“There are only fifteen hundred, then? Fidel will be happy to learn of this detail.”
“The invasion is scheduled for early in the month of April,” Starik said. “Current plans call for three civilian freighters to ferry half the brigade of mercenaries, some seven hundred and fifty men, to Cuba, though it is not excluded that this number could increase to fifteen hundred if more ships are brought into the operation.”
Piñeiro pulled another of the deciphered cables from the pile. “We have an agent among the longshoremen loading one of the freighters, the Río Escondido, at its anchorage on the Mississippi River. The ship is carrying a communications van, large stores of ammunition and a quantity of aviation gasoline.”
“A portion of the aviation gasoline is in tanks below deck, the rest in two hundred fifty-five-gallon drums lashed to the decks topside,” Starik told the Cuban. “With all this gasoline on the main deck the Río Escondido will be a juicy target for your planes. Note, too, that the brigade’s B-26 bombers will strike three times before the landings, once on D-day minus two, a second time on D-day minus one, a third on the morning of the landings. The principal targets of the first two raids will be the airplanes parked at your air bases, and the air base facilities themselves. The third raid will attack any of your planes that survived the first two raids, plus your command-and-control centers, your communications facilities and any armor or artillery spotted by the U-2 overflights near the invasion site.”
“We know that the Americans plan to send the Cuban counterrevolutionists ashore at Trinidad,” Piñeiro said. He was anxious to impress his guest with the work of the Cuban intelligence community. “They selected Trinidad because of its proximity to the Escambray Mountains. They reasoned that if the landing failed to spark a general uprising or an Army mutiny and the invaders then failed to break out of the beachhead, they could slip away into the mountains and form guerrilla bands that, sustained by air drops, could prove to be a thorn in the side of the revolution.”
Starik consulted a second folder. “It is true that the CIA originally targeted Trinidad but, at the insistence of the new President, they recently moved the landings to a more remote area. Even Roberto Escalona, the leader of the brigade, has not yet been informed of the change. The plan now calls for the establishment of a bridgehead on two beaches in a place called the Bay of Pigs.”
Piñeiro had assumed that the KGB had excellent sources of information in America but he had never quite realized how excellent until this moment. Though he was too discreet to raise the subject, it was clear to him that Starik must be running an agent in the upper echelons of the CIA, perhaps someone with access to the White House itself.
“The Zapata swamps, the Bay of Pigs,” he told Pasha excitedly, “is an area well known to Fidel—he goes down there often to skin-dive.” He pulled a detailed map of southern Cuba from a drawer and flattened it on the table. “The Bay of Pigs—it is difficult for me to believe they could be so foolish. There are only three roads in or out—causeways that can be easily blocked.”
“You must be careful to move your tanks and artillery down there in ones and twos, and at night, and camouflage them during the day, so that the CIA does not spot them and realize you have anticipated their plans.”
“Fidel is a master at this sort of thing,” Piñeiro said. “The mercenaries will be trapped on the beach and destroyed by artillery and tank fire.”
“If the American Navy does not intervene.”
“Do you have information that it will?”
“I have information that it will not.” Starik opened yet another folder. “The Americans will have the aircraft carrier Essex and a destroyer squadron standing off your coast, not to mention the air-bases available in Key West, fifteen minutes flying time from Cuba. The young Kennedy has specifically warned the CIA that he has no intention of committing American forces overtly, even if things turn against the Cuban mercenaries on the beaches. But the CIA people in charge of the operation believe that, faced with the destruction of the Cuban brigade on the Bay of Pigs, the President will give in to the logic of the situation and, to avoid a debacle, commit American planes and ships to the battle.”
“What is your assessment?”
“The young President will come under enormous pressure from the CIA and the military clique to intervene if disaster threatens. My feeling, based on nothing more than instinct, is that he will resist this pressure; that he will write off his losses and move on to the next adventure.”
