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

by David Quammen

  Finally, some evidence in Agency hands suggests that Dmitri, all along, was positioned within the Counterintelligence section itself, a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse. Or to stay with our original metaphor: a case of the mole guarding the lawn. For Dmitri, what could have been more perfect? For the CIA, what could have been more disastrous? It isn’t proven fact, by any means, but certain officials at Langley imply archly that this is their own view: Dmitri eluded Claude Sparrow’s relentless search precisely because he was right there among the searchers. If that is true, the entire decade-long upheaval resulting from Sparrow’s great hunt—the paralysis of operations, the dismissals and resignations, the spectacle of an intelligence service turned inward in disarray—can itself be seen as Dmitri’s biggest victory. And Sparrow can be seen as his first and last victim.

  There is also one other possibility. A dozen years later, with Claude Sparrow now in forced retirement, the rumor even persists that Sparrow himself was Dmitri. Does that notion seem dizzying, outlandish, paranoid in the extreme? Almost too clever and too devious for belief? It does indeed. In other words, it is exactly the kind of idea that might come from the brain of Claude Sparrow.

  19

  “THE NEXT PHASE LASTED three years,” says Claude Sparrow.

  “The second hostile interrogation.”

  “So called. I prefer to think of it as the first serious debriefing.”

  “A debriefing conducted in a concrete cell. Under conditions approximating torture. Psychological torture, if not physical.”

  “Precisely,” says Claude Sparrow.

  “Tell me about it.”

  But Sparrow does not seem to be sure that he wants to. For a long time he stares off toward the naked trees, giving Kessler the left half of his face and showing, apart from the ruddy flush brought out already again by the cold air on his otherwise waxy cheek, no more animation than the profile on a buffed Roman coin. His left ear has also gone red. He must have been out for a long luncheon walk, killing time until Kessler arrived, or maybe sweeping the woods and the parking lots himself to make sure there is no Buddyboy watching today.

  “Surely Mel did that,” he says finally.

  “Some.”

  “Mel would have known all the details. It was his debriefing.”

  “He was your deputy. It was your operation now. Tronko had been put in your hands. I assume you supervised pretty closely.”

  Sparrow turns. “Yes. That’s correct. I was fully responsible.”

  “I heard Mel’s version,” says Kessler, stretching the truth. “Then he was murdered. I’d like to hear your version. Are you concerned about being murdered?”

  “Of course not,” Sparrow says and again shifts his attention away.

  Kessler has noticed that the hazel eyes look faintly aqueous, like a failed gelatin. Sparrow seems to be in a state of emotion but the emotion, true enough, does not seem to be fear. Maybe it’s grief over Mel. Maybe Claude Sparrow felt a great deal more strongly about Mel Pokorny than the mere professional relationship would suggest. They had been together since Vienna, after all. Mel was one of his protégés. Sparrow appears to carry some specially paining burden of guilt or regret over the way things have fallen out. And now he is not gazing off with the look of a spurned lover toward distant Langley; he is simply staring at a stand of bare elms, property of the city of McLean and in want of attention from the pruning crew. Litter of foam hamburger coffins and burrito papers on the intervening brown grass. Old man in a park on a dreary winter Monday, no place to go but home.

  “Then tell me about it.”

  “Very simple. We had a complete set of lies, thanks to Jed and Sol Lentzer. Tronko’s legend. The whole false story he had been programmed to tell.” Invocation of Jed McAtee always seems to help Sparrow focus. “Now we wanted the truth.”

