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

could allow the country to become a haven for international terrorists once again. Afghanistan will thus be the ultimate testing ground for the new CIA as it seeks to remake itself for the global war on terrorism.

More than ten years have passed since we left off this story, and a vastly different set of struggles consumes our protagonists these days.

Of the Russians, Rem Krassilnikov retired from the KGB with the Order of the October Revolution for his brilliant work against the Americans. He lives in Moscow with his wife, Nellie, and has written two books covering his years in counterintelligence. One is about his CIA adversaries, The Phantoms of Tchaikovsky Street, and the second deals with his years of tracking British intelligence.

Leonid Shebarshin lives in Moscow, where he heads the private Russian National Economic Security Service with its offices in Dynamo Stadium, home of the old KGB soccer team. He has written his memoirs and remains philosophical about the collapse of the Soviet Union. A mural on his office wall hints at his lingering sentiments, with its heroic scenes of Stalingrad and the Bolshevik revolution. He has traveled in Eastern Europe, but has politely declined invitations to visit the United States for what he terms “obvious reasons.”

Viktor Cherkashin retired in 1995 and settled down in Moscow. He is a proud grandfather, whose most recent progeny is a grandson born to his daughter and the American husband she met while studying in California. Cherkashin has traveled to the United States on several occasions but has steadfastly resisted approaches by the FBI. He now splits his time between international consulting and relaxing with his growing family at his dacha outside Moscow.

Vitaly Yurchenko miraculously survived his defection and redefection and has since worked in Moscow as a bank security officer. He refused all requests for an interview. He is uniformly despised as a traitor by his former KGB colleagues, some of whom believe that at an appropriate moment “justice” will be meted out to the traitor Yurchenko somewhere along the Moscow River.

Valentin Klimenko rose from counterintelligence supervisor in the Second Chief Directorate to become chief of Russia’s new internal security service, the FSB. He is currently Rezident in Israel.

Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov, whom Klimenko launched against Jack Downing as PROLOGUE, is chief of the FSB’s American Department. He admits he is obsessed with finding the man or men who he is convinced betrayed Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen and has pledged to stay with the hunt until he has found his man.

Oleg Gordievsky lives in the United Kingdom. He and his wife, Leila, have divorced, though she and their daughters, Anna and Maria, were finally allowed to resettle in England. Gordievsky has written two books with British author Christopher Andrew detailing his life working for Moscow Center: KGB and Next Stop Execution. He is mulling over the idea of a Russian cookbook.

Gennady Vasilenko survived his interrogation at Lefortovo Prison from January to June 1988, though he was reduced in rank and fired without pension for misconduct in his association with Jack Platt. He and Platt remain close friends, and Vasilenko now works on private security investigations in Moscow when he is not hunting in Russia’s birch forests.

Valentin Aksilenko broke with Moscow and resettled in Virginia, where he lectures on the Soviet Union and the KGB and engages in business consulting. Sasha Zhomov considers Aksilenko a short-list suspect in the betrayal of Aldrich Ames, but he is wrong.

Among the Afghans, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary “Lion of Panjshir,” the man who was to strike a delicate balance between the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan and the Americans supplying the rebels, was assassinated on September 9, 2001. The CIA believes he was murdered by al-Qaeda, linking his killing to the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks against America two days later. Osama bin Laden almost certainly ordered his death because he knew that an American retaliation for the attacks on New York and Washington would rely on Massoud and his Northern Alliance.

Abdul Haq was executed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in October 2001 as he sought to rally anti-Taliban forces to his side, just weeks before American-backed Northern Alliance forces surged to victory.

Jalaluddin Haqqani, the fierce mujahideen commander of Paktia Province, reached an accord with the Taliban after their 1994 victory. By the time the United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001, Haqqani was on the U.S. wanted list. He is still at large.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was driven into exile in Iran by the Taliban in 1995. He returned to Afghanistan in 2001 to rally Pashtun resistance against American forces. The CIA launched a Hellfire missile from an unmanned Predator drone in Afghanistan in 2002 in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Hekmatyar. He is now a hunted man.

Engineer Ghaffar, the team leader in the first stunning Stinger attack against Soviet helicopter gunships outside Jalalabad in September 1986, was killed late in the war when he stepped on a land mine.

In Pakistan, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul retired from the Pakistani Army and went into politics. According to U.S. government sources, he has become linked to extremist groups both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, and after September 11, 2001, he was characterized by officials at the CIA as “the most dangerous man in Pakistan.” Hamid Gul described the September 11 attacks as an “Israeli conspiracy.”

On the American side, Clair George was convicted in 1992 of giving false testimony before two congressional committees in 1986, during the Iran-contra investigation. He received a pardon from President George H. W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992. Later, he did consulting work for Ringling Brothers. He is now retired and lives in the Washington area.

Richard Stolz retired for a second time from the CIA in 1991 and now lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. He has been engaged in a number of consulting activities involving political and economic developments in Eastern Europe, in particular Bulgaria.

Tom Twetten retired in 1996 and moved with his wife, Kay, to the “Northeast Kingdom” in Vermont, where he has become an award-winning bookbinder and