Last Call for Blackford Oakes

by Buckley, William F. ;

  “Lukin told you what the charges were against Viktor?”

  “Not exactly, but I figured it out. There was—obviously—a conspiracy to assassinate Gorbachev. I don’t know how many were involved, but Lukin mentioned several names in our … conversations. I knew nobody he mentioned, except for Viktor, my older brother.”

  He drank from his glass. “Yes, Viktor was one of the plotters. I was actually with him. For almost an hour. It wasn’t easy for him to speak. He had someone even better than Captain Lukin taking care of him. If I could have pleaded guilty there and then, in order to save Viktor, I would have done so with a full heart. But I knew nothing, nothing at all, about the plot on the general secretary. The interrogators decided, finally, that they could get nothing further from me and left me with Viktor, who was shot after I left.”

  “Was he able to talk? You could understand him?”

  “It was hard to make out what he was saying to me, but he wanted to tell me something. He used the word ‘betray’ and the word ‘Singleton.’”

  Though Ivan garbled the American name, Gus knew instantly what the syllables he spoke added up to.

  “But that was all I could make out. I wanted to tell him that I would pledge to take up his cause, to do what I could to assassinate the tyrant. I didn’t, of course, actually say it. There was obviously a bug in the cell. They’d have stood me up against the wall with Viktor, except I had trouble standing, and he couldn’t stand at all.”

  Gus looked at him. He was drinking rapidly, and biting into bread, ham, and cheese with evident relish.

  “Look, Ivan, I do not want to hear anything about any plot you are engaged in. I am here because your friend Galina informed us that a man she called ‘the general’ was plotting against Gorbachev and wondered about contingent American aid. Our interest is in communicating to him that under no circumstances would such aid be available.”

  “Are you telling me, Eric, that the United States was not involved in the events of a year ago?”

  Gus betrayed for only a moment that he was having difficulties. He fudged. “My government was absolutely not involved in the plot of a year ago.”

  “Are you a lawyer?” Even the complexion that went with his red hair didn’t disguise the blush on the face of Gus Windels. “You were not involved in engineering my brother’s attempted coup, but I have good reason to believe that you were involved in trying to stop it.”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “From the general. He was informed by a senior KGB man, a longtime friend, whose first name is—was—Boris. I have got it from the general that this Boris called Viktor—my brother—the day of the attempt and said he believed the Americans were interposing in the planned operation. Boris spoke first to Viktor, then to the general, and then he shot himself. He told the general that he had warned Viktor, ‘Look out for Singleton.’

  “The general had access to KGB records. After I left the Lubyanka, he called the KGB and asked for any tape they had on my visit there with Viktor. He noticed, immediately, the name ‘Singleton,’ the name he had heard from Boris.”

  Gus downed his beer.

  “The general sought me out. General Baranov is a patriot. For that reason I told him that my brother’s cause still had champions. He replied that no such enterprise could ever succeed, and asked me what I knew about Singleton.

  “I drink too much. I told that story to Galina. And now you are here. To do what? To call the KGB to arrest me? To keep me from parachuting down on the general secretary with my machine gun?”

  It was at this hour too late even for Galina.

  Gus took special care, when walking to the metro station. He could discern no one following him.

  CHAPTER 24

  Blackford had reconciled himself, while in Moscow, to reduced communications facilities. He wanted greatly to learn whether Gus had met with the elusive Ivan, and if so, what had come of it. But he would not know until the following day.

  He had spent the afternoon visiting Artur Ivanov and listening to Soviet complaints against the United States. Some of these he thought in fact reasonable. Why, for the third cycle in a row, should the U.S. exhibit open before its Soviet counterpart?… Some demands, of course, were simply unacceptable, like the proposed veto over the list of American books and videotapes to be brought to Gorky. It was one thing to acknowledge Soviet authority over distribution of books in the Soviet Union, another to defer to the Soviets when within the U.S. exhibit.

