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

officer in the GRU, heightened that suspicion when he told his father he thought he’d spotted stakeout surveillance on the narrow road near their dacha. Polyakov told his son to keep his concerns to himself. He didn’t want to spoil the weekend gathering of his family for his sixty-fifth birthday.

The arrest on Monday morning was full of well-practiced fury. As he entered GRU headquarters in full dress uniform, decorations arranged neatly across his breast, he was seized by five men. One held his head in a hammerlock while the other four stripped his tunic and shirt from his chest in case he’d hidden a suicide pill in a seam. Dmitri Polyakov put up no resistance. He simply stood there, leaning his weight against the men who held him in their viselike grip. Polyakov was stripped naked and quickly examined for concealed “special preparations.” He was then dressed in a blue KGB running suit, handcuffed, and advised of the charges against him. His sole request was that his wife and sons be spared any suspicion or indignity.

As the interrogations began, Polyakov offered no apologies. He declared that he’d had ample opportunity to leave the USSR, but he’d never considered that an option. Everything he had done had been for the Russian people, not against them. Whatever was to become of him, he told his interrogators without emotion, was his own cross to bear. And he would bear it with honor. That, too, would be part of his contribution to bringing about a revolution in thinking in the USSR. He was a social democrat of the European sort, he said. That had been the reason for his struggle over the decades. Now his death would be another part of his struggle.

Polyakov’s story came out smoothly and without reservation. He told it all, in great detail, and with an element of pride that unsettled his interrogators. Never wavering from his conviction that he had done the right thing, he repeatedly said he would do it again, faced with the same choices.

Born in the Ukraine in 1921, Polyakov graduated from the Soviet Military Academy at Frunze in time to see combat as an artillery officer in World War II, an experience burned into his consciousness and which defined him as one of the generation that held back the Third Reich. After World War II, Polyakov shifted into military intelligence, serving an early posting to the GRU Rezidentura in New York in the 1950s. After a tour of duty at GRU headquarters in Moscow, Polyakov returned to New York in 1961 for a second stretch as a GRU spy. By this time he had concluded that the suffering and sacrifice of the Russian people during the Great Patriotic War had been betrayed by the corruption and sheer evil of the Soviet system. It was during this time that he crossed the line and volunteered his services to the FBI, launching a dual life that would span almost three decades—that of a rising star in the GRU and that of a man the FBI and CIA called TOP HAT, ROAM, BOURBON, and BEEP.

The CIA became the primary agency handling Dmitri Polyakov during his assignment to Burma in 1966. As with so many before him, his decision to take a stand against the Soviet system would ultimately bring him before the executioner in a darkened Moscow sub-basement.

Polyakov was promoted to the rank of general in 1974, an upward move that gave him access to a wealth of information on everything from long-range military planning to nuclear strategy to research and production of chemical and biological warfare agents. By the time he dropped from sight in 1980, Dmitri Polyakov had provided American intelligence with the most voluminous and detailed reporting on the Red Army of the entire Cold War.

Polyakov gave his interrogators details of his work as a spy without signs of regret, and his demeanor soon became a source of discomfort for some within the KGB’s inner circle. He had not been motivated by greed. Polyakov had accepted only small gifts from the Americans—a few shotguns and rifles, some woodworking tools, and what amounted to little more than pocket money. He hadn’t done it for revenge, either. He had done his part, he maintained to the end, because he could not allow the USSR to win its war against the Russian people.

   21   

Moscow, 1500 Hours, October 22, 1986

The announcement was in the standard language of the Soviet apparatus:

Tass is authorized to announce that as already had been reported, the USSR State Security Committee exposed Adolf Tolkachev, an employee of a Moscow research institute, as an agent of U.S. intelligence and started criminal proceedings against him.

It was established during the course of the investigation that Tolkachev, in pursuit of selfish ends and on account of his hostile attitude to the Soviet state, had maintained espionage contacts with U.S. intelligence agents who had been in Moscow under the guise of U.S. embassy personnel.

The military collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, which examined the criminal case filed against Tolkachev, found him guilty of high treason in the form of espionage, and, considering the gravity of his crime, sentenced him to the exceptional measure of punishment, death.

The presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet rejected Tolkachev’s appeal for clemency.

The sentence has been carried out.

Langley, 1530 Hours, October 30, 1986

It was anticlimactic, Paul Redmond thought as he read the report confirming what he had known all along. Valeriy Martynov and Sergey Motorin had been arrested, the report said. They had been tried and convicted and were to be executed for espionage. The report stated that the men had been arrested in 1985, almost a full year earlier. The FBI told Redmond a few months back that Motorin had called his girlfriend in Washington to let her know he was fine. That had knocked Redmond off balance momentarily, but now he was more convinced than ever that an elaborate deception was under way designed for just one purpose—to protect a