The Company

by Robert Littell

  Anthony whispered to Leo, “Where did he get the gun, Leo?” He spotted the knowing smile on his godfather lips and smiled back. “Hey, forget I asked, huh?”

  Leo drove down Dolly Madison Boulevard in McLean, Virginia, past the “CIA Next Right” sign that was swiped so often by souvenir hunters the Company ordered replacements by the dozen, and turned off at the next intersection. Braking to a stop at the gatehouse, he rolled down the window and showed the laminated card identifying him as a CIA officer to one of the armed guards. (Leo’s appearance had altered so drastically that Jack had taken the precaution of providing him with new ID bearing a more recent photograph.) Driving slowly down the access road, he saw the statue of Nathan Hale (put there on the initiative of Director Colby) outside the front entrance as he pulled around to the ramp leading to the basement garage reserved for division heads and higher. Leo reached for his laminated card but the guard manning the control booth waved to indicate he recognized the Soviet Division chief. “Glad to see you back, Mr. Kritzky,” he called over the loudspeaker. “The Director asked for you to come straight on up to his office when you got in.”

  Waiting for the Director’s private elevator to descend, Leo could hear the secret printing press humming in a room at the back of the garage; at the height of the Cold War it had worked twenty hours a day turning out birth certificates, foreign passports and driver’s licenses, along with bogus copies of newspapers and propaganda handbills. When the doors opened, Leo stepped in and hit the only button on the stainless steel panel, starting the elevator up toward the Director’s seventh floor suite of offices. His head was bowed in thought as the elevator slowed. He was a bit nervous about what he’d find on this first day back on the job. Jack had filled him in on the storm brewing over Angleton’s HT/LINGUAL mail opening operation; a New York Times reporter named Seymour Hersh had gotten wind of the illegal project, which had been running for twenty years before Colby finally closed it down in 1973, and was going to break the story any day now. Everyone topside was bracing for the explosion and the inevitable fallout.

  The elevator doors slid open. Leo heard a ripple of applause and raised his eyes and realized that he had walked into a surprise party. Colby, Ebby and Jack stood in front of half a hundred or so staffers, including many from Leo’s own Soviet Division. Jack’s wife and Manny were off to one side, applauding with the others and smiling. Few of those present knew where Leo had been, but they only had to catch a glimpse of the reed of a man coming off the elevator to realize that he had returned from a hell on earth. He had lost so much weight that his shirt and suit were swimming on him. Shaken, Leo looked around in bewilderment. He spotted dozens of familiar faces—but Jim Angleton’s was not among them. Leo’s personal secretary and several of the women from the Soviet Division had tears in their eyes. The Director stepped forward and pumped his hand. The applause died away. “On behalf of my colleagues, I want to take this opportunity to welcome back one of our own,” Colby said. “Leo Kritzky’s devotion to duty, his loyalty to the Company, his grace under fire, have set a high standard for us and for future generations of CIA officers. It is in the nature of things that only a handful here are aware of the details of your ordeal. But all of us”—the Director waved an arm to take in the crowd—“owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  There was another ripple of applause. When the crowd had quieted down Leo spoke into the silence. His voice was husky and low and people had to strain to hear him. “When I came aboard what we used to call Cockroach Alley, some twenty-four years ago, it was with the intention of serving the country whose system of governance seemed to offer the best hope to the world. As a young man I imagined that this service would take the form of initiating or becoming involved in dramatic feats of espionage or counterespionage. I have since come to understand that there are other ways of serving, no less important than reporting to the trenches of the espionage war. As the poet John Milton said, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ Director, I appreciate the welcome. Now I think I’d like to get back to my division and my desk, and get on with the tedious day-to-day business of winning the Cold War.”

  There was more applause. The Director nodded. People drifted away. Finally only Jack and Ebby remained. Ebby stood there shaking his head in admiration. Jack opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it and raised a finger in salute. He and Ebby headed back toward the DD/O’s shop on the seventh floor.

