The Company

by Robert Littell

  “You did just fine,” Manny said.

  “So we may talk now of how I can come over?”

  Manny shook his head. “If only it was that easy, Sergei. Successful defections aren’t organized in one night. Your answers must be analyzed by our counterintelligence staff—“

  “By your Mr. Angleton,” Kukushkin said.

  “You know of Mr. Angleton?”

  “Everybody at our embassy knows of your Mr. Angleton.”

  “If counterintelligence gives us the go-ahead, then we need to set up a safe house in the countryside and staff it, and then organize the actual coming over—we will need a time when you and your wife and your daughter leave the Russian compound together on a pretext. You must be able to fill that briefcase with the secrets you promised us and spirit it out of the embassy. We must be able to bring you over and hide you away before the SK people know you are missing.”

  Kukushkin face darkened. “How long?”

  “If all goes well it could be done in five to six weeks.”

  The Russian exploded out of his chair. “SASHA is back in Washington before five weeks!” He strode over to the window, parted the curtain and studied the dark street below. “In five weeks, Manny, I am a dead man.”

  “Calm down, Sergei. There is a way out of this.”

  “There is no way out of a coffin.”

  Manny joined Kukushkin at the window. “There will not be a coffin, Sergei, if you give me the SASHA serials now—give us the first initial of SASHA’s family name, give us the biographical detail, tell us when SASHA was absent from Washington.”

  Kukushkin turned away and prowled back and forth behind the couch, a caged panther looking for a way out of the trap he had fallen into. “So: how are you feeling when you play this blackmail game with me?”

  Manny avoided Sergei’s eye. “Lousy. I feel lousy, is how I feel. But we all have our jobs to do…”

  The Russian grunted. “Being in your shoes I am doing the same. You and me, we are being in a lousy business.”

  “I didn’t invent SASHA, Sergei,” Manny said from the window. “I didn’t create the situation where he returns to Washington in a little more than a week.”

  “How can I be sure you are not throwing me away like old rag after I deliver SASHA serials?”

  “I give you my word, Sergei—“

  “Your Mr. Angleton is not bound by your word.”

  “You have other things we want—most especially, we want to discover the identity of your mole inside the NSA.”

  The Russian settled onto the couch again, defeated by the logic of the situation. “What about medical help for my wife?”

  “We can have her examined by specialists within days. If she needs treatment we can provide it.”

  “How examined within days?”

  “The Russians at the embassy all get their teeth fixed in America—they use that Bulgarian dentist near the Dupont Circle subway stop who speaks Russian and doesn’t charge a lot. If your wife suddenly had a toothache she would make an appointment. If she were going to have root canal, she would need three or four appointments over a period of three or four weeks. We could organize to have a heart specialist in another office in the same building.”

  “And the Bulgarian dentist?”

  “He would cooperate. He could pretend to do actual work on her and nobody would be the wiser.”

  “How are you being sure he cooperating?”

  Manny only smiled.

  AE/PINNACLE thought about it. Manny came across the room and sat on the back of the couch. “Trust me, Sergei—give me the SASHA serials. If we can identify SASHA your troubles are over. We’ll bring you and your wife and your daughter across under conditions that are as near to risk-free as we can make them. Then we’ll make you an offer that will knock your eyes out. You won’t regret it.”

  3

  WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, MAY 24, 1974

  TIME WAS RUNNING OUT ON THE SOVIET POLITICAL ATTACHÉ Kukushkin. His two-week window of opportunity had forty-eight hours left on the clock; if his information was correct, SASHA would return to Washington on Sunday and be back at his desk the following morning. Despite the task force’s efforts to limit distribution of its product, SASHA would be bound to pick up rumors of a high-level defection in the works, after which he could be expected to alert the SK people at the Soviet embassy.

