“Jesus, Sam, you do have an asset somewhere in Moscow. For Christ’s sake, come clean!”
“Can’t,” said Sam. “And we don’t, anyway. Have someone in Moscow we haven’t told you about.”
Strictly speaking, he was not even lying.
“Then I’m sorry, Sam, but Orlov stays. He’s good. Our view is that your man—the one who doesn’t exist—is lying. It’s you, not us, who’s been taken for an awful ride. And that’s official. Orlov has passed three polygraph tests, for God’s sake. That’s proof enough.”
For answer, McCready produced a slip of paper from his breast pocket and laid it in front of Roth. It read:
We discovered that there were some East Europeans who could defeat the polygraph at any time. Americans are not very good at it because we are raised to tell the truth, and when we lie, it is easy to tell we are lying. But we find a lot of Europeans ... can handle the polygraph without a blip. ... There is an occasional Individual who lives in that part of the world who has spent his life lying about one thing or another and therefore becomes so good at it that he can pass the polygraph test.”
Roth snorted and tossed the paper back. “Some half-assed academic with no experience of Langley,” he said.
“Actually,” said McCready mildly, “it was said by Richard Helms two years ago.”
Richard Helms had been a legendary Director of Central Intelligence. Roth looked shaken. McCready rose.
“Joe, one thing Moscow has always longed for is to have the Brits and the Yanks fighting like Kilkenny cats. That’s exactly what we’re heading for, and Orlov’s only been in the country forty-eight hours. Think about it.”
In Washington, the DCI and the FBI had agreed that to see if there was truth in Orlov’s statement about Remyants, the only way to prove it was to pick him up. The planning took place through the day that Roth and McCready had their breakfast, and the arrest was fixed for the same evening, when Remyants left the Aeroflot office in downtown Washington, about five P.M. local time, long after dark in London.
The Russian emerged from the building a little after five and walked down the street, then cut across a pedestrian mall to where he had left his car.
The Aeroflot offices had been under surveillance, and Remyants was unaware of the six FBI agents, all armed, who moved in behind him as he crossed the mall. The agents intended to make the arrest as the Russian got into his car. It would be done quickly and discreetly. No one would notice.
The mall contained a series of paths between ragged and litter-strewn lawns, and various benches that had been intended for the good citizens of Washington to sit on while taking the sun or eating their brown-bag lunches. The city fathers could not have known that the small park would become a meeting place for drug pushers and their customers to score. On one of the benches, as Remyants crossed the mall toward the parking lot, a black man and a Cuban were negotiating a deal. Each dealer had backup men close by.
The fight was triggered by a scream of rage from the Cuban, who rose and pulled a knife. One of the black man’s bodyguards drew a handgun and shot him down. At least eight others from the two gangs pulled weapons and fired at their opponents. The few noninvolved civilians nearby screamed and scattered. The FBI agents, stunned for a second by the suddenness of it all, reacted with their Quantico training, dropped, rolled, and drew their guns.
Remyants took a single soft-nosed bullet in the back of the head and toppled forward. His killer was shot at once by an FBI agent. The two gangs—the blacks and the Cubans—scattered in different directions. The whole firefight took seven seconds and left two men dead, one Cuban and the Russian killed in the crossfire.
The American way of doing things is very technology-dependent, and it is sometimes criticized for this; but no one can deny the results when the technology is working at peak.
The two dead men were removed to the nearest morgue, where the FBI took control. The handgun used by the Cuban went for forensic analysis but offered no clues. It was an untraceable Czech Star, probably imported from Central or South America. The Cuban’s fingerprints gave better harvest. He was identified as Gonzalo Appio, and he was already on file with the FBI. Cross-checking by computer speedily revealed that he was also known to the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Metro-Dade Police Department covering Miami.
He was known as a drug dealer and contract hit man. Earlier in his miserable life he had been one of the Marielitos, those Cubans so generously “liberated” by Castro when he dispatched from the port of Mariel to Florida every criminal, psychopath, pederast, and low-life clogging up his prisons and asylums, and America was duped into taking them.
