The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Good thing the speech was secret,” he remarked. “I do not see how the Communist Party leaders who rule the Socialist states of Eastern Europe in Stalin’s name—and using Stalin’s methodology—could survive the publication of Khrushchev’s revelations.”

  Starik, the Centre’s presbyter by dint of his exploits and experience, dragged the cigarette from his lips and stared at the bitter end of it as if there were a message concealed in the burning embers. “It will not remain secret for long,” he told his colleague. “When the story becomes known it will break over the Soviet camp like a tidal wave. Communism will either be washed clean—or washed away.”

  Half an hour after the formal closing of the Twentieth Party Congress, Ezra Ben Ezra, the Mossad’s man in Berlin known as the Rabbi, picked up a “tremor” from a Communist source in East Berlin: a political event registering nine on the Richter scale had occurred in Moscow; delegates to the Congress, sworn to secrecy, were scurrying back to their various bailiwicks to brief the second echelon people on what had taken place.

  As it was a Saturday the Rabbi had his Shabbas goy, Hamlet, dial the Sorcerer’s private number in Berlin-Dahlem and hold the phone to his ear. “That you, Harvey?” the Rabbi asked.

  Torriti’s whiskey-slurred voice came crackling down the line. “Jesus, Ezra, I’m surprised to get ahold of you on the Sabbath. Do you realize the risk you’re running? Talking on the phone on Saturday could get you in hot water with the Creator.”

  “I am definitely not talking on the telephone,” the Rabbi insisted defensively. “I’m talking into thin air. By an absolute coincidence my Shabbas goy happens to be holding the phone near my mouth.”

  “What’s cooking?” the Sorcerer asked.

  The Rabbi explained about the tremor from his Communist in East Berlin. The Sorcerer grunted appreciatively. “I owe you one, Ezra,” he said.

  “You do, don’t you? As soon as the sun sets and Shabbat ends, I shall mark it in the little notebook I keep under my pillow.” The Rabbi chuckled into the phone. “In indelible ink, Harvey.”

  Working the phone, Torriti made some discreet inquiries of his own, then dispatched a CRITIC to the Wiz, who had succeeded Allen Dulles as the Deputy Director for Operations when Dulles moved up to become Director, Central Intelligence. The Moscow rumor mill was abuzz, the Sorcerer informed Wisner. Nikita Khrushchev had made a secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress during which he had criticized the cult of the individual, which was said to be a euphemism for Stalin’s twenty-seven-year reign of terror. The revelations were bound to send a shudder through the Communist world and have a profound impact on the Cold War.

  In Washington, the Wiz was impressed enough to hand-carry Torriti’s CRITIC directly to Dulles, who was winding up an off-the-record briefing to the NewYork Times’s James “Scotty” Reston. The DCI, puffing on a pipe, waved Wisner to a couch while he finished his pitch. “To sum up, Scotty: Anybody looking at the big picture would have to give the Company points for its triumphs. We got rid of that Mossadegh fellow over in Iran—when he nationalized British Petroleum we installed the pro-American Shah in his place, thereby securing oil supplies for the foreseeable future. Two years ago we gave moral support to the people who ousted that Arbenz fellow in Guatemala after he took Communists into his government. The Wiz here had a hand in that.”

  Reston turned a guileless grin on Wisner. “Care to define ‘moral support,’ Frank?”

  The Wiz smiled back. “We held the hands of the rebels who were afraid of the dark.”

  “Nothing material?”

  “We may have provided war-surplus combat boots when the folks who invaded from Honduras got their feet wet. I’d have to check the records on that to be sure.”

  Reston, still grinning, said, “Fact that Arbenz, a democratically elected leader, expropriated four hundred thousand acres of a banana plantation owned by an American company didn’t have anything to do with the coup, right?”

  “Climb down off your high horse, Scotty,” Wisner told Reston, his Mississippi drawl subverting the smile stitched to his face. “The Company wasn’t defending United Fruit interests, and you damn well know it. We were defending United States interests. You’ve heard speak of the Monroe Doctrine. We need to draw the line when it comes to letting Communists into this hemisphere.”

