by Arno Baker
Table of Contents
Also published by Enigma Books
Title Page
Main Characters
Prologue
Part One
I - May 28, 1941 New York, Pierre Hotel, Suite 292 12:42 hours
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
Part Two - Atomic Espionage
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
Part Three - Disinformation
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
Copyright Page
Enigma Books
Thrillers
Also published by Enigma Books
Hitler’s Table Talk: 1941–1944
In Stalin’s Secret Service
Hitler and Mussolini: The Secret Meetings
The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History
The Man Behind the Rosenbergs
Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History
Diary 1937–1943 (Galeazzo Ciano)
Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles
Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945
The Secret Front: Nazi Political Espionage
Fighting the Nazis: French Intelligence and Counterintelligence
A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror
The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counterterrorism in Algeria 1955–1957
Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf
At Napoleon’s Side in Russia: The Classic Eyewitness Account
The Atlantic Wall: Hitler’s Defenses for D-Day
France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932–1939
Mussolini: The Secrets of His Death
Mortal Crimes: Soviet Penetration of the Manhattan Project
Top Nazi: Karl Wolff—The Man Between Hitler and Himmler
Empire on the Adriatic: Mussolini’s Conquest of Yugoslavia
The Origins of the War of 1914 (3-volume set)
Hitler’s Foreign Policy: 1933–1939—The Road to World War II
The Origins of Fascist Ideology 1918–1925
Hitler’s Contract: The Secret History of the Italian Edition of Mein Kampf
Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust
Balkan Inferno: Betrayal, War, and Intervention, 1990–2005
The Kravchenko Case: One Man’s War On Stalin
Operation Neptune
Paris Weekend
Shattered Sky
Hitler’s Gift to France
The Nazi Party: A Complete History
Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations
The Cicero Spy Affair
A Crate of Vodka
NOC
The First Iraq War
Becoming Winston Churchill
Hitler’s Intelligence Chief
Salazar: A Political Biography
Main Characters
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Allen Dulles CIA Director
J. Edgar Hoover FBI Director
Joseph Stalin
Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet Foreign Minister
Lavrenti Beria, Head of NKVD and member Soviet Politburo
Viktor Abakumov Head of SMERSH, counter-intelligence
Semyon Semyonov—“Sam” NKVD officer
Leonid Kvasnikov NKVD-KGB
AnatolyYatskov NKVD-KGB
aka Anatoly Yakovlev, code name—“John”
Alexander Feklisov NKVD-KGB
aka Alexander Fomin, code name—“Kalistrat”
Evgeny Primakov, Director SVR
Julius Rosenberg NKVD Agent
Ethel Rosenberg
David Greenglass NKVD Agent
Ruth Greenglass NKVD Agent
Morton Sobel NKVD Agent
Morris Cohen NKVD Agent
Lona Cohen NKVD Agent
Al Sarant NKVD Agent Dorothy
Harry Gold NKVD Agent code name—“Goose”
—Link” William Weisband NKVD Agent
Elizabeth Bentley NKVD Agent
Georges Bidault French Foreign Minister
Lucien Barnave alias of Lucien Laffont, French journalist
Albert de Savigny, SDECE French espionage
Prologue
One
September 1995
When Moscow taxi drivers hear that you want to go to Yasenevo, they answer with a standard joke: “Why not all the way to Siberia?” Of course it‘s in the opposite direction, but Muscovites wouldn‘t fail to miss the connection or the joke. The next to last stop on the Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya metro line heading south east, could very well land you in Siberia, but never mind. It‘s pointless to either take a taxi or the metro anyway because you wouldn‘t get near the compound and if you tried, it could mean a lot of questions being asked by very unpleasant people.
The only way into the compound is to first pick up a special pass from a tiny window in the security offices in downtown Moscow. The pass is a small numbered card with the date, time and seat number on a bus operated by the SVR that leaves at seven in the morning and goes directly to what is known as the “”Forest.” To secure that numbered card you must produce a letter of invitation from the “organs” and your photo identity card. The suburb where the foreign branch of the defunct KGB, the SVR, has relocated its headquarters is far removed from the city center southeast of Moscow, in the middle of Bitsevsky Park, a favorite spot for week end picnics. The insiders referred to the SVR offices as “the ”Forest” but others whisper “the Fortress.” In any case the bus speeds along the highway, past the Ring Road, and always appears to have the right of way since the other drivers seem to know that it belonged to “”them”.Driving past a sign reading “Water Conservation District” the bus continues for almost another hour through a thick pine forest. Then suddenly, over the treetops comes the roof of the 22 story building of the KGB‘s reincarnated foreign department built in 1972 by a Finnish architect. The bus goes through a checkpoint where armed guards come on board and carefully check each passenger against a master list; then the driver pulls into a courtyard where everybody gets off.
