by Howard Blum
A “BRUSH PASS,” AS SASHA’S tradecraft instructor at the KGB training school in Balashikha had lectured, offered many operational advantages for the clandestine transfer of small objects. Even if the opposition’s surveillance team was breathing down your neck, the skillful agent could still pull off an exchange without being detected. The maneuver’s success, however, required that the fieldman obey certain rules: the delivery should occur only in a crowd; the two agents must never look each other in the eye; and (this one etched in stone at the top of the list) don’t stop walking. Like a baton in a relay race, the pass from one hand to another must be done in a flash, with no one breaking stride.
Over the years, Sasha had perfected this covert art, and it had become his preferred procedure for collecting palm-sized canisters of microfilm from his joes. And so every month or so since he had taken over the Liberal network, walking with seemingly aimless intention through the bustling lunchtime or rush-hour streets of midtown Manhattan, he’d receive a roll of film from the agent code-named “Senya.”
Code names are usually bestowed with the tricky intent of adding one more misleading clue to an agent’s identity. Hence, a tall man would be called “Dwarf,” the rotund spy might be “Thin Man.” “Senya” meant “God heard me” in Russian, and Sasha reflected that for once the KGB’s covert shorthand was accurate: Senya was a most productive asset, an answer to all the Center’s prayers.
He had been recruited by Rosenberg in 1944, and his yield, year after year, had continued with an impressive fecundity. He had consistently delivered documents praised as “very valuable” by the Center, thousands of pages of secrets about sonar, infrared rays, and missile guidance systems. The classified reports he’d passed on from the U.S. government’s Coordinating Committee for Radio Technology revealed precisely what the nation’s scientists knew, and, of even greater interest to the Russians, what they were aiming to accomplish in the future.
Morton Sobell—code-named Senya—was not the ringleader Bob had been hunting. He was just one more of Liberal’s well-placed recruits, another spy in the bread-and-butter operation Sasha was coolly running with remarkable efficiency.
YET AS BOB STRUGGLED TO get a context for the new clues that were coming his way, he was summoned once again by Meredith. Another cable had been deciphered and, Meredith soberly hedged, he might just be jumping at shadows. But then again, it could take them straight into the very operational heart of the ring of spies.
21
IT WAS NOT IN MEREDITH’S nature to appear pleased with himself. In public, he was far too modest. While in private, he was too self-assured to portray his shrewd feats as anything more than natural—for a man who was a legend. Still, when Bob arrived at his friend’s desk and Meredith handed over his latest decryption, the FBI agent couldn’t help but feel that for once he detected a small glimmer of professional pride in his colleague’s smile.
And while that might have been so, what was also animating Meredith, as he’d explain when the passing years had provided him with additional insight, was that he, too, had become caught up in the thrill of the hunt. Before he’d teamed up with Bob, his sedentary (and thoroughly fulfilling) existence had been measured out in academic challenges. He had thought the trajectory of his life and career had been long settled. But like the happily married man whose world is turned inside out by an unexpected passion, Meredith’s “dalliance” with Bob had given him a fresh perspective on things. In this second spring, he’d discovered that he enjoyed the relevance of his new, consequential life. Every day he grappled with puzzles that brought him deep into a real-world mystery. The words that, after all his painstaking labors, took shape on his work sheets were not merely nouns or verbs, but clues to a ring of spies. And all the while, spurring him on, thoughts of Enormoz, of the precarious balance of international power being upended, were never far from the center of his mind.
That afternoon, there was still a bit of pedantry in the report he shared with Bob. “Otvod,” Meredith had written, carefully transliterating the cable’s Cyrillic, “means recruitment in KGB parlance. Similarly, the verb ‘otvesti’ would mean ‘to recruit.’” But all this was simply prelude—and a stagy one at that—to his big reveal. He reported that Moscow Center had been notified back in 1944—four long years earlier!—that Liberal also had his eyes on another recruit. His name, sent en clair, was Joel Barr.
