Conspiracy in Kiev (5 page)

EIGHT

S
panish was spoken in my home,” she said. “My mother was from Mexico City and was a devout Roman Catholic. She moved to Southern California in her twenties to marry my father. He was an aircraft worker with McDonnell-Douglas. His parents had been from southern Italy and had come to America in the 1920s.”

“But if he was Italian, they didn’t speak Spanish to each other,” Cerny observed.

“No,” Alex said with a smile. “Of course not. But I used to visit my grandparents,
los abuelos mexicanos
, during summers. And I loved listening to the Latino pop stations out of Los Angeles and San Diego. By seven years old, I was completely bilingual. Then there was church Bible study. I was raised as a Protestant. My father’s choice to convert—because it was ‘more American.’ But my mom insisted one Sunday a month on taking me to ‘her’ church. It was a traditional Roman Catholic one in Santa Clarita. They spoke Spanish and Latin there. When I first heard Latin, I wanted to study it. My dad didn’t object. He just stayed home to watch the Raiders and Dodgers.”

Cerny laughed. “Sounds like
my
dad,” he said, still in Russian.

Alex continued. Her father had died in an auto accident in the summer of 1993 when she was fourteen. While Alex settled into her faith and found solace there, her mother settled into an alcoholic depression. Alex buried herself in schoolwork. A year later, her mother’s health worsened. Alex went to Mexico for a year to live with an aunt and their family. Her fluency in Spanish gelled. “I read voraciously in two languages,” she said. “Histories. Biographies. Novellas. Journals about
el beisbol
or
el fútbol
. Anything.”

She came back overprepared for her own school system, she explained. A local guidance counselor in California had ties to the East Coast. When her mother’s illness worsened, Alex was sent to a rigorous boarding school in Connecticut on full scholarship.

The school allowed her to excel. She branched from Spanish into French. She won a summer internship in Europe. Off she went to work in the rural Camargue region on a ranch in southern France, an area famous for prized bulls, wild ponies, and a pounding summer sun.

“You know what? I turned into a French cowgirl,” she said with a laugh. “And I loved every minute of it. The local people had a wonderfully unique culture. Distinctly Mediterranean. After six weeks, I came home and without even realizing it, I was fluent in a third language.”

“So where did the Italian come from?” Cerny asked.

“That was easy,” she said. “My dad was from Sicily, as I said. I wanted to know about his culture too. I started studying on my own, but since I knew Spanish and French and had had some Latin, it was very easy. I was lucky and won another summer internship the following year, this time in art history and Italian literature.”

Cerny laughed. “I’m not sure how ‘lucky’ that was,” he said. “Obviously you had a gift and studied hard.”

“What’s the old saying?” she asked, stumbling a little and trying to translate into Russian. “ ‘Luck is the confluence of hard work and opportunity?’ I spent three weeks in Rome and another three in Paris.”

She was fascinated at the time, she recalled, by the work of the Italian poet Dante, whose
Divine Comedy
consigned deathbed confessors to the first circle of Purgatory. She switched into Italian. “During life they made God wait for them. So after death, they must wait for God.”

Cerny blinked. She knew she had him. A personal first for Alex, switching from Russian to quote into sixteenth-century Italian.

Returning to Russian, she described how during her senior year at boarding school, she won a prestigious state university scholarship in California. It was a remarkable achievement, and yet she would always associate her senior year with tragedy. Two days after her eighteenth birthday, one week before graduation, her mother died.

The funeral was in Veracruz. She attended the funeral and missed her own graduation, which at the time barely seemed to matter. She was now on her own. She spent two years at the University of California at Berkeley where she was one of the more conservative students. It was a lonely stretch, by her own admission. She had many acquaintances but made few close friends. She joined a local Episcopal church, formally transferring from her old Methodist church. “It felt more comfortable,” she recalled, “almost as if it were midway between my father’s faith and my mom’s.”

Though she skipped over it here with Michael Cerny, as she entered her early twenties, Alex had transformed from a cute but shy teenage girl into an attractive young woman. She had attained her adult height of five foot seven, but all the sports and training through the years had given her a strong, lean but feminine body. And she had acquired an ample amount of self-confidence and self-assurance to go with it.

She had her mother’s dark Spanish eyes and brown hair. She dated occasionally but there was never anything serious. She tried smoking but quit quickly. She dabbled in liquor but kept it in moderation. She tried pot once at a party and didn’t care for it or its foggy-headed lifestyle. So she never touched weed again or any harder drugs, either, but she had acquaintances who dabbled in both.

