The Debriefing

by Robert Littell

  Stone and the admiral are ill at ease with each other the way people who complement each other often are—the admiral with a cerebral squint to his eyes, totally at home with computer printouts, ballistic trajectories, tables of probabilities; and Stone, all fingertips, nerve ends, intuition.

  “Of course, I’ve only had time for a quick look,” Stone tells him evenly, “but from what I can see, it could be one of the biggest hauls we’ve ever had.”

  The admiral, who has often boasted that he is prepared to be bored by the start of World War III, takes Stone’s assessment in his stride, nods impatiently, adjusts his reading glasses and starts to leaf through the dossier. “Looks like the sight on a tank turret,” he comments, holding up one sheet to the light. Stone cranes his neck, skims the Russian text, tells the admiral, “That’s what it is, all right—a night sight which they plan to install in their T-62s already in Egyptian hands. The sheet gives the specifications for the sight—the ranges at which it’s effective, that sort of thing.”

  “Hmm,” the admiral says. He is, as usual, professionally noncommittal.

  One of the waiters offers the admiral a typed menu. He gives it the same attention he gave to the night sight. “Jellied madrilène, T-bone steak well done, carrots, jello. No bread. No butter.” He looks at Stone. “That suit you?” Without waiting for an answer, he tells the waiter, “Same for him. And we’ll take a bottle of that New York State red wine I had the other day.” To Stone: “The gnomes over at General Accounting won’t let us have French wines in the mess anymore. Some crap about balance of payments. Hmm. What’s this one say?”

  The admiral offers another sheet of paper to Stone, who reads it quickly. “It looks like a report on our fleet movements in the Mediterranean for the next six weeks”—Stone shakes his head in amazement—“including the patrol routes of the two Polaris submarines on station.” Stone is whispering now. “They must have access to our movement reports, which means they’ve broken one of our naval codes. This one”—he hands the admiral another sheet—“is a letter to the Soviet ambassador in Cairo from his brother-in-law, who’s the general in charge of Soviet logistical support facilities in Kazakstan, on the border with China. He says the Chinese are thinning out their forces along the frontier, that the troops are being pulled back to garrison cities, which leads him to believe that Mao’s death has caused more internal trouble than most people are aware of.” Stone picks up the next page. “This one looks like a report on a defect in the low-level parallax input on the radar tracking system for the SAM missiles.”

  The admiral attacks his jellied madrilène as if nothing unusual is happening. He finishes leafing through the dossier, listens with only an occasional “Hmm” to Stone’s running translation, hands the dossier across the table when he is through with it. “Obviously we’re going to have to go over these papers with a fine-tooth comb. Now tell me what you know about the defector Krolokov, isn’t it? What’s he like?”

  “His name is Kulakov,” Stone corrects him. “He’s in his mid fifties, short, tired, frightened. It’s hard to characterize what he’s like. I was raised on coasts, Admiral—in China, in Brazil, later in New England. After a good storm, we always used to scour the beaches for driftwood. Friend Kulakov reminds me of a piece of driftwood washed up on the sand. He’s high and dry, beached, abandoned by the waves; he’s been rubbed smooth, if you see what I mean. He’s without edges, without a center. He feels cut off, isolated, though the isolation is psychological rather than physical. He’s cut himself off from everything behind him, and he has no idea of what’s ahead of him.”

  “What prompted him to up and run for it?”

  “Reading between the lines, I gather a lot has gone wrong with his life in the last six or eight months. I’m not sure of the details yet. Then they were going to bring him up on some kind of charges. So when he got the chance, he flew the coop.”

  “Hmm.”

  Stone, who has dealt directly with the admiral since he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs nineteen months before, thinks again how wrong first impressions can be. At their initial meeting—the admiral didn’t even know that such a group as Stone’s existed, never mind that it was directly answerable to him—Stone came away thinking he was dealing with someone who was slow on the uptake, a time-server who doled out ideas as if there was a limited supply. Now he sees him as one of the cleverest minds in Washington, a man naturally suspicious of conventional wisdom, an expert on so many subjects, not the least of which is Congress, that Stone has long since lost track of them.

