Ops files, known as 201’s, in those days were kept in green 8 ½” X 11” cardboard binders with a big, red diagonal stripe on the cover. Agents’ communications plans were always stapled just inside the cover for quick reference, and this allowed Liebowitz to decrypt "Otto’s" message.
"Aunt Greta" referred to "treffpunkt Greta," the meeting place where the agent would expect contact in Vienna. According to the established communications protocol he would appear at 7:00 PM every evening beginning on 2 February until someone met him. Reference to a "gift" in the body of the message indicated that the agent had important information.
CHAPTER 3 - Madrid, 4 February 1992
Yevgeniy Drozhdov passed through the double swinging doors from the Customs area out into the cavernous, dusty reception hall of Madrid’s Barajas airport. Across the dimly lit space, he spotted his contact, Arkadiy Nikolayevich Yudin, a greasily prosperous type going to fat, waiting by the main entrance. Yudin’s thinning hair, combed straight back from his forehead, was dyed jet black and heavily pomaded in a vain attempt to mask his age. He wore an expensive suit under a cashmere topcoat and was anxiously scrutinizing the arriving passengers. As soon as they made eye contact, Yudin turned on his heel and went out the doors.
Drozhdov followed into the parking lot across the narrow roadway directly in front of the main terminal. He turned up his collar against the cold and damp evening, typical of early February in Madrid. The two Russians slipped unnoticed into Yudin’s rented Mercedes.
“Do you have it?” Tension squeezed Yudin’s vocal chords to produce strangled diction.
Drozhdov produced the small packet from his inside pocket and extended it to Yudin. “I don’t know if this is ‘it,’ but it’s all I could find that matched what I was told to look for. I didn’t have time or instructions from the Center to check its contents.”
Yudin snatched the packet from Drozhdov’s fingers and ripped it open to reveal a blue plastic floppy computer disk. “What about the other business?” he asked.
“By the time I got to Vienna the meeting had already taken place and the American had left town. I followed him and retrieved this for you. The American had an unfortunate reaction to an injection. He’s dead.”
“But the traitor is still alive and at large?” Yudin was displeased.
It grated on Drozhdov that one of his targets still survived, but it wasn’t his fault. And in any event, Yudin was not a professional. He had no business speaking like this to him. Drozhdov belonged to the elite Banner Unit, Vympel in Russian, controlled by Department “S” of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service that had assumed the responsibilities of the now defunct KGB's renowned First Chief Directorate. Formed at the height of the KGB’s anti-Reagan paranoia, Banner was dedicated to assassination, terror, and subversion on enemy territory. Drozhdov, an experienced Spetsnaz veteran, was an expert assassin.
He snarled, “Next time give me more than a couple of hours’ notice to get to Vienna, and tell the Center they should contact me directly. It’s ridiculous in the first place that I had to travel all the way here for instructions and then turn around and make the trip all the way back. But for that, both of the targets would be dead by now.”
But the orders had been precise – Yudin would be the exclusive conduit for all communications on this case. In a calmer voice, Drozhdov continued, “What do they want me to do now?” He referred to Moscow Center.
Yudin bit his lip, inadvertently confirming to Drozhdov that he was out of his depth – he was a financier, not an operative, and the feral Drozhdov made him uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I’ll have to contact the Center, but I can’t do that until I get back to my house in Marbella.”
Drozhdov shrugged. He would not be punished for missing the traitor. The Center was well aware that he had been given the assignment at the eleventh hour. He had been fortunate to find the American at all after his pell-mell drive to Sankt Johann. “The traitor could already be in the States, for all we know,” he said, “but he wasn’t with the American.”
CHAPTER 4 - Ennui
Under its lofty hangarlike ceiling the “food court” aka cafeteria at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, Headquarters was not crowded at 2:30 in the afternoon. I liked it that way. If anyone noticed me at all they would have seen a tall man with long, slightly graying hair swept back from his forehead. I have a lean, angular face and a slightly crooked nose, thanks to a teenage boxing match (which I actually won). Except for the nose people say I bear a passing resemblance to the actor Clint Eastwood. I don’t see it, and I’m not sure I like the idea of resembling someone so recognizable. It can be a detriment in my business.
