The Company

by Robert Littell

  SASHA burst out, “We’re really in hot water if Andropov has become the Centre’s senior intelligence analyst.”

  “Don’t get angry with me. I’m just the messenger. Look, Comrade Andropov is convinced the Americans are planning a preemptive first strike. With final preparations for KHOLSTOMER being put in place, it’s only natural that Andropov and Starik want to pin down the date of the American attack—“

  SASHA stopped in his tracks. “There is no American preemptive strike in the works,” he insisted. “The whole idea is pure nonsense. The reason I can’t come up with the date is because there is none. If there were a preemptive strike on the drawing boards I’d know about it. Andropov is an alarmist.”

  “Starik is only suggesting that you are too categoric. He asks if it isn’t possible for you to report that you are unaware of any plans for a preemptive strike, as opposed to saying there are no such plans. After all, the Pentagon could be planning a strike and keeping the CIA in the dark—“

  SASHA resumed walking. “Look, it’s simply not possible. The Russians have a mobile second-strike capacity on board railroad flatcars—twelve trains, each with four ICBMs, each ICBM with eight to twelve warheads, shuttling around the three hundred thousand miles of tracks. Without real-time satellite intelligence, the Pentagon couldn’t hope to knock these out in a first strike. And the CIA provides the guys who interpret the satellite photographs.” SASHA shook his head in frustration. “We have a representative on the committee that selects targets and updates the target list. We keep track of Soviet missile readiness; we estimate how many warheads they could launch at any given moment. Nobody has shown any out-of-the-ordinary interest in these estimates.”

  An overweight man trotting along with two dogs on long leashes overtook them and then passed them. Eugene kept an eye on the occasional car whizzing down Pennsylvania Avenue behind them. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he finally said. “Starik obviously doesn’t want you to make up stories to please the General Secretary. On the other hand, you could make his life easier—“

  “Do you realize what you’re saying, Eugene? Jesus, we’ve come a long way together. And you’re out here asking me to cook the intelligence estimates I send back.”

  “Starik is asking you to be a bit more discreet when you file reports.”

  “In another life,” SASHA remarked, “I’m going to write a book about spying—I’m going to tell the fiction writers what it’s really all about. In theory, you and I and the rezidentura have enormous advantages in spying against the Principal Adversary—Western societies, their governments, even their intelligence agencies are more open than ours and easier to penetrate. But in practice, we have enormous disadvantages that even James Angleton, in his heyday, wasn’t aware of. Our leaders act as their own intelligence analysts. And our agents in the field are afraid to tell their handlers anything that contradicts the preconceptions of the leaders; even if we tell the handlers, they certainly won’t put their careers on the line by passing it up the chain of command. Stalin was positive the West was trying to promote a war between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, and any information that contradicted that—including half a hundred reports that Hitler was planning to attack Russia—was simply buried. Only reports that appeared to confirm Stalin’s suspicions were passed on to him. At one point the Centre even concluded that Kim Philby had been turned because he failed to find evidence that Britain was plotting to turn Hitler against Stalin. Our problem is structural—the intelligence that gets passed up tends to reinforce misconceptions instead of correcting them.”

  “So what do I tell Starik?” Eugene asked.

  “Tell him the truth. Tell him there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the General Secretary’s belief that America is planning a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.”

  “If Andropov believes that, there’s a good chance he may cancel KHOLSTOMER.”

  “Would that be such a bad thing?” SASHA demanded. “If KHOLSTOMER succeeds hundreds of millions of ordinary people are going to lose their life’s savings.” After a while SASHA said, “A long time ago you told me what Starik said to you the day he recruited you. You remember?”

  Eugene nodded. “I could never forget. He said we were going to promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit. It’s what keeps me going.”

  SASHA stopped in his tracks again and turned to face his comrade in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. “So tell me, Eugene: what does KHOLSTOMER have to do with promoting the genius and generosity of the human spirit?”

  Eugene was silent for a moment. “I’ll pass on to Starik what you said—ABLE ARCHER 83 is not masking an American preemptive strike.”

