The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  It turned out that the Russian had a mind-bending story to tell. He said that he had unique access to a major new counterintelligence campaign being planned by the Second Chief Directorate to disrupt and confuse the CIA’s Moscow operations even further. Over the next few months, the Second Chief Directorate was planning to dangle a series of double agents in front of the CIA, in order to keep the agency so busy, so tied up trying to vet the volunteers, that it couldn’t deal with real spies who might actually volunteer. They would be walk-ins, volunteers selected from segments of the Soviet government that the KGB knew were of special interest to the United States. The KGB was changing the rules of the game in Moscow, becoming both more aggressive and more sophisticated in their methods.

  Before long, the Red Arrow volunteer gave Downing the identities of at least four of the double agents who he said would appear over the next four months, and, like clockwork, they began to approach the Americans, offering information. Now Downing felt he was inside the KGB’s game and hoped he could determine which walk-ins were double agents and which might be the real thing.

  The KGB man also provided a list of the CIA agents who had been arrested since 1985 and revealed how many had been executed. Other informants had told the CIA about the arrests of some of the compromised agents, but Downing’s new source now provided conclusive evidence of the extent of the security breach. Langley had never told Downing how many agents had been lost. So he was stunned when he read the list prepared by his source, who was soon code-named GTPROLOGUE.

  CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, May 1987

  Burton Gerber shared Jack Downing’s excitement about the sudden appearance of PROLOGUE. Since his early days in SE Division, fighting the Angleton paranoia about walk-ins and volunteers, Gerber had developed a rule of thumb that had become accepted wisdom within the CIA: The KGB never dangles one of its own staff officers. The Soviets didn’t trust their own people enough to let a KGB officer with access to sensitive information walk into the Americans as part of a double agent operation. How could they be certain that he wouldn’t simply keep walking across the line and defect? What’s more, the Soviets knew that the CIA and FBI wouldn’t believe a KGB officer was a genuine volunteer unless he revealed some important secrets. And the KGB had never been willing to part with enough secrets to make such a double agent believable. So Burton Gerber had long argued that when a KGB staff officer volunteers to become a spy, he’s not a double agent. Why should PROLOGUE be any different?

  But slowly a debate within SE Division’s senior leadership began to develop about PROLOGUE. The man from the Second Chief Directorate had come along at just the right moment, just when the CIA was desperate for new sources inside Moscow. And he was handing over information that was bound to entice the CIA. Was he too good to be true?

  Gerber and Paul Redmond, the SE Division’s most enduring skeptic, wondered what to make of PROLOGUE. Edward Lee Howard, who had defected to Moscow in 1985, certainly could have told the Soviets about Burton Gerber’s inviolable rule of thumb. Could it be that, thanks to Howard, the KGB was now turning Gerber’s logic back on him?

  It was too early to tell. Gerber and Redmond realized that the only way to find out if PROLOGUE was genuine was to run the operation for a while. Paul Redmond had always believed that production was the best measure of an agent; if PROLOGUE began to hand over secrets that the KGB would never want revealed, then Redmond, the least trustful man in SE Division, would be convinced.

  Gerber agreed. What did he have to lose by running PROLOGUE? The KGB already knew Downing’s identity as Moscow chief, so he would not be compromised by meeting with PROLOGUE, even if he was a double. What’s more, if the Russians were intent on framing Downing and forcing him out of the country, they could do it at almost any time. They wouldn’t need such an elaborate ruse.

  And what if PROLOGUE was real? Then he might just be able to provide the solution to the mystery surrounding the 1985 losses, and to Burton Gerber, that possibility was worth the gamble.

  Moscow, June 1987

  The restaurant that Jack Downing had selected as the site for his first exchange was hardly Moscow’s best. Jack had brought his wife along with him for a late Friday night dinner, and, following PROLOGUE’s instructions, he had left his briefcase in his car, unlocked and parked on the street outside.

