The Tashkent Crisis

by William Craig

  When he awoke, the North Atlantic was still beneath him. He got up from his seat and threaded his way to the bathroom at the rear. Inside, he combed his hair and washed the fatigue from his face. Then he thought again about Rudenko and the envelope. Pulling it from his inside jacket pocket, he held it in front of him and examined it in the harsh fluorescent light. In the upper left corner, there appeared to be some sort of address. Brandon read the smudged Cyrillic characters and made out the words. Soviet Society of Theoretical Physicists. Beneath that, in smudged ink, was an address, Number 10 Tolstoy Prospekt. That was all. The society itself was not familiar to him. But then he was a historian, not a scientist. He was terribly anxious to know what was inside the package but resisted the temptation to tear it open. It was enough to deliver it to Mr. Richter.

  Brandon walked back to his seat and put his headset on. The Afternoon of a Faun lulled him back to sleep.

  At 3:15 P.M., New York time, the plane landed at Kennedy Airport. Brandon went through customs quickly and looked for a pay phone. He called a hotel in Manhattan, then placed a second call to Washington and the State Department. When the operator there answered, he asked to speak to Karl Richter. In thirty seconds, a girl’s voice with a cool Southern accent came on the line, and Brandon asked again for Richter. The voice said, “Who’s calling, please?” Brandon gave his name. The voice excused herself for a moment, and then Richter came on the line. “Yes.” He sounded remote, vaguely unfriendly.

  “My name is John Brandon, and I have something for you from Grigor Rudenko in Moscow. He said it was urgent that you get it promptly.” Richter’s attitude changed. “When can I see you, Mr. Brandon?”

  “Well, I just checked into the Chatham Hotel here in New York, and I’m really bushed from the flight. How about tomorrow morning?”

  “Fine. Take the shuttle from LaGuardia at nine, and I’ll have someone meet you at the gate. Make yourself known at the desk, and he’ll take you from there. And, by the way, Mr. Brandon, how did you meet Rudenko?”

  Brandon gave the whole story to Richter, about his own background as a historian, his summer of research in the Soviet Union, his curious trip to the airport on the final day. When Brandon finished, Richter told him he looked forward to seeing him in the morning, then hung up.

  John Brandon undressed slowly in the welcome air-conditioning of his hotel room. He put the manila envelope on a night table and hung up his lightweight suit. Then he put on a bathrobe over his underwear and took his toothbrush and shaving equipment out of his luggage. Before going in to shower, he called room service and ordered a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich and a pot of coffee. Refreshed by a cool shower, John Brandon stretched out on the bed to watch the evening news. He had missed television during his many weeks in Moscow.

  A knock sounded at the door. Brandon tightened the sash of his robe as he opened the door to let the waiter in. A man stood there, dressed in a fall topcoat. He was swarthy; his face had several ruts in it, and his beard was bluish. The man asked, “Mr. Brandon?”

  Brandon replied, “That’s me.”

  The man pulled a peculiar-looking instrument from his right-hand pocket and put it directly in front of Brandon’s nose. He pulled the trigger, and although no sound came from the gun, John Brandon staggered backward, clutched at his face, and then sagged to the floor.

  The man stepped over the body and walked about the room. He spotted the manila envelope lying on the table and went directly to it. Tearing it open, he looked swiftly at the collection of blueprints and memoranda within. The man shook his head in seeming amazement and then stuffed the material back inside the envelope. He put it into his inside jacket pocket.

  Then he walked to the corpse on the rug, turned it over, and stared into the sightless eyes of John Brandon. The man put his hands under the corpse and, grunting, carried it the short distance to the bed. Pulling the blue covers down, the killer tucked Brandon beneath the blankets. He propped a pillow behind his head and folded his hands in front of him. Then the man stepped back and looked a last time about the room. Satisfied, he went to the door and picked the Do-Not-Disturb sign from a wall hook. In the corridor, he placed it on the outside door knob and then strolled casually fifty feet to the elevator. As he entered it, a waiter carried a sandwich and a pot of coffee past him down the corridor. The waiter stopped in front of John Brandon’s room and stared in confusion at the sign on the door. He knocked very softly, hesitated, and then turned away with the food order.

