Customer Reviews

The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is a fine read, and to my surprise, the contributions from The New York Times are quite worthwhile. In essence the primary author, Milton Beardon, wrote the core of the book, on his experiences with the Soviet Division in the Directorate of Operations at the CIA, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan driving the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then journalist James Risen filled in the gaps with really excellent vignettes from the other side. The two authors together make a fine team, and they have very capably exploited a number of former KGB and GRU officers whose recollections round out the story.

This is not, by any means, a complete story. At the end of thise review I recommend five other books that add considerable detail to a confrontation that spanned the globe for a half-century. Yet, while it barely scratches the surface, this book is both historical and essential in understanding two facts:

1) Afghanistan was the beginning of the end for USSR and
2) CIA made it happen, once invigorated by President Ronald Reagan and DCI William Casey

It may not be immediately apparent to the casual reader, but that is the most important story being told in this book: how the collapse of the Soviet effort in Afghanistan ultimately led to the collapse of Soviet authority in East Germany, in the other satellite states, and eventually to the unification of Germany and the survival of Russas as a great state but no longer an evil empire.

There are two other stories in this book, and both are priceless. The first is a tale of counterintelligence failure across the board within both the CIA and the FBI. The author excels with many "insider" perspectives and quotes, ranging from his proper and brutal indictment of then DCI Stansfield Turner for destroying the clandestine service, to his quote from a subordinate, based on a real-world case, that even the Ghanians can penetrate this place. He has many "lessons learned" from the Howard and Ames situations, including how badly the CIA handled Howard's dismissal, how badly CIA handled Yuchenko, to include leaking his secrets to the press, how badly both CIA and FBI handled the surveillance on Howard, with too many "new guys" at critical points of failure; and most interestingly, how both DCI Casey and CIA counterintelligence chiefs Gus Hathaway (and his deputy Ted Price) refused to launch a serious hunt for Ames and specifically refused to authorize polygraphs across the board (although Ames beat a scheduled polygraph later). The author's accounting of the agent-by-agent losses suffered by the CIA as Howard, Ames, and Hansen took their toll, is absolutely gripping.

The second story is that of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and how the anti-Soviet jihad nurtured by America and Pakistan ultimately turned back on both countries. It may help the reader of this book to first buy and read Milt Bearden's novel, "The Black Tulip," a wonderful and smoothly flowing account in novelized terms. From the primary author's point of view, it was Afghanistan, not Star Wars, that brought the Soviet Union to its knees. The primary author provides the reader with really superb descriptions of the seven key Afghan warlord leaders; of the intricacies of the Pakistani intelligence service, which had its own zealots, including one who launched jihad across in to Uzbeckistan without orders; into how the Stingers, and then anti-armor, and then extended mortars (with novel combinations of Geographical Information System computers and satellite provided coordinates for Soviet targets, all 21st century equipment that was quickly mastered by the Afghan warriors) all helped turn the tide. As America continues to fail in its quest to reconstruct the road of Afghanistan, having severely misunderstood the logistics and other obstacles, one of the book's sentences really leaps out: the supply chain to the rebels "needed more mules than the world was prepared to breed."

This book is a collector's item and must be in the library of anyone concerned with intelligence, US-Soviet relations, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Saudi funding of terrorism. It is a finely crafted personal contribution from someone who did hard time in the CIA, and made an enormous personal contribution, in partnership with the hundreds of CIA case officers, reports officers, all-source analysts, and especially CIA paramilitary officers (including Nick Pratt and Steve Cash, forever Marines).

A few other books that complement this one: Thomas Allen & Norman Polmar, "Merchants of Treason", Ladislav Bittman, "The Deception Game", Vladimir Sakharov, "High Treason", Victor Sheymov, "Tower of Secrets," and Oleg Kalugin, "The First Directorate." There are many more but these are my favorites.

by Richard Sale, UPI Terrorism Correspondent
The U.S.-Soviet war of spies was essentially a war about "denied areas" -- breaching those inner circles of government secrecy whose existence is existence is essential to national security and military supremancy.

For both sides, this meant recruiting defectors in place -- agents with access to denied areas and who were spotted, conditioned, recruited and trained to betray their countries' vital information. (Sometimes they volunteered.) Since government's do not act on a single piece of information, an agent's production must be sustained over a signficant period of time, and it should go without saying that the value of the information is go reat that the recruiters will hazard almost any risk to get it.

This brutal war of brains is the subject of a new classic of intelligence literature by Milt Bearden, a true CIA legend, and James Risen, a first-rate reporter on intelligence for the New York Times.

