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

pilot’s wife. She had bicycled the three kilometers from the air base in the cold rain and was freezing, her hair matted and her flimsy Russian coat soaked through. Rolph took her to his car and turned on the heater while she assured him that her husband was safe. His mother had died, and he’d returned to the Soviet Union for her funeral. His wife had remembered the backup meeting site and had slipped away from the base on her own, determined to make the meeting in her husband’s place. As she sat shivering in his car, Rolph vowed to himself that once the pilot and his wife were safely in the United States, he’d make sure she got a decent winter coat.

With Germany reunified, it was no longer difficult for a Soviet Air Force officer based in what had been East Germany to travel to West Berlin. Before long, the MiG pilot and his family were heading to the United States on a C-5 that had stopped in Germany to pick them up on its way back from the Persian Gulf. Intrigued by the American aircraft, the Soviet fighter pilot sat in the cockpit with the pilots as they landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.

At headquarters, Rolph checked in with NROC—the National Resettlement Operations Center, the arm of the CIA that handles defector resettlement—to hand over his charges. But a harried NROC official tried to fend him off.

“We’re stretched thin,” he said. “We’re getting too many Soviets. Can you stay with them for a while and get them settled?”

Rolph hadn’t realized that the CIA was quite so overburdened with Soviet defectors. He’d planned to head straight back to Germany, but he agreed nonetheless and ferried the family to a safe house in Virginia. The Soviet fighter pilot had arrived in time to consult with the U.S. Air Force just as the war against Iraq was about to begin. He was soon helping the Air Force teach American fighter pilots headed for the Persian Gulf how to deal with Soviet-style air combat tactics. And Rolph stayed with the family long enough to take the pilot’s wife to an American department store, where the CIA bought her a good winter coat.

Langley, February 13, 1991

Not long after the brief intensity of the Gulf War, I was asked by NROC to pay a visit to Sergei Papushin in his apartment in Maryland. It would be a shot in the arm for him to get some high-level attention, his handler told me. Papushin was still fighting a losing battle with alcohol, and maybe a meeting with me would help. I was paired up for the trip with Rod Carlson, long since retired but now back on contract to handle Soviet defectors, of which there were more than enough trickling in every month.

Papushin’s apartment was spotless. He himself was neatly dressed and looked clean and sober—more like a young Mormon missionary, I thought, than a rummy burnout from the KGB. We had a good talk about his getting acclimated to life in America. He said he was working on a possible girlfriend, and I wished him luck. I left the meeting telling Carlson I thought Papushin might actually turn the corner, that he might make it.

I was dead wrong.

Two weeks later, one of his handlers went in to check on him and found the young KGB defector’s body lying underneath his bed, an empty bourbon bottle on the floor beside him. We went on full alert—a defector who had warned that there was a mole inside the agency had just been found dead. We wanted an autopsy to make certain that Papushin had not been murdered.

The autopsy results were clear—he had died of alcohol poisoning. This was of his own doing. Papushin’s body was flown back to Moscow for a quiet funeral. An old friend from the KGB who attended the funeral later said that his face was so swollen that he was almost unrecognizable. The only way he could tell it was his friend was from a familiar scar on his hand.

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Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, April 12, 1991

Aldrich Ames’s return to CIA headquarters in the summer of 1989 after three years in Rome was filled with uncertainty. His tour in Rome had been rocky at best. Ames was about to become a father for the first time, a fact that would dramatically alter his relationship with Rosario, his demanding Colombian wife. At work, meanwhile, he was drifting through what was left of his career. He bounced from one desk job to another and had to wonder whether his career had stalled so badly because he was now suspected of being a spy.

But that wasn’t the problem—what was holding him back was much more mundane. Ames had developed a reputation as a clever but uninspired midlevel CIA officer, a “terminal GS-14.” He was a smooth writer and astute analyst of Soviet intelligence, but many inside the agency considered him lazy and arrogant, and that was a poisonous combination. He was one of those people who don’t get fired but whom managers tend to pass around.

When he returned from Rome, Ames was first sent back to his home division—SE—but he was given a lackluster assignment in the Western European branch. In December, a month after the Berlin Wall fell, he was moved to the Czech desk, but he promptly went on vacation, traveling to Colombia just as the Velvet Revolution swept through Prague.

When he returned in January, he apologized to David Manners, the Prague chief, for having been absent just as Václav Havel and the dissidents were swept into power. What he didn’t tell Manners was that he had met his KGB contacts during his Christmas holiday in Bogotá. Ames stayed on the Czech desk through the summer of 1990 but by October was moved out of the division to a job in the analytical branch of the counterintelligence center.

One of the sources of tension in his life during this period