The Company: A Novel of the CIA (4 page)

Hunched like a parenthesis over the message board on his blotter, the Sorcerer was putting the finishing touches on the overnight report to Washington. Jack, back from emptying the Sorcerer's burn bag into the incinerator, pushed through the door and flopped onto the couch under some gun racks. Looking up, Torriti squinted at Jack as if he were trying to place him. Then his eyes brightened. "So what did you make of him, sport?" he called over the music, his trigger finger absently stirring the ice in the whiskey glass.

"He worries me, Harvey," Jack called back. "It seems to me he hemmed and hawed his way through his biography when you put him through the wringer. Like when you asked him to describe the street he lived on during his first KGB posting in Brest-Litovsk. Like when you asked him the names of the instructors at the KGB's Diplomatic Institute in Moscow."

"So where were you raised, sport?"

"In a backwater called Jonestown, Pennsylvania. I went to high school in nearby Lebanon."

"And then, for the paltry sum of three-thousand-odd dollars per, which happens to be more than my secretary makes, you got what the hoi polloi call a higher education at Yale U."

Jack smoothed back the wings of his Cossack mustache with his forefingers. "'Hoi' already means the,' Harvey. So you don't really need to put a 'the' before 'hoi polloi' because there's already..." His voice trailed off as he spotted the pained expression lurking in the creases around the Sorcerers eyes.

"Stop busting my balls, sport, and describe the street your high school was on."

"The street my high school was on. Sure. Well, I seem to recall it was lined with trees on which we used to tack dirty Burma-Shave limericks."

"What kind of trees were they? Was it a one-way street or a two-way street? What was on the corner, a stop sign or a stoplight? Was it a no-parking zone? What was across the street from the school?"

Jack examined the ceiling. "Houses were across the street. No, it must have been the public school in Jonestown that had houses across the street. Across from the high school in Lebanon was a playground. Or was that behind the school? The street was—" Jack screwed up his face. "I guess I see what you're driving at, Harvey."

Torriti took a swig of whiskey. "Let's say for arguments sake that Vishnevsky is a disinformation operation. When we walked him through his legend, he'd have it down pat, he'd be able to give you chapter and verse without sounding as if he made it up as he went along."

"How do you know the Russians aren't one jump ahead of you? How do you know they haven't programmed their plants to hem and haw their way through the legend?"

"The Russians are street-smart, sport, but they're not sidewalk-smart, which happens to be an expression I invented that means sophisticated. Besides which, my nose didn't twitch. My nose always twitches when it gets a whiff of a phony."

"Did you swallow the story about the rezident making a play for his wife?"

"Hey, on both sides of the Iron Curtain rank has its privileges. I mean, what's the point of being the head honcho at Karlshorst if you can't make a pass at the wife of one of your minions, especially one who's already in hot water for hiding the fact that he's part-Jewish? Listen up, sport, most of the defectors who come over try to tell us what they think we want to hear— how they've become disenchanted with Communism, how they're being suffocated by the lack of freedom, how they've come to understand that old Joe Stalin is a tyrant, that sort of bullshit."

"So what are you telling Washington, Harvey? That your nose didn't twitch?"

"I'm saying there is a seventy percent chance the fucker is who he says he is, so we should exfiltrate him. I'm saying I'll have the infrastructure ready in forty-eight hours. I'm saying the serial about the mole in MI6 needs to be explored because, if it's true, we're in a pretty fucking pickle; we've been sharing all our shit with the cousins forever, which means our secrets may be winding up, via the Brits, on some joker's desk in Moscow. And I'm reminding Washington, in case they get cold feet, that even if the defector is a black agent, it's still worth while bringing him across."

"I don't follow you there, Harvey."

The Sorcerer's fist hit a buzzer on the telephone console. His Night Owl, Miss Sipp, a thirtyish brunette with somnolent eyes that blinked very occasionally and very slowly, stuck her head into the office; she was something of a legend at Berlin Base for having fallen into a dead faint the day Torriti peeled off his shirt to show her the shrapnel wound that had decapitated the naked lady tattooed on his arm. Since then she had treated him as if he suffered from a communicable sexual disease, which is to say she held her breath in his presence and spent as little time as possible in his office. The Sorcerer pushed the message board across the desk. "Happy 1951, Miss Sipp. Have you made any New Year's resolutions?"

"I've promised myself I won't be working for you this time next year," she retorted.

