The Fall of Moscow Station

by Mark Henshaw

  • 2014–2016: Strelnikov leaves Zelensoft, is named Special Advisor to President Putin for Information Security

  • 4 January 2017: Strelnikov named Director, Foundation for Advanced Research.

  “He was a new asset, barely a year on the books, and a volunteer,” Barron told them. “We had high hopes for him, until someone gave him up.”

  “A mole?” Jon asked.

  “A defector,” Barron corrected him. “Kyra, I’m sorry about this one.” The next page showed a photograph of a middle-aged man, midforties, thin, with black hair lightening at the temples. He had bright eyes, green, with a Roman nose and a day’s stubble. The man wore a suit and stood before an American flag. Burke recognized it as the kind of photo that senior leaders were privileged to take when they reached sufficient rank. Not every Agency officer got to take one during his career.

  “Alden Maines,” Kyra said before Barron could name him.

  “You know him?” Jon asked.

  “He was deputy chief of station in Caracas when I was there,” she said, her voice flat. “He got me out of the country after I was shot.” She took the file out of Jon’s hands, dropped it on the table, and leaned over it, hands in her hair.

  “After our station down there was torn to shreds, he couldn’t work South America anymore,” Barron added. “He put together the operation to get Kyra out on the fly, and I thought that was worth a reward. I also wanted to see what he could really do, so I brought him back to headquarters and made him deputy chief of Russia House. But I’m told he didn’t like the desk. Then the current chief of Russia House retired and Maines applied for the job, but I was having second thoughts about him by then. Maines had been showing contempt for leadership since he got back from Venezuela . . . started abusing the people under him too. I interviewed him and he displayed a nasty mix of narcissism and sadism. So I chose the other candidate. I was going to move Maines to some other assignment, where we could sideline him and he couldn’t put ops or people at risk.”

  “I guess Alden didn’t like that decision,” Kyra observed. “He was never like that in Caracas. I always thought he was one of the good ones.”

  “It doesn’t look that way,” Barron agreed. “The FBI was tailing a Russian diplomat who was on their list of suspected intel officers. They followed him out to the Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve in Loudoun County, twenty miles west of Dulles Airport, and figured that he was using it as a dead-drop site. They put the area under surveillance. A week later, he loaded the drop. The special agents on the scene were smart enough to let him go, then crack open the package and take pictures. Then they holed up and watched to see who came for it. Maines showed up. Pictures are in the folder.”

  Kyra turned Maines’s photograph over and found several more underneath, one of a stack of bills, another showing an out-of-focus letter with a transcription clipped onto the back.

  Dear friend: welcome!

  Acknowledging your letter, we express our sincere joy on the occasion of your contact with us last week. Your information was very helpful and we firmly guarantee you for a necessary financial help. You will find in a package 50.000 dollars. Now it is up to you to give a secure explanation of it.

  As to communication plan, we want to share one soonest with you. We have designed a secure and reliable one we will share with you at GLENDA as we have arranged for you in our previous contact. We await your reply and we shall be ready to retrieve your package from BROOKE since 20:00 to 21:00 hours on the 12th of September after we would read you signal (a vertical mark of white adhesive tape of 6–8 cm length) on the gazebo closest to Battlefield Parkway at the Route 15. We shall fill our package in and make up our signal (a horizontal mark of white adhesive tape). After you will clear the drop don’t forget to remove our tape that will mean for us—exchange is over.

  Please, let us know during the September meeting at GLENDA of your opinion on the proposed place (DD “Amy”). For our part we are very interested to get from you any information about possible actions which may threaten us.

  Thank you. Good luck to you.

  Sincerely,

  Your friends

  “That stack of hundreds in the package works out to be something like fifty thousand dollars . . . probably bona fides money,” Barron said. “Maines had to give the Russians something juicy to prove that he was a serious turncoat. Most Russian assets get a pittance, if they get anything at all. The last ones they paid that kind of money to were Robert Hannsen and Aldrich Ames.”

