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

by David Quammen

  The woman was a thirty-year-old secretary from the FBI office in northern Virginia, whom he had met back in 1961 while that office was still supplying him with a bodyguard. Back before he became Daniel Schultz. At just the moment, remember, says Sparrow, when his romantic bolt with Martha Gillespie was all over the newspapers. History doesn’t record what the FBI secretary thought about that at the time, if anything. She herself seemed to have made some sort of lasting impression on Petrosian, though, and so later he tracked her down and they began seeing each other. It all moved quickly. Her boss, a special agent named Fiori out of the Alexandria office, stood in as best man for the ceremony, evidently because he was responsible for their first acquaintance and because Schultz-Petrosian had no other friends.

  The astonishing thing about this marriage, says Sparrow, is that it seems to have become such a very good one. That was against all the odds. Petrosian’s new wife didn’t understand a word of Russian or of physics. She had a nine-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, to a hometown sweetheart, that had lasted less than a year. The ex-husband was dead in a heavy-machinery accident but divorce had come first. Her own family and roots were in West Virginia. She had two years of college and about six years of answering phones and typing reports for the FBI. If she was a stunning beauty, I never heard anyone mention it, says Sparrow. Probably we should assume that she possessed a wonderful smile. Petrosian may have clutched out rather desperately, after the Gillespie experience and then the news from Gorky, to seize the first American female who had been nice to him and whom he felt he could trust. In that case, he was very lucky. But probably it was at least a little more complicated, a little less slapdash, says Sparrow. Before long they had a daughter of their own. Also, Petrosian had legally adopted the nine-year-old. The wife’s name was Joette. She quit her FBI job. Petrosian and she could never talk about any aspect of his work, for security reasons as well as educational ones. God only knows what they did talk about. But when I met the man, five or six years later, says Sparrow, he was still positively mush-headed over her. He called her “my Jo.” Found occasion to invoke her name a half dozen times in the course of a stag dinner, says Sparrow, and then excused himself for a quick phone call. I mean the man was in love.

  “These things always mystify me,” says Sparrow. “I’ve been told it’s a character failing on my part.”

  “Me too,” says Kessler.

  “I suppose I’ve got no quarrel with that interpretation.”

  They had their house out in Fairfax now, and Petrosian’s contract with ARPA had indeed each year been faithfully renewed. He was reviewing a succession of highly speculative projects, writing critical assessments of each. He had passed along his views on the nuclear-powered-airplane idea, on the Sentinel ABM concept in its earliest form, on the Air Force’s notion of putting millions of copper needles into orbit for some kind of communications application, others in that vein. Some dizzy things and some promising things, says Sparrow. Altogether, though, it was a function that could have been performed by any really bright systems engineer. Petrosian didn’t complain. Not even to Joette, evidently. He was doing no original research. He wasn’t publishing. But he didn’t grouse. He did the work. Now it’s 1968. We thanked him for all that, says Sparrow, by handing him over to Ivan.

  Sparrow folds his arms on his chest and gapes belligerently at Kessler, as though waiting for a comment. Kessler has nothing to say.

  “McAtee’s goddamn little voice.”

  Kessler remains prudently silent.

  “Yes, certainly, they would be glad to give Ivan’s career a little nudge,” Sparrow repeats. “Willing to invest in his future. What does Ivan want? How can we be of help? Jed and his inner court of fools speaking, you understand. Offering away the whole candy store. Very well. Petrosian, said the voice. Give me Daniel Petrosian.”

  “What, in a box?” says Kessler.

  “No. Not yet. As an agent. Ivan’s own agent within ARPA. He wanted to recruit Petrosian back. Or, at least, to seem to have done.”

  An operation of such baroque perversity required the collusion, of course, of all the worst brains at three agencies. The director of ARPA had to know, though no one else over there should be allowed to become even faintly suspicious of what Schultz-Petrosian was doing. J. Edgar Hoover had to be apprised of it, dangerous as that might be, so that he could keep his own people from stumbling in with an ill-timed investigation of Petrosian’s security breaches. And McAtee did the real scheming, subject only to the gentle guidance (which by now was like no guidance at all) of Herbert Eames.

  “And subject also to the protesting screams of Claude Sparrow?” says Kessler.

  “No. I couldn’t. I wasn’t consulted. At this point in 1968, I was being cut out of it.”

  “Already?”

  “On the matter of Ivan. Yes.”

  “Then how did you know about the Petrosian operation?”

  “I never stopped knowing things. I just couldn’t always say what I knew. I still had my pores. My capillaries. My various conduits.”

  “You still had your phone taps.”

  Sparrow nods indifferently to that, and continues.

  The most difficult person to enlist, he says, was Petrosian himself. Petrosian reacted very negatively. He wanted no part of espionage against the United States, real or bogus, not even if the CIA were imploring him to play such a role. No. He was outraged at the suggestion. No. Bad enough that he was wasting half his time at ARPA on consummately foolish ideas. No. No. But gradually he was talked around. The telling argument went something like this: unlike his ARPA work, the ruseful espionage activity would be quite dangerous, a great personal sacrifice on his part, and important. At last he agreed.

