“You think Britain and America are frightened of being caught lying.”
He wouldn’t be lying giving her the inference she so desperately wanted, Charlie decided. Why not go on stirring the pot? “No one, certainly not governments, like being caught avoiding the truth, do they?”
She laughed. “Should I draw a conclusion from that remark?”
“I can’t see what conclusion you could possibly make from what I’ve said.”
“Thank you!” said Svetlana, stressing the sincerity.
“Thank you,” said Charlie, just as sincerely.
He got safely back to the Savoy in time to see Svetlana’s broadcast and to hear her quote his reply verbatim to continue her fact-by-innuendo reportage. But then he remained staring, frowning, at the screen for the unexpected live interview from Washington with an American State Department official who actually identified Stepan Lvov by name insisting that there was no truth whatsoever in any suggestion that the American government or its CIA were conducting a clandestine operation in Russia.
29
Charlie was mildly disconcerted at getting wrong what he considered an obvious prediction but his success at keeping Svetlana Modin’s disinformation pot bubbling outweighed his one miscalculation, and at that moment, there was another uncertainty occupying his concentration above all others. Why hadn’t there been another attempt to kill him? He’d certainly taken every precaution. Charlie recognized that despite all the dodging and weaving, a professional assassin would have by now tried again. And possibly succeeded. Had it really been a proper, determined attempt? Or had it instead been intended as nothing more than a warning, a back-off threat?
Still not relaxing, he not only locked the door of his suite but further secured it with the triangular door wedges he always carried to prevent its innocent but unwanted opening by room servicing staff. He cleared the sitting-room coffee table to set out the four separated and sequentially ordered envelopes, working through one at a time. He did not, on first reading, attempt to analyze any one item or message but tried to get a general overview of the entire haul, hoping for a clue to a common direction to their contents, his initial bewilderment growing until he isolated what he believed to be an incongruity. Encouraged by it-and other dissimilarities specifically in an increasing number of other sometimes single-line slips-Charlie made his first but absolutely essential discovery.
He’d begun by assuming that each communication in all four packages was exchanges between KGB-and latterly FSB-Lubyanka headquarters, recognizable from its obvious and unvarying CENTER code identification, and at least five if not more code-obscured foreign field stations or rezidentura.
It was only when he separated the slips from the fuller messages that Charlie was guided to the all-important different language terminologies. Every code-deciphered word in every communication was an absolutely literal translation into Russian. But from the awkwardness of that translation, or at least thirty of the smaller slips, they had to have originated from radio intercept of a foreign language. But that’s exactly what at least thirty of the smaller slips were, not deciphered from their first-time transmission codes but initially translations from foreign language radio intercepts.
That very first item of December 15, 1991, was not technically a message, which Charlie first construed it to be. The literal translation into Russian appeared clumsily stilted because some of the words didn’t have a precise trans-literal match. The first impossible match that Charlie stumbled upon was the phrase walk-in, which no Russian would have written. It was tradecraft terminology of American CIA origin that Charlie immediately and easily understood from its adoption by at least four European intelligence organisations, including both Britain’s MI5 and MI6. It was a term describing a foreign national approaching an American source to offer him or herself-or information he or she possessed-either for money or ideology. Asset was another Americanism, which Charlie picked out from another radio intercept dated February 1992, and knew also to have been adopted by other Western intelligence agencies to mean a foreign national suborned or willing to inform or spy upon his country. Both were sourced from the same KGB field station concealed behind the numeric code 68. The next communication was a reaction from CENTER to the alerting field station allocating the word AMBER as a case code. It included the word “struggle,” which at first confused Charlie until he remembered being told by Natalia when they were together in Moscow and he was learning the Russian language to be occasionally used colloquially to mean “search,” which appeared as search several more times in messages not only to and from Moscow but to and from a wider spread of field stations, some numerically coded-72, 48, 10, and 58-and others under a variety of worded identifications: AJAX, TROJAN, OMEGA, and MARS. In several, another recognizable tradecraft term, sleeper, appeared apparently as a supposition or a suggestion. A sleeper was a committed spy not actively engaged in day-to-day espionage but left buried-sleeping-until the reason or decision arose to wake him to begin work.
Increasingly Charlie came to believe he was looking at a surprisingly simple-although still totally incomprehensible-pattern: rapidly escalating, frustrated KGB alarm confirmed by an equally sharp rise in the secrecy and readership restrictions throughout the KGB and FSB hierarchy. Over the last eighteen months available to him, the access limitation appeared to have been confined to six recipients, with the topmost authorizing and questioning participant identified by the code word ONE, written in words, not numerals, on every your Eyes Only exchange. Throughout the exchanges there were six code series included, which, from experience, Charlie knew to refer not to people but to actual espionage operations.
