“The Soviets left the impression that the response to any future attacks would be at their source, meaning here in Pakistan. I doubt the Soviets hinted at attacking the United States.” For the first time in our conversation, Hamid Gul smiled, but his smile was full of irony and a little pain.
“I have no idea what was said, General. I can only guarantee you that there was a certain level of excitement.”
“Yes, a certain level of excitement.” Gul smiled again. “I’ve ordered it stopped immediately,” he repeated, and I thought I detected in his words a hint of an admission that he might not be fully in control.
“Will it stop?” I pressed.
“Yes,” he said resolutely. “The effort will be stopped. How quickly is another matter.”
Gul was finally opening up. He would, no doubt, follow orders. It was clear that he had inherited a problem, one in which he didn’t have a great personal stake. But it was also clear that he had been on the job long enough to have difficulty blaming everything on his predecessor, who, in any case, was very much under the protection of Zia.
“General,” I said, “we’re going to have to work closely together as we bring this war to some sort of a conclusion. And we’ll have to be willing to meet in executive sessions and to be as open with each other as we have been today. If Brigadier Yousaf had been with us, I doubt that we could have been as frank with each other.”
“You’re right, Milton,” Gul said. “We’ll have to keep our eyes on both the war and the politics.”
I left that meeting understanding that the armor officer was still at the low end of his learning curve. But I saw something in his eyes that told me he would take to the political side of the job, maybe even come to like it one day.
A day later, I received the first of a series of discreet telephone calls from Gul’s predecessor, General Akhtar. Would I be free for a quiet dinner at his quarters in Rawalpindi Cantonment that evening, just the two of us? I said I would.
Rawalpindi, Late April 1987
Akhtar had not moved into the quarters reserved for the chairman of the joint staffs in Rawalpindi Cantonment. He preferred instead to stay put in his old quarters because of their proximity to Zia’s residence. He received me in the driveway of his colonial bungalow and accompanied me to his dining room, where we had a working dinner of chicken tikka, creamed spinach qorma, seekh kabob, and dal, along with freshly made chapatis and roghi nan, the flat breads baked in a tandoor. Akhtar, as was his custom, ate sparingly. The meeting wasn’t about the dinner; it was about what was going on in the Afghan program since he had left.
I preempted Akhtar’s agenda with my own by asking a point-blank question. “General, Bill Casey briefed me fully on his discussions with you about operations across the Amu Dar’ya.”
“Casey was always interested in doing something up there,” Akhtar said, a note of suspicion in his voice.
“I know, but there were always other voices urging caution,” I said. “I’m afraid Bill Casey was impatient with those who didn’t appreciate his ideas for the Central Asian republics.”
“It all started with Casey’s idea to send the Uzbek-language Korans across in numbers. But then your people backed out. I think we took the idea and improved on it.”
“I’m sure you did, General. Though your operations might have been more effective than even you might have planned. There has been much discussion of some events north of Termez. . . .”
Akhtar’s defenses were up again. He looked down and fiddled with his food. When he spoke again, there was an edge of irritation in his voice. “I have heard that they may have gone a bit too far. But how can you stop those people? You and I know that they’re all the same people . . . north of the Amu Dar’ya or south of it, they’re all kin. Any problems there are of the Soviets’ own making. They drove their own people down into Afghanistan in the 1920s. Now they’re just getting paid back!”
“Of course, General, but you’ll agree that this might fall under the category of, how would President Zia put it, boiling the pot over?”
Akhtar caught the note in my voice when Zia’s name was mentioned.
“Has the president become involved in this?”
“I haven’t heard. I think it has fallen to the prime minister and to Sahabzada. Maybe that is the appropriate level for problems like this.”
“Yes,” Akhtar said, still waiting, it seemed, for the punch line.
“General, do you think Brigadier Yousaf might be encouraging these cross-border operations because of some mistaken belief that they were what you and the president and Bill Casey wanted . . . that he might be doing this without fully informing Hamid Gul?”
Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf had been involved with the operational side of the Afghan effort for the last four years and was a well-known Akhtar man. He had recently been passed over for promotion to major general and might be on his way out of the program. At least that was the scuttlebutt I’d picked up.
“Yousaf is a good soldier,” Akhtar said. “I’m certain that he’s keeping Gul advised.”
“I’m certainly relieved to hear that, General,” I said, and changed the subject to Akhtar’s latest fitness program. “How’s the treadmill working out?” I asked.
“About three miles a day,” he said. “And you, any time for exercise?”
“Just staying ahead of what’s happening around here is all I can handle,” I answered as I rose to leave.
A few days later, I would learn that Yousaf had retired from the Army, though a connection between his departure and the Uzbek operation was never clear to me. I did subsequently hear from contacts in the Army that Brigadier Yousaf was particularly critical of my stand on incursions across the Amu Dar’ya—just another example of the Americans being weak-kneed, he’d complained. Yousaf, it turned out, had a hand in planning the incursions into the USSR, though the degree of Akhtar’s own involvement remained in doubt. Problems in the Soviet Central Asian republics bordering Afghanistan would continue to plague the Soviets, but there would be no repeats of the tensions of April 1987.
9
Aboard the Red Arrow Express, May 1987
Jack Downing, a stocky, handsome Texan in his forties, was considered by many inside the CIA to be Hollywood’s version of a CIA case officer—a Harvard man and a Marine veteran. His father had been a naval officer who died at the Battle of Salvo Bay in World War II, and his mother had been a buyer for the original Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. Downing had been raised with high expectations and a sense of duty. He was a straightforward, uncomplicated man, a trait that seemed slightly odd inside the byzantine world of intelligence. But he was also an excellent linguist who picked up languages easily, and he was a careful traditionalist about his espionage tradecraft. He had spied in both Beijing and Moscow, was fluent in Chinese and Russian, and knew more about “denied area” work than just about all the instructors at the Farm combined. During his first tour in Moscow in the 1970s, he had handled TRIGON; now, Gerber was calling him back, and Moscow was to be his. Gerber told him his task was to rebuild the Soviet spy networks that had been so devastated by the 1985 losses.
No matter how many times he had taken the overnight train from Moscow to Leningrad, Jack Downing found it difficult to sit still throughout the more than eight-hour journey aboard the jewel of the Soviet Union’s railroad system. The Krasnaya Strelka, the Red Arrow, had pulled out of Moscow’s Leningrad station just before midnight, but it wouldn’t arrive at Leningrad’s Moscow station until nearly 8:30 A.M. It was inevitable that he would, at some point in the long night, desperately need a cigarette.
It was just after dawn when Downing left his wife and daughter behind in their first-class compartment, threw open the doors between the rocking cars, and walked haltingly back to the Red Arrow’s caboose. Spring was arriving in the Soviet Union, and it was just warm enough for Downing to grab a quick smoke in the open air.
“Jek?”
Cigarette in hand, Downing turned quickly and saw a dark young Russia
n man with flashing eyes and a broad smile.
“Yes,” Downing replied, instantly sensing that he was talking with a KGB man. The two were alone at the back of the train, with the wind and the noise of the rails masking their meeting, yet the Russian was still too cautious to say anything further. The man pressed an envelope into Downing’s hand and hurried away, back into the darkness of the train’s corridor. Downing’s case officer instincts suddenly kicked in, and he stuffed the envelope into his coat, waited for the Russian to disappear, and returned to his compartment. The incident had taken no more than one minute.
Even in the privacy of his own compartment, Downing didn’t dare take out the envelope to examine its contents. He and his family had been assigned the exact same compartment that Downing was always given by the Soviet rail system when he traveled on the Red Arrow, and he assumed that meant it was heavily bugged, probably with both audio and video.
It took all of Downing’s patience and training to sit with his wife and daughter for the next several hours in the cramped compartment with the envelope hidden away. But it wasn’t until the train pulled into Leningrad and Downing was safely inside the CIA’s secure Leningrad office that he finally reviewed what the man had furtively passed him.
