it was to quantify an operation like PROLOGUE.

“Every time we make an exchange with him, I call a meeting of the small compartment of people who know about the case—that’s about five of us. I take a poll on two questions. First, I ask if he’s controlled. About fifty percent of the time we vote that he’s controlled, the other half of the time it goes the other way. And there’s always some changing of positions between polls.”

“What’s the second question?” Twetten asked.

“Whether we should go through with the exfil despite our doubts. The vote is always four to one that we go ahead.”

“What do we lose if he’s bad?” Stolz asked.

“A passport, an unspectacular method of getting him out. That’s about it.”

“What’s Redmond think?”

I paused for a second before answering Stolz’s question. “Like me. Depends on the day. But whatever he says, I believe deep down he thinks the operation is good. And he has no doubts that we should go ahead with the exfil. That’s my position, too. If PROLOGUE is bad, there’s got to be a reason why they’ve been running him at us for two years. If he’s good, he’ll be pure gold.”

“Can’t we insist that he give us the answer to one hard question before we pull him out?”