The Tashkent Crisis

by William Craig

  Samuel Riordan was suffering the same dreadful reactions on this lovely September day. He turned wearily back to his desk and sorted out the information one more time.

  Item:

  From Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet:

  Flotilla of twenty-two Soviet naval warships including four Polaris-type missile carriers passing south of Newfoundland, bearing southwest at twenty-four knots. Complete radio silence being observed. Being shadowed by units of Allied fleet in area. Probable destination unknown at this time. Present speed and course if maintained suggests rendezvous off Virginia coastline with large fleet of Soviet trawlers presently in area.

  MOORE, Admiral

  Item:

  CIA, HQ, Frankfort, Larsen:

  Seven Soviet diplomats, including ambassadors to Belgium, France, West Germany, and Yugoslavia, have within past forty-eight hours, emplaned for Moscow. No explanation of departure. Also KGB activity in Western Europe appears in state of flux. Resident agent in Bonn has not been seen in his usual cover as press officer at embassy for ten days … supposed to have the flu … What do you have from your end on all this?…

  Item:

  MOSCOW, Sept. 5 (Reuters)—Premier Valerian Smirnov was reliably reported today to have gone into the hospital for tests to determine the cause of a persistent stomach disorder. Bulletins will be issued by the Soviet government at periodic stages of the medical diagnosis.

  Item:

  Norad to Langley, August 10, 3 P.M.

  Soviet space base at Baikonur has fired six satellites into orbit within three-day period. Each satellite contained eight-in-one packages now distributed in a global arc seven hundred miles high. Chain of satellites grapefruit-sized. Assume navigational aids for Soviets but no confirmation.

  Item:

  To Riordan from Nichols, Director National Security Agency:

  On August 14 and 22, Midas infrared detection satellites recorded intense heat emissions of fourteen to eighteen seconds duration emitted from a position in area north of Tashkent and also region fifty miles east of Vorkuta just north of Arctic Circle. No hydrogen tests possible since other detection apparatus failed to give corroborative signals.

  Item:

  HAVANA, Sept. 7 (AP)—

  A delegation of Soviet generals and other officials landed today in Havana to pay a courtesy visit to Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban people. They are expected to stay approximately ten days before journeying on to Algeria on the last leg of their goodwill trip to friendly nations.

  Samuel Riordan knew something more about this news dispatch. An agent working in the Cuban Foreign Office had passed word along that the delegation was no ordinary group. The generals included a rocket expert, a long-range bomber man, and the deputy chief of Soviet land forces in Central Europe. The civilians in the gathering were an especially interesting collection of scientists: one, Zabin, had helped father the Soviet H-bomb; Zakharov was a pioneer in the development of the Fractional Orbital Bomb system, now in operation for several years; Bessanova was a theoretical physicist, out of circulation for the past eighteen months, and last reported somewhere in the Urals on a secret project.

  Riordan kept coming back to this news from Havana and wondered why such an outstanding collection of brains and prestige was gathered together for Fidel Castro’s benefit. It just did not make sense, unless something was going on again in that island off the Florida coast.

  The director’s musings were interrupted by the intercom:

  “Charlie Tarrant would like to see you immediately.”

  “Send him right in, Margaret.”

  Charlie Tarrant, a slim, Brooks-Brothers-clothed deputy director, came into the room trailed by Karl Richter, who knew Riordan from their many years together in intelligence work. Riordan was pleased to see him and welcomed him warmly. The three men sat in a corner of the room and coffee was brought in.

  Riordan asked Charlie what the problem was. Tarrant said, “We seem to have another item for today’s briefing. Karl has just told me we may have lost Rudenko. Karl, you may as well tell the story from the beginning.”

  Richter did so, and Riordan sucked on his pipe while the man from the State Department spoke about Brandon and the envelope. Then Riordan offered, “I’m really terribly sorry, Karl, because I know how close you were to Grigor.” Richter nodded, and Riordan continued, “And this Brandon fellow, just an innocent victim. Isn’t that awful! What about his family?”

  Richter said he wanted to keep the government out of it and therefore, the New York police had agreed to say that he had died of a heart attack in his sleep. His sister was on the way to claim the body.

  Riordan went on: “I wish there was something we could do for his family, but it would only make the whole thing a bigger mess right now. They might even be bitter enough to go to the papers with it, and we don’t need that kind of publicity. Maybe someday we can explain it to them and help them financially. Perhaps we can find some way to get an insurance policy payment to them. Something like that might work.”

  The other men agreed wholeheartedly. Richter said, “The manner in which Rudenko involved Brandon in his problems suggests to me that he must have believed that the end was near for him. Otherwise, he would have used the usual means of communication with the boys at the embassy, the drops in Gorki Park, the meetings with agents from the British Embassy. For him to collar Brandon at a hotel and then give him an envelope instead of microdotting the material can only mean he was a goner and knew it. And whatever was in that letter must have been worth dying for, I suspect.”

  Riordan’s right hand tightened around the stem of his pipe as he knocked the ashes from it. For the first time, Richter noticed the large wart that disfigured the director’s ring finger. It fascinated him.

