Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  “I passed along a tip from an old pal.”

  “You know what? You and I underestimated each other.” The banker put out a feeler: “What do you say I stop calling you ‘brother Fein’ and you stop calling me ‘Slow Eddie’?”

  “Tsadeal. But time’s a-wastin’.”

  Liana, ignored by Nikolai Davidov, resolved to retaliate by fixing her attention on Irving Fein and the way he was working his way around the room. Watching him at work would be a journalism lesson. Why had he not approached the American Director of Central Intelligence? Perhaps because they were working closely together and did not want others to know. Although Nikolai wanted her to believe that Fein was a CIA agent in the search for the sleeper, Liana was not so sure; she decided on the direct approach and went directly to the source Fein was avoiding.

  “Your appointment gave heart to many women around the world,” she said to Dorothy Barclay, and then asserted her anticommunist credentials. She awaited the what-brings-you-to-America reply. When it came, Liana said: “The surface reason is to speak at a seminar for journalists in Syracuse. The real reason is to make contact with a Russian agent who has disappeared.”

  “It’s wonderful that your country now has a free press,” said Barclay, veering to another subject, “after so many decades of occupation by the Nazis and the communists.”

  Liana would not be so easily parried. “I would be interested in talking to somebody here who might know about such a deep-cover agent.”

  “The FBI, but don’t tell them I sent you. Or better still, try Irving Fein over there. God knows what you could learn from him. And you’ll find he’s not only a great journalist, but a wonderful man.” The DCI beckoned across the room, and the reporter came over. “Irving, this young woman and you share an abiding interest in the same subject. Help each other.” She slipped away.

  “When you and I had that great lunch a year ago,” he said, “you were a knockout. Why do you make yourself look like such a schlump?”

  “What means ‘schlump’?”

  He ignored the counterquestion and came at her with another. “You’re after the sleeper, same as me, and you’re important enough to have Davidov follow you all the way over here. Why? What makes you such a big deal to the Russians?”

  She admired such directness. “My program is not limited to Riga. The signal carries to Petersburg and is talked about in Moscow.”

  “So who’s Madame Nina?”

  She blinked; he was so direct so quickly, here at a dinner party. Was this how journalism was done here? “I don’t know. Yet.”

  “You got a line on this guy Berensky over here?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yes. Where are you staying?”

  She told him the name of her inexpensive hotel; he described it as a “fleabag,” another word to look up. Then he said, “Lookit”—yet another word she did not know—“I like you. You can trust me. We’ll leave here together tonight. We’ll take a long walk down Fifth Avenue, which is safe enough, and we’ll compare notes, and then we’ll find a bar and talk some more. It’ll drive your friend Davidov up the wall.”

  “Yes to everything.”

  “Good. I’ll leave you alone till it’s time to go. I checked the place cards and you’re sitting between me and the German. Talk to von Schwebel about television stuff—it couldn’t hurt your career—and he may be worth cultivating about Berensky. This is not a social occasion. Use every minute. Remember why you’re here.”

  She nodded vigorously, feeling much better. She had told him, through Mike Shu, that the sleeper was named Berensky; Fein owed her that. She went to the bathroom—an amazing, spacious room, all marble and mirrors and a tub with marvelous nozzles inside—and made the concession to vanity of applying a small amount of eyeshadow.

  At the dinner table, flanked by Liana and the senator’s shrewd wife, Evangeline, who worked a motherly shtick, Irving treated himself to his favorite mental party game: who was going to wind up in the sack with whom—not necessarily that night, but soon.

  Ace, pushing eighty, was out of it; all cattle and no hat, or whatever the Texans said. His dinner partner, the sexy French actress, was probably too weak from hunger to make it with anybody, but the likeliest to bed her down was von Schwebel. He was working at it right now, stealing glances at her; guys with clout in showbiz like him didn’t miss.

