Vanessa said, “I don’t really see how you could decode these sentences—“
“I studied Soviet and East European code systems at the NSA school in Fort Meade,” Tessa said. “Some KGB codes are merely recognition signals—special sentences that alert the agent to something else in the program that is intended for him.”
“Okay, for argument’s sake let’s say that the twenty-four references to Alice or Looking Glass are intended to alert an agent,” Vanessa said. “The question is: Alert him to what?”
“Right after the quotes they always announce the winning lottery number,” Tessa said.
“How many digits?”
“Ten.”
“That’s the number of digits in a telephone number if you include the area code.” Vanessa thought a moment. “But the lottery number itself couldn’t be a phone number—it would be too obvious.”
“At the NSA code school,” Tessa said, “they taught us that East German agents operating in West Germany in the early 1950s were given American ten-dollar bills—they used the serial numbers on the bill as a secret number, which they subtracted from the lottery number broadcast from East Germany to wind up with a phone number.”
Vanessa looked puzzled. “You said there were twenty-four references to Alice and Looking Glass—if you’re right about all this, it means there were twenty-four lottery numbers that translated into twenty-four phone numbers over a period of thirty-three years. But why would a Soviet agent have to be given a new phone number to call all the time?”
Tessa said, “KGB tradecraft calls for cutouts to keep on the move. So the agent might be getting in touch with a cutout who periodically changes his phone number.”
“Did you show your boss what you’d found?”
“Yeah, I did. He said it could easily be a coincidence. Even if it wasn’t, he didn’t see how we could break out a phone number from a lottery number, since there were an infinite number of possibilities for the secret number.”
Vanessa said, “Hey, computers can deal with an infinite number of possibilities. Let me take a crack at it.”
Vanessa, who was programming an IBM mainframe, stayed after work to play with the twenty-four lottery numbers that had been broadcast after the Lewis Carroll quotations. She checked with the CIA librarian and found out that area codes had been introduced in the early 1950s, about the time the Moscow Radio quiz program began, so she started with the assumption that the ten-digit lottery number hid a ten-digit phone number that included a low-numbered East Coast area code. She began with the winning lottery number broadcast after the first use of an Alice quotation (‘And the moral of that is—the more there is of mine, the less there is of yours’) on April 5, 1951: 2056902023. Running a series of equations through the computer, she discovered there was a high probability that an eight-digit secret number beginning with a three and a zero, subtracted from the ten-digit lottery number, would give you a ten-digit phone number that began with the 202 area code for Washington, DC, which was where the girls assumed a cutout would live. Using an eight-digit secret number that began with a three and a zero, Vanessa was also able to break out the 202 area code from the other twenty-three lottery numbers.
The results were hypothetical—but the statistical probability of this being a fluke were slim.
Starting with a three and a zero still left six digits in the secret number. The problem stymied Vanessa for the better part of a week. Then, one evening, she and her lawyer boyfriend happened to be eating at a Chinese restaurant two blocks from the apartment the sisters shared in Fairfax outside the Beltway. The boyfriend went off to pay the cashier with his Visa card and asked her to leave the tip. Vanessa pulled two dollar bills from her purse and flattened them on the table. Her head was swimming with the numbers that the computer had been spitting out for the past ten days. As she glanced at the dollar bills the serial numbers seemed to float off the paper. She shook her head and looked again. Tessa’s story of how East Germans spies operating in the West had used the serial numbers on American ten-dollar bills to break out telephone numbers came back to her. The first Moscow quiz lottery number had been broadcast on April 5, 1951, so the Soviet agent on the receiving end of the code would have been in possession of a ten-dollar bill printed before that date. The serial numbers on American bills ran in series, didn’t they? Of course they did! What she needed to do now was find out the serial numbers that were in circulation from, say, the end of the war until April 1951, and run them through the computer.
First thing next morning, Vanessa made an appointment with a Treasury Department official and turned up at his office that afternoon. Yes, serial numbers on all American bills did run in series. No problem, he could supply her with the series that were in circulation from 1945 until April 1951, it was just a matter of checking the records. If she would care to wait he could have his assistant retrieve the log books and photocopy the appropriate pages for her.
That evening, with a very excited Tessa looking over her shoulder, Vanessa went down the list of ten-dollar bill serial numbers in circulation before April, 1951 until she found one that began with the telltale three and zero. In 1950, the Treasury had printed up $67,593,240-worth of ten-dollar bills with serial numbers that started with a letter of the alphabet, followed by 3089, followed by four other numbers and another letter of the alphabet.
Going back to her mainframe, Vanessa started to work with the number 3089; subtracting 3089 from the first winning lottery number broke out a Washington area code and exchange that existed in the early 1950s: 202 601. And that, in turn, left a mere 9,999 phone numbers to check out.
“What we’re looking for,” Tessa reminded her sister, “is someone who had a phone number corresponding to 201 601 and then moved out of that house or apartment in the week after April 5, 1951.” Tessa was almost dancing with excitement. “Boy, oh boy,” she said. “Do you think this is actually going to work?”
