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

and told him he could do whatever he wanted with his video. The next morning, Langley had a full cabled account of the attempted recruitment.

I was dispatched within twenty-four hours to West Berlin to see if there was anything she felt more comfortable expanding on in person. We had a long talk about the incident in a corner niche at the Kempinski Hotel in West Berlin, and I concluded there was nothing more to be added to the report, beyond some color and atmospherics about the meeting and the heavy-handed pitch. The East Berlin chief could provide a more detailed account when she next visited Langley.

The incident might have been filed away had it not been for a similar occurrence just a few weeks later in Brazzaville, the capital of the Congo, another Soviet client-state where the KGB had free rein. There was no video game this time, just an out-of-the-blue recruitment pitch by a visiting KGB officer appearing at the female CIA chief’s home. She was cold-pitched on the spot to commit treason. Like the East Berlin chief, she flatly turned down the KGB and reported the incident in detail to headquarters. Gerber thought the isolated officer in Brazzaville might welcome some assistance and sent Sandy Grimes, a longtime SE Division officer, to Africa to do the debrief.

As it turned out, there was no more substance to the Brazzaville episode than there had been to the pitch in East Berlin. The CIA was unable to make much sense of these approaches to its female officers. Some wrote it off as another ploy by the KGB, a brainstorm similar to the one a few years back that had the KGB mounting crude recruitment approaches to black CIA officers. The KGB had hoped that they would be bitter about CIA racism and thus receptive to their overtures. That ploy hadn’t worked any better than the approach to the two women. Others wondered if the new tactic was aimed at sowing distrust within the CIA of its female officers. The theory was that if two had turned down and reported KGB pitches, might there not be another one out there who had not rejected Moscow’s overtures?

None of these theories was particularly compelling, but on the heels of the anonymous letter from Bonn, yet another mystery was added to the strange occurrences of the last year. No one had a clear idea of what was happening to the CIA’s Soviet sources. The only thing on which everyone could agree was that there had been a cataclysmic failure somewhere in the system. By the spring of 1986, a new, whispered term had entered the lexicon of the inner circle of SE Division—“the 1985 losses.”

Langley, May 8, 1986

Looking down at the Moscow cable on my desk, I read again the spare language reporting that a Moscow case officer had been arrested the previous evening while on an operational run to meet EASTBOUND. The cable read exactly like the others following the arrests of SPHERE and COWL. But then what else was there to report beyond the fact that a Moscow officer had walked into an ambush, had been taken to #2 Dzerzhinsky, and then had been released a couple of hours later? The cables always ended with the promise that details would follow.

I flipped through the stack of follow-up cables, pausing to look over the final one, where the Moscow officer requested that his father be asked to reserve rooms for him and his wife at their club in Maryland. That one would set Gerber off again. Gerber had taken a dark view of this case officer’s operational judgment after he’d been detained some weeks earlier on a nighttime run in the far suburbs of Moscow. The officer became disoriented and took a wrong turn, ending up at the main gate to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate headquarters at Yasenevo. He was detained for a few minutes, questioned, and then released.

When the cable reporting the incident arrived the next morning, Gerber exploded. He had a simple rule: A case officer should know his city. If he could get lost and end up driving through the main gate of the enemy’s foreign intelligence headquarters, what other mistakes might he make?

Now, reading the cable asking for comfortable accommodations at his father’s club in suburban Maryland, I wondered what was going through Gerber’s mind. Gerber was not a clubby man and didn’t have much patience for those who were.

KGB Headquarters, Moscow, May 8, 1986

Krassilnikov was quite pleased with the way the last ambush had worked out. The Second Chief Directorate had been given a tip about a radar scientist and had ultimately identified the man. Rather than simply arresting the scientist, however, Krassilnikov had taken pains to turn the spy operation back against the Americans. He’d planted a story in the man’s design bureau that the American special services were suspected of having penetrated the establishment and that the subject could enjoy a “certain amnesty” by turning himself in. It worked. The man came forward and cooperated fully, up to the point of setting up the ambush of the American special services officer in a courtyard in an apartment block on Moscow’s Malaya Pirogovskaya Street.

Krassilnikov’s men watched from a distance as the case officer left for home at the end of the day and began his long and laborious surveillance detection run. When he was convinced that he was black, he began an elaborate foot run. He walked straight into Krassilnikov’s trap.

Later, in the holding room at Dzerzhinsky, a pale and subdued CIA officer watched without comment as the contents of his bag were laid out on the table. There was a “Kharkov” razor concealing a subminiature camera and a number of prewritten letters, ostensibly from American tourists to relatives and friends back in the United States. The scientist was to use these to correspond with his handlers, using secret writing on the backs of the letters. Concealed inside a notebook were the intelligence requirements—the CIA’s