The Company: A Novel of the CIA (102 page)

Angleton was on the carpet, figuratively as well as literally. "What did you tell this Hersh fellow?" he demanded.

Colby had come around the side of his enormous desk and the two men, standing toe to toe, confronted each other. "I told him HT/LINGUAL was a counterintelligence program targeting the foreign contacts of American dissidents, that it had been fully authorized by the President, that in any case the whole mail-opening program had been terminated."

Angleton said bitterly, "In other words you confirmed that we opened mail."

"I didn't need to confirm it," Colby said. "Hersh knew it already."

"He didn't know it was a counterintelligence program," Angleton snapped. "You pointed the finger at me."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Jim, but HT/LINGUAL was your brainchild. Your people opened the envelopes. Your people indexed the names of three hundred thousand Americans who sent or received mail from the Soviet Union over a period of twenty years."

"We had reason to believe the KGB was using ordinary mail channels to communicate with their agents in America. We would have been chumps to let them get away with this because of some silly laws—"

Colby turned away. "These silly laws, as you call them, are what we're defending, Jim."

Angleton patted his pockets, hunting for cigarettes. He found one and jammed it between his lips but was too distracted to light up. "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of that government."

Colby peered out a window at the Virginia countryside. A thin haze seemed to rise off the fields. From the seventh floor of Langley it looked as if the earth were smoldering. "Let's be clear, Jim. The role of counterintelligence is to initiate penetrations into the Russian intelligence services and to debrief defectors. As for uncovering Soviet penetrations within the CIA, well, we have the entire Office of Security to protect us. That's their job. Now, how many operations are you running against the Soviets? I never heard of a single one. You sit in that office of yours and, with the exception of Kukushkin, shoot down every single Soviet defector who is recruited by luck or good intelligence work. And the one you don't shoot down turns out to be a dispatched agent dangling false serials. The situation is quite impossible." Colby turned back to face Angleton. "The
Times
is running the Hersh story on your domestic spying operation the day after tomorrow. This is going to be tough to handle. We've talked about your leaving before. You will now leave, period."

Angleton snatched the unlit cigarette from between his bloodless lips. "Am I to understand that you are firing me, Director?"

"Let's just say that I'm retiring you."

Angleton started toward the door, then turned back. His lips moved but no sounds emerged. Finally he managed, "Philby and the KGB have been trying to destroy me for years—you're serving as their instrument."

"Counterintelligence will still exist, Jim."

"You're making a tragic mistake if you think anybody else can do what I do. To begin to thread your way through the Counterintelligence quagmire, you need eleven years of continuous study of old cases. Not ten years, not twelve but precisely eleven. And even that would make you only a journeyman Counterintelligence analyst."

Colby returned to his desk. "We'll do our best to muddle through without you, Jim. Thanks for stopping by on such short notice."

The Deputy Director/Intelligence and his second-in-command, the Deputy Director/Operations (Ebby) and his Chief of Operations (Jack), the various area division chiefs, Angleton representing Counterintelligence, along with senior representatives from the Office of Security, the Office of Technical Services and the Political Psychological Division had crowded into the small conference room across from the DCI's office for the regular Friday nine o'clock tour de horizon. The deputy head of the Political Psychological Division, a dead pipe clenched in his jaws, was winding up a thumbnail portrait of the Libyan dictator Muammar Al-Qaddafi, who had recently pushed world crude prices up by cutting back on oil exports. "Popular belief to the contrary not withstanding," he was saying, "Qaddafi is certainly not psychotic, and for the most part is in touch with reality. He has what we would call a borderline personality disorder, which means that the subject behaves crazily one day and rationally the next."

"Strikes me as a fairly accurate description of some of us," the Director quipped, drawing a chuckle from the troops around the table.

"If the KGB has a psychological division, that's exactly how they would have diagnosed Nixon when he invaded Cambodia in 1970," remarked Leo, who was sitting in on his first regular topside session since his return to Langley.

"Seems to me that this is precisely the kind of personality a leader needs to project," Ebby pointed out. "That way the opposition can't count on being able to predict what he'll do in any given situation."

