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

“We’ve tried that for two years. Every time we push him he says he’s holding out till we get him out. Then he’s ours, he says. Who can argue with that? This guy is a KGB counterintelligence officer. We’ve got that confirmed. If we were in his shoes, we’d hold out till we’d been sprung.”

“What did Gerber think of the guy?” Stolz fidgeted a little when he asked the question.

“You tell me,” I said. “Burton and I haven’t talked. And he doesn’t vote in my straw polls. But my spies tell me that he had his doubts. Like everybody.”

“Your recommendation?” Stolz asked. He liked consensus.

“Let’s do it.”

Turning to Twetten: “Tom?”

“What do we have to lose?”

“Then let’s do it.” Stolz showed no reluctance at the decision. “When do we brief the judge?” CIA Director William Webster would have to approve the plan to exfiltrate PROLOGUE. If anything went wrong, it could spark a diplomatic incident.

“Next week, when we get him to sign off on the U.S. passport. He’ll have to take that to Larry Eagleburger.” The CIA could falsify Soviet identity documents, but it couldn’t issue a false American passport for one of its spies without the State Department’s approval.

“Get the package together,” said Stolz, signaling that the meeting was over.

East Berlin, April 15, 1990

Where was that damn colonel?

That was the question that CIA officers in both West and East Berlin were asking. The missing colonel from the American Department of the HVA, East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, was one of the top-priority targets of the CIA’s aggressive new campaign to recruit agents from what was left of East Germany’s security services. He had once been stationed in New York, and the CIA believed that he almost certainly knew the identities of American spies who had worked for East Germany. Like thousands of other officers from the disintegrating HVA and MfS, he had just been fired, and as far as the CIA was concerned, he was now one of the most important unemployed men in East Germany. If the CIA could entice him to talk, he might be able to help roll up long-running spy operations against the United States. But the colonel seemed to have disappeared. Finding him was a major operation.

Paul Redmond’s January visit had shaken up the East Berlin Station, and David Rolph had gotten the message that it was time to become more aggressive. It didn’t take him long to figure out how. Rolph and the East Berlin Station came up with a plan to launch a brutally simple frontal assault on the crumbling Stasi, beginning with a series of cold pitches to as many HVA and MfS officers as possible. Case officers were told to dispense with the usual operational foreplay of spotting, assessing, and gaining access to their targets. Instead, they’d track them down and bluntly ask them if they wanted a last-minute insurance policy against uncertainty. There were few subtleties involved. The idea was to be up front and in their faces, offering a simple bargain: information for cash. More and more HVA and MfS officers were being laid off each day. If the CIA didn’t act now, they might all simply go home and forget the secrets they were carrying around in their heads.

Armed with organizational charts and rosters provided by their Stasi source, as well as other information about the identities of MfS and HVA officers collected over the years, Rolph and his case officers started calling East German intelligence officers at night at their homes. First calling from pay phones in West Berlin and later from East Berlin, the CIA officers reminded each East German intelligence officer of his current plight. “I represent the Western services,” they’d then say. “Would you be interested in working with us?”

The telephone pitches were blunt and bold—and they didn’t work. Invariably, the East Germans would hang up on the Americans, perhaps suspecting that it was a hoax or even a provocation by the Stasi to test the loyalty of its remaining officer corps. East Germany’s culture of suspicion was dying hard. After two or three luckless weeks, the CIA scrapped its telephone campaign and decided to start knocking on doors. In order to reinforce the small East Berlin Station, officers from the West Berlin base joined in as well.

CIA case officers based in West Berlin had only rarely been involved in operations in the East in the recent past. The West Berlin base was subordinate to the CIA’s Bonn Station and focused on intelligence targets on its own turf. But there were so many potential recruitment targets in East Berlin now that David Rolph needed help, which explained why a CIA officer from West Berlin was now looking for that elusive HVA colonel.

Finally, a source in West Berlin was able to help the CIA track the colonel down. It turned out that the man who five months earlier had been a senior colonel in the HVA was now working as a doorman in Berlin, a downward slide symbolic of what was happening to the Stasi—and to East Germany. A case officer approached him, sat him down, and made his pitch. If he would tell the case officer about the American spies he had handled during his long career, the CIA would be generous. The colonel obviously needed money, and now he was being offered more than he could ever make in his new line of work.

The former HVA colonel looked at the American in disgust and responded with the only rebuke he could make. “You obviously know who I was,” he said. “And you now know what I have become. The only thing I have left is my honor. I have no intention of giving that up. Please do not come back again.”

The CIA officer was taken aback and suddenly felt a deep sense of professional respect for the man. No matter that he had served a corrupt and tyrannical regime that was now vanishing around him. The German would be a loyal