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

to Moscow in May 1985, before Hanssen went to the KGB and before Ames’s fateful meeting at Chadwicks. The fact that the KGB questioned but did not immediately arrest Gordievsky suggests that they lacked the hard evidence they had against the other compromised agents. Ames has been held responsible for betraying Gordievsky, and there is no doubt that he identified him to the KGB. But he did so on June 13, by which time Gordievsky was already back in Moscow and under hostile interrogation. Since his arrest, Ames has consistently told the CIA and FBI that he betrayed Gordievsky at Chadwicks in June, when he first gave the KGB his long list of Soviet agents. Both agencies are convinced he is telling the truth. Neither Howard nor Hanssen could have known about Gordievsky.

Finally, there was the case of FAREWELL, the French spy Vladimir Vetrov, arrested in a sensational but highly suspect Moscow murder case in 1982 and then supposedly uncovered as a spy in prison two years later. While the CIA did not know Vetrov by name, the agency had been briefed on his intelligence by the French as early as 1982. This means that someone at the CIA was in a position to report to the KGB that one of its science and technology collection officers was working for French intelligence. Any list of suspects in the KGB’s S&T collection directorate would have quickly narrowed to Vetrov. FAREWELL was executed in 1984, at least a year before Howard, Ames, and Hanssen volunteered to the KGB. (It is true, of course, that Hanssen spied for a year or two for the GRU beginning in 1979 and then resumed his espionage career with the KGB in October 1985, but it doesn’t appear that he betrayed any of these unresolved cases during his earlier stint as a GRU agent.) Viewed against the pattern of betrayal and misdirection, it is possible, if not probable, that Vetrov was betrayed—like Bokhan, Polyshchuk, and possibly Gordievsky—by an American who has still not been identified.

Could the KGB have caught some or all of these men as a result of its own extensive counterintelligence efforts? Possibly, but then there would not have been any reason for the Soviets to create elaborate cover stories to lure Bokhan and Polyshchuk back home. There also would not have been any reason for the Soviets to create the even more elaborate murder story to cover Vetrov’s demise. Gordievsky could have been compromised by his own operational mistakes, but the prospect of betrayal still looms large. The conclusion is almost inescapable that there was a fourth man—an as yet unidentified traitor who may have left Langley or simply stopped spying by 1986.

It is because of suspicions that there are further spies to be uncovered on both sides that mole hunts still quietly grind on in Washington and Moscow, more than a decade after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Aldrich Ames’s betrayal and arrest played a major role in the evolution of the CIA in the post–Cold War era. The initial after-action investigations, which revealed the shocking ease with which Ames had eluded detection for nine years, prompted bitter recriminations at Langley, and the CIA’s inept security soon became fodder for late-night comedians. Just about everyone who’d had a hand in running the show at SE and in the counterintelligence center received letters of reprimand from CIA Director R. James Woolsey, which unnerved an already rattled agency. The finger-pointing erupted just as the CIA was trying to deal with budget cuts, an exodus of experienced officers, and a post–Cold War identity crisis. Woolsey would soon be gone, too, and by the mid-1990s, turnover at the top of the agency was so bad that each new DCI seemed to come in and out through a revolving door.

Though it had long been suspected in counterintelligence circles that Langley had been penetrated by Moscow, investigators had been hampered by a deep resistance within the agency to a return to the witch-hunting days of the Angleton era. After Ames’s arrest, the pendulum swung hard in the other direction. Hundreds of officers were made to endure torturous polygraph reexaminations. Some were forced to stand idle, unable to perform their jobs, while awaiting the resolution of phantom security issues that prevented them from taking part in classified activities. Senior officers with long records of successful clandestine operations were subjected to wasteful and demeaning scrutiny based on the flimsiest of evidence. Since Ames had skated through his last polygraph examination so easily, the CIA’s Office of Security became wary of giving its seal of approval to any polygraph. Security officials even reopened scores of old investigations after reviewing past polygraph examinations. If Ames had beaten the machine, how many others might also have defeated it in years past?

Pressure from the outside was building, too. With the Cold War’s end, public and congressional scrutiny of the agency’s operations increased, and the nation’s tolerance for expensive and dangerous in-telligence activities waned. New political considerations intruded at Langley as a result, and a cautious, risk-averse climate took hold. The CIA sought desperately to be “correct”—to look like the rest of America. Convinced that the agency was lost and drifting, many of the CIA’s best managers and field officers, the people who had fought the Cold War, headed for the exits. The CIA of the late 1990s had become like the U.S. Army of the 1930s: a peacetime service mired in petty bureaucratic battles and drifting without a clear mission.

September 11, 2001, changed everything. When the terrorists struck, the CIA did, indeed, look like America. The percentage of DO officers with prior military service was only a tiny fraction of the organization, and its WASPish adventurers had disappeared. Officers and their families, like most Americans, were in no hurry to rush off to places where you had to boil your drinking water and check under the car for bombs—let alone keep an eye in the rearview mirror not for local surveillance teams, but for the