  Inside, Jack and Suzie did their best to eat the greasy and unpalatable cuisine while marking time for PROLOGUE to check out their car. The restaurant was nearly deserted, and for good reason. Suzie soon found that she had to keep her feet up off the floor in order to avoid the rats scurrying underneath their table.

  But enduring the meal had been worth it; the communications plan had worked. Back in his office, Jack Downing found that the package he had left was gone. In its place was a message from PROLOGUE with the list of the CIA’s agents who had been arrested and what had become of them. Downing had been away from SE Division in the early 1980s, when many of these cases had been run; now he could see how much had been gained—and now lost—by SE Division during his absence.

  PROLOGUE had also handed over copies of the KGB’s personnel assessment reports on both Downing and his predecessor, Murat Natirboff. It amused Downing that the KGB’s assessment of his performance, including a discussion of his first tour in Moscow, was far more positive and flattering than the report that had been filed by the KGB team that had watched Natirboff.

  Moscow, July 1987

  Downing began to eat out every Friday night and was always careful to park his unlocked car nearby, where PROLOGUE could easily find it and make a quick exchange. He also tried to find an excuse to take the train to Leningrad as often as possible, although he was worried that if he went too frequently, his travel schedule would draw too much attention from the KGB. He decided not to take the train trip more than once every three months; that meant he would have to rely almost exclusively on his Friday night restaurant excursions for his communications.

  But PROLOGUE was maddeningly unpredictable, and Downing was never certain when the KGB man would actually show up for an exchange. Downing and his wife would often return from yet another meal at one of PROLOGUE’s handpicked, stomach-churning eateries only to find that the letter he had left for PROLOGUE was still in his briefcase, with no message in return. Downing soon found that PROLOGUE would contact him only about once a month, which meant that three out of four of his grisly meals were for naught.

  PROLOGUE’s “production”—Paul Redmond’s term for the quality and quantity of the secrets he was handing over—was now steady, and events began to prove its accuracy as well. The engineer who PROLOGUE said would be the first dangle to appear flagged down a CIA officer driving through summertime Moscow. The new case presented Downing and Gerber with an unusual headache. The CIA was now convinced, thanks to PROLOGUE, that the new volunteer had been sent by the KGB. But if the CIA rejected the engineer’s advances, the KGB might suspect the CIA had been tipped off he was a double agent and begin searching for a mole within its ranks. Burton Gerber had lost too many good agents over the last two years; he wasn’t about to take any risks with this one. The CIA would have to handle the engineer as if he were a genuine spy and never give the KGB any reason to doubt that they had fooled the Americans.

  Over the next four months, other double agents began to volunteer to the CIA in Moscow, and like the engineer, the CIA assigned case officers to handle each one. Before long, the double agent cases came to dominate the workload in Moscow, and Downing could see that far too much of the time and energy of his case officers was being spent on agents that the CIA knew to be frauds.

  Sometimes the KGB got sloppy with these double agents. In one instance, a message from one Soviet agent was left for the CIA in a dead drop site that was being used to communicate with another Soviet agent. The only explanation was that both agents were under KGB control, and the Soviets had mixed up the communication instructions for the two cases.

  But the CIA had to look the
other way and keep the cases running in order to protect PROLOGUE. At least Moscow was busy. Working on the double agent cases got the CIA’s officers out onto the streets, and that was something of an accomplishment for an operation that had had its confidence shaken. By the summer of 1987, in fact, case officers in Moscow were aborting their operational runs so frequently that Burton Gerber and the desk inside SE Division that dealt with internal operations were beginning to despair of any successful operations besides PROLOGUE.

  They were seeing ghosts, and even the latest electronic gear designed to detect KGB surveillance didn’t help. The CIA sent new, briefcase-size sensors that could pick up hidden transmissions from surveillance teams, and Moscow officers were instructed to lay them on the front seat of their cars while driving through the city. But each time an officer launched on a run, the device would send out an alarm, so the machines seemed to confirm Moscow’s worst fears about the KGB’s ability to track the Americans. Maybe “ultradiscreet surveillance” really did exist after all. Only later did the CIA discover that the alarms on the sensitive equipment were being triggered by faint electric emissions from the engine of the car, particularly when a CIA officer was making a sharp turn.

