One of Macdonald’s problems was that he had no reasonable means of gaining access to the person of Igor Komarov. Marchbanks calculated that a personal in-depth interview with the leader of the Union of Patriotic Forces might give some clue about whether the man who portrayed himself as an admittedly right-wing Conservative and Nationalist hid beneath his veneer the ambitions of a raging Nazi.
He thought he might know someone who could get that interview. The previous winter he had been on a pheasant shoot and among the guests had been the newly appointed editor of Britain’s leading Conservative daily newspaper. On July 21 Marchbanks called the editor, reminded him of the pheasant shoot, and set up a lunch date for the following day at his club in St. James’s.
Moscow, July 1985
THE escape of Gordievsky caused a blazing row in Moscow. It took place on the last day of the month in the personal office on the third floor of the KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinski Square of the chairman of the KGB himself
It was a gloomy office that had in its time been the den of some of the bloodiest monsters the planet has known. Orders had been signed at the T-shaped desk that caused men to shriek under torture, to die of hypothermia in the wastelands of Siberia or kneeling in a bleak courtyard with a pistol bullet in the brain.
General Viktor Chebrikov did not quite have those powers anymore. Things were changing and execution orders had to be approved by the president himself. But for traitors they would still be signed, and the conference of that day would ensure that more were yet to come.
Very much on the defensive in front of the chairman’s desk was the head of the First Chief Directorate, Vladimir Kryuchkov. It was his men who had fouled up so badly. On the attack was the head of the Second Chief Directorate, the short, chunky, bull-shouldered General Vitali Boyarov, and he was spitting angry.
“The whole thing has been a complete … razebaistvo,” he stormed. Even among the generals, the use of locker-room language was very much the thing, a proof of soldierly crudeness and working-class origins. The word means “fuckup.”
“It won’t happen again,” muttered Kryuchkov defensively.
“Let us agree then,” said the Chairman, “on a structure from which we do not deviate. On the sovereign territory of the USSR traitors will be arrested and interrogated by the Second Chief Directorate. If there are ever any more traitors identified, that is what will happen. Understood?”
“There will be more,” muttered Kryuchkov. “Thirteen more.”
There was silence in the room for several seconds.
“Are you trying to tell us something, Vladimir Aleksandrovitch?” asked the Chairman quietly.
That was when Kryuchkov revealed what had happened at Chadwick’s in Washington six weeks earlier. Boyarov let out a long whistle.
Within a week General Chebrikov, flushed with his agency’s success, revealed all to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Meanwhile, General Boyarov was preparing his Rat-catcher Commission, the team who would interrogate the traitors as and when they were identified and arrested. To head the team he wanted someone special. The file was on his desk, a colonel, only forty but experienced, an interrogator who never failed.
Born 1945 in Molotov, formerly Perm and now called Perm again since Stalin’s henchman Molotov fell into disgrace in 1957. Son of a decorated soldier who had survived and returned home to sire a son.
Little Tolya grew up under strict official indoctrination in the gray northern city. The notes recalled that his fanatical father loathed Khrushchev for criticizing the hero Stalin and that the boy had inherited and abided by all his father’s attitudes.
In 1963 he had been called up at eighteen and seconded to the Interior Troops of the Interior Ministry, the MVD. These troops were assigned to protect prisons, labor camps, and detention centers and were used as antiriot troops. The young soldier had taken to the work as a duck to water.
In those units the spirit of repression and mass control prevailed. So well did the boy do that he received a rare reward, a transfer to the Leningrad Military Institute of Foreign Languages. This was a cover for the KGB training academy, known in the agency as “the manger” because it turned out constant fodder for the ranks. Graduates of the Kormushka were famous for their ruthlessness, dedication, and loyalty. The young man shone again, and was again rewarded.
