A Very Private Plot

by William F. Buckley

  Had he sufficient practice in aiming and shooting a pistol? Yes, but in the army was he using a revolver or an automatic, because the standard police pistol in Moscow was a revolver …

  It was nearly sundown when they reached Moscow, separately. The sense of mission that sustained them all sustained even Vitaly Primakov.

  CHAPTER 22

  OCTOBER 1986

  Pavel watched the motorcade slowly winding down to a full stop. He felt the subdued exhilaration of the crowd. Tired Muscovites, doing a little gawking, waiting to see their leader in the flesh on this fall evening, benign with light and warmth. Pavel was a veteran and had seen action at the front, but the excitement he now felt was without precedent. In a few minutes he might see the end of the life of the head of what the President of the United States had accurately labeled an “evil empire.” And if so, he, Pavel, would cause the death of a brother. Fratricide. He clenched his fists, seeking to dominate his body’s muscles. Then he saw the security official open the door of the car that had parked by the red carpet, saw Mikhail Gorbachev step out and begin to climb the stairs, waving first to the right, then to the left at the applauding crowd—he found himself hoping, hoping desperately that Gorbachev would not turn left to greet the crowd on this side of the great stairs, because he knew that otherwise he would in fact do what he had to do.

  But Gorbachev did just that, turned left, did so swiftly, embracing an elderly lady a mere two steps above Pavel. Pavel saw Vitaly draw his pistol and aim at Gorbachev. But there was a moment’s hesitation—if Vitaly pulled the trigger instantly he’d kill the old lady with whom Gorbachev was for that split second entwined. Pavel lifted his revolver and fired three times at Vitaly, who had got off two shots, one of them grazing Gorbachev.

  Although Pavel had brought Vitaly down, he was surrounded now by a half-dozen guards and there was the sound of an Uzi automatic weapon going off, then the cry, “Stop! We want him alive!”

  But it was quickly evident that the would-be assassin was dead.

  Gorbachev was lost within a human cordon that rushed him back into his car. The motorcade zoomed off, fifteen sirens sounding. What seemed a full company was suddenly standing at intervals of two or three meters, bayonets fixed, facing the crowd on both sides. The captain of the guard approached Pavel. “Come with me, sergeant.” He gripped Pavel’s shoulder. “You did a fine job.”

  The KGB major thought it time to have another session with Mariya Vitaly and motioned to the burly sergeant on duty to follow him to her cell. As the jailer turned the key, the major called out in the relative dark—his eyes hadn’t accustomed themselves to prison dimness—“Mariya, we’ve come back for another visit. This one won’t be as pleasant”—he entered the blackness of the cell—“as the last one, so you had better prepare to tell us more than you have about your brother’s counterrevolutionary companions. Do you hear me?”

  There was silence. He gave the signal, and the sergeant leaned over and smashed his closed fist against Mariya’s right cheek. Her head merely twitched to one side.

  The sergeant leaped to turn on the overhead switch. He and the major stared down on a lifeless body.

  It was absolutely the case, they said to each other much later, that there had been a trace of a smile on that mutilated face. Because Mariya had long since resolved that if Vitaly drew the jack of spades, she would, beginning at 8 p.m. on October 2, carry the cyanide capsule in her mouth.

  CHAPTER 23

  OCTOBER 1986

  Serge came back from the post office. “Our notice,” he told Blackford, “was removed. Maybe by the guy you’ve been looking for, maybe not. I put up a new one, same thing. What are we going to look at today?”

  “I thought we might drive over to Zagorsk. It’s one of the two or three seminaries Stalin left open. Khrushchev breathed a little threatening hot fire into it at one point, but then let it stand. It’s where the Orthodox catspaw hangs out. I’m told it’s interesting.”

  “Why not?”

  As they walked past the desk toward the hotel entrance the concierge hailed them. “Mr. Singleton,” he called out to the older man, “the telephone is for you.”

  Blackford went to the booth. He heard now for the first time in five years a voice he had first heard in 1952. The speaker was, as usual, laconic.

