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

continually over his shoulder to check for KGB surveillance, he explained to Sellers that the CIA had given the letter to “the wrong guy.” Eventually, Sellers came to understand that the person Stombaugh had given the letter to was working for the KGB and had turned the letter over to the authorities. COWL did not suggest that the Daniloff affair had been a frame-up from the beginning. COWL made it sound as though the CIA had simply assumed too much by accepting Daniloff’s guess that Father Roman was the one who had left him the anonymous package. By handing the letter to Father Roman, the CIA had handed it to the KGB.

The meeting with COWL effectively shut down the mystery-shrouded Father Roman operation, setting in motion the beginnings of finger-pointing that would not play out until more than a year later. After COWL told the CIA that Father Roman was working for the KGB, there was a plan within the CIA to warn Daniloff that he had stumbled onto a KGB provocateur. But Daniloff never received the warning.

CIA Headquarters, 1345 Hours, June 18, 1985

Stombaugh sensed Gerber’s agitation as he finished the account of his March 23 run. In fact, Gerber was furious with Stombaugh. He felt that Stombaugh had violated his orders to keep Daniloff’s name out of the operation by using the name “Nikolai.” Within days of Stombaugh’s March meeting with Father Roman, Gerber had cabled a sharply worded reprimand to Moscow, upbraiding Stombaugh for identifying “Nikolai.” But this was Gerber’s first chance to meet with Stombaugh and hear his explanation in person.

Gerber had been Moscow chief when the original package from the anonymous scientist had been handed over to the CIA, so he had lived with the case for years. He was convinced that the original package had contained some of the most important material the CIA had ever obtained from the Soviet Union and had immediately recognized the importance of Daniloff’s letter. As with all Moscow operations, he had tried to choreograph the efforts to contact Father Roman. The letter Stombaugh had handed over—which Gerber insisted did not include the name “Nikolai” or any reference to Daniloff—had been written to his specifications.

This case was so important—and Stombaugh’s actions so troubling to him—that Gerber focused on the Father Roman affair even as Stombaugh and the rest of the SE Division were trying to deal with the final collapse of the Tolkachev case. For Gerber, Stombaugh had committed an unpardonable sin by placing Daniloff at risk; Stombaugh, on his end, felt that Gerber was trying to shift the blame. He believed that by mentioning Nikolai, he had done nothing more than use a reference that was already included in the CIA’s letter to Father Roman. Stombaugh disputed Gerber’s assertion that there was no reference to a Nikolai in the letter that Gerber had approved.

It soon became clear that the Father Roman affair would make it difficult for Gerber and Stombaugh to work together in the future. The dispute with Gerber never hampered Stombaugh’s career, however; he was a rising young star within the Directorate of Operations and would find plenty of opportunities outside of Gerber’s orbit.

   6   

Langley, 0830 Hours, July 10, 1985

Furnished with a by-the-book faithfulness to the rank and seniority of its long string of occupants, the office of the deputy chief of the Soviet/East European Division was dominated by a scuffed Federalist-style wooden desk and matching credenza. A pair of ancient straight-backed leather chairs were lined up against one wall, and a sofa and a side chair in tired blue fabric were propped up against the other. The office seemed to declare that it had just been vacated, possibly in a hurry.

It was my first day on the job, and I was still wondering how I had ended up as deputy in SE Division, the most insular subculture in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. I had received a terse one-paragraph cable in Khartoum, my last post, advising me that upon arrival at headquarters in July, I would report in as deputy chief of the Soviet/East European Division. I knew the decision had been made by Clair George, the Deputy Director for Operations, with Bill Casey’s hand in there somewhere.

Clair George liked to say that he had plucked me out of obscurity in Texas, where I was running the CIA Dallas office, and sent me off to ride the whirlwinds of Africa, first in Nigeria and then, more significantly, in the Sudan, shepherding the Ethiopian Falasha Jews on their long trek to Israel and then protecting a team of Mossad agents on the run in Khartoum. The operation to spirit the Israelis out of Khartoum just as the new Sudanese government was closing in had caught Bill Casey’s imagination. But it was Clair’s deputy, Ed Juchniewicz, who was really my mentor. Juchniewicz had pushed for my new assignment as a way of stirring things up in Burton Gerber’s SE fiefdom.

Juchniewicz knew that Gerber and I were as different in temperament, experience, and skills as any two officers in the Directorate of Operations. I had a reputation for working in crisis situations in remote corners of the world. To some back at Langley, in fact, I was considered too much of a Third World cowboy, better suited to dusty covert operations than quiet “denied-area” spy cases.

By contrast, Burton Gerber was, in CIA parlance, a “sticks and bricks” man—the master of carefully plotted clandestine operations behind the Iron Curtain. There was a foreboding in his eyes that conjured up the Cold War—the glare of floodlights on the Berlin Wall on a cold January night. Gerber was the closest thing the CIA had to George Smiley. Between us, we seemed to embody the two archetypes of the DO: the Third World operator who toppled governments and ran covert wars, and the clandestine intelligence collector who moved softly through the Soviet empire, meeting agents and unloading dead drops. The best CIA officers could do both, but Khartoum and Lagos