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

his story of heroic resistance, single-minded determination, and valiant escape was a fantasy dreamed up by Yurchenko to save himself from execution. They knew the yarns, carefully repeated and spun by Kryuchkov and his deputy, Vadim Kirpichenko, were nonsense. Aksilenko could understand the leadership’s desire to sweep Yurchenko’s treason under the rug, but he couldn’t understand turning him into an institutional icon. Nobody who’d worked in the West seriously believed the nonsense that the CIA had drugged Yurchenko. The rank and file were beginning to write off the whole affair as just another sign of the corrupt KGB leadership protecting itself. Yurchenko had been promoted to flag rank just as he defected. That made him one of the boys. It wasn’t the same when a lieutenant colonel jumped ship. The grumbling grew.

Even comments filtering down about former CIA officer Edward Lee Howard made no sense. No formal acknowledgments had been made that Howard had been working for the KGB, but there were leaks that he might be responsible for the recent successes in rolling up American assets in Moscow. Aksilenko had read the coverage of the Howard affair in the American press as it crossed his desk, but it never quite tallied with the leaks he heard inside the KGB.

And now on his desk before him was a scripted report advising “Tass was authorized to announce” that an American diplomat had been arrested the previous night committing an act of espionage. No further details.

Something was going on, Aksilenko thought; so many of these strange incidents seemed to have their origins in Washington. And here he was, the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch chief responsible for Washington, and he didn’t have a clue what was happening. Maybe he could pick up something from Valeriy Martynov, who had been part of the “honor guard” escorting Yurchenko back to Moscow. Martynov was still around, Aksilenko had heard, but he’d taken a fall and was recovering from surgery.

   20   

Langley, Late March 1986

Sometime in early March, the CIA chief in Bonn sent a cable by special courier to Langley. A letter dropped anonymously into the mailbox of a Bonn case officer had informed him that KGB officer Gennady Varennik had been uncovered as a CIA agent. To establish his bona fides, the letter’s author gave the name of Varennik’s CIA handler, Chuck Leven, and promised to reveal why and how Varennik had been caught. Further details would be made available to the CIA if a package containing $50,000 was placed in a dead drop site in East Berlin, the letter writer said. The money should be cached in waterproof packaging and left under a particular flagstone on a walking path. Instructions were all carefully detailed in the letter. Finally, the author asked that a signal be transmitted on an HF frequency from the American embassy’s backup transmitter. That signal would confirm receipt of the letter and that it was being acted upon.

The letter sent a shock through the leadership of SE Division, in part because it offered ammunition to support all of the major theories then in play about the cause of the lost agents. The statement that Gennady Varennik had been compromised was a confirmation of what was already known, but the promise of details was enough to encourage the CIA to agree to the letter writer’s conditions. There was a debate about whether the letter was a KGB ruse, but no one counseled against going along with the writer’s demands.

Bonn was instructed to make the broadcast, and East Berlin was authorized to make the drop of $50,000 in a park. Some in SE Division were puzzled by the coincidence that the operation was taking place in East Berlin. An operational backwater because of its smothering Stasi surveillance, East Berlin was beginning to heat up.

It all began with the setup of the CIA chief in East Berlin, a female case officer who had previously served in Austria. A Hungarian contact had invited her to dinner at a quiet East Berlin restaurant, but they were quickly joined at their table by a Soviet with a heavy briefcase. The Hungarian politely excused himself on cue, leaving the field to the Soviet, whose intentions became clear immediately.

Unloading a videocassette player from his briefcase, the Soviet, a senior KGB American targets officer, explained to the East Berlin chief that he had prepared a little video story of the last several years of her career. He switched on the machine and turned the screen to face his quarry, while the KGB production of This Is Your Life rolled across the screen.

There were outside shots of her apartment in Vienna, along with recordings of conversations that seemed to have been picked up by KGB microphones planted in her walls. The Vienna story line bluntly suggested that the conversations captured by KGB microphones in her apartment had led directly to the compromise of CIA operations in Austria. This would all be bad for her career, would it not?

As the television drama cut to East Berlin, the scripting became more provocative. More candid shots followed, obviously taken by concealed Stasi cameras shooting through pinholes in her apartment walls and ceiling. These were accompanied by similar shots of at least one of her fellow East Berlin officers, also female, dramatically fading to black. As the KGB officer added his own narrative voice-over to the video, he began to insinuate that the unmarried East Berlin chief might be involved in a lesbian relationship, something she would certainly not want known in Langley. As the tape played out and the KGB officer switched it off and stowed away his player, he turned to the CIA chief and made his pitch. She could come across and assist the KGB, or she would soon begin to suffer the consequences of all her “mistakes.”

The CIA chief thanked the KGB man for the evening’s entertainment and told him he was barking up the wrong tree. She said she would report the evening’s events in great detail to Washington