The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  When the snack truck operator returned a week or two later with the answers to the initial vetting questions, the CIA snapped to attention. The new volunteer belonged to a frontline unit of the Western Group of Forces stationed at Schlottheim, southwest of Berlin. The battalion would be at the point of any Soviet thrust into the infamous Fulda Gap, the invasion route that had been war-gamed as the kickoff point for World War III for the last half century. It was a combat unit that would have been among the first to engage NATO if war had ever broken out between the United States and the Soviet Union on the plains of central Germany.

  At this point, the CIA officer arranged to meet the volunteer in person and quietly cut the snack truck driver out of the equation. The volunteer turned out to be a colonel, the commander of a motorized rifle battalion, and he quickly pledged that he was ready to do anything he could to get out to the West. He said he was scheduled to be transferred back to the Soviet Union and that he was eager to make a break for America as soon as possible, along with his wife and two children. Not every Soviet officer was looking forward to going home.

  The colonel was an appealing prospect, but he wasn’t in this alone. He said that his battalion adjutant, a captain, was also part of his plot to defect, along with the captain’s girlfriend, who was the regimental code clerk. The operation was expanding. Now we were going to have to plot out escape plans for six instead of just one. The colonel was given the cryptonym GTROSETTA and the captain GTSTONE, and we began to try to figure out the best way to exploit this intelligence break.

  At their next meeting, the CIA case officer told the colonel that his value would be enhanced dramatically if he could bring some Soviet weapons with him when he defected. The colonel readily agreed to try and asked for a wish list.

  The Pentagon regularly publishes a classified list of foreign weapons that it would like to obtain and examine to keep its equipment a step ahead of the competition. Near the top of its list was the Soviet SA-19 surface-to-air antiaircraft missile. At approximately fourteen feet long, the SA-19 wasn’t exactly something that a man could carry on his back on his way across the border, but the CIA decided to ask GTROSETTA if he could get his hands on one anyway.

  Yes, the colonel said, his unit was equipped with SA-19s, and yes, he could try to steal one and bring it with him.

  “But when I get it to you, you will need a truck to carry it away.”

  Near Schlottheim, Eastern Germany, November 1990

  The night before the colonel and his crew were planning to make their escape, David Rolph and the case officer in charge of handling the Soviet officer met the colonel in a parking lot along the old border between East and West Germany to go over last-minute arrangements. The colonel blanched when he saw the size of the van they’d brought to haul away the SA-19.

  “You’re going to need a bigger truck,” he said in a deadpan voice.

  Rolph turned to a young CIA officer from Frankfurt who had brought the van. “I don’t care how you do it,” he said, “but get a heavy, over-the-road truck and have it back here by noon tomorrow.”

  At exactly noon the next day, the CIA officer and a driver pulled in with a semi that they’d picked up at a U.S. Army depot in Frankfurt. The CIA men scouted out the secluded rendezvous points on the eastern side of the old border between East and West Germany—one on the outskirts of a village near the Soviet base where they would pick up the colonel’s family, and another in the nearby woods where they’d meet up with the officers and their missile at about 6:00 that night. The colonel was counting on the Soviet soldier’s rigid obedience to higher authority in order to pull off this crazy scheme. Late that afternoon, the colonel ordered a surprise muster of his entire battalion. Following orders, his soldiers assembled on the parade grounds near the base’s front gate.

  While his men were forming up, the colonel drove a large Soviet Army GAZ truck up to the regimental arms depot and walked in to see the supply clerks. With his regiment standing in formation on the other side of the base, the colonel waved a requisition form at the clerks and ordered them to load an SA-19 into the truck. Once the missile was on board, he gave them a list of a few other choice pieces of equipment to load as well. When they were finished, he bounded back behind the driver’s wheel and took off.

  With virtually all of the base’s personnel now standing in formation near the front gate, the colonel gunned the truck engine and barreled to the back of the base, crashing through the perimeter fence and out into the farmland beyond.

