His deputy, Bruce “Gracie” Fields, was awakened at his apartment and asked to be in by nine. Hugo Gray, now back in his own bed, received a similar call. At eight Macdonald asked the security staff, both senior ex-NCOs from the army, to prepare the bubble for a conference at 9:15.
“The point is,” explained Macdonald to his two colleagues just after that time, “yesterday I came into possession of a document. No need to tell you its contents. Suffice to say, if it is a forgery or a hoax, we are wasting our time. If it is genuine, and I don’t know that yet, it could be a significant input. Hugo, tell Gracie the background, will you?”
Gray filled in what he knew, what Celia Stone had told him.
“In a perfect world,” said Macdonald, using one of his favorite phrases and causing the younger men to cover their grins, “I’d like to know who the old man was, the manner by which he came into possession of what might be a seriously classified file, and why he chose that car in that place to deposit it. Did he know Celia Stone? Did he know it was an embassy car? And if so, why us? In the meantime, is there anyone in the embassy who can draw?”
“Draw?” asked Fields.
“As in create a picture, a portrait.”
“I think one of the wives runs an art class,” said Fields. “Used to be an illustrator of children’s books in London. Married to some fellow in Chancery.”
“Check it out. If she can, put her together with Celia Stone. Meanwhile I m going to have a chat with Celia myself. Two other things. Chummy may show up again try to approach us hang around the building. I’m going to ask Corporal Meadows and Sergeant Reynolds to keep an eye on the main gate. If they spot him, they’ll report to either of you. Try and get him inside for a cup of tea. Second, he may try other tricks elsewhere and get himself arrested. Gracie, don’t you have somebody in the police?”
Fields nodded. He was the longest-serving in Moscow of the three, inheriting when he arrived a range of low-level sources around Moscow and creating several of his own.
“Inspector Novikov. He’s with Homicide at the Petrovka headquarters building. Occasionally useful.”
“Have a word,” said Macdonald. “Nothing to do with documents thrown into cars. Just say there’s an old codger been pestering our staff out on the street, demanding a private interview with the ambassador. We’re not fussed about it, but we’d like to ask him to leave us alone. Show him the picture, if we get a picture, but don’t let him keep it. When’s your next meet?”
“Nothing scheduled,” said Fields. “I call him from phone booths.”
“Okay, see if he can help. Meanwhile, I’m going to go over to London for a couple of days. Gracie, you hold the fort.”
Celia Stone was intercepted in the lobby when she arrived and, somewhat startled, was asked to join Macdonald, not in his office but in Conference Room A. She did not know this room was the bug-proof one.
Macdonald was very kind and talked with her for almost an hour. He noted every detail and she accepted his story that the old man had pestered other staff members with his demands to see the ambassador. Would she agree to help draw up a portrait of the old tramp? Of course she would; anything to help.
Attended by Hugo Gray, she spent the lunch hour with the wife of the Deputy Head of Chancery who, with her guidance, produced a charcoal and crayon sketch of the tramp. A silver marking pen highlighted the three steel teeth. When it was finished Celia nodded and said: “That’s him.”
After lunch Jock Macdonald asked Corporal Meadows to draw a sidearm and escort him to Sheremetyevo Airport. He did not expect to be intercepted, but he did not know whether the rightful owners of the document in his briefcase might wish to recover their property. As an added precaution he chained the case to his left wrist, covering the metal with a light summer raincoat.
When the embassy Jaguar rolled out of the gates, all this was invisible anyway. He noticed a black Chaika parked down Sofia Quay, but it made no move to follow the Jaguar, so he thought no more of it. In fact the Chaika was waiting for a small red Rover to emerge.
At the airport Corporal Meadows escorted him to the barrier, where his diplomatic passport eliminated all controls. After a short wait in Departures he boarded the British Airways flight for Heathrow and after takeoff breathed a slow sigh and ordered a gin and tonic.