  At the start Angleton had been wary of AE/PINNACLE. But his natural tendency to assume the worst case, when it came to defectors, started to crack the day Manny mentioned the serial concerning Moscow Centre’s newly created Department D, the Disinformation Directorate in charge of coordinating the KGB’s global disinformation campaign. Angleton had long ago inferred the existence of such a directorate from the fact that the world in general, and the American media in particular, had swallowed whole the rumors of a Sino-Soviet split, as well as the stories of Dubček and Ceausescu and Tito seeking to distance themselves from Moscow. Angleton, who prided himself on being able to distinguish between KGB disinformation and real political events in the real world, knew intuitively that these were planted stories designed to lull the West into cutting military and intelligence budgets.

  The SASHA serials that Manny brought back from his second rendezvous with AE/PINNACLE made Angleton’s head swim with possibilities. For the better part of two years he had been closing in on SASHA, gradually narrowing the list of suspects using a complex process of elimination that involved analyzing operations that had gone bad, as well as operations that had been successful. He felt that it was only a matter of months before he would be able to figure out, with near-certainty, the identity of SASHA. During those months, of course, SASHA could still do a great deal of damage. Which was why the AE/PINNACLE serials, used in conjunction with Angleton’s own painstaking work, were so crucial. Back in his own shop, Angleton assigned a team of counterintelligence experts to each serial.

  —SASHA, according to AE/PINNACLE, would be away from Washington until Sunday, May 26, which probably meant that he would be back at Langley on Monday, the twenty-seventh.

  —he was a Russian-speaker.

  —his last name began with the letter K.

  —when Kukushkin worked in Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate in Moscow Centre, he reported directly to Starik. In September of 1972, Kukushkin was asked to provide Starik with logistical support—highway and city maps, bus and train schedules, locations of car rental agencies—for one of his rare trips abroad, this one to the province of Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. In a casual conversation that took place when Kukushkin personally delivered the file to Starik’s private apartment, located in a villa known as the Apatov Mansion near a village called Cheryomuski, Starik intimated that he was going abroad to meet someone. Only later, when Kukushkin became aware of the existence of a high-level KGB penetration of the CIA, code named SASHA, did he put two and two together; only SASHA would have been important enough to lure Starik overseas.

  Even with these serials, identifying SASHA would be tantamount to stumbling across the proverbial needle in the haystack. The Company had something in the neighborhood of 22,000 regular employees and another 4,000 contract employees. The Clandestine Service alone had roughly 5,000 staffers worldwide; 4,000 of them worked in Washington and another thousand were spread across stations around the globe.

  While counterintelligence went about the tedious business of searching the Central Registry—they had to sort through thousands of files by hand—Manny organized the medical visit for Kukushkin’s wife, a short, heavy woman whose close-cropped hair was beginning to turn white…with worry, Manny supposed. Her name was Elena Antonova. On cue, she complained of a toothache and asked the Russian nurse at the embassy to suggest a dentist. The nurse gave her the phone number of the Russian-speaking Bulgarian dentist near Dupont Circle whom everyone at the embassy used. Miraculously, someone had canceled and there was an opening on the following day. The dentist, actually a Company contract employee, had given Mrs.
Kukushkin a formal written diagnosis without even examining her—she was suffering from an abscess at the root of the lower first bicuspid, which would require between three and four appointments for root canal work, at a cost of $45 per visit.

  Manny was loitering in the corridor when Elena Antonova emerged from the dentist’s office, an appointment card in her hand. He gestured for her to follow him up two flights to an office with the words “Proffit & Proffit, Attorneys at Law” stenciled on the glass door. Inside, Manny introduced Kukushkin’s wife to a heart specialist, a Company contract employee with a top secret security clearance. The doctor, who went by the name M. Milton when he moonlighted for the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, was fluent in Russian. He led her into an inner office (equipment had been rushed in the night before) for an examination that lasted three quarters of an hour. Then, with Manny present, the doctor delivered his prognosis: in all likelihood, Elena Antonova was suffering from angina pectoris (he would make a definitive diagnosis when her blood tests came back from the laboratory), the result of a high cholesterol count that was causing a narrowing of the arteries carrying blood to her heart. Dr. Milton proposed to treat the problem with a combination of beta-blocking agents to decrease the work of the heart and slow the pulse rate, and vasodilators designed to increase coronary circulation. If the condition persisted, Mrs. Kukushkin might eventually require coronary bypass surgery but that decision could be made at a later date.

