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

by David Quammen

  “Samoylov,” says Max Rosen. “Andrei Semyonovich.”

  “That’s the guy.”

  “It wasn’t really so damning, that Tronko had forgotten him. A man he scarcely ever saw. Of itself, it proved nothing.”

  “What about as part of a pattern?”

  “Exactly. Then and only then,” says Rosen. “But there was no coherent pattern, you see. That’s what made Viktor Tronko so difficult. Lies, contradictions, some verifiable and quite valuable offerings, much human fallibility—but no pattern, no. None could be found. Despite three years of trying. Three years of bitter contention within the Agency.”

  “Sparrow seems to have seen one.”

  “Yes. Certainly he did. But Claude Sparrow could find ominous patterns in a bowl of bingo balls.”

  Kessler asks about those verifiable offerings. Besides the forty-four microphones, what else did Tronko deliver up to them? Rosen seems momentarily reluctant about answering, not in this case from boredom or scornful detachment but as though he is scanning his own memory to determine what might or might not still be sensitive information, mentally sorting the precious from the expendable. Kessler will no doubt receive the expendable. Max Rosen doesn’t look much like a man prone to blurting out rash and regrettable revelations.

  “There was a certain French journalist. A freelance, but well connected to one of the wire services. In Paris. He was operating as Moscow’s agent-of-influence. A convenient outlet for all manner of disinformation.”

  “Under General Avvakian?”

  “Very good. Yes, under Avvakian’s gentle guidance. The Agency had long suspected this fellow. Everyone had suspected him. Tronko supplied confirmation. Eventually the French brought the man up on charges.”

  Kessler waits, while Rosen mates the tips of two cigarettes and then flings the butt out into darkness. There comes an audible exhalation, after which Kessler continues waiting. Rosen’s face is broken in half diagonally by a shadow cast from the scaffold.

  “Is that all?” Kessler says.

  “An FBI agent assigned to the New York office, who had compromised himself disastrously with male prostitutes,” says Rosen. His voice is empty of tone. “This fellow was supposed to be catching Russian spies but evidently they had rather more luck catching him. Photographs, embarrassing tapes. The KGB rezident in New York had been running him for five or six years. Tronko did not know this agent’s name, only that the man was married, formerly an attorney, certain other facts that made identification possible. The Agency took what Tronko could give, cross-checked with other sources, and immediately alerted Hoover.”

  “I’ll bet Hoover loved you for that one.”

  “For six months Hoover did nothing whatsoever about it. An unconscionable delay. Almost treasonous, you could say. Until Herbert Eames had a word with Lyndon Johnson.”

  “What else?”

  Again silence. Rosen might be holding back lungfuls of smoke or entire dossiers’ worth of information. Again his head wags.

  “That’s all? That’s the whole dowry?”

  “He was not a bride. He was a defector. He brought what he could.”

  “A real defector or a phony one, Mr. Rosen?”

  “Real. Quite real. But complicated.”

  “And stupid, you said. And sometimes a liar.”

  “Often.”

  “Often a liar. He gives you one French journalist with a weakness for rubles, and one FBI agent with a weakness for boys. Plus forty-four hidden microphones, the investment upon which had already been amortized over twelve years. Period. Almost everything else he tells you is cockamamie, contradictory, or highly implausible, if not manifestly untrue.”

  “Much. Not all.”

  “Much is untrue. Some people we both know would say most. Some people would even call this a pattern. Nevertheless you chose to believe him on the crucial things. I’m trying to understand why.”

  “Me personally?”

  “Yes, let’s be personal here for a minute. You. Max Rosen.” Kessler pronounces the name as though it’s a friendly joke between them.

  “And what are these crucial things, please?”

  “The Oswald connection and Dmitri, of course. Neither of which existed, according to Viktor Tronko.”

  “The Oswald story—that was never believable, no. Not even to me. As to how crucial it might have been, I couldn’t say. Perhaps not so very crucial as some people think.”

  “Dmitri?”

