An Agent in Place Read online

  For Lew Gillenson . . .

  If the past and the future really exist, where are they?

  — St. Augustine

  . . . the past is rotting in the future — A terrible carnival of dead leaves.

  — Anna Akhmatova, "Poem Without a Hero"

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  * he first threads of plot I was able to discover date back to the summer of 1986. According to a security log I was not supposed to see, four people whose names would not have meant anything to the general public gathered around a table in a basement room of the Pentagon. The table was metal and covered with frayed green felt } the room windowless, stuffy, remote. This was the first session of a shadowy Pentagon organization listed innocuously as an Intelligence Support Activity. The group had come into existence during the Carter presidency to deal with the Iranian hostage crisis. When the crisis ended the Support Activity had been disbanded — but it had remained on the books. It had been resurrected several months before the first session by some middle-ranking Pentagon officers who were intrigued by the fact that the group, which was not associated with the Central Intelligence Agency or the Pentagons Defense Intelligence Agency, was outside congressional oversight parameters. Intriguingly, it was also outside White House oversight parameters, inasmuch as it did not require a presidential "Finding" to set the wheels in motion. Few in Washington were even aware of the Support Activity's existence; of those who knew, only a handful had an inkling of how it was funded or who was in charge.

  Fitting the odd pieces of the puzzle together, I learned that the Intelligence Support Activity's budget was buried in the Joint Chiefs' contin-

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  gency fund under the heading "Transportation, miscellaneous." The person in charge was a marine colonel attached to the long-term planning staff of the Joint Chiefs.

  As near as I can determine, there were subsequent meetings, exploratory in nature, through the rest of '86 and all of'87 and into the winter of '88. The discussions revolved around a series of carefully honed written questions devised by the group's eminence grise, a soft-spoken, poker-faced one-time aide to the President's National Security Advisor, about where the American military establishment was headed. It was headed, everyone agreed, for disaster. "There is nothing more pathetic," the marine colonel is supposed to have remarked (in a comment that summed up the general mood of the group) "than a warrior without an adversary. "As the winter of '88-89 waned, there was a general consensus that something had to be done. The question was, what? By the time the cherry blossoms along the Potomac had burst into flower, the group was kicking around scenarios, exploring alternatives, checking and rechecking the givens, agonizing over the unknowns. I have it on unimpeachable authority that what was inelegantly billed as the "skit-or-get-off-the-pot session" was held in June 1989.

  At one time or another I have worked with two of the four men in the room, played poker with the third and done some serious drinking with the fourth. I have a pretty good idea of how they operate. I think I know their weaknesses and their strengths; I think I know what their faces look like when they hesitate or plunge. Which is why it wasn't difficult for me to reconstruct this pivotal meeting, to figure out who said what. The Support Activity's nuts-and-bolts specialist, a fat man in his early fifties who went by the name of Marlowe, would have been the one to kick it off. "Suppose we go over it once more," he might have suggested. Knowing Marlowe, he would have loosened a very loud tie and unbuttoned the top button of a very wrinkled shirt. "What is the best that could happen?"

  "The best that could happen," the retired CIA Deputy Director, who supplied the Support Activity with its operational expertise, would have explained patiently, "is that Ironweed will succeed. It is drastic surgery, I grant you, but the situation is desperate. "

  The marine colonel, who managed to look military even when he turned up in civilian clothing for a regular Wednesday night poker game, might have remarked, "In a manner of speaking, the operation is what our German friends would call an Endlosung— a final solution."

  I can imagine Marlowe eyeing the group's eminence grise with his icy

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  eyes and noting, "Henry here has not given us the benefit of his thoughts yet."

