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

was taking on the Russian boys who were being sent out to the front. After five years as the newsmagazine’s Moscow bureau chief, Daniloff was closing out his tour in the Soviet Union and was about to head home to Washington. His successor, Jeff Trimble, was already in Moscow.

On the embankment near the Moscow River, Daniloff gave Misha a package of Stephen King novels—works by the master of horror were hard to come by in the Soviet Union. In return, Misha handed Daniloff a tightly wrapped package that he said included photographs taken in Afghanistan. Misha had given Daniloff photographs taken by Russian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan before, and though the pictures had been of such poor quality that they’d been of little use for the magazine, Daniloff still felt that Misha had helped him understand the terrors that were haunting Russian soldiers being sent off to fight the Afghan rebels.

Daniloff was walking back to his apartment in Leninsky Prospekt, with the package of photographs from Misha in a white plastic bag dangling at his side, when a van suddenly pulled up next to him and a group of men in civilian clothes quickly enveloped him. Without a word, two of the men grabbed him, forced his arms behind his back, handcuffed him, and pushed him into the van. As the van sped off, Nicholas Daniloff felt like a disembodied observer who had just witnessed his own arrest. He was still trying to sort through the fog of what was happening to him as the KGB van pulled into gate of Lefortovo Prison.

Daniloff’s arrest immediately generated international headlines as the Western press corps railed against the Soviet decision to hold a foreign correspondent. The incident ballooned into a diplomatic crisis, one that threatened an upcoming summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviets quickly made it clear to the Americans that the Daniloff and Zakharov cases were linked, further complicating the Reagan administration’s efforts to free the journalist. Public diplomacy was set in motion: U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze met to try to reach a compromise in time to save the summit.

Meanwhile, Daniloff, in jail and facing repeated interrogations, soon realized that “Misha from Frunze” wasn’t the KGB’s only concern. Before long, the Soviets began to ask him about Father Roman Potemkin—and the CIA.

Knowing that it had left Daniloff exposed as a result of the botched Father Roman affair from the year before, the CIA secretly contacted the KGB while Daniloff was in prison and set up a quiet meeting in Vienna to talk about the case. To contact the Soviets, Burton Gerber activated the “Gavrilov channel,” a secret communications line first established between the CIA and KGB in 1983.

The Gavrilov channel, named after a nineteenth-century Russian poet, had been the KGB’s idea. The Soviets had approached the Americans in the most straightforward way possible: They knocked on the apartment door of Carl Gephardt, the CIA’s Moscow chief in 1983. But Gephardt wouldn’t open the door, so the KGB’s message initially went unanswered.

When Gephardt reported the contact to Langley, however, the KGB’s proposal reached Bill Casey. Burton Gerber, who’d returned from Moscow the year before and was then serving as deputy in the European Division, was called into a meeting with Casey and others to decide whether to respond. Gerber told Casey that he thought they should meet with the KGB. The agency had nothing to lose by hearing what the Soviets wanted to talk about. Casey came around and asked Gerber to go do it himself.

Gerber wanted another CIA officer as a witness, so Gus Hathaway, the head of counterintelligence, went along, too.

The first meeting took place at the Soviet embassy in Vienna and opened with a scene straight out of the movies. As Gerber and Hathaway walked up to the entrance, the front gate to the embassy compound slowly swung open, before they’d even had a chance to ring the bell.

Soon, Gerber and other CIA officials were meeting on a semiregular basis with their KGB counterparts, usually in Vienna, a city where the Soviets felt particularly comfortable. The two sides used the Gavrilov line to tamp down potential crises between the two intelligence services, as well as to discuss ways they might actually find some common ground. One area the CIA pursued was counterterrorism: The Americans asked the Soviets for help in trying to find out what had happened to William Buckley, the CIA chief in Beirut who had been kidnapped and tortured. Buckley eventually died in captivity, and the Soviets never provided any help on the matter.

The Gavrilov channel remained open until the Reagan White House tried to exploit it for political and diplomatic purposes, over Burton Gerber’s strong objections. When Gerber was told to activate the Gavrilov channel to talk to the Soviets about a particularly sensitive diplomatic issue, he at first refused, arguing that Gavrilov had been established purely for the two professional intelligence services to hash things out. He knew that the KGB would object to its use as a diplomatic back channel. But he was told that the National Security Council had issued orders for him to do it anyway. In the end, he went to the meeting with the KGB in Vienna and passed on the message as he was directed. But just as he had predicted, the Soviets responded badly, and the Gavrilov channel was suspended for years afterward.

Before that breakdown, however, Gerber was able to use the Gavrilov channel to arrange a meeting in Vienna with Anatoly Tikhonevich Kireyev, the formidable chief of counterintelligence for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Gerber needed to talk with Kireyev about the Daniloff mess.

Gerber’s message to Kireyev was simple: Daniloff was not a spy and had nothing to do with the CIA. At the end of the meeting, Kireyev casually asked Gerber a telling question.

“Did you ever meet Father Roman?”

“No.”

“You’re lucky.” Kireyev sighed. “He was a pain in the ass.”

It was just one more