Conspiracy in Kiev rt-1

by Noel Hynd

  “Yeah. Three days.”

  Three days projected into the future had never seemed so long a prospect. But she felt strengthened by hearing his voice.

  “I love you and miss you,” she said. She stood at her window and looked out on the snowy square, which was busy with people. There was also a trio of policemen with automatic weapons. She scanned for the man who had confronted her the previous night, but she saw no one who might be him.

  “Same,” he answered. “I love you and miss you. You sure there’s nothing wrong?”

  “I’m sure,” she said. And now, hearing him, nothing was wrong. “Travel safe, okay?”

  “It’s Air Force One,” he said. “Government of the United States of America. Greatest nation on earth. You know what that means, right? Every inch of the aircraft, construction, maintenance, fuel, hey… it’s all done by the lowest bidder or a political pal.”

  He managed to get her to laugh. She told him she loved him again and how much she missed him. He was her mentor, her love, and often her inspiration. Sometimes the miles, the distance, the separation were too much to bear.

  She told him she looked forward to his arrival. He said the same. When the conversation ended, she put down the phone and sat quietly for several minutes, a bittersweet feeling in her chest.

  Then she rallied her spirits. The man in the square had spooked her even more than she had realized. But now he seemed like nothing more than a bad dream.

  She ordered coffee and a light breakfast sent to her room. She ate as she dressed. She was downstairs in front of the hotel to meet her driver punctually at 8:00 a.m., even with jetlag. The snow felt surprisingly good on her face. She had a minute to enjoy it, then her car and driver arrived.

  Friedman again, with Stosh, the everyday designated driver.

  As the snow continued, they drove to the US Embassy which was on the outskirts of downtown Kiev. They passed through a front gate with guards and heavy fortifications. The building was in gray brick, with ornamental pilasters on the front, a mongrel of a building.

  “Not exactly our first choice of a structure,” Friedman said as they arrived and stepped out of the car. He added with a smile, “It was once the headquarters of the Communist Party organization for this district of Kiev. When independence came, the old-line Reds went into the real estate business and sold us the lousy building. Then they went out the day after the money was transferred, imported a planeload of blondes from Estonia and Lithuania, and had Stolichnaya orgies with the profits. Some Marxists, huh?”

  Alex laughed. “Did they want to be paid in rubles or dollars?” she asked.

  Friedman laughed in turn. “What do you think, Anna? Dollars. No one ever said they were stupid. And most of those blondes were pretty great looking, I must admit.”

  “Typical,” she said with a smile.

  Alex was surprised how compact the building was. “Got to admit, I’ve seen larger embassies,” she said.

  “We’re enormously overcrowded,” he answered. “There’s a new complex being constructed, but it won’t be finished for a few years. Meanwhile, we’re cramped. No one foresaw how important Ukraine could be if glasnost happened. So now we’re stuck with our usual bad foreign policy planning. It’s depressing if you think about it, so I don’t think about it.”

  They walked in the front entrance. Two marine guards stood by. Friedman had a fresh ID for Alex. She brushed snow off her shoulders in the front entrance hall.

  When word had come to the embassy in Kiev six weeks earlier of an impending presidential visit, the embassy faced three challenges. One, making sure that the president regarded the visit as a success, both substantively and organizationally. Two, making sure the organizational details were flawless. And three, ensuring that the visit actually met what the ambassador regarded as American objectives in the country.

  Ambassador Jerome Drake had announced that he would be the control officer for the visit. He was a political appointee in his final posting before retirement. But Drake had also spent a career in the Foreign Service. He was unusual in that regard, in that he was wealthy, a crony of the president, and had had experience in the diplomatic field. His family had amassed a fortune in aluminum siding in the 1960s, and Drake had used the fortune wisely.

  “In some ways, Ambassador Drake is ‘bulletproof’ because of his relationship with the president,” Friedman explained to Alex in private shortly after their arrival that morning. “And he was bulletproof for congressional approval because he had been a generous donor to both political parties.”

