by Tom Clancy
“Honestly, no, I limit my thinking to that which I understand—operational questions. I am not competent to trespass into high political confines, comrade.”
A clever answer, if not a truthful one, Andropov noted. But Rozhdestvenskiy would be unable to discuss whatever high-level thoughts he might have, because no one else at KGB was cleared to discuss such things. Now, he might be interviewed by some very senior member of the Party’s Central Committee, on orders from the Politburo, but such an order would almost have to come from Brezhnev himself. And that, Yuriy Vladimirovich thought, was not likely at this time. So, yes, the colonel would think about it in the privacy of his own mind, as all subordinates did, but as a professional KGB officer, rather than a Party flack, he would leave such thoughts right there.
“Very well, we will dispense with the political considerations entirely. Consider this a theoretical question: How would one kill this priest?”
Rozhdestvenskiy looked uneasy.
“Sit,” the Chairman told his subordinate. “You have planned complex operations before. Take your time to walk through this one.”
Rozhdestvenskiy took his seat before speaking. “First of all, I would ask for assistance from someone better-versed in such things. We have several such officers here in The Centre. But . . . since you ask me to think about it in theoretical terms . . .” The colonel’s voice trailed off and his eyes went up and to the left. When he started speaking again, his words came slowly.
“First of all, we would use Goderenko’s station only for information—reconnaissance of the target, that sort of thing. We would not want to use Station Rome’s people in any active way. . . . In fact, I would advise against using Soviet personnel at all for the active parts of the operation.”
“Why?” Andropov asked.
“The Italian police are professionally trained, and for an investigation of this magnitude, they would throw people into it, assign their very best men. At any event like this, there will be witnesses. Everyone on earth has two eyes and a memory. Some have intelligence. That sort of thing cannot be predicted. While on the one hand, this militates in favor of, let us say, a sniper and a long-range shot, such a methodology would point to a state-level operation. Such a sniper would have to be well-trained and properly equipped. That would mean a soldier. A soldier means an army. An army means a nation-state—and which nation-state would wish to kill the Pope?” Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy asked. “A truly black operation cannot be traced back to its point of origin.”
Andropov lit a cigarette and nodded. He’d chosen well. This colonel was no man’s fool. “Go on.”
“Ideally, the shooter would have no ties whatsoever to the Soviet Union. We must be sure of that because we cannot ignore the possibility that he will be arrested. If he is arrested, he will be questioned. Most men talk under questioning, either for psychological or physical reasons.” Rozhdestvenskiy reached into his pocket and pulled out his own cigarette. “I remember reading about a Mafia killing in America. . . .” Again, the voice tailed off and his eyes fixed on the far wall while examining something in the past.
“Yes?” the Chairman prompted.
“A killing in New York City. One of their senior people was at odds with his peers, and they decided to not merely kill him, but to do so with some degree of ignominy. They had him killed by a black man. To the Mafia, that is particularly disgraceful,” Rozhdestvenskiy explained. “In any case, the shooter was immediately thereafter killed by another man, presumably a Mafia assassin who then made a successful escape—no doubt he had assistance, which proves that it was a carefully planned exercise. The crime was never solved. It was a perfect technical exercise. The target was killed and so was the assassin. The true killers—those who had planned the exercise—accomplished their mission, and gained prestige within their organization, but were never punished for it.”
“Criminal thugs,” Andropov snorted.
“Yes, Comrade Chairman, but a properly carried-out mission is worthy of study, even so. It does not completely apply to our task at hand, because it was supposed to look like a well-executed Mafia murder. But the shooter got close to his target because he was manifestly not a member of a Mafia gang and could not later implicate or identify those who paid him to commit the act. That is precisely what we would wish to achieve. Of course, we cannot copy this operation in full—for example, killing off our shooter would point directly to us. This cannot be like the elimination of Leon Trotsky. In that case, the origin of the operation was not really concealed. As with the Mafia killing I just cited, it was supposed to be something of a public announcement.” That a Soviet state action was a direct parallel to this New York City gangster rubout did not need much elaboration in Rozhdestvenskiy’s eyes. But in his operational brain, the Trotsky killing and the Mafia assassination were an interesting confluence of tactics and objectives.
