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

valuable photographs of Soviet military documents wrapped in plastic and then again in dirty rags to look like trash. There was relief in SE when Moscow’s report of the successful outing was received. But it was short-lived.

Langley, 1000 Hours, November 19, 1985

“The other shoe dropped on PIMENTA.”

Paul Redmond was standing in the doorway to my office.

“What!”

“The bureau just let us know that PIMENTA’s wife got a call from Moscow—they’re not sure who called—saying that he’d hurt his leg, some sort of a deep cut when he arrived in Moscow with Yurchenko, and that it required some very tricky surgery to repair some nerve damage. The caller said it was serious enough for her to pack up the children and come home. She’s getting ready to go now.”

“Shit!” was all that I could muster.

   17   

Langley, 0830 Hours, November 20, 1985

The cable from Bonn was a routine notification of a “no show.” Under normal circumstances, it would have generated only mild concern. But circumstances in SE Division were by now no longer normal. There was an unshakable foreboding hanging over the division, and the loss of contact with any agent added to the dread.

Bonn reported that KGB Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Varennik, working under Tass cover in the Soviet embassy in Germany, had failed to show for his last scheduled meeting and had also failed to signal for an alternate. Varennik, encrypted as GTFITNESS, had last been met in a Bonn safe house on November 4, at which time he’d reported that he’d been asked to take part in an unscheduled planning session in Karlshorst, the KGB’s regional headquarters in East Berlin. The purpose of the Karlshorst meeting, Varennik assumed, would be to refine a KGB plan to sow terror among U.S. Army troops and their families through coordinated attacks against targets frequented by U.S. personnel in Germany. The aim behind the terror campaign, Varennik had reported earlier, was to throw the U.S.-German relationship into turmoil by making it look as though the bombings were the work of domestic German terrorist cells—the aging remnants of the Baader Meinhof gang or the more modern and active Red Army Faction.

Varennik’s previous reports on the KGB’s proposed terror campaign had generated an intense debate in both the operational and the analytical sides of the CIA. Some discounted them as outright fabrication or at a minimum the product of an overactive imagination. Others, and that group included Bill Casey, zealously believed the KGB was capable of such atrocities. Casey and the hard-liners were convinced that the Soviets had been behind the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II, so what would stop them from this? The debate was inflamed by the fact that there had recently been terrorist attacks in Germany that had taken three American lives. Those attacks seemed to fit the MO described by Varennik, so Varennik’s reporting captured the attention of the highest levels of Washington readership, including President Reagan. His disappearance would draw a similar level of interest.

Paul Redmond wasn’t particularly interested in the debate over how evil the “Evil Empire” was or wasn’t. He’d leave that to others. His focus was down in the trenches, the hand-to-hand combat of the spy business, not where it all fit in the grand scheme of things. He just wanted to find out what had happened to Gennady Varennik, who seemed to have just fallen down the same hole that had swallowed up so many of SE Division’s Soviet agents over the last six months. Redmond’s mood was foul as he briefed me on the operation.

“He came to us in April this year. That’s important,” Redmond said. “That was after Ed Howard left the division and the agency . . . and even after Mary Howard left, for those who want to believe Howard was still getting pillow talk stuff from Mary. Whatever happens, we can’t pin this one on Howard.”

“How’d we get him?”

“He got us. Called one of our guys in Vienna, someone he knew when he was posted there, said he needed to talk to him right away.”

“All this on the phone?” I was surprised that a KGB officer would go operational on the phone in Austria, where the KGB’s ability to monitor CIA activities was extremely good.

“Yeah, I know. But if FITNESS is in trouble, it’s not because of that phone call. Anyway, after that first contact, we shifted this out of sight right away. We had Chuck Leven get in touch with him in Bonn—safe house meetings, full controls. Chuck was in Moscow with Burton, he can run a tight op.”

“What was the motivation?” I asked.

“Mixed. Said he was in trouble with money. Not much money, less than ten grand, but the usual story—he needed to get it back in his cash box right away. New baby, tough time with the expense of living in Germany. But he told Leven he was more interested in warning us, and maybe the world, about the wacky plot Moscow and Karlshorst were hatching to blow up targets in Germany, kill some Americans, and drive a wedge between the U.S. and the Germans. Maybe start World War Three in the process.”

“You believe it?”

“Doesn’t matter what I believe. Everybody’s trying to pin everything on the Sovs. You know who the believers are. Your buddy—” Redmond motioned toward the ceiling, a shorthand gesture to Casey’s office on the seventh floor. Casey did take the darkest stories of the Soviets at face value. Arguing against him could be dangerous for a CIA officer’s career. “Besides,” he said, “that buffoon Gennady Titov is running things at Karlshorst these days, and he’s capable of anything—even this dumb idea.”

I nodded, wondering why every time Titov’s name came up it set Redmond off. A streetwise KGB officer, Titov had been expelled from Scandinavia in an infamous spy scandal involving Norwegian Labor Party leader Arne Treholt. He was now directing KGB activities in East Germany, and the involvement of a man called “the Crocodile” within the halls of Lubyanka in German