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

Near the top of its list was the Soviet SA-19 surface-to-air antiaircraft missile. At approximately fourteen feet long, the SA-19 wasn’t exactly something that a man could carry on his back on his way across the border, but the CIA decided to ask GTROSETTA if he could get his hands on one anyway.

Yes, the colonel said, his unit was equipped with SA-19s, and yes, he could try to steal one and bring it with him.

“But when I get it to you, you will need a truck to carry it away.”

Near Schlottheim, Eastern Germany, November 1990

The night before the colonel and his crew were planning to make their escape, David Rolph and the case officer in charge of handling the Soviet officer met the colonel in a parking lot along the old border between East and West Germany to go over last-minute arrangements. The colonel blanched when he saw the size of the van they’d brought to haul away the SA-19.

“You’re going to need a bigger truck,” he said in a deadpan voice.

Rolph turned to a young CIA officer from Frankfurt who had brought the van. “I don’t care how you do it,” he said, “but get a heavy, over-the-road truck and have it back here by noon tomorrow.”

At exactly noon the next day, the CIA officer and a driver pulled in with a semi that they’d picked up at a U.S. Army depot in Frankfurt. The CIA men scouted out the secluded rendezvous points on the eastern side of the old border between East and West Germany—one on the outskirts of a village near the Soviet base where they would pick up the colonel’s family, and another in the nearby woods where they’d meet up with the officers and their missile at about 6:00 that night. The colonel was counting on the Soviet soldier’s rigid obedience to higher authority in order to pull off this crazy scheme. Late that afternoon, the colonel ordered a surprise muster of his entire battalion. Following orders, his soldiers assembled on the parade grounds near the base’s front gate.

While his men were forming up, the colonel drove a large Soviet Army GAZ truck up to the regimental arms depot and walked in to see the supply clerks. With his regiment standing in formation on the other side of the base, the colonel waved a requisition form at the clerks and ordered them to load an SA-19 into the truck. Once the missile was on board, he gave them a list of a few other choice pieces of equipment to load as well. When they were finished, he bounded back behind the driver’s wheel and took off.

With virtually all of the base’s personnel now standing in formation near the front gate, the colonel gunned the truck engine and barreled to the back of the base, crashing through the perimeter fence and out into the farmland beyond.

It was already dark when his CIA case officer, waiting at the rendezvous point a few kilometers away from the base, began to hear a grinding engine and the crashing sounds of a truck bowling through the woods. Suddenly the truck pushed through the brush and came to a stop in the clearing, and the colonel jumped out, shouting for the CIA officers to hurry up.

“Bystro! Bystro!” he shouted. “Hurry!”

Moving as fast as they could, the three men helped the colonel transfer the crated SA-19 and other weapons into the Army truck and took off, leaving the Soviet truck abandoned in the woods. As they sped down the narrow road leading to the old border, they passed Rolph, who pulled in behind them with the colonel’s wife and children and the captain and his girlfriend packed into his car.

After a hectic fifteen-minute race they were across the border, and the strange little convoy pulled over. The colonel got out, pulled off his Soviet Army greatcoat, threw it on the ground, and angrily stomped all over it in his Army boots. He then got back in the truck and they sped on, making only one more stop before arriving at a U.S. Army base near Frankfurt: dinner at McDonald’s, for the kids.

The SA-19 was soon on its way to an American exploitation team, which would have time to devise countermeasures against the weapon before the first fighters were launched against Iraq a few months later.

Moscow was not amused. General Boris Snetkov, the commander in chief of the Western Group of Forces in East Germany, and three senior generals of the Western Group were all sacked thanks to ROSETTA and STONE.

Berlin, December 12, 1990

By December, MACRAME was running out of documents to photograph. He had taken great risk to help us, and we decided it was time to pull him out. Rolph waited in the Leipzig park to tell him, but for the first time in six months, the young pilot didn’t show up. Rolph would have to go to the fallback plan.

Two days later, Rolph drove through a cold, rain-soaked night to the small village near the Soviet pilot’s air base. He parked his car and then made his way through the empty lanes to the alternate meeting site, a cemetery on the outskirts of the village. He shivered as he tried to remain inconspicuous, but he knew he couldn’t stay long. If someone passed by, he’d have a hard time explaining why he was standing in the rain in the village cemetery at 10:00 P.M. Maybe he’s been compromised, Rolph thought. Maybe he’s already been dragged back to Moscow. . . .

He was about to leave the cemetery when, in the distance, he saw someone riding a bicycle toward him through the rain. As he peered into the darkness, he realized the figure was too slight to be the pilot. He began to hurry away, back to his car and safety. But as he glanced at the bicyclist one last time, he just barely made out the figure of a woman. He stopped and stared again. It was the