The Kremlin's Candidate

by Jason Matthews

  “A real Ulysses P. Grant,” said Gable. “So who do you think’s running our railgun mole?”

  Westfall looked over at Nate. “DIVA’s the only one who can tell us that,” he said. “But if she can’t find a name pretty darn quick and Pyongyang figures out how to squeeze a uranium device into a warhead, the Seattle Space Needle is gonna be ground zero.”

  NATE’S AEGEAN GREEN BEANS

  Top and tail green beans. Mix minced garlic, parsley, dill, mint, salt, and pepper. Layer thin-sliced onions on the bottom of a Dutch oven, cover with a layer of crushed tomatoes, beans, the herbs, abundant olive oil, another layer of onions, tomatoes, beans, herbs, and olive oil. Finish with a layer of onions and drizzle with more olive oil. Simmer covered until beans are very soft and tender. Season and add lemon juice. Serve warm or at room temperature.

  4

  Stealing Secrets

  Alexander Larson, the sitting Director of CIA, was the first DCIA in thirty years to have come up through the operational ranks. He was a mustang, like the OSS-vintage directors who led the Agency in the fifties and the sixties—before the unrelieved string of successors selected from the military, or from the unctuous halls of Congress, or from the ranks of the Directorate of Intelligence—and tried their hands at directing an organization the arcane mission of which they imperfectly understood and had never experienced firsthand. Some directors were disasters, some of them unmitigated disasters, and a precious few achieved a certain synergy with the notoriously skeptical and ungovernable workforce at Langley before they left. The confirmation of veteran ops officer Alex Larson as DCIA broke the drought.

  Alex Larson had gone through training at the Farm in the early seventies with Simon Benford. Larson the smooth extrovert became friends with Benford the irascible misanthrope, the result of an unlikely personal chemistry that had endured thirty years. It was logical that their disparate personalities would push Alex into the overseas clandestine service and the business of recruitment of foreign assets, and that Benford naturally would gravitate to the slough of counterintelligence and counterespionage. Geographical separation over the years did not dull the friendship, which automatically renewed itself whenever their paths crossed. Now Larson was DCIA. He knew his rumpled friend was brilliant, and had the tenacity of a pit bull, albeit with a maloccluded bite. Benford consulted with him often.

  The past administration had selected Larson as DCIA in recognition of his moral rectitude, bureaucratic acumen, and top-flight recruitments (which Benford over the years had supported by vetting the assets as they came online). Sixty-five-year-old Larson looked the DCIA part: He was short, a bit stout, wore ginger-colored tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and sported what Benford called an Allen Dulles wannabe mustache. This, along with thinning white hair and white eyebrows so bushy that subordinates had to resist the temptation to run a comb through them, made him look like a college professor. But he was every inch the operator, and the troops respected him.

  Larson was not popular with the current White House or with the derivative progressives on the National Security Council, the twentysomething English majors who were advising POTUS on Mideast policy. DCIA Larson moreover had obliquely contradicted his predecessor’s statement during the latter’s farewell foreign tour. “We don’t steal secrets,” the outgoing DCIA had said of CIA intelligence collection to an allied liaison audience. “Everything we do is consistent with US law. We uncover, we discover, we reveal, we obtain, we elicit, we solicit.”

  Asked about his predecessor’s statement at a closed session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Larson unsmilingly and without a trace of irony had replied to the senators, “Fair enough. An asset, for instance, discovers the existence of a Russian mole in NATO headquarters, the CIA case officer solicits the info, the asset then reveals it, and thereby CIA obtains perishable counterintelligence information.” Partisan snitches reported the disloyal comment promptly, but Alexander Larson was not fired. He could not be fired. The reason was COPPERFIN.

  During his fourteen years in the operational field, Larson had built the COPPERFIN espionage network, the massive, pervasive penetration of the entire State aerospace design, construction, and testing combine in the Russian Federation. Larson had personally recruited the first two Russian principal agents years earlier, one in India, the other in Brazil, who in turn had themselves recruited subsources in the Sukhoi, Mikoyan, Ilyushin, Tupolev, and Yakovlev design entities, all of which in 2006 had merged into OAK, Obyedinyonnaya Aviastroitelnaya Korporatsiya, the United Aircraft Corporation, located in the Krasnoselsky District in the central Moscow Okrug. Larson’s COPPERFIN agents regularly emptied the top-secret vaults of OAK to report on the advanced capabilities of fourth- and fifth-generation Russian fighters such as the Su-27, the MiG-29, and the new Sukhoi PAK FA. The US Air Force was ecstatic.