  Down in the lobby, the man in the fall topcoat mingled with crowds of strangers in summer clothing and disappeared through the glass entrance into the warm night.

  Tuesday, September 10

  At 10:15 A.M., the next morning, Karl Richter was told by the man he had sent to the airport that no one named John Brandon had gotten off the plane from New York. In his air-conditioned sixth-floor office at the New State Department Building, Richter sipped a Dixie cup of black coffee and digested the news. Probably Brandon had just overslept and would catch the next shuttle flight due in at 11. He told the man to wait there and call him as soon as contact was made.

  Ever since Brandon’s call the previous afternoon, Richter had become increasingly alarmed at the strange circumstances surrounding his impending visit. At the root of the mystery was the worry over Grigor Rudenko’s unorthodox manner of transmitting information. Grigor must have been in a desperate situation to have used an innocent man as messenger between Moscow and Washington. Always before, Rudenko had operated strictly according to the book as written by the CIA. Always before he had passed his information at the appropriate drops, whether they were embassy parties or clandestine “chance” meetings in playgrounds or at street corners. He had always been prompt, efficient, and the most productive operator working inside Russia. Rudenko must have sensed surveillance while possessing material too urgent to delay transmission.

  Karl Richter felt particularly unhappy and frustrated because Rudenko was different from the others Richter dealt with in the espionage profession. Richter had known several men who were finally exposed and died in anonymity. It was the ultimate hazard of the business. But Rudenko was special. He and Karl Richter had been close friends since high school. They had met at lunch one day and discovered an instant rapport over things like the lowly state of the Philadelphia Athletics and the supreme joy of riding a horse in the sweet fragrance of an early morning mist. After the first day, they had slept at each other’s homes, shared shirts and ties, and double-dated with girls in Karl’s Studebaker convertible. Richter was particularly enchanted with the stories Grigor’s parents told of Russia in the old days, when the Czar was ruler and the winter snows hid the landscape but not the misery of the peasants, who bore the feudal life with stoic passivity.

  In June of 1941, the two boys had graduated from high school and both were to go to Haverford College in the fall. But Grigor’s world changed forever on June 22nd, when Adolf Hitler invaded Russia.

  His family had left Russia in 1928, not because they were totally disenchanted with communism, but to find a more immediate better life for themselves and for Grigor, then four years old. Sacha and Sonya Rudenko knew that Russia would improve under Stalin; anything would be better than life under the Romanovs. But they did not want to wait. The Civil War had ended; Lenin’s Five-Year plans were struggling along to fruition. But Grigor was the Rudenko’s only child, and they wanted a better world for him at once. Because relatives in Philadelphia had urged them to come to America, they packed their suitcases and left the steppe country around Rostov for the last time. For them it was heartbreaking; for Grigor it was an adventure.

  In 1941, when the motherland was threatened and Stalin appealed to his countrymen to defend it, not communism, from the invader, the Rudenkos felt the tug of patriotism. Grigor went to fight in their place.

  When the war was ended, he was nearly twenty-two and had met a nurse named Tamara, whose entire family—except for an uncle, Andrei Parchuk, the world-renown
ed quantum physicist—had been killed in the massacre of Kharkov. Grigor married her in Moscow in 1946, and immediately went to work for the government press agency Tass. He wrote faithfully to Karl Richter, who had just returned from the Pacific where he had served on Admiral Bull Halsey’s staff. Richter was finishing his education at Yale and planning a career in the Foreign Service. Rudenko’s letters were marvelous accounts of life in Moscow, of the new society building in Russia, of his hopes that the two friends might meet again soon. He often wrote of the days before the war and the people they had known in school. In 1948, the letters stopped coming, and, when Richter visited Rudenko’s parents to find out about Grigor, they admitted sadly that he did not write to them anymore, either.