Washington, April 1985
IF the Archangel Gabriel had descended on Washington to ask the Rezident of the KGB team in the Soviet Embassy which of all the officers in the CIA he would like to turn traitor and spy for Russia, Colonel Stanislav Androsov would not have hesitated long.
He would have replied: I’d like the head of the Counterintelligence Group attached to the Soviet Division of Ops Directorate.
All intelligence agencies have a counterintelligence arm working inside the apparatus with them. The job of the counterintelligence people, which does not always make them popular with their colleagues, is to check up on everyone else. It is a job that breaks down into three functions.
Counterintelligence will attend and play a leading role in the debriefing of defectors from the other side, simply to try to discover whether the defector is genuine or a cunning plant. A false defector may bring some real information with him, but his primary task is to spread disinformation: either to convince his new hosts they do not have a traitor in their own midst when they do, or in some other way to lead their hosts down a maze of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. Years of wasted time and effort can result from a skillful plant.
Counterintelligence also checks out those from the opposition who, while not actually crossing over in person, have allowed themselves to be recruited as spies but may in fact be double agents. A double is one who pretends to be recruited while in fact remaining loyal to his own team and acting on its orders. He will provide some granules of genuine information to establish his authenticity and then spring the real sting, which is entirely false and can create havoc among the people he is supposed to be working for.
Finally, counterintelligence has to ensure that its own side has not been penetrated, is not harboring a traitor at its own breast.
To accomplish these tasks, counterintelligence has to have total access. It can call up all the files on all the defectors and their debriefings, going back over years. It can examine the careers and recruitment of all current assets working for the agency deep in the heart of opponent territory and exposed to every conceivable danger of betrayal. And counterintelligence can demand the personnel file of every officer on its own side. All in the name of checking loyalty and genuineness.
Because of rigorous compartmentalization and the need-to-know principle, an intelligence officer acting as controller of one or two operations can betray those operations, but will normally have no idea what his colleagues are working on. Only counterintelligence has access to the lot. That is why Colonel Androsov, had he been asked by the archangel, would have chosen the head of counterintelligence for the Soviet Division. Counterintelligence people have to be the most loyal of the loyal.
In July 1983, Aldrich Hazen Ames was appointed to head the Soviet Counterintelligence Group of the SE Division. As such he had complete access to its two sub-branches: the USSR Desk handling all Soviet assets working for the United States but posted inside the USSR, and the External Ops Desk handling all assets then posted outside the USSR.
On April 16, 1985, short of money, he walked into the Soviet Embassy on Washington’s Sixteenth Street, asked to see Colonel Androsov, and volunteered to spy for Russia. For fifty thousand dollars.
He brought with him some small bona fides. He gave away the names of three Russians who had approached the CIA offering to work for it. Later he would say he thought they were probably double agents, i.e., not genuine. Whatever, those three gentlemen were never heard from again. He also brought an internal CIA personnel list with his own name highlighted to prove he was who he said he was. Then he left, walking for the second time right past the FBI cameras filming the front forecourt. The tapes were never p
layed back.
Two days later he got his fifty thousand dollars. It was just the start. The most damaging traitor in America’s history, back to and probably including Benedict Arnold, had just started work.
Later analysts would puzzle over two enigmas. The first was how such a grossly inadequate, underperforming, alcohol-abusing loser could ever have risen through the ranks to such an amazing position of trust. The second was how, when the senior hierarchs knew by that December in their secret hearts that they had a traitor among them somewhere, he could have remained unexposed for a further—and for the CIA catastrophic—eight years.
The answer to the second has a dozen facets. Incompetence, lethargy, and complacency within the CIA, luck for the traitor, a skillful disinformation campaign by the KGB to protect its mole, more lethargy, squeamishness, and indolence at Langley, red herrings, more luck for the traitor, and, finally, the memory of James Angleton.
