Palace of Treason (22 page)

Their son, Sebastian, grew tall, looking very much like his father and, as a result of the latter’s nose-in-the-air example, acting more and more like him. In both father and son, Francophile self-regard mixed with sedulous bad manners, a preoccupation with money, and the unshakable expectation that they were owed things in life. Father spoke to son in French, the better to sneer at others. The delicate Christine had never been able to cope with the lofty disdain of her husband, and suffered Sebastian’s evolving adolescent disrespect in silence; father had taught son well. Then Claude abandoned the family and returned to France, now an expat US citizen—Sebastian was twenty—and Christine retired from State and wilted smaller and smaller, until she died.

Without support or a place to live, Sebastian graduated from college and joined the US Navy, went shakily through training, and evaded sea duty by applying to and joining the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. He found he did well chasing down bad checks, investigating rape cases, and tracking stolen supplies. He treasured the leatherette wallet with the NCIS badge, and he liked flashing it under people’s noses. Then the position-vacancy call came out and he jumped at the chance to learn to be an NCIS polygraph operator—additional specialist credentials to brandish. A duty assignment to Annapolis on the security staff conducting clearance polygraphs for the Naval Academy plebes gave him the chops to claim “he
had been at Annapolis”—not exactly a ring-knocker, an actual graduate, but close enough.

But the navy was for losers, he decided, and after getting out he applied to CIA’s Directorate of Support, to the Office of Security, and the polygraph division. He was twenty-five. More prestige: first Annapolis, now Langley—never mind that he was a security investigator. CIA was the first string. Even the multiple insider euphemisms for the polygraph were cool. He started by “fluttering” new CIA applicants. He administered the periodic reinvestigation “swirls” on CIA case officers. He eventually was given an overseas trip to “box” a newly recruited asset.

He envied the laconic and sarcastic ops officers he met while abroad. He desired the cachet attached to operations and operators and the foreign field, but frankly wanted to avoid inconvenient and risky overseas assignments. He carefully began planning a safe and profitable career shift to the Clandestine Service: First a lateral assignment to an area desk, pure admin paperwork; then certification as ops-support assistant, tending asset files; then as a special assistant to a division chief, keeping his schedule; then a stint in Public Affairs, learning the art of saying nothing importantly; then hooking on to the coattails of an associate director, more staff work but breathing the air of the seventh floor; then into Congressional Affairs, where one meets future directors; until finally it happened and his patron was confirmed as director, and forty-year-old Sebastian Angevine, fifteen-year veteran of CIA’s administrative track, formerly US Navy, was named CIA’s new associate deputy director for Military Affairs and promoted in rank from GS-15 to SIS-Three with an increase in annual base pay from $119,554 to $165,300. His seventh-floor office soared above the treetops. The telephones on his desk were black, gray, and green. Access to a driver and a midnight-black SUV for getting to meetings at the Pentagon came with the job.

In less than a year, Seb Angevine was well-known on the seventh floor at Langley, around Pentagon conference tables, and in the National Security Council, though he was less well-known in CIA Headquarters on the operational floors and in the geographic divisions, where he rarely visited. The ambitious security officer morphed into a mid-level federal executive with airs. He wore Ermenegildo Zegna silk ties, Aldridge satin braces, and antique Carrington abalone cuff links. He ran long fingers through leonine
hair carefully tended to keep the gray away from his temples. He flirted with women in the office—behind his oblivious back he was considered spotted and greasy, rather than interesting and urbane.

As he had learned during the formative years coming up, you really didn’t have to sweat the work—it just sort of flowed around you, nothing but meetings, talking heads, and staff work delegated down the food chain. The other stuff was out of the senior manager’s playbook: Once a year, either propose an amorphous new “program,” or close down an existing program in a display of efficiency and fiscal rectitude; be sure to fire one or more struggling underlings each quarter to prove you’re a leader; and know that there is no limit to obsequiousness and flummery when dealing with superiors. It was really quite easy.

The rest of it was gravy: access and privilege. Sensitive papers crossed his desk—CIA operational traffic, raw and finished intelligence. That was just the start. He was read into compartmented Department of Defense programs, hundreds of them, binders full of them; CIA and DoD shared a lot. In the Intelligence Community the gravitas of a bureaucrat was measured by the number of clearance designators behind his name: The longer the list, the bigger his
popol,
and Seb had more than a dozen clearances, including the rare Special Handling/Intelligence Techniques compartment, cynically referred to by secretaries and special assistants on the seventh floor by the acronym SH/IT. Angevine was in the know.

Okay, the government money wasn’t great, and that rankled. He wanted nice things, perhaps an apartment at the Watergate, the new Audi, a girlfriend who could speak French with him. He liked going out to restaurants and bars, including unwinding at strip clubs such as Good Guys on Wisconsin Avenue. But that took money, and there definitely wasn’t enough. He could trade his tepid federal salary for some big numbers in the private sector, but he wasn’t ready for that yet—besides, they expected performance and results out there. (A lot of high-ranking chiefs in the Service landed big outside jobs at retirement, and most lasted only three years before being fired: You don’t skate in the private sector, especially not with a front-office federal work ethic.) The solution was to stay in CIA for a while longer. So when Dick Spofford was caught making a deposit to his wank account, Seb Angevine had seen the future: He would ascend
to the DNCS’s job; the director was his ally and would confirm him. That had all changed now.