  10

  Islamabad, June 1987

  The afternoon sun glinted off the sleek black Cadillac Fleetwood as it cruised through the light traffic of the Pakistani capital. Heavily tinted windows kept prying eyes from seeing if the backseat was occupied, but the presence of the Toyota Crown with two armed bodyguards trailing closely behind was a pretty good indicator that it was. Yet the flag was furled and cased in its fender well, suggesting perhaps to the careful observer that there was nothing official about this outing.

  In the air-conditioned coolness of the backseat, Ambassador Arnie Raphel turned to me with an impish grin on his face.

  “You know, every time I ride in this car I remember when I was a boy and thought it was every Jewish kid’s dream to tool around the Catskills in the backseat of a big black Cadillac Fleetwood.”

  I glanced over at Raphel, a man three years my junior and a rising star in the foreign service. “Maybe,” I said, “but this ain’t the Catskills.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s only the Cadillac that counts.” Raphel leaned back in the plush velour and was quiet the rest of the way to the embassy.

  Arnie Raphel had taken over from the crusty career ambassador Dean Hinton as ambassador to Islamabad a month earlier. His arrival in Pakistan coincided with a growing but far from universal conviction in Washington that the Soviets were finally moving toward signing an agreement to pull out of Afghanistan. Raphel knew there was much work to be done before a deal would be sealed, but he arrived in Islamabad as the first American ambassador in seven years who would be more challenged by a probable peace in Afghanistan than by a seemingly unending war.

  I had just accompanied Raphel to ISI headquarters for an unofficial call on Hamid Gul. We were bantering aimlessly for the benefit of the ambassador’s Pakistani driver, an alert man who always had at least one ear tuned to the conversations in the backseat. We would wait until we were in the American compound before discussing our meeting with the ISI chief.

  Raphel had extensive prior service in Pakistan and knew the language and the country better than any American on his staff, or probably anyone in the State Department. He had known Zia before the general was named chief of Army staff by Bhutto eleven years earlier, and he easily picked up his old relationship with the president and, by extension, with the president’s men, who were aware of Zia’s fondness for the ambassador. As a result, the important doors opened easily for Raphel, giving him a leg up on his new job.

  Back at his residence, Raphel spoke more freely. “Why do I look at Hamid Gul and see a plucky little general who might one day take over the country?” he asked.

  “Because one day he just might do it,” I said.

  “Seeing him takes me back to when I met Zia for the first time. I thought then that he’d eventually be running the place.”

  “Bhutto didn’t see it, though. He thought Zia was a little dim, right to the end.”

  “Isn’t it always that way. The guy who ought to figure it out never does.”

  “It sure was with Bhutto and Zia.”

  “Well, maybe you should add keeping an eye on the PLG to your list of things to do,” Raphel said.

  “PLG?”

  Raphel grinned. “Yeah, plucky little general.”

  “He’s plucky all right.” It was curious that military officers who were diminutive in stature were almost always characterized as tough or plucky. Raphel’s name for Gul would stick.

  “Do you think he really got your message about the raids across the Amu Dar’ya? I’d have liked to talk to him about it, since that was the big thing on Shultz’s Soviet-Afghan agenda last month.”

  “He got the message from Yaqub Khan and, I guess, Zia,” I said. “I don’t think he needed another reminder from you or me.” I’d asked Raphel not to raise with Gul the raid into Uzbekistan that had caused such a flap a month earlier. I told him the matter had been settled and that he might want to start off with the ISI chief on a positive note rather than opening an old wound at his first meeting.

  “We can expect attacks on about everything Gul and ISI do from now on. As long as it was about winning a war, the hill was quiet. But with it looking like the Soviets are quitting, the sharks have already started circling your plucky little general.”

