Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “Both. I mean both. It was clear to me and to everyone else with a brain that the Soviet Union was about to be cast on the ash heap of history, to use Marx’s tired phrase. But Russia, my beloved Russia—it was about to collapse as well. Gorbachev had brought me in to run the KGB after Kryuchkov had attempted a coup. But the power was slipping from Gorbachev’s fingers. The hard-liners were pilfering the country’s riches. They knew Yeltsin would take over, and they were lying in wait to destroy him.”

  I had read and heard a great deal about the mysterious disappearance of Russia’s assets, in the form of hard currency, precious metals, even artwork. This was not news to me.

  “And so,” he went on, “I came up with a plan to spirit out of the country as much of Russia’s gold as I could. The hard-liners would try to regain power, but if I could keep their hands off the country’s wealth, they would be powerless. I wanted to save Russia from disaster.”

  “So did Hal Sinclair,” I said, as much to him as to myself.

  “Yes, exactly. I knew he would be sympathetic. But what I was proposing frightened him. It was to be an off-the-books operation, in which the CIA helped the KGB steal Russia’s gold. Move it out of the country. So that one day, when it was safe, it could be returned.”

  “But why did you need the help of the CIA?”

  “Gold is very difficult to move. Extraordinarily difficult to move. And given how carefully I was being watched, I could not have it moved out of the country. My people and I were under constant scrutiny, constant surveillance. And I certainly could not have it liquidated, sold—it would be traced back to me in a second.”

  “And so you two met in Zurich.”

  “Yes. It was a very complicated procedure. We met with a banker he knew and trusted. He set up an account system to receive the gold. He agreed to my condition, that I be allowed to ‘disappear.’ He had all pertinent location data on me deleted from the CIA’s data banks.”

  “But how did Sinclair—or the CIA—manage to get it out?”

  “Oh,” he said wearily, “there are ways, you know. The same channels that were used to smuggle defectors out of Russia in the old days.”

  These channels, I knew, included the military courier system, which is protected by the Vienna Convention. This particular method was used to extract several famous defectors from behind the Iron Curtain. I remember hearing gossip about one legendary defector, Oleg Gordievsky, on the Agency rumor grapevine, to the effect that he’d been taken out in a furniture truck. It wasn’t true, but at least it was plausible.

  He continued: “An entire military aircraft is treated as a diplomatic pouch, allowed to leave the country uninspected. And of course there are sealed trucks. Quite a few methods that the CIA has access to, which we did not, because we were being watched so closely. There were informants everywhere, even among my own personal secretaries.”

  Something didn’t entirely click, however. “But how did Sinclair know he could trust you? How the hell could he be assured you weren’t one of the bad guys?”

  “Because,” Orlov said, “of what I offered him.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, he wanted to clean up CIA. He believed it was rotten through and through.

  “And I gave him the evidence that it was.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Orlov looked up at the door as if he expected one of his guards to appear. He sighed.

  “In the early 1980s we finally began to develop the technology to intercept the most sophisticated communications between your CIA headquarters and other government agencies.” He sighed again, then gave a perfunctory smile. It was as if he’d told the exact story before.

  “The satellite and microwave equipment on the roof of the Soviet embassy in Washington began to pick up a broad range of signals. They confirmed information we had already received from a penetration agent at Langley.”

  “Which was?”

  Another perfunctory smile. I began to wonder whether that was simply the way he smiled, a quick twitch of the mouth, the eyes unchanging, wary. “What was the CIA’s great mission from its founding until, oh, 1991?”

  I smiled, one case-hardened cynic to another. “To defeat world communism and generally make life hell for you guys.”

  “Right. Was there ever a time when the Soviet Union was realistically a threat to the United States?”

  “Where do I begin? Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia? Hungary? Berlin? Prague?”

  “But to the United States.”

  “You had the bomb, don’t let’s forget.”

  “And we were as afraid to use it as you were. Only you used it; we did not. Did anyone at Langley seriously believe that Moscow had either the means or the will to take over the world? And what were we supposed to have done with the world once we took possession—run it into the ground the way, I’m sorry to say, our great esteemed Soviet leaders did the once-great Russian empire?”

  “There was self-delusion on both sides,” I conceded.

  “Ah. But this … delusion … certainly kept the CIA working overtime for years, did it not?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Simply this,” Orlov said. “Your great mission now is to defeat corporate espionage, is that right?”

  “So I’m told. It’s a different world now.”

  “Yes. International corporate espionage. The Japanese and the French and the Germans all want to steal valuable trade secrets from your poor, beleaguered American corporations. And only the Central Intelligence Agency can make America safe for capitalism.

  “Well, by the mid-1980s, the KGB was the only intelligence service in the world equipped to fully monitor communications coming out of CIA headquarters. And what we learned simply confirmed the darkest suspicions of some of my most deeply-dyed Communist brethren. From intercepts obtained between Langley and its outposts in foreign capitals, Langley and the Federal Reserve, et cetera, we learned that CIA had for years been rather busily engaged in directing its formidable espionage abilities against the economic structures of ostensible allies like the Japanese and the French and the Germans. Against private corporations in these countries. All for the sake of protecting American national security.”