As he read, Downing could barely contain his excitement. Inside the envelope, he found a grainy surveillance photograph of himself and his wife as they walked into a Moscow subway station. In the photograph, they were heavily bundled up against the cold, and there was snow piled up in the background. He calculated that the picture had been taken the previous winter, soon after his arrival to take over as Moscow chief. He also found a lengthy note from the young Soviet, stating that he was indeed a KGB officer, that he was increasingly angry and frustrated with the Soviet system, and that he wanted someday to leave for America. Until that day, however, he was ready to spy for the CIA. He had included the photograph of Downing and his wife as proof that he was with the KGB and that he had access to information of unique interest to the CIA chief.
While he didn’t give his name during this first message, the Russian stated that he held an important position within the American Department of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, the spy hunters who watched the CIA’s officers in Moscow. He was the executive assistant to the chief of the American Department, and he was also personally in charge of monitoring the CIA’s Moscow station chief. He was thus Jack Downing’s KGB case officer, so he knew everything the KGB knew about Downing: his work, his travel, his family. Most intriguing, he knew when and where the KGB was following Downing around Moscow and what other secret methods the KGB was using to keep track of him.
Since he was Downing’s KGB case officer, he said he would know when it was safe to communicate. He wrote that Downing shouldn’t try to contact him or schedule meetings. Instead, he gave Downing a brief list of restaurants and theaters around Moscow that he should visit by car on Friday nights. He should park, leave his car unlocked, and then go inside and eat dinner or watch a movie. The Russian would then leave a message in Downing’s car—right under the noses of the KGB’s surveillance teams. He could do so because of the peculiarities of the KGB’s surveillance habits. On Fridays, the KGB knew, American diplomats received their overseas mail. The KGB was always looking for opportunities to rifle through the mail of key diplomats and CIA officers, looking for anything that would provide a handle on the individual, some hint of vulnerability. So on Friday nights, the Russian could easily explain to the surveillance men with him that he was entering Downing’s car to check his briefcase and his mail.
If Downing wanted to send him a message in return, the American could leave a specially marked envelope inside his briefcase in the car. Downing’s briefcase, left casually behind in his car, was to be the letter drop, the mailbox for their clandestine communications. The Russian also wrote that he could continue to meet Downing on the Red Arrow; he would always know when Downing was scheduled to make another trip to Leningrad.
For Downing, the Russian’s sudden appearance couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. Since his return to Moscow in November, Downing had become increasingly worried and depressed by the state of the CIA’s operations in Moscow. The 1985 losses had left the CIA with virtually no assets left to run inside the Soviet Union. The PNG war that had erupted following the Daniloff affair had further reduced Moscow’s effectiveness, delaying Downing’s arrival by several months while several experienced CIA case officers were expelled in the tit-for-tat game with Washington. Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s decision to withdraw Soviet administrative and clerical personnel from the U.S. embassy in October in retaliation for President Reagan’s decision to oust hundreds of Soviets from the United States had paralyzed the embassy’s operations. U.S. embassies, regardless of location, were notoriously more dependent on their local workforce, their so-called foreign service nationals, than were Soviet embassies.
The Clayton Lonetree case in December further shook the CIA; the agency feared that the Marine guard had given the KGB access to Moscow Station. At first, CIA counterintelligence experts believed that Lonetree could not have done much damage by himself; there were always at least two Marine guards on duty at the embassy. But in March, while Downing was in Frankfurt for a meeting with DDO Clair George, the CIA discovered that a second Marine guard, Arnold Bracy, may also have aided the KGB. If Lonetree and Bracy had been conspiring together for the Soviets, it was quite possible that they had given the KGB access to SE Division’s crown jewels.
