Redmond had been stunned early in 1991 when I refused to accept a low-level KGB officer into the CIA’s defector resettlement program. Instead, I ordered that the KGB officer, with our help behind the scenes, apply for immigration through normal refugee channels. He did so and joined the growing flood of Soviet immigrants to the United States. If he’d had something important to tell us, I’d have had no trouble resettling him myself. But to Redmond and others in the SE Division, that decision was unforgivable. He thought I had gone soft on the Soviets.
I’d decided by now that Redmond was blinded by the minutiae of espionage and had no interest in the big picture. He didn’t seem to want to acknowledge that the Berlin Wall had fallen for good and that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse.
During one heated discussion with Paul, I flared.
“Jesus, Redmond, you’re becoming precisely like the people I came here to fight,” I said, thinking of the paranoia of the KGB and of James Jesus Angleton. “You are becoming like our enemy.”
Redmond was still consumed by the 1985 losses. I decided I had to move him out of the division, and the seventh floor agreed to assign him as the deputy in the counterintelligence center, where he could concentrate full-time on catching spies.
He’d be happy; I’d be happy.
The Kremlin, May 1991
The first ominous indicators of the showdown in the KGB that Colonel Valentin Aksilenko felt so certain was coming came in the spring of 1991.
First, early in the year KGB Chairman Kryuchkov created a new central entity for internal propaganda within the KGB. The new unit, described as an “analytical center,” operated independently from the First and Second Chief Directorates and reported directly to the KGB Chairman at Lubyanka. Kryuchkov pulled Nikolai Sergeyevich Leonov away from his job of supervising KGB operations in North and South America and assigned him to head up the new propaganda center. Leonov’s orders were clear enough: bring about a reversal of the growing and dangerous mood of liberalism and defeatism in the KGB.
Leonov decided to reach down into the core of the organization for a solution. He would rekindle the KGB’s patriotic pride, finding in its historical roots the sense of meaning and energy the Chairman required to prepare the KGB for a last great battle—not for socialism, but for the survival of the Soviet Union.
Leonov, who as a KGB wunderkind in his thirties had become a close confidant of Fidel Castro in Cuba’s revolutionary days, took to the job with a passion. Immediately, flyers and leaflets began to appear on KGB desks everywhere, all stoking the patriotic nationalism believed to lie deep in every Russian soul, even the souls of the cynical and urbane officers of the Committee for State Security. “Russian greatness” was the slogan—the flyers did not extol the virtues of Marxism so much as sound the alarm against dangerous conspiracies cloaked in the guise of change.
Leonov relentlessly advanced the proposition that America’s goal was to destroy the Soviet Union. Countless mutations of this theme were woven into the anti-Western propaganda that emerged with great fanfare from his agency. It was all supposed to stir a patriotic response among the rank-and-file KGB.
Aksilenko concluded that it was, in the end, mostly bullshit. He and others at the KGB might have dismissed the propaganda as useless rhetoric had it not been accompanied by more troubling orders. In April, Kryuchkov demanded that all officers of the KGB once again be issued personal weapons, and ordered that they begin carrying them immediately.
Almost two decades earlier, Leonid Brezhnev had declared that class struggle within the USSR had come to a peaceful end and that socialism had been victorious. The Soviet Union no longer had internal enemies. Thus, the KGB was quietly disarmed. Its officers were told to turn in their service weapons. With the issuance of Makarov automatics and even Kalashnikovs to some, Kryuchkov was preparing the KGB for an as yet undefined last battle, Aksilenko concluded. Kryuchkov was gearing up for a showdown, and he wanted his officers armed and ready to follow. What the KGB Chairman apparently didn’t realize was that the order to rearm served only to harden the positions of the KGB officers who believed that change was the Soviet Union’s only possible salvation.
Val Aksilenko, along with many other officers, quietly decided to retire from the KGB rather than be drawn into Kryuchkov’s patriotic struggle.
Langley, May 1991
Aldrich Ames breezed by Dottie, my executive assistant, and marched right up to my desk.
“Milt, I’ve decided it’s time to come back to SE. What I want to do is run cases. I want to come back and work in the ‘back room’ on your internal cases.”
I was more than a little taken aback. Here was Ames, a man some put on a short list of officers who ought to be watched, coming in and almost demanding I take him back in the division after I’d just cleared him out. But what caught my attention as much as his demand was his transformation. The Aldrich Ames I’d met briefly before his departure for Rome in 1985 was a shoddy-looking guy with bad teeth. He had been replaced by a new Ames in a $1,500 sport-coat-and-slacks outfit, and the teeth that had been so hopelessly discolored had now been beautifully capped at what I guessed was a cost of around $1,000 a cap.
I told Ames I would get back to him. After he left, I went over to Redmond’s office.
“Rick Ames just barged into my office and told me I’d better bring him back to the division now and put him in the back room working the sensitive cases. What do you make of that?”