  Karl Richter joined the Foreign Service and was posted to a succession of assignments in South America, then on to Paris, and finally in 1956, to the embassy in Moscow. He had married the daughter of a prominent Main Line doctor in 1951, and she followed him around the world, hating every minute of it. They had no children, and the tedium of diplomatic life claimed her as a victim. She began to drink, at first socially, then to blot out her boredom. Richter watched her disintegrate but could do nothing to arrest her destruction. Just before they were to leave for Moscow, she went into the bathroom of their Paris apartment and swallowed thirty-five sleeping pills. She was dead when he found her.

  Richter went to Moscow a broken man. He plunged into his work as cultural attaché and began the inevitable rounds of cocktails at various embassies. At the Swedish Embassy, he met Grigor Rudenko, now plump and jolly. The two friends did not embrace. Richter instinctively knew that he should not betray their long acquaintance. Grigor shook his hand warmly but otherwise held his own emotions in check. They talked briefly about their families, and Rudenko offered his condolences to Richter about his wife’s death. Richter was positive then that Grigor was involved in Soviet secret police activities, for only the KGB would have a full dossier on him. At the end of the party, Grigor shook hands again with Karl, who felt a piece of paper stick to his palm. He casually put it in his pocket and went out to his car where he unfolded the tiny scrap and read, “Karl, meet me at Dynamo Stadium, soccer game, 2 P.M., Saturday, Gate C.”

  Richter checked with his superiors, who told him to proceed with the meeting. At 1:55, Richter met Grigor, who walked in front of him to the ticket-taker and handed over two tickets. Then the two men went into the stadium and sat down to watch the game. Grigor ignored him for a few moments. The crowd was in an uproar, cheering on the Dynamos against a team from Kiev.

  “Great sport, Karl, isn’t it?”

  “Almost as good as watching the Athletics.”

  Grigor laughed deeply and put his hand on Karl’s wrist. “We have a lot of catching up to do, don’t we?”

  He began to talk. He had stopped writing because of his new job with the KGB. Grigor wanted to know about his family, and Karl assured him they were fine, if a bit hurt that he did not correspond. Rudenko grimaced at this news, but did not comment.

  “Karl, I made a bad mistake, staying here in Russia. I was so enchanted with the victory over Germany and the hopes for this country in the postwar world that I threw everything over for it. Now I’m in it up to my neck. I can never go back.” Richter watched the game while his friend went on. “But I’ve been thinking there may be a way I can still be an American, in spirit at least.” Rudenko leaned over and whispered, “Karl, I’m going to pass information to you. Only you. You have to be my contact at all times.”

  Richter nodded impassively and Rudenko sat back, seemingly purged of his burden.

  At half time, the two men got up and wandered down the ramp under the stands. They separated there with smiles, and Rudenko walked to Gate D and through it. Richter went out through Gate C.

  In the next two years, Grigor Rudenko kept his word. He and Karl met in restaurants, at receptions, and on long walks at night through side streets, where they fleshed in the missing years of their lives and talked about the cold war. Each time they met, Rudenko handed over microfilm, papers, and copies of orders, whose contents provided American intelligence with a staggering insight into Soviet plans. Richter was afraid for Rudenko and told him not to risk his life. Rudenko always laughed and said he was too highly placed to be followed, too important to be suspected. The meetings continued.

  Rudenko never brought Richter to see his wife and two children. Once he did show him snapshots of his family, and Richter made appropriate comments on their appearances. Rudenko was pleased but did not speak about them further.

  In September, 1959, Karl Richter had to leave Moscow. His tour of duty was up, and, if he had requested an extension, the Russians would have been suspicious. That would have endangered Grigor. The old friends met for the last time at the British Embassy, where Richter introduced Rudenko to Anthony Carter, who would be Rudenko’s new contact. Carter would funnel all information to Richter in London. Rudenko seemed satisfied with the arrangement.

  He stood before a buffet table and raised a Scotch and soda to Karl Richter, “Karl, let’s drink to the old days.” Richter looked at Grigor and wanted to cry. His double life was surely going to envelop and crush him someday, but the man was remarkably composed and almost fatalistic in his acceptance. Richter drank to the old days.

