The Company: A Novel of the CIA (86 page)

Flipping through the pages of his loose-leaf, Angleton ticked off an item here, underlined a phrase there, scratched out a word and wrote a new one above it. He wanted to know how Leo felt about Soviet Russia during the Second World War. He was only a kid then, Leo said; he didn't remember thinking about Soviet Russia one way or the other. "You joined Ethical Culture after the war," Angleton noted. He'd never actually joined Ethical Culture, Leo replied; he'd gone to evening meetings in Brooklyn, mostly to play chess. "What kind of people did you meet there?" Leo had to laugh. He'd met chess players, he said. "You met a girl there, didn't you?" Angleton asked. "Named"—he moistened a finger and skipped ahead several pages— named Stella." Yes, Leo agreed. He remembered Stella. She had the infuriating habit of taking a move back after she took her hand off the piece; eventually he'd been the only one who would play with her. Angleton asked, "Do you recall her family name?" Leo thought a moment. No, he said, he didn't. The fragment of a smile turned up again on Angleton's face. "Could it have been Bledsoe?" he wanted to know. That rings a bell, Leo agreed. Bledsoe sounds familiar.

Angleton's voice was reduced to a purr now as he worked the rod, letting the fly skid across the surface of the water. "There was a Bledsoe, Stella, named by Whittaker Chambers as a fellow traveler whom he'd met at Communist Party meetings after the war." When Leo didn't say anything, Angleton looked up from his notes. "Was Stella Bledsoe a Communist?"

Leo snickered. "She was a social worker, and a lot of social workers were Socialists so she might have been, too. If she was a Communist when I first met her in the forties I never knew it."

Sucking away on his cigarette, Angleton said, "She espoused the party line—unilateral nuclear disarmament, abandoning Berlin to the Russians—which makes her a Communist, wouldn't you agree?"

"Does it matter if I agree?"

"It doesn't, Leo. But it would make things easier."

"For whom?"

"For yourself. For me. For the Company."

Pushing himself to his feet, clutching the waistband on the pajama bottoms, Leo shuffled over to the toilet and stared down at the water in the bowl. He swallowed hard to relieve his parched throat and returned to the chair. "Where are we here?" he asked, waving toward the padded walls. He thought he knew; there was a former Naval Hospital on 23rd Street, a group of yellow buildings across from the State Department, which the CIA used for secret research. Because the place was so secure the Company occasionally debriefed defectors there.

Angleton looked up at Leo. "As far as you're concerned we could be on another planet," he said. There was no malice in his voice, only cold information.

"My wife will start asking questions when I don't turn up at home."

Angleton glanced at his wristwatch. "By now," he said, "the Director will have phoned up Adelle and apologized profusely for packing you off to Asia on such short notice. 'Something has come up,' he will have told her. 'You'll understand if he didn't provide details.' Your wife will have taken the news bravely; will have surely inquired when she might expect you to return home. The Director would have been vague. 'It could take time,' he would have said. 'He has no clothing,' your wife will have remarked. 'Can you pack a bag and I'll send a car around to pick it up,' the Director will have said. 'Will he call me?' Adelle might have asked. 'I've instructed him to maintain radio silence,' the Director would have answered. 'But rest assured I'll personally call you when I have more to tell you.' 'Will he be in any kind or danger?' Adelle would want to know. 'None whatsoever,' the Director would tell her. 'You have my personal word for that.'"

Leo felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him again. "I never really understood until now what a bastard you are," he murmured.

Unperturbed, Angleton turned back to the first page in the loose-leaf book and stared at the single word printed on it. Leo concentrated on the capital letters, trying to read them upside down. The letters swam into focus. The word was: SASHA.

Angleton closed the loose-leaf book and stopped the tape recorder. He put them and the ash tray into a brown paper shopping bag and, without a word, went to the door. He rapped twice against it with his free hand. The prizefighter opened the door and let him out and closed it again. Leo found himself regretting that Angleton had gone. At least he was someone to talk to. He spread the blanket and doubled it and tried to doze. The three naked bulbs were brighter than before—Leo realized that they worked on a rheostat and had been turned up to deprive him of sleep. Lying there on the blanket, curled up in a fetal position, he lost track of time. At one point the door opened and someone slid a tin plate inside, then the door slammed closed again. Clutching his waistband, Leo shuffled over to the door and stuffed bits of cold cooked cabbage into his mouth with his fingertips. Tears came to his eyes when he realized that the cabbage had been salted. For a long time he stood staring at the toilet. Finally he went over to it and dipped the tin cup into the water and sipped it. He gagged and crouched, jamming his head between his legs and breathing deeply to keep from vomiting. When he felt better he stood up and urinated into the toilet and flushed it, and stretched out again on the blanket, his eyes wide open, thinking. SASHA.

