The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Why do you speak of mistakes?” Jack asked in annoyance. “To tell me that our night together was a mistake?”

  “That is not at all what I meant. It is my way of telling you in one or two sentences the story of my life,” she explained. “I have concluded that the problem is not so much the accumulation of small mistakes but the big ones we make trying to correct them.”

  Later that night the teardrop planted in SNIPER’s floorboards detected the sound of voices, activating the transmitter hidden in the lighting fixture below. In the morning a transcript arrived on Jack’s desk. It was filled with half-garbled fragments of sentences from people walking into and out of the room, rumors of a famous marriage on the rocks, a hurried declaration of undying devotion from an older man to a younger woman, the punch line of an anti-Soviet joke, a flowery tribute to someone’s cooking. It was pretty much what the microphone had been picking up from the start: the inconsequential prattle of a couple in the privacy of their own apartment, as opposed to intelligence secrets, which SNIPER collected at the university or in government offices. After a while there was a long silence, followed by a quiet and intense conversation between what sounded like a German (obviously SNIPER) and a Pole talking in the only language they had in common, which was English.

  It was the transcription of this conversation that intrigued Jack. The text contained details of bacteriological warfare testing on the Baltic island of Rügen, uranium production in the Joachimstal area of the Harz Mountains and the latest Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia. Then the two men chatted about friends they had in common and what had happened to them over the years; one had died of colon cancer, another had left his wife for a younger woman, still another had defected to the French and now lived in Paris. Suddenly the Pole mentioned that he supposed the Russians had an important spy in British intelligence. How could he know such a thing, asked the older man, obviously surprised. The conversation broke off when a woman’s footsteps came back into the room. There was some murmured thanks for the brandy, the clink of glass against glass. The microphone picked up the woman’s cat-like footfalls as she quit the room. The older man repeated his question: how could his guest possibly know the Russians had a spy in British intelligence. Because the Polish intelligence service, the UB, was in possession of a highly classified British intelligence document, the Pole said. He had seen the document with his own eyes. It was a copy of the British MI6’s “watch list” for Poland. What is a watch list? the older man inquired. It was a list of Polish nationals that MI6’s Warsaw Station considered potential assets and worth cultivating. The list could have been stolen from British intelligence agents in Warsaw, the older man suggested. No, no, the Pole maintained. The copy he had seen bore internal routing marks and initials indicating it had been circulated to a limited number of MI6 intelligence officers, none of whom was serving in Warsaw.

  The conversation moved on to other things—news of friction between the Polish Communists and the Russians, the suppression of a Warsaw magazine for publishing an article about the massacre of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1943, a spirited discussion of whether the Germans or the Russians had killed the Poles (both men agreed it had been the Russians), a promise to keep in touch, a warning that letters on both sides were likely to be opened. Then RAINBOW’s voice could be heard saying goodbye to the Pole. There were heavy footsteps on the staircase, followed by the sound of glasses being cleared away and a door closing.

  Looking up from the transcript, Jack produced a new series of snapshots: he could see SNIPER removing his old-fashioned starched collar and the studs from his shirt; he could see RAINBOW reaching up to take off her earrings, he could see the smile on her lips as she remembered the effect the gesture had had on Jack; he could see her coming back from the toilet in a shapeless cotton nightdress; he could see her turning down the cover of the four poster bed and slipping under the sheets next to the man to whom she owed so much.

  Shaking off the images, Jack reread the passages concerning the Soviet spy in MI6. If the Sorcerer wasn’t already on his way to Washington to flaunt his barium meals in Mother’s face and unmask the Soviet mole, he would have delivered this new serial to him right away. No matter. The gist of the conversation would turn up in SNIPER’s distinctive handwriting on the warm silk that Jack would extract with his own fingers from Lili’s brassiere.

  14

  ARLINGTON, SUNDAY, MAY 20, 1951

  WEARING A SOILED GARDENER’S APRON OVER AN OLD SHIRT AND washed-out chinos, James Jesus Angleton was sweeping the aisles of the greenhouse he had recently installed in the back yard of his suburban Arlington house, across the Potomac from the District of Columbia and the Pickle Factory on the Reflecting Pool. “What I’m doing,” he said, a soggy cigarette glued to his lower lip, a hacking cough scratching at the back of his throat, a dormant migraine lurking under his eyelids, “is breeding a hybrid orchid known as a ‘Cattleya cross.’ Cattleya is a big corsage orchid that comes in a rainbow of colors. If I succeed in crossing a new Cattleya, I plan to call it the Cicely Angleton after my wife.”