  Blackford promised, on his return to Washington, to relay Comrade Ivanov’s suggestions and complaints to the Director of the USIA. For the one-thousandth time since his career began as a CIA agent trained to study Communism, Blackford wondered how the Soviet Union could economically afford what it sponsored. The ballet, let alone moon flights. Over the years he had regularly consulted, as had most of his senior colleagues in the agency, published reports that addressed the Soviet economic scene. These were strangely conflicting. Estimates of the money being spent by the military and by the weapons-development branch of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics varied irresponsibly, Blackford had long thought. Dr. Nervitz of Ohio State assessed 32 percent of GDP going to the military and paramilitary, but Dr. Swiller of Stanford said the proper figure would be nearer to 45 percent. You could run a world through that discrepancy, Blackford thought. Meanwhile Reagan was spending—Blackford picked up his World Almanac—only 6.7 percent of U.S. GDP on defense. And our Ron is a hawk!

  Blackford wondered what a USIA clerk in the embassy would say, if asked over the telephone by a journalist to validate one side or the other on the question of Soviet defense spending. “We will have to refer that question to Washington, sir.”

  He looked out the window. Snow again. Always there were pedestrians with heavy overcoats—their Cossack hats held down by scarves—and autos and trucks, never numerous, by U.S. standards, slogging through one more winter in Moscow. How did such driven people find time to produce such literature, and would the artists ever recover from the ideological repressions?

  But Moscow, for the Russians, was everything. The heart of the nation, their everlasting pride. Already they were engaged in a venture to guard the city against missile attack: Star Wars for Moscow, anything to protect this city. It had been a source of infinite amusement for most of the world, and of near-hysterical alarm for the custodians of Moscow, when a nineteen-year-old amateur pilot from Germany gaily landed his two-seat Cessna in Red Square. In Red Square! The utter audacity of it! The—unthinkability of it! For comparison, one had to call up the thirty-year-old Londoner who a few years before had managed to make his way right into the queen’s bedroom while she was having breakfast in bed, launching into a conversation about world affairs with the benumbed monarch.

  The CIA estimated that the Soviet Union had ten thousand scientists working full time to develop an anti-missile missile. President Reagan had succeeded in getting Congress to come up with $3.9 billion for the U.S. program. The contrast in the intensity of the effort of the Soviet Union and that of the United States was enormous. But the figures were not widely known, and President Reagan did not stress them.

  Blackford knew that the CIA was attempting, quietly, to get the word out on the extravagance of the Soviet effort to pre-empt a U.S. anti-missile missile. The great Andrei Sakharov had traveled to Washington only two months earlier to receive a joint award with top U.S. atomic scientist Edward Teller. They both accepted a freedom award at a splashy dinner given by the Ethics and Public Policy Center at the Hilton Hotel. The focus of the event was the historic meeting, for the first time, of the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and his counterpart in America. A discreet arrangement had been made to slip into Sakharov’s briefcase reports, written in the Russian language, on the Soviets’ heated Manhattan Project–style program for developing anti-missile technology.

  “I’ll tell you something,” a CIA colleague had remarked to Blackford a few days before the event. “I am betting that Sa
kharov does not know what the Kremlin is allocating to missile defense. Remember, he’s been holed up in Gorky, completely out of touch with his former colleagues. My idea is to have someone make available to him, at that Washington dinner, photostats of actual Soviet publications. A careful reading of that”—he pointed to a sheaf of photostats—“would give anyone, let alone a scientist, some idea of the effort they’re putting into a program which they regularly denounce as (1) unworkable, (2) a violation of the ABM treaty, and (3) an invitation to another arms race. Sakharov would be intellectually embarrassed to make statements like the one yesterday in Massachusetts, denouncing the Reagan program as ‘a Maginot Line in space,’ if he knew what his own people were up to.”

  The photostats were put into a large envelope, ready to convey to Sakharov. A little bedtime reading.

