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

it was a forty-five-minute walk from where he had made the call. Stombaugh weighed the variables in his mind. He had now made two phone calls to a religious activist who had contacted an American journalist, just the type of person who would attract KGB attention, even if he wasn’t already under their control. If the phone was tapped, it would be clear to the monitors that a foreigner had called Father Roman twice, but thus far nothing more incriminating than that. And it was unlikely, Stombaugh thought, that Father Roman’s phone would be live-monitored in a city where routine telephone taps numbered in the tens of thousands. He concluded that if he moved quickly, he could get to Father Roman’s address and deliver his letter without walking into KGB surveillance. All bets were off, of course, if Father Roman was already under KGB control.

In what the CIA called “light disguise”—mustache, glasses, hat, and Russian clothing—Stombaugh walked for nearly an hour before arriving at Father Roman’s apartment block. He entered the building and located the apartment number Father Roman had given him. His knock was answered by a young man in his late twenties or thirties, with long hair and what Stombaugh would later describe as a “soft look.”

“Are you Father Roman, and did you deliver an envelope to someone?” Stombaugh asked.

“Da,” the man answered, but Stombaugh could not read deeper meaning into his positive response to the key question. Nevertheless, he slipped the letter into his gloved hand and handed it to Father Roman. He then nodded a good-bye and quickly left the apartment.

As he made his way back home by foot and public transport, Stombaugh took inventory of what had been given up so far. He had probably exposed himself as a CIA officer, though he’d been in disguise and had been careful not to leave fingerprints on the letter. And he had identified “Nikolai” as an intermediary in his call to Father Roman. There had been no mention of the word journalist in conjunction with Nikolai. This had all been discussed with Washington before the operation was undertaken and considered an acceptable risk. If the letter fell into the wrong hands, there would be no easy way to link Nikolai with Nicholas Daniloff—unless, of course, Father Roman had been under the control of the KGB from the start. But that would give the KGB nothing beyond the confirmation that the package they had prepared for William Casey had actually been delivered by Daniloff, according to their own plan. Stombaugh arrived at his apartment just as darkness fell over Moscow, drained but still convinced that he had been “black” for the entire day.

The letter Stombaugh handed to Father Roman had included instructions on how the scientist could contact the CIA. Those instructions included directions on how to arrange a meeting with a CIA officer that could be fully understood only by the person who had written the original 1981 letter to the CIA. Stombaugh began waiting each Thursday at the meeting site, located near the Kiev station not far from Moscow’s city center. But no one appeared to make contact.

On April 5, Father Roman called Daniloff again and gave him a curious message: The March 26 meeting had not been possible. The message to Daniloff was, “Your guys behaved in such a way as to prejudice the meeting.” Sensing danger, Daniloff immediately told Father Roman he didn’t know what he was talking about—and hoped that the KGB eavesdroppers on his telephone line had picked up his response.

Six days later, at a press conference held by visiting House Speaker Tip O’Neill at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, Daniloff once again met Kamman. As they walked through the grounds of the ostentatious villa just one mile west of the Kremlin, Daniloff told the American diplomat about the latest message from Father Roman. The journalist stressed again to Kamman that he wanted to be kept out of whatever was going on.

Each Thursday, meanwhile, Stombaugh made his pass by the meeting site near the Kiev station, searching in vain for the scientist who would never appear, until word came from a new and unexpected quarter that the Father Roman operation had gone awry.

On April 18, Michael Sellers made contact with a KGB officer who had offered to spy for the CIA a few months earlier by dropping a sheaf of documents through the car window of a political officer assigned to the American embassy. While the Americans didn’t know the KGB officer’s identity—he insisted on anonymity—it was clear from the information he had supplied in his initial drop that he was a KGB officer, possibly from the counterintelligence directorate, although there was debate over whether he was from the Second Chief Directorate or from a Moscow district office. The CIA encrypted him GTCOWL and set in motion the means to try to handle him in Moscow.

Sellers was the second CIA officer to meet COWL. The first meeting had gone poorly because the case officer who’d been sent couldn’t understand COWL’s rough Russian dialect.

During his meeting with Sellers, COWL provided confirmation that the KGB was using a special tracking substance against American case officers in Moscow. COWL told Sellers that chemicals were being used against them and sprayed a sample of the chemical into a plastic bag. Sellers, whose Russian language was at the high end of CIA fluency ratings, had an easier time with COWL than the first officer, but even he found it hard to understand his guttural Russian. COWL turned out to be a hard-bitten, streetwise officer in the local Moscow branch of the KGB. He had little patience for an American who couldn’t catch his colloquialisms.

Having shaken KGB surveillance during his long run before the meeting, the six-foot-five-inch Sellers spent hours walking the streets with COWL during that first contact. COWL surprised him by revealing that the KGB knew about the CIA’s letter to Father Roman. As they wound through alleys and side streets, with the Russian looking