  The Sorcerer loosened the knot of his tie and slung his sports jacket over the back of a bamboo chair. He shrugged out of his shoulder holster, and hung it and the pearl-handled revolver from the knob of a ventilation window. “I’m a goddamn Neanderthal when it comes to flowers, Jim. So I’ll bite—how does someone cross an orchid?”

  “For God’s sake, don’t sit on it,” Angleton cried when he saw Torriti starting to back his bulky body into the chair. “The bamboo won’t hold your weight. Sorry. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I am sorry.” Angleton went back to his sweeping. Out of the corner of his eye he kept track of Torriti, who began meandering aimlessly around the aisles running his finger tips over clay pots and small jars and gardening tools set out on a bamboo table. “Crossing orchids is a very long and very tedious process,” Angleton called across the greenhouse, “not unlike the business of counterespionage.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Angleton abruptly stopped sweeping. “I do say. Trying to come up with a hybrid involves taking the pollen from one flower and inseminating it into another. Ever read any of Rex Stout’s mystery novels? He’s got a detective named Nero Wolfe who breeds orchids in his spare time. Terrific writer, Rex Stout. You ought to get hold of him.”

  “I’m too busy solving goddamn mysteries to read goddamn mystery novels,” Torriti remarked. “So what makes crossing orchids like counterespionage?”

  Leaning on the broom handle, Angleton bent his head and lit a fresh cigarette from the embers of the one in his mouth. Then he flicked the butt into a porcelain spittoon overflowing with cigarette stubs. “It can take twelve months for the seedpod to develop,” he explained, “at which point you plant the seed in one of those small jars there. Please don’t knock any of them over, Harvey. It takes another twelve months for the seed to grow an inch or two. The eventual flowering, if there is a flowering, could take another five years. Counter-espionage is like that—you nurture seeds in small jars for years, you keep the temperature moist and hot, you hope the seeds will flower one day but there’s no guarantee. You need the patience of a saint, which is what you don’t have, Harvey. Orchid breeding and counterintelligence are not your cup of tea.”

  Torriti came around an aisle to confront Angleton. “Why do you say that, Jim?”

  “I remember you back in Italy right after the war. You were guilty of the capital crime of impatience.” Angleton’s rasping voice, the phrases he used, suddenly had a whetted edge to them. “You were obsessed about getting even with anybody who was perceived to have crossed you—your friends in the Mafia, the Russians, me.”

  “And people say I have the memory of an elephant!”

  “Remember Rome, Harvey? Summer, nineteen forty-six? You lost an agent, he turned up in a garbage dump with his fingers and head missing. You identified him from an old bullet wound tha
t the doctors who performed the autopsy mistook for an appendicitis scar. You were quite wild, you took it personally, as if someone had spit in your face. You didn’t sleep for weeks while you walked back the cat on the affair. You narrowed the suspects down to eight, then four, then two, then one. You decided it had been the mistress of the dead man. Funny thing is you may have been right. We never got a chance to question her, to find out whom she worked for, to play her back. She drowned under what the carabinieri described as mysterious circumstances—she apparently stripped to the skin and went swimming off a boat at midnight. Curious part was she didn’t own a boat and couldn’t swim.”

  “She couldn’t swim because there was a goddamn chunk of scrap iron tied to her goddamn ankle,” Torriti said. He laughed under his alcoholic breath. “I was young and impetuous in those days. Now that I’ve grown up I’d use her. When she’d been used up, that’s when I’d tie the goddamn iron to her goddamn ankle and throw her overboard.” Torriti hiked up his baggy trousers, which tapered and came to a point at the ankles; Angleton caught a glimpse of another holster strapped to one ankle. “There’s a bond between an agent and his handler, an umbilical cord, the kind of thing that exists between a father and a son,” Torriti was saying. “You’re too analytical to get a handle on it, Jim. You’ve got dazzling theories into which you fit everything. I don’t have theories. What I know I pick up the hard way—I get my hands and knees dirty working in the goddamn field.”

  “You operate on the surface of things. I dig deeper.” Angleton wearied of the sparring. “What did you have to tell me that couldn’t wait until Monday morning?”

