by Howard Blum
Bob, the experienced fieldman, understood the complexity of what he was up against. “I had no idea where the corridors in the KGB’s edifice would take us, or what we would find when we reached the end of the search,” he conceded.
Meredith, although a newcomer to the rough-and-tumble world of secret agents, shared this realization. Their tactical predicament, he explained as he reached for another metaphor, was like the old parable of the blind men and the elephant. Like the naïve blind men who’d reach out to feel a tail or a tusk and think that that was all there was to the animal, they could grapple with a single Soviet cable and believe they were homing in on the enemy’s main thrust. And yet this insight could be absurdly narrow. It might not reveal how their discovery fit into the entire operational puzzle that Moscow Center had assembled. More dangerous, it could just as well give them an entirely skewed view of what the enemy was up to: they’d be as mistaken as the blind men.
And another profound anxiety: the clock had already been ticking away for years. Since the cables they were working with were several years old, they did not know if the enemy’s spies were still active, operating at this very moment in the shadows, or if they had completed their missions. It was a very tricky business.
There was really no choice, however, but to proceed. And no sooner had they addressed the task when Meredith, in a flurry of sustained activity, deciphered a series of apparently interconnected cables. His discovery was a further call to action.
IT HAD BEEN MEREDITH’S TURN to deliver the goods. He had been working away for days, bleary-eyed, oblivious to Bob, maintaining the silence of the self-absorbed, and now he finally was done. There were no shouts of eureka, no attempts to coax a celebratory pat on the back from his partner. He simply handed the pages of his “Special Study” (as he’d officiously titled it) to Bob with a businesslike courtesy, knowing all the while that the words on the page were as potentially explosive as a ticking bomb.
Bob read:
“For some time the cover name ‘Enormoz’ (which is not a word found in the Russian dictionaries, but is obviously based on the English enormous) has been known to occur in one or two New York–Moscow messages of 1944 in the system but previously the context has not been readable enough to limit the possible reference of the name. Recently enough context has been recovered to suggest a possible link between Enormoz and war-time nuclear fission research.”
So there it was! The translation of four still rather cryptic cables filled out this study and each one reinforced Meredith’s deduction that Enormoz was Moscow Center’s cover name for its plot to steal atomic secrets. Now that Bob’s worst fears had been confirmed, he was less surprised than appalled. How could the nation have allowed itself to be so easily victimized? And was it too late? Could his efforts hope to be something more than an after-the-fact closing of the barn door? Or were the Enormoz spies still at work, having moved on from pilfering the science of the atom bomb to the secrets of the next “super weapon,” the hydrogen bomb that Bob had heard mentioned in deliberately vague references in several Bureau counterintelligence briefings? Were these Soviet agents planning to make off with other closely guarded technological treasures?
Hand in hand with those questions, another concern burned in Bob’s already overheated mind: Was it simply vanity to think that the two of them—a relatively junior supervisor on the SE desk and a head-in-the-clouds code breaker—could lead the assault against a well-entrenched Moscow Center operation? Would they have the strength of body and mind to get the job done?
These misgivings, while natural enough, threatened to boil over into a near panic after Bob tried to rally the Bureau to join him in this quest. Part of the problem, he realized, was of his own making: he was bound by his promise to the ASA not to reveal that the KGB ciphers had been cracked. Yet even with that restriction, he could not grasp why his “superiors did not appreciate the worth of the work very much.” The bosses, he’d recall with despair, “believed little would come of the work and the research.” And while he had written the requisite memo to the director and other top officials giving a more revelatory glimpse into the extent of Meredith’s accomplishments, it, too, had elicited not a ripple. No word of encouragement made its way down from the fifth floor.
Bob was mystified. The Bureau’s complacency was not just bewildering, but also, his every professional instinct shouted, dangerous. Context has been recovered to suggest a possible link between Enormoz and wartime nuclear fission research. Yet before he had time to brood, Meredith summoned him. The code breaker knew better than to say too much over the phone; and anyway, by now that sort of directness was unnecessary between the two friends. Bob only had to hear the animated tone of Meredith’s voice and he immediately understood, he’d later explain, that “a sense of urgency and importance” had suddenly taken hold of their hunt.
