The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  In ten minutes, there were a dozen justice investigators led by the general prosecutor of the Russian Federation. Their appearance was sharply different from what Shebarshin and his colleagues were used to seeing within the confines of the Lubyanka—few wore coats and ties, and they all look rumpled somehow. Shebarshin found them polite but slightly agitated. To his surprise, they seemed to make decisions quickly and sensibly. They divided into groups, and one tackled Kryuchkov’s office while another set off for Kryuchkov’s dacha, where the former KGB Chairman’s wife, Ekaterina Petrovna, had been weeping for the last two days. A third group was dispatched to Kryuchkov’s Moscow apartment to begin its search.

  Shebarshin took in the activity about him and asked his aide for a strong cup of tea. Then he began to write his report for Gorbachev. As he was writing, the leadership telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and heard Gorbachev’s voice: “I have signed your temporary appointment as acting KGB Chairman,” he said. “Get to work!”

  Sitting there in the Chairman’s office, Shebarshin wondered why it was that three hours ago, or even now, for that matter, he never had the thought of declining this appointment. Was it force of habit that he should never refuse? Was it discipline? Perhaps it was his training to always obey his seniors, particularly since in this instance it had been the President himself who commanded his fate. But Shebarshin made an unpleasant discovery, which he tried to suppress. It was simply vanity, he decided. Leonid Shebarshin, the son of a shoemaker from Marina Woods, most recently a common intelligence officer, has become the head of the Committee for State Security.

  People are weak, he decided. It is all about vanity.

  Langley, 0745 Hours, Thursday, August 22, 1991

  The pile of cable traffic on my desk seemed to grow each morning after the coup collapsed. As I flipped through the reports, I was able to keep track of the new trajectory of the Soviet Union about as well as anyone else in Washington, Moscow, or other world capitals, which still wasn’t very good.

  This morning I had a situation report stating that the crowds building in central Moscow were becoming more brazen and that it might not take much to spark a real riot. The most volatile crowds seemed to be forming up at the Lubyanka, and many seemed to be spurred on by that old Russian standby, free-flowing vodka. In short, fear had changed sides.

  Dzerzhinsky Square, 2130 Hours, Thursday, August 22, 1991

  The crowd of some twenty thousand packed into Dzerzhinsky Square cheered the prospect of toppling the statue of “Iron” Felix. All over Moscow, crowds had been pulling down the bronze testaments to Bolshevism and hauling them off to a temporary graveyard next to the Tretyakov Gallery. Now it was Dzerzhinsky’s turn.

  Under the watchful eye of the Russian militia, the Moscow city government had assumed charge of the operation, and it had taken most of Saturday to find a crane big enough for the task. As the crane eased into position next to the statue, the crowd began to sing a song about Magadan, the western Siberian city most famously known for its role as a key part of Stalin’s disposal system—the Gulag. Sergei Stankevich, the young deputy mayor of Moscow, leaned into the microphone to lead the chorus. Stankevich was a poor conductor, and the singing was ragged, but the crowd seemed unwilling to abandon the mournful lyrics.

  Inside the Lubyanka, looking out on the square from behind a fifth-floor window, Leonid Shebarshin stood back in the shadows. He watched the crane by the statue, the volunteer “executioner” climbing atop Dzerzhinsky’s shoulders, encircling the neck and torso of the first head of the Soviet secret intelligence service with the crane’s iron cable. The “executioner” straightened up, hitched up his falling pants, and gestured with his hand. “Ready! Proceed with the hanging.”

  He is probably a rigger, Shebarshin thought. Naturally, Moscow Deputy Mayor Sergei Stankevich himself couldn’t put on the noose. No, there were always those who gave orders and those who followed them.

  Finally, the statue lifted off its pedestal, and the symbol of repression that had towered over the square since 1926 was laid on its side. In a few more days, it would be hauled off to the field near Gorky Park to join the corpses of Lenin that had already begun piling up in the makeshift graveyard.

  Few in the crowd seemed to notice the letters and logo emblazoned across the counterweight of the giant crane—KRUPP. But David Rolph’s officer in the crowd at Dzerzhinsky Square brought his camera up at just that moment and snapped the picture he’d been waiting most of the day to get.

