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

husband had contributed to political campaigns, but there is also no evidence that the government investigators followed up on her information.

Washington, D.C., June 22, 1989

Once again, the telephone rang in the middle of the night in Felix Bloch’s home. This time the caller identified himself as “Ferdinand Paul” and said he was calling for “Pierre,” who “cannot see you in the near future.” Pierre was “sick,” Paul said. He added that “a contagious disease is suspected.”

Then, before hanging up, Paul added, “I am worried about you. You have to take care of yourself.”

As Bloch nervously laid down the receiver, he knew that he had to think fast. The call had been from the KGB. He knew that “Pierre” was Gikman and that the message meant that Gikman had been betrayed. The KGB was telling him that he was in deep trouble, too.

Thanks to the warning in May, Gikman had already fled to Moscow, but the KGB had waited a month to warn Bloch after receiving Hanssen’s tip. For whatever reason, the Soviets had moved first to protect Gikman and only later Bloch. Felix Bloch was now on his own.

When he arrived at the State Department the next morning, Bloch learned just how alone he really was. Confronted by the FBI, whose agents had been listening in on the call and were furious that the diplomat had been tipped off the previous night, Bloch found his whole world crumbling around him. Still, the warning from the KGB had been just enough to steel him against the FBI’s hostile questioning. He stood his ground, refusing to give the agents the self-incriminating statements they needed to make an arrest.

Frustrated—both with Bloch’s refusal to talk and their own inability to obtain Justice Department approval to arrest and prosecute him—the FBI began tailing him openly everywhere around Washington. By July, the fact that there was a suspected spy at the State Department finally became public when ABC News broke the story. Now, the FBI agents following Bloch were joined by television news crews, and the investigation that Ted Price had wanted to keep secret had become a media circus. Footage of the bald-headed Bloch sitting forlornly on a Washington park bench surrounded by cameras and reporters almost engendered public sympathy for this very unsympathetic man.

The scrutiny only hampered the FBI’s efforts to persuade the Justice Department to move against Bloch. Soon the case reached a stalemate, and a deep bitterness set in among the investigators at the CIA and FBI who thought they’d been so close to nailing Bloch and now had to watch him slip out of their grasp.

Of course, Bloch didn’t escape punishment completely. He was forced out of the State Department for security violations and later moved to North Carolina, where he was reduced to working first as a clerk at a grocery store and later as a bus driver. His wife divorced him, and he spent his days mounting a last-ditch legal battle against the State Department for denying him his pension.

The Bloch case remained open for years afterward, but Bloch himself was never arrested or charged with espionage. In 1992, after the end of the Cold War, a retired KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, defected to Britain and provided British intelligence with a cache of notes and transcripts he’d copied from secret KGB files, primarily from the illegals section of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Mitrokhin’s stash included notes about the KGB’s handling of the Felix Bloch case, according to sources familiar with the case. The Bloch fiasco quickly faded from the media’s attention, but at least a few counterintelligence experts at the CIA and FBI continued to wonder how their case had been exposed so quickly to the KGB.

Must have been the French.

CIA Headquarters, July 10, 1989

After Boris Gromov’s melodramatic crossing of the Amu Dar’ya in February, Dick Stolz decided it was time for me to come back to Langley to take over the Soviet/East European Division from Burton Gerber, who’d held the job for the last five years. By May it was official, and I began preparations for a change of scenery—I would swap the Indus for the Potomac.

When I arrived at headquarters after the July 4 break, the only small sign I saw that Gerber had hung on to anything associated with his old SE fiefdom was so subtle that it had attracted no attention at all.

By tradition, the chiefs of the line divisions and senior staffs in the DO were assigned to thirteen reserved parking places just outside the southwest entrance of the Old Headquarters Building, with slot number one assigned to Chief, SE, and number thirteen to Chief Europe. My first day back, I spotted Gerber’s Toyota in C/SE’s slot, so I pulled into the vacant number thirteen. In my office, I found the parking permit for slot number thirteen among the welcome home items on my desk. I would never know whether it was the attraction of being in slot number one that had prompted Gerber to hang on to his old parking place or the possibly ominous portent of number thirteen. Either way, it didn’t matter much to me.

SE had moved from its traditional real estate in the Old Headquarters Building to a new building that had gone up behind it while I was away. The new building was touted as a state-of-the-art affair, specially shielded to prevent electromagnetic attack and designed in every way for the needs of America’s intelligence services approaching the twenty-first century. There was a massive atrium with suspended models of U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, an airy court with a James Sanborn sculpture called Kryptos telling a story of information gathering and cryptography. The new building was linked to the old one with a gently curving tunnel called, ominously, a “wave guide,” which was supposed to prevent electromagnetic emanations from passing through from either direction.

But with all the advanced technology, there were signs that it had been thrown up a little haphazardly. In my second-floor corner office,