Read The Company: A Novel of the CIA Online

Authors: Robert Littell

Tags: #Literary, #International Relations, #Intelligence officers, #Fiction, #United States, #Spy stories, #Espionage

The Company: A Novel of the CIA (5 page)

BOOK: The Company: A Novel of the CIA
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From Angleton's vantage point, the Sorcerer had enough experience with nuts-and-bolts field operations to put in the plumbing for a defection but was over his head in a situation requiring geopolitical sophistication; and he was too dense—and, in recent months, too drunk—to follow Mother into what T.S. Eliot had called, in his poem "Gerontion," "the wilderness of mirrors." Oh, Torriti grasped the first level of ambiguity well enough: that even black defectors brought with them real secrets to establish their bona fides. But there were other, more elegant, scenarios that only a handful of Company officers, Angleton foremost among them, could fathom. When you were dealing with a defector bearing true information, it was Mother's fervent conviction that you were obliged to keep in the back of your head thie possibility that thie greater the importance of the true information he brought with him, the bigger the deception the other side was trying to pull off. If you grasped this, it followed, as night the day, that you had to treat every success as if it were a potential calamity. There were OSS veterans working for the Company who just couldn't get a handle on the many levels of ambiguity involved in espionage operations; who whispered that Mother was a stark raving paranoid. "Ignore the old farts," Angleton's great British buddy would cackle when, over one of the regular weekly lunches at their Washington watering hole, Mother would allow that the whispering occasionally got him down. "Their m-m-mentalities grow inward like t-t-toenails."

A buzz on Angletons intercom snapped him out of his reverie. A moment later a familiar face materialized at the door. It belonged to Mother's British friend and mentor, the MI6 liaison man in Washington. "Hello t-t-to you, Jimbo," Adrian cried with the exuberant upper-class stutter Angleton had first heard when the two had shared a cubbyhole in the Rose Garden Hotel on London's Ryder Street during the war. At the time the ramshackle hotel had served as the nerve center for the combined counterintelligence operations of the American OSS and the British Secret Service, MI6. The Brit, five years Angleton's senior and MI6's wartime counterintelligence specialist for the Iberian peninsula, had initiated the young American corporal, fresh out of Yale and a virgin when it came to the business of spying, into the mysteries of counterintelligence. Now, with a long string of first rate exploits to his credit, both during the war and after, Adrian was a rising star in the British intelligence firmament; office scuttlebutt touted him as the next "C," the code-letter designation for the head of MI6.

"Speak of the devil, I was just thinking about you," Angleton said. "Take a load off your feet and tell me what worlds you've conquered this morning."

The Brit cleared several shoe boxes filled with index cards off a government-issue chair and settled onto it across the desk from his American friend. Angleton found a match and lit up. Between them an antique Tiffany lamp beamed a pale yellow oval of light onto the reams of paper spilling from the in-baskets. Angleton's thin face, coming in and out of focus behind a swirling mist of cigarette smoke, appeared unusually satanic, or so the Brit thought.

"Just came from breakfast with your lord and master," Adrian announced. "Meager fare—would have thought we were b-b-back at the Connaught during rationing. He gave me a sales-cackle on some cockamamie scheme to infiltrate emigré agents into Alb-b-bania, of all places. Seems as if the Yanks are counting on us to turn Malta into a staging base and lay on a Spanish Armada of small boats. You'll want a copy of the p-p-paper work if you're going to vet the operation?"

"Damn right I'll want a copy."

The Brit pulled two thick envelopes from the breast pocket of his blazer. "Why don't you have these put through the p-p-pants presser while we chew the fat."

Angleton buzzed for his secretary and nodded toward the envelopes in his friend's hand. "Gloria, will you get these Thermofaxed right away and give him back the originals on his way out." Half-Chicano by birth but an Anglophile by dint of his wartime service in London and his affinity for the Brits, Mother waved a hole in the smoke and spoke through it with the barest trace of a clipped English accent acquired during a three-year stint at an English college. "So what's your fix on our Bedell Smith?" he asked.

"Between you, me and the wall, Jimbo, I think he has a cool fishy eye and a precision-tooled brain. He flipped through twenty-odd p-p-paragraphs on the Albanian caper, dropped the paper onto his blotter and started quoting chapter and verse from the d-d-damn thing. The bugger even referred to the paragraphs by their bloody numbers. Christ, I had to spend the whole night memorizing the ropey d-d-document."

