The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

Burton Gerber, chief of the SE Division, 1984-1989.

Valentin Klimenko, Krassilnikov’s deputy and later chief of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB Second Chief Directorate. He is now the Rezident in Israel.

Aleksandr “Sasha” Zhomov, aka Phantom, aka PROLOGUE, at home with his spaniel in 2001.

A Moscow signal site being read by a Moscow case officer in a drive-by. Note the “V” mark on the pillar—a signal from a Soviet agent that an operational task has been carried out.

Jack Platt, chief of the SE Internal Operations course, 1987.

Paul Redmond, deputy chief of the SE Division and later deputy chief of counterintelligence, 1995.

Jack Downing, former chief in Moscow and Beijing and Deputy Director for Operations.

Gennady Vasilenko as a young KGB officer.

General Leonid Shebarshin, 1987.

A disabled Soviet tank that became a landmark on the road from Parachinar, Pakistan, to Ali Khel in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province.

Milt Bearden and Frank Anderson at Ali Khel shortly after the Soviet garrison fell in 1987. The Soviet major who was adviser to a battalion of Afghan government troops died in the assault. Note the vodka bottle at the lower left.

The redoubtable Chinese mules on the road to Nangarhar.

Aerial shot of a transient mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan.

Chinese-made 107 mm rockets being set up for delayed launch.

Front row, from left: Major General Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI); Director of Central Intelligence William Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and Milt Bearden at a mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province, 1987.

Afghan resistance leader Sibghatullah Mojaddedi and Milt Bearden in 1988.

From left: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, William Webster, Hamid Gul, Ambassador Robert Oakley, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Richard Kerr, and Milt Bearden at a meeting in Islamabad, 1988.

From left: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Richard Kerr, and Maulvi Yunis Khales in Islamabad, 1988.

Milt Bearden and Richard Stolz in Torkham moving supplies into Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, 1988.

Milt Bearden in Paktia Province with two of Hekmatyar’s fighters, 1987.

Milt Bearden and Frank Anderson in Paktia, 1987.

Top Soviet hands at CIA headquarters. From left: Milt Bearden, Gardner “Gus” Hathaway, Steve Weber, Deputy Director for Operations Dick Stolz, Paul Redmond, and Burton Gerber.

Oldrich Cerny, Václav Havel’s national security adviser (left).

Polish intelligence chief Andrzej Milczanowski with Milt Bearden in Warsaw.

Milt Bearden, David Rolph, and Rem Krassilnikov in Dzerzhinsky Square with “Iron Felix” still standing in the background, 1991.

From left: Valentin Klimenko, David Rolph, John MacGaffin, Milt Bearden, and Rem Krassilnikov in a KGB safe house in Moscow, 1992.

The Lubyanka headquarters of the KGB defaced by demonstrators sending their message to the international audience in both Russian and English on August 22, 1991.

The entrance of Lubyanka was defaced with a swastika on the evening of August 22, 1991.

The pedestal that held the statue of “Iron Felix,” Dzerzhinsky Square, August 22, 1991.

“Iron Felix” being hauled down by a German-built crane on the night of August 22, 1991.

Boris Yeltsin, captured on film by a CIA officer, at the Russian Parliament in August 1991.

Paul Redmond in front of a fragment of the Berlin Wall at CIA headquarters.

   8   

Islamabad, Late April 1987

The call from Clair George came through to my secure communications center in Islamabad late in the afternoon. There was none of the usual opening banter; Clair was all business.

“Milt, I want you to think very carefully before you answer the question I am about to ask. Do you understand?”

“I understand, Clair,” I said, wondering what the hell and how big the issue was that had prompted the call from the DDO. I had worked for Clair for years, and this was the first time he had ever gone to the bother of calling me directly in the field on the secure line.

“Were you in any way involved in an attack on an industrial site deep inside the Soviet Union . . . in Uzbekistan . . . anytime in the last month?”

There it was. Clair wasn’t trying to prompt an answer with his careful, almost lawyerly, question. He was just conveying to me the seriousness of the matter and giving me a chance to forgo a flip answer right off the bat. The fact that this was a secure line without an official record was also not lost on me. As it turned out, the answer was easy.

“No, Clair. If anything like that is going on, we’re not involved here. You can say straight out that the agency is not involved.”

“Absolutely uninvolved? No foreknowledge?” Clair’s voice lightened a little, but he was still insistent. He wanted no room for misunderstanding.

“Clair, I don’t know precisely what you’re talking about, but I can say I had absolutely no foreknowledge of any attack across the Amu Dar’ya. But if it happened, and if they used weapons we have provided, would that mean involvement? I don’t think so. We stand by our position that once the stuff’s delivered to the Paks, we lose all control over it.”

“Please say again that there was no involvement in the planning or execution of an attack, any attack, on Soviet territory.”

“Clair, that’s absolutely correct. We have not been involved in any way with planning or carrying out attacks on the Soviet Union.”

“That’s fine, Milt. You may or may not be getting a cable on this. If you do get one, answer it just the way you answered me.”

“Okay, Clair, but how about a question?”

“Sure.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“There has been some discussion between Dobrynin and Shultz over certain matters in the USSR last week. I just wanted to be sure to have your input.”

What Clair might have said was that he wanted to be sure that I wasn’t off freelancing