  “You mean our plucky little general, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Raphel said. “Our PLG.”

  Arnie Raphel and I would work together closely during his next fifteen months in Pakistan, with a notable absence of the usual CIA–State Department tensions I’d seen over the years. Our goals were common and concentric, the prime one being getting the Soviets out of Afghanistan. If that actually happened, we’d have to begin thinking of the next steps for a post-Soviet Afghanistan trying to come to grips with peace. That would be a tough task for a country that had known little else but war for a generation.

  The Kunjerab Pass, June 1987

  The Kunjerab Pass between Pakistan and China is as close to the roof of the world as one can reach in a wheezing Toyota Land Cruiser. At 16,400 feet above sea level, a carburetor-fed, low-compression engine like the Land Cruiser’s could go the distance far better than its more high-strung, fuel-injected cousins, but the oxygen-thin air at that altitude still made it tough going on car and driver. My wife and I had made the trip from Islamabad to Kunjerab, a wrenching journey on the Chinese-built Karakoram Highway, in three days, only briefly delayed by a landslide that had to be cleared with a blast of dynamite by Pakistani Army engineers. We reached the Kunjerab, the wide plateau that rolls back down into China’s Xinjiang Province, as the first of the old British Bedford and shiny Japanese Hino trucks with their loads of mules crested from the other direction, heading back to Pakistan and to the heavier air below.

  I knew from my own shortness of breath and light-headedness that the Pakistani drivers and their cargoes of mules must have been suffering. And sure enough, as the first of the convoy of trucks shifted into low gear for the descent, one of the Bedfords veered off the road and set off on a wobbly course across the tabletop plateau on the top of the world. It had gone no more than a hundred yards before it turned up the gradient and almost lazily flipped over on its side, its wheels still spinning and its load of mules tumbling out on the ice-hard surface. Surprisingly, all of the animals struggled to their feet, checked things out, and then just stood their ground. A groggy driver, also unhurt, and his relief crawled out of the cab of the capsized truck and joined the other Pakistanis trying to get halters on the loose mules, a task they accomplished in less than ten minutes. In another few minutes, the truck was righted by sheer brute force and the animals reloaded for the descent into Pakistan.

  Thus began my sideline involvement in the mule trade, one of the more offbeat jobs in the prosecution of an increasingly unconven
tional war.

  Mules, as any mule lover will tell you, are among the best of man’s improvements over nature. They combine the strength of the horse with the temperamental coolness, stamina, and low maintenance of the donkey. Put the two together and you get the ideal pack animal for mountain warfare. But you can’t just find good mules in the natural way of things. You have to work very hard at it.

  Most pack mules are the offspring of a male donkey, a “jack,” and a female horse, whose union produces a “horse mule” or a “john.” It is possible to reverse the process and breed a male horse and a female donkey to produce a “hinny,” but the failure rate of such unions is high and serves to discourage commercial breeders. So most of the pack mules that ended up hauling ordnance into the Hindu Kush and the White Mountains of Afghanistan were johns, sturdy little Chinese johns.

  Having been raised in Texas, I was always pretty familiar with horses, but mules were a new experience, and a complicated one, I would soon learn. Though I had long been aware of the vastly different reactions of horses and mules to gunfire and explosions, I had never understood the reason for this. Over the next few months, I would have ample opportunity to learn. The donkey is an energy conserver by nature, a careful assessor of the situation and cautious selector of an appropriate reaction. If startled, a donkey will usually jump a little, check things out, and then hunker down until he sees something that might seriously threaten him. When it comes to gunfire, a well-trained donkey won’t even flinch. A horse, on the other hand, under the same circumstances, will often bolt. Training does not always mitigate this trait. When the two animals are mated, the resulting product—the mule—is generally unflappable. Mules have a reputation for being stubborn and cantankerous, but mule aficionados are quick to point out that they may not really be stubborn at all; they just take a little longer to decide whether or not to waste their energy.