***
All bureaucracies have rules. One rule is universal. No surprises.
Maxwell Fajans, CIA Chief of Station, US Embassy, Moscow, was not expecting any surprises. He was actually having a very good Thursday morning and he planned on mentioning it to God the following Sunday. Raised strict Lutheran by a family whose idea of exploring the world was an occasional weekend venture from Queens to Manhattan, he’d abandoned his faith while still a child. After a few years and some nasty scrapes in places like Vietnam, Laos and the inter-German border later, he and God reached an agreement. Every Sunday morning, he would think about going to church. After being reassured that it was not necessary, he would report the events of the preceding week, ask for praise or censure as he felt he deserved (usually praise), receive it, then close out his dedicated circuit to the divine for another week.
Divine approval on such an extended basis had other benefits. He and his wife, Kate, a very successful Washington, DC realtor, had been married for over thirty years and raised three daughters, all of whom were launched into careers they loved, good marriages, and children of their own. Over the past several months, he and Kate, who’d cheerfully and wisely refused to give up her thriving business for one last stint in Moscow, had begun to discuss divorce. Their conversations were benign. It wasn’t that they didn’t love each other or enjoy each other anymore. But they’d spent so much time apart that they’d grown apart. They no longer considered themselves husband and wife in any volitional sense, only members of the same family and that would never change. Still, each was wondering what it might be like to be married again to someone of choice.
They had broached the issue in a joint email to their daughters and received three identical responses. “There will be no divorce. Mom, you’re too old to start over. Dad, you’re too ugly. Matter closed.” He and his wife had agreed.
Life is good together, dear Kate. I think our children like us. Let’s see if we can make it to the finish line together.
Maxwell Fajans had joined the CIA as a poli sci grad straight out of Dartmouth in 1962. He’d chosen the CIA because he’d been genuinely moved by John Kennedy’s challenge to ask himself what he could do for his country, a choice made easier because Dartmouth had the standard Ivy League connections. The events of October of that year, when the United States and Russia nearly agreed to blow up the world, and the events of November 1963—he still wept at the memory—only deepened his resolve. He’d spent three years in Vietnam and Laos because that was where the action was. In 1973, he was doing an obligatory Langley tour, pondering what next as America lost interest in Southeast Asia. For weeks, he found himself in no good mood regarding his country, his employer, or himself. Then he heard it said that Henry Kissinger was going around proclaiming that his job was to negotiate with the Soviets for the best second-place deal available to America. Fuck that, pal. And fuck you, too, while you’re at it. He’d then taken his boss to lunch and poured a few more gin and tonics into him than usual, prior to informing him that he was transferring to the East Europe/USSR division.
“Max,” his boss had sloshed out a protest, “you don’t even speak Russian.”
“I will after I finish a year at DLI.”
“And how do you expect to get to Monterey?”
“You will arrange it as your departing gift to me after all my loyal service in your section. Quickly, boss. The Defense Language Institute awaits.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“First, Southeast Asia’s now a career dead end. Second, I’ve never been comfortable with Asian languages and I’d rather learn Russkie than Chink. And third,” he repeated Kissinger’s comment and added with considerable emphasis, “whenever you get an asshole like that as national security adviser to the president, this country needs me. Bad.”
He was on his way to Monterey within the month.
Fajans was not surprised to find he enjoyed learning the Russian language. And as his career progressed, he discovered that he liked the Soviets he dealt with. Not all the Brezhnev-era people were corrupt, cynical apparatchiki, faking their Communist beliefs. There were any number of good people struggling to help their country move beyond what so many Soviets had inflicted upon her. Not all of them were dissidents; some showed up in surprising places. And a few months of Soviet experience led him to reject, utterly and forever, the notion that there was, as so many American academics loved to claim, a permanent social contract between the Communists and the people. The people would submit and accept in exchange for things getting a little better, each generation. Just a little. But things were not getting better, even a little, as anyone knew who spent time there. Fuck the theories. Go look at the lines outside the stores, waiting for hours to purchase whatever the Kremlin had decided they would have for dinner that night. Try making a phone call. He marveled at the CIA’s estimates of the USSR’s steadily advancing prosperity and was one of the first to realize that whatever prosperity they’d achieved was crumbling under the weight of their lunatic military expenditures and their utter inability and unwillingness to enter the computer age.
He recalled, always vividly, the day he realized that the Soviets also knew what was going on. It was the Gorbachev era and the two countries were ramping up what became known as MBFR, the conference on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions, starting to scrap the conventional forces that had stared at each other in Central Europe since 1945. Assigned to the US delegation, he’d been drinking with an intriguing new acquaintance, an ethnic Russian colonel, a GRU type whose interests seemed to go far beyond counting things. The Soviet Army, the colonel explained, was having great difficulty coming up with decent figures on what it had, since it had no idea what it had. Fajans had countered that, if the USSR didn’t know something as simple as how many tanks and planes it had, how could it know what shape its economy was in?
