Spying Problems

MUCH OF WHAT IS NOW KNOWN about the successes and failures, the heroes and villains, of the Cold War is due to the unmasking of two American turncoat intelligence officers–Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI, and to the process of damage assessment that followed their arrest and imprisonment.

Both held positions deep inside the United States’ intelligence apparatus, which gave them the access and opportunity to turn over thousands of highly classified documents and details of operations to the Russian intelligence services. They betrayed many of the Soviet and East Bloc deep-cover agents working on behalf of the United States, who were then executed. Several programs using high-technology surveillance and interception equipment–including the now-famous tunnel beneath the Russian Embassy in Washington–also went silent when one of the two tipped off Moscow.

With the death of its agents and the shutdown of these “national technical means,” the United States lost most of its capacity to peer inside the Soviet defense, political, and intelligence establishments–with the result that when the tight grip of Soviet power began to unravel, American policymakers learned about it mostly from CNN broadcasts rather than intelligence briefings.

“The Main Enemy,” Milt Bearden’s memoir of his days inside the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, is a chronicle of the closing days of the Cold War. With the aid of his coauthor, New York Times reporter James Risen, Bearden begins his history in 1985 and gives a blow-by-blow account of how each side tried to outwit the other. Avoiding the typical failing of being overly episodic, Bearden and Risen tie a number of seemingly unrelated events into a logical timeline in a way unmatched since Michael Dobbs’s 1997 eyewitness history of the last days of Soviet power, “Down with Big Brother.”

The portraits of the personalities who fought the spy wars are as interesting as all the details of agents following and evading each other on dimly lit back streets in the middle of the night, and the gadgets of intelligence tradecraft: miniature cameras, hollowed out rocks containing secret instructions, and invisible ink. Readers will learn how counterintelligence agents hunted their prey on the streets of Moscow and the reaction of officials in the KGB as they dealt with the steadily accelerating decline of the USSR as a world power.

The book has a happy ending, of course. But there is still some substantial bad news in Bearden’s tale. The defection of KGB colonel Vitaly Yurchenko in 1985 should have been a real coup for the CIA, but once he arrived in the United States his debriefing process soon deteriorated. Word of Yurchenko’s whereabouts soon leaked, and the safe house where he was being held began receiving visitors from every corner of the United States intelligence community. All of these “espionage tourists” had heard that there was a real, live KGB agent in captivity in the Washington, D.C., area. Like a grade school class visiting the zoo, they just had to have a look at him. Yurchenko found himself not only answering the same questions over and over from different questioners, but also started seeing the more sensational revelations from his debriefings being printed in the Washington Post and New York Times.

This understandably shattered his confidence that anyone in the United States could keep a secret or protect him from retaliation by the KGB. Convinced he had made a huge mistake, Yurchenko left his CIA escort at the table in a Georgetown restaurant and walked to the Soviet Embassy to redefect to Moscow.

Throughout Milt Bearden’s “The Main Enemy,” there was an indictment of the enormous unprofessionalism in the United States’ intelligence community and fatal gaps in operation.

This sad condition flows from a major problem that plagues American intelligence: the simultaneously arrogant and incompetent personnel recruited. Jack Platt, a retired Marine who worked under Bearden, was one of his more effective operators, but his style of dress and lack of reverence for authority could not fit in the “new CIA.” Platt, observed Bearden, “was the type of guy the CIA wouldn’t touch today. And I thought that was too bad.”

Many years of attempting to institutionalize political correctness within the CIA have made their mark. It is an agency that eats, sleeps, and breathes “diversity,” and the nation now has a CIA that “looks like America.”

But, as Bearden describes it, “risk aversion had replaced the boldness and romanticism of the old guard.” The agency’s new breed of officers have little or no desire “to rush off to places where you had to boil your drinking water and check under the car for bombs.” Unfortunately, these hardship postings are where most of America’s deadliest enemies have their strongholds and devise their plots.

Bearden’s “The Main Enemy” is a captivating look back at how the West won the Cold War. And, in a time when the United States faces new dangers, it is also a heartfelt call for change in the way we spy.

Reuben F. Johnson is a correspondent for the defense-information website Periscope and Aviation International News.