  SASHA shivered in his overcoat and pulled the collar up around his neck. “It’s damn cold out tonight,” he said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Eugene agreed. “What about KHOLSTOMER? You’re still supposed to monitor the Federal Reserve preparations to protect the dollar. What do we do about that?”

  “We think about it.”

  Eugene smiled at his friend. “All right. We’ll think about it.”

  Tessa was incoherent with excitement so Vanessa did most of the talking. Tessa’s unit supervisor, a saturnine counterintelligence veteran appropriately named Moody, listened with beady concentration as she led him through the solution. It had been a matter, she explained impatiently, of plying back and forth between the lottery numbers, various telephone numbers and the serial number on a ten-dollar bill. Tessa could tell Mr. Moody was perplexed. If you start with the area code 202, she said, and subtract that number from the lottery number broadcast with the first Lewis Carroll quotation on April 5, 1951, you break out a ten-dollar bill serial number that begins with a three and a zero. You see?

  I’m not sure, Moody admitted, but Vanessa, caught up in her own story, plunged on. Using a three and a zero, I was also able to break out the 202 area code from the other twenty-three lottery numbers broadcast by Radio Moscow after an Alice or Looking Glass quotation. There was no way under the sun this could be an accident.

  So far, so good, Moody—one of the last holdovers from the Angleton era—muttered, but it was evident from the squint of his eyes that he was struggling to keep up with the twins.

  Okay, Vanessa said. In 1950 the US Treasury printed up $67,593,240 worth of ten-dollar bills with serial numbers that started with a three and a zero, followed by an eight and a nine.

  Moody jotted a three and a zero and an eight and a nine on a yellow pad.

  Vanessa said, Subtracting the 3089 from that first lottery number gave us a telephone number that began with 202 601, which was a common Washington phone number in the early 1950s.

  Tessa said, At which point we checked out the 9,999 possible phone numbers that went with the 202 601.

  What were you looking for? Moody wanted to know. He was still mystified.

  Don’t you see it? Vanessa asked. If Tessa’s right, if the quotations from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass alerted the Soviet agent to copy off the lottery number, and if the lottery number was a coded telephone number, the fact that they were changing it all the time meant that the cutout was moving all the time.

  Moody had to concede that that made sense; when the agent being contacted was important enough, counterintelligence knew of instances where KGB tradecraft required cutouts to relocate after each contact.

  So, Vanessa continued, what we were looking for was someone whose phone number began with 202 601, and who moved out soon after April 5th, 1951.

  Tessa said, It took us days to find anyone who even knew that old telephone records existed. We eventually found them buried in dusty boxes in a dusty basement. It turns out there were one hundred and twenty-seven phones that started with the number 202 601 that were taken out of service in the week following April 5th, 1951.

  After that it was child’s play, Vanessa said. We subtracted each of the hundred and twenty-seven phone numbers from that fi
rst lottery number, which gave us a hundred and twenty-seven possible eight-digit serial numbers for the Soviet agent’s ten-dollar bill. Then we went to the second time the Moscow quiz program used a Lewis Carroll quote, and subtracted each of the hundred and twenty-seven possible serial numbers from it, giving us a hundred and twenty-seven new phone numbers. Then we waltzed back to the phone records and traced one of these phone numbers to an apartment rented by the same person who had been on the first 202 601 list.

  Tessa came around the desk and crouched next to the unit supervisor’s wooden swivel chair. The serial number on the agent’s ten-dollar bill is 30892006, Mr. Moody. Five days after Radio Moscow broadcast the second coded lottery number, which is to say five days after the Soviet agent in America phoned that number, this person relocated again.

  Vanessa said, We tested the serial number on all the lottery numbers broadcast by Radio Moscow when an Alice or a Looking Glass quote turned up in the quiz. Every time we subtracted the eight-digit serial number from the winning lottery number, it led to a Washington-area phone number in an apartment rented by the same woman. In every case the woman relocated within a week or so of the Moscow Radio broadcast.

  So the cutout’s a woman! Moody exclaimed.