  He paused, turned to look at me, and I said, “So? Normal part of business.”

  “So,” Orlov continued, settling comfortably back in his chair, and lifting both palms at once as if he’d made his point. “We thought we’d picked up the contours of a normal money-laundering operation—you know, money flows out of Langley’s accounts at the Federal Reserve in New York to the various CIA stations around the world. Wherever it’s needed to fund covert operations for democracy, yes? New York to Brussels, New York to Zurich, to Panama City, to San Salvador. But no. Not at all.”

  He looked at me and twitched another smile. “The more our financial geniuses dug—” He noticed my skepticism, and said, “Yes, we did have a few geniuses among all the fools. The more they dug, the more they confirmed their suspicions that this wasn’t standard money laundering at all. Money wasn’t just being channeled. Money was being made. Money was being amassed. Earned from corporate espionage. Intercept after intercept proved this.

  “Was it the CIA as an institution? No. Our asset inside Langley confirmed that it was just a few people. Privateers. These operations were controlled by a small cell of individuals in CIA.”

  “The ‘Wise Men.’”

  “An ironic name, I must assume. A tiny group of public servants inside CIA was becoming enormously rich. Using the intelligence they obtained from these espionage operations to enrich themselves. Rather handsomely, too.”

  The fact is, it’s quite common for CIA operatives to skim from their budgets, their funds, which are fluid and poorly documented (for reasons of secrecy: no CIA director who’s ordered a covert operation in some third-world country wants to leave a paper trail for some congressional oversight committee). Many operatives I have met make a habit of leeching—tithing, some of them call it—ten pe
rcent of the funds to which they have access, and squirreling it away in a Swiss numbered account. I never did it, but those who did, did it to provide themselves with a security blanket, protection in case anything went wrong. The green-eyeshade accounting types back in Langley routinely write off these sums, knowing full well where they’ve gone.

  I said as much to Orlov, who shook his head slowly in response. “We are talking about vast sums of money. Not tithing.”

  “Who were—are they?”

  “We had no names. They were too protected.”

  “And how did they amass their fortunes?”

  “It doesn’t take a deep understanding of business or microeconomics, Mr. Ellison. The Wise Men were privy to the most intimate conversations and strategy sessions in boardrooms and corporate offices and automobiles in Bonn and Frankfurt and Paris and London and Tokyo. And with the intelligence thereby gathered … Well, it was a simple matter to make strategic investments in the stock markets of the world, particularly New York, Tokyo, and London. After all, if you knew what Siemens or Philips or Mitsubishi was up to, you knew what stock to buy or sell, isn’t that right?”

  “So it wasn’t embezzlement, really, at all?” I said.

  “Not at all. Not embezzlement. But manipulation of stock markets, violations of hundreds of American and foreign laws. And the Wise Men did quite well, really. Their bank accounts in Luxembourg and Grand Cayman and Zurich flourished. They made quite a fortune. Hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.”

  He looked up again at the double doors, and went on, a small look of triumph on his pinched face. “Think of what we could have done with the evidence—the transcripts, the intercepts … The mind reels. We couldn’t have asked for anything better to use in propaganda. America is stealing from its allies! We couldn’t have anything better. Once we leaked that, NATO would have been destroyed!”

  “My God.”

  “Oh, but then came 1987.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Orlov shook his head slowly. “This is not known to you?”

  “What happened in 1987?”

  “Have you forgotten what happened to the American economy in 1987?”

  “The economy?” I asked, puzzled. “There was the great stock market crash in October 1987, but apart—”

  “Exactly. ‘Crash’ may be an overstatement, but certainly the American stock markets collapsed on, I believe, October 19, 1987.”

  “But what does that have to do with—”

  “A stock market ‘crash,’ to use your word, is not necessarily a disaster to one who is prepared for it. Very much the opposite; a group of savvy investors can make huge profits in a stock market crash, by short selling, futures and arbitrage, and other means, correct?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I am saying, Mr. Ellison, that once we knew what these Wise Men were doing, what their conduits were, we were able to follow their activities quite closely—unknown to them.”

  “And they made money in the 1987 crash, is that it?”

  “Using computerized program trading and fourteen hundred separate trading accounts, calibrating precisely with Tokyo’s Nikkei and pulling the levers at exactly the right time, and with the right velocity, they not only made vast sums of money in the crash, Mr. Ellison, they caused it.”

  Dumbfounded, I could do no more than stare.

  “So you see,” he continued, “we had some very damaging evidence of what a group within the CIA had done to the world.”

  “And did you use it?”

  “Yes, Mr. Ellison. There was a time when we did.”

  “When?”

  “When I say ‘we,’ I refer to my organization. You recall the events of 1991, the coup d’état against Gorbachev, instigated and organized by the KGB. Well, as you well know, your CIA had advance information that this coup was being planned. Why do you think you did nothing to forestall the plan?”

  “There are theories,” I said.

