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

On January 24, 1985, Nicholas Daniloff, Moscow correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, arrived in his office at 9:30 A.M. and, as part of his morning routine, opened the yellow mailbox hanging on his door. Inside, he found an unstamped envelope, addressed to him in Russian handwriting with no return address. When he ripped open the envelope, Daniloff found a second envelope, this one addressed to U.S. Ambassador Arthur Hartman. A savvy and seasoned Moscow journalist, Daniloff weighed the probabilities and quickly suspected that the letter was part of a classic KGB ruse to entrap him. After all, there were ample precedents for such provocations, designed to justify leveling charges of espionage against members of the foreign press corps in Moscow. He made a quick decision and set in motion events that would explode onto the front pages a year and a half later.

Daniloff and Ruth, his wife, left the U.S. News office immediately by car for the American embassy. Checking constantly for the telltale beige or white Ladas or Zhigulis of the KGB Seventh Directorate, they drove along the Garden Ring Road and through Smolensk Square, pulling up at the U.S. embassy on Tchaikovsky Street. When they had made it past the Soviet militiamen posted at the entrance and arrived safely inside the chancery, they let out a sigh of relief and went to the office of the senior press and cultural affairs officer, Ray Benson. Daniloff turned the package over to Benson, who quickly opened the second envelope while Daniloff stood by. They found a third envelope inside, this one addressed to CIA Director William Casey. Inside was a letter, six or seven pages in length, with dense handwriting in an odd and difficult-to-decipher script. Neither Daniloff nor Benson could make much sense of the letter except that it appeared to relate to weapons research. The word raketa—rocket—appeared repeatedly in the text.

Daniloff felt uneasy as he left the embassy; he sensed the letter spelled trouble. He had told Benson that he assumed the envelope had been left in his mailbox by Father Roman Potemkin, a curious young man who claimed to be a religious activist. Father Roman had suddenly appeared in Daniloff’s life a month earlier, when he came to the U.S. News bureau just before Christmas claiming that he wanted to talk to an American reporter about antireligious oppression in the Soviet Union. Daniloff, fearful of KGB listening devices in his own office, steered Father Roman outside and listened to his story while walking down Kosygin Street through a light snowfall. Father Roman talked about the antireligious campaign the government was mounting during the run up to the one thousandth anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to Russia in 1988. He said he was a member of something called the Association of Russian Orthodox Youth, an activist organization that worried, by his account, the cautious leaders of the establishment Russian Orthodox Church. He also told Daniloff he had been arrested and sentenced to two years of “corrective” labor for purportedly being involved with stolen church icons.

Daniloff took Father Roman’s phone number and came away from the meeting intrigued—yet also very suspicious. The son of Russian émigrés, Daniloff understood the Russian mind and soul far better than did most American correspondents. Even Father Roman’s name raised red flags—phony Potemkin villages had been created centuries earlier as illusions to trick Catherine the Great. Daniloff knew it wasn’t easy for Russians to obtain the telephone numbers of foreign correspondents in Moscow. But Father Roman said he had asked a friend who knew a secretary in the Foreign Ministry’s press section to provide the name and number of an American correspondent who could speak Russian. Daniloff’s suspicions deepened. It sounded like a lame cover story for someone who had been sent by the KGB. After their December meeting, Daniloff decided to keep his guard up if Father Roman reappeared.

On January 22, Father Roman phoned Daniloff. This time he told him he was sending him information concerning Russian Christian youth. Two days later, the unstamped envelope appeared in his mailbox. Daniloff assumed it was from Father Roman—no one else had told him to expect mail. The letter’s appearance only deepened Daniloff’s suspicions about him and his possible ties to the KGB.

At the embassy he told Benson all he knew about Father Roman, in part to protect himself if he was walking into a Soviet trap.

Sitting in Gerber’s office at CIA headquarters, the SE Division chief again prodded Stombaugh to walk back through the Father Roman story. “Go on, Paul. Let’s start with exactly what happened in March.”

Stombaugh leaned forward and began to tell the part of the story he knew best.

Moscow, 1415 Hours, March 23, 1985

Stombaugh knew he was clean as he negotiated the narrow path through hurriedly shoveled snow in the northeast Moscow suburb. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless cobalt blue, but at ground level, the fresh snow was already turning a dirty gray. A heavy spring snowfall the night before had tied Moscow traffic in knots, giving an edge to the American as he carefully engineered his escape from KGB surveillance. Stombaugh had been on his surveillance detection run since 11:00 A.M. and was convinced he’d been surveillance free from the start and had blended into the flow of Muscovites braving the cold on a brilliant Saturday afternoon. He was dressed in Russian winter clothing, with a fur hat and heavy woolen coat. Stombaugh had learned during the first cold snap after his arrival in Moscow that a case officer seeking anonymity never went out in the cold without a warm hat. The first time he went out bareheaded in the winter, he was stopped three times by helpful babushkas scolding him for not wearing a hat.

His task that bone cold afternoon was a mix of high risk and high gain—he was trying to deliver a letter from the CIA to Father Roman. As he struck out