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

by David Quammen

  That last didn’t demand much of Sparrow’s time because for a long while, he says, there just didn’t seem to be any progress. Tronko was repeating obstinately all the same old failed lies he had told Lentzer. Tourist Department, under Rybakov. Rank of colonel. Oswald’s KGB file, pure as snow. No such goblin as Dmitri. All the same tired nonsense, says Sparrow. Insulting to the intelligence. So we just had to keep squeezing him harder.

  “Care to elaborate on that?”

  “Certainly. We tried to drive Viktor Tronko insane with boredom. It was all we could do.”

  “Boredom.”

  “Yes, there you have it: the ultimate psychological weapon of the liberal West. Boredom. Sit in on a Board of Estimates meeting sometime and you’ll see what I mean. In fact, perhaps we should have put Tronko through a few of those meetings.”

  “Did you ever use drugs?”

  “No. Drugs were forbidden.” On further contemplation, Sparrow adds: “Only the other side is allowed to use drugs. We’re gentlemen, over here. Yes indeed. Meaning, we choose to fight standing on one foot.”

  “Were you ever tempted?”

  “Of course I was tempted, always. Those things can be bloody effective. Might have made the difference. But I’ve told you. Drugs were forbidden.”

  As was the tapping of telephones, on U.S. soil and without a court order—Kessler recalls—but that evidently didn’t dissuade you. The drug business continues to puzzle Kessler, though it seems a dead end. He scratches himself a note, quickly, while changing the subject.

  “These analysts. Were they the ‘Schnitzel Group’?”

  “Yes, precisely. You already know about them, Mr. Kessler? From your many well-placed sources?”

  “No. I don’t. I’d like you to tell me about them.”

  “Three macrocephalic academic types alone in a room.” Kessler waits for more. Sparrow just sits. He has had his say.

  “But you admit they helped you. They contributed certain insights.”

  “I do admit it. I’ve got nothing against academic types, in their place.”

  “Names?” says Kessler. “Or are they still active?”

  Sparrow ponders for a moment, presumably reviewing what he knows of the retirement schedule of the Schnitzel Group. Taking Kessler by surprise, he offers a name: “Sidney Gondelman. Large fellow, with a training originally in physics. I’ve heard he went to a private think tank, somewhere up the Hudson. Better money. Mel called him Sidney Gondwana.”

  Kessler scribbles it all. “Thank you.”

  “For God’s sake don’t say I sent you.”

  But Viktor Tronko was a stubborn man, a rather strong man in fact, Sparrow continues, and boredom in even its more extreme form was not enough of a weapon to readily break him. He was not bothered by the fact that his hosts utterly disbelieved him. Nor by the impossible errors and contradictions in his story, as those were thrown up to him. Nor by the physical situation either. The Vault. Loneliness, sensory deprivation, with seemingly no prospect of lying his way out. No. He held. Damn his soul, he held, says Sparrow. A good soldier. General Avvakian had chosen well.

  Not according to Max Rosen, Kessler remembers. If Tronko was sent by Moscow, why wasn’t he given more to offer? Why was his dowry so meager? Ask yourself why Moscow should have chosen so badly. Another variation on the central discrepancy of opinion. Was Viktor Tronko a strong man or a muddled hopeless drunk? A good soldier or a deserter from the ranks? Was he well chosen or badly chosen or wasn’t he chosen at all?

  “You made these assumptions,” Kessler says. “One was that Tronko had been sent. And not just sent. That he had been sent by this General Avvakian. Which would mean it was all a dezo operation—am I right? Or do I have Avvakian confused with one of the others?”

  “Not assumptions. Well-founded deductions. Yes, that’s right: Avvakian. Dezo.”

  “Let’s talk about the deductive process.”

  But instead Sparrow makes a leap forward, to begin talking about the critical point of impasse, the point at which all his own deductions and Pokorny’s interrogations and Viktor Tronko’s stubborn lying finally converged with the impatience of Herbert Eames. It happened in December of 1967, just over three years after Tronko had entered the Vault.

