by Paul Vidich
“How was he recruited?”
“Do you have a plan for me?”
“You have to trust me.”
Vasilenko shook his head skeptically. “Our jobs require that we lie to each other.”
Mueller’s fingers toyed with the bottle of milk. “I could be lying. That’s true. Let’s stipulate that I am lying. What choice do you have?”
Vasilenko reached for his whiskey, but stopped when he found the glass empty. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, relaxing with the tobacco. “I am taking you on your word.” He inhaled again. “Here is what I was told. He was compromised by the Nazis in Vienna in nineteen-thirty-nine. He helped the Nazis fence art taken from wealthy Jewish families using his connections to the business world in London. German intelligence caught him with an underage boy. Protocol’s acquaintance with Goering kept him from arrest and saved him from scandal. He had every reason to believe the incident was covered up. When the Red Army took Berlin they found Goering’s private files, which included a record of the incident. Chernov was head of GRU in Berlin at the time and he took possession of all the files. When Protocol came to Vienna after the war Chernov prepared a trap. Chernov had a German boy brought to the Soviet zone and something was done to make the boy available to Protocol. He was caught a second time. Chernov told him, ‘Now you work for us.’” Vasilenko looked at Mueller. “Is that enough?”
Mueller considered the Russian. “How do I know it’s true?”
Vasilenko looked at Mueller with a cold, hard gaze. “You don’t.” He stood and poured himself another whiskey. “Some of it is true. Some it has to be true so that parts that aren’t true could be true.” Vasilenko took a shallow breath. “You have one day, maybe two, before Chernov gets to Protocol.”
“How will that happen?”
“I don’t know. They will know something is wrong when they discover I’m gone. The plane is the outside date. They know I don’t have his name. If they can’t protect him they will eliminate him.” Vasilenko’s cheeks had the rosy blush of alcohol. He added carelessly, “They have the girl too.”
“Girl?”
“From the apartment. The one who called herself Jane. She was compromised from the start. They say they caught her stealing from the apartments she cleaned. She is being held because she is useful to them. They’ll ask her questions. When they’re done they’ll dispose of her, or exchange her.”
“Where is she?” Mueller demanded.
“Embassy. Top floor. There’s a small room.”
Mueller closed his eyes, pressed fingers into his forehead. “You can sleep on the sofa. I’ll get you a blanket. What happens to your wife and son?”
“They are on a train to the border. I have always thought of you as a friend.”
Mueller looked at him. “We have been friendly. But we are not friends. Friendship is a dangerous luxury in this business.”
Mueller couldn’t sleep that night. He lay in bed wide awake and listened to Vasilenko’s loud whiskey snores in the other room. Not since his nighttime parachute drop behind Nazi lines in ’43 was he frightened like this.
18
* * *
DISAPPEARANCE
WHO KNOWS?” The director looked at the two men sitting opposite him at the conference table under snarling African lion heads mounted on the wall. His question hung in the air like a bad smell. The director regarded Coffin, who looked out the window to avoid meeting the director’s eyes, and then the director settled on Mueller. It was just over twelve hours since Mueller had delivered the news that Altman had defected—disappeared was his exact word.
“It’s a simple question, George. I’m looking at you because you’re the one who seems to know the most.” The sturdy rotary telephone with its direct line to the Oval Office mocked the look of helplessness on the old man’s face. It was the lunch hour and the director’s routine was not to be interrupted, so his conference table was set with linen cloth, a carnation centerpiece, crystal glasses, and plates with the distinctive maroon design of the CIA shield. Mueller’s tight necktie made his slightly oval face look puffy; his hair was parted to the side and combed straight back.
The director lifted his fork to his bibbed neck. “Who else knows about Altman?”
“Just the three of us.” Beth didn’t count. She didn’t know the full story.
“Keep it that way. No one else can know until we understand the full scope of what is at risk. And what they want with him. I don’t want a goddamned call from the White House. I don’t want them thinking we’re a rabbit warren of spies and perverts. Do you understand? Look at me, each of you. Do you understand?”
Coffin and Mueller nodded.
Mueller had seen the director angry on other occasions and he’d seen how the old man’s volcanic temper erupted to intimidate. The tweedy professor wielded a cane against classroom misbehavior that he would not tolerate.
“Just the three of us,” the director said. “Let’s keep it that way. We are in a pretty pickle, gentlemen. He was our colleague.” The director paused. “Defected. You’re sure?”
The question was put to Mueller. Altman was gone from the home in Chesapeake Bay, gone from his townhouse in Georgetown, gone from the office, and gone from the places Mueller expected to find him. No one had seen Altman enter the Soviet embassy, but Vasilenko had heard that a room on the fourth floor had been prepared for a special guest. “They have him. I don’t know if he was taken or if he walked in.”
“How can you walk in and not be seen? Christ. Do you want to explain this to the senator?” The question was put to Coffin. Coffin cleared his throat, but the director cut him off. “I’m not going to blame you, James. You had your suspicions. But on this we hang together, or surely we’ll all hang separately. And we will hang, make no mistake about that.”