  “Dmitri,” says Rosen, and from him it sounds almost wistful. “Okay, very well. Yes. For a time I believed. That there was no Dmitri.”

  Kessler says: “For a time?”

  But, regarding his personal credulity, Max Rosen has no further comment.

  “Ask yourself this,” says Rosen. “If Tronko was sent by Moscow, on some great mission of disinformation, why was he not given more to offer? Why was his dowry, as you call it, so meager?”

  “I have been,” says Kessler. “I get nowhere.”

  “Then ask Claude Sparrow.”

  “I will. What about you? Do you have an opinion?”

  Rosen ignores that. “Ask yourself: how could it serve Moscow’s purposes to send a man who lied so poorly? So confusedly. How could it satisfy Moscow for Viktor Tronko to sit three years in a concrete cell?”

  “I assume that they wouldn’t have planned on that three years. Moscow. If they sent him.”

  “Three years, abused and disbelieved. Accomplishing nothing but to focus intense scrutiny, within the Agency, on the question of Dmitri’s existence. How could such epic futility be of use to Dmitri? Or to anyone else?”

  Kessler has no answer.

  “Ask yourself why Moscow should have chosen so badly. If they chose Tronko at all.”

  Kessler asks himself, not for the first time, why Max Rosen should care what he asks himself.

  “I’ve heard about the night Tronko supposedly flew to Minsk,” says Kessler. “But probably didn’t, according to Claude Sparrow.”

  Rosen shows no interest in that subject. He lets Kessler work.

  “I’ve heard about Rybakov’s patronship. All his help in getting Tronko promoted. Though I have yet to hear why Comrade Rybakov was so benevolently concerned.”

  “You told me you had heard about Rybakov’s daughter,” Rosen challenges him.

  “I lied. I haven’t. I just know she existed. Tell me about her.”

  But Rosen waves that notion away. Not interested in Rybakov’s daughter. Kessler seems to be losing him once more; evidently it’s not the right tack. Maybe Kessler is centering on the wrong person. Maybe he has got his brain in the wrong country. “I’ve heard all about the safe house in Annapolis,” he tries. “The room with the golden floors and the bay window.”

  “What bay window would this be?”

  “A window that Tronko liked to sit in, while Sol Lentzer was debriefing him. Outside in front of the house was a bus stop. Tronko would stare at it. Lentzer had a metal desk. Golden hardwood floors of the debriefing room.”

  “Claude Sparrow told you these details?”

  “Yes.”

  A sarcastic snort. “Then of course they must be accurate.” Whenever Rosen shifts forward slightly, the bar of shadow from the scaffold rises across his forehead, disappearing into the general darkness behind; now it lowers itself back to divide his face.

  “I’ve heard about the first polygraph test,” says Kessler.

  The shadow rises again, gone like a large silent moth. “Ah. What did you hear?”

  “Tronko failed it miserably.”

  “And?”

  “They wouldn’t let him on the premises at Langley. So they had an examiner set up the equipment in a room of a Holiday Inn. Lentzer was waiting with McAtee and Sparrow, in another room down the hall.”

  “Nothing more?”


  “I think Sparrow skipped over this part,” Kessler says cunningly. “I think there was something he didn’t want me to know.”

  The first polygraph was a fraud, says Max Rosen. It was a ruse, a sadistic little charade, contrived not to advance their understanding of Viktor Tronko but to manipulate him, to frighten him. To break him. It was no spontaneous event that brought the honeymoon phase to an end—don’t be misled. It was the well-calculated start of what would come next. Rosen makes these pronouncements with a quiet definiteness suggesting intimate knowledge and, at least to Kessler’s active mind, some extra hint of passion that is perhaps confessional. For once Rosen grinds a cigarette out underfoot instead of tossing it toward the gaping alley; the gesture’s vehement thoroughness, as he twists and scuffs his shoe over shreds of tobacco and torn paper until even Smokey the Bear would approve, seems an unconscious lapse, betraying emotion. The first polygraph, according to Rosen, was merely a tactical stroke designed to begin the destruction of Tronko’s legend. If it was a legend. And if it wasn’t, then of his personality.

