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

morning, a German tabloid ran a photograph of one of the previous night’s revelers holding a placard high above him. It read, “Und nun, Österreich?”—“And now, Austria?”—a thinly veiled reference to Hitler’s ambitions.

In the cold light of day, I still couldn’t shake the odd sense of discomfort that had nagged at me since I’d walked through Karlshorst the previous morning. We were winding down a century that was widely thought to be the “American century,” but the reality was that most of what had befallen mankind since 1914 had its origins in Germany. Would historians even think of calling the twentieth century the “German century”? I doubted it.

Baghdad, October 25, 1990

Czempinski had decided to run the rescue operation himself. He’d slipped into Baghdad with a team of Polish intelligence officers and was developing his plan on the fly, right there under the noses of Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus. Initially, he nearly despaired of finding a way to beat Iraqi surveillance. But finally, on October 25—two months after he had been approached by the CIA for help—Czempinski and his team, using false documents, were able to slip the Americans quietly out of Iraq before the Iraqis could find them.

Interior Minister Andrzej Milczanowski was greatly relieved by the success of the operation. He had taken a great personal risk in keeping it secret from his prime minister and gladly greeted the CIA officers with evident pride as they passed through Warsaw on their way home to the United States. Milczanowski’s decision not to keep his bosses in the loop was easily forgotten in the elation in Warsaw over the dramatic impact the Iraq operation had on relations with the United States. Suddenly, debt relief negotiations were far more positive, and Poland was now seen in Washington as a partner and reliable ally. The operation came at a time when many leading officials in the Solidarity government were still wary of the intelligence agency and had voiced criticism over Milczanowski’s willingness to keep so many of the old officers. It effectively ended the debate within the Polish government over the fate of the service, and afterward few of Czempinski’s requests for resources were denied.

The American Consulate General, West Berlin, November 1990

The security officer at the American consulate in West Berlin wasn’t sure who the man in the waiting room was or what he wanted, but he’d said something about the Soviet military, so he figured he should notify the CIA.

By the time a CIA officer arrived to question the man, the walk-in had walked out. Undeterred, the CIA case officer ran out onto the street to catch him before he got away and asked him to come back inside to talk. If this man really had something to say about the Soviet military, the CIA was interested. You could never have too many Soviet military agents.

Once he sat the man down and began the debrief, the CIA officer discovered that he was not in the Soviet military at all. He was instead an unusual messenger. The man owned a sandwich and snack truck that served Soviet military bases in East Germany, and he had befriended a number of Soviet officers and soldiers over the years. One high-ranking Army officer had decided he could trust the snack truck driver and asked him if he ever traveled to the West. When the driver said yes, the officer asked him to take a message to the Americans. “Tell them I want to provide them with information and volunteer my services.”

The CIA officer arranged to meet the snack truck driver again, this time away from the consulate. By then he had a list of questions for the Soviet officer. He explained that the CIA might be interested in working with him, depending on his answers.

When the snack truck operator returned a week or two later with the answers to the initial vetting questions, the CIA snapped to attention. The new volunteer belonged to a frontline unit of the Western Group of Forces stationed at Schlottheim, southwest of Berlin. The battalion would be at the point of any Soviet thrust into the infamous Fulda Gap, the invasion route that had been war-gamed as the kickoff point for World War III for the last half century. It was a combat unit that would have been among the first to engage NATO if war had ever broken out between the United States and the Soviet Union on the plains of central Germany.

At this point, the CIA officer arranged to meet the volunteer in person and quietly cut the snack truck driver out of the equation. The volunteer turned out to be a colonel, the commander of a motorized rifle battalion, and he quickly pledged that he was ready to do anything he could to get out to the West. He said he was scheduled to be transferred back to the Soviet Union and that he was eager to make a break for America as soon as possible, along with his wife and two children. Not every Soviet officer was looking forward to going home.

The colonel was an appealing prospect, but he wasn’t in this alone. He said that his battalion adjutant, a captain, was also part of his plot to defect, along with the captain’s girlfriend, who was the regimental code clerk. The operation was expanding. Now we were going to have to plot out escape plans for six instead of just one. The colonel was given the cryptonym GTROSETTA and the captain GTSTONE, and we began to try to figure out the best way to exploit this intelligence break.

At their next meeting, the CIA case officer told the colonel that his value would be enhanced dramatically if he could bring some Soviet weapons with him when he defected. The colonel readily agreed to try and asked for a wish list.

The Pentagon regularly publishes a classified list of foreign weapons that it would like to obtain and examine to keep its equipment a step ahead of the competition.