The Deceiver

  The Russians were as grave as the British, or more so. There were seventeen of them, and each had been carefully picked and screened. Several spoke passable English and admitted it; five spoke perfect English and pretended not to.

  The speaking of English had not, however, been the first priority in their selection. Expertise was the first consideration. Each Soviet officer was an expert in his field and well acquainted with British equipment, tactics, and structures. Their instructions were not simply to listen to what they were told, even less to accept it; but to study hard, miss nothing, and report back exactly how good the Brits were, what equipment they used, how they used it, and if at all, where their weak points lay.

  They had arrived the previous evening after a day in London, much of it spent at their own embassy. The first dinner at the Officers’ Mess at Tidworth Army Base had been fairly formal, even a trifle strained, but without incident. The jokes and the songs would come later, perhaps on their second or third evening. The Russians were aware that among the seventeen of them, there had to be five at least who were watching the rest, and probably each other as well.

  No one mentioned this to the British group, nor did the British see fit to point out that among their own thirty members there were four who were actually from Counterintelligence, the watchers. At least the British’ watchers were only there to watch the Russians and not their fellow countrymen.

  The Russian group comprised two generals, one whose insignia showed him to be from Motorized Rifles, the other from the Armored Corps; a General Staff full colonel; from Military Intelligence one colonel, one major, and one captain, all “declared,” meaning they admitted they really were from Military Intelligence; a colonel of the Airborne Forces at whose open-necked combat blouse could be seen a triangle of blue-white-striped singlet, the insignia of Spetsnaz, or Special Forces; a colonel and a captain from Infantry and the same from Armored. In addition there was a half-colonel from Ops Staff, plus a major and two captains; and a colonel and major from Signals.

  The Soviet Military Intelligence Corps is known as the GRU, and the three “declared” GRU men wore their proper insignia. They alone knew that the Signals major and one of the captains from Ops Staff were also GRU but undeclared. Neither the remainder of the Russians nor the British knew this.

  The British, for their part, had not felt it necessary to tell the Russians that twenty operatives from the Security Service were posted around the officers’ mess at Tidworth and would remain until the Soviet delegation departed for London and the Moscow flight on the morning of the third day. These watchers were now tending the lawns and flower beds, waiting table, or polishing bits of brass. Through the night they would “spell” each other, taking turns to keep the mess building under observation from vantage points scattered in a wider ring. As the Chief of General Staff had mentioned to the OC Southern Command at a ministry briefing several days earlier, “One really would prefer not to lose one of the buggers.”

  The war game began on schedule at nine o’clock and proceeded throughout the day. The paratroop drop by Second Battalion, Parachute Regiment, took place just after lunch. A major of Two Para found himself standing next to the Soviet Airborne Colonel, who was watching with the keenest interest.

  “I see,” observed the Russian, “that you still favor the two-inch company mortar.”

  “A useful tool,” agreed the Britisher. “Effective and still reliable.”

  “I agree,” said the Russian in slow, accented English. “I used them in Afghanistan.”

  “Indeed. I used them in the Falklands,” said the major from Two Para. He thought, but did not say, “And the difference is, we won in short order in the Falklands, and you are losing badly in Afghanistan.”

  The Russian permitted himself a grim smile. The Britisher smiled back. “Bastard,” thought the Russian. “He’s thinking how badly we are doing in Afghanistan.”

  Both men kept smiling. Neither could have known that in two years the remarkable new General Secretary in Moscow would order the entire Soviet Army to withdraw from the Afghan adventure. It was early days, and old habits die hard.

  That evening the dinner at Tidworth barracks was more relaxed. The wine flowed; vodka, which the British Army rarely drinks, was in evidence. Across the language barrier an element of jocularity raised its head. The Russians took their cue from their senior general, the Motorized Rifles one. He seemed to be beaming at the translated conversation from the British general, so they relaxed. The major from Ops Staff listened to a British tank man tell a joke and nearly burst out laughing before realizing he was not supposed to understand any English and had to wait for the translation.