“No problem,” Colonel Yuri Mikhailovich Getmanov had replied. “We use CIA statistics and reports and adjust our plans accordingly.”
“But that garbage is based on your official figures and you know they’re worthless.”
“I know.”
“But you can’t run a modern economy that way.”
“I know.”
“The whole thing’s going to collapse on your head.”
“I know.”
And so it had, much to the delight of Maxwell Fajans: a delight that included the chance to stop being a Soviet expert, which he’d always hated, and become a Russian expert, which he’d always loved. And so he did. Now he was at the end of his career, the Moscow job a final special posting for a man who’d served well, and he had a chance to maybe do some good. And he had, quietly, taking whatever unexpected opportunities came his way, working mostly with the men and women his age who were determined to leave their country better than they found it. From time to time, Major General Getmanov had provided such opportunities.
Count me happy. If I die today, I’ve left the world better than I found it. I have served my country well. My family still loves me. And there is much still to live.
“Better read this, chief.”
“What is it?”
“Just off the fax. Washington Post.”
“What is it?”
“Just read it.”
Max Fajans stared at the copy a moment, then reached into a desk drawer and withdrew an item he kept available for just such moments. It was a dinosaur fossil, a genuine, certified, four-inch long bit of dinosaur bone that he’d been given as a memento by a Polish paleontologist after a rather bizarre encounter involving the return of some items seized by the Germans during World War II: art, jewelry, rare books, dinosaur bones, a samurai sword (probably given to the Germans by the Japanese, but who could be sure?), a gown allegedly worn by Our Lady of Swoboda at her consecration as a prioress, a…
Max Fajans took out the dinosaur bone, stuck it between his teeth, started chewing, then started reading. His young assistant left his office quietly, closing the glass d
oor behind him.
“How’s he taking it so far?” asked his secretary.
“Mad enough to chew dinosaur fossils.”
“Oh, Jesus. Here we go again.”
American Woman Held on Espionage Charges
By Rebecca Taylor, Washington Post Moscow Bureau.
Moscow, Thursday, January 9th, 1997.
During the Cold War, Americans in Moscow were occasionally arrested on charges of espionage or subversion and imprisoned in the dreaded Lubyanka. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, a few Americans have been detained. These have generally been fraudulent or otherwise offensive businessmen, criminals, tourists and students who brought their bad habits with them, or activists run afoul of the authorities. With the fall of the USSR, everyone assumed that the espionage era was over. But now an American national, a woman, is once again being held as a spy. Neither government has yet issued any official statement. However, from what is known, this incident has the makings not just of a spy thriller, but of an international love story with a war and some high-tech military miracle gear thrown in.
According to Russian and American sources in Moscow, on, Tuesday, January 7th, Dr. Olivia Tolchin, an American electronics engineer who once did top-secret work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was arrested by the FSB at the dacha of her lover, a highly decorated Russian major general named Dmitri Borisovich Suslov. According to a Russian source, in 1993 Tolchin accepted an offer to come to Russia to design tactical ground combat sensors for the Russian Army. According to the Russian source, she established a special laboratory in Moscow, developed these sensors, and personally supervised their testing and use during the bloody and still-simmering war in Chechnya. Apparently, she also participated in combat and was decorated for courage by the Russian Army. In recent months, Tolchin, tall, blonde, and strangely beautiful, whom the Russians call “Tolchinskaya,” has been seen around Moscow, often in the company of General Suslov. She has not been seen since last Monday and, according to the Russian source, both her laboratory and her home have been sealed. General Suslov’s whereabouts are unknown.
Tolchin apparently came under suspicion when the FSB obtained a copy of a CIA memo about her. How they obtained it is unknown, as are the exact contents. The Russian source believes the memo, written in 1994 before Tolchin arrived in Russia, indicates that she had, at the last minute, offered her services to the CIA, but not as a spy. “It seems preposterous,” says a Russian source familiar with her activities here. “Tolchinskaya has done excellent work. We are in her debt. However, one cannot be too careful, even today. The Cold War may be over but many tensions remain. It is unfortunate.”
An American source, also familiar with the situation, says: “I don’t know if she’s a spy or not. If she isn’t a spy, if she really came here on her own, she certainly violated a lot of regulations from the conditions of her previous employment and probably a couple laws. If she was actively fighting in the army of a foreign nation without prior consent by the US government, that breaks some other laws. Whatever she is, she doesn’t seem to be a traitor or defector in the usual sense of the word. But if I was her, and the Russians let me out, I’d have to think long and hard before I returned to America.”
At the moment, if in fact Tolchin is under arrest and held in the Lubyanka, she has more immediate problems to consider. Perhaps the greatest of these problems is that, unless she really is a spy, none of the standard categories apply to her. Neither do the standard protections that countries sometimes accord each other’s operatives. This is what makes the case, if there is a case, deserving of attention. A strange new situation in a strange new world.