Torriti nodded happily; he appreciated the female of the species who came equipped with a sharp tongue. "Do me a favor, honey, take this up to the radio shack. Tell Meech I want it enciphered on a one-time pad and sent priority. I want the cipher text filed in a bum bag and the original back on my desk in half an hour." As the Night Owl scurried from the office, Torriti splashed more whiskey into his glass, melted back into the leather chair he'd bought for a song on the black market and propped his pointed cowboy boots up on the desk. "So now I'll walk you through the delicate business of dealing with a defection, sport. Because you have a degree from Yale I'll talk real slow. Let's take the worst case scenario: let's say our Russian friend is a black agent come across to make us nibble at some bad information. If you want to make him seem like the real McCoy you send him over with a wife and kid but we're smart-assed Central Intelligence officers, right? We're not impressed by window dressing. When all is said and done there is only one way for a defector to establish his bona fides— he has to bring with him a certain amount of true information."

"So far so good. Once he delivers true information, especially true information that's important, we know he's a real defector, right?"

"Wrong, sport. A defector who delivers true information could still be a black agent. Which is another way of saying that a black agent also has to deliver a reasonable amount of true information in order to convince us that he is a genuine defector so that we'll swallow the shit he slips in between the true information."

Jack, intrigued by how intricate the game was, sat up on the couch and leaned forward. "They sure didn't teach us this in Washington, Harvey. So the fact that the defector delivers true information doesn't tell us if he's a true defector."

"Something like that."

"Question, Harvey. If all this is so, why do we bother taking defectors?"

"Because, first off, the defector may be genuine and his true information may be useful. The identity of a Russian mole in MI6 doesn't fall into your lap every day. Even if the defector's not genuine, if we play the game skillfully we can take the true information he brings with him and avoid the deception."

"My head's spinning, Harvey."

The Sorcerer snickered. "Yeah, well, basically what we do is we go round and round the mulberry bush until we become stark raving mad. In the end it's all a crazy intellectual game—to become a player you need to cross the frontier into what Mother calls a wilderness of mirrors."

Jack thought about this for a moment. "So who's this Mother you're always talking about?"

But the Sorcerer's head had already nodded onto his chest; balancing the whiskey glass on the bulge of his stomach, he had fallen asleep for the first time in two whole nights.

The Sorcerer's overnight report, addressed—like all cables to Washington originating with Company stations abroad—to the Director, Central Intelligence, was hand-delivered to the desk of Jim Angleton in a metal folder with a distinctive red slash across it indicating that the material stashed between the covers was so incredibly sensitive it ought (as the mock directive posted on a second floor bulletin board put it) to be burned before reading. The single copy of the deciphered text had already been initialed by the Director and routed on for "Immediate Action" to Angleton, known by his in-house code name, Mother. The Director, Walter Bedell Smith, Elsenhower's crusty chief of staff at the Normandy invasion whose mood swings were said to alternate between anger and outrage, had scrawled across the message in a nearly illegible script that resembled hieroglyphics: "Sounds kosher to me. WBS." His Deputy Director/Operations, the World War II OSS spymaster Allen Dulles, had added: "For crying out loud, Jim, let's not let this one wriggle off the hook. AD."

The Sorcerers report began with the usual Company rigmarole:

FROM: Alice Reader
To: DCI
COPY TO: Hugh Ashmead
SUBJECT: ÆSNOWDROP
REFERENCE: Your 28/12/50 re bringing home the bacon

Angleton, the Company's gaunt, stoop-shouldered, chain-smoking countermtelligence wizard, worked out of a large corner office in "L" building, one
of the "temporary" wooden hulks that had washed up like jetsam next to the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln and Washington monuments during World War II and had since been nicknamed, for reasons that were painfully apparent to the current tenants, "Cockroach Alley." From Angleton's windows there would have been a magnificent view of the Lincoln Memorial if anybody had bothered to crack the Venetian blinds. Thousands of three-by-five index cards crammed with trivia Mother had accumulated during his years on the counterintelligence beat—the 1935 graduating class of a BrestLitovsk gymnasium, the pre-war curriculum of the Odessa Artillery School, the license plate numbers on the Zil limousines that ferried members of the Soviet elite to and from their Kremlin offices—lay scattered across the desk and tables and shelves. If there was a method to the madness, only Angleton himself had the key to it. Sorting through his precious cards, he was quickly able to come up with the answers to the Sorcerers questions:

1. Yes, there is a street in Brest-Litovsk named after the Russian hero of the Napoleonic war, Mikhail Kutuzov; yes, there is a large statue of a blindfolded partisan woman tied to a stake and awaiting execution in the small park across Kutuzov Street from the apartment building complex where the local KGB officers are housed.

