The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  But Lansing, Harvard and Harvard Law School (Law Review, of course). Supreme Court clerk. Secretary of the Navy, then one of the founders of the CIA—had foresaken the overt insider world of diplomacy and politics and statesmanship for the secret world, and that was because of another chromosome in his character genome, Bayliss believed.

  Men like Lansing—and usually they were men—relished the secret exercise of power, out of the daylight, away from public scrutiny. Where else but in the world of intelligence could you plot against an opponent you had never met? They were the eminences grises, power-players with an abnormal attraction to secrecy, who never got credit because they never wanted any. And Bayliss, who was not without a measure of self-knowledge, recognized this same streak in himself.

  Lansing belonged to a whole generation of aristocratic leaders,

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  like Dean Acheson or Winthrop Lehman or Henry Stimson or Henry Cabot Lodge, whose time had passed. The crafty old pterodactyl, an illustrious servitor of presidents who were not as well born as he, considered himself, by now, one of the wise men, in an age when American foreign policy was like a fine old Bentley being driven ruinously, with a new, inexperienced president taking the wheel every few years, destroying the clutch while he learned to drive. A clutch could be replaced; world peace was far more fragile.

  Yes. Bayliss knew that the Sanctum’s operation was, in a sense, the last spasm of an old order never to be witnessed again, and he was proud to be part of it.

  For the time had come. Never before in the history of the Soviet Union had such an opportunity presented itself. It would never come again.

  The intelligence out of Moscow was clear: Gorbachev was about to be ousted. Talk of a coup was everywhere.

  Fletcher Lansing had put it well at the Sanctum’s last meeting, a mere two weeks ago. “The world we created is no more,” he had said. “Nothing looks the same. Everyone seems to think that the Russians have overnight turned into teddy bears. But even if a snake sheds its skin, it’s still a snake.” Lansing was no crazy right-winger, Bayliss knew, but he was a veteran of the Cold War. He’d been present at the creation of the postwar order, and he knew how easily America, childlike and optimistic in many ways, could have its head turned by changes that were only ephemeral. “So, while we Americans are dazzled and mesmerized by the changes in Moscow, we all forget the long view. Fail to realize that Gorbachev can’t last, and that when he’s gone it will be too late.” Seven decades of hard-line Soviet elements will be just waiting in the wings to reclaim what they believe is rightly theirs. They’ll not give up their power without a fight.

  The Soviet empire was on the verge of collapse, spinning out of control. Its republics were seceding; its economy was crumbling. Now that the Berlin Wall had toppled, Moscow had lost its satellites forever.

  The question was, when?

  Because everyone knew what would happen when it did. When

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  the shit hit the fan, as Ted Templeton so colorfully put it. The intelligence from the Kremlin was clear: Gorbachev’s days were numbered. It was only a matter of time before he was out.

  And then, a new, undoubtedly neo-Stalinist leadership would wrest control, put the lid on all of Gorbachev’s feeble attempts at reform. Throughout the Soviet empire, there would be a crackdown that would make Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 seem like a playground. The leadership—which would need a way to unify the Soviet peoples—would require an enemy once again. An outside threat.

  Their old archenemy: the West.

  And what was the White House doing? Standing by idly, passively. America, the headless horseman.

  Decades of superpower struggle, countless billions of dollars, thousands of lives, had been squandered on containing Communism, and now the White House stood by, blindly fatuous, shuffling their feet, not knowing what to do. We were, as usual, backing the wrong horse.

  The Sanctum had the only solution, the only thing that would bring the world, once and for all, the peace it so desperately thirsted for.

  And it would happen in a matter of weeks.

  For they were about to catapult an American agent-in-place—a “mole,” as the British novelist John Le Garre had termed it—to the top of the Kremlin. The leadership of the Soviet Union. For years, such a thing had been a subject of fanciful speculation in the government and out, a pipe dream, the stuff of spy thrillers, but now it was indeed about to happen. Only now, in fact, could it happen.

  And only the men in this room knew it.

  The existence of this mole was utterly secret to the American government, to the intelligence community at large, even to the White House: a secret to everyone but the few men in this chamber.

  For, Bayliss knew, thus it had to be. The Sanctum group had first met in the early 1950s, convened by Lansing and Reynolds, to run the mole, M-3. The task required inviolable secrecy, and Lansing

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  and his colleagues—who were, of course, in a position to know— realized that the intelligence and foreign-policy establishments were no longer reliable.

  With the rise of the Soviet mole Harold “Kim” Philby virtually to the top of the British spy network, and the increasingly frequent leaks since that time, followed by the Senate investigations of the CIA during the seventies—and so on and so on—the group’s secrecy became imperative. They could trust no one. Presidents and Secretaries of State came and went, and none of them had ever been informed of the Sanctum’s—or M-3’s—existence.

  At last, after decades of planning, the time was at hand. So what, Bayliss wondered with growing alarm, was the hitch?

  Fletcher Lansing cleared his throat and began with some preliminaries. Whatever the bad news was, Lansing was holding off. Bayliss, who had developed the fine art of listening while thinking of something else entirely, began to think of the mind-boggling operation that was now about to change the world.

