“It’s a sleeper transmitter, probably somewhere in the Midlands, and he’s gone to ‘active,’ ” the chief analyst reported to the Director-General of GCHQ. “But our man seems to be using a fresh one-time pad for every word. Unless we can have a lot more of it, we won’t break it.”
It was decided to keep a close watch on the channel the secret sender had used, though if he broadcast again he would almost certainly use a different channel.
A brief flimsy recording the incident went to the desks, among others, of Sir Bernard Hemmings and Sir Nigel Irvine.
The message had been received elsewhere, notably in Moscow. Decoded with a replica of the one-time pad used in a quiet backwater of Ipswich, the message told those interested that the man on the ground had completed all his preliminary tasks ahead of schedule and was ready to receive his first courier.
Chapter 12
The spring thaw would not be long in coming, but for the moment crusted snow hung on the branches of the birch and fir trees far below. From the spectacular double-glazed window on the seventh and top floor of the First Chief Directorate building at Yasyenevo, the man gazing at the landscape could make out, across the sea of winter trees, the tip of the western end of the lake where, in summer, the foreign diplomats from Moscow liked to come and disport themselves.
That Sunday morning, Lieutenant General Yevgeni Sergeivitch Karpov would have preferred to be with his wife and teenage children at their dacha at Peredelkino, but even when one has risen as high in the service as Karpov, there are some things that have to be taken care of personally. The arrival of the bagman due home from Copenhagen was such a matter. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly noon and the man was late. Turning from the window, he sighed and threw himself into the swivel chair behind his desk.
At fifty-seven, Yevgeni Karpov was at the pinnacle of promotion and power achievable by a professional intelligence officer within the KGB, or at least within the First Chief Directorate. Fedorchuk had gone higher, right up to the chairmanship itself, and on to the MVD, but that had been on the General Secretary’s coattails. Moreover, Fedorchuk had not been FCD; he rarely left the Soviet Union; he had made his bones crushing internal dissident and nationalist movements.
But for a man who had spent years serving his country abroad—always a minus in terms of promotion to the highest offices in the USSR—Karpov had done well. A lean, fit-looking man in a beautifully cut suit (one of the perks of being FCD), he was a lieutenant general and First Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate. As such, he was the Soviet Union’s highest-ranking professional officer in foreign intelligence, on the same level as the deputy directors of operations and intelligence at the CIA and Sir Nigel Irvine at the SIS.
Years earlier, on his accession to power, the General Secretary had plucked General Fedorchuk out of the chairmanship of the KGB to overlord the Interior Ministry, and General Chebrikov had gone up to replace him. A slot had been left vacant—Chebrikov had been one of the two first deputy chairmen of the KGB.
The vacant post of First Deputy Chairman had been offered to Colonel-General Kryuchkov, who had jumped at it. The trouble was, Kryuchkov was then head of the First Chief Directorate and he did not want to relinquish that powerful post. He wanted to hold both jobs together. Even Kryuchkov had realized—and Karpov privately thought the man as thick as two short planks—that he could not be in two places simultaneously; he could not at the same time be in his First Deputy Chairman’s office at the Center on Dzerzhinsky Square and in the office of the head of the FCD out at Yasyenevo.
What had happened was that the post of First Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate, which had existed for years, had increased substantially in importance. It had already been a job for an officer of considerable operational experience, indeed the highest in the FCD to which a career officer could aspire. With Kryuchkov no longer resident at “the Village”—KGB house jargon for Yasyenevo—the job of his first deputy had become even more important.
When the incumbent, General B. S. Ivanov, had retired, there had been two possible candidates in line to succeed: Karpov, then a bit young but heading up the important Third Department in Room 6013, the section that covered Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia; and Vadim Vassilyevitch Kirpichenko, rather older, a bit senior, who headed the S, or Illegals, Directorate. Kirpichenko had got the job. As a sort of consolation prize, Karpov had been promoted to be head of the Illegals Directorate, a post he had held for two fascinating years.
