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

ashore, he had found an American embassy official having a picnic with his family and handed him a note volunteering his services. The note had been turned over to the CIA, and a case officer had been sent out to meet him, but the GRU officer had been quickly caught and arrested.

He was out of prison now, however, and he came to the embassy looking for help, and so the CIA agreed to give him some assistance.

Throughout the fall of 1991, the KGB was a confused mess. Kryuch-kov was under arrest, and Boris Yeltsin was determined to defang the intelligence and security apparatus. Not only was the KGB broken up under new chief Vadim Bakatin, as Rem Krassilnikov had predicted, but massive budget cuts were forcing wholesale firings and layoffs. Krassilnikov had survived, but he was no longer the KGB’s only contact with the CIA. Now the CIA was meeting representatives from the SVRR, the successor to the First Chief Directorate; the FSB, the successor to the Second Chief Directorate; and even the new Russian republic KGB, which reported directly to Russian President Yeltsin.

Still, there were already signs that the old KGB wasn’t going to simply disappear as easily as the East German Stasi.

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, October 1991

Dottie didn’t know the purpose of the meeting, only that it was an interview in the counterintelligence center. I was expected, she had said. And I found myself in a small room at a conference table with Sandy Grimes, Jeanne Vertefeuille, Jim Milburn, and Jim Holt, the latter two FBI officers attached to the CIA to help with the investigation of the 1985 losses that had been given new life when Redmond was transferred to the counterintelligence center.

No one made any effort to conceal what was going on: The panel was looking over the list of possible suspects, and I had been on the list from the start. We went over a number of questions about where and when I became aware of certain compromised operations. Most of them in 1985, I answered. Then came a slightly offbeat question.

“If you were going to spy for the KGB, how would you pull it off?”

I thought only briefly before I responded. “It wouldn’t be hard at all,” I said. “I have a very quiet but sanctioned contact with the top levels of the KGB, and disappear every so often to have a little talk with them about matters of mutual interest. If I were interested in spying for the KGB, I’d easily be able to roll it into my official contact with them. What would it take?” I said. “A couple pieces of paper passed at one of these meetings and we’ve got another disaster in SE.”

I would learn much later that of all forty-four people interviewed by the counterintelligence panel, only Aldrich Ames would stumble over that question.

Idylwood Park, Vienna, Virginia, Monday, December 16, 1991

Bob Hanssen left one last package for the KGB under a footbridge, this one containing a classified paper entitled “The KGB’s First Chief Directorate: Structure, Functions, and Methods.” It was something that the KGB’s First Chief Directorate might want to see.

In a note that Hanssen left for his KGB handlers, he said that he had been promoted to a new position that was not directly involved in Soviet matters.

Hanssen would soon break contact with Moscow. On a business trip to Indianapolis, apparently in late 1991 or early 1992, he walked into a Catholic church and once again confessed to a priest that he had been spying for the Soviets. Just as he had done after his wife had caught him in 1980, Bob Hanssen had turned to his church to help him purge his sins. Now he was determined to end his double life.

But perhaps Hanssen’s change of heart was not the result just of his religious convictions. Perhaps the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turmoil inside the KGB had something to do with convincing him that spying for Moscow was no longer a good idea. In the end, he would find it impossible to really stop. Eight years later, he would start up with the Soviets one last time.

Langley, December 31, 1991

The Soviet Union had ceased to exist. With little fanfare, a detachment of Red Army soldiers had marched out on the Kremlin wall and had for the last time lowered the Hammer and Sickle, raising in its place the Russian tricolor.

It’s over, I thought. The whole thing we called the Cold War was over. And it felt pretty good. We hadn’t beat them in straight sets, not by any stretch of the imagination. But beat them we had. Our KGB adversaries had been gifted. We might not have been more gifted, but our system was, and in the end we were probably just good enough.

I remember the reaction of the many visitors to the Christmas party we held in our corridor at headquarters when we handed out a party favor unique to our efforts that year and for many years before. It was a white campaign-style button with a red hammer and sickle and star and the words in red across the top, SE Division Christmas Party 1991. Below and to the right of the symbol of the USSR were the words

The Party’s Over

But it wasn’t over—not quite yet.

EPILOGUE

As the Hammer and Sickle was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin at the close of 1991, marking the end of the Soviet Union, the CIA’s SE Division disappeared too. Replacing it at Langley was the Central Eurasian Task Force, later to become the Central Eurasian Division, whose new role was more closely linked to monitoring and managing a disintegrating Soviet empire than assaulting it from all quarters. From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, the CIA moved quickly to open up new ties to the security and intelligence services of the nations rising from the ashes of the Soviet Union.

Many of the newly independent countries were eager