The head seemed intact apart from the empty eye sockets, but he could see that this damage was the work of birds. The man had lain for about six days undiscovered in the woods near the Minsk Highway. Below the pelvis the legs seemed discolored, as with age and putrefaction, but undamaged. Between thorax and genitals there was hardly a square inch not black with massive bruising.
Putting down the scalpel, he turned the body over. Same at the back. Rolling the corpse back again, he took his scalpel and began to cut giving his running commentary into the turning tape recorder. Later this tape would enable him to write up his report for the goons in Homicide down at Petrovka. He began with the date: August 2, 1999.
Washington, February 1986
IN the middle of the month to the joy of Jason Monk and the considerable surprise of his superiors in SE Division Major Pyotr Solomin made contact. He wrote a letter.
Wisely, he did not even attempt to contact any Westerner in Moscow and certainly not the American Embassy. He wrote to the address Monk had given him in East Berlin.
The giving of the address at all was a risk but a calculated one. If Solomin had gone to the KGB to betray the safe house, he would have had some impossible questions to answer. The interrogators would have known he would never have been given such an address unless he had agreed to work for the CIA. If he protested that he had only been pretending to work for the CIA, that would have been worse.
Why, he would have been asked, did you not report the approach immediately, on first contact, to the commanding colonel of the GRU in Aden, and why did you allow the American who contacted you to escape? Those questions were unanswerable.
So Solomin was either going to stay mum about the whole thing, or he was on the team. The letter indicated the latter.
In the USSR all mail coming in from or heading out to abroad was intercepted and read. Ditto all phone calls, cables, faxes, and telexes. But internal Soviet mail, by its sheer volume, could not be unless sender or recipient were under suspicion. The same applied to mail within the Soviet bloc, and that included East Germany.
The East Berlin address belonged to a subway driver who worked as a postman for the agency and was well paid for it. Letters arriving at his apartment in a run-down building in the Friedrichshain district were always addressed to Franz Weber.
Weber had actually been the previous tenant of the flat and was conveniently dead. If the subway driver had ever been challenged, he could plausibly have sworn that there had been two letters already, he could not understand a word of Russian, they were addressed to Weber, Weber was dead so he had thrown them away. An innocent man.
The letters never had a return address or surname. The text was banal and boring: Hope this finds you well, things here are fine, how are your studies in Russian coming along, I hope we shall renew our acquaintance one day, all best wishes, your pen pal Ivan.
Even the East German secret police, the Stasis, could have deduced from the text only that Weber had met a Russian on some kind of cultural exchange fest and they had become pen pals. This sort of thing was encouraged anyway.
Even if the Stasis had deciphered the hidden message in invisible ink between the lines, it would have indicated only that Weber, deceased, had been a rat who had got away with it.
At the Moscow end, once the missive had been dropped in a mailbox, the sender became untraceable.
Once he had received a letter from Russia, the subway motorman, Heinrich, sent it over the Wall into the West. How he did it sounds weird, but much stranger things happened in the divided city of Berlin during the Cold War. In fact his method was so simple that he was never caught. The Cold War ended, Germany was reunited, and Heinrich retired to a very comfortable old age.
Before Berlin was divided by the Wall in 1961 to prevent the East Germans escaping, it shared an all-city subway system. After the Wall, many tunnels between East and West were blocked off. But there was one stretch where the East German section of the system became an elevated rail and rattled across a stretch of West Berlin.
For this transit from East across a bit of the West and back into the East, all windows and doors were sealed. East Berlin passengers could sit and look down on a piece of West Berlin, but they could not get there.
Up in the cab, all alone, Heinrich would ease down his window and at a certain point, using a catapult, shoot a projectile like a small golf ball out into a derelict bomb site. Knowing Heinrich’s work roster, a middle-aged man would be walking his dog there. When the train had rattled out of sight, he would pick up the golf ball and bring it to his colleagues at the CIA’s enormous West Berlin Station. Unscrewed, the ball revealed the tightly furled onionskin letter inside.
Solomin had news, and it was all good. After repatriation there had been intensive debriefing and then a week’s leave. He had reported back to the Ministry of Defense for reassignment. In the lobby he had been spotted by the deputy defense minister for whom he had built the dacha three years earlier. The man had been promoted to First Deputy Minister.
Although he wore the uniform of a Colonel General, with enough medals to sink a gunboat, the man was really a creature of the apparat who had come up the political ladder. It pleased him to have a rugged combat soldier from Siberia in his entourage. He was delighted with his dacha, completed under schedule, and his aide-de-camp had just retired on health (consumption of vodka) grounds. He raised Solomin to Lieutenant-Colonel and gave him the post.
Finally Solomin, at considerable risk, gave his own residential address in Moscow and asked for instructions. Had the KGB intercepted and deciphered the letter he would have been done for. But as he could not approach the U.S. Embassy, Langley had to be told how to approach him. He should have been supplied with a much more sophisticated communications package before leaving Yemen, but the civil war intervened.
Ten days later he got a traffic violation final-notice demand. The envelope bore the logo of the Central Traffic Office. It was posted in Moscow. No one intercepted it. The demand and the envelope were so well forged that he nearly rang the Traffic Office to protest he had never gone through a red light. Then he saw the sand trickling out of the envelope.