  Sparrow and McAtee had scripted the whole scene in advance, with the approval of Herbert Eames and the halfhearted but dutiful cooperation of Sol Lentzer. Even the examiner was brought in on it: summoned up to the seventh floor on the afternoon one day before the test, he was informed that certain special procedures would be adopted in this case. Certain irregular measures were called for. If there is any sort of professional code among polygraph examiners—an unlikelihood, Rosen concedes—then that acquiescent man surely broke it. He was instructed to fit the subject with electrodes for an electroencephalogram, as well as attaching the standard leads for pulse and the other parameters. He needn’t worry what the EEG measured, if anything, the examiner was told. But he should make a point of informing the subject, preferably in minacious tones, that these particular wires would monitor the subject’s brain waves. His very thoughts. And whatever might show on the graph rollers once the test began, the examiner was by all means, in the immediate aftermath, to stick with their prearranged story: that the subject had failed. That the machines declared he was lying—lying continuously, guiltily, badly.

  All of this was most crucial, decreed the scenarists on the seventh floor. The subject will have failed. The machines will have detected his lies.

  At the motel, according to Rosen, it went by the script.

  The examiner carried his results upstairs and ten minutes later Sol Lentzer burst back into the room, screaming wildly. Tronko sat on a straight-backed chair in his American undershirt, still tethered up like Gulliver. Eyes wide with astonishment and a real or feigned expression of injured trust and maybe also already a bit of dread, the look of a driven deer, as Lentzer let loose on him mercilessly. Lentzer called him a lying KGB maggot and six other unflattering things, all at the top of his voice and with the help of every foul adjective available in two languages. The game was over, Lentzer shouted. No more pretense that Tronko was a real defector, and no more pretense that they had any intention of treating him like one. He was lying. Not confused, not drunk, not weak of memory, but lying lying lying. Furthermore they had always known it. Since he first stepped on the plane that brought him over from Frankfurt, they had known it, and there had been no chance that they would be taken in by his fairy tales. They had only gulled him across for their own purposes. He was a total fake, and they were wise to him. He was an operation, but the operation had failed. And now he should understand: he was a prisoner.

  Lentzer strode back and forth, raving on angrily, working himself up to a case of the shakes, spitting, waving his arms like a chicken, making just an absolute fool of himself, according to Rosen. It wasn’t an easy performance for someone like Lentzer to summon. But it was good enough. Viktor Tronko believed it.

  McAtee and Sparrow then appeared. McAtee repeated the main points of all Lentzer’s dire hollering, while Sparrow remained silent and still as a snake. McAtee’s unfriendly intervention at just this moment was expected—intended—to be an especially discouraging blow for Tronko, in that Jed had been his chief contact, and his chief sponsor, ever since Rome. But Rome was now part of another lifetime. McAtee, like Lentzer, was suddenly a different person. As for Claude Sparrow, this was the first time he had been allowed to set eyes upon Viktor Tronko, as well as vice versa.

  Tronko was handcuffed and led roughly to a car. The handcuffs were purely for melodramatic effect, says Rosen, a touch suggested by Claude Sparrow to which Lentzer had objected with particular outrage. Lentzer had been overruled. Jed McAtee’s own views on how to cope with the Tronko dilemma were just then in flux, as they would be again later, and Herbert Eames was not the kind of Director who cared to know too many details. As they passed through the corridors and then the parking lot of that Holiday Inn, Lentzer’s suit jacket lay across Tronko’s bound wrists—though Max Rosen can’t say whether Lentzer had draped it there mainly to hide the sight of those handcuffs from nosy tourists and salesmen, or to hide the sight from himself. They made their exit quickly. They could hardly afford to linger, after all that shouting. They could hardly afford to be stopped for kidnap by the Virginia state troopers, says Max Rosen.