  “It’s cut-and-dried,” Dulles interjected. “Both Iran and Guatemala are squarely in our camp now.”

  Reston started screwing the cap back onto his fountain pen. “You guys must have heard the story about Chou En-lai—someone asked him about the impact of the French Revolution on France. He’s supposed to have formed his hands into a pyramid, his fingertips touching, and said, ‘Too soon to tell.’ Let’s see what’s happening in Iran and Guatemala twenty-five years down the pike before we list them on the credit side of the CIA’s ledger.”

  “Thought Scotty was supposed to be one of the Company’s friends,” the Wiz complained when Reston had departed.

  “He’s a no-nonsense journalist,” Dulles said, slipping his stockinged feet back into bedroom slippers. “You make a strong case, you can usually count on him being in your corner. He’s peeved because the Times bought our ‘supplied moral support’ cover story two years back. A lot of ink’s been spilled on Guatemala since then—people are aware that we stage-managed the invasion and frightened Arbenz into running for it.” Relighting his pipe, Dulles gestured with his chin toward the piece of paper in Wisner’s fist. “Must be a hell of a dog for you to be walking it personally?”

  Wisner told the DCI that the Sorcerer had picked up rumors of a secret Khrushchev speech denouncing the errors—and perhaps the crimes—of Joe Stalin. Dulles, bored to tears by administrative chores and budget charts, always open to an imaginative operation, immediately grasped the propaganda potential: If the Company could get its hands on the text of the Khrushchev speech they could play it back into the satellite states, into Russia itself. The result would be incalculable: rank-and-file Communists the world over would become disillusioned with the Soviet Union; the French and Italian Communist Parties, once so powerful there was a question of them sharing political power, could be permanently crippled; the Stalinist leaders in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Hungary, could become vulnerable to revisionist forces.

  Dulles instructed Wisner to send a top-secret cable to all Company stations abroad alerting them to the existence of the speech and ordering them to leave no stone unturned to get a copy of it.

  In the end it wasn’t the Company that got its hands on Khrushchev’s secret speech; it was the Israeli Mossad. A Polish Jew spotted a Polish translation of Khrushchev’s speech on a desk in the Stalin Gothic Communist Party headquarters in Warsaw and managed to smuggle it into the Israeli embassy long enough for Mossad people there to photograph it and send it on to Israel.

  In Washington, James Angleton had set up a long table as an extension to his desk and filled it with boxes overflowing with file folders on CIA officers and agents; so many of the documents in the folders were flagged with red priority stickers—each sticker signaled an operation gone awry, a curious remark, a suspicious meeting—that one of the rare visitors to Mother’s sanctum sanctorum had described them as poppies in a field of snow. Some two weeks after the Twentieth Party Congress, Angleton (who, in addition to his counterintelligence chores, handled liaison with the Israelis) had returned from one of his regular three-martini lunches and was poring over the Central Registry file on a Company officer who claimed to have sweet-talked a Soviet diplomat in Turkey into spying in place for the Americans. Under the best of circumstances Angleton would have been leery of anything or anybody that fell into the Company’s lap. Which prompted him to take a closer look at the person who had done the recruiting. Angleton noticed that the officer in question had belonged briefly to a socialist study group at Cornell, and had fudged the episode when it was brought up during an early interview. Philby, Angleton remembered, had joined a socialist society at Cambridge but
had later severed his ties with the socialists and covered his tracks by associating with rightist groups and people. The CIA officer who had recruited the Russian diplomat in Turkey needed to be brought back to Washington and grilled; the possibility that he was a Soviet mole and had “dropped out” of the socialist study group on orders from his KGB controlling officer had to be explored. If the shadow of a doubt persisted, the officer would be encouraged to resign from the CIA. In any case, the Soviet diplomat in Turkey would be kept at arm’s length lest he turn out to be a KGB disinformation agent.