Called, "The Main Enemy," the book opens in 1985, when the FBI and the CIA had suffered a series of disatrous losses among the Russians they had recruited. It is with intense disquiet that the reader comes to realize that top U.S. assets are one by one coming under the dominion of a dark power. Within a space of 15 months, like night lights in a distant village winking out, two dozen priceless Soviet spies working for America are recalled to Moscow, interrogated, and many shot in the back of the head in a KGB prison including a 65-year-old Russian grandfather Gen. Dmitri Polyakov or "TOPHAT," of the agency's and FBI's most irreplaceable and beloved sources.

The book is built around a rough chronology of Bearden's career, which poses a narrative problem mainly because right in the middle of the spy hunt for moles, Bearden is pulled out of Washington and made head of CIA operations in Afghanistan to bolster anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters there. This is an arresting section of the book in which we view one colorful tableaux after the next.

After the Russians are defeated Bearden returns to Washington and to his dismay finds that the probe for the mole who caused the losses is continuing but has lost its focus and become feeble. The climax comes when a CIA investigator helps to uncover Aldrich Ames, an agency traitor arrested in Februrary 1994.

By 1990, communism had collapsed but questions about the mole remained. Many were answered when FBI agent Robert Hanssenis finally uncovered.But Bearden still believes that another extraordinary effective U.S. traitor is still at large and doing damage, and he sets out his case.

It is a gripping book of extraordinary sweep and signifcance. In putting it together, Bearden and Risen have produced a work of the first distinction.

This is the story gathered through hundreds of interviews with both US and USSR players of the battle between the CIA and KGB in the closing days of the Cold War, 1985 through the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Part I, Year of the Spy tells of the efforts to "turn" KGB agents, Government officials and high-ranking military and subsequent contacts by their American controllers. We're told of the constant surveillance of embassy officials, the training of new agents, tricks for eluding tails. Surprising to me was the involvement of spouses who often accompanied the agents on "runs" or otherwise aided the agents. In training there would be surprise arrests that would seem real to the agents, they would include a roughing up by FBI agents. The test for the agent was to hold back his CIA connection.
Starting in 1985 a string of our moles were arrested by the KGB. Despite ridicule of James Jesus Angleton whose paranoia about moles inside the CIA was legend, it appeared now that his paranoia was well-placed.
The luring of moles, their exchanges of money and information at drop points are covered from both sides. For example meticulous planning has gone into a "run," i.e., CIA meeting with a KGB agent to exchange money, needs, information. The story is told by the US agent arriving at the drop site, having shaken his KGB tail; the same story is then told by KGB officials who are setting him up and the capture of the spy (a scientist in this case).
Almost at the same time, June '85, Aldrich Ames was meeting in DC with his Russian handler, delivering to him the name of every spy he knew. He did this because John Walker, US Navy man, had been arrested in May as a Russian spy. Ames feared Walker had been fingered to the FBI by someone in the KGB that the CIA had previously "turned." He didn't want the same fate.
In their recruitment efforts the CIA always had to be on the alert for "dangles." These were spies trying to be double agents. Some of the Russians turned for money, some for ideology, a hatred for the Communist system. Edward Lee Howard was a CIA agent who was fired by the CIA and who betrayed us out of his anger over what he thought was unfair treatment. He eluded capture and escaped to Russia with help from his wife, his training in eluding tails, and the incompetence of the FBI.
There were constant turf wars between the FBI and CIA which sometimes got in the way.
Robert Hanssen (FBI) started spying in 1979. Among information turned over to the KGB was his revealing to them the spy tunnel under the Soviet embassy in DC.
There were many more tales of recruitment, capture and sometimes execution.

Part II, Afghanistan. In December 1979 Russia invaded Afghanistan. They were fearful of the country coming under the sphere of the US, further completing the ring around the USSR.
When the British decided decades earlier to withdraw from Afghanistan, the cost of marching out was horrific, 16,000 men were reduced to 1 left standing
After the loss of 15,000 soldiers, in 1986 Gorbachev decided enough was enough. He wanted to get out, but how to do it without looking like the US in Vietnam or with the costs the British incurred.
US efforts helped Gorbachev reach his decision to exit. We had been pouring in money and arms. The destruction of a huge Russian arms depot was pivotal in firming up his mind as was the introduction of Stinger missiles and advanced anti-tank weapons, both of which produced spectacular results.
They managed the withdrawal at a minimum loss of life. Then began the tribal chiefs dislodging the puppet leader in Kabul and the jockeying amongst themselves for leadership.

Part III, Endgame. The story here is the winding down of the Soviet Union, starting with tearing down the Berlin Wall, the role of the East German secret police, STASI and the interplay with the CIA. The dissolution of Reagan's Evil Empire, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and the Baltic states; the fragility of the new Russia and its near fall to reactionary forces, the emergence of Yeltsin.

