The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  “Who gives a shit about what happened to Claude Sparrow?”

  “I think you do,” Pokorny says coldly.

  They drink at their beers while seconds pass and then Kessler, impulsively and for the sheer pleasure of goading, says: “Now I’m writing a book about termites.” But he wishes immediately that he had kept quiet. It’s going slowly enough, badly enough, and Kessler is superstitious.

  “Termites.”

  “Sure,” Kessler says. “Toodle toodle.”

  Fortunately Pokorny doesn’t believe him.

  “All right,” says Kessler. “Assume that I am interested. For the sake of discussion. Assume that as a member of the press I prefer to take only the most cynical view of these things. What are you going to tell me? That the Joe Delbanco revelations were only a pretext?”

  Pokorny says nothing. He sits there as though deaf.

  “That Sparrow was thrown out for some entirely different reason? Possibly—just as a wild hypothetical—because he had brought the whole Agency to a standstill? Because the Counterintelligence staff, under him, was running amok? Because he and his people—you guys—had put everyone else into a state of paranoid catalepsy? Because McAtee felt that Sparrow had finally, literally, wobbled over the brink of sanity?”

  “Not hardly. Where do you get such ideas?”

  “Cocktail chatter. These were the annotations,” says Kessler. “What, then? That Jedediah McAtee himself is, in reality, a Soviet operation? And only Claude Sparrow was keen enough to smell it?”

  “No,” says Pokorny. Then he is quiet again. He scowls with one eye down into his bottle, as if watching the past through a telescope, and slouches sulkily. Evidently the bottle is empty. “Never mind.”

  “Sorry, Mel. I’m a crank on conspiracy theories, is all. You know that. They’re the muscatel of the mind, and they make me impatient. Always did. Even when I was fascinated by people like Claude Sparrow.”

  “There are no people like Claude Sparrow.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure I do. You’re a hard-ass. That’s exactly why I came up here.” The tone now is aggrieved. “Washington has journalists like cockroaches, but do I take this to one of them? No. No, I spend a long wasted day on the train.” Peeling away the comic glasses, Pokorny drops them dispiritedly into the attaché case. His real nose is much smaller but hardly less comic. He gropes halfheartedly for his shoes.

  Kessler decides to wait out this shameless gambit. In the meantime he strolls to the kitchen and returns. Keeping a Budweiser, he sets the last Beck’s at Pokorny’s elbow.

  “Bless you, Michael Mikhailovich.” An old nonsense nickname invented by Pokorny, who had one for everybody, and invoked now no doubt to play upon nostalgia. After a few meditative swallows of beer, he says: “Where were we?”

  “The purge.”

  Pokorny nods, gathering back his focus.

  It is almost the way they used to transact their business, information passing in layers and scraps, each scrap coyly withheld and challenged and bartered over as to value, other scraps moving back and forth too at the same time. Kessler recalls having relished the process, even on those occasions when it led him nowhere. Dealing with Mel Pokorny—as he believed he knew, in those days after the splash made by his second CIA story—dealing with Mel entailed roughly the same mixture of satisfactions and perils as dickering with a cheery fellow in a plaid jacket over a ’55 Mercury coupe with wonderful paint.

  But that was the view of a foolish young man. Later Kessler came to suspect that the perils had been very much greater.

  “All right. The purge. We’ll start at the end,” says Pokorny, and proceeds directly to the beginning. “How much do you know about Viktor Tronko?”

  Not much, Kessler admits. A Russian defector. Came across sometime in the sixties. There was a ripple of controversy within the Agency—by Kessler’s dim recollection of what were even then dim signals—as to whether or not he was real.

  “A ripple, the man says. God’s bones. The ripple you heard about, Michael Mikhailovich, was Niagara Falls. That’s a ripple. This Tronko thing, on the other hand, was a certified shitstorm.”

