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

Krassilnikov stressed that there was no reason why the coup should harm relations between the KGB and the CIA, which had been improving in recent months. The SE chief and a delegation of senior officers had just been to Moscow to meet with the KGB, and now a meeting between the two agencies was scheduled for October in Helsinki, Krassilnikov reminded Rolph. He insisted that the Helsinki meeting go on as planned. After all, the coup was purely an internal matter, he noted dryly.

While the aging spymaster hadn’t shed much light on the degree of KGB complicity in the coup, he had certainly made clear his own position of support. As Rolph stepped out of the Volga and headed back to the office, he toyed with a difficult but essential question: Was Krassilnikov speaking for himself or for the entire officer corps of the KGB?

Rolph sat in his office that night firing cables back to Langley as thousands of Russians stood vigil outside the White House, guarding the man they now viewed as their salvation—Boris Yeltsin. There was still no sign that the plotters were prepared to wade through the crowds and their handmade barricades and move against Yeltsin. And every hour they waited gave the democrats more time to gain strength and confidence. While Yeltsin and his band of Russian reformers stood at the ramparts, Mikhail Gorbachev, still trapped and isolated in his villa on the Black Sea, was rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Lewinsville Park, McLean, Virginia, Monday, August 19, 1991

While the CIA was scrambling to try to make sense of the crisis unfolding in Moscow, the KGB was conducting a secret operation just a few miles from CIA headquarters.

Robert Hanssen made his way on August 19 to a dead drop site code-named FLO, which was the space underneath a footbridge on the wooded edge of Lewinsville Park, a few steps from a residential street in the upscale suburb of McLean. That Hanssen and his KGB handlers were willing to carry out an exchange almost in the shadow of CIA headquarters also revealed the level of confidence they had in their ability to counter American counterintelligence efforts at the time. Of course, Hanssen had over the years helped the KGB learn how to defeat FBI surveillance, since he had betrayed many of the techniques the FBI used to monitor the Soviets.

In fact, at the FLO dead drop that day, Hanssen left a package that contained a new FBI memorandum about the methods the bureau was using to conduct surveillance of a particular Soviet intelligence officer. In addition to other classified documents crammed onto a computer diskette, Hanssen included an essay that he had crafted for the private benefit of his Soviet handlers.

Given the political instability that the Soviet Union was experiencing, he suggested that the KGB review the history of Chicago. In particular, he wrote that the Soviets could benefit from a thorough study of Chicago’s legendary mayor Richard J. Daley and how he had used an iron fist and a well-oiled political machine to turn Chicago into the “city that works.” Maybe the Soviets needed a little infusion of Chicago-style politics to regain order and stability.

In October, the KGB responded with thanks to “B,” marveling that the “magical history tour” to Chicago was mysteriously well timed.

“Have you ever thought of foretelling the things?” they wrote. “After your retirement, for instance, in some sort of your own cristall ball and intelligence agency (CBIA)? There are always so many people in this world eager to get a glimpse of the future.”

Cairo, 2000 Hours, Monday, August 19, 1991

I had just arrived in Cairo from Tel Aviv for a series of meetings. The telephone was ringing as I stepped into my hotel room.

“Milt? Bill Piekney.” Piekney was now chief in Cairo. “It looks like things have come unstuck in Moscow,” he said. “A gang of the old guard have seized power from Gorbachev. I’m sending an officer with a reading file and have already booked you on the next plane to Washington if you want to head back tonight.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, flipping to CNN.

Two hours later I was on a flight to Washington.

   10   

Langley, 0800 Hours, Tuesday, August 20, 1991

There was a buzz of excitement in SE Division and throughout the Directorate of Operations when I arrived home from Cairo the next morning. Some of the old guard felt a delicious sense of vindication, particularly those I had moved out of the division. They had been right—and I had been wrong. So much for Bearden’s ideas of historic change in the Soviet Union. And so much for his notions about overhauling the division to adapt to the new realities. Happy days were here again!

“You’re fucked, chief,” O’Reilly said as I passed his office.

I turned back and slumped into a chair across from his desk. I picked up his Buddhist prayer wheel and began to twirl it. “Tell me about it,” I said.

“There were whispers all yesterday,” O’Reilly said. “Bearden furled his colors too soon, they said. Some of them were pretty happy about it.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“They’re wrong,” he said, handing me a stack of cable traffic. “Look at this stuff, and you’ll see the ones who’re really fucked are Kryuchkov and his gang.”

By the afternoon of August 20, the heady feelings of vindication had dissolved. As the intelligence and overt reporting flowed in, the coup appeared to be bogged down and was looking more and more like a slapdash affair. Something was definitely going wrong.

The intelligence on the specially screened cadre of volunteers in the Red Army’s Western Group of Forces in Germany bore out that assessment. The Army volunteers had been handpicked months earlier for possible action, and now we learned that though they had been alerted, they were still sitting in their barracks as confused as the rest of the world. Stand by, they had been ordered. A little later, almost as an afterthought,