  “I will be, beginning at six tonight, at—memorize this address, Blackford—226 Kalinin Prospekt, apartment 1412. Do not be late. You will, of course, be alone.” The telephone clicked off. Blackford rejoined Serge. “It’s set. Thank God. We can go on to Zagorsk. My date isn’t till six.”

  They were back at midafternoon, after walking about the historical seminary, which seemed now more like an old monks’ home. “It looks like they’re eyedropping holy water into hell,” Serge commented as they left in the hired car with the Intourist driver. Freedom of religion, Soviet style.

  Back in the hotel in their little sitting room Serge carefully read the afternoon paper. An item on page 7, a mere inch or two, caught his eye. “Dad!”—Serge had got into the habit of calling him that, and rather enjoyed it. “Listen to this. ‘Two weeks ago a young man fired a pistol shot that grazed the ear of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, doing absolutely no harm. The dangerous man was shot down by a policeman and by security. An investigation revealed that he was an escapee from the Vronsky Health Institute, an asylum where dangerously unbalanced citizens are treated. Security delayed in publicizing the event because they have been looking for the next of kin.’

  “Oh, well,” Serge shrugged after finishing the story, “so there are crazy people everywhere. Except that here they usually get shot, I gather. Hinckley plays basketball every day.” The reference was to the would-be assassin who five years earlier had shot President Reagan. “And get that ‘two weeks ago’ business! The reporter will probably put in for a Pulitzer for finding out, just two weeks after it happened, that somebody took a shot at the chief of state.”

  Blackford said nothing. But when Serge was finished with the newspaper, Blackford asked him to clip the story. Serge looked up at him. The embassy would routinely clip it and wire it in to Langley, so why would Blackford want it? But he said nothing and, using his fingernails, ripped it out, jaggedly. “Say, Dad, is it okay if I call the embassy? There’s a girl there I went to college with.”

  “Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. And if you visit with her, it’ll have to be at the embassy. You can get lunch there at the PX.”

  “Okay,” Serge said resignedly. “I’ll just walk around a bit, maybe stop in somewhere. It’s fun to use my Russian. My record so far is ninety-eight percent. And the guy who wondered about whether maybe I wasn’t really a native wondered on account of my clothes, not my accent.” Serge could tell that Blackford was not quite taking it all in. His mind was elsewhere.

  Blackford was giving thought to the route he had memorized, the route that would take him to 226 Kalinin Prospekt. He calculated that to walk there would take forty minutes. Conveniently, at this meridian, he could arrive just after the sun had set.

  The elevator at 226 Kalinin did work, and at exactly six Blackford depressed the button for the fourteenth floor. The elevator creaked up and finally stopped. The door was not automatic. Blackford pushed it open. But when the elevator door closed behind him he found himself in total darkness. The overhead light was not working. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a penlight. He saw that he was standing outside 1404. He walked carefully, stopped at 1412, and knocked on the door. There was a moment of silence and then a voice, two words in Russian.

  Blackford decided to reply in French, a language he knew his host to be familiar with. “C’est moi. Avec qui vous avez fait le rendez-vous.”

  The door opened. Blackford slid in and let it shut. He put out both arms and touched them down on the old man’s shoulders. “Well, you scoundrel, you’ll outlive us all.”

  He led Blackford to the tiny living room/dining room, motioning him to sit opposite at the table covered by a Fre
nch-style red-and-white-checked tablecloth. On the table there was a bottle of wine in a dull aluminum cooler, a bottle of vodka, and a tray of zakuski.

  Boris Bolgin had aged since their pivotal meeting in Geneva. How many times, over the years, they had crossed paths, Blackford reflected. And on two of those occasions Bolgin’s very specific objective was to shoot Blackford; a third time, to kidnap him.

  Blackford was talking to the man who had headed the KGB in Great Britain and briefly in all of Europe. Bolgin’s figure was plump; what hair he had left was totally white. He bore on his face the scars of Siberia’s frostbite. Bolgin had been seven years in Siberia when the Nazis marched. His knowledge of languages, vital to the war effort, rescued him from the Gulag. He began translating for the KGB, and six years after the war was chief of station in Great Britain, where he first crossed swords with Blackford.

