The Debriefing Read online

  “You boys have sure come a long way from the days when you tattooed secret messages on stiff upper lips and then hid them with mustaches.” The senator chuckles. “Ah, here’s the admiral. And Nicholas. Morning to you, Nicholas. I guess we can put our little show on the road now.”

  Nicholas Toland, the short, secretive assistant to the President for national security affairs, waves everyone to places around the large circular table, activates the black box that jams any eavesdropping microphones. Toland appears uncommonly moody today; a New York Times review of his most recent speech, delivered to a Harvard audience, called him a “literary Sisyphus rolling clichés up a hill.” The conferees take their seats; Stone sticks close to the admiral. The décor is State Department Conference Room, off green, with the only touch of color coming from the red rose in Senator Howard’s lapel. Unlike most interdepartmental groups, there is no pecking order here; Toland, as the President’s representative at the table, is the unofficial chairman, but each man defends his department’s territory. When interests conflict, which is more often than not the case, the problem is generally avoided, if possible, or sent up to the Oval Office for a judgment.

  Toland unstraps his wrist watch, a gold Patek Philippe, and places it on the felt-covered table. “Incidentally, Charlie”—he turns to Charlie Evans—“the President is curious to know whether your people have come up with an identity for Volkov. It’s almost two years now since he took over as chief of Soviet military intelligence. It’s almost a year since he pulled off that coup in West Germany, of which the less said the better. It’s seven months since he managed to buy the blueprints for our new Day-Track System before we could even put it into production. The man has given us a lot of trouble in the past; he’s obviously going to give us a lot of trouble in the future. And we don’t even know what he looks like!”

  Evans doesn’t appreciate the question. “There have been some leads,” he reports, “but nothing we can pin down. There’s a possibility that Volkov may actually be two people, one in charge of domestic activities, the other foreign. But it’s unconfirmed. Volkov is still a name without a face.”

  “In other words, you still don’t have the vaguest idea who Volkov is,” Toland says. He is a stickler for restating things precisely.

  “That’s correct,” Evans says tightly.

  Toland makes a note on a yellow pad. “All right. We’ve got two items on the formal agenda,” he announces. “First is the delicate matter of one war versus one and a half wars. Second is the Russian defector. Andrew, why don’t you start the ball rolling.”

  Andrew is Andrew Horrick, the deputy secretary of defense, a cool, brainy West Coaster who began life in Washington as one of McNamara’s whiz kids. “The Defense Department,” says Horrick, “takes the view that worst-case contingency planning is still the basis of scenario construction. Now, it’s all well and good to pinpoint Soviet weaknesses in production, in procurement, in translating existing forces into field potentials, but the fact of the matter is that the Russians are capable of launching a major land conflict in the European theater, and a brush-fire affair in, say, the Gulf area. In other words, they can get up steam for one and a half wars—”

  “Nicholas, this is something we’re going to have to iron out at a higher level,” sighs Al Prentice, a scholarly undersecretary of state for political affairs. “Aside from the obvious drawback of us spending billions for weapons we don’t need, worst-case contingency planning has had the effect of frightening the Russians about our intentions—”

  “Of making them spend enormous sums to catch up to their worst-case estimates on us,” agrees Charlie Evans.

  “That’s it exactly.” Prentice leaps on the point. “We construct a military response to a supposed worst case—the one-and-a-half-war bogey this year; a missile gap ten years ago; an ability to sweep across Europe to the English Channel ten years before that—and then they construct a response to our response. And then your boys, armed with computer printouts, come in trying to scare the pants off us with how much the Russians spend in dollar equivalents—”

  “The dollar equivalent calculations are extremely valuable in estimating Soviet capabilities,” insists Horrick.

  “Capabilities don’t tell you anything about intentions,” Prentice argues earnestly. “Look at the difference between our capabilities and our intentions. My God, we have the capability of wiping out the Soviet Union a hundred times over, but we don’t intend doing that. Or do I have that wrong too?”

  Nicholas Toland asks quietly, “We’re not against dollar equivalent calculations, are we?”

  “They’re extremely useful tools,” says Ohm Berenson, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  “They sure are useful when it comes to prying money out of Congress for military hardware,” quips Senator Howard.

  “Which is pretty much what they’re for,” mutters Prentice. “Listen, the State Department is just against getting locked into worst-case contingency planning as methodology. We’re dead set against accepting as fact that the Soviets will wage a war and a half simply because they may, in the worst case, be capable of waging a war and a half.”

  “In general, I concur,” says Charlie Evans. “I think we should structure our assessments to take into consideration the likelihood that the worst case won’t be the case we have to deal with.”

  The admiral, who carries a good deal of weight in his role of chairman of the Joint Chiefs, catches Toland’s eye. Toland, preoccupied with trying to remember which clichés he threw at the Harvard audience, nods toward the admiral. “What do our professional soldiers think about all this?” he inquires.

  “I think Charlie here, and Mr. Prentice, are missing the boat,” he begins. He speaks slowly, as if he is picking his way through a thicket. “All of our intelligence assessments point to the inescapable conclusion that the worst case is a plausible case. The hard truth is that the Soviets are capable of launching and supporting, for a prolonged period of time, one and a half wars. It seems to me that once you grant this capability, it would be criminal insanity to fail to accept the capability as a possibility. If it is not a possibility, why is it a capability?”