The non-descript building has none of the sinister cachet of the venerable Lubyanka so conveniently located close to the Kremlin. The security guards now wear smart Hugo Boss suits while a row of ‘Ninja’ type armed guards in worrisome black Kevlar-lined combat uniforms and infrared submachine guns, hover just behind them. Visitors stop at a long counter for a preliminary identity check before they walk through the bulky heavily curtained metal detector a contraption of crisscrossed laser beams far more sophisticated than those used in airports. Then visitors must stop at another small window where they hand over their pass and identity card and are given a special building badge to be worn for the day. So far this procedure takes about one and a half hours since leaving the center of Moscow.
The older well dressed man walked up the few steps at a brisk pace eagerly volunteering his card. One of the civilian guards in the fancy dark suit immediately escorted him past the waiting line and the guards through a corridor and across a second courtyard patrolled by more heavily armed sentries with fierce looking police dogs. There w
ere barbed wire fences around the yard and on both sides of the entrance to the main building. He was escorted into a special ‘executive’ elevator inside the hallway that opened directly three flights up into the office of Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov, the new head of the trimmed down SVR or foreign intelligence. The FSB, a much larger unit handling all the internal security duties formerly belonging to the KGB, was now under the energetic leadership of a young and still unknown officer named Vladimir Putin.
Yevgeny Maksimovich, a high-level intelligence officer and seasoned diplomat, was endowed with the kind of survival instincts that allowed him to prosper and fill a void at a critical moment of the Yeltsin regime. In the mid-nineties when the ‘organs’ had reasserted their take over of the new Russia, most of the old leadership was being replaced with younger men and women considered more reliable. Primakov‘s pedigree was almost flawless: fluent in Arabic having studied at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Languages where he was recruited and became a KGB informer, he became a key case officer and diplomat in the Middle East. His greatest feat was to have successfully propped up Saddam Hussein after Desert Storm in 1991 managing to fight off CIA attempts to topple the Iraqui dictator. Now Primakov was being handsomely rewarded.
The director had a keen interest in the Western hunger for Cold War secrets, viewing it as an opportunity to build a positive image for the SVR, distancing it from the terrible reputation of the KGB‘s foreign department. The Western media was willing to pay small fortunes for all kinds of stories and think-tank scholars were easily dazzled by well prepared sophisticated disinformation campaigns. All those operations were proceeding smoothly until the summer of 1995 when New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suddenly revealed the existence and achievements of the VENONA decryption project. Those revelations became an immediate and unexpected challenge that the SVR could not ignore.
A smiling, and jovial Primakov greeted the older man with a warm handshake. With his hooded oriental eyes hidden behind dark green-tinted eyeglasses, the director carefully took stock of the much taller Colonel Alexander Semyonovich Feklisov, KGB foreign department, retired. His first impression was positive: Feklisov was both powerfully built and obviously enjoying excellent health at seventy-five just as his medical report proclaimed.
“What a great, great pleasure and an honor to welcome you to this office Colonel Feklisov. An honor!”
He almost gave a slight bow as Feklisov attempted a smile. A middle aged dark haired woman in a very tight tailored blue designer suit meant to accentuate her curves wheeled in a samovar on one of those vintage wooden trolleys that “Alex” Feklisov remembered seeing parked outside the offices of Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria in the old Lubyanka. The woman barely glanced at the colonel who looked at her for just a few seconds but then quickly turned back to focus exclusively on the director. The lady in the blue suit poured two cups of strong black tea then closed the double doors behind her without a sound.
Primakov nodded and encouraged Feklisov to open the discussion. The colonel gathered his tall athletic body on the edge of the deep armchair facing the director‘s desk to feel more forceful and cleared his throat:
“With all due respect, Comrade Director, -- he used the “old” socialist form of address -- as you know, several years ago I requested permission to publish my memoirs. This has been consistently denied by the leadership, a decision I accept, naturally with some disappointment. There was some hesitation about allowing a fictional version but that also didn’t materialize unfortunately. I would like to express my disagreement with this position, to you directly and only in the privacy of this office, Comrade Director. I believe the time has come to show the point of view of the new Russia and offer a more positive side of our history, namely how the USSR during the Great Patriotic War was working for all humanity and why the Rosenbergs, husband and wife, in particular, were authentic socialist heroes. To prove that their work was vitally important not simply for the cause of Communism but for all men and women, and for the world itself, in the struggle against Nazi Germany and Imperialist Capitalism…”
Primakov smiled politely as the colonel dusted off a sampling of classic Stalinist rhetoric with amazingly accurate total recall. The director had read various summaries and excerpts of Feklisov‘s past submissions and like his predecessors had rejected permission to publish after discussion with former KGB officials and the new SVR committee. The retired colonel‘s thick personnel file also indicated that he possessed an awful temper and an equally foul mouth when he was directly challenged; that was the main reason he had been passed up for promotion on several occasions and remained very bitter about it. But contrary to his predecessors, Primakov found that such a background offered an excellent range of opportunities if the colonel could be properly harnessed and kept under strict control. He opted to wait patiently before offering his reply.