  The two august scientists bumped into each other by accident in the hotel elevator, bound for the special room in which, with interpreters, they would converse privately before the gala event. Teller was dressed in black tie, Sakharov in a business suit. Both carried folders with the speeches they would be delivering. Edward Teller always looked a little conspiracy-bent, with his unruly hair and his suspicious smile. Sakharov was resolutely genial, but edgy if his interpreter strayed more than six inches away from him.

  Dr. Andrei Sakharov and Dr. Edward Teller meet before the Shelby Cullom Davis award dinner.

  The assembly was well aware of Sakharov’s heroic resistance to Soviet censorship. He had received a Nobel Prize in 1975, but, in 1980, his criticisms of Soviet repression resulted in internal exile, at the demand of Brezhnev. He was sent off to Gorky, where he endured gross material privations. He had emerged from exile only a few months before the party in Washington, a city he had never seen, whose destruction was absolutely plausible, by means of the weapons he had invented.

  In their exhilaration, Blackford and Ursina hadn’t spent time on the implications of her news. Their news, Blackford corrected himself.

  In the years with Sally, he had never sired a child. When she left him to marry a Mexican lawyer, after ten years of the inconclusive romance that had begun when they were both at Yale, he had reflected morosely on her refusal to marry him and have children so long as he was—he remembered Sally’s words—“engaged in man-killing activity around the globe.” The pain was especially keen a year later, when she bore a son to Antonio Morales. Antonito was born, but his father was dead, assassinated by a Castro agent while on a mission of great concern to U.S. intelligence. Sally then agreed to marry Blackford, and he acquired a stepson whom he loved dearly. But there could be no more children, after the operation that accompanied the birth of Antonito.

  Professor Sally Partridge Morales Oakes had declared to Blackford that as long as he continued with the CIA, she would continue to live in the Morales family estate in Mexico City. She would raise her son there, and would go on teaching English literature at the university. Blackford would join them on breaks from his own work, bringing her and Antonito to Merriwell, in Virginia, for summers.

  It had been so many years since any thought of raising a child of his own had even crossed his mind. Now, with that prospect ahead, he felt an excitement he had to suppose was novel for men of his age. But the thought of retiring from his work, living with Ursina, reconstituting her professional life in America, and raising their child gave him a thrill especially exhilarating, he reflected, precisely because of his age. At sixty-two, he was walking into pleasures he had long since thought forfeit to a childless marriage, a widower’s bleak prospects, and a certain professional fatigue. They would have to talk about every aspect of life together, plan carefully, look after—especially—her safety, devise the means of bringing her away from the Soviet Union, time his own withdrawal from the agency. Talk about everything.… They’d do that, talk about everything.

  He paused at the dollar shop on Kozitsky Street. Dollar shops were the piquant arrangement by which the Communist regime took in foreign currency, the little silver rain that collected from tourists, diplomats, businessmen, and black-market operators, in exchange for Western cigarettes, special foods, and sundry other items not available to mere citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with access only to their own currency. It was a kind of commercial Jim Crow, separating ordinary citizens from the nomenklatura. Blackford paid for a bottle of champagne and two hundred grams of caviar with a twenty-dollar bill.

  Once again Ursina was late, but she shrugged off her weariness quickly on laying eyes first on the father of the child in her womb, then on the champagne and caviar. They decided to enjoy these right away, intending a proper dinner later at the Metropol Hotel.

  Soon after opening the bottle, Ursina turned serious. “Let’s explore the alternatives—and please, Harry, let me get through them without interruption. Remember, my training is scientific, and therefore I am instructed by the scientific method. Yours is—what is your formal training, Harry?”

  “Well, I went to Yale. And I am—thanks very much for assuming exclusive scientific credentials—an engineer by training. The kind who builds bridges and skyscrapers—”

  “And intercontinental missiles?”

