The Company

  “Nitpicking is what I do for a living, Bill,” Angleton said.

  It was clear there was no love lost between the two men, and for good reason. Soon after he became DCI in 1973 Colby had terminated one of Angleton’s pet operations, code named HT/LINGUAL, which had his counterintelligence people reading all first-class mail to and from the Soviet Union that passed through New York; Colby had argued that the CIA’s charter prohibited operations inside the continental United States. Adding injury to insult the Director had whittled away at Angleton’s empire, reducing his staff from three hundred to eighty. Now, the Director eyed his counterintelligence chief. “Do me a favor, Jim,” he told him. “Nitpick on your own time and in your own shop.” Colby turned back to Manny and nodded.

  “A Russian political attaché that Ept had met at a Smithsonian reception weeks before had turned up at her door.”

  Angleton closed his eyes and puffed on the cigarette. “Ept has an unlisted phone. How did the Russian know where she lived?”

  Jack caught Ebby’s eye and signalled with a palm for him to simmer down.

  Manny looked directly at Angleton. “Ept told me on the phone that she had met the Russian for lunch at the Kennedy Center a week ago Sunday. When I asked him directly how he managed to turn up at her door, given that her phone was unlisted, he claimed that he knew her address because he had followed her home after the lunch.”

  Ebby said coldly, “That explains that.”

  Manny wondered if all topside meetings were this nerve racking. “Jack here—Mr. McAuliffe—gave me verbal authorization to proceed with the initial meeting. I interviewed the Russian, whom I assigned the random cryptonym AE-slant-PINNACLE, in the living room of Ept’s apartment near Rockville. Ept was not present during the meeting. The Russian specifically asked me not to record the conversation.”

  Angleton looked up. “SOP for dispatched agents. The people who sent him over don’t want me nitpicking before you swallow the bait.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Jim, Manny went by the book,” Ebby blurted out. “A genuine defector is putting his life on the line. He’s bound to be skittish. It’s SOP to go along with his wishes as long as security isn’t compromised.”

  “Thank you for this illuminating instruction on how to handle defectors,” Angleton said in a flat voice.

  Colby said grimly, “Manny, I’d take it as a favor if you would go on with your presentation.”

  “Yes, sir. AE/PINNACLE identified himself as a Soviet political attaché named Kukushkin, Sergei Semyonovich, on assignment in Washington to monitor the relationship between the White House and Congress. He quickly got around to telling me that he was really a temporary captain in the KGB named Klimov, Sergei”—Manny turned to another page of his notes—“who, in addition to his political attaché duties, works on general assignment for the rezidentura. I consulted the 201 in Central Registry early this morning. We have a file on a Klimov, Sergei, born 1927, which would make him forty-seven, which matches Kukushkin’s appearance. According to our 201, Klimov, Sergei, successfully completed a four-year course at Lomonosov University in Moscow; he passed the Marxist-Leninism boilerplate course with a three out of possible five and graduated with honors in comparative political models. His wrote his senior thesis on the American republican model and the system of checks and balances between the various branches of government. At the end of the four-year course, graduates routinely appear before selection committee composed of representatives from various departments and ministries—Foreign Affairs, Trade, the Trade Unions, TASS, KGB, GRU, what have you. Klimov must have been selected by the KGB, because the next time we see him he’s working for the First Chief Directorate, analyzing American signal intercepts that deal with the political situation, as well as political articles in the American press and magazines. At some point during this tour he married the daughter of an Artillery colonel-general who was area commander of intercontinental ballistic missiles bases in Kazakhstan. Curiously, there is no mention in our 201 of the birth of a daughter, though if she is seven, as AE/PINNACLE told me, she would have been born around this time. Klimov was next posted to Directorate S—which, as you know, runs Soviet illegals abroad—after which we lose track of him. The man claiming to be Klimov told me he had worked for Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate. If we decide to go back at him we can prepare questions to confirm this—ask him to pick out from lists the names of classmates at Lomonosov University, as well as colleagues and superiors who worked with him in Directorate S.”

  Angleton sat there slowly shaking his head.

  Colby asked, “What’s wrong now, Jim?”