KGB housekeepers had drawn the Venetian blinds and transformed the third-floor Kremlin suite into a working clinic. It was staffed around the clock by doctors and nurses specially trained in hemodialysis, and fitted with an American-manufactured artificial kidney machine to deal with acute kidney failure. Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov—the former Soviet Ambassador to Budapest at the time of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, and since the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union’s undisputed leader—was the clinic’s only patient. Ten months in power, Andropov, at 69, was suffering from chronic kidney disease and kept alive by regular sessions of hemodialysis that filtered noxious waste out of his blood stream. Living on borrowed time (doctors gave him six months at most), pale and drawn, capable of concentrating for only relatively short periods, Andropov sat propped up in bed, an electric blanket tucked up to his gaunt neck. “I’m fed up with the bickering,” he told Starik. “The Army brass, their chests sagging under the weight of medals, come here every day or two to swear to me that the war is winnable, it is only a question of having the stamina to stick with it despite the losses.”
Starik said something about how his particular service concentrated on the Principal Adversary but Andropov rushed on. “Then the KGB people drop by with their latest assessment, which is the same as the previous assessment: the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, the Islamic fundamentalists can never be defeated, the Army must be instructed to cut its losses, at which point the fundamentalists can be manipulated in such a way as to turn them against US interests.” Shaking his head in frustration, Andropov glanced at the yellow appointments card. “It is written here you requested an appointment to talk about KHOLSTOMER.”
“The Politburo’s Committee of Three has split down the middle, Yuri Vladimirovich,” Starik explained. “One member is for the project, one against, one undecided.”
“And who is against it?” Andropov inquired.
“Comrade Gorbachev.”
Andropov snickered. “Mikhail Ser
geyevich is supposed to be a specialist on agricultural questions, though even that is not sure—all he mumbles about lately is the need for glasnost and perestroika, as if openness and restructuring were magic potions for all of our economic troubles.” He waved for the male nurse sitting next to a window to leave the room. Once they were alone he said to Starik, “This KHOLSTOMER project of yours—is it the same as the one I signed off on when I ran the KGB? The one that Brezhnev subsequently vetoed?”
“There have been slight modifications since Comrade Brezhnev’s time—the project has been fine tuned to take into account the ability of the American Federal Reserve Board to allocate currency resources and deal with a massive attack on the dollar.”
Andropov reached with trembling fingers to turn up the heat on the electric blanket. “Refresh my memory with the details,” he ordered.
“Since the middle 1950s the KGB has been siphoning off hard currency from the sales of our national gas company, GazProm, as well as armament and oil sales abroad. We quietly created what are called shell companies in various tax havens—on the Isle of Man, on Jersey and Guernsey in the Channel Islands, in Switzerland and the Caribbean. Typically, a shell company is owned by two other companies, which in turn is owned by a Geneva- or Bermuda-based company, which in turn—“
Andropov waved a hand listlessly. “I get the point.”
“At the present moment we control roughly sixty-three billion in American dollars in these shell companies. The beauty of KHOLSTOMER is that all the dollars are physically held in corresponding banks in the city of New York. These New York banks are unable to identify the ultimate owner of the dollars. Now, on any given day, somewhere between five and six hundred billion United States dollars change hands in New York on what currency traders call the spot market—which means that the sales of these dollars are executed immediately.”
“How can you expect to undermine the American dollar if you only have a fraction of the six hundred billion available?”
“We calculate that if we handle the affair shrewdly, which is to say if we plant articles in the world’s newspapers about the intrinsic weakness of the dollar and then manipulate the market cleverly, the sudden sale of our sixty-three billion will suck in people and institutions—speculators, insurance companies, private banks, retirement funds and, most especially, European and Asian Central Banks—in the general panic of the moment. We estimate that the panic money will be ten times the original sixty-three billion, which will mean that the total sum of dollars dumped onto the market will be the neighborhood of six hundred billion dollars—and this will be in addition to the regular sale of dollars on that day. A movement of this nature will inevitably have a snowball effect. The American Central Bank, which is called the Federal Reserve Bank, would naturally intervene to buy up dollars in an effort to stabilize the American currency. But our guess is that, on the condition that we catch them by surprise, this intervention will come too late and be too little to prevent the dollar from spiraling downward. We estimate that seventy percent of the foreign currency holdings of the Central Banks of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia are in US dollars; we are talking about a sum in the neighborhood of one thousand billion. Ninety percent of this one thousand billion is held in the form of US Treasury bonds and bills. We have agents of influence in these four territories, people in key posts in the Central Banks, as well as a German agent close to the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. At the first sign of a steep downward spiral of the US dollar our agents will push their respective Central Banks, as a hedge against further deterioration of their holdings, to sell off twenty percent of their Treasury bond dollar assets. At that point, in addition to the downward spiral of the American currency, the American bond market would collapse and this, in turn, would lead to panic and collapse on Wall Street; one could expect the Dow Jones industrial average, now in the twelve hundred range, to plummet. The European stock markets would plunge in turn. Europeans who hold dollar assets would join the panic, selling off their American holdings in their haste to switch personal and corporate assets into gold.”
Andropov’s right eyelid twitched. “Can you predict the long term effects of KHOLSTOMER on the Principal Adversary?”