  The eminence grise would have been sucking thoughtfully on the stem of a dead pipe. In his middle seventies, his hair silky white with age, he had started what his colleagues invariably referred to as a "long and distinguished career" as a young OSS field agent armed with a poison pill and one-time pads coated with potassium permanganate so they would burn quickly if he had to destroy them in a hurry. Those were the days, he liked to say, when Americans still had qualms about reading other people's mail — qualms, he made it clear, he had never shared. A former head of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, he was known to be prudent to a fault. Without his assent there was no chance of the Intelligence Support Activity giving the green light to what had become known as operation Ironweed.

  "My obsession in life," the man with the white hair would have reminded everyone, "is damage control. We propose to play with fire. I want to be absolutely sure there is no possibility of our getting burned."

  "Which brings us to the next logical question," Marlowe, a former Prague station chief for the CIA, would have observed. "What is the worst that could happen?"

  I can see the retired CIA Deputy Director removing a pair of bifocals and massaging his eyelids with his thumb and third finger. "I have been involved in a great many schemes in my time, but this one is by far the most imaginative, and the most compartmented, I've seen. It is textbook perfect from every point of view. Assuming we give him the go-ahead, the agent charged with carrying out our instructions won't have the vaguest idea whom he is working for or what Ironweed is all about, and thus will be incapable of compromising it, or us. As a matter of fact the only ones who can fit all the pieces of the puzzle together are inside these four walls. That's about as tightly held as an operation can get." He looked directly at the man with the silky white hair, whom all of them considered the Godfather of the plot. "To dot the is and cross the ts: The worst that could happen is the Russians will not react the way we expect, and the plot won't succeed. But even then they will not be aware that it was a plot."

  The others in the room would have exchanged looks; there was really nothing more to be said. They had approached the problem from every possible angle, anticipated every conceivable snare, weighed and reweighed the risks. An agent had been painstakingly selected, discreetly

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  briefed by Marlowe (who had passed himself off as a State Department security consultant), and dispatched to Prague to await the coded signal ordering him to launch Ironweed. If they were going to bite the bullet, the moment to do it was obviously now.

  At this point the man with the silky white hair might have shrugged. I can see him screwing up his eyes, something he always did before he plunged. I can hear him saying: "What the hell. Let's take a crack at it."

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  announced, "Against the Russians who will certainly try and tempt you to betray your country."

  The three people in the room, two women and one man freshly posted to the Soviet Union, resisted the urge to look at each other. If they had they would have burst out laughing. Who was this political Neanderthal guarding the chastity of the American enclave in Moscow? Hadn't he heard of the political prestidigitator the Russians referred to as the Great Helmsman and the resident Americans had taken to calling the Great Houdini? Hadn't he heard of glasnost or perestroika? Didn't he know the Cold War was a sun-bleached bone that historians gnawed on every now and then to sharpen their academic teeth?

  Manny re
ad the expressions of disbelief on their faces. He had seen similar reactions every time he briefed new hands. They memorized a couple of Russian slogans and, as far as they were concerned, the Cold War was over. Peace in our time. The only thing missing from the picture was Chamberlain's umbrella. The embassy security officer coughed up a guttural laugh from some remote corner of his ulcer-prone stomach. The sound conveyed dry irreverence, which was Manny Custer's preferred protective coloring. Most of the time his irreverence amused more than it offended. But there were moments when he lost control, when his mood slipped across a frontier into outright insolence. Which accounted for the pile of ambivalent fitness reports in his service record. Which explained why he had been denied promotions someone judged purely on performance would have merited. Which also explained why the current assignment was his last posting before early retirement.

  Moscow, embassy wags proclaimed gleefully, was going to be Custer's last stand.

  "You are probably thinking," Manny was saying, "that I am treating possibilities as probabilities in order to capture your attention." His bushy eyebrows arched their backs like two lazy cats as another mocking laugh bubbled to the surface. "Consider this: Every word spoken here is being beamed through hidden microphones to those antennas on the roof across the street"—with a toss of his head he indicated the window, the city, the enemy—"and from there into the ears of some bilingual techint comrade in an overheated office at the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, better known by its initials, KGB."

