The Fall of Moscow Station

by Mark Henshaw

  Galushka had demanded, not asked, to see Rostow. The president had granted the request, summoned the secretary of state and his national security adviser to the Oval Office for the meeting, and made Galushka wait fifteen minutes for no good reason before admitting him to the room. The Secret Service officer on duty admitted the Russian diplomat, then took up a position by the closed door.

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. President,” Galushka began after the pleasantries were finished. “I regret that this will not be a friendly visit.”

  Rostow doubted that Galushka regretted anything. “I do hope that we can resolve your issue in a fair way.”

  “To speak in honesty, Mr. President, there is nothing you need do except comply with single demand that I must make,” Galushka told him. “As you are aware, I am sure, our security services are the most skilled in the world at counterintelligence. They have been running a major operation for some time, and have confirmed that your country has brought a number of spies into our motherland under the false pretenses of being diplomats and businessmen. This is unacceptable! The presence of a single infiltrator would be unacceptable to us, but the scale of your activity is appalling. Our president has reaffirmed his readiness to expand cooperation with the U.S., including the cooperation of our intelligence agencies in fighting terrorism, but such provocations are in the spirit of the ‘Cold War’ and undermine the mutual trust we both value.”

  “I assure you, Igor, your services must be mistaken—” Rostow began.

  The Russian reached into his jacket, withdrew a single sheet of folded paper, and laid it on the Resolute desk. “This is a list of the CIA spies that our security services have identified in our country. I am here to inform you that my government has declared them all persona non grata, unwanted persons expelled from our soil for engaging in activities inconsistent with their diplomatic status. Their expulsion is mandatory and they and their families must leave our soil within twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-four hours? That’s unreasonable, Igor. You can’t expect people to settle their affairs, pack up, and evacuate in a single day.”

  “Given the scale of American perfidy in this matter, that is all the time we are prepared to offer. The number of spies you have sent into the Russian Federation beggars the imagination.”

  Rostow frowned, picked up the paper, and unfolded it. The list of names was arranged in two columns and almost filled the page. “Igor, this can’t possibly be right. Are you trying to gut our embassy?” Rostow protested. He had abandoned any thoughts of diplomatic phrasing.

  “The list is correct,” Galushka replied. “Our foreign minister has summoned your ambassador in Moscow to receive our formal demarche and is sharing the same information with him. However, in the spirit of generosity, we will not arrest the ones who lack diplomatic cover. They will be allowed to leave peacefully, but any of them still within our borders after the deadline will be subject to the full penalties of our law.”

  “Igor, this would not be a wise move—”

  “It is done, Mr. President. It was not my decision. I am here only to inform you of it.” Galushka stood. “I will take up no more of your time. I am sure that you will need to consult with your cabinet and others to facilitate this new state of affairs.”

  Rostow nodded at the Russian ambassador, then looked down to reread the list.

  • • •

  Isaac Menard disliked any visit to the White House. FBI directors rarely were the bearers of good tidings and most presidents came to dread any private meetings with them. Six presidents had lived in outright fear of J. Edgar Hoover, the man who’d ruled over the Bureau for almost fifty years. Hoover had menaced so many politicians for so long that Menard was sure that a fear of the FBI had become part of the White House’s institutional memory, something that was just part of the air, breathed in and internalized by every president of the United States and his staff, whether they were conscious of it or not. Harrison Stuart, the man who’d appointed him, had been friendly enough; but President Rostow’s behavior toward Menard seemed to match the theory, always keeping their visits short and efficient, with no pleasantries exchanged. Menard always had the sense that Rostow wanted the FBI director out of his presence as quickly as possible, like an apostate wanting the priest at his doorstep to leave him to his sins in peace.

  Menard had been summoned to the Oval Office this morning, which was a rare event, so he assumed it would be Rostow delivering the unwelcome news today. It’ll be about Maines, Menard told himself. Some development in that case. There were no other active cases that warranted a U.S. president’s attention. He had dispatched a small team of special agents to Berlin, but they had nothing new to report since the CIA’s woman had met with Maines at the Russian Embassy. Menard had wanted it to be one of his own people who’d gone in, but Clark Barron had persuaded him to let his own person go. The FBI director respected that. Barron wanted first crack at cleaning up the mess one of his own people had made, and Menard would’ve asked for the same favor had he been in Barron’s seat. But the Louisiana-born former special agent was very happy not to be in Barron’s chair. He much preferred hunting spies to running them. The moral lines in his mind surrounding the jobs were cleaner, less blurred. Menard liked keeping the black and white very close together, with as little gray between them as possible.

  Rostow’s secretary admitted him to the Oval Office and closed the northeastern door behind him. “Come on in, Isaac,” Rostow ordered. The couches in the room were mostly full, with only one space left. Cyrus Marshall, director of national intelligence, sat to Rostow’s immediate right, and Kathryn Cooke, deputy director of national intelligence, next to him. Rostow’s dislike of the woman was no secret. For her to be in the room was a sign of unpleasant things.

