by Daniel Silva
Whatever the case, Colonel Sergei Morosov was a changed man when he returned to the interrogation room. After first apologizing for his earlier intransigence, the Russian said he would be more than willing to offer any and all assistance to the Office in exchange for sanctuary and a reasonable financial settlement. He acknowledged, however, that Israel was not his first choice as a permanent home. He was no anti-Semite, mind you, but he had strong personal views about the Middle East and the plight of the Palestinians and had no desire to live among people whom he regarded as colonizers and oppressors.
“Give us a few months,” said Gabriel. “If you still feel the same way, I’ll reach out to one of our friends.”
“I didn’t know you had any.”
“One or two,” said Gabriel.
With that, they took him to one of the bungalows and allowed him to sleep. It was nearly 10:00 p.m. when finally he awoke. They gave him a change of clothing—proper clothing, not another tracksuit—and served him a dinner of warm borscht and chicken Kiev. At midnight, rested and fed, he was brought back to the interrogation room, where Gabriel waited, an open notebook before him.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Sergei Morosov.”
“Not your work name,” said Gabriel. “Your real name.”
“It’s been so long, I’m not sure I remember it.”
“Try,” said Gabriel. “We have plenty of time.”
Which wasn’t at all the case; the clock was working against them. They had three or four days to find the mole, thought Gabriel. A week at the outside.
36
Upper Galilee, Israel
His real name was Aleksander Yurchenko, but he had shed it many years ago after his first posting abroad, and no one, not even his sainted mother, called him anything but Sergei. She had served as a typist at Lubyanka, and later as personal secretary to KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, who would eventually succeed Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the dying Soviet Union. Sergei’s father was also a servant of the old order. A brilliant economist and Marxist theoretician, he had worked for Gosplan, which produced the blueprint for the Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy known as the Five-Year Plan. They were Orwellian documents, full of wishful thinking, that frequently set output targets in terms of weight rather than actual units produced. Sergei’s father, who lost faith in communism near the end of his career, kept a framed Western cartoon above his desk in the family’s Moscow apartment. It depicted a group of glum factory workers standing around a single nail the size of a Soviet ballistic missile. “Congratulations, Comrades!” declares the proud factory director. “We have met our quota for the current Five-Year Plan!”
Sergei’s parents were by no means Party elites—the members of the nomenklatura who zipped through Moscow’s traffic in special lanes, in the backs of Zil limousines—but they were Party members nonetheless, and as such they lived a life far beyond the reach of ordinary Russians. Their apartment was larger than most, and they had it entirely to themselves. Sergei attended a school reserved for the children of Party members and at eighteen entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the Soviet Union’s most prestigious university. There he studied political science and German. Many of his classmates entered the Soviet Union’s diplomatic corps, but not Sergei. His mother, the personal secretary of a KGB legend, had other ideas.
The Red Banner Institute was the KGB’s academy. It maintained four secluded sites scattered around Moscow, with the main campus at Chelobityevo, north of the Ring Road. Sergei arrived there in 1985. One of his classmates was the son of a KGB general. But not just any KGB general; he was the head of the First Chief Directorate, the KGB’s foreign espionage division, a very powerful man indeed.
“The son had been spoiled rotten as a child. He’d been raised abroad and exposed to Western culture. He had blue jeans and Rolling Stones records, and thought he was much cooler than the rest of us. As it turned out, he wasn’t terribly bright. After graduation they sent him to the Fifth Chief Directorate, which handled internal security. Thanks to his father, he did quite well for himself after the fall. He founded a bank and then diversified into a number of different fields, including international arms dealing. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. His name is—”
“Ivan Kharkov.”
Sergei Morosov smiled. “Your old friend.”
Because he came to the Red Banner Institute directly from university, Sergei Morosov’s training period was three years in length. Upon graduation he was assigned to the First Chief Directorate and placed on the German operations desk at Moscow Center, the directorate’s wooded headquarters in Yasenevo. A year later he was assigned to the rezidentura in East Berlin, where he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, knowing full well the Soviet Union would crumble next. The end came in December 1991. “I was inside Yasenevo when they lowered the hammer and sickle at the Kremlin. We all got drunk, and we stayed drunk for the better part of the next decade.”
In the post-Soviet era, the KGB was disbanded, renamed, reorganized, and renamed again. Eventually, the basic elements of the old organization were split into two new services: the FSB and the SVR. The FSB handled domestic security and counterintelligence, and took over the KGB’s old central headquarters in Lubyanka Square. The SVR became Russia’s new foreign intelligence service. Headquartered in Yasenevo, it was essentially the old First Chief Directorate of the KGB with a new name. The United States, ostensibly a Russian ally, remained the SVR’s primary obsession, though officially the SVR referred to America as the “main target” instead of the “main enemy.” NATO and Great Britain were also primary targets for collection.
“And Israel?” asked Gabriel.
“We never gave you more than a passing thought. That is, until you got into your feud with Ivan.”
“What about you?” asked Gabriel. “How did Sergei Morosov fare in the new world order?”