Then, in the early spring of 1985, Kirpichenko had done the decent thing: speeding down the Sadovaya Spasskaya ring road at close to a hundred miles an hour, his car had clipped a pool of oil left by a leaking truck and had gone completely out of control. A week later there had been a quiet private ceremony at Novodevichii Cemetery, and a week after that, Karpov had got the job, rising in rank from major general to lieutenant general.
He had been happy to hand the Illegals Directorate over to old Borisov, who had been number two there for so long few cared to remember just how many years it had been, and who deserved the job, anyway.
The phone on his desk rang and he snatched it up.
“Comrade Major General Borisov on the line for you.”
Speak of the devil, Karpov thought. Then he frowned. He had a private line that did not pass through the switchboard, but his old colleague had not used it. Must be phoning from outside. Telling his secretary to bring the bagman from Copenhagen to him the moment he arrived, Karpov depressed the outside-line switch and took Borisov’s call. “Pavel Petrovitch, how are you this fine day?”
“I tried you at home, then at the dacha. Ludmilla said you were at work.”
“So I am. It’s all right for some.” Karpov was gently pulling the older man’s leg. Borisov was a widower who live alone and put in more working weekends than almost anyone else.
“Yevgeni Sergeivitch, I need to see you.”
“Of course. You don’t have to ask. You want to come over here tomorrow, or shall I come into town?”
“Could you make it today?”
Even odder, thought Karpov. Something must have really got into the old boy. He sounded as though he might have been drinking. “Have you been on the bottle, Pavel Petrovitch?”
“Maybe I have,” said the truculent voice on the line. “Maybe a man needs a few drams now and again. Especially when he has problems.”
Karpov realized that, whatever it was, the problem was serious. He dropped the bantering tone. “All right, Starets,” he said soothingly, “where are you?”
“You know my cottage?”
“Of course. You want me to come out there?”
“Yes, I’d be grateful,” said Borisov. “When can you make it?”
“Say about six,” proposed Karpov.
“I’ll have a bottle of pepper vodka ready,” said the voice, and Borisov hung up.
“Not on my account,” muttered Karpov. Unlike most Russians, Karpov hardly drank at all, and when he did, he preferred a decent Armenian brandy or the Scotch single malt that came to him in the bag from London. Vodka he regarded as an abomination, and pepper vodka even worse.
Bang goes my Sunday afternoon at Peredelkino, he thought, and rang to tell Ludmilla he could not make it. He made no mention of Borisov; just told her he could not get away and that he would see her at their central Moscow apartment at about midnight.
Still, he was perturbed by Borisov’s unusual truculence; they went back a long way together, too long for him to take offense, but Borisov’s mood was odd in a man habitually so genial and phlegmatic.
That Sunday afternoon, the regular Aeroflot service from Moscow came into London’s Heathrow Airport at just after five.
As with all Aeroflot crews there was one member who worked for two masters, the Soviet state airline and the KGB. First Officer Romanov was not a KGB staffer, only agyent—meaning an informer upon his colleagues and from time to time a runner of messages and errands.
The whole cre
w closed the aircraft down and left it in the hands of the ground staff for the night. They would fly it back to Moscow the next day. As usual, they went through the flight-crew entry procedures, and customs made a cursory check of their shoulder bags and hand luggage. Several were carrying portable transistor radios, and no one took any notice of Romanov’s Sony model on its shoulder strap. Western luxury items were part of the perks of foreign travel for Soviet citizens—everyone knew that—and although they had an extremely tight foreign-currency allowance, cassettes and players, along with radios and perfume for the wife back in Moscow, were among the top priorities.
After clearing immigration and customs formalities the whole crew boarded their minibus for the Green Park Hotel, where Aeroflot crews often stay. Whoever had given Romanov that transistor radio in Moscow just three hours before takeoff must have known that Aeroflot crews are hardly ever shadowed at Heathrow. The British counterintelligence people seem to accept that though they may constitute a risk, it must be a tolerable one compared to the mounting of a pretty major surveillance operation.
