On leaving the shop, he drove back to the British Embassy. Ten minutes later, he left again, now seated in the back of a Jaguar being driven by an embassy chauffeur. As the Jaguar left the city heading for the airport, the leader of the watcher team was patched straight through to General Kirpichenko.
“He is approaching the concourse now, Comrade General.”
“He has made no contact of any kind? Any kind at all?”
“No, Comrade General. Apart from the old lady and the ice cream seller—now both in custody—he has spoken to no one, nor has anyone spoken to him. His discarded newspaper and sandwich wrappers are in our possession. Otherwise, he has touched nothing.”
“It’s a mission-abort,” thought Kirpichenko. “He’ll be back. And we’ll be waiting.”
He knew that McCready, under the guise of a British Foreign Office technician, was carrying a diplomatic passport.
“Let him go,” he said. “Watch for a brush-pass inside the airport concourse. If there is none, see him through the departure lounge and into the aircraft.”
Later, the general would examine his team’s telephoto pictures of McCready in the Montego and at the park, call for a large microscope, look again, straighten up with a face pink with anger, and shout: “You stupid pricks, that’s not McCready.”
At ten past eight on the morning of the same day, a Jaguar driven by Barry Martins, the SIS Station Head in Moscow, left the embassy and drove sedately toward the old district of the Arbat where the streets are narrow and flanked by the elegant houses of long-gone prosperous merchants. A single Moskvitch took up the tail, but this was purely routine. The British referred to these KGB agents who followed them all over Moscow in one of life’s more boring chores as “the second eleven.” The Jaguar drove aimlessly around the Arbat. The man at the wheel occasionally pulled into the curb to consult a city map.
At twenty past eight a Mercedes sedan left the embassy. At the wheel, in a blue jacket and peaked cap, was an embassy chauffeur. No one looked in the rear, so no one saw another figure crouched low down near the floor and covered with a blanket. Another Moskvitch fell in behind.
Entering the Arbat district, the Mercedes passed the parked Jaguar. At this point Martins, still consulting his city map, made up his mind and swerved out from the curb, taking space between the Mercedes and the following Moskvitch. The convoy now constituted a Mercedes, a Jaguar, and two Moskvitches, all in line astern.
The Mercedes entered a narrow one-way street, followed by the Jaguar, which then developed engine trouble, coughed, spluttered, lurched, and came to a halt. The two Moskvitches piled up behind it, spilling out KGB agents. Martins flicked the hood release, climbed out, and raised the hood. He was at once surrounded by protesting men in leather jackets.
The Mercedes disappeared down the street and turned the corner. Amused Muscovites gathered on the narrow pavements to hear the Jaguar driver saying to the KGB team leader, “Now, look here, my good man. If you think you can make the bugger work, you go right ahead.”
Nothing entertains a Muscovite as much as the sight of the chekisti making a mess of things. One of the KGB men re-entered his car and got on the radio.
Clearing the Arbat, David Thornton, at the wheel of the Mercedes, took his guidance from Sam McCready, who emerged from his blanket and gave directions, without any disguise at all and looking precisely like himself.
Twenty minutes later, on a lonely road screened by trees in the middle of Gorki Park, the Mercedes halted. At the rear, McCready ripped off the CD plate, which was secured by a quick-release snaplock, and stuck a new license plate, prepared with strong adhesive on one side, over the British plate. Thornton did the same at the front. McCready retrieved Thornton’s makeup box from the trunk and climbed into the rear seat. Thornton swapped his hard blue peaked cap for a more Russian black leather cap and got back behind the wheel.
At eighteen minutes past nine, Colonel Nikolai Gorodov left his apartment in Shabolovsky Street on foot and began to walk toward Dzerdzinsky Square and the headquarters of the KGB. He looked haggard and pale; the reason soon appeared behind him. Two men emerged from a doorway and without a pretense of subtlety took station behind him.