She supported herself through work-study jobs and her scholarship. She played soccer for the freshman women’s team at Berkeley and ran track. After two years, she transferred to UCLA. She selected an undergraduate major in business and finance and found herself surrounded by a coterie of unusual friends. Many students were foreign, Asian and European. Many were American.

Her political views came more into focus at this time too. She disliked the right when it became intolerant and bigoted. She disliked the left when it strayed into cuckooland. She liked to think she was of the reasonable center, able to listen to an argument from either side and make her own judgments accordingly.

At this time, she was also finding that her abilities in language combined with a business major were opening doors for her, not the least of which was even more financial aid for her academics.

“When I was at UCLA,” she said, “I started Russian, then accelerated my study by taking a summer semester in Moscow. It was an exciting place to be, during the Gorbachev era, perestroika, and all that.”

Cerny nodded. “Have any Russian boyfriends?” he asked.

“Is that any of your business?”

“No. Just curious.”

“An American girl in Moscow who spoke Russian?” She laughed. “I got a lot of offers,” she said, “but didn’t accept very many of them. Too much vodka,
, too many late nights at the Café Pushkin after going to the clubs, can interfere with a girl’s studies.”

He raised an eyebrow in mild disbelief. “Sure,” he said. Then he moved on.

The following summer, she worked in New York for a big time entrepreneur named Joseph Collins. She worked in his international finance section. Her work was so diligent that he took personal note of her. Collins promised her a job after university, if she was interested.

She switched her course of study to a five-year program that led to a master’s. By the time the University of California awarded her an MA, she was fluent in five languages, had a thorough understanding of modern European politics, art, and history, and had a master’s degree in finance.

After UCLA she turned down an offer to return to New York and work for Joseph Collins, who was expanding his business in Latin America. Instead, she wanted to stay in California. She worked for Wells Fargo for eighteen months in one of their international divisions, overseeing
hipotecas
—mortgages—in the Latin community.

She used her Spanish daily.

“I was bored stiff,” she said. “But I stumbled across a few cases of bank fraud in the mortgage division. So I grew interested in law enforcement. I applied for a job with the FBI.”

“And they hired you,” Cerny said.

“About two weeks later,” she said. “I filled an immediate need.”

The FBI sent her to their academy in Virginia. She excelled at all aspects of her training, from the book-learning to firearms to the bone-crunching unarmed combat.

She advanced quickly. Her linguistic skills were of immense value. She was assigned to Internet rackets and bank frauds in her first years, initially working out of the Newark, New Jersey, office, then moving around the country on a case-to-case basis.

She was socially traditional as an adult, which meant she didn’t have affairs all over the place, same as she had been as a student. But she liked looking good. She wore sharp suits, blouses and skirts that appealed to men. She worked hard at the gym to maintain a good physique. So her clothes flattered her, and she chose them carefully, same as the men she went out with.

In recounting this part of her life to her interviewer, small scenes in her past played out in her mind. She had realized as an adult that her late father had had his quirks. He had not been a faithful churchgoer but he had been a believer nonetheless. At Alex’s twelfth birthday, her father had given her the small gold cross on a delicate gold chain that she continued to wear around her neck. It was the only thing of substance that he had given her that she still owned. As jewelry went, it was modest, more meaningful in what it represented than its actual monetary worth. But she had worn it now for almost eighteen years.

Wear it in good health, he had told her, in good health and in good fortune.

So far, she always had.

And over the years, she had even developed this inadvertent habit of taking the cross between her thumb and forefinger; she would hold it and touch it thoughtfully at times when somehow she sought guidance or when she was deep in thought. For whatever reason, emotional, spiritual, or just plain quirk of habit, it comforted her. The cross was something that had once been in her father’s hand. It represented both his and her beliefs and kept his spirit close.

“Someday,” her dad had once said to her many years ago, “your faith will be challenged. You’ll think it has been destroyed. You’ll think your world has come to an end. That’s when this cross will mean more to you than you’ll ever know. When that happens, find your way back to the cross.”

This advice had come from a casual Methodist who wasn’t the best at showing up for Sunday services. Faith survived, she had concluded, in some strange dark places. It was a conversation she would never forget. Ever since that day, the small gold cross had been part of her.

Sitting in the small office at the State Department, her thoughts came back to the present. As she sat in front of Michael Cerny and concluded her dialogue in rapid now-excellent Russian, she realized she was fingering the small gold cross as she spoke.

If it bothered him, he didn’t mention it. But she knew he had noticed.

“That’s really about it,” she said with a shrug and a smile, switching back to English. “What else can I tell you?”

NINE

E
xtraordinary,” Cerny finally said, following Alex back to English.