"No one denies he's smart—"

"The problem is he's a military man. Military men take it on faith that the shortest distance between two p-p-points is a straight line, which you and I, old boy, in our infinite wisdom, know to be a dodgy proposition. Me, I am an orthodox and Euclidean. There simply is no short distance between two points. There's only a meander. Bob's never your uncle; you leave p-p-point A and only the devil knows where you're going to wind up. To dot the I's, your 'Beetle' Smith started griping about how his operational chaps tell him one thing about resistance groups in Albania and his analysts, another."

"Knowing you, I'll lay odds you set him straight."

The Brit tilted the chair back until it was balanced on its hind legs. "As a matter of fact I did. I quoted chapter and verse from our illustrious former naval p-p-person. True genius, Churchill taught us, resides in the capacity to evaluate conflicting information. You have true genius, Jimbo. You have the ability to look at a mass of what seems like conflicting trivia and discern patterns. And patterns, as any spy worth his salt grasps, are the outer shells of conspiracies."

Angleton flashed one of his rare smiles. "You taught me everything I know," he said. And the two of them recited E.M. Forster's dictum, which had been posted over the Brit's desk during the Ryder Street days, in chorus: "Only connect!" And then they laughed together like public school boys caught in the act.

Angleton suppressed the start of a hacking cough by sucking air through his nostrils. "You're buttering me up," he finally decided, "which means you want something."

"To you, Jimbo, I'm the proverbial open book." Adrian righted his chair. "Your General Smith allowed as how he had an exfiltration in the works that would be of keen interest to me and mine. When I asked him for the dirty details he gave me leave to try and p-p-pry them out of you. So come clean, Jimbo. What do you have cooking on that notorious front b-b-burner of yours?"

Angleton began rummaging through the small mountain of paper on his desk for the Sorcerer's overnight cable. He found it under another cable from the Mexico City CIA Station; signed by two Company officers, E. Howard Hunt and William F. Buckley, Jr., it provided the outline for what was euphemistically called a "tangential special project."

"Frankly, you're the only Brit I'd trust with this," Angleton said, flapping Torriti's cable in the air to disperse the cigarette smoke.

"Thanks for that, Jimbo."

"Which means you'll have to give me your word you won't spill the beans to London before I say so."

"Must be bloody important for you to take that line."

"It is."

"You have my word, old boy. My lips are sealed until you unseal them."

Angleton slipped the cable across the desk to his British friend, who fitted a pair of National Health spectacles over his nose and held the report under the Tiffany lamp. After a moment his eyes tightened. "Christ, no wonder you don't want me to cable London. Handle with care, Jimbo— there's always the chance the Russian bloke is a dangle and his serial is p-p-part of a scheme to set my shop and yours at each other's throats. Remember when I scattered serials across Spain to convince the Germans we had a highlevel mole chez-eux? The Abwehr spent half a year chasing their tails before they figured out the serials were phony."

"Everything Torriti pried out of him at their first meeting checked out."

"Including the microphone that went dry?"

Behind the cloud of smoke Angleton nodded. "I've already assigned a team to walk back the cat on the microphone in the Soviet Ambassador's chair in The Hague—the product was circulated narrowly but circulated all the same. You can count the people who knew where the product came from on the fingers of two hands."

Angleton's Brit, an old hand at defections, was all business. "We'll have to tread on eggshells, Jimbo. If there really is a mole in MI6, he'll jump ship the instant he smells trouble. The KGB will have contingency p-p-plans for this sort of thing. The trick'll be to keep the defection under wraps for as long as p-p-possible."

Angleton pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit it from the bitter end of the old one. "Torriti's going to smuggle the Russian and his family into West Berlin and fly them straight back to the states out ofTempelhof," he said. "I'll put people on the plane so that we can start sorting through the serials before word of the defection leaks. With any luck we'll be able to figure out the identity of the mole before KGB Karlshorst realizes the deputy to the chief of the First Chief Directorate has gone AWOL. Then the ball will be in MI6's court—you'll have to move fast on your end."