  “Just because they have a capability for waging one and a half wars doesn’t mean they can wage them efficiently,” Al Prentice says sullenly.

  “The possibility that one and a half wars might be waged inefficiently,” the admiral says sternly, “doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of having to prepare a response to them.”

  “If they’re going to wage one and a half wars inefficiently,” comments Charlie Evans, “they’d have to be crazy to wage them.”

  “They’ll go to war,” the admiral says quietly, “when they conclude they have no more to gain by not going to war. It’s no secret where I stand on this.” He appeals directly to Nicholas Toland. “I told the President, when he offered me the chairmanship, that I believed in my heart that we would one day find ourselves at war with the Soviet Union. And I want the United States to win that war, gentlemen.”

  “You mean war and a half,” mocks Prentice.

  “Win what?” asks Charlie Evans. “What’s the prize?”

  “Victory is the prize,” says the admiral angrily, focusing directly on Evans.

  Evans uncrosses and recrosses his long pin-striped legs. “Would the admiral care to define victory?” he asks, staring straight back at him.

  “The admiral would be delighted to define victory,” the admiral says with cold contempt. “Victory is being around to write the history of what happened.”

  “Even if nobody is around to read it?” sneers Prentice.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Nicholas Toland intervenes. “I’ll take memos on the efficacy of worst-case contingency planning from anyone who cares to put his two cents in. Keep them reasonably short; you know the President’s attention tends to wander at anything that spills over an eight-by-ten file card. We’ll put it to him and see what reaction we get. Now, what a
bout this defector? We’re all of us curious to know what we have.”

  Charlie Evans nods to Stone. “Why don’t you start,” he says politely. To the others he explains, “The defector was a military courier on a run to Cairo. Stone here has debriefed the warm body. We got to debrief the diplomatic pouch.”

  “Mr. Stone,” Nicholas Toland says, “has the floor.”

  Speaking in a low, deliberately unemotional voice, Stone fills in the members of the Forty Committee on the Russian defector Kulakov. He carefully explains the personal tragedies that made Kulakov wake up screaming every night, though he was never sure which of the tragedies he was screaming about. “We caught a number of small errors in his story,” says Stone, “but they were inconsequential things that anyone could slip up on, such as someone’s rank or address. We only caught him out in one outright lie.” And he explains about Kulakov’s father being Jewish, and the fact that Kulakov hid this, apparently successfully, from the Russians too.

  “Then as far as you can determine,” inquires Charlie Evans, “Kulakov is a genuine defector?”

  “He thinks he is, yes,” answers Stone.

  “I detect a nuance there,” says Senator Howard, peering across the table at Stone through his bifocals. “He thinks he’s a genuine defector, but you seem to have reservations. You’ll have to explain that, I’m afraid.”

  “Senator,” Stone says, “intelligence activity, as you have good reason to know, is the process of great numbers of people laboring over a period of months, and sometimes even years, to put enough pieces of a puzzle together to come out with a morsel that can prove useful to those like yourself who make political decisions. When a diplomatic pouch full of morsels lands in your lap, through no effort of your own, you must begin by being extremely cautious—”

  “Caution is a laudable quality,” says the senator, “but we’d be damn fools to not use something that falls into our lap just because you don’t believe, as a matter of faith, that things fall into laps.”

  Charlie Evans asks Stone, “Do you have any specific reason to think that Kulakov is not a genuine defector? Has he tried to contact anyone since he left the farm?”

  Stone shakes his head. “He’s clean in that respect,” he says. “We bugged his car, we bugged his apartment in Los Angeles, we’ve watched him twenty-four on twenty-four. If he’s contacted anyone, he’s been pretty clever about it.”

  Nicholas Toland has forgotten about rolling clichés uphill for the moment. “Have the Soviets reacted in a way that indicates the defection isn’t genuine?” he asks.

  “On the contrary,” says Stone, “every motion they’ve made since the defection, starting with some of their heavies waylaying a laundry truck that left the Athens embassy just after Kulakov, looks like the desperate reactions of people trying to close the barn door after the horse has fled. They’ve called home, and we have reason to believe they’ve punished, anyone remotely connected to the defection. The duty officer who made the fatal mistake of sending Kulakov abroad has disappeared from the face of the earth.”

  “Probably shot,” offers Senator Howard.

  “Dozens of their people have been called back to Moscow as a result of the Kulakov defection,” continues Stone. “The Glavnoe Razdevyvatelnoe Upravlenie, which is the chief intelligence directorate of the Soviet General Staff—run by our faceless Comrade Volkov, as a matter of fact—has opened an inquiry into the causes of the defection. More heads will roll, you can count on it.”

  The senator peers at Stone quizzically. “You still haven’t explained, then, why you don’t think he’s a genuine defector.”

  “I didn’t say I don’t think he’s genuine,” insists Stone. “I said he thinks he’s genuine. And I’m suggesting that before we leap for joy over the contents of the pouch, we consider—I’m only suggesting we consider, you understand—other variations on the theme.”