Bob listened, and now it was his turn to experience a sudden burst of encouragement. He had begun with Max Elitcher, who had brought him to Morton Sobell, and here was another rich clue: Joel Barr. Bob knew, of course, that this was just more of the beginning; he remained at the starting gate and had no notion of how far off in the distance the finish line was. At this point, Barr was only one of Liberal’s targets; Bob had no knowledge of whether he’d become part of the ring. His investigation, woefully preliminary, further handicapped because the deciphered cables recorded events that had taken place years earlier, had not yet allowed him to draw any of the firm connective lines that he’d need to guide him in the summer of 1948 to the mysterious Liberal, the ringleader. And it was so far only his conjectures that had tied the ring in to the enemy’s theft of atomic secrets. But now that he possessed another name, he felt the plot had considerably thickened. For a counterintelligence man, it “was a golden time.” “I could look ahead and see us coming closer and closer, not only to Russian agents whose trails the intervening years had muddied, but also to spies who were actually still at work among us.”
Nevertheless, in the long nights that followed, while he lay in his bed in Maryland surrounded by darkness and his unsettled thoughts, Bob had trouble sleeping. In his bedroom, away from the activity at headquarters, his conferences with the uncanny Meredith a receding blur, he found his optimism harder to sustain. He feared the enemy was beyond his reach, and always would be.
BUT IN THE RESTORATIVE LIGHT of day, there was an investigation to run, and, seemingly unencumbered by any of his nocturnal doubts, he threw himself into it. Even as the operational wheels still turned on Elitcher and Sobell, he focused his attention on Barr. Meredith had given him reason to suspect that Barr would lead to Liberal. Perhaps Barr even was Liberal, the busy anchor of the ring. And so Bob took a gamble.
Ignoring the concerns of his circumspect bosses on the fifth floor, and skirting very close to the edge of the agreement he’d made with the brass at Arlington Hall, when he turned his men loose on the new target, he pretty much let them know what was at stake. He believed the agents in the field would be more diligent if they had some sense of the prize.
The formal request for information he sent through the FBI pipeline was headed “Joel Barr and UNSUB,” the designation Bureau-speak for “unknown subject.” And while Bob knew better than to reveal the code name Liberal, or how he had learned of the ring’s existence, he nevertheless lifted the cloak of official secrecy to share what this unsub was involved in. Barr, he wrote in his accompanying report, possibly “acted as an intermediary between person or persons who were working on wartime nuclear fission research and for KGB agents.”
When the fifth floor got wind of Bob’s indiscretion, they went into full damage-control mode. A bristling directive went out under Hoover’s signature to the field offices ordering that no further references were to be made to the unsub “for security reasons.” And as for Bob, he received an official reprimand.
But Bob quickly forgot about this administrative slap on the wrist as the field reports poured in. Pieced together, they formed an intriguing story. Barr had an electrical engineering degree from City College, same as Elitcher, Sobell, and, if the clues were pointing in the right direction, Liberal. He’d also been a member of Branch 16B of the Industrial Division of the Communist Party, and so he’d been a “fellow countryman” same as all the other potential recruits in the ring. His employment history set off even more alarms. Barr had worked at the U.S. Army Signal Corps laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, only to lose his job when the Army lear
ned about his Communist ties. Still, he was quickly hired by Western Electric, a major defense contractor, where he helped develop a classified radar bombsight for B-29s. And after the war, he’d moved on to become a project engineer at Sperry Gyroscope, working daily with “information secret and unlimited.” Just as the New York rezidentura had boasted in its cable about Elitcher, so, too, did Barr have “access to extremely valuable materials.” Adding it all up, Bob moved toward a confident conclusion: Barr had all the makings of another member of the well-placed ring.
