The Cardinal of the Kremlin

  The attendant was outside the door when he emerged. The Colonel handed over his branches and towel, then walked off to the cold-water showers. Ten minutes later he was a new man, the pain and depression of the vodka gone, and the strain behind him. He dressed quickly and walked downstairs to where his car was waiting. His sergeant noted the change in his stride and wondered what was so curative about roasting yourself like a piece of meat.

  The attendant had his own task. On asking again a few minutes later, it turned out that two people in the steam room had changed their minds. He trotted out the building’s back door to a small shop whose manager made more money selling drink “on the left” than he did by dry-cleaning. The attendant returned with a half-liter bottle of “Vodka”—it had no brand name as such; the premium Stolychnaya was made for export and the elite—at a little over double the market price. The imposition of sales restrictions on alcohol had begun a whole new—and extremely profitable—part of the city’s black market. The attendant had also passed along a small film cassette that his contact had handed over with the birch branches. For his part, the bath attendant was also relieved. This was his only contact. He didn’t know the man’s name, and had spoken the code phrase with the natural fear that this part of the CIA’s Moscow network had long since been compromised by the KGB’s counterintelligence department, the dreaded Second Chief Directorate. His life was already forfeit and he knew it. But he had to do something. Ever since his year in Afghanistan, the things he’d seen, and the things he’d been forced to do. He wondered briefly who that scarred old man was, but reminded himself that the man’s nature and identity were not his concern.

  The dry-cleaning shop catered mainly to foreigners, providing service to reporters, businessmen, and a few diplomats, along with the odd Russian who wished to protect clothing purchased abroad. One of these picked up an English overcoat, paid the three rubles, and left. She walked two blocks to the nearest Metro station, taking the escalator down to catch her train on the Zhdanovsko-Krasnopresnenskaya line, the one marked in purple on the city maps. The train was crowded, and no one could have seen her pass the cassette. In fact, she herself didn’t see the face of the man. He in turn made his way off the train at the next station, Pushkinskaya, and crossed over to Gor’kovskaya Station. One more transfer was made ten minutes later, this one to an American who was on his way to the embassy a little late this morning, having stayed long at a diplomatic reception the previous night.

  His name was Ed Foley; he was the press attaché at the embassy on Ulitsa Chaykovskogo. He and his wife, Mary Pat, another CIA agent, had been in Moscow for nearly four years, and both were looking forward to putting this grim, gray town behind them once and for all. They had two children, both of whom had been denied hot dogs and ball games long enough.

  It wasn’t that their tour of duty hadn’t been successful. The Russians knew that CIA had a number of husband-wife teams in the field, but the idea that spies would take their children abroad wasn’t something that the Soviets could accept easily. There was also the matter of their cover. Ed Foley had been a reporter with the New York Times before joining the State Department—because, as he explained it, the money wasn’t much different and a police reporter never traveled farther than Attica. His wife stayed home with the children for the most part—though she did substitute-teach when needed at the Anglo-American School at 78 Leninsky Prospekt—often taking them out in the snow. Their older son played on a junior hockey team, and the KGB officers who trailed them around had it written up in their file that Edward Foley II was a pretty good wingman for a seven-year-old. The Soviet government’s one real annoyance with the family was the elder Foley’s inordinate curiosity about street crime in their capital, which was at its worst a far cry from what he had written about in New York City. But that proved that he was relatively harmless. He was far too obviously inquisitive to be any kind of intelligence officer. They, after all, did everything possible to be inconspicuous.

  Foley walked the last few blocks from the Metro station. He nodded politely to the militiaman who guarded the door to the grimly decorous building, then to the Marine sergeant inside before going to his office. It wasn’t much. The embassy was officially described in the State Department’s USSR Post Report as “cramped and difficult to maintain.” The same writer might call the burned-out shell of a South Bronx tenement a “fixer-upper,” Foley thought. In the building’s last renovation, his office had been remade from a storage room and broom closet into a marginally serviceable cubicle about ten feet square. The broom closet, however, was his private darkroom, and that was why the CIA station had had one of its people in this particular room for over twenty years, though Foley was the first station chief to be housed there.

