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

moves in Hungary, the devastating elections in Poland, and, even more ominous, the growing restlessness in the German Democratic Republic. The stage was set for a total breakdown, he concluded darkly, and he decided he’d better call home his Rezidents from Eastern Europe. He’d need their assessments to draw a new road map for Eastern Europe, and a quick conference should help.

He may not have bargained for the frankness he got. The gathered KGB chiefs drew a dismal picture of events in their countries. Their collective judgment was that socialist unity was coming to an end, and rapidly. The economic position of the USSR, it was reluctantly agreed, was so weak that meaningful aid to the countries of Eastern Europe was no longer possible. They would have to tailor their activities accordingly.

A consensus was reached early in the conference that the ideological commitment in the fraternal socialist countries, never strong, was weakening to the point at which the collapse of socialism throughout the Warsaw Pact was likely, if not imminent. In Poland, over forty years of socialism had been wiped away at the polling stations just a month earlier. Less sensational, but equally irreversible, was the shift away from the principles of socialism in Hungary; and in Czechoslovakia, there was talk of a return to the Prague Spring of a generation ago. The key, of course, would be the German Democratic Republic. If the troubles took root in Germany, the results could be disastrous.

The belief in the common threat from the United States that had held the alliance together for forty years had suddenly given way to a race for rapprochement with the Americans. Shebarshin placed an equal share of the blame on Gorbachev and his two key political advisers, though his deepest distaste was reserved for Shevardnadze. It seemed that the Georgian Foreign Minister spent hours on end alone with his American counterparts, first George Shultz and now James Baker, without interpreters or note takers watching over the proceedings. There was no telling what sort of devil’s deals he was cutting with the Americans when nobody was watching.

Shebarshin’s last job had been cauterizing what Gorbachev had described as the “bleeding wound” of Afghanistan. This new job involved greater stakes, and he was afraid the outcome had already been decided.

Langley, 0900 Hours, July 12, 1989

I arrived a few minutes early for my first DDO staff meeting. Standing alone in the sixth-floor conference room where the DDO had been holding his weekly meetings for as long as I could remember, I felt surrounded, as I always had in that room, by the history of the Directorate of Operations. Punctuating the gray, sound-absorbing walls were the photographs of the men who had charted the history of the directorate for the forty years of its existence. At one end were the fading but somehow still dashing black-and-white snapshots of Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, the establishment men who’d run the directorate from 1951 to 1959, when it was more mysteriously known as the Deputy Directorate for Plans. At the other end were the posed and somber color shots of the “citizen DDOs,” ending with John Stein and Clair George, the Stars and Stripes hanging proudly in the background. In between were the directorate’s icons—Dick Helms, Des FitzGerald, and Bill Colby—and its oddities like Max Hugel, who lasted just two turbulent months in 1981.

There were thirteen photos on the wall—that dangerous number again—and whenever I scanned them I would note the unsettling proportion of them who had come to grief. Dulles had been fired by JFK over the Bay of Pigs fiasco; Wisner had died by his own hand, tormented by demons; Helms had pleaded “no contest” to charges of failing to testify fully to Congress regarding CIA activities in Salvador Allende’s Chile. He was fined a few thousand dollars, a token sum paid in full by loyal colleagues who passed the hat, and then confirmed by Congress as ambassador to Iran. The last photo was of Clair George, Dick Stolz’s predecessor, who had retired under the pressure of the Iran-contra affair two years earlier and was now under federal indictment.

As I waited for the meeting to begin, I wondered how many of the men who would be here this morning would want the DDO’s job. Probably all of them, I decided.

“Welcome back, Milton.”

I turned to find Burton Gerber walking toward me, hand extended.

“Settled in?” he asked.

“You left it all nice and tidy,” I said. “And yes, thank you, I’m settling in fine.”

Before the moment could become awkward, the other DO chiefs filed in, followed by Stolz and Tom Twetten. Stolz and his deputy took their seats at the end of the table nearest the entrance; the opposite end was occupied by the counterintelligence chief, Gus Hathaway. The rest of us fanned out along both sides of the table, according to a rigid territoriality—I took the seat that had been occupied by SE chiefs ever since the DDO staff meetings had been taking place in the room. The dozen chiefs at the table were known as the “barons.” The chiefs of the smaller staffs took straight chairs along the wall.

Today’s staff meeting was the season opener for those of us who’d just returned from the field. I spotted Bill Moseby, who controlled Africa, a man I hadn’t seen since we’d run our probe involving the phony recruitment of the GRU Rezident when he was chief in Nairobi in 1986. Jim Higham ran the Near East, and I’d worked with him closely in Islamabad. A professorial man with a faint British accent, Higham had spent much of his career in the Middle East. Jack Downing had returned from Moscow earlier in the year to take over East Asia, which was his original home division. After spending the last three years as Moscow station chief, Downing had been astounded when he’d returned to headquarters that so little was being done to investigate the 1985 losses. But now that he was out of Soviet operations and