They discussed various details of the CIA operation that the Russians had knowledge of: the arms and ammunition that would be available to the Cuban invaders on the beach, the communications channels that would be used from the beach to the American flotilla off the coast, the makeup of the Cuban government in exile that would be flown to the invasion site if and when the beachhead was secured. Piñeiro asked what the Soviet reaction would be if the American President gave in to the pressure and used American ships and plans overtly. Starik himself had briefed Nikita Khrushchev on the CIA plans to mount an invasion of Cuba, he told his Cuban colleague. They had not discussed what the Soviet side would do in the event of overt—as opposed to covert—American aggression; that was a subject that Fidel Castro would have to take up with First Secretary Khrushchev, either directly or through diplomatic channels. Again, all exchanges between the two sides should be limited to letters carried by hand in diplomatic pouches, lest the America code-breakers learn that the CIA plans had leaked. Pressed, Starik offered his personal opinion: in the event of overt American intervention, the best that the Soviet side could do would be to threaten similar intervention in, say, Berlin. This would focus the attention of the American President on the risks he was running.
Piñeiro pointed with his chin toward Starik’s manila folders. “There is a fourth folder you haven’t yet opened,” he said.
Starik kept his eyes fixed on Piñeiro’s. “Hand in glove with the invasion,” he said, “the CIA is planning to assassinate Castro.”
The young translator winced at the word “assassinate.” Piñeiro’s high brow furrowed. The red beard on his chin actually twitched as his Russian visitor pulled a single sheet from the fourth folder and began reading from it aloud. Piñeiro’s nephew translated the words phrase by phrase. The CIA had summoned home its Berlin Base chief of many years, a Sicilian-American who had been in contact with the Mafia during the war, and ordered him to develop a capability to neutralize foreign leaders who obstructed American foreign policy. Castro was the first target on the list. The former Berlin Base chief, whose name was Torriti, had immediately contacted various American Cosa Nostra figures, including the head of the Chicago Cosa Nostra, Salvatore Giancana. Giancana, in turn, had come up with a Cuban on the island willing to slip poison into one of Castro’s drinks. Giancana had refused to identify the killer even to the CIA, so the Russians were unable to pass his name on to the Cubans. “We know only that sometime in the next month he will be given a bottle filled with aspirins, three of which will contain deadly botulism toxin,” Starik said.
Piñeiro asked how the poison pills could be distinguished from the ordinary aspirin. Starik had to admit that he was unable to provide an answer to that crucial question. Piñeiro, feverishly jotting notes on a pad, wanted to know if any other details of the plot, however small, were available. The Russian reread his sheet of paper. There was one other thing, he said. The Cosa Nostra apparently expected to exfiltrate the killer from Cuba after the assassination by means of a fast boat. To Piñeiro, this seemed to be a telling detail and he said so. It indicated that the attempt on Castro’s life would be made not far from a port.
Starik could only shrug. “I leave it to your service,” he said, “to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle.”
Piñeiro said with a cold glint in his eye, “We will.”
Minutes after eleven there was a soft drumbeat on the door of the suite on the top floor of the hotel in a Havana suburb. His spidery legs jutting from a c
oarse nightshirt, Starik padded over to the door and looked through the fisheye lens of the peephole. Three little girlies, their thin bodies squat and foreshortened in the lens, stood giggling outside the door. Starik threw the bolt and opened it. The girls, wearing white cotton slips, their bare feet dark with grime, filed silently past into the hotel room. The tallest of the three, whose dyed blonde hair curled around her oval face, started to say something in Spanish but Starik put a finger to his lips. He circled around the girls, taking in their jutting shoulder blades and flat chests and false eyelashes. Then he raised the hem of their slips, one by one, to inspect their crotches. The bleached-blonde turned out to have pubic hair and was immediately sent away. The two others were permitted into the enormous bed planted directly under the mirrors fixed in the ceiling.
In the immutable dusk of his corner office on the Reflecting Pool in Washington, James Jesus Angleton crawled like a snail across “Eyes-Only” cables and red-flagged index cards and hazy black-and-white photographs, leaving behind a sticky trail of conjecture.
