Adil murmured to Kapo in Albanian. Kapo said, “Adil tells that his half brother called Hsynitk was trialed for listening American music on radio and shot dead in parking lot of Tiranë soccer stadium half of one hour later. Our blood enemy is Enver Hoxha, for sure.”
Kapo pulled a small package wrapped in newspaper and string from the pocket of the leather jacket hanging over the back of his chair. He held it aloft. Everyone smiled. “Me and everyone, we want give you present so you remember us, remember time we spending together in great German city of Heidelberg.”
The package was passed from hand to hand until it reached Ebby. He flushed with embarrassment. “I don’t know what to say—“
“So don’t say nothing, Mr. Trabzon. Only open it,” Kapo called. The others laughed excitedly.
Ebby tore off the string and pulled away the paper. His face lit up when he saw the present; it was a British Webley Mark VI revolver with a date—1915—engraved in the polished wood of the grip. The weapon looked to be in mint condition. “I am very pleased to have this beautiful gun,” Ebby said softly. He held the gun to his heart. “I thank you.”
At the head of the table, Adil said something in Albanian. The translator said: “Adil tells that the next present they bring you will be the scalp of Enver Hoxha.” Around the table everyone nodded gravely. Adil tossed back his glass of brandy. The others followed suit, then drummed their glasses on the table in unison. No one smiled.
Ebby stood up. The translator next to him rose to her feet. When she translated Ebby’s words, she unconsciously imitated his gestures and even some of his facial expressions. “It has been an honor for me to work with you,” Ebby began. He paused between sentences. “A great deal is riding on this commando raid. We are sure that the death of Hoxha will lead to an uprising of the democratic elements in Albania. The anti-Communist Balli Kombëtar forces in the north can put thousands of armed partisans in the field. An uprising in Albania could ignite revolts elsewhere in the Balkans and the other countries of Eastern Europe and eventually—why not?—in the Ukraine and the Baltics and the Central Asian Republics. The Soviet Union is like a set of dominoes—topple the first one and they will all come crashing down.” Ebby peered the length of the table at the eager faces. “To you falls the honor and the danger of toppling the first domino.” He grinned as he added, “For sure.” The young Albanians roared with laughter. When they had quieted down, Ebby added solemnly: “Good luck and Godspeed to you all.”
9
BERLIN, THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 1951
ROCKING ON A PAINTED HOBBYHORSE THAT ONE OF THE BERLIN BASE officers had bought on the black market and parked in the hallway, the Fallen Angel was a-twitter over “Dennis the Menace,“ the new comic strip that had recently turned up in the pages of Die Neue Zeitung, an American newspaper written in German. Leaning against the water cooler filled with slivovitz across from the Sorcerer’s partly open door, Miss Sipp and Jack were engrossed in the newspaper’s front page that Silwan II had passed on to them; there was the usual box score of how many East German Volkespolizei had defected in the past twenty-four hours (an office pool was riding on the number), and banner-headlines above the lead story on Truman’s decision to relieve Douglas MacArthur of his command in Korea after the General publicly called for air strikes on Chinese cities. Absorbed as they were in various pages of the newspaper, the Fallen Angel, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Torriti’s Night Owl were oblivious to the bleating hullabaloo emanating from the Sorcerer’s office, clearly audible over an orchestral version of Bellini’s Norma.
“Even the French come up with better intelligence than you,” the Company’s Chief of Station in Germany, General Lucian Truscott IV, was complaining in a raucous bellow.
The Sorcerer could be heard retorting with a lewd doggerel. “The French are a creative race—they talk with their hands and fuck with their face.”
“Last week they came up with the Soviet order of battle in Poland.”
“Their numbers are flaky.”
“At least they have numbers.”
“We have our triumphs.”
“Name one recent one.”
“I got my hands on a sample of Walter Ulbrecht’s shit—we sent it back to Washington for analysis.”
“Oh, cripes, next thing you’ll tell me that the rumors about Ulbrecht being allergic to ragweed are true!”