  “I assume that giving up Strelnikov would’ve been worth fifty thousand?” Jon asked.

  “Ten times that much, easy,” Barron replied. “Maines gave him up cheap. Anyway, FBI Director Menard put a surveillance detail on him and got a warrant for cell-phone and Internet taps. Five days ago, Maines made like he was going to work. Surveillance lost him, he never showed up at headquarters, and he never came home.”

  “A deputy chief of Russia House defecting to the Russians could shut us down in Moscow,” Kyra observed.

  “He knows about all of our tech ops and key assets,” Barron agreed. “If he’s talking to the Kremlin, there’s probably not an intel officer in the city from any of the English-speaking countries who’s safe, much less our assets. I’ve suspended all human operations there as of this time yesterday and the chief of station is preparing to exfiltrate our key assets, but it’ll take a few weeks to get the resources in place.”

  Jon turned the file on the table, looked at Maines’s biography, then turned it back. “Sounds like a straightforward greed-and-revenge defector,” he said, the boredom in his voice clear.

  “It was until three days ago,” Barron agreed. “First, Strelnikov turns up dead just a few days after Maines fingers him. That’s not how the Russians operate. They’re methodical. They build airtight cases so they can rip our operations open in a public trial. They watched Oleg Penkovsky for months before they grabbed him and he was giving up nuclear secrets.”

  Barron leaned across the table and offered the analysts another photograph. Kyra took the picture . . . Maines standing in a customs line at an airport. “Second, two days ago, the Russian ambassador walked into Main State and gave that up. We’ve identified the airport where that was taken as Berlin Schönefeld. The ambassador told SecState that Maines was defecting.”

  Kyra’s eyes grew wide “He’s here?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Looks that way,” Barron said. “What we can’t figure is why the Russians burned him. Maines could’ve been an incredibly valuable asset to the Russians. There was no good reason to burn him that we can see, and now he won’t be worth anything to them in a few months. I would say they were dumb, but I have the feeling someone is getting played and I don’t want it to be us.”

  “It’s not us,” Jon said, his voice flat. “It’s Maines.”

  “I want to believe that more than you know,” Barron said. “What’re you thinking?”

  “Maines wasn’t planning on defecting. Look at the letter . . . this sentence here,” Jon ordered, pointing to the second paragraph.

  As to communication plan, we have designed a secure and reliable one we will share with you at GLENDA very soon as we have arranged for you in our previous contact.

  “You don’t establish a covert communications system for an asset unless you’re expecting him to keep working for you,” Kyra observed.

  “That’s not even the interesting part,” Jon said. “The money is.”

  “How so?” Barron asked.

  “Given how tight the Russians are with a ruble, not just anyone could authorize a fifty-G payout,” Jon offered. “Add onto that Strelnikov’s former military rank and his position as the head of the Russia’s DARPA, and it’s obvious that not just anyone could order his execution.”

  The NCS director frowned but his expression betrayed his agreement. “Makes sense,” Barron replied. “Still doesn’t tell me why they burned Maines.”

  “There’s only one reason that makes sense, d
on’t you think?” Jon asked, looking at Kyra.

  The woman stared down at the photograph of Maines in the airport. “Running an asset is slow business,” she started, thinking as she talked. The puzzle unraveled in her head in an instant. “Impatience will get your people killed, but the Russians are being impatient, which means they’re worried or scared. They’re in damage-control mode, trying to protect something or someone very important. So whoever took out Strelnikov has leaks he needs plugged, he wants it done fast, and Maines knows where the leaks are. So Strelnikov’s killer tricks Maines into leaving the U.S. and then burns his bridge back. Now Maines has to depend on him for protection, and the cost of that protection will be a complete download of everything he knows.”

  “You’re saying that the Russians are blackmailing their own asset?” Barron asked, incredulous. “That doesn’t make sense if he’s already playing for their team.”