  Manny accompanied Mrs. Kukushkin to the elevator and, speaking Russian in an undertone, promised her that on her next visit to the dentist, the doctor will have prepared the necessary medicine disguised as ordinary over-the-counter pills that women used to alleviate menstrual cramps. Bolshoe spasibo, she whispered. She tried to smile. “I will tell you—I am terrified. If they find out about this it will be terrible for us: for Sergei, for me, for our daughter, Ludmilla.”

  “We will do everything under the sun to prevent them from finding out,” Manny promised her.

  At Langley Angleton emerged from a sick bed—he had come down with Asian flu and was running a fever—to attend the regular afternoon task force meeting down the hall from the DD/O’s office. Wrapped in an overcoat and a scarf, he settled sluggishly into his habitual seat at the head of the table. The skin on his wrists and face was almost translucent, his shirtfront was drenched in sweat; beads of perspiration trickled down the side of his nose. For the first time in memory he didn’t immediately light a cigarette. “My people have gone over the serials with a fine-tooth comb,” he announced, his voice low and strained. “And we’ve added a serial of our own that has been on a back burner for years. My tentative conclusion is that AE/PINNACLE could be the rarest of orchids, a genuine defector bearing real secrets.”

  Colby looked across the table at his DD/O, Elliott Ebbitt. It was easy to see that both men were stunned.

  “Are you telling us that you’ve identified SASHA?” Jack asked.

  Angleton only said, “You’re not going to like it.”

  “You want to walk us through it,” Colby said impatiently. He doodled with the point of a number two pencil on a yellow legal pad, creating an endless series of linked circles.

  Angleton’s lanky body could be seen trembling under the overcoat. “Working from AE/PINNACLE’s four serials,” he began, “my people have narrowed the list of suspects dramatically. I’ll start with the first three serials. There are one hundred and forty-four Russian speaking Company employees whose last name begins with K and are expected to be away from Washington until Sunday. Of these hundred and forty-four, twenty-three were also out of Washington at some point during the period Kukushkin claims SASHA was away, which was in September of 1972.”

  Colby designed a very elaborate “twenty-three” on his pad, replete with curlicues. From his place at the far end of the table, Manny watched Angleton slouch back into his seat, almost like an animal gathering itself for a kill.

  “Which brings me to the serial that I’ve kept on a back burner now for thirteen years.” Angleton’s mask of a face twisted into an anguished smile; his dark eyes seemed to be laughing at some long-forgotten joke. “Thirteen years! You need the patience of a saint to breed orchids. It can take twelve months for the seedpod to develop, another year or two for the seed to grow as big as your thumb. The flowering, if there is a flowering, could take another five years, even eight or ten. Counterintelligence 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. And all the while you hear the voices whispering behind your back. Mother’s obsessed, they say. He’s paranoid, they say. Mother is a conclusion searching for confirmatory evidence.” Angleton shivered again and chewed on his lower lip. “Believe me, I heard every word. And every word hurt.”

  Colby tried to gently nudge Angleton back on track. “The fifth serial, Jim.”

