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

In one large, double-lined plastic shopping bag, Stombaugh carried cash bundles totaling 125,000 rubles in small notes, equivalent to almost $150,000. The bag also contained five new compact subminiature cameras concealed in key chain fobs, all preloaded with microfilm, sealed, and set to a precise focal length. The cameras and their settings had received extra attention for this meeting, after the last series of documents failed to develop properly. The problem with the last batch raised the tension for tonight’s meeting considerably.

The second shopping bag was packed with American medicine and glasses for Tolkachev and his wife, English-language tapes for their son, books with concealed messages, “intelligence-reporting requirements”—Soviet secrets the CIA wanted Tolkachev to try to steal—and communications plans, printed on water-soluble paper for added security. The bags were so heavy that the plastic handles had started to stretch during Stombaugh’s long run, and he was beginning to worry about them. Everything he carried was compromising—fatally so for the man he was to meet.

Stombaugh thought his SDR—surveillance detection route—had gone well. Neither he nor his wife, Betsy, had seen anything threatening during their run. After Betsy dropped him off, he continued on his long SDR. By the time he arrived, Stombaugh was confident that he was now “black”—free of surveillance: Moscow was his.

Moscow, 2025 Hours, June 13, 1985

Five minutes, Krassilnikov thought. And then, with lights suddenly blazing, the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate would once again capture an American spy trawling Moscow’s streets, gravely threatening the security of the USSR. Another in a remarkable string of successes for Soviet counterintelligence.

Krassilnikov had never been a man of doubts, not about himself, not about the Soviet Union. He was the son of an NKVD general, a true believer in Lenin’s dream. Flush with revolutionary zeal in the 1920s, his parents had named him Rem, an acronym for the Russian phrase Revolutsky Mir—the Soviet system’s loftiest goal, World Revolution. Rem Krassilnikov had proudly followed his father’s footsteps into the NKVD’s successor organization, the KGB. After training in En-glish and in the crafts of Soviet intelligence, he had been sent abroad as an officer in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, responsible for the KGB’s foreign intelligence operations.

Along the way he had married a woman of stout Communist Party pedigree, whose parents had named her Ninel—a popular name in the 1920s, fashioned by spelling Lenin backward. Krassilnikov was moving up in the KGB after stints in Ottawa and Beirut. In Beirut, he had been aggressive enough to try a “cold pitch” recruitment of a rising CIA star, John MacGaffin, who dismissed the attempt. But Krassilnikov eventually came home to Moscow and the world of counterintelligence in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. By the mid-1980s, he had established himself as a legend, a man of exquisite patience, adept at the hidden art of blunting the attacks from Glavniy Vrag, the Main Enemy, the KGB’s term for the United States and the CIA. Within the KGB, Krassilnikov was now called, with some reverence, the “professor of counterintelligence.”

Krassilnikov had for a time been chief of the Second Chief Directorate’s Second Department, which investigated the activities of British intelligence in the USSR. He had become close to two of Britain’s most notorious spies who had defected to Moscow, the legendary Kim Philby and the lesser-known but nearly equally damaging George Blake. His contacts with Philby and Blake gave him a new understanding of his adversaries; lessons he learned from them would serve him well when he moved up to head the Second Chief Directorate’s First Department, the counterintelligence arm responsible for thwarting American operations against the USSR.

For the past six years, Krassilnikov had been engaged in a laborious chess match with American intelligence. But over the past few months, the battle had intensified, and Krassilnikov felt he had begun to clear his opponent’s board. Suddenly the Second Chief Directorate was marching from victory to victory, and there was a new excitement in counterintelligence.

Krassilnikov believed, with all his heart and soul, that these successes were due largely to the brilliant investigative techniques of the Second Chief Directorate along Moscow’s streets. His men had the CIA in Moscow on the run.

Of course, he admitted grudgingly, they had received some help from the First Chief Directorate. The foreign intelligence boys at Yasenevo seemed to have lately come into some remarkably accurate information. He never questioned the First Chief Directorate about the source of its information—such things could be learned only over time from the “wall talkers” lined up at the urinals used by senior KGB officers—but it seemed obvious to him that the KGB had a mole somewhere inside the CIA’s inner sanctum. And a good one. Maybe even more than one.

But even the best tips from foreign spies had to be run to ground, and fully investigated, by the men of the Second Chief Directorate. Only then could an American spy be caught. Krassilnikov was painfully aware of the fact that the Second Chief Directorate never got the credit it deserved.

The First Chief Directorate’s insufferably smug attitude soon evaporated as stories about betrayals within its own ranks began to circulate. In May, the acting Rezident of the KGB’s London Rezidentura, Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, came under suspicion of being a spy for the British Secret Intelligence Service. He was lured back to Moscow by an elaborate ruse and was undergoing interrogation at a KGB safe house. The KGB rumor mill had it that Gordievsky’s interrogators were using drugs to get him to admit his treachery, but so far without success.

Within days of the Gordievsky compromise, a GRU colonel, Sergei Bokhan, in the military intelligence Rezidentura in the Soviet embassy in Athens, came under suspicion of spying for the CIA. He, too, was asked to return to Moscow on an elaborate ruse, but he sensed he was in danger and made a run for it.

Vladimir Sharavatov tapped lightly and opened the sliding door of the van. “Narziss is moving.”

“It’s time to take the walk