Executive Treason

by Grossman, Gary H.

  He served another master. He attacked anyone who purported to have an international view rather than a national view. He went after those who advocated free trade with China and full restoration of relations with Vietnam. He dismissed the very existence of the EU, the European Union. He questioned America’s constant effort toward unseating contemptible dictators and installing “pro-American stooges,” as he called them. And he questioned the unquestionable: Israel’s politics.

  Elliott Strong walked the line, never crossing over directly. He was always careful with the way he put things. He talked about the Jews, but he asked, “What are those people thinking?” It was always those people. Subtle, but effective. Most of all, he vigorously fanned political fires only to get out of the way of the flames.

  “Well, well, well, what do we have? A sort of new president in the White House. You never know what you’ll find when you wake up. So now it’s a Republican again. Correct me if I’m wrong, didn’t America vote this guy out last year? Is this some sort of Twilight Zone mockery of the Constitution?”

  In reality, it was the Constitution that legally gave Morgan Taylor the reins of government. However, Strong ignored the law of the land when it was convenient—like today. He twisted the meaning of the laws and lied to turn millions of Americans toward his way of thinking.

  “So Taylor’s back. The old commander landed again at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Quite frankly, I’m stumped.” He wasn’t really. Strong stretched his jaw, watching himself in his mirror. He was just getting loosened up.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m telling you, it’s arrogance of power. What we have here is a supreme arrogance of absolute power, spying from those people and cover-ups. Taylor—” he dropped his voice as if to cast suspicion “—somehow back in office? Just watch, in the coming days, you’ll start seeing changes. A little here, a little there. Taylor will put his cronies back in—the old Taylor team reunited: an imperial presidency that won’t care about you. Trust me. That’s what we’ll be seeing, and only you can get them out!

  “I suppose we can only blame ourselves.” Strong let himself sound defeated, only to raise his voice after a dramatic pause. “But I’ll tell you right now, it’s not too late. No way! There’s time for more calls, more e-mails, and more faxes to Congress and the White House. Now more than ever. My friends, this is a battle we must win. We need a Constitutional Amendment that will fix this once and for all!”

  He cleared his throat on the air. “So you wrote before. You wrote your own congressman. Your own senator. Well, pick five more now. It’s your job, ladies and gentlemen of America. Take one hour each day, every day, and do it.”

  He went to a caller and took a forkful of mushroom pasta.

  Chapter 34

  Staritsa, Russia

  How ironic, the old mushroomer thought. Pravda—the principal Soviet newspaper. Pravda meant truth in Russian. There was hardly a word of truth in it. Maybe the weather forecasts and the soccer scores, but never the news. Now, decades after the fall of the Soviet regime, the concept of truth was finally meaning something to a former Politburo member.

  He came to this newfound opinion because of lies perpetrated on the Internet by people who described his role in the Soviet government.

  Former KGB operatives had cashed in, selling their stories and speculating about things they knew little about. Some colleagues relocated to the United States, others ended up in England. Too many told things that should have remained secret. A few wrote about Dubroff’s role in the intelligence agency and the programs he had supervised. They separated themselves from heinous crimes, but willingly attached Dubroff’s name.

  He slammed his fist down on his old oak desk, nearly tipping over his 14-inch computer screen. “Traitors!” he screamed. “Lies. They rewrite history and wash their own hands of blood at my expense!” He read on, thinking to himself, we had to protect the country. Defend the Motherland from the Capitalists. What did the poet Nikolai Nekrassov plead? “You are poor and abundant, mighty and impotent, Mother Russia.”

  It was my duty. My responsibility. My job. He read on. More hits. More revelations. More lies. The Internet was the new Pravda.

  Aleksandr Dubroff’s English was spotty. It took him time to comprehend the things he read on the web. Learning as he went, he entered his name on the Google search engine. A few lines of text came up under the sub-heading Author’s Inquiry:

  Information sought on the life of Aleksandr Dubroff. Member of Soviet Politburo. 1979-1985. Master spy KGB 1964-1979. Chief Interrogator for First Directorate 1964-1973. Allegedly responsible for the deaths of more than 400 prisoners. Operations director, Andropov Institute, 1973-1979. Former Russian Army Colonel. Local magistrate. Widower. No children. Status unknown. Presumed deceased. First-person interviews with survivors’ families, former Soviet officials sought.

  The extract was posted by a British writer soliciting information for a new book. A biography. Dubroff was tempted to e-mail back an emphatic, “Fuck you!” But he did not. Instead, he stared at the screen for nearly thirty minutes, re-reading the inquiry, seeing how his life was reduced to a handful of words, cold words, including the one word—widower. His whole time with Mishka reduced to one word.

  At 0330, Dubroff pushed his chair away from the computer. He rubbed his eyes and went to his lonely bed. He still reached for his beloved, wanting her warmth beside him, but he had only her pillow. He spoke softly into it, as he did every night. But this time, he asked for forgiveness. She had never known what he had done in the name of the Motherland. Now his crimes would be published by someone who would never understand, never know what it was like to faithfully serve.