Lighting a fresh cigarette, Angleton impatiently whisked ashes off the open file folder with the back of his hand. (His two-and-a-half pack a day habit had left his fingertips stained with nicotine, and his office and everything in it saturated with tobacco smoke; people who worked in Angleton’s counterintelligence shop liked to say they could sniff the paperwork and tell from the odor whether a given document had already passed through the chief’s hands.) He reached again for a magnifying glass and held it above one of the photographs. It had been taken with a powerful telephoto lens from a rooftop half a mile from the airport and enlarged several times in one of the Company’s darkrooms, leaving a grainy, almost pointillistic, image of a man emerging from the dark bowels of an Ilyushin freshly landed at José Martí Airport after one of the twice-weekly Moscow-Havana runs. The man appeared to shrink away from the dazzling burst of sunlight that had struck him in the face. Speckles of light glanced off something metallic in his left hand. A dispatch case, no doubt; standard KGB procedures would require that it be chained to the courier’s wrist.
But this was clearly no run-of-the-mill courier. The figure in the photo was tall, his face thin, his eyes hooded, his hair thinning, his civilian suit badly cut and seriously in need of a pressing. A long, unkempt wispy white beard trickled off of his chin.
Angleton shuffled through a pile of top-secret cables and dragged one out onto his blotter. A Company asset in Havana had reported on a conversation overheard at a cocktail party; Che Guevara and Manuel Piñeiro had been describing a meeting in Moscow with a bearded KGB chief known to the Russians as Starik. The Cubans, always quick to assign nicknames to people, had taken to calling him White Beard.
The cigarette glued to Angleton’s lower lip trembled at the possibility—at the likelihood even!—that he was, after all these years, looking at a photograph, albeit a blurred one, of his nemesis, the infamous Starik.
Angleton stared intently at the photograph. The word KHOLSTOMER came to his lips and he uttered them aloud into the silence of his office. Recently, one of the legal assistants in the Public Prosecutor’s office in Rome—a middle-aged paper pusher who, unbeknownst even to the Rome CIA station, was on Angleton’s personal grapevine—reported hearing rumors that the Institute for Religious Works, the Vatican bank, may have been laundering large amounts of hard currency being siphoned out of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The original tip had come from an Italian Communist who worked as an informer for the Prosecutor’s Office; according to the informer the money-laundering operation, some of it tied to loans to the Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank, went under a code name known only to a handful of the bankers involved: KHOLSTOMER. The sums of money mentioned had so many digits that the Public Prosecutor had actually laughed in derision when the rumors were brought to his attention. A very junior prosecutor had been assigned to the case, nevertheless; his investigation had been cut short when a speedboat he was riding in capsized while crossing the lagoon off Venice and he drowned. Soon after the Communist tipster was found floating face down in the Tiber, the apparent victim of a drug overdose. The Public Prosecutor, unmoved by the coincidence of these deaths and convinced that the whole affair was political propaganda, had decided to drop the matter.
Angleton shifted the magnifying glass to a second photograph. Like the first, it had been enlarged many times and was slightly out of focus. Piñeiro himself could be seen reaching up awkwardly to embrace the taller man. The fact that Piñeiro, the chief of Cuban intelligence, had personally come to the airport to greet the Russian reinforced the idea that the visitor, and the visit, must have been extraordinarily important.
Grabbing the bottle, Angleton poured himself a refill and gulped down a dose of alcohol. The warm sensation in the back of his throat steadied his nerves; these days he needed more than the usual amount of alcohol in his blood to function. Assuming, for the moment, that the man in the photograph was Starik, what was he doing in Havana? Angleton peered into the twilight of his office, looking for the thread that would lead him in the direction of answers. The only thing that would bring Starik himself to Cuba was to deliver intelligence that he didn’t want to trust to other hands or send by cipher for fear that American cryptoanalysts would be able to read his mail. Castro already knew what every Cuban in Miami knew (the New York Times had, after all, published the details): the Company was training Cuban exiles on a coffee plantation in Guatemala with the obvious intention of infiltrating them into Cuba in the hope of sparking a counterrevolution. What Castro didn’t know was where and when the exiles would strike. Within the CIA itself this information was closely held; there weren’t more than half a hundred people who knew where, and two dozen who knew when.