After a careful sip of black tea, Primakov suddenly interrupted the talkative old spy, who by then was deeply immersed into World War II detail. The director said with a wave of his hand:
“Colonel Feklisov, permit me if I may for one second. I have ordered a completely new review of the entire matter of your book and my staff has examined the various angles. It is indeed a rich and proud history in which you play a central role and this key fact encourages us to modify our position to some extent.”
Feklisov who usually displayed an unfriendly scowl seemed to suddenly melt as his face creased into a hesitant and rare smile. Could this be true? Was the approval really forthcoming? Of course, he could barely believe that he was actually sitting right there, having tea in the secluded Yesenevo office of the very busy director whom he was meeting for the first time. The reason for this meeting was surely not for old times’ sake! The man had other things to do. There had to be a reason, obviously; perhaps even a plan. Feklisov put down his cup and said with all the emphasis he could muster:
“Comrade Director, you know my file…”
Primakov was determined to avoid any time consuming statements and raised both hands to his chest.
“I know, I know your record, colonel”---Primakov interrupted softly–”we must properly use the ‘revelations’ you offer with a few necessary modifications. The Rosenberg spy case remains a detonator in certain key circles in the United States: the media; the Jews; some of whom are convinced that the new Russia is potentially as anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic as the USSR of 1949! May the Jewish angle now be turned to our advantage? Those are just two areas for you to ponder and there are several others that we need not discuss at this time.”
Primakov looked at Feklisov and felt reasonably satisfied that he could safely reveal the committee‘s decision. The colonel’s amazing vigor and clarity of expression confirmed all the surveillance reports that he was of sound mind, still appreciative of pretty women, and even unexpectedly aggressive at times. But his terrible violent temper could of course always intrude. Primakov lit another Kent, took his time as he exhaled and then said quietly, with one hand resting on the arm of his chair:
“Colonel Feklisov, you may write your book using your own words and it will be published. But we must control the information through careful editing to serve multiple objectives. There are layers and degrees of hard facts mixed with the irrational beliefs that many people feel comfortable nurturing. Your story will serve our image at home and overseas in many ways that might even appear negative to you. But you are a professional and know how such things really work. So the book must be prepared, written and sold with a certain national objective in mind. I know you understand this perfectly. I expect you to handle the task as prescribed and you may consider yourself covertly drafted back into the service.”
Feklisov’s jaw slackened a bit in utter disbelief. Those were the magic words he longed to hear. To be recalled to duty! At his age and secretly! Flushed with sudden emotion, Feklisov stood up at attention, 50 of his 75 years instantly erased. He believed that what he had just heard said in a soft spoken, almost off ha
nded way in the secrecy of the director‘s office, had to be serious and real. He was alive again!
“It is my duty to serve, Comrade Director.”
Primakov nodded and smiled a he also stood up and shook Feklisov’s hand:
“Excellent! Colonel, you will be contacted once the operational plan is complete. Be patient and follow instructions…to the letter, eh Feklisov? No surprise initiatives or zealous overreaching! You fully understand what I am referring to?” The older man nodded and looked embarrassed since the latest incident was only two weeks old but, upon reflection, it could have also played a role, perhaps in forcing the presnt meeting. The director then concluded.
“And remember that this meeting never took place as far as you are concerned. You shall hear from the service shortly.”
Feklisov was moved and for a brief instant his light blue eyes clouded a little. It was only as they shook hands again near the elevator that the colonel noticed the small bust of Felix Dzerzhinski on a high wooden stand, behind Primakov‘s desk.
Things haven’t changed that much, after all, he thought.
Two
The others always felt a little uneasy around cantankerous and crusty old Alex. His obsessions, his nervous bad temper, his bizarre paranoia could easily become unbearable especially on those long weekends when the retired spies would convene at Molody’s dacha outside Moscow. But during the endless bleak years of retirement one such weekend did stand out because of the unexpected hilarity it provided to all the members of the little select group. It was in January or February 1984 when Molody called each one of them to plan for a three day weekend to watch a series of films. The movies, he said, were part of an eight hour western television series, a British production that was just released! The viewing would begin on Friday night, and continue all day Saturday. But then the would all demand to see selected parts all over again on Sunday morning and the second viewing turned out to be even better, far clearer, in fact, than the first once the plot had been understood and assimilated by the ‘professionals’.