18
“WE MIGHT HAVE AN ACTIVE spy on our hands!” Bob decided.
Not much more than an hour had passed since he had received Meredith’s call, but it had been an hour that had raced away as if it were an instant. One moment he was driving pell-mell through the D.C. traffic; the next he was hurrying across the Arlington Hall campus in a walk that was near enough to a run as to attract curious stares; and then, as soon as he’d entered the gloomy room, Meredith, for once rising from his desk in greeting, had handed over the deciphered cable. And now Bob had just finished his reading. Still clutching the thin page in his hand, he let a single operational thought sink in: there was at last the possibility of a living, breathing target in his sights.
Yet despite his excitement, Bob chose to store that intelligence in the back of his mind for now. He needed, he realized, to get a firmer grasp on the entire puzzle. With the dispassionate scrutiny of a veteran counterintelligence analyst, he held the page up to his glasses and started to reread the message that had been sent more than three years earlier, on July 26, 1944, with a slow and deliberate concentration.
“To Viktor,” it began. “In July Antenna was sent by the firm for ten days to work in Carthage.”
Bob now paused. It was important to get all the working parts clear before going any further. “Viktor,” Meredith had previously deduced, was the cover name of Pavel Fitin, the spymaster who pulled all the strings in the Foreign Intelligence Division at Moscow Center. Or, as the cable put it, “the firm.” And “Carthage,” as in “Carthage must be destroyed!” was the KGB’s cover name for Washington. But “Antenna”—who was he, or she, for that matter? All Bob knew, again thanks to Meredith, was that the Center, as part of its routine security procedures, had recently changed that cover name. “Antenna” had been rechristened as “Liberal.” Other than that, Bob had no clue; and so he decided to put the problem aside for the time being and continue reading.
“There he”—Antenna/Liberal—“visited his school friend Max Elitcher, who works in the Bureau of Standards as head of the fire control section for warships. He has access to extremely valuable materials on guns.”
Indeed he must, Bob thought. No KGB hood would dare to embellish in a cable to his no-nonsense boss. And Bob pondered something else: Elitcher’s name had been sent en clair; his identity was not hidden behind a code name. Which meant he was not working for the Soviets—at least not at the time the cable had been sent.
Bob resumed his reading. There was a summary of Elitcher’s education; he had a degree from the Electro-Technical Department at New York’s City College. Now Bob’s mind flitted back to the beginning of the cable: Since Antenna/Liberal was a “school friend,” this might prove to be helpful in identifying him. Filing that away, he continued: Elitcher “entered the Fellow Countrymen’s organization after finishing his studies.” And all at once Bob’s heart sank. The “Fellow Countrymen’s organization,” according to Meredith’s exhaustive report on cover names, was KGB-speak for the Communist Party. At the very least, the stage was set for a potential national security disaster: a card-carrying Party member had access to military secr
ets.
Plowing on, he read some details about Elitcher’s wife, “a fellow countryman” who worked, he discovered with one more stab of dismay, “at the War Department.” Yet what followed struck Bob as even more ominous: “Max Elitcher is an excellent amateur photographer and has all the necessary equipment for taking photographs.” In other words, Bob realized, Elitcher had the makings of a fully operational spy.
All, though, was not yet lost. The cable’s concluding sentence offered a small hope: “Please check Elitcher and communicate your thoughts on his clearance.” So this message, Bob noted with some solace, had simply initiated the vetting process. It informed the Center that the New York rezidentura had a potential recruit, and wanted to get permission before attempting to reel him in. But there was no confirmation that Elitcher, fellow countryman or not, had agreed to betray his country.
And with that, the cable came to an end.