“Comrade, I need some time to consider this fully.”
“I’ll give you two hours,” Chairman Andropov responded generously.
Rozhdestvenskiy stood, came to attention, and walked out through the clothes dresser into the secretary’s room.
Rozhdestvenskiy’s own office was small, of course, but it was private and on the same floor as the Chairman’s. A window overlooked Dzerzhinskiy Square, with all its traffic and the statue of Iron Feliks. His swivel chair was comfortable, and his desk had three telephones because the Soviet Union had somehow failed to master multiline phones. He had a typewriter of his own, which he rarely used, preferring to have a secretary come in from the executive pool. There was talk that Yuriy Vladimirovich used one of them for something other than taking dictation, but Rozhdestvenskiy did not believe it. The Chairman was too much of an aesthete for that. Corruption just wasn’t his way, which appealed to him. It was hard to feel loyal to a man such as Brezhnev. Rozhdestvenskiy took the Sword and Shield motto of his agency seriously. It was his job to protect his country and its people, and they needed protecting—sometimes from the members of their own Politburo.
But why did they need protection from this priest? he asked himself.
He shook his head and applied his mind to the exercise. He tended to think with his eyes open, examining his thoughts like a film on an invisible screen.
The first consideration was the nature of the target. The Pope seemed to be a tall man in the pictures, and he usually dressed in white. One could scarcely ask for a finer shooting target than that. He rode about in an open vehicle, which made him an even better target, because it drove about slowly, so that the faithful could see him well.
But who would be the shooter? Not a KGB officer. Not even a Soviet citizen. A Russian exile, perhaps. KGB had them throughout the West, many of them sleeper agents, living their lives and awaiting their activation calls. . . . But the problem was, so many of them went native and ignored their activation notices, or called the counterintelligence service in their country of residence. Rozhdestvenskiy didn’t like that sort of long-term assignment. It was too easy for an officer to forget who he was and become what his cover said he was supposed to be.
No, the shooter had to be an outsider, not a Russian national, not a non-Russian former Soviet citizen, not even a foreigner trained by KGB. Best of all would be a renegade priest or nun, but people like that didn’t just fall into your lap, except in Western spy fiction and TV shows. The real world of intelligence operations was rarely that convenient.
So, what sort of shooter did he need? A non-Christian? A Jew? A Muslim? An atheist would be too easy to associate with the Soviet Union, so no, not one of those. To get a Jew to do it—that would be rich! One of the Chosen People. Best of all, an Israeli. Israel had its fair share of religious fanatics. It was possible . . . but unlikely. KGB had assets in Israel—many of the Soviet citizens who emigrated there were KGB sleepers—but Israeli counterintelligence was notoriously efficient. The possibility of such an operation being blown was too high, and this was one operation that could not be blown. So that left Jews out.
Maybe a madman from Northern Ireland. Certainly the Protestants there loathed the Catholic Church, and one of their chieftains—Rozhdestvenskiy couldn’t remember his name, but he looked like an advertisement for a brewery—had said he wished the Pope dead. The man was even supposed to be a minister himself. But, sadly, such people hated the Soviet Union even more, because their IRA adversaries claimed to be Marxists—something Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy had trouble accepting. If they were truly Marxists, he could have used Party discipline to get one of them to undertake the operation . . . but no. What little he knew of Irish terrorists told him that getting one to put Party discipline above his ethnic beliefs was far too much to ask. Attractive as it might be in a theoretical sense, it would be too hard to arrange.