His burrowers had dug up something else that caught Bob’s interest. When Barr had worked at the Signal Corps lab, his close friend had been Alfred Sarant. Sarant had graduated from the Cooper Union, not CCNY like all the other suspects. But Sarant had also been a member of Barr’s Communist Party cell, and when he, too, had been dismissed from the Army lab, he’d also found a job at Western Electric. His work was focused on APQ-17, a secret airborne radar system being developed for the military. And during their wartime bachelor days, Barr and Sarant had shared an apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. All of which, Bob readily conceded, proved nothing; it was a biography that could have no intelligence value. Or, as his professional’s hunch shouted, Sarant’s life had been too closely cut from the same cloth as Elitcher’s and Barr’s not to have attracted the attentions of the ring’s KGB talent spotter.
When Bob shared all this with Meredith, the code breaker felt enough had been unearthed to allow him to return to old mysteries and tackle things from another vantage point. He tracked back over the messages he’d already broken and, armed with this new knowledge, something caught his eye. In one of the early messages sent from the New York rezidentura to Moscow back in the spring of 1944, there had been a reference to a pair of friends. Liberal, the cable informed the Center, “has safely carried through the contracting of Hughes who was a good friend of Meter.” At the time, Meredith had no doubt that by “contracting” the KGB meant “recruiting,” but he’d been totally stymied by the cover names “Hughes” and “Meter.” The only clue he’d had during his first go-round was their friendship. Now, extrapolating from the fresh intelligence Bob had gathered, he felt he had the kernels of a budding theory.
It went like this: in early 1944, Meter had preceded Hughes into the ring; at least that was how Meredith read the cable. And since Barr, like Elitcher and quite possibly Liberal, had been “school friends,” then QED: Barr = Meter. Which meant that Sarant, the new acquaintance who’d earned his degree at another college and would’ve needed to have been introduced to old school pal Liberal, was Hughes.
This supposition became arguably more solid, and certainly more menacing, after Meredith managed to break down a fragment of another message between New York and Moscow, sent on December 5, 1944: “Expedite consent to joint filming of their materials by Meter and Hughes.” It was a request that made further operational sense if, like Barr and Sarant, the two operatives were not only best friends but also shared an apartment. And the cable’s concluding sentence made it disturbingly clear why Moscow needed to give the okay for the two agents to film their yield sooner rather than later: “We are afraid of putting Liberal out of action with overwork.”
The case, once filled with only imponderables, was now taking firmer shape in Bob’s mind. He believed that his gut instincts and Meredith’s hypothesis were parts of the same whole. It was time, he decided, to see how it all might hold up if he brought Barr in for questioning. Only now he couldn’t find him.
Sperry Gyroscope had finally gotten around to doing their own background check on the engineer; and when Barr’s Communist affiliations became known he was stripped of his security clearance and, days later, fired. Barr, according to what the New York field office unearthed, had realized his days of getting work in the defense industry were over. Reluctant to endure years of unemployment in America, he had decided to reinvent himself. The story he told acquaintances was that he was going to Paris to study piano.
Bob needed to know more. On his orders, the New York office dispatched an earnestly fulsome agent to make contact with Barr’s mother. Trotting out the thin cover story that he was a school friend of Joel’s, the agent asked the unsuspecting woman where he might find his old buddy. Her amused response was that his guess was as good as hers. The last she had heard, her son was traveling through Finland, playing the piano to support himself.
When Bob read the report, he promptly felt that all his suspicions had been confirmed. Finland was just a short hop from the Russian border—and it was precisely the sort of circuitous itinerary an agent would follow as he made his covert way to his Moscow Center spymasters. It was a journey that would end with his disappearing without a trace.
Bob was stymied. He had neither the resources nor the authority to track down Barr now that he was abroad. All he could do was pass on a heavily censored explanation of his interest in Barr to the CIA. Perhaps they might be able to pick up his trail. As for Sarant, Bob had nothing on him. No, he glumly realized, less than nothing. The decrypts were thin gruel; the messages had been sent four years earlier. Worse, they couldn’t be introduced as evidence in court. Further, whatever leverage he might once have had was gone; Sarant had left Defense Department work for the groves of academe, teaching physics at Cornell. As for his being Barr’s friend and roommate, well, even the ever condemnatory Hoover, Bob admitted, couldn’t begin to make a federal case out of that.
