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

F. YURCHENKO REPORTS THAT KGB DEPUTY REZIDENT LONDON—HE CANNOT REMEMBER NAME—RECALLED IN MAY UNDER COVER COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INTERROGATION/INVESTIGATION. YURCHENKO HAS HEARD KGB USING “TRUTH DRUGS” ON THIS MAN AT REMOTE LOCATION. NO FURTHER DETAILS.

2. YURCHENKO HAS SIGNED FORMAL REQUEST FOR ASYLUM. SEPARATE MESSAGES WILL FOLLOW BY IMMEDIATE NIACT PRECEDENCE AS DEBRIEFING PROGRESSES.

3. BELIEVE IT MOST PRUDENT TO MOVE YURCHENKO DIRECTLY TO CONUS ASAP. HE BELIEVES IT ONLY MATTER OF THREE-FOUR HOURS BEFORE KGB ROME REZIDENTURA PEOPLE WILL START LOOKING FOR HIM, POSSIBLY REQUESTING ASSISTANCE OF ITALIAN SECURITY. IF WE CAN HAVE HIM AIRBORNE BEFORE THAT HAPPENS SO MUCH THE BETTER. PLEASE ADVISE.

4. FILE: DEFER. E2IMPDET.

“It’s Howard. ‘Mr. Robert’ is Edward Lee Howard,” Gerber said with what I thought was a strange calmness in his voice. “Edward Lee Howard has betrayed us.”

I was about to ask who Howard was when the phone rang. Gerber picked it up, paused, and said, “Yes, Clair. I’ve just read it.” He listened to the DDO for a moment, then said quietly, “Yes. There’s no question. It’s Howard.”

Looking behind Gerber at his little blackboard, I saw the single word written in white chalk: Resolve!

Later, in my office, I went over the first trace memo providing background on one Vitaly S. Yurchenko. It contained the standard biographical information, the usual boilerplate memoranda from the FBI, but one entry caught my eye. Yurchenko was the hapless Soviet embassy security officer who in 1976 had turned over to the D.C. police a packet tossed into the embassy compound by former CIA officer Edwin G. Moore. Moore had been trying unsuccessfully to volunteer his services to the KGB by dropping notes in the mailbox of Dimitri Yakushkin, the KGB Washington Rezident. When the KGB failed to contact him—they mistakenly feared an FBI provocation—he had taken the desperate step of tossing a package of secrets over the fence. Vitaly Yurchenko, the report stated, thought the package might have been a terrorist bomb and called the police. Moore ended up with a fifteen-year federal jail sentence, and Yurchenko got the bungler of the year award at Lubyanka.

Interesting guy, I thought. I was looking forward to meeting our new prize the next morning.

   8   

Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, 0700 Hours, August 2, 1985

Chuck Medanich scanned the milling crowd of CIA and FBI officers in the VIP lounge at Flight Operations at Andrews Air Force Base. Medanich, a stocky southerner with a broad and open face, could have passed for a linebacker or a security guard. But he was actually the chief psychologist for the CIA’s Defector Resettlement Staff, and it was his job to move defectors through the flow of the intelligence community while keeping an eye on their mental health. He had been up past midnight the previous night, laying in supplies at the Oakton, Virginia, safe house reserved for Yurchenko’s initial debriefing. Gerber had called Medanich in for a meeting and personally asked that he “see to things.” Gerber had also assigned Aldrich Ames, chief of counterintelligence inside SE Division, to help Medanich get things ready for the debriefing. Ames would be one of Yurchenko’s initial debriefers.

Medanich and Ames had stocked the safe house with the usual defector fare: juices, Coca-Cola, milk, bottled water, coffee, tea, bread, eggs, bacon, cold cuts, fruit and vegetables, a few six-packs of beer, a bottle of vodka, and one of bourbon. They worked into the early morning getting the town house ready, then agreed to meet outside the CIA headquarters building a few hours later, at 6:00 A.M., for the drive out to Andrews Air Force Base. There they would greet the C-141 bringing Yurchenko and his escorts, flying in from Rome via Frankfurt, Germany. But Ames didn’t show up on time, so an impatient Medanich called up to the SE Division office to see if anyone knew where he was. A secretary answered that they hadn’t heard from him. After a few minutes, Medanich headed out to Andrews without him. As Medanich waited for the plane in the spartan VIP lounge at Andrews, he was beginning to wonder if Ames, the man who was supposed to debrief Yurchenko, would ever arrive at all.

As the plane landed and taxied to a stop, Customs and Immigration officers clambered aboard to process Yurchenko’s paperwork. Medanich saw Ames arrive at the VIP lounge just as Yurchenko was being brought off the plane and into a milling crowd of FBI agents, CIA officers, and other government officials.

Ames thrust himself into the crowd and approached Yurchenko with a line that prompted Medanich to roll his eyes.

“Colonel Yurchenko, I welcome you to the United States on behalf of the President of the United States.”

Medanich glanced at Ames. His introduction was awfully pompous, especially for a guy who had nearly overslept and missed the whole thing. The group quickly formed into a motorcade led by armed CIA security officers in rented sedans, followed by the FBI contingent in their official cars and a van. Ames left his old Volkswagen at Andrews. It would remain illegally parked in front of Flight Operations for three days.

If Aldrich Ames’s behavior at Andrews seemed somewhat odd and contrived, there was a good reason for it. Ames wasn’t certain whether Yurchenko knew he was a Soviet mole. Ames was one of the CIA’s most knowledgeable students of the KGB, and from Yurchenko’s initial debriefing in Rome and a quick reading of the CIA’s files, he had tried to gauge whether Yurchenko had been in a position inside the KGB to have access to his case. Ames believed the answer was no, but he wasn’t quite sure.

Ames was being handled by Directorate K, the counterintelligence division inside the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Yurchenko had left Directorate K under a cloud in January 1985, at least three months before Ames had volunteered, and had since been named one of several deputies in the American Department in the First Chief Directorate, responsible for Canada and U.S. reserves. But Ames knew the KGB bureaucracy was filled with dozens of “deputies” with small