The only thing not proved about Appio, though suspected by the FBI, was that he was really a gunman for the DGI, Cuba’s KGB-dominated secret police. The evidence was based on Appio’s believed involvement in the slaying of two prominent and effective anti-Castro broadcasters who were working out of Miami.
The FBI passed the file to Langley, where it caused deep concern. It was the DDO, Frank Wright, who went over Bailey’s head and spoke to Joe Roth in London.
“We need to know, Joe. Now, fast. If there is any substance to the British reservations about Minstrel, we need to know. Gloves off, Joe. Lie-detector, the works. Get up there, Joe, and find out why things keep going wrong.”
Before he left for Alconbury, Roth saw Sam McCready again. It was not a happy meeting. He was bitter and angry.
“Sam, if you know something, really know something, you have got to come clean with me. I’m holding you responsible if we have made a bad mistake here, because you won’t level with us. We’ve leveled with you. Now come clean—what have you got?”
McCready stared at his friend blank-faced. He had played too much poker to give away anything that he did not want to. He was in a dilemma. Privately, he would have liked to tell Joe Roth about Keepsake, given him the hard evidence he needed to lose his faith in Orlov. But Keepsake was walking a very tight wire indeed, and strand by strand that wire was soon going to be cut away by Soviet counterintelligence, as soon as they got the bit between their teeth, convinced they had a leak somewhere in Western Europe. He could not, dare not, blow away Keepsake’s existence, let alone his rank and position.
“You have a problem, Joe,” he said. “Don’t blame me for it. I’ve gone as far as I can go. I think we both agree Milton-Rice might have been a coincidence, but not both.”
“There could have been a leak over here,” said Roth, and regretted it.
“No way,” said McCready calmly. “We’d have to have known time and place for the hit in Washington. We didn’t. It’s either Orlov setting them up by prearrangement, or it’s on your side. You know what I think; it’s Orlov. By the by, how many on your side have access to the Orlov product?”
“Sixteen,” said Roth.
“Jesus. You could have taken an ad in the New York Times.”
“Me, two assistants, tape-deck operators, analysts—it mounts up. The FBI knew about the Remyants pickup, but not Milton-Rice. Sixteen would have known about both—in time. I’m afraid we have a loose nut—probably low level, a clerk, cryptographer, secretary.”
“And I think you have a phony defector.”
“Whatever, I’m going to find out.”
“Can I come?” asked Sam.
“Sorry, buddy, not this time. This is CIA business now. In-house. See you, Sam.”
Colonel Pyotr Orlov noticed the change in the people around him as soon as Roth arrived back at Alconbury. Within minutes, the jocular familiarity had vanished. The CIA staff within the building became withdrawn and formal. Orlov waited patiently.
When Roth took his place opposite him in the debriefing room, two aides wheeled in a machine on a trolley. Orlov glanced at it. He had seen it before. The polygraph. His eyes went back to Roth.
“Something wrong, Joe?” he asked quietly.
“Yes, Peter, something very wrong.”
In a few brief sentences Roth informed the Ru
ssian of the fiasco in Washington. Something flickered in Orlov’s eyes. Fear? Guilt? The machine would find out.
Orlov made no protest as the technicians fitted the disks to his chest, wrists, and forehead. Roth did not operate the machine—there was a technician for that—but he knew the questions he wanted to ask.
The polygraph looks and performs something like an electrocardiograph found in any hospital. It records heart rate, pulse, sweating—any symptom normally produced by someone telling lies while under pressure, and the mental pressure is exercised simply by the experience of being tested.
Roth began as always with simple questions designed to establish a response norm. The fine pen drifted lazily over the rolling paper in gentle rises and falls. Three times Orlov had been so tested, and three times he had produced no noticeable symptoms as of a man lying. Roth asked him about his background, his years in the KGB, his defection—the information he had given so far.
