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

the tricky endgame in the USSR. Getting that kind of intelligence was now our most pressing mission.

Redmond had been stunned early in 1991 when I refused to accept a low-level KGB officer into the CIA’s defector resettlement program. Instead, I ordered that the KGB officer, with our help behind the scenes, apply for immigration through normal refugee channels. He did so and joined the growing flood of Soviet immigrants to the United States. If he’d had something important to tell us, I’d have had no trouble resettling him myself. But to Redmond and others in the SE Division, that decision was unforgivable. He thought I had gone soft on the Soviets.

I’d decided by now that Redmond was blinded by the minutiae of espionage and had no interest in the big picture. He didn’t seem to want to acknowledge that the Berlin Wall had fallen for good and that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse.

During one heated discussion with Paul, I flared.

“Jesus, Redmond, you’re becoming precisely like the people I came here to fight,” I said, thinking of the paranoia of the KGB and of James Jesus Angleton. “You are becoming like our enemy.”

Redmond was still consumed by the 1985 losses. I decided I had to move him out of the division, and the seventh floor agreed to assign him as the deputy in the counterintelligence center, where he could concentrate full-time on catching spies.

He’d be happy; I’d be happy.

The Kremlin, May 1991

The first ominous indicators of the showdown in the KGB that Colonel Valentin Aksilenko felt so certain was coming came in the spring of 1991.

First, early in the year KGB Chairman Kryuchkov created a new central entity for internal propaganda within the KGB. The new unit, described as an “analytical center,” operated independently from the First and Second Chief Directorates and reported directly to the KGB Chairman at Lubyanka. Kryuchkov pulled Nikolai Sergeyevich Leonov away from his job of supervising KGB operations in North and South America and assigned him to head up the new propaganda center. Leonov’s orders were clear enough: bring about a reversal of the growing and dangerous mood of liberalism and defeatism in the KGB.

Leonov decided to reach down into the core of the organization for a solution. He would rekindle the KGB’s patriotic pride, finding in its historical roots the sense of meaning and energy the Chairman required to prepare the KGB for a last great battle—not for socialism, but for the survival of the Soviet Union.

Leonov, who as a KGB wunderkind in his thirties had become a close confidant of Fidel Castro in Cuba’s revolutionary days, took to the job with a passion. Immediately, flyers and leaflets began to appear on KGB desks everywhere, all stoking the patriotic nationalism believed to lie deep in every Russian soul, even the souls of the cynical and urbane officers of the Committee for State Security. “Russian greatness” was the slogan—the flyers did not extol the virtues of Marxism so much as sound the alarm against dangerous conspiracies cloaked in the guise of change.

Leonov relentlessly advanced the proposition that America’s goal was to destroy the Soviet Union. Countless mutations of this theme were woven into the anti-Western propaganda that emerged with great fanfare from his agency. It was all supposed to stir a patriotic response among the rank-and-file KGB.

Aksilenko concluded that it was, in the end, mostly bullshit. He and others at the KGB might have dismissed the propaganda as useless rhetoric had it not been accompanied by more troubling orders. In April, Kryuchkov demanded that all officers of the KGB once again be issued personal weapons, and ordered that they begin carrying them immediately.

Almost two decades earlier, Leonid Brezhnev had declared that class struggle within the USSR had come to a peaceful end and that socialism had been victorious. The Soviet Union no longer had internal enemies. Thus, the KGB was quietly disarmed. Its officers were told to turn in their service weapons. With the issuance of Makarov automatics and even Kalashnikovs to some, Kryuchkov was preparing the KGB for an as yet undefined last battle, Aksilenko concluded. Kryuchkov was gearing up for a showdown, and he wanted his officers armed and ready to follow. What the KGB Chairman apparently didn’t realize was that the order to rearm served only to harden the positions of the KGB officers who believed that change was the Soviet Union’s only possible salvation.

Val Aksilenko, along with many other officers, quietly decided to retire from the KGB rather than be drawn into Kryuchkov’s patriotic struggle.

Langley, May 1991

Aldrich Ames breezed by Dottie, my executive assistant, and marched right up to my desk.

“Milt, I’ve decided it’s time to come back to SE. What I want to do is run cases. I want to come back and work in the ‘back room’ on your internal cases.”

I was more than a little taken aback. Here was Ames, a man some put on a short list of officers who ought to be watched, coming in and almost demanding I take him back in the division after I’d just cleared him out. But what caught my attention as much as his demand was his transformation. The Aldrich Ames I’d met briefly before his departure for Rome in 1985 was a shoddy-looking guy with bad teeth. He had been replaced by a new Ames in a $1,500 sport-coat-and-slacks outfit, and the teeth that had been so hopelessly discolored had now been beautifully capped at what I guessed was a cost of around $1,000 a cap.

I told Ames I would get back to him. After he left, I went over to Redmond’s office.

“Rick Ames just barged into my office and told me I’d better bring him back to the division now and put him in the back room working the sensitive cases. What do you make of that?”

Redmond, who was packing out and transferring to the counterintelligence center, had no flip answer this time. He just stared at me, taking in what I had