Bob now focused his full attention on Meredith. Was the FBI man looking for help? The assistance of his friend’s invaluable mind in formulating a tactical strategy to grapple with this new information? Or was he using Meredith as a sounding board, trying to bring clarity to his own meandering and alarmed thoughts by speaking them aloud? Bob never shared his motivations. The record that exists is simply cool testimony to this moment when Bob, as if a commander briefing his troops on the upcoming mission, enumerated what must be done.
“First, we needed to know,” Bob would recall of this charged occasion, “whether Elitcher had ever agreed to work for the KGB.”
“Second, if he had been recruited, whether he was still active.”
“And third, whether we could identify the person who had tried, successfully or unsuccessfully, to recruit Elitcher.”
It was this final challenge, pinning a name and face on the Moscow Center talent spotter working under the cover name Antenna/Liberal, that held the promise of real gold. “This last was the most important objective,” he’d explain with the unfailing wisdom of hindsight, “because the recruiter might lead us to others in a network.” But even at the time, working only on instinct, he was driven by the possibility that this network would somehow be tied to the unsettling words that kept seizing up inside him: a possible link between Enormoz and wartime nuclear fission research.
The operational goals laid out, Bob was ready to take charge. At this challenging juncture, he realized only too well that all his big questions remained to be answered. And another reason for pessimism: every fieldman knows that making an airtight espionage case is often as much a matter of luck as of diligence. The SE desk was scattered with the carcasses of abandoned investigations. Here the legal hurdles would be even higher: the deciphered cables couldn’t be introduced as evidence in a courtroom; they were such a closely kept secret that even President Truman had no inkling that the Russians’ mail was being read. Still, when Bob left Meredith that afternoon he felt like a hunter who finally had caught the scent of his prey. There was a Soviet network out there, a ring of spies coordinated by a talent spotter, quite possibly an American, code-named Antenna/Liberal, who had graduated from New York’s City College. Bob drove back to headquarters with the deciphered cable in his suit jacket pocket, close to his heart.
BUT THE SPARSE CABLE COULD only hint at the furtive war that was being waged in the shadows. The New York rezidentura had been, as Bob and Meredith had increasingly come to suspect, a busy nest of spies. Operating simultaneously on several fronts, the KGB had successfully penetrated the atom bomb project, while also running an ongoing network of well-placed agents who were making off with bundles of technological and scientific secrets. Liberal—just as Bob’s gut had suggested—was the linchpin of this secondary ring.
Liberal’s recruitment had been a cautious dance of veils straight out of the Moscow Center handbook. First, a friend from his student labor movement days—who also was an occasional talent spotter for Soviet intelligence—had, as if it were the most natural of occurrences, introduced him to a KGB fieldman working out of the consulate in Manhattan, under diplomatic cover. Next, this professional, not pushing, just having a casual talk, yet all the while discreetly taking the potential recruit’s pulse, discovered that the prospect was not only a passionate supporter of the Soviet experiment, but also worked for the Army Signal Corps. When that tantalizing information was shared with the New York station, Kvasnikov, the KGB deskman running the XY line (as the operation aimed at both atomic and technological secrets was known at the Center), was swiftly brought in. It was Kvasnikov, as perceptive as he was cautious, who gave the orders to slip off the final veil.
The approach to the spy who would be code-named Liberal was made during the Labor Day Rally in Central Park in 1942. Fifty thousand people jammed the park on a sunny afternoon, and in the midst of this crowd, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity with workers everywhere, was a comradely trio: the potential recruit, his friend from their shared labor-movement days, and his new buddy, the talkative Soviet diplomat. And with a serendipity that couldn’t have fooled anyone, who should bump into them but the diplomat’s good friend, “Henry,” who happened to be another Russian national. No sooner had Henry and the targeted recruit started talking, than the other two men—one the original talent spotter, the other the Soviet diplomat—hewing to the prearranged script, exited.
Henry and his new friend went out for lunch that afternoon. The unbreakable rule is that you never go to bed on the first date; it’s best to leave some mystery, some anticipation wafting in the air. And the Center also preached that time spent being prudent was never time wasted; you don’t want to wind up in the false embrace of a double agent. So in the fall of 1942, on their third get-together—fast work by the puritanical standards of the KGB—the relationship was artfully consummated. In a well-rehearsed argument, Henry complained that America, despite its professed commitment to the Soviet wartime effort, was not sharing its technology with its besieged ally.
