Last Call for Blackford Oakes

by Buckley, William F. ;

  “Why would he tell you about a plot against Gorbachev?”

  “Because the general told him to tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess, wanting to use me to set up a meeting with an American official. The brother knows I have U.S. contacts.”

  Gus took a deep breath. He mustn’t just say Americans-don’t-do-that-kind-of-thing. And he wanted as much information as he could get. “Is the brother … talking about a day? Soon?”

  “He said that was for the general to decide. Oh. The most important thing. Really, the reason I went to the library to give you the signal to come. The brother knows you and I are friends. He said that perhaps you could enlist the aid of a ‘Mr. Singleton.’”

  Gus dug his nails into the palms of his hands. He raced though his memory. When he came to Moscow last October it was as Jerry Singleton, son of Harry Singleton, allegedly in search of a Ukrainian aunt. No one in the Kremlin knew that the Singletons had other reasons to be in Moscow.

  “I never heard of a Mr. Singleton,” Gus told Galina. But her intercom was buzzing.

  “Yes,” she said. “Send him up in five minutes.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The rules were formal. CIA activity in a foreign country had to be disclosed to the U.S. ambassador in that country. But formal rules sometimes bump into presidential prerogatives. The moment had come when Gus Windels had to face the problem, in total privacy with the ambassador.

  They went together into the embassy’s so-called bubble room—the capsule with glass enclosure designed to block eavesdropping of any kind. Jack Matlock was a historian, a learned student of Soviet life and politics. Gus Windels had rehearsed what to tell him, what to hold back.

  “Sir, you probably know Blackford Oakes? CIA?”

  “Yes, sure I know him, though I haven’t spent any time with him. What’s he up to? Not coming over here, I hope.”

  “Yes sir, he is. He’s on a presidential mission.”

  Ambassador Matlock peered over his glasses. “What is the mission?”

  The answer to that question Gus had rehearsed over a protected telephone line with the director. “Mr. Oakes wants to investigate a rumor of special interest to the president.”

  Matlock’s expression was wry. “Presumably of no special interest to me, merely the ambassador. Such a rumor as would cause the president to send his own man to check?”

  “Sir, it’s nothing more than a rumor, and Mr. Oakes wants to play it that way.”

  “Well, it must be a mission of some importance, bringing in the former head of the covert-operations division of the CIA. Bringing him here, as we both know, is against security rules. But the president can override such rules. He is presumably engaged at this moment in overriding them by your failure to disclose to me more exactly what Oakes—what the president is looking for. What kind of cover is Mr. Oakes using?”

  “He will be here, sir, as a kind of book agent or promoter, with ties to the USIA. The USIA is routinely committed to the exchange of cultural information, and, you of course know, ’88 is the year for a special exhibit—once every two years. It’s on your calendar to be there physically at the opening. The USIA exhibit will open in June. In Gorky. It’s Oakes’s assignment to involve himself thoroughly in the Gorky exhibit and to try to persuade Gosizdat to publish a few U.S. titles.”

  “Getting Gosizdat to open up on foreign books takes a while. It took Soviet publishers twelve years before they published Philby’s book.”

  “Yes, sir. But that was a unique operation. Kim Philby is the crown jewel of Soviet intelligence operations.”

  Jack Matlock tightened his lips. “Thank God one can think of Philby as unique. If there were more Philbys, maybe one of them would work his way to becoming national security adviser.” Matlock reflected on Philby’s remarkable career. He was a clandestine Communist agent who managed to get himself appointed head of counter-Soviet intelligence in Great Britain. He did a tour of duty in Washington and betrayed a dozen clandestine operations and who knows how many human beings. “I never got over that: a Communist agent working his way into the job of looking out for Communist agents! I don’t suppose Oakes is coming over to sell Gosizdat on publishing more books about the successes of Soviet spies in the West.”

