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

story. In the end, the errant case officer decided he’d had enough with the CIA and simply resigned. It was another chapter closed in the search for the truth, and it had itself involved nothing but lies.

Like the alarm raised earlier by Sergei Papushin, the drunken defector who’d said he knew the CIA had been penetrated in Moscow, the case officer’s story had been debunked. It was just the latest in a series of dead ends in the hunt for a solution to the 1985 losses over the past few years. Nothing had come of the mysterious case of “Mr. X,” the anonymous volunteer in Germany who had warned earlier that the CIA’s communications had been compromised, and nothing had come of our gambit to test those communications by conducting phony recruitment operations of KGB officers, including my effort in Nairobi. There was no sign that the KGB was reading our mail, since the Soviets never moved against the KGB officers we had set up in our cable traffic. The investigation was back to square one.

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Moscow, August 1, 1991

It was still hard for David Rolph to comprehend. When he’d read the cable back in December notifying him that he was being reassigned as Moscow chief, he’d thought it was a joke. As chief of the small East Berlin operation, Rolph was only a GS-14 and too junior to be considered for the flagship field assignment in the Soviet Division. Moscow was a post that had always been reserved for a Senior Intelligence Service officer—the CIA equivalent of a general.

But his assignment was no joke. Rolph had responded well to the stern message he had received from Paul Redmond, and now he was being rewarded for the remarkable success of the Berlin cold-pitch campaign. Promoting Rolph to Moscow was part of my effort to revitalize SE Division with young blood. For Rolph, it was a dream come true.

Rolph knew that his promotion had irritated a number of more senior officers in the division who thought they deserved Moscow. But he was determined to prove them wrong. Still, he knew that Berlin would be a tough act to follow. “At least I’m going someplace that’s stable,” he’d joked at his good-bye party in Berlin in June.

But just beneath the surface, Moscow in the spring of 1991 was anything but stable. By now, Gorbachev was walking a tightrope between the reformers he had once empowered and the Communist hard-liners who were convinced he was responsible for the collapse of the old order in Eastern Europe and their own diminishing powers. The Soviet leader had long since lost control over the pace of change, and his perestroika campaign now seemed quaint and outmoded even to many of his supporters. He had calculated that if he slipped the knots with Eastern Europe, a weight would be lifted from the Soviet Union. And he was convinced that the chaos would stop at the Soviet border.

He was soon proved wrong. By 1991, powerful independence movements had sprung up in the three most western Soviet republics in the Baltics, finally forcing Moscow to crack down. In Lithuania, in January, fear made a fleeting comeback. In order to quash the growing independence movement, KGB and Soviet military units had moved into the capital of Vilnius in force, sending tanks against dissident crowds, killing fourteen protesters, and wounding many others as the military seized the city’s main television tower. The Soviets had moved into Lithuania just as the world was focused on the Persian Gulf crisis, so the incident received relatively little attention in the West.

Yet Moscow’s attempt to turn back the clock failed miserably. Soviet troops failed to curb the independence movement in Lithuania, and their violent assault backfired at home, prompting a bitter outcry in Moscow among Russians who had come to believe that the time for such ruthless actions had long since passed. Journalists resigned from the Communist Party, Soviet radio and television broadcast the attacks and aired the angry recriminations of citizens, and members of the Soviet legislature marched in the streets of Moscow. The Supreme Soviet demanded to know how many protesters had been killed in Vilnius—it called for an investigation and demanded answers.

Gorbachev was forced to distance himself from the military action, although few believed him. Shevardnadze had resigned as Foreign Minister in December 1990, warning darkly that a dictatorship was coming and telling those who would listen that the hard-liners were back in charge. Gorbachev had dismissed his old adviser’s fears, but the truth was that he was so close to the hard-liners that he didn’t recognize the contempt they had for him and his policies.

Now, even in remote areas of the Soviet Union, far from the volatile and impatient Baltics, new nationalist and democratic tides were surging in. In June, Boris Yeltsin became Russia’s first popularly elected President, and the white, blue, and red flag of Russia began to appear at official functions. The emergence of an independent-minded Russian leader and government posed grave threats to Gorbachev and the Soviet order. By the time David Rolph arrived in Moscow, it was clear that something would have to give.

Langley had been watching the warning signs for months. A source inside the Soviet military in Germany had told the CIA six months earlier that volunteers were being sought among Soviet Army officers for some sort of contingency operation in Moscow. Marshal Dmitri Yazov, the Defense Minister, was reported to have ordered the Soviet Western Group of Forces based in Germany to form units of reliable troops prepared to do whatever was necessary to preserve the union. The CIA had not seen any evidence that volunteers had actually been sent back to the Soviet Union, but the threat that the Soviet military might be used to deal with civil unrest hung in the air throughout the spring and summer of 1991.

In June, Secretary of State James Baker passed on a specific warning to Soviet Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh that a coup was