The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  Speaking almost off the cuff, he vastly oversimplified the new rules. He made it sound as if the East German government were now going to allow East Germans to travel directly to West Germany—rather than going to a third country first—for both permanent exit and private travel, with virtually no restrictions. East German officials would approve the travel on short notice.

  Schabowski was asked by surprised reporters when the new rules would go into effect. A flustered Schabowski said: Immediately.

  The press conference was carried live on radio and television, and even though Schabowski badly misstated the regime’s intentions, his words had the effect of changing policy on the spur of the moment. To everyone who had listened to Schabowski, it sounded as if East Germany had decided to open the Berlin Wall and let its citizens out, ending forty years of national isolation.

  The televised press conference dumbfounded the border guards listening in as they manned the checkpoints on the Berlin Wall. Some East Germans who were near the checkpoints when they heard Schabowski’s broadcast decided to test the new policy right away. The border guards, who had heard Schabowski and had no other instructions, decided to let them through to West Berlin. West German television—which could be seen in East Germany—reported the fact that people were being allowed through the Wall, and soon thousands of East Berliners were flooding through the newly opened checkpoints and into West Berlin.

  Rolph was as surprised as anyone and, after listening to the press conference, went out into the night with his family, acting as tourists and eyewitnesses to history. That night, he sent a cable back to headquarters, just to confirm the news reports that the Wall had been opened and that East Berliners really were being allowed to cross into the West. But there was nothing poetic about the cable, despite its historic significance as the first CIA cable to report the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  There was certainly nothing in the cable that was based on secret intelligence, either. Since the CIA did not have any high-level agents in the East German government, there was no one Rolph could turn to in order to gain special insights into the overnight collapse of East German discipline. East Germany’s counterintelligence had done its job well; it had deprived the CIA of access to the political hierarchy of the government.

  So it would be CNN rather than the CIA that would keep Washington informed of the fast-moving events in Berlin. In fact, the fall of the Berlin Wall was the first shot in an unspoken competition between CNN and the CIA that would continue throughout the closing years of the Cold War. With historic events occuring daily between 1989 and 1991, David Rolph and other CIA officers in the field, first in Eastern Europe and later in the Soviet Union, would begin to feel a subtle pressure to remain relevant by staying on top of events. Headquarters repeatedly told case officers not to try to match everything on the news and instead to focus on stealing secrets that the President couldn’t find out about anywhere else. But it was hard for case officers to ignore the daily sweep of history taking place all around them.

  At the same time, stealing secrets that could help the President better understand that daily history was also easier said than done. It’s very difficult to get secret insights on rapidly moving events, even if you have well-placed spies. But in truth, the CIA didn’t have spies with high-level political access who could provide important political insights. How then should CIA officers try to satisfy policy makers hungry for a continuous flow of information? Tell them to turn on CNN and hope for the best? That was the awkward situation facing the CIA in East Berlin in November 1989.

  Warsaw, 2230 Hours, November 9, 1989

  German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was on the first day of a five-day visit to Warsaw and, like everyone else, was caught off guard by Schabowski’s astonishing statement and the news that the new East German travel regulations would take effect immediately. During a cocktail reception at the former palace of Count von Radzivill in Warsaw, Kohl spoke animatedly with his Polish hosts, including Lech Walesa, but he was distracted by events in Berlin and kept his ear cocked for the next fateful announcement.

  When it came it was almost anticlimactic. An aide whispered in his ear, “The Wall is open!”

  Later that night at Warsaw’s Marriott Hotel, the German chancellor told the gathered press, “Now, world history will be written.”

  That evening in his hotel suite, Helmut Kohl, like the rest of the world, turned to the only functioning source of information on the most historical moment in the second half of the century: CNN.

  Langley, November 9, 1989

  Burton Gerber, now chief of the European Division, which was responsible for CIA operations in Western Europe, was in the midst of a quiet lunch with CIA Director William Webster and a small group of visiting West German intelligence officials in the Director’s private dining room when he was told that he had an urgent message. Gerber excused himself from the table and went outside, where he was given electrifying news—the Berlin Wall had just been opened. Gerber went back into the dining room and broke the news to the CIA Director and his ecstatic German guests.

  After lunch, Gerber went to see his counterparts in the Directorate of Intelligence to find out what the analysts could tell him about the situation, and then returned to his office to watch the latest news from Berlin. For Gerber, who had just spent five years running the SE Division and had devoted so much of his life doing quiet battle with the Soviet empire, it was a deeply emotional moment. As he sat and watched history unfold on television, Gerber exulted as he realized that Berlin, the original Cold War battlefield, had just been won.

  Langley, 1830 Hours, November 9, 1989

  I flipped back and forth between CNN and the CIA’s satellite downlink of the East and West German channels covering events at the Berlin Wall. No one had predicted it would happen when and how it had. No one, not the CIA, not the State Department, not the Bonn government. No one was prepared for the events of November 9 and 10. Where was the human intelligence? I would be repeatedly asked that question. What were our spies telling us would come next?