  As soon as he fell asleep, Dubroff became absorbed in a vivid dream. He was at the head of a classroom. A blackboard was behind him. A TV patched into a three-quarters-inch videotape machine played an episode of an American police show. He listened to it through his sleep. Something called Starsky & Hutch. Students, some very young, some older, sat on chairs, spread out in two rows of a semicircle in front of him. He spoke to them in perfect English. They listened, but they wrote nothing down.

  “You will learn to think as an American,“ he told them in his dream. “You will become an American. You will take your place in American society. Marry. Have a family. But you will remain a citizen of the Soviet Union, one day being summoned to duty, forsaking all you have acquired. All who are near to you. You will feel your Russian blood course through your veins again. You will fulfill your mission.”

  He saw the faces of his students. Attractive young men and women. They were being trained to head businesses, to become lawyers, to rise in government as judges, mayors, and congressmen. He could see them all so clearly. While he wasn’t aware of their exact assignments, he knew them all by name—their new American names. He went around the room, one by one, saying hello to the old students in his dream.

  Simonson, Curtis, Maxwell, Greer, Luber, Hale, Blair, Chantler, Gerstad, Ford, Gillis, in the first row. Twelve others sat behind them.

  One young man, no older than 15, peered over someone in front of him and smiled. It was a friendly, winning, engaging smile. He nodded. Dubroff remembered that he was a remarkable student, maybe even his prize pupil. This boy was going to do great things, he dreamed.

  Dubroff smiled back. Suddenly, the lights in the classroom darkened. Everyone disappeared except for the young student and Dubroff. Without warning, the boy’s face disengaged from his body and floated up in front of him. The smile morphed into a horrifying grin. “You were such a good teacher, Sasha. You nearly brought the Capitalists to their knees. Did you even know it?”

  Dubroff was now outside of his body, watching himself in his own dream. “No. What do you mean?”

  “We got so close.”

  “Close to what?”

  “Our dream.”

  In the next instant the entire class was visible again. The boy slowly moved back into place.

&nb
sp; “Close to what?” Dubroff asked again in his sleep. “Close to what?” he was now mumbling aloud.

  Dubroff opened his eyes. The image of the face was still before him. A young, handsome boy. So familiar. So intense. But that was more than forty years ago. Close to what? Then Aleksandr Dubroff remembered the visiting student.

  For nearly two decades, everyday Russians enjoyed a sense of freedom. The government stayed out of people’s lives, and anyone with the money could travel throughout the country. But recently, soldiers with .45 mm Stolbovoy St-8 automatic rifles were taking up posts along the major highways and the transportation hubs. At the same time, newspapers and television barely concealed a conspicuous slant toward Kremlin attitudes, shunning the more populace points of view they’d exhibited.

  A sure sign that Russia was in the midst of change: an occasional click on the telephone line. It took a trained ear to catch it. Even in his eighties, Aleksandr Dubroff had the knack. The government was eavesdropping again. The signs all pointed to an unequivocal fact: the country’s new president was clamping down.

  Putin was the first. He’d taken advantage of America’s preoccupation with Iraq and the war on terrorism to quietly dissolve Yeltsin’s democratic gains. What Vladimir V. Putin didn’t do, his successor did. He elevated many Federal Security Service officials into high-level government positions. He arrested hundreds of foreign spies. Some fell out of windows just before FSB thugs left. Most were sent to Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina Prison. Jews were targeted again. People spied on one another like the old days—in private industry, in political parties, and in government offices.

  Of course, the rollback on freedoms was sold as reform. The Kremlin explained away the FSB intrusion in everyday life as a necessity to protect the nation from terrorists. Dissidents in the Ukraine gave Putin the justification to clamp down. In light of Anther turmoil in the East, ever-expanding terrorist attacks in Moscow, and the very basic realization in the Kremlin that Russian rule demanded strong tactics, the new Russian president turned a deaf ear toward democratic principles.

  Dubroff retired before the Soviet Union fell. At the time he quietly applauded its demise. After thirty years as a party member, twenty as a KGB officer, and the last six as a respected member of the Politburo, Dubroff came to realize that Communism would not survive the millennium. He envisioned an age of reformists. But he had no doubt they would have great difficulty ruling. He foresaw elections and a fragile democracy. Borders would open up and foreign money would pour into Russia. So would organized crime. Post-Communist Russia would be ripe for drugs and prostitutes. It seemed so inevitable to him.

  He also predicted that the Soviet states would eventually resist home rule. The suppressed Muslims would align with their Middle East cousins. He saw it all coming. He saw the chaos, and he predicted the day would come when Russia would have to restore authoritarian rule.

  It was unfolding now.

  Russia was returning to its more familiar, brutal, autocratic roots. It was the best way to control dissidents. That meant an increase in military spending, heightened authority for the secret police, and the eradication of basic freedoms. In this new-new Russia, the FSB, like the KGB of old, had to discover what potential enemies were doing.

  This Russia wasn’t built on bogus five-year plans and state-owned industry. It was taking the form of a free-market dictatorship.

  Elections were not necessary unless and until the president declared the need. Representatives served at the pleasure of the nation’s leader. The legislature was little more than a rubber stamp board of trustees. Information flowed to the top, not down through the press to the people. This was the Russian way.