  Angleton was tacking one of the red priority stickers to the CIA officer’s Central Registry file when there was a knock on the door. His secretary opened it a crack and held up a sealed pouch that had just been brought over by a young Israeli diplomat. Waving her in, Angleton broke the seal with a wire cutter and extracted a large manila envelope. Scrawled across the face of the envelope was a note from the head of the Israeli Mossad: “Jim—consider this a down payment on the briefing you promised re: the Egyptian order of battle along the Suez Canal.” Opening the envelope, Angleton discovered a bound typescript with the words “Secret Speech of the Soviet First Party Secretary N. Khrushchev to the Twentieth Party Congress” on the title page.

  Days later, Dulles (over the strenuous objections of Angleton, who wanted to “doctor” the speech to further embarrass the Russians and then leak it in dribs and drabs to spin out the impact) released the text of the secret speech to the New York Times.

  Then he and the Wiz sat back to watch the Soviets squirm.

  A friend of Azalia Isanova’s who worked as a headline writer for the Party newspaper, Pravda, let her in on the secret as they queued for tea and cakes at a canteen on a back street behind the Kremlin: the American newspaper, the New York Times, had published the text of a secret speech that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev delivered to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress. Khrushchev had created a sensation at the Congress, so the American newspaper claimed, by reproving “real crimes” committed by Joseph Stalin, and accusing the Great Helmsman of abusing power and promoting a cult of the individual. At first Azalia didn’t believe the news; she suggested that the American Central Intelligence Agency might have planted the story to embarrass Khrushchev and sow dissension within the Communist hierarchy. No, no, the story was accurate, her friend insisted. His brother’s wife had a sister whose husband had attended a close meeting of his Party cell in Minsk; Khrushchev’s secret speech had been dissected line by line for the Party faithful. Things in Russia were going to thaw, her friend predicted gleefully, now that Khrushchev himself had broken the ice. “It might even become possible,” he added, his voice reduced to a whisper, “for you to publish your—“

  Azalia brought a finger to her lips, cutting him off before he could finish the sentence.

  In fact, Azalia—trained as a historian and working for the last four years as a researcher at the Historical Archives Institute in Moscow, thanks to a letter of introduction from her girlfriend’s father, the KGB chief Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria—had been compiling index card files on Stalin’s victims. She had been enormously moved, years before, by two lines from Akhmatova’s poem, “Requiem,” which she had come across in an underground samizdat edition passed from hand to hand:

  I should like to call you all by name,

  But they have lost the lists…

  Azalia had celebrated the death of Stalin in March of 1953 by beginning to compile the lost lists; cataloguing Stalin’s victims became the secret passion of her life. The first two index cards in her collection bore the names of her mother and father, both arrested by the secret police in the late forties and (as she discovered from dossiers she unearthed in the Historical Archives Institute) summarily executed as “enemies of the people” in one of the basements of the massive KGB headquarters on Lubyanskaya Square. Their bodies, along with the dozens of others executed that day, had been incinerated in a city crematorium (there would have been a small mountain of corpses piled in the courtyard, and dogs had been seen gnawing on human arms or legs in a nearby field), and their ashes thrown into a common trench on the outskirts of Moscow. The great majority of her index cards were based on files she came across in cartons gathering dust in the Institute. Other information came from personal contacts with writers and artists and colleagues; almost everyone had lost a parent or a relative or a friend in the Stalinist purges, or knew someone who had. By the time of Khrushchev’s secret speech, Azalia had quietly accumulated 12,500 index cards, listing the names, dates of birth and arrest and execution or disappearance, of the upto-then nameless victims of Stalin’s tyrannical rule.

  Unlike Akhmatova, Azalia would be able to call them by their names.

  Spurred on by her Pravda friend’s suggestion, Azalia arranged a meeting with the cousin of a cousin who worked as an editor at the weekly Ogonyok, a magazine noted for its relatively liberal point of view. Azalia hinted that she had stumbled across long forgotten dossiers at the Historical Archives Institute. In view of Khrushchev’s denunciation of the crimes of Stalin, she was prepared to write an article naming names and providing details of the summary trials and executions or deaths in prison camps of some of the victims of Stalinism.