  “If your Kukushkin is a genuine defector, which is extremely unlikely, he will know the answers to these questions. If he is a dispatched agent he will also know the answers. The fact that he knows the answers tells us nothing.”

  Jack teased his Cossack mustache with a forefinger. “Jim’s right, of course,” he observed. He turned to Manny. “What reason did Kukushkin-Klimov give for wanting to cross over?”

  “There is the usual disillusionment with the Communist system—” Manny began.

  Angleton snorted. “Sounds like someone sent over from central casting.”

  “There’s more,” Manny insisted. “He claimed that his wife suffers from a heart ailment—that she’s had it for years. He wants to have her treated by American doctors. This is a detail that can be verified. She won’t be able to fake a heart disorder.”

  Colby said, “The ultimate test will be the information he gives us.”

  Angleton was still shaking his head. “A dispatched agent will always give us a certain amount of true information in order to convince us he is not a dispatched agent.”

  “Let’s move on to the get,” Colby suggested.

  Manny looked at the notes he had scribbled as soon as they had dropped the Russian a block from a downtown bus stop the night before. “I only had enough time with him to scratch the surface,” he reminded everyone. “But AE/PINNACLE gave me to understand that once we’d put in the plumbing for the defection, he’d come over with a briefcase filled with secrets. Here I take Mr. Angleton’s point—some or all of these serials could be true even if the defector turns out to be a dispatched agent. All right. I’ll start at the base camp and work my way up to the summit.” Manny wished his division chief, Leo Kritzky, were sitting in on the session to lend him moral support; Angleton’s bloodshot eyes, staring across the table through curlicues of cigarette smoke, were beginning to unnerve him.

  “For openers he’s offering the order of battle at the Soviet embassy in Washington—we can expect to get from him names, ranks, serial numbers. Plus particulars of local KGB tradecraft—locations of dead drops, for instance, along with the variety of signals, including classified ads in newspapers, indicating that the dead drops have been filled or emptied.”

  Angleton shrugged his bony shoulders in derision. “Chickenfeed,” he said crabbily.

  “AE/PINNACLE claimed that Moscow Centre has recently created a special Disinformation Directorate, designated Department D, to coordinate a global disinformation campaign. He said it was staffed by fifty officers who were area or country specialists with field experience. He said he knew of the existence of the Disinformation Directorate, which is supposed to be closely held and highly secret, only because he himself had been recruited into its ranks due to his expertise on the American political model. But AE/PINNACLE was determined to remain abroad. Since he would have had to return to Moscow if he was transferred to the Disinformation Directorate, he asked his wife’s father to use his considerable influence to have the assignment cancelled.”

  Manny had finally come up with something that impressed Angleton. The chief of counterintelligence straightened in his chair. “Does your Russian have specifics on the Directorate’s product? Did he mention the Sino-Soviet split? Did he talk about Dubček or Ceaucescu or Tito?”

  “We won’t know whether AE/PINNACLE has heard of specific projects a
ssociated with Department D until we arrange for additional debriefings,” Manny said.

  “What else is he offering, Manny?” Jack asked.

  “He claims to have information on the current British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, but when I pressed him he became very vague—all he would say was that serials concerning Wilson had passed through the hands of a KGB officer who shared an office with him in Moscow.”

  “He’s playing hard-to-get,” Colby commented.

  “He’s negotiating his retirement package,” Ebby said. “If he gives us everything at once he’ll lose his leverage.”

  Manny looked again at his notes. “I’m halfway to the summit. AE/PINNACLE claims that approximately a year ago he picked up office scuttlebutt that the rezidentura was running a walk-in from the National Security Agency with a habit—the walk-in apparently had a weakness for women and gambling and needed money badly. To avoid unnecessary risks, all of the face-to-face debriefings with the NSA walk-in were organized while he was vacationing abroad. The contacts in Washington were through dead drops. The KGB lieutenant colonel who ran the defector was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in a private embassy ceremony last December. AE/PINNACLE took this as an indication of how important the NSA defector was. In mid-January—on January sixteenth, to be exact, which was a Wednesday—the KGB rezident asked Kukushkin to stand in for this same lieutenant colonel, who had come down with the flu. He was instructed to service a dead drop in the men’s room of the Jefferson Hotel in downtown Washington. Because he was filling in for the lieutenant colonel who had won the Red Banner, Kukushkin concluded that the message he was delivering was intended for the mole inside NSA. The rezident gave Kukushkin an enciphered note rolled up inside the top of a fountain pen and, defying regulations, laughingly told him what was in it. Once we know the contents of this note, so Kukushkin claims, we will be able to identify the traitor in the NSA. As the operation was tightly compartmented inside the Soviet rezidentura, AE/PINNACLE never heard anything more about it.”