  Viktor Tronko, Pokorny explains with uncharacteristic vehemence, was one or the other of two things. Could only have been one or the other. “Either he was the biggest beluga we ever landed,” says Pokorny—the most significantly placed KGB agent who ever came West, shedding new light on a range of old questions, including two especially perplexing ones of paramount delicacy, a priceless resource, in other words, this Tronko, as Jed McAtee would claim—“or else, option two, he was the greatest fraud since Piltdown.” And therefore the worst catastrophe—the very worst of any sort, Pokorny stresses fiercely, even including Watergate and Senator Frank Church—that has ever befallen the CIA. Total disaster. And worse than total. Worse than if Congress had voted the Agency out of existence. Worse than if they had disbanded the whole staff, burned all the files, pulled the plug on every agent and every spy satellite, sent the Corps of Engineers out to rip down the building and salt the earth. Worse. Tiny sparkles of spit fly in diving parabolas from Pokorny’s mouth. His high, fat little cheeks have gone red.

  “As Claude Sparrow would claim,” says Kessler. “And Mel Pokorny.”

  “Either this or that. Choose one. No middle possibilities. Yes I would. You bet I would. Michael, the place isn’t just wrecked. It’s inside out.”

  “Where’s Viktor Tronko now?”

  “Inside,” says Pokorny. “Contract employee. A high-level analyst for the Soviet Bloc Division. McAtee’s old bailiwick, of course. Trusted, relied upon, confided in. Cleared for a staggering breadth of access.”

  “And you ask me to believe that Tronko, all along, is simply a Soviet hoax.”

  “ ‘Simply’ is not the word I would use. Anyway, no. I don’t ask you to believe a goddamn thing. What I ask you to do is wonder. I ask you to doubt.” Without warning Pokorny pitches his empty bottle to the far end of the room, where it shatters smartly against an old whiskey barrel that is part of Kessler’s bachelor decor. For a moment Pokorny’s eyes bug slightly, as though he has shocked himself. “I ask you to listen.”

  Deft aim and no real damage. That was rather good, Kessler thinks.

  “From here on we’re into cans.”

  “It’s okay,” says Pokorny. “Don’t get up.” And he goes to the kitchen for a round.

  By its bare outline the Tronko case does not seem to offer prospect of infinite befuddlement. “In that sense you’re right,” Kessler is told. “In that sense I suppose you could call it simple.” The overt facts are stark. The moves are brusque. The potential permutations of uncertainty would not appear to be so very numerous. Either it’s this or it’s that. Either the man was what he claimed he was, or he was something other. “That much is obvious. Correct?” says Pokorny.

  “Maybe,” says Kessler.

  “Hah. Don’t be sucked in.”

  The first contact had been made in Rome, during the summer of 1962. Viktor Tronko was there on assignment—a plum assignment for any KGB officer—as chief of security for a trade delegation touring industrial sites in the Tiber Valley. In other words, he was watchdog for a busload of Soviet junketeers. Technically, it was a counterintelligence post, with responsibility for protecting the delegation members from being spied upon or blackmailed; realistically, his chores amounted to keeping those other comrades in line or reporting on them when they stepped out, and by a nice irony the primary chore was to watch for defections. Entirely unsolicited, Tronko passed a letter to an American diplomat—actually, and presumably not by coincidence, it was a CIA man under embassy cover—volunteering himself as an agent in place.

  “What we call a walk-in,” says Pokorny. “Maybe ten percent of our useful agents come from the walk-in trade. Maybe less. We don’t altogether spurn it but we begin those cases
with the presumption that, well, you know, more likely than not here’s a guy who is out to diddle us. Most of the diddlers are freelance. Just trying to peddle phony intelligence for a quick dollar. Some are bait, in nasty little traps set by the opposition. They’re hoping we’ll give something or somebody away.” Kessler wonders if there is significance to the fact that, immediately upon beginning this talk about tradecraft, Pokorny has lapsed into the present tense. “For instance, they might kidnap the case officer. Or a safe house gets blown, and then we’re stuck holding the lease. So walk-ins are special. We tread carefully.” For that first contact, Tronko was handled by what amounted to remote control. No very precious U.S. intelligence assets, either human or in terms of real estate, were compromised.

