The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  Cline knew what Krassilnikov wanted. “Yes, I can do that,” he said quickly. “What time?”

  “Will noon be satisfactory?”

  “Noon will be fine,” Cline said in the same guarded language he always used on a phone he knew was live-monitored by the KGB. Never mind that it was the KGB who was actually calling—old habits were hard to break.

  “Then noon it is, tomorrow,” the KGB counterintelligence chief said, and rang off.

  The next day at noon sharp, Mike Cline walked along the ring road toward the Chinese restaurant that had been preselected as the site for these furtive meetings. Cline had made his first call to activate the Gavrilov channel when he’d arrived in Moscow eight months earlier as Jack Downing’s replacement, and he and Krassilnikov had agreed then that the Chinese restaurant would be their established rendezvous point. But since then they’d had almost no contact—it was as if the CIA-KGB hot line had gone cold.

  Nearing the site, Cline spotted the black Volga pulled up against the curb, its engine running, spewing exhaust fumes into the cold air. Krassilnikov was huddled in the backseat, a woolen muffler around his throat and his hat pulled just above his ears. As Cline approached the car, both Krassilnikov and his driver got out. Krassilnikov offered his hand and drew the CIA man into the backseat of the overheated Volga.

  With the driver standing dutifully out of earshot and smoking a cigarette, Krassilnikov told Cline that he thought it was time for a meeting at a higher level. The KGB side would be represented by himself and Leonid Nikitenko, chief of Directorate K, counterintelligence, of the First Chief Directorate. They would be able to meet their American counterparts in either Tokyo or Helsinki in the next month. The American side could take their pick, Krassilnikov offered.

  Cline wrote down three words—“Tokyo, Helsinki, December”—and turned to Krassilnikov. “Is there anything special you’d like to talk about?” he asked.

  “Nothing special,” Krassilnikov said. “It’s just been too long since we’ve gotten together.”

  Cline added a fourth word to his notes, “agenda,” and underlined it. He told Krassilnikov he’d get back to him and stepped out of the car. He had no inclination to be chatty. It was not Cline’s nature to hang out with the opposition on their own turf.

  Langley, November 29, 1989

  Stolz called down to tell me that he’d already talked to Gus Hathaway and that Gus would be accompanying me on the Gavrilov outing. “What do you think it’s about?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said truthfully. “But it’s been two years since we had an offshore Gavrilov meeting—they broke off contact in 1987. Maybe their new team wants to see our new team.”

  The CIA and KGB had always sent two senior officials apiece to Gavrilov meetings, except for the brief and infrequent encounters between the CIA’s Moscow station chief and Krassilnikov. With two officers from each side present, the possibility of misadventure was greatly reduced. It eliminated the suspicions that one officer had been pitched by the other side and hadn’t reported it fully. In the world of espionage, doubts, once raised, always lingered. So we went into the Gavrilov meetings two by two.

  Gus and I met with Stolz later that morning, and we decided that we’d go to the meeting mostly just to listen. Since the KGB asked for the meeting, we’d hear them out and see what was on their minds. The only issues we might raise would be the perennials: the status of our embassy building in Moscow and the fate of Oleg Gordievsky’s family.

  I decided that Helsinki should be the meeting site and cabled Mike Cline to pass the decision along to the KGB. I then began to review our file holdings on both of the men I would meet at my first Gavrilov session. We’d had plenty of contact with Krassilnikov over the years, but Nikitenko was less known to us. He’d come up on our screen while he was Rezident in London, where he’d been Oleg Gordievsky’s chief, but we hadn’t had much firsthand experience with the man. It should be interesting, I thought as I prepared for the first Gavrilov meeting. Their empire was cracking; they must be feeling the aftershocks all the way to Moscow.

