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

Eventually, the logjam in the Daniloff case broke. On September 12, the two governments agreed to arrange for both Daniloff and Zakharov to be released from prison and held in the custody of their own embassies. Finally, on September 29, Daniloff was allowed to leave the Soviet Union without facing trial. He quickly left for Frankfurt and then the United States. Zakharov was released by the United States the next day. The Reagan administration faced a brief spate of criticism for allowing the Soviets to link the two cases, but the crisis had been defused.

With tensions rising in the wake of the Daniloff-Zakharov showdown, the intelligence war between Washington and Moscow finally burst into the open and took on a diplomatic life of its own. On September 17, the United States ordered twenty-five Soviet diplomats at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations to leave the country; the Reagan administration said they were intelligence officers. On October 19, the Soviets ordered five American diplomats out of Moscow in retaliation. The tit-for-tat expulsions and declarations that spies were persona non grata soon escalated into what became known inside the CIA as the “PNG war.” By the end of October, fifty-five Soviet diplomats had been ordered out of Washington. Since the CIA presence in Moscow and Leningrad was so much smaller than the KGB’s staff in Washington, New York, and San Francisco, the Soviets had a hard time retaliating in kind.

But they finally responded by pulling out the 260 Soviet employees who handled cleaning, cooking, and other day-to-day chores at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The KGB’s move was inspired; it virtually paralyzed the embassy. Even though the Americans knew their local employees reported back to the KGB, they still relied on their Russian servants to help them navigate the nightmarish Moscow bureaucracy and keep the embassy functioning.

The retaliatory expulsions had a dramatic effect on the CIA’s ability to conduct operations in Moscow. With the departure of Murat Natirboff, Gerber asked Jack Downing to return to Moscow as the new chief. Downing had been deputy chief in the late 1970s and had handled the TRIGON case, and Gerber wanted someone with extensive experience in Moscow to help rebuild after the 1985 losses. Downing had already served as Beijing chief, so he would now become the first man in CIA history to run CIA operations in the two capitals of world Communism.

The PNG war forced Downing to delay his transfer; the CIA didn’t want him to arrive just in time to be expelled. After months waiting out the battle at headquarters, Downing finally moved to Moscow in November, only to find that the withdrawal of the embassy’s Russian staff made it nearly impossible to get anything done. Before long, Downing was spending his days washing the ambassador’s car and handling other cleaning chores rather than spying on the KGB. With virtually all of its agents rolled up and the CIA chief running errands for the ambassador, the CIA’s Moscow operation was all but out of business.

First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, Late August 1986

The hall talkers out at Yasenevo agreed on one thing about their chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov: He had “grown taller” in the last few months. And he had grown bolder. Kryuchkov seemed to have new confidence in his stewardship at Yasenevo. And his growing relationship with the new General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, was also part of the buzz. The lackluster First Directorate chief of the last several years was beginning to look to some like a new force.

Evidence of Kryuchkov’s new operational energy began to manifest itself in small but important ways. For as long as he had been engaged in intelligence operations against Americans, Val Aksilenko had known that there was a hard-and-fast rule of thumb inside the KGB. If your American agent was polygraphed by the CIA or FBI, you could write him off. He could never be trusted again, because chances were he’d been broken and then doubled back against you. This view had been unyielding dogma for decades. Now, word was filtering down from above—Aksilenko first heard it from his boss in the American Department, Anatoly Flavnov—that the polygraph policy was no longer hard and fast. It had evolved to the point where under the “right conditions,” an American could go through the polygraph grinder and still be trusted by Moscow Center. Aksilenko was taken aback by the course change on the polygraph. What had prompted the change? he wondered. Had the technical people come up with a way to beat the polygraph? Had someone actually beaten the machine?

KGB Headquarters, Lubyanka, August 30, 1986

From the moment of his arrest on July 6, 1985, Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov had instantly understood that his long journey was finally over. There was no more need for evasion, no need to worry about the next knock on the door.

The original investigation of Polyakov was triggered by the first tip to the GRU from Robert Hanssen in 1979. Polyakov had been recalled and had been forced to retire, but a KGB counterintelligence general had intervened, arguing that a general in the Red Army simply could not be a spy. A proposal devised by Rem Krassilnikov to unmask Polyakov as a traitor had been turned down, and the investigation was put on ice.

The general went into retirement. And while questions lingered, the case gradually receded into the background. Polyakov settled into his new life puttering around his dacha, tending to his grandchildren, and engaging in one of his passions, woodworking and cabinetmaking.

Five years later, the last missing piece snapped into place. The KGB finally had the goods on the GRU general, straight from its new source in Langley, Virginia.

Polyakov had known instinctively that he was being called in for his final reckoning when he received a summons on July 4 to attend a retirement ceremony at GRU headquarters in Moscow two days later. He was suspicious of the pretext, and his son, Peter, now an