It was a measure of Seb Angevine’s pathology that his sudden bombshell decision to sell secrets to the Russians did not conflict with notions of loyalty to or betraying his country. He was apoplectic at being passed over—this did not happen to
him.
He idly tried rationalizing that passing secrets (and thus leveling the intelligence playing field) would create calm in the Kremlin, reassure Putin, and make Russian foreign policy less prone to global adventurism.
Yeah maybe,
thought Angevine, je m’en tamponne,
I don’t give a shit.

He was sliding down the slope toward espionage for two of the classic human motivations: money and ego. He wanted money, lots of it, and based on various counterintelligence summaries he had read, the Russians paid a lot better than they used to. And his damaged and galloping ego thirsted to repay the director; all the peacock deputies; that
morue, that codfish,
Bevacqua; and the entire CIA for ruining his life. The bitter contempt for his colleagues salved any guilt that might have intruded—none did—and focused him on what he really wanted.

The element that preoccupied Seb was how to pass classified information to the Russians and not be caught. During his training, the former NCIS polygrapher had learned a lot about past US espionage cases—Pollard, Ames, Hanssen, Pelton, Walker—and he knew how each of them had eventually been exposed: sloppy tradecraft, a pissed-off ex-wife, or a stupid accomplice, yes. But hands down, if you were an American passing secrets to the Russkies, you were most likely to be blown out of the water by an SVR officer
recruited and run inside by CIA,
a penetration agent who would report to Langley that the Center was running an American case—perhaps a name would be provided, perhaps not—and that’s all the FBI needed to start an investigation.

Hanssen, for one, had gotten cute. From the first contact he had tried to stay anonymous to the Russians: He refused face-to-face meetings, identified himself only as “Ramon.” But the Russians were also cute and
tape-recorded one of Ramon’s calls to his handler.
The actual audiotape was stolen from the file in Moscow Center by a CIA penetration of SVR and passed back to Langley.
Hanssen’s thunderstruck Bureau colleagues had recognized his voice—he was in supermax ADX in Florence, Colorado, for life.

Therefore, the critical task was to find a secure conduit to the Russians that could not be tracked back to him. Seb spent the weekend thinking about the problem, exhausted and edgy, but nothing came to him. For dinner he munched absently on the
lumpia
—Philippine spring rolls—his housekeeper, Arcadia, had left in the fridge. Seb brooded alone. Then he remembered the OSI double-agent briefing on his calendar.

The Air Force Office of Special Investigations, known as AFOSI or simply OSI, was, like NCIS, more a law-enforcement agency dedicated to policing air force miscreants. A small counterintelligence section pursued leads, but if one of their cases really heated up, the “FEEBs” in the Hoover Building would take over, or CIA would swoop in for foreign-based cases. All that was left to try was controlled cases.

Seb Angevine knew that double-agent ops were a creaky anachronism of the Cold War. Generating (and approving) authentic feed material for passage to the opposition was an unending, crushing chore. Moreover, intelligence agencies around the world were all finely attuned to the threat of provocation from a dispatched volunteer: They had all been burned. Thus the opposition’s requirements for bona fide intelligence were wickedly demanding—blockbuster intelligence, the kind that really could be considered a loss of national-security information, was the standard test for any agent. If intelligence production was meager, or inconsequential, or uncorroborated, a volunteer would not be vetted.

Angevine, as ADD/Mil, could ask for and receive detailed, classified briefings on any double-agent operation, and he called his contacts at the Pentagon to be more fully read into the new OSI project. Seb listened carefully to the description of SEARCHLIGHT, the code name for the operation. An air force major named Glenn Thorstad had been drafted as the
double agent—a red-haired, green-eyed Lutheran from Minnesota;
a real squarehead,
thought Angevine. He was surprised to hear that Major Thorstad had already made contact with the Russian Embassy in Washington by slipping an envelope under the windshield wiper of a Russian diplomat’s car at the National Arboretum on New York Avenue.

As Seb walked into the OSI briefing room in the Pentagon he saw Simon Benford sitting in a chair against the wall. Angevine was acquainted with Benford slightly—their professional worlds did not often intersect. He knew Benford was chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Division, and the enfant terrible of the Intelligence Community. Apart from that, Angevine was only faintly aware that Benford’s universe was populated with moles and spies, a murky world of indications, clues, and intelligence leaks. Angevine did not like him—during the past year of high-level meetings on the seventh floor he could feel Benford’s eyes on him, could hear the contempt in his voice when he spoke. But Benford was that way to everybody.

Angevine knew that veteran operations officers in the service (like Benford) discounted him. They all knew that Angevine had not earned his associate deputy director position in CIA by running operations in the foreign field. It was sweet irony that Angevine outranked them all—not that he could pull rank on any of them. In the strangely egalitarian clandestine service, and despite its patrician roots, even junior officers addressed seniors by their first names.

