The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB by Milton Bearden, James Risen Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB
Book Review: The Shadow Lifts...
Summary: 4 Stars
Espionage, especially that concerning the CIA and the KGB, is extraordinarily hard to write about in an understandable way. It is either cloaked in a still tight shroud of official secrecy, or is so complicated and personal that readers simply cannot grasp the inherent complexities of the world of international intelligence gathering. Milt Bearden, a well known CIA official who has written on these matters for the last few years finally puts his fascinating life down on paper. His career in the 1980's and 90's spanned some of the most tumultuous and intriguing periods of the Cold War spy war. He watched as the CIA, newly emboldened, created a very effective network of penetration agents inside the Soviet Union, only to watch it fall apart dramatically. He ran an intense guerilla war in the wilds of Afghanistan as his mercenaries and his weapons dealt the Soviet Union a mortal blow. Finally, he watched the Evil Empire fall apart in fairly rapid succession, even as the CIA struggled to recover from its invisible betrayer. It's an amazing story, and it's very well told.The early 1980's was a very positive time in American espionage. The CIA in Moscow was running some very good HUMINT sources, including various KGB, GRU, and Red Army officers, even a general. The flow of information from the Soviet Union was fairly constant and was often spectacularly accurate. The agency, newly bolstered by a conservative administration and new funding, was spreading its wings as it was finally managing to effectively outwit the dreaded KGB. Bearden experienced this period of success as a senior official in the Soviet section of the operations directorate, and was instrumental in its success. The CIA was also aided by a new influx of volunteers or outright defectors, as KGB officers sensed their side was losing the its grip on the empire. However, the whole deck of cards quickly collapsed. Starting in 1985, the CIA's agents began to disappear, often executed by the KGB. The agency struggled to understand what would only become clear years later. There was a mole deeply buried in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, and his involvement in Soviet operations, as told first hand by Bearden, is really chilling. This first part of the book is the best part of the book, as it gives the reader a surprisingly well detailed examination and chronicle of nitty gritty spywork. If you want to have an idea how dead drops, surveillance, and other tricks of the trade are pulled off, this is a great book to read.
Bearden's job at the CIA takes a radical turn in 1986 as he is tasked with coordinating agency aid to the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet occupation. I felt this part of the book was the weakest, as it was short on real specifics and paled in comparison to recent works on the subject. However, at times, it did offer some new insights on the war and the agency's role, especially that concerning the Stinger missiles that eventually led to the Soviet withdrawal. In comparison to the really scintillating read the first part of the book offered, the Afghan section is a bit weak. One great part though had to do with Bearden's meeting with the infamous Afghan warlord, Hekmatyar. Recently a target of a CIA assassination attempt, Bearden sensed the danger that this man would pose in the future, as his religious extremism was clear under a thin veneer of gratitude for US weapons and funding.
The last part of the book deals with the final dissolution of the Soviet Empire. While a great success for the United States, it was hardly a sterling moment for the CIA. Because of the dramatic losses suffered in the late 1980's, the CIA was virtually blind in regard to Soviet operations. In East Germany, the highly effective Stasi had a stranglehold on any CIA operations in the area. Still, Bearden does point out that the CIA was able to take advantage of the deteriorating situation in the eastern bloc and quickly adapted. It began presenting large amounts of money to anybody that wanted to flee the sinking ship, so to speak. These efforts were moderately successful. Bearden ends the story of the great Cold War battle by documenting the birth of free eastern European intelligence agencies, and the collapse of the KGB itself.
Bearden's memoir serves as a critical examination of the world of Cold War espionage and the men and women who played roles in it. It's a story of traitors, thugs, academics, and covert operations that often sounds like a Clancy thriller. But, as they say, the truth is often much stranger than fiction, a reality made clear all throughout The Main Enemy.
Book Review: Well written view into the CIA and KGB
Summary: 4 Stars
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I had trouble putting it down, and it was looong! It was not a strong plot that pulled me through but rather a rich immersive background and atmosphere. I really enjoyed finding out about the 'back side' of events that I remember from the news when I was in high school.I would highly recommend this book to anyone with a flair for spy stories or cold war history.
Book Review: Gripping Clash of Cultures
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Spy vs Spy in thrilling "Main Enemy
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: for Cold War junkies, worth reading
Summary: 4 Stars
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.