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

by David Quammen

  “Aha,” says Kessler. “Dmitri.”

  “Dmitri was always a large factor, yes. Always. But it didn’t stop there. We had other security problems at the same time. Quite a number. Each of them far less egregious than Dmitri, but nevertheless very troubling. You must understand, Mr. Kessler, these things all interlock with each other.”

  “Interlock. Explain what you mean by that, please.”

  Instead Sparrow laces together the fingers of his two hands, holds them before Kessler’s face, and repeats: “They interlock. What Fedorenko told us about Schratt, about the Norwegian woman, about Dmitri, and all the rest. The pieces of testimony interlock. Inextricably. It’s a crucial point. When one decides to give credence to a defector, any defector, well, after that one simply can’t pick and choose among his offerings. Believe this, disbelieve that. Ignore the third. No. No, it doesn’t work. One must use everything. Or at very least, make sense of everything.”

  “And you had already made that decision. Giving credence to Fedorenko.” Kessler amends: “You Claude Sparrow, not you the Agency. The Agency overall was divided. Right? Some of the others out there, they remained unconvinced.”

  “That is correct.”

  “McAtee, Lentzer, Scott Wickes. The Soviet Bloc Division versus your own.”

  “Roughly correct.”

  “Then Bogdan Kirilovich began naming names on this side of the Atlantic. Agency officers. Quite a number, you say. Ding alingaling. Fire alarms, klaxons, a seismic reaction, no doubt. Norwegian secretaries, they were one thing, Mexican diplomats in Spain, but now watch out. Suddenly the disagreement over Fedorenko’s credibility grew distinctly more heated. Am I still roughly correct?”

  “You are.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “But you’re doing very well yourself. I suspect Melvin must have touched on this, didn’t he?”

  Kessler ignores that. “Were you still at the oaken table in the little house with the garden?”

  “Actually it was rather a big house. But what difference where we were? Bogdan Kirilovich was, all this time, dealing directly and solely with me, yes. If that’s what you’re getting at. We had only moved into a new phase of the debriefing.”

  “I just want to see it,” Kessler says. “The way you wanted to see Comrade Nechaev, seated among his telephones.”

  Fastidiously, Sparrow covers his knees again with the tails of his coat, taking time. “We were no longer at the house. We were in my office. Better security.”

  “Not a home office, I assume. You mean at headquarters. Langley.”

  “Yes of course.”

  “Were the sessions still being taped?”

  “No. At least I devoutly hoped that they weren’t. Not at this point,” says Sparrow. “And I had very good reasons. So far as I know today, that was the case. No recording.”

  “You took notes.”

  “Melvin or Roger Nye did, usually.”

  “What’s our date now, Mr. Sparrow?”

  “Early summer of 1963.”

  “June?”

  “May and June. And right on through until autumn, as it turned out.”

  “Fedorenko had come across in, what, January of that year?”

  “Correct.”

  “By May he was in your office. Inside the great gates. Seventh floor, presumably. Was that the least bit unusual? For a KGB man, freshly defected, to be taken to bosom so quickly?”

  “Fedorenko first came through those gates in April, Mr. Kessler. For a polygraph test. Administered on the first floor, by an examiner from the Office of Security. Which test, by the way, he passed. I only brought him in afterward. And being interrogated in my office, by myself and two assistants—it did not, I assure you, constitute being taken to bosom.”

  “But you see what I mean. You see how it appears. Was that unusual? Bogdan Kirilovich getting a look at your office?”

  “Not very,” Sparrow says coldly.

  “How long was it before Viktor Tronko got invited up there?”

  “Never,” Sparrow says. “Not during my tenure, at least. What’s your point, Mr. Kessler?”

  “No point. Just curious.” Unctuously, Kessler adds: “Of course I realize that the two cases were very different.”

