The Company

by Robert Littell

  “It is no secret that I was a Chekist for many years,” he replied. “You will forgive me if I do not reveal to you what I did, or where I did it.”

  “Tell us, then, how one goes about opening a private bank these days,” the younger woman asked.

  “It is not all that difficult,” Yevgeny said with a twinkle in his eyes. “First you must convince people that you have a hundred million American dollars. Once you do that the rest is child’s play.”

  “Oh, you are a naughty man,” the older woman remarked. “Everyone knows you have much more than a hundred million American dollars.”

  A young Russian businessman who had made a fortune exporting second-hand Soviet weapons—the word was he could supply everything from a Kalashnikov to a nuclear submarine—pulled Yevgeny aside. “What do you make of the rumors of a coup d’état against Gorbachev?” he demanded.

  “I have heard them, of course,” Yevgeny said. “And common sense would suggest that if you and I heard them, Gorbachev has heard them, too. Mikhail Sergeyevich is many things but stupid is not one of them. He will surely take precautions—“

  “A coup would be bad for business,” the young Russian decided. “What forward dollar rate are you giving against the ruble?”

  Smiling, Yevgeny extracted a small embossed business card from his breast pocket. “Call me for an appointment, Paval. I have reason to believe that the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce can be of assistance to you.”

  Later, as the cocktail party thinned out and the guests were calling for their cars, the wife of the press baron buttonholed Yevgeny in the antechamber off the ballroom. “Yevgeny Alexandrovich, my husband is eager to make your acquaintance. It appears the two of you have a mutual friend who speaks very highly of you.”

  “I would be honored to meet your husband.”

  Mathilde slipped a perfumed visiting card from her small embroidered purse and handed it to Yevgeny. An address in Perkhushovo, a village off the Mozhaysk Highway, a date at the end of February, and hour, were written in ink on the back of it. “You are invited to join a select gathering. My husband and a group of his friends and associates are meeting to discuss”—the woman flashed a knife-edged smile—“Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Our mutual friend, the person who speaks of you in glowing terms, has said you were greatly influenced by Tolstoy in your youth—that you once adopted as an alias the name Ozolin, who of course was the stationmaster at Astapovo, where the great Tolstoy died.”

  Yevgeny hardly dared breath. He had assumed Starik’s talk of a code phrase was the ranting of a half-crazed old man. He managed to murmur, “I am stunned by how much you know about me.”

  The barest trace of a smile vanished from the woman’s painted lips. “My husband has been told that you are one of the rare people who remembers the Count’s last words: ‘The truth—I care a great deal.’ Do you, like the immortal Tolstoy, care about the truth, Yevgeny Alexandrovich?”

  “I do.”

  “Then you will share that obsession with my husband and his friends when you honor us with your presence.”

  Mathilde offered the back of her gloved hand. Yevgeny bent forward and brushed her fingers with his lips. When he straightened and opened his eyes, she was gone.

  Room SH219 in the Hart Office Building, home to the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence, was reputed to contain the most secure suite of offices in a town obsessed with security. The unmarked door opened into a foyer guarded by armed Capitol Hill policemen. The conference room was actually a room suspended inside a room so that the walls and floor and ceiling (all made of steel to prevent electromagnetic signals from penetrating) could be inspected for bugs. Even the electrical supply was filtered. Inside, mauve chairs were set around a horseshoe-shaped table. On one wall hung a map of the Intelligence Committees’ area of interest: the world. Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt II, the Director of Central Intelligence since Bill Casey’s death in 1987, had barely settled into a catbird seat when the assault began.

  “Mawning to you, Di-rector,” drawled the Texan who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He had a smile plastered across his jowls but it didn’t mislead anyone; the Senator had been quoted in the New York Times the previous week saying there were some in Congress who favored breaking up the Company into component parts and starting over again. “Won’t waste your time ’n ours pussyfootin’ ’round,” he began. He looked through bifocals at some notes he’d scrawled on a yellow legal pad, then peered sleepily over the top of the glasses at the Director. “No secret, folks in Congress are pissed, Ebby. Been almost two years since the last Russian soldier quit Afghanistan. Still can’t figure out what the CIA could’ve been thinkin’ ’bout when it delivered Stinger missiles to Islamic fundamentalists. Now that we’re bombin’ the bejesus out of Saddam Hussein, chances are good some of them-there Stingers will wind up bein’ shot at our aircraft.”