  The major from Two Para found himself next to the declared major from Soviet Military Intelligence, the GRU. He thought he would practice his smattering of Russian.

  “Govoritya-vi pa-Angleeski?” he asked.

  The Russian was delighted. “Ochen malinko,” he replied, then dropped into halting English. “Very little, I am afraid. I try with books at home, but it is not so good.”

  “Better than my Russian, I’m sure,” said the paratrooper. “By the way, I’m Paul Sinclair.”

  “Please, I am so sorry,” said the Russian. He reached around and held out his hand. “Pavel Kuchenko.”

  It was a good dinner and ended with songs in the bar before the two groups of officers trooped off to their rooms at eleven o’clock. A number of them would appreciate that the following morning would permit a lie-in—the orderlies were instructed to appear with cups of tea at seven o’clock.

  In fact, Major Kuchenko was up at five and spent two hours seated quietly behind the lace curtains that covered the windows of his bachelor bedroom. He sat with all his lights out and studied the road that ran past the front of the officers’ mess toward the main gate leading to the Tidworth road. He spotted or thought he spotted three men in the half-gloom of very early morning who might be watchers.

  He also spotted, precisely at six o’clock, Colonel Arbuthnot appear from the main doors of the mess almost beneath him and depart on what was apparently his regular morning jogging run. He had reason to believe it was a regular habit—he had seen the elderly colonel do exactly the same the previous morning.

  Colonel Arbuthnot was not a difficult man to spot, for his left arm was missing. He had lost it years earlier while on patrol with his levies in that strange half-forgotten war in the hills of Dhofar, a campaign fought by British Special Forces and Omani levies to prevent a Communist revolution from toppling the Sultan of Oman and taking control of the Straits of Hormuz. A sentimental Army board had permitted him to stay on in the Army, and he was by then the catering officer at Tidworth officers’ mess. Every morning he kept in trim with a five-mile jog down the road and back, an accepted figure in white tracksuit with cowl hood and blue piping, the loose left sleeve neatly pinned to the fabric by his side. For the second morning, Major Kuchenko watched him thoughtfully.

  The second day of war games passed without incident, and finally all the officers of both nationalities agreed the umpires had done a good job in awarding a technical victory to the Greens, who had finally dislodged the Blues from their positions on Frog Hill and secured Fox Covert from counterattack. The third dinner was very jolly, with copious toasts and later a much-applauded rendering of “Malinka” from the young Russian Ops Staff captain, who was not a spy but had a fine baritone voice. The Russian group was due to congregate in the main lobby after breakfast at nine A.M. the next morning to board the coach for Heathrow. The coach would come from London with two embassy staff on board to see them through the airport. During the singing of “Malinka,” no one noticed that Colonel Arbuthnot’s room, which was not locked, was entered by someone who left sixty seconds later as quietly as he had come and who later rejoined the group at the bar, coming from the direction of the men’s toilet.

  At ten minutes to six the next morning a figure in white-cowled tracksuit with blue piping, the empty left sleeve pinned to th
e side, trotted down the steps of the mess and turned toward Main Gate. The figure was spotted by a watcher behind the glass of a window in an upper room of another building two hundred yards away. He made a note but took no action.

  At the gate the Corporal of the Guard came out of the guardroom and threw up a salute to the figure as it ducked under the barrier. The runner, not wearing a cap, was unable to return the salute but raised a hand in salutation, then turned in the usual direction and jogged toward Tidworth.

  At ten past six the corporal glanced up, stared, then turned to his sergeant.

  “I’ve just seen Colonel Arbuthnot go past,” he said.

  “So?” asked the sergeant.

  “Twice,” said the corporal. The sergeant was tired. They would both be relieved in twenty minutes. Breakfast awaited. He shrugged.

  “Must have forgotten something,” he said. He would regret that remark—later, at the disciplinary hearing.

