In the Enemy's House

by Howard Blum

  Dedication

  FOR

  JOHN LEVENTHAL

  AND

  BRUCE TAUB

  *

  Friends from long ago, in a faraway land

  And a lifetime later they still have my back

  With gratitude and affection

  Epigraph

  I stood in the vestibule of the enemy’s house, having entered by stealth. . . . I had no idea where the corridors in the KGB’s edifice would take us, or what we would find when we reached the end of the search—but the keys were ours, and we were determined to use them.

  —FBI Counterintelligence Supervisor Bob Lamphere

  Naught’s had, all’s spent,

  Where our desire is got without content.

  ’Tis safer to be that which we destroy

  Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

  —William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Note to the Reader

  Prologue: “The Storks Fly Away”

  Part I: The Blue Problem

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part II: “In the Enemy’s House”

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part III: Dominoes

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue: A Toast

  Notes on Sources

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Also by Howard Blum

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Note to the Reader

  The main foreign intelligence arm of the Russian state has been reorganized and renamed several times throughout its history. For the sake of clarity and convenience, it is called the KGB in this account. That was the organization’s final name before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

  Prologue:

  “The Storks Fly Away”

  BOB LAMPHERE STARED AT THE phone, waiting, willing it to ring. It was the tail end of the afternoon on a perfect late spring day—June 19, 1953—in Washington, D.C., the time of day when Bob liked to have a restorative scotch and soda. Instead, Bob, usually so rock steady, calm even in crisis to the point of detachment, found himself in the fifth-floor office of his boss, the assistant director of the FBI, anxiously staring at the phone. Waiting.

  If there was one thing Bob should have learned in his twelve years as an FBI agent, in all the long days and longer nights he’d spent on espionage cases, it was how to wait. He had sat in parked cars until his legs grew stiff, stood with stolid discipline under leaky awnings in the teeming rain, huddled down low in his seat in the back of movie theaters. “Physical surveillance,” the Bureau manual insisted, was an essential skill for fieldwork. Any agent, especially one like Bob who had risen to the rank of supervisor in the Intelligence Division, either learned patience or went looking for another job. But there had never been a wait like this.

  Bob tried telling himself he had done what he could. He had written—damn the consequences!—a blunt memo to J. Edgar Hoover stating that the facts of the case were clear: at the very least the wife did not deserve her sentence. She should not be executed. And the director, in a response that filled Bob with both surprise and a measure of respect, swiftly put this argument into a letter that he signed with his looping schoolboy cursive and had hand-delivered to the judge.

  The judge, however, would not be persuaded. He was adamant. If the prisoners did not cooperate, the sentence would be enforced just before nightfall.

  Now all Bob could do was stare at the phone. It was a direct line to the death house in Sing Sing prison. Al Belmont, the hard-edged, by-the-book assistant director of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, whom Bob had known since their quarrelsome days years ago working in the New York field office, was in charge of the command post. In Belmont’s suit jacket pocket he had a typed list of questions that Bob, in a wishful burst of optimism, had helped prepare; two stenographers were on call in an adjacent room. And farther down a long, dimly lit prison corridor, behind a steel door with the word “Silence” above the lintel, was the electric chair.

  There would be two reasons for the phone to ring in the fifth-floor office in the Justice Department Building in Washington. Either the two prisoners had finally agreed to provide “pertinent information.” Or they would have received three jolts of electricity—2,000 volts for three seconds, dropping to 500 volts for fifty-seven seconds so as not to cook the flesh; another 2,000 volts, steadying to 500 volts; and a final 2,000-volt surge—and were now dead.

  The office grew crowded, and Bob knew all the newcomers; he had done some things, been in some difficult places, with a few of them. But Bob was in no mood for reminiscing. He remained quiet, aloof, locked in his own tight circle of dread.

  After a while, Bob’s eyes wandered absently about the room. Heavy blue curtains framed a double window, and when he looked out he saw that long, gray shadows were starting to stretch across the courtyard below: the sun was setting. And all at once his blood ran cold.

  AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME, a half-hour’s drive into suburban Virginia from downtown Washington, Meredith Gardner, Bob’s unlikely collaborator and, no less improbably, good friend, was suffering his own pangs of guilt.

  The evening in the modest one-story ranch that sat in the cul-de-sac off Old Dominion Drive had been, at least at first, routine. Meredith had been determined to push from his mind the grim events unfolding in Sing Sing prison—and the role he had covertly played in this drama. Restraint was natural to his demeanor, just as it was a necessity in his secret life.

