The Company

by Robert Littell

  —the Russians, convinced that Nixon was lying when he claimed to have cancelled the American biological weapons program in the late 1960s, had gone ahead with their own program, with the result that they were now capable of arming intercontinental ballistic missile warheads with anthrax bacteria and smallpox viruses.

  —the Kremlin had reason to believe that Taiwan was attempting to buy nuclear technology from South Africa, developed over the past few years in partnership with Israel.

  —the KGB had buried bugs inside the electric typewriters used in the American embassy in Moscow while the typewriters were being shipped from Finland on Soviet trains; the bugs transmitted what was being typed to a nearby listening post in short bursts and on a frequency used by television transmitters so that security sweeps through embassy detected nothing out of the ordinary.

  “So, Manny, there it is—your weekly ration of secrets.”

  “Is everything normal at the embassy?”

  Kukushkin had settled onto the couch and had looked at his wristwatch; he wanted to be back at the embassy when his wife returned from the dentist. “I think so.”

  “You only think so?”

  “No. I can be more positive. Everything appears normal to me, to my wife also.” The Russian had flashed a lopsided smile. “I appreciate you worry about me, Manny.”

  “If anything were to happen…if there were to be an emergency, you have the safety razor with the numbers on the handle.”

  Kukushkin nodded wearily; they had been over this before. “I twist the grip to adjust the setting of the blade. If I set the grip precisely between number two and number three and twist counterclockwise, a hidden chamber in the bottom of the handle snaps open. Inside is a frame of microfilm containing emergency procedures for establishing contact in both Washington and Moscow.”

  “Are you still on good terms with your rezident, Borisov?”

  “It would seem so. He invited me into his office for a cognac late last night. When I said him he looks gloomy he laughed a Russian laugh—which, for your information, is a laugh with more philosophy than humor in it. He said Russians are born gloomy. He is blaming it on the winters. He is blaming it on the immensity of Russia. He says we are afraid of this immensity the way children are afraid of the dark—afraid there is a chaos somewhere out there waiting to strangle us in its tentacles. I said him that this explains why we put up with Stalin—our dread of chaos, of anarchy, pushes us to the other extreme: we value order even if it is not accompanied by law.”

  Manny had watched Kukushkin’s eyes as he spoke; they were fixed intently on his American friend and filled with anguish. The nail of his middle finger, flicking back and forth across his thumbnail, had fallen silent. A sigh had escaped from his lips. Was Kukushkin the genuine defector he claimed to be or a consummate actor putting on a good imitation of treason?

  Leo Kritzky’s fate was riding on the answer to this question.

  Kukushkin, suddenly eager to bare his soul, had plunged on. “I am going to tell you something I never before told to a living person, Manny. Not even my wife. There was a Communist, his name was”—even now, even here, Kukushkin had lowered his voice out of habit—“Piotr Trofimovich Ishov, who fought with great heroism in our Civil War and rose to the rank of colonel general. In 1938, I am eleven years old at that moment, Piotr Ishov vanished one evening—he simply did not return to his flat after work. When his much younger wife, Zinaida, made inquiries, she was told that her husband was caught plotting with Trotsky to murder Stalin. There was no trial—perhaps he refused to confess, perhaps he was too beaten to permit him to confess in public. Within days Zinaida and Ishov’s oldest son, Oleg, were arrested as enemies of the people and deported to a penal village in the Kara Kum desert of Central Asia. There Zinaida committed suicide. There Oleg died of typhus fever. A youngest son, a child of eleven, was given over for adoption to a distant relative living in Irkutsk. The relative’s name was Klimov. I am that child, Manny. I am the son of the enemy of the people Ishov.”

  Manny had instantly recognized this as the defining moment of their relationship. Reaching over, he had gripped Kukushkin’s wrist. The Russian had nodded and Manny had nodded back. The silence between them had turned heavy. Manny had asked, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Before…you were not yet my friend.”

  One thing had puzzled Manny. “The KGB would never have recruited you if they had known about your past.”