  The administration’s intention to eventually jettison Alex Larson in favor of a DCIA more conformable to the White House’s pigeon-hearted foreign policy was stopped cold by howls from the Pentagon after the acquisition through the COPPERFIN network of the technical parameters of APFAR, Aktivnaya Fazirovannaya Antennaya Reshotka, the new Russian phased array radar, an inestimable prize. Next came the delivery of an actual Zvezda Kh-35U antiship missile, NATO designation KAYAK, but nicknamed the harpoonski because of its similarities to the US Harpoon missile. The Zvezda was brought across the Lithuanian border by a courier in the COPPERFIN network who bribed border guards to ignore the tail of the missile protruding from the broken-out back window of his UAZ Patriot, which was the only way he could fit the 520 kg, 380 cm missile into his compact SUV.

  Immune from dyspeptic antagonists, DCIA Larson, in consultation with Simon Benford, launched his own active-measures campaign against the Putin regime—an offensive long overdue in the eyes of many to repay the Russians in their own coin for seven decades of disinformation, forgeries, and political meddling that was the Kremlin’s stock-in-trade. Larson became a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation, testifying in open committee sessions about congenital Russian use of active measures to influence political outcomes, mostly with mediocre results. He increased intel sharing with allied services, especially in Ukraine and the Baltics, which resulted in several flashy spy arrests of red-faced Russian intel officers. Their identities had been provided by DIVA and Larson had passed along his compliments to her via Benford. (The Director and DIVA had never met; Larson properly left the case in the able hands of Benford and company.)

  After a career of working the Russian target, Larson understood the depredatory worldview of Vladimir Putin, and knew that the Kremlin would stop misbehaving only when the costs of Putin’s delinquency exceeded the perceived gains. Then came the explosive report: COPPERFIN assets smuggled out documentary proof of massive fraud in the OAK aerospace consortium. OAK had been set up by President Putin as an open joint-stock company combining Russian private and State-owned assets, the lion’s share of which disappeared into the pockets of favored cronies. Supported by Benford, Larson pushed the White House and the hand-wringing Department of State to publicize the corruption (citing foreign sources to protect internal assets), to denounce Russia in the United Nations, to levy sanctions on companies selling Russian commercial airliners, and to block any reinstatement of Russia to the G7. Reluctant to antagonize the Kremlin, the White House dithered, but finally acted at the urging of a bumptious Congress that had been briefed by the DCIA. Alex Larson was everywhere in town, pressing official Washington to bestir itself.

  Benford huddled with Alex in Larson’s office. “Finally. This is an opening to discommode these coarse Slav fuckers,” Benford said. “We’re collecting comprehensive technical and military intelligence, and the negative international publicity will cow Putin, at least for a while. I only wish we could more accurately predict his reaction. Handling a cornered snake and so on, if you follow the metaphor.”

  “As I recall, your metaphors used to be markedly more erudite,” said Alex
, deadpan. “Perhaps DIVA will soon have better access to Putin’s plans and intentions if she becomes Director of SVR, assuming, of course, that your handling of her is as inspired as you claim it to be.”

  Benford did not smile. “You can be sure that even in the absence of your signature flamboyant rococo operational style, the DIVA case is being managed securely.”

  Larson laughed. “Is the young officer still primary handler? What was his name?”

  “Nash, Nathaniel,” said Benford. “He is possibly going to assist the Australians in the Hong Kong operation I briefed you on last week. Marty Gable will hold DIVA’s hand in the interim.”

  Larson’s nose was too good. “Any trouble?”

  Benford shrugged. “The recruiting case officer and DIVA have a relationship that falls slightly outside the usual parameters.”

  “Meaning what?” asked Alex.