Over the years, American cryptographers had broken out snippets of clear text from enciphered Soviet messages and discovered garbled references which, when pieced together, seemed to point to the existence of a Russian operating under deep cover in Washington using the code name SASHA. Assuming, as Angleton did, that SASHA was a Russian mole in the heart of the Company, one had to presume the worst case: that he was among the happy few who knew the date and precise target of the Cuban operation. SASHA might even have caught wind of the super-secret ZR/RIFLE, the executive action program being organized by Harvey Torriti to assassinate Castro. In his mind’s eye Angleton could follow the chain links: SASHA to a cutout to Starik to Piñeiro to Castro.
The existence of a cutout intrigued Angleton. Weeks before he had been on the receiving end of a private briefing from one of Hoover’s underlings. The department had unearthed an old Communist named Max Cohen, who had changed his identity and gone underground in 1941, probably on orders from his KGB handler. Kahn, as he was now called, wasn’t giving the FBI the time of day: he claimed his arrest was a case of mistaken identity; claimed also that he knew nothing about the young man named Dodgson who delivered liquor for him, or the cache of espionage paraphernalia the FBI discovered under the floorboards of the closet in Dodgson’s studio apartment over the store.
The FBI had stumbled across Kahn by chance. He had mailed a greeting card to an old Party friend on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his marriage; Kahn had been the best man at the wedding. The card, which the FBI intercepted, had been signed “Your old comrade-in-arms who has never forgotten our friendship or abandoned the high road, Max.” Fingerprints on the envelope and the card matched those of the Max Cohen who had dropped from sight in 1941. The card had been mailed from Washington, DC. Working from the cancellation stamp on the envelope the FBI had been able to pin down the post office, then (on the assumption that Max Cohen might have kept his given name) went over the phone book looking for white males with the given name of Max in that neck of the Washington woods. There turned out to be a hundred and thirty-seven Maxes in that particular postal zone. From there it was a matter of dogged legwork (photographs of the young Max Cohen were doctored to see what he might look like twenty years later) until the
FBI narrowed the search down to Max Kahn of Kahn’s Wine and Beverage. Agents had shadowed him and his two employees for weeks before they decided to risk searching the suspects’ homes when they were out. It was then that the FBI hit pay dirt: in the studio over the store, the agents discovered a cache of ciphers and microfilms, a microdot reader, a small fortune in cash, along with a radio that could be tuned to shortwave bands. Hoover had hoped that one of three Soviet agents would lead him to Americans who were spying for the Soviet Union but, after ten days, he lost his nerve; fearful that one of the three might have spotted the FBI surveillance, he decided to take them into custody. The one who went by the name of Dodgson—a male Caucasian, age 31, medium height, sturdy build with sandy hair—had somehow slipped through the FBI net. When he phoned the girl she managed to blurt out a warning. After that he simply vanished, which indicated to Angleton that he must have been meticulously trained and furnished with a fallback identity. Although Eugene Dodgson was said to speak American English without a trace of a foreign accent, Angleton didn’t rule out the possibility that he might be a Russian passing himself off as an American.
Angleton would have given up cigarettes for the rest of his life to interrogate this Dodgson character. Agonizing over the problem, he reflected once again on the central reality of counterintelligence: everything was related in some way to everything else. A North Vietnamese defector who asked for asylum in Singapore was related to the fragment of a message that MI6 had deciphered from the London KGB rezident to Moscow Centre, which in turn was related to the disappearance in Germany of a secretary who worked part time for Gehlen’s organization. Hoping to stumble across missing pieces of the puzzle, Angleton had asked the FBI for a list of Kahn’s customers since the liquor store opened for business in the early 1940s. Philby’s name had leapt off the page. On several occasions in 1951 Eugene Dodgson had delivered liquor to Philby’s address on Nebraska Avenue. Suddenly it all made sense: Philby had been too valuable to let the KGB people at the Soviet embassy, constantly surveilled by FBI agents, come into contact with him. Starik would have set up a cutout operation, using someone living under deep cover. Dodgson, whether Russian or American, had been the link between Philby and his Soviet handler from the time he came to work at Kahn’s. Which meant that Dodgson was also the cutout between the Soviet mole SASHA and the KGB.
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