  Menard had known Cooke for years, their respective jobs requiring them to share information about foreign intelligence services working in the U.S. Menard nodded at the woman. Should’ve kept you in the top job at Langley, Menard thought. Not tried to give it to an amateur who’s still waiting for a vote on the Hill. Maybe Congress would be smart and reject Rostow’s pick, opening up another chance for the president to do the smart thing and tap Clark Barron for CIA director. Not likely, Menard thought. Heaven forbid we should ever give the job to people who actually climbed the ranks. Menard himself had been appointed by Rostow’s predecessor, a man who had valued an appointee’s potential political capital less than his time in service and the experience that came with it. But Harrison Stuart had been a very rare breed among chief executives.

  “Good evening, everyone,” Menard said.

  “Good evening, Isaac,” Kathy replied. Her voice sounded flat, without emotion, as though the woman was trying to hold something inside.

  “I know this is unusual,” Rostow said, impatient, “but I had a visit with Igor Galushka an hour ago. He said that the Russian security services had just wrapped up a major counterintelligence op and identified a lot of our intel officers over there. They’ve ordered all of the following and their families out of the country.” The president passed out copies of Galushka’s list.

  Cooke’s expression at seeing the paper confirmed the Russian’s accusations. “How bad is it, Kathy?” the president asked. There was no current CIA director and Rostow thought it beneath him to consort with acting directors of any agency. Cooke, the last occupant of Langley’s top job, was now his best source of information.

  The deputy DNI took her time before answering. She scanned the page several times, matching the names on the paper against the ones in her head. “It looks like they’ve targeted almost everyone the Agency has in the country, including several under nonofficial cover who don’t have diplomatic immunity.” She folded the paper and set it down. “This wasn’t from a counterintelligence operation. This was Maines giving up every name he had, and CIA will be gutted over there for the next five years, maybe longer.”

  “We won’t even have anyone left over there to try to save the asset
s that Maines’s probably named,” Marshall added. “This is a death sentence for every last one of them. By the time we can get our case officers replaced, there won’t be anyone over there for them to talk to. Recruiting another stable of assets . . . no telling how long that will take.”

  Menard nodded. “If my people could do this to the Russians and the moles they have in our government, we could give my counterintelligence units a six-month vacation after. It doesn’t get worse than this, Mr. President, and there’s no upside.” The man sounded morose.

  “Oh, no, it does get worse. Kathy, tell Isaac what happened yesterday,” Rostow ordered.

  She turned her head slightly toward the man, but didn’t look up. “Clark Barron brought two analysts to Berlin to help him figure out who assassinated General Stepan Strelnikov, who was one of our key recruitments. They developed a theory that General Arkady Lavrov, the GRU chairman, might have met with Strelnikov in the ruins of the old Soviet missile base at Vogelsang before Strelnikov died. They went out there to see if they could confirm that, and they did. They found evidence that Strelnikov was abducted at the old base commandant’s office. Acting on a hunch, they also visited one of the abandoned missile storage bunkers.” Cooke opened a binder and passed Menard a satellite photograph of the Vogelsang base, with labels identifying the buildings. “They also gathered evidence that Lavrov’s people had set up a test rig for an EMP weapon of some kind, probably as a demonstration for the Syrians who were in town earlier this week.”

  “That’s bad news,” Menard noted. “They saw the weapon?”

  “No,” Cooke admitted. She passed the rest of the binder across the table. Menard opened it and found a stack of the photographs Kyra had taken at the site. “But the test rig was still up and they found generators mounted inside one of the bunkers.”

  She stopped talking for a moment and Menard looked up at the woman, feeling the weight of some piece of news yet to come. “The analysts were ambushed coming out of the bunker. It looks like Lavrov had sent a team back, possibly to break down the test rig and clean up the site. We don’t know. We suspect the men were Spetsnaz. The analysts ran for the woods and the Russians pursued them. Only one of the analysts made it back to the embassy.”

  Menard looked at Cooke, then the men in the room. Marshall was making no effort to hide his anger. Cooke’s poker face was impressive, but Menard could see the woman was holding down sadder emotions that were threatening to break through. “And the other one?”

  “He got separated from his partner by a concrete barrier,” Cooke reported. “She reports that he was shot by the Russians, how seriously we don’t know. He could be dead. He told her to keep running. She evaded capture and delivered her evidence to our people in Berlin.”

  “You’re saying that Russian Special Forces may have killed a U.S. citizen on allied soil?” Menard asked.

  “That’s what she’s saying,” Marshall confirmed. “Kidnapped him at best, murdered him at worst.”

  Menard sat back, amazed and trying to process what he’d heard. “That’s insane. Have the Germans checked the site?”

  “Yes,” Marshall answered. The DNI’s voice was quiet. “They didn’t find anything beyond some blood on the ground. The generators, the test rig, the evidence of Strelnikov’s abduction, it was all gone. The Russians cleaned house. If we didn’t have those pictures, we wouldn’t be able to prove a thing.”

  “We still can’t prove a thing,” Cooke corrected him. “If we made these public, the Russians would just claim everything was staged or Photoshopped. Those wouldn’t be enough to nail Lavrov on anything.”

