Read The Company: A Novel of the CIA Online
Authors: Robert Littell
Tags: #Literary, #International Relations, #Intelligence officers, #Fiction, #United States, #Spy stories, #Espionage
"Not something you'll find at one of those fast food kiosks on the Kurfurstendamm," she said with a knowing frown.
"Barium what?" Truscott demanded.
"Meals. I'm gonna feed... feed stuff back to a single addressee at a time. It will be radioactive, in a manner of speaking—I'll be able to trace... it and see who saw what, when. I'll stamp everything... ORCON—dissemination controlled by originator. All copies numbered. Then we'll... we'll see which operations get blown and... figure out from that who's betraying us... us."
"You're giving away some of the family jewels," Truscott noted uneasily.
"Goddamn mole will give away more of them if we don't catch him."
"I suppose you know what you're doing," the General mumbled.
"I suppose... I do," the Sorcerer agreed.
The Sorcerer had begun the arduous process of walking back his cat with the distribution list on the Vishnevsky exfiltration. As far as he could figure there had been nine warm bodies on the Washington end who were party to the operation: the director of Central Intelligence and his deputy director, four people in the Operations Directorate, the cipher clerk who had deciphered the Sorcerer's cables, the routing officer in Communications who controlled the physical distribution of traffic inside Cockroach Alley, and of course Jim Angleton, the counterintelligence swami who vetted all would-be defectors to weed out the "bad 'uns."
The permutations weren't limited to the people on the in-house distribution list. Kim Philby, as MI6's broker in Washington, was known to have access to all the top Company brass, up to and including the director, whose door was always open to the official nuncio from the British cousins. Any of them might have confided in Philby even though he wasn't on the distribution list. If someone had whispered in Philby s ear, he might have passed on to the head of MI6 the information that the Yanks were bringing across a defector who claimed to be able to finger a Soviet mole in MI6. "C," as the chief was called, might then have convened a small war council to deal with what could only be described as a seismic event in the secret Cold War struggle of intelligence services. If Philby wasn't the culprit—Torriti understood that the evidence pointing to him was only circumstantial—the mole could be anyone who learned of the Vishnevsky affair on a back channel.
Philby was also known to be bosom buddies with Jim Angleton, his sidekick from their Ryder Street days. According to what the Sorcerer had picked up (during casual phone conversations with several old cronies toiling in the dungeons on the Reflecting Pool), the birds of a feather, Philby and Angleton, nocked to a Georgetown watering hole for lunch most Fridays. Angleton obviously trusted Philby. Would he have passed on the meat of a "Flash" cable to his British pal? Would his pal have quietly passed it on to "C?" Would "C" have let the cat out of the bag to prepare for the worst?
Torriti meant to find out.
Burning midnight oil, devouring quantities of PX whiskey that had even Miss Sipp counting the empties in the wastebasket, Torriti meticulously prepared his barium meals.
Item: The Sorcerer had recently managed to have a hand-carved wooden bust of Stalin delivered to an office in the Pankow headquarters of the East German Intelligence Service. Hidden inside the base of the bust was a battery-operated microphone, a tiny tape machine and a burst-transmitter that broadcast, at 2 A.M. every second day, the conversations on the tape. The initial "get" from the microphone revealed that the East Germans had initiated a program, code-named ACTION J, to discredit the Allied-zone Germans by sending threatening letters purporting to come from West Germany to Holocaust survivors. The letters, signed "A German SS officer" would say: "We didn't gas enough Jews. Some day we'll finish what we started." Revealing ACTION J would blow the existence of the microphone hidden in the room in which the operation was being planned.
Item: The Rabbi had traded the names of two KGB case officers working under diplomatic cover out of the Soviet embassy in Washington for the whereabouts of a former Nazi germ warfare specialist in Syria, which the Sorcerer had acquired from the Gehlen Org (which, in turn, had purchased the information from a member of the Muhabarat, the Egyptian Intelligence Service). Judging from past experience, if the identity of the KGB officers fell into the hands of the Soviet mole, the Russians would find excuses (a death in the family, a son broke a leg skiing) to quickly pull the two back to the Soviet Union. If the two remained in Washington it would mean the Sorcerer's cable containing the names had not been blown.