Angleton had once been head of counterintelligence at the agency, rising to become a legend and ending deranged by paranoia. This strange man, without private life or humor, became convinced there was a KGB mole, code-named Sasha, inside Langley. In fanatic pursuit of this nonexistent traitor, he crippled the careers of loyal officer after loyal officer until he finally brought the Operations Directorate to its knees. Those who survived him, risen by 1985 to high office, were desolated at the thought of doing what had to be done—searching with rigor for the real mole.
As for the first question, the answer can be given in two words: Ken Mulgrew.
In twenty years with the agency before he turned traitor, Ames had had three postings outside Langley. In Turkey his Chief of Station deemed him to be a complete waste of space; the veteran Dewey Clarridge loathed and despised him from the start.
In the New York office he had a lucky break that brought him kudos. Although the Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, Arkady Shevchenko, had been working for the CIA before Ames arrived, and his final defection to the States in April 1978 was masterminded by another officer, Ames handled the Ukrainian in between. He was by then already becoming a very serious drinker.
His third posting, in Mexico, was a fiasco. He was consistently drunk, insulted colleagues and foreigners, fell down and was helped home by the Mexican police, broke every standing operating procedure imaginable, and recruited nobody.
On both the overseas postings Ames’s performance reports were appalling. In one wide-spectrum performance assessment he came 198th out of 200 officers.
Normally such a career would go nowhere near the top. By the early eighties all the senior hierarchs—Carey Jordan, Dewey Clarridge, Milton Bearden, Gus Hathaway, and Paul Redmond—thought he was a useless article. But not Ken Mulgrew, who became his friend and protector.
It was he who sanitized the dreadful performance and assessment reports, smoothed the path, and procured the promotions. As Ames’s senior he overrode the objections and, while heading up Personnel Allocations, slipped Ames into the Counterintelligence Group.
Basically, they were drinking buddies, both serial boozers who with the self-pity of the alcoholic agreed with each other that the agency was grossly unfair to both of them. It was a judgmental error that would soon cost a lot of lives.
¯
LEONID Zaitsev the Rabbit was dying but he did not know it. He was in great pain. This he knew.
Colonel Grishin believed in pain. He believed in pain as persuasion, pain as example to the witnesses, and pain as punishment. Zaitsev had sinned and the colonel’s orders were that he should fully comprehend the meaning of pain before he died.
The interrogation had lasted all day and there had been no call to use violence because he had told everything that was asked of him. Grishin had been alone with him most of the time, because he did not wish the guards to hear what had been stolen.
The colonel had asked him, quite gently, to start at the beginning, so he had. He had been required to repeat the story over and over again until Grishin was satisfied no detail had been left out. There was not really much to tell.
Only when he explained why he had done it was the colonel’s face masked in disbelief.
“A beer? The English gave you a beer?”
By midday Grishin was convinced he had it all. The chances were, he reckoned, that confronted with this scarecrow the young Englishwoman would throw the file away, but he could not be sure. He dispatched a car with four trusted men to stake out the embassy and wait for the little red car, then follow it to wherever she lived and reported back.
Just after three he gave final orders to his Guards and left. As he drove out of the compound, an A-300 Airbus with British Airways livery on its tailfin turned toward northern Moscow and headed west. He did not notice. He ordered his driver to take him back to the dacha off Kiselny Boulevard.
There were four of them. The Rabbit’s legs would have buckled, but they knew that so two of them held him up, fingers digging hard into his upper arms. The other two were one front, one back. They worked slowly and placed their punches diligently.
The big fists were wrapped in heavy knobbed brass knuckles. The punches crushed his kidneys, tore his liver, and ruptured his spleen. A kick pulped his old testicles. The man at the front drove into the belly, then moved up to the chest. He fainted twice but a bucket of cold water brought him around and the pain returned. His legs ceased to function so they held his light frame on tiptoe.
