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

by David Quammen

  The temperature was beginning to dive further, they were now again utterly alone in the little park, headlights were flashing by along Old Dominion, yet Sparrow continued talking.

  “Because, you see, Hoover hated us,” he told Kessler. “Hoover loathed the Agency with a jealous, venal passion that surpassed even his ignorance of our aims and our methods. He wouldn’t have warned us of a falling piano—not if there was a chance he could extract gain somehow, from standing aside and watching the accident happen. It proved nothing, his denial of knowledge about Nechaev. If the man had shown up in routine FBI surveillance, Hoover was simply withholding that information. Hoarding it, on principle. Thinking this might be something he could eventually put to his own use.” Then again there was an equal likelihood, Sparrow said, that Nechaev had not let his face be seen on the streets of New York.

  In fact it probably made better sense that way, Sparrow said.

  Having flown into New York in masquerade as a minor diplomatic functionary, maybe even just a translator, L. V. Nechaev could have gone underground at once, disappearing from sight, slipping on down to Washington by train to avoid leaving so much as a false name in the airline records. In Washington, of course, he would have performed his mission solitarily, independent of the KGB rezidentura, going nowhere near his own country’s embassy, not even letting them know he was here. Independent also of the “illegal” apparatus in town. He was strictly on his own. So far as humanly possible, he had kept the sphere of his activities and the nature of his mission totally secret. From everyone, Sparrow said. From us, and from his own people too.

  “His mission,” Kessler said.

  “Yes.”

  “He had come over to activate Dmitri. Who had been recruited sometime before, presumably. And was waiting.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would Nechaev do it personally?”

  “To establish those fanatically cautious procedures. To circumvent what you call the phobias.”

  “An invisible case officer for the invisible agent,” Kessler said then, and he was about to repeat his cavil about negative evidence when Sparrow replied:

  “Not entirely. In this case there was something tangible. Comrade Nechaev did leave one mark.”

  It was a visa application. A two-page form, little noted at the time and long since forgotten, slumbering innocently in the records section of our embassy in Moscow, Sparrow said. It had been filed in February of 1958, this application, by Nechaev himself or a trusted assistant acting on his behalf. Five years later when we came looking, it was still there, locked in a file cabinet under no very great security, among similar papers of no very great significance. In those days before computerized records the embassy held a backlog, in routine paperwork such as visa applications, covering the previous ten years. After a decade each year’s worth was culled, for whatever morsels might seem potentially worth keeping, and those went back to Washington by diplomatic pouch; the rest were shredded and then carefully burned. The year 1958, by our good fortune, said Sparrow, was still too young for the shredder. But we couldn’t just call up the embassy and ask them to take a peek. Go rooting through your visa records, would you, with an eye open for one L. V. Nechaev. Hardly. Not even by highest-security coded cable we couldn’t ask that, no.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, too many eyes and ears. Good lord. We might just as well have cabled Mr. Nechaev directly: WE’RE COMING, READY OR NOT.”

  “But Dmitri himself must have known.”

  “This part of the investigation was very closely held, Mr. Kessler. Very closely. We knew Dmitri was well placed, yes, we had that from Bogdan Kirilovich. But we didn’t yet know just how well.”