  “There are theories, and there are facts. The facts are that the KGB possessed detailed, explosive files on this group that called itself the Wise Men. These files, once released to the world, would have destroyed America’s credibility, as I’ve told you.”

  “And so the CIA was made inert,” I said. “Blackmailed by the threat of disclosure.”

  “Precisely. And who would give up such a weapon? Not a dedicated opponent of the United States. Not a loyal KGB man. What better proof could I offer.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Brilliant. Who knows of the existence of these files?”

  “Only a handful of people,” he said. “My predecessor at the KGB, Kryuchkov, who is alive but fears for his life too much to talk. His chief aide, who was executed—no, excuse me, I believe The New York Times published a story that said he had ‘committed suicide’ just after the coup, am I right? And, of course, I.”

  “And you gave him these amazing files.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  A brief shrug, a twitch of a smile. “Because the files had disappeared.”

  * * *

  “What?”

  “Corruption was rampant in Moscow in those days,” Orlov explained. “Even more rampant than it is now. The old order—the millions of people who worked in all the old bureaucracies, the ministries, the secretariats—the entirety of the Soviet government knew that their days were numbered. Factory managers were selling off their goods to the black markets. Clerks were selling off files in the Lubyanka offices of the KGB. Boris Yeltsin’s people had taken many files from KGB headquarters, and some of those seized files were changing hands! And then I was told that the file on the Wise Men had disappeared.”

  “Files like that don’t simply disappear.”

  “Of course not. I was told that a rather low-level file clerk in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate had taken the file home with her and sold it.”

  “To whom?”

  “A consortium of German businessmen. I was told she sold it to them for something over two million deutsche marks.”

  “About a million American dollars. But surely she could have gotten far more.”

  “Of course! That file was worth a great deal of money. It contained the tools to blackmail some of the highest-ranking officials in the CIA! It was worth far, far more than this foolish woman sold it for. Greed can make one irrational.”

  I suppressed the urge to smile. “A German consortium,” I mused. “Why would a group of Germans be interested in blackmailing the CIA?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “But you do now?”

  “I have my theories.”

  “Such as?”

  “You are asking me for facts,” he said. “We met in Zurich, Sinclair and I—in conditions of absolute secrecy, naturally. By this time I had left the country. I knew I would never return.

  “Sinclair was furious to learn that I no longer had the incriminating files, and he threatened to cancel the deal, to fly back to Washington and put an end to this. We quarreled for many hours. I tried to make him believe the truth, that I was not deceiving him.”

  “And did he?”

  “At the time I thought he did. Now I do not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought we had a deal, and as it turned out, we did not. I left Zurich for this house—which Sinclair, incidentally, had found for me—and awaited further word. Ten billion dollars was now in the West. Gold that belonged to Russia. It was an enormous gamble, but I had to trust in Sinclair’s honesty. More than that, in his own self-interest. He wanted to keep Russia from becoming a right-wing, Russian-chauvinist dictatorship. He, too, wanted to spare the world that. But I think it was the files. The fact that I did not have the Wise Men files to give him. He must have felt that I was not playing fair. Why else would he have double-crossed me?”

  “Double-crossed you?”

  “The ten billion dollars went into a vault in Zurich. Sitting in a vault beneath Bahnhofstrasse with two
access codes required to secure its release. But I could not gain access to it. And then Harrison Sinclair was killed. And now there is no hope of taking back the gold. So I hope you understand that I certainly had no interest in having him killed, now, did I?”

  “No,” I agreed. “You would not. But perhaps I can help you now.”

  “If you have Sinclair’s access codes—”

  “No,” I said. “There are no codes. None were left to me.”

  “Then I am afraid there is nothing you can do.”

  “Wrong. There is something I can do. I need the name of the banker you met with in Zurich.”

  And at that moment the tall double doors at the far end of the dining room flew open.

  I jumped to my feet, not wanting to pull out my gun in the event that it was one of his guards again, in which case everything should look normal; I could not risk appearing to be threatening the master of the house.

  I glimpsed a flash of deep blue cloth, and knew at once. Three uniformed Italian policemen entered, pistols directed at me.

  “Tieniti le mani al fianco!” one of them commanded. Keep your hands at your sides.

  They advanced into the room, in SWAT formation. My pistol was useless at this point; I was outnumbered. Orlov backed away from me until he was against a wall, as if avoiding the line of fire.

  “Sei in arresto,” the other said. “Non muoverti.” Don’t move—you’re under arrest.

  I stood there dumbly, confused. How could this have happened? Who had called them? I didn’t understand.

  And then I saw the small black call button set into the broad oak leg of the dining table, at the point at which it rested on the terra-cotta floor. It was the sort of button you could set off by tapping your foot, the way bank tellers can, unseen, summon the police. It would set off a noiseless alarm far away—in this case, I suspected, as far away as the municipal police headquarters in Siena, which explained why they took so long to arrive. Police, no doubt, in the pay of this mysterious “German” émigré who required excellent security.

  That lunge that Orlov had made at me, his only clumsy move. He knew I would push him to the ground, that he’d be able to roll over and set off the emergency button with his hand or knee or foot.