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

reports coming in were familiar: The KGB was under threat; some forces were preparing to storm the building; all the chiefs were awaiting orders. Shebarshin decided that he must reinforce his rule of the previous day: The KGB cannot allow itself to be drawn into any confrontation with the crowd.

The phone rang again. This time it was the chief of the investigative directorate, reporting that the supporters of Moscow dissident Valeria Novodvorskaya were preparing to storm the Lefortovo Prison to free their leader. Shebarshin was familiar with Novodvorskaya and had always dismissed her as part of what he considered the hysterical end of the political spectrum. But he also understood that it was precisely that end of the political spectrum that was now in charge.

Almost wearily he asked, “Do we have her?”

“We do,” the chief of investigations answered.

“What should we do?”

“Release her.”

“Who can authorize that?” Shebarshin asked.

“You can.”

“Then release her,” Shebarshin said with finality.

Langley, 2345 Hours, Thursday, August 22, 1991

It had been a long day, I thought as I drafted a cable to Rolph telling him that at his next meeting with Krassilnikov he might see if the general was interested in “reinsuring with us.” But gently, I instructed my Moscow chief. Do it with finesse.

Before I closed up, I just sat there alone in my office, trying to come to grips with the drama that now seemed to have played out with such finality. Was this it? I wondered. Was history really going to play another of its anticlimactic tricks, dragging us along for almost half a century in a struggle that seemed so endless that it had defined generations—it had certainly defined mine—and then just get tired and call it quits? Was I missing something? Were the hard-liners like Redmond right? Would we all arrive in Langley some Monday morning and find the Berlin Wall neatly restored and propping up the Humpty-Dumpty of the Warsaw Pact?

None of this really made any sense at the end of two turbulent weeks. Maybe it would take a little more time to sink in, I decided, and pulled the vault door closed and initialed the sign-out sheet.

Lubyanka, 1400 Hours, August 23, 1991

Shebarshin had not been wrong when he’d told his wife that he’d probably hold the acting chairmanship of the KGB for only a couple of days. In the afternoon after the festivities at Dzerzhinsky Square, he was advised by the President’s office that Vadim Bakatin, the minister of the interior and a liberal oppositionist, had been appointed Chairman of the KGB, effective immediately. Shebarshin would continue on concurrently as Vice Chairman of the KGB and as head of the First Chief Directorate’s foreign intelligence service.

Shebarshin understood that he would hold an important record in the annals of the Soviet Union—he had been chairman of the Committee for State Security, the twenty-first in the line of succession that began with Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky in 1917, but only for a single day.

Moscow, 1230 Hours, Monday, August 25, 1991

The two men didn’t have to huddle in the backseat of a KGB Volga this time. Moscow was suddenly an open city, and they could talk more comfortably over lunch in a Chinese restaurant inside the Peking Hotel.

As Rolph ate the Russian-Chinese food and talked about the coup and its stunning aftermath, he could see that Krassilnikov was a changed man. For one thing, Krassilnikov observed that Boris Yeltsin had shown great courage by standing up to the coup plotters. When Rolph reminded him of his earlier words—that if Yeltsin wanted a confrontation, he’d get one—the old man shrugged. I didn’t mean a military confrontation, the KGB general explained. I meant an ideological one. We were misled and misinformed by the emergency committee. Fortunately, the Second Chief Directorate never got its hands dirty with the plotters. It had no involvement in the coup, he stressed.

As Rolph listened and studied Krassilnikov’s deeply lined face, he finally eased into his pitch.

“You know, Rem, I have really come to enjoy the time we spend together. These meetings have been very useful for me. Of course, we don’t know which way things are going to end up now. But as a friend, if there is anything I can do to help you, I would be happy to. I have no authority to say this, of course, I’m speaking just as a friend, but if you need anything . . .”

A stern look crossed Krassilnikov’s face, and he raised his hand and held it in front of Rolph. “Stop. Don’t do this.”

Rolph brought his pitch to a halt. Rem Krassilnikov, the professor of counterintelligence, was not interested in working for the CIA, no matter how bleak the outlook for the KGB.

Rolph abandoned his recruitment efforts, and Rem Krassilnikov refused to let the incident interrupt their meeting. He went right back to explaining the KGB’s new realities.

With Yeltsin now calling the shots, the KGB was to be broken up, Krassilnikov revealed. The First Chief Directorate was to become independent, as were the signal intelligence units of the Eighth and Sixteenth Directorates—the KGB’s version of the NSA. The border guards and VIP security units would also be split off. Vadim Bakatin, a liberal former interior minister who had already proposed ways to reform the intelligence service, was to run the KGB. And guess who would be a member of an “advisory” panel, helping Bakatin “reform” the KGB? Why, Rem Krassilnikov’s boss, Gennady Titov, the current head of the Second Chief Directorate.

And that’s when Rolph realized: These guys won’t give up easily.

But Bakatin moved quickly to break up the KGB. He summed up his view of the organization in the immediate aftermath of the coup: You see, the most terrible thing is that the KGB in its old form had an absolute monopoly on government communications, total surveillance, secrecy, the encrypting and decrypting of documents, the protection of the USSR’s borders, and even the protection of the president. That, I am sure, played the decisive role in the coup. The danger