Redmond, who was packing out and transferring to the counterintelligence center, had no flip answer this time. He just stared at me, taking in what I had said.
A few security questions over Ames’s sudden show of wealth had been raised after his return from Rome. Redmond had followed the counterintelligence center search for the source of our 1985 problem, and he’d told me they had noticed that Ames had bought a $500,000 home in Arlington without taking out a mortgage.
Credit checks had been run on Ames, and a CIA officer was sent to Colombia to investigate whether his sudden wealth came from his wife’s family in Bogotá, as Ames had told colleagues. The reports that came back showed that Ames’s story seemed plausible. His finances looked to be okay, and his wife’s family did appear to be wealthy.
In passing, Redmond had told me that there were a couple of other DO officers who had also bought expensive homes, but unlike Ames, each had taken out mortgages.
“You find my mortgage?” I asked Redmond.
“Haven’t even looked . . . yet.” Redmond didn’t smile.
Ames came back later that summer for a study on the KGB, but he was never granted his wish to get back into the division’s sensitive cases. A few months after that I moved him out again, this time to the counternarcotics center.
CIA Headquarters, July 1991
Paul Redmond had mixed feelings about being moved out of the SE Division to his new home in the counterintelligence center. Soviet operations were all he had ever done, and it was going to be hard for him to leave that part of his life behind. But most of all he was deeply bothered because he disagreed with the way the SE Division was now being managed—by me.
Redmond and other old-school Soviet hands were especially angry over my decisions to downgrade the SE Division’s traditional bread and butter—the more or less unlimited recruitment operations against KGB officers around the world. Over the signatures of Dick Stolz and Tom Twetten, I had sent out cables aimed at the CIA’s field stations in Africa and Latin America that had made it clear the SE Division was no longer interested in targeting every Soviet intelligence officer posted in every remote embassy in the Third World, particularly if the operation ended up inducing a defection. From now on, we’d look at the cases more carefully.
I saw the collapse of the Soviet empire as a moment that called for new ideas. On the one hand, we needed all the policy-relevant intelligence we could get, but on the other, we were beginning to find common ground with the Soviets on issues such as international terrorism, narcotics, a
nd control of their arsenal of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. We were making the first steps toward cooperation in these areas, and we needed to change the way we dealt with the Soviets.
This included easing back on the provocative pressures we had maintained on them for the last thirty years in literally every backwater capital in the Third World. In short, I thought that the USSR was going to become a more classical intelligence target now that we were having to deal with them directly on a number of important issues. It didn’t make sense for the left hand to provoke them in one capital and the right hand to try to cajole them into helping out in another capital at the same moment. I was determined to introduce a little more finesse into the targeting equation.
I also decided that any new defectors had to earn their passage to the United States up front and issued the order to start screening Soviet defectors carefully before committing to resettlement in the United States. Over the previous two years, we had resettled more than a dozen defectors, each new one more or less like the previous one. I had been assured in each case that the most recent defector had been a “gold mine” of counterintelligence, but the claims never lived up to the hype. The reality was that KGB officers were becoming part of a massive flow of Soviet citizens trying to find a new life in the West and were turning to us for what they still believed was the old reliable CIA million-dollar sure thing. In the process, their growing numbers had become a costly liability, as each defector and his family would cost the U.S. taxpayers close to $1 million over the long haul.
Redmond and the other old SE hands considered my actions heresy. Generations of CIA officers had spent their careers trying to recruit the KGB and GRU officers stationed in Soviet embassies in the Third World. There was no doubt that some of the CIA’s most productive spies had originally been recruited while they were working in remote embassies, but times were changing. Redmond feared that, once abandoned, it would be difficult for the CIA to reestablish its worldwide targeting mechanisms to recruit Soviet intelligence officers.
From his new post in the counterintelligence center, Redmond kept in close touch with old friends in the SE Division, and almost every day they complained bitterly to him about the direction I was taking the division. Redmond was frustrated that he was helpless to prevent me from overhauling the division—actions that he believed were tantamount to the dismantling of traditional Soviet operations. So he and Robert Wade, a senior FBI representative at the counterintelligence center who shared Redmond’s views, decided to try to draw wider attention within the CIA to the dispute over the future direction of Soviet operations.
In July, they challenged me and the rest of the SE Division leadership to a debate. Redmond printed up flyers advertising a showdown and circulated them throughout the SE Division’s offices.
“There appears to be a growing tendency in some quarters to establish a politically correct policy that the KGB is no longer an effective organization,” the flyer read.
“With this tendency in mind, Paul Redmond, DC/CIC, and Robert Wade, FBI, challenge the senior management of the Soviet/East European Division to a debate. Resolved: ‘The KGB Is No Longer a Threat to United States National Security.’ The challengers, of course, will support the negative side. CIC/FBI will supply the vodka, SE will supply the Brie.”