  A courier was sent to Moscow. This courier was a senior officer at Langley who had the full confidence (a rather exceptional distinction itself) of both Claude Sparrow and Jedediah McAtee, not to mention of course the Director, Herbert Eames. Sparrow did not offer Kessler the courier’s name. Kessler asked for the name and was politely rebuffed, no reason given. The courier went off at a scramble. His cover story was something about important talks with the CIA chief of station, Moscow, concerning new intelligence requirements and the problem of nuclear-test-ban verification; and that cover story was wrapped inside another, a more public offering, which made the man an agricultural economist on contract to the State Department. The courier returned in four days. He hadn’t had much sleep. The chief of station, under instructions which did not include even a modicum of explanation, had seen to it that the man got a secure room and all the files he requested, and otherwise had left him alone, though adhering to the pretense that the two of them were holding very private talks. The courier had done his work after hours on the first full day following his arrival in Moscow. He demanded and got a huge, confusing assortment of archival material, including some personnel files on former U.S. Embassy staff, some correspondence received from naturalized American citizens seeking information about missing Russian relatives, and a selection of back-date visa applications. The visa applications were stored in packets by month and year. The courier ordered up those packets for January and February 1958; for September and October 1958; for March and April 1953, coinciding with the death of Stalin; for December 1953, coinciding with the execution of Lavrenti Beria; for February 1955, coinciding with the resignation of Malenkov; for February and March 1956, coinciding with Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech to the Twentieth Party Congress; and for September 1960, coinciding with Khrushchev’s own trip to the UN session in New York. All of these, except January and February of 1958, were simply red herrings. The courier ignored those other packets. In the packet for February of 1958 he found a visa application from one L. G. Orlov, chemical engineer and adviser on industrial aid to developing nations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Application granted: three months, renewable. The attached photograph and the physical information seemed to fit with the skimpy description Bogdan Kirilovich had supplied. The courier’s intuition was good: later investigation established that there was no L. G. Orlov, engineer, assigned to the Foreign Ministry in 1958, and probably never had been. This despite the fact that Orlov is a common name, Sparrow said—almost like signing yourself as Smith. The courier made one photocopy of L. G. Orlov’s form, replaced the original, and flew home.

  Bogdan Kirilovich confirmed that the face in the bad copy of the bad passport photo was indeed that of L. G. Nechaev. Furthermore, Sparrow said, the ugly styling of the eyeglasses matched—though that bit of detail had been intentionally withheld from the courier.

  “We were quite excruciatingly careful, you see,” Sparrow said. The planning had been elaborate but fast, and confined to a very small circle of senior staff. Besides Herbert Eames himself, and the top people within Sparrow’s shop, and the top people within McAtee’s, no one at all knew about this interest in the Nechaev visit five years before. No one else knew that Bogdan Kirilovich had directed their attention to that visit. No one else knew what the courier had brought back from Moscow. “But of course,” Sparrow added sourly, “with Dmitri there, our carefulness was all so much piss in the wind. As you rightly point out.”

  Kessler waited to see what might follow that. Nothing followed. So he broke the silence with: “Would you like to continue this in a warm and well-lighted restaurant?”

  “Certainly not,” Sparrow said.

  Ugly silver eyeglasses, Kessler writes in the notebook. Like a yoke with oxbows, he writes. Alias L. G. Orlov, he writes. Fedorenko “confirmed” the identification, Kessler’s quotes. In effect, Fedorenko countersigning his own I.O.U. Still, the glasses. Trusted courier, name withheld. A short list of people Kessler hopes to find and, with large luck, to question: Fedorenko, Scott Wickes, um, Roger Nye. Very short. Eames is dead. McAtee is beyond the big gate. Kessler is dopey from fatigue. Remember to check with someone about that Smith business. Remember to dress warmly tomorrow. And then Sparrow will probably haul us of
f to his favorite secret steambath. Kessler discovers that his wineglass has somehow gotten empty. Pushing the notebook away, he orders a whiskey.

  Eventually he shuffles back to the Tabard. Behind the desk it is still the same woman, in the same baggy black mohair sweater with pushed-up sleeves, working the late shift again. She seems to work all the shifts, so far as Kessler can tell. Maybe she sleeps right there at the switchboard. Maybe she is the owner. A collector of rare old sofas who needed someplace to show them. With her long neck protruding from the sweater, her pale skin and dark hair and wide bloodshot eyes, she reminds Kessler inescapably of a grebe, though it’s not nice, he knows, and as desk clerks go she is quite good about messages. A Western grebe. Her nose is shorter, of course. Probably she is a fine intelligent person with many sterling qualities, beloved to those who know her.

  “Did he find you?” she says when she sees Kessler.

  “Who?”

  Stretching her grebelike neck out through the little window, she inspects the lobby’s sole sofa, which is mustard-yellow and empty. Before it is a low table covered deep in newspapers, and a standing brass ashtray.

