Spy vs. spy in thrilling 'Main Enemy'

The U.S.-Soviet war of spies was essentially a war about "denied areas" -- breaching those inner circles of government secrecy whose existence is essential to national security and military superiority.

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 governments do not act on a single piece of information, an agent's production must be sustained over a significant time, and it should go without saying that the value of this information is so great that the recruiters will hazard almost any risk to get it.

The spy-hunter's job is to stop this hemorrhage of vital secrets at all costs, and when one hostile service pits its best, most inventive and subtle brains against those of the other in ruse and counter ruse, lure and counter trap, what results is a drama of the first order.

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, the excellent reporter on intelligence for the New York Times.

Called "The Main Enemy," the book opens in 1985, when the FBI and CIA had suffered a aeries of disastrous losses among 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 dominance of a dark power. Within a space of 15 months, like night lights in a distant village winking out one by one, 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. Dimitri Polyakov or "TOPHAT," one of the agency's and FBI's most priceless and beloved sources.

The agency puts its keenest and most relentless minds to work trying to solve the puzzle, and, a heroic figure soon steps to center stage. It is Paul Redmond, a member of the agency's Soviet/Eastern Europe Division and a spy hunter from counterintelligence. A former colleague of Redmond, Jack Platt, once described Redmond's speech to me as direct and forceful: "F--- you! Strong note follows." Redmond is almost alone is believing that the losses are due to a spy in CIA, not to any breach of its communications.

The exchanges between Bearden and Redmond in the book are matchless and wry. When Redmond tells Bearden he is staying clear of CIA mole hunters because he himself is a suspect, Bearden smiles. "Don't smile," Redmond shoots back: "You're still on the list."

The book is built around a rough chronology of Bearden's career, which poses a narrative problem mainly because right in the middle of this riveting mole hunt, Bearden is pulled out of Washington and made head of CIA operations in Afghanistan, his job to bolster the anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters there. Bearden's astuteness, his certainty of touch with rebel leaders, made him a key architect of the West's eventual Afghan victory, and this is an arresting section of the book in which we view one colorful tableaux after the other.

None is more dramatic than the meeting in which Gulbudden Hekmatyar, a Stalinist fanatic and murderer (and U.S. ally), confronts Bearden and accuses the agency, and even Bearden, of wanting to kill him. Hekmatyar even accuses Bearden of being armed on the spot, and Bearden calmly opens his sport coat to show he has no holster in his left armpit, confiding slyly to the reader that his handgun is jammed into the back of his pants.

Bearden then wonders whimsically if he shouldn't have killed Hekmaytar right there as the Afghan suspected he might. (Hekmatyar is currently being hunted by the U.S. government.) There is a sense of immediacy in this scene, the weight of lifelike fact that acts instantly to convince. Like Redmond, Bearden is enormously sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of the people with whom he is in contact, able to grasp and appreciate the different temperaments and interests of friends and enemies alike, and in such a scene we get the watch the exact movements of Bearden's mind as it observes, notes, compares, decides.

In any case, Russia suffered a stinging defeat in Afghanistan. In 1989, Moscow, having lost 15,000 killed, ignominiously withdrew from Kabul, and it then dawns on the reader that the Afghan interlude is not an intrusive digression, but a way of stating the true theme of the book: that the war of spies and the hunt for moles are a paler, smaller-scale reflection of the bitter, titanic rivalry of the two systems locked in a ruthless global fight to the finish.

To his dismay Bearden finds on his return that the probe for the traitor who caused the 1985 losses is continuing but its focus has become piecemeal and feeble. CIA hunters are still unsure as to whether it is a mole or some compromise of agency communications that has caused the havoc in assets. The FBI has begun its own probe named AN-LACE, but the bureau does no better, and the leads in the case go dry.

The climax comes thanks to the relentless industry of CIA spyhunter Sandy Grimes, which seals the doom of suspect Aldrich Ames, head of counterintelligence for the CIA's SE Division. With incredible resolve, Grimes sits down and makes a list of important dates in Ames' career: his first day at work, his overseas travel requests, vacation times, even his sick days, putting everything into a time line. When she began to add the dates of Ames' check and deposits to her list, she would discover a key link between Ames' meeting with a Soviet official and Ames the next day depositing $9,000 at his bank. Ames would finally be arrested in February 1994.

What is amazing in all this is to watch the minds of Bearden, Grimes and Redmond and wonder at their extraordinary penetration, their quickness and inventiveness, their supple adaptiveness to ambiguity and uncertainty.

In any case, by 1990, communism had collapsed. The defeat in Afghanistan had begun the dissolution, and the policies of Gorbachev completed it. The vast, gloomy, frightful Soviet Empire crumbles into dust and nothingness before our eyes like something fastened together by pins. One feels a glorious thrill of victorious accomplishment.

But questions remain. Robert Hanssen, an FBI traitor (and a more damaging spy than Ames), would be captured in 2001 after the agency bought his Russian file for $7 million. Yet as Bearden and the other spy hunters assess the damage done by traitors like the CIA's Ed Howard, Ames and the FBI's Hanssen, they discovered unaccounted cases still remained, and these prey on Bearden's mind.

The betrayal of MONOLITE, Vassilenko Gennady, who was not even a CIA agent; the execution of Vladimir Vetrov, who worked for the French; the compromising of Oleg Gordievsky, a superb asset run by MI-6 until blown by someone in the CIA -- these cannot be traced to anything Howard, Ames or Hanssen has done. There is plainly another mole and he is still out there.

Was the selling of Hanssen's file a "purposeful sacrifice" of an agent who was past his best work and meant to protect a more productive mole? Was the betrayal of a Russian technical operation to bug the State Dept. 7th floor conference room when Hanssen was there another "sacrifice" to protect the undiscovered spy?

A former very senior CIA Moscow watcher thinks so. He says that the microphone was picking up much classified information, yet in his words: "We suspected a give-away when a Russian diplomat was found virtually interrogating the mike from a van right next to the building." He added that he finds it "very surprising" that the acquiring of Hanssen's file is not being seen as perhaps a attempt to protect another, more important Russian mole still at work in the U.S. government.

Needless to say, the knowledge that there is another extraordinarily effective traitor still at large in the upper reaches of the U.S. government is disconcerting in the extreme.

Yet taken in all, the Bearden/Risen story is a gripping tale of magnificent sweep and significance. In putting it together, Bearden and Risen have produced for us a work of the first distinction.

"The Main Enemy, The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with

the KGB" by Milt Bearden and James Risen, Random House, 564 pp., $27.95