"Give me a name to go on," the Brit insisted, "we'll draw and quarter the son of a b-b-bitch."

Part 3

Torriti had gone on the wagon for the exfiltration, which probably was a bad idea inasmuch as the lack of booze left him edgier than usual. He skulked through the small room of the safe house over the cinema the way a lion prowls a cage, plunging round and round so obsessively that Jack became giddy watching him. At the oriel window the Fallen Angel kept an eye on Sweet Jesus walking his muzzled lap dog in endless ovals in the street below. Every now and then he'd remove his watch cap and scratch at the bald spot on the top of his head, which meant he hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Russian defector, hide nor hair of his wife or eleven year old son either. Silwan II's radio, set on the floor against one wall, the antenna strung across the room like a laundry line, burst into life and the voice of the Watcher in the back row of the cinema could be heard whispering: "Der Film ist fertig... in eight minutes. Where is somebody?"

"My nose is twitching to beat the band," the Sorcerer growled as he pulled up short in front of the clock over the mantle. "Something's not right. Russians, in my experience, always come late for meetings and early for defections." The pounding pulse of the imperturbable cuckoo ticking off the seconds was suddenly more than Torriti could stomach. Snatching his pearlhandled revolver from the shoulder holster, he grasped it by the long barrel and slammed the grip into the clock, decapitating the cuckoo, shattering the mechanism. "At least it's quiet enough to think straight," he announced, preempting the question Jack would have posed if he had worked up the nerve.

They had made their way into the Soviet Sector of East Berlin in the usual way: Torriti and Jack lying prone in the false compartment under the roof of a small Studebaker truck that had passed through a little-used checkpoint on one of its regular runs delivering sacks of bone meal fertilizer; Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel, dressed as German workers, mingling with the river of people returning through the Friedrichstrasse Station after a day of digging sewage trenches in the western part of the city. Sweet Jesus had had a close call when one of the smartly dressed East German Volkspolizei patrolling beyond the turnstiles demanded his workplace pass and then thumbed through its pages to make sure it bore the appropriate stamps. Sweet Jesus, who once worked as a cook for an SS unit in Rumania during the war and spoke flawless German, had mumbled the right answers to the Volkspolizei's brittle questions and was sent on his way.

Now the plumbing for the exfiltration was in place. The defector Vishnevsky and his wife would be smuggled out in the fertilizer truck, which was waiting for them in an unlighted alleyway around the corner from the cinema; the driver, a Polish national rumored to have a German wife in West Berlin and a Russian mistress in the eastern part of the city, had often returned from one of his fertilizer runs well after midnight, provoking ribald quips from the German frontier guards. An agent of the French Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), carrying a diplomatic passport identifying him as an assistant cultural attaché, was scheduled to pass close to the cinema at midnight on his way back from a dinner at the Soviet embassy. Allied diplomats refused to recognize the authority of the East German police and never stopped for passport controls. His Citröen, with diplomatic license plates and a small French flag flying from one of its teardrop fenders, would spirit the Sorcerer and Jack past the border guards back into West Berlin. The two Rumanians would go to ground in East Berlin and return to the west in the morning when the workers began to cross over for the day. Which left Vishnevsky's eleven-year-old son: the Sorcerer had arranged for the boy to be smuggled across by a Dutch Egyptologist who had come into East Germany, accompanied by his wife, to date artifacts in an East Berlin museum. The Dutch couple would cross back into West Berlin on a forged family passport with a blurred photo taken when the boy was supposed to have been five years younger, and a visa for the Dutch father, his wife and 10-year-old boy stamped into its very frayed pages. The Sorcerer had been through this drill half a dozen times; the sleepy East German Volkspolizei manning the checkpoints had always waved the family through with a perfunctory glance at the passport photo. Once over the border, the three Russians would be whisked to the Tempelhof airport in West Berlin and flown in a US Air Force cargo plane to the defector reception center in Frankfurt, Germany, and from there on to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

But the success of the exfiltration hinged on Vishnevsky and his family shaking off their Watchers—there were KGB people at Karlshorst who did nothing but keep track of the other KGB people—and making their way to the safe house over the cinema. Torriti resumed his prowl, stopping once every orbit to peer over the Fallen Angel s shoulder at the street.

BOOK: The Company: A Novel of the CIA
9.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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