  Only thirty-three, tall but very thin, Foley was an Irishman from Queens whose intellect was mated to an impossibly slow heart rate and a pokerface that had helped him earn his way through Holy Cross. Recruited by CIA in his senior year, he’d spent four years with the Times to establish his own personal “legend.” He was remembered in the city room as an adequate, if rather lazy reporter who turned out work-manlike copy but never would really go anywhere. His editor hadn’t minded losing him to government service, since his departure made room for a youngster from Columbia’s School of Journalism with hustle and a real nose for what was happening. The current Times correspondent in Moscow had described him to his own colleagues and contacts as a nebbish, and rather a dull one at that, and in doing so gave Foley the most sought-after compliment in the business of espionage: Him? He’s not smart enough to be a spy. For this and several other reasons, Foley was entrusted with running the Agency’s longest-lived, most productive agent-in-place, Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, code name CARDINAL. The name itself, of course, was sufficiently secret that only five people within the Agency knew that it meant more than a red-caped churchman with princely diplomatic rank.

  Raw CARDINAL information was classified Special Intelligence /Eyes Only-Δ, and there were only six Δ-cleared officials in the entire American government. Every month the code word for the data itself was changed. This month’s name was SATIN, for which less than twenty others were cleared. Even under that title, the data was invariably paraphrased and subtly altered before going outside the Δ fraternity.

  Foley took the film cassette from his pocket and locked himself in the darkroom. He could go through the developing process drunk and half-asleep. In fact, a few times, he had. Within six minutes, the job was done, and Foley cleaned up after himself. His former editor in New York would have found his neatness in Moscow surprising.

  Foley followed procedures that had been unchanged for nearly thirty years. He reviewed the six exposed frames through a magnifying glass of the type used to inspect 35mm slides. He memorized each frame in a few seconds, and began typing a translation on his personal portable typewriter. It was a manual whose well-worn cloth ribbon was too frayed to be of use to anyone, particularly the KGB. Like many reporters, Foley was not a good typist. His pages bore strikeovers and X-outs. The paper was chemically treated, and you couldn’t use an eraser on it. It took nearly two hours for him to finish the transcription. When done, he made a final check of the film to guarantee that he hadn’t left anything out, nor made any serious grammatical mistakes. Satisfied, but with a tremor that he never quite got over, he crumpled the film into a ball and set it in a metal ashtray, where a wooden kitchen match reduced the only direct evidence of CARDINAL’s existence to ashes. He then smoked a cigar to disguise the distinctive smell of burning celluloid. The folded typescript pages went into his pocket, and Foley walked upstairs to the embassy’s communications room. Here he drafted an innocuous dispatch to Box 4108, State Department, Washington: “Reference your 29 December. Expense report en route via pouch. Foley. Ends.” As press attaché, Foley had to pick up a lot of bar bills for former colleagues who held him in contempt that he didn’t bother returning; he had to do quite a few expense reports for the cookie-pushers at Fog
gy Bottom, and it amused him greatly that his press brethren worked so hard at maintaining his cover for him.

  Next he checked with the embassy’s courier-in-residence. Though little known, this was one aspect of life at the Moscow post that hadn’t changed since the 1930s. There was always a courier to take the bag out, though nowadays he had other duties, too. The courier was also one of four people in the embassy who knew which government agency Foley really worked for. A retired Army warrant officer, he had a DSC and four Purple Hearts for flying casualties out of Vietnam battlefields. When he smiled at people, he did so in the Russian way, with the mouth but almost never the eyes.

  “Feel like flying home tonight?”

  The man’s eyes lit up. “With the Super Bowl this Sunday? You’re kidding. Stop by your office around four?”