Agatha Ept was categoric: Today was not the moment for a Capricorn and a Virgo to undertake new projects. "I'd be thrilled to explain why," she said," backing toward the bedroom. "To begin with, Pluto is squaring Mars— okay, okay, I can take a hint." And she disappeared through the door.

"She is a crazy American lady," Sergei Kukushkin told Manny when they were alone, "if she is seriously thinking that stars decide our fate."

Manny had come to like Kukushkin. His open features, the worry lines that creased his brow whenever they talked about his wife or daughter, even fhe anxiety betrayed by the metronome-like clicking of his fingernails—they appeared to support the notion that Æ/PINNACLE was a genuine defector bearing genuine information. Manny wished it were otherwise; wished that Sergei wouldn't look him straight in the eye when he talked, wished that he could detect in his handshake a holding back, a hesitation hint of something other than forthrightness. Because if Kukushkin was genuine and Jim Angleton was right, Leo Kritzky was SASHA.

"Did Elena Antonova pick up the pills this morning?" he asked Kukushkin now.

A smile lurked in the Russian's eyes. "She took the first two immediately she returned to the embassy," he said. "Elena said me that she felt relief in minutes." Kukushkin's fingernails fell silent, a sign that a particularly important question was on his tongue. "And SASHA? What has happened with SASHA?"

With an effort Manny kept his eyes on Kukushkin. "Mr. Angleton claims he has discovered his identity."

The Russian asked in a whisper, "And has SASHA been taken into custody?" Manny nodded. "You do not look happy about this."

"Arranging meetings with you, establishing codes and signals that you can use if the circumstances change, relaying questions and bringing back your answers, this is my job. What happens with the serials you give me is in the hands of others."

"And do you honestly think, Manny, that the SASHA in custody is the real SASHA?"

"It's Thursday," Manny said. "According to your information SASHA has been back at his desk at Langley since Monday. It is true that only a handful of our people know your identity. But a number of people from various departments are involved in this—monitoring phone lines, disguising pills for your wife, watchers and handlers keeping track of you and your wife, that kind of thing. Word that there is a high-level defection in the works is bound to seep out. If you are right about SASHA—if he is someone important—he would have heard about it by now. Did you notice your SK people taking any particular precautions?"

Kukushkin shook his head.

"Did your wife think she was followed when she went to the dentist this morning?"

"If she was followed I am not sure she would see it."

"We would see it, Sergei. She was clean when she came out of the subway at Dupont Circle. She was clean when she went back into the subway. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary at the embassy? Anyone paying particular attention to you?"

"The rezident called me in and opened a bottle of Scotch whiskey and offered me a drink."

"He's pleased with the patent reports you bring back?"

Kukushkin thought about this. "I would say he is satisfied, yes. He was in trouble with Moscow Centre last December. A KGB officer at the embassy was recalled to Moscow for claiming he ran an American defector who gave him radar secrets—it developed that this same information was available in aviation magazines. A month later a KGB colonel, working under diplomatic cover, wrote a ten-page report on a conversation he had with your Secretary of Defense Schlesinger when he only shook his hand in a receiving line." The Russian raised his palms. "We are all under great pressure to produce secrets."

Manny judged the time had come to pose the question he had been instructed to ask. "How about it, Sergei? Will you risk it? Will you stay in place now that SASHA is no longer a menace to you?"

"And if I agree..."

Manny understood that the Russian wanted to hear the terms again. "We'll bring you all over at Christmas when you and your family go down to visit Disney World in Florida. There will be a lump sum payment of two hundred fifty thousand dollars sitting in a bank account, and a monthly consultant's stipend of fifteen hundred for a minimum of ten years. There will be a completely new identity and American citizenship, and a two-story house in a residential area of Florida to be decided on by you. There will be a four-door Oldsmobile parked in the driveway."

"What if I sense that they are closing in on me before December?" "We'll devise emergency signals and procedures to pull you and your family out immediately."

Kukushkin inspected his fingernails, then looked up. "I think I am crazy like the American lady in the bedroom, Manny, but I trust you. I do not think you would lie to me. I do not think you would betray me. I will do it—not for the money, although I will be happy to provide security to my family. I will do it to prove to your organization that I am who I say I am— that I am loyal to America."

Manny reached over and the two men shook hands. "You won't regret it, Sergei. I promise you." He looked at his wristwatch. "We still have three quarters of an hour."