  “He held, damn him,” Sparrow repeats quietly. “He held, and we ran out of time.”

  Partly, says Sparrow, it had to do with political pressures again. Lyndon Johnson had fallen into the last and enduring foul mood of his presidency, and one day, during an NSC meeting in late December that year, the subject of the Tronko case had somehow cropped up. Certainly Eames himself wouldn’t have mentioned it. Someone else, maybe the National Security Adviser or one of our other bureaucratic enemies, says Sparrow. Johnson of course had forgotten all about Viktor Tronko. He was enraged when he heard that the matter had never been settled, that Tronko was still being detained, still being debriefed. Enraged and shocked, were the words Eames used when he told us of the President’s reaction, though I personally found it hard to imagine Lyndon Johnson being genuinely shocked by anything, says Sparrow. Of the rage part, there was no doubt. Eames returned from that meeting ashen-faced. We could only guess what exactly the President had said to him. And all in front of a roomful of witnesses, Eames’s own peers. So at nine the following morning Eames suddenly called both myself and McAtee into his office, says Sparrow, and told us that there must be a final, conclusive judgment on Tronko within sixty days. Sixty days, mind you, when three years had been insufficient. Eames still seemed a little pale and wobbly from his humiliation the previous afternoon. This occurred during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, our busiest and most frantic time of year, everything in half disarray with the effort to compose budget documents. The budget is now a secondary priority, we were told. My God. Eames was passing along to us the same peremptoriness that he had gotten from Johnson—though not anything like the same rudeness, I’m sure. He wanted the Tronko thing settled. And not settled “as soon as decently possible,” not “with all dispatch,” not “by March 1 or thereabouts,” no: he wanted it settled in sixty days, period. A definitive report should appear on his desk by the morning of February 27. It was quite unlike Herbert Eames as I had otherwise known him, says Sparrow. Furthermore we two—McAtee and I, that is—would be personally and jointly responsible for making this impossibility happen.

  “How did you feel?”

  “How? Crestfallen, of course,” says Sparrow. “This was disaster. Madness. Total disaster.” The legs go into motion again, short weighty pendulums counting off a segment of fleeting time: just sixty days.

  “Did you consider resigning?”

  “Yes. Definitely. I would have loved to do something so stupid and petulant.”

  “But you decided against that.”

  “Decided is hardly the word. I knew better. I couldn’t afford any such childish self-indulgence. Flushing half a lifetime of effort down the commode.”

  “And conceding the victory to Jed McAtee.”

  “Precisely.”

  Under this ultimatum from Herbert Eames, a small panel was selected to conduct the review. Three men. These three would examine the entire documentary record of the case—all the transcripts from the various stages of debriefing, plus every other scrap of evidence—and then render a final assessment by Eames’s deadline. They would be granted access to any file they might need, and to all other assets and resources of the Agency, with a single exception: Viktor Tronko himself. No further interviews, Eames decreed. No more visits, no more polygraphs, no more follow-up questions to puzzling answers to questions about previous answers. No more. Evidently Eames was concerned that the person in the Vault, whoever and whatever he was, might cast the same spell of confusion over this panel that he seemed to have cast over all prior inquisitors. You’ll work from the documentation, God knows there’s enough of it, Eames told them. The
panel members came from three separate divisions within the Agency. They were all—they were supposedly all, Sparrow corrects himself—they were supposedly all men of the best fiber, much esteemed for objectivity as well as acuity of mind. Eames himself reviewed and endorsed the choices.

  “Who?”

  “Roger Nye from my shop. Even the unspeakable Jed couldn’t argue with that. Everyone knew Roger for one of the finest and cleanest brains at the Agency.”

  Kessler decides to let pass the question of just what Sparrow means by a “clean” brain, and to stay for now on the track. “Someone from McAtee’s shop too?”

  “Scott Wickes,” Sparrow says brusquely.

  “Ah. The unspeakable Scott. I wondered when we’d come back to him.” But Sparrow shows no sign of being amused. “Who was the tie breaker?”

