Next, Caitlin made nonalcoholic “mocktails” in pink plastic martini glasses for the party. I told her that she didn’t have to make mocktails on my account: underage sleuths like me are used to being around inebriated intelligence officers who drown their sorrows in whiskey.
“No way,” said Caitlin. “I’m your mom for the summer, and I insist we keep it to mocktails.”
Lately Caitlin’s been on this “I’m your mom for the summer” kick. If she is my mom, I’m one heck of a latchkey child, since she’s hardly ever here.
But as I was saying, we made the drinks with ice cream, sherbet, soda, coconut flakes, pink food coloring, and maraschino cherries, and they were FABULOUS! I’ll make you one when I get home. (But don’t ask me to make one for Stephen. He’ll just say it looks “too pink,” and then it won’t be fun anymore.)
PARTY ATTENDEES:
I invited everyone I work with at the Spy Museum and Caitlin invited all her friends and coworkers (about half of Washington, D.C., right there) along with an elevator full of people who live in our building.
Did I ever tell you about Roger, the guy who designs the exhibits and who first saw the Spy Museum ghost? Well, he brought us a compilation of spy music from movies, and even his own original synthesizer composition called “Spy-Ghost Rock.” His wife came with him, and if you ask me, she seemed a little annoyed at all the time Roger had spent creating music for a museum intern’s party. She came to the party wearing a tiny sleeping baby in a contraption strapped to her stomach. You’d think a spy party would be too noisy for a sleeping baby, but Roger said, “This is the first nap he’s taken all day. He likes it here.” (To be honest, I couldn’t understand how such a tiny, helpless infant could cause two grown people to look so totally haggard and exhausted.)
A PROMISING MATCH OR AN IMPENDING DISASTER?
At one point during the party, I spotted Caitlin standing in the corner talking to Matthew Morrow (Spy Museum historian), who turned up wearing spandex bike shorts and a huge T-shirt that said BARENAKED LADIES. It’s no wonder he doesn’t get invited to the more sophisticated Washington, D.C., soirees if that’s his idea of party wear.
Get this: Caitlin and Matthew got in a huge argument about some obscure historical fact, and after a few minutes, Caitlin flounced into the kitchen, came up to me and whispered, “I really like that guy you work with at the museum! I think he might ask me out.”
I glanced over at Matthew and if you ask me, he looked more like someone who had just been hit by a bulldozer than someone who was thinking about asking Caitlin on a date. Either Caitlin was totally deluded or Matthew had an odd way of demonstrating his interest in a girl. “I’ll go see what I can find out,” I said.
“Be subtle,” said Caitlin.
“I’ll be so subtle, he’ll hardly know what I’m talking about.” I moseyed over to Matthew, who was still standing by himself in the corner.
“Hi, Gilda.”
“So what do you think of my roommate?” I hoped Caitlin couldn’t hear my point-blank question.
“Your roommate?”
“You know. The girl you were just talking to. She’s pretty cute, huh?”
Matthew blushed, which made me think that Caitlin might be right after all. “She’s completely wrong about J. Edgar Hoover, that’s for sure,” he said.
“Who’s J. Edgar Hoover?”
Matthew looked at me with contempt. “You’ve been working at the Spy Museum all this time and you don’t even know who J. Edgar Hoover is?”
He sounded really familiar, but I wasn’t sure.
Matthew sighed. “He was a very formative director of the FBI for no less than forty-eight years. He was pretty much responsible for giving the FBI an iconic status in American culture. Anyway, your roommate insists he actually went to work at the FBI wearing women’s clothing, and that’s totally absurd.”
“He worked at the FBI wearing women’s clothing?”
“Of course not! The idea of him being a cross-dresser was a rumor started by the KGB. A very successful propaganda rumor, I might add.”
“Oh.”
“Try telling that to your roommate.”
“Well, Caitlin just told me that she thinks you’re cute and really smart.”
Matthew was dumbstruck. “She did?” Suddenly he didn’t care so much about J. Edgar Hoover’s panty hose. His face lit up.
“Oh, yeah. She said you’re the first guy she’s ever met who didn’t start crying during an argument.” By now, I was feeling like a real CIA case officer, using somewhat manipulative tactics, “relationship building” from behind the scenes.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed my least favorite Spy Museum coworker, Janet, glaring at Caitlin from across the room as she pretended to examine a collection of CDs and books. (I’d better warn Caitlin that Janet may be out to get her soon.)
By the time the party ended, Caitlin and Matthew were making plans to train for a marathon together. If they end up running around the city arguing about J. Edgar Hoover’s strapless gowns and negligees, I guess it’s partly my fault. Only time will tell if my intervention falls into the category of a helpful matchmaking strategy or ill-advised CIA interference!
SPECIAL GUEST OF HONOR:
Balthazar Frobenius came to my spy party. You heard right: BALTHAZAR FROBENIUS CAME TO MY PARTY. A week ago, if you had told me I’d be able to write that sentence, I’d never have believed it.
