The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  He was distant. A deep-water fish, of indeterminate weight and God only knew what manner of jaws. He was a cipher, even to those who worked under him.

  Fedorenko had it (though only at second or third hand) that Comrade Nechaev was elaborately polite in most contact with his deputies; polite but formal, correct, cold as the steppes. He wasn’t evidently a fellow to whom one could offer the little friendly bribes—English razors and whiskey, Yugoslav brandy, French perfume for a wife or a mistress—that one customarily brought back to boss and colleagues after a trip out to the West. Unspoken signals from Comrade Nechaev suggested that such gifts to him would be unnecessary, or worse. And no one except two or three deputies was close enough to receive even those signals. Fedorenko himself did not even know the man’s first name or patronymic. It was thought Nechaev preferred to be addressed by his military-equivalent rank, which was colonel, or by the quite unmellifluous official title he held as chief of Special Two, or simply as Comrade Nechaev. But then again, few of his underlings ever had occasion to address him. All in the world that Comrade Nechaev demanded from his own staff, evidently, was performance. Failing that, fulsome loyalty would never save you. Brandy and razors would never save you. Being invisible would never save you.

  It was testimony to Bogdan Kirilovich’s good head and precise memory, Sparrow claims, that, notwithstanding the chilly climate of Comrade Nechaev’s office during that single visit, Fedorenko had counted the telephones; that he had noticed and remembered the Armenian carpet.

  Fedorenko also provided a physical description of Comrade Nechaev, of course, though Sparrow had not then foreseen how this information would be of any particular consequence. Nechaev as Bogdan Kirilovich painted him was simply a gray man of medium height and weight, steady intelligent gaze, thinning hair combed back. He wore eyeglasses. The glasses were of a style then mildly fashionable among opticians to the Soviet elite: thick silver framing across the brow but only a thin rim looping down around the lenses. Rather like peering out through the oxbows of a yoke. Fedorenko could offer no impression of Comrade Nechaev’s voice, never having heard it. Sparrow let the visual description be duly filed in the mug book they kept on KGB players. He himself was far more interested, at first, in the operations of which Fedorenko had personal knowledge.

  Kessler, on the other hand, is interested in where Claude Sparrow got his familiarity with oxbows and yokes.

  The Western services were just rotten with KGB penetrations, Fedorenko told Sparrow during their first week at the oaken table. On that point he was vehemently, scornfully dogmatic: rotten with penetrations.

  “Like ‘bad goat cheese’ was the exact phrase Bogdan Kirilovich used,” Sparrow tells Kessler. Then Fedorenko simply waved a hand as though fanning away flies and went momentarily silent—a rarity for him—with disgust. Gently, Sparrow said: Tell me. Sparrow had a yellow pad in front of himself, he took up a ballpoint and held it. Tell me about them, Bogdan Kirilovich. That’s what we’re here for. The stubby hand swung again, fingers like dill pickles. After which Fedorenko did begin telling him, in horrifying detail, of that true and awesome rottenness. “I didn’t want him to see how shocked I was,” Sparrow says. “He talked and I made notes and my mind commenced reeling, but I concealed that. Not for any operational reason. I just didn’t want him to see. I was mortified. Dumbfounded.” But Sparrow recognized at once that Bogdan Kirilovich himself was still harboring a confused ambivalence—one part of him proud, even smug, about these successful Special Two penetrations.

  Now Kessler is distracted by the goat cheese. Eighteen years have passed, Sparrow recalls a phrase about goat cheese, also not one but three Disney characters on jelly glasses, and the man talks about Fedorenko’s precision of memory. Of course Sparrow did have the transcripts. Of course. Every word Fedorenko said to him went onto tape, and Sparrow would have studied the transcripts later with rabbinical diligence. Nevertheless.