  “I’m in the process of writing a memorandum to the Director laying out the case that your pal Philby is a Soviet spy. Has been since the early thirties. As you’re the Company’s counterintelligence honcho, I thought it was only fair to give you some advance warning. On top of that, I thought we ought to take precautions to make sure Philby doesn’t blow the coop.”

  “You’ll only make a fool of yourself, Harvey.”

  “I have the son-of-a-bitch by the balls, Jim.”

  “You want to lay out the case for me.”

  “That’s what brought me across the goddamn Potomac on a drizzly Sunday afternoon when I could be drinking in my goddamn hotel room.”

  Angleton leaned the broom against the side of the greenhouse and produced a small pad from his hip pocket. “Mind if I make notes?”

  “No skin off my goddamn nose.”

  Pulling the bamboo chair up to the bamboo table, pushing aside his gardening tools to make room for the pad, Angleton fingered the pencil he used for filling in his gardening log and looked up, the barest trace of a condescending smile on his lips.

  The Sorcerer, patrolling behind him, began with the story of Phlby’s membership in the Cambridge Socialist Society in the early thirties, his pilgrimage to riot-torn Vienna, his marriage to a rabid Red (Angleton’s Israeli friend, Teddy Kollek, had known about the wedding), his efforts after he returned to England to paper over his left-wing leanings by turning up at German embassy parties and nursing a reputation for being pro-German. Then came the Times assignment to cover Franco’s side during the Spanish Civil War.

  Angleton glanced up. “Adrian has been vetted a dozen times over the years—none of this breaks new ground.”

  Torriti rambled on, raising the Krivitsky serial which, according to Elihu Epstein, the Brits had never shared with their American cousins.

  “Krivitsky was debriefed when he reached this side of the Atlantic,” Angleton remembered. He closed his eyes and quoted the serial from memory. “There is a Soviet mole, code named PARSIFAL and handled by a master spy known by the nickname Starik, working in British intelligence. The mole worked for a time as a journalist in Spain during the Civil War.” Opening his eyes, Angleton snickered. “Krivitsky was telling us there was a needle in the haystack in the hope we’d take him seriously.”

  “Somebody took him seriously—he was murdered in Washington in 1941.”

  “The official police report listed his death as a suicide.”

  Torriti turned in a complete circle, as if he were winding himself up, then asked if Angleton was aware that Philby had signed out MI6 Source Books on the Soviet Union long before he became involved in Soviet counterespionage.

  “No, I didn’t know that but, knowing Adrian, knowing how thorough he is, I would have been surprised if he hadn’t signed out those Source Books.”

  Which brings us to Vishnevsky, the Sorcerer said, the would-be defector who told us he could finger a Soviet mole in MI6.

  “Which brings us to Vishnevsky,” Angleton agreed.

  The night of the aborted exfiltration, Torriti plunged on, KGB Karlshorst sent Moscow Centre an Urgent Immediate—the Sorcerer happened to have a copy of the clear text—thanking Moscow for the early warning that prevented the defection of Lieutenant Colonel Volkov/Vishnevsky, his wife and his son. “Once Vishnevsky claimed he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6,” Torriti said, “I was careful not to include any Brits on the Vishnevsky distribution list. So tell me something, Jim. I’m told you hang out with Philby at La Niçoise, not to mention that he drops by your office whenever he shows up at the Pickle Factory. Did you mention Vishnevsky to your British pal? Spill the beans, Jim. Did you tell him we had someone claiming he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6?”

  Angleton set down his pencil. He appeared to be talking to himself. “To begin with, there is no hard evidence that there is a Soviet mole in MI6—“

  “Vishnevsky claimed there was—“

  “Vishnevsky wouldn’t have been the first defector to make himself appear valuable by claiming to have a gold ingot.”

  “All the pieces fit,” Torriti insisted.

  “All the pieces are circumstantial,” Angleton said coolly; he was talking down to Torriti again. “All the pieces could point to any one of two or three dozen Brits.” Sucking on his cigarette, he twisted in the bamboo chair until he was facing Torriti. “I know Adrian as well as I know anyone in the world,” he announced with sudden vehemence. “I know what makes him tick, I know what he’s going to say, the attitude he’ll take in a given situation, before he opens his mouth and starts to stutter. I’d trust Adrian with my life. He couldn’t be spying for the Russians! He represents everything I admire in the British.” A haze of cigarette smoke obscured the expression on Angleton’s face as he confessed, “Adrian is the person I would have liked to be.”

