by Arno Baker
Murphy, the guy with the binoculars, was sweating profusely with his shirt sticking to his back here and there. The hours crawled slowly by with nothing happening in the street below, just delivery trucks and a few well dressed people. Suddenly he stood up as he focused on the two men who had just stepped out of the building stopping briefly as they talked on the sidewalk below. He could see them so close up that their facial expressions were clearly visible and had he known Russian he could have probably been able to read their lips.
“Well, well what d’ya know. A new face for our mug book, Jerry! Make sure you snap him flush. I mean the one on the right in the tan striped suit. The other one we already know.”
The triple clicking sound of the shutter came three then four times in rapid succession. Jerry smiled with satisfaction.
“Yeah, I got him, at least four frames but that damn hat of his makes it a tough angle. But don’t worry I got him smack in the kisser.”
The two men went on talking nonchalantly in the sun drenched street then they shook hands and walked in separate directions.
Murphy grabbed the phone.
“Hey, this is Room 292. …You see the one in the tan stripes walking east? … Yeah, that one…. Make sure you stay with him. Not like last time, ok? Careful now... Good.”
“Let’s see where that Commie takes us today. He looks very new. I‘ve never seen him before.”
Murphy decided to light up another Chesterfield. Then Jerry asked.
“Don’t you want the other guy?”
“Nah, lets concentrate on the new face. We’ve been tailing the other one for months without much success. He just goes to the movies a lot.”
“No kidding, what does he go and see?”
Murphy took a swig of ginger ale from the bottle.
“Mostly Russian language pictures, in that theater off Times Square, otherwise it’s almost exclusively westerns. Bang bang, cowboys and Indians, shoot em’ up kinda stuff. Always the same routine, sometimes I get the feeling he’s goofing off. I‘ve tailed him many times myself but the guy is very good. I mean real good! I lost him in the subway dozens of times. He‘s probably made me by now. Damn it.”
“Wish I could do a tail job one of these days.”
“Your time will come Jerry.–Murphy finished the bottle and eased it on to the floor next the others making a face---I wish the director would let us at least have one beer on jobs like this one.”
“Not a chance, Murph…!”
Murphy nodded and returned to his binoculars. The street was empty and shimmering in the heat. The radio interrupted the Yankee game for a news flash, as an emphatic sounding voice announced:
“President and Mrs. Roosevelt have left the heat of the nation‘s capital and will be spending a few days at Hyde Park this week-end... In other news…”
Then came more big band sounds.
At FBI offices on Foley Square in lower Manhattan, known inside the Bureau as NYO for New York Office, Murphy was examining three of the snap shots Jerry took the day before with a magnifying glass, carefully comparing them to the official diplomatic identification photos of Soviet consular personnel neatly arranged in a huge photo album marked “SECRET-DIPLOMATIC –USSR—1941” in red letters on a shiny black cover. Standing next to Murphy, impeccably dressed as usual, was William “Willy” Anderson, the new face of the FBI‘s New York “enemy subversive squad.” Anderson had just been promoted and congratulated by the Director himself for his secret work on Italian diplomats and spies. He was quickly becoming a legend among the other special agents because of his meteoric rise.
“So that’s the new face for this week, Murph?”
“Yes Sir, we spotted him this morning for the first time. He’s very young, just like Yakovlev, I’d say not more than twenty-five or so.”
“It figures, their people are suddenly getting much younger than the crowd we were working on until last year. But these new fellows are also much better trained. They’re shaking our tails very easily and they’re highly disciplined.”
Murphy straightened up and pointed with his magnifying glass at the pages in the book.
“Bingo! Here’s our boy and he’s even got a name Aleksander Fomin, F-O-M-I-N. He arrived in San Francisco on February 20th on a Japanese freighter, the Shinara Maru sailing out of Yokohama via Honolulu. Good God! That’s three months ago! And we only spotted him today? Where’s he been all this time?”
“You mean where the hell have we been Murphy! What does this guy do?”
Murphy made a face and read from a 3x5 index card.
“Fomin is officially a diplomatic trainee in the passport office. That means he doesn’t yet enjoy diplomatic immunity so he’ll probably not be doing anything compromising. But I’m positive that he’s never left that damn building in the past four months. We never saw him before, Mr. Anderson, I’m sure about that.”
“No, no, we just didn’t spot him, Murphy. The guy has to go out and buy groceries, even if he‘s living upstairs in the attic, come on! He’s probably in training on the inside under Yakovlev or some other senior type. Keep on top of those two. As far as we‘re concerned the Nazis and the Russkies are allies, birds of a feather. Don’t you forget it.”
Murphy was always convinced that Anderson had some extra inside information he couldn’t share and that was the reason he often remained silent during briefings.
“The Russians are becoming much more active, Mr. Anderson, there’s lots of new people and they are far more visible. I mean they go to social events: opera, concerts, parties… they’re always attending some new function.”
Anderson smiled and nodded.
“And they have learned at last to avoid the Communist Party USA as though it were a leper colony. You know they could still join up with Hitler and Mussolini and burn the Limeys’ and our ass real bad one of these days. So you had this Fomin guy tailed, right?”