  “My adopted father, Ivan Klimov, worked as a structural engineer in an aviation plant in Irkutsk. After the Great War he was transferred to Moscow and eventually rose through the nomenklatura to become a sub-minister for aviation attached to the Ministry of Armaments. He understood that I would never be admitted to the Party or a university, never be permitted to hold an important job, if my history became known. The Klimovs had lost a son my age in a car accident in 1936. When they were transferred to Moscow, with the help of a nephew who worked in the Irkutsk Central Record department they managed to erase all traces of my past. In Moscow Ivan Klimov passed me off as his legitimate son, Sergei.”

  “My God,” Manny had whispered. “What a story!”

  What bothered him most about it was that nobody could have invented it.

  Jack fed some coins into the pay phone in the parking lot of the sprawling National Security Agency building at Fort Meade, Maryland. “It’s our worst nightmare,” Jack confided in Ebby. “I can’t say more—this is an open line. I’ll be back by three. You’d better convene a war council. Everyone in the task force will want to be in on this.”

  Colby was the last to turn up for the meeting. “Sorry to be late,” he said, settling into an empty seat. “I had to take a call from the White House. That Indian atomic test has them going up the wall.” He nodded at Jack “You want to start the ball rolling.”

  “Director, gentlemen, AE/PINNACLE was on the money,” Jack began. “The Russians do have a mole inside the NSA.” He noticed a faint smile creeping onto the lips of James Angleton, slouched in his seat at the head of the table. “We came at the ‘Congratulations on the Second Man’ serial from another angle.” Here Jack nodded at Ebby. “If you start from the premise that the husband is the first man and the firstborn baby is the second man, the pieces fall into place. There were twenty-three NSA employees who had children born in January. Of these twenty-three, seventeen were firstborn sons. Working from phone logs, what records they have in the NSA travel office and the master logs, we were able to establish that the father of one of these seventeen boys was in Paris during Christmas of ’72, Copenhagen during Christmas of ’73 and Rome during Easter of this year. This, you’ll remember, matches the pattern of the KGB’s face-to-face debriefings that AE/PINNACLE passed on to us.”

  “Who is it?” Colby asked. He could tell from the way that his DD/O, Ebbitt, avoided his eye that it was going to be pretty bad.

  “His name is Raymond R. Shelton. He’s a forty-eight-year-old middle-grade NSA staffer who has been analyzing transcripts of Russian intercepts—“

  “That’s all we needed,” Colby muttered.

  Angleton raised the eraser-end of a pencil to get Jack’s attention. “Were you able to work up any corroboration aside from the business of the first son and the travel pattern?”

  Ebby said, “The answer is affirmative.”

  Jack provided the details. “AE/PINNACLE also mentioned that the mole had a habit, a weakness for women and gambling. The implication was that he couldn’t make ends meet on his NSA salary, which in Shelton’s case is twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars, and sold out to the Russians for cold cash.”

  Colby said to himself, “I don’t know which is worse—selling out for cash or because you believe in Communism.”

  “Four years ago,” Jack went on, “Shelton’s wife filed divorce papers against her husband and named a second woman. The wife eventually reconciled with her husband and dropped the case. The security people looked into it at the time and came a
cross evidence that Shelton, who was a natty dresser with a reputation as a skirt chaser, may have been playing around. They also discovered what they called a ‘manageable’ poker habit that had him dropping fifty or a hundred on a bad night. Shelton was warned he’d be fired if he continued gambling. He denied the womanizing part and vowed to give up poker, which apparently mollified the security people. In any case, the work he was doing was so important that his section head and the division director both vouched for him.”

  Colby asked, “Who knows about Shelton outside this room?”

  “I had to bring the chief of security at Fort Meade into the picture,” Jack explained. “I didn’t tell him how we found out about the second-man message or the travel dates.”

  Angleton was scratching notes to himself on a yellow legal pad. “Who or what’s going to keep the NSA security chief from blowing the story to his superiors at Fort Meade?” he asked.