  We have someone at Pullach, Fedorenko told Sparrow, still by habit referring to Special Two with the first person plural. Kessler shakes his head to indicate ignorance, so Sparrow gives him a gloss: Pullach, just outside of Munich, was the site of Reinhard Gehlen’s spy fortress. The postwar, Dulles-financed version, Sparrow adds archly, not the Nazi version. Gehlen had made one of those seamless transitions of loyalty and kept himself in business, says Sparrow, so the distinction is necessary.

  A man at Pullach, Fedorenko said, and this one has been in place for years. He was with us in Berlin during the early occupation, making himself useful in various ways, a fellow who knew the black market and the sewer tunnels but could also put on a dinner jacket, and in 1948 we played him back across to the West. I’ve read the whole file, Bogdan Kirilovich told Sparrow. He was well connected to General Gehlen, and remotely to Adenauer. Gehlen himself brought the man into West German intelligence. He is still there. He has done well, made a good career. And for that he has us to thank, Fedorenko said. We contrived and delivered most of his biggest successes. Name: Otto Schratt. I’ve handled his product myself, when I was in Moscow, Fedorenko said. Schratt has fantastic access all throughout the BND. He reports to us through another BND man, also in reality ours, but this one just a field officer who finds excuses for frequent trips to Berlin. The field officer sees a cutout, a woman, who passes Schratt’s reports along to our officer in Karlshorst, on the other side of the Wall. Understand that all of this came, Sparrow tells Kessler, in Bogdan Kirilovich’s own blunt and slightly mangled version of English. We had to go quite slowly. I could get every bit of it down on the pad. Name of the field officer, I demanded. He gave it. Name of the woman. He gave it. Name of your own man in Karlshorst. He gave me that. We had them—all but the KGB man, who was of course beyond reach—we had them shoveled up and shit-canned within a fortnight. The crudity this time seems to be Sparrow’s own.

  “What was Otto Schratt’s exact role?” Kessler asks.

  “For whom? In what? His role on which level, in which context?” Sparrow throws up his shoulders, pretending a bemused helplessness. “In the saga of Bogdan Kirilovich Fedorenko?”

  “At Pullach. The surface level. His job.”

  “He was West Germany’s chief of counterintelligence.”

  “Somehow I knew you’d say that. Do I detect a pattern, or is it just howling coincidence?”

  “Wait,” Sparrow says.

  “Or a character trait.”

  We have a person in Oslo, Fedorenko told Sparrow—tossing these claims out now almost impatiently, more concerned to prove his original point (the one about goat cheese) cumulatively than to dwell on any one case. A woman, in Oslo. She is personal secretary to the cabinet minister in charge of budgeting and oversight for Norwegian intelligence. Also she sleeps with him, this minister. The minister’s oversight function is largely token, but he does know things. He is sixty and a widower but very sensitive about his situation with the secretary, because of his great reputation for Lutheran rectitude. Probably he is in love with her. Under instructions from us, Bogdan Kirilovich said, she will refuse absolutely to marry him, though so far he hasn’t asked her. She coaxes information out of him in response to specific questions from us. Not a hugely important connection, but it is potentially useful for our Baltic fleet, especially the submarines. The secretary for her part is infatuated with a young French businessman, a wine exporter, who comes to Oslo frequently on his worldly travels. She first met him fifteen months ago at an embassy party. He is her case officer, and she devoutly, ignorantly believes he is carrying her information back to the French. But the Frenchman was born in Riga and he is ours, Bogdan Kirilovich said. Her name is Ilse Sjodahl. The minister’s name, Sparrow demanded. Fedorenko gave it. The false Frenchman’s name, and where can we find him when he isn’t in Norway? Fedorenko told him.

  “It all checked, of course,” says Sparrow. “Within six months Ilse Sjodahl was on trial, and the minister had locked himself in his study to put a bull
et through the roof of his mouth.”

  “Wonderful. Where was the false Frenchman?”

  “Moscow, unfortunately. Thanks to a stupid error by the Norwegians.”