No one answered. The director’s eyes drifted back from the view of the gray Potomac. His crimson house robe was open at the neck and he abandoned lunch to light his pipe, puffing until the tobacco glowed red. “I should have suspected something. He took over in Bern when I was transferred to Berlin. I got little clues, but there was nothing to act on and nothing specific or concrete. I knew his father. I didn’t want to believe what I might have suspected. His suggestion that we use George to reach out to the Russians should have been a red flag. George, go ahead. What is it you want to say?”
“We’ve jumped to a conclusion,” Mueller said.
The director puffed. “I can do that. It’s a prerogative that comes with this office.”
“Do we have facts?” Mueller snapped. His anger showed.
There was a beat of silence and the flow of conversation stopped. The rebuke startled the director, whose fingers began a restless drumming.
Mueller softened his tone. “It may be him. It’s looks bad, yes. But I don’t think he ran to them. He has disappeared. He deserves the benefit of the doubt until we have facts. I’m not defending him. I’m defending how we go about this.”
The director nodded at Coffin. “Share with us your facts. What have you got?”
Coffin pulled a thick file from his bulky attaché case. His shoulders slumped, his pale skin was shiny from exhaustion, and he had the shadowed eyes of a man who had been up all night. His pleasant tenor voice had acquired a raspy huskiness, and he cleared his throat with a smoker’s cough.
“We have an idea,” he said. “Some facts, yes. A theory. We have gone through what we have to understand about when he started, our losses, and what’s still at risk. Shall I start at the beginning?”
Mueller listened. Coffin spoke with the authority and condescension that Mueller found distasteful. A tiresome pompous ass, he thought. But the game had shifted.
“Knowing it is Altman helped us solve the problem from within,” Coffin said. “Knowing it is him we could work backwards. We think he was turned in Vienna. January nineteen forty-e
ight.”
Coffin looked at Mueller. “You were there too, which is why suspicion could fall on you. We don’t know where the first contact was made. Vasilenko said you were in the Soviet sector, which raised a suspicion, but Altman had no clearance to travel there. They probably got him to one of those bars near the Russian zone that allied troops visited. Smoke, cheap beer, prostitutes with a good line. Chernov had his file and a photo. Chernov has terrible English so he probably had someone to interpret. A short conversation. All he had to do was show the photos. The meeting would have led to another that dealt with logistics, what signals to use when alerting there was a dead drop. He was fully turned by February, I suspect.”
Coffin looked up. “We know from Altman’s service record that he had no access to missions run outside of Austria. So he gave them what he had. It wasn’t much to start. A little bit of intelligence he got on currency support for the schilling. The cryptonym of an agent in Berlin, but no name. Our contact in the Italian Social Democrats who came through Vienna on his way to Moscow. A date here, the address of a hotel in the Soviet sector used by MI6, the names of Red Army deserters who we interrogated, minutes of meetings among Czech partisans who we were training to parachute behind Soviet lines.
“Altman knew the Soviets already had some of this information so he could believe that he was satisfying his obligation to Chernov without doing damage. And he could let himself believe the information was random, inconsequential, of little value. This would be the most forgiving explanation for what he did. He passed along information that Chernov already had, or was of little operational value. We were protected for a time because each link in our network was sequestered from the others. And maybe Altman convinced himself that he wasn’t hurting anyone.” Coffin paused. “This is stage one.”
Coffin opened a second file. “Stage two started when Moscow Center assembled these fragments into a map of intelligence possibilities, pointers to places, dates, names, actions that became situations of interest. We do the same thing. Slowly, their men in Moscow assembled a puzzle and saw the shape of the missing pieces and once they had the shape of those pieces they could look for them. The picture came into focus. They could create a run on the schilling. They could see our success running a Soviet asset, and then identify a suspect inside GRU or NKVD. They targeted these suspects until they were able to catch them in an act of espionage. This happened with Orlav in East Berlin. They trapped him with a prostitute in a safe house in Karlshorst. The dates align with Altman’s trip to Berlin. Orlav is the first loss we can link to Altman.”
Coffin leaned forward, palms on the table, eyes red from his long night of forensic research. “Altman had to see our losses mounting and he had to know that the information he passed along resulted in executions.”
Coffin turned over a page on which several names were typed. “Altman is responsible for these deaths. He killed these men as surely as the man who put a gun to their heads.”
Mueller scanned the list. He was struck by the sheer hypocrisy of it all. How could they not see that the Agency did the same thing, eliminating men who were no longer useful. Where was the outrage for the death of people like Mrs. Leisz, and the answer that came back to Mueller was, of course, they were not moral at all.
Mueller went down the list, stopping on each name, each life. He had known two personally, double agents who turned up dead in Berlin, one shot in an alley, the other found floating in the river. Poor dead souls, he thought. He read the captions.