  “What’s next on the agenda?” Stone asks now.

  The admiral ignores the question, slices into his steak, cuts it in small pieces of equal size, chews each morsel methodically, almost for a fixed time, before swallowing. When there is nothing left on his plate but the bone, he wipes his lips on his napkin, looks up to contemplate his guest. “I’ve been meaning to ask you for some time, Stone: Do you have a first name?”

  Stone is caught off guard by the question. “I had one once,” he quips, “but it’s been lost somewhere in the bureaucratic shuffle.”

  The answer, for some reason, seems to please the admiral, who nods and twists his facial muscles into what could pass for a smile. “Tell me something else, Stone: If you had your choice, which would you take—the warm body of Kulakov or the papers?”

  Stone doesn’t hesitate. “The warm body, any day of the week.”

  “Why?” The admiral levels his gaze on Stone.

  Stone’s intuition is at work now. “Because,” he explains, “if there’s a fly in the ointment, something tells me we’ll find it in the warm body. The papers, if they’ve been set up, will be perfect.”

  Again Stone’s response pleases the admiral. “Thought you’d say that,” he mutters. He leans back, reaches for his cigar case, clips the tip off one, puts it in his mouth. One of the Philippine stewards appears from nowhere with a light. “Here’s where we’re at,” says the admiral, exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke. “Charlie Evans over at CIA was furious when I put you onto the defector instead of one of his boys. Their station chief was out of town at the time, and one of our military attachés—a Navy captain, I might add—had the good sense to latch on to the Russian when he walked in the embassy door. Anyhow, the modus operandi I’ve worked out is this: Charlie Evans gets the cold paper, and you get the warm body. I had to promise Evans that his boys could have the courier, if they still want him, when you get through with him. You speak a bunch of languages, don’t you, Stone?”

  “Five fluently, not counting English.”

  “You don’t happen to speak Eskimo, do you?” the admiral asks seriously.

  Stone has to smile. “Eskimo? Not a word.”

  “Hmm. Well, in the Eskimo language there are four future tenses: the immediate future, the middle future, the far-in-the- future future, and a future that will never arrive. I was conjugating in this tense when I spoke to Evans.”

  “I think I read you, Admiral,” Stone says. What he understands is what all the insiders in Washington understand: that there is a long-standing bitter feud between the admiral and Charlie Evans that dates back to the days when Evans, then a middle-echelon regional chief at the CIA, tried to pressure the admiral, then the captain of an aircraft carrier, into launching an air strike attacking the Bay of Pigs against Castro’s troops. The admiral refused (so, eventually, did the President when he was approached directly by the CIA) and Evans did his level best to ruin the admiral’s career, filing a scathing report accusing him of being personally responsible for the fiasco by failing to provide air cover at the crucial moment. In later years, the mere mention of Evans’s name would bring an instantaneous glint to the eyes of the admiral, who neither forgot nor forgave.

  The admiral puts his cigar case back into his breast pocket. “How much time will you need with the warm body?” he wants to know.

  “Hard to say, Admiral, until I’ve made a pass or two at him.”

  “Hmm.” The
admiral appears lost in thought for a moment.

  “All right. Start the debriefing and set up a coordinating link with Evans’s people who will be working over the papers. But don’t tell them anything you haven’t told me first. What I mean, Stone, is don’t give away the family jewels”—he winks slyly—“if you find any family jewels.”

  Again Stone says, “I read you, Admiral.”

  “Hmm.” The admiral glances over his shoulder, checks to make sure that the stewards can’t observe him, removes a dead fly from his jacket pocket and, holding it by a wing, drops it onto the uneaten jello. “That’ll keep them on their toes,” he whispers, and he laughs wickedly.

