Book Review | The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB, reviewed by Hayden Peake

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2004

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

Milt Bearden and James Risen. New York: Random House, 2003. 563 pages, note on sources, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

This is a splendid book by any measure. Former senior CIA case officer Milt Bearden and New York Times journalist James Risen tell how the KGB penetrated the CIA and FBI during the 1980s. They emphasize three cases: Edward Howard, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hanssen. The reader will learn what these American intelligence officers did while they served the main enemy, what they got for it, how they were caught, and how each case progressed within the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and the FBI’s National Security Division.

From interviews with former KGB officers involved in the cases, the authors tell how the KGB identified, with the help of their American agents, more than 20 Soviets recruited by the CIA and FBI during the 1970s and 1980s. Then comes the sad story of their capture, conviction, and punishment. Of particular interest are the cases of Dmitri Polyakov and Adolf Tolkachev.^[6]Both took great personal risks to contact and serve the CIA, only to be betrayed by Howard, Ames, and Hanssen.

The extraordinary level of detail provided is possible in part because Bearden was a participant. He often uses true names as he discusses the way the penetrations were discovered and handled. In addition, the authors were able to interview the KGB counterintelligence officer, Rem Krassilnikov, who supervised the arrests of the CIA agents in Russia. While separate books have been written about these American traitors,^[7] The Main Enemy is the only one in which the actions of so many of the players from both sides are described and their interactions clarified.

For part of the time during the long search for moles in the CIA and FBI, Milt Bearden was assigned to the Afghanistan problem. Two chapters of the book describe his role as chief of station in Pakistan, as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan came to an end. We learn here how and why approval for the introduction of the Stinger missiles was obtained. The story adds to and agrees with George Crile’s assessment in Charlie Wilson’s War.^[8]

In the end, after analyzing all the evidence, The Main Enemy reaches an unsettling conclusion: There is very likely at least one more Russian mole in the FBI or CIA that has yet to be caught.

Footnotes

^[6]A detailed discussion of the Tolkachev case may be found in Barry Royden’s “Tolkachev, A Worthy Successor to Penkovsky,” Studies In Intelligence 47, no. 3 (2003): 5–33.

^[7]For the Ames case, see Pete Earley’s Confessions of a Spy(New York: Putnam, 1997). For Hanssen, see David Wise, SPY: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (New York: Random House, 2002). The Howard case is described in Wise’s book, The Spy Who Got Away: The Inside Story of Edward Howard, The CIA Agent Who Betrayed His Country's Secrets and Escaped to Moscow (New York: Random House, 1988). The late Edward Howard’s account of the case appears in his book, SAFEHOUSE: The Compelling Memoirs of the Only CIA Spy to Seek Asylum in Russia(Bethesda, MD: National Press Books, 1995). He tells of a secret trip to the United States from Russia that never happened.

^[8]George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). Review in Studies in Intelligence 48, no. 4 (2004).