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

“Right at the top,” Clair George shot back.

“It’s easy enough,” Redmond said. “We create an agent someplace and begin reporting on him by cable. We create another phony agent and send someone to Moscow to talk it up.” Gerber had called Redmond into his office to work out a strategy for running the traps to try to detect a penetration somewhere along the line. He asked me to join them. “Then we wait to see if anything happens. If either one gets rolled up, we’ve got a problem on the line we’re testing. If they don’t, we’re no better or worse off than we are now. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth it.”

Gerber agreed and told Redmond to start setting things up. He would create two Soviet spies who never were.

Nairobi, Kenya, December 1985

I flew to Kenya under an alias and took a room opening onto an inner garden at the venerable Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. An hour after my arrival, there was a light knock at the door and I quickly ushered in the CIA chief in Nairobi, the agency’s preeminent Africa hand, Bill Moseby, and his deputy, Dave Lameroux. Moseby had been alerted through a back channel that I would be “passing through” Nairobi and that I’d be staying at the Norfolk under an alias. He’d been told to contact me there.

A descendant of the Confederate cavalryman who led Moseby’s Raiders in the Civil War, Bill Moseby had spent most of his career in Africa. With his tailored safari suits and his waxed and twirled mustache, he looked more like a colonial plantation owner than one of the most accomplished CIA managers on the continent. Blind in one eye and deaf in one ear from two different accidents, Moseby was nevertheless an avid hunter, and he often sported a faint half-moon indentation on his forehead, caused by the kick from a recoiling telescopic sight lined up awkwardly with his good eye.

“What can I do for you, bwana?” Moseby said, using the greeting he reserved for fellow veterans of the CIA’s African operations, of which I was one.

I silently shook hands with Lameroux, a former Air Force navigator with whom I’d entered on duty two decades earlier, and turned up the volume on my television set. After pulling chairs together, we leaned in close and I began my whispered briefing.

“I’ll give you the facts. We’ve been losing assets in Moscow, and Soviet assets around the world, one by one for the last seven or eight months. It can’t be natural attrition. It’s got to be something else.”

“What’s Nairobi got to do with it?” Moseby asked.

“Nothing really, except that you’ve got an obnoxious colonel running the GRU Rezidentura. And we’d like to use him for a little test.”

Moseby and Lameroux looked at each other quizzically. “That jerk? He’s all yours. But how?”

“You’ve had enough casual contact with the colonel for it to be common knowledge both here and back at Moscow Center. You and I are going to create an operation over the next few days that will make it look like he’s decided to work for us. When we’re finished, it will look like he’s a CIA asset.

“We’re going to kick this off with a restricted handling cable, reporting that you arranged for me to contact the colonel. We’ll say in the cable that he approached you and wanted to talk to someone from Langley. You accommodated him. I came out here to make the pitch. Then we send the next RH cable reporting the pitch, saying he accepts. From that point on we start a tightly controlled and graduated operation using special communications channels to test for a penetration at key points along the line back to Gerber and SE.”

“How will you know when your trap’s been sprung?” Moseby asked.

“When they throw your colonel on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow with his hands tied behind his back.”

“How many people are going to read the traffic on this?”

“Not too many at first. A handful. We’ll start with the short list. Then we’ll broaden it out.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Yes, bwana”—Moseby smiled—“if you get lucky, the colonel’s luck runs out.”

“That’s right,” I said. “But if you tell us he’s been dragged back home, we’ll start moving pretty fast on our end. We’ll find our problem before they do anything permanent. If we find our penetration, we’ll tell ’em. Gerber and Hathaway will go see the KGB and say, ‘Oh, by the way, your GRU colonel from Nairobi is actually an okay guy. We just had to set him up for this little experiment.’”

“Will they buy that?” Lameroux asked.

“Probably. They’re picky about those things. We’re assuming that your buddy wouldn’t confess. And without a confession they don’t move all that fast. This isn’t going to be a career enhancement for him, but he’ll be okay.”

“When do we start?” Moseby asked.

“How about now?” I said, taking a legal pad from my suitcase.

Langley, Mid-December 1985

Paul Redmond read the cable from Nairobi carefully. It was a three-page account of the meeting Moseby had ostensibly arranged for me with the GRU Rezident in Nairobi. The cable arrived at the special communications center just before the opening of business, and two copies had been couriered to Gerber’s office. Redmond had been called to the front office to read one of the two copies reserved for the chief of the SE Division. Beyond that, only two other copies of the cable from Nairobi had been couriered to the seventh-floor office of the DDO, where they would be read by the DDO and his two executive officers. The total count of people with access to the cable traffic this first go-round would be limited to seven, including Gerber’s secretary. Then Redmond would slowly begin casting the net wider.

   18   

Moscow, Early January 1986

Rem Krassilnikov had another “guest” in Lefortovo Prison, a KGB major from a local Moscow city district. The lead to this new spy had been handed down from above, providing Krassilnikov