The Company Read online

  “I’m saying there is a seventy percent chance the fucker is who he says he is, so we should exfiltrate him. I’m saying I’ll have the infrastructure ready in forty-eight hours. I’m saying the serial about the mole in MI6 needs to be explored because, if it’s true, we’re in a pretty fucking pickle; we’ve been sharing all our shit with the cousins forever, which means our secrets may be winding up, via the Brits, on some joker’s desk in Moscow. And I’m reminding Washington, in case they get cold feet, that even if the defector is a black agent, it’s still worth while bringing him across.”

  “I don’t follow you there, Harvey.”

  The Sorcerer’s fist hit a buzzer on the telephone console. His Night Owl, Miss Sipp, a thirtyish brunette with somnolent eyes that blinked very occasionally and very slowly, stuck her head into the office; she was something of a legend at Berlin Base for having fallen into a dead faint the day Torriti peeled off his shirt to show her the shrapnel wound that had decapitated the naked lady tattooed on his arm. Since then she had treated him as if he suffered from a communicable sexual disease, which is to say she held her breath in his presence and spent as little time as possible in his office. The Sorcerer pushed the message board across the desk. “Happy 1951, Miss Sipp. Have you made any New Year’s resolutions?”

  “I’ve promised myself I won’t be working for you this time next year,” she retorted.

  Torriti nodded happily; he appreciated the female of the species who came equipped with a sharp tongue. “Do me a favor, honey, take this up to the radio shack. Tell Meech I want it enciphered on a one-time pad and sent priority. I want the cipher text filed in a burn bag and the original back on my desk in half an hour.” As the Night Owl scurried from the office, Torriti splashed more whiskey into his glass, melted back into the leather chair he’d bought for a song on the black market and propped his pointed cowboy boots up on the desk. “So now I’ll walk you through the delicate business of dealing with a defection, sport. Because you have a degree from Yale I’ll talk real slow. Let’s take the worst case scenario: let’s say our Russian friend is a black agent come across to make us nibble at some bad information. If you want to make him seem like the real McCoy you send him over with a wife and kid but we’re smart-assed Central Intelligence officers, right? We’re not impressed by window dressing. When all is said and done there is only one way for a defector to establish his bona fides—he has to bring with him a certain amount of true information.”

  “So far so good. Once he delivers true information, especially true information that’s important, we know he’s a real defector, right?”

  “Wrong, sport. A defector who delivers true information could still be a black agent. Which is another way of saying that a black agent also has to deliver a reasonable amount of true information in order to convince us that he is a genuine defector so that we’ll swallow the shit he slips in between the true information.”

  Jack, intrigued by how intricate the game was, sat up on the couch and leaned forward. “They sure didn’t teach us this in Washington, Harvey. So the fact that the defector delivers true information doesn’t tell us if he’s a true defector.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Question, Harvey. If all this is so, why do we bother taking defectors?”

  “Because, first off, the defector may be genuine and his true information may be useful. The identity of a Russian mole in MI6 doesn’t fall into your lap every day. Even if the defector’s not genuine, if we play the game skillfully we can take the true information he brings with him and avoid the deception.”

  “My head’s spinning, Harvey.”

  The Sorcerer snickered. “Yeah, well, basically what we do is we go round and round the mulberry bush until we become stark raving mad. In the end it’s all a crazy intellectual game—to become a player you need to cross the frontier into what Mother calls a wilderness of mirrors.”

  Jack thought about this for a moment. “So who’s this Mother you’re always talking about?”

  But the Sorcerer’s head had already nodded onto his chest; balancing the whiskey glass on the bulge of his stomach, he had fallen asleep for the first time in two white nights.

  The Sorcerer’s overnight report, addressed—like all cables to Washington originating with Company stations abroad—to the Director, Central Intelligence, was hand-delivered to the desk of Jim Angleton in a metal folder with a distinctive red slash across it indicating that the material stashed between the covers was so incredibly sensitive it ought (as the mock directive posted on a second floor bulletin board put it) to be burned before reading. The single copy of the deciphered text had already been initialed by the Director and routed on for “Immediate Action” to Angleton, known by his in-house code name, Mother. The Director, Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s crusty chief of staff at the Normandy invasion whose mood swings were said to alternate between anger and outrage, had scrawled across the message in a nearly illegible script that resembled hieroglyphics: “Sounds kosher to me. WBS.” His Deputy Director/Operations, the World War II OSS spymaster Allen Dulles, had added: “For crying out loud, Jim, let’s not let this one wriggle off the hook. AD.”