  To Dubroff’s mind, the Soviet Union failed because it excluded the West. It had been in the throes of death for years, hanging on with leftover Cold War political currency and very little cash. When both ran out, the system collapsed.

  Dubroff believed that international trade was the key to Russia’s long-term survival, no matter what the Kremlin needed to do to maintain domestic order. But the newest regime was gradually closing the nation off again. Fools, he thought. What will that get us? Nothing but a new age of economic instability. To him, the only way to save Russia was to forge lasting partnerships with the West.

  However, Americans were beginning to interpret Russia’s actions as a sign that the Cold War was not over. This empowered right wing political causes, most notably fresh talk of Star Wars defense systems.

  Dubroff studied Machiavelli. American leaders needed enemies and wars to maintain their influence over the masses. In that respect, they were no different than the Russian government. In Dubroff’s view, recent administrations perfected that particular political art. The Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein all helped sustain conservative power in America. President Taylor, a former military man, took exception with Russia’s soft stance on North Korea’s nuclear stockpiles, Russia’s lack of support for America’s war on terror, and Russia’s inability to account for its own missing weapons of mass destruction.

  While the real fight was with Arab terrorists, many political factions in America didn’t want Russia as a friend. For the time being, U.S. businesses were knocking on Russian doors. But the Kremlin was seizing private businesses, and the climate was rapidly chilling. That’s why the infantry had taken to the streets. That’s why the phones were being tapped. That’s why Aleksandr Dubroff was worried for his country more than ever before.

  Then an awesome truth hit him.

  Years after he retired, the pieces were coming together. How could they? But of course he knew the answer. He had sown the seeds himself.

  The plan seemed so preposterous years ago. It had been a simple money play for Russia. Arab money. Millions. He remembered giving it zero chance of surviving. And yet, it had. Maybe not all of it, but certainly the most elegant part.

  After forty years his work—Jiis—was about to come to fruition. Not all of it, but some. How? he asked himself.

  By accident, he followed the progress on the Internet. He couldn’t believe it. And yet, soon America’s view of the Middle East would be immediately and inextricably altered. And who would the United States single out as the new evil in the world?

  Russia.

  Aleksandr Dubroff shuddered. The results would be disastrous. Moreover, Russia, which battled Muslim fundamentalists in the eastern states, could hardly stand alone in a fight against Arab extremists. It needed the U.S.

  Dubroff could not turn to his own government for help. He’d be branded a traitor for having had a hand in a plan that was, unintentionally now, so detrimental to Mother Russia. He had to do something. Somehow he had to expose this awful thing. He had to communicate with a credible contact: someone who could surreptitiously reach the American leadership. Who?

  Chapter 35

  Los Angeles, California

  Bernstein’s call gave Charlie Huddle the idea. After mulling it over for a few days he decided it was time for the mainstream press to acknowledge Elliott Strong’s impact. Actually, he mused, acknowledge wasn’t necessarily the correct term for a vanity ad buy.

  Strong had surpassed all late-night radio numbers established by Larry King, Art Bell, and George Nouri. He was the first radio nighttime host to also carve out a significant daytime audience. And he was the principal political pundit on the air, overshadowing every other voice. That was worth touting in full-page ads in USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, and most of all, The New York Times.

  Huddle’s ad sales department asked for quotes. The normal combined rate card price for all the ads was well over a half-million. Yet, because this was the first time Strong’s syndication company explored buying advertising space, the liberal papers were willing to discount the rates. “Glad to have you!” was basically the word. Huddle laughed when he saw the memos. So much for politics! he thought.

  He personally oversaw the produc
tion of the ad, sending it back eight times for rewrites. In its final form it was simple and powerful—a full page with very few words: all of them strong.

  YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS LISTEN TO ELLIOTT STRONG. DO YOU? STRONG NATION.

  He was told that it would take a little time to coordinate a buy that would simultaneously run in the first section of all the papers. Huddle gave them the target date. It would be worth the short wait.

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  Jack Evans also communicated in just a few words. His directive to Vinnie D’Angelo: “Find Haddad!” To others, he said D’Angelo was to be given access to CIA, NSA, and FBI files. The same message was sent to the corresponding branches in military intelligence.

  All of that was fine, except for one thing: D’Angelo didn’t know where to start. The Mossad had given him only sketchy information. Haddad was said to be a Jordanian by birth, a naturalized American citizen, and a very successful international businessman. He was the likely Arab connection to the Russian sleeper spy network.

  Who the hell is he? Is he still alive? He felt certain he knew the answer to the second question. But what about the first? This is what he asked himself as he walked into the office area the CIA designated for his investigation. He was met by a young, enthusiastic, Middle Eastern-looking man and a roomful of other analysts.

  “Good morning, Mr. D’Angelo,” said Faruk Jassim.

  “Ah, good morning.” Five people were busy at work, six including Jassim, who was closest to the door. Their faces were buried in computer screens. It seemed like they had been at it for hours, and yet it was only 6 A.M.

  Jassim smiled, noting D’Angelo’s reaction. “A little surprised?”

  “Yes.”