  He persuades Sparrow to tell him about the security investigations, the boards of review, the resignations and demotions and outright firings that Fedorenko’s seventh-floor testimony led to at Langley, and this occupies them for a rather long time as the sun loses heart and the afternoon grows even colder, Sparrow pausing occasionally to edit in his head, omitting names and details in those cases, he says, where an officer might still be active for the Agency and so have a right to expect that Sparrow will not jeopardize the man’s cover, Sparrow in those cases giving only a silhouette version of the individual episode. But the silhouettes are the exceptions. Mainly what Sparrow offers are vivid and particularized facts—or at least vivid and particularized allegations. The names omitted don’t seem to be many. Evidently few of those officers who came under scrutiny, during this phase of Fedorenko’s debriefing, are still active for the Agency. Few have anything left in the way of career, it appears, that Sparrow could jeopardize. Of course after eighteen years a good number might just be retired. But that’s not the impression Kessler gets. The impression he gets is of rolling heads.

  “You’re telling me that all these people were Soviet agents? Dozens of penetrations, right there at headquarters? Christ, I don’t see how the place could have continued to function.”

  “I am not,” Sparrow says. “I’m telling you that these people came under suspicion. As we began tracking backward from what Bogdan Kirilovich could tell us. But you see, he only had fragmentary knowledge of these cases. Stray facts that had come across his desk, back in Moscow, buried within unrelated reports. Passing allusions picked up in office chat. Not the same sort of full and unmistakably damning data he had been able to give us on Schratt. Or on Nigel Willey. No, no. His access hadn’t been nearly so good with regard to the American assets. He hadn’t handled the files. Comrade Nechaev kept this group to himself.”

  “How many people were fired?”

  “It was like the challenge to a paleontologist, you see. Working out these cases, from the bits he gave us. You have a fossilized tibia. Or maybe it’s an ulna. You aren’t even sure which. But you’ve got to extrapolate from it, imagining the whole animal into being.”

  “How many people were fired? Counting the resignations.”

  “I suppose it was thirty or forty,” Sparrow says.

  “How many were convicted of espionage?”

  “None, Mr. Kessler. As a matter of fact, none went to trial.”

  “And you’d have me believe that that was a tactical matter, right? The Agency declined to prosecute. Cutting your losses. You couldn’t afford to have more secrets coming out in court.”

  “You may believe what you wish, but yes: that happens to have been true. In some cases. We didn’t dare prosecute. In others, it was merely that we hadn’t the evidence.”

  “Let me make a wild guess. Did any of these suspect people come from the Soviet Bloc Division?”

  “Several. Including one analyst, part of a group set up by Lentzer to read the tea leaves and study the garbage of Politburo members. This analyst was from a Russian émigré family, parents who had gotten out in the twenties—same sort of background as Lentzer himself. But you mustn’t think that Soviet Bloc was in any way specially targeted. That wasn’t so. They had their share, merely. Other divisions had their shares. Even Counterintelligence, we had one man who had to go.”

  “How did McAtee react?”

  “Quite childishly, I thought,” says Sparrow. “He made a very large issue of it, over that one analyst.”

  “What eventually happened to him?”

  “Jed? Why of course he
—”

  “No, no. I mean the analyst.”

  “It was a she,” says Sparrow. “Fired. No criminal charges. She may have signed some sort of confession, a form of consent agreement with us and the Justice Department. There were a few of those. With her, I don’t precisely recall.”

  “How old was she?”

  A moment has passed before Sparrow says: “What an odd question.”

  “You said McAtee behaved foolishly. I’m trying to consider all angles. And I’m guessing that female officers at the Agency, however few there may be, find themselves sometimes with an extra set of problems.”

  “Nonsense.” Sparrow is deadpan but he adds: “No, I think you just have a dirty mind.”

  “A suspicious mind. But that’s all right, I withdraw the question.” It is interesting to see Sparrow coming, even obliquely, to the defense of Jed McAtee’s professional rectitude.

  “She was gray, Mr. Kessler. She was put cruelly out to pasture in the twilight of, oh, I suspect, her fifty-eighth year,” Sparrow says with brittle irony. “Very much like myself.”

  “Did Fedorenko identify this woman by name?”

  “No. He merely gave us a profile. He pointed us where to look. We found certain damaging patterns in her record, certain congruencies. She matched the profile.”