He kissed his wife as she left to take the children to school, and when he was alone painted the demand notice with the enhancer from the small flask he had smuggled back from Aden in his shaving kit. The message was simple. The following Sunday. Midmorning. A café on Leninsky Prospekt.
He was on his second coffee when an anonymous figure passed by, struggling into an overcoat against the chill blast outside. From the empty sleeve a single pack of Russian Marlboros dropped onto Solomin’s table. He covered it with his newspaper. The overcoat left the café without looking back.
The pack appeared to be full of cigarettes, but the twenty filters were a block, glued together and with nothing smokable beneath them. In the cavity were a tiny camera, ten rolls of film, a sheet of rice paper describing three dead drops with directions for how to find them, and six types of chalk mark, with their locations, to indicate when the drops were empty or needed servicing. Also a warm personal letter from Monk beginning, “So, my hunter friend, we are going to change the world.”
A month later Orion made his first delivery and picked up more rolls of film. His information came from the deepest heart of the Soviet arms-industrial complex, and it was priceless.
¯
PROFESSOR Kuzmin checked over the transcript of his notes on the postmortem of Cadaver 158 and made a few annotations in his own hand. He was not even going to ask his overworked secretary to do a retype; let the mutton-heads down at Homicide work it out for themselves.
He had no doubt that Homicide was where the file would have to go. He tried to be merciful to the detectives, and where there was some doubt he would sign off the deceased as an “accidental” or “natural causes” if he could. Then the relatives could collect and do what they wished, or, in the event of an unidentified body, it would remain in the morgue for the statutory time required b
y law. He would alert Missing Persons, and if they could not come up with an ID, the body would eventually go to a pauper’s grave, courtesy of the mayor of Moscow, or to the anatomy classes.
But 158 was a homicide, and there was no way of getting around it. Short of a pedestrian being hit by a truck at full gallop, he had seldom seen such internal damage. One single blow, even by a truck, could not have achieved it all. He supposed being trampled on by a herd of buffalo might produce the same effect, but there were few buffalo in Moscow and in any case they would stamp on head and legs as well. Cadaver 158 had been beaten many times by blunt objects between the neck and hips, both sides.
When he had finished his notes he signed and dated them, August 3, at the bottom and put them in his out tray.
“Homicide?” asked his secretary brightly.
“Homicide, John Doe Desk,” he confirmed. She typed out the buff envelope, put the file inside, and placed the package beside her. On her way out that evening she would give it to the porter who lived in a cubbyhole on the ground floor, and he would in due course give it to the van driver who took the files to their various destinations around Moscow.
In the meantime Cadaver 158 lay in the icy darkness minus his eyes and most of his innards.
Langley, March 1986
CAREY Jordan stood at his window and stared out at his favorite view. It was late in the month and the first faint haze of green was coming upon the forest between the CIA main building and the Potomac River. Soon the glint of water, always visible through the leafless woods in winter, would disappear. He loved Washington; it had more woods, trees, parks, and gardens than any city he knew, and spring was his favorite month.
At least, it had been. Spring 1986 was proving a nightmare. Sergei Bokhan, the GRU officer the CIA had been running in Athens, had made clear during his repeated debriefings in America that he believed if he had flown back to Moscow he would have faced a firing squad. He could not prove it, but the excuse his superior officer had given for his recall, his son’s bad grades at military academy, were simply a lie. Therefore, he had been blown. He had not made any mistakes himself, so he believed he had been betrayed.
As Bokhan had been among the first three to experience problems, the CIA had been skeptical. Now they were less unbelieving. Five others around the world had been mysteriously recalled in midposting and had vaporized into thin air.
That made six. With the Brits’ man Gordievsky, seven. Five more, based inside the USSR, had also vanished. There was not a single major source, representing years of hard work, patience, and cunning, and a massive investment of tax dollars, now left functioning. Bar two.
Behind him Harry Gaunt, head of the SE Division, which was the principal—nay, at the moment the only—victim of the virus, sat plunged in thought. Gaunt was the same age as the DDO and they had come up through the ranks together, weathering years in foreign outstations, recruiting their sources, and playing the Great Game against the KGB enemy, and they trusted each other like brothers.
That was the trouble; inside the SE Division they all trusted each other. They had to. They were the inner core, the most exclusive club, the cutting edge of the covert war. Yet each man harbored a terrible suspicion. Howard, code breaks, clever detective work by the KGB’s Line KR, might account for five, six, even seven blown-away agents. But fourteen? The whole goddam lot?
And yet there could not be a traitor. There must not be. Not in the Soviet/East European Division. There was a knock on the door. The mood lightened. The last remaining success story was waiting to come in.
“Sit down, Jason,” said the DDO. “Harry and I just wanted a word to say ‘Well done.’ Your man Orion has come up with real paydirt. The guys in Analysis are having a field day. So we reckon the agent who brought him in is worth a GS-15 tag.”
Promotion, from GS-14 to GS-15. He thanked them.
“How is your man Lysander in Madrid?”
