The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Girlies, imagine you are innocent little Alice lost in Wonderland—transport yourselves into her magical world for a moment.”

  “What is Wonderland really like?” Axinya asked shyly.

  “Is Wonderland in the socialist camp, Uncle?” Revolución, always pragmatic, wanted to know. “Is it a workers’ paradise, do you think?”

  “It is a paradise for little girls,” Starik whispered. He could make out the ethereal expressions creeping onto the faces of the two little nieces as they were transported to the whimsical world where, at any moment, the White Rabbit might appear, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other. Satisfied, Starik tripped the plunger. Opening the aperture to heighten the washed-out effect, he took several more shots. Finally he waved toward the door. “Enough for today,” he said grumpily. “You may go outside and play until suppertime.”

  The nieces, only to happy to flee his moodiness, tugged sleeveless cotton shifts over their heads and, arm in arm, scampered from the room. Starik could hear their shrieks as they skipped down the wide steps toward the front door of the Apatov Mansion. He turned off the klieg lights, rewound the film and stuck the exposed roll in the pocket of his long shirt. Deep in thought, he returned to the library and poured himself a glass of mineral water.

  What should he make of Philby, he wondered. He liked the man personally; Yevgeny had come away from their meeting saying that the Englishman was an embittered drunk and incapable of the intricate mental compartmentalization that would be required of a triple agent. Andropov, on the other hand, was absolutely convinced that Philby had been turned by Angleton; that somewhere along the way Philby had switched his ultimate loyalties to the CIA. How else explain the fact, so Andropov reasoned, that Philby had never been arrested? How else explain that he had been allowed to slip away from Beirut, where he had been working as a journalist, after the British came up with irrefutable evidence that he had betrayed his country? Starik’s gut view, which found few supporters within the KGB hierarchy, was that Angleton would have been only too happy to see Philby escape; might even have made sure whispers of an impending arrest reached the Englishman’s ears so that he could head for Moscow one jump ahead of the MI6’s agents come to fetch him home to London. The last thing Angleton wanted was for Philby to tell the world about all those lunches with the American counterintelligence chief at La Niçoise, about all the state secrets he’d swiped directly from the man charged with protecting state secrets. When Philby had turned up in Moscow in 1963, Starik had spent weeks screening the serials he’d sent from Washington during the years he’d been meeting regularly with Angleton. All of them had seemed true enough, which meant…which meant what? If Angleton had turned Philby into a triple agent, he would have been shrewd enough to continue feeding him real secrets to keep the KGB from suspecting the truth. That was what Starik had done over the years; was still doing, in fact: sending over false defectors with real secrets and real defectors with false secrets was all part of the great game.

  Sipping the mineral water, Starik slipped through the narrow door in the wood paneling into his small inner sanctum. Locking the door behind him, he disabled the destruction mechanism on the large safe cemented into the wall behind the portrait of Lenin, then opened it with the key he kept attached to the wrought silver chain hanging around his neck. He pulled out the old-fashioned file box with the words Soversheno Sekretno and KHOLSTOMER written in Cyrillic across the oak cover, and set it on the small table. He opened the box and extracted from a thick folder the cable that had been hand-delivered to the Apatov Mansion the previous night. The KGB rezident in Rome was alerting Directorate S to rumors circulating in Italian banking circles: The Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani, was said to be looking into reports that the Vatican Bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works, was involved in money-laundering transactions. Luciani, whom some touted as a possible successor to the current Pope, Paul VI, had apparently been alerted to the existence of a fourteen-year-old investigation by a Roman public prosecutor into a money-laundering operation bearing the code name KHOLSTOMER, and had dispatched two priests with accounting skills to review the handwritten ledgers gathering dust in the archives of the Institute for Religious Works.

  Starik looked up from the cable, his eyes dark with apprehension. Fortunately, one of the two priests came from a Tuscan family with strong ties to the Italian Communist Party; working closely with the Italian Communists, the rezident in Rome would be able to keep track of what information the priests sent back to Albino Luciani in Venice.

