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

was the polygraph examination he knew he’d have to take sometime after his return from Rome. He’d passed his last polygraph test in 1986—one year after he began working for the KGB—and CIA officers were routinely reexamined every five years. He was able to delay the polygraph test for several months, but by April of 1991 he could no longer avoid it. As he prepared for the test, which was now scheduled for April 12, he knew he had a lot to conceal and had to give serious thought to how he could beat the machine.

As a longtime operations officer, Ames had experience in administering polygraphs and had a good sense of the limits of their capabilities. He had been on the other side of the tests and knew what the examiners looked for. He also knew that polygraph results consistently reflect the expectations of the technicians. So his ability to pass the polygraph would depend on whether he could establish a good rapport with the examiner.

Ames was doing fine on the test until he hit a snag on questions related to money. When the examiner came back to the issue, he figured out that there was a problem. He began to talk about his plans for a career after the CIA. “We discussed at considerable length my nascent plans to do some import-export business with friends in New York and Colombia,” he later recalled. “They had been, and remained, merely plans, but it took a lot of discussion to assure the examiner that I had not yet violated and didn’t intend to violate any regulations about preretirement business planning and activities.” Clever misdirection had carried him through.

The examiner called a break for the day but said he wanted him to come back the next morning. Ames was concerned, but he’d studied the examiner’s behavior and methods during the test, and he was convinced that the man was showing no signs of trying to conceal hostility.

The next day they continued the examination, and Ames added more details to his thoughts about a future business career. He cruised through the rest of the test.

He had a great sense of relief—so great that it surprised him a bit. He seemed to be nowhere near so calm in his heart as he thought he’d been in his mind.

Canterbury Park, Springfield, Virginia, April 15, 1991

Three days after Aldrich Ames faced off against the polygraph machine at Tyson’s Corner, Robert Hanssen was a few miles away, scrambling to make an exchange with the KGB. At Doris, a dead drop site under a footbridge in Canterbury Park, Hanssen left a computer diskette—the twenty-second diskette filled with classified information that he had turned over to the KGB since 1985. It included details of an FBI recruitment operation that the KGB had previously asked him about.

The KGB left a package for Hanssen at Doris as well, one that included $10,000 and a note filled with Russian sentiment.

Dear Friend:

Time is flying. As a poet said:

What’s our life

If full of care

You have no time

To stop and stare?

You’ve managed to slow down the speed of your running life to send us a message. And we appreciate it.

The KGB then tasked Hanssen with a series of specific requests for information. Among other things, they wanted information on how the U.S. intelligence community was planning to respond to the political upheaval in the Soviet Union. The KGB was worried that the CIA was going to try to exploit the situation. And if they could prove that the CIA was becoming more active behind the scenes inside the Soviet Union, maybe they could use that information against the reformers in Moscow. Maybe Gorbachev could still be stopped before he destroyed what was left of the empire.

Langley, May 15, 1991

Richard Kerr was a levelheaded officer, and it was reassuring to see that someone like him could rise through the CIA ranks from line analyst to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. I’d known Dick fairly well over the years, as he occupied a number of important jobs in the intelligence and administration directorates on his way to becoming the number two. I’d always found that when he spoke it was wise to listen, even if what he said seemed cloaked in humor. One time in a conversation with the new Pakistani prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, in Islamabad, Kerr had concluded his description of a particular facet of developments in Afghanistan by saying, “If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, CIA will probably call it a duck.” The Radcliffe-educated Bhutto got Kerr’s point, but her note takers clearly had to scramble.

A conversation I’d had with Kerr summed up what seemed to be wrong with the direction the DO had instinctively taken as it pursued the Soviet target after 1989.

“All you guys do is take in each other’s laundry, don’t you?” Kerr said with his disarming smile. “You just go after KGB guys.” And the truth was I had no answer to that. Kerr’s message was punchy but clear—SE Division was stuck in another era. I agreed with him and began making adjustments to the way we were doing business.

Too much of the CIA’s clandestine collection effort had too little relevance in the fast-moving new world. Landing a Soviet defector had been our bread and butter in the old days, but now we found ourselves simply in the resettlement game, with no real evidence that we were getting much of anything useful in return. I’d raised the issue a few times and asked if we should really be taking so many of these defectors, but Redmond and the old guard were convinced that the next KGB officer coming over the hill would bring the goods. Only it just wasn’t working out that way. Not only were we not getting important counterintelligence from the stream of young KGB officers defecting to us, we were still coming up short on collecting crucial intelligence the NSC needed for