  Jack looked across at Angleton. Their eyes met. “I took the liberty of reminding him that Bill Colby wasn’t only the CIA director; he was the director of the entire American intelligence establishment, including NSA, and as such would bring the appropriate NSA topsiders in on the situation when he considered it appropriate. For now, the Shelton affair is being closely held.”

  “Okay,” Colby grunted. “Time for the other shoe to drop.”

  Angleton put a fine point on the question. “What exactly does this Shelton do for a living?”

  Jack nodded to himself. “He’s in charge of the team assigned to one of NSA’s most productive intercept projects, a top-secret BIGOT listed operation code-named IVY BELLS.”

  “Christ, I walk sterilized chunks of the IVY BELLS product up to the White House from time to time,” Colby said.

  Ebby said, “I’m sorry, Jack—I’m not familiar with IVY BELLS.”

  Jack said, “I wasn’t either until this morning. Turns out that American submarines have fitted a small waterproof pod onto a Soviet underwater communications cable lying on the ocean floor in the Sea of Okhotsk off the Soviet Union’s Pacific coast. The cable is packed with Soviet military lines. The pod is probably the most sophisticated eavesdropping device ever conceived. It wraps itself around the target cable and taps into the lines electronically without actually touching the wires themselves. When the Soviets raise the cables for maintenance, the pod breaks away and sits undetected on the seabed. Tapes in the pod can record Soviet military channels for six weeks, at which point our sub returns, frogmen retrieve the tapes and install new ones. The tapes are sent to NSA for transcription and deciphering. The messages are old but they are brimming with information about Soviet ballistic missile tests—“

  “Soviet missiles test fired from the Kamchatka Peninsula land in the Sea of Okhotsk,” Colby noted.

  “Which means that reports of their successes or failures pass through our pod,” Ebby observed.

  “The Russians are so confident their underwater lines are untappable that they don’t use high-grade cipher systems,” Jack went on. “On some of the channels they don’t bother enciphering their transmissions at all.”

  Manny caught Jack’s eye. “I’m missing something. If the guy in charge of the NSA team handling the IVY BELLS material is a Soviet agent, it means that the Russians know about the pod—they know their undersea cable is being tapped. So why didn’t they shut it down?”

  Jack said, “If you were the KGB would you shut it down?”

  Manny’s mouth opened, then closed. “You’re all one jump ahead of me, aren’t you? They won’t shut it down because they don’t want us to walk back the cat and stumble across their mole at NSA.”

  “There are also advantages to knowing your phone’s being tapped,” Ebby said. “You can fill it with disinformation.”

  Colby said, “The Soviets could have been overstating the accuracy of their missiles or the success rate of their tests. We’ll have to go back and reevaluate every single IVY BELLS intercept.”

  Manny said, “When we take Shelton into custody—“

  Angleton interrupted. “Arresting Shelton is out of the question.”

  “But how can we let a Soviet mole operate inside NSA?” Manny asked.

  Jack filled in the blanks. “Think it through, Manny. If we pick up Shelton, the KGB will walk back the cat to see how we found out about him. That could lead them to our defector in the Soviet embassy, AE/PINNACLE. Besides which, we’re better off knowing that they know about IVY BELLS—we can see what they’re trying to make us believe, which will give us clues about what’s really going on in their missile program.”

  “On top of that,” Colby said, “we have similar pod intercepts on Chinese underwater lines, as well as French undersea cables to Africa. They don’t know about the existence of the pod technology. But they will if we blow the whistle on Shelton.”

  “It’s a classic intelligence standoff,” Angleton remarked. “The Russians know about our pod but don’t close it down so we won’t discover Shelton. We know about Shelton but don’t close him down so they won’t discover AE/PINNACLE. We’re dealing with a helix of interlocking secrets—unlock one and we give away secrets we don’t want to give away.”

  “What we need to do now,” Ebby said, “is leave some disinformation lying around Shelton’s shop that he can pass on to his handlers.”

