Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  He sent her to the airport in his chauffeured car.

  “He sent you out alone? No riding along with you, neckin’ in the backseat? That’s where a lot of sexual harassment takes place, you know. In corporate cars.”

  She seemed so pleased with herself that Irving could not resist giving her a little zotz. But Viveca had done well, better than he could have done with the tight-assessed bank executive, and when she glared at him, the reporter hastened to say he was only kidding. She didn’t have much of a sense of humor.

  “Hey, where’d you get that stuff you used in his office about moles and sleepers?” he asked to make amends. “That was pretty good. Accurate, too.”

  “It came from Principles and Practices of Counterespionage by Cooper and Redlinger,” she answered. “I do my homework. This espionage business is not as arcane as you think.”

  He shot his eyebrows up at her forty-dollar word. “I used to go to the penny arcane. You’re so hot on Cooper and Redstuff, where do you come out on Golitsyn and Nosenko?”

  “I haven’t read their work yet.”

  “Lookit. Golitsyn was a Russian defector, came over here in 1960 with the whole story of the disinformation plan of Shelepin, the head of the KGB at the time. Shelepin was feeding all our spies phony stuff, in the biggest deception operation ever run. Then another defector, named Nosenko, came over after the Kennedy assassination and reassured everybody here that the Kremlin had nothing to do with Lee Harvey Oswald. The two defectors’ stories collided. The question: Was Nosenko a ‘dangle’?” Irving waited for her to figure out that a dangle was a false defector, not hard for a quick student.

  “What was the answer?”

  “Angleton at the CIA believed Golitsyn, but Hoover at the FBI believed Nosenko. For decades, that disagreement split the spook world, until a new crowd took over the CIA and decided to believe Nosenko. They fired Angleton.”

  “Do I have to know this?”

  “ ’Course not. But when you start giving me arcane, it’s important for you to understand that in this business there are a lot of bodies buried you don’t know about.”

  She said nothing. He let her brood about being caught with a superficial knowledge of the intelligence dodge, and they sat in silence waiting for the flight to be called. Finally she said, “So was Nosenko a dangle?”

  He was not sorry he’d bitten her head off for being a wiseass, because a little humility was called for in this business, but at least she hung in there and asked her question again. She could get herself and a lot of other people in deep trouble with a smattering of ignorance and her inclination to fake the rest. Her knowledge was shallow, a little book-learning here and a short briefing there, no depth of experience to call up when the puzzle got complicated. Great for a forty-five-second newsbreak, but deadly in an all-day seminar or a year’s sustained work on a book.

  “Neither one was a dangle, I think.” He wasn’t sure even now. “They were both real defectors, which seems like a contradiction. The lesson is,” he instructed, “students of spooks have to live with maddening contradictions. Because Angleton of the CIA was probably wrong about Nosenko, the crowd that came in during the seventies assumed he was a paranoid about penetrations. So they kicked him out—and later on, in came the moles like Ames. Jim Angleton was our counterpart to Shelepin, a scholar of deception, simultaneously right and wrong. Raised orchids.”

  “Why orchids?”

  “Orchids fake out wasps to get pollinated.”

  “I can handle that,” she said with her misplaced self-confidence. “It’s called an anti-syzygy, and I won the spelling bee in high school on that word.”

  “You must have been a pisser in high school.”

  “You and your friend the accountant had better give me a complete briefing on the sleeper. Every detail we know. Dominick wants to deal with me, not you. This is going to take more of my time than I thought.”

  “You tell Dominick we think maybe the handler got his ass blown off in Barbados?”

  “I didn’t want to alarm him. But Dominick is sensitive to the potential danger.” She fell silent. Irving hoped the banker hadn’t scared her off the story.

  “Lookit, some of this may be heavy-duty stuff,” he warned her. “If the sleeper has a big moneymaking operation going, using inside stuff from Russia, he could get very upset at our dangle.” His purpose in teaching her about the controversy over dangles was to alert her to the way they would use Dominick to stir up the KGB, the Feliks people, our CIA and Fed, and the sleeper himself. She had a lot to learn in a hurry. He, on the other hand, had no need to know how to spell “anti-syzygy.”

  He fed it to her gently. “I ran a Dialog search on the words ‘Fifth Directorate.’ ” He assumed everybody in the business knew about this computerized morgue, capable of instantly searching most of the key publications in the world. “Seems that a couple of months ago, the Director and his deputy got killed in an airplane accident. Within days, there was the explosion on Barbados that wiped out a guy I think was the sleeper’s handler. My guess is that the handler believed he had slipped past all central control, what with the top KGB guys who knew about the sleeper dead, and tried to put the squeeze on the sleeper and got blown to smithereens.”

  She had turned sickly pale. Irving sought to reassure her about her own safety; he didn’t want her throwing up on his shoes. “Nobody in the spook dodge ever knocks reporters off, Viv. We’re like family. But there’s sometimes collateral damage, and the sleeper is the sort who can inflict it. People we use take their chances.”

  She took her bag, went to the john, came back composed. Irving doubted that she was a druggie; maybe she’d taken a fast belt from a pint in her bag, or maybe, to be charitable, she’d just had a sudden, frightened urge to pee. Then he thought of Ace and the sizable advance they had a real shot at, as well as the way Viveca had this banker eating out of her hand.