“Yes Sir.”
Chuck Mason was a rookie FBI agent originally from Nebraska who had been dispatched to New York City after two months’ training. This was only the third or fourth time he was following a “subject” in the streets of Manhattan and he was nervous because he’d been singled out by Mr. Murphy himself for a discreet surveillance job on a Soviet diplomat.
Mason followed Fomin at a distance as he walked briskly East on 61st Street until he reached Lexington Avenue and entered a cigar store. Mason waited for a few minutes across the street until he saw his subject emerge with a copy of the Journal American in his right hand walking north on Lexington for two more blocks. Fomin stopped at the northwest corner of 64th Street waiting for the light to change. Mason decided to keep at a safe distance and remained across the avenue half a block south. A heavy truck lumbered east on 64th turning slowly into Lexington Avenue. Mason hurried up to the corner where Fomin had crossed at the risk of being spotted. Once the truck passed the Soviet passport trainee had vanished and Mason was desperately looking everywhere to pick up his trace. He couldn‘t decide which direction to take and on a hunch he opted to continue north to the next block. Minutes went by while a smiling Alexander Fomin watched from a flower shop on East 65th Street a desperate Chuck Mason hurrying briskly uptown as fast as he could. The rookie was now totally off course, completely lost and heading quickly and decidedly away from his subject.
Fomin wasted no time and walked quickly to Third Avenue and the protective shadows of the massive structures of the elevated train. He used the sacrosanct routine of stopping at various stores and entering them to check his front and back thoroughly. He also pretended to walk up the ramp to the El at 59th Street and surveyed the side streets for any sign of Mason before he crossed the platform and then went back down on the other side. By now the young man was off on chase to oblivion. After a full forty minutes of bobbing and weaving Fomin finally reached the corner of 55th Street and Third and a non-descript hamburger joint called “Sally’s Luncheonette” with a few booths and a string of round stools at the counter. He took a
seat at the far end near the kitchen and the bathroom door, ordered coffee and unfolded the newspaper as he kept galcing at the entrance.
A few minutes later a tall and rather attractive blonde in her late twenties wearing sturdy laced up walking shoes and a dress with flowery patterns came in, seemed to hesitate and finally sat at the counter next to Fomin. She pulled out an identical copy of the Journal American from her handbag and kept it folded in half on the counter next to his paper. The woman ordered a cup of tea with lemon and sat there reading and lighting a cigarette completely oblivious of the man on her right. After a few minutes the order taker wandered into the kitchen and the two quickly switched newspapers without saying a word or looking in each other‘s direction. With very deliberate and precise gestures the blonde opened up a compact, powdered her nose then she slowly folded her new paper placing it inside her bag. She left a few pennies‘ tip on the counter, and paid at the cash register taking her time to slide the change into her purse. She looked at herself almost coquettishly in the mirror on the side of the entrance, adjusted her hat and took a few seconds more to look carefully up and down Third Avenue before she walked out at a determined pace and turned south.
“Now there’s a true professional.” thought Fomin while he was carefully observing her movements and waiting a few more minutes before he walked in the opposite direction along Third Avenue with his paper folded under his left arm.
Mason had finally understood that he was off to nowhere by the time he reached the Armory at 67th Street and Park Avenue so he doubled back south at full speed wondering how he’d managed to explain that his “subject” had lost him. By the time the blonde had left the luncheonette Mason was one block north of 60th Street still unsure of what he should do. By pure accident as he reached 59th and Third Avenue under the shadows of the El he spotted Feklisov walking nonchalantly back from Sally’s with his newspaper neatly folded and safely tucked under his left arm. Mason was ecstatic to have miraculously reconnected with his “subject.” He kept his distance and followed him diligently all the way back to the Consulate of the USSR at 61St Street and Madison Avenue.
From across the street Fomin immediately spotted the tail that had fortuitously reappeared but he was positive that Mason hadn‘t witnessed his brush pass with the blonde at the luncheonette so he calmly made no attempt to shake his shadow and slowly walked back to the consulate in linear fashion stopping only to look at storefronts along the way making sure the young FBI agent was hanging diligently at a distance right behind him. Mason recorded Fomin’s return at the exact same time as Murphy at 1:57 pm. He later had to admit in his report that he had lost the Soviet diplomatic trainee for 24 minutes on Lexington Avenue but found him again by pure accident on Third Avenue after wandering too far north. He couldn‘t use the word “luck” in an official report but that‘s what it was and the way Murphy read it.
Murphy got angry and felt that greenhorns like Charlie Mason could prove to be dangerous and desperately required a lot more training especially before being let loose in a city like New York! He asked Anderson to approve rotating Mason so he would be removed from New York City, the most sensitive and difficult posting in the country and sent to a far less demanding job at the Canadian border, near Niagara Falls where he‘d get a lot more training. The request was granted without any objections.