Statements by both governments are expected soon. Sources indicate that both governments wish to resolve this situation as quickly as possible.
Max Fajans took the dinosaur bone out of his mouth, inspected it for new teeth marks, noticed several, and then wiped it clean with his handkerchief. He knew his phone was about to begin ringing with some very senior people back in America asking some very direct questions. He took a deep breath and screamed for his assistant. The glass vibrated. The assistant tumbled in. Fajans got out his strongest New York accent and screamed in native dialect: “Why the fuck don’t we know anything about this?”
“Easy, chief. We’re looking into it.”
“What have you learned?”
“Not much so far. We’ve had reports of a woman who fits the description here in Moscow. We’ve heard stories for over a year about a tall blonde out with the Spetsnaz in Chechnya with some sort of super-gear. But we’ve never followed them up because…”
“Because what?”
“Because it seemed too ridiculous.”
“Doofus, this is Russia. It exists to be fucking ridiculous. What do you know about this memo?”
“Hey, chief. That’s Langley. Not us.”
“Yeah? Well, don’t tell that to Langley. In about a minute, that phone’s going to starting ringing and…”
“Sorry, chief,” his secretary called from her desk. “No minute. You’ve got a call.”
“Langley?”
“Uh…not exactly.”
“Can it wait?”
“Better not.”
“OK,” said Fajans, popping the fossil back between his teeth. He took a deep breath, rotated his fossil, and got his voice under control. He picked up the receiver. “Fajans.”
“Getmanov. Are we holding one of your people?”
“I don’t know. Are you holding one of our people?”
“No games, Max. It was a long flight and I’m very tired. We need to get to work on this very quickly. Before it explodes in all our faces.”
“If you say so. Good to hear your voice again, by the way. How long has it been since our last personal encounter?”
“A regime or two ago. I still have fond memories of the MBFR talks, arguing over how many of our fifty thousand tanks actually worked. You said twenty thousand. I said five hundred and forty-six. I was closer to the truth.”
“Yeah, yeah. But I got it right on all those movies about how your tanks were able to snorkel across river bottoms so you didn’t have to build bridges. You people fucking paved the river beds before you made the films.”
“In America, you would call it special effects.”
“Look, Yuri Mikhailovich, at the moment I can’t speak for anybody but myself and that’s hard enough.”
“If would be easier if you took that fossil out of your mouth.”
“How do you know?”
“I am sensitive to dialect.”
“Look, if she’s what this article says she is, you’re welcome to her.”
“She’s much more than that.”
“In my book, she’s nothing but a traitor and one thing I know about you is that you hate traitors.”
“True. But we’re beyond that with this woman. She has betrayed you not at all and has given us some incredible technology that she offered your Defense Department and they turned down over and over. And over. We’re five years ahead of you in ground sensors. Maybe ten. You’re an intelligence officer, show some curiosity and see what you can learn about her. You might also get hold of Ms. Taylor, assuming she has the total lack of sense to still be in Russia.”
“She’s probably that dumb.”
“Yes. The more I learn about smart American women, the more I wonder.”
“The more I don’t. What will you be doing at your end?”
“Calming down my superiors. I’ll let you know what happens.”
“Thank you.”
“And Max…”
“What now?”
“That memo is genuine. It was written by one of your people in Vienna. A certain Mister Jay Lyons. Tolchinskaya did not offer to spy. She offered herself in some undefined capacity so that our two nations might work together a little better. He dismissed her, and I am quoting from memory, as alcoholic, drug-addicted, probably promiscuous, certainly delusional. He then wrote a memorandum for the recor
d and filed it and there it sat until…”
“Until what?”
“Until we obtained it. You said that I never liked traitors. I don’t. I like even less traitors who hurt people who save the lives of Russian soldiers. You might ask your Langley to consider how this memo came into our possession.”
“I’m sure they already are.”
“Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“If you have any more alcoholic, drug-addicted, delusional women like Doctor Tolchin, please send them to us.”
“Not my department. But if what you say about this Lyons jerk is true, I may recommend that we lock him up and beat him until he’s better.”
“We used to do that in my country. It did not work. Please emulate only our good qualities. As for how we obtained the memo…Seek and ye shall find, my friend. Seek within and ye shall find.”
“Fuck you, Yuri,” Fajans snapped happily.
“Yes,” Getmanov answered. “They say it’s better here. My wife agrees. Let’s get together before I return to Washington.”
“If you return.”
“Life is full of ifs, my friend. Goodbye.”
Fajans hung up the receiver. It felt good to have the blood going again. He opened his mouth to bellow for his assistant. The fossil fell onto his lap. He wanted to tell his assistant to call the Washington Post Moscow bureau and start asking questions. Then he realized that the number was in his Rolodex.
“Hell, I’ll do it myself,” he growled, his eyes twinkling. “Should be fun.”