He hung around Berlin, where he constructed a stay-behind network of agents that would spy the daylights out of the reunified Germany for years to come. Then it was off to Helsinki where, under a new name, he served as deputy rezident. He became a rezident for the first time in 2004 in The Hague and then, in 2009, he reprised the role in Ottawa, an important post, given its proximity to the United States. Unfortunately, he got into a bit of trouble—“A girl and the Canadian minister of defense, water under the bridge”—and the Canadians told him to take a hike, quietly, so as not to start a tit-for-tat scandal. He cooled his heels at Moscow Center for a couple of years, changed his name and his face, and then returned to Germany as Sergei Morosov, a Russian banking specialist employed by Globaltek Consulting.
“The German services were so clueless, no one remembered me from my days in East Berlin.”
“Does Globaltek do any actual consulting?”
“Quite a bit. And we’re rather good, I must say. But mainly we function as a rezidentura in the heart of the German business community, and I’m the rezident.”
“Not anymore,” said Gabriel. “You’re a defector now, but please continue.”
Globaltek, said Sergei Morosov, served two functions. Its main task was to identify potential assets and steal German industrial technology, which Russia needed desperately. To that end, Globaltek ran numerous kompromat operations against prominent German businessmen. Most of the operations involved illicit payments of money, or sex.
“Women, boys, animals . . .” Sergei Morosov shrugged. “The Germans, Allon, are a freewheeling lot.”
“And the second function?”
“We service sensitive assets.”
“Assets who require special care because their exposure would create problems for the Kremlin.” Gabriel paused, then added, “Assets like Werner Schwarz.”
“Correct.”
By any objective measure, Sergei Morosov continued, the Globaltek operation was a smashing success. Which was why he was surprised by the message that arrived in his encrypted mailbox on an unusually warm October afte
rnoon.
“What was it?”
“A summons from Moscow Center.”
“Surely,” said Gabriel, “you returned home for consultations frequently.”
“Of course. But this one was different.”
“What did you do?”
Sergei Morosov did what any SVR officer would have done under similar circumstances. He put his affairs in order and penned a letter of farewell to his sainted mother. And in the morning, certain in the knowledge he would soon be dead, he boarded an Aeroflot flight to Moscow.
37
Upper Galilee, Israel
“You’ve been to Moscow, yes?”
“Several times,” admitted Gabriel.
“You like Moscow?”
“No.”
“And Lubyanka?” wondered Sergei Morosov.
Again, Gabriel acknowledged what was already well known among Russian intelligence officers of a certain age and rank, that some years ago he had been arrested in Moscow and interrogated, violently, in the cellars of Lubyanka.
“But you’ve never been to Yasenevo, have you?” asked Sergei Morosov.
“No, never.”
“Too bad. You might have liked it.”
“I doubt it.”
“Oh, they’ll let almost anyone into Lubyanka these days,” Sergei Morosov went on. “It’s something of a tourist attraction. But Yasenevo is special. Yasenevo is—”
“Moscow Center.”
Sergei Morosov smiled. “Would it be possible to have a sheet of paper and something to write with?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to draw a map of the grounds to help you better visualize what came next.”
“I have a very good imagination.”
“So I hear.”
Yasenevo, Sergei Morosov resumed, is a world unto itself, a world of privilege and power, surrounded by miles of razor wire and patrolled at all hours by guards with vicious attack dogs. The main building is shaped like a giant cruciform. About a mile to the west, hidden in a dense forest, is a colony of twenty dachas reserved for senior officers. One dacha stands slightly alone and bears a small sign that reads inner-baltic research committee, a nonsensical title, even by SVR standards. It was to this dacha that Sergei Morosov was taken under armed escort. Inside, surrounded by thousands of books and piles of dusty old files—including several that bore the stamp of the NKVD, the precursor of the KGB—a man was waiting to see him.
“Describe him, please.”
“Winner of the Vladimir Lenin look-alike contest.”
“Age?”
“Old enough to remember Stalin and to have feared him.”
“Name?”
“Let’s call him Sasha.”
“Sasha what?”
“Sasha It Doesn’t Matter. Sasha is a ghost of a man. Sasha is a state of mind.”
“Had you ever met this state of mind before?”
No, said Sergei Morosov, he had never had the honor of being introduced to the great Sasha, but he had heard whispers about him for years.
“Whispers?”
“Loose talk. You know how spies are, Allon. They love to gossip.”
“What did they say about Sasha?”
“That he ran a single asset. That this asset had been his entire life’s work. That he had been assisted in this endeavor by a legendary figure in our business.”
“Who was this legendary figure?”
“The whispers never addressed this.”
Gabriel was tempted to press Morosov on this point, but didn’t. He had learned long ago that, when it came to debriefing a source, it was sometimes better to sit quietly and bide one’s time. And so he allowed the identity of the legendary figure to fall temporarily by the wayside and asked for the date.
“I told you, Allon, it was October.”
“Last October?”
“The October before.”
“Did he offer you tea?”
“No.”
“Black bread and vodka?”
“Sasha regards vodka as a Russian illness.”
“How long did the meeting last?”
“Meetings with Sasha are never short.”
“And the topic?”
“The topic,” said Sergei Morosov, “was a traitor named Konstantin Kirov.”