  If the Patriarch of Venice came too close to the flame he would have to be burned. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with KHOLSTOMER. Now that the American economy was in a recessionary spiral and inflation was soaring, Starik intended to present the scheme first to KGB Chairman Andropov and, if he approved it, to the secret Politburo Committee of Three that scrutinized intelligence operations. By year’s end, Starik hoped that Comrade Brezhnev himself would sign off on KHOLSTOMER and the stratagem that would bring America to its knees could finally be launched.

  Starik’s thoughts drifted to Yevgeny Alexandrovich. He bitterly regretted his decision to bring him back to Russia on home leave. The fatal illness of Yevgeny’s father had clouded Starik’s thoughts, lured him into the realm of sentimentality; he owed a last debt to the elder Tsipin, whom Starik had controlled when he worked in the United Nations Secretariat. Now that the debt was paid—Tsipin’s ashes had been scattered amid the birches of Peredelkino the previous afternoon—it was time for Yevgeny Alexandrovich to return to the war zone. Time, also, for Starik to get on with his cat-andbat game with the declining but still dangerous James Jesus Angleton.

  “Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?” he recited out loud.

  He made a mental note to read that particular chapter to the girlies before they were tucked in for the night.

  5

  WASHINGTON, DC, THURSDAY, JULY 4, 1974

  THE DARK GOVERNMENT OLDSMOBILE, OUTFITTED WITH BULLETPROOF windows and anti-mine flooring, threaded through the heavy beltway traffic in the direction of Langley. Riding shotgun up front next to the driver, the security guard fingered the clips taped back to back in the Israeli Uzi across his knees as he talked on the car radio to the chase car. “Breakwater Two, that there green Ford pickup two cars backa us been round for a spell—“

  There was blast of static from the speaker in the dashboard. “Breakwater One, been eyeballing him since we crossed the Potomac. Two Caucasian males with Raybans up front.”

  “Breakwater Two, ah’d certainly ’preciate you cuttin’em off if they was to try to tuck in behind us.”

  “Breakwater One, wilco.”

  In the backseat the Director of Central Intelligence, Bill Colby, was reading through the “Eyes-Only” overnight cables bound in a metal folder with a red slash across it. There had been a dry spell in the last several weeks—Angleton had run into a stone wall in his interrogation of Leo Kritzky, Jack McAuliffe hadn’t had any joy in identifying the Soviet mole inside the National Security Agency, Manny Ebbitt was scraping the bottom of the barrel at the weekly debriefing of the Russian defector AE/PINNACLE. Which made downright good news all the more welcome. Colby initialed a cable from Teheran Station (reporting on the feebleness of the Islamic fundamentalist opposition movements in Iran) and added it to the thin batch that would be routed on to Secretary of State Kissinger once the Company indicators and operational codes were expunged. Teheran Station’s assessment reinforced recent estimates from the Deputy Director/Intelligence predicting that Iran’s pro-Western monarch, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi, would rule into the next century; that Islamic fundamentalists would not menace Persian Gulf stability, or Western oil supplies, in the foreseeable future.

  The red telephone in the console buzzed. Colby lifted the receiver. “Yes?” He listened for a moment. “I’ll be at my desk at the stroke of eight—tell him to stop by.”

  Mi
nutes later Colby was pushing a steaming cup of coffee across the table toward Jack McAuliffe, the chief of operations for the Deputy Director/ Operations, Elliott Ebbitt. “It seemed pretty straightforward,” Jack explained. “Manny went back at AE/PINNACLE with the wording to make sure he got it right. There’s no mistake. The KGB rezident deposited a message, addressed to the NSA mole, behind the radiator in the men’s room of the Jefferson Hotel. The message said: ‘Congratulations on the Second Man.’”