  Ebby said, “I would respectfully remind the Senator that giving Stingers to the mujaheddin was a Presidential decision—“

  “Casey recommended it,” a Republican Congressman from Massachusetts told the Director. “You could make a case that he talked Reagan into it.”

  “How many Stingers are still out there and what are you doing to get them back?” another Congressman asked.

  “We reckon roughly three hundred and fifty are unaccounted for, Congressman. As for recuperating them, we’re offering a no-questions-asked bounty of one hundred thousand dollars a Stinger—“

  The Chairman snapped his head to one side to clear the mane of white hair out of his eyes. “I expect an Islamist could get more for a Stinger in the Smugglers’ Bazaar in Peshawar. The long an’ the short of it, Ebby, is that everyone’s patience is wearin’ rice-paper thin. Here we are, shellin’ out somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-eight billion dollars of the taxpayers money a year on intelligence. And the single most important event since the end of the Second World War—I’m talkin’ ’bout the dee-cline ’n’ fall of the Soviet empire—goes unpredicted. Hellfire, the CIA didn’t give us a week’s warnin’.”

  A Senator from Maine rifled through a folder and came up with a report stamped “Top Secret.” “A couple of months ago you personally told us, in this very room, Mr. Ebbitt, that—and I’m quoting your words—‘the most likely outcome for 1991 is that the Soviet economy will stagnate or deteriorate slightly.’”

  “It sure as hell deteriorated slightly!” scoffed the Chairman. “The Berlin wall came tumblin’ down November of ’89; Gorbachev let the satellites in East Europe squirm off the Soviet hook one by one; Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Ukraine are talkin’ autonomy—and we’re settin’ here twenty-eight billion poorer and readin’ ’bout these earth-quaking events in the newspaper.”

  A Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts cleared his throat. “Senator, in all fairness to Mr. Ebbitt, I think we are obliged to acknowledged that he’s done a lot to clean up the CIA’s act since Director Casey’s day. I don’t think I need to remind anyone in this room that, in Casey’s time, we had him testifying into a microphone and we listened on earphones trying to decipher his mumblings. And we didn’t succeed. Mr. Ebbitt, on the other hand, has been very open and straightforward with us—“

  “I ’preciate that much as you do,” the Chairman said. “But the problem of gettin’ a handle on intelligence—the problem of gettin’ some early warnin’ for our bucks—remains. We woulda been a hell of a lot better off if’n the CIA’d apprised us of Saddam Hussein’s dishonorable intentions visà-vis Kuwait.”

  “Senator, Senators, Congressmen, we’ve been moving in the right direction on these matters,” Ebby said, “but Rome wasn’t built in a day and the CIA isn’t going to be reconstructed in a year or two. We’re dealing with a culture, a mindset, and the only thing that’s going to change that over the long run is to bring in new blood, which, as you gentlemen know, is what I’ve been doing. As far as drawing an accurate portrait of the Soviet Union�
��s leadership, I want to remind the Senators and Congressmen that you’ve put pressure on the CIA over the years to cut back on covert operations—nowadays we run roughly a dozen programs a year, compared with hundreds in the fifties and sixties. One of the results of this policy is that we don’t have assets in Moscow capable of telling us what Gorbachev and the people around him are up to. We don’t even know what information they’re getting. As for the stagnation of the Soviet economy, Gorbachev himself didn’t put his hands on reasonably accurate economic statistics until two or three years ago, and it seems unfair to criticize us for not knowing what he himself didn’t know. Looking back, we can see that when he finally discovered how bad things really were, he decided the only way to rejuvenate a stagnating command economy was to move to a market-oriented economy. Just how fast and how far he plans to move is something that Gorbachev himself probably hasn’t figured out.”

