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

“car pickups,” where the CIA officers would talk to him on the run, but the Americans also arranged a few more lengthy debriefings in one of their local safe houses.

As in Katmandu, Polyshchuk’s information on the KGB’s local operations in Lagos was not of great interest to the Americans. Still, the CIA once again hoped that their agent could be convinced to spy from inside Moscow.

The opportunity came in April 1985. Polyshchuk reported that he had received a letter from his parents telling him of a stroke of luck. A condominium apartment near their home in Moscow had come onto the market, and Polyshchuk could buy it for 20,000 rubles. Polyshchuk told the CIA that he had been looking for just such an apartment near his parents for years and had asked his parents to keep up the search while he was away in Africa. Concerned that he had to move fast or lose the apartment, Polyshchuk said that he had already requested leave to go home to Moscow to close the deal. He explained that this was commonplace for KGB or Foreign Ministry officers living abroad; the difficulties of finding and purchasing apartments in overcrowded Moscow were shared by many of his colleagues. His request was approved by Moscow Center, but only on condition that he take his full annual home leave, to save travel costs and time away from the job. Again, Polyshchuk told his CIA case officers that such an arrangement was routine. The only problem was that he didn’t have the 20,000 rubles.

The CIA could give him the money, he said, and he’d carry it with him to Moscow. He would never be searched.

SE Division accepted Polyshchuk’s explanation with few reservations. The story made sense. For the CIA, there seemed to be an added benefit; here was another chance to coax Polyshchuk into working in Moscow. He had given a variety of excuses about why he had failed to reestablish contact after he had returned to Moscow from Katmandu. But it was clear that he had been afraid of the risks.

This time, the CIA believed it had a great way to convince Polyshchuk to unload a dead drop in Moscow and, in effect, get his operational feet wet. To get his 20,000 rubles, then worth about $30,000, Polyshchuk would have to get it at a Moscow dead drop.

The CIA officers persuaded Polyshchuk that it would be too risky to carry the cash through customs at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. He’d be much safer picking it up after he arrived clean in Moscow. Polyshchuk finally agreed, and by May 10, the CIA had identified a dead drop site in Moscow that could be used in the operation.

Polyshchuk left his last meeting with his handlers in Lagos in high spirits.

Krassilnikov thought back over Polyshchuk’s arrest. He recalled how officers of the Seventh Chief Directorate, acting under the direction of the Second Directorate, had arrested Polyshchuk while he was picking up the money-filled rock at the Moscow dead drop site. The Americans must be second-guessing the decision to have him pick up his money in Moscow. They would be wondering what went wrong for quite some time.

Krassilnikov would forever insist that the men of the Second and Seventh Directorates deserved the credit. One of his subordinates had come to him and said that his men could feel that the Americans were about to go operational. Krassilnikov had agreed to put whatever resources were necessary on the Americans and deferred to his number two, Valentin Klimenko, to manage those resources.

On the night that a CIA officer had placed a rock full of rubles near a pylon, leaving it there for Polyshchuk to pick up later, Klimenko had more than twenty surveillance vehicles and forty surveillance personnel following him. With so many resources, the men of the Second and Seventh Directorates were able to stand off more than five hundred meters at all times. After watching the CIA officer leave the cash-filled rock, it was just a matter of waiting and watching at the dead drop site to see who showed up.

The KGB would make certain that the CIA got the message that Polyshchuk had been unmasked thanks solely to solid legwork by the Second and Seventh Chief Directorates. In Washington and Bonn, and perhaps elsewhere in the West, KGB officers were told that a drunken KGB colonel had been arrested after he was followed and watched, and the news soon got to the CIA from its agents inside those KGB Rezidenturas.

But the CIA never quite believed it. Was the story KGB disinformation? What about the fact that Polyshchuk’s long-sought apartment in Moscow had suddenly become available? Had it been a ruse to lure him back to Moscow?

   10   

Coventry, Virginia, August 15, 1985

Moving Yurchenko to a secluded safe house near Fredericksburg, Virginia, well outside the twenty-five-mile travel limit for Soviet diplomats posted in Washington, brought a sense of order to his debriefings. The large, single-family house, isolated on several waterfront acres, offered an ideal setting for the case. In Oakton, Medanich had grown frustrated with the espionage tourists, but they were unlikely to make the long drive to Fredericksburg. Now, only the intelligence officials who had real business with Yurchenko would show up.

The KGB colonel had settled into something of a routine, and the debriefings had eased into the steady pace known in the trade as “counterintelligence production.” Yurchenko was living up to his early promise. The flurry of activity over his identification of Edward Lee Howard as a probable KGB agent had calmed after the FBI was finally brought in on the case. Though the bureau had still not arrested—or even interviewed—the troubled former CIA officer, he was now under surveillance.

The second KGB agent Yurchenko had mentioned, an NSA employee who had volunteered to the KGB in Washington in 1980, was still unidentified. But it was clear that the NSA source had betrayed the U.S. Navy’s supersensitive undersea cable tap of Soviet submarine command communications—Operation Ivy Bells, an enormously