In the hallway the Fallen Angel glanced up from “Dennis the Menace” and caught Miss Sipp’s eye. She hiked her shoulders and curled out her lower lip. Since he’d come on board, General Truscott, a tough cookie who could turn abusive after three or four whiskeys, had cleaned up the Company’s act in Germany: a lot of the dumber clandestine service ops (like the idea of bombarding Russia with extra-large condoms stamped “medium”) had been permanently shelved, some of the more amateur officers had been sent to the boondocks. But despite the occasional verbal shootout, Truscott—a gruff soldier from the old school who had once spilled a pitcher of water over the head of a CIA officer to “cool him down”—seemed to have a healthy respect for the Sorcerer. Ulbrecht’s excrement wasn’t the only thing Torriti had come up with, and the General knew it.
“‘Nother thing,” the General was shouting over the music, his words strung together with a slurred grumpiness. “Air Force people’ve been bellyaching ’bout having to identify bombing targets from old German World War II Abwehr files. Can’t we supply them with some up-to-date targeting, Torriti?”
Miss Sipp thought she heard another empty bottle crash land in her boss’s wastebasket. Jack must have heard it, too, because he asked, “How many today?”
“If you love,” the Night Owl pointed out with a sheepish grin, “you don’t count.”
“I thought you hated him,” Silwan II said from the hobbyhorse.
“I hate him but I don’t dislike him.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding as if he understood, which he didn’t. He went back to the saner world of “Dennis the Menace.”
“Not my fault if there’s a demon cloud cover over East Europe,” the Sorcerer was telling Truscott.
“It’s because of the demon cloud cover that we need more agents on the ground, damn it.”
The door to Torriti’s office flew open and the two men, both clutching tumblers half-filled with whiskey, stumbled into the corridor. Truscott was bringing the Sorcerer up to date on the latest nightmare scenario from the Pentagon war gamers: the Russians would block off the 100-mile-long umbilical corridor between the Western sectors of Berlin and West Germany; French, British and American units drawn from the 400,000 allied troops in West Germany would start down the Autobahn to test Soviet mettle; local Russian commanders would panic and blow up a bridge in front of them and another behind; rattled, the West would send in a tank division to rescue the stranded units; someone, somewhere would lose his nerve and pull a trigger; the shot would be heard ‘round the world.
Torriti closed one very red eye to sooth a twitching lid. “Bastards won’t take me alive, General,” he boasted, and he flicked a fingernail against the poison-coated pin he kept stuck in the whiskey-stained lapel of his shapeless sports jacket.
With his hand on the knob of the heavy fire door leading to the staircase, Truscott suddenly spun around. “What’s this I hear about you walking back a cat?”
“Who told you that?”
“I keep my ear to the ground.”
The Sorcerer suddenly got the hiccups. “Fact is…I had an exfiltration that turned…turned sour,” he moaned.
“Spoonful of sugar—it works every time,” the General suggested.
Torriti looked confused. “For an exfiltration?”
“For the hiccups, damn it.”
Miss Sipp looked up from the newspaper. “Try drinking water out of a glass with a spoon in it,” she called.
“Maybe slivovitz in a glass with a…spoon might work,” Torriti called, pointing to the water cooler. He turned back to Truscott. “The Russians were…tipped off. If it’s the last
…thing I do, I’m gonna find…find out where the tip…tip came from.”
“How?”
“Barium…meals.”
“Barium meals?” Jack repeated to Miss Sipp. “What the hell is that?”
“Not something you’ll find at one of those fast food kiosks on the Kurfürstendamm,” she said with a knowing frown.
“Barium what?” Truscott demanded.
“Meals. I’m gonna feed…feed stuff back to a single addressee at a time. It will be radioactive, in a manner of speaking—I’ll be able to trace…it and see who saw what, when. I’ll stamp everything…ORCON—dissemination controlled by originator. All copies numbered. Then we’ll…we’ll see which operations get blown and…figure out from that who’s betraying us…us.”
