by Alex Dryden
Laszlo walked outside the embassy’s wall with a light, boxer’s step, the emphasis on the balls of the feet. A blustery wind now blew the beginnings of a sleet shower directly down Reterska Street and into his face.
At forty-one years of age, he kept a trim figure, and made sure its shape was well advertised to the rest of the world. The hard muscle tones of his medium-height body were accentuated by a cashmere coat over a tight-fitting dark suit, with a white silk scarf draped artfully low around his neck. Even the careful haircut that swept his thick blond hair in a mop to one side seemed to exist only in order to show off the lean, carved face, with its well-oiled and spa-pampered skin. His hands were recently manicured and his clear blue eyes, with their curiously expressionless gaze that bordered on the defensive, seemed to have some neutralising gauze stretched over them. His was a deadening expression, as though any hint of character or personality might upset the physical impression Laszlo wished above all else to convey.
To achieve this physical fitness that was, incidentally, beyond the call of duty, Laszlo spent his spare time climbing mountains, riding in cycle races, skiing, and sailing a catamaran off the coast of Brittany. In Kiev he’d had to make do with an expensive gym. To achieve his tough but well-looked-after appearance, some colleagues suggested, required a narcissism of quite exceptional dedication.
With a final look up ahead of the Citroën to check for other parked cars, Laszlo stepped into the rear seat. The retired sous-lieutenant from French special forces who was his chauffeur for the evening pulled out into a steady stream of traffic that was headed out for a Saturday night’s entertainment in the clubs and bars of Kiev. It would be a preelection binge, Laszlo thought with slight disgust, a brain-numbing drink fest designed to lay to rest the disappointing inadequacy, the lack of achievement in the six years since the Orange Revolution of 2004—and prepare the way for a hoped-for change. Drink to forget the past, that would be it. And drink to welcome the future. The king is dead, long live the king. Whoever won the election, at least there would be change, even if it only meant a few more names added to the list of corrupt Ukrainian industrialists on the new government’s books.
As the car threaded its way towards Independence Square, Laszlo wondered how his new posting to Kiev might affect his career, the only aspect of life that he devoted as much attention to as his appearance. Perhaps it would depend on the meeting tonight, he thought. Precious little else had happened since his posting to Kiev that could offer him a moment of glory. Until six months before, when he’d been posted to Ukraine, he had spent five years stationed in Moscow. There, he had made many lasting contacts who were now interested in his new posting—Russians, both buzinessmen and KGB officers to whom, unlike the Americans, the French had left an open door of communication.
Laszlo was, principally, a Russophile, like his boss Plismy. And Russia was the biggest game in town if you were in the east of Europe. On top of that the French had special interests in Russia that predated even Napoleon’s disastrous defeat in 1812. Russia and France were natural allies, and always had been, despite the embarrassment of that distant invasion. Laszlo believed that France and Russia had a special relationship that would bear fruit now in the twenty-first century. France’s energy companies were making great headway in the allocation of contracts by the Kremlin and the Russians were favouring them over the British, let alone the Americans.
But before that, before his posting in Moscow, Laszlo had been stationed at the Outre Mer—Overseas Department—of the French Republic’s former colony of Guadeloupe. And it was there that in his twenties, as a young, ambitious, and comfortably amoral intelligence officer, he had learned the merits of election fixing. That experience, he thought as the car turned left over the Dnieper River, had served him well in Putin’s Russia and—as he fully expected—it would serve him well as the world watched the unfolding of events in Ukraine in the following three weeks, first in tomorrow’s elections and in the final runoff between the two leading candidates, at the end of which the final victor would be revealed.
For a moment, a slight sneer marred Laszlo’s otherwise blandly smooth countenance with its strange, unwelcoming eyes. The Americans and the British would be out in force tomorrow—as well as in the final vote in three weeks’ time—to ensure that the elections in Ukraine were free and fair. The Anglo-Saxons were always there to impose their hypocritical conditions, he thought. As if the American elections were free and fair! But as Laszlo knew, whichever way the Ukrainian elections were viewed in the outside world by the West’s electoral observers, behind the scenes the corruption and fixing would be of the usual gigantic proportions. And that was why this meeting tonight intrigued him. He was hoping that it would be an insight into what was really going on in and outside Ukraine to influence the elections.
