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

“Just call him and welcome him aboard,” I said, handing Casey the suggested talking points on a pair of three-by-five cards. “Here’s some language that will go a long way with him right now.”

Casey glanced at the cards as he dialed the number himself, waiting until Yurchenko came on the line.

“Alex”—Casey tilted his head back and peered through his bifocals at the three-by-five cards—“this is Bill Casey.” He paused to listen to the stream of words from Yurchenko. “Yeah, sure. I couldn’t agree more. I just wanted to welcome you personally to the United States. Together we can accomplish much.”

Casey listened to Yurchenko for a few moments, then added, “Alex, when you’ve rested a little and talked to our colleagues, you and I can get together for a quiet dinner. In the meantime, you can always get a message to me through Tom Fannin. . . . Yeah. . . . Yeah. . . . And thank you again for coming to us to help with the struggle.”

Casey flipped the three-by-five cards on his desk and winked at me.

Vienna, Austria, August 9, 1985

Edward Lee Howard flew from Albuquerque to Zurich on August 7 and on to Vienna two days later. He had arranged for a hurried leave from his job at the New Mexico state capitol. He told his boss that his grandmother, who had been ill, had suddenly died.

Howard would spend only two days in Vienna, returning to Santa Fe on August 12. It would later be learned that Howard’s grandmother was neither dead nor living in Austria or Switzerland. It was not his first trip to Austria, either. He had traveled there in September 1984, when he first met his KGB contacts. It was either during that meeting or at a subsequent one that he betrayed Adolf Tolkachev. He probably also compromised the TAW operation at about the same time.

Whether he knew Tolkachev’s real name or not, Howard certainly provided the key information the KGB needed to identify him. Rem Krassilnikov later insisted that the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate was already investigating Tolkachev before the First Chief Directorate provided information about Tolkachev from a source. But while the Second Chief Directorate had conducted a security probe of Tolkachev’s institute in 1983—before receiving Howard’s information—the KGB had not focused on Tolkachev specifically until Howard betrayed him.

   9   

Lefortovo District, Moscow, 0930 Hours, August 10, 1985

The white Volga sedan wound its way through the Lefortovo district of old Moscow, a once elegant section of the city built on the Yauza River. Named after Franz Lefort, its Swiss planner, who had been a confidant of Peter the Great, it had once been a posh residential district of cobblestone streets reserved for foreigners. The original Lefortovo Palace, which had dominated the district, had been designed with three intersecting wings forming a letter K, a tribute by its architect, so the story went, to his demanding and fleeting lover Catherine the Great.

By now, however, the palace’s name had become synonymous with the mystery and despair of what it had become—the Lefortovo pretrial and investigation prison. Lefortovo and its blood-soaked history had long since tempered the Russian soul. It is not known precisely how many of the Soviet Union’s elite died inside the prison in the late 1930s, giving Lefortovo the dubious honor of being Stalin’s premier “shooting prison.” The long cell-block corridors of the old palace had been painted an eerie flat black, and scuppers had been cut deep along the seams of walls and floors in some spots for quick pressure-hose cleanups after a busy night of shooting. In addition to the long line of Soviet officials purged after falling from Stalin’s grace, Lefortovo had also held Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish savior of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the 1940s, and, more recently, Natan Sharansky, the irrepressible Jewish dissident who had eventually been allowed to immigrate to Israel as part of a spy trade.

Rem Krassilnikov’s Volga pulled to a halt before the high brown metal gate in front of an ocher building marked 3A.

Krassilnikov knew Lefortovo’s history but thought it unrelated to his honorable work of catching spies. Krassilnikov was a true believer in the Soviet system and couldn’t understand the questioning attitude of the younger generations. To his mind, the job of extracting confessions from traitors could not be compared to the purges of the past. The only shootings that took place in Lefortovo now were by judicial decree. It just so happened that business was booming these days.

Krassilnikov currently had two “guests” in separate isolation cells. One, the now resigned and courteous Adolf Tolkachev, had come to terms with the irreversibility of his situation. He was being most helpful, Krassilnikov thought.

But this new one that Sharavatov’s men had netted was still in the indignant, tough-guy defensive stage. He was still searching desperately for that single snappy answer that would turn the game against his tormentors and make his awful problem vanish in a burst of overwhelming logic. But finding a harmless explanation for why he had been caught in the act of unloading an American dead drop full of cash was turning out to be more than even Colonel Leonid Georgiyevich Polyshchuk could handle.

Polyshchuk was a KGB counterintelligence colonel in Moscow on leave from his posting in Lagos, Nigeria. When Sharavatov’s men had arrested him three days earlier, he had put a patchy, theatrical defense on the spot. He said he’d come to meet a woman at the Severyanin station and that he’d stepped into the field only to relieve himself and had been mistakenly arrested. While pissing on the stones around the electric pylon, he said, he’d suddenly remembered he ought to get a substantial rock to place under the rear wheel of his car to keep it from rolling down the sloping street where he had parked it. His parking brake was faulty, he explained, expecting that to clear up the little “misunderstanding” on the spot. But when