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

they were told that instead of leaving immediately, they might be asked on short notice to report to their assigned train stations. After waiting for orders that never came, most of the personnel simply went back into the routine of spreading rumors like everybody else.

Moscow, 0900 Hours, Wednesday, August 21, 1991

Like the Red Army volunteers in Germany, Leonid Shebarshin had been sitting by the telephone since Monday, waiting for orders to act that had never come. Early on Monday morning, KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov had called him and asked him to put all of his directorate’s resources at the disposal of the emergency committee. Shebarshin had agreed and had then ordered the nation’s foreign intelligence service to begin spying on Moscow.

Over the course of the rest of that day, he had passed on reports from his officers to Kryuchkov. Shebarshin had also agreed to order the First Chief Directorate’s paramilitary team to gather at the KGB’s central club in downtown Moscow. Kryuchkov, a former chief of the First Directorate himself, wanted a loyal unit in place when the time came to storm the White House and crush the ragtag forces now protecting the defiant Boris Yeltsin. But since that initial flurry of activity on Monday, Shebarshin had done little but wait patiently through an odd silence. Kryuchkov never called back.

That silence was the best evidence Shebarshin had that something was very wrong. Shebarshin was a man of the KGB, and if Kryuchkov had told him to send in the paramilitary unit on Monday, he would have followed the Chairman’s orders. But obedience had its limits. By Wednesday morning, it was clear to him that the coup was collapsing into a farce; and he told himself that if Kryuchkov called him into action now, he would not obey the chairman’s orders.

So he called the commanding officer of the paramilitary unit still standing by at the KGB club and told him not to accept any orders from anyone except himself. And he had decided that he wasn’t going to be issuing any orders. It had become obvious to Shebarshin that Kryuchkov and his cohorts had suffered from a fatal lack of will.

Across Moscow, other military, intelligence, and political leaders were all coming to the same conclusion. The plotters had lacked the conviction to follow up their drunken grab for power with an immediate show of ruthless action and instead had bumbled at every turn. Men like Leonid Shebarshin—the people in the upper tiers of the bureaucracy who really controlled the levers of power in the Soviet system—calculated the odds and in the end simply stopped returning calls.

Moscow, 1200 Hours, Wednesday, August 21, 1991

As he slid into the backseat of the black Volga for another meeting with Rem Krassilnikov, David Rolph saw that the KGB general looked exhausted and disheveled, as if he hadn’t slept since the coup began. The confidence and bravado that Krassilnikov had displayed in their meeting on Monday was gone, replaced by a more tentative attitude toward the crisis that was now moving to its whimpering conclusion. This time it was Rolph who had a message to deliver from the CIA to the KGB.

The Helsinki meeting, planned for October, was being postponed, Rolph told Krassilnikov. So was a proposed visit by a KGB delegation to the United States. The CIA was sending a message to the KGB—the new relationship between the two intelligence services, which had seemed so promising just a few weeks earlier, was being put on hold. With Kryuchkov’s coup failing, the KGB that he led was now on the wrong side of history. The CIA was looking to the new leaders of Russia.

Langley, 1900 Hours, Wednesday, August 21, 1991

By Wednesday, we’d concluded that the coup was in serious trouble and chances were it would fail. That analysis was carried by Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates to President Bush’s vacation headquarters in Kennebunkport, Maine.

The CIA assessment was based on the continued lack of signs that the coup plotters were actually in control. None of the usual indicators were being picked up—there were no widespread arrests, no communications blackouts, and telephone and fax traffic between university students in the United States and the Soviet Union were operating and were full of defiance.

By the end of the day, the President would observe on national television that sometimes coups failed, making the United States the first among the Western allies to suggest that perhaps the clock couldn’t be turned back in the USSR by a handful of old guard plotters. The President’s observation was then flashed across the world by CNN to Moscow, where the men who ran the USSR sat transfixed by the television coverage.

First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, 0630 Hours, Thursday, August 22, 1991

To Leonid Shebarshin, it seemed the slide down the slippery slope had accelerated. The emergency committee was in free fall. Gorbachev’s return from the Crimea in the early hours of the morning had been a dreamlike affair. The President was greeted at Vnukovo-2 airport, but not by the usual crowd. There were no Politburo members, no Vice President or members of the presidential council. Members of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate bodyguards were lost in the colorful sea of men in uniforms and in civilian clothes, all armed with automatics and pistols. The crowd was animated, maybe even a little drunk.

Descending the steps from his plane, Gorbachev waved to those greeting him, his manner friendly but lethargic. His smile was uncertain—maybe he was tired, or maybe guilty, Shebarshin didn’t know which. The huge armored presidential Zil limo wheeled up to the aircraft stairs, and its heavy door swung open.

“Whose car is this?” the President demanded unexpectedly. “The Ninth’s?”

Upon hearing the response—“Yes, Mikhail Sergeyevich, the Ninth’s”—Gorbachev gestured, as if to brush away the Zil and his Ninth Directorate KGB bodyguards. He declared, “I will not go with the Ninth!”

Most of the onlookers could not have known that the head of the Ninth Directorate, Yuri Plekhanov, had been one of the members of