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

required a different set of skills and a different personality type from Moscow. So when I was teamed up with Burton Gerber, a culture clash of sorts was inevitable.

When I first arrived at Langley in 1964, the CIA was still at the low end of its learning curve. The young men and handful of women who came to Washington that fall to become part of the class of OC-19 were a new generation of CIA officers, most born just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Many of their fathers had gone to college on the GI Bill after the war, some the first members of their families to climb that once tightly restricted ladder. OC-19, to be sure, had its share of graduates from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but most of its members came from dots on the map spread farther afield. They came to serve as officers of the CIA’s elite clandestine service—the DDP, as the spying side of the agency was then known. It stood for Deputy Directorate for Plans, an enchantingly vague name that could apply either to the organization or to its chief.

I’d served four years in the Air Force and spoke both Chinese and German when I first reported for duty at Langley. After a year of training, my first field assignment was in Bonn. By then, the most active arena for the Soviet-U.S. contest had shifted quietly from Germany to the Third World. The Berlin Wall had made it far more difficult to conduct espionage operations along the front lines in the divided city. Berlin was now a training ground for newly minted case officers, rather than the hub of espionage operations that it had been in the early days of the Cold War. Old German hands had taken to sarcastically calling Berlin “Brandenburg’s school for boys” and longed for the old days.

I was transferred to Hong Kong in 1968 for a tour of China watching, then rotated back to Europe in 1971 for four years in Switzerland. Intelligence collection requirements during this period had made a subtle shift from gathering information that might help win the war in Vietnam to gathering information on the Paris peace talks and parallel deliberations in Geneva that would help the United States cut its losses and get out of Vietnam. While in Switzerland I saw us lose our cockiness as a nation and as an agency; it seemed a short journey from the hopeful early 1960s to America’s withdrawal from Vietnam without victory, the self-destruction of Richard Nixon’s presidency, and the fall of Saigon.

My arrival back in Washington in the summer of 1975 coincided with new attacks on the agency by a post-Watergate Congress. The CIA in 1975 was anything but the self-assured organization with an unchallenged mission I had joined. The DDP had been renamed, this time in plain vanilla, as the Directorate of Operations. It was awash with men and women who’d been run out of Southeast Asia by the North Vietnamese Army and were walking the halls looking for jobs.

After one year at headquarters, I was sent back to Hong Kong—mercifully, I thought at the time. President Carter’s new DCI, Admiral Stansfield Turner, brought the President’s moralistic sensibilities to Langley with him, and soon field case officers were tasked with transforming the often ugly business of espionage into a “morally uplifting experience” for both case officers and their foreign agents. The President thought that America had an “inordinate fear of Communism,” and his DCI agreed. Within a few years, Turner had dismantled many of the capabilities the CIA had built up over the decades, dismissing them as Cold War relics. By the time Iranian revolutionaries took sixty-six Americans hostage in Teheran in November 1979, there was precious little the CIA could do about it with the resources it had in place at the time. To add insult to injury, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad was sacked and burned by a howling Pakistani crowd the same month. As 1979 closed out, the United States seemed on the run across the globe, and the Soviet Politburo apparently decided that it could tidy things up south of its border without much trouble from a besieged America. On Christmas Eve in 1979, the USSR took the plunge into Afghanistan and within a month seemed in full control of the cities.

The year 1980 was no kinder to the United States or the CIA. The humiliation in Teheran was compounded by the disaster of Desert One, when eight Americans died in the ill-fated attempt to rescue the American hostages who were still held in Teheran. The year ended with the election of Ronald Reagan as President, and moments after his inauguration, the American hostages were released by Teheran.

Before Reagan’s new Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, arrived at Langley, I was off for what would turn out to be a four-year interlude in Africa. By 1985, Casey decided he wanted me back in Washington, either running his pet project in Central America or working on the Soviet Union. After four years on the job, the DCI had decided that the CIA had to deal aggressively with the “Evil Empire,” Ronald Reagan’s term for the Soviet Union. Casey had taken a demoralized agency and pumped it up with people, money, and, most important, a mission. I thought things were beginning to look bright again at Langley.

But even then, few insiders knew what the old man was really up to. People seemed to think he had a hand in every action that might put pressure on the Soviet Union, forcing the already visible cracks to open a little wider. There were rumors about his discreet meetings in the Vatican with the Polish pope, his deals with the Saudis to keep oil prices down so that the Soviets couldn’t reap windfall profits from their oil sales, and his efforts to block a proposed Soviet oil pipeline to Western Europe. And to be certain, Casey had discovered the Soviet Union’s Achilles’ heel