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

in the works, and he identified some of the key leaders of the plot. The information had originated with Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov, who had warned American ambassador Jack Matlock about the threat. When Gorbachev heard about the American warning, however, he dismissed it as fantasy.

By mid-August, though, it was becoming clear to the CIA’s analysts that Gorbachev’s decision to sign the All-Union Treaty that month could prompt the hard-liners to act. In the President’s Daily Brief for August 17, the CIA warned President Bush that the scheduled treaty signing had created a deadline for the conservatives in Moscow. There was a strong chance that they would act within the next few days, before the treaty was signed.

Termez, Uzbekistan, August 6, 1991

Stepping out on Friendship Bridge was an eerie experience. I had spent three years assisting the men on the other side of the river in their fight against those on this side of the river, and now here I was looking across the bridge in what seemed like the wrong direction. With me was Jack Devine, who was now chief of the CIA’s counternarcotics center, and the purpose of our visit to Central Asia was to talk with the Soviets about ways to cooperate on the international war on drugs. Devine had been chief of the Afghan Task Force when I first arrived in Islamabad, and we both found it strangely unsettling to stand on Friendship Bridge looking into Afghanistan with our KGB escorts.

We’d flown along the border between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan in a Soviet MI-8 helicopter, exactly the same chopper that the Afghan rebels had so frequently shot down with Stinger missiles that I’d helped supply them with during the war. As we flew low and slow along the north bank of the Amu Dar’ya, the pilot spoke into his intercom. Across from me, a KGB colonel became alert as he listened to his headset. Then he barked back a brief answer.

“What did he say?” I asked the colonel.

“He said to tell you that we are flying so low because the Afghan bandits across the river still have Stinger missiles. They are not supposed to work so well if you fly below three hundred meters. The pilot wanted me to tell you that.”

“And what did you say to him?” I asked.

The colonel held my gaze for a couple of seconds, then answered. “I told him you already knew all about that,” he said coldly.

Moscow, August 7, 1991

I was riding along in a rattling KGB Volga that smelled as if it had a leak in its fuel system. With me in the backseat was Rem Krassilnikov, who despite the changes and upheavals in Moscow over the last twenty-four months was still chief of the First Department of the Second Chief Directorate. His perch, as far as he was concerned, was unchanged and secure. For the last twenty minutes I had been watching the street pattern around us, and I thought I had detected surveillance teams following us.

“Rem, do you think it’s possible that your boys are following us around town?”

Krassilnikov glanced at me quizzically. “No,” he said, “that would not be possible.” His answer was definitive. One just did not argue with Rem Krassilnikov on his turf.

But as we drove on, Krassilnikov began to look more carefully at the rhythm of the street. About two minutes later he said, “Perhaps it is, Milton.” He stared at a beige Zhiguli beside us. “Yes, it is possible.” He looked puzzled for a minute, then recovered without commenting further on the oddity of having KGB surveillance units trailing the guest of a KGB general in his own car.

It was early August, and we had spent several days in Moscow trying to find areas where the CIA and the KGB could work together. The drug war and the spread of weapons of mass destruction were two seemingly fruitful options. Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and the republics of Soviet Central Asia meant the region was a leading source of heroin, and the Soviets had a growing drug problem in their cities. Meanwhile, the breakup of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was creating new fears in Washington about the security of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. We approached these topics with our KGB counterparts in the abstract, discussing them as looming problems but never tracing their origins to the breakup of the old order.

We met in a KGB safe house in a residential section of Moscow not far from Communist Party headquarters. The house had once been used by Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s ruthless and perverse henchman and intelligence chief. We held our meetings on the second floor, and during the breaks I was able to look around. I came upon a very large tiled bathroom with ancient fixtures and, inexplicably, a gynecologist’s examination table, complete with stirrups. I could only imagine what amusements Beria had found in that room.

While in Moscow, I had a chance to glimpse anecdotal evidence of the diminished power of the KGB in Soviet society. My traveling companions and I, accompanied by a lively KGB colonel by the name of Kuzmin, attempted to get into the Kremlin courtyard to view the czar’s cannon. We were stopped at the entrance by a guard, who with great aplomb pointed to his watch and told us we had come too late. The courtyard had closed three minutes earlier. Kuzmin tried to sweet-talk the guard, saying we were an important American delegation, but the man would have none of it. Finally, Kuzmin winked at me and said, “Watch this.”

With practiced flair, he whipped out his red KGB identity book, flipped it open, and eased it in front of the guard’s eyes. “Committee for State Security,” Kuzmin said. “Now please let us through.”

The guard took the identity book, looked at it carefully, then folded it shut and handed it back to the KGB colonel. “I don’t care if you’re Vladimir Kryuchkov,” he said. “You’re not getting in here after closing time.”