Tool of the Trade (3 page)

(That’s one problem with this kind of life. When things go well, you can never be sure whether it’s good luck and reward for ability, or strings being
pulled on your behalf. Another problem, obviously, is paranoia, and I would soon have advice about that.)

A small stack of mail was waiting for me at MIT, mostly journals and advertising circulars. There was also a note in an envelope with no return address: “We must talk. Let us have a picnic at Walden Pond on Thursday, September 9th. Meet me at noon by the ruins of the cabin. Bring a bottle of red wine.—VL”

Over the past twenty years, most of my contacts with Vladimir Lubenov—or anybody else from the KGB—have been outdoors, even when it meant standing in ten-degree weather with the snow falling horizontally. This first meeting, though, was pleasant: a place of quiet beauty, leaves changing color, surprisingly few people. There was only one person at the rectangle of stones that marked the place where Thoreau had lived so economically, and he was holding a picnic basket. We shook hands American style and he introduced himself. I started to say something in Russian, but he cut me off with a sharp jerk of his head and then a self-effacing laugh. “Paranoia, Nicholas. Paranoia is its own reward.” He had a rather thick Russian accent, Moscow.

We took basket and bottle up to the top of a small rise, where we could see for quite a distance in every direction—something we certainly wouldn’t do today. They could shine a laser on a nearby leaf and pick up our conversation from its vibrations. Or something.

Over a weird lunch of Chinese-restaurant takeout food and French table wine, Vladimir gave me a broad outline of what I was to do and be for the next few years.

“Of course you are aware,” he said, not looking at me, setting out white boxes on a small checkered
cloth, “you are aware that our… Committee is very changed from the time when you and I went through our training.” We were about the same age. “Less use of force. Very little use of force.”

“I know. But I didn’t miss the Stashinski trial. Nor Khokhlov.”

“
Khokhlov
!” He said it like a curse. Khokhlov had been a senior KGB officer who, a few years before, was given an assassination job in West Berlin and, instead of carrying it out, turned himself over to the American authorities. He brought some interesting weapons with him, things you can’t buy in a sporting-goods store, not even today. Vladimir looked at me carefully. “Perhaps I can understand his being reluctant to murder a stranger in cold blood. But he could have refused the assignment. This is not 1948.”

“Do you think it did much harm?”

“To the KGB, you mean, or the Soviet Union?” I shrugged. “Perhaps it’s not a bad thing for our enemies to think us capable of…excess. I suppose in that ruthless sense it serves both the Committee and the Motherland. The other side of the coin, though, is that the CIA is of course capable of excess itself. Things like this make it easier for them to justify their actions.”

“Did we actually try to kill him afterward? Thallium poisoning?”

“I don’t know.” He grimaced. “The Thirteenth Department doesn’t confide in me. Thallium does seem unnecessarily exotic.

“At any rate, your own assignment is straightforward enough and, for the time being, includes nothing illegal. No thallium assassinations. We want you to function as a ‘spotter.’ Simply keep your eyes open, looking for people who might be of use to the KGB,
inside your part of the MIT academic community.”

“People who express Communist sympathies?”

“Yes, of course. Also first-generation Americans from the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. People in financial trouble, especially. It’s easier to buy an American than to convince him ideologically.”

“All right. But we didn’t go to all this trouble just to put a spotter in MIT’s psychology department”

“No. But almost all of MIT is of potential importance. We can’t know yet what your ultimate assignment will be. Simply advance in your field and don’t do anything politically suspicious. There will come a time, maybe five years, maybe ten, when we will need a man with your credentials, and a spotless record.

“Meanwhile, I will stay in contact with you. Of course it’s best that you know as little about me as possible, not even my real name.”

“What if I need to get in touch with you?”

“You won’t need to, not at this stage of your assignment. At any rate, I don’t live in Boston, nowhere near.”

“But what if my true identity is discovered?”

“You may go to jail,” he said softly, “or be deported. Nothing worse. I wouldn’t worry about violence from the CIA or any of the other intelligence agencies, not unless our silent war becomes much noisier.