  Leo took a deep breath. He was home again, and relieved to be.

  Angleton was on the carpet, figuratively as well as literally. “What did you tell this Hersh fellow?” he demanded.

  Colby had come around the side of his enormous desk and the two men, standing toe to toe, confronted each other. “I told him HT/LINGUAL was a counterintelligence program targeting the foreign contacts of American dissidents, that it had been fully authorized by the President, that in any case the whole mail-opening program had been terminated.”

  Angleton said bitterly, “In other words you confirmed that we opened mail.”

  “I didn’t need to confirm it,” Colby said. “Hersh knew it already.”

  “He didn’t know it was a counterintelligence program,” Angleton snapped. “You pointed the finger at me.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Jim, but HT/LINGUAL was your brainchild. Your people opened the envelopes. Your people indexed the names of three hundred thousand Americans who sent or received mail from the Soviet Union over a period of twenty years.”

  “We had reason to believe the KGB was using ordinary mail channels to communicate with their agents in America. We would have been chumps to let them get away with this because of some silly laws—“

  Colby turned away. “These silly laws, as you call them, are what we’re defending, Jim.”

  Angleton patted his pockets, hunting for cigarettes. He found one and jammed it between his lips but was too distracted to light up. “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of that government.”

  Colby peered out a window at the Virginia countryside. A thin haze seemed to rise off the fields. From the seventh floor of Langley it looked as if the earth were smoldering. “Let’s be clear, Jim. The role of counterintelligence is to initiate penetrations into the Russian intelligence services and to debrief defectors. As for uncovering Soviet penetrations within the CIA, well, we have the entire Office of Security to protect us. That’s their job. Now, how many operations are you running against the Soviets? I never heard of a single one. You sit in that office of yours and, with the exception of Kukushkin, shoot down every single Soviet defector who is recruited by luck or good intelligence work. And the one you don’t shoot down turns out to be a dispatched agent dangling false serials. The situation is quite impossible.” Colby turned back to face Angleton. “The Times is running the Hersh story on your domestic spying operation the day after tomorrow. This is going to be tough to handle. We’ve talked about your leaving before. You will now leave, period.”

  Angleton snatched the unlit cigarette from between his bloodless lips. “Am I to understand that you are firing me, Director?”

  “Let’s just say that I’m retiring you.”

  Angleton started toward the door, then turned back. His lips moved but no sounds emerged. Finally he managed, “Philby and the KGB have been trying to destroy me for years—you’re serving as their instrument.”

  “Counterintelligence will still exist, Jim.”

  “You’re making a tragic mistake if you think anybody else can do what I do. To begin to thread your way through the counterintelligence quagmire, you need eleven years of continuous study of old cases. Not ten years, not twelve but precisely eleven. And even that would make you only a journeyman counterintelligence analyst.”

  Colby returned to his desk. “We’ll do our best to muddle through without you, Jim. Thanks for stopping by on such short notice.”

  The Deputy Director/Intelligence and his secon
d-in-command, the Deputy Director/Operations (Ebby) and his Chief of Operations (Jack), the various area division chiefs, Angleton representing counterintelligence, along with senior representatives from the Office of Security, the Office of Technical Services and the Political Psychological Division had crowded into the small conference room across from the DCI’s office for the regular Friday nine o’clock tour de horizon. The deputy head of the Political Psychological Division, a dead pipe clenched in his jaws, was winding up a thumbnail portrait of the Libyan dictator Muammar Al-Qaddafi, who had recently pushed world crude prices up by cutting back on oil exports. “Popular belief to the contrary not withstanding,” he was saying, “Qaddafi is certainly not psychotic, and for the most part is in touch with reality. He has what we would call a borderline personality disorder, which means that the subject behaves crazily one day and rationally the next.”

  “Strikes me as a fairly accurate description of some of us,” the Director quipped, drawing a chuckle from the troops around the table.

  “If the KGB has a psychological division, that’s exactly how they would have diagnosed Nixon when he invaded Cambodia in 1970,” remarked Leo, who was sitting in on his first regular topside session since his return to Langley.