  He knew that, over the years, the United States had cultivated several deep-penetration agents in Moscow, generally Soviet citizens sympathetic to the American side. One of the earliest, in the 1950s, had been code-named “Major B.” There had been others, from Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU, to Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Popov of Soviet military intelligence, to the weapons expert A. G. Tolkachev at the Moscow Aeronautical Institute. Each was discovered by the Soviets, each arrested.

  Yes, there were others still in place, but each of these was small-fry compared with the asset the Sanctum group had run all these years.

  To preserve and promote M-3, the Bay of Pigs operation had been scrubbed—and not even John Kennedy was told why. Likewise, data that American intelligence had on Nikita Khrushchev’s unstable power base, right down to the hour he’d be thrown out of the Politburo, were information that not even Lyndon Johnson had had.

  There were jokes in Washington, of course, that America couldn’t wish for a “mole” that could do any more than Mikhail Gorbachev

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  already had. But what these pundits didn’t know was that Gorbachev had made M-3’s rise to power virtually inevitable. Only amid such turmoil in the Kremlin would M-3 be able to seize power.

  Bayliss felt he knew the importance of M-3 almost better than anyone in the Sanctum.

  After all, he had been chosen as the Sanctum’s contact with M-3’s intermediaries. This contact had begun only a few weeks earlier, when the channel had been activated after decades of dormancy. The postcard that was slipped into his car by Aleksandr Malarek, the Soviet Embassy’s first secretary, contained a microdot, an entire document reduced to the size of a t'pewriter’s period.

  Malarek was known to be KGB, but none of his KGB colleagues knew of his work in behalf of M-3. For M-3 would have nothing to do with KGB channels.

  Bayliss remembered the last meeting of the Sanctum, when Lansing and Templeton had told him he was to coordinate arrangements with Malarek.

  ”You�
��re aware of how careful you must be,” Lansing admonished.

  ”Certainly, sir.” Can they see me swallowing? Can they see how terrified 1 am?

  “If you re somehow connected to this — if you re caught — you’ll undoubtedly be put on trial for treason.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “On the other hand,” Lansing continued, “if we are, all of us, successful …” His voice trailed off as he looked around the table at the rest of the Sanctum group. “If we succeed, you’ll have been instrumental in changing history forever.”

  Yes, Bayliss had thought. Forever.

  Lansing, finished with his introductory remarks, now spoke in a voice that trembled with anger.

  “The situation,” he rasped, “is unforgivable.” He struck the black marble table with a tight, liver-spotted fist, looked around at the bunkerlike walls of the chamber, and then continued. “We have had our moles before. But nothing compared with M-3.”

  Now the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Ronald San-

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  ders, interrupted softly. “Little damage has been done. Nothing irrevocable.”

  “Blood has been shed!” Lansing shouted, his voice cracking. Bayliss had never seen him so angry, never seen him shed his facade of patrician reserve. “The blood of innocent men. The blood of men who have served this country loyally.”

  “Only that which was necessary,” CIA Director Ted Templeton objected. Their voices were curiously dead in the soundproof, surveillance-proof chamber. “Saul Ansbach all but did himself in, raising alarms. We couldn’t know how much he knew. I hated to allow it—Saul was once a friend of mine.”

  “But the others!”

  “All of the sanctions have been carried out with scrupulous care. That was our agreement with Malarek’s people.” Templeton sighed noisily. “Nothing traceable.”

  Sanders, who had been nervously shifting in his chair, put in, a touch defensively: “Only one section of the Agency was involved in looking into this HEDGEHOG business. Parnassus. But Ted put a halt to it.” He unconsciously addressed his remarks to the grand old men, Lansing and Reynolds.

  Templeton nodded. “It’s a good thing we were able to blow that chauflFeur’s cover. Jesus, I didn’t know he was—”

  “Gentlemen,” Lansing interjected, “we are in a profession where blood is shed all the time to protect the blood of the greater masses. But I am disturbed by the extent of this, by the elimination of innocent men. Frankly, it violates everything I’ve ever stood for. But, morality apart, these sanctions strike me as highly dangerous. If any of them were ever traced, by KGB, by any other interested party—”

  “Impossible,” Templeton said. “The Sekretariat are highly trained. Extremely sophisticated. As long as we keep hands off, they’ll do the job invisibly.”

  “But will they finish the job?” Evan Reynolds’s remark was little more than a whisper, but instantly everyone at the table turned his way. He had voiced, if crudely, exactly what was on the mind of every man in the room.

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  There was a beat of silence before Bayliss mustered the courage to speak up. “Can we be absolutely sure this is the right person?”

  “Roger,” Templeton said with a dismissive shake of the head, “my people have voice prints that match precisely the voice on the tape taken from Lehman’s basement telephone. That, plus the tap on his phone, confirms that he’s the one who’s been stirring matters up. There’s no question.”

  “But I thought you were assured Parnassus was—” Reynolds objected.