“He’s fine, sir. He’s reporting regularly. Not cosmic stuff, but useful. His tour’s nearly up. He’ll be going back to Moscow soon.”
“He hasn’t been recalled prematurely?”
“No, sir. Should he?”
“No reason at all, Jason.”
“Could I say something, speak frankly?”
“Fire away.”
“There’s word out in the Division that we’ve been having a rough time these past six months.”
“Really?” said Gaunt. “Well, people will gossip.”
Up to that point the full import of the disaster had been confined to a top ten men at the peak of the agency hierarchy. But though Ops had six thousand employees, a thousand of them in the SE Division with only a hundred at Monk’s level, it was still a village and in a village word spreads. Monk took a breath and plunged on.
“The talk is that we have been losing agents. I even heard a figure of up to ten.”
“You know the need-to-know rules, Jason.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, maybe we have had a few problems. It happens in all agencies. Runs of good luck and runs of bad. What’s your point?”
“Even if the figure was anything like ten, there is only one place all such information is gathered together in one place. The 301 files.”
“I think we know how the agency is run, soldier,” growled Gaunt.
“So how come Lysander and Orion are still running free?” asked Monk.
“Look, Jason,” said the DDO patiently. “I told you once you were weird. Meaning unconventional, a rule breaker. But that you were lucky. Okay, we have had some losses, but don’t forget your two assets were in the 301 files as well.”
“No, they weren’t.”
An observer could have heard a peanut drop on the pile carpet. Harry Gaunt stopped fiddling with his pipe, which he never smoked indoors but used like an actor’s prop.
“I just never got around to filing their details with Central Registry. It was an oversight. I’m sorry.”
“Just where are the original reports? Your own reports, covering recruitment details, places, times of meetings?” asked Gaunt at last.
“In my safe. They’ve never left.”
“And all ongoing operating procedures?”
“In my head.”
There was another even longer pause.
“Thank you, Jason,” said the DDO at last. “We’ll be in touch.”
Two weeks later there was a major strategy campaign at the pinnacle of the Ops Directorate. Carey Jordan, working with only two fellow analysts, had whittled the 198 who theoretically had had access over the previous twelve months to the 301 files down to forty-one. Aldrich Ames, by then still taking his Italian course, was on the smaller list.
Jordan, with Gaunt, Gus Hathaway, and two others argued that to make sure, the forty-one should be subjected, however painful it might be, to serious investigation. That would mean a hostile polygraph test and a check of private finances.
The polygraph was an American invention and great store was set by it. Only research in the late eighties and early nineties revealed how flawed it could be. For one thing, an experienced liar can beat it, and espionage is based on deception, hopefully only of the enemy.
For another, the questioners need to be superbly briefed to ask the right questions. They cannot be so briefed unless the subject has been checked out. To sort out the liar, they need to cause the guilty party to think, Oh my God, they know, they know, and set the pulses racing. If the liar can discern from the questions that they know nothing, he will calm down and stay calm. This is the difference between a friendly and a hostile polygraph test. The friendly version is a waste of paper if the subject is a skilled and prepared dissembler.
Key to the inquiry the DDO wanted would be a check on the subjects’ finances. Had they but known it, Aldrich Ames, broke and desperate after a messy divorce and remarriage twelve months earlier, was by then awash with cash, all deposited since April 1985.
Leading the group that opposed the DDO was Ken Mulgrew
. He evoked the frightening damage that James Angleton had achieved with his constant checking on loyal officers, pointing out that to check out private finances was a massive invasion of privacy and an assault on civil rights.
Gaunt countered that never in Angleton’s day had there been a sudden loss of a dozen agents in a brief six months. Angleton’s own investigations had been based on paranoia; the agency in 1986 was gazing at solid evidence that something had gone badly wrong.
The hawks lost. Civil rights won the day. The “hard” check on the forty-one was vetoed.
¯
INSPECTOR Pavel Volsky sighed as another file thumped onto his desk.
A year earlier he had been perfectly happy as a top sergeant in Organized Crime. At least there they had got a chance to raid the warehouses of the underworld and confiscate their ill-gotten gains. A smart sergeant could live well when confiscated luxuries suffered a slight skim-off before being handed over to the state.
But no, his wife had wanted to be the lady of a Detective Inspector so when the chance occurred he took the course, the promotion, and the transfer to Homicide.
He could not foresee that they would give him the John Doe desk. When he gazed at the tide of “who-knows-who-cares” files that drifted across his vision, he often wished he was back at Shabolovka Street.
At least most John Does had a motive attached. Robbery, of course. With the wallet gone the victim had lost his money, credit cards, family snapshots, and the all-important pazport, the internal Russian ID document, with picture, that carried all the necessary details. Oh, and his life, or he would not be on a slab in a morgue.
In the case of an upstanding citizen with a wallet worth taking there would usually be family. They would complain to Missing Persons, who ran a weekly gallery of family photos over to him, and often a match could be made. Then the weeping family could be told where to identify and collect their missing member.
In the cases where robbery was not the motive, the body would usually still have the pazport somewhere about the pockets, so the file would never come to Volsky anyway.