It was just past three in the morning when Charlie finally straightened, cramped and gritty eyed, from the thirty-two pages finally restored to their specific envelopes, minimally satisfied with what he hoped to have established. By listening in to American intelligence radio traffic, most likely between CIA field stations and their headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the KGB had discovered a Russian mole to whom they’d allocated the code name AMBER, but which possibly had been changed to ICON. That American asset appeared to be operating from within KGB ranks itself and, judging from the rising priority-toward the end verging on panic-of those involved in the hunt for him had as recently as 2006, a period of roughly eighteen years since his first location, had still not been found. And who, over those eighteen years, had disclosed or participated or had information about at least six, maybe more, Russian intelligence operations.
And everything contributed absolutely nothing to any understanding without his knowing or being able to break the concealing codes. Worse, even. If he were even half right in his interpretation, it raised a dozen more questions instead of providing one single answer.
With whom had Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin tried to trade the gold lode he believed he had found? The most obvious answer was the CIA, to keep their asset protected. But according to Irena, her lover would not have betrayed his country. Could one of the wilder speculations about the embassy murder be true after all, that Ivan had been trying to sell the information to the British but had been stopped and killed by pursuing FSB at his moment of contact? No, rejected Charlie at once. He knew, as an indisputable fact, that Ivan had not been killed in the embassy grounds but elsewhere before being dumped where he had been found. And he surely wouldn’t have been sent from London-unless, of course, as an intended sacrifice-as totally blind as he had been, if Oskin’s approach had been to the sister service MI6? Not such an easy assurance here because MI6 only cooperated with MI5 if there was some beneficial advantage and MI5 operated on the same imbalanced principle: and if MI6 had had an asset like Ivan Oskin they certainly wouldn’t have shared him. But they would have definitely tried to discover his killer, which would have involved David Halliday, even if the rest of their investigatory team had been covert. And despite-or perhaps because of-the chaos within the embassy Charlie was convinced he would have detected some sort of awareness from the c
ontact he’d had with Halliday. Why were the FSB so anxious to close the murder investigation down with a bullshit story of Oskin being a member of a drug-smuggling gang and Sergei Pavel being assassinated in gangland retribution? It might just be conceivable that the FSB had linked the disappearance over the past near fortnight of one of its own Lubyanka operatives with the embassy murder and wanted to resolve an awkward international problem. Still they, or the uniformed militia, would surely have wanted to find Pavel’s killer? Was he right in believing the material lying on the table before him was about a Russian or KGB defector to the CIA? From what he knew at that moment, there couldn’t be any other conclusion. The CIA would unquestionably have killed Oskin instead of paying him off if they believed he knew the identity of their deeply embedded ICON. But they wouldn’t have killed him before getting what Oskin had taken from KGB and FSB records. And that still left Pavel’s murder unexplained. What connection with anything was there in the CIA’s attempt to get involved but cut the Russians out of the link-up? If the Agency had killed Oskin, they’d surely want to distance themselves from everything about it.
Their own spy in the embassy! Charlie felt a jump of irritation that the possibility of a connection hadn’t occurred to him before now. There most definitely was a hostile source whose activities had reduced the British legation to a laughingstock by remaining undiscovered despite every single person within it being interrogated by the best and most experienced mole hunters in the British service. And Oskin’s information was of another undetected spy. Could that be beyond a coincidence-the phenomena he distrusted-and be in some way part of the same enigma? But how? And why? The spy within the KGB had remained undiscovered for eighteen years. The hunt for the British embassy mole hadn’t yet been running for eighteen weeks. The connection could only be coincidence, nothing else. Or could it?
Circles within circles, blocking his mind until he was incapable of thinking or rationalizing anything, Charlie decided. As an incalculable number of KGB and FSB minds had seemingly been blocked for eighteen years and the minds of Paul Robertson and his mole-hunters remained blocked.
Which could be an answer to so much! One, Charlie remembered, that he’d actually suspected days ago! Creating for himself yet another circle, Charlie confronted his earlier speculation that while not knowing what it was an answer to, the constantly unremitting avalanche of apparently unrelated facts and events was creating an impenetrable mental fog through which it was impossible for him and a lot of other people to focus upon what they were trying so desperately to see! And then he remembered the cliche that had escaped him when the idea had first come to him. No one was being able-or allowed-to see the wood from the trees because of the ever and constantly growing forest in front of them.
“The code-breakers and analysts have managed to get some way further than you, while at the same time completely agreeing and confirming every one of your interpretations. But by any assessment not far enough,” declared Aubrey Smith, when Charlie finished enumerating his overnight impressions from the Russian intelligence archives.
“How much further have they got?” asked Charlie.
“Station code names, which we had on record in our own archives,” enlarged the Director-General. “The first mentioned, 68, is-or rather was-Beirut. It was changed to MARS, during the civil war there, so we’ve got a double confirmation. The KGB field station in Cairo is 72, Teheran is 58. Athens is TROJAN.”
“All Middle East, where Oskin worked,” identified Charlie.
“The connection’s been made here, too. And the fact that Oskin was fluent in the languages in the region.”
“Could it have any connection with the Islamic terrorism we’re facing?” questioned Charlie. “A sleeper operation conceived a very long time ago, coming to fruition now.”
“Not from non-Islamists,” rejected Smith.
“He and Irena were actually based in Cairo,” Charlie pointed out.