  Major Kuchenko ducked into some trees beside the road after half a mile and slipped out of the stolen white tracksuit and hid it in deep undergrowth. When he went back to the road he was in gray flannel slacks and tweed jacket over a shirt and tie. Only his Adidas running shoes were at odds with the outfit. He suspected but could not be sure that a mile behind him jogged an annoyed Colonel Arbuthnot, who had wasted ten fruitless minutes searching for his regular tracksuit before coming to the conclusion that his orderly must have taken it for laundering and not returned it. He was wearing his spare, and he had not yet noticed he was also missing a shirt, tie, jacket, slacks, and a pair of running shoes.

  Kuchenko could easily have stayed ahead of the British colonel until Arbuthnot turned around to make his way back, but he was saved the trouble by a car that came from behind him and stopped at his wave. Kuchenko leaned toward the window on the passenger side.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” he said, “but my car seems to have broken down. Back there. I was wondering whether I could get some help from a garage in North Tidworth?”

  “Bit early,” said the driver, “but I can run you up there. Jump in.”

  The paratroops major would have been amazed at Kuchenko’s sudden mastery of English. But the foreign accent was still there.

  “Not from these parts, are you?” asked the driver by way of conversation. Kuchenko laughed.

  “No. I am from Norway. Touring your British cathedrals.”

  Kuchenko was dropped by the kindly driver in the center of the sleepy town of North Tidworth at ten minutes to seven. The driver drove on toward Marlborough. He would never see any reason to mention the incident again, nor would anyone ever ask him.

  In the town center Kuchenko found a phone booth and at exactly one minute to seven dialed a London number, punching in a fifty-pence piece to start the call. It was answered at the fifth ring.

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Roth, Mr. Joe Roth,” said Kuchenko.

  “Yeah, this is Joe Roth speaking,” said the voice at the other end.

  “Pity,” said Kuchenko. “You see, I really hoped I might talk to Chris Hayes.”

  In his small but elegant Mayfair apartment, Joe Roth stiffened, and all his professional antennae went onto red alert. He had only been awake for twenty minutes, still in pajamas, unshaven, running a bath, and preparing his first coffee of the day. He had been crossing the sitting room from the kitchen, juice in one hand, coffee in the other, when the phone rang. It was early, even for him, and he was not a late riser, even though his job as Assistant Public Affairs officer at the American Embassy just a quarter of a mile away in Grosvenor Square did not require him to check in until ten.

  Joe Roth was CIA, but he was not the Company’s Head of London Station. That honor went to William Carver, and Carver was with Western Hemisphere Division, as all station heads would be. As such, Carver was “declared,” which meant that just about everyone who mattered knew what he was and what job he did. Carver would sit, ex officio, on the British Joint Intelligence Committee, the official representative of the Company in London.

  Roth came from the Office of Special Projects, a bureau formed only six years ago to handle, as its name implied, projects and active measures that Langley regarded as sufficiently sensitive to merit the station Heads later being able to claim innocence, even to America’s allies.

  All CIA officers, of whatever department they come from, have a real name and an operational or professional name. The real name, in friendly embassies, actually is real; Joe Roth really was Joe Roth and was listed as such in the Diplomatic List. But unlike Carver, Joe was undeclared, except to a tiny caucus of three or four British counterparts, in the Secret Intelligence Service. And his professional name was equally known to only that same few, plus some of his colleagues back in America. To have it thrown at him down a phone line at seven A.M., and in a voice with a non-British accent, was like a warning buzzer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said carefully, “You’ve got Joe Roth here. Who is that speaking?”

  “Listen carefully, Mr. Roth, or Mr. Hayes. My name is Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov. I am a full colonel of the KGB.”

  “Look, if this is a joke—”

  “Mr. Roth, my calling you by your operational name is no joke for you. My defection to the U.S.A. is no joke for me. And that is what I am offering to do. I want to get to America—fast. Very soon now, it will be impossible for me to go back to my own side. No excuse will be accepted. I have an enormous amount of information of great value to your Agency, Mr. Roth. You must make your decision quickly, or I go back while there is time.”

  Roth was scribbling rapidly on a jotting pad he had clawed off his sitting-room coffee table. The pad still had the scores from the poker game he had concluded late the previous evening with Sam McCready. He recalled later thinking, “Jesus, if Sam could hear this now, he’d go apeshit.” He cut in.