Jack said, "The question is: Are the Qaddafis and the Nixons suffering from borderline personality disorders—or just trying to convince each other that they are?"

The Director, presiding from the head of the table, glanced at his watch. "We'll put that intriguing question on a back burner for now. I have one more matter to raise before we break up. I want to announce, to my great regret, the retirement of Jim Angleton here. I don't need to tell anyone in this room that his contributions to the Company in general, and Counterintelligence in particular, are nothing short of legendary. His service to the United States, which goes back to his days at Ryder Street in London during the war, are a matter of record. I accepted Jim's resignation with deep regret. But he's an old warhorse and if anyone deserves a pasture, he does."

Colby's announcement was greeted with stunned silence; an earthquake under the foundations of Langley wouldn't have shaken the people gathered around the table more. Ebby and Jack studiously avoided looking at each other. Several of the Barons couldn't resist glancing at Leo Kritzky, who was staring out a window, lost in thought. The Director smiled across the table at the chief of Counterintelligence. "Would you care to say a word, Jim?" he asked.

Angleton, a lonely and skeletal figure of a man at the bitter end of a long and illustrious career, slowly pushed himself to his feet. He raised one palm to his forehead to deal with the migraine lurking behind his eyes. "Some of you have heard my Nature of the threat presentation before. For those who haven't I can think of no more appropriate swan song."

Angleton cleared his throat. "Lenin once remarked to Feliks Dzerzhinsky: 'The West are wishful thinkers, so we will give them what they want to think."' Avoiding eye contact with the Company Barons around the table, Angleton droned on. "When I worked at Ryder Street," he said, "I learned that the key to playing back captured German agents was orchestration—where layer upon layer of confirming disinformation supports the deception. This is what the Soviets have been doing for years—as part of a master plan they've been feeding layer upon layer of mutually reinforcing disinformation to the wishful thinkers in the West. They achieve this through the sophisticated use of interlocking agents-in-place and dispatched defectors. I have determined that the British Labor leader Hugh Gaitskell, who died in 1963 of lupus disseminata, was murdered by KGB wetwork specialists. They employed the Lupus virus as an assassination weapon so that Moscow could insert its man, Harold Wilson, into the Labor post and position him to become Prime Minister, which is the job he holds today. Wilson, who made many trips to the Soviet Union before becoming Prime Minister, is a paid agent of the KGB. Olaf Palme, the current Swedish Prime Minister, is a Soviet asset recruited during a visit to Latvia. Willy Brandt, the current West German chancellor, is a KGB agent. Lester Pearson, the Canadian Prime Minister until two years ago, is a KGB agent. Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, is a longtime Soviet agent. Averell Harriman, the former ambassador to the USSR and the former governor of New York State, has been a Soviet agent since the 1930s. Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under Nixon, is objectively a Soviet agent. What these agents-in-place have in common is that they all advocate and defend, which is to say orchestrate, the Soviet strategy of detente. Make no mistake about it, gentlemen, detente, along with such Soviet-inspired chimera as the Sino-Soviet split, the Yugoslav or Rumanian deviations, the Albanian defection, the Italian Communist Party's presumed independence from Moscow, are part of a master disinformation scheme designed to destabilize the West, to lure us into thinking that the Cold War has been won."

Several of the Barons around the table glanced uneasily at the Director. Colby, who had anticipated a short valedictory, didn't have the heart to interrupt Angleton.

"Dubcek's so-called Prague Spring," Angleton plunged on, "was part of this disinformation campaign; the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was worked out by Brezhnev and Dubcek in advance. The differences between Moscow and the so-called Euro-Communists in Western Europe are phony, part of the KGB Disinformation Departments global theater."