“Also flagged up here,” assured Smith. “We’ve managed, as well, to identify three of the six operations itemized in Oskin’s stuff. OPERATION MIDAS was a KGB effort to penetrate the banking links between America and Saudi Arabia. OPERATION OSCAR was to get, through KGB nominees, control of two Greek tanker companies which would have given Moscow a limited window into world oil movements. They tried to extend that oil monitor with OPERATION BORE, which was targeted from Beirut after its code change to MARS, by infiltrating tanker companies worldwide.”
“You’re talking past tense?” questioned Charlie.
“That’s how they got into our archives, the tanker operations particularly: Lloyds of London was an obvious priority infiltrating objective because of its insurance records. All three operations were discovered and blown once we got involved.”
“Discovered?” queried Charlie.
“The lead, against all three, came from the CIA.”
“Who got it from their KGB asset,” completed Charlie.
“Where else?” agreed the Director-General. “By giving it to us they protected him. Incidentally, we also agree with you here that AMBER is the Russian code name for the mole they cannot catch but that they changed it to ICON. And we know that ONE, as the secrecy determination ratcheted up, is the chairman of the KGB himself and continued on into the FSB.”
“Making ICON-and the need to uncover him-also number one of the Russian’s Most Wanted list.”
“Which it would be, wouldn’t it, for someone they’ve known about for eighteen years, done incalculable damage and who they still haven’t managed to catch?” suggested Smith. “ICON is up there with the all-time greats in the spy ratings. My guess is they’ll have a full-time section permanently hunting him.”
“If they still haven’t caught him?” qualified Charlie.
“The analysts here don’t think they have,” said Smith. “You didn’t mention the gaps in the intercepted CIA radio traffic?”
“Because I didn’t isolate them,” admitted Charlie.
“I didn’t, either,” said Smith, equally honest. “Because the gaps were filled with KGB and FSB traffic, giving an impression of unbroken continuity. You did isolate sleeper, though. And that’s what our provisional assessment is. That the CIA has put ICON to sleep, until they choose to activate him. And while the Russians go on looking for him.”
“They-or he-are expecting something big: maybe a transfer back here to Moscow headquarters?”
“It could be,” agreed Smith. “The FSB will be going even more frantic at the possibility. Anyone being brought in from outside will be put through more loyalty tests than you can imagine.”
“None-or any-of which gets us any closer to understanding why Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin came to be found dead in our embassy grounds,” reminded Charlie. “Do the analysts think they’ve got it all? Or could there be more?”
“No one is going to admit we’ve got it all in less than twenty-four hours: what I’ve told you is basic, surface stuff. Of course they’re going to go on.”
“Any thought of a link up with MI6: maybe Oskin was negotiating with them, even though we know he wasn’t actually killed in the embassy grounds. His being dumped there could have been a message to them, although I don’t believe the resident MI6 officer here knows anything about it. But it would explain MI6’s efforts to get involved, wouldn’t it?”
“You’ve asked the station officer directly?”
“Not since getting this material,” said Charlie, sensing the concern in the man’s voice. “We obviously discussed it before that. I’m sure he doesn’t know anything.”
“If MI6 already had Oskin they wouldn’t admit it or share anything in a million years. And I don’t want to share anything with them or anyone else yet, as I’ve already made clear. Things are still far too uncertain, both here and where you are.”
Aubrey Smith saw this as his way to win the power struggle in London, Charlie recognized at once. “What about Irena Novikov’s demands?”
“I’ll pay her, of course. How much
depends upon the ultimate value of what she’s given you. And I could also arrange her asylum.”
Smith was ducking the most important part of his question, Charlie acknowledged. “What about the body? She wants the whole package, not part of it.”
“It’s a technical situation that’s never arisen, as far as I am aware. And I certainly haven’t had time to discuss it with anyone yet. In fact, I can’t think of anyone with whom I could discuss it.”
“I promised I’d give her a reaction as soon as I could.” He’d also promised to make contact with Natalia, Charlie remembered.
“She can’t expect a decision this soon on something as complicated as she’s asked,” complained the Director-General. “Neither can you. What’s the situation with this damned Russian press conference that could make us all look absurd?”
“As confused as everything else.”
“I’m not sure of the benefit of keeping this joint American-British covert business running. Or using this Svetlana woman,” said Smith. “It could be exacerbating a situation that doesn’t need to get any worse.”
Was that a genuine remark or a way of letting him know that all the recorded conversations were still being forwarded to London? “It generates a little confusion.”
“Don’t we have enough confusion already?” asked Smith.
“Hasn’t it occurred to you that there’s almost too much of that coming from somewhere?”
For the first time there was a reflective silence from the London end. “Are you suggesting there’s a positive disinformation operation going on?”
“I don’t know what I’m suggesting, if anything,” avoided Charlie. “It could be a possibility.”
“By whom? To achieve what?”
Charlie started to regret beginning the exchange. “I can’t answer that, either. Maybe I’m imagining there’s some kind of orchestration in a lot of things that have happened.”
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