Counterintelligence may have had its point about the KGB still being able to run spies against us, but in the cosmic view I saw the KGB as one of the three pillars that propped up the Soviet Union as a whole—the Red Army, the Party, and the KGB. The Army had fallen on hard times, the Party was being torn apart, and the KGB, in my opinion, was no longer the element that would hold together the creaking empire. The threat from the KGB for the last forty years was always part of the whole, and that whole included the Red Army and the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at us. Whether or not it could penetrate the CIA or the FBI with spies was not really in doubt, but it was also not the most important part of the new equation. But I had no confidence that either Redmond or Bob Wade could discuss the matter outside their narrow counterintelligence world, so I flipped Redmond’s challenge into a burn bag and went back to dealing with the final six months of Soviet history.
Langley, July 10, 1991
Not long after he’d vacated his office next to mine in SE, Redmond got an unexpected call on his STU-III secure phone in the counterintelligence center, where he was still settling in. A European station chief was on the line. He was calling to say that one of his case officers had picked up something about a KGB penetration of SE Division. It was a very detailed and sensitive report, and the station chief said he didn’t want to put it in the normal cable traffic. So he had called Redmond personally.
Redmond told the station chief to send the case officer back to Washington, have him check into a hotel in the Virginia suburbs, and then have him call him directly. The case officer was to say he was “Bobby,” who was passing through town. Redmond would come out to his hotel to meet him. The case officer was to stay away from CIA headquarters.
The station chief assured Redmond that the case officer would be in Washington by the next day.
Redmond came down the flight of stairs that separated our offices, walked in, and closed the door. “We’ve got something coming in. It might be what we’ve been looking for,” he said. There was a deadly serious look on his face that told me he was on to something directly related to his passion—the search for the mole. Then he told me about the call from the European station chief.
“Oh, shit!” was about all I could muster.
I knew the case officer who had turned in the report. And I knew he couldn’t be trusted. He had a track record that convinced me he played fast and loose with his intelligence reports. I’d already had to clean up after him on a couple of Eastern European operations, and I’d come to believe that he’d fabricated his reports on those operations. “Paul,” I said, “I’d feel a hell of a lot better if this was coming from somebody else. This guy’s got a real problem with the truth. His stuff always seems too good to be true. And guess what? It probably isn’t.”
I could see Redmond deflate just a bit when he heard my assessment of the case officer with the story. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “And I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve met him.”
As bad as I felt about shooting down Redmond’s new lead, I felt pretty good about how we were getting on together. But for his challenge to a debate, we’d been able to put aside our differences and get on with the job. After he left, I thought that at least Redmond could now find satisfaction in his new job at the counterintelligence center, where he was in a position to focus full-time on the unsolved spy cases that had burdened him for so long. After moving to the center, he was shocked to learn that the investigation of the 1985 losses had been all but abandoned. Since he had always been on the possible list of suspects, he had been reluctant to ask many detailed questions about the progress of the investigation over the last few years. But now that he was deputy chief of the center, Redmond found to his dismay that Jeanne Vertefeuille and her small team had made virtually no progress. The probe that had been started back in 1986 by Gus Hathaway was now firmly relegated to the back burner inside the center. Gus Hathaway had retired, and no one else in the CIA’s management was paying any attention to what Vertefeuille was doing. Redmond was determined to change that. He owed it to the agents who’d been executed.
Langley, July 12, 1991
Redmond checked in with me again a day later. He said he’d met with the case officer. It turned out that a KGB informant had told him about the penetration of SE. After their first extended conversation, Redmond asked the case officer to write down the details of what the KGB officer had told him. The next day, Redmond compared the case officer’s new notes with his original report, which had finally been sent over from Europe.
When he looked at the two reports side by side, Redmond found that the case officer had included much more detail in the notes he’d written in hi
s hotel the previous night than in his first report, written right after he’d met the KGB officer. What bothered Redmond most was that he’d added detailed answers to questions that Redmond had asked him in the hotel, and he’d attributed the new details to what the KGB officer had told him. He said his talk with Redmond had jogged his memory.
His claim was that the KGB had recruited an ethnic Russian CIA case officer who was working in the SE Division. Redmond wasn’t sure he could believe the case officer’s report, but he knew he had to follow the lead. And he didn’t want to let the case officer know that he had doubts about the credibility of his report.
I was about to leave for Africa to meet with our stations there to explain the new Soviet targeting rules, and then I planned to transit Europe. I’d stop in on the station and have a little talk with the case officer myself to see if I could make sense of all this.
At a European Station, July 20, 1991
We were seated across from each other in an acoustic conference room, which was both secure and claustrophobic. The station chief had arranged for my meeting with the case officer on a ruse, saying that I’d been traveling when he’d come back to Washington to meet Redmond and needed a briefing on the sensitive case.
“I hear you’ve got a live one,” I said.
“Yeah. I hope so,” he said, his eyes never locking on mine.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“My KGB guy I’m working told me that he’d picked up something about a penetration of your division. He said there’d been a recruitment. An ethnic Russian.”
The Main Enemy Page 52