  The CIA had no human intelligence on the events as they were unfolding. None of our human assets in the capitals of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were in a position to tell us what was going on; most were asking us what was happening. They were all watching the drama play out on television and wondering what the hell would happen next. Even the best agent couldn’t tell what a government was going to do when no one in that government knew what it was going to do.

  All of Washington had their television sets tuned to CNN. And as I watched the pieces of that despicable structure being pulled down, I thought back almost a quarter of a century when I had first seen the reinforced concrete barrier as a new CIA case officer in Germany. I had seen escapes to the West fail and a few succeed, but always the Wall seemed to get stronger, both as a physical barricade and as a symbol separating the minds of the human beings who lived on either side. More than any other structure, the Berlin Wall symbolized what had brought me to the CIA.

  Now it was coming down, and I felt strangely dissociated from the process. I decided to send a cable to all hands in the field the next day to tell them to leave to the international media what it could best do, but to let us know if they saw things differently from the television coverage. Get out on the streets, I said, and keep the situation reports coming.

  East Berlin, November 10, 1989

  Thursday night had been crazy enough, but when Rolph and his wife went to Checkpoint Charlie the next day to see what was happening for themselves, it seemed as if all of Germany were there. Mixing in the crowd with the thousands of East Germans waiting to make the crossing, the CIA station chief found himself in the midst of the greatest party he had ever seen, the most indescribable, unforgettable moment of his life. Lost in a sea of champagne and open arms, Rolph was an elated Cold Warrior watching Germany come together. He made his way to the West Berlin side and saw that the East Berliners were being treated like returning heroes, lost in th
e wilderness for nearly thirty years.

  Yet Rolph still wasn’t sure he understood the dimensions of what was happening all around him. When he returned home to his East Berlin neighborhood of Pankow, there was a strange air of normalcy. Away from the massive block parties near the border checkpoints, Rolph was struck by how East German life was still grinding on. The Stasi is still here, he told himself, and they are still a fearsome intelligence service. The surveillance teams are still here, too.

  The Kremlin, November 11, 1989

  It was over. Of that, Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign-policy guru, was certain. The entire seventy-year era of the socialist system was over. First Poland had gone over, then Hungary, then, suddenly, East Germany. All had gone peacefully. China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, and Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov had announced their retirements. That left only Fidel Castro, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Kim Il Sung. And they hated the Soviet Union’s guts! Yes, it was over, Chernyaev decided.

  The main thing had been the Berlin Wall. Its fall would have a profound effect not only on the final course of socialism, but also on the balance of world power. It meant the end of Yalta, the end of the legacy of Stalin, and the end of remembrance of the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. It was all over.

  And that, Chernyaev concluded with an ironic sense of pride, was all Gorbachev’s doing. He had, indeed, turned out to be a great leader. Gorbachev had sensed the pace of history and had helped it find a natural channel. Gorbachev’s loyal aide would never sway from the conviction that the dramatic historical shifts now under way in Eastern Europe were the result of Gorbachev’s decision not to stand in the way.

  3

  Prague, November 17, 1989

  Oldrich Cerny, a slight, sandy-haired writer, film translator, and dissident, had been following Václav Havel’s lead since he was a star-struck teenager in the 1960s. Back then, Cerny had summoned up the courage to march into a Prague theater and had brazenly introduced himself to Czechoslovakia’s brightest young playwright. Havel had agreed to the boy’s simple request that he join him for coffee. Now, more than twenty years later, Oldrich Cerny was about to follow Havel’s lead once more. This time, Cerny would help Havel foment a revolution.

  But just now they were waiting, impatiently, for the revolution to begin.

  In fact, both men had been waiting for at least twelve years. Havel had solidified his status as Czechoslovakia’s most important anti-Communist dissident in 1977, with the creation of Charter 77, a group of intellectuals who signed a petition seeking freedom of speech and thought and, more broadly, freedom from the repression that had been imposed on the Czech people following the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968. Havel’s reward for Charter 77 had been prison.

  Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, meanwhile, Cerny had been ostracized for his refusal to become an informant and agent of the Czech secret services. First he rejected an overture from the internal security police and later a separate pitch from the foreign intelligence service, which was intrigued by his fluency in English and was eager to send him abroad as a spy. His defiance cost him his job at a Czech publishing house, and before long he was barely making ends meet unloading cargo on Prague’s riverfront.

  By mid-November 1989, Cerny could see that Havel was worried that the new democratic spirit sweeping across Eastern Europe might pass Czechoslovakia by. Old regimes had tumbled in Poland through elections, and in Hungary through negotiations. The Berlin Wall had just come down, and the government of East Germany seemed to be on its last legs. Yet demonstrations in Prague had so far been modest, hardly enough to shake the Communists out of Prague Castle. Protests in late October on Czech National Day had been so unimpressive that Havel had become depressed. He spent several days in early November recovering from an illness—and frustration. He feared that Czechoslovakia was destined to remain an island of tyranny surrounded by democracy, the Cuba of Eastern Europe.

