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

but in the spring of 1985, when one of Stombaugh’s colleagues in Moscow Station had gone to retrieve its tapes, a secret alarm warned him that the device had been tampered with, and the officer aborted. After a lengthy debate between Moscow and Langley, the decision was made to send in another case officer, one who was at the end of his tour, thus making the risk of his walking into an ambush slightly more acceptable. When the officer returned successfully with the recording device, the celebration was short-lived. The tapes were blank. It was unclear whether there had been a malfunction or the KGB had tampered with them, so TAW remained on a list of unsolved “anomalies.”

Scratch TAW, Redmond thought. First TAW, and then there was the problem with Bokhan two weeks ago.

Sergei Bokhan, a colonel in the GRU—Soviet military intelligence—code-named GTBLIZZARD, had been spying for the CIA for ten years. In 1978, during his first tour in Greece, Bokhan told the CIA that a young American had walked into the Soviet embassy in Athens offering to sell the secret manual for the KH-11 spy satellite. His information led to the arrest of former CIA employee William Kampiles, who sold the manual for just $3,000. In 1984, during a second tour in Athens following a stint back home in Moscow, Bokhan revealed that a Greek agent with access to defense contractors had given the GRU technical data for the U.S. Army’s advanced Stinger antiaircraft missile. The loss of the Stinger was especially troubling for the Pentagon, since the Stinger was considered the most advanced shoulder-launched antiaircraft weapon in the world. As the GRU’s deputy Rezident in Athens, Bokhan was moving up in the Soviet espionage bureaucracy and promised to become an increasingly valuable mole.

Then on May 21, Bokhan received a call from GRU headquarters, instructing him to return to Moscow within a few days instead of waiting for his August home leave. His senses sharpened. He was told he had to return home because his eighteen-year-old son, Alex, was “having problems” at Kiev Military Academy. But it didn’t tally. Bokhan had spoken by phone to his brother-in-law in Kiev just a few days earlier and knew there was no problem with his son at that time. Were his bosses finally on to him? Bokhan became convinced that something was wrong when the GRU Rezident in Athens began nagging him about the matter, insisting that he return home by the end of the week. He tried to stall for time and called for an emergency meeting with his CIA case officer, Dick Reiser.

Bokhan hurriedly laid out for Reiser what had happened, and both Athens chief David Forden, who happened to be back in Washington at the time, and Burton Gerber agreed that the sudden interest in Bokhan’s swift return was ominous. Gerber sent word to Athens to tell Bokhan not to go home. The CIA quickly set in motion Bokhan’s emergency exfiltration plan, and a few days later he was in a CIA safe house in the Virginia countryside.

TAW, BLIZZARD—and now scratch VANQUISH. One, two, three. Coincidence? Not fucking likely, Redmond thought.

Redmond was chief of the branch of the Soviet/East European Division responsible for all clandestine operations inside the Soviet Union. At forty-four he was an irascible, irreverent, Boston Irish Harvard man who some said owned just two shirts, both faded plaids with the sleeves permanently rolled above his elbows. On what his subordinates considered his good days, he wore a bow tie.

Redmond had served overseas in Zagreb, Kuala Lumpur, Athens, and Cyprus, but he and his wife, Kathy, had decided in 1984 not to venture overseas again until their two children were grown. Tethered to a headquarters job, Redmond, like Rem Krassilnikov, had found his niche.

His philosophy of U.S. intelligence was that given half a chance, Americans wouldn’t get into the spy business at all. And if forced into it, they wouldn’t be particularly good at it. He didn’t consider this a negative quality of the American psyche; it was just a condition to be factored into the way he did his job. Even though he was now on offense—running operations against the Soviets—Redmond had a natural inclination to the defense, counterintelligence. He believed that sooner or later the CIA would be penetrated by the KGB. Not a small-time penetration like Kampiles. No, America had not yet found its Kim Philby.

Maybe James Jesus Angleton hadn’t been as crazy as people thought. He had been convinced there was a mole inside the CIA. He had just been wrong about who, what, when, and where.

   4   

Moscow, June 13, 1985

Early on the morning of the Stombaugh ambush, Krassilnikov had visited Adolf Tolkachev at Lefortovo Prison. He sat patiently with the tired and defeated man in a second-floor interrogation room of the converted seventeenth-century czarist fortress, going over for a final time the procedures the scientist had used to arrange meetings with the Americans.

Tolkachev had been in total isolation since his arrest, and under Krassilnikov’s relentless interrogation, he had confessed—haltingly at first, then almost eagerly. Inevitably, he told everything as he formed a strange bond with the aging spy hunter. Krassilnikov gradually began to understand the narcotic rush, the exquisite excitement, that Tolkachev had found in his new calling. He didn’t spend time fretting over the harm Tolkachev had done to the Soviet Union. That could be left to those doing the damage assessment. Nor did he allow himself to loathe the traitor. Tolkachev was a counterintelligence challenge, a testimony to the professionalism of the men of the Second Chief Directorate who had tracked him. All that was left now was to tie it all together, and Adolf was being helpful on that score.

Adolf Tolkachev had lived with his secret for six years. He had never shared it with anyone, not even his wife or son. The operational discipline imposed on him by his CIA handlers had been sobering, but Tolkachev had always been fatalistic about the risks he was running.