No wonder, then, that CIA officers in Moscow, suffering through such an extended losing streak, were beginning to second-guess themselves and their methods. In its best days, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Moscow operations had a certain cachet within the CIA, and Moscow case officers walked with the swagger of those who believe they are the best of the best. They had reason to preen: Moscow was then running the most dazzling inventory of agents in CIA history.
But now, everything that had been built in the late 1970s and early 1980s had been swept away, and with it, the confidence of the case officers in Moscow. Murat Natirboff left Moscow in the summer of 1986, just as the KGB was rolling up the last of the CIA’s agents; Gerber wanted him replaced. But for the next five months, while Downing cooled his heels waiting for a truce in the PNG war, Moscow went without a chief, and the drift took its toll. There had been too many arrests, too many blown operations, so CIA officers were beginning to see shadows and ghosts.
The American case officers came to believe that it was no longer possible to break free of the KGB in order to conduct operations. They began to mutter about the mysterious, almost mystical capabilities of the KGB to follow their every movement and began to believe the KGB had developed “ultradiscreet surveillance,” a new layer of surveillance that kicked in just when you were certain you were free. You could never see this new surveillance, so there was no way to prove it didn’t exist. Case officers began to second-guess their instincts on the streets of Moscow, aborting missions at the slightest sign of casual Soviet interest. The new, unspoken mantra in Moscow was that there was no way to beat the KGB.
Downing was eager to snap Moscow out of the doldrums, but even he was beginning to wonder what was going wrong. After Bracy’s revelations, Downing was ordered to put Moscow on a new kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day alert status. A CIA officer would have to be in the office at all times, just to make certain no one could get in. Downing decided that he and two other officers would take turns sleeping in the office at night, so that the secured space was never unattended. For this arduous new duty, he picked officers whose cover had already eroded so badly that the KGB had probably identified them as CIA officers; the fact that they were not going home at night wouldn’t suddenly compromise their identities as spies to the KGB.
But even this new precaution wasn’t enough. Langley soon ordered that every single piece of paper, every fake rock used in dead drops, every piece of equipment and furniture inside the CIA area, be packed up and shipped
back to the United States for examination. So for a time, Moscow was stripped to the bare walls while the CIA tried to determine whether the Marines had given the Soviets access to the office.
A close examination of the security measures in Moscow suggested that the KGB had not gotten in. The main door was a vault with a combination lock, and there were two inner doors with locks as well. The Marine guards didn’t have the combinations to any of them. The locks also had special counters that revealed how many times they had been opened, and officers were required to keep a log that noted the count on each lock. Similar locks on safes were logged as well. To be sure, the counters on the locks sometimes skipped, causing slight anomalies in the numbers logged. But those anomalies weren’t consistent enough to suggest that the KGB had broken in.
What’s more, Moscow was equipped with a hidden camera that revealed who had been inside, and an in-depth review of hours of videotapes never showed any KGB entry into the premises. While there were brief gaps when the camera hadn’t been working, those gaps were never deemed significant. Despite the CIA’s initial concerns, senior CIA officials were soon convinced that the Marines hadn’t let the KGB into the CIA’s Moscow office.
In the end, the Marine guard spy scandal died away, as the investigation petered out amid heavy criticism of the way the case had been handled by the Navy and other agencies. Officials were never quite sure what Lonetree and Bracy had done and whether the hysteria surrounding the case had led to exaggerations about the extent of their work for the Soviets. But in the spring of 1987, as Jack Downing was trying to rebuild, the Marine spy case was one more bad headache.
So now, just when Downing was getting desperate for a change in fortunes, here was this young Soviet offering him a look at the other side’s playbook.
After notifying CIA headquarters about the potential new KGB agent, Downing scrupulously followed the Russian’s instructions. Every Friday without fail, he and his wife went out to dinner at one of the preselected restaurants (a list that, unfortunately, didn’t include Downing’s favorites in Moscow), and each time he left his briefcase tucked away in his car. Inside, he included an envelope with a message for the Russian, asking him for specific information that the CIA was eager to know about KGB operations.
The Main Enemy Page 33