  “A man. He waited. Maybe an hour. Then left, evidently.”

  “What sort of man?”

  “He reminded me of a lizard,” the woman says. Her eyes dance guiltily. “Wrinkled face. Skinny.”

  “Did he give his name?”

  “No name. If he’s a friend of yours, don’t tell him I said that, okay?”

  “I don’t think he is.”

  “And an accent. He had an accent.”

  “Southern,” Kessler says.

  “No. European,” she says. “Somewhere east of Zurich, if I’m any judge.”

  Kessler’s pulse is high, not just from the climb, as he swings open the door of his room and snaps on the light. But there is only his bag, and the pile of books and papers.

  12

  “WHO COINED THE NAME Chicken Little?”

  A question that flopped once, Kessler has learned, can sometimes succeed in a fresh context. He springs this one back out abruptly, before any preliminaries, even as he sits down, but Sparrow is not taken off guard, or else genuinely doesn’t know the answer or care. With a vague hyperopic expression and a shake of the head, Sparrow passes directly to a subject of his own choice, seemingly remote: seemingly Viktor Tronko. But fine, all right, now at least we’re focusing, Kessler thinks. Today they have bright sunlight of the most frigid and hypocritical sort. Sparrow squints toward Langley.

  “We knew he was coming before he came. That’s the single crucial fact. Everything was known in advance.” There is no tone of exaltation; this seems to be, rather, a deeply galling memory.

  “Tronko.”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew he was going to defect?”

  “Yes. Him or someone like him. We were warned.”

  It was Sparrow’s own dear Bogdan Kirilovich, naturally, who warned them. Kessler is surprised, though he shouldn’t be, at the insistent centripetalism that drags Claude Sparrow’s attention back to Fedorenko. Pokorny did not even mention this character. But clearly Bogdan Kirilovich Fedorenko is the hub star, in Sparrow’s mind, to the whole whirling galaxy of facts and suppositions and appearances. Tronko is just a quasar blasting away out on the cold fringe. Or a pulsar. Kessler as usual can’t remember the difference. After me, Fedorenko warned them, will come false and misleading signals.

  “The Russians have a term for it. A quite particularized concept, to them. Language tells us a lot about thought, you know. They call it dezo.”

  “I don’t speak Russian,” says Kessler.

  “Short for dezinformatsiya.”

  “Disinformation. Okay, I follow. A fairly particularized concept in this city too, by the way.”

  “No,” Sparrow says, more meticulous than argumentative. “No, it’s not mere obfuscation I’m talking about, Mr. Kessler.”

  “Or mere lies?”

  “Or mere lies either. No. Precisely not.”

  “Then tell me what.”

  “A story,” Sparrow says. “If I may. I’ll tell you a little story.”

  One night in the spring of 1958, Sparrow says, a handful of youngsters kicked over gravestones at a Jewish cemetery in Düsseldorf, West Germany. Scrawled a few swastikas with chalk. The boys weren’t caught in the act and there was no proof, but local people knew who they were. Juvenile delinquents merely. Incorrigible and mindless. Still, from Hamburg to Munich the Jewish community, what was left of it, shuddered. And the incident got into newspapers, both there in Germany and abroad. The British press was especially fierce on the subject of Nazism’s smoldering embers. The American press slightly less so.

  Toward the end of that year came another outbreak of what seemed the same type of nastiness, only now more widespread and more sustained, so of course far more disturbing. On Christmas Eve the doorposts of a synagogue in Cologne were painted with swastikas and, in crude angry lettering: GERMANS DEMAND THAT JEWS GET OUT. Germans demand, Sparrow repeats pointedly. A Jewish cenotaph nearby was also toppled, no small feat of boyish muscle. During just the next several nights Jewish tombstones were broken and Jewish stores were defaced in a dozen more West German cities. Jews began receiving death threats by telephone, a strange hateful voice and then click, gone. Over the New Year’s weekend this epidemic spread suddenly to Vienna, Paris, Antwerp, Stockholm, even London and New York. More swastikas. More graveyard desecrations and obscene slogans. Many further anonymous threats. So far no one had been killed. Nor had any of the perpetrators been arrested.