  Only after the photographs were developed overnight would the irony of a German crane lifting the bronze statue of Dzerzhinsky become the subject of whispers. Many would later opine that some sort of historical irony had just played itself out—that Dzerzhinsky’s statue, itself thought to be cast from the bronze barrels of Krupp cannon forged for wars long since past, was finally hauled off its perch by a crane built by the same German conglomerate.

  An exhausted Leonid Shebarshin returned to his dacha in the early hours of the morning. His wife, Nina, was waiting for him, worried. She had heard about his appointment. “Do you think it’s for long?” she asked.

  “I think it will be for just a few days,” he answered.

  Moments later, Shebarshin fell into a deep sleep, his last thought not to forget to ask the Rezidents the next day about the state of mind of their personal staffs and, more important, of their intelligence agents. It was essential that the helpers be reassured.

  The Lubyanka, 0300 Hours, Friday, August 23, 1991

  Dzerzhinsky Square was deserted three hours after midnight when a small group of KGB officers, unaccustomed to looking over their own shoulders, furtively made their way through the clutter and trash littering the square to the fallen statue of their founder. In dark paint they printed out the words on the pedestal that Iron Felix would carry with him into his uncertain future:

  DEAR FELIX, WE ARE SORRY THAT

  WE COULDN’T SAVE YOU

  BUT YOU WILL REMAIN WITH US.

  Then they disappeared into the night.

  Moscow, 0600 Hours, Friday, August 23, 1991

  Shebarshin woke with a start. For a few moments he wasn’t sure it hadn’t all been a bad dream—the emergency committee, Kryuchkov’s arrest, Dzerzhinsky’s “execution.” The events of the previous day seemed like fragments of a film—the meeting with Gorbachev, the investigators in Kryuchkov’s office, it was all a disjointed jumble.

  Awake now, he wondered what the day would bring. He knew trouble would be coming. But he also knew that the new democrats would eventually realize that no government can rule without state security. Unfortunately, in the exuberance of victory, in vengeful celebration, they would not think of the future. Yes, there would be trouble, and soon, he decided.

  Two hours later he was back at Lubyanka, already caught in a struggle with tradition. An acting chief was never supposed to sit in the office of the Chairman of the KGB. It was not just a matter of appropriate reticence, but one of deep Russian superstition. To sit in a chair prematurely would frighten off success. But Shebarshin decided that the drama of the situation demanded he dispense with tradition and ignore superstition. He took over at Kryuchkov’s desk.

  The Chairman’s office was huge, somber, and now free of any lingering trace of its previous occupant. Kryuchkov had been a man indifferent to his surroundings; he simply did not notice them. All he’d needed was a well-lit desk, his telephones, and any kind of ballpoint pen, no matter how cheap. The pens stood fanlike in a tumbler. As soon as he sat down, Shebarshin was assaulted by a flood of calls on the bank of nearby telephones: internal calls from the special Kremlin phones, calls on the supreme command link, and calls on lines he simply could not identify. He decided to switch the telephones to his assistants, leaving only the leadership and supreme command phones to himself.

  The reports coming in were familiar: The KGB was under threat; some forces were preparing to storm the building; all the chiefs were awaiting orders. Shebarshin decided that he must rei
nforce his rule of the previous day: The KGB cannot allow itself to be drawn into any confrontation with the crowd.

  The phone rang again. This time it was the chief of the investigative directorate, reporting that the supporters of Moscow dissident Valeria Novodvorskaya were preparing to storm the Lefortovo Prison to free their leader. Shebarshin was familiar with Novodvorskaya and had always dismissed her as part of what he considered the hysterical end of the political spectrum. But he also understood that it was precisely that end of the political spectrum that was now in charge.

  Almost wearily he asked, “Do we have her?”

  “We do,” the chief of investigations answered.

  “What should we do?”

  “Release her.”

  “Who can authorize that?” Shebarshin asked.

  “You can.”

  “Then release her,” Shebarshin said with finality.

