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

wasn’t sure he could believe the case officer’s report, but he knew he had to follow the lead. And he didn’t want to let the case officer know that he had doubts about the credibility of his report.

I was about to leave for Africa to meet with our stations there to explain the new Soviet targeting rules, and then I planned to transit Europe. I’d stop in on the station and have a little talk with the case officer myself to see if I could make sense of all this.

At a European Station, July 20, 1991

We were seated across from each other in an acoustic conference room, which was both secure and claustrophobic. The station chief had arranged for my meeting with the case officer on a ruse, saying that I’d been traveling when he’d come back to Washington to meet Redmond and needed a briefing on the sensitive case.

“I hear you’ve got a live one,” I said.

“Yeah. I hope so,” he said, his eyes never locking on mine.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“My KGB guy I’m working told me that he’d picked up something about a penetration of your division. He said there’d been a recruitment. An ethnic Russian.”

“Did he have a name?” I asked, leaning forward to show my deep interest.

“No name,” he said, “but he said he thought the guy’s name began with the letter K.” The man sitting across from me was still reluctant to make lasting eye contact, though he didn’t seem otherwise overly nervous.

“Do you think the K is for his true name or his code name?” I asked.

“You know, I didn’t even think to ask,” he said, livening up a little. He then set off on a rambling but rich and informative yarn full of color and detail.

The trouble was, I’d heard his stories before. The CIA had never been able to catch him in an outright fabrication, but he’d come damn close one too many times. In one of those earlier cases, we’d tried to get him to let another case officer meet with his foreign agent to verify his information, but something always seemed to get in the way, and no one ever managed to meet him. Now, sitting across from him in the soundproof room, I decided that I still didn’t trust him one bit.

When he had finished his long and elaborate story about the KGB penetration of SE Division, I kept quiet, saying nothing, but with what I hoped was a friendly if expectant look on my face. The painful silence lasted about half a minute, until he started telling more of the story. This time there were new details that he hadn’t included in his original report or in his follow-up report to Redmond.

When I returned to Washington a week later, I met with Burton Gerber and his station chief at the Farm for a private talk about the case officer and his sensational reporting.

I made it clear that I thought he was making up the whole thing.

“Have you written it up?” Gerber asked, always one to focus on procedural protocol.

“Yes, I have.”

“I haven’t seen it,” he said with a touch of irritation in his voice.

“It’s a memo for the record right now,” I said. “I haven’t sent it forward. But I will now that we’ve talked.”

“Now what?” came the third voice in the room, bringing our tense exchange to a merciful end. “You’re saying that there’s nothing there? That this guy’s sitting on the curb and making this stuff up?” The station chief was incredulous.

“Yes,” I said. “That about sums it up. But we’re going to need more than my gut reaction to this guy. We need to talk to the KGB officer.”

Gerber suggested using the former deputy in Moscow, whose pseudonym was KLETTERING. (The CIA makes an important, if little understood, distinction between a pseudonym and an alias. A CIA officer is assigned one pseudonym for use in internal agency cable traffic and usually keeps the same one throughout his or her career. CIA officers use their pseudonyms to sign cables sent back to headquarters and are sometimes even referred to by their pseudonyms in internal discussions. By contrast, CIA case officers use many aliases during operations in the field to mask their true identities. A case officer never uses a CIA pseudonym as one of his or her aliases.) KLETTERING had the expertise needed to talk to the KGB officer and figure out whether there was anything to the story we had been told.

In a European Capital, August 1, 1991

KLETTERING had a doctorate in Russian studies and was counted among a handful of the best operations officers in his generation at SE. He’d served as Mike Cline’s deputy in Moscow and was now back at Langley handling our internal operations; but at the moment he was sitting on the verandah of a riverside restaurant in Europe, engaged in one of the more bizarre conversations of his career. It had taken him several days to arrange the meeting, but in the end he had succeeded. Across from him was a smooth, urbane Soviet intelligence officer, the source to which the case officer had attributed the counterintelligence yarn that had gotten Redmond so spun up, at least initially. KLETTERING had explained to him in detail the information he had supposedly passed on to us about a penetration of SE Division. The Soviet took it all in, registering deep interest. “There is, indeed, a serious problem,” he said at last. “But it has very little to do with me. It has everything to do with your own officer. I have met this man, but I am saddened to say that everything he has told you is sheer fantasy. But excellent fantasy!”

The case officer had already been transferred back to Washington, and when he was confronted with a more hostile interrogation, both he and his story began to fall apart. But the case officer still scrambled to explain himself, never admitting that he had fabricated the whole