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

A few security questions over Ames’s sudden show of wealth had been raised after his return from Rome. Redmond had followed the counterintelligence center search for the source of our 1985 problem, and he’d told me they had noticed that Ames had bought a $500,000 home in Arlington without taking out a mortgage.

Credit checks had been run on Ames, and a CIA officer was sent to Colombia to investigate whether his sudden wealth came from his wife’s family in Bogotá, as Ames had told colleagues. The reports that came back showed that Ames’s story seemed plausible. His finances looked to be okay, and his wife’s family did appear to be wealthy.

In passing, Redmond had told me that there were a couple of other DO officers who had also bought expensive homes, but unlike Ames, each had taken out mortgages.

“You find my mortgage?” I asked Redmond.

“Haven’t even looked . . . yet.” Redmond didn’t smile.

Ames came back later that summer for a study on the KGB, but he was never granted his wish to get back into the division’s sensitive cases. A few months after that I moved him out again, this time to the counternarcotics center.

CIA Headquarters, July 1991

Paul Redmond had mixed feelings about being moved out of the SE Division to his new home in the counterintelligence center. Soviet operations were all he had ever done, and it was going to be hard for him to leave that part of his life behind. But most of all he was deeply bothered because he disagreed with the way the SE Division was now being managed—by me.

Redmond and other old-school Soviet hands were especially angry over my decisions to downgrade the SE Division’s traditional bread and butter—the more or less unlimited recruitment operations against KGB officers around the world. Over the signatures of Dick Stolz and Tom Twetten, I had sent out cables aimed at the CIA’s field stations in Africa and Latin America that had made it clear the SE Division was no longer interested in targeting every Soviet intelligence officer posted in every remote embassy in the Third World, particularly if the operation ended up inducing a defection. From now on, we’d look at the cases more carefully.

I saw the collapse of the Soviet empire as a moment that called for new ideas. On the one hand, we needed all the policy-relevant intelligence we could get, but on the other, we were beginning to find common ground with the Soviets on issues such as international terrorism, narcotics, and control of their arsenal of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. We were making the first steps toward cooperation in these areas, and we needed to change the way we dealt with the Soviets.

This included easing back on the provocative pressures we had maintained on them for the last thirty years in literally every backwater capital in the Third World. In short, I thought that the USSR was going to become a more classical intelligence target now that we were having to deal with them directly on a number of important issues. It didn’t make sense for the left hand to provoke them in one capital and the right hand to try to cajole them into helping out in another capital at the same moment. I was determined to introduce a little more finesse into the targeting equation.

I also decided that any new defectors had to earn their passage to the United States up front and issued the order to start screening Soviet defectors carefully before committing to resettlement in the United States. Over the previous two years, we had resettled more than a dozen defectors, each new one more or less like the previous one. I had been assured in each case that the most recent defector had been a “gold mine” of counterintelligence, but the claims never lived up to the hype. The reality was that KGB officers were becoming part of a massive flow of Soviet citizens trying to find a new life in the West and were turning to us for what they still believed was the old reliable CIA million-dollar sure thing. In the process, their growing numbers had become a costly liability, as each defector and his family would cost the U.S. taxpayers close to $1 million over the long haul.

Redmond and the other old SE hands considered my actions heresy. Generations of CIA officers had spent their careers trying to recruit the KGB and GRU officers stationed in Soviet embassies in the Third World. There was no doubt that some of the CIA’s most productive spies had originally been recruited while they were working in remote embassies, but times were changing. Redmond feared that, once abandoned, it would be difficult for the CIA to reestablish its worldwide targeting mechanisms to recruit Soviet intelligence officers.

From his new post in the counterintelligence center, Redmond kept in close touch with old friends in the SE Division, and almost every day they complained bitterly to him about the direction I was taking the division. Redmond was frustrated that he was helpless to prevent me from overhauling the division—actions that he believed were tantamount to the dismantling of traditional Soviet operations. So he and Robert Wade, a senior FBI representative at the counterintelligence center who shared Redmond’s views, decided to try to draw wider attention within the CIA to the dispute over the future direction of Soviet operations.

In July, they challenged me and the rest of the SE Division leadership to a debate. Redmond printed up flyers advertising a showdown and circulated them throughout the SE Division’s offices.

“There appears to be a growing tendency in some quarters to establish a politically correct policy that the KGB is no longer an effective organization,” the flyer read.

“With this tendency in mind, Paul Redmond, DC/CIC, and Robert Wade, FBI, challenge the senior management of the Soviet/East European Division to a debate. Resolved: ‘The KGB Is No Longer a Threat to United States National Security.’ The challengers, of course, will support the