by John Weisman
“Public integrity?”
“You know—bribes, visa fraud.” O’Neill paused. “Traitors.”
“She was working CI?”
“You got it, bud.”
“Michael—where the hell did you hear this?”
“Remember, I still have friends in low places, Sam. And some of them even work in Moscow these days.”
“When did you hear this?”
“Today. At lunch. My source served in Bonn the same time she was there.”
“You certainly made a fast recovery, Michael. Last night I thought you were going to croak on me.”
“There’s nothing like strong tea, dry toast, a shot of Georgian cognac, and a double Imodium on the rocks to ease the pain,” O’Neill said. “It was a twenty-four-hour bug, only I managed to compress it into twelve.” He looked at Sam. “The LEGATT thing is only the half of it, Cyrus.”
Sam wasn’t in the mood to be playful. “Drop the other shoe, Michael.”
“The CI operation was an Agency program. She was ultra-deep-cover. Recruited by and working for Langley.”
“Bullshit.”
“My source wouldn’t BS me, Sam. My source owes me.”
“Impossible.” After all, Sam had The Knowledge. He’d never missed an Alien. Never.
But it wasn’t impossible—and Sam knew it. The Agency was constantly running ultra-deep-cover programs. Two of Sam’s Marine Corps buddies had been recruited right out of the military. One had gone to the air marshal program and from there to the U.S. Customs Service, where he still worked delicate undercover assignments in the Middle East, playing the role of an arms dealer. The other was a twenty-year veteran of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, currently serving as the lead RSO, or regional security officer, in Tel Aviv.
But both former Marines served two masters. They performed their official jobs. They also reported to Langley, working under a special U.S. citizen’s contract agreement, and reporting through a series of cutouts. There were scores—perhaps hundreds—of Langley operatives similarly embedded at other government agencies.
O’Neill paused. “So the question has to be asked, don’t it, Cyrus?”
Sam halted as well. “The question.”
“The question is, just who does the delectable Ms. Vacario really work for?”
“Delectable?”
“C’mon, this is me—SAMGRASS. I read you like a book. I was sick last night. You and Ms. Vacario had the evening all to yourselves.”
“Come off it.”
“Deny what you will, Cyrus,” O’Neill said. “Body language don’t lie.” He took Sam by the arm and drew him close. “But here’s where the prob gets thorny, old friend. Our late and unlamented pal Ed Howard was prowling and growling at about the same time you and I were in Paris and carry-you-back-to-old-Virginny was in Bonn. And we both know how … anxious Ed was to prove himself to his masters at Moscow Center.”
Sam said nothing. But his emotions were churning.
“Who’s to say he didn’t do a little trolling, Cyrus?”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Oh, it makes perfect sense. A false flag recruitment—maybe through one of Moscow’s BND25 penetrations, or a Langley mole.”
“You’ve always been skeptical about my mole theory, Michael.”
“Skeptical don’t mean I can’t run some scenarios, old friend.”
Sam bit his lower lip. It was perfect operational logic for the opposition. The Justice Department was one of Moscow Center’s prime targets. And a false flag recruitment would be the obvious way to get inside. Sam had to admit to himself that O’Neill might be right. But he didn’t say so. In fact, he said nothing.
It was O’Neill who picked up the slack. “Hence, my criticoni,” O’Neill said. “By the way, where were you all day?”
“I had a couple of meetings, too,” Sam said obliquely.
“Get anything?”
“Nah.” Sam shook his head. “Blind alley.”
“Hmm,” O’Neill grunted in response. “Well, if I can be of any help, Cyrus …”
Sam nodded. “You’ve already been a great help, Michael.” But he said nothing further, and the two men walked in silence for the next few hundred yards.
It wasn’t that Sam Waterman didn’t trust O’Neill. He had—and he did. Now more than ever. But Sam considered his day’s work as a compartmented op. And O’Neill didn’t need access. Not yet, anyway.
Besides, unlike many of his former colleagues, Sam had never gossiped about his operations or his agents. Others considered him paranoid. He simply thought of himself as prudent.