  Torriti produced a rumpled handkerchief and mopped the humidity off his palms. “Would you trust him with your Cattleya if it ever blooms?” Smirking at his own joke, he raised the matter of the agent drops into Poland and the Ukraine that had all ended in disaster. Philby, as MI6’s liaison in Washington, had known about these drops.

  “You parachute a bunch of courageous but amateur recruits into the lion’s den and then you’re surprised to discover they’ve been eaten alive.”

  Torriti wandered off and picked up a small jar with a tiny bud breaking through the earth in it.

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t handle the merchandise,” Angleton called over. “They are extremely fragile.”

  The Sorcerer set the jar in its rack and ambled back. Pulling out his own notebook, wetting a thumb and leafing back the pages, he began to walk Angleton through his series of barium meals. He had sent one off to every single person on the Washington end who might have betrayed the Vishnevsky exfiltration. All of the barium messages had looked as if they were distributed widely but the distribution had been limited in each case to a single person or a single office. All of the operations he had exposed in the meals remained in place—all, that is, except the Albanian operation. The barium meal spelling out the Albanian caper had gone to the inter-agency Special Policy Committee, of which Philby was a member.

  “There are sixteen members of the Special Policy Committee,” Angleton noted, “not counting aides and secretaries who are cleared to read everything that passes through the co
mmittee’s hands.”

  “Know that,” Torriti said. “That’s why I narrowed the field down with a last barium meal. I had it sent to Philby himself. I let him know that I knew the identity of the Soviet mole in MI6. Two days later the Russians set me up for a kidnapping.”

  Angleton shook his head. “Russians kidnap people all the time—not surprising they’d try to get their hands on the head of Berlin Base.” Suddenly a gleam appeared in Angleton’s dark Mexican eyes. He snapped shut his notebook and stood up. “There was one more barium meal you haven’t mentioned, Harvey. Unfortunately for you it punctures a gaping hole in your case against Adrian. What’s your single best intelligence source in the Soviet zone of Berlin? SNIPER, by far. He is not only a theoretical physicist who has access to Soviet atomic secrets but a Deputy Prime Minister of the German Democratic Republic, someone extremely high up in the nomenklatura—someone who one day could conceivably become Prime Minister. Who services SNIPER? A courier code-named RAINBOW. You fed me this information in one of your so-called barium meals. I don’t mind telling you I shared it with Adrian. If Adrian is your Soviet mole, how come SNIPER and RAINBOW weren’t blown?”

  The Sorcerer retrieved his holster and, dipping his left arm through the loop, buckled it across his barrel chest. “You never did say whether you passed on the Vishnevsky serial to your pal.”

  Angleton, tracing a series of petals in the film of humidity coating a pane of greenhouse glass, appeared to be in the middle of a conversation he was having with himself. “Adrian can’t be a Soviet mole—all these years, all these operations. It is inconceivable.”

  15

  GETTYSBURG, SATURDAY, MAY 26, 1951

  EUGENE STOOD ON THE CREST OF CEMETERY HILL, GAZING ACROSS the killing ground that sloped down to Seminary Ridge. “They came from there,” he said, pointing with the flat of his hand to the woods at the bottom of the fields. “Pickett’s lunatic charge—the high water mark of the Confederacy. At midafternoon thirteen thousand Rebels started across the no-man’s land, muskets leveled at their waists, bayonets fixed, battle flags flying, drums beating, dogs barking, half the men pissing in their trousers. If they had been Russian soldiers, they would have shouted: ‘To the success of our hopeless task!’ The objective was the Union line, stretched out along this ridge over to the Big Round Top. The Union gunners held their fire until they could hear the Rebels calling encouragement to each other. Then seventeen hundred muskets fired at once. A moan went up from the soldiers in the fields. Union grapeshot raked the Confederate ranks; the Yankee cannons became so hot their gunners burned their fingers firing and loading, firing and loading. When the cannons and the muskets fell silent, the battlefield was strewn with limbs and awash with blood. Only half of those who started out made it back to the woods. General Lee is supposed to have ridden up to Pickett and ordered him to rally his division against the counterattack that was sure to chase him back across the Potomac. Pickett is supposed to have told Lee that he no longer had a division to rally.”