  Viveca and Edward—Slow Eddie wasn’t so slow—either were already having what used to be called a torrid affair or, if Mike Shu was right, were about to make it, maybe that very night for the first damn time. Viveca was watching her boy watch the others: seeing a person you are about to get involved with interacting with others at a dinner party was not a deliberate tease but nevertheless a turn-on. The odious mental picture drew a sigh from Irving; Dominick was too big for her, a bit too detached, and she’d wind up hurt, which she couldn’t complain about, because she would have brought it on herself. That was some consolation to Irving.

  Davidov of the KGB was going to jump on the bones of Sirkka von Schwebel. The way the two of them avoided each other—maybe one brief conversational pass—was a dead giveaway, considering all they had to say to each other about economic intelligence. Moreover, Irving could sense the tension. Next to his corruption sniffer, his sexual-tension sensor was his major reporting asset. Hard to put a finger on how he could tell, but Irving was certain the KGB man was going to waste a lot of time in America in the sack with the Finnish financial whiz. That was fine; it would cut down his snooping around after Liana Krumins.

  He put down one of his three forks—Ace was big on silverware and glassware—closed his eyes, and gently banged his palm on the side of his head five, six times. The answer did not come as to what made this Latvian kid valuable to both the KGB and the Feliks organization. He looked to his left at her, as she was getting her second wind, talking animatedly to Karl von Schwebel, as Irving had instructed, about the radar base the Russians still held a lease on in Latvia.

  He couldn’t tell in that outfit if Liana had much of a figure, but she was fresh and eager, and maybe Irving would get lucky. No; he put that thought out of his mind; worse than dishonorable with a source, it would be a mistake for him to knock over a girl half his age. Certainly not tonight. Something could happen with her in Syracuse, where he would call a buddy on the faculty of the journalism school to arrange for him to give a lecture during her seminar.

  Even then, he promised himself he would make a move on her only if it moved the story along and she expressed an interest: maybe she’d open up to him when she was opening up to him. The Latvian girl was one of the good guys in all this, he was sure; something about her reverberated with journalistic integrity, a value akin to virginity, and it was not his way to violate either. He noted that even Dominick, as he was getting ready to have his way with Viveca’s body, kept stealing observations of Liana in the mirror, not so much attracted as fascinated.

  Dorothy Barclay? She would sleep with her lifelong companion in Washington that night, a relationship Irving had not exposed when it might have been a story long ago; he liked both women, and personal loyalty sometimes got in the way of printing gossip. He justified that lapse by thinking how it had ultimately paid off with a bigger story.

  The senator would sleep with his wife. Harry and Evangeline Evashevsky had enjoyed each other’s company for forty years, complaining but not meaning it all the way, and each was the repository of a different set of the nation’s secrets. Irving had to smile. If those two ever disgorged what they knew about who was doing what to whom in Washington and Moscow, the intelligence establishment in the United States would be in the same leakage mess as its counterpart in Russia.

  Ace raised a champagne flute. “This evening is symbolic of the new era, which some call ‘post–Cold War,’ and which someone will soon find a really good name for in the title of a book.

  “Here, at one table, are the top intelligence brains of the twentieth century’s great powers. In some matters, and
I shall not elaborate, they still compete, although now as peaceful rivals and not as angry adversaries. In other fields, such as antiterrorism and international crime, these intelligence professionals are joined as Globocops. But who am I, a mere literary man, to toast this unique new relationship? I yield to the senator from Nebraska, who was overseeing espionage when Dorothy Barclay and Nikolai Davidov were teenagers dreaming of being lawyers and epistemologists.”

  The senator rose to give the toast to the two spymasters, recalling the duplicities of the past, noting the tentative and limited working-together of the present, looking toward the cooperation of the future. Nice toast, spiced with a couple of anecdotes Ace had heard before, and so carefully couched that it would not get him into trouble if the two nations found themselves at loggerheads overnight. Davidov responded informally and briefly; Barclay rose and at some length recalled the Russian help at a time of danger for the U.S. President, a message of appreciation that Ace presumed Davidov would carry back to his superiors in Lubyanka, if he wasn’t already wired and transmitting. He wondered how many recorders were going in vans on the street outside.