“Take a couple of turns,” he said to the driver. He spoke little and when he did his voice was flat. The sous-lieutenant obediently went twice round Independence Square.
Laszlo had been many things in the past eighteen years besides an intelligence officer: soldier, journalist, trade representative, election observer, though all the time the underlying reasons for these diversions was his job as a DGSE intelligence officer. But he seemed to have no friends from his previous incarnations. He was unmarried. Ambition seemed to be absent from his considerations. Tonight he felt that here was the moment he’d been waiting for, an opportunity for advancement. Like his boss Plismy, he sensed that he was close to something crucial, to something that would, ultimately, bring him the power that all his patience, self-control, and disinterest in other human beings had prepared him for.
The driver finally turned the Citroën away from the square and it made its way smoothly, though by a roundabout route, towards the Theatre of Russian Drama, not far from Kreschatik. They crossed the Dnieper River twice more, turned around in a U once, stopped to buy a magazine from a kiosk by St. Sophia’s Cathedral, and stalled deliberately at a crossroads farther up the street, holding up angry drivers who flattened their hands to their car horns. And on each occasion, driver and passenger observed the similarities and differences in the street landscape without forming the conclusion that they were being tailed.
Finally, the Citroën pulled up outside the theatre. Laszlo stepped out of the car without a word to his driver. He entered the theatre, checked his coat, bought a ticket for Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, and then entered the auditorium. He saw the two fire exits on either side near the stage and passed down on the right side to a fire door that led to a side street. He took no notice of the young usherette who asked him where he was going. Within a minute of walking out of the theatre, he’d checked all the possibilities and concluded he was on his own.
He walked briskly, not least because of the cold. Though prepared for walking with no coat—he wore a silk thermal vest under his suit—January was not a month for an evening stroll through Kiev’s streets. First he retraced part of the Citroën’s route back in the direction of Independence Square. The billboards he passed in the capital’s streets were dominated by election themes and by the eighteen candidates for the opening round of the next day’s elections. Sixteen of them would be gone by tomorrow night and, with them, their investment. There were only two candidates who had a chance of passing into the last round.
The city had slowly filled with foreign election observers in the previous days but, unlike in the heady period of the Orange Revolution six years before, the signs of electoral interest from actual Ukrainians on the streets was minimal; there were no crowds as he entered the square, just a few minor rallies, that was all, mostly extremist groups largely made up of pensioners from the old days of the Soviet Union and a smattering of far-right nationalists with skinhead views. After six years of disappointed dreams under the incumbent president, Viktor Yuschenko, Ukrainians seemed to believe that their political views no longer made any difference.
Laszlo crossed the square and made for a café in a side street that was to be
the meeting place.
He entered the Reprisa café at 8:25 and, buying a short black coffee, he retreated to the back of the orange-coloured space and took a stool screwed to the floor and against a wall. There were a dozen or so people in the café; the strip lights were shockingly bright and seemed designed to put a customer off from staying too long. He withdrew a newspaper from inside his jacket and, with his back to the rest of the café, began to reread stories he’d read earlier in the day. He was patient and seemed incapable of boredom. Life, he thought, held few surprises, even a secret life.
He had read the paper from cover to cover and drunk two more short coffees before his elation at the thought of the forthcoming meeting began to be replaced by a feeling of anticlimax. He’d looked around the café from time to time. There were three high school girls sitting at a table. They looked at him, spoke in whispers, laughed occasionally and self-consciously in his direction, then returned to their own affairs. A man in a slightly grubby black suit sat in a far corner. There were two other men still wearing their hats and coats as they sat at the counter, and other, scattered groups dotted elsewhere who seemed to have no plans for the evening. But by 9 P.M. the café was beginning to thin out. Everyone who had any plans was heading off for their evening’s entertainment. In half an hour, only the lonely would remain, and then the café would close anyway.