  “The…fifth…serial,” Angleton said, dolling out the words as if he had decided to toy with his audience. “In 1961 the FBI stumbled across an old Communist named Max Cohen who had gone underground twenty years earlier. You recall the incident, don’t you, Bill? Cohen, using the alias Kahn, had set up a wine and beverage store in Washington. Kahn provided the perfect front for the Soviet cutout who lived above the store and delivered liquor to hundreds of clients in the Washington area. The cutout went by the name of Dodgson, which, curiously, happened to have been the real name of Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland; it makes you wonder if the KGB spy-master who ran Philby, who runs SASHA, isn’t, like Dodgson, creating worlds within worlds within worlds for us to get lost in.” Angleton shut his eyes and appeared to meditate for a moment before going on. “When the FBI searched Kahn’s store they discovered ciphers and microfilms, a microdot reader, wads of cash bound in rubber bands and a shortwave radio, all of it hidden under the floorboards in Dodgson’s closet. Dodgson himself somehow slipped through the FBI’s fingers when they arrested Kahn and a female employee. But I never forgot him. Not for a moment. All these years. Nurturing the seeds, keeping the temperature moist and hot, hoping against hope that the seeds would burst into flower.” His voice trailed off and a glazed look came into his eyes.

  Colby tugged on the rein again. “The fifth serial?”

  “The fifth serial…I checked Kahn’s invoices for the previous ten years and discovered that, at one point in the early fifties, Dodgson had been delivering liquor to”—Angleton spit out the words—“my former colleague Adrian Philby; I myself was at Adrian’s house one evening when Dodgson brought over two bottles of Lagavulin Malt Whisky. At the time, of course, it seemed perfectly natural and I thought nothing of it. Only now do I understand how close I was to…” The sentence trailed off. Angleton shook his head in frustration. “With Philby gone,” he plunged on, “it seemed logical to suppose that this same Dodgson would act as the cutout for Philby’s replacement; for SASHA.” Angleton reached into a jacket pocket and extracted a pack of cigarettes, which he set on the table. The sight of the cigarettes seemed to revive him. “Checking through Kahn’s clients who had been on the receiving end of deliveries during the previous ten years, I was able to identify the names of one hundred and sixty-seven full-time Company employees and sixty-four contract employees.”

  Jack jumped ahead. “You matched the Kahn client list against the twenty-three names you teased out of the Kukushkin serials.”

  “It seemed too good to be true,” Angleton admitted. “And it was. None of the names on Kahn’s delivery list matched any of the twenty-three names derived from Kukushkin’s four serials.”

  “It sounds as if you reached another dead end after all,” Colby said.

  Angleton extracted a cigarette from the pack and turned it in his fingers. “Oh, it may have looked like a dead end to the ordinary eye. But not to mine. I knew the identity of SASHA was buried there—somewhere in the overlap of the two lists.” He clamped the cigarette between his chapped lips without lighting it. “Last
weekend,” he continued, his voice a throaty growl, the unlit cigarette twitching on his lower lip, “I overheard my wife on the phone making hotel reservations for us in New Haven—Cicely and I were going up to attend a Robert Lowell reading at Yale. As a security precaution—we don’t want the opposition keeping track of my movements, do we? —I always have my wife make reservations or purchases using her maiden name. And all of a sudden it hit me—my God, how did I miss it?—SASHA could have had a wife. To put as much distance between himself and Dodgson, he could have had his wife order the liquor from Kahn’s using her maiden name. With this in mind I sent my people back to the drawing boards. We checked the maiden names of the wives of the twenty-three people we teased out of Kukushkin’s serials, and then went back to Kahn’s clients—to the people the cutout Dodgson had delivered liquor to between the hasty departure of Philby and Kahn’s arrest ten years later.”

  By now everyone in the room was hunched forward, their eyes fixed on Angleton’s lips almost as if they expected to see the name emerging from his mouth before they could hear it.

  “And?” Colby whispered.

  “The only maiden name that turned up on both lists was…Swett,” Angleton said.

  Both Jack and Ebby recognized the name instantly. “Adelle Swett is Philip Swett’s daughter,” Jack said.

  “And Leo Kritzky’s wife,” Angleton murmured.

  “You’re way off base, Jim—” Ebby started to say.

  “Are you suggesting that Leo Kritzky is SASHA?” Jack demanded incredulously.

  Manny said, “This has got to be a blind alley—“

  Jack’s palm came down hard on the table. “I’ve known Leo since Yale. We crewed together. We roomed together. He’s the godfather of my boy. I’d stake my life on him—“