  Colby gazed out the window of the seventh floor office. The wooded Virginia countryside stretched away as far as the eye could see, conveying a sense of serenity that contrasted sharply with the mood inside the CIA’s sprawling Langley campus. “Maybe the mole’s second son was born in December rather than January,” Colby suggested.

  “Tried that,” Jack said. “I went over the NSA roster with their chief of security. There are ten thousand people making and breaking codes over at Fort Meade. Of these ten thousand, fourteen had second sons in January, eight in December, eighteen in November.”

  “That ought to give you something to work on—“

  Jack shook his head. “Remember what AE/PINNACLE told Manny. All contact between the rezidentura and the mole in Washington were through dead drops. The face-to-face debriefings took place when their mole was vacationing abroad—Paris during Christmas of ’72, Copenhagen during Christmas of ’73, Rome during Easter of this year. None of the fathers of second sons fit into this vacation pattern.”

  “How about working backward from the vacation pattern?”

  “Tried that, too. Got swamped. Half of NSA takes off for Christmas, the other half for Easter, and the security people don’t have a systematic breakdown on where people went during vacations. If I give them a name they could find out—from phone logs, from discreet inquiries at their travel office, from office scuttlebutt. But I’m obliged to start with a suspect. We need the second son to narrow the field.”

  “What does Elliott think?”

  “Ebby says that the answer is probably staring us in the face, that it’s just a matter of coming at the problem from the right direction.”

  “All right. Keep looking. Anything else?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is, Director.” Jack cleared his throat.

  “Spit it out, Jack.”

  “It’s about Leo Kritzky—“

  “Thought it might be.”

  “Jim Angleton’s had him on the carpet for five weeks now.”

  Colby said coldly, “I can count as well as you.”

  “When Angleton turns up for a meeting of the AE/PINNACLE task force, which isn’t often these days, Ebby and I ask him how the interrogation is going.”

  “He probably tells you what he tells me,” Colby said uncomfortably.

  “He says these things take time. He says Rome wasn’t built in a day. He says he’s convinced AE/PINNACLE is a genuine defector, which means that Leo Kritzky is SASHA.”

  “What do you want me to do, Jack?”

  “Put a time limit on the interrogation. God knows what Angleton’s people are doing to Leo. If you let Angleton have him long enough he’ll confess to anything.”

  Colby pulled a manila envelope from a bulging briefcase and dropped it onto the table in front of Jack. “Jim polygraphed Kritzky.”

  “You can’t flutter someone who’s been in solitary confinement for five weeks. His nerves will be shot. He’ll send the stylus through the roof when he gives his full name.”

  “Look, Jack, for better or for worse, Jim Angleton is the head of counterintelligence. Counterintelligence is supposed to detect Soviet penetrations of the Company. Angleton thinks he has detected such a penetration.”

  “All based on the fact that SASHA’s last name begins with the letter K, that he is a Russian speaker, that he’s been out of the country at such and such a date. That’s pretty thin gruel, Director. On top of which AE/PINNACLE’s second serial—the Soviet mole inside the NSA—hasn’t worked out. If the second serial is wrong there’s a good chance the first is, too.”

  Colby eyed Jack across the low table. “Are you sure you want the second serial to work out?”

  The question stunned Jack. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “If you find the NSA mole it will establish that AE/PINNACLE is genuine. If AE/PINNACLE is genuine, Leo Kritzky is SASHA.”

  “Damnation, Director, I’d give my right arm for there to be no mole in NSA. But if there is a mole I’ll find the son of a bitch. Count on it.”

  “If I wasn’t convinced of that, Jack, you wouldn’t be in my office this morning. Look, the case Angleton’s building against Kritzky rests on more than the AE/PINNACLE serials. Jim claims to have discerned a pattern to the SASHA business—a long list of operations that went bad, a short list of operations that came off and boosted Kritzky’s career. He’s saying he was closing in on Kritzky even without the AE/PINNACLE serials.”

