The Company

by Robert Littell

  Jack settled back until he was sitting on the floor. He realized how cold the room was. “We have a Russian defector,” he said. “We’ve given him the code name AE/PINNACLE. Ebby’s boy, Manny, had the night watch when the Russian made contact. Manny’s been running him since.”

  Leo’s eyes burned fiercely into Jack’s; it dawned on him that Jack’s visit was highly irregular; he was astonished Angleton would sit still for it. “This AE/PINNACLE identified me by name? He said Leo Kritzky is SASHA?”

  “He said SASHA’s last name began with K. He said he was fluent in Russian.”

  “How did he know these things?”

  “The defector worked for Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate in Moscow Centre, the department that runs illegals—“

  “Damn it, I know what Directorate S is.”

  “He reported directly to this Starik character. In September of ’72, he laid in the plumbing for a trip Starik took to Nova Scotia to meet an agent.”

  “He said Starik was going to meet an agent.”

  “No. We surmised that part. We surmised that the only thing that would lure Starik out of Russia was a face-to-face meeting with his agent SASHA.”

  “And I was on a bicycle trip to Nova Scotia in September of ’72.”

  “Yes, you were, Leo.”

  “There has to be more to it. What else do you have?”

  “AE/PINNACLE learned from the KGB rezident that SASHA was away from Washington for the two weeks ending on Sunday, twenty-six May.”

  “Which just happens to be when I was in France.” What started out as a laugh gurgled up from Leo’s throat. “That it?”

  “Jesus H. Christ, isn’t that enough?”

  “Didn’t occur to you guys that Starik was feeding you a phony defector with phony serials to frame the wrong person.”

  “Why would Starik want to frame you, Leo?”

  “To distract you from the right person?”

  Jack shook his head. “Angleton’s worked up a profile on you that is very persuasive—“

  Leo managed a sneer. “Every operation that succeeded was designed to advance my career. Every one that failed, failed because I gave it away.”

  “There’s too much overlap for it to be coincidental. Besides which, you flunked Jim’s polygraph test. In spades.”

  “Did anyone flutter this AE/PINNACLE character of yours?”

  “Come off it, Leo. You know as well as I do we don’t flutter defectors in a safe-house environment. He’ll be too uptight, too edgy to get an accurate reading. We’ll flutter him when we bring him over for good.”

  “You can’t flutter a defector in a safe house. But Angleton can flutter a prisoner in a padded cell who drinks water out of the toilet and still get good results?” Leo teetered forward. “Pay attention, Jack, I’m going to tell you something you need to remember: AE/PINNACLE will never be fluttered. He’ll be run over by a car or mugged in an alleyway or whisked back to Mother Russia for some cockamamie reason that will sound plausible enough. But he won’t be fluttered because he won’t be brought in. He won’t be brought in because he’s a dispatched defector sent to convince Angleton I’m SASHA.”

  Jack shook his head in despair. “If you’re not SASHA, Leo, it means that SASHA is still out there somewhere. If that’s so, how do you explain the fact that AE/PINNACLE hasn’t been put on ice by his embassy’s SK people?”

  “Jack, Jack, he hasn’t been put on ice because your AE/PINNACLE is a dispatched agent and SASHA, if he exists, knows it.”

  “Look, I didn’t come here to argue with you, Leo. I came here to offer you a way out.”

  Leo whispered hoarsely, “The way out of here is through that padded door, Jack. I’m innocent. I’m not SASHA. I’m Leo Kritzky. I’ve been fighting the good fight for twenty-four years. And look at the thanks I get—” Suddenly Leo began trembling. He jammed his thumb and third finger into the corners of his eyes and breathed hard through his mouth. “It’s so unfair, Jack. So fucking unfair. There has to be someone who believes me—who believes this defector is a dispatched agent, sent to frame me—“

  Jack struggled to find the right words. “Leo, I can’t tell you how but AE/PINNACLE has proven his bona fides beyond any doubt. There is absolutely no possibility of his being a dispatched agent. Which means his serials concerning SASHA are genuine. And they all point to you. Admit you’re SASHA, Leo. Tell us what you’ve given them over the years so we can run a damage assessment analysis. And then come over to our side. We’ll double you, we’ll run you back against the KGB. No one here will forgive you, no one here will shake your hand again. But it can keep you out of prison, Leo. Adelle, the twins won’t find out you betrayed your country unless you tell them. When it’s all over, you can go off somewhere where people won’t know you and live out what’s left of your life.”

