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

decade earlier, Gordievsky had provided London with a wealth of information. His most sensitive piece of intelligence came when he warned London that the aging KGB leadership believed that the new American President, Ronald Reagan, was preparing to launch a nuclear war. In 1981, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov had told a KGB conference that the United States was preparing for a nuclear strike against the USSR. Moscow Center took the threat seriously and soon sent out orders to KGB residencies in NATO countries to look for signs of a pending attack. Code-named RYAN—a Russian acronym for a nuclear missile attack—the operation reportedly became the KGB’s top intelligence priority by 1982.

RYAN was the product of Moscow’s paranoia about Reagan. Andropov, with little exposure to the West, seemed convinced that Reagan was such an extremist that he was willing to destroy the world in the name of his right-wing ideology. Gordievsky told the British about RYAN and Moscow’s exaggerated fears of Reagan. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher personally briefed Reagan on RYAN and its implications.

Still, NATO went ahead with “Able Archer,” a nuclear launch exercise, in November 1983, simulating the actual procedures the NATO allies would use at the start of a nuclear war. Only later did the United States learn how badly Able Archer had shaken the Soviets. The KGB reported back to Moscow that NATO was on actual alert, and Soviet forces were placed on alert status as well. The volatile combination of Able Archer and RYAN had created one of the worst nuclear scares since the Cuban missile crisis—and Washington didn’t even know it until after it was over.

The British decided to hide Gordievsky’s identity from the Americans, but that didn’t stop the CIA from trying to figure out where London was getting its information. Burton Gerber was determined to identify the British source and assigned the SE Division’s chief of counterintelligence, Aldrich Ames, to puzzle it out. By March 1985, Ames thought he had the answer—Gordievsky. Ames sent a cable to the CIA’s London Station asking whether Gordievsky fit the profile. The answer was yes, and the CIA concluded—without being officially told—that Gordievsky was a British mole.

When Gordievsky arrived in Moscow in mid-May, his confidence evaporated. He immediately discovered that his apartment on Leninsky Prospekt in southwest Moscow had been surreptitiously searched. Were it not for a few subtle traps he had laid out, he might never have known it had been entered.

A few days later, he was taken to a KGB dacha a few kilometers from the First Chief Directorate’s headquarters, where he was fed drug-laced brandy and interrogated by KGB counterintelligence specialist General Sergei M. Golubev, the KGB officer who by the end of the Cold War would be the man most identified with Moscow’s use of drugs and poisons against the enemies of socialism. Then, without further explanation, Gordievsky had been told that while he could continue his service in the KGB, his London posting had been terminated. He was free to take a month’s leave.

Within days he had spotted the first surveillance. Gordievsky was convinced he was followed to a health spa in Semyenovskoya, about a hundred kilometers south of Moscow. He had apparently held his own in the interrogations, although he still had no recollection of the details. KGB counterintelligence didn’t seem to have the goods on him, not just yet, but the noose was tightening. The KGB had to be acting on a well-founded suspicion, and it would only be a matter of time before they had what they needed for the perversely legalistic Soviet system to charge him with espionage. What had gone wrong? The question had eaten away at him since he had returned to Moscow. Had the displaced Nikitenko become suspicious?

After what seemed like an eternity, but in reality was no more than three or four minutes, Gordievsky eased back from the curb and fell into the flow of pedestrians heading toward the Kievsky metro station. His only thought was a fervent hope that the British had seen him. He would not know for three more weeks that he had left a minute too early.

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 1330 Hours, June 18, 1985

Paul Stombaugh had managed to dodge the Washington press corps since his expulsion from Moscow and arrival in Washington two days earlier. CIA security officers had escorted Paul and Betsy and Rusty, their seven-year-old son, around the reporters waiting at Dulles International Airport and registered them under an assumed name at a Washington hotel. Burton Gerber visited the Stombaughs in their hotel room that first night and said all the right things. He assured them he shared their sense of personal and professional loss in the Tolkachev operation and he knew they had done their best to keep Adolf Tolkachev alive. It was just another reminder of the risks associated with the business, he told them soothingly. Both Paul and Betsy Stombaugh could see in his eyes that Gerber meant every word, that he felt the loss as a human tragedy as well as an intelligence setback.

Now, two days later, Stombaugh was sitting in Gerber’s fifth-floor corner office undergoing his first real debriefing. On the couch next to him sat Paul Redmond, chief of USSR operations, a notepad in his lap. Jim Olson, the taciturn chief of the SE Division’s operations group, which oversaw all activities inside the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries, sat in the corner. Gerber sat below a framed pencil etching of a pack of wolves in the wild on the wall behind him. It was sparingly entitled Wolves.

Gerber listened intently as Stombaugh finished his account of the ambush and arrest in Moscow four days earlier.

“After we arrived at Dzerzhinsky I was trundled up the elevator and shoved into a holding room with the two KGB men who had ridden with me in the van. They still held on to my arms, even while we went up the elevator.” Gerber had learned from the CIA medics that Stombaugh’s shoulders had been severely