  But the last encounter, the one in Geneva, was Appomattox time. Boris handed Blackford his sword.

  They had spent a long evening together. Bolgin did not volunteer to tell Blackford what it was that finally affected him. Blackford suspected he knew the reason why. It would seem so trivial, after all that had come before. Like defecting because of the Twentieth Congress speech against Stalin: why did anyone need to wait to hear it said by Khrushchev, three years after Stalin had died? He did not press Bolgin, who many years before had privately abjured first Stalin, then Stalinism, then Marxism, then communism. But he had not engineered the moral will actually to pull out—even to assert his right to retire, now that he was nearing age eighty. He hadn’t thought to do what, finally, he was doing, across the table from a much younger man, but a venerable antagonist.

  But Bolgin had come to the conclusion, whatever had driven him to it, that he could seek to compensate for the damage he had done in a lifetime’s work for Soviet communism only by using what resources he had to seek to hinder its march, however erratic, through history. He did not wish to talk about the analysis he had made, and it did not occur to Blackford to inquire. So that the evening boiled down to the mechanics of the new life. From then on, Boris Bolgin became Cyclops.

  Now, in Moscow, Blackford thought to ask immediately: “Boris, how much time can you give me?”

  “I have as much time as you wish, Blackford. I will need to get home eventually. I do not live here. It is the apartment of a friend who is out of town.”

  Blackford let out a deep breath, then reached over and took the wine bottle, aiming it at Bolgin. “Or are you sticking to your vodka, you old lush?” Boris replied by reaching for the vodka and pouring himself a generous drink. With his other hand he advanced the wineglass to Blackford, who filled it.

  “First things first, Boris.” Blackford reached into his pocket, pulled out the clipping from the afternoon paper, and put it in front of Bolgin. “Was this business last week our gang? I mean, your gang?”

  Bolgin looked down at the clipping, then raised the vodka to his lips and took a deep swallow.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ, Boris.”

  Boris chose this moment to talk at discursive length about high moments in the Bolgin–Oakes marathon. This was vodka time for Boris Bolgin, and at this time, usually spent alone, Bolgin was glad to talk to someone else. He wanted to know: What was the clue, back in 1951, that had led Blackford to trail the British viscount to the confessional in the little church in May-fair at which, without ever being seen by Boris, the Queen’s second cousin revealed through the priest’s screen his nation’s most delicate secrets? What was it that had prompted Blackford to arrange the kidnapping of the Soviet scientist in Paris, when he had to have known that the abduction could not hope to escape detection? Wasn’t it, really, a breach of professional protocol when Blackford had refused to act as the executioner in the case of Count Wintergrin?

  Blackford spoke frankly, gave to Bolgin everything he wished to hear, factual details sparing only continuing intelligence operations; he was glad to talk to Bolgin about what had motivated him, Blackford, to do this, or to do the other—intimacies which he had never felt free to share with any of his own countrymen. Sally, by mutual agreement, was generally excluded from details of his operations. The code within the CIA prevented him from talking about details extraneous to the operation, including those that touched on Blackford’s frame of mind. But he could share these with his archenemy, because Bolgin needed no familiarization with the tangential perspectives. They were in the same business and could talk to each other as professionals. The code that barred a CIA agent from divulging to another CIA agent who did not need to know the particulars of an engagement did not operate here. There was no code detailing what you could or could not reveal to a defector who would remain in Moscow, and work from there for what had been the enemy. And Bolgin was glad to talk about his own experiences. Blackford learned details he hadn’t known, and shivered over the closeness of past escapes.

  And of course there was, finally, the business at hand.

  It was ten at night when Blackford went to the elevator. Boris said he would allow fifteen minutes to pass before leaving to go to his own apartment.

  CHAPTER 24

  OCTOBER 1986

  Serge thought—why not?—he might as well walk down Tchaikovsky Street and go by the embassy; maybe Gloria was working late, might just run into her. That wouldn’t mean defying Dad’s orders, exactly. And anyway, he wouldn’t mind seeing what the derelict embassy looked like. It had received a lot of attention in recent weeks in America. In documenting the vulnerability of the unoccupied new embassy to intrusive Soviet intelligence, the State Department did not proceed to drop its objections to the old, inadequate embassy. The decision to abandon it for a more modern building with adequate facilities had, after all, been reached in the late sixties.