What was Benford doing at this relatively unimportant OSI meeting? He sat down next to him, the only two CIA officers in the room otherwise filled by blue uniforms and ribbons.

“Simon,” said Angevine, staring straight ahead.

“Sebastian,” said Benford, focused on the far wall.

“What are you doing here?” said Angevine. “A bit below your scope.”

“I would have thought the same for you,” said Benford. Neither had looked at the other once.

“I try to immerse myself in a variety of operations,” said Angevine archly.

“Of course you do,” said Benford, “being the ADD/Mil and all.” Angevine ignored the sarcasm.

“And you?”

Benford turned to look at Angevine. “You know what I think of double-agent operations,” he said. “Time intensive, dilatory, inconclusive. No serious service spends much capital on them anymore.” Angevine turned and looked at Benford. “But you know all that, don’t you, Sebastian?”

“Then why are you here, Simon?” asked Angevine.

“God Bless OSI,” said Benford. “They are squeaky and enthusiastic and they try. And this operation of theirs—SEARCHLIGHT, I think they call it—seems to have drawn out the Bolshies. Quite remarkable.”

“Bolshies?” said Angevine.

“Russians to you. The Washington
rezidentura
responded to the note that squeaky young air force major left on one of their cars. Directed him to a site in Maryland. Quite extraordinary; they normally turn volunteers away. The
rezident
may be under pressure from the Center to become more productive.”

“Interesting,” said Angevine. “Who is the head boy these days?” He was thinking ahead: Getting the
rezident
’s name could be useful in the future.

“It’s the head
girl,
actually,” said Benford.

Most interesting,
thought Angevine. “Who is she?” he said.

“Yulia Zarubina,” said Benford, tilting his head. “Name mean anything to you?”

A jolt of guilt ran up Angevine’s spine. “No. Why, should it?”

“Yulia’s grandmother was Elizaveta Zarubina, posted to Washington in 1940. While Hoover’s FBI was chasing her husband around town, she recruited half the US atom spies in Moscow’s stable. Oppenheimer, Gold, Hall, Greenglass. She was a legend, personally commended by Stalin.”

“Never heard of her,” said Angevine.

“Ancient history,” said Benford. “Yulia kept the family name, presumably to continue the pedigree.”

“So you’re here to take a closer look at her,” said Angevine.

“Indeed. She’s a rarity in SVR. Highest-ranking woman in their service—she’s around fifty-five. Only a few of them around.

“Coming up she did the usual rounds in the Foreign Language Institute and the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” said
Benford. “Got her grandmother’s genes: ten languages, cultured and savvy. Overseas tours in Paris, Tokyo, and Stockholm as
rezident.
Putin sent her to Washington as
rezident,
part charm offensive. But there’s another side to our Zarubina. The reason I’m interested in this OSI stage show.”

“Do tell,” said Angevine, feigning uninterest, looking around the room.

“Yulia Zarubina is a recruiter. Got a talent for it. Source once reported that they call her
shveja,
the seamstress, like she sews up her targets.”
Useful to know,
thought Angevine.
Benford just did my homework for me.

“If she’s coming out to play with our major over there,” said Benford, “we’d like to take a closer look at her.”

“It’s all a bit melodramatic, don’t you think, Simon?” said Angevine.

Benford tilted his head again. “It depends on your definition of drama, Sebastian,” he said.

Angevine listened to half the OSI briefing on SEARCHLIGHT and slipped out the door, earning a heavy-lidded stare from Benford. He had heard enough. Every month OSI handlers, a production review board, and the deputy director of the A-2 Staff (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) would compile and review the proposed digital package assembled by OSI for passage to the Russians.

Angevine thought the operation idiotic and transparent. But the notion of photographing documents with a digital camera was interesting—perhaps something he could manipulate. He would append real secrets to the tail end of the OSI dross. He imagined the jaw-dropped Russians coming to the end of Thorstad’s chicken feed to find additional images from another source, explosive images, dynamite secrets. No personal meetings, no exposure—he would be flying under the radar, using an approved channel. And the new source—Seb would have to come up with his own code name, that would be amusing—would be unknown and untraceable to him in Langley: If any suspicions emerged, Benford the mole hunter would have to comb through the thousands of USAF personnel files of those employees with access to classified information before looking elsewhere.

Two refinements remained: He needed access to the OSI flash card, and he had to receive his money. He thought furiously. He would insist that CIA’s Military Affairs staff review the card before passage as a counterintelligence check—he would do it himself. As for the money: no bank accounts, domestic or offshore. Counterintelligence investigators could uncover those in an afternoon. No, the money would have to be passed via old-fashioned dead drops. But in this he was courting danger: The FBI followed Russian intel officers around Washington waiting specifically for such activity—loading and clearing drops. SVR officers in Washington were too hot. Except perhaps the urbane and effective Yulia Zarubina, Putin’s poster girl for improved bilateral relations. It could work.