  It was already dark when his CIA case officer, waiting at the rendezvous point a few kilometers away from the base, began to hear a grinding engine and the crashing sounds of a truck bowling through the woods. Suddenly the truck pushed through the brush and came to a stop in the clearing, and the colonel jumped out, shouting for the CIA officers to hurry up.

  “Bystro! Bystro!” he shouted. “Hurry!”

  Moving as fast as they could, the three men helped the colonel transfer the crated SA-19 and other weapons into the Army truck and took off, leaving the Soviet truck abandoned in the woods. As they sped down the narrow road leading to the old border, they passed Rolph, who pulled in behind them with the colonel’s wife and children and the captain and his girlfriend packed into his car.

  After a hectic fifteen-minute race they were across the border, and the strange little convoy pulled over. The colonel got out, pulled off his Soviet Army greatcoat, threw it on the ground, and angrily stomped all over it in his Army boots. He then got back in the truck and they sped on, making only one more stop before arriving at a U.S. Army base near Frankfurt: dinner at McDonald’s, for the kids.

  The SA-19 was soon on its way to an American exploitation team, which would have time to devise countermeasures against the weapon before the first fighters were launched against Iraq a few months later.

  Moscow was not amused. General Boris Snetkov, the commander in chief of the Western Group of Forces in East Germany, and three senior generals of the Western Group were all sacked thanks to ROSETTA and STONE.

  Berlin, December 12, 1990

  By December, MACRAME was running out of documents to photograph. He had taken great risk to help us, and we decided it was time to pull him out. Rolph waited in the Leipzig park to tell him, but for the first time in six months, the young pilot didn’t show up. Rolph would have to go to the fallback plan.

  Two days later, Rolph drove through a cold, rain-soaked night to the small village near the Soviet pilot’s air base. He parked his car and then made his way through the empty lanes to the alternate meeting site, a cemetery on the outskirts of the village. He shivered as he tried to remain inconspicuous, but he knew he couldn’t stay long. If someone passed by, he’d have a hard time explaining why he was standing in the rain in the village cemetery at 10:00 P.M. Maybe he’s been compromised, Rolph thought. Maybe he’s already been dragged back to Moscow. . . .

  He was about to leave the cemetery when, in the distance, he saw someone riding a bicycle toward him through the rain. As he peered into the darkness, he realized the figure was too slight to be the pilot. He began to hurry away, back to his car and safety. But as he glanced at the bicyclist one last time, he just barely made out the figure of a woman. He stopped and stared again. It was the pilot’s wife. She had bicycled the three kilometers from the air base in the cold rain and was freezing, her hair matted and her flimsy Russian coat soaked through. Rolph took her to his car and turned on the heater while she assured him that her husband was safe. His mother had died, and he’d returned to the Soviet Union for her funeral. His wife had remembered the backup meeting site and had slipped away from the base on her own, determined to make the meeting in her husband’s place. As she sat shivering in his car, Rolph vowed to himself that once the pilot and his wife were safely in the United States, he’d make sure she got a decent winter coat.

  With Germany reunified, it was no longer difficult for a Soviet Air Force officer based in what had been East Germany to travel to West
Berlin. Before long, the MiG pilot and his family were heading to the United States on a C-5 that had stopped in Germany to pick them up on its way back from the Persian Gulf. Intrigued by the American aircraft, the Soviet fighter pilot sat in the cockpit with the pilots as they landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.

  At headquarters, Rolph checked in with NROC—the National Resettlement Operations Center, the arm of the CIA that handles defector resettlement—to hand over his charges. But a harried NROC official tried to fend him off.

  “We’re stretched thin,” he said. “We’re getting too many Soviets. Can you stay with them for a while and get them settled?”

