The main enemy: the inside story of the CIA's final showdown with the KGB

593 Pages·2003·3.026 MB·English

by  Soviet Union. Komitet gosudarstvennoĭ bezopasnosti.;Sowjetunion Komitet Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti;Risen, James;Bearden, Milt

THE MAIN
ENEMY
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R A N D O M H O U S E
N E W Y O R K
THE MAIN
ENEMY
THE INSIDE STORY OF
THE CIA’S FINAL SHOWDOWN
WITH THE KGB
MILT BEARDEN
AND
JAMES RISEN
Copyright © 2003 by Milton Bearden and James Risen
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random
House, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Random House and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
e-ISBN 1-58836-306-6
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
v1.0
To Marie-Catherine
To Penny

FOREWORD
The Main Enemy is the first comprehensive history of the climactic se-
cret battles between the CIA and the KGB in the closing days of the
Cold War, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded.
Beginning with the watershed “Year of the Spy” in 1985 and following
through to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the book chronicles the
major espionage engagements between the CIA and KGB through the
eyes of the spies who fought them.
This is the story of the lives and careers of the generation trained as
spies in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis, who took charge at the
CIA and KGB just as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev rose to
power in the 1980s and then suddenly found themselves at the center
of a maelstrom of historic change. Many of the CIA and KGB officers
who faced off in the Cold War have returned to civilian life. And like
their fathers, the combat veterans of Normandy and Stalingrad, they
have much to remember.
The Main Enemyis the product of a unique experiment, an effort by
a CIA insider and an outside journalist to combine forces to write a
more revealing and human narrative than either could on his own.
This truly was a collaborative project, but the authors also adhered to a
strict division of labor in order to abide by certain rules imposed by the
CIA on its former officers. As required under CIA regulations, Milt
Bearden submitted his portion of the manuscript to the CIA for pre-
publication review, and then he made redactions requested by the
agency. Those redactions were modest and did not affect the story
being told.
viii FOREWORD
James Risen did not submit his portion of the book to the CIA for
prepublication review. In order to provide a consistent narrative tone,
Milt Bearden is referred to in the first person throughout the book,
even in those sections of the book written by James Risen.
The book is based on hundreds of interviews conducted over the
course of three years with dozens of CIA and KGB officers on either
side of the divide. Where there is dialogue in the book, it corresponds
to the specific recollections of one or more of the people present in the
room. Beyond this, we have taken the liberty of reconstructing several
CIA cables. With the exception of an excerpt from one, these are not
actual cables but are reconstructions by Milt Bearden based on his
thirty years of reading and writing CIA cables; they are similar in tone
and language to the real cables sent in each instance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To all of the men and women who fought the battles described in
these pages, we are in your debt. Many of you could not be named be-
cause the job is not yet done; others wished not to be named, and we
have honored that wish. But your anonymity does not diminish your
contribution.
We also owe an enormous debt to our editor at Random House, the
matchless Joy de Menil. The Main Enemyis infused with her energy and
vision.
And one of our greatest advocates has been Tina Bennett, our liter-
ary agent at Janklow & Nesbit, whose enthusiasm for our project never
wavered.
We wish to thank Jill Abramson, the Washington bureau chief of
The New York Times, who has been a steadfast friend throughout the
years of work on The Main Enemy.
We are also grateful for the research assistance of Barclay Walsh, re-
search supervisor in the Washington bureau of The New York Times.