“You’re giving away some of the family jewels,” Truscott noted uneasily.
“Goddamn mole will give away more of them if we don’t catch him.”
“I suppose you know what you’re doing,” the General mumbled.
“I suppose…I do,” the Sorcerer agreed.
The Sorcerer had begun the arduous process of walking back his cat with the distribution list on the Vishnevsky exfiltration. As far as he could figure, there had been nine warm bodies on the Washington end who were party to the operation: the director of Central Intelligence and his deputy director, four people in the Operations Directorate, the cipher clerk who had deciphered the Sorcerer’s cables, the routing officer in Communications who controlled the physical distribution of traffic inside Cockroach Alley, and of course Jim Angleton, the counterintelligence swami who vetted all would-be defectors to weed out the “bad ’uns.”
The permutations weren’t limited to the people on the in-house distribution list. Kim Philby, as MI6’s broker in Washington, was known to have access to all the top Company brass, up to and including the director, whose door was always open to the official nuncio from the British cousins. Any of them might have confided in Philby even though he wasn’t on the distribution list. If someone had whispered in Philby’s ear, he might have passed on to the head of MI6 the information that the Yanks were bringing across a defector who claimed to be able to finger a Soviet mole in MI6. “C,” as the chief was called, might then have convened a small war council to deal with what could only be described as a seismic event in the secret Cold War struggle of intelligence services. If Philby wasn’t the culprit—Torriti understood that the evidence pointing to him was only circumstantial—the mole could be anyone who learned of the Vishnevsky affair on a back channel.
Philby was also known to be bosom buddies with Jim Angleton, his side-kick from their Ryder Street days. According to what the Sorcerer had picked up (during casual phone conversations with several old cronies toiling in the dungeons on the Reflecting Pool), the birds of a feather, Philby and Angleton, flocked to a Georgetown watering hole for lunch most Fridays. Angleton obviously trusted Philby. Would he have passed on the meat of a “Flash” cable to his British pal? Would his pal have quietly passed it on to “C?” Would “C” have let the cat out of the bag to prepare for the worst?
Torriti meant to find out.
Burning midnight oil, devouring quantities of PX whiskey that had even Miss Sipp counting the empties in the wastebasket, Torriti meticulously prepared his barium meals.
Item: The Sorcerer had recently managed to have a hand-carved wooden bust of Stalin delivered to an office in the Pankow headquarters of the East German Intelligence Service. Hidden inside the base of the bust was a battery-operated microphone, a tiny tape machine and a burst-transmitter that broadcast, at 2 A.M. every second day, the conversations on the tape. The initial “get” from the microphone revealed that the East Germans had initiated a program, code-named ACTION J, to discredit the Allied-zone Germans by sending threatening letters purporting to come from West Germany to Holocaust survivors. The letters, signed “A German SS officer,” would say: “We didn’t gas enough Jews. Some day we’ll finish what we started.” Revealing ACTION J would blow the existence of the microphone hidden in the room in which the operation was being planned.
Item: The Rabbi had traded the names of two KGB case officers working under diplomatic cover out of the Soviet embassy in Washington for the whereabouts of a former Nazi germ warfare specialist in Syria, which the Sorcerer had acquired from the Gehlen Org (which, in turn, had purchased the information from a member of the Muhabarat, the Egyptian Intelligence Service). Judging from past experience, if the identity of the KGB officers fell into the hands of the Soviet mole, the Russians would find excuses (a death in the family, a son broke a leg skiing) to quickly pull the two back to the Soviet Union. If the two remained in Washington it would mean the Sorcerer’s cable containing the names had not been blown.
Item: The Sorcerer had organized a phone tap in the office of Walter Ulbricht’s closest collaborator, his wife, Lotte, who worked in the Central Committee building at the intersection of Lothringerstrasse and Prenzlauer Allee in the center of East Berlin. One of the barium meals would contain a transcript of a conversation between Ulbricht and his wife in which Ulbricht said rude things about his Socialist Unity Party rival Wilhelm Zaisser. The Russians, if they got wind of the tap via the Soviet mole, would make a “routine” security check on Lotte’s office and discover the phone tap.