  “Seems to me that this is precisely the kind of personality a leader needs to project,” Ebby pointed out. “That way the opposition can’t count on being able to predict what he’ll do in any given situation.”

  Jack said, “The question is: Are the Qaddafis and the Nixons suffering from borderline personality disorders—or just trying to convince each other that they are?”

  The Director, presiding from the head of the table, glanced at his watch. “We’ll put that intriguing question on a back burner for now. I have one more matter to raise before we break up. I want to announce, to my great regret, the retirement of Jim Angleton here. I don’t need to tell anyone in this room that his contributions to the Company in general, and counterintelligence in particular, are nothing short of legendary. His service to the United States, which goes back to his days at Ryder Street in London during the war, are a matter of record. I accepted Jim’s resignation with deep regret. But he’s an old warhorse and if anyone deserves a pasture, he does.”

  Colby’s announcement was greeted with stunned silence; an earthquake under the foundations of Langley wouldn’t have shaken the people gathered around the table more. Ebby and Jack studiously avoided looking at each other. Several of the Barons couldn’t resist glancing at Leo Kritzky, who was staring out a window, lost in thought. The Director smiled across the table at the chief of counterintelligence. “Would you care to say a word, Jim?” he asked.

  Angleton, a lonely and skeletal figure of a man at the bitter end of a long and illustrious career, slowly pushed himself to his feet. He raised one palm to his forehead to deal with the migraine lurking behind his eyes. “Some of you have heard my Nature of the threat presentation before. For those who haven’t I can think of no more appropriate swan song.” Angleton cleared his throat. “Lenin once remarked to Feliks Dzerzhinsky: ‘The West are wishful thinkers, so we will give them what they want to think.’” Avoiding eye contact with the Company Barons around the table, Angleton droned on. “When I worked at Ryder Street,” he said, “I learned that the key to playing back captured German agents was orchestration—where layer upon layer of confirming disinformation supports the deception. This is what the Soviets have been doing for years—as part of a master plan they’ve been feeding layer upon layer of mutually reinforcing disinformation to the wishful thinkers in the West. They achieve this through the sophisticated use of interlocking agents-in-place and dispatched defectors. I have determined that the British Labor leader Hugh Gaitskell, who died in 1963 of lupus disseminata, was murdered by KGB wetwork specialists. They employed the Lupus virus as an assassination weapon so that Moscow could insert its man, Harold Wilson, into the top Labor post and position him to become Prime Minister, which is the job he holds today. Wilson, who made many trips to the Soviet Union before becoming Prime Minister, is a paid agent of the KGB. Olaf Palme, the current Swedish Prime Minister, is a Soviet asset recruited during a visit to Latvia. Willy Brandt, the current West German chancellor, is a KGB agent. Lester Pearson, the Canadian Prime Minister until two years ago, is a KGB agent. Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, is a longtime Soviet agent. Averell Harriman, the former ambassador to the USSR and the former governor of New York State, has been a Soviet agent since the 1930s. Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under Nixon, is objectively a Soviet agent. What these agents-in-place have in common is that they all advocate and defend, which is to say orchestrate, the Soviet strategy of détente. Make no mistake about it, gentlemen, détente, along with such Soviet-inspired chimera as the Sino-Soviet split, the Yugoslav or Rumanian deviations, the Albanian defection, the Italian Communist Party’s presumed independence from Moscow, are part of a master disinformation scheme designed to destabilize the West, to lure us into thinking that the Cold War has been won.”

  Several of the Barons around the table glanced uneasily at the Director. Colby, who had anticipated a short valedictory, didn’t have the heart to interrupt Angleton.