It was not, Laszlo thought curiously, a good place for a meeting anyway; it was too bright, too sparsely populated, too public. And the small window of time for the meeting was unusual, too. There was just a half hour in which it could take place before the café closed; 8:45 until 9:15 P.M. was the time the contact had dictated. For a moment Laszlo felt unnerved, uncertain about his hopes for the evening.
He reviewed once more what they knew about the proposed contact on this evening, January 16, 2010. That he was a contact from the Russian side—Plismy seemed to be sure this was the case—though why he was sure was anyone’s guess. Code name: Rafael (chosen by the contact, not by them, not by Paris—the contact had insisted on that). Sex: male. Age: in his late thirties or early forties. Nationality: Russian, Middle Eastern, or from one of the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus mountains. This seemed unnecessarily vague, though agents often obfuscated details of their identity, for obvious reasons. Usefulness: unknown, but rumoured to be in possession of some highly sensitive information regarding the Kremlin’s intentions in Ukraine. Purpose of contact: find out those intentions. In other words, clear-cut, straightforward, and simple. At least, that was what it should have been, Laszlo thought. All he needed was for the damned contact to actually show up.
Laszlo now sat half turned towards the entrance to the café, willing “Rafael” to enter in the dying moments left. To his vague surprise, at just after 9:15 P.M., he saw a face he recognised. The man was walking head down, almost obscuring his identity, along the wet pavement outside the rain-streaked window. Laszlo had exchanged information with this man before—the man worked in the intelligence communications section at the Italians’ Kiev embassy. Behind him, at a distance of some twenty-five yards, Laszlo now saw a Romanian intelligence officer he also recognised. Coincidence? Possibly. Was the one following the other? Likely, he supposed.
Kiev seemed to have become a front line of sorts for the world’s intelligence agencies, and in particular those of Western Europe. The whole country was crawling with spies—officers, agents, informers…Kiev appeared to have become what Vienna had once been in the Cold War. It was bang up against Russia, as Vienna had once been before the Soviet collapse and the Russian retreat from Eastern Europe. And now, after twenty years of its own form of capitalism, Russia now transported its energy supplies at great profit to Western Europe’s hungry nations. And with its vast network of pipelines, Ukraine held the key to Western Europe’s energy needs. Without Ukraine’s willingness, or ability, to transport Russian oil and gas, the EU countries were beggared. That was why Russia’s meddling in the country was of the greatest interest to all.
The two men passed outside the window and out of sight. Laszlo turned, back to his study of the wall two feet away. A plasticised picture of the Orange Revolution met his gaze, a kind of photographic negative, tinged in orange. It seemed almost quaintly out of date—after only six years.
France’s view, he knew, was to bypass Ukraine’s interests and befriend Russia. Soon, anyway, there would be pipelines directly from Russia underneath the Baltic that would curtail Ukraine’s importance as a go-between. But France had its own, and possibly unique, policy. The Anglo-Saxons seemed intent on keeping the two countries separate, to keep Ukraine independent of the Kremlin. Good luck to them, Laszlo thought—but in his opinion, that wasn’t going to happen. The forces against it were too great. So the intelligent thing to do—France’s secret policy—was to prepare for the eventuality of Ukraine’s return to Russian rule—direct or indirect was unimportant—after more than twenty years of the country’s independence.
By 9:30 P.M. the last moment for the meeting had passed. Now that no one had shown up and when he was alone in the café with only the two men in coats and hats, Laszlo realised that his expectations for the evening were not going to be met. The café was closing. There was no fallback venue, which was odd, too. It was over, at least for tonight. The contact, he guessed hopefully, must simply have been delayed.
Laszlo paid now, for his three coffees in an hour, and he left the café just as a woman with a broom swept up the day’s detritus from beneath the chairs and tables. He decided to walk and ended up back at the theatre where he retrieved his coat.