  In London we have at least one that I’m aware of, Bogdan Kirilovich told Sparrow, and probably many more. Everyone in Special Two dreams of someday going to London as a field officer, according to Bogdan Kirilovich. The opportunities for recruitments are always bountiful, the penalties for those not protected with diplomatic status are relatively quite mild, the standard of living is good, the whiskey is good, the English traitors are so friendly and respectful to their case officers and everyone else ignores you totally. Bogdan Kirilovich himself had angled for an assignment to London, though he had been glad enough to get Paris. A long tour in London was the next best thing to defection, Bogdan Kirilovich said. Even those KGB officers responsible for policing the Soviet colony—they’re from the Eleventh Department, Bogdan Kirilovich said, and their job is to spy on the rest of us for signs of ideological heresy and decadence and potential defectors—even those bull mastiffs tend to be slightly more lenient in London. At least so Bogdan Kirilovich had heard, by hopeful rumor. What’s the Englishman’s name? Sparrow said.

  Fedorenko told him: Nigel Willey. A code analyst at MI-6 with very good access. Also a homosexual and a Marxist ideologue, though he had never been anywhere near Oxford or Cambridge. The Englishman served fourteen years in prison, says Sparrow, then was released and the next day took a flight to Moscow. Perfectly legal, believe it or not. Bogdan Kirilovich also—

  “I think I get the idea,” Kessler says. “How long did this part of the debriefing go on?”

  “Weeks. No, wait,” says Sparrow. “There was more.”

  And he drags Kessler onward through the dossiers on a half dozen other agents or alleged agents of Special Service Two, all of whom had at the time of Fedorenko’s defection been safely ensconced within the intelligence agencies of Washington’s trusted allies. Another Englishman, this one stationed at a listening post in Berlin. A brilliant Canadian mathematician, former academic, lately working in codes. A Frenchwoman, born in Algiers, also brilliant, and underemployed as a personnel officer with her country’s service in Paris. A Mexican, under consular cover at his country’s embassy in Madrid, with debts. A young Belgian, disgruntled over Washington’s nuclear swaggering. An Austrian Jew incensed at the easy rehabilitation of Bonn and, even more, at Gehlen’s propensity for hiring former SS. Sparrow recites names, positions, motives, arrangements by which Special Two maintained contact with these people, an outpouring of recollected detail that is astonishing to Kessler for its sheer volume even as it continues and continues, fogging his brain with confusion and impatience, threatening boredom. Overload, he thinks. Too much data. Where is the switch, how do I cut this man off? Simultaneously he is mesmerized by Claude Sparrow’s sudden energy, his intensity, his passionately thorough dedication to the recall of facts and near facts associated with all these stale cases. What’s happening here? Something is at stake, Kessler senses. Something is on the line to be proved. Sparrow chatters on like a commodity report over morning radio while Kessler squints at him, noting the flush on those two patches of aging and flaccid skin just under the man’s cheekbones, wondering whether that color was there earlier, whether it too is only a symptom of the cold. Bogdan Kirilovich kept us quite busy that spring, Sparrow says after a pause for oxygen. And of course I haven’t yet even begun, he says, on the Americans.

  “All of these accusations checked out?” says Kessler.

  Sparrow is silent. His jaw moves. His mouth seems to be dry from the recitation, but he doesn’t evade Kessler’s eyes.

  “Many of them checked out.”

  Seated on this bench Sparrow has chosen in this park Sparrow has chosen, he and Kessler are facing northeast, toward the Potomac. Also toward Langley, Kessler has realized. The spot could be thought of as an exile’s piteous overlook, just too perfectly surveyed to be accidental. Kessler wonders whether Claude Sparrow has been back to CIA headquarters, on even a short visit, since he was sacked.