Item: The Sorcerer had organized a phone tap in the office of Walter Albrecht's closest collaborator, his wife, Lotte, who worked in the Central Committee building at the intersection of Lothringerstrasse and Prenzlauer Alice in the center of East Berlin. One of the barium meals would contain a transcript of a conversation between Ulbricht and his wife in which Ulbricht said rude things about his Socialist Unity Party rival Wilhelm Zaisser. The Russians, if they got wind of the tap via the Soviet mole, would make a "routine" security check on Lotte's office and discover the phone tap.
Item: An East German agent who had fled West with the tens of thousands of East German emigres streaming across the open border had eventually landed a job working for the Messerschmidt Company. Berlin Base had stumbled across his identity while debriefing a low level Karlshorst defector and Gehlen's Org had "doubled" the agent, who now delivered to his East German handlers technical reports filled with disinformation. The East German agent was debriefed by his Karlshorst handlers during monthly visits to his aging mother in East Berlin. A barium meal from the Sorcerer identifying the doubled agent would blow the operation; the agent in question would undoubtedly fail to return to West Berlin the next time he visited his mother.
Item: The Sorcerer had personally recruited a maid who worked at the Blue House the East German government dacha in Prerow, which was the Security Ministy's official resort on the Baltic coast. The maid turned out to be a sister of one of the prostitutes in the West German whorehouse above the nightclub Berlin-Schoneberg that Torriti visited whenever he had a free hour to debrief he hookers. If a barium meal reporting snippets of conversation from bigwigs vacationing at the Blue House was passed on to the Soviets by their mole, the maid would certainly be arrested and her reports would dry up.
Item: The Sorcerer had a Watcher in an attic taking photographs with a lone telephoto lens of the personnel who appeared at the windows in the KGB base in the former hospital at Karlshorst on the outskirts of Berlin. Using these photos, Berlin Base was compiling a "Who's Who in Soviet Intelligence" scrapbook. A barium meal status report on this operation that fell into Soviet hands would lead to the arrest of the photographer and the end of Berlin Base's scrapbook project.
Item: The Sorcerer had seen a copy of a field report prepared by E. Winstrom Ebbitt II, the CIA officer he'd kicked out of Berlin Base for shooting off his mouth about Torriti's medicinal alcohol habit. Ebbitt, now working out of Frankfurt Station, had recently been put in charge of Albania ops because of some obscure qualification relating to Albania. He was currently training a group of Albanian emigres in a secret base near Heidelberg. In the next few days, Ebbitt planned to fly his commando group to the British base near Medina on Malta and then sneak them onto the Albanian coast near Durres from a sailing yacht. From there they were supposed to work their way inland to Tirane and assassinate Enver Hoxha, the malevolent Stalinist leader of the Peoples Republic of Albania. Torriti's barium meal would take the form of a private "Eyes Only" cable to the Special Policy Committee that coordinated British-American operations against Albania; Kim Philby, as the ranking MI6 man in Washington, happened to be the British member of this committee. The Sorcerer would warn the committee that Ebbitt had gotten his priorities ass-backward. Hoxha lived and worked in "Le Bloc," a sealed compound in Tirane. He was said to pass between his villa and his office through a secret tunnel. A far better (not to mention more realistic) target, Torriti would suggest, would be the submarine pens that the Soviets were constructing at the Albanian port of Saseno which, if completed, would give the Russians control of the Adriatic. If Ebbitt's commando found a reception committee waiting for them on the beach when they came ashore, it would indicate that this Message had leaked, via the mole, to the Russians in Washington.
Item: Last but not least, he would send off a barium meal to Angleton giving details of the latest "get" that the courier code-named RAINBOW had delivered from her source, known as SNIPER. One of the items particularly intriguing: SNIPER was important enough in the East German hierarchy to have been invited to hear a pep talk given by none other than Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov during a recent visit to Berlin; in the course of the talk, Zhukov—who had masterminded the Soviet assault on Berlin in 1945—let slip that, in the event of war, senior troop commanders expected to reach the English Channel on the tenth day of hostilities. If the Russians got wind of a leak at this level of the East German superstructure, the SNIPER source would dry up very quickly, and RAINBOW would fail to turn up for her dance course in the small theater on Hardenbergstrasse in West Berlin.