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  The man sitting on a folding chair between the two women, a diplomat in his early thirties with disheveled dark hair and the alert, watchful eyes of someone too rational to be passionate about anything, cleared his throat. "In other words/' he said so guilelessly that Manny understood he was being baited, "Big Brother is watching us.

  A faint smile found its unaccustomed way onto the security officer's lips. He let his gaze stray idly over the desk cluttered with service records and telexes and hastily scribbled notes to himself, over the paint peeling like sunburned skin from the office wall, over the battleship gray safe with the collection of paperback detective novels stacked on top, over his bookcase crammed with security manuals and bound State Department biographies of Soviet leaders, over the faces of the three who had turned up for the obligatory security briefing. Manny had the knack of scrutinizing people as if they held no secrets for him, which prompted those who didn't know him well to conclude that he was indifferent to the world around him. The truth was less complex. He was far from indifferent; he disliked it intensely. "Orwell got it all wrong," Manny said presently. "He completely misunderstood the nature af the totalitarian regime. It was never Big Brother who was doing the watching. It was a psychotic father figure who sometimes went by the title of Tsar and sometimes Secretary General of the Communist Party. Whatever."

  Manny glanced at the service records on his desk, noted the young diplomat's name: It was Benedict Bassett. A newcomer to the diplomatic corps, divorced, the father of a six-year-old son, Bassett had distant Russian roots and spoke Russian fluently. He had been stationed in Prague for four months before being posted to Moscow. The four months struck Manny as curious. Most diplomatic tours lasted two years; many three. Manny, who collected details the way other men collected lint in their trouser cuffs when trousers still had cuffs, made a mental note to find out what eggs Bassett had hatched during his stay in Prague. And why the tour had lasted only four months.

  The other woman, Esther Easley, a stenographer replacing a secretary on maternity leave, asked, "Who is this Orwell? And what is his connection with the American Embassy in Moscow?"

  "Mr. Custer here is warning us that walls have ears," observed Ben Bassett, as if Manny's remarks needed to be translated into English.

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  Bassett angled his head and eyed the security officer. "That's what it boils down to, isn't it, Mr. Custer?"

  "A little bird is whispering in my ear," commented Manny. "He's saying you and I don't talk the same language." He shrugged a heavy shoulder to indicate that he would not let their failure to communicate affect his appetite or his bowels. Reaching into a desk drawer for Xerox copies of his standard security briefing, he handed one to each of them. "Read through this when you have a moment. It lists some elementary do's and don'ts. Kindly sign on the dotted line to indicate you have digested the contents and stick it in my mailbox downstairs."

  The grammar teacher examined the sheet. "Are these rules something we should learn by heart?"

  "Security isn't so much a matter of rules as common sense," Manny said. "Vary your daily routine. Don't talk shop outside the shop." He looked pointedly at Bassett. "Contrary to what some of our colleagues think, walls really do have ears. The KGB still has roughly two million employees on its payroll, and it has to keep them occupied. Don't accept letters or packages from Russians you don't know, and think twice about accepting them from Russians you do know. This kind of thing happens all the time. Just yesterday a Russian woman buttonholed one of our political officers in a store and tried to get him to accept a sealed envelope. He quite rightly refused. Don't deal on the black market. Don't order a Sony video recorder from Finland as a favor for a Russian friend even if you sell it to him at cost; nobody will believe you didn't trade it for an icon. I certainly won't. Whatever else you do, don't fall in love with a Russian. The KGB has been known to plant what they call a 'swallow' and we call a 'dangle' in the path of unsuspecting diplomats, who can then be blackmailed. Give me a written report of anything that smells like a compromising situation. If you have any doubts report it and let me decide. If you need something from the Russians—a maid, a language teacher, hotel reservations for a visiting relative, whatever—get it through the General Service Office downstairs. You want Bolshoi tickets, see the folks in the Community Liaison Office. The two of you"—Manny indicated the two women "have white badges, which means that everything above the sixth floor of the embassy is off-limits. Your green badge, Mr. Bassett, authorizes you to go anywhere in the embassy, up to and including the communications bubble, but

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  you'd better have a reason for being there. Also, unlike the ladies, who are being housed in the New Office Building complex around the corner, you'll be living in a compound across the street from the Hotel Ukraine on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, which means you'll be more exposed. Your neighbors are mostly African diplomats, but there will be several Russians—and everyone understands they are there to report on what you do and who you do it with."

