The Main Enemy Read online

  THE MAIN ENEMY

  THE INSIDE STORY OF THE CIA’S FINAL SHOWDOWN WITH THE KGB

  MILT BEARDEN

  AND

  JAMES RISEN

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  PART ONE

  The Year of the Spy

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART TWO

  The Cold War Turns Hot in Afghanistan

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  PART THREE

  Endgame

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  A Note on Sources

  Select Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To Marie-Catherine

  To Penny

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To all of the men and women who fought the battles described in these pages, we are in your debt. Many of you could not be named because the job is not yet done; others wished not to be named, and we have honored that wish. But your anonymity does not diminish your contribution.

  We also owe an enormous debt to our editor at Random House, the matchless Joy de Menil. The Main Enemy is infused with her energy and vision.

  And one of our greatest advocates has been Tina Bennett, our literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit, whose enthusiasm for our project never wavered.

  We wish to thank Jill Abramson, the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, who has been a steadfast friend throughout the years of work on The Main Enemy.

  We are also grateful for the research assistance of Barclay Walsh, research supervisor in the Washington bureau of The New York Times.

  FOREWORD

  The Main Enemy is the first comprehensive history of the climactic secret battles between the CIA and the KGB in the closing days of the Cold War, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded. Beginning with the watershed “Year of the Spy” in 1985 and following through to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the book chronicles the major espionage engagements between the CIA and KGB through the eyes of the spies who fought them.

  This is the story of the lives and careers of the generation trained as spies in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis, who took charge at the CIA and KGB just as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the 1980s and then suddenly found themselves at the center of a maelstrom of historic change. Many of the CIA and KGB officers who faced off in the Cold War have returned to civilian life. And like their fathers, the combat veterans of Normandy and Stalingrad, they have much to remember.

  The Main Enemy is the product of a unique experiment, an effort by a CIA insider and an outside journalist to combine forces to write a more revealing and human narrative than either could on his own. This truly was a collaborative project, but the authors also adhered to a strict division of labor in order to abide by certain rules imposed by the CIA on its former officers. As required under CIA regulations, Milt Bearden submitted his portion of the manuscript to the CIA for prepublication review, and then he made redactions requested by the agency. Those redactions were modest and did not affect the story being told.

  James Risen did not submit his portion of the book to the CIA for prepublication review. In order to provide a consistent narrative tone, Milt Bearden is referred to in the first person throughout the book, even in those sections of the book written by James Risen.

  The book is based on hundreds of interviews conducted over the course of three years with dozens of CIA and KGB officers on either side of the divide. Where there is dialogue in the book, it corresponds to the specific recollections of one or more of the people present in the room. Beyond this, we have taken the liberty of reconstructing several CIA cables. With the exception of an excerpt from one, these are not actual cables but are reconstructions by Milt Bearden based on his thirty years of reading and writing CIA cables; they are similar in tone and language to the real cables sent in each instance.

  PART ONE

  THE YEAR OF THE SPY

  1

  Washington, D.C., 1830 Hours, June 13, 1985

  There was nothing more he could do, Burton Gerber told himself again. The run had been choreographed like a ballet, of this he was certain. He had imposed his own iron discipline on the night’s operation and had personally signed off on every detail, every gesture. Now that the route had been selected, he could close his eyes and visualize each intersection.

  Gerber knew Moscow as well as any American, and from the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters half a world away, he routinely insisted on approving each turn to be followed on the operational run from Moscow’s city center through the bleak outer neighborhoods. Night after night during his own years in Moscow, he had taken his wife, Rosalie, to obscure Russian theaters in distant parts of town rarely frequented by foreigners. His knowledge of Russian and his reputation as a movie buff had served him well. A good case officer has to learn his city, he told himself.

  From his office in Langley, Virginia, Gerber had approved the script for the conversation that was to take place at the end of tonight’s run, during the ten-minute meeting in the shadows of the Stalinist apartment blocks on Kastanayevskaya Street that was the sole object of the operation. Finally, Gerber had demanded that rigorous rehearsals be conducted inside the cramped working spaces on the fifth floor of the U.S. embassy in Moscow before the run was launched.

  A wraith-thin Midwesterner, Jesuitical in his approach to his work, Gerber was one of the most demanding spymasters the CIA had ever sent against its main enemy, the Soviet Union’s KGB. As chief of the CIA’s Soviet/East European Division for the past year, he had made his mark. His exacting attention to the details of espionage tradecraft and his impatience with those who failed to meet his standards were legendary. Some critics called him a screamer who berated subordinates, but most respected his single-minded devotion to his job and, in an old-fashioned sense, to duty. Gerber was a complex man who evoked a jumble of emotions from those who worked for him. Longtime Soviet/East European hands studied him with the same intensity they brought to their analysis of the Soviet leaders in the Kremlin. What were they to make of a man whose greatest avocation was for the care, feeding, and preservation of wild wolves?