  They choreographed Petrosian’s espionage career with great care, says Sparrow. Started him slowly, modestly, quite plausibly. He was to be the disgruntled expatriate, you see, underappreciated and underemployed in his new country, full of regrets, gazing back wistfully toward the Motherland. That was at the beginning. Later his supposed bitterness, and his rashness, would be made to escalate. They worked up each bit of this script as they went along and turned it over to him with little advance notice, no consultation, as though he were just an actor in a successful soap opera, highly expendable himself, who might at any time be written out of the plot in a plane crash or on a long vacation, according to the producers’ whim. They led him along gradually, and left him ignorant of their real purposes. Petrosian knew only his own small, perilous role. He knew only what they asked of him. Never why. He was told nothing about Ivan, nor of the investment they were making in Ivan’s future.

  They began him with the usual, innocuous sort of thing. He would steal an internal phone directory of ARPA employees.

  “They is who?” says Kessler. “Hoover and McAtee and the ARPA guy?”

  “McAtee, yes. Hoover had jurisdiction, and token control, by way of his own so-called Counterintelligence section. The ARPA director stayed clear, leaving it to the two of them. There was a muted turf battle, which technically Hoover should have won, but McAtee was much brighter than J. Edgar Hoover, of course. He knew how to appease the old crocodile. And McAtee alone was in communication with Ivan. So it developed as Jed’s operation in every sense.”

  The phone directory was passed to a KGB field officer, Ivan’s man in the United States, who had come down from New York for the contact. He and Petrosian met in a park. A public place, not very much different from this one, says Sparrow. It was only the second time they had set eyes on each other. On the first occasion, the field man had heard Petrosian (whom he knew only as Schultz, a pseudonymous émigré) confirm his willingness to function as a Soviet agent. That was when the field man asked him to pirate the directory. Petrosian’s first chore as a spy. The directory itself possessed no real significance; it was just a token, a gesture of irreversible commitment, like a thumbprint on a receipt or a dr
op of Petrosian’s blood to seal the pact. On the second occasion Petrosian carried it, the directory, rolled up inside a magazine. Just as the field man had instructed him. After a casual conversation, they contrived to exchange magazines, a Time for a Newsweek. Petrosian was now compromised. He was trapped.

  But by whom? says Sparrow, raising his eyebrows.

  The field man’s name was Bubnov. At least that’s the one he went under, says Sparrow, as a trade attaché to the consulate in New York. Evidently he was a property of the Scientific and Technical Department, Ivan’s group back in Moscow, and had been given this New York tour to see what he might cadge and steal in the way of interesting high-tech hardware. Probably Bubnov spent a lot of his time buying drinks at computer trade shows. Certainly no one on that side would have expected him to land such a catch as Daniel Petrosian. Least of all, no doubt, would Comrade Bubnov have expected it himself. For the initial meeting with Petrosian, Bubnov had merely been acting on a tip from home, passed along by his desk officer. The tip had described a disgruntled émigré using the name Daniel Schultz, who held a sensitive position in Washington and was thought to be ripe for recruitment. Check it out, Comrade. The desk officer of course was Ivan, says Sparrow. The recruitment attempt proved successful, even surprisingly easy. Bubnov may not have known with whom he was dealing—that his Schultz was the infamous traitor Petrosian—until after the phone directory had been handed over, or later still, after their third or fourth transaction, when a terse message had come across the wire from Moscow and Bubnov’s immediate boss, the KGB rezident in New York, had begun treating Bubnov with an entirely new degree of cordial respect. The Petrosian recruitment might have made Comrade Bubnov’s career, says Sparrow. It would also have done well for the desk man, Ivan. There would have been glory enough to go around. At least that’s the way we were asked to view it, says Sparrow. That’s the version McAtee chose to believe.

  “But it all rests on the assumption that Moscow ever did credit Petrosian’s recruitment as real,” says Sparrow. “And that Ivan was indeed an actual flesh and blood desk officer, not a committee of very senior ghosts. Who were cackling up their sleeves, as they sucked Jed and Petrosian along.”

  “Which is the version you choose to believe.”

  Sparrow is too engrossed to be testy. “Poor little Bubnov, no one knows what ever became of him. Called back to Moscow, finally, in 1972. I’ve always suspected that he finished his career in a camp.”

  But through the four years of Daniel Petrosian’s life as an agent, it was poor little Bubnov who serviced him. Bubnov who traveled every month down to Washington, Bubnov who collected Petrosian’s material, Bubnov who saw it into the pouch or filed reports back to Ivan by wire. Ivan provided the guidance, the wit, and Comrade Bubnov the legs and hands, by which Daniel Petrosian was developed into a precious source of information on certain arcane areas of American weapons research, a source highly valued by Moscow. Or an apparently precious source, Sparrow amends. Apparently valued. It was never clear who had been fooling whom, Sparrow says. Anyway Bubnov was the case officer. He and Petrosian established a new pattern after the first half dozen times. They would make a brush contact, at noon on a Saturday in some crowded suburban restaurant out in Fairfax or Rockville, a place filled with young parents and howling children and angry distracted waitresses, a different restaurant chosen anew for each meeting by Bubnov from his apparently inexhaustible roster of such spots. The worse and more hectic the restaurant, the more secure. Evidently Petrosian loathed this arrangement, because it ruined his weekends and forced him to eat entire meals of breaded frozen shrimp while enduring obnoxious clamor. That’s what we are told, says Sparrow. That’s the cartoon version. He had other and better reason to loathe those occasions, however. He was passing away American defense secrets. Scraps of them, at least. Against all his own instincts of gratitude, loyalty, and self-preservation. And he had never been allowed to know why.