  Prague, December 10, 1989

  With hundreds of thousands of Czechs packing into central Prague each night, chanting and ringing their keys in the air, change came with astonishing speed. On December 10, Communist president Gustav Husák resigned, and by acclamation, Havel and Civic Forum took over. Though it would take until the end of the month for Havel to be formally elected president, a band of playwrights, stagehands, and poets suddenly had a country to run.

  One of the most vexing questions as Havel and his motley band of ministers assumed their new posts was the fate of the Czech security and intelligence services. The Communists had been ousted so quickly that the intelligence services had no time to reform themselves or prepare for a smooth handover. In December, the government was still a strange amalgam of dissidents and Communists who had not yet been replaced. The domestic security service, known as the StB, and the foreign intelligence service, which was under the StB umbrella and was known as Sprava One, were still intact, and their seventeen thousand employees were reporting to work each day as if nothing had changed, even after Havel was sworn into office.

  The Soviets, of course, knew that it was only a matter of time. The KGB had six officers who worked on a full-time basis inside Sprava One headquarters in Prague. Just before Christmas, the six KGB officers were called home to Moscow, and they never returned.

  StB’s direct links to the KGB were being cut, but Czech intelligence was still being run by Communists with no allegiance to Havel or democracy.

  After the frantic days of November and December, Oldrich Cerny was about to return to his film studio job, but Václav Havel had other ideas. The new president decided in early 1990 that he wanted Cerny, the man who had twice rejected demands that he become a Communist spy, to help lead Czechoslovakia’s spy service into the new world.

  Frankfurt, December 1989

  Dave Manners sat down for a hurried meeting with a key SE Division manager who had just flown into Frankfurt from headquarters. Manners and the other chiefs of station from the capitals of Eastern Europe had been summoned to Germany to talk through the remarkable changes sweeping the region.

  It was hard to know where to start—all the old assumptions had to be thrown out the window. The United States had once worried about dominoes in Southeast Asia; now it was the Soviets who were watching their dominoes fall—Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and now Czechoslovakia.

  So much was happening that Manners couldn’t afford to spend much time away from his post. “You should know that you’re getting somebody new to run the Czech desk at headquarters,” Manners was told in quiet confidence. “Rick Ames. He’s smart. If you had to pick the three or four people at the agency who understand the KGB the best, he would be one of them.”

  Helsinki, Finland, 1955 Hours, December 12, 1989

  It was bitterly cold and slippery going as Gus Hathaway and I trudged along the icy sidewalks in a residential section of Helsinki. The meeting was to be held at the Soviet embassy promptly at 8:00 P.M., and as we came up to the gate of the embassy not far from Helsinki’s waterfront five minutes early, Hathaway rang the bell and waited. A moment later a voice crackled over a speaker, asking who was there.

  “We’re here to see Rem Sergeyevich Krassilnikov,” Hathaway announced in Russian.

  “Never heard of him,” the voice crackled back with curt dismissal.

  I looked at my watch. “We’re early. Let’s walk for a few minutes.”

  Five minutes later, we approached the gate again and pushed the button. This time the latch buzzed and the iron gate popped open. My mind flashed back four years to the moment Edward Lee Howard had passed through this same gate as he made good his long escape from the FBI in Albuquerque to the Soviet Union.

  Gus and I went twenty yards down the shoveled walkway to the embassy’s front door, where we were met by a Soviet officer who ushered us into a secure room on the ground floor. Th
ere we met Krassilnikov and Nikitenko and a third KGB man who introduced himself as Viktor, a counterintelligence officer from the First Chief Directorate.

  Their secure room was really a room within a room. It had the touch of the handyman; the walls and ceiling were covered with acoustic tiles and with heavy drapes hung slightly haphazardly on the walls. I thought there might be electronic white noise generated around the enclosure once the heavy door was closed, but I had no way of knowing for sure. Inside were a couple of couches, and some chairs had been arranged around a low table, where we found a spread of zakuski, Russian snacks ranging from salami and pickles to salads to cheeses. On a small end table were four half-liter bottles of Stolichnaya.