  Like other Moscow intellectuals, the editor had heard rumors of Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin. But he was wary of actually publishing details of Stalin’s crimes; editors who went out on limbs often fell to their deaths. Without identifying her, he would sound out members of the magazine’s editorial board, he said. Even if they agreed to her proposition, it was unlikely that a final decision would be taken without first clearing the matter with high ranking Party officials.

  That night Azalia Isanova was woken by the thud of feet pounding up the stairwell. She knew instantly what it meant: Even in buildings equipped with working elevators, the KGB always used the stairs in the belief that their noisy arrival would serve as a warning to everyone within earshot. A fist pounded on her door. Azalia was ordered to throw on some clothing and was hauled off to a stuffy room in Lubyanka, where until noon the following day she was questioned about her work at the Institute. Was it correct, the interrogators wanted to know, that she had acquired data on enemies of the people who had died in prison camps during the thirties and forties? Was it correct that she was exploring the possibility of publishing an article on the subject? Glancing at a dossier, another interrogator casually inquired whether she was the same Isanova, Azalia, a female of the Hebrew race, who had been summoned to a KGB station in 1950 and quizzed about her relationship with a certain Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin? Thoroughly frightened but lucid, Azalia kept her answers as vague as possible. Yes, she had once known Tsipin; had been told that continuing to see him was not in the state’s best interests; by that time the relationship, if that is what it was, had long since ended. Her interrogators didn’t appear to know about her index cards (which she kept hidden in a metal trunk in an attic in the countryside). After twelve and a half hours of interrogation, she was let off with a crisp warning: Mind your own business, she was sternly instructed, and let the Party mind the Party’s business.

  One of her interrogators, a coldly polite round-faced man who squinted at her through rimless spectacles, escorted Aza down two flights of wide stairs to a back entrance of Lubyanka. “Trust us,” he told her at the door. “Any rectifications to the official history of the Soviet Union would be made by the Party’s historians acting in the interests of the masses. Stalin may have made minor mistakes,” he added. “What leader doesn’t? But it should not be forgotten that Stalin had come to power when Russian fields were plowed by oxen; by the time of his death, Russia had become a world power armed with atomic weapons and missiles.”

  Aza got the message; Khrushchev’s speech notwithstanding, real reform in Russia would only come when history was restored to the professional, as opposed to the Party, historians. And as long as the KGB had a say in the matter, that was not about to happen anytime soon. Aza vowed to keep adding
to her index cards. But until things changed, and drastically, they would have to remain hidden in the metal trunk.

  Lying awake in bed late that night, watching the shadows from the street four floors below flit across the outside of her lace window-curtains, Aza let her thoughts drift to the mysterious young man who had come into her life six years before, and gone out of it just as suddenly, leaving no forwarding address; he had disappeared so completely it was almost as if he never existed. Aza had only the haziest memory of what he looked like but she was still able to recreate the timbre and pitch of his voice. Each time I see you I seem to leave a bit of me with you, he had told her over the phone. To which she had responded, Oh, I hope this is not true. For if you see me too often there will be nothing left of you. On the spur of the moment, stirred by a riptide of emotion, she had invited him to come home with her to explore whether his lust and her desire were harmonious in bed.

  They had turned out to be lusciously harmonious, which made his disappearance from the face of the earth all the harder for her to bear. She had tried to find him; had casually sounded out some of the people who had been at the Perdelkino dacha the day they met; had even worked up the nerve to ask Comrade Beria if he could discover where the young man had gone to. A few days later she had found a hand-penned note from Beria under her door. Continuing a relationship with Tsipin was not in the state’s best interests, it had said. Forget him. Several weeks later, when the KGB called her in to ask about her relationship with Tsipin, she had managed to put him out of mind; all that remained was the occasional echo of his voice in her brain.