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

The Lubyanka, 1300 Hours, Thursday, August 22, 1991

Shebarshin returned to KGB headquarters and announced the President’s decision to the few colleagues gathered there. There were no immediate questions, and he found instant agreement to his order that the senior leadership cadre be gathered the following day to decide on the next steps. Shebarshin called for the creation of a commission to investigate the activity of the KGB during the coup and appointed Gennady Titov to head it. He thought Titov would be a good investigator but wondered whether they would let him remain head of the commission. Titov was a controversial old-line KGB officer who had as many enemies as friends. He could handle the job, but perhaps not the politics, Shebarshin thought.

After the brief meeting, Shebarshin walked the long corridor to his new office. Along the way, he was stopped by a friend from the Ninth who reported that Boris Pugo, former member of the Ministry of the Interior and one of the coup plotters, had killed himself with his own gun. Shebarshin knew Pugo and wondered why the honest and dedicated man had to take his own life. Were he and his co-conspirators so sure of the success of their enterprise that failure was tantamount to death?

Eternal memory to Boris Karlovich Pugo, Shebarshin thought dryly. He would have the same feeling later when he learned that Marshal Akhromeyev, another of the coup plotters and, yes, another honorable man, had hanged himself.

   11   

Moscow, 1530 Hours, Thursday, August 22, 1991

Dave Rolph had kept his team fanned out across Moscow since Monday, and as the mood in Moscow shifted from fear to jubilation, his officers were out there in the crowd capturing the images of a failed counterrevolution that had by now caught the imagination of the world.

One of Rolph’s officers was mingling with the growing crowd around Dzerzhinsky Square, noting that some had begun to paint slogans on the wall of the Lubyanka, while others were gathering around the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Moscow’s cast-bronze symbol of repression. He began snapping pictures like everybody else, thinking that before it was over, he might get lucky and get that one photograph that summed up the history of what was happening in the square.

The Lubyanka, 1530 Hours, Thursday, August 22, 1991

The chief of physical security for the KGB’s Dzerzhinsky complex reported to the new Chairman of the KGB that the crowd in the square outside had grown and that it might be getting ready to storm the building. What were his orders?

“Close and block all doors and gates, check the gratings,” said Shebarshin. “Under no circumstances, no matter what the situation, are firearms to be used. I’ll order the Moscow authorities to contact the militia.”

With great difficulty, the security department at the KGB headquarters was able to find someone from the militia leadership who promised to send help. But they never showed up. Shebarshin dismissed it as another sign of confusion and uncertainty in all of Moscow’s institutions. Not long after that, he received a call from the Soviet prosecutor’s office advising him that criminal charges had been filed against Kryuchkov. He was further advised that a team was ready to head over to search Kryuchkov’s office.

“All right, let them come,” he said without hesitation. The call was followed immediately by another from the Russian Federation’s prosecutor’s office, advising the new KGB Chairman that the Russian Federation had also initiated criminal charges against Kryuchkov. They were sending a team of investigators to search Kryuchkov’s office and would be accompanied by a team from Central Television.

Television! Shebarshin reacted in a flash. But he immediately resigned himself to the new way of things. What’s the difference? he thought. He told the Russian Federation prosecutor to send over his investigators and to let them know that there would also be a team from the Soviet Union prosecutor’s office.

In ten minutes, there were a dozen justice investigators led by the general prosecutor of the Russian Federation. Their appearance was sharply different from what Shebarshin and his colleagues were used to seeing within the confines of the Lubyanka—few wore coats and ties, and they all look rumpled somehow. Shebarshin found them polite but slightly agitated. To his surprise, they seemed to make decisions quickly and sensibly. They divided into groups, and one tackled Kryuchkov’s office while another set off for Kryuchkov’s dacha, where the former KGB Chairman’s wife, Ekaterina Petrovna, had been weeping for the last two days. A third group was dispatched to Kryuchkov’s Moscow apartment to begin its search.

Shebarshin took in the activity about him and asked his aide for a strong cup of tea. Then he began to write his report for Gorbachev. As he was writing, the leadership telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and heard Gorbachev’s voice: “I have signed your temporary appointment as acting KGB Chairman,” he said. “Get to work!”

Sitting there in the Chairman’s office, Shebarshin wondered why it was that three hours ago, or even now, for that matter, he never had the thought of declining this appointment. Was it force of habit that he should never refuse? Was it discipline? Perhaps it was his training to always obey his seniors, particularly since in this instance it had been the President himself who commanded his fate. But Shebarshin made an unpleasant discovery, which he tried to suppress. It was simply vanity, he decided. Leonid Shebarshin, the son of a shoemaker from Marina Woods, most recently a common intelligence officer, has become the head of the Committee for State Security.

People are weak, he decided. It is all about vanity.

Langley, 0745 Hours, Thursday, August 22, 1991

The pile of cable traffic on my desk seemed to grow each morning after the coup collapsed. As I flipped through the reports, I was able to keep track of the new trajectory of the Soviet Union about as well as anyone else in Washington, Moscow, or other world capitals, which still wasn’t very good.

This morning I