“Thank you,” she answered. “But let’s get real. I don’t speak any Ukrainian. Drop me down in Odessa and I’d be unable to find either the bathroom or the railroad station.”

“Oh, I disagree,” he answered. “You speak Russian. Odessa is an almost one-hundred percent Russian-speaking city. It was part of Russia until given to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Khrushchev in the early fifties as a PR move,” Cerny said.

“Touché,” she said. “I warned you I didn’t know the area.”

Cerny enjoyed scoring the point. Then he got back to business.

“Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t think a three-week crash course in Ukrainian language and culture would do much good,” he said. “But you’re not the normal student and you’re not being primed for a normal task. How much do you know about the relationship between the Russian and Ukrainian languages?” he asked.

“I know they have a similar grammar, a common root, and a similar vocabulary, while sounding quite different,” she said. “I traveled in eastern Hungary and Poland the summer I was in Russia. I heard some Ukrainian near the borders. I could understand a little. They’re similar, much like French and Spanish are similar.”

“Good start,” he said. “Assume that Ukrainian assumes the role of Spanish in your analogy and Russian is in the role of French. The river that runs through Kiev is known in Russian as the Dnieper. The
dn-YEH-per
. In Ukrainian it’s the Dnipro, the
dnee-PRO
. When I was there Kiev was almost entirely a Russian-speaking city. I suspect that it remains so despite efforts by the new government to promote Ukrainian.”

“When were you there?” she asked.

“From 1996 to 2005,” he said. “Due to Soviet dominance, every Ukrainian, at least in Kiev and the eastern Ukraine, is usually able to speak Russian fluently even if he regards Ukrainian as his native language. I would have meetings at the foreign ministry and speak in Ukrainian, and then on the way out, my interlocutor would turn to his secretary and speak in Russian. Typical.”

Alex nodded.

Cerny continued. “How much do you know about the great famine of the 1930s in Ukraine—the so-called ‘fake famine’?”

“Again, I’m not an expert,” she said, “but I’ve read my history.”

In truth, she knew quite a bit. The 1930s were the bleakest years in Ukraine’s modern history. The famine of 1932 and 1933 killed up to ten million people. Largely unknown beyond Europe, the famine was still called the ‘fake famine’ by older Ukrainians. Fake, because it was manufactured in Moscow and didn’t have to happen.

The Ukraine had normally been a fertile agricultural region. But the harvests of those years were confiscated by the Soviet Red Army under orders from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator. Under the new policy of Soviet agricultural collectivization in the 1930s, all grain from collective farms in Ukraine was shipped back to Russia, leaving millions of Ukrainians to starve to death. It was part of a brutal campaign by Stalin to force Ukrainian peasants to join collective farms while local farmers resisted all such collectivization. It was an era when almost all food disappeared from the rural areas of Ukraine. Children disappeared as cannibalism became widespread. About a quarter of Ukraine’s population was wiped out.

The Ukrainian famine, or
Holodomor
, was one of the largest national catastrophes of the Ukrainian nation in modern history. While the famine in Ukraine was a part of a wider famine that also affected other regions of the USSR, the name
Holodomor
was specifically applied to the events that took place in territories populated by ethnic Ukrainians. It was sometimes referred to as the Ukrainian Genocide, implying that the famine was engineered by the Soviets, specifically targeting the Ukrainian people to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a political factor and social entity. Some modern-day revisionists and apologists suggest that natural causes such as weather, inadequate harvest, and insufficient traction power were also among the reasons that contributed to the origins of famine and its severity. Yet the truth was that Moscow initiated a policy of death by forced starvation, all for the greater glory of the godless Soviet Communism.

To Alex it was just one more example of the suffering and atrocities of that part of the world. The Nazis had killed nearly one and a half million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly thirty-four thousand Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history had gone untold. Alex shuddered. So much of the twentieth century had been a testament to man’s inhumanity to man, a complete loss of any moral compass.

Thinking about all of this today in a room with Michael Cerny, Alex felt her indignation rising, three quarters of a century later. Anyone could say or think whatever they wanted about Christians, but true Christians sent missionaries all over the world to help
feed
people, not starve or murder them.

“
Holodomor
in Ukrainian means ‘death by hunger,’ ” said Cerny, bringing it back to the 1930s. “In central Kiev there is a monument to those who perished in the
Holodomor
. The president of the United States is going to lay a wreath at the base of that monument.”

“In my humble opinion, long overdue,” Alex said.

“It’s also a controversial gesture. The Russians still deny that the fake famine was official policy. Never mind the fact that there are documents in Moscow above Stalin’s signature ordering the Red Army to shoot anyone caught hiding food.”