  “And how does the Company assess his chances of arresting the downward spiral of the Soviet economy?” inquired a Republican Congressman.

  “It’s a good bet that things will get worse before they get better,” Ebby replied. “In Russia there are individuals, communities, organizations, factories, entire cities even, that have no rational economic reason to exist. Pruning them away is as much a social problem as an economic problem. Then there is the challenge of meeting the raised expectations of the workers—coal miners in the Kuzbass or the Don Basin, to give you one example, want to find more on the pharmacy shelves than jars filled with leeches. It’s anybody’s guess whether Gorbachev, with his talk of perestroika and glasnost, will be able to satisfy their expectations. It’s anybody’s guess whether he’ll be able to buck the vested interests—buck the KGB and the military establishment, buck what’s left of the Communist Party which fears Gorbachev will reform them out of existence. It’s anybody’s guess whether the revolution—and there will be a revolution, gentlemen—will come from below or from above.”

  “What do you make of all this talk in the papers ’bout a putsch?” the Chairman demanded.

  “There are people in the Soviet superstructure who would obviously like to set the clock back,” Ebby said. “Speaking frankly, we don’t know how serious the rumors of a coup are.”

  “I think we need to give Mr. Ebbitt credit,” the Congressman from Massachusetts remarked. “He doesn’t bull his way through these briefings. I for one appreciate that when he doesn’t know something, he says he doesn’t know.”

  “I second the motion,” said a Republican Congressman.

  “Still ’n’ all, these rumors need to be checked out,” the Chairman persisted. “Is there a clique workin’ behind the scenes to undermine Gorbachev? How strong are they? What kind of support can they expect from the military? What can we do to support Gorbachev or undermine his opponents? And what should we make of those rumors ’bout the KGB having large amounts of foreign currencies stashed away somewhere in the West?”

  “There is sketchy evidence that sizable amounts of Soviet foreign currency holdings may be finding their way into German banks,” Ebby confirmed. “The front man handling the mechanics of the operation is said to be someone in the Central Committee—his identity remains a mystery. Who is giving the orders, to what use this money will be put has yet to be determined.”

  “What role do you see Yeltsin playing in all this?” asked one of the Congressman who had remained silent up to now.

  “Yeltsin is coming at Gorbachev from the other direction,” Ebby said. “The two men detest each other—have ever since Gorbachev expelled Yeltsin from the Politburo in ’87; in those days the Party was above criticism and Yeltsin made the fatal mistake of ignoring this cast-iron rule. Nowadays, Yeltsin openly attacks Gorbachev for slowing down the pace of reforms. I think it can be said with some assurance that Yeltsin, who was elected Russian President by the Russian Republic’s Supreme Soviet last year and thus has a strong power base, sees himself as the logical successor to Gorbachev. Our reading is that he wouldn’t mind seeing Gorbachev shunted aside on the condition that he’s the one doing the shunting.”

  “Which pretty much pits Yeltsin against the KGB and the military and the Communist Party hacks who are squeamish about reforms,” someone said.

  “He has more than his share of enemies,” Ebby agreed.

  The briefing went on for another three-quarters of an hour, with most of the time devoted to a discussion of Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage chemical or biological warfare in the wake of his stunning defeat in the Gulf War. At noon, when the meeting finally broke up, even those who tended to be critical of the Company conceded that Ebby had a firm grasp of current events and was doing his level best to shape the CIA into an organization that could cope with the post-Cold War world.

  “How’d it go?” Jack asked quietly.

  “As well as could be expected,” Ebby told his Deputy Director, “all things considered.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that the policy wonks still don’t understand the limitations on intelligence gathering. They spend twenty-eight billion a year and they don’t feel they’re getting their money’s worth if questions go unanswered or events go unanticipated.”

  “They don’t give us credit for the ones we call right,” Jack griped.

  “They give us credit,” Ebby said. “But they want us to get it right a hundred percent of the time.”