  The truth was that Burton Gerber was a deeply spiritual man, a Roman Catholic who felt a moral obligation to the Russian agents he and his case officers were running. He lit a candle at Mass for each one of his agents unmasked and arrested by the KGB. He had come home from serving as station chief in Mos
cow three years earlier, so he understood the dangers of operating inside the Soviet bloc better than most at CIA headquarters. He believed that nothing less than perfection was owed to America’s Russian agents, and if he yelled at case officers who failed to meet his standards, so be it. Cable traffic between Langley and Moscow was frequently dominated by a tense running debate between Gerber and his Moscow station chief, Murat Natirboff, over the minutiae of operations. There were some in SE Division who whispered that Natirboff was miscast as Moscow station chief, and it was increasingly clear that Gerber didn’t trust him to get things done right. He seemed to believe he had to run Moscow operations himself—so much so that to some within SE Division, it sometimes felt as if Burton Gerber had never left Moscow.

  But at some level, beneath the rigorous precision so necessary to a successful spy, Gerber also believed in both faith and fate. And so, after he signed off on the night’s run, he closed the door to his fifth-floor office at CIA headquarters and smoothly turned his mind to other duties.

  It was almost perfect late spring weather in Washington. The day was ending quietly as Gerber left for his home in a graceful old apartment building in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood. He had planned a modest dinner that night, after which he had promised to join a night training exercise.

  At the very moment one of his officers would be winding his way through Moscow to meet the CIA’s most valuable Soviet spy, Gerber would be watching green trainees playacting espionage on the streets of Washington. Better, he thought, that he devote his time to making certain that the next crop of officers be properly schooled than waste his energy fretting over details of a run he could no longer control. Gerber willed himself to stop worrying, to move on.

  This was no routine training course, to be sure. Like the Navy’s famed Top Gun school for fighter pilots, the CIA’s “Internal Operations” course was the most arduous training program the agency had to offer. It was restricted to a handpicked elite—case officers slated for assignments in Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and other capital cities in the Soviet empire. These were among the most difficult jobs in the CIA. The physical and mental stresses that came with the constant surveillance, the threat of exposure and arrest, meant that “inside work” was a young case officer’s game.

  After searching for some time for new tactics to defeat the KGB’s suffocating surveillance in Moscow, the agency hit upon the idea of adding some green officers to the Moscow pipeline, recruits who wouldn’t be easily recognized from other tours of duty. The decision to send rookies to Moscow placed an added burden on the IO course. It had to provide the most realistic training possible for officers who had never before faced a hostile opposition, much less the professional spy catchers of the KGB’s Second and Seventh Chief Directorates.

  Run by Jack Platt, a gruff ex-Marine and longtime Soviet targets officer, the six-week course simulated “Moscow Rules.” The new case officers had to pass messages and receive documents from “spies” even as they were being trailed through Washington by teams of FBI agents playing the part of a hostile counterintelligence service. The FBI agents played hard—because the course kept them sharp for following real Soviet spies. Still, the best-trained CIA officers in the course could defeat the FBI, often through the use of sophisticated electronic devices, such as burst transmission equipment, that allowed them to pass messages without face-to-face contact.

  But the FBI always had a lesson in store. The trainees—often with their spouses in tow—would go out on what they thought was an ordinary operation and walk into an explosive surprise arrest. They’d be roughed up and charged with drug dealing by FBI agents who were totally convincing in making it seem as though the bust had nothing to do with the IO course. After a few hours of questioning, only the most controlled students had the will to hold back their CIA connections. Invariably, some would try to talk their way out by explaining that there had been some horrible mistake: You see, Officer, I was loitering on a deserted street corner late at night with this woman, who happens to be my wife, as part of a CIA training exercise, not to sell drugs.

  Gerber had invited Jim Olson, who had served with him in Moscow, to join him for dinner before they both went and played their parts in the training exercise. Olson, chief of internal operations for the Soviet Division, had amassed a remarkable record in Moscow and was now one of Gerber’s most trusted lieutenants. But when he arrived at Gerber’s apartment, Olson brought devastating news: Paul Stombaugh had been arrested in Moscow.

  Olson’s words hit Gerber like a gut shot. He knew instinctively what Stombaugh’s arrest meant: The CIA’s most important spy in twenty-five years had been rolled up by the KGB. It meant that Adolf Tolkachev, the billion-dollar agent, code-named GTVANQUISH, the man Stombaugh was supposed to meet, had been fatally compromised.

