An Honorable Man

by Paul Vidich

She shook her head. “No.”

  Idiots. “It will be okay. We will be in here as soon as you give the signal.”

  A prostitute was the normal way this was done, but it was agreed that Vasilenko would see that coming. He was too smart, too clever, too wary for that type of obvious trap. Something in his world that he trusted—young and innocent. That’s not how she was described to Mueller, but she fit the profile. Young and poised.

  Mueller walked to the living room and made a final inspection. All Vasilenko needed was one false note to sense a trap and he’d be gone. The job compromised. Mueller’s eyes swept the titles of the paperback books, the dates on the fan magazines, the ashtrays, looking for cigarette butts that would not be hers. He opened the refrigerator. A bag of sprouting potatoes. Save or toss? “Do you eat out a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  He closed the door. He looked at her. “Where are you from?”

  She looked confused.

  “Where are you from?” he demanded.

  “Me or her?”

  “Her . . . Where are you from?”

  “Maryland.”

  “How old?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Ambition?”

  “Acting. Saving money to go to New York.”

  “Gilda?”

  “Rita Hayworth.”

  “Orson Welles?”

  “Second husband.”

  He studied her composed face. “You’ll do fine.”

  10

  * * *

  TRAPPED

  THE CALL came after midnight. He’d gone to bed after a long dinner with Altman at the F Street Club and he’d felt good staying away from the booze. Drinking alone hadn’t stopped Altman, who had two vodka tonics and then wine with dinner. Mueller found himself restless to be sober in the company of a man boisterous with too much alcohol. Old acquaintances, once close friends. He could complete the stories that Altman felt a need to tell at great length.

  Mueller sat bolt upright when his bedside phone rang. He reached for his glasses without which, by some vagary of concomitant senses, he couldn’t answer the telephone properly.

  “Hello,” he said. Half asleep.

  “They left the bar in a taxi.”

  Bar? He was on his feet, bare soles on the cold floor, and he pressed his fingers to his forehead to concentrate. Think. His body was alert like a prey animal. He looked at his wrist watch.

  “Where are they coming from?”

  “Georgetown.”

  He had twenty minutes, tops. “FBI?”

  “No. She brought him out the back to the alley. They’re clean.”

  Mueller had the taxi drop him two blocks away on a side street, a precaution, and he hurried along the sidewalk, staying away from the streetlights. His breath plumed in the night air. He’d left quickly, and he regretted leaving home without his gloves. He wondered what else he’d forgotten. He went down the mental list of things that could go wrong. This had been his life for too long. The cold reminded him of mist on the Danube. That one night of fog. Weeks of waiting, long periods of drudgery punctuated by a harrowing moment of acute tension. It was all about the plan, the actions they had rehearsed, which if followed, kept the mistakes of poor judgment in the moment to a minimum. Trust the plan.

  The photographer was already in place when Mueller quietly let himself into the neighboring apartment. He’d seen two Agency officers in place in the hallway. There was no need to give them any sensible cover, so the plan risked a neighbor calling the police on two loitering strangers, but it was a tolerable risk at that hour of night in a quiet apartment building. It was either that, or have no security to manage a bad outcome.

  Mueller draped his coat over a chair and peered through the two-way mirror into the empty bedroom. The narrow twin bed was made. A negligee hung from the open closet door. Family photographs were arranged on the dresser. Drapes drawn. Light entered the darkened room through the open door that led to the living area, lit up, bright, and he could see the legs of a tall man stretched onto a coffee table.

  “How long have they been inside?” Mueller asked, whispering.

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  There were two 16mm film cameras. One ready. One backup. No light stands.

  Vasilenko would be wary. He would have his eyes open, ears alert, even as passion planted its talons. Prey animals knew to move cautiously near the bait—drawn by hunger but looking for the trap. He and Vasilenko were alike, Mueller thought. Drawn to risk, tired of the young man’s game but good at it.