Gabriel turned to a fresh page in his notebook, indifferently, as though he were not surprised to learn that the Office’s prized SVR source had been blown for well over a year. “Why would a man like Sasha be interested in Kirov?” he asked, his pen hovering above the page. “Kirov was a nothing man.”
“Not in Sasha’s mind. Kirov’s treachery was for Sasha a great opportunity.”
“For what?”
“To protect his asset.”
“And the reason for the ominous summons?”
“Sasha wanted me to work with him.”
“You must have been honored.”
“Greatly.”
“Why do you suppose he chose you?”
“He knew my mother had worked for Andropov. As far as Sasha was concerned, I was someone who could be trusted.”
“With what?”
“Alistair Hughes.”
Moscow Center’s primary file on MI6’s Vienna Head of Station made for dull reading. It stated that Alistair Hughes was loyal to his service and his country, that he harbored no personal or sexual vices, and that he had rejected several offers of recruitment, including one made when he was still an undergraduate at Oxford and assumed—by Moscow Center at least—to be bound for a career in British intelligence.
To this meager offering, Sasha added a file of his own. It contained intimate portraits of Hughes’s wife and his two sons. There were also details of his sexual preferences, which were rather specific, and his mental health, which was not good. Hughes suffered from bipolar disorder and acute anxiety. His condition had worsened during a tour of Baghdad, and he hoped his posting to Vienna, while dull in comparison, would help restore his equilibrium. He was seeing a prominent specialist from the Privatklinik Schloss in neighboring Switzerland, a fact he was concealing from his superiors at Vauxhall Cross.
“And his wife as well,” added Sergei Morosov.
“Who was the source of the material?”
“The file didn’t say, and neither did Sasha.”
“When was it opened?”
“Sasha never dated his private files.”
Gabriel instructed Sergei Morosov to hazard a guess.
“I’d say it was some time in the mid-nineties. Hughes had been an MI6 officer for about ten years. By then, he was working in the Berlin station. I was one of the officers who made a pass at him.”
“So you and Alistair were already acquainted.”
“We were on a first-name basis.”
“When did you start watching him in Vienna?”
“I had the surveillance operation up and running by mid-November. Sasha reviewed every aspect, down to the makes of the cars and the clothing worn by the pavement artists.”
“How pervasive was it?”
It was total, said Sergei Morosov, with the exception of the station itself. The SVR had been trying for years to bug the place but without success.
“Specifics, please,” said Gabriel.
“We had two flats on the Barichgasse, one on each side of the street. The inside of his flat was wired to the hilt, and we owned his Wi-Fi network. On any given day we had twenty or thirty pavement specialists at our disposal. We brought them in on the Danube river ferry from Budapest disguised as day-trippers. When Alistair had lunch with a diplomat or a fellow intelligence officer, we were at the next table. And when he stopped for a coffee or a drink, we had a coffee or a drink, too. And then there were the girls he brought home to his apartment.”
“Any of them yours?”
“A couple,” admitted Sergei Morosov.
“What about the trips to Bern?”
“Same story, different town. We flew with Hughes on the plane, stayed with Hughes at t
he Schweizerhof, and went with him to his appointments at the clinic up in Münchenbuchsee. It was a ten-minute ride by taxi. Alistair never took a car from the hotel, always from a taxi stand and never the same stand twice in a row. And when he returned to Bern after his appointment, he had the car drop him somewhere other than the entrance of the hotel.”
“He didn’t want the staff to know where he was going?”
“He didn’t want anyone to know.”
“What about when he wasn’t at the clinic?”
“That’s where he made his mistake,” replied Sergei Morosov. “Our friend Alistair was a bit predictable.”
“How so?”
“There’s only one flight a day from Vienna to Bern, the two o’clock SkyWork. Unless the flight was delayed, which was rare, Alistair was always at the hotel by four at the latest.”
“Leaving him with more than an hour and a half before his appointment.”
“Exactly. And he always spent it the same way.”
“Afternoon tea in the lobby lounge.”
“Same table, same time, last Friday of every month.”
With the exception of December, said Sergei Morosov. Alistair spent the holidays with his family in Britain and the Bahamas. He returned to duty three days after the New Year, and a week later, on a Wednesday evening, he was called to the station late at night to take delivery of an urgent eyes-only telegram from Vauxhall Cross. Which returned them once more to the subject of the traitor Kirov and his murder on a snowy night in Vienna.
38
Upper Galilee, Israel
Under normal circumstances, he would have been arrested and interrogated for days, weeks, perhaps even months, until they had wrung every last secret out of him, until he was too exhausted, too crazed with pain, to offer a coherent answer to even the simplest question. Then he might well have been given one last beating before being taken to a windowless room in the basement of Lefortovo Prison with walls of concrete and a drain in the floor for ease of cleaning. There he would have been forced to kneel, and a large-caliber handgun would have been placed, in the Russian way, to the nape of his neck. One shot would have been fired. It would have exited through his face, leaving his body unsuitable for proper burial. Not that he would have received one. He would have been hurled into an unmarked hole in the Russian earth and hastily buried. No one, not even his mother, would have been told of his grave’s whereabouts.
