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

by Milton Bearden and James Risen

Book Overview

A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the dramatic inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them.

Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679463097
• ISBN13: 9780679463092
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

A curious discrepancy

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.

Gripping Clash of Cultures

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.

Spy vs Spy in thrilling "Main Enemy

by Richard Sale, UPI Terrorism CorrespondentThe 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.

An exceptional insight into the endgame of the Cold War

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.

Extraordinary--Substantive History--Real World Good Stuff

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 and2) CIA made it happen, once invigorated by President Ronald Reagan and DCI William CaseyIt 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