More pertinent was the fact that Sam hadn’t established Ed Howard’s true motives yet. And wouldn’t do so until he’d had a look at what was on the pen drive—which wouldn’t happen until he was securely back in Washington, if then. Indeed, while Sam had been shaken to the core by Irina’s brutal murder, he wasn’t about to be goaded into doing anything rash or impetuous.
From his very first days as a case officer, Sam had been schooled in prudence. The inculcation began during his initial overseas tour in the West German capital. In Bonn, Sam had been taken under the wing of the chief, a disheveled, pipe-smoking, fifty-eight-year-old veteran named Donald Kadick. Kadick was a soft-spoken, genteel Brahmin whom Sam at first dismissed as yet another of CIA’s professorial eccentrics.
But he soon learned that Don Kadick was no muddle-minded academic. In fact, he was a legend in the Clandestine Service. He’d been one of Bill Donovan’s ostiaries at OSS. A slightly built, bespectacled twenty-five-year-old Princeton grad, Kadick survived three nighttime jumps into occupied France, where he’d coordinated networks of anti-Nazi resistance fighters in the eight months prior to the Normandy invasion. By the age of thirty-six he was a tough-minded professional intelligence officer, fluent in Russian, Polish, German, and French. He’d recruited not one but two Soviet officers (one of whom Kadick convinced to purloin the complete technical manuals for the Red Army’s T-54 battle tank), during his first overseas tour in postwar Berlin. In 1961, at the age of forty-two, Kadick had been selected by Director of Central Intelligence Allan Dulles to be one of two CIA case officers to meet, debrief, and then help run a GRU colonel working for MI626 named Oleg Penkovsky.
Sam first worked for Kadick in 1978. He’d been assigned to West Germany under consular cover, and his days were spent standing behind a teller’s window in the consulate, stamping visas, answering inane queries, and examining reams of documents. It was tedious, boring, mind-numbing work. But at least, Sam rationalized every time he pored over yet another execrably written visa application, all his compulsory interaction with the locals allowed him to improve his German.
Kadick was a demanding boss, but generous with his time. He loved tradecraft, and often took time to show Sam one or another of the tricks he’d developed over the years. The reversible hat, the two-color boots, and the jacket that turned into an overcoat that Sam had worn to meet Irina had all originated with Don Kadick.
IN BONN, Sam was given three developmental to run— handovers from his predecessor. The most promising seemed to be a Turkish émigré named Yavuz Ozkan, cryptonym DSBRONCO, who worked as a part-time janitor at the Polish embassy.
Sam, restless, ambitious, and energetic, was anxious to recruit the Turk after his fourth rendezvous. Don Kadick took a more cautious approach.
“He was a walk-in,” the veteran explained.
“So what? Let’s take yes for an answer and snap him up.”
The chief scrunched closer to his desk, dropped his elbows onto the leather-bordered blotter pad, and peered at Sam through round-lensed, gold-framed glasses. “How long has he been a developmental, Sam?”
Sam thought about it. “Three months.”
“How long have you been meeting with him?”
“Three weeks.”
Kadick’s watery gray eyes focused on Sam’s face. “What’s BRONCO’s motivation, Sam?”
Sam b
linked. It occurred to him at that instant that he hadn’t the foggiest idea why Yavuz Ozkan had walked into the embassy, asked to speak to a security officer, and volunteered to spy for the United States. He lowered his gaze, embarrassed. “I don’t know, Don.”
The chief nodded. “Lesson one,” he said. “Slow down. Before you take that final step, you have to learn everything about your developmentals. You have to discover what makes them tick. Sure, you have to probe their vulnerabilities, just the way you were taught at the Farm. But you also have to establish their motivation. You have to learn their quirks, their foibles, their idiosyncrasies.” Kadick paused, allowing his words to sink in. “How much time did you spend reading Harry’s reports before he turned BRONCO over to you?”
“I read ‘em.”
“Carefully?”
Sam’s face reddened. Between eight hours a day in the teller’s cage, a vigorous social schedule encouraged both by his State Department superiors and his bosses at the Agency, and the time required to learn the layout of the West German capital so he could perform surveillance detection routes, locate dead drops, and pinpoint agent meeting sites, Sam had put off studying his agents’ files. But he was a Marine. He didn’t make excuses. He simply sat there, embarrassed, humiliated, and silent.