  West Germany continued to be the main locus. Into the first and second week of 1959, every big city and quite a few smaller towns, even villages, were getting their turns for anti-Semitic incidents, enacted in all cases under cover of night. Essen and Münster in the north, Mainz, Würzburg, a little Bavarian town called Pfronten, in the mountains, where a lawyer’s office caught fire when a tossed rock broke not only a window but an antique oil lamp; the office, and two adjacent businesses, were gutted. It all seemed too familiar. Augsburg, then something else back in Bonn. These occurrences were all clustered closely in time, you understand, says Sparrow; all just before or just after the turn of the year. There seemed to be some sort of interrelation, a consecutive psychic triggering, one event to the next, one community to the next. Perhaps epidemic is the wrong metaphor, says Sparrow. It seemed perhaps more like a chain reaction among unstable nuclei, he says. Leaping caroming neutrons. Fracturing atoms. Good God, when might it go critical? Naturally that’s what people asked themselves. Not just Jews. Not just Germans, Jewish and otherwise. This was getting attention, by now, in all the Western newspapers. And in the East bloc press too, of course. They were howling piously, over there. You’re familiar, I assume, says Sparrow, with what I mean when I talk about going critical.

  “Sure,” says Kessler.

  It went hard on the Federal Republic’s world image, needless to say. The Western press were screaming, TASS was screaming, British MPs were screaming particularly, even the Japanese and the Australians for God’s sake—everyone was screaming about the filthy recidivist murdering Huns. As well they might have been, says Sparrow. They had every reason. It was all quite convincingly ominous. One headline in the old Herald Trib said, “Bonn Can’t Eliminate Nazi Poison,” something like that. Trade agreements were canceled. West German diplomats were given the sneer. West German businessmen also. And just inevitably, of course, there began to be loud talk about whether such a country could be a fit partner to the NATO alliance.

  “It was all disinformation,” Kessler hazards obligingly.

  “No. The early Düsseldorf business, that was exactly what it seemed to be. Isolated juvenile vandalism,” says Sparrow. “The rest of it, yes. All a dezo operation. A classic of the genre. Entirely concocted in Moscow, by a man named Avvakian. Executed, the West German part, by
good German Communists, agents that Avvakian had played back across from the East. And in the other countries, by his own home-grown Soviet KGB thugs. Brushes and paint paid for by the Central Committee.”

  “Am I supposed to be shocked? Don’t you people routinely do the same kind of thing?”

  “No. We do not. That’s a sentimental fallacy of great comfort to liberals and other moral relativists, but no. Utterly untrue.”

  “Come on, Mr. Sparrow. Maybe you don’t call it dezo. Maybe your term is ‘black propaganda.’ Doesn’t that ring a bell? Or maybe it’s just ‘operations.’ ”

  Sparrow is momentarily mute.

  “Guatemala,” says Kessler. “Sukarno’s Indonesia. Vietnam under Diem. Cuba during the Kennedys. Nasser’s Egypt. Sihanouk’s Cambodia.”

  “We’ve had our excesses and our mistakes, yes. Not that I grant you anything in those particular cases. Our excesses, in fact, have mainly been ones of caution. Our mistakes, of naiveté.”

  “That’s arguable.”

  “It is arguable, certainly, and I would be delighted to argue it with you. But is this the story you’re writing, Mr. Kessler? Evil scheming CIA at large in the world?” Sparrow twists his body suddenly to glower across the park and back toward Old Dominion Drive, as though hoping somebody might appear on the scene to interrupt them. No one around. He settles himself again with a sigh of boredom. “Oh, it’s so very tired. It has been done and done. You did it yourself, a decade ago in your callow youth, aren’t I correct? This week I rather thought you were more interested in the case of Viktor Tronko.”

  “I’m not writing any story right now. Not until I get a pretty full sense of the who and the why,” says Kessler. “What I’m doing right now is called researching.”