When he got to his bedroom, Romanov could not help looking at the radio with curiosity. Then he shrugged, locked it in his suitcase, and went down to the bar to join the other officers in a drink. He knew exactly what to do with it after breakfast the next day. He would do it, then forget all about it. He did not know then that on his return to Moscow he would be going straight into quarantine.
* * *
Karpov’s car crunched up the snow-clogged track just before six o’clock, and he cursed Borisov’s insistence on having his weekend cottage in such a forsaken place.
Everyone in the service knew Borisov was one of a kind. In a society that regards all individualism or deviation from the norm, not to mention eccentricity, as extremely suspect, Borisov got away with it because he was unusually good at his job. He had been in clandestine intelligence since he was a boy, and some of the coups he had mounted against the West were legendary in the training schools and the canteens where the junior men took their lunch.
After half a mile down the track, Karpov could make out the lights of the izba, or log cabin, that Borisov favored for his retreat. Others were content, even eager, to site their weekend places in the approved zones according to their station in the pecking order, and those areas were all west of Moscow, along the curve of the river across the Uspenskoye Bridge. Not Borisov. He liked to retire on the weekends—or on those when he could get away from his desk—to play rustic peasant in a traditional izba deep in the forest well east of the capital. The Chaika came to a halt in front of the timber door.
“Wait here,” Karpov told Misha, his driver.
“I’d better turn around and get some of those logs under the wheels or we’ll stick solid,” grumbled Misha.
Karpov nodded his agreement and climbed out. He had not brought galoshes because he had not envisaged wading through snow up to the knees. He stumbled to the door and hammered on it. The door opened to reveal an oblong of yellow light, thrown apparently by paraffin lamps, and in the glow stood Major General Pavel Petrovitch Borisov, dressed in a Siberian shirt, corduroy trousers, and felt boots.
“You look like something out of a Tolstoy novel,” remarked Karpov as he was shown into the main sitting room, where a brick stove full of logs gave the cottage a womblike warmth.
“Better than something out of a Bond Street window,” grumbled Borisov as he took Karpov’s coat and hung it on a wooden peg. He uncorked a bottle of vodka so strong it poured like syrup, and filled two shot glasses. The men seated themselves, a table between them.
“Bottoms up,” Karpov offered, raising his glass, Russian style, between forefinger and thumb, pinkie extended.
“Up yours,” Borisov replied testily, and they drained the first slug.
An old peasant woman shaped like a tea cozy, looking like an incarnation of Mother Russia with her blank face and gray hair in a tight bun, came in from the back, banged down a collation of black bread, onions, gherkins, and cheese cubes, and left without a word.
“So what’s the problem, Starets?” asked Karpov.
Borisov was five years older than himself, and not for the first time Karpov was struck by the man’s close resemblance to the late Dwight Eisenhower. Borisov, unlike many in the service, was much liked by his colleagues and adored by his young agents. They had long ago given him the affectionate nickname Starets, a word that originally meant village headman but now had the connotations of the English “Old Man” and the French patron.
Borisov stared moodily across the table. “Yevgeni Sergeivitch, how long have we known each other?”
“More years than I care to remember,” said Karpov.
“And in that time, have I ever lied to you?”
“Not that I know of.” Karpov was pensive.
“And are you now going to lie to me?”
“Not if I can help it,” said Karpov carefully. What on earth had got into the old boy?
“Then what the hell are you doing to my department?” demanded Borisov loudly.
Karpov considered the question carefully. “Why don’t you tell me what is happening to your department?” he countered.
“It’s being stripped, that’s what,” snarled Borisov. “You have to be behind it. Or aware of it. How the hell am I supposed to run the S operation when my best men, my best documents, and my best facilities are being stripped from me? Bloody years of hard work—all confiscated within a matter of days.”
