24. GETTING TO KNOW THE ENEMY
World politics were changing at an accelerating rate, and American
officials saw the need to check its fancies against the facts. Unfortu-
nately the Kremlin continued to put up barriers of mystery. In
mid-June 1986, however, there seemed to be a breach in the wall when
National Security Adviser John Poindexter received a startling memo
in this connection from his subordinate Jack Matlock. Attached to it
was a foreign policy briefing that Anatoli Chernyaev seemed to have
written for Gorbachëv. Supposedly a Kremlin ‘mole’ had passed it on
to the Americans. In fact it was a satirical spoof written by Matlock,
who was having a bit of fun while describing the dilemmas that cur-
rently faced Gorbachëv.^1 Poindexter liked it enough to send a copy to
the President, who asked for more briefings from the same ‘secret’
informant.^2
The West’s real intelligence agencies had performed their work
efficiently for many years. In 1981 France’s Directoire de la Surveil-
lance Territoire (DST) recruited the KGB’s Lieutenant Colonel
Vladimir Vetrov, who supplied names of agents carrying out techno-
logical espionage in the NATO countries. Mitterrand told Reagan, and
the Americans and their allies quickly closed down the spy networks.^3
The United Kingdom’s MI6 was still more impressive, at least until July
1985 when its double agent Oleg Gordievski, a leading KGB officer,
had to flee for his life to Britain.^4 Casey proudly reported that the
CIA had enlisted thousands of individuals to help the cause: ‘Some
for money – some for freedom and power – some for patriotism.’^5 The
Americans no longer had agents at the highest levels in Moscow: their
best information came from outright defectors. The CIA’s Aldrich
Ames debriefed one of the most promising among these, Vitali Yurch-
enko, who was a leading KGB official, and Casey invited Yurchenko to
dinner.^6 Soon Yurchenko abruptly chose to return to Moscow, where
the KGB leadership was reluctant to trust him again.^7 In fact Ames
had been secretly working for the KGB since April 1985; and even if