Aldrich Ames was arrested in 1994 after 20 years of spying. A Russian agent provided enough information but no name, enabling the CIA to identify him. A group within the CIA had spent years trying to locate the leak that James Jesus Angleton was sure existed.

Robert Hanssen was arrested in 2001 after 22 years of betrayal, his capture also aided by Russian agents.

The author Milt Bearden was close to all the activities he recounts. He concluded after a thorough analysis of times and dates that there must be another mole yet to surface within the CIA.

I found much of the book exciting. After all, this wasn't fiction; these were real people and events.

Much as I have enjoyed this fascinating book, I wish to point out a startling anachronism. Bearden makes much of the delivery of the "120 mm Spanish mortar" to the Mujahideen in 1987, and elaborates on how teams were trained in applying GPS readings to precisely deliver their ordnance beyond visual range. "It came...with a ranging system worked out by Langley...that fused the low-tech mortar with the high-tech world of satellite guidance." And "Once their exact coordinates had been calibrated, the leader of the team would feed the GPS data into a small computer, add the coordinates of the target, and then query the computer for the precise compass direction and elevation..." This procedure, GPS and all, supposedly led to devastating night attacks on the Spetsnaz battalion at Chagasaray on 28 Nov 1987 and 15 Dec 1987.
Problem: Although initial use of GPS was reported in 1990, it did not become operational until 1993. In 1987 the satellites had not been launched yet (this was during the Challenger stand-down).
We can only conclude that while the attacks and the mortars were real, the procedures and the "ranging" method used must have been invented by the authors for literary convenience. No doubt this is the ghost writer's shortcut, not Bearden's, but this does raise questions about technical accuracy throughout the volume.

This reviewer served in Embassy Pakistan for two years from the week the author arrived in mid-1986 as Chief of Station, Islamabad.

In a government career that spanned twenty-five years, he was, without a doubt, the best Agency operator and manager ever encountered. Looking back on events, what was accomplished under our watch was not only important, it was truly exciting.

This book, especially the middle third that deals with the war in Afghanistan, is right on the mark. In fact, I learned things in this book that I never knew about at the time as I did not have the "need to know."

This book has a very important story to tell on a critical junction-point in the resolution of the Cold War told by the man at the tip of the spear. In all areas where I have direct knowledge, there is not one instance where I felt he was less than totally objective. Most remarkably, he made what he did seem effortless and, more importantly to me, he did it with elan. His troops relished every minute of every day -- unless they dropped the ball. One lapse and there was all hell to pay.

The seriously broad scope of this book is such that, clearly, there was simply not enough pages to encompass all the many peripheral stories that might have been mentioned. Anecdotes and telling detail abound throughout but there are many more tales that could have been told that would make the reader drop the book in sheer glee. Of the many that do make it into the text, the one on the exchange of cables between the field and Langley on the "specifications" for mules delivered to portage materiel into the Afghan war zone, is, without a doubt, a classic.

For those of us then in Islamabad who fought in Viet Nam and saw it as a correct but completely mishandled affair by both the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, we all understood on that crisp, Fall day in 1986 when a Stinger missile brought down the first Soviet aircraft, that their arrogant adventure in Afghanistan was the death-knell of their perverted philosophy and totally-flawed and simplistic system.

One had to be there. To date, for the armchair warrior, this book is as close and as good as it gets.

In a brief period of time between 1989 and 1991, the world changed dramatically. Several significant events transpired, each literally changing the way the world worked overnight. In The Main Enemy, Milt Bearden and James Risen provide a detailed and fascinating view into the struggle between the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Soviet security service, Komitet Gosudarstvenoj Bezopasnosti (KGB).

Anyone aware of the state of world affairs for the last half of the twentieth century would be hard pressed to believe any of the events that took place as the final decade of the century was poised to begin. Starting with the Soviet Union's withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989, we observed as one event followed another, each coming as a greater surprise than the previous. We watched the collapse of the Berlin Wall and saw the reunification of Germany shortly thereafter. Not long behind Germany's rejection of socialism, we saw revolutions in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and elsewhere. In the latter half of 1991, we watched a failed coup in the Soviet Union, and as that year drew to a close, the Soviet hammer and sickle was replaced with the Russian tricolor flag over Moscow.

These were not events that took place on their own. These were the highly visible climax of an ongoing struggle between the proponents of the Soviet Revolutskyj Mir ("World Revolution") and their counterparts in the West -- including Britain's MI6 and America's CIA. Such a conclusion wasn't always assured, and there were times when CIA was baffled by the tremendous success of KGB's operations against Western agents and interests. It is during these "1985 losses" that the book opens, providing a foundation that helps the reader to see just what was happening in the world of intelligence.