  Havel thought that November 17 would just bring more of the same, so he didn’t join that day’s demonstrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of an infamous Nazi murder of a Czech student. But the students and others who did march peacefully that day through Prague and into Wenceslas Square, the city’s long, narrow, and sloping centerpiece, to commemorate the anniversary were met by riot police eager for a confrontation. The police waded into the crowds, brutally wielding truncheons, beating men, women, and children. The incident outraged the Czech people and electrified the nation overnight. Through its own heavy-handed stupidity, the regime had finally managed to turn the Czechs into revolutionaries.

  Suddenly energized, Havel moved to capitalize on the massive protests that were immediately sparked by November 17. He called together key dissidents from all over Prague, including many of the old Charter 77 members, and that weekend they crowded into the Actor’s Studio Theater. In the midst of their heated talks, someone pointed out that they were meeting in a building that was easily accessible to the authorities, so they soon moved to the basement of Laterna Magika, the Magic Lantern Theater, to plot their next move. The Magic Lantern was to become their informal headquarters and the iconic symbol of the sudden and miraculous success of their peaceful “Velvet Revolution.”

  No one had elected or appointed Havel and his new dissident group, Civic Forum, to take charge and represent the people, but there had also never been any question among the people crowding into Wenceslas Square that anyone other than Havel would lead them. Within days, Civic Forum opened negotiations with the regime, even as the Communists grumbled that they would never sit down with Havel himself. Meanwhile, the protests grew exponentially, providing fuel to the revolution and sapping the strength of the regime. One local Communist leader in Prague belatedly sought to whip up blue-collar support, but when he went to a working-class district, he was jeered by restive workers who shouted, “We are not little children.” Throughout the revolution, Cerny thought with some amusement, the Communists were always two days late.

  Prague, Czechoslovakia, November 1989

  Inside the cramped CIA space in the old American embassy, the CIA communicator, a young man with a keen technical mind, patiently worked the video equipment, searching the dial for just the right frequency.

  “There!” he called over to David Manners, the CIA’s chief in Prague, and proudly displayed his achievement. It had taken time, but the technician had finally plugged into a very special television show. He had just captured the video feeds from the surveillance cameras that the Czech security service had placed strategically all over Prague to watch their own people, who just now happened to be in the midst of a revolution. The television set in the CIA’s station in the old mansion now filled with images of massive crowds of protesters surging through the streets of Prague. Suddenly, the video feed switched to a different camera and then another; Manners realized his communicator had stumbled across the entire Czech surveillance network, and he was now viewing the same live pictures from all over the city as the “watchers” of the Czech security service. As he watched the video feed cut from one protest to another, and then zoom in on individual protesters being confronted by undercover agents and by police, he realized with a jolt that he was watching, in real time, how Czech security was responding to the revolution.

  The shifting camera angles and feeds from around the city suggested which protests and protesters the Czechs most feared, while close-ups of agents hidden in the crowds revealed how the Czech government was scrambling to try to respond in an effort to disrupt the demonstrations.

  “Start taping,” Manners told his communicator.

  It was the best live coverage that the CIA had obtained in any of the revolutions sweeping across Eastern Europe that fall and winter. After recording a few hours’ worth of video, Manners went to see his boss, American ambassador Shirley Temple Black. He thought the former child star might enjoy a good show, so he asked her to come to the CIA station and sat her down for a front-row seat to watch the Velvet Revolution unfold.

/>   Langley, November 29, 1989

  Redmond stuck his head in my office. “The bureau’s got a guy from the Second Chief Directorate in New York,” he said.

  Actually, it turned out to be an ex-KGB man, Sergei Papushin, who’d quit his job and moved into Russia’s new economy. Papushin had taken a job with an oil company. He’d come to New York on business, promptly got seriously drunk, and washed up in a hospital in New Jersey, where the police, and later the FBI, found him. As he sobered up, the FBI learned from him that he’d been in the Second Chief Directorate and decided to pitch him to see if he would work for them. The FBI knew that officers from the Second Chief Directorate, the KGB’s secretive counterintelligence arm, were hard to come by.

  Frightened by the experience, Papushin rushed back to New York, where he went to the Soviet mission to report the approach. Incredibly, the security officer at the mission told him to forget about it and get on with his business.

  Instead, Papushin changed his mind. He called the FBI back and asked for asylum.

  “When do we get a shot at him?” I asked Redmond.

  “We’re setting it up with the bureau now.”

  We were back to business—but somehow, in the midst of the revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe, I couldn’t get too excited over this defector.

  Moscow, November 29, 1989

  Rem Krassilnikov dialed the home number of Mike Cline, our new Moscow chief, and waited.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice answered.

  “Oh, hello, Michael,” Krassilnikov said in his unmistakable accent, stretching out Cline’s name. “This is Gavrilov. I was wondering if we could meet for a few moments tomorrow to discuss a matter of some importance.”