  A Polish woman by the name of—Tessa retrieved an index card from the pocket of her jacket—Aida Tannenbaum. We got our hands on her naturalization papers. She is an Auschwitz survivor, a Jewish refugee from Poland who emigrated to America after World War II and became an American citizen in 1951. She was born in 1914, which makes her sixty-nine years old. She never seems to have held a job and it’s not clear where she gets money to pay the rent.

  Vanessa said, She’s changed apartments twenty-six times in the past thirty-two years. Her most recent address—which we traced when we broke out the most recent lottery signal from Moscow Radio—is on 16th Street near Antioch College. If she sticks to the pattern she’ll move out in the next two or three days.

  Mr. Moody was beginning to put it all together. She moves out a week or so after she’s contacted by the Soviet agent in America, he said.

  Right, Tessa said.

  Vanessa said, When she moves, all we have to do is get the phone company to tell us when someone named Aida Tannenbaum applies for a new phone number—

  Tessa finished the thought for her: Or wait for the Moscow quiz program to come up with an Alice or a Looking Glass quotation, then subtract the serial number from the lottery number—

  Moody was shaking his head from side to side in wonderment. And we’ll have her new phone number—the one that the Soviet agent will call.

  Right.

  That’s it.

  It looks to me, Moody said, as if you girls have made a fantastic breakthrough. I must formally instruct both of you not to share this information with anybody. By anybody I mean any-body, without exception.

  As soon as the twins were gone, Moody—who, like his old mentor Angleton, was reputed to have a photographic memory—opened a four-drawer steel file cabinet and rummaged through the folders until he came to an extremely thick one marked “Kukushkin.” Moody had been a member of the crack four-man team that Angleton had assigned to work through the Kukushkin serials. Now, skimming the pages of the dossier, he searched anxiously for the passage he remembered. After a time he began to wonder whether he had imagined it. And then, suddenly, his eye fell on the paragraph he’d been looking for. At one point Kukushkin—who turned out to be a dispatched agent but who had delivered a certain amount of true information in order to establish his bona fides—had reported that the cutout who serviced SASHA was away from Washington on home leave; the summons back to Russia had been passed on to the cutout by a woman who freelanced for the Washington rezidentura.

  A woman who freelanced for the rezidentura!

  In other words, SASHA was so important that one cutout wasn’t sufficient; the KGB had built in a circuit breaker between the rezidentura and the cutout who serviced SASHA. Could it be this circuit breaker that the Kritzky twins had stumbled across? He would get the FBI to tap Aida Tannenbaum’s phone on 16th Street on the off-chance the cutout who serviced SASHA called again before she moved on to another apartment, at which point they would tap the new number.

  Barely able to conceal his excitement, Moody picked up an intra-office telephone and dialed a number on the seventh floor. “This is Moody in counterintelligence,” he said. “Can you put me through to Mr. Ebbitt…Mr. Ebbitt, this is Moody in counterintelligence. I know it’s somewhat unusual, but I’m calling you directly because I have a something that requires your immediate attention…”

  4

  WASHINGTON, DC, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1983

  TWO MEN IN WHITE JUMP SUITS WITH “CON EDISON” PRINTED ON THE backs showed laminated ID cards to the superintendent of the apartment building on 16th Street off Columbia, within walking distance of Antioch College. Quite a few Antioch undergraduates lived in the building, three or four to an apartment. The old woman with the heavy Eastern European accent in 3B had given notice, so the super said. She was obliged to move in with a sister who was bedridden and needed assistance; the old woman, whose name was Mrs. Tannenbaum, didn’t seem overly concerned when she discovered that she would lose the two-months’ security she had deposited with the real estate company. No, the super added, she didn’t live alone; she shared the furnished apartment with someone named Silvester.