  “There’s this joke,” Irving said. “Guy buys a yachtsman’s cap, and goes home to his mother, and says, ‘Looka-me, Ma, I’m a captain.’ And the old lady says ‘Son, by you, you’re a captain. And by me, your mother who loves you, you’re a captain. But by a captain—you’re no captain.’ ”

  “Very funny. But by a journalist, I’m no journalist.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She missed the point, and the damn joke did damage rather than smoothed things over. “What I meant was, by a spook you’re no spook. You did a pretty good job as a journalist today. Damn good job. You charmed the pants off this guy, which I might not have been able to do.”

  “You couldn’t even get in to see him.” That was a sign of life; she was up and beginning to take nourishment.

  “Like I say, you have your advantages.”

  “Your brains and my legs, you mean?”

  “Don’t start with the feminism, I wrote the book.”

  “You know what? I didn’t read that book, I just sort of flipped through it to say I did, like everybody else. And you know what else? Because they fired Angleton, counterintelligence went to hell and the Sovs penetrated the Agency with their mole Ames. And when Ames gave them the names of our agents in the Kremlin, they turned them around and fed us back misinformation for years. That’s what else. And I didn’t get that from a damn textbook, I got it from a network reporter who covers intelligence.”

  He pretended to be impressed at the ass-covering line some buddy of the Agency’s had given her easily duped colleague. She used “misinformation” when she meant “disinformation”—data fed back with the strategic intent to deceive—but he bit his tongue at his urge to correct her; she needed a little victory, and he had no need to start another fight.

  They listened to the flight being called. The ticket taker took the tickets, the stews now called flight attendants smiled them aboard, and the silver-haired pilot stood behind them to get a look at the celebrity passenger.

  “Welcome aboard, Ms Farr,” the pilot said, touching his fingertips to his flight cap.

 
Viveca jerked a thumb in the direction of her companion and said, “By him, you’re no captain.”

  Irving allowed to himself he might have been wrong about her having no sense of humor.

  LANGLEY

  “I don’t like it,” Director Barclay said for the record. “I don’t want us to have any part of it.”

  The Deputy Director for Operations, briefing the DCI and the Agency’s chief lawyer on the awkward request from Walter Clauson in counterintelligence, agreed. “The Agency has no official interest anymore in counterespionage within the United States. That’s now the FBI’s job, with oversight in the intelligence committees of Congress.” He turned to the attorney. “Harry, you’re the secretary of this meeting, but beyond that—do you agree that Clauson is overstepping in seeing this banker from Memphis?”

  The general counsel was well aware he was in the meeting to make the notes that would cover everybody’s ass. He also knew that when the DDO used the word “official” in “no official interest,” that meant the Agency was interested as hell but was determined to take no steps that could get the Director at cross purposes with the FBI or in hot water with Congress. And, because he had drafted two of them, he knew that a presidential “finding,” citing national security needs, could override the restriction on the CIA’s counterespionage activities within the United States.

  He therefore demurred, pointing out that Walter Clauson had acted by the book after receiving the call from one Edward Dominick of Memphis. “When a respectable citizen calls, especially one who has cooperated with the Agency in the past, and asks to come in for a chat about a suspicion in his mind—it’s quite proper to see him.”

  “Then you be in Clauson’s office, Harry, when this fellow walks in,” Barclay told him. “And you be sure Clauson listens, and says exactly the appropriate thing, and you be there until the visitor leaves. And give me a transcript of the tape of that meeting with a cover memo from you suitable for Congressional oversight.”

  Why so hypersensitive? “Because I don’t fully trust Clauson,” she said in her bark-off style. “He’s the last of the old Angleton crowd that saw moles under every bed. I’m told they ruined the lives of dozens of fine public servants with their paranoid theories.”

  “There are no more penetration agents in the Agency,” the DDO assured her. “I’ll stake my reputation on that.”

  “Thanks.” Dorothy Barclay looked at counsel and said slowly, so he could get it down, “Though a sleeper, in certain circumstances, could do even more damage than a mole. Are we still supporting that Golitsyn, by the way?”

  Yes, the lawyer informed her, the old defector was in a Southern state under a false identity, part of the Witness Protection Program, personally overseen by a retired operator. “He publishes don’t-trust-the-Russians tracts under his own name. Rails at the disinformation scheme supposedly dreamed up a generation ago and still being carried on.”

  “Thirty years at the public trough—what a waste,” she said. “And how long will it take to get rid of Clauson?”

  The DDO pointed out that one member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was still high on him but that member was being rotated off the committee this year.

  “I’m directing you to build a firewall between us and this fellow Dominick’s interest in a potential Russian agent over here,” Director Barclay told her deputy, which the general counsel noted down. “Tell the Memphis banker to take whatever he has to the FBI, if he wants.”

  The general counsel was seated in Clauson’s small office. Counterspy Clauson’s job had been downgraded, as had most of that discredited division. In many ways he had been encouraged to take early retirement, but had clung to the old life protected by a veiled threat of age discrimination.