Adolf Motorin missing in Berlin in August 1948. He remembered Motorin’s jaunty style and his obviously false hairpiece. Prescott Goodyear gone missing in Istanbul near the Blue Mosque in 1948, and assumed dead. His death had been a surprise. Gunther Hesse, twenty-eight, ex-Nazi turned double agent, or triple agent, depending on what you believed, found executed in West Berlin. Leonid Varenik executed in Munich. Found slumped over the steering wheel of his sedan, young wife in the passenger seat, also shot. Collateral damage. The people on the list were not just names to Mueller. He’d met them, or known them, and their names triggered memories and incidents from the past. The last was Alfred Leisz, the gaunt, chain-smoking Hungarian he’d found in a displaced persons camp and brought to Washington with infant son and pregnant wife. Damn fool. Leisz ignored the rules and was sloppy. Mueller looked up at Coffin, who had not stopped talking.
“We have another list of assets who are still in place. We don’t know if they’ve been compromised. We know Altman is familiar with them. We don’t have a way to contact them. They come to us when they have something they want to pass along, but we don’t have a way to reach them. They are now at risk.”
Coffin sipped his coffee. Lunch plates had been cleared. “They knew we were getting close to Protocol. They took Altman before we got to him. They will begin to debrief him, if they haven’t already begun. They’ll squeeze him and then silence him. Or park him in a dacha. We need to find him, to get him back . . . silence him.”
Coffin closed his folder and looked at the two men across the table. The mood had darkened. Coffin added, by way of a confirmatory remark, putting a period at the end of his indictment, “The shopping bag Vasilenko left in Union Station points to you, George, if you know what you’re looking at, and Walker didn’t, which is why they couldn’t make sense of the papers. But I could. You were set up.” Coffin spoke with cold affection for his certainty.
The director stared at Coffin and then at Mueller. “It makes us look like a bunch of incompetent amateurs. The man was in this room talking about the traitor knowing all the time that it was him. We were played.” The director stood and stretched fingers to toes of his slippers, and then moved to the window. He gazed out at the Washington Monument piercing the low gray clouds. In a moment he turned back to his colleagues and spoke calmly. “We have let down brave men who entrusted us with their lives.” He slumped in his chair. “We will all be looking for new jobs if they get him to Moscow and trot him out to the press.”
The director looked at Mueller. “What’s next?”
Mueller contemplated what else he could say in Altman’s defense. “They will try to get him out of the country. How? That’s the question. They won’t risk taking him out under his own name. We have three days, maybe four, before they get a false passport via diplomatic pouch. They have to assume the FBI has been alerted and that the airports are being watched.”
“I don’t want the FBI involved, understand?” The director shifted his foot thick with gout, and massaged the swollen ankle. “Sonofabitch, this is a mess. I will not sacrifice this Agency, and our hard work, to the hyenas in Washington. Gentlemen, what do you suggest?”
Mueller saw a bead of perspiration on the director’s upper lip. Worry pleated his large forehead, but for the first time in their acquaintance Mueller couldn’t tell how much of the man’s worry was for the work, how much for himself. Perhaps there was no difference. The thin line of judgment was porous with error, rank with self-interest. Washington was a terrible place for honorable men to work.
The director slapped the morning’s Post on the table. “We’re in one of those silly seasons.” He pointed to the front-page banner headline, “Oust More Sex Perverts in State Department.” He intoned solemnly, “There are those in this town who dress their conscience in the latest fashion.” He paused. “We need to make sure the overzealous vice squad hasn’t rounded up a man with those tendencies who points a finger at Altman, and that starts a witch hunt here.” The director looked directly at his two subordinates. “Gentlemen, what do you suggest? James, you’re always good at brainy suggestions.”
Coffin raised his eyes from his coffee. “They don’t know we have Vasilenko. We should use him to our advantage.”
The director pondered the comment. He looked at Mueller. “You have him?”
“He’s safe for now.”
“Does he trust you?”
Mueller considered the q
uestion. “Up to a point. He wants asylum. He has few options.”
“Will he cooperate?”
“Bait?”
“Yes.”
Mueller was incredulous.
“What options does he have?”
Mueller gazed at the director. “It could be a death sentence.”
“There are no good options here, George.” The director lifted his chin in the way he did when he was about to give a little speech. “He got into this business knowing the risks. Just like each of us. I’m sure your clever imagination can come up with a way to make this suitable for him. He must have a family. There are things that we can do.”
Lunch was over. The director removed his bib and limped back to his desk. He lifted the small statue of Nathan Hale. “There is a difference between losing one’s life and giving one’s life. We do the latter willingly for some higher purpose, you know, because we believe in something larger than ourselves, and a man of courage, a man of the world will rise to the occasion. Vasilenko might be such a man. You will have to find out.”
Mueller couldn’t tell if the director believed his little speech, but Mueller did not. There was nothing romantic about a spy’s death. Dead. Gone. Forgotten. It was a shitty job.
• • •
A few people in the Agency were told that Roger Altman was out of the office on special assignment. His secretary was spoken to so she wouldn’t contribute to loose talk. No one was to know. The assignment was code for a classified job. It happened all the time in Operations that one of the officers went dark for weeks at a time, dispatched secretly overseas. There was no more than the usual amount of chit chat about Altman’s absence. Someone speculated that he had flown to Berlin to support the severely understaffed team working on the uprising of East German construction workers. Altman, everyone knew, was fluent in German.