Kukushkin himself started the tape recorder and pulled the microphone to the edge of the kitchen table. "I will begin today by telling you what was ln the message that I deposited in the men's room of the Jefferson Hotel for the agent that the rezidentum is running inside your National Security Agency." When the Russian hesitated, Manny smiled encouragingly.

"So, I have already told you that the resident gave me an enciphered note roll up inside the top of a fountain pen. Because the contents did not concern operational information, Borisov boasted to me what was in it. The message said, 'Congratulations on the Second Man'. You must apprehend that KGB agent-handling guidelines call for paying careful attention to the personal lives of American agents. The contents of this particular message suggests that the wife of the American spying inside your NSA gave birth to a second son, probably sometime early in the month of January..."

4
MOSCOW, SUNDAY, JUNE 9, 1974

ASIDE FROM THE WRINKLES FANNING OUT FROM HIS EYES AND THE eight or ten pounds around his waist, PARSIFAL hadn't changed all that much since Yevgeny had met him on the Gettysburg battlefield twenty-three years before. "Awfully good of you to stop by," mumbled Harold Adrian Russell Philby, leading his visitor down a narrow corridor that smelled of disinfectant to the glass doors opening onto a small living room crammed with furniture and piles of books and magazines. A Westinghouse air conditioner fixed into the bottom of one window hummed in the background. "B-b-bloody things make a hell of a racket but at least they keep the corpus from overheating. Do I have it right? Last time our p-p-paths crossed you were called Eugene. What do I call you now?"

"The Russian equivalent—Yevgeny."

"Well, old b-b-boy, you haven't gone to seed like some people I know, I'll give you that. Been living in America all these years, have you?" Yevgeny raised his eyebrows apologetically. "Oh, dear, there I g-g-go again! Sorry, sorry, so very sorry," Philby muttered. "Ropey thing to ask a spy, isn't it, old chap?" It was not yet four, but Philby's breath reeked of alcohol. "Starik send you by to see how I was holding up, did he?"

As a matter of fact," Yevgeny lied, "I asked him where I could find you. Thought it might be fun to compare notes."

"Right. I'll b-b-bet. Compare notes with old PARSIFAL." Squinting, he grabbed a half empty-bottle of Lagavulin and measured out a shot for Yevgeny before refilling his own glass to the brim. "Ice? Water? Both? Neither?"

"Ice, thanks. Lagavulin is what I used to deliver to your door on Nebraska Avenue. How do you manage to find good malt whiskey in Moscow?"

Philby unbuttoned his booze-stained blazer and carefully lowered himself into a shabby armchair that squeaked on its rusty springs. "Find anything I need in Moscow," he grumbled. "Easy as falling off a log. I draw up a shopping list—m-m-mango chutney from Harrods, custom tailored b-b-blazer from Savile Row, beluga from the shallow end of the Caspian olives from Italy,
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
from Hayward Hill,
Times of London
seven days late by air mail, you name it, my minders supply it."

"And do you mind your minders?" Yevgeny inquired, settling onto a ratty settee with an outrageously loud floral pattern. He had come across Philby's minders when he entered the run-down building on Patriarch's Pond; the one in the lobby had checked his identity card and ticked his name off a list, the one sitting behind a small table on the fourth floor landing had favored him with a surly nod, the one standing in front of the door of Philby's seedy three-room flat had wanted to see his ID again.

Philby snickered. "Law of nature, isn't it, old boy? One always minds one's b-b-bloody minders. If you get used to them, means you've got one foot in the grave, doesn't it? They tell me I need round-the-clock minding to prevent MI6 from knocking me off. What they're really afraid of is that Jimbo Angleton may have turned me into a triple agent. Christ, there's a ripe idea—I managed the double agent stint all right but triple would keep me up nights trying to figure out which side I really worked for." And he laughed uproariously at what he thought was a joke.

Yevgeny sipped at his whiskey. "What was it like," he asked, studying Philby over the rim of his glass. "Coming home after all those years."

"Told you in Gettysburg when you wanted me to run for it. No state secret. England was my home, old boy, not Russia," Philby said with undisguised bitterness. "Russia was merely where my loyalties were since I saw the light at Cambridge. In my wildest imagination I never dreamed I'd wind up living here. If you can call this living. Mind you, it's more upscale than your average English slammer." He forced another laugh through his clenched jaw.

Philby's new wife—after he'd fled to Moscow in 1963, one jump ahead of the Brits who had finally come up with proof that he had spied for the Soviets, he had courted and married Donald Maclean's wife—stuck her head in the room. "Will your friend be staying for tea, then, Kim?" she asked. "Do stay," she said to Yevgeny. Her cheery voice seemed out of place in this dreary setting; she could have been the spouse of a Midlands squire chatting up her husband's chums.