  “Right.” Foley closed the door and returned to his office. The courier booked himself on the British Airways 5:40 P.M. flight to Heathrow.

  The difference in time zones between Washington and Moscow virtually guaranteed that Foley’s messages reached D.C. early in the morning. At six, a CIA employee walked into the State Department mail room and extracted the message forms from a dozen or so boxes, then resumed his drive to Langley. A senior field officer in the Operations Directorate, he was barred from any further overseas duty due to an injury sustained in Budapest—where a street hoodlum had fractured his skull, and been locked up for five years by the irate local police. If only they’d known, the agent thought, they’d have given him a medal. He delivered the messages to the appropriate offices, and went to his own office.

  The message form was lying on Bob Ritter’s desk when he got to work at 7:25. Ritter was the Agency’s Deputy Director for Operations. His turf, technically known as the Directorate of Operations, included all of the CIA’s field officers and all of the foreign citizens they recruited and employed as agents. The message from Moscow—as usual there was more than one, but this one counted the most—was immediately tucked into his personal file cabinet, and he prepared himself for the 8:00 brief, delivered every day by the night-watch officers.

  “It’s open.” Back in Moscow, Foley looked up when the knock came at the door. The courier stepped in.

  “The plane leaves in an hour. I have to hustle.”

  Foley reached into his desk and pulled out what looked like an expensive silver cigarette case. He handed it over, and the courier handled it carefully before tucking it into his breast pocket. The typed pages were folded inside, along with a tiny pyrotechnic charge. If the case were improperly opened, or subjected to a sudden acceleration—tike being dropped to a hard floor—the charge would go off and destroy the flash paper inside. It might also set fire to the courier’s suit, which explained his care in handling it.

  “I should be back Tuesday morning. Anything I can get you, Mr. Foley?”

  “I hear there’s a new Far Side book out ...” That got a laugh.

  “Okay, I’ll check. You can pay me when I get back.”

  “Safe trip, Augie.”

  One of the embassy’s drivers took Augie Giannini to Sheremetyevo Airport, nineteen miles outside of Moscow, where the courier’s diplomatic passport enabled him to walk past the security checkpoints and right onto the British Airways plane bound for Heathrow Airport. He rode in the coach section, on the right side of the aircraft. The diplomatic pouch had the window seat, with Giannini in the middle. Flights out of Moscow were rarely crowded, and the seat on his left was also vacant. The Boeing started rolling on schedule. The Captain announced the time of flight and destination, and the airliner started moving down the runway. The moment it lifted off Soviet soil, as often happened, the hundred and fifty passengers applauded. It was something that always amused the courier. Giannini pulled a paperback from his pocket and started reading. He couldn’t drink on the flight, of course, nor sleep, and he decided to wait for dinner until his next flight. The stewardess did manage to get a cup of coffee into him, however.

  Three hours later, the 747 thumped down at Heathrow. Again he was able to clear customs perfunctorily. A man who spent more time in the air than most commercial pilots, he had access to the first-class waiting rooms still allowed in most of the world’s airports. Here he waited an hour for a 747 bound for Washington’s Dulles International.

  Over the Atlantic, the courier enjoyed a Pan Am dinner, and a movie that he hadn’t seen before, which happened rarely enough. By the time he’d finished his book, the plane was swooping into Dulles. The courier ran his hand over his face and tried to remember what time it was supposed to be in Washington. Fifteen minutes later he climbed into a nondescript government Ford that headed southeast. He got into the front seat because he wanted the extra leg room.

  “How was the flight?” the driver asked.

  “Same as always: borrr-inggg.” On the other hand, it beat flying medivac missions in the Central Highlands. The government was paying him twenty grand a year to sit on airplanes and read books, which, combined with his retirement pay from the Army, gave him a fairly comfortable life. He never bothered himself wondering what he carried in the diplomatic bag, or in this metal case in his coat. He figured it was all a waste of time anyway. The world didn’t change very much.