  With an effort Leo struggled to his feet and, clutching the waistband of his pajamas, shuffled in short, cautious steps across the room to the toilet. He sank to his knees in front of it and filled the tin cup from the bowl and moistened his lips with the water. He looked over at Jack. Then, with his eyes fixed on him, Leo slowly drank off the rest of the cup. When he finished he set the cup down on the ground and whispered through his raw lips, “Go fuck yourself, Jack.”

  6

  WASHINGTON, DC, TUESDAY, JULY 30, 1974

  AND THEN AE/PINNACLE DISAPPEARED FROM THE RADAR SCREEN. “What do you mean, disappeared?” Jack demanded when Manny called in on a secure line from the Watcher’s flat down the hall from Agatha Ept’s apartment.

  “He seems to have vanished, Jack. That’s all I can say for the moment.”

  “Did their SK people somehow tag on to him?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Jack was clearly irritated. “What do you know?”

  “AE/PINNACLE phoned Ept Friday before she left for work to say he’d come by Monday evening. I just listened to the tape of the conversation. He said he’d appreciate it if she could get her hands on more of the candy that she swiped from the Patent Office from time to time. Which means that, as of Friday morning, he was operational.”

  “How did he sound?”

  “He didn’t sound as if he was talking with a gun to his head, if that’s what you mean. He was tense—who wouldn’t be in his shoes—but he wasn’t particularly agitated or anything. “

  “When did you see him last?”

  “A week ago today. We cut the session short because his daughter was running a fever and he was anxious to get back to the embassy.”

  “He seem normal?”

  “Yeah, Jack, he did. Although for AE/PINNACLE, ‘normal’ was preoccupied—anxious to unload the material he’d collected, worried about what the future held for him and his family. We chatted for a moment waiting for the elevator—he told me the latest Brezhnev joke, then he said he’d call Ept and let her know when he would be able to come again.”

  Jack asked “Did you have any trace of him between Tuesday and Friday, when he phoned Ept?”

  “The FBI caught him on their surveillance cameras going in and out of the embassy, once on Wednesday afternoon, once on Thursday morning. Both times he was with the chief of the consular section, Borisov, who is the KGB rezident—they were chatting away as if neither of them had a care in the world. Then we have him on tape Friday morning telling Ept he’d come by on Monday. Then—he dropped from sight.”

  “I don’t like the sound of it, Manny,” Jack said. “With all the cameras and Watchers, how does a Russian diplomat drop from sight?”

  “It turns out the Russians recently bought several cars with tinted windows—we film them coming into and out of the underground parking but we have no idea who’s inside. It’s possible AE/PINNACLE could have been in one of these cars.”

  “Any sign of the wife or daughter?”

  “No. And his wife missed a Monday afternoon appointment with the heart man we set up two floors above the Bulgarian dentist. She was supposed to come in for another
electrocardiogram. And she never phoned the dentist’s office to cancel.”

  Jack said, “Okay, if AE/PINNACLE and his wife left town, chances are it was by plane, so we ought to have them on surveillance cameras. I’ll put the Office of Security onto the problem. You come on in and look over their shoulder when they go through the footage—if anybody can spot Kukushkin or his wife it’ll be you.”

  Manny spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon in a Company screening room, studying the clips that the security people projected for him. He started with the footage from Friday afternoon—reel after reel of people boarding international carriers. Several times Manny spotted heavy-shouldered men with light-colored hair. But when the clip was run again in slow motion he could see that none of them was Sergei Kukushkin. Sandwiches and coffee were brought in and he started going through the Saturday morning reels.

  At one point, Manny ducked out to phone Nellie and tell her not to count on him that night; they were more or less living together in Nellie’s apartment, though Manny hadn’t given up his old flat, which was a sore point with Nellie. It’s not the two rents that bugs me, she’d told him when the subject came up at breakfast one morning, it’s the symbolism; you’re afraid to burn your bridges. Incest takes getting used to, he’d explained. At which point they’d laughingly repeated in chorus what had become their credo: No doubt about it, incest is definitely best!