  Colby whistled through his teeth. The National Security Agency, which, among other things, eavesdropped on Soviet communications and broke Russian codes, was so secret that few Americans were aware of its existence; an in-house joke held that the initials NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” If the KGB actually had an agent inside the NSA it would mean that America’s most closely held Cold War secrets were hemorrhaging. If Kukushkin’s defection could lead to the unearthing of the NSA mole, it would be a major blow to the KGB.

  Angleton sniffed at the air as if he had detected a foul odor. “Timeo Danaos et donna ferentis—I am wary of Greeks bearing gifts.”

  “I hate to think what you’re saving for your last-but-not-least if your next-to-last is a Soviet mole inside the NSA,” Jack commented.

  “Time to take us up to the summit,” Colby told Manny.

  Manny caught his father’s eye across the table. Ebby nodded once to encourage him; Manny could tell from his expression that the briefing was going well, that his father was pleased at the way he had handled himself. “The summit, Mr. Colby,” Manny said. He flipped to the last page of his hand-written notes. “The last item on my list—” Manny stole a look at Angleton, who was preoccupied lighting another cigarette from the old one—“has to do with SASHA.”

  Angleton’s drowsy eyes flicked open.

  “AE/PINNACLE claims that Moscow Centre—not the Washington rezidentura—directly runs an agent in place inside the Company code named SASHA. The mastermind behind this operation is someone known only by the nickname Starik, which means ‘old man’ in Russian. Word of mouth inside the rezidentura is that this Starik is supposed to be the same person who ran Philby. There is no direct contact between the rezidentura and SASHA—everything passes by a cutout who is living under deep cover in America.”

  “Pie in the sky,” Angleton groused, but it was evident that Manny’s story had hit a nerve.

  “Kukushkin claims that the KGB rezident, the chief of the embassy’s consular section named Kliment Yevgenevich Borisov, is an old chum from Lomonosov University. The two often drink together late at night in the rezident’s office. Kukushkin says he decided to defect at this moment in time when he learned, during a casual conversation with the rezident, that both SASHA and his cutout were out of town. He claims that no defection is possible while SASHA is in Washington because he would be one of the first to get wind of it and alert the SK people at the Soviet embassy. Kukushkin says we must move rapidly because the window of opportunity, which is to say the period of time that SASHA will be absent from Washington, is very narrow—two weeks, to be precise. Once we have brought him and his wife and daughter to safety, AE/PINNACLE is prepared to give us the first initial of SASHA’s family name, along with an important biographical detail and another specific period when SASHA was away from Washington. With that information, so he says, we ought to be able to identify him.”

  Angleton swatted the cigarette smoke away from his eyes. It was an article of faith with him that all Soviet walk-ins worldwide were dispatched agents, since the Soviet mole inside the Company would have warned Moscow Centre the moment he got wind of a defection, and a genuine defector would be eliminated before he could organize the defection. Now he had finally heard a single plausible detail that intrigued him: it was possible for a walk-in to be genuine if SASHA were somehow absent from Washington and therefore couldn’t immediately learn about the defection. Angleton’s smoker’s rasp drifted across the table. “Did your Russian provide details on the cutout?”

  “I pressed him, Mr. Angleton. He said only that the cutout who serviced SASHA was away on home leave; the summons back to Russia had been passed on to the cutout by a woman who freelances for the rezidentura and serves as a circuit breaker between the rezidentura and the cutout. AE/PINNACLE is not sure whether the cutout went away because SASHA was away, or vice versa. As for the biographical details and the date of SASHA’s previous absence from the Washington area, all he would say was he came across that information when he was attached to Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate in Moscow Centre; SASHA’s previous absence from Washington corresponded with a trip abroad by the handler known as Starik.”

