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

suggested that they felt like innocent victims in a U.S.-Soviet spy game.

As Brodine fielded questions from reporters, the CIA’s Moscow chief took a seat in the empty row behind me. “Welcome to Moscow,” he said quietly.

I glanced over my shoulder and nodded without comment. Both of us listened as Brodine and other members of the team tried to maintain a delicate balance between their duty to alert the assembled Americans to a potential health hazard and the need to avoid generating panic. Mutagens, Brodine explained, are not always carcinogenic and include some of the most common compounds people expose themselves to on a daily basis, such as coffee. The team ended its formal presentation with the announcement that an expanded technical team from Washington would arrive in Moscow within days to begin collecting environmental samples in the homes, offices, and automobiles of all Americans wishing to be sampled, including private citizens residing in Moscow.

As the crowd filed out of the auditorium, the CIA officer fell in step with me long enough to whisper a brief message. “Nine o’clock tomorrow at Post One. You’ll be met.”

The next morning, I sat with the Moscow chief in the cramped quarters of the “yellow submarine,” the custom-built enclosure that served as the CIA work area. It was a three-hundred-square-foot, hermetically sealed metallic box floating on cushions of air with a self-contained power supply. No electronic devices were allowed inside. Even manual typewriters had been forbidden, ever since a successful KGB attack on thirteen IBM Selectric typewriters in the Moscow embassy. In an ingenious operation discovered by the CIA in 1984, the KGB had managed to place the typewriters in secure areas of the embassy used by State Department personnel. The typewriters had fallen into Soviet hands while being shipped to the U.S. embassy, and tiny transmitters had been installed by the KGB, sending every word typed on the machines to a KGB electronic listening post outside the embassy. Typewriters used in the CIA area had not been compromised, but Burton Gerber didn’t want to take any chances.

Even inside the secure enclosure, we spoke in whispers and half sentences as we discussed the anomalies Moscow had been experiencing over the past year. In the midst of our conversation, he paused and wrote out a message on a single sheet of paper from a yellow legal pad. He pushed it across to me.

“Sometimes I think they’re in here with me,” the note read.

I took his pencil and scribbled out a reply: “How long?”

“All of 1985.”

I left Moscow the next day.

   11   

Santa Fe, New Mexico, August 25, 1985

Edward Lee Howard had been trained to spot surveillance in the CIA’s operational pressure cooker—the Internal Operations course—and by the end of August he was convinced he was being followed. Howard began to notice every jogger and repairman on his isolated street. He was convinced that he had been tracked by a circling aircraft while driving into the desert.

Howard was right that he was being followed, but he was also seeing ghosts, believing the surveillance to be far more extensive than it was. Of course, he had good reason to be paranoid. Howard knew this was not a game. It wasn’t going to end in a friendly after-action critique. He began to review his options.

Lisbon, 1630 Hours, August 27, 1985

Like most of the CIA’s clandestine meetings with GRU Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Smetanin, this one was rushed. Smetanin had called the out-of-sequence meeting on the outskirts of Lisbon to advise his CIA case officer that he had been asked to begin his home leave in the next two days, so he could be back on the job in Lisbon in late September. As the meeting ended, it was agreed that the next scheduled meeting would take place on October 4, at another prearranged meeting site on the outskirts of Lisbon. Smetanin told his case officer he didn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary about the accelerated vacation schedule. In fact, he and his wife were looking forward to getting back to Moscow and taking care of personal matters, including their purchase of an apartment.

CIA Headquarters, 1530 Hours, August 27, 1985

“He’s been compromised.” Paul Redmond was matter-of-fact as he read the Lisbon cable in my office.

“What makes you think that?” I asked, looking for some sign of bad news in the routine cable from Portugal advising that GTMILLION was returning to Moscow early on home leave.

“I just know. It’s like Bokhan.”

“How’d he get compromised?” I was trying to understand whether Redmond actually knew something or his darkening view of counterintelligence had taken over.

“Somebody told them about him. Maybe someone in here.”

“You think the problem’s in here?” I waved my hand to indicate the inner sanctum of SE Division.

Redmond nodded. “Either they’re reading our cables or they’ve got someone talking to them. One or the other. Take your choice.”

“What can we do about MILLION?”

“It’s too late. He’s gone. I’m just saying we’ll never see him again, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. I’ll be happy if I’m wrong. But I’m not.”

Redmond left my office, and then, under the watchful eye of Gerber’s secretary, I went to Gerber’s four-drawer safe in his outer office and retrieved a small two-ring notebook with a thick red stripe running diagonally across the black cover. I was one of five people in the division with access to the notebook, which contained the case histories of all SE Division operations going back more than a dozen years. Turning to the page for GTMILLION, I found in cold summary language the story of Gennady Smetanin.

In 1983, GRU officer Gennady Smetanin had secretly sent a letter to an officer in the Defense Attaché’s office of the U.S. embassy in Lisbon. Smetanin offered his services to American intelligence, in return for which he said he would expect certain considerations. If there was interest, he wrote, a personal ad should be placed in a certain Lisbon paper. I flipped the page but