“Besides, the only law you’ve broken is that of illegal immigration, which you did ten years ago as a juvenile. And some small lies that might be considered misdemeanors, in connection with maintaining your identity. ‘Spotting’ isn’t high-level espionage; they don’t devote that much energy to countering it.”

“I suppose. So how will I get the information to you? Meetings like this?”

“Generally not. There are more secure ways. You’ll
be instructed.” He got up suddenly and dusted off his trousers. “It was good meeting you.” We shook hands. He turned abruptly, took a couple of steps and turned back. “Oh. Do you still have the pistols from Iowa?” I had coached the ROTC pistol team.

“Yes… I don’t know whether to—”

“No, don’t register them. Better to take the small chance of exposure. We can’t afford to have any of our people on that particular list.”

“I should keep them, then?”

“In a safe place. One never knows.” He checked his watch and then hurried down the leaf-strewn path. I wouldn’t see him again for several years.

I sat on the hill for a while thinking and, not having shed my starving-student ways, finished all the chow mein and sweet-and-sour pork, and washed it down with red wine. I still have the basket. It gives me heartburn to look at it.

My instruction as a spotter began the next morning. There was a large MIT Interoffice Memo envelope on my desk; inside it was a pad of pale-blue notepaper, matching envelopes, and a long note, handwritten in Russian.

The notepaper was “safe,” the note said, purchased in a New York dime store and devoid of fingerprints. Most of my spotting reports would be written on it and then dead-dropped-left in a public place for another agent to pick up, unless a curious child or streetcleaner got there first.

I was to write each report with a different safe typewriter, a cheap one bought in a pawnshop and then disposed of. The respondent suggested that I wipe it clean of fingerprints and leave it inconspicuously in a public place, letting an American thief be my accomplice.

At the time, I was extremely annoyed by the cloak-
and-dagger caution of the arrangements. It probably wouldn’t be smart to write the reports on MIT letterheads and sign my name to them, but this seemed to be laughably excessive. Now, I’m not so sure. Both sides in this game can be thorough.

So every few months for the next couple of years, I would write a list of a few people who might be useful, along with a paragraph or so of explanation for each. I would seal it in an envelope addressed to a nonexistent place and affix a stamp (many people who would open a plain envelope out of curiosity will virtuously drop a stamped one in the mailbox unopened), and then set it down at the place and time instructed. Usually the drop was in a quiet corner of a fairly busy public place—the back booth of a greasy spoon or an uninteresting exhibit in a museum. I never waited to watch the pickup, though of course I was always on the lookout for Lubinov.

In American-spy parlance I was a “sleeper”—someone who leads a fairly normal life until the KGB orders him activated—as well as a spotter. Technically, I suppose I was also an
agent vlyiyania
, or agent of influence; someone who attempts through friendly discussion to alter the opinions of those around him, to bring them more in line with Soviet principles. This being Cambridge in the sixties and seventies, though, even a doctrinaire Marxist would have looked relatively inconspicuous. And I always tried to be careful to temper my outlook with American conventional wisdom. I could deplore “my” country’s presence in Vietnam, for instance, yet proclaim my sympathy for the unfortunate lads who had been drafted to fight there.

But by 1971 I had spent half my life—all of my adult life—in America, and a lot of my pro-American sympathies were not feigned. This is not to say I was
no longer a good Communist. That the Revolution survived the enormity of Stalin’s crimes proved to me its durability, and its durability implied universality.

But American democracy was also surviving Vietnam, Nixon, and the cultural schism of the sixties, and it seemed to me the system might emerge from these adversities tempered rather than weakened. Perhaps tempered in both senses of the word, amenable to detente and the evolution of a more humane economic system.

(I was convinced that it would have to be evolution here, rather than revolution. If there was going to be another American Revolution, it would be to the right. That’s where most of the guns were. Not even the Russian Revolution was fought with ideas alone.)