  Tarrant broke in, “What the hell could he have gotten that was so worth dying for?”

  Samuel Riordan sucked on a fresh pipe while he pondered the question. “I don’t know, Charlie, but maybe he had the answer to what’s bothering me.” Riordan glanced at his watch and started to rise. “I expect the situation will be bothering a few other people before the day is out.”

  A full-scale briefing was held that afternoon in the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. As four o’clock neared, men entered Ring E of the massive building and showed their ID cards to guards at the desk in front of a barred door. The participants had come at the express request of the President of the United States, who had been alerted to the situation by Sam Riordan from CIA. Riordan had called the President shortly after noon and briefed him on the disquieting intelligence reports flooding in from around the world. The President had told Riordan to convene the special session and invite every intelligence-gathering unit in the government to send representatives. From the meeting, something should emerge, some pattern or clue to the intentions of the other side. The President expected Riordan, who arrived with Charlie Tarrant and Karl Richter, to make a personal report to him at 8 P.M.

  At 4:10, General Stephen Austin Roarke, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called the meeting to order. Fourteen men sat with Roarke around a huge oaken table, which he had moved into the conference room from his home in Texas. It had been his family’s dining board for over one hundred years, since the time of the Alamo. Roarke was proud of his family, his state, and his own rank as the leading American military personage next to the President of the United States.

  “Gentlemen, we’re all here to add whatever we can to a clearer picture of the enemy’s capabilities and motives on this beautiful September day. While I have no doubt we have a true picture of him, the President feels we should pool our information and distill it for his personal evaluation. Therefore, let’s begin with a general rundown of the world as seen from Langley. Mr. Riordan, would you take over.”

  Sam Riordan took the floor and told of his fears. He admitted that his agency had not been able to diagnose any unfriendly act in the making. He described the various bits of intelligence that bothered him,
including the probable loss of a top Soviet informant. He added two items that had come in overnight. A man named Cherkovinin, from the Soviet Embassy in Paris, had been found shot dead and floating in the Seine. Karl Richter, sitting next to Charlie Tarrant, leaned over and whispered, “He’s a friend of Rudenko. Worked for him once at Tass. He’s a courier.”

  Richter’s face was pained. “They must be making Grigor talk.”

  Riordan was still speaking. “The other piece of trivia is this. Russian troop units on the West German border just came off summer maneuvers three weeks ago. And yet they are now beginning new movements toward the frontier, nothing threatening to us but highly unusual, based on their past performances.”

  Charlie Tarrant passed Riordan a note about Rudenko’s friend floating in the Seine and Riordan pursed his lips. But he sat down without making any reference to it in front of his colleagues.

  The representative from the National Security Council followed with his own report. Eavesdropping radar and telephonic equipment had noticed a startling increase in Soviet radio conversations between army units, but it only indicated what Riordan had already said. The Soviets were maneuvering again at a time when they should be dormant. By contrast, the Soviet Navy was quiet, especially the group moving toward the open Atlantic and possibly the United States east coast. The missile sites ranging across the spine of Russia were in their usual state of readiness; monitors detected no overt sign of aggressive intent. The man speaking wore spectacles and read from notes like a teacher charging a class with responsibility for knowing the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. He was boring his listeners with his recital. Then he brought up the heat-sensing devices in the sky, which had alerted their masters to the pulsing emissions from the ground.

  General Roarke broke in. “Have they been testing aboveground?”

  “No, all evidence denies that. It could be something else, like a laser weapon. We’ve been working on the same thing, haven’t we?”

  Roarke and the others looked at Gerald Weinroth, head of the President’s scientific board. The shaggy-haired, rumpled professor nodded vigorously and stood up.

  “Project Jerusalem has been going forward for over three years. We hope to have a workable model in three to six months. It has been in many ways a more difficult task to organize this effort than the original atomic bomb back in 1945. But when we do get it, it will revolutionize warfare. We’ll have come up with a death ray.”

  Roarke interrupted again, “Where are the Russians on this one?”

  Riordan took the floor again, “We know they’ve been working on the same idea for some time. But like their missile program, it may be they’ve run into economic difficulties which have slowed down their progress. It’s like the time they tried to beat us to the moon and fell so far behind, mostly because of finances and also a certain lack of sophistication in gadgetry. Look how long it was before they finally got to the Sea of Tranquillity. At any rate, the information we get back from agents on the ground is that they have gotten bogged down. Now as to those Midas readings, I’m not quite sure if that’s a prototype that was fired. I can only hope they didn’t break through on this. It might get sticky as hell …”

  At 6:45, the meeting adjourned for a light supper, and the participants went to the next room for a meal of chicken salad and black-eyed peas, General Roarke’s favorite delicacy. Whitecoated waiters passed among the officials and served impeccably from gold service, bearing the seal of the U.S. Army. The conversation was relaxed and warm. Most of these men were comrades from many crises during the cold war and often entertained one another at intimate parties in the suburbs of Washington. They spoke the same language professionally and faced the same problems in their tiny fiefdoms. In the dining room at the Pentagon, they were comfortable and confident over coffee and brandy.

