The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (Mass Market Paperback)

by Milton Bearden (Author), James Risen (Author) "There was nothing more he could do, Burton Gerber told himself again..." (more)
Key Phrases: dead drop site, counterintelligence center, spy dust, Soviet Union, United States, East Berlin (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
Bearden, who headed up the CIA's Soviet/ Eastern European division as the Soviet Union was coming undone, joins with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Risen to chronicle those fateful years.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE MAIN ENEMY

"Risen, the journalistic outsider, and Bearden, the clandestine insider, have combined their insight and knowledge to give us a compelling account of the last fierce days of Cold War machinations between Soviet and American intelligence. This is history very up close and very personal.? --Seymour M. Hersh

"Fascinating stuff . . . an inside view of a complex world . . . it doesn't get any better than this. It's great." --Robert De Niro

"Some study war from an armchair; others through field glasses. The best go into the firing line. Milt Bearden of the CIA was one of those. For those of us who recall the Cold War, this is fascinating stuff. For those who are too young, read and learn."--Frederick Forsyth, author of The Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War


From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Presidio Press (August 31, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345472500
• ISBN-13: 978-0345472502
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #20,668 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary--Substantive History--Real World Good Stuff, May 24, 2003

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (Hardcover)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spy vs Spy in thrilling "Main Enemy, October 18, 2003

By	Richard T. Sale (Stamford, CT USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (Hardcover)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An exceptional insight into the endgame of the Cold War, June 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (Hardcover)

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.