  November of 1964, Sparrow says. McAtee and Lentzer had been given their chance and botched it. All the peremptory presidential deadlines had come and gone, the Warren Report had been issued. The pressures of time and politics had somewhat abated. Though of course there were still other and very grave pressures. The task of Tronko’s debriefing was charged over, finally, to the Counterintelligence staff. Tronko himself was not “in the hands of” the CI staff, however, not in the sense that Kessler seems to assume. No, Sparrow wants to make this small but important distinction: Tronko’s actual physical custody—his care and feeding, his safety, guard details, the arrangement of living conditions—all that was still a matter for the Office of Security, just as it had been during McAtee’s turn. Counterintelligence had no autonomy in that area. None whatsoever. They could only suggest and request. Every aspect of Tronko’s physical keep had to be cleared through the Director’s office, Sparrow insists, and then put into effect as a line order down through Security. So you see, Sparrow says, to claim that we tortured Tronko in some sense or other, we meaning Counterintelligence, is utterly unjust and inaccurate. Everything came down through other channels. Everything but the interrogation itself. In that only were we free to shape our own strategies.

  “So now it’s an interrogation again,” says Kessler. Sparrow ignores him.

  The facility itself, for instance. Sparrow and his people wanted Tronko in a wholly new place, a fresh context, away from the scene of Lentzer’s efforts. They wanted better security, greater privacy, greater freedom for the debriefing officer to come and go without exposing himself to the curiosity of an Army sergeant in a guardhouse. They wanted Tronko more thoroughly isolated—and they wanted him to feel that isolation. Also there was the matter of duration. Sparrow himself already sensed, he says, that to dismantle Tronko’s legend might take some real time. A year or more. Even he did not foresee at that point, though, just how much more it would take. No one guessed three years.

  “Least of all, Viktor Tronko.”

  “No. No, that’s wrong,” says Sparrow, fastidious and cold. “He would have known exactly what he was stepping into. Perhaps better than anyone.”

  The facility was designed and constructed expressly for this single use. It met all the specifications. It cost Sparrow extravagantly—in more senses than one. The order had to go up from Counterintelligence to Eames’s office and come back down through Security and Sparrow himself was required to raise a wild bureaucratic din, but he did that, and required also to pay the acquisition and construction costs from his own budget, and he did that too, and finally he got what he wanted. Tronko was moved during the last week of November.

  “How?”

  “By people from Security, under our supervision. He was blindfolded.”

  “Was he handcuffed again?”

  Sparrow twists his head to see Kessler with both eyes. “Again?”

  “Was he handcuffed?”

  “Yes. Blindfolded and handcuffed. This was to be his passage beyond the pale.”

  “Moved by car or plane?”

  “Both. Actually, we loaded him onto a military transport and flew him around for an hour, then landed again at a different end of the same air base. All for that sense of isolation, you see. Then it was by car.” Sparrow, recollecting, grins like a guilty child.

  “That’s bizarre. Whose idea was it?”

  “Mine, Mr. Kessler. And it wasn’t bizarre. On the contrary, it was quite sensible and economical. We wanted Tronko to feel alone, remote, hopeless. But our own debriefing officer would still need to commute back and forth.”

  “Like Dante. Commuting to the far side of the grave.”

  “Like Dante in purgatory, yes,” Sparrow agrees.

  “I was thinking more of hell.”

  “But Viktor Tronko got out,” says Sparrow. “Unfortunately.”

  “And you called this place the Vault. Concrete walls, concrete floor. A cot and a light. Nothing else. Nothing. Am I correct?”

  “Mel named it that,” says Sparrow.

 
; Vault or crypt or whatever, Mel was the one who would know. It was Mel, after all, who spent so many hundreds of hours there over the next three years, sharing that concrete box with its chief inhabitant. In the first week of December 1964 Mel Pokorny began his divided life as a commuting inquisitor.