  Then the Italian junket ended and the Soviet delegation went home, Comrade Tronko along with the others. Arrangements had been made for him to continue the contact in Moscow; he had a signal code that would alert an American case officer to a rendezvous. But the signal was never used. “So we assumed it had just been a KGB trawl,” says Pokorny. “Halfhearted and inept.”

  Eighteen months later Tronko turned up in Vienna, again as security chief for a trade delegation, and this time he used a telegraph message, also in prearranged code, to ask Langley for another contact. Promptly and discreetly granted. At which meeting Tronko abruptly declared his eagerness to defect. No word for a year and a half, and now he wanted to jump on the first plane for America. Just couldn’t wait to go. Langley was uncomfortable with this Tatar impulsiveness. “We were still calling it impulsiveness then,” says Pokorny, implying murky reversals to come. Impulsive or not, Tronko was unmistakably an adroit professional, and he danced Langley into a corner. He effectively made it impossible for them to turn him down. So Jed McAtee brought him back to Washington and then the Soviet Bloc Division had—

  “Wait,” says Kessler. “How did he make it impossible?”

  Mel Pokorny for a moment gives at least the impression of weighing his answer. “He dropped names.”

  “What names?”

  “Lee Harvey Oswald, for one.”

  “He knew something about Oswald?”

  “Yes. No, not exactly. I’m getting to that.”

  “Who else?”

  “Who else what? Who else knew about Oswald?”

  “Don’t pull that on me. You said names. Plural.”

  Pokorny’s eyes shine as he hides his mouth behind a beer can. “Did I?”

  Back to Washington with McAtee, and then the Soviet Bloc Division had its shot at debriefing him. Last week of February until the middle of June 1964. Meanwhile the Warren Commission was also in session, Warren himself and the other members getting summaries of summaries of evidence while the staff scrambled to put some sort of findings together by LBJ’s deadline, which was September. Let’s get it settled, the President was saying. Get something out fast; reassure the citizenry. Also of course September was before the election. So there was heavy pressure to make sense, quickly, of the new Oswald lead. After three days of routine processing at an Agency compound near Washington, Tronko was booked into a safe house out in Annapolis, with a couple of nannies from the Office of Security; and the first phase of debriefing began. It was conducted by a clever fellow from the Soviet Bloc Division named Sol Lentzer, Russian by extraction and by manner, though he had been born in Paris. Lentzer was chosen because he was the best that Jed McAtee had. Throughout this phase McAtee himself remained in Langley, reading the daily reports and conferring with Lentzer personally, sometimes listening to the raw tapes, but having no further direct contact with the subject. For now. Tronko was treated as a man with information to offer and a certain claim to pampering.

  “Which is not to say,” Pokorny interrupts himself, “that we expected the information would be true. Not at all. We still assumed he was some kind of devious fake. Sent across by the KGB. On a mission of disinformation, as yet unspecifiable. Even goddamn McAtee still assumed that. But we didn’t want Tronko to suspect our suspicions. Get him to dump his load first. As he had been programmed to do, back in Moscow. After which we would break him, see, was the idea. And figure out what to make of it all.” Pokorny drinks. A long languid tilt that must very nearly have drained the present can.

  Then he says: “But the man drank. That was the first problem. At least it seemed to be. You know how drunks are.” Pokorny offers a broad smile. “Mendacious and crafty.”

  Denied other options, Tronko took his pampering in the form of alcohol, which Langley then believed, foolishly, would be harmless and not involve troublesome complications. So after each hard day of answering questions, Tronko dragged the nannies out on a pub crawl. He boozed his way through every bar in Annapolis, every country roadhouse in that corner of coastal Maryland. Between February and June, Tronko was drunk or hung over most of his waking hours. And the debriefing, according to Pokorny, was a total mess.

  “Why?”

  “His story was full of holes. Contradictions, factual mistakes, minor implausibilities. Exaggerations of his own importance. And some other things, crucial things, that just defied belief. It was obvious that he was lying through his teeth.”

  “What sort of crucial things?”