That left Muslims. A lot of them were fanatics, with as little to do with the core beliefs of their religion as the Pope did with Karl Marx. Islam was just too big, and it suffered from the diseases of bigness. But if he wanted a Muslim, where to get him? KGB did have operations in many countries, with Islamic populations, as did other Marxist nations. Hmm, he thought, that’s a good idea. Most of the Soviet Union’s allies had intelligence services, and most of them were under KGB’s thumb.
The best of them was the DDR’s Stasi, superbly operated by its director, Markus Wolf. But there were few Muslims there. The Poles were good, as well, but there was no way he would use them for this operation. The Catholics had it penetrated—and that meant the West had it penetrated as well, if only at second hand. Hungary—no, again the country was too Catholic, and the only Muslims there were foreigners in ideological training camps for terrorist groups, and those he probably ought not to use. The same was true of the Czechs. Romania was not regarded as a true Soviet ally. Its ruler, though a stern communist, played too much like the gypsy gangsters native to his country. That left . . . Bulgaria. Of course. Neighbor to Turkey, and Turkey was a Muslim country, but one with a secularized culture and a lot of good gangster material. And the Bulgars had a lot of cross-border contacts, often covered as smuggling activity, which they used to get NATO intelligence, just as Goderenko did in Rome.
So, they would use the rezident in Sofia to get the Bulgars to do their dirty work. They had a debt of long standing to KGB, after all. Moscow Centre had enabled them to dispose of their wayward national on Westminster Bridge in a very clever operation that been partially blown only by the worst case of bad luck.
But there was a lesson in that, Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy reminded himself. Just as with that Mafia killing, the operation could not be so clever as to point directly to KGB. No, this one had to look gangsterish in its execution. Even then, there were dangers. Western governments would have their suspicions—but with no direct or even indirect connection to Dzerzhinskiy Square, they would not be able to talk about it in public. . . .
Would that be good enough? he asked himself.
The Italians, the Americans, and the British would all wonder. They would whisper, and perhaps those whispers would find their way into the public press. Did that matter?
It depended on how important this operation was to Andropov and the Politburo, didn’t it? There would be risks, but in the great political reckoning, you weighed the risks against the importance of the mission.
So Station Rome would be the reconnaissance element. Station Sofia would contract the Bulgarians to hire the shooter—it would probably have to be done with a pistol. Getting close enough to use a knife was too difficult a task to plan for seriously, and rifles were too hard to conceal, though a sub-machine gun was always the weapon of choice for something like this. And the shooter would not even be a citizen of a socialist country. No, they’d get one from a NATO country. There was some degree of complexity here. But not all that much.
Rozhdestvenskiy lit up another cigarette and mentally walked back and forth through his reasoning, looking for errors, looking for weaknesses. There were some. There were always some. The real problem would be in finding a good Turk to do the shooting. For that they had to depend on the Bulgars. Just how good were their clandestine services? Rozhdestvenskiy had never worked directly with them, and knew them only by reputation. That reputation was not entirely good. They reflected their government, which was cruder and more thuggish than Moscow, not very kulturniy, but he supposed that was partly Russian chauvinism on the KGB’s part. Bulgaria was Moscow’s little brother, politically and culturally, and big brother-little brother thinking was inescapable. They just had to be good enough to have decent contacts in Turkey, and that meant just one good intelligence officer, preferably one trained in Moscow. There would be a lot of those, and KGB’s own academy would have the necessary records. The Sofia rezident might even know him personally.
This theoretical exercise was shaping up, Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy thought to himself, with some degree of pride. So he still knew how to set up a good field operation, despite having become a headquarters drone. He smiled as he stubbed out his smoke. Then he lifted his white phone and dialed 111 for the Chairman’s office.
CHAPTER 8
THE DISH
THANK YOU, ALEKSEY NIKOLAY’CH. That is a most interesting concept. So, how do we move forward, then?”
“Comrade Chairman, we have Rome keep us updated on the Pope’s schedule—as far in advance as possible. We do not let them know of the existence of any operation. They are merely a source of information. When the time comes, we might wish for one of their officers to be in the area merely to observe, but it is better for all concerned that Goderenko knows as little as possible.”
