Win, draw or worse?
Alan Judd
THE MAIN ENEMY: THE CIA's BATTLE WITH THE SOVIET UNION by Milton Bearden and James Risen Century, ,f20, pp. 560, ISBN 0712681515 This book takes its title from the KGB's term for the USA, although its subject is the attritional battle between the CIA and the KGB during the last years of the Cold War. With the tide of antiAmericanism running so high, it's a timely reminder that the KGB's main enemy was also the main reason why postwar European generations grew up in unprecedented peace and prosperity.
Milton Bearden was in charge of the CIA's Soviet and Eastern European Division when the Berlin Wall came down and was deeply involved throughout the Year of the Spy — 1985 — when the CIA's Aldrich Ames and the FBI's Robert Hanssen wrought such terrible damage within America's secret establishment. They each, separately and for no excusable reasons — money, resentment, vanity in one case. vanity again and the thrill of deception in the other — volunteered to spy for the KGB.
Although no individual's account of even that single aspect of the great struggle is likely to be truly comprehensive, there is plenty of gratifying detail here for espionage enthusiasts. The book comprises oral and written quotes from former insiders on both sides, so we learn about operations not only from the CIA's point of view but what happens if you are a CIA officer or agent arrested by the KGB. The latter should be a cure to anyone prone to heroic self-projections. You are suddenly seized by five or six strong men, thick rope is forced between your teeth (in case you have a suicide pill), your arms are yanked up behind your back in the excruciating 'chicken-wing' hold (the shoulders of one CIA officer who was held for only a few hours took a year to recover), you are stripped completely, your orifices are thoroughly searched and you are then put into prison overalls and taken to the Lubyanka. Then they start on you. There are good accounts of some of the CIA's Russian agents betrayed and sent to their deaths by Ames, in order to save him
self from suspicion. The story of the military scientist, Tolkachev, for example, is one of the great Cold War cases, run for many years by the CIA under the eyes of the KGB's ubiquitous surveillance teams. His motives, unlike those of his betrayer, were ethical and ideological; he directed that part of the very substantial sums the Americans were prepared to pay him should be used to relieve the needy families of dissidents.
His interrogator was the legendary Rem Krassilnikov, almost a real-life version of le Carre's Karla. Bearden, who met him several times, gives a good picture of the white-haired, gentle-mannered, remorseless investigator. Yet this man has now done what would have been unthinkable then: published his own memoirs. What hope now for the Karlas we love to read about when the real thing tells it like it is (up to a point)? The central third of the book is an account of the CIA's contribution to getting the Russians out of Afghanistan. Bearden was directly involved and it is at least arguable that without American (and, to a much lesser extent, British) intervention the Russians might have remained there. Given all that followed from Russian defeat — the collapse of the Soviet empire, the end of the Cold War, the further resurgence of extremist Islam — it is impossible not to reflect on that ghostly unseen familiar that haunts all our actions, the law of unintended consequences. Nevertheless, the heart of the book is that fateful Year of the Spy. There are two lessons to be drawn from Bearden's account. Firstly, how well the CIA did to have that many agents to lose (and they didn't lose them all). Secondly, after Ames, Hanssen and the CIA reject, Howard, who defected to Moscow, can we be sure there wasn't another American traitor, a fourth man? Bearden raises the question because not everything that went wrong can be laid at the doors of the first three, including the KGB's unmasking of our own Oleg Gordievsky, rescued from his Moscow interrogators by MI6. Finally, what was the balance — who won? The book's irritating TV docudrama style militates against analysis, but the subject prompts it. The West won the war, of course, but the intelligence battle was a close-run thing, and we may never really know. It's tempting to think we clinched it, if only because MI6's exfiltration from Russia of KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin yielded a historical intelligence trove of unprecedented range and depth. But what the Mitrokhin archive also shows is the range and depth of the KGB's espionage around the world. They may not have been the world's most efficient or secure intelligence service, but overall they may have been the most effective. We should be grateful that the system they served proved incapable of making proper use of them.
Previous page
