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

for relationships with the CIA, partly to counterbalance the power of Soviet intelligence. John MacGaffin, who took over the division in January 1992, was rather startled by his first meeting with the new president of Turkmenistan; he was happy to have a visit from a senior CIA official who might be able to tell him about Moscow’s attempts to spy on his new government. As they sat in the president’s office, the leader’s first question for MacGaffin came in a whisper: “Is it safe to talk in here?”

For a time, newly opened CIA stations across Central Asia were lightly staffed and received little interest back at headquarters. It was difficult to imagine in the early and mid-1990s what intelligence could possibly come out of Uzbekistan that would be of much interest to the President of the United States. Washington was reveling in a new world order, and Langley was earnestly in search of a new identity, a new rationale for its existence. Yet even as the agency attempted to reorder and redesign itself, the effort to solve the lingering mystery surrounding the 1985 losses ground on, until February 1994, when an FBI team forced Aldrich Ames’s Jaguar to the curb and arrested him on charges of espionage.

Ever since his arrest, the CIA has insisted that Ames was uncovered purely through painstaking analysis, but there is more to the story, a piece of the puzzle that has remained hidden for nearly a decade. In solving the Ames case, the CIA had help from a Russian agent. The agent didn’t identify Ames by name, but he did provide information, such as times, dates, and places, that meshed with the background of one suspect—Aldrich Ames.

At first, it seemed that Ames’s arrest would allow the mole hunters to close the books on 1985. But their relief was short-lived. Paul Redmond and his team knew within weeks of the arrest that there was at least one other mole still at large. Ames couldn’t possibly have known about all of the cases and operations that had been blown over the years—including the investigation of Felix Bloch and several highly sensitive technical intelligence probes. Redmond soon established a new mole hunt unit to track down yet another spy.

In time, Redmond began to suspect that the new mole might be at the FBI, but he was rebuffed by bureau officials who seemed intent on ignoring the warning signs. Determined to take advantage of a weakened and exposed CIA, under fire for having allowed Ames to go undetected for so long, the FBI demanded and won from Congress new powers to take the lead on counterintelligence investigations. In the wake of the Ames case, a senior FBI agent was dispatched to CIA headquarters to take control of the counterespionage group, the spy-hunting unit within the CIA’s counterintelligence center. FBI investigators agreed with Redmond that there was another spy—but they were determined to look for the mole inside the CIA. And now they were calling the shots.

Redmond bristled as the FBI trampled on his turf, and he ominously told colleagues that “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Undeterred, FBI officials lorded it over their CIA counterparts, setting counterintelligence policy on their own terms. With the FBI now in charge and eager to consolidate its bureaucratic gains over the CIA, the last thing it wanted to do was launch an investigation that would target its own agents.

And so Robert Hanssen went undiscovered for another seven years, until he was finally arrested in February 2001. Hanssen’s arrest blindsided the FBI, and his case would ultimately prove every bit as traumatic for the bureau as the Ames case had been for the CIA. Like Ames before him, Hanssen was discovered with help from a Russian agent—but not the same one.

The Hanssen case seemed to answer many of the questions that had been left unresolved by the arrest of Aldrich Ames: It was Hanssen who had tipped off the KGB that Felix Bloch was under investigation; it was Hanssen who had revealed the existence of the tunnel built under the Soviet embassy in Washington; and it was Hanssen who had betrayed dozens of other FBI technical operations. But maddeningly, even Hanssen couldn’t account for everything.

The more investigators kept digging, the more they found that Hanssen, Ames, and Edward Lee Howard—the spies thought to be responsible for the 1985 losses—could not account for all of them. Gradually it became clear that there could be a fourth man, still undiscovered, who was behind at least some of the betrayals.

For starters, there was the case of Sergei Bokhan, the GRU colonel in Athens who defected in May 1985 after receiving a suspicious order to return home. Bokhan received his summons a full month before Ames identified him and five months before Hanssen volunteered his services to the KGB. Edward Lee Howard, who was preparing for an assignment in Moscow when he was fired in 1983, knew only about operations that required internal handling in Moscow. Bokhan was being handled with rigid compartmentalization by Athens, so Howard was eliminated as the source of compromise.

And Bokhan was not the only anomaly. There was also Leonid Polyshchuk, the KGB officer posted to Lagos who’d been arrested unloading a dead drop in Moscow in August. After his arrest, the KGB put out the word that Polyshchuk had been caught because of the vigilant surveillance conducted by the Second and Seventh Chief Directorates. But a careful review of the case strongly suggests that the KGB was tipped off in the spring of 1985, shortly after Polyshchuk arrived in Lagos. The KGB, aware that Polyshchuk had been in the market for an apartment near his parents in Moscow, almost certainly arranged for one to come on the market in order to lure him back to Moscow. Polyshchuk’s father sent word to him in Lagos about the good fortune of finding an apartment in early April—well before Ames betrayed him on June 13.

Oleg Gordievsky was another unresolved case. He was recalled