  “We’re not going to go public with them,” Rostow announced. All heads turned toward the president. “Russian soldiers have attacked and possibly murdered a U.S. citizen on friendly soil to cover up some covert action. That’s not going to stand, especially not when they’re about to cut us open like a trout and probably kill a lot of their own people in the process. We’re going to talk to them about it in the language they can understand.” Rostow opened a folder on the table and passed a sheet of White House letterhead to the FBI director. “Isaac, as of today, I want the FBI to arrest every Russian on U.S. soil who your people ever dreamed might be an intelligence officer. I’m going to talk to the secretary of state and have him start pressing allied countries to do the same. I expect most of the Europeans won’t be much use, but the Brits and the Aussies will probably jump at the chance to kick the Russians where it hurts.”

  “We’ll never be able to hold them,” Menard advised. “Most of them will be under diplomatic cover.”

  “I’ll declare them persona non grata as fast as you can lock them up, and I don’t care if you put most of their embassy staff behind bars. I want tit for tat on this, and I don’t care what stories you have to make up about them to get it done,” Rostow countered. “Clark, I want your operators to start disrupting every Russian covert operation they know about, and I don’t want them to be subtle about it. I want Arkady Lavrov and anyone else over there who’s in bed with him to know why we’re dropping the mountain on them.”

  “Sir, if I may,” Marshall interjected. “I don’t think escalating the situation is the right approach. We don’t have our own Alden Maines fingering every Russian intel officer in their embassy up on Wisconsin Avenue. So if we start trying to arrest them en masse, the ones we don’t get will know that their cover is intact. They get bolder in their operations than they are now, and we don’t know many other potential Maineses they might already be talking to.”

  “What good is collecting intelligence if we’re going to let our enemies murder our people whenever they get the urge? And when our own people are just going to run over the border and tear us down whenever they get an itch?” Rostow asked. “Cy, I thought snakes stopped walking on two legs when the dinosaurs died out until I met the Russian president. The Syrians drop nail bombs and nerve gas on their own people, and he vetoes any statement of condemnation coming out of the UN just because he can. He sells guns to every butcher with a bank account and murders journalists at home when they dare to talk about it, and no one can touch him. He plays rough and then rubs our nose in it, and the world gets a happy laugh because we look feckless. Well, enough. I’m not going to sit here and look feckless. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” the men replied. Silence ruled the room.

  Cooke had said nothing. “Kathy, are you with me on this?” Rostow asked.

  Cooke looked at the president, murder in her eyes. “We have our orders, don’t we?”

  “I’d rather hear that you’re behind this. The Russians are about to cripple us, and they might have killed one of our own . . . one of yours. I would’ve thought that you’d want to hit them back.”

  “More people will die if we do this, you know that,” Cooke said. She let the silence hang for a minute, then turned loose. “Mr. President, you don’t know what you’re saying when you call that missing analyst ‘one of my own,’ ” she told him. “And I don’t understand how you plan to define victory with this.” She held up the White House letterhead that Rostow had placed on the table. “After the Soviet Union fell, the Russian intelligence services practically fused with the mob. Organized crime is running that country, for all practical purposes, so this operation will look like mob warfare in Chicago in the twenties before it’s over. You’ll get your tit for tat, but it’ll be a one-way ratchet of violence and every turn of the handle will be greased with blood. And, with all due respect, Mr. President, I don’t think you’ve considered how we’re going to break the cycle once it starts. The Russians assassinate their dissidents abroad by feeding them radioactive poison, and they just shoot the ones at home. So if you’re not prepared to fight in the mud, it would be better to walk away now because the Russian security services like it down there.”

  No one spoke. Rostow stared at the deputy DNI, frowning, but the woman refused to turn away. He saw pain in her eyes that he didn’t understand. It was rare that he let
a rebuke go, but an instinct, a voice somewhere in his mind, told him to let this one go.

  Rostow finally broke the silence that no one else would break. “Thank you for your views, everyone, but I’m not going to back away from this. I consider it one of my primary duties as president to protect our citizens abroad, and I want the Russians to know that they can’t just take out our people for free.” He turned to the men in the room. “I expect daily updates on this during my PDB briefings, understood?” There were nods and mutters of assent. The president of the United States closed the file on the table, and the meeting was over.

  • • •

  Rostow walked back to his desk as the subordinate stood. “Kathy, my people will need to coordinate with yours,” Menard said, his voice low.

  “I’ll have the Counterintelligence Center contact them,” Cooke promised.

  “You knew the analyst who got taken down by the Russians?” Menard asked.

  “We were close. Leave it there.”

  “Sure. I am sorry.”

  Cooke nodded. “Thank you . . . but right now we need to figure out how to manage the damage control on this,” she said. Only old Navy discipline was keeping her mind focused on anything other than her grief. “Between Maines feeding the Russians the names of our assets in Moscow and an open ground war between CIA, the GRU, and the FSB, maybe the SVR too? We’ll be lucky if the Russians don’t burn our embassy down.”