  Moscow’s street lights flashed on as Serge approached it and discerned the two Soviet guards at parade rest outside the large iron gates. He stopped to observe one of the guards leaving his post to open the gates and let a limousine slip out. The ambassador, presumably.

  Serge approached the guards and spoke in Russian. “Hello, my name is Serpei and I am visiting from Kiev. This is the U.S. Embassy, is it not?”

  They did not answer him.

  “Oh come on now, tovarich. I would not treat you that way if you were visiting in Kiev. Our security guards there are very friendly. It isn’t as though I were a threatening character,” he laughed.

  He succeeded. One of the guards said, “We are not supposed to speak except to people who seek entrance into the embassy. I will pretend that you are asking me to let you go in, so I can speak to you. Yes, it is the embassy. The hours are nine to twelve and two to five. But a Russian from Kiev—why would he want to visit the U.S. Embassy?”

  The guard snorted, or at least that was what Serge made the sound out to be. “Maybe they would give you a tourist visa to visit America, but would our ministry give you an exit visa?” The other guard joined in the raillery.

  “Well,” said Serge, “I am in Moscow for the first time, to take the art course with the curator at the Kremlin museum. I like to wander about and see this fabulous city.”

  “You are allowed to come in during official hours by simply requesting to look at the U.S. Information Agency library, which has books and foreign periodicals. Many students do that. But we would then take your identification papers and put them in the registry.”

  Serge chuckled good-naturedly. He did in fact have an emergency I.D., a Kiev graduate student’s university pass, but not with him. The rule was that he must never simultaneously keep on his person that I.D. and also his conflicting U.S. passport. He was now carrying his U.S. passport. “Well, maybe I’ll come around tomorrow and have a look at their library. I studied English also at Kiev and can read it without difficulty.” But the guard he was addressing had turned and was opening the inner gate to let someone out.

  Serge caught a glimpse of her as she passed under the light over the guardhouse. He stepped
back into the shadows. The young woman, wearing a light wool coat with a narrow fur collar, turned left and began to walk down Tchaikovsky Street. Serge lingered only long enough to avoid any impression that he was following her. He repeated to the guards that he would probably come in, if not tomorrow, one day soon. He said good night and sauntered off in the same direction as the girl. Once out of sight of the guardhouse, he quickened his pace until he was abreast of her.

  “Gloria Huddleston! It’s me, Serge Windels! What do you know!”

  The woman stopped under the street light. Gloria Huddleston looked up at the man she had first known as the college senior who had attracted her in sophomore year at Ames. They had dated frequently during that spring and when Serge left to do graduate work at Georgetown she missed him greatly. They had corresponded for several months. But for the last five years they had settled down to Christmas-card exchanges. It was from her last card that Serge learned that Gloria was being sent to Moscow as a librarian for USIA. He had told her that he was working for IBM and spending a great deal of time traveling.

  Her delight at seeing him was authentic and effusive, sentiments reciprocated by Serge, though it slightly bothered him that Oakes had told him not to make contact with her until further notice, and then only within the embassy. But … how, really, could it matter? It was, after all, a coincidence.

  They walked happily down the street, laughing and asking about friends in common, until at one point Serge asked, “Hey, where are you walking to?” She said she was going home, “to cook a dull supper. Do you want to share it?”

  Serge replied that sharing was the happiest conceivable way in which he could spend this uncharted evening. “Do you have everything you need, I mean for dinner for two?” Gloria reminded him that there was never any shortage of anything when one shopped at a United States Government PX. “And you can even have all the caviar you want to eat. It costs me, like, well, like next to nothing. But it’s funny,” she laughed. “When I first laid eyes on you at school I thought, Gee, this guy is a real authentic American hayseed—with your red hair and your freckles, and your Gary Cooper build. I wouldn’t have guessed, that first time, that you would even know what caviar was. It wasn’t till our third date that I found out you were as fluent in Russian as in English! Say, I’m getting pretty good at the language myself; you can try me out later if you want.”