  “Hey, are you watching the tube?” Nellie asked now.

  “I am otherwise engaged,” Manny said dryly.

  “Well, you’re missing out on history in the making: The House Judiciary Committee just voted the third article of impeachment.”

  “Nixon will worm out of it,” Manny said. “He always does.”

  “Not this time,” Nellie said. “Here’s what I think: It has nothing to do with the Watergate break in, it has nothing to do with the Supreme Court ordering Nixon to turn over those sixty-four incriminating tapes to the special prosecutor.”

  “You always have exotic explanations for current events,” Manny noted.

  “I see under the surface of things, is all,” Nellie said.

  Manny took the bait: “And under the surface of Watergate is?”

  “Come on, Manny, don’t play the innocent,” Nellie said. “Under the surface is crude oil at eleven dollars and twenty-five cents a barrel; my law firm negotiates insurance for the tankers, is how I know this. Under the surface is the recession, also the Dow Jones plunging past the six-hundred mark and no bottom in sight. It’s not Nixon—he more or less did what Lyndon Johnson did when he ran the Oval Office; it’s the economy, stupid.”

  Back in the screening room, the projectionist brought in the Saturday afternoon reels and Manny started in on them. Halfway through one reel he straightened in his seat and called, “Morris, you want to go back and run that one again.” Manny leaned forward. On the screen, a man with the heavy shoulders and thick torso of a wrestler and disheveled, vaguely blond hair had joined the line boarding a Scandinavian Airline flight to Stockholm.

  “Oh my God,” Manny whispered. He stood up and called, “Freeze that frame and make up some prints.” Turning, he hurried from the screening room.

  The task force handling the AE/PINNACLE affair convened in the small office down the hall from the DD/O’s shop at 5:55 P.M. Present and presiding was Bill Colby. Seated around the table were the other regulars: Ebby Ebbitt, Jack McAuliffe, Jim Angleton, and Manny Ebbitt.

  Colby had been under a great deal of pressure in recent months, and looked it. At the moment he was desperately trying to shield the Company from the fallout that would inevitably accompany a Presidential impeachment or resignation. And then there was the lingering bitterness over “the family jewels.” In 1973, the CIA had come under fire when it turned out that most of the people involved in the Watergate break-in had CIA ties. When Congress began breathing down the CIA’s neck, Colby, then DD/O, had drafted an order instructing CIA employees to report any Company activities that might be “outside the legislative charter of this agency.” The result was a 693-page single-spaced brief, which Colby had eventually turned over to Congress. He was convinced that letting out what he called the “bad” secrets would protect the “good” ones—the identity of agents and details of ongoing operations. Angleton, the most outspoken of the Director’s many critics inside Langley, told anyone who would listen that Colby couldn’t have done more harm to the Company if he’d been a paid Soviet agent. “What we have going for us is the generally accepted notion that we are the good guys,” Angleton would say. “Wound this notion and you cripple the Company.”

  Now, peering wearily through his eyeglasses, Colby studied the grainy photograph that the security people had printed up. “You’re positive this is AE/PINNACLE?” he demanded grumpily; the last thing he needed right now was to lose the rare defector-in-place who was spying for the Company from inside the Soviet embassy compound.

  “It’s Kukushkin, all right,” Manny assured him.

  “There wasn’t a Russian in sight at the airport,” Jack noted. “So there is no reason to think he was being coerced into getting on the plane.”

  Ebby said, “I looked at the footage myself. At any point he could have buttonholed a policeman and demanded political asylum. The fact that he didn’t speaks for itself—he was going of his own free will and volition.”

  Angleton’s listless eyes suddenly focused on the DD/O; he knew that, deep down, Elliott Ebbitt and his people were hoping AE/PINNACLE was a phony defector, which would mean Kukushkin’s serials were disinformation and Leo Kritzky was innocent. “Do we know what happened to AE/PINNACLE in Stockholm, Elliott?” Angleton inquired.