  “No. But we can take advantage of Gorbachev’s easing up on the reading rules. Remember the fuss at the eighth congress of the Union of Writers? Well, the battles between the reformers and the gatekeepers of orthodoxy aren’t over. Those people are sore as hell that Novy Mir is publishing Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Mr. Oakes has that very much in mind. His idea will be to get publishers to release a few books written in English and promote them in connection with the Gorky cultural exhibit.”

  “Like what books?”

  “Well, one of them is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is now a U.S. publication. Also, the Great Books, which is fifty-plus volumes right there. Another is The Federalist Papers—”

  “That’s one of the quote unquote Great Books.”

  Son of a bitch Matlock knows everything. “Yes, of course. But the point is, we’re not asking them to okay books by Whittaker Chambers or Eugene Lyons or Max Eastman. Or, for that matter, speeches by President Reagan.” Gus returned Matlock’s smile. “I think Blackford Oakes is going to tread carefully.”

  “Will he need an office, or just a hotel room?”

  “We’re getting a couple of rooms at the Metropol Hotel. There are a dozen suites there rented and lived in by ‘businessmen.’ He told me he wants to get around, be where the culture mavens gather.”

  “Does he speak Russian?”

  “Some. Not enough to get very far. That’s an important point, sir, because he wants me to work with him again.”

  Matlock paused. “Well, that’s okay. We can detach you for special duty on the Gorky exhibit. I hope he does not want to see me.”

  “No, sir. He wants very much not to see you.”

  The ambassador got up. “Okay, Windels. You’ve gone through the necessary motions. I don’t need to tell you to be careful. Try to do things so they don’t end up kicking me out of the country. To be U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1987 and be kicked out of the country! That would be torture for a historian.”

  “I see what you mean, sir.”

  CHAPTER 13

  In preparing for this trip to Moscow, Blackford Oakes elected to become “Henry Doubleday.”

  The assignment was very different from the one of a year ago. Then, the planned assassination of Gorbachev was set for a few days ahead. This time, such a plot was not by any means set, it was gestating. Blackford had told the director he would be away perhaps for several weeks. “It’s your call,” Bill Webster had replied. Blackford’s seniority shielded him from bureaucratic interference, and having given up the post of chief of covert operations, he had no managerial responsibilities.

  The facilities of the agency, on the other hand, were entirely at his disposal. So he went to the shed and checked in with Andrew. They were contemporaries, and Blackford had, over the years, relied on this close-mouthed, bald-headed specialist in disguises and identification paraphernalia.

  “Andrew, if anybody in Moscow knows anything at all about U.S. book-publishing history, they’ll know the name Doubleday. If anybody approaches me and says, ‘Are you a Doubleday?’ I can answer, ‘Well, in a way.’” He winked. “‘I’m named Doubleday, but I’m not a Doubleday.’”

  Gus Windels had, of course, diplomatic immunity. And the KGB had not taken note of his phony mission of the year before, looking for a lost “aunt.” But Blackford needed cover. There were CIA in the Soviet Union, and KGB in the United States. Their mobility—and sometimes their safety—depended on not being noticed. It was for this reason that the most valuable Soviet agents in the West were natives of the countries they worked in. It was so, too, in the Soviet Union: U.S. assets were mostly Russian-born. But Americans in the Soviet Union, doing covert duty for Washington, needed plausible cove
r. Thanks to Andrew, Oakes would have this.

  Andrew went to work preparing his documents. Meanwhile, two letters went out to counterparts at the Soviet end of the planned cultural exhibit. Preliminary letters from Henry Doubleday, advising that he would soon be on the scene, and giving a preview of the books he hoped might be made available to Soviet students and readers—which meant getting clearance for them from the censors.

  Not a bad idea to plead for more books in connection with the scheduled two-nation exhibits. These were a part of a decades-old agreement, reached by President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev in 1958, with the exalted title, “Agreement between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields.” The first exhibit, in Moscow, had been the scene of the legendary “kitchen debate” between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon, the young vice president, seemed overpowered by the massive presence of the Soviet premier. But Nixon had been a debater in college, and a strenuous advocate in his days as congressman and senator. When Khrushchev made reference to the great achievements of the Soviet economy, Nixon replied by showing off kitchen equipment—refrigerators, toasters, blenders—that was routine in the United States, mouth-watering to Soviet citizens.