  “Money talks,” Alex said.

  “It doesn’t just talk, it’s multilingual,” Friedman answered. “Same as you.”

  Friedman then introduced Alex to his own boss, Charles Krimm, the chief political officer at the embassy.

  “Oh yes, of course,” Krimm said. “You’re the lucky party in charge of keeping tabs on our favorite local hoodlum, Yuri Federov.”

  “Apparently so,” Alex answered.

  “Don’t spend much time with him alone. We’ll never see you again.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Good luck, Anna,” he said. “You’ll need it.” He rushed off. Within minutes of arrival, Alex had the impression of the embassy in Kiev as a place in constant motion, the impending presidential visit being the cause.

  Then, briefly in a hallway, Friedman introduced Alex to the ambassador himself, Jerome Drake. Drake was a tall, thick, lumbering bear of a man, about sixty with a moonish face-Grizzly Adams in a three-piece suit. He was known as a man of dry humor and a quick tongue.

  Like Krimm, Drake seemed preoccupied. Yet Alex also immediately picked up the notion that he was more interested in her as a new female on the premises than in what she was doing there.

  “We’re having one of the countdown meetings in fifteen minutes,”Friedman said. “That’s why everyone seems slammed. You should sit in on it.”

  “Sit in on what? The slamming?” she joked.

  “No,” Friedman said with a grin. “The countdown meeting.”

  During the weeks that had preceded Alex’s arrival, there had been back-and-forth between Washington and the embassy on the details of the program for the president, but the White House had remained in the driver’s seat. It took advice but the trip was the president’s visit and his staff’s call. As the schedule had begun to take shape, appointments were made of two officers for each “event.” Since this all-hands-on-deck event was draining embassy personnel resources, these were junior officers.

  Everyone got sucked in. An “event officer” was responsible for organizing each event, working with a Ukrainian counterpart assigned to the visit. The event officer knew everything about the event. There was also an embassy “site officer” for each event whose job was to know everything about the locale where the event would take place, including but not limited to the location of the toilets.

  Then there was the presidential “advance” team. They were mostly young White House staffers, sons and daughters of heavy political contributors, who descended on the embassy with the mission of ensuring a perfect experience for the president.

  “Some of the advance people are okay; most are a pain in the butt,” Friedman said sotto voce as he and Alex entered a large conference room on the third floor. “They arrived weeks ago and insisted on running through every event time after time. They were accompanied by a ‘site officer’ and an ‘event officer,’ both based in Washington.”

  “Do they know what they’re doing?” Alex asked.

  “Let’s just say Ambassador Drake can’t stand them.”

  “What do you think of them?”

  “No comment.”

  “Thought so,” she said.

  The meeting began when Ambassador Drake finally rambled into the conference room. The ambassador mostly listened over the course of the next ninety minutes. Charles Krimm, the political officer, ran the meeting. There were forty staffers present, plus the entire advance team from the White Hous
e, who hogged all the seats at the large table in the center of the room. Other attendees sat in chairs scattered around the room. As the newcomer, Alex selected one of the more remote seats against a wall. Friedman sat with her and looked as if he was trying to stay clear of the meeting entirely.

  Yet among the assembled staff, Alex found a genuine nonpartisan feeling, even though the president was from the extreme wing of the reigning political party. It was, after all, the boss who was coming and the boss represented the United States of America. But then again, Alex found the diplomatic enclave on high anxiety and high alert. As Michael Cerny had suggested back in Washington, there was plenty of opposition to the president’s impending appearance.

  “We’re still picking up a lot of rumors of trouble,” Krimm said.

  He expanded.

  The most persistent rumor, the same one that Cerny had mentioned in Washington: A group of pro-Russian Ukrainians, the filorusski, were determined to stop the proposed NATO alliance by any means possible. Even worse, according to intelligence that local CIA people had picked up, within this group there was one fanatical subgroup that had now decided to assassinate the new president of the US during the state visit. Their goal: to torpedo US-Ukraine relations and thus Ukraine’s membership application for NATO.

