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

The Army’s verdict of a “double feed” in the Chagasaray incident was accepted with relief. The Pakistani officers in charge of the mortar project knew well the realities of both mortars and combat anxieties and had no difficulty accepting the results of the American tests. Instead of brooding, as soon as the 120 mm mortar was cleared for combat, they mounted the operation once again on December 15, aimed against the same target. Despite their misgivings about returning to the same target area, the second time around was a spectacular success.

The gunners again moved under cover of darkness to within about eight thousand yards of the Chagasaray garrison, set up their tubes, queried with the GPS satellites, set their azimuth and elevations, and let loose a barrage of rounds that struck the Spetsnaz battalion garrison with complete surprise. The Soviets never knew what happened to them. They made a futile attempt at counterbattery fire but succeeded only in hitting one of their own outposts. The mujahideen gunners dropped round after round down their tubes, long overstaying their planned time on target, until they had expended their ammunition. Then they rolled their tubes in the asbestos blankets, loaded them aboard their mules, and made their way back to Pakistan in the last hours of darkness.

By the time the sun was high in the sky, a CIA KH-11 satellite looked down on the Spetsnaz garrison at Chagasaray and took a series of photographs of the devastation wreaked by the new weapon. When I showed the imagery boards to the Pakistanis and the Afghan commanders ten days later, the effects of the attack were stark. Just like the before and after imagery boards of the Kharga ammunition dump in August 1986, the boards of Chagasaray before the attack showed the intact wooden barracks buildings, the battalion vehicles neatly parked, and the usual evidence of an active, orderly military installation set along the Konar River. The shots taken after the attack showed the burned-out shells of the buildings, scattered and destroyed vehicles, and a few new, undamaged vehicles that were determined to belong to the Soviet Army team that had arrived on the scene the next day to investigate the attack.

The attack against Chagasaray had a special effect on resistance morale. In a war characterized more by defensive operations and ambushes than by offensive attacks on mainline Soviet units, the devastation of the Chagasaray garrison marked a qualitative change in the way the resistance carried its war to the Soviet 40th Army. Although the success of the strike was never replicated with the same dramatic results, the mortar attack was just one more event that reinforced the Soviet decision to quit Afghanistan. By the end of 1987, even the hard-core doubters in Washington were becoming convinced that Moscow was ready to quit.

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Nottoway Park, Fairfax County, Virginia, November 23, 1987

Bob Hanssen was back in his element as he walked purposefully down the dirt path to the small footbridge on the quiet edge of the busy county park. He reached down, and in a dark crevice just beneath the footbridge, he could feel the spot. It was one of his favorite dead drop sites, one the KGB had creatively named “Park.” The last site they’d recommended, named “AN” and located in a more remote park in the far western suburbs of Fairfax County, had not been satisfactory as far as Hanssen was concerned. It was far from his home in Vienna, Virginia, and it required too much physical effort, too much undignified mess, for the middle-aged FBI agent. With new management responsibilities at work, six children at home, and an increasingly active life in the Catholic Opus Dei religious community, Hanssen was a busy man, and he didn’t have time for such cumbersome security arrangements. Using his code name B, he had just written a frosty letter to his KGB handlers about the dead drop issue, urging a switch back to the more convenient Park.

“Recognize that I am dressed in business suit and cannot slog around in inch-deep mud,” he wrote in a November 19 letter. “I suggest we use once again original site.” He had complained about AN in September, too, writing to the KGB, “I am not a young man, and the commitments on my time prevent using distant drops such as you suggest. I know in this I am moving you out of your set modes of doing business, but my experience tells me we can be actually more secure in easier modes.”

So now Hanssen was back at a dead drop site in his own neighborhood, one where he felt far more comfortable. But more important, Bob Hanssen was happy with his new job as supervisor of the FBI’s Soviet Analytical Unit, a position that gave him access to virtually all operational and analytical documents related to the Soviet Union produced by the FBI’s counterintelligence squads. One interesting document to cross his desk during his first months back in Washington was the summary of an October trip to Guyana by CIA officer Jack Platt to renew his friendship with Gennady Vasilenko. Platt had dutifully sent a copy of his trip report to the FBI, which was working with the CIA on the Vasilenko case—code-named MONOLITE—and it didn’t take long for it to pass through Hanssen’s office.

That night in Nottoway Park, Hanssen was turning over a copy of Platt’s report to his Soviet handlers, along with a package of other secret documents, including a detailed account of the KGB secrets that Vitaly Yurchenko had revealed to the CIA and FBI before his curious redefection to Moscow. He left the package, wrapped tightly in plastic, tucked underneath the footbridge, exactly where he found another package from the KGB waiting for him, one that contained $20,000 in cash and a letter from the KGB telling him that another $100,000 had been deposited on his behalf in a Soviet bank. The letter also contained specific questions about classified information for