The next day, staff inside KGB headquarters were ordered to seal the doors. Knowledge is power for a spy service, and for the KGB it resided in its files that listed the names of informers and agents at home and abroad. These had to be protected at all costs. When East Germany had seen its revolution in 1989, the offices of its security service, the Stasi, had been overrun. There had been frantic shredding of documents. In Dresden, a young KGB officer on his first foreign posting had watched in fear as the crowds gathered outside his office. He had dreamed of joining the KGB since he was a teenager. He called a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection. He expected them to crush the protests, but they explained they were still awaiting orders. “Moscow is silent,” he was informed. He was shocked. It was time to destroy the files. “I personally burned a huge amount of material,” the KGB officer later recalled. “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.” That officer’s name was Vladimir Putin. He would never forget what happened when crowds rose up and Moscow was silent.
In August 1991, the KGB in Moscow feared the same fate as the Stasi. Shebarshin opened his safe and pulled out incriminating papers so they could be destroyed. He also took out his service pistol—a Makarov 9-millimeter semiautomatic. He carefully oiled and cleaned it. He gave the order to ship files out to a secure location. Shebarshin was then informed that his time as head of the KGB would be only a single day. Gorbachev returned him to head of the First Chief Directorate and installed a liberal reformer as his superior, with a mission to break up the KGB.
Thousands of miles away, in Langley, Virginia, the cables from their team on the ground were being pored over for every detail. No one in the CIA had seen the coup coming and now their opponent was down. But were they out?
“Their dicks are in the dirt,” the head of the CIA’s Soviet division, Milt Bearden, used to tell his staff. Bearden was a straight-talking Texan with a swagger to match who was head of the CIA’s Soviet and Eastern Europe division. The division was the powerhouse of the agency. Its inner sanctum would become known as “Russia House”—a reference, like so much in the spy world, to a John le Carré novel. But at the moment of triumph, it was a house divided. Many officers had spent their entire career having been working against the Soviet target, but Bearden was an outsider, his last job running operations in Afghanistan. That meant he was viewed with suspicion by the insiders. There were deep divisions over how to deal with the old enemy. Bearden’s view was that times had changed and that liaison—sitting down with the other side’s spies—offered new opportunities. That view was met with deep resistance from those who thought it was naive to think their adversary was changing. The “insular subculture didn’t want to let go of the Cold War,” Bearden would later write of his critics; “it had been too much fun.” Over the decades to come, and even as it moved away from the center of CIA operations, Russia House would always retain its own unique identity, its work sealed off from everyone else behind walls of secrecy. Its critics would say it was trapped in the past, but inside its walls, its inhabitants believed they were the only ones who understood that, whatever changed on the surface, the opponent they faced off against was patient, persistent, and aggressive, and only they fully appreciated the danger. At the time of the coup they thought Bearden did not get it.
As the coup collapsed, Bearden summoned one of his officers into his spacious office. Mike Sulick was a Bronx-born former marine who had served in Vietnam and had a PhD in Russian studies. He joined the CIA in 1980 and had already done one undercover tour in Moscow. He would eventually rise to be the head of the CIA’s clandestine service and a central figure in the intelligence war with Russia, one of the key players in the Vienna spy swap. Sulick that day had his bags packed to head off to Lithuania, one of the Baltic states that had sought independence from the USSR, in order to make contact with their intelligence service. “As I entered Bearden’s office, he eased back into his chair, propped his leather cowboy boots up on his oak desk, and broke the news: ‘Sorry, trip’s off, young man,’ ” Sulick later wrote. Then Bearden broke into a grin. “But look at it this way. It’s not every day the president puts you on hold,” he explained. The White House had delayed Sulick’s trip while they worked out whether or not to recognize the Baltic states. A few days later Sulick was allowed to travel to meet the Lithuanian spies. Once there, he walked around the local KGB office, a grand building that had been stormed while the coup had been taking place in Moscow. It was littered with documents half burnt and shredded by frantic KGB officers a few days earlier. A portrait of Dzerzhinsky had been slashed with a knife by the protesters who had forced their way in. Sulick went down into the grim, dark cellar in which prisoners had once been tortured in tiny cells. There was even a padded, soundproofed room for those sent mad by their punishment. “The empty cells still seemed faintly to echo the screams of tortured prisoners,” Sulick later remembered. He felt a tightness in his chest, an inability to breathe, and he could only stay inside for a few moments. This was the type of memory that stayed with those who battled against Russia in the spy wars and made them determined never to relent.
A few days later Bearden was in Moscow and sat across from the new, reformist head of the KGB. The KGB chief explained he wanted to end the Cold War mind-set. Too much effort and money had been wasted, for example, by putting listening devices into the new US embassy. Bearden slipped the US ambassador a note: “Ask him to give you the blueprints.” To the amazement of the Americans, the new KGB chief would soon hand over not just the plans but some of the actual transmitters that had been buried inside the American embassy being built in Moscow. Bearden took it as proof that his new ways of liaison might bear fruit. The KGB chief hoped the Americans would reciprocate with details of their bugging operations on Soviet missions in Washington and New York. He would be disappointed.
The handover of the plans by their new boss stunned the hardened operatives of the KGB. They thought it was madness. “How naïve to believe the fall of the Soviet Union meant foreign intelligence would no longer be needed,” thought one officer who had battled America. The KGB’s old guard, like those in the CIA’s Russia House, were not yet ready to give up the game even if their bosses were sitting down together. And their dicks were not quite in the dirt as much as it looked. One thing the KGB had not revealed was that even as their country fell apart, they had a pair of aces up their sleeve—two spies in the heart of American intelligence. But the reforms were too much for some. Shebarshin resigned soon after. “The Soviet Union is no more but eternal Russia remains. It is weakened and disorganised but the spirit of the Russian people has not been broken,” he wrote.
By the end of that year, republics including the Baltics had their independence, Gorbachev was gone, and the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. And so was the KGB, broken up in early December, to reduce the concentration of power. The old First Chief Directorate—the sword—became the SVR, with the task of spying abroad. Even though his statue had been torn down outside, inside the Lubyanka, Dzerzhinsky’s picture was still up on the walls, and small statues stood in rooms and corridors like shrines. The domestic security arm of the KGB—the shield—would go through various names in the coming years before eventually becoming the FSB. The names changed and the organizations underwent a crisis of morale in the following years. But what was preserved among a small cadre of KGB officers was a mind-set—the one that Shebarshin had articulated in 1991, in which Russian nationalism supplanted communism and in which spies had a duty to preserve the state to protect the motherland. That would be passed on to a new generation and when Shebarshin, decades later and in ill health, shot himself in his Moscow apartment using his ceremonial pistol, he would be living in a country run by one of his former KGB officers.