IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR
WNINTEL
1. CASE OFFICER PLIMPTON ARRESTED 2130 HOURS EVENING OF 13 JUNE WHILE ON OPERATIONAL RUN TO MEET GTSPHERE. HE DETAINED AND INTERROGATED FOR FOUR HOURS AT KGB CENTER AT LUBYANKA; CONSULAR ACCESS GRANTED 0230 HOURS AND PLIMPTON RELEASED AT 0430 HOURS. DETAILS WILL FOLLOW WHEN WE REGROUP AFTER OPENING OF BUSINESS 14 JUNE.
2. NO FILE. END OF MESSAGE.
3
Washington, D.C., 0700 Hours, June 14, 1985
Burton Gerber took deep personal pride in the fact that the CIA was running more highly placed agents inside the Soviet Union than at any other time in its history. Better than anyone else at Langley, Gerber knew just how far both he and the agency had come.
Life had never been particularly easy for Burton Gerber. He often told the story of how, as a young boy growing up in Columbus, Ohio, during World War II, he would track the progress of the Allied armies through the military maps in the local newspaper that he delivered to his neighbors. He became fascinated with world events and yearned to earn his stripes in the next war. But since major wars seemed to be spaced about a generation apart, he calculated that he’d come of age in a time of peace. A career in the CIA, clandestinely fighting the Cold War and rolling back the Soviet threat, became an attractive alternative.
Gerber helped put himself through Michigan State by working the night shift at an auto plant, racing back across Lansing to campus every night to study for the next day’s tests. After college, he served a stint in the Army before moving on to the CIA. Married but childless, he’d been supported in his steady rise up the American intelligence bureaucracy by his wife, who had been a CIA employee herself and thus understood the demands of the job. Like many other CIA wives, she often got involved in secret operations in support of her husband and his agents.
During his formative years as a case officer in Eastern Europe, Gerber had witnessed the agency’s early, amateurish, and often bungled attempts at spying against the Soviet Union, the fleeting successes invariably ending in deadly failure. He had also endured the destructive “sick-think” of the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton. Fortunately, he had been overseas as the worst of the Angleton paranoia played out in the 1960s. He’d heard the rumors, of course, the hushed whispers that made the rounds from one outpost to another, about Soviet cases going bad. But when he finally got back to headquarters in the summer of 1970, he got a heavy dose of the ugly truth.
The whole awful story was there, laid out before him in file folders that he could spread neatly across his desk. As he read, page after page seemed to explode with another bombshell, another scandal. The story was fascinating, terrifying, astonishing. Lives had been ruined, and the story had the power to claim more. As he read on, Burton Gerber was forced to doubt what he thought he knew about the institution he loved, almost above all else.
Gerber was a leading member of a new generation just beginning to transform the CIA into a professional intelligence service, the first to be tempered by long, hard, operational experience, much of it behind the Iron Curtain. Gerber and other young CIA officers like him had already logged more time operating against the Soviets and their Eastern European surrogates than any of their older bosses, who were veterans of the Office of Strategic Services—the wartime predecessor to the CIA. That generation had come of age in a less complicated era, blowing up German trains during World War II.
As they rose through the ranks, Gerber and his generation were bringing back an up-close-and-personal feel for the KGB and its Eastern European proxies, a streetwise know-how that had been lacking in the early CIA. Middle American graduates of state universities and the military, they brought a more democratic face and a sense of professionalism to a service that for years had lived off the amateurish enthusiasm of its elitist founding fathers, whose notions of secret keeping or secret stealing had been shaped by Yale and Skull and Bones.
Gerber was a driven man who was fascinated by the intricacies of espionage. By 1970, he had risen to the middle ranks in the CIA’s Soviet Division, joining the cultlike world of Soviet counterintelligence. He was one of the very few people with access to information about the agency’s most sensitive operations against Moscow, including the sordid tale of a KGB officer who had defected to the United States, only to be held incommunicado for three years, including more than two years in a nightmarish prison custom-built by the CIA. Never arrested or charged with any crime, he was kept in solitary confinement, not allowed to read or write. For a time, lights in his ten-foot-by-ten-foot cell were kept on twenty-four hours a day, to disorient him and prevent him from developing a regular sleeping pattern. The defector’s name was Yuri Nosenko, and his case became enmeshed in a witch-hunt within the upper echelons of the CIA that had not yet run its course as Gerber read the files.
Nosenko began meeting with CIA officers in 1962, defected in 1964, and brought with him the answer to the most pressing question facing the CIA at the time. Was Moscow behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? The Warren Commission had concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone, but inside the CIA, officials still brooded over his Soviet connections. Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union after serving in the Marines, including a stint at an intelligence-gathering post in Japan, and then, in a bizarre twist, had returned to the United States with a Russian wife shortly before shooting the President. The CIA had not made public its doubts about Oswald—in fact, it had shared few of its concerns with the Warren Commission—but the truth was that the