  The ambassador then interjected one of his few remarks of the morning.

  “I should stress,” Drake said, “that this is not part of the official Russian program these days. Putin may be a bastard, but these days, he’s our bastard. So the Russians are looking at the big picture of future Russia-US relations. The feelings of Vladimir Putin, no matter what you think of him as a clone of Uncle Joe, echo the alliances of World War II when America, the arsenal of democracy, allied itself with Soviet Bolshevism to battle Hitler. All of you, please keep that in mind.”

  “We won that one, didn’t we?” Krimm asked, trying to lighten the mood. “The big set-to with our Russian friends.”

  “Yes,” Drake answered without missing a beat. “First in 1945 and then in 1986. I suppose the next one will be in 2027, but I don’t expect to be around for it.”

  To Alex, political alliances never ceased to have an Alice in Wonderland aspect. They adjourned for lunch.

  At 2:00 that afternoon, an associated meeting convened, planning out the itinerary for the president while in Kiev. This time, the ambassador was absent.

  On any occasion, a visit by an American president to a counterpart in a foreign country was largely a media show. The purpose was always to demonstrate the “close ties” between the United States and the host country. This was accomplished by symbolic acts, all staged with the media in mind.

  “To review,” Krimm said, “while in Kiev the president will have three events, all of which will occupy the day after arrival. By evening the president will depart.”

  Alex then learned the full details of the three events for the first time. There would be a meeting with the Ukrainian president in the morning. Attendance at a Christian church service would follow. Then there would be the laying of a wreath at the memorial for the victims of the Holodomor, the enforced famine of the 1930s.

  “Then, we have no scheduled fourth event,” Krimm said to mild laughter. “The president will get the executive butt out of the country as fast as possible.”

  From what was said, Alex saw quickly that the trip from the cathedral to the memorial was the problem. It was no more than several hundred yards, and there was no way to make sure the area was completely secure. The Ukrainian security services would have no qualms about occupying apartments and roofs.

  “But are these guys dependable?” asked one of the more belligerent members of the advance team. “Come on. How can we count on them?”

  “We can’t count on them,” Krimm said. “We just hope they do their job and our security people will assume they won’t. No protection is infallible. There’s always risk.”

  Back in Washington, Krimm explained further, the US president had been warned of the problems but refused to cancel the visit or change the program. The Secret Service was apoplectic, as was the CIA bureau chief in the Ukraine. Alex felt herself cringe slightly at the mention of the Secret Service and the potential dangers that lurked in Kiev.

  But the president wouldn’t budge. The ambassador was an old pal as well as a political crony. Ambassador Drake had assured safety. The president further insisted that it would be an affront not to visit the monument. The president was not one to shy away from a high profile political date, laden with political positives-the least of which was the defender-of-liberty-around-the-world role-particularly in a new administration. So both venues remained in the official program.

  Alex leaned to Friedman and whispered. “If there’s no way to secure the appearance at the monument,” she asked, “the president shouldn’t do it. Or am I missing something?”

  Friedman winced.

  “The advance team and the president’s spin doctors are still fighting with the Secret Service about that one,” he said. “The spin doctors love the image of a head-bowed president walking across a large square with the Ukrainian counterpart. Yet that’s the most vulnerable moment. What the heck can we do?”

  “Then they should avoid it,” she said, thinking of the safety of both Robert and the president.

  “Try telling them that,” Friedman said. “The security people know that it’s impossible to completely secure the public square. Somewhere there’s going to have to be a compromise of some sort. And we’ve only got three days to find the compromise.”

  “Great,” she said.

  “Politicians take dumb chances all the time,” Friedman said, almost a little too loud, since a few heads turned in their direction. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time they get away with them.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  V irgil Bruni, assistant manager of one of the finest hotels in Europe, had an invitation that evening also. Gian Antonio Rizzo picked him up at 6:30 in the evening and drove him to the municipal morgue, where Bernardo Santangelo, the cheerful, chubby mortician, waited.