  “It’s good of you to take the time to protect my interests in the meeting requested by this banker,” Clauson said.

  “You did the right thing,” the lawyer replied, which was the sentence everybody in the Agency wanted to hear. “Reputable American citizen calls, wants to discuss a matter about a fellow with insomnia, apparently a signal that you’re supposed to understand. He’s been told to see you, and you alert your superior. All by the book.”

  “And your advice as to what I should do?”

  “Listen to what he has to say, Walt, but be noncommittal. No Agency involvement. If any wrongdoing to report, see the FBI. Should be a short meeting. Do you know this guy? How come he had your name?”

  “Four or five years ago, he was vice-chairman of a group sponsored by the American Bankers Association to visit Kiev. He contacted us for information, and asked if he should take a course in Russian at a local university before leaving the next spring. Unfortunately, without thinking, I said he should.”

  “Why unfortunately?”

  Clauson looked slightly embarrassed. “In Kiev, they speak Ukrainian. Well, never hurts to know a little Russian.”

  What the counsel would have liked to know was whether Clauson had used Dominick in any way on his Kiev trip or had debriefed him on his way back. But Clauson was not volunteering any further information, and the general counsel was not about to ask anything that would create stacks of paperwork.

  Dominick’s entry elevated the officials from their seats and activated the recorder. The banker from Memphis struck the lawyer as a banker from Memphis: hearty, outgoing, pleasantly rumpled mid-American conservative on the surface, probably concealing a native cunning. The printout on him that the counsel had called up beforehand revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Born in Dyersburg, Tennessee, forty-four years ago, father a textile plant worker. A student deferment kept him out of the Army during Vietnam; later, Dominick showed an aptitude for international finance and was graduated near the top of his class at Wharton. Respectable widower, best country club, appropriate mid-six-figure income, net worth nearly $7 million though mainly in unregistered stock of his own bank. Never a brush with the law, not even a speeding ticket.

  Clauson introduced the general counsel as the general counsel, no name. In one of those resonant voices that big men cultivate, Dominick said, “My purpose here is to tell you about an investigative enterprise that has been brought to me, and to make certain it does not work at cross-purposes to anything being done by the U.S. government.”

  “Perhaps the State Department would be a better place to begin,” said Clauson. “Or Commerce, if it involves overseas business.”

  “It has to do with a spy, so I came here. Are you aware of something called a sleeper agent, and a group in Russia called the Feliks people?”

  The counsel noted Clauson’s poker face. “Go on,” the counterspy said.

  “I have been told, by two well-known American journalists, that the KGB once placed what is called a ‘sleeper’ agent here. Seems he was activated a few years ago to manage and conceal the assets of the collapsing Communist Party in Russia. Does any of this ring a bell with you?”

  “We’re listening.”

  “They want me to impersonate this agent. Run a similar operation on a smaller scale, protecting myself from loss with hedges and swaps, but imitating both him and his method of operation. The idea is to attract approaches from those who are searching him out, and ultimately elicit a feeler from him.” He paused, looking from one to the other. “The journalistic goal is to expose the secret activities of what may be one of the richest individuals in the world.”

  Clauson just looked back at him. After a longer pause, Dominick said: “What I want to know from you gentlemen is this: does this conflict with anything our government is doing to apprehend him? Will I be at any risk of interfering with any ongoing investigation?” In the ensuing silence, the banker spoke more plainly: “In a nutshell, is this an entirely legitimate venture, and if I decide to pursue it, how can I keep out of trouble with the law?”

  “A banker friend of mine once gave me an enamel ashtray,” said Clauson. “On it were written the words ‘Everything is sweetened by risk.’ ”

  “I unders
tand financial risk,” the banker said cheerily. “I just don’t want to run the risk of getting my ass shot off or my reputation besmirched by some government agency.”

  “I cannot confirm or deny the existence of a KGB sleeper agent in the United States,” Clauson said slowly, as if reciting from memory. “You are one hundred percent on your own.” He rose and extended a hand. “Thank you and good afternoon.”

  “Sit down, sir. I pay a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year in federal taxes, and I think that entitles me to a moment or so more of your time.”

  Observing all this, the general counsel was gripped by the inescapable feeling that he was witness to another charade, this one more complex than the earlier meeting in the Director’s office. For example, if Clauson had subjected this fellow to six months of unnecessary language study, some bantering reference would surely have been made at the outset. What counsel was hearing, and what was being dutifully tape-recorded, was not spontaneous conversation; the lawyer had heard enough tapings to know when he was listening to deliberate dictation on both sides. He interjected nothing and waited for the charade to play out.

  “Are you telling me,” asked Dominick, “in the presence of this attorney as a witness, that my impersonation of this sleeper agent will in no way conflict with any operation the Central Intelligence Agency has under way?”

  “I am telling you, my heavily taxed fellow citizen, that I cannot confirm or deny the existence of the operation you mentioned.”

  “And if this journalistic enterprise entraps a foreign agent here in control of vast sums, which is surely in the public interest—would I become the target of an investigation?”

  Clauson turned to the general counsel. “Perhaps you are in a better position to give this gentleman the legal advice he seeks.”