“Interest rates in the United States, and then Europe and Asia, would climb sharply in response to the collapse of the bond market. As interest rates soar prices would rise, which would mean that American companies would sell less, both domestically and abroad, leading to a dramatic increase in the American trade deficit. This would result in inflationary pressures, an economic slowdown, a sharp rise in unemployment. The chaos in the American economy would, it goes without saying, have political repercussions, most especially in France and Italy, where the powerful Communist parties could offer alternatives that freed their countries from American economic domination and led to closer cooperation and eventually alignment with the Soviet bloc. West Germany, Spain and Scandinavia could be expected to follow suit to avoid being isolated.”
There was a soft knock on the door. A young male nurse wheeled a stainless steel cart to the side of the bed. “Time for your vitamins, Comrade Andropov,” he said. The General Secretary pulled the blanket away from his left arm and shut his eyes. The nurse rolled back the left sleeve of the patient’s bathrobe and pajama top and deftly injected 20 cc of a milky solution into a vein. After his arm was safely back under the heated blanket and the nurse gone from the room, Andropov kept his eyes closed. For a few moments Starik wondered if he had dozed off. Then Andropov eyes drifted open and he broke the silence. “For the past six months I have been obsessed with the American President’s Strategic Defense Initiative—what the American press has called ‘Star Wars.’ I have never believed Reagan seriously imagined that the United States, at a staggering cost, could build and position satellites capable of shooting down one hundred percent of the incoming missiles with lasers. Which led me to conclude that he has one of two motives. First, he may think that by escalating the arms race and moving it into outer space, he will oblige us to commit enormous sums to keep up with the Americans, both in terms of offense and defense. This would have the effect of sabotaging our already delicate economic situation, which would undermine the power and prestige of our ruling Communist Party.”
Andropov gazed hard at his interlocutor and it appeared as if he had lost the thread of the conversation.
“And the second motive, Yuri Vladimirovich,” Starik prompted.
“Yes, the second motive…which I consider the more likely, is that Reagan’s Star Wars proposals of last March were designed to prepare the American people psychologically for nuclear war, and more specifically, for what our military planners refer to as Raketno yadenoye napadeniye—an American nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union.”
Startled, Starik looked up to find the anxious eyes of the General Secretary fixed on him. “Army intelligence has broken a NATO cipher system and discovered,” Andropov continued, his voice barely audible, “that a secret NATO exercise, designated ABLE ARCHER 83, is scheduled to be held before the end of the year. Its stated purpose is to practice nuclear release procedures. It is apparent to me that this so-called NATO exercise could well be a cover for the imperialist powers to launch a nuclear first strike.”
“If what you say is true—“
“It is a worst-case scenario,” Andropov said, “but I believe that the imperial ambitions of Reagan, aggravated by his tendency to view us as an evil empire, to use his own words, justify a worst-case conclusion.” Andropov’s right hand appeared from under the blanket. He leaned over the bedside table and scratched the words “Approved and sanctioned,” and, in a clumsy script, his full name on the bottom of the six-line authorization order designated, 127/S-9021, that Starik had prepared. “I consent to KHOLSTOMER,” he announced in a gruff whisper. “I instruct you to launch the operation before the end of November.”
The General Secretary’s head sank back into the pillow in exhaustion. Starik said, softly, “I will do
it, Yuri Vladimirovich.”
3
SOMEWHERE IN AFGHANISTAN, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1983
IBRAHIM’S BAND, SOME SIXTY IN ALL, TRAVELED BY NIGHT, SOMETIMES ON foot, sometimes on donkeys, occasionally in canvas-covered trucks driving without headlights not only as a matter of security, but because Afghans believed vehicles used less gasoline when they ran without headlights. Everywhere they went, peasants offered them shelter and shared the meager rations of food left to them after the passage of Russian commando units. Everyone recognized Ibrahim and he seemed to know dozens by name. The group would turn off the trail as soon as the first silver-gray streaks of light transformed the tops of the mountains high above them into murky silhouettes. Closely guarded by the mujaheddin, Anthony and Maria were led along narrow tracks marked by whitewashed stones. Scrambling up footpaths, they would reach one of the half-deserted, half-destroyed hamlets clinging to the sides of steep hills. Each hamlet had its mosque, surrounded by the stone houses that had not been destroyed in Russian air raids, and the rubble of those that had been hit. Inside common rooms fires blazed in soot-blackened chimneys. Calendars with photographs of the Kaaba at Mecca or the Golden Dome Mosque in Jerusalem were tacked to unpainted plastered walls next to the mihrab—the niche that marked the direction of Mecca. Pistachios and nabidth, a mildly alcoholic drink made of raisons or dates mixed with water and allowed to ferment in earthenware jugs, would be set out on linoleum-covered wooden tables. One morning, after a particularly arduous night-long march, a boy set a porcelain bowl filled with what looked like cooked intestines in front of Maria. She made a face and pushed it away. When Ibrahim taunted her, Maria—who had been raised in Beirut by her Lebanese-American father—retorted with an old Arab proverb, “Yom asal, yom basal”—“One day honey, one day onions.”
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