  Later, seeing Irving and Liana to the door, Ace said: “Enjoy the party?”

  “It was an honor to be included,” the Latvian reporter said.

  “Advanced the story,” said Irving.

  NEW YORK

  “These are not exactly the secrets of the Republic,” the Federal Reserve’s enforcement chief told Irving, pushing the printouts across the coffee-shop table, “but you don’t want to get the butter from your bialy all over them.”

  The reporter stuffed the sheaf into the pocket of his overcoat, hanging within reach on a wall hook. “What do they tell me?”

  “There were two hedge funds and one bank that led the parade in buying marks and selling dollars in the last quarter of ’89,” the Fed official, Hanrahan, said. “Really heavy plunge by the Vasco da Gama Fund, maybe came out ahead by two billion bucks, if they were leveraged out to ninety-five percent. Not that big a fund, either, and they were new back then.”

  “What do we know about them?”

  “Not a hell of a lot. This isn’t securities, with the SEC and registrations and stock exchange rules—this is the currency market, Irving, does a trillion dollars a day, and more on busy days. We miss a lot.”

  “You missed the whole Lavoro swindle. Billions to build Iraqi nukes through a hinky-dinky branch bank in Atlanta. Remember?”

  Hanrahan nodded grimly and stirred his coffee. “My belief that you are operating in the public interest is the only reason I’m stretching the rules a little to give you a look at the old trading.”

  “You were telling me what we know about Vasco da Gama. Italian outfit?”

  “No, a lot of the funds like the names of explorers. Like they’re going to find something. This one is headquartered in Liechtenstein, represented by a front-man lawyer there, with the ownership of the mutual fund in the Antilles. But the names listed there will just be nominees.”

  “So they made two billion dollars. Where did the money go?”

  “We spotted some big transfers late that year to U.S. banks—maybe half of it—and the biggest bite of that to Chicago National. Another to a multinational controlled by a shipping magnate. It’s all there in the printouts. For the overseas transfers, you’ll have to talk to the big ears.”

  “No Such Agency?” That was what the ever-eavesdropping NSA, or National Security Agency, was called. Irving didn’t like those high-budget snoops and had few contacts at their Fort Meade headquarters.

  Hanrahan nodded. “The other things I flagged in that stuff are, one, the Privet Fund had nearly four hundred million in currency profits the week the Berlin Wall fell, and two, that’s the outfit that’s been killing the competition in gold futures ever since. I have my eye on the Privet Fund managers, who mainly live in Coral Gables, because they’re so good at guessing Fed actions. I put the key transactions in there even though you didn’t ask for it.”

  “And now it’s payback time, hunh?”

  “Exactly,” said the official. “You got us all steamed up about a mole in the Fed and now I got to show progress. The Chairman nearly peed in his pants, never saw him so excited. What do you have in the way of specifics?”

  “Has to be somebody who started making real money in ’89,” Irving said. “You got a Fed governor, or a staffer in close, had his net worth increase then, or was doing a lot of traveling to the Bahamas or Switzerland?”

  “We’re working on that. I need a name, Irving, or a few names.”

  “I don’t have it. But I got a lead. Check to see if you have any old sea dogs in sensitive spots, maybe Navy veterans, or yachtsmen. Or a retired Marine.”

  “What’s the basis of your lead?”

  Irving shook his head; he couldn’t very well quote a poem. “Another word you want to run through your computers is ‘albatross.’ ”

  “That’s what you’ll be to me—hung around my neck—if none of this pans out.”

  “Baloney. Who’s gonna prove a negative, that there’s no mole? You get a safe run on this clear through to retirement.”

  “Yeah, but I got this conscience. Irving, what does your sniffer say?”

  The reporter wiped his nose. “You got a mole, all right. Oceangoing. Look into that.”