  “It does if you consider that Maines is a new asset . . . so new that the Russians don’t really know him or what his motivations are,” Kyra explained. “Some traitors still have morals or principles, and won’t give up everything they know. But that’s not acceptable if this Russian really is desperate to plug some leaks and doesn’t think he has much time to do it. So he needs leverage to force Maines to give up everything right now.”

  Kyra realized that she’d been staring into the distance, unfocused on the men in the room as she’d thought through the story. She looked down. Jon was smiling, Barron was horrified. “Sir,” she said, “if that’s right, you may not have a few weeks to exfiltrate any of those assets. The Russians could start dropping them anytime. They might kill them as fast as Maines identifies them, the same as Strelnikov.”

  Barron muttered a curse. “If that’s true . . . we have no way to figure out who’s at the top of the hit list.”

  “No, there is a way,” Jon disagreed. Barron looked up, hopeful. “Figure out who ordered Strelnikov’s execution and what he’s trying to protect. Do that and you can identify which remaining assets are his biggest threats. But . . .” He trailed off.

  “Yes?”

  Jon hesitated, then looked to Kyra. He doesn’t know how to say it gently, she realized. Kyra tumbled the thought about in her mind for a few moments before deciding that there were no gentle words for it. “We can start with Strelnikov’s file. That might give us an idea of where to start. But after that . . . dead assets might be the only other clues we’ll get to answer the question.”

  “That’s not acceptable,” Barron said, his voice turning cold.

  “The only other option is to talk to Maines,” Jon said. “If the Russians have pulled a bait and switch on him, he might not be happy about his current situation.”

  “And how, exactly, would we get in the same room with him?” Barron asked.

  “If Maines really is in town, he’s either at the Russian Embassy or a safe house,” Kyra said, thinking aloud. “If it’s a safe house, someone at the embassy will know where. So we go to the embassy.”

  “Good luck even getting the Russians to admit they have anyone in our business at the embassy,” Jon mused.

  “They can do a lot worse than say no,” Barron warned. “If the Russians really are desperate to use Maines’s information to plug some leaks, there’s no telling how they might react when you show up asking for him.”

  “I don’t think,” Jon said, his mind engaged now. “They were the ones who told us where he was. They had to expect that we’d come asking about him. They might even be planning on it.”

  “And it might offer some clues besides dead bodies that will help us figure this out,” Kyra added. “So let’s go knock on the door.”

  • • •

  Kyra sat in the empty conference room, focused on Maines’s file to distract herself. She’d read it twice already, and had found it surreal to read about the operation he’d led to save her from the Venezuelan SEBIN. Moving on, she saw that Barron’s clinical words about narcissism and sadism had softened his description of the true problem. She’d only known Maines a few months before she’d been pulled from the country, had liked him well enough. He’d been a decisive leader, amiable, with a concern for his subordinates that she’d thought genuine at the time. The papers on the table had shaken that conclusion.

  On the first reading, the file seemed nothing more than the record of a solid career, with no obvious signs of personal or professional distress. Her second review revealed that the high marks and bureaucratic language used to avoid legal issues were hiding a flawed man. There were no reprimands or disciplinary actions in the records, but performance covered a multitude of sins. Case officers considered sin itself a tool for plying their trade, and if the practitioners indulged on occasion, that was the price of business so long as they didn’t cross certain lines. But pride and wrath were capital vices too, and Alden Maines’s arrogance and temper both had bloated until he couldn’t accept that his decisions could be faulty or see any better way to deal with his failures than making his staff into targets.

  The file had been thin, which Kyra hoped was the result of some nervous counterintelligence manager’s fear that giving away too much would jeopardize the investigation. There were less noble reasons why such files often were thin. Information was the life’s blood of intelligence, but it was also the black-market currency of bureaucrats and only reluctantly did they give it away for free if they thought it had some value they could trade for favors or some other advantage. But there was enough in the papers to ensure she would lose sleep tonight trying to dissect the puzzle Maines had left behind. One line in the Russians’ dead-drop letter stood out in her mind.