  Using penlights, the two technicians found where the telephone cable came into the basement and followed it along the wall to the central panel near a wire mesh storage space filled with baby carriages and bicycles. The shorter of the two men opened a metal tool kit and took out the induction tap and cable. The other man unscrewed the cover on the central panel. Inside, the connections were clearly labeled by apartment number. He touched 3B and, following the wire up with a fingertip, separated it from the others. Then he attached the induction clamp to the line; the device tapped into a phone without touching the wire, which made it difficult to detect. The two men wedged a small battery-powered transmitter between a metal beam and the ceiling, then ran the black cable from the induction tap up behind a pipe and plugged the end into the transmitter. They connected one end of an antenna wire to the terminal and, unreeling it, taped it to the side of the beam, then activated the transmitter and hit the “Test” button.

  Inside the white panel truck with “Slater & Slater Radio-TV” printed on the side, a needle on a signal reception meter registered “Strong.” The two FBI agents manning the truck, which was parked in front of a fire hydrant further down 16th Street, gave each other the thumb’s up sign. From this point on, all incoming and outgoing calls to 3B would be picked off the phone line by the induction clamp and broadcast to the white panel truck, where they would be recorded on tape and then rushed over to a joint command post staffed by FBI agents and Moody’s people from counterintelligence.

  The President was extremely proud of his long-term memory. “I recall, uh, this grizzly old sergeant looking out at the new recruits, me among them,” he was saying, “and he growled at us, you know, the way sergeants growl at new recruits: ‘I’m going to tell you men this just once but trust me—it’ll stay with you for the rest of your lives. When you come out of a brothel the first thing you want to do is wash your, uh, private parts with Dial soap. The way you remember which soap to use is that Dial spelled backwards is laid.’” Reagan, who liked to think of himself as a stand-up comic manqué, grinned as he waited for the reactions. They weren’t long in coming. “Dial spelled backward is laid!” one of the White House staffers repeated, and he and the others in the room howled with laughter. Reagan was chuckling along with them when his chief of staff, James Baker, stuck his head in the door of the second-floor office in the Presidential hideaway, the four-story brick town-house on Jackson Place that Reagan had worked out of during the transition and still used when he wanted to get away from the darned goldfish bowl (as he called the Oval Office). “Their car’s arriving,” Baker snapped. He l
ooked pointedly at the aides. “You have five minutes before I bring them up.” With that, he disappeared.

  “Remind me who’s, uh, coming over,” Reagan said amiably.

  A young aide produced an index card and hurriedly started to brief the President. “Bill Casey is coming to see you with two of his top people. The first person he’s bringing along is his deputy director, Elliott Ebbitt II, Ebby for short. You’ve met him several times before.”

  “Did I, uh, call him Elliott or Ebby?”

  “Ebby, Mr. President. The second person is the Deputy Director for Operations, Jack McAuliffe. You’ve never met him but you’ll pick him out immediately—he’s a six-footer with reddish hair and a flamboyant mustache. McAuliffe is something of a legendary figure inside the CIA—he’s the one who went ashore with the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs.”

  “Ashore with the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs,” Reagan repeated.

  “McAuliffe’s boy, Anthony, is the CIA officer who is being held hostage in Afghanistan, along with the Shaath woman.”

  Reagan nodded in concern. “The father must be pretty, uh, distressed.”

  “You were briefed about the boy’s toe being amputated and delivered to the CIA station in Kabul.”

  “I remember the business with the toe,” Reagan said cheerily. “They were able to identify it because of a birthmark.”

  “They’re coming to see you,” another aide added, “because they’ve discovered where this Commander Ibrahim is holding the hostages. They want a Presidential finding to mount a commando-style raid to free them.”

  Bill Clark, the President’s National Security Advisor, came over to Reagan, who seemed lost in an enormous leather chair behind the large mahogany desk. Photographs of Nancy and himself, along with several of his favorite horses, were spread across the desk. “There are pros and cons to a commando raid,” Clark said. “The one your predecessor, President Carter, mounted to free the hostages in Iran went wrong. US servicemen were killed. And of course the raiders never got anywhere near the hostages. Carter looked inept—the press was very critical. On the other hand, the Israelis mounted a commando raid to free the Jewish hostages being held by airline hijackers in Entebbe and pulled it off. They got a terrific press. The whole world applauded their audacity.”