The chief’s tone softened. “I know how tough the schedule is, Sam. But you have to do the homework. If you’re going to do this job the way it should be done, you have to get inside people’s heads. You have to be able to pick up inconsistencies—and that happens only if you’re carrying the whole bloody case file in your head—which is why we spend all that time writing such detailed postmeeting reports—and reading them over and over and over before we go for a meet. Because if you’re running six agents, it’s nigh on impossible to keep all the details about each one of them in your head.” The chief studied Sam’s face to see what effect his words were having. Satisfied, he continued. “I don’t believe in paperwork for paperwork’s sake, Sam. But writing a good report is one of the keys to great agent handling. Because the more detail you are able to provide, the better armed you’ll be to deal with these sons of bitches.”
The chief looked at Sam’s surprised expression. “Yes—no matter how much we coddle them, or play to their vulnerabilities, or encourage them, they’re still sons of bitches to me. Don’t forget: they’re traitors. Spies. They’re the ones betraying their side to us. And so, we have to know for sure whether they’re on the up-and-up, or they’re agents provocateurs.” He looked across the desk at his protégé. “Slow down, Sam. Learn how to read this guy like a book. Take your time. Establish BRONCO’s bona fides. And always, always remember that he was a walk-in.”
Sam was confused. “What does being a walk-in have to do with it, Don?”
Thechief lifted the antique Rosenthal cup at his elbow, sipped cold coffee, and gently replaced it on its scalloped saucer before he spoke. “Look,” he said, “walk-ins can be extremely valuable. They’re motivated by something external. Maybe they’re being treated badly by the other side. Maybe they want revenge. Maybe they just want to get paid—or get laid. The key here, Sam, is that we weren’t introduced to this guy at a cocktail party and then decided to target him. We didn’t spot him at the Foreign Ministry and decide he could do us some good. We haven’t singled him out because he guards the door of the defense minister’s office and can tell us who comes and goes. We spot those sorts of targets, then we evaluate what they can do for us, and then we assess the possibilities while we develop them, and then, finally, after we’ve done our homework, we either recruit them or we drop them.”
“I know—” Sam broke in.
“But walk-ins,” the chief said before Sam could shoehorn another word in, “walk-ins, Sam—they’re different. They target us, not the other way around. I’m not saying you should be paranoid. Paranoid is counterproductive. But you have to be careful. Take nothing at face value. Probe. Examine. Scrutinize. We don’t want to get burned. If you’re dealing with a walk-in, I say it’s worth the trouble to go extra slow. Uncover his motivation. Double-check his stories, then check them again for inconsistencies. And finally, after you’re sure he’s proven himself, after we have established to our satisfaction—yours and mine—that he won’t double on us, only then do we recruit him and run him.”
IT WAS almost seven by the time Sam and O’Neill turned back onto Tverskaya Street and marched lockstep toward the bright lights of the Marriott’s entrance. When they got there, O’Neill turned left and allowed the doorman to open the heavy glass door. But Sam took him by the arm and held him back. “Let’s get a little more air, Michael.” He waved the doorman off and guided the younger man around the corner.
Sam had planned to spend the next morning checking out the second site Ed Howard had mentioned—Pavel Baranov’s mailbox in the Church of the Trinity in Serebryaniki. But Sam was so shaky emotionally he knew he’d have a hard time going “black.” Operations demanded total focus and concentration. Sam’s head was nowhere close to the black-ops zone. But there was a solution. O’Neill still had his Top Secret/SCI clearance. He’d send O’Neill to the Ukrainian quarter, have him scope the church out, and if everything was okay, check the mailbox for a second message from Howard.
Sam guided his old friend around the corner before he began speaking. Yes. It was time to open a compartment door for O’Neill.
And shut one for Virginia Vacario.
CHAPTER 18
THE WEATHER cleared overnight. The morning was stunningly bright and fiercely cold. Sam spent a second night with Ginny, returning to his own room a little after four.
