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

Mr. Richard Kerr, sends you his compliments and as an accomplished historian in his own right wanted you to know his view of the events that you have been so personally associated with here in Moscow in the last forty days. Mr. Kerr places the beginning of the twentieth century at August 1914, in the Balkans. And he places the beginning of the twenty-first century at August 1991, in Moscow.”

As Bakatin smiled, I felt Strauss turn to look at me twice.

A few moments later, we ended our visit with Bakatin and took a short tour of Yuri Andropov’s museum office overlooking Dzerzhinsky, now denuded of the once proud statue of Iron Felix. Then, as Strauss and I were walking down a broad staircase to the parade entrance of the Lubyanka, the ambassador turned to me.

“Milt, how does that 1914 thing you said to Bakatin go again?”

I told him, wondering where the old fox was headed. Strauss thought for a moment and then said, “Milt, I don’t want to hear you ever say that again. Not in this town. Not in any other town. You understand me?”

“Sure, Mr. Ambassador. But are you going to tell me why?”

“Yes, I am. That is so goddamn good that it now belongs to me. I’m stealing that from you, and I don’t want to hear you say it again.” Then he smiled.

I saw the “1914 thing” appear in an interview Bob Strauss gave to The Washington Post a few weeks later.

Vadim Bakatin did indeed hand over the blueprints to the KGB’s bugging scheme against our embassy in Moscow. No one in Washington really believed that the blueprints were complete, however, so it didn’t resolve the debate over what to do with the embassy building.

The action did, however, help get Bakatin fired and earned him a place in KGB history as the most reviled Chairman the organization had ever had.

Moscow, Mid-September 1991

I later met with a group of the new KGB leadership, one of whom provided me with an animated description of the role CNN had played on KGB thinking during the crucial moments of the putsch. The KGB officer staff, uncertain whether to throw in with the supporters of the new emergency committee or the resisters backing Yeltsin, found themselves in an information blackout. Lacking any other source of information on what Kryuchkov and his cohorts were up to, the men in the Lubyanka had tuned in to CNN to watch events in Moscow unfold.

The general summed it up for me, his voice full of irony and amusement. “We are sitting here in KGB headquarters watching CNN like probably you were, Milton, and we see Boris Yeltsin come out of the parliament building and get up on the tank. But we see on CNN that the turrets on the tanks lined up in front are turned in the wrong direction—they are no longer pointed at the parliament. Then the American President, who is on vacation, comes on CNN saying that coups sometimes fail. And by then there are whispers all over Dzerzhinsky that CIA knows more about what is happening right now in Moscow than we do in the KGB. And I even have reports that President Bush has called Boris Yeltsin while he is surrounded by tanks and tells him to be strong! And so we just turn off our phones and go home or to our dachas.”

Moscow, September 18, 1991

Vanity had its limits, Shebarshin decided after less than a month on the job as deputy to the new and reform-minded KGB Chairman, Vadim Bakatin. He submitted his resignation on Wednesday, September 18, and it was accepted on Friday. He had spent almost thirty years in the KGB, and now he would retire to his dacha to reflect on what it had really meant. It would take a few years for him to sort through those years, but then he would begin to write it all down.

Moscow, October 1991

David Rolph didn’t wait this time for headquarters to tell him to get moving; he decided to take advantage of the revolutionary climate in Moscow by launching an aggressive new campaign to recruit Russian agents. In the upheaval after the failed coup, KGB surveillance in Moscow had all but vanished. For the first time since the start of the Cold War, CIA officers could walk or drive around Moscow without being followed and could meet Russian officials without fear of exposure or arrest. Moscow was no longer a “denied area.”

Five months earlier, CIA case officers still feared the KGB’s mythical power to follow them everywhere, using what some called “ultradiscreet surveillance.” Now, case officers in Moscow trained in the clandestine arts of “sticks and bricks”—dead drops, chalk marks on walls, burst transmissions—could simply call up a Russian and ask him to lunch.

Moscow Station prepared a list of Soviet and Russian officials who were worth the time and energy to get to know, divided up the names, and started calling them to see if they’d be interested in talking. It was the kind of routine meet-and-greet activity that diplomats conduct the world over, yet it was something that had never been done before by the CIA in Moscow. And it worked. The case officers found that in the wake of the coup, government officials all over Moscow were eager to talk to them, to make their observations and opinions heard in Washington—particularly if it meant a free lunch.

The end of the Soviet Union, like so many upheavals, stirred things up and brought a few old ghosts out of hiding. Long-lost agents, people who had spied for the CIA and then either been arrested or had simply gone underground, now began to come forward, demanding payment for services rendered during the Cold War. One of these was a former GRU officer who’d gone to extraordinary lengths to try to spy for the CIA a decade earlier. Back in 1981, he’d swum down the Moscow River until he’d reached a beach reserved for foreign diplomats. Coming