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

Even before Gerber saw Medanich’s memo, he had also begun to see signs of trouble. In mid-October, Gerber went to see Yurchenko at the Coventry safe house. Gerber was accompanied by Murat Natirboff, who happened to be in Washington and had asked to meet Yurchenko. Natirboff told Gerber that he was interested in talking to Yurchenko about KGB operations in Moscow.

Leaving Natirboff behind, Gerber and Yurchenko took a walk on the grounds of the safe house by themselves, and Yurchenko calmly but firmly told Gerber how he felt about the leaks, which by then had reached flood stage. “Mr. Gerber, how can I trust your service when everything I tell you ends up in the newspaper?”

The next day, Gerber told his colleagues what Yurchenko had asked him, and Gerber said that he had no answer. The Russian was right: The CIA had failed him. Gerber wrote a memo for his superiors, warning that Yurchenko’s mood had darkened and that the case could be in trouble.

   14   

Alexandria, Virginia, October 4, 1985

As he went through his mail at home, Viktor M. Degtyar, a Line PR officer in the KGB’s Washington Rezidentura, found an intriguing letter addressed to him and postmarked “Oct. 1, Prince George’s County, Md.” Inside was a second envelope, marked “DO NOT OPEN. TAKE THIS ENVELOPE UNOPENED TO VICTOR I. CHERKASHIN.” There was no name or return address on either envelope, but whoever had sent this letter knew something about KGB operations in Washington. Mailing a letter to the home of a KGB officer bypassed the dangers of a more direct means of approaching Soviet intelligence officers under the watchful eyes of the FBI. And the very fact that the sender knew the name and home address of a KGB officer—and knew the name of the man in charge of counterintelligence for the Rezidentura—strongly suggested that this letter was to be taken seriously.

Once the letter was delivered to the Rezidentura, opened, and read, any doubts that the KGB might have had about its significance evaporated:

Dear Mr. Cherkashin:

Soon, I will send a box of documents to Mr. Degtyar. They are from certain of the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the U.S. intelligence community. All are originals to aid in verifying their authenticity. Please recognize for our long-term interests that there are a limited number of persons with this array of clearances. As a collection they point to me. I trust that an officer of your experience will handle them appropriately. I believe they are sufficient to justify a $100,000 payment to me.

I must warn of certain risks to my security of which you may not be aware. Your service has recently suffered some setbacks. I warn that Mr. Boris Yuzhin (Line PR, SF), Mr. Sergey Motorin (Line PR, Wash.), and Mr. Valeriy Martynov (Line X, Wash.) have been recruited by our “special services.”

. . . Details regarding payment and future contact will be sent to you personally. My identity and actual position in the community must be left unstated to ensure my security. I am open to commo suggestions but want no specialized tradecraft. I will add 6 (you subtract 6) from stated months, days and times in both directions of our future communications.

As if his letter wasn’t already intriguing enough, the volunteer also passed on information about recent Soviet defectors to the United States, as well as some of the government’s most sensitive technical operations targeting Soviet intelligence activities in the United States.

Stanislov Androsov, the KGB Rezident, and Viktor Cherkashin, chief of counterintelligence in the Rezidentura, knew immediately that this volunteer was genuine. The letter corroborated some of the information that Cherkashin had received from Aldrich Ames a few months earlier, and the KGB was already quite satisfied that Ames was not a double agent. He had provided too much information to be a double. Like this new volunteer, Ames had also fingered Martynov, Motorin, and Yuzhin, and as a result they were all already under suspicion. To be sure, Martynov had been allowed to take his summer home leave—and then return to the United States—after Ames had identified him as a spy, perhaps because the Soviets were not yet certain what to make of Ames or his information. But this new source was providing corroboration.

The letter writer did not reveal his identity, but to an experienced counterintelligence officer like Cherkashin, the letter offered plenty of clues about where he worked. From Ames, the KGB knew that the Russian spies inside the Washington Rezidentura and other stations in the United States were handled jointly by the CIA and the FBI. But a CIA officer like Ames with broad access to the agency’s Soviet programs might also be aware of Russian agents in Moscow and other locations overseas. An FBI agent would not. By contrast, an FBI agent involved in counterintelligence would have greater detailed knowledge of collection operations targeted against the Soviets in the United States. “I think it would have taken Cherkashin about thirty seconds to figure out that the letter was from an FBI agent,” Paul Redmond would later observe.

The letter writer was smart enough to realize that the secrets he was planning to hand over to the Soviets could finger him, even if he never gave the KGB his name. He acknowledged in his letter that the “box of documents” he planned to send to Degtyar would “as a collection . . . point to me.”

Androsov and Cherkashin knew how to protect this volunteer. Earlier in the year, both had flown back to Moscow, rather than send a cable, to inform Center about Ames. Now, the KGB code-named this new volunteer B and slowly created an operational environment in which he could begin to thrive. On October 15, Degtyar received a package at his home containing a large number of classified documents from B. Androsov and Cherkashin could hardly believe their luck; just five months after Ames, this new, anonymous volunteer was providing equally astounding material