  The bedroom looked bare, Mueller thought. Too bare. Not lived in. Where was the accumulation of useless stuff that came with ordinary living? Twice Mueller’s eyes passed over the bedside table before he spotted a man’s ring. He leaned forward, nose almost at the dark glass. It was heavy, gold with a crest, like a college fraternity ring.

  “Shit,” he said. Someone had used the place and not swept it properly.

  The couple rose from the living room sofa and Mueller saw them pause, drinks in hand, taking a moment to talk about something. Familiar, but negotiating the situation and the temptation that brought them together.

  There was a faint whrrr of film traveling through the camera when the couple entered the bedroom, but Mueller knew it couldn’t be heard through the glass. She turned the overhead light on, but Vasilenko turned it off. She glanced sideways at the mirror, but stopped herself.

  Mueller saw her face, worried in the moment, having been told to leave the light on, looking for an instruction. Improvise, Mueller whispered to himself.

  Vasilenko placed his drink on the night table and he spotted the ring. He turned on the bedside lamp to get a better look, studied it for a moment. He said something. She said something. Their lips moved, but the sound was lost. She shook her head, laughed, and then removed her sweater over her head in a single motion. He put the ring back where he had found it.

  She got out of her skirt without removing her heels, and then sat on the edge of the bed and undid one ankle strap and then the other. It was all performance, Mueller thought. A dance for an audience of one.

  Vasilenko removed his shoes, shirt, and trousers and stood by the bed in white cotton underwear and black socks, pale, fleshy, a big man who had thickened at the waist. Mueller had a flicker of sympathy for this man whose life was about to crash and burn. He was a decent sort. Probably a good husband, a caring father. What was his mistake that set him apart from any other man? Boredom? Loneliness? The attraction of young flesh? Mueller didn’t let himself give in to pity. He knew the Russian would easily, vigorously, do the same to him if the circumstance required it. They were in the business of deceit, high-stakes lies. Vasilenko had been quick to reject a trophy shotgun and some helpful cash, but they’d found his weakness.

  The couple sat on the edge of the narrow bed in their underwear, sharing the silly intimate nonsense that the presumption of privacy permitted. He was vulnerable, she was coy, and Mueller saw the steel jaws of the trap ready to snap. Vasilenko took the marijuana cigarette she handed him, and he inhaled with a first-timer’s awkward hesitation, then coughed. She glanced at the mirror.

  Don’t look! “Shit,” Mueller muttered.

  She reached behind her back and undid her bra. Small breasts. How much more did he need to seal the case?

  Mueller watched her draw her fingers across Vasilenko’s tufted chest hair, the romantic girl exploring her new friend with patient touch.

  “You’re getting that?” Mueller asked.

  “Yes,” the cameraman said.

  “We need to see the whole room.”

  “How long do we go on?”

  “How long has it been?”

  “A couple of minutes. Maybe more.”

  “A little more. Is the exposure good?”

  “High-speed film. It will be fine. Th
e faces are exposed. He turned on the night lamp. You’ll have what you need.”

  “What other jobs do you do?” Mueller asked.

  “For you?”

  “Anyone.”

  “Weddings mostly.”

  Mueller wanted to laugh, and he looked at the cameraman to confirm that he wasn’t joking. Mueller turned back to the view of the bedroom. She had gone onto her back, naked, and Vasilenko was moving his hulking figure over her. He was putting kisses on her lips that she was returning. Sad, Mueller thought. He tried not to think about the man’s son. It was hard to take someone down. He’d done it before. It didn’t get easier. The naked man and woman were wrapped in each other’s arms.

  “We’ve got him.” Mueller turned to the cameraman before he left the room. “Keep filming. If he gets violent I need that too.”

  Mueller assembled the two agents in the hallway, lined up behind him, coordinating with eye contact and a nod. Hand gestures. He slipped a key in the door lock, turned slowly to confirm they had access. On hearing the click of the bolt he raised a signaling finger.