He turned up wearing a flowered shirt and flip-flops, and everyone assumed he was just some guy who lives in the building--maybe a computer programmer or a journalist. Nobody suspected that here in the middle of our party was one of the great psychics of our time.
Balthazar prefers it that way: in fact, when he’s at parties he tells people that he’s a travel writer. “Otherwise, I end up in the corner doing psychic readings and someone inevitably gets mad when I tell them something they don’t want to hear.”
ANOTHER SURPRISE OF THE EVENING: BALTHAZAR ENJOYED TALKING TO JANET!
Go figure! Actually, I was relieved when Balthazar went over to Janet and started talking to her about ghosts in D.C., because I was worried that she was going to attack someone if she didn’t get her mind off Matthew Morrow.
As it turns out, Janet and Balthazar are going on a “ghost walk” through the nation’s capital tomorrow. I guess Janet can’t be all bad if Balthazar thinks she’s okay, but she’s still my least favorite coworker.
NEWS ALERT:
I couldn’t believe it. Standing right there in the middle of our party was that spooky, grannyish lady who has awakened me several times with the lights going on and off in her apartment! What in the world is she doing here? I wondered. “Take a look at who turned up at our party,” I said, grabbing Caitlin’s arm.
Caitlin peeked into the crowd while mixing mocktails in the blender. “Oh, yeah; I invited her. She was standing on the elevator when I told some other people about it. Believe me, I’ve learned the hard way that you have to invite the old ladies. Otherwise they hear the music and call to complain when what they really want is just to be invited.”
Okay, I admit I never found evidence linking Flashing Lights Lady to either the museum haunting or the dead drop. Still, I couldn’t help it; there was just something freaky about her. ”I still think she’s up to something weird in her apartment,” I said.
“No better time than the present to find out,” said Caitlin.
Caitlin walked over to “Lady Flash,” handed her a pink mocktail with a big maraschino cherry on top, and introduced herself. I half expected Lady Flash to do something bizarre, but the pink mocktail seemed to normalize her and within a couple minutes, she and Caitlin were sitting on the couch chatting like old friends.
“Okay--here’s the deal,” said Caitlin, returning to the kitchen a few minutes later. “Her name is Catherine. She seems to be independently wealthy because she inherited a fortune from her parents. They’re dead, of course, and now she manages their estate. She also has a part
-time job in some government agency just to keep busy.”
I had to admit it all sounded more normal than I expected. I mean, the fact of her being a rich old lady was a little surprising considering the drab way she dresses, but it wasn’t exactly shocking. “But what about the flashing lights?” I guessed there was no way Caitlin could find out about that in less than fifteen minutes.
“I asked her about that, too, and she said she’s really sorry if it keeps you awake. She told me she has this condition where she has a compulsion to do things like turn off the lights exactly seventy-two times before she goes to bed. And get this: if she doesn’t do it exactly the right way or if she loses track, she has to start all over again; otherwise she can’t sleep at all. She said she worries a lot about things happening here in the city, and I guess turning her lights off and on makes her feel safer or like she’s controlling something, even though it makes no sense. I think that’s why she acts so unfriendly --like she’s always afraid of being attacked or something. Anyway, she said she’s working on it, but in the meantime she’ll try to remember to close her curtains. She’s actually not quite as weird as we thought. I mean, her breath smells like old chickpeas, but after you get to know her, she’s fairly nice. Satisfied?”
“I guess.” Well, I felt kind of bad for being so suspicious after hearing this. After all, I had experienced firsthand how easy it is to be fearful in a city filled with intrigue and secrets. Who could really blame an old lady for turning her lights off and on in the middle of the night?
NOTE TO SELF--ADD THE FOLLOWING ITEM TO THE “MOSCOW RULES” FOR SPIES:
You learn a lot by peeking into people’s windows. Sometimes you learn even more when you invite them to a big party and serve pink mocktails.
AFTERWORD
Entrenched in Lies: The Revelation of CIA Mole Loomis Trench
By Matthew Morrow, Spy Museum historian
With his white shirt, briefcase, and careworn expression, Loomis Trench looked like any other middle-aged government employee walking down the street after work. He had a government job with a security clearance, a nice house in a nice neighborhood, a pretty wife, and two grown children attending reputable colleges. Only one detail of his appearance was slightly unusual: he wore a bow tie with his suit instead of a necktie. Loomis liked the notion that wearing bow ties would lead his colleagues to conclude that he adhered to quaint, formal traditions whereas the truth was that he broke the rules as often as possible.
If you observed him very closely (something his coworkers rarely did), you might notice a few tiny clues that he lived a lie: his eyes looked wary behind his rectangular, rimless glasses, and he stared and held his arms rigidly at his sides when he spoke to people, almost as if he wanted to avoid betraying himself with sudden gestures.
Later, when it was all over, his wife would remember odd details: the way he bragged about his children when other adults were around, but then ignored them entirely whenever they had a problem or failed at some pursuit; his delight in knowing obscure facts that nobody else in the office knew (and his willingness to argue for hours if contradicted); his penchant for reading everything he could find about Abraham Lincoln. “Lincoln was actually very misunderstood and unpopular during his own time,” he would often repeat, as if striving to link his own existence with that of a great president.