This time it was a posting to the Moscow Oblast (city and region) branch of the Second Chief Directorate where he spent four years earning a fine reputation as a clever desk officer, thorough investigator, and tough interrogator. Indeed he so specialized in the latter that he wrote a highly regarded paper on it, which gained him a transfer to the national headquarters of the Second Chief Directorate.
Since then he had never left Moscow, working out of headquarters mainly against the hated Americans, covering their embassy and tailing their diplomatic personnel. At one point he spent a year in the Investigative Service, before returning to the Second CD. Superior officers and instructors had taken the time to note in the files his passionate hatred of Anglo-Americans, Jews, spies, and traitors, and an unexplained but acceptable level of sadism in his interrogations.
General Boyarov closed the dossier with a smile. He had his man. If quick results were wanted and no messing about, Colonel Anatoli Grishin was the man for him.
¯
OF the remaining thirteen, one was lucky, or smart. Sergei Bokhan was an officer of Soviet military intelligence, posted in Athens. He was abruptly ordered back to Moscow on the grounds that his son was having exam problems at his military academy. He happened to know the boy was doing fine. Having deliberately missed the booked plane home, he contacted the CIA station in Athens and was brought out of there in a hurry.
The other twelve were caught. Some were inside the USSR, others abroad. Those abroad were ordered home on a variety of pretexts, all false. All were arrested on arrival.
Boyarov had chosen well. All twelve were intensively interrogated and all twelve confessed. The alternative was even more intensive interrogation. Two escaped with years in slave labor camps and now live in America. The other ten were tortured and shot.
CHAPTER 5
HALFWAY UP ST. JAMES’S STREET, HEADING NORTH WITH the one-way traffic, is an anonymous gray stone building with a blue door and some potted green shrubs outside. It bears no name. Those who know what and where it is will have no trouble finding it; those who do not will be those who have no invitation to enter, and will pass on by. Brooks’s Club does not advertise.
It is however a favorite watering hole of civil servants from Whitehall not far away. It was here that Jeffrey Marchbanks met the editor of the Daily Telegraph for lunch on July 22.
Brian Worthing was forty-eight and had been a journalist for over twenty years when, two years earlier, the Canadian proprietor Conrad Black had headhunted him from the Times to take over the vacant editorship. Worthing’s background was as a foreign and war correspondent. He had covered the Falklands War as a young man, his first real war, and later the Gulf in 1990-1991.
The table Marchbanks had secured for himself was a small one in a corner, far enough from the others not to be overheard. Not that anyone would dream of attempting such a thing. In Brooks’s a chap would never dream of eavesdropping another chap’s conversation, but old habits die hard.
“I think I probably mentioned at Spurnal that I was with the Foreign Office,” said Marchbanks over the potted shrimp.
“I recall that you did,” said Worthing. He had been of two minds about whether to accept the lunch invitation at all. His day would as always last from ten in the morning until after sundown and taking two hours out for lunch—three if you counted the haul from Canary Wharf up to the West End and back—had better be worth it.
“Well, actually I work at another building further down the river from King Charles Street and on the other side,” said Marchbanks.
“Ah,” said the editor. He knew all about Vauxhall Cross though he had never been in it. Perhaps the lunch was
going to produce something after all.
“My particular concern is Russia.”
“I don’t envy you,” said Worthing, demolishing the last shrimp with a slice of thin brown bread. He was a big man with a notable appetite. “Going to hell in a hand-basket, I would have thought.”
“Something like that. Since the death of Cherkassov the next prospect seems to be the forthcoming presidential elections.”
The two men fell silent as a young waitress brought the lamb chops and vegetables with a carafe of the house claret. Marchbanks poured.
“Bit of a foregone conclusion,” said Worthing.
“Our view precisely. The Communist revival has fizzled over the years and the reformers are at sixes and sevens. There seems to be nothing to stop Igor Komarov from taking the presidency.”
“Is that bad?” asked the editor. “The last piece I saw about him, he appeared to be talking some sense. Get the currency back in shape, halt the slide to chaos, give the mafia a hard time. That sort of thing.”