“I find it unfair that you should be fighting the common enemy alone. If I can do anything to help you, you can count on me,” replied Julius Rosenberg, swallowing the dangled hook without hesitation.
At their next meet, the novice secret agent delivered his first shipment of purloined documents. And throughout the months ahead, he kept at it with unflagging efficiency. By the time his code name had been switched to Liberal, Rosenberg was regularly passing over, according to the boastful Soviet accounts, between six hundred and a thousand pages of often top-secret technical documents at each encounter. Also, himself an intrepid recruiter, he’d built up a valuable network. They were a youthful, largely under-thirty group of friends and relations—each knew the other members in the ring; that is, they were “inter-conscious,” as the jargon of his new trade put it—who were, in their zealous hearts, dedicated to the socialistic goals of Mother Russia. And now, as the KGB cable Meredith had deciphered three years later had reported, Rosenberg hoped to pull his old school friend and fellow Communist, Max Elitcher, into his network of strategically placed idealistic spies.
But as Rosenberg in May 1944 prepared for his recruitment mission in Washington, D.C., Moscow Center, the sternest of employers, had decided he required a new handler. For Liberal, the move was, in its indirect way, a promotion. In recognition of his ring’s success—the yield, according to the Center’s consistently pleased evaluations, varied from simply “good” to more often “extremely valuable”—and with an eye toward an even more promising future, the spymasters decreed that the phlegmatic Henry must be replaced. A more resourceful professional, an agent who would know how to exploit the ring’s many burgeoning connections into the defense industry, a case officer who’d inspire the confidence that was necessary for daring undertakings, was needed to run the group.
Alexander Feklisov—Sasha—got the job.
19
SASHA PRIDED HIMSELF ON THE calm he showed in the field. He had grown up living by his fists in the hard streets of Worker’s Alley, and he didn’t fear the danger
s that came with his new profession. Let the enemy test him! “If they broke an arm or a rib while they beat me,” he’d say, “I’d laugh at their blows.” He was confident he could be reduced mentally and physically to the limits of any man’s endurance and yet he would not crack. His death would be his honor. His loyalty to the Center was absolute.
Yet Sasha lived with a secret fear that was worse than any physical pain. His greatest anxiety, the imagined death that left his heart racing and had him staring at the ceiling unable to sleep at three a.m., was being outwitted by the opposition and, in the humiliating process, letting the Center down. He still worked under diplomatic cover at the Soviet consulate on East Sixty-First Street in Manhattan, and there was no sign that the FBI had any suspicions that he was anything other than what he pretended to be. And he was determined to keep things that way.
Pondering his new assignment, Sasha was, by his own embarrassed admission, nervous. With so much at stake, there was no room for error, for any rash or impetuous move. His tradecraft must be meticulous. But from the start, his concerns centered on one large problem: How would he establish contact with this agent?
The simplest way would be to call Liberal at home. But all his training warned against such an approach. Liberal had access to secret documents; it had to be assumed that the Americans, as a matter of routine security, had a tap on his phone. With a single telephone call he could wreck a productive network, and, in the inevitable aftermath of such a disaster, earn himself a long stay in the Lubyanka basement. No, Sasha decided after some deep thought, “the best solution was to meet him at home.”
He knew better, however, than to rush off and knock on Liberal’s door. First, he went to reconnoiter the location. A discreet, no-contact reconnaissance. With a professional’s scrupulous eye, he weighed the potential dangers: a busy Lower Manhattan street in the long shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. A dark brick apartment house, Building G, part of a complex of ten-story buildings that made up Knickerbocker Village. Liberal’s three-room apartment was on the eighth floor; Sasha tried to locate its windows. And there was the building’s lobby: to enter, a code needed to be punched; or, one used the intercom and asked to be buzzed in.