"Will you, old b-b-boy?" Philby asked hopefully.

"Afraid I'll have to take a rain check," Yevgeny said.

"Tea for three, three for tea another time, so the gentleman says," Philby chirped, waving his wife out of the room. He fixed his bloodshot eyes on his visitor. "They don't trust me, old boy, do they?"

"Nobody told me."

"Course they did. B-b-brecht once said something about how a good Communist had quite a few dents in his helmet, and some of them were the work of the enemy." Philby scrubbed his lips with the back of his hand. "Starik's on the fence, doesn't know which way to jump. KGB pinned the Order of Lenin on my b-b-blazer when I came in—at the time I thought it roughly equivalent to one of the better K's handed out by HM Elizabeth II, but I have my doubts now. The KGB Oberfuhrer, Comrade Chairman Andropov, keeps me at arm's length—never even had the d-d-decency to give me the rank of a KGB officer. Far as he's concerned I'm still a lowly agent. Trots me out Friday nights to brief people whose faces are carefully kept in the shadows. I lecture them on what life is like in England and the States; I tell them how to tip; I tell them to be careful to order two for the road when the warning bell rings; I advise them to butter up your average American by talking about money, your average Brit by talking about the last war." Philby closed his eyes for a moment. "I tell them how James Jesus Angleton's mind works. I'm the in-house expert on Jimbo, aren't I, chum? Biggest asset we have in the states is Jimbo Angleton. Thanks to yours truly he suspects absolutely everyone, so nobody takes him very seriously."

Philby took a swig of Lagavulin, tilted back his head and tossed it down. "Tell you a secret, sport, if you swear you won't repeat it to too many people. After I came over, Jimbo had a note delivered to me—it took the form of a handwritten inscription on the title page of a book I'd ordered from London. Bugger signed it, too—with a big fat J for Jimbo."

"What did he say in the note?"

"Amicitia nostra dissoluta est. That's Latin for Our friendship is dissolved. S'what. Nero wrote to Seneca when he wanted his old fart of a tutor to bugger off and commit suicide." Philby giggled like a schoolgirl. "Bit out of touch with the real world, wasn't he, old boy, if Jim actually imagined I'd slit my wrists because he'd put paid to our friendship?"

Philby fell into a moody silence. After a moment Yevgeny said, "Do you ever think about going back?"

"Wouldn't tell you if I did, would I, sport? Not stark raving yet." He gulped down some more alcohol. "Truth is, even if I could, I'd never give the Brits the satisfaction."

They chatted on for another half hour. Philby was following the Nixon impeachment business closely. He was particularly intrigued by the presence of the one-time CIA hand E. Howard Hunt at the heart of the White House "plumbers" who had pulled off the Watergate break-in; he wondered aloud if the CIA didn't know more about the caper than they let on. "Oh, Brezhnev was a jammy b-b-bastard, all right; doesn't say much for the Communist system when a sod like him makes it to the top of the heap." Yes, he'd read about the Russian dissidents in the English press; he'd ordered a copy of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago from his favorite London bookstore, Hayward Hill, expected it any day now. One of Andropov's lackeys had come round with a letter condemning dissident writers and invited him to sign but Philby had sent the bugger packing; told them they ought to be fighting real criminals instead of persecuting dissidents.

Later, lumbering down the dark hallway toward the front door, a drink in one soft paw, the palm of the other brushing the wall to steady himself, Philby said in a slurred mutter, "Bit schizo, these Russians, don't you think? I have a theory about it—I reckon it's because a Russian, Peter the Great, tried to turn them into Germans, and a German, Catherine the Great, tried to turn them into Russians." At the door, which had Philby's original Soviet code name—SYNOK, TOM—written under the apartment number, Philby hung on to Yevgeny's lapel. "Heard the news? The Brits are thinking of making a film about me. It's all very hush-hush. They say M-m-michael York's going to play me. Rotten choice, that's my view. Don't see how in b-b-bloody hell he could pull it off. M-m-michael York's not a gentleman, is he, old boy?"

Yevgeny had been servicing SASHA's dead drops on the average of once every three or four weeks with such regularity that the possibility of home leave had never crossed his mind. Then one night, a month or so before his reunion with Philby, he'd strung the antenna from picture frame hooks on the walls of his tiny apartment over the garage in Tysons Corner and had tuned the General Electric clock radio to Radio Moscow's 11 P.M. English language shortwave quiz program. When he recognized one of his personal code phrases—"I don't like belonging to another person's dream"—he had subtracted the serial number of his lucky ten-dollar bill from the winning lottery number and had wound up with a Washington phone number. At the stroke of midnight he had dialed it from an outdoor pay phone in a local shopping center. The ancient woman who spoke English with a thick Eastern European accent had answered immediately. "Gene?"