Toward the end the ribs in the skinny chest cracked and sprung, two driving deep into the lungs. Something warm and sweet and sticky rose in his throat so that he could not breathe.
His vision narrowed to a tunnel and he saw not the gray concrete blocks of the room behind the camp armory, but a bright sunny day with a sandy road and pine trees. He could not see the speaker, but a voice was saying to him:
“Come on, mate, ‘ave a beer ... ‘ave a beer.”
The light faded to gray but he could still hear the voice repeating words he could not understand. “ ‘Ave a beer, ‘ave a beer ...” Then the lights went out forever.
Washington, June 1985
TWO months almost to the day after he got his first cash payment of $50,000, Aldrich Ames, in a single afternoon, destroyed almost the entire SE Division of the Ops Directorate of the CIA.
Just before lunch, having raided the top secret 301 files, he swept seven pounds of classified documents and cable traffic off his desk and into two plastic shopping bags. With these he walked down the labyrinthine corridors to the elevators, rode to the ground floor, and let himself out through the turnstiles with his laminated ID card. No guard paused to ask what was in the bags. Climbing into his car in the huge parking lot, he drove the twenty minutes to Georgetown, the elegant section of Washington renowned for its European-style restaurants.
He arrived at Chadwick’s, a bar and restaurant under the K Street Freeway on the waterfront, and met the contact designated for him by Colonel Androsov, who as the KGB Rezident knew he himself would probably have been tailed by the FBI watchers. The contact was an ordinary Soviet diplomat called Chuvakhin.
To the Russian Ames handed over what he had. He never even demanded a price. When it came it would be enormous, the first of many that would make him a millionaire. The Russians, normally stingy with valuable hard-currency dollars, never even haggled after that. They knew they had hit the mother lode.
From Chadwick’s the bags went to the embassy and thence to the Yazenevo headquarters of the First Chief Directorate. There the analysts could not believe their eyes.
The coup made Androsov an instant star and Ames the most vital asset in the firmament. The FCD’s commanding general, Vladimir Kryuchkov, originally a snoop put into the FCD by the ever-suspicious Andropov but since risen to higher things, at once ordered the formation of a top-secret group to be detached from all other tasks and assigned only to handle the Ames product. Ames was code-named Kolokol, meaning Bell, and the task force became the Kolokol Group.
In those shopping bags were des
criptions of fourteen agents, almost the SE Division’s entire array of assets within the USSR. The actual names were not included, but they did not need to be.
Any counterintelligence detective, told that there is a mole inside his own network and told that the man was recruited in Bogotá, then worked in Moscow, and is now in service in Lagos, would work it out pretty fast. Only one career will match those postings. A check of the records usually suffices.
A senior CIA officer later calculated that forty-five anti-KGB operations, virtually the CIA’s entire menu, collapsed after the summer of 1985. Not a single top agent working for the CIA whose name had been on the 301 files continued to function after the spring of 1986.
¯
JOCK Macdonald’s first port of call on arriving in the late afternoon at Heathrow was the headquarters building of the SIS at Vauxhall Cross. He was tired, although he had dared to take a catnap on the plane, and the notion of going to his club for a bath and a real sleep was tempting. The flat he and his wife, still in Moscow, retained in Chelsea was not available, being let to others.
But he wanted the file in the briefcase still attached to his wrist under lock and key inside the HQ building before he could relax. The Service car that had met him at Heathrow dropped him in front of the green-glass and sandstone monster on the south bank of the Thames that now housed the Service since its move from shabby old Century House seven years earlier.
He penetrated the security systems at the entrance, assisted by the eager young probationer who had accompanied him from the airport, and finally lodged the file in the safe of the head of Russia Division. His colleague had welcomed him warmly but with some curiosity.
“Drink?” asked Jeffrey Marchbanks, indicating what appeared to be a wood-paneled filing cabinet but which both men knew contained a bar.
“Good idea. Been a long day, and a rough one. Scotch.”