  Three men burst through the apartment door. They arrived in the bedroom to find Vasilenko standing bedside naked, his face a mix of surprise, embarrassment, and the deep flush of anger. The two men stared at each other.

  Mueller motioned for the girl to leave the room. She had wrapped herself in the sheet and slipped out quickly, wordlessly.

  “Get dressed,” Mueller instructed Vasilenko. “This doesn’t have to be difficult. I think you know what we want.” He nodded at the mirror. “There’s a record of this. No one will see it, or even know this happened, unless we don’t get the right type of cooperation.”

  Vasilenko glared. He shook his head, disparaged himself, his mistake, his stupidity. He spat the word “Govno!”

  Mueller waited for Vasilenko to dress. The two men sat opposite each other in the living room, adversaries, one with a new advantage, the other cautious, wary, glum, but also restless and impatient. There were new rules of engagement between them, and it didn’t matter who they had been, or pretended to be in their previous meetings. The old game had taken a turn.

  “What do you want?” Vasilenko asked.

  “A name.”

  “Who?”

  “A man. He is with us, but he works for you.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m not in counterintelligence.”

  “How do I know?”

  “I’m telling you. I will report this. They’ll send me back to Moscow Center. So what. We’ll see what happens. I’ll take my chances.”

  “No one has to know,” Mueller said. “We can keep this quiet. Protect you. It’s a name we want. You’ll be kept out of it.”

  Vasilenko emitted a gruff, sarcastic laugh. He lit a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and drew deeply, relaxing himself. He stared at Mueller with disgust.

  “We will pay,” Mueller said. “When we get the name you won’t have obligations to us. This”—he gestured to the bedroom—“forgotten.”

  “No one forgets.”

  “We can be generous too.”

  “How much?”

  “How much do you need?”

  Vasilenko drew on the cigarette and contemplated Mueller. He threw out a figure.

  Mueller looked skeptical. “Why fifty thousand?”

  “I don’t need that much, you’re right. And if I spent it how would that look?”

  “Why fifty thousand?”

  “To reassure myself that you think highly of what I will give you.”

  Mueller acknowledged how Vasilenko could bargain even when he had no leverage. It was a confidence that Mueller respected. It suggested that Vasilenko knew there was an endgame that had yet to play out.

  In the pause that followed, and in the body language spoken, Mueller knew he had an understanding.

  “I will give you instructions,” Vasilenko said. “Where to meet. When. I will come to you. Don’t approach me anymore.” Vasilenko gave the ground rules and set expectations. He said he’d see what he could discover. For security reasons everything was compartmentalized. He was NKVD, so he didn’t see cables or messages from GRU counterintelligence. He might hear something, get a hint, circumstantial information, a fragment that he could provide that might add to a profile. At the door he turned. “I will contact you when I know something.”

  • • •

  Mueller informed the director and the Council that Vasilenko was turned, but he cautioned against quick results. If nothing else, he would confirm the Agency had been penetrated. Not everyone was convinced of that. Mueller’s report on the meeting was “eyes only” for the Council. It didn’t go into the file that was shared weekly with FBI counterintelligence. There was an interagency arrangement that all contact between CIA and Soviet staff be shared with the FBI liaison. This formal reporting of meetings was the way FBI distinguished authorized contact from potential recruitment of double agents. Mueller’s reports had described Vasilenko as an expert in metallurgy who was able to discuss advances the Soviets had made in high-temperature alloys for ballistic missile parts. Vague stuff. But enough detail to convince Walker. Mueller had made most of it up reading Popular Mechanics.

  He met Vasilenko again a week later. They’d worked out a way to communicate. A vertical chalk mark on a mailbox in Georgetown was the signal. Mueller had come alone to the safe house on L Street. Two knocks followed by a third. Mueller let Vasilenko in and made sure there was no one in the stairwell. Habit.

  “Here is what I have,” Vasilenko began. An aluminum moon filtered through the gauzy curtain illuminating his face. His expression was grim, serious, but defeated too. A compromised man. Mueller took notes.