  Thereafter, for just slightly more than three wearying years, he bounced back and forth two or three times a week between Langley and the Vault, between Claude Sparrow’s company and Viktor Tronko’s, carrying always questions in one direction and answers in the other, not much enlightenment either way, reviewing transcripts, brainstorming with Sparrow and the analysts, going back out to drag Tronko over old matters from a dozen different new angles, working long hours on too little sleep, consuming too much bad coffee and highway food, losing his marriage, burning himself unstintingly and with narrow focus, like an acetylene torch aimed for cutting a hole in a bulkhead, all of it just as Lentzer had done before, and Claude Sparrow himself back in the early days with Fedorenko. The difference was that Pokorny’s ordeal went on so much longer, says Sparrow. And yet he seemed to be tireless. Indestructible. He seemed to thrive under this unwholesome regimen. He seemed to grow only more determined that Tronko could and would be broken. Mel was perhaps an example of the ideal personality for an interrogator, says Sparrow. He was very smart, he was quick, yet he could be fierce and tenacious as a pit bull—sometimes just shockingly fierce. At the same time there was that other side to him, the clown, the incorrigible comic, inventing silly nicknames and refusing ever to take himself or anyone else too seriously, cutting up in meetings like the classroom goon, a seemingly harmless and quite likable fellow who could charm a smile out of the most grim-minded individual. You would know about that last, thinks Kessler. Mel was the obvious choice for this chore, says Sparrow. He was in many ways the best I had.

  Claude Sparrow is loyal. Kessler, seeing the slant taken, is distracted especially by one thing Sparrow has said. Pokorny’s ordeal? Pokorny’s? For Christ sake what about Viktor Tronko’s?

  After just two weeks they decided on another polygraph, says Sparrow. Brought the examiner out to Tronko, fluttered him right there in the Vault. None of that Holiday Inn business this time.

  “Did you pull the EEG trick on him again?”

  “No. We did not. Who told you about that?”

  “A source,” Kessler says. “I have several, besides yourself.”

  The logic behind this second test was entirely different, says Sparrow. The first had been a gimmick, yes. A little drama staged with the hope of breaking their impasse. Not a bad idea, says Sparrow—suggesting in Kessler’s mind that again the inspiration must have been Sparrow’s—but it didn’t happen to work. The second was different. A straight polygraph, says Sparrow, as scientifically valid and accurate as we could make the thing. We called for it now, after only two weeks, because we imagined it might help us know how to proceed. Baseline data, was the general notion. We’d ask Tronko everything once again, let him give all his old lying answers once again, and then we’d look at the charts. The true emotional topography of his legend. That was the notion. We imagined this would give us coordinates on the weak points, you understand, and also identify the places where his tale must have had some framework of more solid factuality. Then we would proceed against the weaknesses. Flanking right around the points where he was solid.

  Any good legend must contain some portion of real truth, some element of factual support, says Sparrow. The most persuasive lie, always, is a half-lie. Our thought was to let this flutter steer us toward Tronko’s more vulnerable half. But again, says Sparrow, it didn’t happen to work.

  Under even the most scientific conditions, Viktor Tronko seemed to be lying about everything.

  Everything—Sparrow stresses the word forlornly. Tronko’s story seemed to contain almost no truth at all. No framework of real fact. Not even in the most banal details. Not according to the machines, anyway. As he had done before, when we intentionally made the test situation rather menacing for him, Tronko again registered spikes of cognitive dissonance against almost every statement he made. Spikes and more spikes, Sparrow says in a voice going shrill. Well, this itself was suspicious. Befuddling. It ran counter to what we knew or believed we knew about Soviet disinformation techniques. And of course it gave no help at all as to how we should focus our attack. Rather the opposite. It raised a whole bloody mess of new questions about what could or couldn’t be taken for granted.

  “Give me an example.”

  “Everything,” Sparrow gasps again. “His job. His rank. His access. His special assignments and incongruous vacations, if any. His education. His language skills, or lack of. His relations with goddamn Rybakov. All of that was full of lies, the needles jumped right off the paper. Very well. Fair enough. The bugger had been sent over for a purpose, after all. His mission was to deceive us, presumably on a few crucial matters. Fine. But we had also asked him about these other things. Simple things, innocent. Who are you? What’s your name? The needles were jumping already. What’s your age? Are you married? Wife’s name and age. Any children? One boy, all right, his name and age. Do you love your wife? Yes Viktor Tronko loved his wife. Good for him. Do you love your son? Pause. A straightforward query, is it not? Do you love your son? And dammit, these were supposed to be just the control questions”—Sparrow’s fists shake like tiny maracas—“but the needles were going everywhere!”

  “Easy.”

