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

but the trail ended there. Some at the FBI thought he had linked up with the KGB in Finland, then traveled into the Soviet Union under their protection. Others in the bureau felt he had traveled to Finland to throw off his pursuers, hoping they’d believe he’d defected to the Soviets and give up the hunt, thus allowing him to travel under a false name to one of his more familiar Latin American haunts. The CIA was convinced that once in Finland, Howard would head straight to the USSR.

In early October, a clandestine CIA source in the Soviet embassy in Helsinki reported that over a period of two days at the end of September, there had been a flurry of activity at the KGB Rezidentura. It was whispered that a very important person was secretly spirited out of Finland and across the USSR border to Leningrad in a Soviet embassy vehicle.

There was little doubt at the CIA that the mysterious visitor in Helsinki was Howard, though it would take the FBI a little more time to believe that Howard had actually crossed over to Leningrad. In his own book—written years later from Moscow, almost certainly with the cooperation of the KGB—Howard claimed that he had wandered the world before settling down in Moscow. He insisted that he had even spent time in the United States. But the CIA remained convinced that he was taken across the border into the Soviet Union soon after his arrival in Helsinki.

Coventry, Virginia, 1530 Hours, October 25, 1985

Yurchenko seemed somehow more settled. Maybe it was his recent trip to Nevada. We were outside now, walking in the cool October sunshine down to the lake that the Coventry property fronted. He was mildly animated about a beaver lodge he had been watching over the last few months, and during lunch he had insisted we walk down to take a look. Lunch had been another of Yurchenko’s quirky boiled-chicken-breast-and-carrot affairs. He still cooked for himself as if he were suffering from a terminal disease, and he still couldn’t seem to get beyond chicken breast and veal tongue. An American doctor had given him a clean bill of health; much to his astonishment, he did not have stomach cancer and was not about to die and rejoin his mother.

Over lunch Yurchenko told me the story about Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB Line X (Science and Technology collection) officer who had volunteered to spy for the French five years earlier, only to be arrested a year and a half into his new career for a senseless murder in a Moscow park. A few years into his twelve-year prison sentence, it had been discovered that Vetrov was not only a murderer, but also a spy who had been working for the French under the code name FAREWELL. Yurchenko said he thought Vetrov had been betrayed by his letters to his wife, or perhaps by a prison informant. He wasn’t sure which story was accurate—he’d heard both at different times.

Once Vetrov had been exposed as a spy, he was ordered to write a complete confession. When he handed the notepad containing his “confession” back to his KGB interrogators at Lefortovo, it was completely filled with a tight script that, upon close inspection by General Sergei Golubev, first deputy head of Directorate K, counterintelligence, turned out to be one of the most virulent attacks on the KGB establishment that had ever been produced inside the organization itself. Golubev, according to Yurchenko, reread Vetrov’s indictment a few times and decided just to lock it away. Yurchenko said that in addition to brutalizing the KGB, Vetrov devoted much of his statement to lionizing the French and the West. The hard-core Golubev—he’d headed the team that had interrogated Gordievsky a few months earlier and six years before that had been implicated in the infamous poisoned umbrella murder of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian émigré writer—decided the confession should never see the light of day. Word nevertheless spread about the confession and about how Vetrov had walked to his execution without showing the slightest hint of remorse. Or fear.

Now, proceeding down to the lake with walking sticks Yurchenko had fashioned from saplings, I decided to tell the KGB defector why I had dropped in on him unannounced. “Alex, I told you before I’d let you know if there was any unpleasantness coming in the press.”

Yurchenko cocked an eye. “You have more unpleasantness, Tom?”

“Yes, Alex, I have more unpleasantness. It is about Artamonov.”

At that moment a glistening beaver broke the water’s surface beside the lodge at the point where the lake fed into a small stream. “There, Tom! See him!”

Then, as suddenly as he had become excited at spotting his beaver, the KGB colonel became quiet again. After a moment he asked, “What is the unpleasantness about Artamonov, Tom?”

“I said before that we would try to keep what we learned from you about Artamonov’s death out of the newspapers. But I’ve just learned that it’s going to be published within a week.”

There was no expression on Yurchenko’s face as he listened. “Why?”

“Because of our laws. There is a lawsuit by Artamonov’s widow against the United States, and we have no choice but to share with her and her attorney what you have told us.”

“When will you do this?”

I was struck by the calmness with which Yurchenko was taking the news—I’d expected a much more dramatic response. “I met with the Defense Department and the FBI yesterday at the Pentagon. The lawyers there representing all three agencies agreed that now that we have the full details from you, we must pass them on to Artamonov’s wife and her attorney. It has to be done now. There’s no choice.”

“What do I have to do about it?” Yurchenko’s question seemed odd, out of context.

“I don’t follow, Alex.”

“Do I have to go to your courts and speak on Artamonov?”

“Not yet. We’re looking at our options for dealing with that problem. Nothing’s been decided as of now.”

I hoped I sounded convincing, since the