  “My first suspicions came in the fall, ’forty-nine. I was in Vienna. Everyone in Moscow Center knew the CIA was mounting a campaign to recruit a network of spies inside the Soviet bloc. We saw evidence of one incident after the other. Hungarians hijacked a C-47 on its way to Munich and then diverted it to the Carpathian Mountains, landing near Lvov with a dozen paramilitary troops. You call them freedom fighters,” Vasilenko said with disdain. “We tracked a ship that left Malta and went to Rome and Athens with a handful of volunteers—criminals mostly—and mercenaries who were put in small craft to land off the coast of Albania. Then we got intelligence you’d recruited Albanians in Trieste and put them on planes piloted by Poles and sent them to parachute near Tirana.”

  Vasilenko paused. “All the missions were neutralized by us. Some men were killed when they landed, and we captured others. A few radios got working and sent out a report, but they were eliminated quickly. They had no chance.” Vasilenko wiped one palm against the other, theatrically. “Finished.”

  Another pause. “I heard about these failures from colleagues and we were all pleased. But we knew we weren’t that good to eliminate every mission, or the CIA was that sloppy to run operations and have them all compromised. You lost three hundred men. Maybe more. No one survived. There was only one answer. We had penetrated the CIA. Our luck could not be so good. There had to be a source. That’s what we all suspected.

  “I was Directorate K working in the Second Bezirk, by the Prater Park in the Leopoldstadt district, the European Division. There were rumors, but NKVD was compartmentalized. My wife and I were transferred to Moscow Center a few months later. I didn’t know anything else. You don’t talk about these things with colleagues. You ask questions and then Counterintelligence comes to you and says, ‘Why are you asking questions.’ So that was that. But I had a friend. Let’s call him Vladimir.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Is that necessary?”

  “Yes.”

  Vasilenko lit a cigarette. The red end glowed in the dark room. “He had nothing to do with any of this, but fine. Vertov. Alexie Vertov. He was ambitious. He was a GRU lieutenant in his forties, when you need
to be promoted to colonel or it means you are passed over, your career is finished. Vertov confronted his superior and asked for a promotion and this man said, ‘Alexie, you have a lot of nerve. Do your job. Do good work. People notice. Don’t push it.’ So Vertov’s promotion was rejected.”

  Vasilenko looked at Mueller. “Why am I making a big deal out of this Gogolian incident, trivial at first glance?” Vasilenko leaned forward. “It was motivation for his anger. He got drunk with me and he said he’d read cables from our embassy in Washington that talked about a double agent. Moscow Center gave him the name Sasha. You call him Protocol. His handler has the code name Nightingale, but Vertov knew the code, and he knew this was Chernov. Vertov continued to talk too much.”

  “And?”

  “Arrested.” Vasilenko drew a cutting finger across his neck. “We all take risks,” he said in a voice that drifted off. When he continued his voice was quiet, and he spoke in the rush of words of a man wanting to finish up an uncomfortable confession. “I found out more when I was transferred to Washington. There is a room on the top floor of the embassy that has been sealed with lead in the walls so FBI across the street can’t listen. The room is off-limits, but one day I was called in to see Chernov. There is a map on the wall with flags pinned to the designated locations around the city. These are Protocol’s dead drops. This is how information is conveyed. A post office box in one neighborhood. A chalk mark. Same as us. The exchange is made. He takes the shopping bag of money and leaves a shopping bag of secrets. They don’t meet here. Too dangerous.”

  “Where?”

  “Once in Istanbul. Berlin twice.”

  “Why?”

  “Change procedures, arrange banking. Coordinate communications. Make human contact. Each side tests the mental state of the other.”

  “Rome?”

  “Perhaps. This is what I’ve heard. You asked what I know. This is what I know.”

  “How is he paid?”

  “I said, cash in a shopping bag.”

  “That’s all.”

  “There is an account in Bern. A dead drop there with cash deposits that go into a numbered account.” Vasilenko added with sarcasm, “For his retirement.”