  “Yes. You’re right.” Sparrow catches his breath. He sits back against the bench and swings his legs in a willful rhythm; composes his hands into a still life on his lap. “I’m not supposed to excite myself.”

  “So he lied there too,” Kessler says helpfully. “Even the personal matters. He had no wife and son.”

  “A wife maybe, but no son. Or something,” says Sparrow.

  “He invented a son. Or his bosses invented one for him. But why in the world should they do that?”

  The little legs continue swinging. Sparrow works them as though he is pumping a bellows. “God damned if I ever knew.”

  So without the advantage of any particular guidance they began the long process of trying to comprehend Viktor Tronko—the process that Sparrow wants to think of as a “debriefing” but to which he can’t seem to resist applying words like “attack” and “dismantle.” Kessler recalls how Max Rosen put it: the idea was not just to incarcerate Tronko for a period of intensive questioning, but to demoralize him and break the man’s will. Will to resist being equated with will to lie. Break the man’s will and you also break open the legend. Break open the legend and find—aha!—Moscow’s sinister little toothy caiman lurking inside. But the eggshell was evidently tougher than anyone foresaw. Sparrow even now seems prone to hyperventilate at the thought of that pliant toughness. Kessler also remembers a bit of Pokorny’s description, so frustratingly foreshortened, and offered before Kessler knew how much he might care: Tronko in solitary for three years, surrounded by concrete and questions. No human contact except with his latest interrogator, said Mel, the cast-iron asshole yours truly. Claude Sparrow on the other hand seems to view the whole episode from a much different perspective than those two, Pokorny and Rosen. Sparrow’s version is not so immediate, not so claustrophobic. Not so concrete. His powers of imaginative self-transport seem to have failed him here, or else been determinedly restricted. He may have spent half his working life on mental reconnaissance visits to the third floor of the Lubyanka in Moscow, out-of-body experiences that allowed him to test the feel of L. V. Nechaev’s swivel chair, but he does not seem ever to have projected himself into the Vault. Kept his distance from that place, mentally as well as physically. The second hostile interrogation, in Sparrow’s mind, seems to exist chiefly as a series of mendacious transcripts and a long-distance battle of wills. And the Vault itself was a vaguely imagined, mildly austere place where Sparrow himself never went—no more than Viktor Tronko came to Langley.
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br />   “Where was it?” says Kessler.

  “Out. Outside the Washington area.” Sparrow’s hand makes a push at the air, implying the outland status of all America. “But as I said, within range.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Exactly? I won’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t choose to. Just as I won’t speak by name of Agency men who are still active. Never mind, Mr. Kessler. You couldn’t go there and find anything now. Leave it.”

  “You speak about Jed McAtee,” Kessler argues. He really does want a look at the place, the Vault, for no evidential reason but merely on principle. Go see for yourself, breathe and touch, before you describe. Maybe it’s no more than a literary need. “McAtee is still active.”

  “Yes. Well. Jed is a public figure,” in derisive italics. “And he can damn well take care of himself.”

  For three years Mel made his commutes and brought back his tapes. The tapes were transcribed right there in Counterintelligence, under a designation of highest priority and highest restriction, then sent straight down the hall to Sparrow’s personal office, where he and Mel and Roger Nye would work over each installment before Mel went back out. One copy of every transcript went also to the analysts, who dealt with it in their own curious way, and filed advisory reports that came back to Sparrow for whatever use he chose to make of them. The analysts themselves were not within Sparrow’s section; they were separate, even remote, a small working group over in the Office of Strategic Research, but for the entire three-year period they were assigned to the Tronko problem and that only, and occasionally they saw something in the transcripts or offered an idea that Sparrow and his own people had missed. Otherwise the yield from Mel’s ongoing interrogation was held to drastically limited access. Jed McAtee saw none of the transcripts. No copy to any other section or division. Even Herbert Eames got no copy—though that was at his own choosing, and he was kept abreast of progress by verbal briefings from Claude Sparrow delivered privately, just the pair of them, in the Director’s office.