Summary of Milton Bearden & James Risen's The Main Enemy

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Burton Gerber was the man in charge of the operation. He was a deeply spiritual man, and he lit a candle for each Russian agent that was arrested by the KGB. He had come home from serving as station chief in Moscow three years earlier, so he understood the dangers of operating inside the Soviet bloc better than most at CIA headquarters.

#2 The CIA’s Internal Operations course was the most rigorous training program the agency had to offer. It was restricted to a handpicked elite—case officers slated for assignments in Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and other capital cities in the Soviet empire.

#3 The FBI always had a lesson in store for its trainees. They would go out on what they thought was an ordinary operation, and suddenly be arrested by FBI agents who were totally convincing in making it seem as though the bust had nothing to do with the IO course.

#4 Gerber knew that the failure of the operation meant that Stombaugh had been arrested, and a consular officer had been dispatched to secure his release from the KGB’s Lubyanka Center. He made a few quick calls back to headquarters to make sure that Clair George, Deputy Director for Operations, and others on the seventh floor knew what was going on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822535039

IRB Media

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Insights on Milton Bearden & James Risen's The Main Enemy

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Burton Gerber was the man in charge of the operation. He was a deeply spiritual man, and he lit a candle for each Russian agent that was arrested by the KGB. He had come home from serving as station chief in Moscow three years earlier, so he understood the dangers of operating inside the Soviet bloc better than most at CIA headquarters.

#2

The CIA’s Internal Operations course was the most rigorous training program the agency had to offer. It was restricted to a handpicked elite—case officers slated for assignments in Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and other capital cities in the Soviet empire.

#3

The FBI always had a lesson in store for its trainees. They would go out on what they thought was an ordinary operation, and suddenly be arrested by FBI agents who were totally convincing in making it seem as though the bust had nothing to do with the IO course.

#4

Gerber knew that the failure of the operation meant that Stombaugh had been arrested, and a consular officer had been dispatched to secure his release from the KGB’s Lubyanka Center. He made a few quick calls back to headquarters to make sure that Clair George, Deputy Director for Operations, and others on the seventh floor knew what was going on.

#5

The KGB had found a ringer for Adolf Tolkachev, and his job was to walk a few dozen yards carrying a book with a white cover. He was to appear as if he was being arrested and dragged into a van. The CIA did not have a clue that its prized agent was in prison.

#6

The CIA’s superagent had gone limp, his knees buckling under him. In those first seconds, Tolkachev’s arms were pinned to his sides and Sharavatov deftly forced a thick rope between his teeth to prevent him from swallowing or biting down, in case he had a suicide pill hidden in his mouth.

#7

Ogorodnik was one of the CIA’s most valuable spies in Moscow, but he was remembered within the KGB mostly for what happened during his arrest. He took the modified Montblanc pen Downing had given him and used the suicide pill hidden inside.

#8

Stombaugh was to meet with Tolkachev, and he had come prepared. He had five new compact subminiature cameras preloaded with microfilm, sealed and set to a precise focal length. The cameras and their settings had received extra attention for this meeting after the last batch of documents failed to develop properly.

#9

Krassilnikov had never been a man of doubts, not about himself, nor the Soviet Union. He was the son of an NKVD general, and he had proudly followed his father’s footsteps into the KGB. He had become close to two of Britain’s most notorious spies who had defected to Moscow.

#10

The Second Chief Directorate, led by Vladimir Sharavatov, had to investigate all of the information that they received from foreign spies. The First Chief Directorate, led by Krassilnikov, seemed to have a mole in the CIA.

#11

In May 1989, Aldrich Ames walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington and volunteered his services to the KGB. He handed over the identities of nearly every Russian agent working for the CIA and FBI.

#12

When Stombaugh arrived at the bench, he saw Tolkachev’s car, with its familiar registration number, parked on the far side of the street. The men holding his arms over the back of the seat in the van for the long ride to the KGB headquarters at Dzerzhinsky Square were hurting him extremely.

#13

Gerber was a leading member of a new generation of CIA officers who had transformed the agency into a professional intelligence service. He and other young CIA officers had already spent more time operating against the Soviets and their Eastern European surrogates than any of their older bosses.

#14

Gerber was a driven man who was fascinated by the intricacies of espionage. He rose through the ranks in the CIA’s Soviet Division, and was one of the few people with access to information about the agency’s most sensitive operations against Moscow.

#15

The CIA had a very close relationship with Director Richard Helms, who allowed Angleton to co-opt key officials in the Soviet Division, convincing them that virtually all of the spies they were running were double agents sent against them by the KGB.

#16

By 1971, the CIA had finally realized that its Soviet Division needed shaking up. It turned to David Blee, an old Middle East hand, to fix it. Blee had made his mark in the Third World, and he didn’t want to leave his job as chief of the CIA's Near East Division.

#17

The CIA had been paralyzed during the 1960s, but below the radar screen of upper management, young case officers had been busy modernizing espionage techniques. They had been frustrated that they hadn’t been able to put these new techniques to use during the previous decade, but now Blee’s revolution meant that they could be put to the test.

#18

The CIA’s Moscow operations were constantly being compromised by poor tradecraft, and it was difficult for the agency to figure out who was betraying them. It was believed that the KGB was responsible for these losses, until a series of unexplained incidents in 1977 convinced CIA Director Stansfield Turner that the CIA’s Moscow operations were fatally flawed.

#19

Redmond walked into Burton Gerber’s office unannounced. Gerber was writing on a yellow legal pad. Without looking up, he handed Redmond a stack of Moscow cable traffic. The enormity of the loss