The truth was that Burton Gerber was a deeply spiritual man, a Roman Catholic who felt a moral obligation to the Russian agents he and his case officers were running. He lit a candle at Mass for each one of his agents unmasked and 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. He believed that nothing less than perfection was owed to America’s Russian agents, and if he yelled at case officers who failed to meet his standards, so be it. Cable traffic between Langley and Moscow was frequently dominated by a tense running debate between Gerber and his Moscow station chief, Murat Natirboff, over the minutiae of operations. There were some in SE Division who whispered that Natirboff was miscast as Moscow station chief, and it was increasingly clear that Gerber didn’t trust him to get things done right. He seemed to believe he had to run Moscow operations himself—so much so that to some within SE Division, it sometimes felt as if Burton Gerber had never left Moscow.
But at some level, beneath the rigorous precision so necessary to a successful spy, Gerber also believed in both faith and fate. And so, after he signed off on the night’s run, he closed the door to his fifth-floor office at CIA headquarters and smoothly turned his mind to other duties.
It was almost perfect late spring weather in Washington. The day was ending quietly as Gerber left for his home in a graceful old apartment building in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood. He had planned a modest dinner that night, after which he had promised to join a night training exercise.
At the very moment one of his officers would be winding his way through Moscow to meet the CIA’s most valuable Soviet spy, Gerber would be watching green trainees playacting espionage on the streets of Washington. Better, he thought, that he devote his time to making certain that the next crop of officers be properly schooled than waste his energy fretting over details of a run he could no longer control. Gerber willed himself to stop worrying, to move on.
This was no routine training course, to be sure. Like the Navy’s famed Top Gun school for fighter pilots, the CIA’s “Internal Operations” course was the most arduous 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. These were among the most difficult jobs in the CIA. The physical and mental stresses that came with the constant surveillance, the threat of exposure and arrest, meant that “inside work” was a young case officer’s game.
After searching for some time for new tactics to defeat the KGB’s suffocating surveillance in Moscow, the agency hit upon the idea of adding some green officers to the Moscow pipeline, recruits who wouldn’t be easily recognized from other tours of duty. The decision to send rookies to Moscow placed an added burden on the IO course. It had to provide the most realistic training possible for officers who had never before faced a hostile opposition, much less the professional spy catchers of the KGB’s Second and Seventh Chief Directorates.
Run by Jack Platt, a gruff ex-Marine and longtime Soviet targets officer, the six-week course simulated “Moscow Rules.” The new case officers had to pass messages and receive documents from “spies” even as they were being trailed through Washington by teams of FBI agents playing the part of a hostile counterintelligence service. The FBI agents played hard—because the course kept them sharp for following real Soviet spies. Still, the best-trained CIA officers in the course could defeat the FBI, often through the use of sophisticated electronic devices, such as burst transmission equipment, that allowed them to pass messages without face-to-face contact.
But the FBI always had a lesson in store. The trainees—often with their spouses in tow—would go out on what they thought was an ordinary operation and walk into an explosive surprise arrest. They’d be roughed up and charged with drug dealing by FBI agents who were totally convincing in making it seem as though the bust had nothing to do with the IO course. After a few hours of questioning, only the most controlled students had the will to hold back their CIA connections. Invariably, some would try to talk their way out by explaining that there had been some horrible mistake: You see, Officer, I was loitering on a deserted street corner late at night with this woman, who happens to be my wife, as part of a CIA training exercise, not to sell drugs.
Gerber had invited Jim Olson, who had served with him in Moscow, to join him for dinner before they both went and played their parts in the training exercise. Olson, chief of internal operations for the Soviet Division, had amassed a remarkable record in Moscow and was now one of Gerber’s most trusted lieutenants. But when he arrived at Gerber’s apartment, Olson brought devastating news: Paul Stombaugh had been arrested in Moscow.
Olson’s words hit Gerber like a gut shot. He knew instinctively what Stombaugh’s arrest meant: The CIA’s most important spy in twenty-five years had been rolled up by the KGB. It meant that Adolf
