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

handicrafts bound for Leningrad, where it would be forwarded to an address in West Germany.

When KGB investigators opened the container, they found stacks of cardboard boxes carefully packed with ceramic flower pots, all innocent enough. But after removing the first two rows of cardboard boxes, they came upon a wooden partition. When they pulled that back, they found what Krassilnikov would describe to his superiors as a “miracle laboratory.” Concealed cameras were trained through narrow slits disguised as ventilation ports on either side of the container. These fed into computers attached to a sophisticated collection of scientific sensors. An arduous KGB analysis of the equipment would reveal its high-tech Cold War mission—to sense sources of radioactivity across the vast expanse of the USSR. The KGB found that the equipment could register the intensity, spectral composition, and total dose of neutron and gamma radiation; establish the location of the reading, the atmospheric pressure, and the temperature at the time of the sampling; and link this data to panoramic photography taken simultaneously through the ventilation slits. The KGB concluded that the “miracle laboratory” had the capability of mapping the geographic locations of nuclear weapons production, storage, and transport points across the expanse of the Soviet Union. The sensors were found to be capable of identifying a nuclear warhead with one kilo of plutonium within a radius of ten meters. The KGB scientists estimated that the system could function for up to three months on its own power sources and that there could be only one possible intelligence service behind container #CTIV-1317221—the American Central Intelligence Agency.

Krassilnikov, convinced that the discovery in Nakhodka could be used to great advantage in the battle against the American special services, recommended a major propaganda exposé. To his surprise, the suggestion was received with a cool silence, a disappointment he attributed to the fact that Eduard Shevardnadze was Foreign Minister at the time and earnestly engaged in “new thinking.” But Krassilnikov was not willing to give up quite so easily on his discovery.

Langley, Late February 1986

I read the cable from Tokyo and wondered how long it would take for the SE world to come unstuck again. I had my answer when I saw Paul Redmond at my door.

“They got ABSORB,” Redmond said without emotion, the way a man does when he no longer has any doubts.

“Yeah,” I said, tossing the Tokyo cable into my out box. “Was Howard read in on the operation?”

“Shouldn’t have been. But who the hell keeps secrets around this place anymore?”

“Can we find out?” I asked.

“We’re looking at it.”

“What are you thinking?”

Redmond paused. “You know what I’m thinking.”

Moscow, March 10, 1986

Michael Sellers had met GTCOWL only once, almost exactly one year earlier. During that first meeting, a two-hour-long walking conversation as the two men furtively navigated Moscow’s back streets and alleys, the KGB man never revealed his identity. He said he knew how closely the KGB tracked American CIA officers in Moscow and didn’t want to take any chances with his own security. Sellers knew him only by the name they’d agreed to use—“Stas.”

Stas had first volunteered in 1984, when he dropped an envelope through the open window of the car of an American embassy official as he walked by. The CIA eventually sent an officer to contact him, but the officer who managed to break free of surveillance that night couldn’t understand the volunteer’s Russian, and the meeting had been a bust. The failure of that first meeting fueled a debate back at CIA headquarters about whether the Soviet was a real volunteer.

COWL was gruff, and even an excellent Russian speaker like Sellers found him difficult to understand. Sellers took him to be from the Second Chief Directorate’s local counterintelligence forces in Moscow. He was the Moscow version of a New York cop, a Soviet Popeye Doyle. He made no bones about what he wanted. It was money, and he wasn’t shy about the cynicism of his approach. He grew impatient whenever Sellers, who was wearing a tape recorder, asked him to repeat or clarify something.

But the man knew plenty about the KGB’s tracking of CIA operations in Moscow, and as the two spies cautiously made their way through the city’s darkened streets, COWL warned Sellers that he wouldn’t provide the CIA with documents that could be traced back to him, and he demanded that any money passed to him come from “clean” sources outside the Soviet Union and be placed in packages that were never opened by CIA officers in Moscow.

Sellers and COWL had worked out a careful communications plan to set up future meetings. COWL gave Sellers a phone number to call at prearranged times, with ten-minute windows he declared as “safe.” The CIA later concluded it was a KGB duty phone line, one that couldn’t be traced to any specific individual in the KGB. COWL would arrange to be the only officer at that number at the prescheduled times, and the CIA would call with prearranged, innocuous-sounding messages.

After one meeting, COWL dropped out of sight for several months. He failed to respond to one call but eventually responded to another call-out in March 1986. Sellers was sent out to meet him.

On the night of March 10, Sellers thought he had broken free of surveillance for his late-night run by pulling off an identity transfer with another embassy employee. Later, when he was “black” on Moscow’s icy streets, he quickly changed into Russian street clothes and melted into the flow of Muscovites on their way home.

The meeting site was an alleyway between two Stalinist apartment blocks not far from Moscow’s Lenin Hills district. Sellers arrived at the meeting site at 10:30 P.M., and as he got to within twenty feet of COWL, he could sense something was very wrong. COWL had lost weight and, it seemed to Sellers, his tough-guy swagger. When he began to speak, he could only stammer. The man was a ghost of his former self, and in that instant Sellers braced himself for what he