  “Well, maybe. Though you’re edging there into nuclear science, which leaves me out.”

  “Never mind. Obviously we don’t need to be scientists to know that we could abort the child.”

  Blackford’s face drained of color.

  She looked away from him. “I am reciting alternatives, not making recommendations.

  “I could bear the child in Moscow and send him or her to be raised elsewhere. I have a childless married cousin.” She turned and faced him again, but looked to one side when she resumed talking.

  “Or I could bear the child and raise him myself. This is not easy to do, but our bounteous Communist society has provisions.” She paused.

  “Going on with the alternatives: We could marry and raise the child.

  “We could raise the child in Russia. Or we could raise the child in the United States. Harry?” Ursina’s tears interrupted her. “Harry, could we just agree to think about these things, and put off trying to answer the questions?” He gave her his hand. “To spend time on those questions,” she spoke now saucily, the champagne glass in hand, “would get in the way of our love life.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Philby’s KGB case officer checked in every day. There usually wasn’t much conversation. But there was at least the single question formally put to him every day: Did he have plans to go out? If so, the KGB provided a bodyguard, walking discreetly behind him.

  The Uspensky Street flat was the third assigned to Philby since his arrival in Moscow in 1963. It was very much his favorite, and in his walks about the city, he had a pleasant time of it. He knew he was never alone. He was watched wherever he walked, and when he went by cab he was followed by an unmarked car. The reason given for this—when Rufina, impatient, pressed him—was that the authorities could not take any risk of foreign assassins. “There are people,” he told her, “who, in the judgment of my handlers, want to kill me as an important enemy asset, or just to avenge themselves.”

  For revenge? Yes, that would be understandable, Philby once said directly to a Soviet case officer he liked. It was infinitely annoying that the KGB changed regularly the case officers assigned to him. Even if he had come to know fairly well his incumbent case officer, he would discover that the man had been replaced only when a successor drily introduced himself. No mention was ever made of the officer relieved, and no word was ever heard from him or about him.

  Rufina found this harder to take than Philby did, but then, she was younger. Though hardly accustomed to freedom of action, she was dismayed that she now had less of it than she had had before she married him. But she knew they had to live by the rules. Philby routinely cooperated with the case officer on duty, and with higher handlers in the KGB, and this morning his case officer, whom he knew only as Oleg, told him that his presence was requested
by Colonel Bykov at headquarters.

  Why? What did they want from him? He never turned them down, but they hadn’t overtaxed him. Philby knew better than to ask Oleg if he knew the reason for the summons.

  As Philby dressed to go out—boots, overcoat, hat, gloves—he thought back to his first visit to the Lubyanka, only eleven years earlier. Philby, the most celebrated secret-service officer in the world, had been in Moscow fourteen years before he was invited to set foot in the Lubyanka, the yellow citadel of the KGB. From that fortress, occupying a city block, his own life had been governed for his twenty-five years as a secret agent. He remembered reflecting, on that first visit, that here in this building were housed the men and women who gave him orders back then, and still did.

  A car was waiting to drive him the thirty blocks to Dzerzhinsky Square 1. Comrade Feliks Dzerzhinsky was a blooded Polish revolutionary who had survived six arrests before the day came when he would actually have a hand in helping Vladimir Ilyich Lenin achieve his goal. On December 20, 1917, two months after Lenin achieved power, Dzerzhinsky interrupted his ongoing execution of disagreeable people to found an organization well adapted to further the security interests of the state, and to fend off hostile foreign interventions. That organization was the Cheka, which succeeded the czar’s Okhrana and, over the years, evolved into Stalin’s powerful and terrifying NKVD. Post-Stalin, it became the KGB, the initials deriving from Komitet Gosudarstvenno Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security.

  Dzerzhinsky died young (age forty-nine), in 1926, just two years after Lenin, but Stalin already had the power he needed, not only to chart the future of the USSR, but to elevate Dzerzhinsky to the national pantheon.