The counterintelligence chief scoured his bone-dry lips with the back of a hand. "If the facts I have outlined have been questioned at the highest level within our own intelligence organization, it can be said that this is the handiwork of the Soviet mole inside the CIA code named SASHA, who has twisted the evidence and caused many in this room to overlook the obvious menace. Which brings me to the greatest Soviet plot of all—one designed to ravage the economies of the Western industrial nations, bringing on civil unrest that will ultimately result in the triumph of the Moscow-oriented left in national elections. I have determined that the mastermind of this long-term KGB plot is none other than the almost mythical controlling officer who directed the activities of Adrian Philby, and today directs the activities of SASHA. He is known only as Starik—in Russian, the Old Man. The plot he has been concocting for at least the last ten years, and possibly longer, involves siphoning off hard currency from the sale of Soviet gas and oil and armaments abroad, and laundering these sums in various off-shore banking institutions against the day when he will use the vast sum that he has accumulated to attack the dollar. Ha, don't suppose that I can't see your reactions—you think this is far-fetched." Angleton's eyelids began to flutter. "I have discovered that the Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani, is investigating reports that the Vatican Bank has been receiving mysterious deposits and sending the money on to a variety of off-shore accounts. The money-laundering operation bears the Russian code name KHOLSTOMER. The English equivalent is STRIDER—it's the nickname of the piebald gelding in Tolstoys 'Strider: The Story of a Horse.'"

Shaking himself out of a near-trance, Angleton opened his eyes and began to speak more rapidly, as if he were running out of time. "Obviously these serials—Gaitskell, Wilson, Paime, Brandt, Pearson, Hollis, Harriman, Kissinger, Starik, KHOLSTOMER—weren't handed to me on a silver platter. Far from it. I teased them out of the wilderness of mirrors during thousands of hours of painstaking attention to the minutiae that nobody else bothers with. The process, like the art of fly-fishing, requires infinite patience. Oh, some people would have you think that all you have to do is go out there and toss a fly onto the river and you'll wind up with a trout. But it's not that way at all, gentlemen. You can take my word for it. The first thing you have to do if you want to catch the mythical brown giant of a trout that swims the upper reaches of the Brule is to observe what the fish are feeding on." Angleton was leaning over the table now, eager to share his professional secrets with his colleagues. "You catch a small trout, you slit it open, you empty the contents of the stomach into a celluloid cup. And when you see what it's been feeding on, you fashion a fly that resembles it. You can give the illusion of a real fly with the coloring of your hackle and wings and all the feathers you put on it. And it will float down the river with its hackles cupped up, and if you do it correctly, the trout really believes that it is a fly. And that, gentlemen," he announced triumphantly, "is how you get a strike..."

The Director stood up and said, very quietly, "Thank you, Jim."

Looking preoccupied, Colby turned and walked out of the room. One by one the others followed him until only Leo and Angleton were left.

"I know it's you," Angleton murmured. His brow was pleated in pain. "I see the whole thing clearly now—you really are SASHA. Kukushkin was sent over by Starik to feed me serials that would lead me to you because he knew it was only a matter of time before I teased your identity out of the wilderness. Then Starik organized the mock trial and execution knowing we would walk back the cat and discover that Kukushkin was still alive. Which would free you and undermine my credibility. The whole thing was a KGB plot to ruin me before I could identify SASHA... before I could expose KHOLSTOMER."

Leo scraped back his chair and rose. "I bear you no hard feelings, Jim. Good luck to you."

As Leo walked out the door, Angleton was still talking to himself. "The trick, you see, is to cast as far as you can and let the fly float back down stream with its hackles cupped up, and from time to time you give it a little twitch"—his wrist flicked an imaginary rod—"so that it dances on the surface of the water. And if you are subtle enough and deft enough, above all if you don't rush things, why, the son of a gun will snap at it and you'll have your trout roasting on the spit for supper..."

His voice faded as he settled heavily into the chair and braced himself for the lesser pain of the inevitable migraine.

The red bulb burning in the darkroom had turned Starik's skin fluorescent—for an instant he had the eerie feeling that his hands resembled those on the embalmed corpse of Lenin in the mausoleum on Red Square. Under Starik's lucent fingers, details began to emerge on the twelve-by-fifteen black-and-white print submerged in the shallow pan filled with developer. Using a pair of wooden tongs, he pulled the paper out of the bath and held it up to the red light. It was underexposed, too washed out; the details that he had hoped to capture were barely visible.