  Bassett, who had been skimming Manny's photocopied sheet while the security officer was talking, pulled an expensive fountain pen from the breast pocket of his sports jacket, uncapped it and resting the sheet on Manny's desk, scrawled his name at the bottom. "Is it all right if I leave this with you now?" he asked.

  An amused smile pulled at the corners of Manny's eyes as he accepted the sheet. The truth was he found Bassett's irreverence refreshing. In his experience most young diplomats panted like lap-dogs at the feet of their masters; a ball only had to be tossed to send them scampering off to fetch it. Bassett didn't come on like a careerist; he appeared indifferent to the exigencies of the embassy pecking order and protocol. Custer liked that about him. "You'll have one other neighbor at the Kutuzovsky compourad you'll be interested in," he informed the newcomer to the embassy with a playful grin.

  "Who?"

  "Me."

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  peated often enough for Viktor to have committed them to memory) inhabited by the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti people closer to the heart of the city.

  There was still no sign of his limousine. Zenkevich was exaggerating this time. Viktor toyed with the idea of retreating into the lobby, but abandoned it. The babushka holding fort at the table inside the door would take it as a sign of weakness; would smile to herself at the fragility of a grown man who could not tolerate a dose of Russian winter.

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p; Viktor's thoughts drifted back to the winter of '45. He had been sixteen at the time, but had lied about his age to get into the Army before the war ended. The winter of '45 had been colder than this winter, his boots had been thinner, he had had only an Army cloth cap on his head and a rough woolen scarf over his ears, and fur-lined sniper's mittens scavenged from a corpse frozen in the ice of a German river they had crossed. (He still wore the much mended sniper's mittens in winter, a sign, no doubt, of nostalgia for the simpler days when he had been able to fight his enemies.) Thinking back, Viktor remembered that spit had frozen before it hit the ground during the winter of '45, but he could not recall ever suffering from the cold. But then he and his comrades had had other things to occupy them —there was Berlin's Reichstag dead ahead and the savage house-to-house, hand-to-hand combat to get there.

  How times had changed! Now he worried about a wife twenty-two years younger than he was openly flirting with her Jewish lover during a dinner at the Actor's Union, or the fact that she seemed to have more rehearsals than usual and they seemed to last longer than usual. One night, with half a bottle of garlic-and-dill-flavored vodka under his belt, Viktor had worked up the nerve to ask her what her lover had that he lacked, but she had only laughed the laugh that always made her sound on the bitter edge of hysteria. "He knows how to make me forget, Viktor," Ekaterina had said. "You make me remember." Her voice slipping into the octave she normally reserved for melodrama, she had arched her carefully plucked eyebrows and had added, "I hope you are not having second thoughts about our arrangement. "

  What could he do? Trot off to her father, Viktor's mentor, not to mention his superior in the chain of command, with tales of . . . what? Infidelities? Treasons? The old general would wave his de-

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  formed hand in the direction of the Kremlin. (He suffered from a disorder called Dupuytren's Contracture, a gradual curling of the fingers; catching their first glimpse of the general, newcomers to his service invariably thought they were being summoned.) "My daughter's transgressions are trivial compared with the infidelities, the treasons out there," he would mutter in a voice gravelly with age. And producing a bottle of imported bourbon, he would change the subject so abruptly Viktor's shoulders would droop under the weight of the things that had been left unsaid.