Of moles and men

During the Cold War, it was no easy matter for a Russian to volunteer to spy for the CIA. Take the case of Adolf Tolkachev, an aircraft designer in Moscow. Risking his life, Tolkachev tried half a dozen times to approach the agency.

He left notes in the cars of two successive CIA station chiefs in Moscow. He got nowhere. The CIA, it seemed, yawned at the prospect of recruiting an agent at the very heart of the Soviet aviation industry, a scientist who could reveal vital information about the state of Moscow’s research into stealth technology. Poor Tolkachev had to do everything but dance the kazachok naked in Red Square to attract the attention of the CIA. Finally, giving up on the obtuse station chiefs, he made contact by approaching the Italian butler at Spaso House, the residence of the American ambassador.

Perhaps the agency had worried it was all a KGB plot. But Milt Bearden, the former chief of the CIA’s Soviet division, and James Risen, a Washington correspondent for the New York Times, report that Tolkachev, once recruited, turned over a cornucopia of secrets about Soviet MIGs and other weapons systems, saving the United States “billions of dollars” and perhaps five years of research and development time. He was eventually betrayed by Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who defected to the Soviets in 1985. Tolkachev was executed a year later.

“The Main Enemy” -- the title comes from the KGB’s designation of the United States during the Cold War -- is the product of an unusual collaboration between the veteran former CIA officer and a respected journalist who specializes in intelligence and national security. Their joint authorship created some cumbersome logistical problems: Bearden was required to submit his portion of the manuscript to CIA for clearance, but Risen, not having worked for the spooks, was under no such restriction.

The result, despite the screening by the CIA -- the agency’s censors do seem to have wielded only a light pencil -- is a fast-paced page turner, a richly woven tapestry of the spy wars between Moscow and Washington in the fading twilight of the Cold War. For spy buffs, there are delicious inside details: The CIA specialists who prepared instructions in Russian for Tolkachev and other agents are called “poets”; a brief encounter between a case officer and an agent is a “bren”; and the KGB -- not just Saddam Hussein and Hollywood -- used body doubles to mislead onlookers. At one point, the CIA even consulted magicians to learn the art of deception.

As a CIA officer, Bearden was a participant in the games of intelligence played with the Soviets. But the authors were also able to mine high-level sources inside the former KGB. Many of the stories in the book have been told before, but aside from providing new detail, the real value of “The Main Enemy” is that it assembles in one place all the interlocking cases of the period: Howard, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, Ronald Pelton, Vitaly Yurchenko and several others. By pulling the threads together, the authors demonstrate the often complex relationships among the cases. In the wilderness of mirrors, as counterintelligence has been termed, Ames and Howard betrayed some of the same agents, as did Hanssen and Ames. You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and Bearden and Risen have provided one. For students of espionage, and readers who just enjoy a good spy story, the result is an essential guide to the endgame of the Cold War, a sort of espionage Michelin with a lot of three-star stopping places along the way.

More details are disclosed, for example, about “the Gavrilov channel,” the fascinating secret meetings of senior CIA and KGB officials that were held when, on occasion, they had matters of mutual interest to discuss. In one such session in Helsinki in 1989, Bearden and Gardner “Gus” Hathaway, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, met warily with Rem Krassilnikov, the agency’s nemesis in Moscow, and two other KGB officers. The official business concluded, the vodka was produced, and apparently the party got fairly raucous because Hathaway lost his wallet, as Bearden reveals with evident glee. The KGB politely returned it: “[T]he thing’s probably radioactive from all the photocopying,” Bearden cracks. In researching the book, the authors had extensive help from Krassilnikov, whose job it was to catch the CIA’s officers and agents in the Soviet capital, and from Leonid Shebarshin, who headed the KGB for exactly one day after the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. Krassilnikov died before the book was published.

Beginning in 1985, the CIA was losing agents inside the Soviet Union almost faster than they could be recruited, thanks in large measure to Ames. Ten were executed, many others imprisoned. The CIA hardly seemed to notice; it took nine years to track down the mole. But the book reveals a clever ploy by Bearden to try to find the culprit. He flew to Kenya in 1985 and arranged to have the station there create a fake CIA asset -- the hapless chief of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, in Nairobi. The cables to CIA headquarters reporting on the information ostensibly provided by the new “recruit” -- but manufactured by the CIA -- would be read only by a small group of agency officers. If the GRU man was suddenly recalled to Moscow, it would be pretty good evidence that one of the cable-readers at Langley, Va., was the mole, thus narrowing the field of suspects. A similar ruse was activated at a meeting inside the soundproof “bubble” in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Unfortunately both schemes failed; Ames was not arrested until 1994.

Bearden, a Yale graduate who grew up in Texas, was the CIA officer tapped to run the covert operation that succeeded in pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989. In one unforgettable vignette, Bearden meets in 1986 with CIA Director William J. Casey, who instructs him to “do whatever it takes to win.” Casey adds: “A billion enough for ya?” Bearden replies, “Yeah, a billion ought to do it.” And in fact the CIA’s money flowed to arm the moujahedeen.

In a cinematic scene on the Moscow-to-Leningrad train, the Red Arrow, Jack Downing, the Moscow chief of station (he was not one of the ones who turned away Tolkachev), is approached by a KGB man. The Russian seemed almost too good to be true, and he was. Not until the CIA was ready to “exfiltrate” him out of Moscow -- and he failed to show -- was the agency sure it had been had.

A couple of names of CIA chiefs of station are misspelled: Alan D. Wolfe was the station chief in Rome when Yurchenko defected (and later when Ames worked there), and the Moscow station chief whom Howard tried to telephone was Carl E. Gebhardt. But these are minor errors and do not reflect the work as a whole, which is accurate and carefully researched.

In the maze that is espionage, not every path and byway is clearly marked, however. The authors maintain that a Russian source helped pinpoint Ames. But CIA officers involved in the mole hunt say that although a source was indeed helpful in filling in some blanks, that happened only after the agency had already concluded that Ames was the mole.

Are there still spies among us? The authors speculate that there is “a fourth man,” yet another Russian mole inside U.S. intelligence who has not been caught, an American Anthony Blunt, as it were. They argue that four agents rolled up by the KGB were not known to Ames, Howard or Hanssen. It is “possible” or “almost inescapable” that there is a source “still out there.”

One of the cases they cite to buttress their theory is that of Sergei Bokhan, the GRU officer in Athens who was a longtime CIA spy. The CIA rescued him after he was summoned home to Moscow in 1985 and decided he better not go. True, Bokhan was recalled on May 21, 1985, more than three weeks before Ames turned over the bulk of the names of the CIA’s agents to the KGB. But Ames had by then already walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington twice, on April 16 and May 15, and had been promised $50,000, which he received two days after his last visit. So it is also possible that he gave away Bokhan on one of those visits; at some point he indisputably did pass on Bokhan’s name to the KGB.

Still, recent history suggests that predicting that another mole is burrowing away inside U.S. intelligence is a safe bet. Former CIA Director Robert Gates has quoted Richard Helms, one of his predecessors, on the point. When Gates became director, Helms cautioned him: “Never go home at night without wondering where the mole is.”