  “She was fired on the basis of congruencies?”

  “Counterintelligence is largely a matter of finding congruencies.”

  “I thought it was the effort to see through appearances.” Sparrow isn’t the only one with a memory. “I’m quoting now.”

  “And to all appearances this woman was a reliable officer. A loyal citizen. Until we looked more closely.”

  “What did you find then?”

  “That her parents had not fled from the Bolsheviks, as previously implied. They were Crimean Jews, and they had fled from the Whites. From the Cossack pogroms. Also that she took her vacations, each February, in Mexico City.”

  Kessler says nothing. He waits. But Sparrow only gawks back at him, so finally: “Is that all?”

  “No. Mexico City is a notorious lair for KGB officers. You wouldn’t know that but we did. It’s virtually a free zone for them. The Soviet Embassy alone, it generally harbors upward of sixty under diplomatic status. Almost no room for real diplomats.”

  “Aren’t there about ten million other folk in the town too?”

  “Yes. All of them speaking Spanish. This woman, though—she had made eight trips to the city, she claimed it was for the cultural experience, yet she spoke scarcely a word of Spanish. We tested her. She was hopeless. She couldn’t have ordered in a restaurant.”

  “Maybe she liked mariachi music. Maybe she went for the tan but was embarrassed to say so.”

  “Why are you defending her, Mr. Kessler? This is the ancient case of a woman you never met.”

  “I don’t know. Good question. You seem to be forcing me. Was there anything else against her?”

  “Yes of course.”

  “Any evidence?”

  “Testimonial evidence.”

  “From Fedorenko. All right. I’m listening,” Kessler says carefully. He has nothing whatever to gain, he reminds himself, from debating with Sparrow. “Please go on.”

  “From Bogdan Kirilovich, yes. Back in Moscow, he had seen several pages from a file. The file involved still another case, an English traitor who was then serving MI-6 on liaison to Washington. This man was very delicately placed, his product handled by a high deputy in Special Service Two. Bogdan Kirilovich had no knowledge and no reason for knowledge. But because of his responsibilities in the Nigel Willey operation, for which he was desk officer, Fedorenko suddenly one day was permitted to see several pages. These were just excerpts from a report, no beginning or end, and a number of the lines had been blacked out. He was handed these pages, allowed to have them for half an hour, long enough to read and make notes, and then they were fastidiously collected back. Based on that glimpse, Bogdan Kirilovich could tell us of an American woman, émigré family, who reported to Moscow infrequently but quite usefully through a case officer in a South American capital.”

  “And you filled in the rest.”

  “We filled in the rest.”

  “Like a paleontologist. Imagining a whole animal into being.” Kessler is assailed by a heavy dull sadness, retroactive and futile. “Mr. Sparrow, didn’t anyone point out to you fellows that Mexico is part of North America?”

  “Latin,” Sparrow says quickly. “I misspoke. It was ‘a Latin American capital’ that Fedorenko talked of. ‘Latin American’ was what he had seen.”

  And the verification is there, somewhere at Langley, in a forgotten file, one phrase scribbled down in the shorthand of Pokorny or Roger Nye. Kessler now understands how convenient it might have been, for Claude Sparrow, that from this phase of Fedorenko’s debriefing there were no recordings.

  “Who coined the name Chicken Little?” he asks wearily. Kessler’s neck aches from facing sideways on the bench and he has long since lost touch with his toes.

  “Lord. It might have been any number of people. I never knew. Never even paused to wonder,” Claude Sparrow claims.

  They return to Dmitri. They return to the month of March 1963, to those early spring days before Bogdan Kirilovich’s first polygraph test, before the heads began rolling at Langley, back when most Agency officers on the seventh floor still held the touching conviction—as Sparrow puts it—that even one penetration was far too many, those days when heartbreakingly fine weather was encouraging Sparrow and Bogdan Kirilovich to take themselves back outside for long afternoons of pacing the muddy garden of the house in suburban Baltimore. Kessler guides the talk in this direction. He wants to know more about Dmitri. He is puzzled by what he has already heard—great sense of urgency, Sparrow losing sleep, phone calls from Bobby Kennedy that were no doubt more peremptory than supportive, find Dmitri, sink Dmitri, then somewhere along the way that frantic search falling into a stalemate that lingered on for ten years—and he has also a broader motive. Kessler senses that Dmitri must be the link between Bogdan Kirilovich’s story, offered at such length, and Viktor Tronko’s.

