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

movement of supplies into Afghanistan and of the wounded out, one of the Pakistani officers traveling with us approached and whispered in my ear, “We’ve caught a man photographing you and Mr. Stolz! He says he’s an American working for The Washington Post.”

Though both Stolz and I were dressed in shalwar kameez, we were nonetheless obviously foreigners.

“Where is the guy?” I asked.

“Don’t worry. We’ve got his camera. We’ll take care of him.” The Pakistani officer winked and motioned about twenty yards away to a young man with a scraggly beard and dressed in Afghan garb talking to two of his officers. The colonel’s answer was far from reassuring.

“No, Colonel. Let’s not just ‘take care of him,’” I said. “Give him back his camera and let him go. But first let’s get Stolz out of here.”

If, by 1989, there was one man working at Langley who most clearly embodied the old-school traditions of the CIA, it was Richard Stolz. He was a throwback to the first crop of Ivy Leaguers who had joined the CIA in the years immediately after World War II. Born in 1925 and raised comfortably in New Jersey, Stolz enlisted in the Army at eighteen and by late 1944 was a combat infantryman with the 100th Division in France. After the war, he graduated from Amherst College and made his way to New York, where a college friend quietly contacted him and asked him if he was bored at work and would like to be part of something interesting going on in Washington. It was, at the time, the typical recruitment pitch at the fledgling CIA, which relied heavily on elite eastern college connections to fill its new officer corps.

Short and slight, and with a quiet, unassuming demeanor, Stolz took to the intelligence business and in the early 1960s was chosen to be the CIA’s first chief in Moscow. After just a few months in Moscow, Stolz was kicked out by the Soviets in retaliation for the FBI’s aggressive action against a KGB officer in Washington. Yet he continued his smooth rise up the CIA’s management ranks until 1981, when he decided he couldn’t work for President Ronald Reagan’s new CIA director, Bill Casey.

Stolz was London station chief when Casey took over at the CIA. Casey quickly asked him to return to headquarters to serve as one of two deputies to Max Hugel, a Republican crony whom Casey was going to name DDO. Stolz was deeply insulted that he was being asked to nursemaid an amateur and retired rather than accept the assignment.

Hugel was forced out by scandal in just a few months, and Casey ruefully put the professionals back in charge, first naming John Stein to be DDO and later replacing him with Clair George. At first, Stolz probably regretted his decision to leave, since it looked as though he could have been rapidly promoted to DDO if he’d just waited it out.

But in the long run, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It meant that he was out of the CIA, and untainted, when the Iran-contra scandal engulfed the DO’s leadership in the mid-1980s.

After Casey’s death in 1987, William Webster, the highly regarded FBI Director, was asked by President Reagan to take over the CIA and steer it out of the Iran-contra morass. Webster turned to Stolz, whom he had known at Amherst, and asked him to come out of retirement in 1988 and get the DO back on track. The fact that Stolz had been out of the CIA throughout Iran-contra made him a much more attractive candidate for Webster, who was then trying to deal with increasingly aggressive intelligence oversight committees in Congress. It also meant that Dick Stolz, who as a young case officer had experienced the earliest of the CIA’s battles against the Soviet Union, would return to lead the DO during the Cold War’s final days.

By early 1989, the upheaval in Eastern Europe was just beginning, but Stolz could already see that SE Division needed new leadership. Stolz and his deputy, Tom Twetten, believed that the entire Directorate of Operations had to change, but nowhere was the need for an overhaul more pressing than in the SE Division.

Stolz had run the division himself in the 1970s, when it was called the SB Division (for “Soviet Bloc”). He was old school, but still he recognized that the division had to be aired out to keep up with the accelerating pace of events. He knew that Burton Gerber was one of the best of the CIA’s Soviet operations officers, but he had been division chief for five years—far too long, in Stolz’s opinion.

Stolz and Twetten knew that the SE Division had to start thinking more broadly to seek out the kind of political intelligence that policy makers in Washington were hungry for as they tried to grapple with the accelerating pace of change in the Soviet empire. But they also worried that SE Division managers were still so focused on obtaining yet another microdot message from a spy inside the KGB that they were missing the big picture. Stolz realized that Burton Gerber and his deputy, Paul Redmond, were both products of the SE Division culture and were not the right people to try to change it. Stolz wasn’t certain how rapidly the division should or could be overhauled, but he knew that it had to change.

For his part, Gerber also recognized that he had been in the job too long. He had already quietly gone to Stolz to ask that he be allowed to move on to a new post.

Dick Stolz had come out to Pakistan not only to take a look at the endgame of the war, but to tell me that I would be returning to headquarters in July to take over SE Division from Burton Gerber. It was time for a change, was all that the DDO had said.

Islamabad, June 1989

June brought an end to predictions of a rapid collapse of the Kabul regime.