So by this trick of the mind I was working in the best interests of both my homeland and my adopted country. I suppose that’s not a rare accommodation for people in my shoes.

In fact, though, matters of espionage and conflicting allegiances took up little of my time, while I was busy “creating background”—which is to say, pursuing the professional and personal interests of a normal American man. In 1971 I married Valerie, who had been one of my most talented students (she teaches Abnormal at Boston U. now), and although or because we have never had children, our marriage is a model of love and sharing. Of course I never shared with her the basic exotic details of my past and present. Perhaps I should have.

It was a mutual interest in hypnosis that brought Valerie and me together. We happened to sit next to each other at a lecture on the anesthetic uses of hypnotism and found out we were in the same department We meshed.

MIT reserves the winter break, New Year’s Day to
early February, for IAP, Independent Activities Period. (Everything that changes my life has three initials.) We decided to work with biofeedback, then fashionable, to see whether a willing subject could put himself into a deeper hypnagogic state by monitoring his own physiological parameters.

As it turns out, I am not a good subject for hypnosis, not being particularly artistic or imaginative or reflective. Valerie was all three—a moody fantasizing artist/musician—and after a week of practice, mutual conditioning, I could put her into a deep trance with a word and a touch. I myself could barely manage a light trance after ten minutes of monotonic reassurance, which was not reflection on her ability as a hypnotist. I couldn’t get as deep as she did even when I used illegally acquired barbiturates.

Unsurprisingly, we also experimented a bit with the effect of grass, hash, and LSD on hypnosis—perhaps I was a little old for that sort of thing, but she wasn’t, and it
was
the sixties—and there was no consistent result, though we did collect some amusing experiences. (Like the day I delivered a lecture to a hall full of thoughtful blue lizards.)

Valerie had started out majoring in electrical engineering, and although she switched to psych, she never did lose her love for gadgets. I like machines, too, but don’t have her talent or creativity. It was her initial fiddling that eventually led to the device that ultimately so complicated our lives.

She had gotten hold of a picoammeter, a machine that measures electrical currents down to a fraction of a trillionth of an ampere. On a dry day you can make the needle move from across the room by running a comb through your hair.

We had both progressed far enough in biofeedback
that it was easy for us to isolate our alpha and theta waves by a special kind of “relaxed concentration” that was obviously related to the hypnagogic state. We normally did this with the help of a commercial “brainwave monitor” that used a headband with two electrodes, and an earphone connected to a black box that was some kind of a signal generator working with a couple of bandpass filters that isolated the alpha and theta waves. You would sit quietly in a dark room with the earphone on while the signal generator gave off a soft, high-pitched whine. Once you relaxed the right way—a “way” that can’t really be described in words—the signal would start to warble, which meant you were in the alpha or theta state. At first it took ten or twenty minutes to find the right way to feel; eventually it was a matter of seconds.

There was no way to fiddle with the sealed machine (it belonged to the Institute, anyhow) so Valerie set about cobbling together one of our own. That way she could experiment to her heart’s content.

That’s where the picoammeter came in. One of the odd things you can do with biofeedback is to alter at will the electrical conductivity of your skin. We had it set up so that the picoammeter measured a microscopic current across the back of your hand. You made a mental effort (or not-effort; it required relaxation) to slow the current down, to increase the resistance, and the picoammeter would reward you, through a signal generator, with a musical tone that rose in pitch as the resistance increased. We both tried it in a normal relaxed state first, and then while hypnotized.

I should add that this was long after IAP was over; I’d known Valerie for more than a year. We saw each other socially as well as in the context of this unofficial research—“socially” in a sixties sense, including
offhand sexual intimacy. I can imagine what would happen to one of my assistant professors today in that situation, more or less openly sleeping with a student still enrolled in his department.

That is relevant to what happened. The first run-through, I was subject and Valerie was the hypnotist. The results were not impressive; under hypnosis the note rose perhaps a half tone higher than it did in a normal state, the meter showing it wavering around 450 hertz (from a base tone of A/440). When we switched, the results were astounding.