  The ashes on Angleton’s cigarette grew perilously long but he was too engrossed in the discussion to notice. Squinting down the table at his colleagues, he declared, “Which brings us back to the unfinished business—AE/PINNACLE and SASHA.”

  Ebby glanced at Jack, then lowered his eyes.

  Angleton said, “I take it that nobody in this room doubts that Kukushkin has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, his bona fides.”

  Everyone understood what that meant.

  Jack said, “Director, I’d like to speak with Leo—“

  “That’s a nonstarter,” Angleton snapped. “Kritzky has to be kept in total isolation, he has to be brought to the point of despair—“

  Colby asked Jack, “What would you hope to accomplish?”

  Jack considered the question. “Leo and I go back a long way. I can get him to face up to the reality of the situation he’s in—“

  Ebby saw possibilities in this approach. “We have to give Leo a way out short of life in prison. The problem isn’t to break him—it’s to double him back. If we handle Leo skillfully we could turn a disaster into an intelligence triumph—imagine what we can feed the KGB if Leo agrees to work for us.”

  Angleton, as he often did, began thinking out loud. “In order to double him you’d have to convince him that we have proof of his treason. Which means you’d have to tell him about the existence of AE/PINNACLE. And that breaks every rule in the book—“

  “That’s why it’d work,” Jack said with sudden vehemence. He talked directly to Angleton. “If you go by the book, Jim, this could drag on for God knows how long. It could be the Philby interrogation all over again. His interrogators were the best in the business. They went at him for months. They knew he was guilty but as long as he held out, as long as he insisted on his innocence, they couldn’t bring the case into court because, in the end, without a confession, the evidence was circumstantial.”

  “It might be worth trying,” Ebby told Colby.

  “It would be coming at the problem from another angle,” Jack pleaded.

  Angleton puffed away on his cigarette. “Highly unusual,” he grumbled. “Not something I’d feel comfortable with.”

  Colby looked from one to the other. “Let me think about it,” he finally said.

  At first Jack thought he’d been let into the wrong cell. The man sitting on the floor on an army blanket, his back to the padded wall, didn’t seem familiar. He looked like one of those survivors of concentration camps seen in old photographs: thin, drawn, with a wild stubble of a beard and sunken cheeks that made his hollow eyes appear oversized and over-sad. His complexion had turned chalky. He was dressed in pajamas that were t
oo large for him. His teeth gnawed away on his lower lip, which was raw and bleeding. The man brought a trembling hand up to shield his eyes from the three naked electric bulbs dangling from the high ceiling. Words seemed to froth up from his lips. “Slumming in Angleton’s dungeons, Jack?”

  Jack caught his breath. “Leo, is that you!”

  The mask on Leo’s face cracked into a lop-sided grimace. “It’s me, or what’s left of me.” He started to push himself to his feet but sank back in exhaustion. “Can’t offer you much by way of refreshments except water. You can have water, Jack, if you don’t mind drinking from the toilet bowl.”

  Jack crossed the room and settled onto his haunches facing Leo. “God almighty, I didn’t know…” He turned his head and stared at the tin cup on the floor next to the toilet. “None of us knew…”

  “Should have found out, Jack,” Leo said with stiff bitterness. “Shouldn’t have left me in Angleton’s clutches. I have diarrhea—I clean the inside of the toilet with my hand so I can drink out of it afterward.”

  Jack tried to concentrate on the reason for his being there. “Leo, you’ve got to listen up—this doesn’t have to end with you rotting here, or in prison for the rest of your days.”

  “Why would I go to prison, Jack?”

  “For treason. For betraying your country. For spying for the Russian we know as Starik.”

  “You believe that, Jack? You believe I’m SASHA?”

  Jack nodded. “We know it, Leo. There’s nothing left for you to do but come clean. If you won’t think of yourself, think of Adelle. Think of the twins. It’s not too late to redeem yourself—“

  Mucus seeped from one of Leo’s nostrils. Moving in lethargic slow motion, he raised the arm of his filthy pajamas and wiped the mucus away, then blotted the blood off his lips. “How do you know I’m SASHA?” he asked.