  The cost of this arrangement to Petrosian’s working life made it even more doleful. He was assigned to one nitwit project after another—because what he worked on was what he would give away, and what he gave away had to be expendable. He told Bubnov all about the copper needles in space, and that was fine, perfect, since by that time the copper needles were a dead idea anyway. Under the careful supervision of McAtee and with the ARPA director’s reluctant consent, he told Bubnov what he knew of the nuclear-airplane research. By then the nuclear airplane was also stone dead. In 1969 he was put to work on another certifiable loser. This was the space mirror project—an excellent example of what our lunatic fringe in the Pentagon laboratories can come up with if we give them enough money, says Sparrow. The notion was to send a gigantic inflatable mirror into high orbit and use it for reflecting sunlight onto the night side of the earth. An enormous spotlight, you see, to cast a beam down on those dark Asian jungles where there was a war going on and we were only winning it during the daytime, says Sparrow. Light up the bush with a cosmic aluminoid glow twice as bright as the full moon. On that Daniel Petrosian was made to squander his fine intelligence. Because it was expendable. Even the Pentagon planners, by 1969, had lost interest in their giant mirror and begun draining away the budget. Even little Bubnov must have shaken his head at the folly of that one. And Ivan, for his part, had commenced to complain over the quality of Petrosian’s product.

  Petrosian himself was the silent soldier, accepting everything, risking everything, slogging along, while Ivan if you can believe it had complaints. Couldn’t they get the man out of these bizwhack, dead-end projects and into something good? Like particle-beam research, for instance?

  ARPA in those days was indeed doing a bit of the earliest particle-beam work, Sparrow says. They also had several small programs to look at other directed-energy technologies, one of these being the X-ray laser in its most primitive form, another involving more conventional lasers that might be jumped up to huge energies. I don’t really know what I’m talking about, you understand, says Sparrow, but of course Daniel Petrosian would have. Certainly he could have done valuable work for ARPA on lasers. Certainly. And that is exactly what Ivan lusted for. Petrosian himself may have wanted it too. A decent research assignment would have helped him salvage some peace of mind, some shred of pride. But no, it couldn’t happen, no. Out of the question. This was an absolute, this was the line. The ARPA director was adamant: Daniel Schultz would be allowed nowhere near particle beams or lasers. He would stay over there with the copper needles and the inflatable space mirrors and the other exploding cigars, or he could leave, period. ARPA would surrender his services. It wasn’t that the director distrusted Petrosian himself, necessarily. He distrusted Jed McAtee. A sensible man, says Sparrow. Well, of course Petrosian could not be permitted to leave ARPA and take his skills elsewhere—that would spoil everything for Ivan. So he stayed. He labored on in the kingdom of criminal silliness. And then still worse.

  “Lord, what now?” says Kessler. “They assigned him to the United Appeal campaign?”

  No. Worse. To cover the deadlock over Petrosian’s access, to exploit it on Ivan’s behalf, McAtee had a rumor leaked to select Pentagon and FBI people that Daniel Schultz-Petrosian was under suspicion of espionage.

  “Oh,” says Kessler. “Jesus.”

  Nothing could be proven against the man, not yet, according to this rumor. Petrosian himself didn’t realize that he was suspected, according to the rumor. A very discreet investigation was under way; Petrosian’s work and his security clearance were being reviewed; possibly he himself was being watched. If the current investigation proved eventually to establish his innocence, his loyalty, then Petrosian would come back into good standing and be allowed to continue in his present important position at ARPA, said the rumor. Meanwhile he was in shadow. Even little Bubnov seems somehow to have got a sniff of this rumor and canceled all contact with Petrosian for three months, later reestablishing it cautiously under a new arrangement that, mercif
ully for all, did not involve breaded shrimp.

  To Ivan, in Moscow, the rumor provided a perfect explanation for Petrosian’s stagnating career. Ivan could use that explanation on his own Lubyanka superiors: the asset was under suspicion, therefore extreme care must be exercised, at least temporarily; afterward, if the crisis was successfully weathered, there would still be a chance of getting at those particle-beam projects. This little drama would also help Ivan by making the whole Petrosian recruitment seem more vividly authentic. Petrosian’s very jeopardy would seem to give him, in his role as a Soviet agent, greater cachet. All of that being the theory, at least, behind McAtee’s latest machination. And upon Petrosian also the rumor had an effect. It nearly ruined what remained of his life.