  “Got the case?” the man in the back asked.

  “Yeah.” Giannini took it from his inside pocket and handed it back, with both hands. The CIA officer in the back took it, using both hands, and tucked it inside a foam-lined box. The officer was an instructor in the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, part of the Directorate of Science and Technology. It was an office that covered a lot of bureaucratic ground. This particular officer was an expert on booby traps and explosive devices in general. At Langley, he took the elevator to Ritter’s office and opened the cigarette case on the latter’s desk, then returned to his own office without looking at the contents.

  Ritter walked to his personal Xerox machine and made several copies of the flash-paper pages, which were then burned. It was not so much a security measure as a simple safety precaution. Ritter didn’t want a sheaf of highly flammable material in his personal office. He started reading the pages even before all the copies were done. As usual, his head started moving left and right by the end of the first paragraph. The Deputy Director for Operations walked to his desk and punched the line to the Director’s office.

  “You busy? The bird landed.”

  “Come on over,” Judge Arthur Moore replied at once. Nothing was more important than data from CARDINAL.

  Ritter collected Admiral Greer on the way, and the two of them joined the Director of Central Intelligence in his spacious office.

  “You gotta love this guy,” Ritter said as he handed the papers out. “He’s conned Yazov into sending a colonel into Bach to do a ‘reliability assessment’ of the whole system. This Colonel Bondarenko is supposed to report back on how everything works, in layman’s terms, so that the Minister can understand it all and report to the Politburo. Naturally, he detailed Misha to play gofer, so the report goes across his desk first.”

  “That kid Ryan met—Gregory, I think—wanted us to get a man into Dushanbe,” Greer noted with a chuckle. “Ryan told him it was impossible.”

  “Good,” Ritter observed. “Everybody knows what screw-ups the Operations Directorate is.” The entire CIA took perverse pride in the fact that only its failure made the news. The Directorate of Operations in particular craved the public assessment that the press constantly awarded them. The foul-ups of the KGB never got the attention that CIA’s did, and the public image, so often reinforced, was widely believed even in the Russian intelligence community. It rarely occurred to anyone that the leaks were purposeful.

  “I wish,” Judge Moore observed soberly, “that somebody would explain to Misha that there are old spies and bold spies, but very few old and bold ones.”

  “He’s a very careful man, boss,” Ritter pointed out.

  “Yeah, I know.” The DCI looked down at the pages.

  Since
the death of Dmitri Fedorovich, it is not the same at the Defense Ministry, the DCI read. Sometimes I wonder if Marshal Yazov takes these new technological developments seriously enough, but to whom can I report my misgivings? Would KGB believe me? I must order my thoughts. Yes, I must organize my thoughts before I make any accusations. But can I break security rules ...

  But what choice do I have? If I cannot document my misgivings, who will take me seriously? It is a hard thing to have to break an important rule of security, but the safety of the State supersedes such rules. It must.

  As the epic poems of Homer began with the invocation of the Muse, so CARDINAL’s messages invariably began like this. The idea had developed in the late 1960s. CARDINAL’s messages began as photographs of his personal diary. Russians are inveterate diarists. Each time he began one, it would be as a Slavic cri de coeur, his personal worries about the policy decisions made in the Defense Ministry. Sometimes he would express concern with the security on a specific project or the performance of a new tank or aircraft. In each case, the technical merits of a piece of hardware or a policy decision would be examined at length, but always the focus of the document would be a supposed bureaucratic problem within the Ministry. If Filitov’s apartment were ever searched, his diary would be easily found, certainly not hidden away as a spy was expected to do, and while he was definitely breaking rules of security, and would certainly be admonished for it, there would at least be a chance that Misha could successfully defend himself. Or, that was the idea.

  When I have Bondarenko’s report, in another week or two, perhaps I can persuade the Minister that this project is one of truly vital importance to the Motherland, it ended.