  The Soviets seemed interested in sizing up the new team, and we were equally interested in sizing them up. As I settled into one of the couches, I thought about the secrets that must be running through the minds of the two men seated across from us in those cramped quarters.

  Krassilnikov was the closest thing to a real-life Karla, the master spy of John le Carré’s Cold War espionage series. He had an almost mythic status at Langley, as at the end of each disastrous compromise he would walk into the holding room and have his little chat with our ambushed case officer. I’d seen his photograph in the files, but it was an old one and looked nothing like the man before me. Krassilnikov seemed more like a kindly Russian grandfather than a man who spent his days and nights leading our agents to the executioner and trying to keep us off balance with a steady string of bogus volunteers.

  As I looked at Krassilnikov’s soft, lined face, set off by a mane of thick white hair, it was hard to picture him as the man who had rolled up so many of our operations over the last four years. I had to force the image into my head of him interrogating our agents, Tolkachev, Vorontsov, Polyshchuk, Varennik, and all the others, before they were led down to the dark basement and the KGB executioner.

  Leonid Nikitenko was a barrel-chested bear of a man, full of life. From the moment he extended his hand, it was clear that he loved the drama of the spy game, and there was no question that he was good at it. He was at home in this secret universe and relished every moment we spent crowded together in the secure room with the zakuski and Stolichnaya. He was an actor on a stage that he had set for himself, playing a role he had scripted.

  As chief of Directorate K, First Department, First Chief Directorate, Nikitenko was responsible for the KGB’s counterintelligence operations against the American target worldwide. He had last been posted abroad as KGB Rezident in London, until he was expelled by the British in a series of carefully planned moves in 1984 that left Nikitenko’s deputy and MI6’s long-term asset Oleg Gordievsky in charge of the London Rezidentura. Gordievsky still thought Nikitenko had been behind his compromise in May 1985, when he was called back, interrogated, and then inexplicably set free. I wondered how much heat Krassilnikov had taken for Gordievsky’s escape.

  The Soviets didn’t seem to have a specific agenda for the meeting. In fact, what was most remarkable was the topic that wasn’t brought up—the ongoing rollback of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. It was the elephant in the room that no one dared talk about. No one mentioned the Polish election, the Berlin Wall, or events under way in Prague at that very moment. The KGB officers sitting across from us were probably as stunned as we were by what had been happening throughout Eastern Europe over the past weeks and months, but they weren’t about to share their emotions with the CIA.

  The KGB side got right to business, asking about a Soviet defector who had come across in the last year. Our response was the standard: “Your Mr. X is well and is living outside the country where he was last posted. He enjoys total freedom of movement and is acting on his own. He has expressed no interest in meeting with officials of the Soviet Union.” The translation was always the same: “He’s come to us but doesn’t want it out in the open. And he doesn’t want to meet your guys.”

  After a few rounds of drinks, I broached a long stalled but politically sensitive topic: How were we ever going to get beyond the stalemate on our new Moscow embassy building? Work on the project had been tied up for years as special American security teams sought to determine the extent to which the KGB had embedded listening devices in the building as it was going up. By now it was on its way to becoming the most expensive structure in the world for its size. If you took into account the cost of the original construction, and added to it the cost of the KGB’s high-tech assault and of our defensive measures, the building’s price tag was phenomenal. Large portions of the structure had been dismantled and sent back to the United States as diplomatic cargo for examination. The embassy remained unoccupied, and it looked like a never-ending standoff.

  Krassilnikov leaned into the question. “Your embassy building is perfectly safe as it now stands,” he said carefully. “You could occupy it right away without any concerns for matters of security.”

  “Are you saying that there are no devices in our embassy?” I asked.

  “I am saying that there is nothing in the building that should cause you concern.”

  “Let me get this straight. I think I hear you saying that while there may have been some earlier intentions to attack our embassy, no such plans have been fully carried out. Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “I think you have drawn a correct conclusion. The most important point is that your new embassy building is secure as it now stands.”

