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

Krassilnikov was the closest thing to a real-life Karla, the master spy of John le Carré’s Cold War espionage series. He had an almost mythic status at Langley, as at the end of each disastrous compromise he would walk into the holding room and have his little chat with our ambushed case officer. I’d seen his photograph in the files, but it was an old one and looked nothing like the man before me. Krassilnikov seemed more like a kindly Russian grandfather than a man who spent his days and nights leading our agents to the executioner and trying to keep us off balance with a steady string of bogus volunteers.

As I looked at Krassilnikov’s soft, lined face, set off by a mane of thick white hair, it was hard to picture him as the man who had rolled up so many of our operations over the last four years. I had to force the image into my head of him interrogating our agents, Tolkachev, Vorontsov, Polyshchuk, Varennik, and all the others, before they were led down to the dark basement and the KGB executioner.

Leonid Nikitenko was a barrel-chested bear of a man, full of life. From the moment he extended his hand, it was clear that he loved the drama of the spy game, and there was no question that he was good at it. He was at home in this secret universe and relished every moment we spent crowded together in the secure room with the zakuski and Stolichnaya. He was an actor on a stage that he had set for himself, playing a role he had scripted.

As chief of Directorate K, First Department, First Chief Directorate, Nikitenko was responsible for the KGB’s counterintelligence operations against the American target worldwide. He had last been posted abroad as KGB Rezident in London, until he was expelled by the British in a series of carefully planned moves in 1984 that left Nikitenko’s deputy and MI6’s long-term asset Oleg Gordievsky in charge of the London Rezidentura. Gordievsky still thought Nikitenko had been behind his compromise in May 1985, when he was called back, interrogated, and then inexplicably set free. I wondered how much heat Krassilnikov had taken for Gordievsky’s escape.

The Soviets didn’t seem to have a specific agenda for the meeting. In fact, what was most remarkable was the topic that wasn’t brought up—the ongoing rollback of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. It was the elephant in the room that no one dared talk about. No one mentioned the Polish election, the Berlin Wall, or events under way in Prague at that very moment. The KGB officers sitting across from us were probably as stunned as we were by what had been happening throughout Eastern Europe over the past weeks and months, but they weren’t about to share their emotions with the CIA.

The KGB side got right to business, asking about a Soviet defector who had come across in the last year. Our response was the standard: “Your Mr. X is well and is living outside the country where he was last posted. He enjoys total freedom of movement and is acting on his own. He has expressed no interest in meeting with officials of the Soviet Union.” The translation was always the same: “He’s come to us but doesn’t want it out in the open. And he doesn’t want to meet your guys.”

After a few rounds of drinks, I broached a long stalled but politically sensitive topic: How were we ever going to get beyond the stalemate on our new Moscow embassy building? Work on the project had been tied up for years as special American security teams sought to determine the extent to which the KGB had embedded listening devices in the building as it was going up. By now it was on its way to becoming the most expensive structure in the world for its size. If you took into account the cost of the original construction, and added to it the cost of the KGB’s high-tech assault and of our defensive measures, the building’s price tag was phenomenal. Large portions of the structure had been dismantled and sent back to the United States as diplomatic cargo for examination. The embassy remained unoccupied, and it looked like a never-ending standoff.

Krassilnikov leaned into the question. “Your embassy building is perfectly safe as it now stands,” he said carefully. “You could occupy it right away without any concerns for matters of security.”

“Are you saying that there are no devices in our embassy?” I asked.

“I am saying that there is nothing in the building that should cause you concern.”

“Let me get this straight. I think I hear you saying that while there may have been some earlier intentions to attack our embassy, no such plans have been fully carried out. Is that what I’m hearing?”

“I think you have drawn a correct conclusion. The most important point is that your new embassy building is secure as it now stands.”

“And we should just move into it, right?” I asked, half joking.

Krassilnikov smiled and said, “That would have to be your decision, but it would also be the right one.”

“We’ll pass along your comments,” I said noncommittally. My instinct was to dismiss what Krassilnikov was saying, but deep down I knew that he was probably telling the truth. Somewhere between the mounting of the attack on the embassy and now, the decision may have been made at Lubyanka, or maybe in the Politburo, to call it off. But it was too late for trust to enter the game. Nevertheless, I saw something in Krassilnikov’s eyes as he made his careful statement about the embassy that told me this man was trying to navigate his way out of troubled waters.

Hathaway changed the subject to the family of Oleg Gordievsky, an outstanding issue that was routinely raised at all levels of contact with the Soviets.

Nikitenko didn’t react as emotionally as I’d expected—Gordievsky was working for him, after