  Richter went to London and then to Washington, where he became second in command at State Department Intelligence. Always he handled Rudenko’s material, which by now centered on Soviet missile production and silos. The data helped American planning for defense all during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon years. Anthony Carter and others delivered back to Rudenko letters from his parents in Philadelphia and notes from Richter, who used the code name Haverford in case the papers fell into the wrong hands. The contact man said that Rudenko appeared in the best of health. His spirits were always good. Only two weeks before, when Grigor had dropped a container of microfilm at a trade fair in Moscow, he had appeared jovial and unconcerned. And yet, he had now sought out a stranger, John Brandon, within the past twenty-four hours and entrusted him with something for Washington. Richter was deeply concerned for his friend.

  At 11:10 A.M. on that Tuesday morning, Richter’s messenger at the airport called once more to say that John Brandon had not emerged from the shuttle plane.

  Richter went into action. He called the Chatham Hotel in New York and asked to be connected to John Brandon’s room. The phone rang ten times. Richter told the operator to send someone up there quickly to find out if Brandon was ill.

  The bell captain found John Brandon in bed, facing the television set showing a Charlie Chaplin comedy. The bell captain said, “I’m sorry to intrude, sir, but a friend of yours …” Then the bell captain stopped talking, for he had seen Brandon’s eyes, fixed unwaveringly on the picture screen. They never blinked. The bell captain went to the phone and asked the operator to let him speak to Richter. He said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, sir, but Mr. Brandon seems to have passed away during his sleep.”

  Karl Richter was not terribly surprised. He ordered the hotel manager to hold the body for a police autopsy, then spoke to FBI headquarters in New York and told the bureau chief to search the room immediately for a manila envelope among Brandon’s personal effects.

  Karl Richter waited beside his phone. He drank another container of coffee. He contacted the traffic department in the basement of the building and asked them to cable the American Embassy in Moscow for information on the whereabouts of Grigor Rudenko. He cautioned the embassy to be extremely discreet in its inquiry since Rudenko might be under surveillance or worse. Richter told the clerk to use the Croesus code in relaying the message to Moscow. Later, after reading two urgent reports, he ate a sandwich at his desk.

  Finally, the phone rang. The FBI reported that after a careful search, they had found no manila envelope in John Brandon’s room. Richter was now certain that the messenger from Moscow had not died from a heart attack. He told the FBI to look for death by “unnatural mea
ns” and to stay with the coroner until something definite emerged from the autopsy.

  Richter went to the elevator and down into the basement garage at the State Department. He drove his car up the ramp and into the early afternoon stream of traffic heading past the Lincoln Memorial and across the bridge into Virginia. Ahead lay the hill where John and Robert Kennedy lay at rest. The late summer foliage wrapped the hillside in lush warmth. Tourists formed a line around the memorial to the assassinated President. Richter watched the antlike column of mourners idly as he swung the car off the bridge and onto the road leading into the country and the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency fifteen miles away in Langley. He found himself thinking of those terrible days in the fall of 1962 when the Kennedy brothers had confronted the Russians over Cuba and won the “eyeball to eyeball” duel. Richter shuddered slightly as he remembered the unbelievable tension of those hours. It had been too close a thing to romanticize the affair even now. And still, the cold war went on. Richter thought of Grigor sadly as he drove along the highway toward the agency.

  On the second floor of that sprawling main building which housed the men and apparatus that monitored enemy intentions, someone else was remembering the days of the missile crisis with the same feelings of subdued horror. In his walnut-paneled office, Director Samuel T. Riordan had wheeled his chair around to the window and tilted it back with his feet propped up against the pane. He drummed his fingers against the arm of the chair as he looked out at the rolling hills surrounding his domain. Riordan was uneasy. Years of training in the intelligence business had honed his instincts for danger to a high degree of sophistication. Riordan’s instincts were now working overtime. Something was wrong in the world, and the director felt it strongly. In his lap lay pieces of the puzzle, reports from agents and data from evesdropping devices which clearly indicated an extraordinary turn of events somewhere in the world. Riordan was nagged by the similarity of this situation to the Cuban crisis when the constant filtering of bits and pieces of data pointed to a highly irregular activity on the part of the enemy. Only at the last moment had the pieces fitted together and enabled the President of the United States to counter the threat.