But their lovemaking was far from successful. Sam found her withdrawn, even remote. The previous night she’d been delightfully open and candid—and her eyes reflected her state. Now she was guarded and cautious, her eyes probing, her questions attempting—although subtly—to breach the defenses around his state of mind.
After what he’d been through that day, Sam didn’t waste any time at all. He dropped the portcullis, raised the drawbridge, and retreated behind his emotional bulwarks.
So for her, too, there was a sensation of distance; a sudden aloofness in Sam she hadn’t sensed before.
It was, she said to his back as he pulled his clothes on, “as if a wall of glass has come between us.”
Sam knew she was right, of course. But he wasn’t about to agree. So he reacted in exactly the way the instructors had taught him to deal with hostile situations at the Farm: deny everything, admit nothing, file countercharges. Glass-shmass. Everything was just fine. Didn’t she understand this wasn’t the time or the place to put their relationship under a microscope? Hadn’t she herself told him the previous night that she hadn’t been with anyone in a long time? “You said, ‘I’m not used to this level of intimacy,’ “ he’d chided. “Well I’m not, either, Ginny—especially under the circumstances.”
There, he was telling the truth. As a young case officer, Sam Waterman had had virtually no personal life. Indeed, shortly after he first arrived at Langley, the old-timers told him that recruiting a girlfriend would be tougher than recruiting a KGB Rezident. He didn’t understand what they meant until he was posted to Bonn. Sam spent a fair amount of his time trolling for assets in the bars lining the streets of Bad-Godesburg, the picturesque suburb across the Rhine and near the embassy. At O’Halloran’s, one of three Irish pubs where diplomats and German government workers hung out to drink draft Guinness and snack on weisswurst, he met a statuesque redhead bartender named Deirdre Shaughnessy and was smitten.
But there was a problem. Deirdre Shaughnessy was Irish. And so far as the Agency was concerned, her Irish nationality was a security problem. The unwritten rule was that case officers could date Americans, but that all foreigners with the exception of Brits, Canadians, and Australians—all of whom could be vetted through CIA’s close liaison with their respective intelligence services—were off-limits.
Sam decided to disregard the rule. Three months later, he fo
und himself the subject of a security investigation, when someone—Sam never learned who—turned him in on an LW-JAR report.
IT IS a little-known fact that the Security Division at Langley sends forms known as LW-JARs, twice a year to all CIA facilities. Replies are mandatory. In the LW-JAR, case officers are required to disclose whether or not they are cohabiting with a foreign national in what the form describes as “a close and continuing relationship.” Sam was therefore obligated to reply in full detail, describing the relationship with his cohabitee Deirdre, and providing information about said cohabitee’s background.
Given the fact that Deirdre Shaughnessy had an Irish temper and every other week or so would toss his belongings out the third-story window of her tiny apartment, Sam rationalized that “close and continuing” did not accurately describe their relationship. Moreover, he guessed that any cohabitee with an Irish surname might fall under suspicion of being an agent for the Irish Republican Army—even though he knew that in Deirdre’s case, the assumption was absurd. And so he submitted his LW-JAR form without disclosing the “close and continuing” nature of their relationship.
Someone else, however, snitched. The IRA was, after all, active in Germany. And since the organization was known by CIA to use Irish pubs to launder money and smuggle weapons and explosives, Langley was concerned enough to send a gumshoe to Bonn to interview Sam, who realized far too late that he could be reprimanded, sent home, or even fired if the Security Division deemed his relationship with the delectable Deirdre detrimental to the nation’s interests.
The investigation was halted only after Don Kadick intervened. The chief told the investigator he’d done a clandestine background check on Deirdre Shaughnessy and it had come up negative. He insisted he had complete confidence in Sam. Then, in the presence of the security officer, he gave Sam a severe tongue-lashing.
At dinner that night, Kadick lectured the contrite young case officer on the need to keep the folks at Langley happy, ordered him to break things off with Deirdre, and advisea him to date only Americans—preferably Americans with Top Secret security clearances—for the foreseeable future. Two weeks later the COS wrote a strong recommendation for Sam’s early promotion to his old friend the assistant deputy director for operations.