Worthing prided himself on being a man of direct speech and tended to talk in staccato.
“Exactly, sounds wonderful. But he’s still a bit of an enigma. What does he really intend to do? How, specifically does he intend to do it? He says he despises foreign credits, but how can he get by without them? More to the point, will he try to negate Russia’s debts by paying them off in worthless rubles?”
“He wouldn’t dare,” said ‘Worthing. He knew the Telegraph had a resident correspondent in Moscow but he had not filed a piece on Komarov for some time. Perhaps this lunch was not a waste after all.
“Wouldn’t he now?” countered Marchbanks. “We don’t know. Some of his speeches are pretty extreme, but then in private conversation he persuades visitors he’s not such an ogre after all. Which is the real man?”
“I could ask our Moscow man to seek an interview.”
“Unlikely to be granted, I’m afraid,” suggested the spymaster. “I believe just about every resident correspondent in Moscow does the same regularly. He only grants interviews with exceptional rarity and purports to loathe the foreign press.”
“I say, there’s treacle tart,” said Worthing. “I’ll take it.”
The British in middle age are seldom more content than when being offered the sort of food they were fed in nursery school. The waitress brought treacle tart for both.
“So, how to get at the man?” asked Worthing.
“He has a young publicity adviser whose advice he seems to listen to. Boris Kuznetsov. Very bright, educated at one of the American Ivy League colleges. If there’s a key, he’s it. We understand he reads the western press every day and particularly likes the articles by your man Jefferson.”
Mark Jefferson was a staffer and regular contributor to the main feature page of the Telegraph. He dealt with politics, domestic and foreign, was a fine polemicist and a trenchant conservative. Worthing chewed on his treacle tart.
“It’s an idea,” he said at length.
“You see,” said Marchbanks, warming to his ploy, “resident correspondents in Moscow are two a penny. But a star feature writer coming to do a major portrait of the coming leader, man-of-tomorrow sort of thing—that might appeal.”
Worthing thought it over.
“Perhaps we should think of pen-portraits of all three candidates. Keep a sort of balance.”
“Good idea,” said Marchbanks, who did not think so. “But Komarov is the one who seems to fascinate people, one way or the other. The other two are ciphers. Shall we go upstairs for coffee?”
“Yes, it’s not a bad idea,” agreed Worthing when they were seated in the upstairs drawing room beneath the portrait of the Dilettantes. “Touched as I am by your concern for our circulation figures, what do you want him asked?”
Marchbanks grinned at the directness of the editor.
“All right. Yes, we would like to know a few things that we can feed to our masters. Preferably something not in the article itself. They can also read the Telegraph, and do. What does the man really intend? What about the minority ethnic groups? There are ten million of them in Russia, and Komarov is a Russian supremacist. How does he really intend to produce the rebirth to glory of the Russian nation? In a word, the man’s a mask. What lies behind the mask? Is there a secret agenda?”
“If there is,” mused Worthing, “why should he reveal all to Jefferson?”
“One never knows. Men get carried away.”
“How does one get to this Kuznetsov?”
“Your man in Moscow will know him. A personal letter from Jefferson would probably be well received.”
“All right,” said Worthing as they descended the wide staircase to the lower hall. “I can see a center-page spread in my mind’s eye. Not bad. If the man has something to say. I’ll get on to our Moscow office.”
“If it works, I’d like to have a word with Jefferson afterward.”
“Debriefing? Huh. He’s pretty prickly, you know.”
“I shall be all olive oil,” said Marchbanks.
They parted on the pavement. Worthing’s driver spotted him and glided up from his illegal parking spot opposite the Suntory to carry him back to Canary Wharf in Dockland. The spymaster decided to walk off the treacle tart and the wine.
Washington, September 1985
BEFORE he even began spying, back in 1984, Ames had applied for the post of Soviet Branch chief at the CIA’s big station in Rome. In September 1985 he learned he had the job.