  Rolph hadn’t realized that the CIA was quite so overburdened with Soviet defectors. He’d planned to head straight back to Germany, but he agreed nonetheless and ferried the family to a safe house in Virginia. The Soviet fighter pilot had arrived in time to consult with the U.S. Air Force just as the war against Iraq was about to begin. He was soon helping the Air Force teach American fighter pilots headed for the Persian Gulf how to deal with Soviet-style air combat tactics. And Rolph stayed with the family long enough to take the pilot’s wife to an American department store, where the CIA bought her a good winter coat.

  Langley, February 13, 1991

  Not long after the brief intensity of the Gulf War, I was asked by NROC to pay a visit to Sergei Papushin in his apartment in Maryland. It would be a shot in the arm for him to get some high-level attention, his handler told me. Papushin was still fighting a losing battle with alcohol, and maybe a meeting with me would help. I was paired up for the trip with Rod Carlson, long since retired but now back on contract to handle Soviet defectors, of which there were more than enough trickling in every month.

  Papushin’s apartment was spotless. He himself was neatly dressed and looked clean and sober—more like a young Mormon missionary, I thought, than a rummy burnout from the KGB. We had a good talk about his getting acclimated to life in America. He said he was working on a possible girlfriend, and I wished him luck. I left the meeting telling Carlson I thought Papushin might actually turn the corner, that he might make it.

  I was dead wrong.

  Two weeks later, one of his handlers went in to check on him and found the young KGB defector’s body lying underneath his bed, an empty bourbon bottle on the floor beside him. We went on full alert—a defector who had warned that there was a mole inside the agency had just been found dead. We wanted an autopsy to make certain that Papushin had not been murdered.

  The autopsy results were clear—he had died of alcohol poisoning. This was of his own doing. Papushin’s body was flown back to Moscow for a quiet funeral. An old friend from the KGB who attended the funeral later said that his face was so swollen that he was almost unrecognizable. The only way he could tell it was his friend was from a familiar scar on his hand.

  8

  Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, April 12, 1991

  Aldrich Ames’s return to CIA headquarters in the summer of 1989 after three years in Rome was filled with uncertainty. His tour in Rome had been rocky at best. Ames was about to become a father for the first time, a fact that would dramatically alter his relationship with Rosario, his demanding Colombian wife. At work, meanwhile, he was drifting through what was left of his career. He bounced from one desk job to another and had to wonder whether his career had stalled so badly because he was now suspected of being a spy.

  But that wasn’t the problem—what was holding him back was much more mundane. Ames had developed a reputation as a clever but uninspired midlevel CIA officer, a “terminal GS-14.” He was a smooth writer and astute analyst of Soviet intelligence, but many inside the agency considered him lazy and arrogant, and that was a poisonous combination. He was one of those people who don’t get fired but whom managers tend to pass around.

  When he returned from Rome, Ames was first sent back to his home division—SE—but he was given a lackluster assignment in the Western European branch. In December, a month after the Berlin Wall fell, he was moved to the Czech desk, but he promptly went on vacation, traveling to Colombia just as the Velvet Revolution swept through Prague.

  When he returned in January, he apologized to David Manners, the Prague chief, for having been absent just as Václav Havel and the dissidents were swept into power. What he didn’t tell Manners was that he had met his KGB contacts during his Christmas holiday in Bogotá. Ames stayed on the Czech desk through the summer of 1990 but by October was moved out of the division to a job in the analytical branch of the counterintelligence center.

  One of the sources of tension in his life during this period was the polygraph examination he knew he’d have to take sometime after his return from Rome. He’d passed his last polygraph test in 1986—one year after he began working for the KGB—and CIA officers were routinely reexamined every five years. He was able to delay the polygraph test for several months, but by April of 1991 he could no longer avoid it. As he prepared for the test, which was now scheduled for April 12, he knew he had a lot to conceal and had to give serious thought to how he could beat the machine.

  As a longtime operations officer, Ames had experience in administering polygraphs and had a good sense of the limits of their capabilities. He had been on the other side of the tests and knew what the examiners looked for. He also knew that polygraph results consistently reflect the expectations of the technicians. So his ability to pass the polygraph would depend on whether he could establish a good rapport with the examiner.