  “For instance?” Senator Howard leans forward.

  Stone glances at the faces around the table. “For instance,” he says quietly, “the possibility that the Soviets organized the defection.”

  “To what purpose?” asks the senator, obviously skeptical. “Why would they go to all that trouble?”

  “To make us swallow the pouch,” says Stone.

  “Which takes us to the pouch,” says Nicholas Toland. He turns toward Charlie Evans.

  “Which takes us to the pouch,” agrees Evans. He places a single typewritten sheet of paper on the green felt. The page has been initialed by the woman who typed it, the six aides who subsequently read it, and Evans. In the upper-left-hand corner is stamped: “No Copies Exist.”

  “Gentlemen,” Evans begins, letting his eyeglasses slip down along his nose and peering out, like a professor, over them. “I’ve been in the business of harvesting morsels, as Mr. Stone so accurately puts it, for twenty-four years. This is the first time I’ve ever been confronted by a feast.” Evans plays to Nicholas Toland and the senator. “I identify nine items in the diplomatic pouch. Item: A diagram and operational specs on the night sight that our Russian friends plan to install in their T-62s in Egyptian hands. No positive confirmation here, but our tank ordnance people were able to identify several components that the Russians used in previous-generation night sights. They say the design and the characteristics are entirely plausible. Item: A memorandum on American Mediterranean fleet unit movements, including those of two Polaris submarines on station, for the six-week period starting 1 January. These movements were contained in a routine movement report summary sent by the Commander in Chief Atlantic, in Norfolk, to the British admiral in charge of NATO fleet units. The code used was NATO code Alpha Delta, December edition. The implication is that the code sheet somehow fell into Soviet hands. By backtracking on a basis of access, West German counterintelligence agents have arrested a female code clerk in Bonn and accused her of supplying Alpha Delta for December to her lover, who turns out to be a Soviet sleeper working for Comrade Volkov’s military intelligence organization. So far nobody has admitted anything; there is some mystery as to how the clerk actually got the code sheet out, since surveillance is continuous. The best the Germans have come up with is that she memorized it line by line. Nevertheless, the Germans are positive that they’ve plugged a potentially disastrous leak.”

  “I assume,” says Nicholas Toland, “that your people will be going over all traffic in the compromised code to see what the damage is.”

  “Berenson’s people over at DIA are onto it,” says Evans. “We both thought they would be in a better position to assess damage, given the fact that the compromised code dealt exclusively with military matters.” Evans glances at the paper in front of him. “Item: Notification of a defect in the low-level parallax input on the radar tracking system for SAM missiles. Up to now, gentlemen”—Evans pauses for effect—“we’ve only had probable confirmations. Here we get into our first positive confirmation. The Israelis have owned up to being aware of the defect for some time. They ran a computer study on SAM firings in the ’73 war and came up with the fact that supersonic passes at low altitudes led to an apparent displacement of the target and a subsequent lag in SAM tracking—”

  “If I follow you right,” says the senator, smiling broadly, “the SAMs missed the target.”

  “That’s what happened,” says Evans. “There is a defect that causes the SAMs to miss low-flying jets.”

  “Uh huh.” The senator nods. “What else you got in that kit bag of yours?”

  “Item,” continues Evans. He has their attention now; the senator and Nicholas Toland are leaning forward, their elbows on the table, their chins resting on their hands. “Eighteen letters from various people at the Soviet Ministry of Defense procurement, to Egyptian procurement officers, listing which spare parts for MIG 17s, 19s and 21s are available, and in what quantity. Again, we have firm confirmation. The handwriting on one of the eighteen letters matches that of a Soviet Air Force procurement officer who served a tour as Air Force attaché in Tokyo a few
years ago. Also, the first shipment of spare parts to arrive in Alexandria since Kulakov’s defection—six crates of wheel-assembly housings for MIG 19s—matched exactly the notification of what was available.” Evans regards the paper again. “Item: A letter to the Soviet ambassador in Cairo from his brother-in-law, who happens to be the general in charge of Soviet logistical support facilities in Kazakstan on the Chinese frontier. Once again, we can offer you positive confirmation. The handwriting is the general’s; we have in our possession various letters he wrote to his wife while observing Warsaw Pact war games two years ago. In his letter to the ambassador, he mentions that the Chinese are thinning out their frontier forces and pulling units back to cities. This detail, too, has been confirmed by our satellite monitoring program.”

  “That’s one program that’s paid its way, and then some,” says the senator. “Sorry, Charlie; go on.”

  “Item: A letter to the daughter of the Soviet ambassador in Cairo from a young man who signed only his first name, Dmitri. He’s apparently someone she knew from when she studied at Lomonosov University.”

  “No confirmation on this one, I take it?” asks Ohm Berenson.

  “On the contrary, we have positive confirmation,” says Evans. “The letter mentions, in passing, that there were bread shortages, and subsequent riots, in the city of Nordvik. One of the Russian dissidents in Moscow was visiting his sister in Nordvik at the time of the riots, and told Western reporters about it when he returned to Moscow. It was never published because they weren’t able to obtain independent confirmation.”