  “They are in love and are intimate, whenever circumstances allow,” said Benford. “Until now I have stayed my hand from firing Nash. I assess his separation from the service would have a significant effect on DIVA’s production.”

  “How significant?” said Alex.

  “As in she would quit. With Nash in Hong Kong for a few weeks and Gable to steady the asset, there are no immediate concerns.” The two men thought alike and the matter—and Nash’s future—was shelved for now.

  Larson opened the file on his desk that contained Benford’s script for tomorrow’s briefing of POTUS and the NSC Principals Committee on CIA’s continued covert-action campaign against the Kremlin. He was silent as he read. “One misses the field,” he said, looking up.

  Benford opened his file too. “The organization needs you behind this desk. You’ve had your debauch overseas for thirty years. Now you have to turn this pig’s breakfast back into a spy service.”

  “Run through your notes for me,” said Alex.

  Benford spoke briefly and succinctly. This brief was a matter of reassuring the jittery US president, and ensuring continued Pentagon support. Jamming a stick into Putin’s spokes at this time was critical, given his brazen interference on the world stage. He was emboldened by confusion and anxiety among Western governments. Publicly embarrassing the Kremlin would disrupt multiple Russian active measures in the Baltics, Europe, and in places like Montenegro. Russia’s moribund economy would be trebly stung by any publicized malfeasance within OAK, scaring away investors, reducing customers for Russian military material, constraining the military budget, and complicating Kremlin adventurism in Africa, Latin America, and the resource-rich Arctic. Twisting the Russian bear’s tail abroad, moreover, would distract the Kremlin and thus protect valuable assets, such as COPPERFIN. The Russians would be driven frantic in the face of withering international disparagement. The DCIA would politely insist that POTUS could not ignore the opportunity and must not remain quiescent.

  “We’ll see how it works on him,” said Alex. “At least the top brass will support me.”

  “Don’t worry, this will stir the hornets’ nest,” said Benford. He was correct, but he would set in motion events no one could have even remotely predicted.

  * * *

  * * *

  The Russian reaction to the first American exposé was to cry provocation (ironic: the inveterate plotters always assumed their own misfortune was, naturally, the result of an outside plot). But the international embarrassment, and the innate Russian paranoia of being laughed at as manure-speckled kulaks and relegated to second-world status, drove Vladimir Putin into a rage, in part fueled by fright. This was how leaders were toppled. He summoned Gorelikov to his personal, most-isolated dacha in the town of Solovyevka, 130 kilometers outside Saint Petersburg, on the shore of Lake Komsomolsk. He wanted privacy and to be away from the prying eyes of his siloviki. They would smell his panic like the pack hunters they were. He trusted Gorelikov.

  “How did word leak of financial arrangements at OAK?” raved Putin, pacing the room, kicking the snarling head of a Siberian tiger rug each time he passed. They were in the dacha’s large main room, redolent with wood smoke, decorated in rustic style with leather couches and chairs scattered about and a vintage 1936 7.62-caliber Tula hunting rifle above the roaring fireplace. Outside the panoramic picture windows—uncharacteristically lavish in a typical lakeside dacha—snow covered the shoreline and dusted the pines, but the black water of the lake had not yet frozen.

  Gorelikov did not want to excite the president any more than he was now. “It is likely that the corporation’s foreign contacts—bankers, salesmen, and government buyers—were the sources of these defamations,” he said, quoting the news releases.

  Putin looked at Gorelikov like a week-old sturgeon with milky eyes. “No. We have a gemorróy, a big problem. Someone inside OAK, someone who knows the books.”

  Gorelikov had by choice never prospered from the bacchanal of corruption in the Kremlin, and was secretly amused now that the spoils of greed had stung the tsar. “There are thirty thousand employees working at OAK,” said Gorelikov. “We’d have to tear the place apart.” He took a breath. “Ignore the accusations. They will be forgotten in a week.” Putin swore.

  Those specific accusations were in fact forgotten the next morning when a message from MAGNIT was relayed from the Center to the dacha’s commo room reporting that an intact Zvezda Kh-35U antiship missile had been delivered to the Dahlgren Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center test facility in Virginia for evaluation of guidance, propulsion, and warhead systems.