  The exhibits were to be open for three months, the one in Russia devised by Americans, the one in the United States devised by Soviets. They were conceived as giving expression to life and culture in the two countries. “I’m glad I don’t have to design the USSR’s exhibit,” Blackford said to Andrew. “What will they come up with? The ballet and missile-producing factories? Never mind, that’s their problem.”

  The United States leaned heavily on the universal appetite for American cars and movies and popular music. The exhibit at Gorky would show off eight 1988-model cars, including the flashy Chevrolet Camaro and the solid new Plymouth Reliant. There would be a snowland of refrigerators and freezers, long tables of word processors and tape recorders, stacks of music CDs and movies on videotape—and libraries of books. That was the division of the exhibit Henry Doubleday would be paying special attention to.

  From the Russian desk he got a listing of U.S. books that had been approved for circulation in the Soviet Union. The Communists, the covering CIA memo said, were especially concerned to forbid any book that dealt with internal USSR quarrels. There was an ethnic division among the cultural advisers to the Kremlin—Great Russians vs. Georgians, Central Asians, and so on. There was also division over Gorbachev’s glasnost, his declared policy of openness. Some were enthusiastic about the general secretary’s reforms, some cautious, some actively opposed. On the matter of what books to promote, some called for a return to “classic Russian writers,” others to “proletarian populism.”

  Blackford looked over the long memo, then put it down. He booked the clear phone line for a call to Gus.

  “What made you think I’d still be in the office, Dad?”

  It was endlessly amusing to Gus—and, actually, also to Blackford—to hark back, when in private, to the father–son relationship they had feigned the first time they worked together.

  “Gus, I’m going to steer clear of the glasnost maelstrom, but here’s something I need advice about. The people I’ll be dealing with on the Gorky exhibit—which way do they lean? Toward glasnost, or against? I’m preparing a pitch, and that would be useful to know.”

  “I’ll dig into that.”

  Gus agreed that Blackford would do best to concentrate on Western masterworks of composition, “like Hemingway,” or collections, “like the Great Books.” They talked about other American authors. Gus had a list of individual books that had been vetoed in the past. “I’ll send those to you on the wire. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to tell the Gorky people I’ll be following you around while you’re in Moscow.”

  Using USIA facilities, Blackford sent letters to the U.S. head of the Gorky exhibit and to his counterpart in the Soviet cultural-affairs office. The letters advised these officials that Mr. Gus Windels of the U.S. Embassy, who was fluent in Russian, had been detached to assist him with the exhibit, and that he, Henry Doubleday, would be using as his office a suite at the Metropol Hotel, and would receive mail and messages there. He hoped to arrive in the next few days, he said, and to stay in touch with the operation until after the exhibit was opened in June.

  A few days later Henry Doubleday arrived at the Sheremetevo Airport.

  The activity there had begun to reflect the more open policies of glasnost and perestroika. It was twice as busy, Blackford Oakes reflected, as just one year ago. He had brought with him two crates of books, and he supervised, unhurriedly, the unloading of these, carefully labeling them for the official exhibit, before he got into a cab to go to the Metropol. The next, snowy morning, he met for breakfast with the U.S. head of the Gorky exhibit and his Soviet counterpart. They discoursed at some length on the subject of the exhibit, staying away from the heat of political concern over cultural relations. He would go the following day, he told them, to Gorky, traveling by rail with his assistant from the embassy, Mr. Windels.

  There was plenty of time to talk during the three-hour train ride over sparsely populated farmlands. The railroad car was of European design (“These cars were designed in Germany, built in France, and transported to Russia by the Nazis,” Gus informed him). Arrived in Gorky, they spent hours surveying the buildings in which U.S. technology would be featured and then the movie auditorium. The USIA guide took them to the area being prepared for American books. “It’s here, Dad, that you’ll be displaying The Federalist Papers and inciting the counterrevolution.”