  The two stood off to one side in the executive dining room at the Company’s Langley headquarters watching as Manny, Deputy Director/ Operations since the previous summer, presented gold wristwatches to three veteran case officers who had been encouraged to take early retirement. (Encouraged, in the sense that all three had been offered new assignments, two in listening posts in the Cameroon Republic, the third in a one-man Company station in the Canary Islands.) The chairs and tables had been pushed against one wall to make room for the hundred or so Operations personnel at the ceremony. Manny, at forty-four the youngest DD/O in memory, blew into the microphone to make sure it was alive. “It’s always painful to see old hands take their leave,” he began. “John, Hank, Jerry, I speak for everyone in the DD/O when I tell you that we’ll miss not only your expertise but your company. Between the three of you, there’s exactly seventy-six years of experience—seventy-six years of manning the ramparts of the Cold War. These wristwatches are a token of our esteem and the country’s appreciation for your long and meritorious service.”

  There was a smattering of applause. Several voices from the back cried, “Speech, speech.”

  “What bullshit,” Jack muttered to Ebby. “These jokers were never interested in scoring. They sat around various stations waiting for opportunities to fall into their laps. Even then they always played it safe.”

  The oldest of the three retirees, a corpulent man with bushy eyebrows fixed in a permanent scowl, stepped up to the microphone. Bitterness was draped across his face like a flag. “Thought I’d pass on a joke that may or may not be about the Central Intelligence Agency,” he said. Manny, standing at his side, shifted his weight from one foot to another in discomfort. “Goes like this: A Federal census taker comes across a family of hillbillies living in a shack in Tennessee. Barefoot kids everywhere. The adults have rifles in one hand and moonshine jugs in the other. The father says there are twenty-two in the family. He whistles with his thumb and middle finger and everyone comes a-running.”

  Some of the DO people began to titter—they had heard the story before.

  “The census taker counts heads but finds only twenty-one. Turns out that Little Luke is missing. Then someone shouts from the outhouse—Little Luke has fallen through the privy hole. Everyone runs over to take a look. The father shrugs and wanders off. The census taker can’t believe his eyes. ‘Aren’t you going to pull him out?’ he shouts. ‘Shucks no,’ the father calls back. ‘It’ll be easier to have another than clean him up.’”

  Half the DO staffers burst into laughter. Others raised their eyebrows. Manny gazed at
the floor. The officer who told the joke turned his head and looked across the room directly at the DCI.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Jack moaned angrily. He would have strode over to have it out with the retiring officer then and there if Ebby hadn’t put a hand on his arm.

  “These guys were hotshots when they started, but they’re burnt out,” Ebby said in a low voice.

  “That doesn’t give him the right—“

  “Getting rid of the deadwood is a painful experience for everyone concerned. Grin and bear it, Jack.”

  Later, in the DCI’s seventh-floor Holy of Holies, Jack flopped into a seat across the desk from Ebby. “What he said back there—there may be some truth to it,” he moaned. “There are people in Congress who’d prefer to start from scratch rather than give us a chance to clean up the mess Casey left behind him.”

  “Ran into several of them when I testified this morning,” Ebby said.

  Jack leaned forward. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, Ebby. Fighting Columbian drug lords or Islamic terrorists or Russian arms merchants is too much of a sideshow to justify the twenty-eight billion spent on intelligence every year. Look at it another way: How are we going to recruit the best and the brightest if our archenemy is Cuba?”

  “You have another idea of what we should be doing?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Jack got up and strolled over to the door, which was ajar, and kicked it closed. He came around behind Ebby and settled onto on a windowsill.

  Ebby swiveled around to face him. “Spit it out, Jack.”

  “I nibbled around the edges of the subject with you when Anthony was kidnapped by the fundamentalists in Afghanistan. We were in a no-win situation then, we’re in a no-win situation now. Congress ties our hands with oversight and budget restrictions and strict limitations on Presidential Findings—my God, Ebby, it’s actually against the law for us to target a foreign leader, it doesn’t matter that he may be targeting us.”