  Langley, 2345 Hours, Thursday, August 22, 1991

  It had been a long day, I thought as I drafted a cable to Rolph telling him that at his next meeting with Krassilnikov he might see if the general was interested in “reinsuring with us.” But gently, I instructed my Moscow chief. Do it with finesse.

  Before I closed up, I just sat there alone in my office, trying to come to grips with the drama that now seemed to have played out with such finality. Was this it? I wondered. Was history really going to play another of its anticlimactic tricks, dragging us along for almost half a century in a struggle that seemed so endless that it had defined generations—it had certainly defined mine—and then just get tired and call it quits? Was I missing something? Were the hard-liners like Redmond right? Would we all arrive in Langley some Monday morning and find the Berlin Wall neatly restored and propping up the Humpty-Dumpty of the Warsaw Pact?

  None of this really made any sense at the end of two turbulent weeks. Maybe it would take a little more time to sink in, I decided, and pulled the vault door closed and initialed the sign-out sheet.

  Lubyanka, 1400 Hours, August 23, 1991

  Shebarshin had not been wrong when he’d told his wife that he’d probably hold the acting chairmanship of the KGB for only a couple of days. In the afternoon after the festivities at Dzerzhinsky Square, he was advised by the President’s office that Vadim Bakatin, the minister of the interior and a liberal oppositionist, had been appointed Chairman of the KGB, effective immediately. Shebarshin would continue on concurrently as Vice Chairman of the KGB and as head of the First Chief Directorate’s foreign intelligence service.

  Shebarshin understood that he would hold an important record in the annals of the Soviet Union—he had been chairman of the Committee for State Security, the twenty-first in the line of succession that began with Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky in 1917, but only for a single day.

  Moscow, 1230 Hours, Monday, August 25, 1991

  The two men didn’t have to huddle in the backseat of a KGB Volga this time. Moscow was suddenly an open city, and they could talk more comfortably over lunch in a Chinese restaurant inside the Peking Hotel.

  As Rolph ate the Russian-Chinese food and talked about the coup and its stunning aftermath, he could see that Krassilnikov was a changed man. For one thing, Krassilnikov observed that Boris Yeltsin had shown great courage by standing up to the coup plotters. When Rolph reminded him of his earlier words—that if Yeltsin wanted a confrontation, he’d get one—the old man shrugged. I didn’t mean a military confrontation, the KGB general explained. I meant an ideological one. We were misled and misinformed by the emergency committee. Fortunately, the Second Chief Directorate never got its hands dirty with the plotters. It had no involvement in the coup, he stressed.

  As Rolph listened and studied Krassilnikov’s deeply lined face, he finally eased into his pitch.

  “You know, Rem, I have really come to enjoy the time we spend together. These meetings have been very useful for me. Of course, we don’t know which way things are going to end up now. But as a friend, if there is anything I can do to help you, I would be happy to. I have no authority to say this, of course, I’m speaking just as a friend, but if you need anything . . .”

  A stern look crossed Krassilnikov’s face, and he raised his hand and held it in front of Rolph. “Stop. Don’t do this.”

  Rolph brought his pitch to a halt. Rem Krassilnikov, the professor of counterintelligence, was not interested in working for the CIA, no matter how bleak the outlook for the KGB.

  Rolph abandoned his recruitment efforts, and Rem Krassilnikov refused to let the incident interrupt their meeting. He went right back to explaining the KGB’s new realities.

  With Yeltsin now calling the shots, the KGB was to be broken up, Krassilnikov revealed. The First Chief Directorate was to become independent, as were the signal intelligence units of the Eighth and Sixteenth Directorates—the KGB’s version of the NSA. The border guards and VIP security units would also be split off. Vadim Bakatin, a liberal former interior minister who had already proposed ways to reform the intelligence service, was to run the KGB. And guess who would be a member of an “advisory” panel, helping Bakatin “reform” the KGB? Why, Rem Krassilnikov’s boss, Gennady Titov, the current head of the Second Chief Directorate.

  And that’s when Rolph realized: These guys won’t give up easily.