II
Six months earlier, a small gathering was taking place in the office of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov that was located in one of the large wings of the Kremlin Palace. There was a huge portrait of Stalin on the wall behind the minister’s desk that was kept immaculately clean and empty thanks to the highly disciplined working habits that Foreign Minister Molotov modeled on his mentor and boss, the General Secretary Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. General Pavel Fitin head of foreign espionage was shown in and behind him were three young NKVD officers. Molotov stood up behind his desk; he looked like a bank clerk in his dark purple suit and black tie. His shiny black shoes did appear to be Western however. He didn‘t smile and shook hands with Fitin who whispered a few words until finally Molotov spoke.
“So Fitin, these young comrades are ready to go to America?”
“Yes comrade minister.”
Molotov scrutinized each man carefully then asked Fomin.
“You are quite young, are you married?”
“No, not yet comrade minister.”
“What do you mean ‘Not yet’? Molotov then turned to Fitin and asked:
“What does this mean Fitin? This twenty-six year old is being shipped out to the citadel of capitalism without a woman? Don‘t you know how easily a vigorous young man can be compromised by one of their expert “ladies of the night?”
Fitin looked very embarrassed but had a ready answer since he expected the question.
“Yes comrade minister. I am well aware of the situation but in this case Fomin is a radio engineer specialist and we are very short of scientific staff in New York. We shall quickly help him find a suitable and pretty young Russian girl from a secretarial pool.”
Molotov smiled at Fomin‘s embarrassment.
“Ah yes of course, Amtorg is full of bright young typists. Get married Fomin, that‘s an order!”
Fomin looked up at the giant portrait of Stalin as though the order had come directly from the Gensek.
“Yes comrade minister!”
Molotov seemed satisfied at Fomin’s almost robotic reply.
“Good! Well then general we agree to relax the rules this one time. But this is entirely your responsibility.”
Molotov the adopted a solemn, official tone as though he were speaking ex-cathedra to a large audience in the Hall of Columns.
“Let me now say to all you new officers that you are entering the service at a crucial moment in history. Never has the working class been under such pressure and at the same time so close to success! Our incomparably wise leader, our Great Comrade Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin has shown the path to follow and has warned us repeatedly that the greatest threats to the working class in fact lay just ahead. You are all infiltrating the heart of capitalism, the very center of the beast, and have been selected out of thousands of other recruits because you are the best in your graduating class. It is your duty to always remember your allegiance first to the party, the service, and above all to the General Secretary and head of the Politburo, Comrade Stalin.” Molotov went on for some time speaking in the accepted and well honed jargon used by the top political class, a language that Fomin understood and accepted as carrying the message of socialist truth itself.
“It was during my studies at the technical institute that I learned about radio technology as rudimentary as it was in 1939. At the same time the personnel services of the NKVD were going around actively looking for potential recruits, how they settled on me I will never know. But I did fit a certain profile: working class, party member, both parents party members with unblemished records and I already had some technical training that allowed me to read a blueprint. I also had no foreign attachments by family or otherwise. On the negative side a hiking accident during my early teens left me with a slight limp in my right leg and mild deafness in my right ear but not enough to disqualify me for radio operations. I would never be able to serve in the army with those handicaps but the NKVD was a far different matter.
Training was hard and required being constantly on the alert using safe houses and secret meetings, until I was finally assigned to a group of five young men in a house in the outskirts of Moscow where we were taught the basics of operating in a hostile environment. At the same time I was taking advanced radio technology and electrical engineering classes and I rightly suspected that I was being destined to some kind of security job inside a facility. My hunch turned out to be correct. More importantly I became friendly with my classmates one of whom happened to be Yatskov. Neither of us knew that later on I would be serving in New York using the alias of Fomin under his supervision as Yakovlev since he had a few months’ seniority ov
er me…”
Irina kept on typing but once they reached this point she stopped and turned to her notepad. It meant that this section was probably delicate and required careful editing,
“Colonel, even though we are describing things that happened almost a half century ago, the techniques used by the services must remain protected, as you know. I shall have to check to make sure that we do not add too much detail in this part about training.”
Feklisov kept on talking and Irina took notes until she paused and they had tea and worked for a few more hours. In the end she had managed to condense that section down to some 20 pages and finally entered those into her laptop. The session ended when Natasha arrived. She was meeting Irina for the first time and openly displayed her aversion for the instruder so much so that it had become embarrassing. Feklisov wondered whether it truly was jealousy and felt privately flattered if it turned out to be the case.
III
Fomin closed the passport section at the consulate at 4 p.m. and walked up four steep flights of stairs that ended with a locked armored steel plate door leading to the security section in what used to be the attic, under the roof of the building. An NKVD officer unlocked the doors from the inside: in the first small room to the left was a powerful radio transmitter and receiver allowing for direct communication with Moscow used only in extreme emergency situations. A second door opened into a larger room with a long table used by the code clerks and by Feklisov at other times to develop and cut filmed documents. Along the wall there was a modest sofa that he used as his bed. In the back there was only a large closet, a toilet and a wash room. Most routine coded messages were sent via Western Union cable. Less urgent materials were placed in the diplomatic pouch that was sealed under red wax and addressed to a special office at the Narkomindel in Moscow.