2. Yes, instructors named Piotr Maslov, Gennady Brykin and Johnreed Arkhangelsky were listed on the roster of the KGB Diplomatic Institute in Moscow in 1947.

3. Yes, the deputy rezident at KGB Karlshorst is named Oskar UgorMolody.

4. Yes, an entity using the appellation Institute for Economic and Scientific Research has set up shop in a former school in the Pankow district of East Berlin.

5. Yes, there is a sports journalist writing for Pravda under the byline M. Zhitkin. Unable to confirm the patronymic Sergeyevich. He is said to be married but unable to confirm that his wife is ÆSNOWDROP's sister-in-law.

6. No, we have no record of Zhitkin traveling to Stockholm last February, although his weekly Pravda column failed to appear during the third week of February.

7. Yes, the audio device Division D embedded in the arm of an easy chair purchased by the Soviet Embassy in The Hague and delivered to the ambassador's office was operational until 2245 hours on 12 November 1949, at which point it suddenly went dry. A friendly national subsequently visiting the Soviet Ambassador reported finding a small cavity in the underside of the arm of the chair, leading us to conclude that KGB counterintelligence had stumbled on the microphone during a routine sweep of the office and removed it. Transcripts of the Soviet Ambassador s conversations that dealt with Kremlin plans to pressure the Americans into withdrawing occupation forces from West Berlin had been narrowly circulated in American and British intelligence circles.

8. The consensus here is that ÆSNOWDROP has sufficiently established his bona fides to justify an exfiltration operation. He is being notified by my source to turn up at MARLBOROUGH with his wife and son, no valises, forty-eight hours from time of his last meeting.

Angleton signed off on the message and left it with his girl Friday to be enciphered using one of his departments private polyalphabetic codes. Back in his corner office, he frisked himself for cigarettes, stabbed one between his delicate lips and stared off into space without lighting it, a distracted scowl on his brow. For Angleton, the essence of counterintelligence was penetration: you penetrated the enemy's ranks, either by defections such as the one being organized now in Berlin or, more rarely, through the occasional agent in place who sent back material directly from the KGB inner sanctums, to get at their secrets. And the secret you most wanted to get at was whether they had penetrated you. The Russians had already succeeded in penetrating the American government and scientific communities; Elisabeth Bentley, a dowdy American Communist serving as a courier for her Soviet handler in Washington, had reeled off under FBI questioning the names of a hundred or so people linked to Soviet spy rings in the states and in Canada, among them Hiss, Fuchs, Gold, Sobell, Greenglass, the Rosenbergs. There was good reason to believe that the blueprint for the atomic bomb the Russians successfully tested in 1949 had been swiped from American A-bomb labs in Los Alamos. Angleton's job was to circle the Company with the counterintelligence wagons and make sure the Russians never got a toe in the CIA's door. Which is how Mother, riding high on his reputation as a World War II counterintelligence ace for the Office of Strategic Services, America's wartime spy agency, wound up looking over everyone's shoulder to monitor clandestine operations—a situation that rubbed a lot of people, including Torriti, the wrong way.

Angleton and Torriti had crossed paths—and swords—in 1944 when Mother, at twenty-seven already considered a master of the subtleties of the espionage game, had been in charge of rounding up stay-behind fascist agents as the Germans retreated up the boot of Italy. Torriti, who spoke the Sicilian dialect fluently and went out of his way to look like a Sicilian caid, had been acting as liaison with the Mafia clans that aided the allies in the invasion of Sicily and, later, the landings in Italy. In the months after the German surrender the Sorcerer was all for nurturing the Italian Social Democrats as a way of outflanking the local Communists, who received considerable support from Moscow and were threatening to make a strong showing in the next elections. Angleton, who was convinced that World War III started the day World War II ended, argued that if you scratched a Social Democrat you uncovered a Communist who took orders from the Kremlin. Angleton's reasoning prevailed with what the Sorcerer called the "poison Ivy League" crowd in Washington; the Company threw its considerable weight—in the form of tens of millions of dollars in cold cash, propaganda campaigns, and the occasional blackmail caper—behind the Christian Democrats, who eventually came out on top in the elections.