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

the communications plan had worked. Back in his office, Jack Downing found that the package he had left was gone. In its place was a message from PROLOGUE with the list of the CIA’s agents who had been arrested and what had become of them. Downing had been away from SE Division in the early 1980s, when many of these cases had been run; now he could see how much had been gained—and now lost—by SE Division during his absence.

PROLOGUE had also handed over copies of the KGB’s personnel assessment reports on both Downing and his predecessor, Murat Natirboff. It amused Downing that the KGB’s assessment of his performance, including a discussion of his first tour in Moscow, was far more positive and flattering than the report that had been filed by the KGB team that had watched Natirboff.

Moscow, July 1987

Downing began to eat out every Friday night and was always careful to park his unlocked car nearby, where PROLOGUE could easily find it and make a quick exchange. He also tried to find an excuse to take the train to Leningrad as often as possible, although he was worried that if he went too frequently, his travel schedule would draw too much attention from the KGB. He decided not to take the train trip more than once every three months; that meant he would have to rely almost exclusively on his Friday night restaurant excursions for his communications.

But PROLOGUE was maddeningly unpredictable, and Downing was never certain when the KGB man would actually show up for an exchange. Downing and his wife would often return from yet another meal at one of PROLOGUE’s handpicked, stomach-churning eateries only to find that the letter he had left for PROLOGUE was still in his briefcase, with no message in return. Downing soon found that PROLOGUE would contact him only about once a month, which meant that three out of four of his grisly meals were for naught.

PROLOGUE’s “production”—Paul Redmond’s term for the quality and quantity of the secrets he was handing over—was now steady, and events began to prove its accuracy as well. The engineer who PROLOGUE said would be the first dangle to appear flagged down a CIA officer driving through summertime Moscow. The new case presented Downing and Gerber with an unusual headache. The CIA was now convinced, thanks to PROLOGUE, that the new volunteer had been sent by the KGB. But if the CIA rejected the engineer’s advances, the KGB might suspect the CIA had been tipped off he was a double agent and begin searching for a mole within its ranks. Burton Gerber had lost too many good agents over the last two years; he wasn’t about to take any risks with this one. The CIA would have to handle the engineer as if he were a genuine spy and never give the KGB any reason to doubt that they had fooled the Americans.

Over the next four months, other double agents began to volunteer to the CIA in Moscow, and like the engineer, the CIA assigned case officers to handle each one. Before long, the double agent cases came to dominate the workload in Moscow, and Downing could see that far too much of the time and energy of his case officers was being spent on agents that the CIA knew to be frauds.

Sometimes the KGB got sloppy with these double agents. In one instance, a message from one Soviet agent was left for the CIA in a dead drop site that was being used to communicate with another Soviet agent. The only explanation was that both agents were under KGB control, and the Soviets had mixed up the communication instructions for the two cases.

But the CIA had to look the other way and keep the cases running in order to protect PROLOGUE. At least Moscow was busy. Working on the double agent cases got the CIA’s officers out onto the streets, and that was something of an accomplishment for an operation that had had its confidence shaken. By the summer of 1987, in fact, case officers in Moscow were aborting their operational runs so frequently that Burton Gerber and the desk inside SE Division that dealt with internal operations were beginning to despair of any successful operations besides PROLOGUE.

They were seeing ghosts, and even the latest electronic gear designed to detect KGB surveillance didn’t help. The CIA sent new, briefcase-size sensors that could pick up hidden transmissions from surveillance teams, and Moscow officers were instructed to lay them on the front seat of their cars while driving through the city. But each time an officer launched on a run, the device would send out an alarm, so the machines seemed to confirm Moscow’s worst fears about the KGB’s ability to track the Americans. Maybe “ultradiscreet surveillance” really did exist after all. Only later did the CIA discover that the alarms on the sensitive equipment were being triggered by faint electric emissions from the engine of the car, particularly when a CIA officer was making a sharp turn.

   10   

Islamabad, June 1987

The afternoon sun glinted off the sleek black Cadillac Fleetwood as it cruised through the light traffic of the Pakistani capital. Heavily tinted windows kept prying eyes from seeing if the backseat was occupied, but the presence of the Toyota Crown with two armed bodyguards trailing closely behind was a pretty good indicator that it was. Yet the flag was furled and cased in its fender well, suggesting perhaps to the careful observer that there was nothing official about this outing.

In the air-conditioned coolness of the backseat, Ambassador Arnie Raphel turned to me with an impish grin on his face.

“You know, every time I ride in this car I remember when I was a boy and thought it was every Jewish kid’s dream to tool around the Catskills in the backseat of a big black Cadillac Fleetwood.”

I glanced over at Raphel, a man three years my junior and a rising star in the foreign service.