  But Bakatin moved quickly to break up the KGB. He summed up his view of the organization in the immediate aftermath of the coup: You see, the most terrible thing is that the KGB in its old form had an absolute monopoly on government communications, total surveillance, secrecy, the encrypting and decrypting of documents, the protection of the USSR’s borders, and even the protection of the president. That, I am sure, played the decisive role in the coup. The danger for the Soviet Union was precisely in the very structure of its security organs—that’s the paradox!

  12

  The Lubyanka, Moscow, Mid-September 1991

  Robert Strauss was as smooth an operator as I had seen in over a quarter century of dealing with smooth operators and trying, sometimes with grave self-doubt, to be one myself. Though I had made that decision in my first meeting with Strauss, the high-stakes poker player from Texas, the Democratic Party healer, and one of the shrewdest lawyers to work Washington’s K Street, watching him here in the Lubyanka, not more than a hundred feet from Yuri Andropov’s museum office overlooking Dzerzhinsky Square, I knew I had been right about America’s new ambassador to Moscow from the moment we first met.

  I had briefed Strauss on the USSR, from the CIA’s perspective, as soon as he was confirmed as President George H. W. Bush’s envoy to the Kremlin. He’d put me at ease with a couple of old J. Edgar Hoover stories from his days as an FBI agent in Dallas to set the mood and probably to let me know that he knew a little something about my world.

  “I was a young agent in the Dallas Field Office when J. Edgar made one of his imperial visits,” Strauss told me in that down-home Texas drawl I’d grown up with. “I was picked as the guy to drive him around, but there was one catch. J. Edgar didn’t like his drivers to make left turns. I guessed it was because he never wanted to be broadsided, but anyway it was a pretty big thing back then. So I’d have to figure a way to drive him all over Dallas without making any left turns!”

  I guessed Bob Strauss was telling me how he navigated his way through the tricky intersections of life, not just how he’d gotten the FBI Director through Dallas traffic. He also told me how he took the job of ambassador to Moscow when it was offered by a Republican President.

  “I was sitting there in front of George Bush’s desk in the oval office as he asked me to go to Moscow for him. I said that I had not voted for him the last time and that I’d probably never vote for him. But the President said that didn’t matter and that the man he wanted in Moscow was me.”

  While I was briefing him on what was going on, Strauss cut to the chase.

  “What do I tell the Soviets when they ask why I’m the President’s man in Moscow?”

  “It’s easy,” I told him. “Tell
them that the President sent you to Moscow not because you know a damn thing about Russia or how the Soviet Union works. He sent you because you know everything about how Washington works.”

  Strauss looked at me like a guy who has just filled in a straight flush and said, “I’m gonna like you, Milt.”

  Now, sitting with this old fox and watching him handle Boris Yeltsin’s new KGB Chairman, Vadim Bakatin, the former minister of the interior fired by Gorbachev as he scrambled to distance himself from the liberals in the summer of 1991, I knew that George Bush had sent the right man to Moscow.

  Bakatin asked Strauss a number of questions, and then the new KGB Chairman turned to me.

  “How many analysts do you have in CIA?”

  “Around two thousand,” I answered.

  Bakatin called an aide over to the table and asked him how many analysts the KGB had. After hearing the man’s answer, he turned back to me. “He says we have less than a dozen!” His tone was one of exasperation. The KGB had never put much stock in analysis, since for generations the Kremlin had not wanted to hear bad news.

  Bakatin said that the time had come to end the Cold War contest between our agencies. He complained about all the money and resources spent just on spying against our respective embassies in Moscow and Washington. Pointing to his safe in the corner of his large office, Bakatin said, “In that safe are the complete plans of the efforts to put listening devices in your embassy. Now your embassy stands empty and we are at an impasse!”

  Strauss perked up. He and I had talked earlier about ways to get the Soviets to move on the issue of the bugging of our embassy. I had briefed him on the claims by the KGB, made to me in Helsinki more than a year earlier, that the embassy was now “safe.” But Strauss would need solid proof that the embassy was actually safe for occupation. As the ambassador talked with Bakatin about the need to get the embassy problem behind us, I slipped him a note.