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

Counterintelligence may have had its point about the KGB still being able to run spies against us, but in the cosmic view I saw the KGB as one of the three pillars that propped up the Soviet Union as a whole—the Red Army, the Party, and the KGB. The Army had fallen on hard times, the Party was being torn apart, and the KGB, in my opinion, was no longer the element that would hold together the creaking empire. The threat from the KGB for the last forty years was always part of the whole, and that whole included the Red Army and the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at us. Whether or not it could penetrate the CIA or the FBI with spies was not really in doubt, but it was also not the most important part of the new equation. But I had no confidence that either Redmond or Bob Wade could discuss the matter outside their narrow counterintelligence world, so I flipped Redmond’s challenge into a burn bag and went back to dealing with the final six months of Soviet history.

Langley, July 10, 1991

Not long after he’d vacated his office next to mine in SE, Redmond got an unexpected call on his STU-III secure phone in the counterintelligence center, where he was still settling in. A European station chief was on the line. He was calling to say that one of his case officers had picked up something about a KGB penetration of SE Division. It was a very detailed and sensitive report, and the station chief said he didn’t want to put it in the normal cable traffic. So he had called Redmond personally.

Redmond told the station chief to send the case officer back to Washington, have him check into a hotel in the Virginia suburbs, and then have him call him directly. The case officer was to say he was “Bobby,” who was passing through town. Redmond would come out to his hotel to meet him. The case officer was to stay away from CIA headquarters.

The station chief assured Redmond that the case officer would be in Washington by the next day.

Redmond came down the flight of stairs that separated our offices, walked in, and closed the door. “We’ve got something coming in. It might be what we’ve been looking for,” he said. There was a deadly serious look on his face that told me he was on to something directly related to his passion—the search for the mole. Then he told me about the call from the European station chief.

“Oh, shit!” was about all I could muster.

I knew the case officer who had turned in the report. And I knew he couldn’t be trusted. He had a track record that convinced me he played fast and loose with his intelligence reports. I’d already had to clean up after him on a couple of Eastern European operations, and I’d come to believe that he’d fabricated his reports on those operations. “Paul,” I said, “I’d feel a hell of a lot better if this was coming from somebody else. This guy’s got a real problem with the truth. His stuff always seems too good to be true. And guess what? It probably isn’t.”

I could see Redmond deflate just a bit when he heard my assessment of the case officer with the story. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “And I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve met him.”

As bad as I felt about shooting down Redmond’s new lead, I felt pretty good about how we were getting on together. But for his challenge to a debate, we’d been able to put aside our differences and get on with the job. After he left, I thought that at least Redmond could now find satisfaction in his new job at the counterintelligence center, where he was in a position to focus full-time on the unsolved spy cases that had burdened him for so long. After moving to the center, he was shocked to learn that the investigation of the 1985 losses had been all but abandoned. Since he had always been on the possible list of suspects, he had been reluctant to ask many detailed questions about the progress of the investigation over the last few years. But now that he was deputy chief of the center, Redmond found to his dismay that Jeanne Vertefeuille and her small team had made virtually no progress. The probe that had been started back in 1986 by Gus Hathaway was now firmly relegated to the back burner inside the center. Gus Hathaway had retired, and no one else in the CIA’s management was paying any attention to what Vertefeuille was doing. Redmond was determined to change that. He owed it to the agents who’d been executed.

Langley, July 12, 1991

Redmond checked in with me again a day later. He said he’d met with the case officer. It turned out that a KGB informant had told him about the penetration of SE. After their first extended conversation, Redmond asked the case officer to write down the details of what the KGB officer had told him. The next day, Redmond compared the case officer’s new notes with his original report, which had finally been sent over from Europe.

When he looked at the two reports side by side, Redmond found that the case officer had included much more detail in the notes he’d written in his hotel the previous night than in his first report, written right after he’d met the KGB officer. What bothered Redmond most was that he’d added detailed answers to questions that Redmond had asked him in the hotel, and he’d attributed the new details to what the KGB officer had told him. He said his talk with Redmond had jogged his memory.

His claim was that the KGB had recruited an ethnic Russian CIA case officer who was working in the SE Division. Redmond