Item: An East German agent who had fled West with the tens of thousands of East German émigrés streaming across the open border had eventually landed a job working for the Messerschmidt Company. Berlin Base had stumbled across his identity while debriefing a low level Karlshorst defector and Gehlen’s Org had “doubled” the agent, who now delivered to his East German handlers technical reports filled with disinformation. The East German agent was debriefed by his Karlshorst handlers during monthly visits to his aging mother in East Berlin. A barium meal from the Sorcerer identifying the doubled agent would blow the operation; the agent in question would undoubtedly fail to return to West Berlin the next time he visited his mother.
Item: The Sorcerer had personally recruited a maid who worked at the Blue House, the East German government dacha in Prerow, which was the Security Ministry’s official resort on the Baltic coast. The maid turned out to be a sister of one of the prostitutes in the West German whorehouse above the nightclub in Berlin-Schoneberg that Torriti visited whenever he had a free hour to debrief the hookers. If a barium meal reporting snippets of conversation from bigwigs vacationing at the Blue House was passed on to the Soviets by their mole, the maid would certainly be arrested and her reports would dry up.
Item: The Sorcerer had a Watcher in an attic taking photographs with a long telephoto lens of the personnel who appeared at the windows in the KGB base in the former hospital at Karlshorst on the outskirts of Berlin. Using these photos, Berlin Base was compiling a “Who’s Who in Soviet Intelligence” scrapbook. A barium meal status report on this operation that fell into Soviet hands would lead to the arrest of the photographer and the end of Berlin Base’s scrapbook project.
Item: The Sorcerer had seen a copy of a field report prepared by E. Winstrom Ebbitt II, the CIA officer he’d kicked out of Berlin Base for shooting off his mouth about Torriti’s medicinal alcohol habit. Ebbitt, now working out of Frankfurt Station, had recently been put in charge of Albania ops because of some obscure qualification relating to Albania. He was currently training a group of Albanian émigrés in a secret base near Heidelberg. In the next few days, Ebbitt planned to fly his commando group to the British base near Mdina on Malta and then sneak them onto the Albanian coast near Durrës from a sailing yacht. From there they were supposed to work their way inland to Tiranë and assassinate Enver Hoxha, the malevolent Stalinist leader of the People’s Republic of Albania. Torriti’s barium meal would take the form of a private “Eyes Only” cable to the Special Policy Committee that coordinated British-American operations against Albania; Kim Philby, as the ranking MI6 man in Washington, happened to be the British member of this committee. The Sorcerer would warn the committee that Ebbitt
had gotten his priorities ass-backward. Hoxha lived and worked in “Le Bloc,” a sealed compound in Tiranë. He was said to pass between his villa and his office through a secret tunnel. A far better (not to mention more realistic) target, Torriti would suggest, would be the submarine pens that the Soviets were constructing at the Albanian port of Saseno which, if completed, would give the Russians control of the Adriatic. If Ebbitt’s commando found a reception committee waiting for them on the beach when they came ashore, it would indicate that this message had leaked, via the mole, to the Russians in Washington.
Item: Last but not least, he would send off a barium meal to Angleton giving details of the latest “get” that the courier code-named RAINBOW had delivered from her source, known as SNIPER. One of the items was particularly intriguing: SNIPER was important enough in the East German hierarchy to have been invited to hear a pep talk given by none other than Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov during a recent visit to East Berlin; in the course of the talk, Zhukov—who had masterminded the Soviet assault on Berlin in 1945—let slip that, in the event of war, senior troop commanders expected to reach the English Channel on the tenth day of hostilities. If the Russians got wind of a leak at this level of the East German superstructure, the SNIPER source would dry up very quickly, and RAINBOW would fail to turn up for her dance course in the small theater on Hardenbergstrasse in West Berlin.
10