  “Sidney Gondwana. From the analysts.”

  “Gondelman.”

  “Gondelman, I meant. Yes. Sidney Gondelman.”

  And the impossible was accomplished, more or less. The panel of three hid themselves away for those sixty days, with that small mountain of self-contradictory paper, proceeding upon their assignment as though it were purely a problem of textual exegesis. They locked grips with the phantom of Viktor Tronko and with each other’s view of that phantom. They had their own separate conference room, down on the second floor in a wing devoted otherwise to the Directorate of Science and Technology. They didn’t discuss their progress or lack of it with anyone but each other—not even with Sparrow himself nor, so far as he knew, with McAtee. Herbert Eames had forbidden that. They were the jury on Viktor Tronko, these three, and now the trial was over, the closing arguments had been made, and they were out. Deliberating, and not to be tampered with. On February 27, 1968, a sheaf of typescript appeared, as demanded, on Eames’s desk. It ran to 126 pages. There was no executive summary and, according to a cover note of transmittal, there were at that moment no copies in existence but this single one. It had been composed chiefly on Roger Nye’s personal typewriter; it came to be known as the Nye Report. It was signed by Sidney Gondelman and Roger Nye.

  “But not by Scott Wickes,” says Kessler.

  “Not by Wickes. No.”

  “Did he file a dissent? A minority opinion?”

  “He filed a tantrum. We’ll get to that.”

  There were two sections to this document. Following a dry recapitulation of the major points of evidence, the discrepancies among those points, and the various plausible or less plausible explanations for those discrepancies (all of which was necessarily concise at just 114 pages), the Nye Report spoke its conclusions in the form of numerical probabilities:

  —The probability that Viktor Tronko had lied to his American debriefers, from the first contact at Rome and consistently thereafter, and not just due to drunken confusion, not just from an impulse of innocent self-inflation, but with the determined intention to deceive, was reckoned at one hundred percent.

  —The probability that Viktor Tronko was (as he most recently claimed to be) a former KGB officer of the rank of colonel, lately assigned to the Tourist Department, as deputy to one Trofim Filippovich Rybakov, in which position he, Tronko, had handled the routine surveillance file of the expatriate Lee Harvey Oswald, could be put altogether at zero percent, in the opinion of the signatories.

  —The question of whether Tronko had ever handled an Oswald file, routine or not, innocent or not, was judged indeterminable. The prospect that no direct KGB contact had ever been made with Oswald, despite his U-2 background, as Tronko claimed, was set at a ten percent likelihood of being true. The probability that the penetration agent code-named Dmitri did not exist, as Tronko claimed he did not, was put—for the very reason that Tronko claimed it—at ten percent.

  —The chance that Viktor Tronko was a false defector, a dispatched agent, sent to Rome and then Vienna on an elaborate mission of disinformation, was figured at eighty percent.

  Eighty percent, Sparrow repeats. Eighty percent. In our judgment, concluded the Nye Report, it is overwhelmingly probable that Tronko was sent across expressly for the purpose of deceiving this Agency and this country on the matters of Dmitri and Oswald. Overwhelmingly probable, Sparrow repeats.

  “Was Eames satisfied?”

  “No. Of course not. He’d wanted unanimity and certitude. The in-achievable dream. Not a table of numbers. He certainly couldn’t go back to Johnson with that sort of statistical gobble. ‘Eighty percent chance we’ve been suckered, Mr. President. Ten percent chance that the Warren Commission got it right.’ He’d have taken worse than a tongue-lashing. But Eames was stuck and he knew it. He himself had called halt to the interrogations. His panel had delivered. Now it was all on the desk of him, the Director. Now he had no way out but to pay his money, as they say, and take his choice.”

  “Except Scott Wickes hadn’t delivered.”

  “No. That’s correct,” says Sparrow. “Not yet. Wickes refused to sign. He just went back up to Soviet Bloc and brooded. McAtee kept him out of view, protected Wickes under his own skirts, until the storm winds had died down and the Director’s attention had shifted elsewhere.”

