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

stressed. Full recovery might take up to a year. “They only let go a couple of minutes while they had me strip to my undershorts. After that they sat on either side of me and held my arms again while we waited, I guess, for the others to set the cameras up in the adjoining room.”

“Anyone else come in to talk to you?” asked Redmond.

“Nobody. I finally told the two goons that they really didn’t need to hold on to my arms anymore. I wasn’t going anywhere and they could relax.”

Gerber said nothing, but there was an intensity in his eyes that told Stombaugh he was taking in every word.

“The two guys looked at each other for a second, and then just shrugged and let go of my arms. And that was that. Then after a while another one I hadn’t seen before came in from the adjoining room and told me to put my pants and shirt on and come with him.”

“Any name?” Redmond asked.

“No. No names. I didn’t exactly feel like I was in a position to ask.” Stombaugh quickly regretted his last comment and hoped he didn’t sound flip. He glanced over at Gerber but read nothing in the man’s face.

“We’ll take a look at the mug books and see if you can make any of them out,” Redmond said, making a note on his pad.

“At any rate,” Stombaugh continued, “when I went next door they had everything I’d been carrying laid out on tables. It was all there, the rubles, stacked, but no longer banded—they must have counted—the cameras, the books, medicines, eyeglasses, the tape recorder. Photographers were snapping away at me and the materials I was carrying until an older man with white hair told me to sit down while he stood across the desk from me. He was the senior man. Everybody deferred to him. He looked at me for a second or two without saying anything, for dramatic effect, I think, then quietly asked me to explain what I was doing with all that stuff.

“I told him I was an American diplomat and that I wasn’t required to answer any of his questions. I said I wanted my embassy notified of my whereabouts immediately, and that he knew the rules.”

“And his response?” Gerber asked.

“He went on a tirade. Threw the word diplomat back in my face and asked me if all the spy gear laid out on the table was what American diplomats carried around these days.”

Redmond broke in. “He did this in English?”

“No. We only spoke Russian. But his tirade seemed pro forma, rehearsed, maybe played to the others in the room. There was a lot of sound and fury and what was supposed to pass for anger, but I never saw anything like that in his eyes. He was kind of sad looking, actually, like he knew something I didn’t.”

Gerber shifted his weight, but his eyes held Stombaugh’s. “You can finish all this downstairs, Paul. Now tell me about Father Roman.”

Stombaugh was taken aback by Gerber’s abrupt switch from Tolkachev to the bizarre affair of Father Roman Potemkin. Since he had returned to Washington, no one at the CIA had asked him the most obvious question—not Gerber, not even the famously spooky Paul Redmond. Nobody had asked him if the KGB had tried to “pitch” him, to “turn” him while they had him under their control. And now Gerber had just signaled an end to the debriefing on his arrest by changing the subject to the strange case of Father Roman. Stombaugh knew only the most recent twists in the convoluted case, one whose peculiar beginning went back four years, long before Stombaugh had arrived in Moscow.

In 1981, an unidentified Soviet scientist approached an American journalist in Moscow and handed him a mysterious package. Some time later, the package found its way from the journalist to the CIA. The journalist asked for and received a pledge of secrecy from the agency, which tucked the affair away in a compartment that would remain closed for decades.

The package was an intelligence windfall. Analysts at the CIA’s Office of Scientific and Weapons Research examining the 250 pages contained in the package found data on the Soviet strategic weapons program that had until then been the subject of only the most speculative analysis. The level of detail and precision in the documentation could redraw American assessments of Soviet nuclear weapons development, but only if crucial additional data could be acquired. The Soviet weapons experts inside the U.S. intelligence community were unanimous: The information included in the package was simply too sensitive, too revealing, to be disinformation designed to confuse the West. The information was so good, in fact, that the anonymous volunteer held the promise of being one of the most highly prized sources the CIA might ever obtain on the Soviet nuclear target. There were already whispers that the source could do for Soviet nuclear programs what Adolf Tolkachev had done for aviation research and development.

Yet the anonymous source had taken care to omit key details that completed the picture. Those could be gathered only through sustained, clandestine contact with him in Moscow. He had to be recontacted, at almost any cost.

The excitement in the analytical community translated into dismay inside the Directorate of Operations, which was given the seemingly impossible task of finding the mysterious volunteer. The handwritten letter included in the package laid out in imaginative detail how the CIA could meet its author in Moscow, but the date was more than six months past by the time the CIA received the packet. The letter bore neither a signature nor other identifying markers. While the CIA could develop a kind of mental image of the scientist from clues in the package—one hint came from a poem—the agency had no way to track him down. By the time Paul Stombaugh arrived in Moscow in 1984, the case that had held the promise of a second Tolkachev had turned into a frustrating dead end.

But