  Typically, when an operation was carried off successfully in the heart of Moscow, right in the middle of a rolling sea of KGB surveillance, Langley wouldn’t hear about it until the next morning. To keep the KGB from guessing that an important operation was under way, case officers returning from a late-night run would simply “get black,” disappear into the city, and wait until the next morning to reinsert themselves into their cover jobs at the embassy. So only when the officer reported to work the next day would he go through a thorough debriefing, while the tape recordings of his brief encounter with the agent were transcribed.

  That was when a flurry of messages would come pulsing into Langley, providing the details of how the run had unfolded the night before. Adrenaline would be pumping across the cable traffic, and well into the next day it would infect the small circle in the SE Division managing the case. Days later, the tape recordings of the agent meeting would arrive by diplomatic pouch, allowing senior SE Division managers to hear the tense voices and feel the strained emotions of the Moscow street encounter for themselves. They could then try to gauge the state of mind of an agent most of them had never met, as well as the performance of a case officer trying to ask all the right questions while constantly scanning his surroundings for signs of the KGB.

  Success took a while to percolate through the system. But word of failure came quickly. It would originate in Moscow in the middle of the night, a clipped cable chasing the sun and arriving in Washington in the early evening. The first sign of trouble might come from the wife of a Moscow officer, signaling that her husband had failed to return home on schedule. A few hours later, confirmation would come that the officer had been arrested and that a consular officer from the embassy had been dispatched to secure his release from the KGB’s Lubyanka Center at #2 Dzerzhinsky. Tonight’s message, Gerber knew, meant that Stombaugh, a young former FBI agent now on his first CIA tour, had been ambushed while tracing the run that he had choreographed so carefully.

  Gerber made a few quick calls back to headquarters, to make sure that Clair George, Deputy Director for Operations, and others on the seventh floor knew what was going on. After that, he sat down for dinner, determined to go through with his plans to participate in the IO exercises. But even the steel-willed Gerber couldn’t keep his mind from wandering back to Stombaugh and to Tolkachev.

  He could only imagine how the night’s drama had played out eight time zones away in Moscow.

  2

  Moscow, 2010 Hours, June 13, 1985

  The headset crackled with a one-word message: “Narziss.”

  In the darkened rear compartment of an unmarked, windowless KGB van, Major General Rem Sergeyevich Krassilnikov, white haired and imperturbable, shifted slightly in his seat. Krassilnikov knew that the young CIA officer code-named Narziss—the pretty one—was about to fall into his trap.

  The CIA had tried to fool him, to lull his watchers, Krassilnikov thought. They had wanted him to believe that this was down time for the Main Enemy. The CIA’s Moscow chief had just departed the capital with great operational clatter on a trip to the North Caucasus. He had applied well in advance for permission to travel and had provided a thorough itinerary to the F
oreign Ministry, who passed it to #2 Dzerzhinsky. He had also “talked to the walls” in his apartment, giving his KGB monitors the clear impression that mid-June, with the chief away, was going to be a slow period for CIA watchers in Moscow. Was this trip to the Caucasus another trick? Krassilnikov could only wonder what kind of a special services chief left his post at such a time. A clever one, possibly.

  But Krassilnikov was confident that the bait for tonight’s trap would be irresistible. The KGB had found a ringer for Adolf Grigoryevitch Tolkachev, and his job tonight was to walk a few dozen yards carrying a book with a white cover, a mere fifty paces, in Tolkachev’s shoes. Nothing complicated. From a hundred feet away, his CIA contact would catch a glimpse of a man he would conclude was Adolf Tolkachev being arrested and dragged into a van. It would be just enough for him to report back to Langley that Tolkachev had been free until that awful moment, sowing seeds of doubt as to when and how the KGB had discovered the spy.

  Adolf Tolkachev had been a devastating spy, but he hardly looked the part. A slightly built scientist in his late fifties, Tolkachev worked quietly at a top-secret aviation design bureau in the heart of Moscow. He had been spying for the CIA for the past six years, long enough to have accumulated two code names, CKSPHERE and GTVANQUISH. (GT was a CIA digraph, two successive letters placed before a code name to identify the geographic region of an agent or operation. GT had only recently replaced an earlier Soviet digraph, CK.) Tolkachev had eluded the KGB long enough to deliver tens of thousands of pages of secret documents to the CIA, looting his design bureau’s classified library.

  But now he was in the Lefortovo investigative and pretrial prison, undergoing enforced “cooperation” with KGB interrogators while he awaited the inevitable—trial, conviction, and certain execution. The KGB had patiently pieced together Tolkachev’s communications plan—how he would signal for meetings with the CIA or, conversely, warn his American handlers of trouble. Krassilnikov and his Second Chief Directorate, the KGB’s counterintelligence watchdogs, had carefully triggered the communications plan calling the CIA out for tonight’s scheduled meeting. As Stombaugh approached the meeting site, Krassilnikov was certain the CIA didn’t have a clue that its prized agent was in prison.