  “Where exactly are you now, Colonel?”

  “In a phone booth in a small town near Salisbury Plain,” said the voice. Grammatically, the English was near perfect. Only the accent was clearly foreign. Roth had been trained to discern accents, place them. This one was Slavic, probably Russian. He still wondered whether this would turn out to be one of Sam McCready’s crazy jokes, whether he would suddenly hear peals of laughter coming down the phone at him. Dammit, it wasn’t even April Fool’s Day. It was the third.

  “For three days,” said the voice, “I have been with a group of Soviet officers attending British military maneuvers on Salisbury Plain. Staying at Tidworth barracks. My cover there was as Major Pavel Kuchenko of the GRU. I walked out one hour ago. If I am not back within one hour, I cannot go back at all. It will take me half an hour to get back. You have thirty minutes to give me your decision, Mr. Roth.”

  “Okay, Colonel. I’ll go with it—so far. I want you to call me back in fifteen minutes. The line will be clear. You will have your answer.”

  “Fifteen minutes. Then I walk back,” said the voice, and the phone went down.

  Roth’s mind was racing. He was thirty-nine, and he had spent twelve years in the Agency. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. But then, many men spent their entire working lives in the Agency and never smelted a Soviet defector. But he knew about them, they all knew about them; all field operatives were briefed and lectured and trained to be aware of the constant possibility of a Soviet defection.

  Most, he knew, came after initial, tentative approaches. Usually, they came after long thought and some preparation by the defector. Messages were passed to the known Agency men in the area: “I want to meet, I want to discuss terms.” Usually the potential defector was asked to stay in place and provide a stream of information before finally “coming over.” If he refused, he was urged at least to come with a bagful of documents. The amount he could send out before coming over or bring with him would affect his standing, his rewards, his life-style. In the trade, it was called the bride-price.

  Occasionally, just occasionally, you got what is called a “walk-in.” The defector si
mply appeared, having burned his boats behind him, unable to go back. That left little choice; you either accepted the man or cast him back into a refugee camp. The latter was rarely done, not even in the case of a rather useless, low-level defector like a merchant seaman or a private soldier with nothing to offer. It was usually done only if lie-detector tests at the point of defection proved the man was a disinformation agent. Then America would refuse to accept him. When that happened, the Russians just bit the bullet, got their agent out of the refugee camp, and took him home.

  On one occasion, to Roth’s knowledge, the KGB had traced a turned-down defector to a refugee camp and liquidated him because he had failed the polygraph test, even though he had been telling the truth. The machine had interpreted his nervousness as lies. Damned bad luck. Of course, that was in the old days; the lie detectors were better now.

  And here was a man claiming to be a full colonel of the KGB who wanted just to walk in. No forewarning. No haggling. No suitcase full of documents fresh from the KGB Rezidentsia of his latest posting. And defecting right in the heart of England of all places, not the Middle East or Latin America. And to the Americans, not the Brits. Or had he already approached the Brits? Been turned down? Roth’s mind raced across the possibilities, and the minutes ticked away.

  Five past seven—five past two in Washington. Everyone asleep. He ought to call Calvin Bailey, head of Special Projects, his boss. Now no doubt fast asleep in Georgetown. But the time—there wasn’t time. He flipped open a wall cabinet to reveal his private computer. Swiftly, he tapped himself into the mainframe deep beneath the embassy in Grosvenor Square. He put the computer into encrypted mode and asked the mainframe to consider senior KGB officers known to the West. Then he asked: Who is Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov?

  One of the strange things about the covert world is the almost clublike atmosphere that can exist within it. Pilots share the same sort of camaraderie, but they are allowed to. Paratroopers have it also, and Special Forces. Professionals tend to respect each other, even across the barriers of rivalry, opposition, or outright hostility. In the Second World War the fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe and the RAF seldom hated each other, leaving such sentiments to the zealots and civilians. Professionals serve their political masters and bureaucrats loyally, but would usually prefer to sink a pint of beer with others of their own arcane skills, even the opposition.