  “And we should just move into it, right?” I asked, half joking.

  Krassilnikov smiled and said, “That would have to be your decision, but it would also be the right one.”

  “We’ll pass along your comments,” I said noncommittally. My instinct was to dismiss what Krassilnikov was saying, but deep down I knew that he was probably telling the truth. Somewhere between the mounting of the attack on the embassy and now, the decision may have been made at Lubyanka, or maybe in the Politburo, to call it off. But it was too late for trust to enter the game. Nevertheless, I saw something in Krassilnikov’s eyes as he made his careful statement about the embassy that told me this man was trying to navigate his way out of troubled waters.

  Hathaway changed the subject to the family of Oleg Gordievsky, an outstanding issue that was routinely raised at all levels of contact with the Soviets.

  Nikitenko didn’t react as emotionally as I’d expected—Gordievsky was working for him, after all, while he was spying for the British. He simply eased back a little deeper into the couch and concentrated on keeping his face as unreadable as possible.

  Krassilnikov’s expression was impassive. An awkward silence descended between us, but in the end he did respond. “Now that you raise the question of Gordievsky’s wife and daughters,” he observed at last with an ironic smile, “I am reminded once again of the mystery about our Mr. Gordievsky’s disappearance from Moscow. I have always wondered why you Americans show such a strong interest in having this man’s family leave the Soviet Union. Is it solely a humanitarian interest, or was there perhaps an American hand in getting Mr. Gordievsky out of the USSR?”

  “Our interest is purely humanitarian,” Hathaway said, ignoring Krassilnikov’s probe. “We would like to see Gordievsky reunited with his family.”

  “And our position remains unchanged,” Nikitenko interjected. For the first time that evening, his smile showed signs of brittleness.

  At that point, Krassilnikov commented on the nature of our mutual engagement. “I would not suggest that spying against each other will ever cease,” he said. “But at some point we should begin to look at what kinds of rules might be incorporated into the conduct of our business. I am speaking here of coercion. The use of drugs and, indeed, the use of violence. I think at some time, perhaps not today, we might examine certain, how should I say, provocative behavior.”

  “Are you actually referring to the allegations that we drugged, kidnapped, and used coercion against Yurchenko?” I asked.

  “Yurchenko might not be the most appropriate example,” K
rassilnikov said. “I am talking about the conduct of our operations against each other in general, not in a specific case.”

  Hathaway leaned forward an extra few inches to signal that he, too, found Krassilnikov’s statement provocative. “The Soviet side has chosen to cover the changing of sides of its officers over the years by accusing us, as well as the British, of using drugs, kidnapping, and violence. You know as well as I that these things have never happened, and to raise the issue, quite frankly, surprises me.”

  “What we are saying is that perhaps there would be some value to discussing certain ground rules to the way we carry out our business,” Nikitenko interjected, attempting to defuse the issue. “This can be done over the course of some time, and I, too, think it would be of value.”

  “I think there is merit to keeping our agendas open,” I said. “Though I think we should be careful not to bring certain themes to these meetings that might be more appropriately considered propaganda battles. But you can be certain that the CIA does not use drugs or violence against officers of your service. We have always thought it dangerous for your side to make such claims, as was done with Yurchenko, when we all know the truth in that case. But your points are taken.”

  With that exchange, it was clear that the substantive part of the meeting had come to an end. It was almost with relief that we turned the discussion to the harshness of the winter that had enveloped northern Europe at that moment. Within those few hours we’d gotten a look at our opposite numbers in the KGB, and they’d done the same with us. While nothing concrete had been accomplished, I felt that the Gavrilov channel, after two years of dormancy, had been resurrected. I wasn’t certain what might come from it, but I was fairly sure it would do no harm. With the changes coming as rapidly as they were, I was happy enough to have the option to call a temporary truce to talk things over from time to time.