  “Partly about Oswald, during his time in the Soviet Union. Oswald at this point was still the main focus. We were in a sweat to know anything at all about Oswald. How much KGB interest had the guy attracted while he was living in Russia? It was inevitable that there had been some. Oswald, you know, he was once a radar operator at a U-2 base in Japan. Just before he left the Marines. Only natural to assume that the Soviets—well, here’s a creep from the U.S., calling himself a defector, he wants Russian citizenship, and it turns out the kid spent a year tracking U-2s. Definitely the Soviets would pick his brain. Right? Wouldn’t they? Sure. There would be contact. But how much contact? Under what circumstances? To what end? Tronko claimed no. Unequivocal nyet. Claimed the KGB never so much as interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald. And Tronko at that time had been in precisely the position to know. Rather, again, he claimed he had.”

  In June, cold sober and with a margin of four days for drying out, Tronko was given a polygraph test. Which he failed.

  Then began what Pokorny refers to as “the first hostile interrogation.” Quickly Pokorny adds: “Compared to the second one, though, this one was still almost cozy.”

  The pretense of benign credulousness was abruptly dropped. Tronko was allowed to know that the Agency disbelieved his story; had always disbelieved it, in fact. And “allowed to know” is an understatement, Pokorny explains, since the sessions now included a good deal of shouting, badgering, other varieties of verbal and psychological abuse. Sol Lentzer was still in charge but the sort of role he played was much different. No longer an amiable and patient debriefing officer; now he was an inquisitor. More demanding, more unpredictable. Much more strident. They might have replaced Lentzer altogether and started fresh, sent in a cold new face at this point, if it hadn’t been for one consideration: they wanted Tronko left without hope. Wanted him devoid of any suspicion that he might still have a partisan, a single believer, somewhere out there within the Agency. So Lentzer stayed on, merely changing his own face. His personality. His whole approach. Of which, being the division’s own Dostoyevskian Russian, he was quite capable. All this was plotted out premeditatively at Langley, Pokorny says.

  Tronko now heard himself called a liar, repeatedly and at high volume. He got no more pampering, no more booze. He was not even free to go out on the street. Handcuffed and blindfolded, he was moved to a different location, a place of decidedly more spartan atmosphere than the safe house in Annapolis, but still within an hour’s drive of Langley. There he was slapped into a single bare room with a window boarded over and a naked bulb dangling from above, of which he did not control the switch. The only furniture was a cot with a rough wool blanket. His Annapolis clothes were taken away and he was issued m
ilitary fatigues—first a set that were too small for him, then when those grew fetid a set that were too big; after the next washing the small set again. Once a day he was allowed use of a chamber pot, brought in by armed guard at an arbitrarily varied time, waited for, taken away again. Once a week he was permitted to shower and shave. No toothbrush. No washbasin in the room. Nothing to read. No heat—which was not a bitter hardship when he arrived there in June but became one before he left. No cooling and no ventilation through the summer. He was observed constantly through a door peephole by his guards, who were laconic and under instructions to scowl. They took turns watching television in the far front room of the house, wearing earphones, while Tronko was left rotting in silence. Awakened at 6 A.M. with boot-camp stridency, he was forbidden to sit or lie on the cot again until ten at night. Mainly he leaned. Sometimes he paced. In every way possible the point was made to Tronko that he was no longer—never had been—a valued defector. He was a prisoner. He was a captured enemy in the spy wars.

  Every few days he was visited by Lentzer, put through a long and exhausting session, sometimes three or four days in a row, then maybe no session at all for a week. Less often, Lentzer was joined by another, these two working on him like lumberjacks with a crosscut saw. On those days the language jumped wildly back and forth from abusive to conciliatory, and from English to Russian. The second man was Jed McAtee.

  Together Lentzer and McAtee attacked Tronko’s story in its—

  “Was this legal?” says Kessler.

  “No,” says Pokorny.

  “He was on U.S. soil. Subject to and protected by U.S. laws. But incarcerated against his will.”

  “You bet he was.”

  “Charged with no crime.”

  “Not in a courtroom, no. Not officially.”

  “What was the legal justification? You guys keep a lawyer or two on the payroll, don’t you?”

  “No justification. We couldn’t think of one,” says Pokorny. “We just did it.”