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

a halt for the fifth and what he thought would be the final time on the Soviet side of the border, he heard the voices of a couple of Russian women and assumed that he had cleared the KGB checkpoints and that the car was now passing through Soviet customs. Gordievsky held his breath as he heard the whining and sniffing of dogs near the car. From inside the car’s trunk he couldn’t know that the wife of one of the British SIS officers was busily popping potato chips into the drooling mouth of the customs dog, keeping it away from the rear of the car.

After two minutes that seemed like an eternity, the car began to move, and the pop music from the tape deck once again filtered into Gordievsky’s cramped quarters. As the car accelerated, the pop music stopped abruptly, replaced a moment later by the strains of Sibelius’s Finlandia, the signal that the car had crossed over the Finnish frontier.

The KGB later suspected that the CIA had played a role in Gordievsky’s exfiltration, but it was entirely a British-run operation. Thanks to analysis conducted by Aldrich Ames, the CIA had learned on its own that Gordievsky was spying for the British, but London didn’t officially tell the CIA that Gordievsky was a British agent until well after he was safely across the Soviet border.

Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow, 1000 Hours, July 24, 1985

Vitaly Sergeyevich Yurchenko struggled to calm himself as he stood before the passport control booth while the young KGB border guard on the other side of the glass flipped through the pages of his freshly issued Soviet diplomatic passport. He doesn’t look more than seventeen, Yurchenko thought, fighting off the urge to bang on the window and tell him to get a move on. He’d done that enough times in the past, but this time leaving the USSR was different.

The border guard looked up at Yurchenko. The KGB colonel was a tall, athletically built man with blond hair, deeply set slate gray eyes, and a broad Slavic face offset by a blond, scraggly mustache curving below the corners of his mouth.

“Let’s not take all day, young man. I’ve got a flight to catch.” Yurchenko hoped he sounded cool and on the friendly side of authoritative. But inside he was in turmoil. He kept telling himself he was absolutely safe—there was nothing anyone could know. Only he, Vitaly Sergeyevich Yurchenko, senior colonel, soon to be general in the First Department, First Chief Directorate of the KGB, could possibly know what demons had been raging inside his head in the weeks since cancer had taken his mother in May. No one could know he had been quietly engineering an opening to travel abroad. No one could know what he was planning. Breathe deeply and calm down, Yurchenko told himself. Nobody can possibly know.

Finally the border guard reached for the telephone, talked for a few seconds, then stamped Yurchenko’s passport and slid it back to him without comment. Yurchenko snapped it up and turned toward the international departures lounge for his flight to Rome.

South of Rome, 1030 Hours, July 28, 1985

The man’s demeanor raised a red flag. Here was Thomas Hayden, a U.S. Navy radioman with a top-secret clearance, sitting with two KGB officers in the woods near a secluded beach south of Rome, drinking Pilsner Urquell. The gathering itself was no less than an act of high treason for Hayden, yet he was hardly sweating. At least not any more than he was, thought Vitaly Yurchenko.

Yurchenko had been interrogating the man, in the breezy way that intelligence officers like to chat up agents, with a patter of sometimes linked and sometimes disjointed questions designed to pin him down, ferret out a detail, or simply knock him off balance. But Hayden handled the probes well, occasionally breaking the pace by holding out his empty glass for a refill of the cool Czech beer. At the end of the opening round of vetting, Yurchenko threw the voice analysis scam at Hayden, asking him if he could record his responses to his questions for later screening in the KGB’s technical lab. A kind of voice polygraph, Yurchenko explained.

With no other choice, Hayden easily agreed, and Yurchenko reached into his shopping bag filled with picnic supplies and pretended to switch on a recorder. There was none, but Hayden couldn’t know that.

Yurchenko’s KGB colleague, Aleksandr Chepil, watched the visitor from Moscow center probe his trophy agent with some apprehension. Personally, Chepil had no doubts about Hayden—he was the prize of his career, the kind of agent an enterprising intelligence officer could easily parlay into an Order of Lenin, if he made certain to share the “success” up the ladder.

What’s more, Hayden had taken on new urgency for the KGB. Just two months earlier, John Walker, head of the KGB’s Navy spy ring, had finally been arrested after an espionage career that dated back eighteen years. The Walker ring, which included Walker’s brother Arthur, his son Michael, and his old Navy friend Jerry Whitworth, had provided the Soviets with an invaluable window into the U.S. Navy’s communications and codes since the Vietnam War. Moscow was desperate to find a replacement, and Hayden was a promising candidate. Chepil felt good about his agent, but he knew that others at Moscow Center were beginning to question Hayden’s bona fides. The best that could happen here today was that Yurchenko would declare the case a good one and then take some credit for getting it on track. Chepil had no problem with that. It was the way things worked in the KGB.

What Chepil and the others in the Rome Rezidentura didn’t know was that Yurchenko had been the one who had seeded doubts about the Hayden case back in Moscow. It was his gambit to set up this trip to Italy. Yurchenko had made it clear back in Moscow that he had to go vet Hayden and make sure Rome wasn’t being taken for a ride.

Now,