What, Bob glumly asked himself, had he accomplished? “So far,” he’d say in answer to his own troubling question, “the inquiries had been tantalizing but inconclusive.” “Both Elitcher and Barr might have been spies in 1944, or neither of them might ever have been a spy.”
WHILE BOB COULD ONLY WONDER, Sasha knew the truth. And what he knew had kept him for years in a constant state of high alert. Barr and Sarant—Meter and Hughes, as Meredith had accurately surmised—had been a reckless pair of spies. They had continually broken the most basic rules of operational security. “Danger,” Sasha, their beleaguered case agent, would moan, “was never very far away.” His steady fears were further compounded by his helplessness: his two young charges refused to obey his orders.
The problem was sex. Now, Sasha was no prude. He was married and had a young daughter, but it had not been that many years ago when he’d been a footloose bachelor. More to the point, he knew firsthand about ill-advised romances. While he’d been stationed at the Center’s spy school, he had entered into a risky arrangement with a certain Lydia, who taught English. She was six years older and about to marry a divorced university professor. Yet Lydia feared that if on her wedding night her new husband discovered she was still, at the ripe age of thirty-two, a virgin, he might reevaluate his infatuation; why should he want what no other man had wanted in all these years? And so Lydia focused her attentions on handsome Sasha, and the would-be spy, despite the explicit prohibition against fraternization between teachers and students, responded with an ardor that she apparently found a revelation; their liaisons continued even after Lydia had returned from her honeymoon. It was Lydia, with her more mature practicality, who finally ended it. “I do hope that you did not lose anything because of our affair,” she told the secret agent in training as she waved goodbye.
Looking back at the experience, Sasha knew he’d dodged a bullet. If the spymasters at Moscow Center had known what had been going on, his career would have ended before his first mission. But that was nothing when measured against what Meter and Hughes were jeopardizing by their parade of one-night stands. Every time the two young lotharios entertained the latest in a series of seemingly unending conquests, they put the entire Liberal network at risk.
The honey trap was one of the oldest tricks in the counterintelligence agent’s book, and, Sasha had been taught, one of the enemy’s favorites. In the bedroom, even the most prudent spy was bound to let his guard down; there were few secrets in a double bed. Sasha lived in a state of perpetual anxiety that one or perhaps both of his agents would
reveal something as he lay next to a woman he’d met earlier that night in a Village bar, and that with the new day the FBI would be hot on their trail.
But while it was a genuine cause for concern when your agents were spending their nights with a chorus line of strangers, it was a complete five-alarm disaster when the love nest was also their operational headquarters. Barr had a makeshift darkroom in the two-room apartment, where he routinely photographed and then developed both his and Sarant’s haul.
The best Sasha could do to ensure some small measure of security was to come by the apartment and work with Barr to find hiding places for the tools of his secret trade. Together, they pried up a few floorboards and cached the camera and its accessories in one spot, the rolls of microfilm in another. Still, it was just rudimentary tradecraft and Sasha could not help fearing that it was only a matter of time before the FBI came crashing through the door of the Morton Street flat.
There was, however, one saving grace, and it was a substantial reward that put all the risks in perspective. Once a month, Barr would slip Sasha a package containing about twenty exposed rolls of film, a total of between four and five hundred pages of often highly classified defense-related material. On other occasions, he’d provide the photographs of the actual documents.
Even better, the two spies were remarkably prescient. Without needing to be told, they seemed to know what their masters were hoping for. For example—
Early one morning over a coffee in the rezidentura, Sasha read a cable detailing the Center’s latest urgent request: “Just outside London, an ultra-modern device, the SCR-584, automatically determines the speed and path of German V-2 rockets and sets the firing of antiaircraft batteries. Take every step to obtain more information on this facility.”
The next day at seven a.m. Sasha was sitting with Barr in a midtown cafeteria when he passed his agent a slip of paper describing what the Center wanted.