  And so, as usual on Friday night, there had been a family dinner; Blanche, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Mount Holyoke who had done her own hush-hush government work during the war, cooked for her husband and the two children. After the table was cleared and the children had gone off to play, Meredith, his tie still knotted tightly, a glass of sweet sherry within reach on the end table, sat in the living room with his wife. They were at opposite corners of the room, each in identical wing chairs covered in an identical floral print, each with a book in their hands. What were they reading? It could have been—almost literally—anything. The family library was both obscure and eclectic. A Slovak grammar primer, a Spanish-language history of Turkey, an analysis of slavery in the Bible, a Chinese–Russian dictionary—all were well thumbed. Books crowded the small house like wild, entangling vines. Volumes spilled out from a pair of tall, mahogany-stained bookshelves, cluttered tabletops, and were stacked in knee-high piles on the floor so that walking from one room to the next was as difficult as navigating a maze. Meredith relished this evening ritual, this period of quiet community with his wife; and tonight it was a refuge that was deeply ne
eded.

  Then suddenly the lights in the house went out. And in that same moment, their eight-year-old son, Arthur, let out a hair-raising howl.

  Meredith hurried into the children’s room. He found his frightened son with his thumb wedged into the wall socket, and Ann, their four-year-old daughter, sitting complacently in the electric chair. Or that was how a teary Arthur, after his finger, albeit without most of the nail, was carefully extricated from the socket, identified the contraption in which he had placed his little sister.

  A good deal of planning had clearly gone into building the device. Arthur had taken the child’s car seat from the family Studebaker, wrapped the frame with a pair of wires connected to the transmitter that powered his electric trains, and then attempted to complete the electrical circuit by inserting the wires into the socket. He’d imagined a burst of electricity surging up through the car seat and giving his sister a mean tickle. Instead, he’d managed to short all the fuses in the basement fuse box, and given himself the shock of his life.

  Once he’d gotten the lights back on, and was certain that neither of his children was seriously injured, Meredith confronted his son.

  “What in heaven’s name were you thinking?” he demanded. “Why of all things would you want to build an electric chair?” Meredith’s voice was, as always, soft, measured, precise. Yet there was a telltale clue to his mood: when he was angry, a Southern twang, the vestige of a childhood in Mississippi and Texas, would become more pronounced. At this moment, the lilt was unmistakable.

  “Poppa, I heard you and Momma talking. I wanted to see what it was,” the boy said. He went on hurriedly, desperate to be exonerated: “I was playing. It was a game. I didn’t want to hurt Ann.”

  Meredith stared at Arthur, but did not respond. It was as if his mind had abruptly wandered off, and now his distracted silence filled the room. At last he kissed his son gently on the top of the head and walked off.

  Only years later would he explain to his son a bit about what he’d been thinking then. That he, too, had been caught up in what had started as a game. An intellectual challenge, a rigorous test of wits even more daunting than any of the London Times crossword puzzles he so relished. He had never considered the consequences. He had never imagined his actions, the deductions that had previously filled him with pride, the long chase, that any of this could result in two gruesome deaths, could leave two young boys orphaned.

  After Arthur was in his pajamas, when it was time to say good night, the boy went looking for his father. He found him sitting on the wooden picnic bench in the backyard, alone, apparently lost in thought, with the darkness of the late-June evening closing in.

  FAR OFF, ACROSS THE WORLD, it was a predawn morning in the weathered yellow-brick building on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. Inside the KGB headquarters—or Moscow Center, as the spy fortress was known—Alexander Feklisov sat in the First Directorate staff office. He had arrived after midnight. Sleep had proved impossible; he could not push what was happening in America from his mind. He had tried to leave the apartment on Pestschanaya Street without awakening his wife, but it was difficult to move about in the cramped space and not make noise. Still, Zina did not ask him where he was going, or why. She was used to the eccentric hours of his profession.

  Now he sat in the large room with its pale-green walls, a space corridors away from his own small office in the British Section, waiting for the clock to strike three a.m., the shortwave radio already tuned for the hourly update broadcast by the BBC World News Service. Like the two Americans, men he had never met but whose files he’d carefully read, he continued to hope against all reason that there would be a last-minute reprieve.

  As the top of the hour relentlessly approached, as he, too, struggled to come to terms with a somber, looming fear, the tense events gave a dangerous edge to his memory. A long-forgotten evening intruded. And he found himself recalling the last time he had seen his agent, the friend he called “Libi.”

  It had been in a Hungarian restaurant, the Golden Fiddle, on the West Side of Manhattan. Feklisov—Sasha to his comrades in the spy trade—had chosen the restaurant after considerable deliberation. It was a comfortable place with white tablecloths and heavy flatware, and served a hearty, spicy goulash they could wash down with carafes of an inexpensive yet pleasant Portuguese red; and, good konspiratsya, a small orchestra played gypsy music so they’d be able to talk freely without fear of being overheard. It would be, he’d decided, the perfect setting.

  Sasha waited until the meal was done and the waiter had removed the empty dinner plates. “I have to give you some news,” he said softly, leaning across the table. “I’m about to leave New York in a very short time. I’m going back home.”

  Libi seemed unnerved by the announcement. “What do you mean?” he asked after a moment. “You’re leaving me? Why?”

  “You know the normal stay abroad is three to four years. I have been here for five and a half years.”

  “So?”

