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

to him, the Berlin Wall would still be standing in a hundred years. Gorbachev let him know he wanted no part of that. He was on his own.

“The White House is playing its cards pretty close,” I said, thinking back to my last meeting at the NSC a week earlier. “They think—actually, they hope—they’ve been able to convince Gorbachev and Shevardnadze that we’re not trying to steamroll them in Eastern Europe. What they’re angling for now is that no one overreacts and tries to stop whatever’s happening.”

The White House, like everyone else, was trying to develop a strategy on the fly, reacting to the fast-moving events day by day. No one in Washington had any sense of control or even of what the options would be in a month. What I did know was that the policy makers would soon be turning to us for answers, and we didn’t have them. Things were moving so fast that it was hard even to know the right questions to ask.

That morning’s session ended with a sense of expectation. Something was about to explode in East Germany, but nobody at Langley or across the river in Washington had a clue what it was. One thing I did know was that we’d have to find a way to get a handle on things, to get ahead of the daily rush of events. We’d have to turn things around pretty quickly if we wanted to have a prayer of giving the NSC what they wanted. “Let’s understand what we’re about from here on out,” I’d said in closing. “And that’s trying to be relevant.”

I’d had a few months to take a close look at the division and now had a good idea where the strengths were, as well as the weaknesses.

In the front office, Redmond, the deputy division chief, was the operational continuity. He quite literally knew where the bodies were buried, but that was part of the problem. He was smart, no mistake about that, but he was so caught up in the 1985 problems that I wasn’t sure I’d have him with me for the long haul.

Steve Weber was another matter. Weber had been born in Hungary before World War II and had been a kid when the war ended and the Communists took over. He’d ended up on the wrong side of the Hungarian security services and found himself in a forced labor battalion in the late 1950s. Somehow he’d forged a travel document and made his way to the West, where he was picked up by U.S. Army intelligence. After a few years working on the margins of the espionage world, Weber was recruited by the CIA, and now, a quarter century later, this Hungarian refugee was my COPS, with the equivalent rank of a two-star general. Only in America, I thought every time I looked at Weber. I’d decided I could rely on the smooth, gray-haired Hungarian operator for unvarnished counsel.

My counterintelligence chief, John O’Reilly, was a total iconoclast. Nothing was sacred to O’R, as we called him, and nobody was safe from his sharp wit. In his rabbit warren of SE counterintelligence, he surrounded himself with the quirky vestiges of espionage history, including an eight-by-twelve glossy of James Jesus Angleton staring through his horn-rimmed glasses. On a table below the photograph was a Buddhist prayer wheel that visitors couldn’t resist picking up and spinning as they sought counsel from the counterintelligence chief. O’Reilly had been in SE counterintelligence for years. He had the history of the division down cold and the scuttlebutt even better. He’d already sensed that the center of gravity was shifting and that SE had a new role to play. I decided I’d bring O’R up to the front office. I wanted him closer when things started getting interesting.

East Berlin, October 1989

David Rolph’s deputy walked into the CIA’s East Berlin Station on a Saturday afternoon with a pale and stunned face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Curly’s bad. He’s been controlled since the beginning.”

The CIA officer had just returned from West Berlin, where he’d held his first meeting with another Stasi officer, who’d volunteered by dropping a letter into his car. The Stasi man had started off the meeting by saying that he knew Curly was working for the Americans, and he also knew when and where they met. Curly had reported the initial approach and had been working as a double ever since. After hearing of the CIA’s approach to Curly, this second Stasi man decided that he would step in and become a legitimate agent.

While Curly turned out to be a Stasi-controlled operation, this second Stasi volunteer was genuine. The recruitment pitch to Curly hadn’t worked, but his report of the contact—complete with the amount of money the Americans were offering—planted the seeds of espionage in this second Stasi officer’s mind. He in turn would soon become the most important American spy in East Germany, turning over thousands of pages of documents from inside the Stasi, including organization charts and rosters of MfS and HVA officers. Those rosters would come in handy within a few weeks, when the East German nation began to crumble.

Langley, October 18, 1989

Steve Weber stuck his head in my office and said, “Honecker just resigned.”

“What!”

“Yeah. Reasons of health, is what they’re saying.”

“Who’s taking over?” I asked.

“Egon Krenz, his deputy.”

“What’s next?” I asked, knowing there was no ready answer.

“No telling,” Weber said.

East Berlin, 1900 Hours, November 9, 1989

David Rolph was still at work in the early evening when he heard that a spokesman for the East German government had just said something on the radio that caught him—and the entire East German nation—by surprise. It was a statement, made casually and off the cuff, that helped bring down the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.

For weeks, protests in the streets of East Germany’s major cities had been growing, and the new East German leader, Egon Krenz, found that none of the regime’s tried-and-true tactics were working to stem the tide of discontent. The mass