Milt Bearden is a career CIA officer, having spent a lifetime in the shadows and working for America's interests. James Risen is an accomplished journalist. The collaboration -- which also includes the input and assistance of many other players from many sides in this international game of strategy and intrigue -- is an admirable success. The story is gripping, compelling, and personal. The book is well-structured and the prose makes it easy to forget that The Main Enemy isn't a novel, but a book of real history.

For those of us whose understanding of intelligence is primarily from the technical side -- most likely through Bamford's glimpses into the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) -- The Main Enemy is instructive, helping us to see the value of human intelligence (HUMINT) and its role in world affairs.

While hardly the definitive work on the operations of CIA, The Main Enemy provides valuable insight into the climax of the Cold War. Hopefully its accessible style will help to open this important chapter of history to a wide audience -- not just spy buffs.

This is a work about diverging cultures on two levels. It is the conflict between the cultures of the two world powers, the USSR and the United States. But a theme running throughout the book is how the world of intelligence is a culture unto itself. This story is better than any fictional tale around. Tom Clancy only wishes he could produce something like this.

We are back in the final days of the Cold War, with both sides working through proxies and attempting to trump the other side in any way possible. What strikes one throughout is the motive difference between those who chose to spy for the other side. The few Americans did so for money or revenge. The volunteers behind the Iron Curtain - and this included generals, high-up party members, scientists - did so for ideological reasons. The two worse US spies - Hannson (FBI) and Ames (CIA) both loved the thrill and the money; both were contemptuous of the Soviets.

In the end, this is an old-fashioned spy tale with all that that implies - skulking in the dark alleys, the drops, the chase, the planting of devices, transfers of cash, discreet signs, suicide pills, bravery, cowardice and a battle of wills in the agencies that exemplified the clash between the two cultures. This is one of those books you just can't put down.

This book is a curious mix: for the Cold War/espionage junkie, there will be much here that's known or familiar from other reading. Still, one can't fail to read the recollections and opinions of someone like Bearden who was involved with so much. The first 40-50% of the book (and it's a big book!) is hard to follow because it skips around among different persons and places; it's hard to keep them straight, especially the Russians. When the narrative comes back to someone mentioned previously, it's often hard to remember who they are. After that, as it moves into the recent decade--fall of the Iron Curtain--readers will be fascinated to read of the inside look at things still fresh in their own memory. Bearden had quite a career and you can get a good feel for it here; the epilogue alone is a good summary of the recent ordeals of the CIA.

Superbly written, page burning, riveting book. All of the excitement and word craft of a Tom Clancy novel but real history from a man who lived it. This book is a great read and about a subject that anyone interested in history, politics, or current events should absolutely read.
The Main Enemy chronicles the secret war of spying from 1985 until the end of the cold war. What makes this book so interesting, and different, is that one of the authors lived the story. In addition this book shows how men make history while not even knowing the ultimate consequences of their actions. Milt Bearden puts the stories and the lessons learned in a global context. Instead of being simply a collection of anecdotes or a another narcissistic (and self-serving) biography, this book opens up a very poorly understood period of history and of a profession.
The Main Enemy also clearly shows us the debt we owe countless men and woman who protect and serve this country whose actions and sacrifices will never be known. The authors show how the information acquired by these brave people contribute to saving lives on the battlefield, contribute to better US-World negotiations, and impact every American's life, without our even knowing it.
Not only have Mr. Bearden and Mr. Risen written a great book, but they have served this country by better educating us on how the world really works and what is needed in the future. I believe that this book should be required reading by every student and politician. It could save grave errors and costly mistakes in the future.

Superbly written, page burning, riveting book. All of the excitement and word craft of a Tom Clancy novel but real history from a man who lived it. This book is a great read and about a subject that anyone interested in history, politics, or current events should absolutely read.
The Main Enemy chronicles the secret war of spying from 1985 until the end of the cold war. What makes this book so interesting, and different, is that one of the authors lived the story. In addition this book shows how men make history while not even knowing the ultimate consequences of their actions. Milt Bearden puts the stories and the lessons learned in a global context. Instead of being simply a collection of anecdotes or a another narcissistic (and self-serving) biography, this book opens up a very poorly understood period of history and of a profession.
The Main Enemy also clearly shows us the debt we owe countless men and woman who protect and serve this country whose actions and sacrifices will never be known. The authors show how the information acquired by these brave people contribute to saving lives on the battlefield, contribute to better US-World negotiations, and impact every American's life, without our even knowing it.
Not only have Mr. Bearden and Mr. Risen written a great book, but they have served this country by better educating us on how the world really works and what is needed in the future. I believe that this book should be required reading by every student and politician. It could save grave errors and costly mistakes in the future.