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

on to take the problem seriously and keep his mouth shut. Redmond knew his way around the SE file system and wouldn’t have to ask anyone where to find what he needed. He could check out the files without drawing attention to himself, pass them to Stein, and take them back for safekeeping.

With Redmond’s help, Stein spent the following six weeks poring over the division’s secret files. He was looking for any pattern, any clue that might connect the losses to a single weakness—human or technical—somewhere in the system. At the end of his review, Stein wrote a précis of each case and then a final paper for Casey. He concluded that the CIA had a leak of some kind.

In March, Stein took the paper to Casey and briefed the Director in person on his findings. He told Casey that he believed there could be a communications breach somewhere—“and that is between you and NSA to find out.” Then he said the other possibility was that there was a mole inside the CIA. “And that we can do something about,” he said. “I would recommend that you start by looking at Moscow, which is smaller and a more manageable place to start an investigation, and then look at headquarters. But I would try to make sure it’s not in Moscow first.” The bottom line was that it was time for the Director to “put some people together to work on the problem.” When Stein raised the possibility that there was a spy inside the CIA, Casey was less than forthcoming in his response.

“Hmm,” he said noncommittally. “We got to put people on it.”

Stein left for South Korea without ever hearing whether the DCI had followed up and actually launched a mole hunt. He never saw Casey again. Later, Stein would learn that Casey never launched a major mole hunt. Stein would also conclude that Casey didn’t tell anyone about his final briefing.

By the time Stein was secretly recommending to Casey that he should start looking for a mole, Burton Gerber had already taken a series of defensive measures to make certain that the 1985 losses couldn’t happen again. He ordered a dramatic change in the way the SE Division handled its most sensitive cases. Gerber realized that the controls had become too lax. SE Division had been running more Soviet agents than ever before, and as a result more people were involved in handling them. He was determined to reduce the numbers. To do so, he created what he called the “back room.” It was a new system with special handling procedures for cables and other files on Soviet agents. Sandy Grimes and Diana Worthen, two trusted and experienced SE Division officials, were put in charge of making the new system work in early 1986.

Initially, that meant handling agents without any cable correspondence between Langley and the field. When a new agent was identified and recruited, CIA officers would fly back and forth to Washington to discuss the case. The word went out to senior officers in the field that if they got a potentially important Soviet intelligence source, they were not to send any cables about the case: They should get on a plane and tell Gerber in person.

Before resuming cable traffic on sensitive cases, Gerber insisted on adding a new layer of encryption. Normally, cables were decoded in the CIA’s communications center and then routed up to the division. But now, all cable traffic about Soviet cases was encrypted twice. The CIA officer handling the case would encrypt a message before turning it over to a CIA communicator, who then encrypted it again before sending the cable. At headquarters, the communications center would decipher the code added by the communicator, but that would reveal only the second layer of encryption. Just a small handful of top officials in SE Division had the keys to decipher that second code. In the field, often the only person with the code was the chief. Field stations were not allowed to keep paper files on the new cases, and they were not to be discussed within the station. Meetings between headquarters personnel and field officers involved in the cases were treated as if they were being held behind the Iron Curtain—Moscow Rules applied. The officers would meet in safe houses for the debrief or at CIA stations in the field.

By February 1986, Gerber could see that the new system was working; the CIA developed two new Soviet agents, and they were not compromised or arrested by the KGB. Gerber still didn’t know what had caused the 1985 losses, but he knew that he had stopped the hemorrhaging.

Moscow, January 1986

Barry Roydon, the CIA’s deputy chief of counterintelligence, sat across from the Moscow chief; his mission was straightforward enough. He was going to brief the Moscow chief and his deputy on a new operational success against the KGB in Bangkok. Only there was no operation in Bangkok. The name of the new KGB recruit was real enough, but the rest of the story was a carefully crafted fabrication scripted for delivery to whatever technical penetration the KGB may have been able to set up inside the yellow submarine that served as the Moscow work spaces. The Moscow chief was slightly uncomfortable with Roydon’s direct verbal briefing. He’d been worried for months about the possibility that his enclosure had somehow been penetrated and had scribbled his haunting note to me just five months earlier: “Sometimes I think they’re in here with me.”

Roydon was now testing that suspicion.

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Moscow, February 21, 1986

Rem Krassilnikov was shocked at what the KGB had found when the vessel Siberia Maru docked in Nakhodka with container #CTIV-1317221 aboard. The container was scheduled to be loaded onto the first available freight train bound for Leningrad, on a journey that would cross all eleven of the USSR’s time zones over a period of three to four weeks. According to the shipping manifest, the container was packed with a cargo of