  Ames was doing fine on the test until he hit a snag on questions related to money. When the examiner came back to the issue, he figured out that there was a problem. He began to talk about his plans for a career after the CIA. “We discussed at considerable length my nascent plans to do some import-export business with friends in New York and Colombia,” he later recalled. “They had been, and remained, merely plans, but it took a lot of discussion to assure the examiner that I had not yet violated and didn’t intend to violate any regulations about preretirement business planning and activities.” Clever misdirection had carried him through.

  The examiner called a break for the day but said he wanted him to come back the next morning. Ames was concerned, but he’d studied the examiner’s behavior and methods during the test, and he was convinced that the man was showing no signs of trying to conceal hostility.

  The next day they continued the examination, and Ames added more details to his thoughts about a future business career. He cruised through the rest of the test.

  He had a great sense of relief—so great that it surprised him a bit. He seemed to be nowhere near so calm in his heart as he thought he’d been in his mind.

  Canterbury Park, Springfield, Virginia, April 15, 1991

  Three days after Aldrich Ames faced off against the polygraph machine at Tyson’s Corner, Robert Hanssen was a few miles away, scrambling to make an exchange with the KGB. At Doris, a dead drop site under a footbridge in Canterbury Park, Hanssen left a computer diskette—the twenty-second diskette filled with classified information that he had turned over to the KGB since 1985. It included details of an FBI recruitment operation that the KGB had previously asked him about.

  The KGB left a package for Hanssen at Doris as well, one that included $10,000 and a note filled with Russian sentiment.

  Dear Friend:

  Time is flying. As a poet said:

  What’s our life

  If full of care

  You have no time

  To stop and stare?

  You’ve managed to slow down the speed of your running life to send us a message. And we appreciate it.

  The KGB then tasked Hanssen with a series of specific requests for information. Among other things, they wanted information on how the U.S. intelligence community was planning to respond to the political upheaval in the Soviet Union. The KGB was worried that the CIA was going to try to exploit the situation. And if they could prove that the CIA was becoming more active behind the scenes inside th
e Soviet Union, maybe they could use that information against the reformers in Moscow. Maybe Gorbachev could still be stopped before he destroyed what was left of the empire.

  Langley, May 15, 1991

  Richard Kerr was a levelheaded officer, and it was reassuring to see that someone like him could rise through the CIA ranks from line analyst to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. I’d known Dick fairly well over the years, as he occupied a number of important jobs in the intelligence and administration directorates on his way to becoming the number two. I’d always found that when he spoke it was wise to listen, even if what he said seemed cloaked in humor. One time in a conversation with the new Pakistani prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, in Islamabad, Kerr had concluded his description of a particular facet of developments in Afghanistan by saying, “If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, CIA will probably call it a duck.” The Radcliffe-educated Bhutto got Kerr’s point, but her note takers clearly had to scramble.

  A conversation I’d had with Kerr summed up what seemed to be wrong with the direction the DO had instinctively taken as it pursued the Soviet target after 1989.

  “All you guys do is take in each other’s laundry, don’t you?” Kerr said with his disarming smile. “You just go after KGB guys.” And the truth was I had no answer to that. Kerr’s message was punchy but clear—SE Division was stuck in another era. I agreed with him and began making adjustments to the way we were doing business.

  Too much of the CIA’s clandestine collection effort had too little relevance in the fast-moving new world. Landing a Soviet defector had been our bread and butter in the old days, but now we found ourselves simply in the resettlement game, with no real evidence that we were getting much of anything useful in return. I’d raised the issue a few times and asked if we should really be taking so many of these defectors, but Redmond and the old guard were convinced that the next KGB officer coming over the hill would bring the goods. Only it just wasn’t working out that way. Not only were we not getting important counterintelligence from the stream of young KGB officers defecting to us, we were still coming up short on collecting crucial intelligence the NSC needed for the tricky endgame in the USSR. Getting that kind of intelligence was now our most pressing mission.