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

on their minds. The only issues we might raise would be the perennials: the status of our embassy building in Moscow and the fate of Oleg Gordievsky’s family.

I decided that Helsinki should be the meeting site and cabled Mike Cline to pass the decision along to the KGB. I then began to review our file holdings on both of the men I would meet at my first Gavrilov session. We’d had plenty of contact with Krassilnikov over the years, but Nikitenko was less known to us. He’d come up on our screen while he was Rezident in London, where he’d been Oleg Gordievsky’s chief, but we hadn’t had much firsthand experience with the man. It should be interesting, I thought as I prepared for the first Gavrilov meeting. Their empire was cracking; they must be feeling the aftershocks all the way to Moscow.

Prague, December 10, 1989

With hundreds of thousands of Czechs packing into central Prague each night, chanting and ringing their keys in the air, change came with astonishing speed. On December 10, Communist president Gustav Husák resigned, and by acclamation, Havel and Civic Forum took over. Though it would take until the end of the month for Havel to be formally elected president, a band of playwrights, stagehands, and poets suddenly had a country to run.

One of the most vexing questions as Havel and his motley band of ministers assumed their new posts was the fate of the Czech security and intelligence services. The Communists had been ousted so quickly that the intelligence services had no time to reform themselves or prepare for a smooth handover. In December, the government was still a strange amalgam of dissidents and Communists who had not yet been replaced. The domestic security service, known as the StB, and the foreign intelligence service, which was under the StB umbrella and was known as Sprava One, were still intact, and their seventeen thousand employees were reporting to work each day as if nothing had changed, even after Havel was sworn into office.

The Soviets, of course, knew that it was only a matter of time. The KGB had six officers who worked on a full-time basis inside Sprava One headquarters in Prague. Just before Christmas, the six KGB officers were called home to Moscow, and they never returned.

StB’s direct links to the KGB were being cut, but Czech intelligence was still being run by Communists with no allegiance to Havel or democracy.

After the frantic days of November and December, Oldrich Cerny was about to return to his film studio job, but Václav Havel had other ideas. The new president decided in early 1990 that he wanted Cerny, the man who had twice rejected demands that he become a Communist spy, to help lead Czechoslovakia’s spy service into the new world.

Frankfurt, December 1989

Dave Manners sat down for a hurried meeting with a key SE Division manager who had just flown into Frankfurt from headquarters. Manners and the other chiefs of station from the capitals of Eastern Europe had been summoned to Germany to talk through the remarkable changes sweeping the region.

It was hard to know where to start—all the old assumptions had to be thrown out the window. The United States had once worried about dominoes in Southeast Asia; now it was the Soviets who were watching their dominoes fall—Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and now Czechoslovakia.

So much was happening that Manners couldn’t afford to spend much time away from his post. “You should know that you’re getting somebody new to run the Czech desk at headquarters,” Manners was told in quiet confidence. “Rick Ames. He’s smart. If you had to pick the three or four people at the agency who understand the KGB the best, he would be one of them.”

Helsinki, Finland, 1955 Hours, December 12, 1989

It was bitterly cold and slippery going as Gus Hathaway and I trudged along the icy sidewalks in a residential section of Helsinki. The meeting was to be held at the Soviet embassy promptly at 8:00 P.M., and as we came up to the gate of the embassy not far from Helsinki’s waterfront five minutes early, Hathaway rang the bell and waited. A moment later a voice crackled over a speaker, asking who was there.

“We’re here to see Rem Sergeyevich Krassilnikov,” Hathaway announced in Russian.

“Never heard of him,” the voice crackled back with curt dismissal.

I looked at my watch. “We’re early. Let’s walk for a few minutes.”

Five minutes later, we approached the gate again and pushed the button. This time the latch buzzed and the iron gate popped open. My mind flashed back four years to the moment Edward Lee Howard had passed through this same gate as he made good his long escape from the FBI in Albuquerque to the Soviet Union.

Gus and I went twenty yards down the shoveled walkway to the embassy’s front door, where we were met by a Soviet officer who ushered us into a secure room on the ground floor. There we met Krassilnikov and Nikitenko and a third KGB man who introduced himself as Viktor, a counterintelligence officer from the First Chief Directorate.

Their secure room was really a room within a room. It had the touch of the handyman; the walls and ceiling were covered with acoustic tiles and with heavy drapes hung slightly haphazardly on the walls. I thought there might be electronic white noise generated around the enclosure once the heavy door was closed, but I had no way of knowing for sure. Inside were a couple of couches, and some chairs had been arranged around a low table, where we found a spread of zakuski, Russian snacks ranging from salami and pickles to salads to cheeses. On a small end table were four half-liter bottles of Stolichnaya.

The Soviets seemed interested in sizing up the new team, and we were equally interested in sizing them up. As I settled into one of the couches, I thought about the secrets that must be running through the minds of the two