  Ebby pulled a deciphered cable from a file folder. It had originated with the Company’s Chief of Station in Stockholm and was stamped “Top Secret” and “Eyes Only.” “A Russian matching AE/PINNACLE’s description was in transit at Stockholm airport. He purchased two bottles of aquavit before he boarded the early evening Aeroflot flight to Moscow.”

  “Doesn’t sound like someone who’s worried about being arrested when he arrives,” Colby commented.

  “We have some indication that his wife, Elena Antonova, and his seven-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Ludmilla, may have been on the regular Friday afternoon New York-Moscow Aeroflot flight,” Jack said. “Two women named Zubina, apparently mother and daughter, were listed on the manifest—Zubina is Elena Antonova’s maiden name. Manny is the only one who could really recognize her but he hasn’t had a chance to look at the Kennedy Airport surveillance clips. The flight stopped for refueling in Stockholm and the passengers were taken into the airport lounge for coffee and cakes. One of the waitresses there remembers seeing a short, heavy Russian woman with close-cropped hair and a thin girl, aged seven or eight. We’ve wired mug shots to Stockholm of Elena Antonova and Ludmilla, taken from the State Department forms filed by all foreign diplomats posted to Washington—we’re waiting on confirmation now.”

  “Assuming, for a moment, that Elena Antonova and Ludmilla were on the Friday Aeroflot flight to Moscow,” Ebby said, “do we have any idea what prompted them to return?”

  Jack and Manny shook their heads. Angleton sucked on a cigarette, then corkscrewed it out of his mouth and said, “My people came across an item in the Soviet military newspaper Krasnaia Zvezda which could shed some light on this.” Everyone stared at Angleton and he basked in the attention. “The Russian Central Asian high command announced the appointment of a Colonel General Maslov as commander of Soviet missile bases in Kazakhstan,” he said. “You’ll remember that Kukushkin’s father-in-law, a Colonel General Zubin, held this post. The brief communiqué said that Maslov’s predecessor had been granted sick leave. The tour of duty for area commanders of missile bases is normally five years; Colonel General Zubin’s tour had twenty-two months more to run. Reading between the lines, he would have had to be pretty ill to cut short the tour and bring in a replacement.”

  Colby said, “So Kukushkin’s
wife and daughter could have been summoned back to Moscow to be at his bedside.”

  “The pieces fit, which means we’re nibbling at the edge of something that’s true,” Angleton said. “If Kukushkin’s wife and daughter were summoned home on the spur of the moment, he wouldn’t have had time to arrange for the three of them to defect.”

  “And he couldn’t have stopped them from going back without arousing suspicion,” Manny put in.

  “Why would Kukushkin himself have gone back, and on such short notice?” Colby asked.

  “He sure went back in a hurry,” Jack said. “He didn’t wait for the regular weekly Aeroflot direct flight but took the SAS flight to Stockholm and caught a connecting flight to Moscow.”

  “Maybe the father-in-law bought the farm,” Manny said. “Maybe Kukushkin went back for Zubin’s funeral.”

  Angleton said, “I’ll have my people who monitor Soviet newspapers keep their eyes peeled for an obit.”

  The phone on a side table buzzed. Ebby snatched it up, listened for a moment, said “Thanks” and hung up. “You don’t have to look through the New York surveillance reels,” Ebby told his son. “The waitress in the Stockholm lounge positively identified Kukushkin’s wife and daughter from photographs.”

  “All of which could mean AE/PINNACLE is alive and well in Moscow,” Colby said. “That would be a relief.”

  Manny, whose loyalty to Leo Kritzky was matched by his feelings of responsibility for the defector Kukushkin, didn’t look relieved. “I won’t breathe easy until AE/PINNACLE’s back in Washington and I can personally debrief him.”

  Angleton shut his eyes, as if his patience were being put to the supreme test. “What makes you think he’ll return to Washington?”

  “I just assumed—“

  “We’ve noticed that the Russians tend not to fly diplomats and their families across the Atlantic if they have less than six months to serve on station,” Angleton remarked. “It’s surely connected to budgetary considerations; when it comes to money the KGB has the same problems we have. Kukushkin’s tour was due to end in December, which is in five months. And don’t forget that they wanted to recruit him for the KGB’s new Dis-information Directorate. With his father-in-law sidelined and his tour in Washington running down, he may not be able to weasel out of the posting this time around.”