He had gone two hundred yards when a black Mercedes drew to the curb beside him and kept pace. He heard the hiss of an electric window coming down, and a voice said in English, “Good morning, Colonel. Going my way?”
Gorodov stopped and stared. Framed in the window, shielded by the rear curtains from the two KGB men up the street, was Sam McCready. Gorodov was stunned, but not triumphant.
“That,” thought McCready, “is the look I wanted to see.”
Gorodov recovered and said loudly enough for the KGB ferrets to hear, “Thank you, Comrade. How kind.”
Then he entered the car, which sped away. The two KGB men paused for three seconds—and lost. The reason they paused was because the license plates of the Mercedes bore the letters MOC and then two figures.
The extremely exclusive MOC plates belong only to the members of the Central Committee, and it is a bold KGB footsoldier who dares stop or harass a Central Committee man. But they took the number and frantically used their hand communicators to tell the head office.
Martins had chosen well. The particular registration plates on that Mercedes belonged to a Politburo candidate member who happened to be in the Far East, somewhere near Khabarovsk. It took four hours to find him and learn that he had a Chaika, not a Mercedes, and that it was safely garaged in Moscow. By then it was too late; the Mercedes was back in its British Embassy livery, the Union Jack jauntily fluttering from its pennant-staff.
Gorodov leaned back in the seat, his bridges now completely burned behind him.
“If you are a long-term Soviet mole, I am dead,” remarked McCready.
Gorodov considered this. “And if you are a long-term Soviet mole,” he replied, “then I am dead.”
“Why did you return?” asked McCready.
“As it turned out, a mistake,” said Gorodov. “I had promised you something, and I found I could not discover it in London. When I give my word, I like to keep it. Then Moscow summoned me back for urgent consultations. To disobey would have meant coming over to the West immediately. No excuse would have been accepted for my not returning. I thought I could come for one week, find out what I needed, and be allowed to return to London. Only when I got here did I learn that it was too late. I was under deep suspicion, my apartment and office bugged, followed everywhere, forbidden to go out to Yazenevo, confined to meaningless work in Moscow Center. By the way, I have something for you.”
He opened his attaché case and passed McCready a slim file. There were five sheets in the file, each with a photograph and a name. The first picture had beneath it Donald Maclean, and the second Guy Burgess. Both moles were by then dead and buried in their adopted Moscow. The third sheet showed the familiar face and name of Kim Philby, who was then still alive in Moscow. The fourth had the thin, ascetic features and the name of Anthony Blunt, who was then disgraced in England. McCready turned to the fifth page.
The photo was very old. It showed a thin young man with wild wavy hair and large, owlish glasses. Beneath the photo were two words. John Cairncross. McCready leaned back and sighed.
“Bloody hell, him all along.”
He knew the name. Cairncross had been a senior civil servant during and after the war, senior despite his youth. He had served in a variety of capacities—private secretary to War Cabinet Minister Lord Hankey; in signals intelligence at Bletchly Park, in the Treasury and the War Office. He had had access to nuclear secrets in the late forties. In the early fifties he had come under suspicion, conceded nothing, and been eased out. Nothing could be proved, so he was allowed to move on to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. By 1986, he was in retirement in France.
The Fifth Man. Keepsake had made good on his promise. The thirty-five-year hunt was over, and no more innocent men need be accused.
“Sam,” ask
ed Gorodov mildly, “where exactly are we going?”
“My horoscope,” replied McCready, “says I am to travel west today. Yours, too.”
Thornton parked again in the trees of Gorki Park, changed places with one of the men in the rear, and went to work. The other man sat in the front pretending to be the chauffeur. No one would care to interfere with a Central Committee member’s limousine, even if they saw it. Senior Party members always shrouded the rear of their cars with inner curtains, and these were now drawn. Thornton worked on his client—he always referred to those he made up as his clients—by the sunlight that filtered through the curtains.