  Across the river, the White House basked in the brilliant sunshine. In the Oval Room, President William Mellon Stark sat with his Secretary of Labor, Bruce A. Hinton, and discussed a proposed bill to enlarge relief benefits to migratory workers scattered across the land. The secretary was telling the President how much the passage of the measure would ingratiate him with the liberal community, which would be convinced the President was finally moving on the human-rights issue. Stark was bored by the whole discussion and particularly by the secretary. Hinton had been forced on him by certain people who had contributed heavily to his campaign. Because of this, Stark put up with his constant ramblings about minorities and whatever else he preached about as the months went by.

  Stark himself was more interested in a long-postponed vacation, due to start in two days. His wife was joining him at a retreat near Bar Harbor for two long weeks. Since the children had their own families and jobs to think about, that would leave him alone with Pamela for the first time in two years. Stark was tired of being President, tired of constantly watching over the fate of the nation. He had lost that drive which once ate at him, forcing him to grasp for the shiny gold ring. Once he got it, the challenge was met and the fires had been banked. The President of the most powerful country in the world just wanted to serve out his term and then quit and go fishing with his wife of twenty-five years. He owed it to her and to himself.

  So Stark listened to his Secretary of Labor and found him a bore. The secretary did not seem to notice and kept up his dreary monologue.

  In the basement of the building, another man sat before a machine. Master Sergeant Arly Cooper watched indifferently as he read a poem before him on a teletype; it was in English but it was from Eugen Onegin by Pushkin:

  I write you; is my act now serving

  As an arrival? Well I know

  The punishment I am deserving

  That you despise me. Even so,

  perhaps for my sad fate preserving

  A drop of pity you’ll forbear

  To leave me here to my despair.

  Fifty-one hundred miles away in Moscow, a Russian soldier was tapping out his favorite lines to his American counterpart in the Situation Room deep beneath the White House. The two men manned the hot line which traversed the Atlantic Ocean and then went through Scandinavia on into the heartland of Russia. Every hour on the hour the Soviet technician cleared his machine to guarantee its dependability. Each hour on the half hour, Arly Cooper or his replacement did the same. Cooper, a black man, always used Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for his message. He would type out: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Cooper did it with a certain relish, as though in the process he was educating the enemy to the real meaning of America. Cooper felt as though he personally was piercing the Iron Curtain with his own brand of propaganda. It was a game which helped him while away the monotonous eight hours a day he spent locked in this walnut-paneled nerve center of United States military communications. The hot line was manned on three shifts by both countries. Cooper’s counterpart in Moscow was always the Pushkin lover. He often wondered what the man looked like, whether he too was a master sergeant, or if he too wished he could be somewhere else, doing something more interesting. Arly Cooper would never know, but he thought about it often.

  The transmission ended at 7:05 P.M. and Cooper acknowledged. He then went to the coffee urn and poured himself a cup, black with no sugar. In twenty-five minutes it would be his turn to promote the cause of Abraham Lincoln behind the Iron Curtain.

  At the Pentagon, the intelligence meeting had reconvened. The representative from the Defense Intelligence Agency, filling in for Secretary of Defense Clifford Erskine, who was in London, added his office’s pieces to the world mosaic. He noted that a Soviet diplomat in Ankara, who had been friendly for years with Premier Smirnov, had been unusually garrulous at a reception for foreign ambassadors on the previous Tuesday. His garrulity seemed forced, and an informant reported he seemed extraordinarily nervous and agitated. No one had ever seen him act this wa
y before.

  Charlie Tarrant commented on this remark by saying that a pattern had been established in at least one area. The ranks of Soviet diplomats and secret police apparently were under some kind of internal stress. “Perhaps,” offered Tarrant, “the Kremlin is undergoing a periodic reshuffle.”

  Claude Norton, from the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, reinforced this argument by saying that the last meeting of the two great powers had been the most difficult in several months. The Soviet delegation was mute, completely intransigent. It was shocking to the Americans because Premier Smirnov himself had urged the Americans to stay at the conference so that an important breakthrough could be achieved in the near future. Smirnov was evidently pursuing the idea of disarmament despite increasing opposition at home from hawkish elements who feared he was giving away the security of the country. Yet, in the last meeting, Norton recalled, it had seemed just like the old days of Stalin.

  General Roarke asked for any further comments bearing on the subject Hearing none, Roarke continued, “Gentlemen, I think we can say that our immediate safety is not threatened by anything we’ve heard here today. Our missile strength is at least equal to the enemy. Our military posture is superb. There does seem to be some indication of a political upheaval over there, but it will take time to resolve the significance of it. Don’t you agree? As to the mysterious Midas sensings, let’s also suppose that the Russians are working on a project similar to ours, and are possibly proceeding at a faster rate than we thought. Still, Dr. Weinroth, what would that mean as far as capability if they are now testing a weapon?”

  He turned to Weinroth again, and the scientist thought for a moment or two. Then he sighed and shrugged his hands in front of him. “I can’t predict what they will do, but it would strike me they’d have to iron out the bugs for another year. By that time, we’ll have an operational system ourselves and we’ll be at parity just as in bombs and missiles.” Roarke nodded happily and adjourned the group.