He had had his explosion, the thing that he had bottled up until now. Karpov sat back, lost in thought, while Borisov filled the glasses. Karpov had not risen as high as he had within the labyrinthine corridors of the KGB without developing a sixth sense for danger. Borisov was no alarmist; there had to be something behind what he said, but Karpov quite genuinely did not know what it was. He leaned forward.
“Pal Petrovitch,” he said, dropping into the very familiar diminutive of Pavel, “as you say, we have been around for a good many years. Believe me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Will you please stop shouting and tell me?”
Borisov was mollified, although puzzled by Karpov’s assertion of ignorance. “All right,” he said, as if explaining the obvious to a child. “First, two goons arrive from the Central Committee and demand that I hand over to them my best illegal, a man I’ve spent years training and of whom I had the greatest hopes. They say he has to be detached for ‘special duties,’ whatever that may mean. Okay, I give them my best man. I don’t like it, but I do it. Two days later they are back. They want my best legend, a story that took more than ten years to put together. Not since that damned Iranian affair have I been treated like that. You remember the Iranian business? I still haven’t recovered from that.”
Karpov nodded. He had not been with the Illegals Directorate then, but Borisov had told him all about it later when they worked together during Karpov’s tenure as its head. In the last days of the Shah of Iran, the International Department of the Central Committee had decided it would be a nice idea to spirit the entire Politburo of the Iranian Tudeh (Communist) Party out of Iran covertly. They had raided Borisov’s magpie-hoarded files and confiscated twenty-two perfect Iranian legends, cover stories Borisov had been saving to send people into Iran, not get them out. “Stripped to the bone!” he had screamed at the time. “Just to get those flea-bitten wogs to safety.” Later he had complained to Karpov, “It didn’t do them much good, either. The Ayatollah’s in charge, the Tudeh is still banned, and we can’t even mount an operation in there anymore.”
Karpov knew that the affair still rankled, but the new business was odder. For one thing, any request for personnel or legend should have come to him. “Whom did you give them?” he asked.
“Petrofsky,” said Borisov resignedly. “I had to. They asked for the best, and he was way ahead of the others. Remember Petrofsky?”
Karpov nodded. He had headed the Illegals Directorate for two years only, but he recalled all their best nam
es and ongoing operations. In his present post he had total access, anyway. “Whose authorization was on these requisitions?”
“Well, technically the Central Committee’s. But from the authority rating ...” Borisov pointed a rigid finger at the ceiling and, by inference, the sky.
“God?” queried Karpov.
“Almost. Our beloved General Secretary. At least, that’s my guess.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Just after they got the legend, the same clowns came back again. This time they took the receiver crystal for one of the covert transmitters you planted in England four years ago. That was why I thought you were behind it.”
Karpov’s eyes narrowed. During the time he was head of the Illegals Directorate the NATO countries had been deploying Pershing II and Cruise missiles. Washington had been running around the world trying to reenact the last reel of every John Wayne movie ever written, and the Politburo had been worried sick. Karpov had received orders to upgrade the Illegals’ contingency planning for massive behind-the-lines sabotage operations in Western Europe, for use in the event of any actual outbreak of hostilities.
To fulfill this order he had had a number of clandestine radio transmitters placed in Western Europe, including three in Britain. The men guarding the sets and trained to operate them were all “sleepers,” ordered to lie low until activated by an agent with the proper identification codes. The sets were ultramodern, scrambling their messages as they were transmitted; to unscramble a message the receiving set would need a programmed crystal. The crystals were stored in a safe in the Illegals Directorate.
“Which transmitter?” Karpov inquired.
“The one you called ‘Poplar.’ ”
Karpov nodded. All operations, agents, and assets had official code names. But Karpov had been a specialist on Britain for so long and knew London so well that he had private codes names for his own operations, and they were based on London suburbs whose names contained two syllables. The three transmitters he had caused to be placed in Britain were, for him, “Hackney,” “Shoreditch,” and “Poplar.”
Fourth Protocol Page 22