  They could hardly afford that precisely because it was, after all, kidnap. Viktor Tronko’s forced detention, from this moment on, was in contravention of U.S. law, according to Rosen. In fact, it would have been hard to justify with even a loose reading of the CIA charter.

  Once in the car, Tronko was blindfolded and crushed down onto the floor of the back seat. He was driven to a new place, a place beyond the far fringe of the greater Washington area, more distant than his comfortable Annapolis hideaway though still only an hour from Langley; a place where secure lodgings of a much different sort awaited him. The new place was on a military base, says Rosen, which allowed a higher degree of privacy and more latitude of methods for the next phase. The building itself had been an infirmary, now in disuse, and located in a remote corner of the base’s grounds, so that it offered the advantages of being protected by fence and guardhouse yet was still far out of the flow of routine military traffic. The commandant of the base had signed that single building over to the Agency, no questions to be asked. Certain modifications had already been seen to. Windows boarded over, a light switch rewired, new fittings on the door of one room so that it could be locked from the outside, microphones and recorders. The car passed the guardhouse in late afternoon, McAtee or someone showed a badge, and Viktor Tronko did not emerge again for five months.

  “The first hostile interrogation,” says Kessler.

  Rosen doesn’t answer at once. He gazes out from his spot near the beam. The bar shadow has disappeared permanently, which must mean that Rosen has shifted a full pace closer. “Exactly. Did Sparrow call it that?”

  “No,” Kessler says, then makes a little decision. The best approach with Claude Sparrow is not necessarily the best with Max Rosen, and Kessler has never discovered a guiding principle in these matters that works any better than instinct. His instinct tells him to be more forthcoming with Rosen than with Sparrow, less coy. Rosen himself, anyway, is already coy enough for two. “Mel Pokorny called it that.”

  “Pokorny. He told you about this part?”

  “Yes he did,” says Kessler. “Some.”

  Rosen edges forward another pace. Like Sparrow, he seems to be captivated by the thought of Mel Pokorny, before he died, having unloaded a lot of secrets into Kessler’s notebook. But at least Rosen doesn’t pursue it with Sparrow’s prurient insistence.

  “Pokorny’s version would . . .” His voice is a little quieter. Then Rosen seems to decide against finishing that statement at all, choosing instead a more guarded formulation: “Mine is liable to be rather different from his.”

  “Good. That’s why I want to hear yours.”

  “It was a travesty. It was cruel and unusual punishment.” Another step closer, close enough now to Kessler that Rosen could
whisper if that were called for. He does not whisper. “And nothing of value was accomplished. Nothing.”

  “Mel said this one was milder than the second interrogation. I think he even used the word ‘cozy.’ Compared to the second.”

  “No,” says Max Rosen. “Cozy? No.”

  In a few sentences Rosen describes vividly the cell-like room where Lentzer, and sometimes also McAtee, now met with Viktor Tronko. A bare dangling bulb, a cot, windows sealed from the inside with unpainted plywood. Failing plaster on the walls, which in one area near the door had crumbled away sufficiently to reveal lath; failing plaster on the ceiling, stained by rain that had leaked through a bad roof and cracking, dropping. Small bits of plaster sifted down intermittently onto the floor, onto the cot, and occasionally a larger hunk would catch a person on top of the skull. You really wanted a helmet even to step into that room, says Max Rosen. An irredeemably shabby place. Little wonder that the commandant had no use for the building. It was past saving. Of course the Agency could have got something in better condition, but no, this was precisely what they wanted. This was the desired ambience: a grim and forgotten hole. End of the line.

  There was a folding chair that came in for each session with Lentzer, says Max Rosen, and was taken out again afterward. No other furniture. No sitting for Tronko, except on the floor, or the edge of the cot—and only when he was given specific permission. No metal desk for Lentzer, who now worked from a clipboard—though of course the tapes were always running, says Rosen. Even the cot’s factory label had been sliced away with a razor blade.

  “Why in the world did they do that?”

  “So that Tronko couldn’t read it. He was to have nothing to read. Absolutely nothing. Complete mental starvation. That was to be part of the psychological torture.”