  “Where did it shift to?”

  “Tronko himself. The problem of what to do with the body.”

  “The body?”

  “Just an expression, Mr. Kessler. Don’t work yourself up. The problem of what to do with the man.”

  “The man in the Vault.”

  “Yes. At that point he was still there.”

  “This eighty-percent-likely Soviet disinformation agent who had already served three years of solitary for no other crime than lying.”

  Sparrow shrugs. “If you care to see it that way.”

  “How did Herbert Eames choose to see it?”

  Sparrow slouches lower within his camel-hair coat. The legs have stilled, the hands have disappeared again into pockets. If he were a tortoise, he would be gone altogether. The ears and the little nose are raw. He doesn’t answer.

  “What did Eames do?” Kessler presses.

  “You’ll need to understand,” says Sparrow, “that at this point, the spring of 1968, Herbert Eames had already begun to leave us. Something like Lyndon Johnson had, I suppose. Though in his own very different manner.” Sparrow doesn’t take his eyes off the naked elms. They might all just be leafless with the season or, some of them, dead of blight. Only a man who comes to this park often would know.

  “He was already sick then? Eames was?”

  “No, not in the way you mean. Not like later. But he had already lost his vigor. He had lost the focus and strength that were necessary to the job. Getting himself a tumor, eventually, was just a symptom of that loss. Rather than vice versa.”

  Kessler waits.

  “You should understand that Herbert Eames had once, in his time, been an exemplary Director,” Sparrow volunteers. “Among the best we’ve had.”

  “What did he do about Tronko?”

  “A very silly thing.”

  Kessler’s opinion of the late Herbert Eames continues to be improved by new information. Eames accepted the assessment of the Nye Report, evidently, and then pointedly ignored the options presented therein for the “disposition” of Viktor Tronko.

  “Wait a minute. Disposition?” says Kessler.

  “Never mind,” says Claude Sparrow.

  “No. Wait. Like what sort of options? Burial at sea in an oil drum? Involuntary committal to an asylum? A lifetime in the Vault? I’m just asking. What options?”

  “Options are not the same as recommendations.”

  “I understand. But what options?” Having raised his voice, Kessler glances self-consciously around the park. In all its desolate banality, this time of afternoon, it is theirs alone.

  “Never mind. Forget that, Mr. Kessler. That’s a blind alley, I promise you.”

  “Where can I get a copy
of this Nye Report?” For the first time in days Kessler thinks of the empty Grand Central locker and the key from Pokorny’s attaché case. For the first time he feels a sense of having been robbed.

  “You can’t. Forget about it.”

  “ ‘Highly classified,’ ” Kessler says scornfully. “For all the usual good reasons.”

  “Yes,” Sparrow says. His chin is stuck out like a small plow. “Yes, exactly.”

  What Eames did was give Viktor Tronko his choice. A Solomonic choice, it was supposed to be, says Sparrow. To my own great surprise, to my own horror, says Sparrow, Eames had elected to take the findings of the Nye Report in a counterintuitive and utterly wrongheaded way. An eighty percent likelihood was not a likelihood after all. Eighty percent full turned out to be—in Eames’s view, this fading Eames—twenty percent empty. Overwhelmingly probable was not probable enough to carry. Instead Eames decided, for reasons known only to him, that a narrowly legalistic standard of proof should be applied. By this standard, Viktor Tronko had not been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If you can believe it, says Sparrow. His duplicity had not been established beyond a reasonable doubt, because there was still that twenty percent. So Eames proposed simply to send the man packing. Tronko was summoned in from the Vault and scrubbed up and given a fresh change of clothes, and then Eames actually met with him personally. Not at the Director’s own office, of course, because Tronko still wasn’t to be allowed inside the gates, but instead in a room of that very same Holiday Inn, the one at Tyson’s Corner, where we had staged the first polygraph, says Sparrow. I myself was obliged to arrange this encounter, says Sparrow. Vodka and herring for two, and a little placative small talk. It was horrible, says Sparrow. And then the Director gave Tronko his choice.