  The Sorcerer’s report began with the usual Company rigmarole:

  FROM:

  Alice Reader

  TO:

  DCI

  COPY TO:

  Hugh Ashmead

  SUBJECT:

  AESNOWDROP

  REFERENCE:

  Your 28/12/50 re bringing home the bacon

  Angleton, the Company’s gaunt, stoop-shouldered, chain-smoking counterintelligence wizard, worked out of a large corner office in “L” building, one of the “temporary” wooden hulks that had washed up like jetsam next to the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln and Washington monuments during World War II and had since been nicknamed, for reasons that were painfully apparent to the current tenants, “Cockroach Alley.” From Angleton’s windows there would have been a magnificent view of the Lincoln Memorial if anybody had bothered to crack the Venetian blinds. Thousands of three-by-five index cards crammed with trivia Mother had accumulated during his years on the counterintelligence beat—the 1935 graduating class of a Brest-Litovsk gymnasium, the pre-war curriculum of the Odessa Artillery School, the license plate numbers on the Zil limousines that ferried members of the Soviet elite to and from their Kremlin offices—lay scattered across the desk and tables and shelves. If there was a method to the madness, only Angleton himself had the key to it. Sorting through his precious cards, he was quickly able to come up with the answers to the Sorcerer’s questions:

  1. Yes, there is a street in Brest-Litovsk named after the Russian hero of the Napoleonic war, Mikhail Kutuzov; yes, there is a large statue of a blindfolded partisan woman tied to a stake and awaiting execution in the small park across Kutuzov Street from the apartment building complex where the local KGB officers are housed.

  2. Yes, instructors named Piotr Maslov, Gennady Brykin and Johnreed Arkhangelsky were listed on the roster of the KGB Diplomatic Institute in Moscow in 1947.

  3. Yes, the deputy rezident at KGB Karlshorst is named Oskar Ugor-Molody.

  4. Yes, an entity using the appellation Institute for Economic and Scientific Research has set up shop in a former school in the Pankow district of East Berlin.

  5. Yes, there is a sports journalist writing for Pravda under the byline M. Zhitkin. Unable to confirm the patronymic Sergeyevich. He is said to be married but unable to confirm that his wife is AESNOWDROP’s sister-in-law.

  6. No, we have no record of Zhitkin traveling to Stockholm last February, although his weekly Pravda column failed to appear during the third week of February.

  7. Yes, the audio device Division D embedded in the arm of an easy chair purchased by the Soviet Embassy in The Hague and delivered to the ambassador’s office was operational until 2245 hours on 12 November 1949, at which point it suddenly went dry. A friendly national subsequently visiting the Soviet Ambassador reported finding a
small cavity in the under-side of the arm of the chair, leading us to conclude that KGB counterintelligence had stumbled on the microphone during a routine sweep of the office and removed it. Transcripts of the Soviet Ambassador’s conversations that dealt with Kremlin plans to pressure the Americans into withdrawing occupation forces from West Berlin had been narrowly circulated in American and British intelligence circles.

  8. The consensus here is that AESNOWDROP has sufficiently established his bona fides to justify an exfiltration operation. He is being notified by my source to turn up at MARLBOROUGH with his wife and son, no valises, forty-eight hours from time of his last meeting.

  Angleton signed off on the message and left it with his girl Friday to be enciphered using one of his departments private polyalphabetic codes. Back in his corner office, he frisked himself for cigarettes, stabbed one between his delicate lips and stared off into space without lighting it, a distracted scowl on his brow. For Angleton, the essence of counterintelligence was penetration: you penetrated the enemy’s ranks, either by defections such as the one being organized now in Berlin or, more rarely, through the occasional agent in place who sent back material directly from the KGB inner sanctums, to get at their secrets. And the secret you most wanted to get at was whether they had penetrated you. The Russians had already succeeded in penetrating the American government and scientific communities; Elisabeth Bentley, a dowdy American Communist serving as a courier for her Soviet handler in Washington, had reeled off under FBI questioning the names of a hundred or so people linked to Soviet spy rings in the states and in Canada, among them Hiss, Fuchs, Gold, Sobell, Greenglass, the Rosenbergs. There was good reason to believe that the blueprint for the atomic bomb the Russians successfully tested in 1949 had been swiped from American A-bomb labs in Los Alamos. Angleton’s job was to circle the Company with the counterintelligence wagons and make sure the Russians never got a toe in the CIA’s door. Which is how Mother, riding high on his reputation as a World War II counterintelligence ace for the Office of Strategic Services, America’s wartime spy agency, wound up looking over everyone’s shoulder to monitor clandestine operations—a situation that rubbed a lot of people, including Torriti, the wrong way.

  Angleton and Torriti had crossed paths—and swords—in 1944 when Mother, at twenty-seven already considered a master of the subtleties of the espionage game, had been in charge of rounding up stay-behind fascist agents as the Germans retreated up the boot of Italy. Torriti, who spoke the Sicilian dialect fluently and went out of his way to look like a Sicilian caid, had been acting as liaison with the Mafia clans that aided the allies in the invasion of Sicily and, later, the landings in Italy. In the months after the German surrender the Sorcerer was all for nurturing the Italian Social Democrats as a way of outflanking the local Communists, who received considerable support from Moscow and were threatening to make a strong showing in the next elections. Angleton, who was convinced that World War III started the day World War II ended, argued that if you scratched a Social Democrat you uncovered a Communist who took orders from the Kremlin. Angleton’s reasoning prevailed with what the Sorcerer called the “poison Ivy League” crowd in Washington; the Company threw its considerable weight—in the form of tens of millions of dollars in cold cash, propaganda campaigns, and the occasional blackmail caper—behind the Christian Democrats, who eventually came out on top in the elections.

  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 the possibility that the 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 Angleton’s 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 émigré 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 anti-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 Is, 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?”