“You do not trust him?”
“No, Comrade Chairman. Excuse me; I did not mean to give that impression. But the less he knows, the less he might ask questions or inadvertently ask things of his personnel that might tip matters off, even innocently. We choose our Chiefs of Station for their intelligence, for their ability to see things where others do not. Should he sense that something is happening, his professional expertise might compel him at least to keep watch—and that might impede the operation.”
“Freethinkers,” Andropov snorted.
“Can it be any other way?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked reasonably. “There is always that price when you hire men of intelligence.”
Andropov nodded. He was not so much a fool as to ignore the lesson.
“Good work, Colonel. What else?”
“Timing is crucial, Comrade Chairman.”
“How long to set something like this up?” Andropov asked.
“Certainly a month, likely more. Unless you have people already in place, these things always take longer than you hope or expect,” Rozhdestvenskiy explained.
“I shall need that much time to get approval for this. But we will go forward with operational planning, so that when approval comes, we can execute as rapidly as possible.”
Execute, Rozhdestvenskiy thought, was the right choice of words, but even he found it cold. And he had said when approval comes, not if, the colonel noted. Well, Yuriy Vladimirovich was supposed to be the most powerful man on the Politburo now, and that suited Aleksey Nikolay’ch. What was good for his agency was also good for him, especially in his new job. There might be general’s stars at the end of this professional rainbow, and that possibility suited him as well.
“How would you proceed?” the Chairman asked.
“I should cable Rome to assuage Goderenko’s fears and tell him that his tasking for the moment is to ascertain the Pope’s schedule for traveling, appearances, and so forth. Next, I will cable Ilya Bubovoy. He’s our rezident in Sofia. Have you met him, Comrade Chairman?”
Andropov searched his memory. “Yes, at a reception. He’s overweight, isn’t he?”
Rozhdestvenskiy smiled. “Yes, Ilya Fedorovich has always fought that, but he’s a good officer. He’s been there for four years, and he enjoys good relations with the Dirzhavna Sugurnost.”
“Grown a mustache, has he?” Andropov asked, with a rare hint of humor. Russians often chided their neighbors for faci
al hair, which seemed to be a national characteristic of Bulgarians.
“That I do not know,” the colonel admitted. He was not yet so obsequious as to promise to find out.
“What will your cable to Sofia say?”
“That we have an operational requirement for—”
The Chairman cut him off: “Not in a cable. Fly him here. I want security very tight on this, and flying him back and forth from Sofia will raise few eyebrows.”
“By your order. Immediately?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked.
“Da. Yes, at once.”
The colonel came to his feet. “Right away, Comrade Chairman. I will go to communications directly.”
Chairman Andropov watched him leave. One nice thing about KGB, Yuriy Vladimirovich thought, when you gave orders here, things actually happened. Unlike the Party Secretariat.
COLONEL ROZHDESTVENSKIY took the elevator back down to the basement and headed for communications. Captain Zaitzev was back at his desk, doing his paperwork as usual—that’s all he had, really—and the colonel went right up to him.
“I have two more dispatches for you.”
“Very well, Comrade Colonel.” Oleg Ivan’ch held out his hand.
“I have to write them out,” Rozhdestvenskiy clarified.
“You can use that desk right there, comrade.” The communicator pointed. “Same security as before?”
“Yes, one-time pad for both. One more for Rome, and the other for Station Sofia. Immediate priority,” he added.
“That is fine.” Zaitzev handed him the message form blanks and turned back to his work, hoping the dispatches wouldn’t be too lengthy. They had to be pretty important for the colonel to come down here even before they were drafted. Andropov must have a real bug up his rectum. Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy was the Chairman’s personal gofer. It had to be kind of demeaning for someone with the skills to be a rezident somewhere interesting. Travel, after all, was the one real perk KGB offered its employees.