  “All but one,” Templeton said. “This one has kept prodding, for personal reasons that we couldn’t have foreseen.”

  “I should think the subject must be dealt with delicately,” Lansing said.

  “Why?” Reynolds asked sharply. “If he has possession of the document, of the—the file, he may compromise the entire operation. Decades of cultivation. My life’s work, for God’s sake. We have no choice. But if he has copies concealed, then what?”

  Templeton explained his plan, and when he was done, he could see the shock on the faces of the men around the table. There was a long silence, broken only by the most senior man at the table.

  “Jesus God,” Lansing breathed. “Jesus God, help us.”

  Washington is a cit^ of foundations. Any number of organizations, from the most venal lobbying organizations to the most selfless nonprofit consumer groups, like to call themselves “foundations,” because the name is at once neutral and dignified.

  The American Flag Foundation, located on K Street in central Northwest Washington, occupies one floor of a modern complex that also houses law offices and the lobbying outposts of several Midwestern corporations. From its exterior, the building looks like every other office building in that part of town, an impression confirmed by the drab entrance and inefficient elevators.

  But, were a visitor mistakenly to get off at the sixth floor, he would be amazed by the opulence before him. He would see a single secretary sitting at a large mahogany desk in an anteroom furnished

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  with Persian rugs, marble tables, highly burnished paneling on the walls. He would notice, too, that the secretary’s telephone rarely seems to ring.

  Most who pay it any attention mistakenly believe the American Flag Foundation to be some kind of conservative think-tank. In reality, it is an organization of retired officers of several American intelligence organizations, chiefly the CIA, the NSA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These officers maintain close links to the agencies from which they are retired, and in fact many continue on their payrolls. But the links, and even the means of payment, are so byzantine that not even the most dogged congressional investigator would be able to establish for certain that the Foundation is in any way linked to American intelligence.

  Which is the way the intelligence community wants it. By a presidential executive order, the CIA is forbidden to conduct espionage operations domestically, and indeed, since the Church Committee investigations of the mid-1970s, the CIA has in fact been scrupulous about this. It is a commonplace within certain elements of this and other intelligence agencies, however, that such proscriptions are foolish vestiges of noble democratic sentiment. Intelligence cannot function when it is handicapped by such rules, by having to depend upon domestic forces such as the FBI, or any other law-enforcement agency that does not operate abroad.

  And so, long before the days of Colonel Oliver North and the National Security Council’s secret dealings with Israel, Iran, and Nicaragua, the American Flag Foundation was set up to serve as a domestic-intelligence arm of the various agencies, a coordinating base for covert operations.

  The phone rang, startling the secretary/receptionist, who was reading the Style section of The Washington Post. She answered it, then depressed a key on her intercom switchboard.

  “General Knowlton,” she said, “it’s the Director of Central Intelligence.”

  Several minutes later, the phone rang in a small farmhouse outside of Alexandria, Virginia. The house was located on a rural road,

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  miles from any other building; its electrified fence was concealed in high thickets of bushes and trees. The roof of the house was dotted with gray, conical microwave antennas.

  “McManus,” said the man who answered the phone. He was Major Leslie McManus, a retired officer of armed-forces intelligence. He listened for a minute, jotted down a few notes on a white pad. “Done.”

  19

  Boston

  After a tedious nine-hour drive during which he stopped only once, Stone was back in Boston.

  Alfred Stone was in his hospital room, fully dressed, sitting up in a chair. The bed was made.

  “You,” he said, starded, when Charlie entered. “I called you in New York, even at—at your place of work. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I was just about to call
a taxi. This morning they decided to let me check out. Would you mind taking me home?” He glanced around the hospital room with distaste. ‘Tve had enough of this place.”

  It was just after nine o’clock at night.

  Several hours earlier, a neatly dressed middle-aged couple had mounted the stairs of a small, squarish tan house and rung the doorbell. They waited a minute, two minutes; it seemed an eternity, but they knew the woman was home. Everything had been prepared meticulously; that was simply how their employers did things. The couple knew for certain that the old woman was asleep in her small, pathetically furnished bedroom upstairs. It would take her some time to answer the door.

  The couple appeared to be husband and wife. The husband was in his early forties, balding, somewhat pudgy, but obviously quite strong. What little hair he had was dark, flecked with gray, and cropped close. He wore a camel’s-hair overcoat over a blue pinstriped suit, a

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  blue shirt, and a paisley tie. The woman who seemed to be his wife was a year or two younger, compact and poised; she was a rather plain woman who groomed herself fastidiously. She wore a touch too much eyeshadow above her large brown eyes, and her straight brown hair was cut in neat, straight bangs. She wore a prim-looking floral-patterned dress with a Peter Pan collar.

  There was a faint noise from behind the door, and the couple exchanged a brief glance.

  The two spoke flawless English with a Midwestern twang. They made their rather modest living from the graphic-design firm they jointly owned and ran; they had very few customers. The woman, in fact, had actually been trained as a designer at the State Institute of Art in Leningrad for a few months, after she had completed her training in Moscow.