On went the thin, inflatable undervest to give the slimmer man the sturdy bulk of Rabbi Birnbaum. Then the white shirt, black trousers, tie, and jacket. Thornton affixed the rich gray beard and moustache, dyed the client’s hair to the same color, and appended the curling gray ringlets of the orthodox rabbi to his temples. With the addition of the black homburg and single handgrip, Rabbi Birnbaum had been recreated exactly as he had arrived the previous day—except that he was a different man. Finally, the car was changed back to a British Embassy vehicle.
The rabbi was dropped off at the entrance to the National Hotel, where he had a sustaining lunch, paid in U.S. dollars, and took a cab to the airport after lunch. He was booked on the afternoon flight to London, his ticket showing that he was connecting to New York.
Thornton drove the car back into the British Embassy compound with his other client crouched under the rug in the back. He went to work again almost at once, with an identical ginger wig and moustache, foundation creams, colorants, tinted contact lenses, and tooth stain. Ten minutes after Denis Gaunt, hot and itchy under the ginger wig he had worn all day for the benefit of the KGB, drove back in his Montego, the other man left for the airport in the Jaguar, driven by a real chauffeur. Within an hour Thornton, transformed into the Queen’s Messenger, was himself driven to Scheremetyevo by Barry Martins.
The rabbi drew the usual curious glances, but his papers were in order, and he was passed through the formalities in fifteen minutes and into the departure lounge. He sat and read his Talmud, occasionally murmuring prayers in an unintelligible mutter.
The man in the ginger wig and moustache was almost escorted to the door of the departure lounge, so numerous were the KGB team trying to ensure he neither passed nor received a message or package.
Last to arrive was the Queen’s Messenger, his attaché case chained to his left wrist. This time, Thornton’s precious workbox was in his own suitcase; he did not need anyone to carry it for him, as his case could not be searched.
Denis Gaunt remained inside the embassy. Three days later, he would be exfiltrated when another SIS man posing as a messenger would enter Moscow and pass Gaunt a passport in the same name as his own—Mason. At precisely the identical moment, two Masons would pass out through the controls at different points in the concourse, and British Airways would be briefed to board two Masons for the price of one.
But that afternoon the passengers for London were boarded on time, and the British Airways flight cleared Soviet air space at five-fifteen. Shortly after that, the rabbi lumbered to his feet and walked down to the smoking section, and said to the man in the ginger wig and moustache: “Nikolai, my friend, you are now in the West.”
Then Sam McCready bought champagne for them both, and for the Queen’s Messenger. The scam had worked because McCready had noticed that he, Gaunt, and Gorodov were all of the same height and build.
With the gain in time caused by flying west, they landed at Heathrow just after seven. A team from Century House, alerted by Martins from Moscow, was there to meet them. They were enveloped as they left the aircraft and spirited away.
As a concession, Timothy Edwards allowed McCready to take Nikolai Gorodov to his own apartment in Abingdon Villas for the evening.
“I’m afraid, Colonel, the real debriefing must start in the morning. A very agreeable country house has been prepared. You will want for nothing, I assure you.”
“Thank you. I understand,” said Gorodov.
It was just after ten that evening when Joe Roth arrived, summoned by a phone call from McCready. He found two SIS heavies in the hallway and two more in the corridor outside McCready’s modest flat, which surprised him.
McCready answered his ring on the doorbell, appearing in slacks and sweater, a glass of whiskey in his hand.
“Thanks for coming, Joe. Come on in. There’s someone I have wanted you to meet for a long time. You’ll never know how much.”
He led the way into the sitting room. The man at the window turned and smiled.
“Good evening, Mr. Roth,” said Gorodov. “Good to meet you at last.”
Roth stood as if paralyzed. Then he slumped into a chair and took McCready’s proffered whiskey. Gorodov seated himself opposite Roth.
“You’d better tell it,” said McCready to the Russian. “You know it better than I.”
The Russian sipped his drink as he pondered where to begin.
“Project Potemkin started eight years ago,” he said. “The original idea came from a junior officer, but General Drozdov took it up personally. It became his personal baby. The aim was to denounce a senior CIA officer as a Soviet plant, but in a manner so convincing and with such a wealth of apparently fireproof evidence that no one could reasonably not be taken in.