10
BERLIN, TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 1951
IN ORDER TO HAVE DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY, JACK—LIKE ALL COMPANY officers in Berlin—was carried on the books as a Foreign Service officer working out of the American consulate. With Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the architect of America's policy of containing Soviet expansionism, passing through Berlin on a hit-and-run tour of front line consulates and embassies, Jack received one of the ambassadors notorious "your presence is requested and required" invitations to a "happy hour" pour in the Secretary's honor. Milling around with the other junior CIA officers, Jack listened as one of the Company's Technical Service Division "elves," recently back from Washington, described the new Remington Rand Univac computer being installed in the Pickle Factory. "It's going to revolutionize information retrieval," the technician was explaining excitedly. "The disadvantage is that Univac s not very portable—as a matter of fact it fills a very large room. The advantage is that it can swallow all the phone books of all the cities in America. You punch in a name, the rotors whir and four or five minutes later it spits out a phone number."
Damn machines," someone cracked, "are going to take all the fun out of spying."
Jack laughed along with the others but only halfheartedly; his thoughts were on tonight's rendezvous in the rehearsal hall with RAINBOW, his sixteenth meeting with her since their paths first crossed two months before. For some time the snatches of conversation between them had turned into a kind of coded shorthand; the things left unspoken loomed larger than the things said, and they both knew it. Tonight Jack meant to screw up his courage and say what was on his mind; in his guts. He wasn't sure she would stand still long enough to hear him out; if she heard him out, he didn't kn, if she would sock him in the solar plexus or melt into his arms.
Drifting away from the group, Jack wandered over to the bar and help himself to a fistful of pretzels and another whiskey sour. Turning back toward the room, rehearsing in his head what he would say to Lili if she gave him an opening, he suddenly found himself eyeball to eyeball with the austere Secretary of State.
"Good afternoon, I'm Dean Acheson."
The American ambassador (who had helicoptered in from the embassy in Bonn), the consul general from Berlin, two senators and a bevy of highranking State Department political officers crowded around. "Sir, my name is John McAuliffe."
"What do you do here?"
Jack cleared his throat. "I work for you, Mr. Secretary," he said weakly.
"I didn't catch that."
"I work for you. In the embassy."
The ambassador tried to take Acheson's elbow and steer him toward the buffet of popcorn and open sandwiches but the Secretary of State wasn't finished quizzing Jack. "And what do you do in the embassy, Mr. McAuliffe?"
Jack looked around for help. The two senators were staring off into space. The political officers were concentrating on their fingernails. "I work in the political section, sir."
Acheson was starring to get annoyed. "And what precisely do you do in the political section, young man?"
Jack swallowed hard. "I write reports, Mr. Secretary, that I hope will be useful..."
Suddenly the penny dropped. Acheson's mouth fell open and he nodded. "I think I see. Well, good luck to you, Mr. McAuliffe." The Secretary of State mouthed the words "Sorry about that" and turned quickly away.
RAINBOW had come to look forward to her twice weekly meetings with Jack; living as she did in the bleak Soviet side of the city, locked into a relationship with a man twenty-seven years her senior, she savored the brief encounters during which she was made to feel desirable, and desired. For the past several weeks Lili had no longer turned modestly away when she reached under her sweat shirt and into her brassiere to pull out the small square of silk filled with minuscule handwriting. Now, for the first time, Jack snatched the silk, warm from her breast, and pressed it to his lips. Lili, startled, lowered her eyes for an instant, then looked up questioningly into his as Jack grazed one of her small breasts with his knuckles and kissed her softly on the corner of her thin lips. "Please, oh please, understand that you have arrived at the frontier of our intimacy," she pleaded, her voice reduced to a husky whisper. "There can be no crossing over. In another world, in another life..." She managed a forlorn smile and Jack caught a glimpse of what her face would look like when she had grown old. "Jack the Ripper," she murmured. "Jackhammer. Jack rabbit."
"Jesus H. Christ, where do you discover all these Jacks?"
"Herr Professor has a wonderful dictionary of American slang, yes? It has long been my habit to learn several new words every day. I was up to grab forty winks when I met you. I skipped ahead to the Jacks."