Still, on the outside, he looked and acted pretty much like everyone else. Nobody suspected that on the inside, he was actually a criminal and a traitor.
During the 1980s, Loomis was a young reports officer working a CIA desk job when he became what the Soviets called a “walk-in”—a man or woman who literally walks into the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., with an offer to sell classified information. Trench’s motivation was primarily financial: he needed to keep up with his friends by purchasing a big house in a nice neighborhood and a private-school education for his two young children. He had watched younger colleagues receive promotions and raises that eluded him. As his resentment grew, a solution formed in his mind: he would simply sell classified CIA information to the Soviet Union. As long as he ignored the fact that people could actually get killed as a result of his actions, selling American intelligence simply seemed like an easy way to leverage his opportunities to get ahead financially. No risk, no reward, he told himself.
“Besides,” he wrote in a journal entry turned over to investigators, “if I can get away with it, it proves that I’m smarter than they are. If they had promoted me, I wouldn’t be doing this. The agency deserves whatever happens.”
Gradually, Loomis realized that it was not so much the money, but the risk itself that attracted him—the excitement of keeping a very dangerous secret from everyone in his life. When a feeling of malaise descended as he waited in line at Starbucks or sat in his office under fluorescent lights, he could instantly inject a rush of adrenaline into his workday by printing classified information, saving it in a secret pocket of his briefcase, and taking it with him when he left work.
Among his colleagues, Loomis Trench was regarded as a capable but argumentative man who was prone to complaining about coworkers and supervisors. “Loomis always had to be right,” one of his colleagues commented. “If you disagreed with him, the friendship was basically over.” Still, none of Trench’s coworkers viewed him as the type of person who would actually smuggle secrets from the CIA and sell them to a foreign government.
Secretly, Trench knew he was very different from the person his colleagues knew at work. For one thing, none of them guessed at the deep loneliness that kept him looking forward to reading the letters that accompanied thousands of dollars in payment from his secret Russian contacts. “Sometimes I think it’s really these notes more than the money that keep me going,” he wrote. His journals depict the faceless KGB officers with whom he communicated through dead drops as “friends”—pen pals who appreciated him in a way none of his friends, acquaintances, or even family ever could. For Loomis, it was an ideal friendship—a friendship free of conflict, competition, and demands. His Soviet contacts were now his “true friends” and his coworkers at the CIA were the enemies who might discover his secret.
Loomis’s feelings of alienation from the CIA increased toward the end of the Cold War, when a young American case officer named Pete Biebow, who was undercover as a translator and academic, began to receive enthusiastic praise from Loomis’s colleagues in the agency. Based in Moscow and occasionally joking with colleagues that he was independently running his own CIA operation code-named “project Romeo”—a reference to his penchant for accessing information by seducing Soviet women affiliated with the KGB—Biebow managed to cultivate a special relationship with the young, lonely girlfriend of a senior KGB officer—a woman named Svetlana (CIA code name “The Girlfriend”). Secretly in love with the American spy who listened to her, who gave her money, and who tempted her with the possibility of a visa to America and a new life, Svetlana disclosed essentially everything she could find out through her KGB boyfriend about the inner workings and intentions of the Soviet government, often using surveillance equipment obtained from her boyfriend to get photographs of secret documents. She became one of the best assets the CIA had.
Jealous of the CIA’s praise for Biebow and deeply resentful of his amorous adventures, Loomis blew his colleague’s cover to his Soviet contacts:
Dear Friends,
The information I am about to disclose is simple but incredibly valuable to you. I think you will see it is well worth the price we, agreed upon.
Here it is :
A CIA case officer named Pete Biebow, who grates un
Svetlana photographs KGB internal documents, including government &rganizational charts and other secret documents, which she gives to �
��Mr. B&
I can assure you that Mr. Brown (Pete Biebow ) is a spy and an enemy of the Soviet Union.
Yours,
THE POET
As a direct result of Trench’s note, Pete Biebow endured harsh interrogation by the KGB, after which he was expelled from the U.S.S.R. By now, Biebow may well have suspected the workings of a mole within the CIA, but upon his return to the relative safety of the United States, the intelligence officer met with a decidedly ironic death. Struck by a Metro bus while crossing a street near Dupont Circle, Biebow was fatally injured. Whatever suspicions he harbored were silenced, and for the time being, Trench’s secret was safe.
Svetlana was found dead with a very unusual gun in her hand—a gold-plated “lipstick pistol” that she acquired from the KGB. Her death was reported in Moscow as a suicide, but the CIA speculated that she was more likely murdered by the KGB.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Trench stopped selling secrets—at least for the time being. For one thing, the KGB was being absorbed into the new Russian government, and for another, Loomis had less need for excitement ever since he had been promoted to working with an exciting project in the CIA called Project STARGATE—a top-secret program to develop psychic spying techniques.
The Dead Drop Page 21