The nonappearance of the man who called himself Rafael was a recurrent theme in Kiev on that night of January 16, and not just in Kiev. In other towns and cities across Ukraine—not to mention one proposed meeting by a lakeside near the Russian border that the unfortunate head of intelligence at the Chinese embassy pointlessly attended—Ukraine’s spy community was coaxed to attend meetings that never took place. Rafael turned out to be a chimera. In total, the embassies of fourteen different countries sent out their intelligence officers on this wild goose chase. Rafael had spun his web so effectively that none of those contacted knew any more by the end of the night than what Rafael had chosen to give them—which was very little, and even that, it was assumed, would turn out to be false.
But with the intelligence community living on top of itself in the city and though meetings between the officers of different agencies were largely covert, soon the rumour began to pass around the watering holes and restaurants of Kiev that everyone Rafael had contacted had fallen for Rafael. It started with an apparently innocent question from an intelligence officer at the German embassy to his opposite number at the Spanish embassy: “Come across a source who calls himself Rafael?” was the casual remark. Then the question was repeated in bars, until it left the street talk of the spies and graduated to informal chats between the chiefs of the different national agencies involved.
At first there was reluctance. Nobody wanted to admit they’d been fooled until someone else admitted it first. And nobody even admitted to knowing anything about anyone called Rafael. But soon everyone grew to the understanding that they had all been set up, equally and with no shame, and then the discussions between rival and allied agencies became more open. Rafael made it onto the agendas of interagency meetings, he was tagged by NATO, and he was openly discussed now in the bars and restaurants of Kiev whenever any two officers from different countries crossed paths, either by design or by accident. Rafael was an embarrassment, then he became a joke, an anecdote, until finally he was filed away at the very back of the fine minds who’d been taken in, to be forgotten at the earliest possible convenience. Why did he do it? Whoever this Rafael was, it was generally assumed that he was just some clever student who, instead of hacking his way into national computer networks, preferred a more earthy approach in order to mess around with the world’s intelligence efforts. And so, finally, Rafael was laid to rest, and the world moved on.
On the following day, a Sunday, all eyes in Kiev and in the political world at large were anyway focused on the first round of the elections. Yulia Timoshenko and Viktor Yanukovich were the victors. He was Russia’s preferred candidate for ultimate victory, it was noted, while Ms. Timoshenko appeared to be available for wooing by all sides, West and East.
At the American embassy in Kiev, at number 6 Mykoly Pymonenka Street, the Rafael affair, or incident—or spoof, as it was commonly known—caused a similar confusion, and then an irritation, as it had caused elsewhere. Sam MacLeod, the CIA’s station head had, in fact, despatched a relatively junior officer to a meeting with Rafael at a small town in the Carpathian Mountains—a day trip that was enjoyed by the officer despite its lack of success. And, as elsewhere in Kiev’s intelligence community, Rafael was swiftly relegated to an elaborate prank by the Americans.
But on that very morning of the elections, January 16, a letter had been delivered to the embassy, sealed in an old-fashioned way with red wax, on which there was an impression of a bird. The letter was addressed not to anyone at the embassy, but to Burt Miller, head of Cougar Intelligence Applications. And in the East, from Kiev to the Tajik border with China—including the vast landmass of Russia—Burt’s name was very well known indeed in certain circles. It was here in the empty regions of central Asia that had been his original stamping ground. As a man in his early twenties he had begun his explosive intelligence career over forty years before in the great central Asian plains and mountains.
Because of his—and Cougar’s—importance to the CIA and general good regard from its chief Theo Lish, the unopened letter was put on a morning plane to London, where Burt Miller was meeting with the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Adrian Carew, before they both attended a meeting of NATO intelligence chiefs in Brussels the following week. During a brief break in his talks with Adrian Carew, Burt carefully slit the top of the envelope, avoiding causing damage to the seal, and withdrew a single sheet of paper. On it he read, “Rafael will not be meeting tonight.” He stared at the message for a long time and then replaced the sheet back into its envelope.