Then he went for the hard ones. “Are you a double agent working for the KGB?”
“No.”
The pen kept drifting slowly up and down.
“Is the information you have given so far truthful?”
“Yes.”
“Is there any last vital information you have not given us?”
Orlov was silent. Then he gripped the arms of his chair. “No.”
The fine pen swerved violently up and down several times before settling. Roth glanced at the operator and got a nod of confirmation. He rose, crossed to the machine, glanced at the paper, and told the operator to switch it off.
“I’m sorry, Peter, but that was a lie.”
There was silence in the room. Five people gazed at the Russian, who was looking at the floor. Finally, he raised his eyes.
“Joe, my friend, can I speak to you? Alone? Really alone? No microphones—just you and me?”
It was against the rules, and a risk. Roth thought it over. Why? What did this enigmatic man who had failed the lie-detector test for the first time want to say that even security-cleared staff were not to hear? He nodded abruptly.
When they were alone, all the technology disconnected, he said, “Well?”
The Russian gave a long, slow sigh.
“Joe, did you ever wonder at the manner of my defection? The speed? Not giving you a chance to check with Washington?”
“Yes, I did. I asked you about it. Frankly, I was never completely satisfied with the explanations. Why did you defect that way?”
“Because I didn’t want to end like Volkov.”
Roth sat as if he had been punched in the belly. Everyone in the “business” knew of the disastrous Volkov case. In early September 1945, Konstantin Volkov, apparently Soviet Vice-Consul in Istanbul, Turkey, turned up at the British Consulate-General and told an astonished official that he was really the deputy head of the KGB in Turkey and wanted to defect. He offered to blow away 314 Soviet agents in Turkey and 250 in Britain. Most vital of all, he said, there were two British diplomats in the Foreign Office working for Russia and another man high in the British Secret Intelligence Service.
The news was sent to London while Volkov returned to his consulate. In London the matter was given to the head of the Russian Section. This agent took the necessary steps and flew out to Istanbul. The last that was seen of Volkov was a heavily bandaged figure being hustled aboard a Soviet transport plane bound for Moscow, where he died after hideous torture in the Lubyanka. The British Head of the Russian Section had arrived too late—not surprisingly, for he had informed Moscow from his London base. His name was Kim Philby, the very Soviet spy whom Volkov’s evidence would have exposed.
“What exactly are you saying to me, Peter?”
“I had to come over the way I came because I knew I could trust you. You were not high enough.”
“Not high enough for what?”
“Not high enough to be him.”
“I’m not following you, Peter,” said Roth, though he was.
The Russian spoke slowly and clearly, as if liberating himself from a long-held burden.
“For seventeen years the KGB has had a man inside the CIA. I believe that by now he has risen very high.”
Chapter 4
Joe Roth lay on his cot in his bedroom in the isolated building on Alconbury field and wondered what to do. A task that six weeks earlier had appeared fascinating and likely to advance his career by leaps and bounds had just turned into a nightmare.
For forty years, since its creation in 1948, the CIA had had one obsessive concern: to keep itself pure from the infiltration of a Soviet “mole.” To this end billions of dollars had been spent in counterintelligence precautions. All staff had been checked and checked again, given lie-detector tests, questioned, vetted, and vetted again.
And it had worked. While the British had been rocked in the early fifties by the treachery of Philby, Burgess, and Maclean, the Agency had remained pure. The Philby affair had rumbled on as the ousted British SIS man had eked out a living in Beirut until his final departure to Moscow in 1963, but the Agency had remained clean.
When France was shaken by the Georges Paques affair and Britain again by George Blake in the early sixties, the CIA stayed unpenetrated. Through all of that time, the counterintelligence arm of the Agency, the Office of Security, had been headed by a remarkable man, James Jesus Angleton, a lonely, secretive, and obsessive man who lived and breathed for one thing: to keep the Agency free from Soviet infiltration.