"Yes, it's me."

"Ah, dear boy"—he could hear her exhaling in relief—"it is a comfort to hear your voice, a comfort to know that you are alive and well."

As a matter of pure tradecraft, Yevgeny never liked to stay on the telephone too long; you couldn't be sure who might be listening in, who might be tracing the call. But his cutout to the rezident had wanted to talk. And he liked the sound of her voice.

"Do you realize, dear Gene, that this will be our seventeenth conversation in twenty-three years?"

Yevgeny had laughed. "I wasn't counting, to tell the truth."

"I was," the woman had said emphatically. "You are all I do, Gene—you are the reason I remain in this godforsaken America. Sometimes I think you are the reason I remain alive. Seventeen conversations in twenty-three years! After each telephone call I am obliged to relocate—to move to another address and another phone number. And I settle in and wait to be contacted; wait to be told you will be calling; wait to be instructed what information to pass on to you."

"You are a vital link—" Yevgeny started to say, but the woman rushed on.

"Over the years I have come to feel as if I know you, Gene. I have come to think of you as the son I lost to the fascists in Poland a lifetime ago."

"I didn't know. I'm sorry for that—"

The woman must have realized that she had been running on. "You must pardon me, Gene—the truth is I am quite alone in the world. The only times I am not alone is when I speak with you." She cleared her throat abruptly. "I am, I beg you to believe me, very grieved to be the bearer of distressing news. Your father had surgery ten days ago—two knee operations to correct a condition which, uncorrected, would have left him confined to a wheelchair. The anesthesia lasted seven hours. His heart must have been weaker than the surgeons thought because, two days later, he suffered a stroke. His right side is paralyzed. He can hear but he cannot speak. Your mentor, the Old Man, arranged to be alone with him and told him at long last what you were doing. It appears that your father, hearing this, opened his eyes and nodded with pleasure. He was elated to learn that you were following in his footsteps, and—like me, I may add—extraordinarily proud of you."

Cornered in a foul-smelling phone booth, Yevgeny had started to sort through emotions; he had discovered that the principal emotion was a lack of emotion where there should have been one. He had never loved his father, had barely liked him; he felt closer to the unidentified woman speaking to him on the phone than to his own father. Now that he himself was leading the shadowy life of an undercover agent, he could understand that his father—who had worked undercover for the KGB, for Starik, while posted to the United Nations Secretariat—must have had strong nerves and a certain amount of courage. "For Gene, from his Dad, on his eighth birthday," the handwritten message on the lucky ten-dollar bill read. As far as Yevgeny could remember, Alexsandr Timofeyivich Tsipin had never given him anything in his life other than criticism: when he did badly at school he had been told he should have done well; when he did well he had been told he should have done better. End of conversation.

"Gene, are you on the line?"

"I'm still here."

"Please bear with me if I talk business at such a moment."

"Life goes on."

"Oh, it must, mustn't it?" the woman had agreed with quivering vehemence. "There can be no turning back, no alternative but to go forward with the work in progress. We are, both of us, the servants of history."

"I never thought otherwise."

"Given the precarious state of your father's health, given other considerations which neither you nor I can be party to, your mentor has decided that this is a convenient moment for you to return for home leave. Do you hear me, Gene? You are long overdue for a vacation—"

Yevgeny had almost laughed into the phone. The mere mention of a vacation had made it seem as if he held a dull nine-to-five job at a bank. "I'm not sure... It's been twenty-three years..."

"Oh, dear boy, you must not be afraid to go home."

"You're right, of course. In any case I always follow the suggestions of my mentor. Tell me what I must do."

The extraction had been simple enough: Yevgeny had packed a beat-up valise, spit over his shoulder for luck, then sat on the valise for a moment before heading for the airport and a charter flight to Paris. From there he had caught an overnight train across central Europe to Vienna, then (using a Canadian passport with a new identity) a Hungarian steamer down the Danube to Budapest. In a Pest tearoom near the quai, the Allamvedelmi Hatosag, the Hungarian secret police, had handed him on to the local KGB rezidentura, which had provided him with an Australian passport and had put him aboard an Aeroflot flight bound for Moscow. A black Zil with two men in civilian clothes standing next to it had been waiting at the curb when Yevgeny emerged from the passenger terminal at Sheremetyevo International. One of the men stepped forward and relieved Yevgeny of his valise. "The general polkovnik is waiting for you," he said.