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

was East Asia Division chief, he no longer felt it was his place to push for more action.

John MacGaffin was just in from Turkey and had taken over the powerful operational review and resource management staff of the directorate. I hadn’t met John before, but we’d be spending much time together in the next few years. Terry Ward was another senior who was new to me—he was the new Latin America chief.

The half-hour meeting was taken up with a welcome back talk by Stolz, the renewal of acquaintances, and little else, except that Burton Gerber and I had managed our handover of SE Division.

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East Berlin, July 20, 1989

David Rolph had come a long way in his twelve years at the CIA. On his first overseas tour, in Moscow, he’d been lucky enough to handle some of the agency’s most important Soviet cases, including Adolf Tolkachev. Now, at forty-one, Rolph was back on the front lines of the Cold War, and this time he had been given his first command on the wrong side of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

In many ways, the small East Berlin Station was a more difficult assignment for a CIA officer than Moscow. It wasn’t that the surveillance by the East Germans was any better or more effective. In fact, it was less comprehensive than the blanket coverage one had to deal with inside the Soviet Union. In Moscow, the KGB could put twenty cars out onto the streets to trail one CIA officer. The East Germans never went to that kind of trouble.

The problem was the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the MfS—infamously known as the Stasi. East Germany’s ubiquitous security service had such an iron grip on its people that almost no one dared spy for the Americans. The Stasi had, by one conservative estimate, 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—agents or full-time informants—and many more snitches in a country of just 17 million. With those odds, few people truly believed they could steal secrets and get away with it. The Stasi didn’t follow CIA officers as diligently as the KGB, but then again, maybe they didn’t need to.

By the 1980s, Berlin had lost some of its early Cold War status as a major hub of espionage operations. After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, the ability of CIA officers based in West Berlin to conduct operations in the eastern sector plunged. West Berlin came to be known as a training ground, rather than a real hotbed of active operations. It was mockingly called “Brandenburg’s School for Boys,” since it was now little more than a place to hone skills before being sent off to the new hot spots where real espionage was being conducted. The East Berlin Station, meanwhile, had never quite been able to establish itself as a major operational hub over the years; it too had come to be regarded as little more than a training assignment for the other capitals in the Warsaw Pact, where real business was being carried out.

Some thought the problems with East Berlin might stem from its movie set atmosphere. A CIA officer operating under the watchful eye of the Stasi, unlike his colleagues in Moscow, could always call time out and slip through Checkpoint Charlie to the west a few hundred yards away for a break. Whatever the reason, the small East Berlin Station that opened for business a dozen years after the Wall went up had remained something of a backwater.

When Rolph arrived in East Berlin in the summer of 1988, the CIA had no agents inside the internal security apparatus of the MfS, or in the HVA, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung, its foreign intelligence arm. It wasn’t for lack of trying. But every one of the men who seemed ready to change sides turned out to be a double agent; the CIA had had no luck in recruiting even the dullest functionaries.

Even so, there was plenty to keep Rolph busy. For some time, officers in East Germany had been secretly planting ground sensors near military bases. The sensors would measure the volume of traffic passing by a military installation and relay the data to a spy satellite in space. If the sensors suddenly detected spikes in traffic outside several military bases all at the same time, it might mean that the East Germans—and their Soviet allies—were mobilizing troops and preparing for war.

CIA officers were trained to install the shoebox-size sensors both at the Farm and in West Germany before they attempted to mount the operations in the East German woods. After making sure he was “black,” the CIA officer would slip on nightvision goggles and plunge into the underbrush closest to the military base. His job was to bury the sensor, leaving only its antenna above ground so that it could regularly signal a passing satellite.

It was such an exciting and productive operation that the U.S. Army decided it wanted to get in on it, too. And that was where the trouble began. The Army didn’t let its West German–based intelligence officers work in East Germany—it turned the task of planting the sensors over to German agents. One of the Germans turned out to be a double agent, and he immediately gave his sensor to the Stasi to examine. A flaw in the design quickly became apparent to the East Germans: All of the sensors had been assigned the same frequency. When they dialed in the frequency, they were able to intercept the transmissions from all of the sensors that had been planted at military bases throughout the country. In order to protect their spy, the Stasi left the sensors in place for a time. But the operation was blown.

Another technical operation was designed in response to recent agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union to gradually reduce the nuclear weapons both nations kept in Germany. To verify that Moscow was honoring the treaty, the CIA hit on the idea of hiding gamma radiation sensors next to the East German rail lines heading toward