  “Dubček’s so-called Prague Spring,” Angleton plunged on, “was part of this disinformation campaign; the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was worked out by Brezhnev and Dubček in advance. The differences between Moscow and the so-called Euro-Communists in Western Europe are phony, part of the KGB Disinformation Department’s global theater.” The counterintelligence chief scoured his bone-dry lips with the back of a hand. “If the facts I have outlined have been questioned at the highest level within our own intelligence organization, it can be said that this is the handiwork of the Soviet mole inside the CIA code named SASHA, who has twisted the evidence and caused many in this room to overlook the obvious menace. Which brings me to the greatest Soviet plot of all—one designed to ravage the economies of the Western industrial nations, bringing on civil unrest that will ultimately result in the triumph of the Moscow-oriented left in national elections. I have determined that the mastermind of this long-term KGB plot is none other than the almost mythical controlling officer who directed the activities of Adrian Philby, and today directs the activities of SASHA. He is known only as Starik—in Russian, the Old Man. The plot he has been concocting for at least the last ten years, and possibly longer, involves siphoning off hard currency from the sale of Soviet gas and oil and armaments abroad, and laundering these sums in various off-shore banking institutions against the day when he will use the vast sum that he has accumulated to attack the dollar. Ha, don’t suppose that I can’t see your reactions—you think this is far-fetched.” Angleton’s eyelids began to flutter. “I have discovered that the Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani, is investigating reports that the Vatican Bank has been receiving mysterious deposits and sending the money on to a variety of off-shore accounts. The money-laundering operation bears the Russian code name KHOLSTOMER. The English equivalent is STRIDER—it’s the nickname of the piebald gelding in Tolstoy’s ‘Strider: The Story of a Horse.’”

  Shaking himself out of a near-trance, Angleton opened his eyes and began to speak more rapidly, as if he were running out of time. “Obviously these serials—Gaitskell, Wilson, Palme, Brandt, Pearson, Hollis, Harriman, Kissinger, Starik, KHOLSTOMER—weren’t handed to me on a silver platter. Far from it. I teased them out of the wilderness of mirrors during thousands of hours of painstaking attention to the minutiae that nobody else bothers with. The process, like the art of fly-fishing, requires infinite patience. Oh, some people would have you think that all you have to do is go out there and toss a fly onto the river and you’ll wind up with a trout. But it’s not that way at all, gentlemen. You can take my word for it. The first thing you have to do if you want to catch the mythical brown giant of a trout that swims the upper reaches of the Brule is to observe what the fish are feeding on.” Angleton was leaning over the table
now, eager to share his professional secrets with his colleagues. “You catch a small trout, you slit it open, you empty the contents of the stomach into a celluloid cup. And when you see what it’s been feeding on, you fashion a fly that resembles it. You can give the illusion of a real fly with the coloring of your hackle and wings and all the feathers you put on it. And it will float down the river with its hackles cupped up, and if you do it correctly, the trout really believes that it is a fly. And that, gentlemen,” he announced triumphantly, “is how you get a strike…”

  The Director stood up and said, very quietly, “Thank you, Jim.” Looking preoccupied, Colby turned and walked out of the room. One by one the others followed him until only Leo and Angleton were left.

  “I know it’s you,” Angleton murmured. His brow was pleated in pain. “I see the whole thing clearly now—you really are SASHA. Kukushkin was sent over by Starik to feed me serials that would lead me to you because he knew it was only a matter of time before I teased your identity out of the wilderness. Then Starik organized the mock rial and execution knowing we would walk back the cat and discover that Kukushkin was still alive. Which would free you and undermine my credibility. The whole thing was a KGB plot to ruin me before I could identify SASHA…before I could expose KHOLSTOMER.”

  Leo scraped back his chair and rose. “I bear you no hard feelings, Jim. Good luck to you.”

  As Leo walked out the door, Angleton was still talking to himself. “The trick, you see, is to cast as far as you can and let the fly float back down stream with its hackles cupped up, and from time to time you give it a little twitch”—his wrist flicked an imaginary rod—“so that it dances on the surface of the water. And if you are subtle enough and deft enough, above all if you don’t rush things, why, the son of a gun will snap at it and you’ll have your trout roasting on the spit for supper…”