  Putin swore again. “Bljad, son of a bitch; so you think this will be forgotten in a week?” he said to Gorelikov. “Not only is Washington defaming us on the world stage, but also CIA appears to have at least one asset inside OAK.”

  Gorelikov chose his words carefully. “We sell Zvezda missiles to India, Brazil, and Vietnam. The Americans could have acquired an export model from a third-world agent without our top-of-the-line seeker head and telemetry.”

  Putin gave him another fishy stare. He had trusted Gorelikov since knowing him from law school, recognized his brilliance, and appreciated his analytic mind. He also knew Anton was not corrupt, or susceptible, or power hungry. He would never covet Putin’s throne. Most important, Putin recognized Gorelikov’s proclivity for and love of naneseniye uvech’ya, covert mayhem. Just as a chess player relishes organizing defenses, traps, attacks, and feints to achieve checkmate, Gorelikov reveled in concocting an intricate intriga just for the sheer joy of causing havoc. In this he was unmatched: Bortnikov of FSB, or Patrushev of his Security Council, were accomplished schemers, but no one was like Gorelikov.

  “Enough of the rationalizations,” said Putin. “I want a solution. Washington and CIA are making fools of us. The loudmouths in the Moscow press and on the street will spread the word and agitate.”

  Gorelikov shrugged. “Repina especially,” he said, referring to one of the most vocal anti-Putin, anticorruption dissidents recently noticed in the West and raising money as a result.

  “Suka, bitch, forget her. I want sredstvo. I want a remedy,” said Putin, leaving the room, and Gorelikov, to contemplate the snow-laden landscape and the ink-black water.

  * * *

  * * *

  The next evening, Putin lighted two thick candles in eighteenth-century red, gold, and turquoise cloisonné candlesticks on a plank table placed near the dacha’s picture windows. The rest of the room was dark—only the light of the burning logs in the vast fireplace cast additional flickering shadows around the room. Two steaming bowls of kormya, Russian lamb stew, were in front of them with two heels of black bread for dipping into the gravy. The stewards serving them had withdrawn. Putin and Gorelikov both drank tea from a hissing samovar on a side table. Tonight was no night for vodka. The wind had kicked up after dusk and frozen crystals of snow adrift in the utterly black night scratched invisibly against the glass. With the roaring hearth, the hiss of the samovar, and the storm raging outside, this was the Devil’s waiting room. The two men were sitting at either end of th
e table eating stew and looking at each other, as if waiting for Shaitan to join them.

  “The Americans are timorous,” said Gorelikov. “They avoid conflict in the foreign field; they ignore their allies and coddle those who oppose them.”

  Putin slurped a spoonful of stew. “And yet we see this attack against the reputation of Russia and the calumny directed at me.” His voice shook.

  “This is my point,” said Gorelikov. “This campaign does not originate from the craven White House. This comes from CIA; it is their brand of active measures directed back at us.”

  “Why does it come now?”

  Gorelikov wiped his mouth, and leaned forward. “It could be for a hundred reasons, all of which we know well. We ourselves concocted a legend to camouflage the intelligence Snowden brought with him. Or we send a dispatched volunteer to discredit a genuine defector. We focus criticism elsewhere to mask the existence of a high-level agent or network.”

  Putin set his spoon down. “We can discuss American motives all day,” he said. “And we can speculate about how many moles we have in place in each other’s pantries. But it does not solve the problem.” His voice rose. “It is my reputation, my prestige, and my public image.” Which is more important than any spy stealing our secrets, thought Gorelikov.

  Gorelikov commiserated. “The Director of CIA is Alexander Larson,” said Gorelikov. “He is a legend among the operational cadre in CIA’s Ops Directorate. He is also the first ops-trained DCIA since the midseventies, and is aggressive. Reports from rezidenturi indicate CIA is ramping up activity worldwide—CIA officers are pitching our officers in scores of foreign capitals. For every one who reports a hostile pitch, how many do not? We cannot know, but we must assume a small percentage accept recruitment. Egorova in Line KR also regularly reports operational flaps and ambushes, as though a mole in SVR is advising the Americans.”