It was hard to comprehend. The Soviet policy of that era was as mind numbing and satanic as the extermination camps of Nazi Germany or the attacks on the civilians at the World Trade Center on September 11.

Cerny leaned down to a briefcase beside him. “I’m glad you seem to be a sympathetic soul,” he said. “I’m going to give you some reading. For right here, right now,” he said. “The first thing you need to know is the current political situation vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia. Under Vladimir Putin, who’s basically a gangster, Russia is under its worst dictator since Stalin.”

“You think he’s
that
bad? Worse than Khrushchev?”

“ ‘Vlad the Impaler Lite,’ we call him. Look, you be the judge,” Cerny said. “Putin has allowed Gazprom, the state gas company, to raise its own army. He had the editor of
Izvestia
fired for publishing accurate accounts of the Beslan school hostage crisis. And now he’s founded these ideological youth groups called
Nashi
to do the pro-Putin brainwashing of the first generation to come of age in post-Soviet Russia. They look like all those sick little Aryans in the Hitler Youth of the 1930s. On top of that, he’s out of official power as president, but still runs the country. You decide.”

“You make a solid case,” Alex said.

“But how does that affect us? Today. With the president going to Ukraine?” Cerny asked. “The Russians have never accepted the idea of an independent Ukraine. But Ukraine is about to join NATO. There are groups of fanatically pro-Russian, pro-Putin young Ukrainians who are opposed to this. They’ve vowed to cause trouble, probably when our president visits the monument to the victims of the famine. The president is visiting to maintain a visibility in support of the pro-Western elements, not the least of which are the members of the many Christian churches in Ukraine.”

Alex was always smart enough to listen to an expert on anything.

“Why would ethnic Ukrainians support the Russians?” she asked.

“While there are Ukrainians who are strongly committed to Ukrainian independence from Russian influence, there are others who actually regarded Ukraine’s past as one of partnership with Russia in what was a superpower,” he answered.

“Despite the famine?”

“Despite the famine,” Cerny said. “The Russians hoped to eventually turn the Ukrainians into Russians, something not all that difficult given the relative similarity of the languages and cultures, including the common Orthodox faith prior to the Russian Revolution. The Russians ruthlessly repressed any stirrings of Ukrainian nationalism but offered ‘little brother’ status in return. An ambitious young Ukrainian who bought into the concept could wind up in the Politburo in Moscow. Ukraine’s first president, Leonid Kuchma, was actually the boss of the factory that made the ICBM’s that were the Soviet Union’s nuclear deterrent.”

“But there is Ukrainian nationalism? Right?” Alex asked.

“Absolutely. It is centered in western Ukraine, where the Austro-Hungarian Empire let Ukrainians be Ukrainians as long as they were loyal to the emperor in Vienna. But the tension between Ukrainian nationalists and ‘Russophiles’ is a basic fault line that runs through the country. And it has implications for the US. The Ukrainian nationalists want a Western-oriented Ukraine, one that joins the European Union and NATO. The Russophiles don’t necessarily want to reestablish the Soviet Union, but they want a close ‘special relationship’ with Russia.”

Cerny had organized some hard-copy reading for her. He had a briefing booklet, a blue-jacketed document of several dozen pages folded into something with a blue cover that looked like an old-fashioned examination book. He placed it on the table. Then he gave her another half dozen books.

She knew the drill. It was a day of background preparation.

“Choose a comfortable place to read,” he said, motioning to the sofa and the chairs. He glanced at his watch. “Take the rest of the day with this stuff. Let’s meet back here at 4:30 this afternoon, and we’ll speak further. How’s that?”

“That would work,” she said.

Alexandra broke the official seal on the table. She scanned the stiff opening pages that warned of dire legal sanctions for blabbing what she was about to read.

Cerny slid a paper along the desktop in her direction. “The confidentiality agreement,” he said. “If you please …”

He slid a fountain pen along with the paper.

She picked up the pen and looked for the space for her signature.

“You might wish to read it first,” Cerny said. “Always a good idea, you know.”

She was midway through the form already. At the top was the usual “steam-rollered eagle,” the flattened bird that was the Great Seal of the United States.

Olive leaves in one talon and the arrows in the other. Then the content:

I, Alexandra LaDuca, have today read the declarations of USSD Intelligence dossier UK-3-122a-2008.

I resolve and warrant that I will not divulge any part of this report….

Blah, blah….

She scanned to the end. The normal crap that no one paid much attention to. Probably everything in the documents had already been in the
New York Times
anyway.

She signed.

Cerny left the room. Alexandra stayed at the conference table and began to read.