  “Quiet, Gus.” Blackford looked about. He measured some distances within the U.S. quarters by taking his yard-long steps, while Gus smoked a cigarette.

  Back on the train that afternoon, Blackford asked about friction at the Politburo level. “Is the division between Dmitriev and Gorbachev completely healed? What about Dmitriev? And what have you pulled together on ‘the general’? We’re talking about Leonid Baranov, we have to assume. The single bit of hard evidence we have of the whore’s credibility is her use of the name Singleton. Since our talk on Monday, what have you been able to find out about how many of our friends were in on the Singleton episode?”

  “I’ve run,” Gus Windels said, frowning deeply, “into the solidest stone wall I’ve ever butted up against.” He tried to lean back in the unyielding railroad seat, finally lifting his hips and stretching out his legs. “Let’s go over the story. Yeah, we know it, but doing it this way, I think, we can lay it out like a computer folder, see how it looks. To us—and to them.

  “Two American characters come to Moscow, Harry Singleton—that’s you, Dad—and Jerry Singleton, that’s me, your son. They are pretending to be here to look for an old Ukrainian aunt, thought long dead, but there was that sign of life in a letter to her sister that arrived just before—Mom’s death. So the Singletons, father and son, are determined to discover whether Aunt Avrani is alive, and, if she is, to arrange to give her a little material comfort.

  “But actually—” Gus stretched open his arms as if addressing not a solitary colleague, but a tearful wake of mourners. “But actually”—Gus spoke now in a stage whisper—“Dad’s mission is to communicate with his old antagonist, the retired spy Boris Bolgin, to instruct him that he has to abort the plot to assassinate Gorbachev.

  “Any corrections?”

  “Go on, Gus.”

  “I will. Maybe my real vocation is for the theater.

  “Anyway, the senior Singleton contacts the KGB defector, who is conniving in the assassination of the premier, and says: Boris, you can’t do that! The United States would not like it at all. And if you don’t break up the conspiracy, Harry Singleton, acting for the president of the United States, will.

  “So what happens? The bomb goes off and kills not Gorby, but an aide. The KGB swoop down and get one of the four conspirators. Now—pay rapt attention, Dad—none of the conspirator
s knew you were in town under the name Singleton. So how did Galina get to talk to me about ‘Mr. Singleton’?”

  Blackford looked over from his seat, opposite. “You forgot a little detail.”

  “Oh well, er—”

  “Oh no you don’t. You wanted to play Laurence Olivier. Well, I can do that, too. What you left out is that young Jerry Singleton, although he had been told not to take any chances, couldn’t refrain from accompanying a young lady from the embassy home to her apartment and screwing her just in time for the KGB to come in, photograph him, and haul his ass off to jail. They were looking for drugs—they said—and they didn’t hold you for very long. But they had plenty of time to stare at your passport, and to record the name.”

  “Which was Singleton,” Gus nodded, soberly.

  “Which was Singleton.”

  “All right. But how did an American guy called Singleton, shacking up with an American girl, held overnight on drug suspicion, get to be known by Galina, a prostitute, as involved in an operation to assassinate Gorbachev? An operation in which, as we both know, the only role the U.S. did play was to get there and try to abort the whole thing.”

  Blackford said he could not come up with an answer to the question. None of the assassins had brushed up against either of the Singletons. The senior Singleton had returned to duty in Washington. Gus, the junior Singleton, had also returned, but was quickly reassigned to Moscow under his own name. His superior had consulted the Moscow embassy and learned that Gus did not appear to have been listed on any active Soviet ledgers as persona non grata. If he was later identified, he would simply be recalled, pursuant to Moscow–Washington standard practice when spies were detected under diplomatic cover.

  So how might Galina’s friend have known there was an American called Singleton in the picture?

  “Odd stuff. Almost”—Gus hesitated—“unbelievable.”

  “Did you study any logic at the University of Iowa?”