  Thro is working herself up again; her slightly hysterical laughter rings through the room like crystal being tapped with a spoon. “Then there’s the dreadful possibility that we’ll be sucked into the black hole at the center of our galaxy which is pulling in stars the way a vacuum cleaner pulls in dust. Do you understand, Stone, what will happen? The gravitational force of the black hole will shrink the earth to the size of a green pea. All the Picassos and Brandenburgs and Beatle records and Porches of Maidens and Pentagons and Top Secret Eyes Only documents will be crushed, Stone, crushed and pulverized and disintegrated, their molecules and atoms intermingling.”

  “I’m more interested in the gynecologist,” Stone tells her, “the one you said danced so close he gave you a Pap smear on the dance floor, while I was off on the frontier of freedom, which this time out happened to be Athens.”

  “My God, Stone, don’t you know a joke when you hear one anymore?” She adds coyly, “He did dance a bit closer than I’m used to.”

  Mozart buzzes on an interoffice line. “Anytime you’re ready,” he says. “Everyone’s primed.”

  “Be right in,” says Stone. He rocks back in his swivel chair, his head against the photostat of the front page of the New York Times dated November 9, 1917. “Revolutionists Seize Petrograd; Kerensky Flees,” reads the main headline. A small one, circled in red crayon, says: “Washington Reserves Judgment, Hoping Revolt Is Only Local.”

  Thro says, “Ah, Stone, don’t be sulky. I was only trying to bug you. You made such a fuss about my ring turning black in Paris. … I was just getting back, is all I was doing.”

  “The chemistry of couples”—Stone shakes his head in annoyance—“is a fascinating thing.”

  “And what, pray tell, is the chemistry of couples?”

  “I have a theory,” Stone explains—he starts to gather the notes he wants to take with him—“that couples have a fixed amount of time together, and the chemistry of their relationship at any given moment depends on their perception of how much of this time is behind them, and how much ahead.”

  “Working the equation backward,” Thro says, “you ought to be able to figure out how much time they have ahead by observing the chemistry.”

  “You ought to,” agrees Stone.

  Thro’s voice is barely audible. “Oh, Stone, it used to be so good, our chemistry. There used to be an endless amount of time ahead of us.”

  “I don’t know what you want anymore,” mutters Stone. He puts his notes in a blue folder with the words “Topology—Current” stenciled on the cover.

  “I want what I’ve always wanted,” pleads Thro. “I want to be imagined.”

  Stone’s unit is carried on the Pentagon books under the innocuous nomenclature “Task Force 753—Topology.” Its budget, which has been hovering around the $2.5 million mark for the past several years, is buried in the Defense Intelligence Agency appropriations. The money is funneled from the DIA director’s current contingency fund to the Joint Chiefs current contingency fund to Topology Project Chief current contingency fund, where it pays for the twenty-eight staff members on the books, the two European bureaus (in Paris and Vienna), half a dozen safe houses scattered around the world, and the top two floors of the Georgetown town house which serves as the headquarters of Task Force 753—Topology. Actually, only the top floor is used for Topology work. The floor underneath was originally bought and left vacant to “insulate” the top floor; one of Stone’s innovations has been to install a working business to go along with the unit’s cover. Thus was born John Pierce Associates Inc., an international mail order house that netted $245,488 in the last calendar year, enough to pay for the upkeep (without dipping into contingency funds) of the small Virginia debriefing operation which is the only other physical entity under Topology control. The particular advantage of raising funds this way is that it permits Stone to run an operation that is totally untraceable through funding links, even to the handful of people in Washington who know what Task Force 753—Topology really is.

  And what it really is is this: the elite private intelligence arm of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The unit was originally created in 1946, as the cold war was getting under way, under the title “Penetration Feasibility Studies.” Its mandate then—and it has never been altered—was to train penetration agents, and organize support facilities, against the day when they would be sent into the Soviet Union, under the direct control of the Joint Chiefs, on one-time missions.