  “We’re getting some traction,” said Michael Shu on one of his trips to New York. “The Privet Fund? Same outfit that cashed in on the drop in aluminum when the sleeper went into business. And the banking relationships of the two funds are almost parallel.”

  “Which means?”

  “Irv, it’s as if somebody said not to put all the action in one fund, to split it between two.”

  “Why not three?”

  “I’m way ahead of you. We’re running a computer check of the transfer patterns of these two funds against similar-sized funds, or against funds and banks that changed hands during Berensky’s launch. The two funds, plus the Antilles bank—it’s like a Rosetta stone. We have all sorts of leads to real places that made real money.”

  “You got a list of every political event in ’89 and ’90 that affected the markets? Ones that Berensky would know about in advance?”

  “Right out of the almanac,” Mike said, “and we’re cross-checking the activity on each by the suspect funds and bank.”

  “Now fast-forward ahead a few years. He kills his KGB handler in Barbados, and kills the banker in Bern, and that costs him his stream of inside poop from Russia.” Irving had the feeling they were indeed getting what Shu called traction. “He begins using his KGB connections in the West. You got anything on somebody making big bucks anticipating the Fed’s changes in interest rates?”

  “We’re working on that. Just a matter of time.”

  “Same with the Bundesbank?”

  “Haven’t started on that yet, but it won’t be a big deal to get.”

  Irving looked at his telephone. “That phone, as you know, is tapped.” His counterspy equipment, an electronic toy that had cost a bundle, indicated at least two taps on the same number.

  “I never say anything on it, Irv, or fax you here. Everything by snail mail, like you said, or if it’s urgent, FedEx.”

  “I want you to call me on it from Memphis,” Irving told him, “and say you got a lead on the Memphis Merchants Bank as a possible sleeper front. Don’t use the word ‘sleeper.’ Instead, get cute—’the one who snores,’ which should make it seem like you’re worried about being overheard. And then ask me if I have a lead on the old Mariner.”

  Shu made a note. “That’ll get somebody suspecting Dominick is Berensky, maybe, if the guy doing the tap doesn’t screw up. Who’s the old Mariner?”

  “That’s right near the top of the dunno sheet. It may be the code name of somebody in contact with the sleeper.”

  Irving hoped that by now Berensky, and perhaps the KGB, and maybe the Feliks people out of Riga—and maybe even the FBI at Dorothy’s request—would be attempt
ing to tap the Memphis operation’s phones. The countertap activity, including bug sweeps twice daily and a Taiwanese encryption chip to block the FBI’s access to a clipper chip, was to mimic the security at the real sleeper’s home base. Any business office so secure would be suspect to all interested parties, especially when it became known to the parties listening to Irving’s home phone that Shu was staking it out. Only Berensky himself could then be sure the Memphis bank was not the sleeper’s front.

  His purpose in the whole impersonation business was to force Berensky into initiating contact with Dominick. The trick was in deceiving all the others tracking Berensky into the belief that Dominick was their man. Irving was not competing with other news organizations, which would require him to hoard what little he knew, but was competing with world spookery, drawn up in vast, cumbrous array; that’s what made this enterprise so different and required such an elaborate trap. As long as the others did not suspect Irving suspected his conversations were overheard, his home telephone would be his double-agent conduit, feeding disinformation back to his adversaries. By transmitting back to the surveillers the pretense that he knew who Mariner was—the mole at the Fed—he might flush out the real Berensky himself.

  Irving asked himself what he would do if he were the sleeper and found out that the investigators were closing in on Mariner at the Fed. Though a protective cutout was a possibility, the reporter presumed that Berensky and Mariner knew each other’s real identities. With the fate of Clauson in mind, he said aloud, “I’d rub him out.”

  “You’d what? You’re mumbling, Irving.”

  “Need a rubdown. Gonna go to the gym.” He caught himself asking himself: What was the number for disinformation?

  NEW YORK

  Davidov told the statuesque Finn he hoped she had not found it too difficult getting away from her husband for a few hours.