  By arrangement, Rizzo walked Bruni back to the vaults where unidentified bodies were kept. Two corpses were removed from their freezer vaults and brought to marble slabs for inspection. Rizzo barely spoke, and neither did Santangelo. They had been down this path many times before.

  Despite the cold within the viewing chamber, Bruni looked as if he were about to break a sweat. Rizzo moved quickly, however. There was no point to prolong the agony.

  Santangelo personally unzipped the body bags. Then he presented the partially decomposed bullet-smashed faces of two murder victims to the dapper little hotel manager.

  Bruni gasped. Then for a fraction of a second, Bruni swayed and appeared as if he might faint. Rizzo held out a hand and steadied him.

  “Well, then?” Rizzo asked. “Were these unfortunate ones- questi disgraziati -your guests?”Several seconds passed before Bruni could answer, not because he didn’t know the answer, but because he had to get past his horror. Never before had he seen anything like this happen to someone he had known personally, however briefly.

  “Yes,” he finally said, his voice barely audible. “They were.”

  Rizzo nodded to Santangelo, who rezipped the bags. The evening trip to the morgue was a resounding success.

  THIRTY-THREE

  A lex returned to her hotel after her first working day at the embassy in Kiev. Her initial meeting with Yuri Federov had been pushed back a day. No reason given.

  It was Ukraine. Reasons weren’t necessary.

  She would not have the luxury of staying in this evening and relaxing, however, since a social event had been scheduled at the ambassador’s residence. The event was the ambassador’s reception in honor of the most unpopular people currently in the embassy, the White House Advance team. All embassy officers were “invited,” including those like Alex who were on temporary assignment, albeit in Godfather style-an invitation that could not be refused.

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bsp; From the clothes she had brought with her, Alex picked out a pale green travel dress with three-quarter sleeves and a scooped neckline. The material was clingy and followed her shape nicely, stopping two or three inches above the knee.

  Richard Friedman picked up Alex at the hotel. Once again, Stosh, Freedman’s driver was at the wheel. Their car guided them through the quiet cold streets of Kiev. A light snow fell.

  The ambassador’s residence was in a neighborhood called Podil, upstream from the main part of Kiev. Podil was the old merchant’s quarter when the river was used for trade; there was still a station for tourist riverboats there, the “River Station,” and Podil was filled with the former houses of such merchants. In the streetlights Alex could see that many of the old mansions had been gentrified.

  When they arrived, Alex found “the Residence,” which was how embassy personnel always referred to the place where the ambassador lived, to be a modest mansion, a comfortable old building with an appealingly livable quality. There was a staircase leading from the sidewalk to the front, but the actual entrance was in a courtyard in the back for security purposes.

  “I guess we’re early,” Alex said. The only people present were embassy personnel.

  “Standard practice,” Friedman said. “It’s like the crew of a warship going to action stations as the enemy approaches. Don’t forget this is work.”

  “But it’s also a party, right?”

  “Free food and booze, but you have to earn it.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Depends.” Friedman nodded in the direction of a young man. “For instance, Bill Katzmann there is a JO who has pulled receiving-line duty.”

  “Which consists of…?”

  “… keeping the line moving. There will be three hundred guests. If each one spent five minutes talking to the ambassador that would be about twenty-five hours. So guests are expected to be content with a handshake and maybe a ‘glad you could come.’ ”

  “Are they?”

  “Most understand, but some don’t and want to have a real conversation. So Bill’s job will be to wait for a break in the conversation and politely say, ‘This way, sir,’ or something like that. The problem is when an ambassador doesn’t understand the drill because he’s a political appointee new to the game or who doesn’t want to play it. I was in Bonn under Arthur Burns, a good ambassador but also a very chatty person. At the Fourth of July reception, where there are over a thousand guests, the line slowed to a crawl, with some guests waiting in it for three hours.”