  Jack pushed away the cup of coffee and leaned forward. “Jim Angleton has been chasing shadows since Philby was exposed as a Soviet agent. He’s convinced the Sino-Soviet split is phony. He thinks half the leaders of the Western world are KGB agents. He’s decimated the Company’s Soviet Division in his manhunt for SASHA. We don’t even know for sure that SASHA exists outside of Angleton’s head, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Simmer down, Jack. Put yourself in the catbird seat. Maybe AE/PINNACLE is a dispatched agent. Maybe Leo Kritzky is clean as a whistle. Maybe SASHA is a figment of Angleton’s imagination. But we can’t take the risk of ignoring Jim Angleton’s worst-case scenario.” Colby stood up. Jack rose, too. The Director said, “Track down the father of the second man, Jack. Or bring me proof that he doesn’t exist.”

  In the corridor, Jack hiked his shoulders in frustration. “How can you prove something doesn’t exist?”

  The words, uttered in a hoarse whisper, were almost inaudible. “I don’t have any recollection of that.”

  “Let me refresh your memory. The Russian journalist was recruited in Trieste, given some elementary tradecraft training on a farm in Austria, then sent back to Moscow. Less than a week later he was pushed under the wheels of a subway train—“

  “Moscow Station said he’d been drinking—“

  “Ah, the story’s coming back to you now. Moscow Station passed on the police report printed in Pravda, which mentioned a high alcohol level in the dead man’s blood. A journalist who worked at the same radio station said our man was perfectly sober when he was picked up by two strangers the night before. The next morning the women cleaning the subway found his body on the tracks. The NODIS file describing the initial recruitment of the journalist has your initials on it. And you want to chalk it up to coincidence—“

  “I haven’t been able to…to move my bowels in days. I suffer from stomach cramps. I would like to see a doctor—“

  James Angleton glanced up from the loose-leaf book, a soggy cigarette stuck between his lips. “In August of 1959, two six-man frogmen teams from Taiwan were caught as they come ashore on mainland China and shot the next morning. Do you remember that incident?”

  “I remember the incident, Jim. I told you that last time you asked. The time before, also. I just don’t remember initialing the op order on its way up to the DD/O.”

  Angleton unhinged the loose-leaf spine and pulled a photocopy of the op order from the book. “The LK in the upper right hand corner look familiar?” he inquired, holding it up.

  Leo Kritzky swayed on his seat, trying to concentrate. The overhead lights burned through his lids even when they were closed, causing his eyes to smart. An unruly stubble of a beard covered his face, which was pinched and drawn. His hair had started to turn white and came out in clumps when he threaded his fingers through it. The skin on the back of his hands had taken on the color and texture of parchment. His joints ached. He could feel a pulse throbbing in his temple, he could hear a shrill ringing in his right ear. “I have difficulty…focusing,” he reminded Angleton. Trembling with f
atigue, Leo bit his lip to fight back the sobs rising from the depths of his body. “For God’s sake, Jim, please be patient…”

  Angleton waved the paper in front of Kritzky’s eyes. “Make an effort.”

  Leo willed one of his eyes open. The LK swam into focus, along with other initials. “I wasn’t the only one to sign off on that op order, Jim.”

  “You weren’t the only one to sign off on the one hundred and forty-five op orders that ended with agents being arrested and tried and executed. But your initials were on all one hundred and forty-five. Should we chalk them all up to coincidence?”

  “We lost something like three hundred and seventy agents between 1951 and now. Which means my name wasn’t associated with”—simple arithmetic was beyond Leo and his voice trailed off—“a great many of them.”

  “Your name wasn’t associated with two hundred twenty-five of them. But then a lot of paperwork never passed through your hands, either because you were too far down the ladder or out of town or out of the loop or sidetracked on temporary assignments.”

  “I swear I’ve told you the truth, Jim. I never betrayed anybody to the Russians. Not the Russian journalist who died in Moscow. Not the Nationalist Chinese who went ashore on the mainland. Not the Polish woman who was a member of the Central Committee.”

  “Not the Turk who smuggled agents into Georgia?”