  Dmitri must be the link, if any exists, between the festering abscess in Claude Sparrow’s memory and whatever piece of information got Mel Pokorny murdered. What exactly did Fedorenko tell you about this Dmitri? he asks Sparrow.

  Very little, it seems. Sparrow repeats himself: Bogdan Kirilovich swore on the graves of both grandmothers that there was such a creature as Dmitri, lurking within the high reaches at Langley; there had to be, Fedorenko knew it as unshakable fact, he had worked after all right there in Special Service Two, only three glass doors and a railing away from the desk of the chief. But he couldn’t, evidently, give Sparrow much more than that.

  Dmitri had no code name, in Moscow, that ever fell upon Bogdan Kirilovich’s ears. Dmitri had been known to him only from whispers—but whispers of precisely the sort, Fedorenko insisted, that invariably proved true. Dmitri had been the private project of Comrade Nechaev himself. Dmitri, whoever it was, must be a genius of the craft and a paragon of cautious methodical daring. Dmitri was invisible.

  That much Fedorenko knew. So far as the ordinary channels of communication and support within Special Two were concerned—those channels by which all other penetration agents were serviced, with reports flowing in by way of a case officer in the field and small payments or interrogatory instructions flowing out—so far as those channels were concerned, Dmitri was invisible. It had been the case when Bogdan Kirilovich first arrived at the Lubyanka, and it was still the case when he left for Paris. Nothing through channels. Not with this source. This one was Comrade Nechaev’s own personal phantom.

  “If you were going to invent a source, one that didn’t really exist,” Kessler observes, “there’s much to be said for inventing a phantom.”

  “
Precisely what McAtee was fond of pointing out.”

  “How did you answer him?”

  “It wasn’t easy. I confess to you. Not easily.”

  For instance the matter of radio. Dmitri absolutely refused to use radio. Generally the KGB favored UHF radio, Fedorenko told Sparrow, for communication with agents within the Washington rezidentura. That was true for Special Two and its assets at Langley, equally true for all other assets within the U.S. State Department or elsewhere as handled by other KGB branches. But not true for Dmitri. Dmitri would not go on the air. There was some risk in any contact or communication between an agent and his handlers, always, inherently, Sparrow explains. The risk attendant in radio transmissions—brief bursts, heavily encrypted, and usually untraceable—was generally considered less threatening than most alternatives. But Dmitri, according to Fedorenko, was nonetheless adamant. Even crankish. No radio. And not only did Dmitri refuse to broadcast; Dmitri would not even own an innocent short-wave receiver.

  “What did that mean, if it was true?” Kessler asks.

  “Two things. It suggested that Dmitri lived in very great fear of having his home searched. And also, perhaps, that he had no confidence in the Soviet ciphers.” This is the first time, Kessler notices, that Sparrow has referred to Dmitri with the masculine pronoun. “Of course he was right. We were having good success those days on Soviet ciphers, thanks to a few big early IBMs. We were getting a lot of their radio. As he well knew. He—” Sparrow starts again and stops. He holds Kessler’s eye. “It was, by the way, true.”

  He also refused live meetings, Dmitri. Another precaution against being compromised. No face-to-face encounters with a Soviet case officer. No brush-contacts for passing rolls of film. No cutouts, no go-betweens, no third parties of any sort were permitted to see his face or be seen in his presence. Dmitri in fact had no case officer on American soil. Not a single KGB man in Washington, neither with diplomatic cover nor among the “illegals,” was allowed to know he existed.

  “What’s left?” says Kessler. “How could an agent even communicate, with so many phobias?”