  In all the years of its existence, Task Force 753—Topology has never sent a single agent into the Soviet Union. But it religiously maintains the capability. It has its own Clothing and Accessories Section (with a sign on the door of the storeroom that reads “Buy Russian”), which can outfit an agent with everything from a Soviet-manufactured valise to toothpaste to underwear. There is an Identity Section, which deals in internal passports, work books and various ministry or military identification cards. (The section chiefs pride and joy is a secondhand Soviet-made lamination machine, bought some years before from a source in Yugoslavia.) There is one middle-aged woman who does nothing in life but keep up to date on train and plane schedules, and someone else who compiles lists of places where a potential agent might stay in various cities without coming to the attention of the local militia. Still someone else keeps track of Soviet soccer scores, which are posted on a bulletin board; Stone’s staffers are the only Americans in Washington who run an office pool on Russian teams. Even the dentistry (for the few, Stone among them, who are carried on the books as potential penetration agents) is performed by a Russian exile who drills and fills exactly as he did when he practiced in Minsk. (One of the running arguments between Stone and Mozart has been on just this sore point, with Mozart representing the staffers who prefer high-speed drills and more modern dentistry techniques, and Stone insisting on verisimilitude down to the poorly done lead fillings in his molars.)

  What makes all this accumulated expertise possible is the fact that Task Force 753—Topology is staffed by second- and third-generation anti-Communists, all of them the offspring of people who at one time or another fled the motherland—or died trying. The first requisite for membership in Topology is fluency in Russian. Russian is the office language. Copies of Pravda, Izvestiya, Literaturnaya Gazeta (preferred by most, though not at all for its articles on literature), Yonost, Oktyabr and Novy Mir are scattered around desks. All told, Stone’s unit subscribes—via a cover library facility in the Pentagon—to one hundred and twelve Soviet publications.

  With all this Russian expertise at its fingertips, the unit—under Stone’s prodding—took to performing odd jobs in its spare time. (The admiral describes this as “honing the blade.”) Stone’s attempt to turn a Soviet diplomat in Paris was a typical extracurricular activity. Before that, the unit had concentrated its resources on examining the private life and loves of a first-term congressman who was rallying his colleagues on the Hill against military appropriations. Topology got into the debriefing business when it was charged by the Joint Chiefs with questioning the American scientist Lewinter, a rare bird who defected to the Soviet Union several years ago and was then unaccountably handed back to the Americans. Stone concluded that the Russians had released him to convince the U.S. that they didn’t believe Lewinter really possessed the signature trajectories for America’s ballistic
missile force. Ergo, they did have their hands on the crucial trajectories, a breakthrough which would permit them to distinguish, during a missile attack, the decoys from the real McCoys by their flight paths. Stone’s conclusion was instrumental in obliging the Joint Chiefs to change the missile trajectories, a project that cost the American taxpayers four billion dollars over a three-year period.

  After the success with Lewinter, the odd job that Topology undertook more often than not involved debriefing Soviet defectors who, for one reason or another, had aroused the interest of the Joint Chiefs.

  Kulakov is just such a defector.

  The woman who follows the soccer scores is making book on an upcoming match between the Moscow Dynamos, known for playing unflappable position soccer, and a squad from Bratsk, which has a reputation for improvisation, a rare trait among Soviet teams. The smart money (led by Mozart, who has put himself down for five dollars) is on the Dynamos. Stone, characteristically, risks two dollars on the boys from Bratsk as he makes his way through the small, crowded room to the desk.

  The atmosphere, as always, is casual. The woman who has as her bailiwick Planes and Trains is describing how a Washington hostess organizes the dinner parties for which she is universally famous. “Picture it,” she says, her voice pitched high, her penciled eyebrows dancing. “She starts off by choosing the dessert. Then she figures out what cheese goes with that dessert, then decides what main course goes with that cheese, and then selects what guests go with that main course!”