  This is why we suggest you use some money in this package to meet us in GLENDA very soon as we asked in our previous contact.

  Kyra had parsed the words so many times that she’d lost count, but the implication never changed, like a quiet voice in her mind. They’re in a hurry, she thought. The Russians knew that they had a rich source to tap and they wanted to start mining him immediately. Maines imagined that it was so they could talk face-to-face, issue him taskings, and settle on a communications plan in hours that would take them weeks or months to work out through dead drops alone. But if Jon’s theory was right, the Russians were more impatient than that. Maines could’ve been a long-running source, like a deep mine in a mountain, full of endless veins that could produce valuable ores for years. Now the Russians were prepared to strip-mine that resource in a single stroke, looking for only a few tidbits of Maines’s information that they considered more valuable than his long-term potential.

  What operation is so important that it’s worth burning an asset like him? Kyra wondered. Any of the answers she could imagine scared her more than she wanted to admit even to herself.

  She finally heard Jon enter. “Barron approved your plan,” the man said.

  Kyra stared at her mentor, taking in his face. “You’re worried about it.”

  He nodded and his eyes stared off at some point in the distance as he always did when he was talking and thinking at the same time. “The Russians are vicious. We’ve tangled with the Chinese and the Iranians and the Venezuelans and came out with everything attached, but the Russians play on their own level. Anyone who isn’t scared of the Russian intel machine is either stupid or ignorant.”

  “They’re not perfect,” Kyra said. “You’re the historian. You know our people outplayed them plenty of times during the Cold War.”

  “ ‘Quantity has a quality all its own,’ ” Jon quipped.

  Kyra frowned. “What are you saying?”

  “That was something Stalin said when a critic pointed out that his enormous army was mostly untrained conscripts. When the other guy has enough people on his side, he can afford mistakes. It’s the one who’s outmanned that has to be perfect, and even that might not be enough. If the enemy is big enough, sometimes he only has to hit you once and the fight’s over. The only question is whether you’re humble enough to stay on the m
at. Can’t fight when you’re dead.”

  Kyra felt an ache in her arm, under the scar that a Venezuelan bullet had left behind years before. “Jon, we have to help.”

  He glared at her. “Leading with your heart is a fine way to get yourself killed.”

  Kyra smiled. She’d seen him surrender to the inevitable before. “God hates a coward,” she said.

  • • •

  “Your plan is only marginally insane,” Barron said. To be fair, the analysts had only worked on it for an hour before approaching him, but he supposed that time was working for traitors today. The proposal Kyra had offered him had taken less than two minutes to explain.

  “I’m open to a better one,” Kyra told him.

  “I called Langley. No one there has anything either. Honestly, I don’t mind a little insanity when it’s called for. The Russians practically sent us an invitation to come talk, but they’ve got some agenda and I’ve got no idea what it is,” Barron admitted.

  “I could talk to the ambassador . . . see if he’d be willing to send one of these State Department boys in to talk,” Kyra suggested.

  “I thought about that,” Barron told her. “But they don’t know the right questions to ask, and Maines is our problem anyway. Plan approved. When are you going?”

  “First thing in the morning, as soon as we can get a disguise in place,” she replied. “Maines will know who I am, but there’s no sense in giving the Russians an easy picture of my real face.”

  “Agreed,” Barron replied. “How’s Jon doing?” The tone of his voice suggested he wasn’t asking about her partner’s professional performance.

  “The same,” she admitted. “He’s been this way ever since Marissa was killed last year. He’s never been the happiest man I ever met, but I’m pretty sure he’s clinically depressed. I tried to get him to see one of the Agency psychologists, get him on something that’ll help him climb out of the dark, but he won’t go.”