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

Oh, shit, Sellers said to himself. Here it comes.

Suddenly, glaring lights lit up the street, and men came running from all directions. The arrest, Sellers thought, was straight out of the movies. He was thrown into the back of a van by a small army of KGB security men, and GTCOWL disappeared in the blur.

In the back of the van, the KGB men, talking among themselves in Russian—perhaps not realizing how well Sellers could understand them—appeared confused as to whom they had just arrested. Finally, one of the security men reached over to Sellers, and as he pulled off his fake mustache, a look of recognition flashed across his face.

“Ah, Misha!” the man exclaimed, using the Russian diminutive of Michael. The CIA disguise was better than they had anticipated. The security men noticed the mud on Sellers’s shoes, and they began debating in Russian how he could possibly have gotten out of the embassy and disguised himself as a Russian worker without anyone on the surveillance stakeout team noticing him.

The van drove Sellers and his minders to an annex of Lubyanka Prison—the interrogation office at #2 Dzerzhinsky.

Sellers spent only a few hours in interrogation. By 2:30 A.M., Stuart Parker, a counselor officer in the American embassy, had arrived to take him home. But during those few hours, Sellers had sparred with Rem Krassilnikov, trying to parry each question from the KGB’s gray ghost. Normally, CIA officers were told to say nothing while under arrest, except to declare diplomatic immunity and ask to see a counselor officer from the embassy. Sellers knew the game, but he couldn’t resist giving a few jabs, especially since he could speak Russian with his captors. When Krassilnikov told Sellers that his arrest would damage his career with the CIA, Sellers told him he was wrong; it wouldn’t hurt his career at the agency. Perhaps to encourage Sellers to keep talking, Krassilnikov tried to switch to small talk, describing the little details of his life known to the KGB. He was the goaltender on the American embassy’s broom ball team—what did he think about American hockey versus Russian hockey? But in trying to keep Sellers engaged, Krassilnikov revealed some interesting facts. It became clear to Sellers that the KGB didn’t know how he had gotten out of his apartment for his meeting. The KGB still didn’t have a good understanding of the CIA’s identity transfer techniques, and finding Sellers at the arrest scene had puzzled them; his watchers thought he was still in his apartment.

It wasn’t until long after his arrest that Sellers learned COWL’s real identity: Sergey Vorontsov.

Langley, March 11, 1986

The “mornings of compromise” were becoming an unsettling routine. The notification of the COWL ambush had arrived the previous evening, and everyone at the staff meeting was aware of what had happened in Moscow the night before. Redmond poked his head in my office on the way to Gerber’s office for yet another briefing on a compromise in Moscow.

“Let’s go to the morning miseries,” I finally told him.

Yasenevo, USSR, March 12, 1986

Valentin Aksilenko sat in his fifth-floor office in the First Chief Directorate’s American Department, pondering a string of strange occurrences. Since he’d left the Washington Rezidentura three years earlier, he had been the headquarters branch chief watching over the KGB’s foreign intelligence operations in Washington. And watching Washington was getting more curious for Val Aksilenko, a big, thoughtful man with thinning red hair. At forty-five, he had done well for himself and for the KGB, and during his five-year tour in Washington he had been promoted to colonel in the KGB’s Line PR—political intelligence. But now it seemed that the familiar world he had taken for granted had slipped its axis. He felt increasingly uneasy, but he couldn’t put his finger on the source of his discomfort. Probably it was his own problems, he thought. His marriage was falling apart. Maybe it was a combination of things. Even the job he thought he understood so well was becoming increasingly opaque. Things were happening that he couldn’t account for or understand.

The anomalies had begun last June, when the American was arrested. Contradictory reports began to surface regarding the identity of the Soviet traitor he had been trying to meet, but the only common thread in the competing stories was the spy’s first name—Adolf. It seemed that people at the top wanted the name to stick out. Maybe it was because this Adolf was arrested a month after the celebrations commemorating the end of the Great Patriotic War. But there was another message in the dogged use of the spy’s name, which some thought might even be a phony name cooked up by the KGB leadership. But why?

Then, in September 1985, stories began making the rounds at Yasenevo that a fellow First Directorate officer had been caught red-handed by the boys in the Second and Seventh Directorates unloading a dead drop in Moscow—a rock full of rubles was what they were saying. It took a while for the man’s name to surface, but eventually the rumor mill pointed to a Line KR officer on leave from Lagos.

Then there was the story of the incredible escape of Gordievsky while under active investigation. Contradictory facts were still being leaked out on that case, too, mostly in the form of finger-pointing between the intelligence and the counterintelligence directorates. Speculation as to how he had escaped and who had helped him was rampant. Some were convinced that the American special services must have been in on it with the British. Others thought Dzerzhinsky Square—KGB headquarters—had been part of the conspiracy. But there was nothing official on any of this from the top. They were staying very quiet.

On top of that, there was the lingering problem of Vitaly Yurchenko, who had come home to Moscow a hero, complete with an honor guard. The trouble was that nobody believed his story.

The Yurchenko affair was an affront to most officers in the First Directorate, who knew that