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

for the Soviet Union was precisely in the very structure of its security organs—that’s the paradox!

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The Lubyanka, Moscow, Mid-September 1991

Robert Strauss was as smooth an operator as I had seen in over a quarter century of dealing with smooth operators and trying, sometimes with grave self-doubt, to be one myself. Though I had made that decision in my first meeting with Strauss, the high-stakes poker player from Texas, the Democratic Party healer, and one of the shrewdest lawyers to work Washington’s K Street, watching him here in the Lubyanka, not more than a hundred feet from Yuri Andropov’s museum office overlooking Dzerzhinsky Square, I knew I had been right about America’s new ambassador to Moscow from the moment we first met.

I had briefed Strauss on the USSR, from the CIA’s perspective, as soon as he was confirmed as President George H. W. Bush’s envoy to the Kremlin. He’d put me at ease with a couple of old J. Edgar Hoover stories from his days as an FBI agent in Dallas to set the mood and probably to let me know that he knew a little something about my world.

“I was a young agent in the Dallas Field Office when J. Edgar made one of his imperial visits,” Strauss told me in that down-home Texas drawl I’d grown up with. “I was picked as the guy to drive him around, but there was one catch. J. Edgar didn’t like his drivers to make left turns. I guessed it was because he never wanted to be broadsided, but anyway it was a pretty big thing back then. So I’d have to figure a way to drive him all over Dallas without making any left turns!”

I guessed Bob Strauss was telling me how he navigated his way through the tricky intersections of life, not just how he’d gotten the FBI Director through Dallas traffic. He also told me how he took the job of ambassador to Moscow when it was offered by a Republican President.

“I was sitting there in front of George Bush’s desk in the oval office as he asked me to go to Moscow for him. I said that I had not voted for him the last time and that I’d probably never vote for him. But the President said that didn’t matter and that the man he wanted in Moscow was me.”

While I was briefing him on what was going on, Strauss cut to the chase.

“What do I tell the Soviets when they ask why I’m the President’s man in Moscow?”

“It’s easy,” I told him. “Tell them that the President sent you to Moscow not because you know a damn thing about Russia or how the Soviet Union works. He sent you because you know everything about how Washington works.”

Strauss looked at me like a guy who has just filled in a straight flush and said, “I’m gonna like you, Milt.”

Now, sitting with this old fox and watching him handle Boris Yeltsin’s new KGB Chairman, Vadim Bakatin, the former minister of the interior fired by Gorbachev as he scrambled to distance himself from the liberals in the summer of 1991, I knew that George Bush had sent the right man to Moscow.

Bakatin asked Strauss a number of questions, and then the new KGB Chairman turned to me.

“How many analysts do you have in CIA?”

“Around two thousand,” I answered.

Bakatin called an aide over to the table and asked him how many analysts the KGB had. After hearing the man’s answer, he turned back to me. “He says we have less than a dozen!” His tone was one of exasperation. The KGB had never put much stock in analysis, since for generations the Kremlin had not wanted to hear bad news.

Bakatin said that the time had come to end the Cold War contest between our agencies. He complained about all the money and resources spent just on spying against our respective embassies in Moscow and Washington. Pointing to his safe in the corner of his large office, Bakatin said, “In that safe are the complete plans of the efforts to put listening devices in your embassy. Now your embassy stands empty and we are at an impasse!”

Strauss perked up. He and I had talked earlier about ways to get the Soviets to move on the issue of the bugging of our embassy. I had briefed him on the claims by the KGB, made to me in Helsinki more than a year earlier, that the embassy was now “safe.” But Strauss would need solid proof that the embassy was actually safe for occupation. As the ambassador talked with Bakatin about the need to get the embassy problem behind us, I slipped him a note.

“Ask him to give you the blueprints.”

Without casting more than a sideways glance at the note, Strauss continued his statement about getting on with the important work and getting the problem of the bugged embassy resolved once and for all. Then he dropped the bomb.

“Mr. Chairman, there is one way you could help us get over this hurdle of the status of my embassy. Why don’t you just give me those blueprints in your safe. I’m sure that would set us on the right course.”

I watched the other KGB officers in the room as they leaned forward in their chairs at this point in the conversation. There was something close to shock in their faces as Bakatin’s interpreter translated Strauss’s suggestion.

Bakatin thought for a moment, then said, “I will be back to you on this, Mr. Ambassador.”

Strauss had made his point very smoothly, and I thought Bakatin had been intrigued by the ambassador’s suggestion. I then took my turn at speaking and passed along the greetings of our new acting Director of Central Intelligence to the new KGB Chairman. Bill Webster had retired at the end of August, and Dick Kerr was acting DCI, while Robert Gates, the President’s nominee to take over at Langley, was working through the confirmation process.

“Mr. Chairman,” I said, “our acting Director,