“The long-term aim was to sow years of feuding inside the Agency and thus destroy morale among the staff for a decade and wreck the relationship with the SIS in Britain.
“At first, no particular officer was the target, but after half a dozen were considered, the choice fell on Calvin Bailey. There were two reasons for this. One was that we knew he was not a much-liked man inside the Agency because of his personal manner. The second was that he had served in Vietnam, a suitable place for a possible recruitment.
“Calvin Bailey was spotted as a CIA agent in Vietnam purely as routine. You know we all try to identify each other’s staffers, and when we do, their movements and progress up the promotions ladder are carefully noted. Sometimes a lack of promotion may sow resentment, which can be exploited by a cunning recruiter. Well, this you know—we all do it.
“Also like the CIA, the KGB throws nothing away. Every tiny scrap of information, every fragment, is carefully kept and stored. Drozdov’s breakthrough came when he was once again examining the material that came to us from the Vietnamese after the final fall of Saigon in 1975. Most of your papers were burned, but in the confusion some survived. One mentioned a certain Nguyen Van Troc, who had worked for the Americans.
“That paper was the end for Van Troc. He and his cousin were picked up—they had not managed to escape. The cousin was executed, but Van Troc, although brutally interrogated for many months, was finally sent to a North Vietnamese slave labor camp. That was where Drozdov found him, still alive in 1980. Under torture, he confessed he had worked for Calvin Bailey inside the Viet Cong.
“The Hanoi government agreed to cooperate, and the photo session was set up. Van Troc was taken from the camp, fattened on good food, and dressed in the uniform of a colonel of Hanoi’s intelligence arm. The photos were taken of him enjoying tea with other officers just after the invasion of Cambodia. Three separate tea-servers were used, all Hanoi agents, and then sent to the West with their photos. After that, Van Troc was liquidated.
“One of the stewards posed as a boat-person and showed his proud possession to any British officer in Hong Kong who would look at it. Finally, it was confiscated and sent to London—as planned.”
“We sent a copy to Langley,” said McCready, “just as a courtesy. It seemed to have no value.”
“Drozdov already knew Bailey had been involved in the Phoenix Program,” Gorodov resumed. “He had been spotted by our Rezident in Saigon, a man posing as a Swedish importer of liquor for the foreign community. And Drozdov learned that Bailey had been at My Lai when Bailey gave evidence at the court-martial of that young officer. You are
very open with your public records in America. The KGB scours them avidly.
“Anyway, it seemed that a likely scenario for a change of allegiance in Bailey had been established. His 1970 visit to Tokyo had been noticed and noted—purely routine. Drozdov only had to brief Orlov to say that he, Drozdov himself, had been in Tokyo on a certain date to take over the running of an America CIA renegade, and when you checked—presto—the same dates. Of course, Drozdov was not there at all in 1970. That was added later.
“From that point on, the case against Bailey was built up, brick by brick. Pyotr Orlov was chosen as the disinformation agent about 1981; he has been in training and rehearsal ever since. Urchenko, when he foolishly came back and before he died, provided valuable information on exactly how you Americans treat defectors. Orlov could prepare himself to avoid the traps, beat the polygraph, and always tell you what you wanted to hear. Not too much, but enough that when you checked it out, it fit.
“After Drozdov picked Bailey as the victim, Bailey went under intensive scrutiny. Wherever he went, it was noted. After he rose in rank and began to travel to Europe and elsewhere to visit the out-stations, the bank accounts began. Bailey would be spotted in a European city, and immediately a bank account would be opened, always in a name he might choose, like that of his wife’s married sister or his maternal grandmother.
“Drozdov prepared an actor, a dead ringer for Bailey, to fly at a moment’s notice to open these accounts so that the bank teller would later recognize Bailey as the client. Later, large sums were deposited in these accounts, always in cash and always by a man with a strong Central European accent.