This put him in a quandary. He did not know then that the KGB was unwillingly going to put him in extreme danger by picking up all the men he had betrayed with such speed.
The Rome slot would remove him from Langley and access to the 301 files and the Soviet Branch of the Counterintelligence Group attached to the SE Division. On the other hand, Rome was considered an attractive place to live and a prime assignment. He consulted the Russians.
Their attitude was approving. For one thing they had months of investigations, arrests, and interrogations ahead of them. So vast was the harvest that Ames had brought them and, for security reasons, so small the Kolokol Group working on that material in Moscow, that the full analysis could take years.
For in the interim Ames had provided much more. Among his secondary and tertiary deliveries to his cutout, Chuvakhin, was background material on just about every case officer of any note in Langley. There were not only full résumés of each of these officers, with their postings and achievements, but photos as well. Forewarned by this, the KGB would be able to spot these CIA officers whenever and wherever they showed up.
Also, the Russians estimated that in Rome, one of the key centers in the SE Division, Ames would have access to all CIA operations and collaborations with its allies along the Mediterranean from Spain to Greece, an area of vital interest to Moscow.
Finally, they knew they could have much easier access to Ames in Rome than in Washington where there was always the danger of the FBI spotting them meeting. They urged him to take the posting.
So that same September Ames went off to language school to learn Italian.
At Langley the full import of the catastrophe about to hit the agency had not started to impinge. Two or three of their best agents in Russia had seemingly gone out of contact, which was worrying but not yet disastrous.
Among the personal dossiers Ames had passed to the KGB was that of one young man just transferred to the SE Division whom Ames referred to, because word had run like wildfire through the office, as a rising star. His name was Jason Monk.
¯
OLD Gennadi had been picking mushrooms in those woods for years. In retirement he used nature’s cost-free crop as a supplement to his pension, either taking them fresh to the best restaurants of Moscow or drying them in bunches for the few delicatessens that remained.
The thing about mushrooms is, you have to be out early in the morning, before dawn if possible. They grow in the night and after dawn the voles and squirrels get at them or, e
ven worse, other mushroom pickers. Russians love mushrooms.
On the morning of July 24 Gennadi took his bicycle and his dog and rode from the small village where he lived to a forest he knew where they tended to grow thickly on summer nights. Before the dew was gone, he expected to have a good basketful.
The forest he chose was just off the great Minsk Highway where the trucks rolled and growled west toward the capital of Belarus. He rode into the wood, parked his bicycle by a tree, took his rush basket, and set off through the wood.
It was half an hour, with his basket half full and the sun just rising, that his dog whined and headed into a clump of shrubs. He had trained the mutt to sniff out mushrooms, so clearly he had found something good.
As he neared the spot he caught the sweet sickly odor. He knew that smell. Had he not smelt it enough, years before as a teenage soldier all the way from the Vistula to Berlin?
The body had been dumped, or had crawled there and died. It was a scrawny old man, massively discolored, eyes and mouth open. The birds had had the eyes. Three steel teeth glinted with dew. The body was stripped to the waist but an old overcoat was in a heap nearby. Gennadi sniffed again. In that heat, it told him, several days.
He pondered for a while. He was of the generation that recalled civic duty, but mushrooms were still mushrooms, and there was nothing he could do for the fellow. A hundred yards away through the forest he could hear the rumble of the trucks on the road from Moscow to Minsk.
He finished filling his mushroom basket and pedaled back to his village. There he put his crop out to dry in the sun and reported to the small and ramshackle selsovet, the local council office. It was not much, but it had a phone.
He dialed 02 and the call was taken by the police central control office.
“I’ve found a body,” he said.
“Name?” said the voice.
“How the hell should I know? He’s dead.”
“Not his, idiot, yours.”
“Do you want me to hang up?” said Gennadi.
There was a sigh.