Finally, Angleton had fallen victim to his own innate suspicions. He began to believe that despite his efforts, there really was a mole loyal to Moscow inside the CIA. Despite all the tests and all the vetting, he became convinced that a traitor had somehow gotten in. His reasoning seemed to be, “If there isn’t a mole, there ought to be. So there must be; so there is.” The hunt for the suspected “Sasha” took up more and more time and effort.
The paranoid Russian defector Golytsin, who held the KGB responsible for everything bad on the planet, agreed.
This was music to Angleton’s ears. The hunt for Sasha was stepped up. Rumor began that his name started with K. Officers whose name started with K found their lives being pulled apart. One resigned in disgust; others were dismissed because they could not prove their innocence—a prudent move, perhaps, but not very good for morale, which slumped. For ten more years, from 1964 to 1974, the hunt went on. Finally, Director William Colby had had enough. He eased Angleton into retirement.
The Office of Security passed into other hands. Its duties to keep the Agency free of Soviet penetration continued, but at a lower and less aggressive tenor.
Ironically, the British, having gotten rid of their older-generation ideological traitors, suffered no more spy scandals from within their intelligence community. Then the pendulum seemed to swing. America, so free of traitors since the late forties, suddenly produced a rash of them—not ideologues, but wretches prepared to betray their country for money. Boyce, Lee, Harper, Walker, and finally Howard had been inside the CIA and betrayed American agents working in their native Russia. Denounced by Urchenko before his bizarre redefection, Howard had managed to slip away to Moscow before he could be arrested. The affairs of Howard’s treachery and Urchenko’s redefection, both the previous year, had left the Agency with a very red face.
But all this was as nothing compared with the potential effect of Orlov’s claim. If it was true, the manhunt alone could tear the Agency apart. If it was true, the damage assessment would take years—the realignment of thousands of agents, codes, foreign networks, and alliances would last for a decade and cost millions. The reputation of the Agency would be badly damaged for years to come.
The question that raged through Roth’s mind as he tossed the night away was, “Who the hell can I go to?”
Just before dawn, he made up his mind, rose, dressed, and packed a suitcase. Before leaving he looked in on Orlov, who was sound asleep, and said to Kroll, “Look after him for me. No one enters, no one leaves. That man has just be
come incredibly valuable.”
Kroll did not understand why, but he nodded. He was a man who followed orders and never questioned why.
Roth drove to London, avoided the embassy, went to his apartment, and took a passport in a name other than his own. He secured one of the last seats on a private British carrier to Boston and connected at Logan Airport into Washington National. Even with the five-hour time saving, it was dusk when he drove a rented car into Georgetown, parked, and walked down K Street to the far end, close to the campus of Georgetown University.
The house he sought was a fine building of red brick, distinguished from others near it only by extensive security systems that scanned the street and all approaches to it. He was intercepted as he crossed the road toward the portico, and he flashed his CIA pass. At the door he asked to see the man he had come for, was told he was at dinner, and asked that a message be passed. Minutes later, he was admitted and shown into a paneled library redolent of leather-bound books and a hint of cigar. He sat and waited. Then the door opened, and the Director of Central Intelligence entered.
Though he was not accustomed to receiving youthful and relatively junior CIA staffers at his home, except on a summons, he seated himself in a leather club chair, gestured Roth to sit opposite him, and quietly asked for the meaning of the visit. Carefully, Roth told him.
The DCI was over seventy, an unusual age for the post, but he was an unusual man. He had served with the OSS in World War II running agents into Nazi-occupied France and the Low Countries. After the war, with the OSS disbanded, he had returned to private life, taking over a small factory from his father and building it to a huge conglomerate. When the CIA had been formed to succeed the OSS, he had been offered a chance to join by the first Director, Allen Dulles, but had declined.
Years later, a wealthy man and a major contributor to the Republican party, he had noticed and attached himself to a rising ex-actor who was running for the governorship of California. When Ronald Reagan won the White House, he had asked his trusted friend to take over the CIA.