  Probably at least once. Probably they hauled him back out there for some sort of presentation ceremony after six or eight months had passed and the wounds were at least scabbed over, if not healed, Kessler supposes. A brief afternoon event featuring one bottle of domestic champagne and a half dozen congregants, not including Sparrow’s wife if he had a wife, during which they would have presented him with a citation for distinguished or maybe exceptionally distinguished service and given him a flash look at the actual ribboned medal in its little box that was then to be snatched back for safekeeping there in a locked cabinet at the Agency. From what Kessler recalls having once thought he knew, that was an important part of the protocol for a CIA dismissal in bad grace. You give the man a medal and he must accept. The more controversial the case, the more delicate the basis of that bad grace, and the more interesting it might possibly be to a congressional committee staff or a newspaper or the general public—that much bigger and shinier did the vanishing medal need to be. Kessler wonders whether this might be one bit of methodology they picked up from the Russians. He suspects that Claude Sparrow on that afternoon, if there was such an afternoon, got a glimpse of a very grand wafer of gold. Jed McAtee himself might have dropped in for the ceremony.

  Fortunately the big building in Langley, though they do face it from their bench, is invisible beyond two miles of hillocks and trees.

  That would have been eight years ago, the retirement ceremony. Kessler is curious about what Claude Sparrow has done with his time. Mildly curious, at least. It’s part of the human as opposed to the professional side of the subject, the vivid banalities that can make a story seem real. How would a man such as this, forced into early retirement, spend his hours days and weeks? Toward what other conceivable task could that cold intensity be aimed and discharged? None comes to mind. If there was or is a Sparrow wife, Kessler pities her. Imagine it, Judas, this guy around the house with nothing to do. Even now, when Sparrow’s status as a pensioner no longer seems glaringly premature—he appears to be in his middle or late sixties—how would he be likely to cope with it? Long afternoon walks through the local parks? Bench-sitting with or without journalists? Maybe some fiercely intense pastime like building bamboo fly rods, translating Gilgamesh, trying to recapture with stiffening fingers a youthful competence on the viola? Or has he just devoted all those hours days and weeks to planning implacably toward a Restoration? As Pokorny’s visit gave Kessler cause to suspect. If not that, then Kessler can’t imagine what. Literally he tries but can’t. He is able to summon no mental picture of the man’s passing time, eight years of idleness or, if not idleness, at least obscurity. Kessler can only see the man seated on a park bench, those eight years raveling out, while the old body performs its furious isometric exercise, one hand locked on the opposite wrist. Otherwise, for Kessler, a blank.

  He has opportunity for this idle speculation, though, because Sparrow is momentarily distracted.

  From the naked brown woods two small boys have appeared, coming down the paved path. Locked in another of his clamlike silences, Sparrow is watching them.

  These kids are about six years old. They are spaced apart some distance, one behind the other, as though the first has stalked off poutishly and the second is tagging after. But it isn’t that. They are simply involved in a game, a little adventure fantasy of the kind Kessler himself remembers well, though in their case assisted by the latest in solid-state electronic toys: they are jabbering back and forth, in their own pseudomilitary double-talk, on a pair of plastic walkie-talkies.

  Claude Sparrow gapes at them distrustfully. He waits until the second little boy, in a knit hat that almost covers his eyes, has passed beyond earshot; and Kessler, mystified, waits for Sparrow. Yes, God forbid that we should let the Russians or Jed McAtee tap into this conversation by way of two devious urchins playing hooky from kin
dergarten.

  “They gave him a name,” Sparrow says at last. “They began calling him Chicken Little.”

  “Fedorenko.”

  “Yes of course, Fedorenko.”

  “This was a code name?”

  “No. Nothing like that. It was a nickname. It was ridicule.” A schoolyard joke that Claude Sparrow, after eighteen years, like a wounded child become a maimed man, is still not about to dismiss lightly. Chicken Little. But it wasn’t Sparrow’s own nickname, after all, was it? Only by extension. Kessler begins to sense just how far Sparrow must have committed himself, professionally and emotionally, to the premise of Bogdan Fedorenko’s credibility.

  Kessler says: “Because of Otto Schratt and all the others. I see. Sure. The ‘rotten with penetrations’ business. Not everyone at Langley shared your high opinion of Fedorenko.”

  “No, later. This was a bit later than Schratt. Two or three months, anyway,” says Sparrow. “He had started helping us with our own difficulties. Within the Agency.”