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

one of the outer walls just missed properly joining a connecting wall and had to be patched, much in the way a pair of pants might be expanded at the waist with a sewn-in strip of cloth. High-tech, low-tech, I thought. A pretty appropriate description of the agency.

Paul Redmond, the deputy division chief, was waiting when I checked in.

“Welcome back,” he said, extending his hand. “You’ve been out there goofing off too long.”

“You been goofing off, too? Or do we have some new business?” I hadn’t had any detailed briefings on what had been going on in SE since I’d left in the midst of the “1985 troubles”; I’d made a point of not overlapping with Gerber and hadn’t asked for a briefing from him.

“We’ve got business,” Redmond said.

That first morning back, Redmond brought me up to date on the cases that had been compromised after I’d left—FITNESS, MILLION, ACCORD, TOP HAT, JOGGER from Jakarta . . . the casualty list was long. The cause of the losses was still a mystery. Edward Lee Howard could account for some, but not all; and the Marine guard scandal in Moscow, though it had looked as if it might be the answer at the time, turned out not to be. Internal investigations at the CIA and FBI had turned up nothing, and our two probes had run dry. The fact that most of the losses seemed to have occurred in one brief but intense burst had prompted a review of obituaries of CIA employees, to see if someone who’d had access to the blown cases had died. The FBI had tried cold pitches of KGB officers in an effort to recruit a source who could tell them what had happened. But nothing worked—the investigation had gone cold. Redmond told me that Jeanne Vertefeuille was still looking at the problem in the counterintelligence center.

But Vertefeuille, an experienced SE Division hand, had been looking at the 1985 losses since late 1986, and had not had any success in solving the mystery. Gus Hathaway, then the counterintelligence chief, had asked Vertefeuille, who had been serving as a station chief in West Africa, to return to headquarters to analyze the damage and try to solve the puzzle of why the CIA was losing its Russian agents. When she arrived back at Langley in the fall of 1986, Vertefeuille began a lonely and painstaking effort to find out if the damaged cases had anything in common. Working in such secrecy that she even refused to tell Redmond exactly what she was doing, Vertefeuille and her small staff spent months sorting through old files and interviewing key SE Division employees who had had access to the cases. It was all in a vain attempt to develop a cross-referencing matrix that might reveal a common denominator and unlock the mystery. With limited resources and virtually no high-level interest in the investigation, she was unable to determine conclusively whether there was a mole or simply a compromise in the agency’s communications. The best that Vertefeuille could offer was that Moscow Station had access to all but one or two of the cases. The FBI, concerned about the losses of its own Soviet agents, including Martynov and Motorin, consulted with the CIA and began its own probe as well in 1986, code-named ANLACE. But the bureau had no more luck than Vertefeuille, and both reviews had soon lost steam.

The Vertefeuille investigation continued for years, but it was crippled from the start by the fact that Hathaway had made it clear that he didn’t want a full-fledged mole hunt, one that would have included polygraph examinations of all those who had had access to the blown cases. Instead, Vertefeuille worked her matrices and lists of names, but she lacked the evidence—or the bureaucratic power—to make much progress. Her inquiry was conducted at such a low level that top CIA officials were not aware that it had all but petered out.

Redmond told me that he hadn’t been following what she was doing too closely since he was still on the short list of suspects.

I smiled when he said that, until he quipped, “Don’t smile, you’re on the list.”

I quickly got a feel for how Gerber’s security measures had changed the old routines. Back when I’d left in 1985, there had been one morning staff meeting, attended by all of the division’s seven or eight senior officers. Each one would be able to hear what was going on in other areas—counterintelligence, external operations, Eastern Europe, Moscow operations, intelligence production, personnel matters. All that was history. My first morning staff meeting was actually a series of small sessions. Along with Redmond, who continued as my deputy, and Steve Weber, the division’s chief of operations, or COPS, I met with each group chief one at a time. That way, the Eastern European group chief never knew what was going on in the Soviet Union, and vice versa. The only officers in the division aware of the full scope of our activities were the chief, the deputy chief, and the chief of operations. It was not the most efficient way to manage things, but it seemed to be keeping our agents alive, and that was undoubtedly a good thing.

After the endless compartmented staff meetings that first morning back on the job, I shuffled back to my new corner office and took in the lay of the land. Though the surroundings were different—modern steel and blue glass as opposed to the more Gothic architecture of the old building—the props were much the same: the same Federalist furniture, the couches arranged for small meetings, the secure STU-III phone on the credenza. But on the two-drawer safe behind my desk was something I’d never had before—a plain black telephone that linked me to KGB headquarters in Moscow—the Gavrilov channel. Inside the safe was Gerber’s file on the link with Lubyanka, explaining in great detail how the communications pipeline had been opened in the early 1980s. Over the coming two years,