  The men around the table were silent for some minutes, digesting Manny’s report. Lost in thought, Ebby nodded to himself several times; he had been convinced there was a Soviet mole inside the Company since he was betrayed into the hands of the Hungarian secret police in 1956. Colby climbed to his feet and began circling the table. “Did you set up a second meeting with your Russian friend?” he asked.

  Manny said, “No. I assumed I would need authorization to do that.”

  Ebby said, “How is he going to contact you?”

  “I took my cue from something Mr. McAuliffe said when he authorized the initial contact—I told AE/PINNACLE to telephone Agatha Ept on Thursday evening. I suggested that he tell his SK people that, following a chance meeting at the Smithsonian, he was trying to become her lover in the hope of gaining access to American patents. If she invites him over for dinner, then he’ll know we are willing to continue the dialogue. If she gives him the cold shoulder it will mean we don’t want to pursue the matter.”

  Angleton scraped back his chair but remained sitting in it. “Obviously, counterintelligence needs to take over from here,” he announced.

  Jack bristled. “It’s obvious to you but not to me. The Soviet Division has the competence to deal with this.”

  Settling back into his seat, Colby pulled at an earlobe. “Let the battle for turf begin.”

  Angleton reached for an ashtray and corkscrewed his cigarette into it. “There’s an outside chance that this could be a genuine defection,” he said carefully. “But it’s equally likely that the KGB—that Starik himself—is dangling some bait in front of our noses.”

  “Let’s take the worst case,” Colby said. “Kukushkin is bait. He’s offering us some odds and ends about a Disinformation Directorate and God knows what about the British Pri
me Minister, and some juicy morsels—a mole inside NSA, SASHA inside the CIA. You’ve always said that a false defector would have to bring over true information to establish his bona fides, to make us swallow the false information. If we play our cards carefully we ought to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

  “Almost impossible to do,” Angleton replied, “without assigning an experienced counterintelligence team. There’s a lot at stake here. If AE/PINNACLE is genuine, we’ll need to wade through a maze of serials. If he’s a dispatched agent, it means the KGB is going to a great deal of trouble and we’ll need to find out why.” Angleton, suddenly short of breath, wheezed for a moment. Then he addressed Ebby directly. “Your boy did a good job, I’m not suggesting otherwise, Elliott. He didn’t put a foot wrong as far as I can see. But he’s too young, too inexperienced, to run with this. Debriefing a defector is an art in itself—it’s not only a matter of asking the right questions but of not asking them too soon; questions bring answers and answers bring closure to the process of thinking, and that’s not something you want to rush.”

  Jack said to Colby, “Manny wouldn’t be alone, Bill. He’ll have the considerable resources of the Soviet Division behind him.”

  Ebby turned to the DCI. “I’ll remove myself from the decision, for obvious reasons.”

  Jack said, “Well, I won’t. If Leo Kritzky were here he’d be saying the same thing as me. The Soviet Division, under the aegis of the DD/O, ought to be handling this. Counterintelligence has a long history of turning away defectors, some of whom—many of whom—could well be genuine.”

  “If counterintelligence discourages defections,” Angleton retorted hotly, “it’s to protect the Company from dispatched agents—“

  “All right,” Colby said. “Jim, we both know that a familiar face is worth its weight in gold to a would-be defector. And you yourself said that Manny here didn’t put a foot wrong.” He turned to Ebby. “I want the DD/O to form a task force to handle this defection. Keep it down to a happy few, which is to say the people in this room and their principal aides and secretaries. All paper is to be stamped NODIS. I don’t want the fact that we’re dealing with a walk-in to become known outside this small circle. I want the task force’s recommendation in my hand within thirteen days, which not incidentally is the time frame that has SASHA away from Washington. Manny, you’ll be the point man—you’ll meet with AE/PINNACLE and gain his confidence and bring home the bacon. Jim, you’ll represent counter-intelligence on the task force. If you have operational qualms that you can’t iron out with the DD/O or his deputy, you can bring them directly to me. Once we’ve milked the Russian you can file a dissenting opinion with me if you don’t reach the same conclusions as the DD/O.” Colby shot out a cuff and looked at his watch. “Jim, if you don’t shake a leg, you’re going to stand up the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.”