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

“When do you get off duty tomorrow?”

“At noon, sir.”

“Tomorrow, after you are off work, leave the embassy and call this number from a pay telephone. I’ll answer. Don’t identify yourself. Just be friendly and tell me what time we can meet. The meeting place will be the McDonald’s on Spätenplatz. You know the place?” Olson kept the instructions simple. He doubted Lonetree’s ability to handle anything more complicated, more secure, in a city like Vienna, which the KGB still felt was their operational preserve.

“Yes, sir. I know McDonald’s.”

“We’ll meet there at the time we’ve agreed to on the phone. Then we’ll go somewhere to talk.”

“Yes, sir,” Clayton Lonetree said.

Olson saw that the panic was still in his eyes. “You’ll tell no one about our talk. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

Olson left the Christmas party and went to cable CIA headquarters, outlining his account of the encounter with Clayton Lonetree. By early the next morning, he had received instructions from Langley to debrief Lonetree on the nature of his relationship with the KGB in Moscow. He was told to stay alert for the possibility of running Lonetree in place for a while, until the CIA could determine how much damage he had done. But Olson was convinced that Lonetree was too close to an emotional breakdown, too panicked, to function as a double agent and reported that observation to Langley as he prepared for the meeting with the Marine.

Shortly after noon, the telephone rang. Olson picked it up before the third ring.

“Sir, I could meet at two-thirty.”

“Two-thirty is fine,” Olson responded. “I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

Jim Olson selected a young counterintelligence officer with a good background on the KGB to accompany him to the initial debriefing. He hoped that the young officer would help calm Lonetree down and ease his fears.

Lonetree was waiting at the McDonald’s on Spätenplatz when Olson and his colleague arrived. Quickly taking the Marine in tow, they drove him to a safe site, where they conducted their initial debrief. The instructions from CIA headquarters had been specific—Olson was to determine how much damage had been done.

Langley, 1330 Hours, December 22, 1986

Paul Redmond read the latest wrap-up from Vienna on Lonetree. Olson was not only a seasoned intelligence officer, he was also a lawyer, and his summary of the debriefing sessions with the Marine guard concluded that this was no longer a counterintelligence operation. It should now be a criminal case.

As Clayton Lonetree talked, it became clear to Olson that he had fallen into the oldest KGB trap in the business. While serving as a Marine guard at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Lonetree, a lonely young Native American, had met a beautiful Soviet embassy employee, Violetta Sanni. Their affair was in violation of the embassy’s policy forbidding fraternization between Marine guards and Soviet women, so the two kept their relationship secret. But as the relationship with Violetta deepened, her “uncle Sasha” suddenly appeared, completing the classic honey trap. Lonetree began passing information to Violetta’s kindly uncle and responded to his directions to serve as his eyes and ears in the U.S. embassy.

After his transfer to Vienna, Uncle Sasha appeared in the Austrian capital and introduced Lonetree to “George,” his KGB colleague in Vienna. Lonetree continued providing information to the KGB in Vienna and received occasional payments for his services, until he could no longer live with himself.

Olson recommended in his summary report that the case be turned over to the prosecutors. He concluded that the CIA had reached the end of its proper involvement.

Redmond didn’t like the idea, but he knew Olson was right. Clayton Lonetree was spirited out of Vienna on Christmas morning by a team of officers from the Naval Investigative Service, just eleven days after he approached Jim Olson at the ambassador’s residence.

To assess the damage, Redmond decided he’d have to order a comprehensive review of all documents sent to Moscow in any way related to the agents who had been lost in the last eighteen months. If the KGB had a Marine guard on their payroll in Moscow, they might have gotten into the CIA area—and the agency’s files. Someone would have to look through every cable in Moscow’s files that mentioned the agents who had been arrested to see if a KGB break-in—possibly facilitated by Clayton Lonetree—could explain the 1985 losses. Redmond would ask Sandy Grimes and Diana Worthen to handle the investigation.

Moscow, 1940 Hours, December 22, 1986

The waitress brought two more tumblers of gin to the two men at the corner table and took away the four empty glasses. As an afterthought, she dumped the overflowing ashtray on her serving tray and sullenly walked away. Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov and his boss, Valentin Klimenko, were seated at a low table in the bar of the Press Club at the Soviet Foreign Ministry near Moscow’s Old Arbat. They had been there, drinking imported English gin and smoking Marlboro filters, for about an hour before Klimenko dropped the bomb on his subordinate.

“Sasha, I have a job for you.”

Zhomov watched his boss expectantly. With thick, dark hair, the blue-eyed Klimenko was a small, wiry man in his early forties. Both men were American specialists in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, and both knew as much about the Americans in Moscow as anyone in Soviet counterintelligence. Valentin Klimenko was Rem Krassilnikov’s deputy, and Aleksandr Zhomov directly supervised the people who watched the Americans twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Zhomov’s people put their American charges to bed in the evening and woke them up each morning. Sometimes, depending on the particular American, they had the means to “watch” them while they slept.

“You have one month,” Klimenko continued, “to come to me with a plan for something special for our American special services boys. One month.”

“Something special?”

“Yes. Something that will get us deep inside them, give us a window we’ve never had, something that will tell us what they’re doing to us, how they do it, maybe even how they smuggle their agents out.”

Zhomov fell