  “So, if I stay too much longer you-know-who might start getting suspicious.”

  “You’re sure you can’t stay longer?”

  “It’s not my call,” Sasha said, as if making an apology.

  Handlers are taught to instill confidence in their agents, to be father, mentor, confessor all in one; how else can they persuade them to take such chances, to put themselves in such danger? But that evening, Sasha couldn’t help feeling that Libi, now that the news had been shared, was trying to reassure him. That was why when the orchestra had stopped playing, Libi had risen from the table, approached the bald violinist with the gaunt, chiseled cheekbones, and, after pressing some cash into his hand, told him what he wanted to hear.

  The musician came to the table and fell into a slow, melancholic tune.

  “You know what that song was?” Libi had asked when he’d finished. “A Hungarian song called ‘The Storks Fly Away.’”

  At the time, Sasha had been touched. He thought his agent was telling him that change is inevitable, yet life goes on. The ring of spies, these heroes of Mother Russia, will continue, will endure, just as one season inevitably follows another, just as the storks fly away, only to return.

  But sitting safely in Moscow Center, Sasha could not help but be branded by his own self-deception. He had not understood at all what Libi, full of stoic resignation, had been telling him. Only now he did. At this unsettled hour, there was no disguising the reality. He had flown away, and he, and the Center, had left Libi, had left all of them, on their own, with no chance of escape. And all he could offer in return for their courage and sacrifice was his remorse.

  THEY WAITED. AND AS THEY continued their solitary vigils, as the announcement from Sing Sing prison pushed closer and closer, the three men shared a common predicament. They had all served as soldiers in a secret war that had done nothing less than change world history. They had all believed in the righteousness of their cause, in the excesses of their enemy. They had all paid high prices, but never considered it a sacrifice. Yet at this moment, with every tick of the clock pounding in their heads like a hammer on an anvil, each of them could not help feeling he had done something unforgivable, something that had deeply violated his own sense of honor.

  How had it come to this?

  Part I

  The Blue Problem

  1

  THE INCIDENT IN CHINATOWN CHANGED everything for Bob Lamphere. Without warning, it had come down in an instant to this: gun drawn, an angry crowd pressing in on him, and his target fixed in his sights. A volley of enraged, keening voices rose up behind him, but Bob pushed all the noise out of his mind. His focus narrowed. And his finger increased its pressure on the steel trigger. He was ready—his mind set—to fire.

  Until that moment in the winter of 1944, Bob had been convinced that the FBI didn’t offer him what he wanted from the world. Its sensibility grated, with all those rigid regulations (a towrope missing from a government tugboat generated as much paperwork as a murder investigation,
he complained), with the powerful insistence on an even more intrusive personal conformity (the required snap-brim hats and starched white shirts, the regulation Bureau briefcase). This wasn’t for him. He’d put in another year or two, he thought, until the war ended, and then there’d be plenty of opportunities for an ambitious young man with a law degree. And as he knew only too well, the Bureau, for that matter, was disenchanted with him. Hoover favored “straight arrows,” and Bob was having a hard time playing that role. There’d be no protests when he moved on. His departure would be dismissed, if anything was said at all, as part of the normal attrition.

  IT HADN’T ALWAYS BEEN LIKE that. When Bob, just twenty-three, had joined the FBI back in September 1941, he’d been gung ho, energized by the wistful notion that once his probationary period was over he’d be in the front line of an elite group of derring-do lawmen, continuing in the great tradition of the tommy gun–toting G-men who’d relentlessly chased down John Dillinger. Fawning newspaper reports regularly proclaimed that the FBI were the best that law enforcement had to offer, and Bob, who had no small sense of pride, was certain that was where he belonged.

  And, another vanity, he was confident he looked the part: square-jawed, broad-shouldered, thick black hair with a precise part, and, not least, deep brown eyes that would routinely hold a person with a gaze as steady as a marksman’s. He wasn’t a big man, maybe a tad over five-foot-ten if he made an effort to stand erect, a trim welterweight, but he had a presence. Handsome in an even-featured all-American way, a man’s man, someone you just knew at a glance had grown up fishing in mountain streams and hunting deer in deep woods.

  Yet while that was true, Bob nevertheless hadn’t had much of a childhood. He’d been raised in Mullan, Idaho, a small hardscrabble mining town plunked down in a high canyon overshadowed by the formidable Coeur d’Alene Mountains. His father, a no-nonsense disciplinarian with a quick temper, was what people in those parts knew as a “leaser.” The way Joe Lamphere had it figured, it made more sense to lease a mine and hire hands to work for him than to have to answer to some know-it-all mine owner. Besides, each time he’d signed on for work in one of the big silver mines, it was never long before he went off on a tear about one thing or another to the shift boss. The man in charge would respond by muttering something dismissive and often crude, Joe would let loose with an angry punch, and the next thing Joe knew, he’d be given his walking papers. Running things himself, then, made a lot more sense, although the economics of it were often precarious.