My feet were propped comfortably on a chair, and I was idly contemplating the tassels on my well-polished Gucci loafers. I’d gotten them half-price at the Gucci store on Faubourg St. Honoré during another lifetime when I was stationed in Paris and still considered a rising star. In fact the only clothing I was wearing that was not French was the powder blue Brooks Brothers permanent press shirt.
I know, I know. Sartorial vanity is a weakness, but I’m trying to get over it, I promise.
Here and there other tables were occupied by fellow slackers. I had been in the cafeteria for about an hour and was on my third cup of coffee, but I was not concerned that anyone was likely to miss Harry Connolly, Deputy Chief of Travel Assignments. Nevertheless, it was time to
head back to my office. Maybe something exciting was happening. (That’s a joke. Humor was an indispensable psychological crutch at that point in my life.)
I levered my feet from the chair and held my legs horizontal to the floor for a few seconds, feeling my abdominal muscles tighten. I did this to salve my conscience over my current lack of exercise. It did no good. Shrugging my blazer over my shoulders I headed down the broad corridor to the elevator bank. There was no hurry.
The elevator whisked me to the Fourth Floor where I entered an office populated by a sea of cubicles guarded by a reception desk. Behind the desk was Cheryl, a generously proportioned African-American woman incongruously dressed in a bright green spandex pantsuit she had accessorized with an orange silk scarf.
Cheryl looked up from the latest issue of Ebony.
“Hi, Harry. Got any big plans for the weekend?”
“Just me, the dog, the woods, and maybe a good book.”
I thought I detected a hint of pity lurking in Cheryl’s liquid brown eyes, but decided to ignore it.
“Anything exciting happening here this afternoon?” I asked.
Both of us knew this was a facetious question. A pizza delivery was more exciting than anything that had ever happened in this office.
Cheryl had spent almost ten years in the same position, and she had neither expectation nor desire of moving anywhere else. Excitement was the last thing she had learned to expect at the CIA.
She rolled her eyes and intoned without enthusiasm, “Oh, yes, Harry, we got loads of excitement up here.”
I threaded the way to my office through the cubicles that were occupied by definitely, absolutely, undoubtedly unexcited people who spent most of their time counting down the hours to closing time. My office was tiny, but it was better than a cubicle. Perks of the job. A quick scan of my gray metal desk confirmed that the in-box held the same tall stack of travel forms waiting for my signature that had driven me to the cafeteria an hour earlier.
Discouraged, I pulled my overcoat and scarf from a hook on the wall, and headed back towards the corridor. The same stack of stuff would be waiting for me Monday morning.
I waved at Cheryl as I strode past.
“See you Monday. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do over the week-end.”
By 3:30 I was in my old Jeep Wagoneer heading west on I-66 toward the Shenandoah Valley.
Soon after leaving behind the neo-urban sprawl of Manassas and Chantilly the rolling hills and ancient mountains of the Appalachian, the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah ranges, came into view.
The descendants of the solid German stock which originally settled the Shenandoah Valley display their heritage in their rustic stoicism and churches that appeared wherever a half-dozen houses comprised a village.
Finally turning off the highway, I steered the old but robust four-wheel drive vehicle along familiar ruts in a twisting dirt road that led ever upward to a track through the heavily wooded terrain where my current home was located. It was isolated and far from Washington and I liked it that way.
Full throated barking erupted from inside the two-bedroom log cabin as I unlimbered out of the car.
“I’m coming, Angus. Hold your horses, boy!”
I opened the door, and a small black blur sped past me in frantic search of the nearest tree.
“That’s a helluva way to greet your lord and master, Angus.”
The Scots terrier, his business with the tree satisfactorily concluded, dashed back to offer a proper greeting, short pointy tail wagging furiously.
I traded office garb for jeans, boots, and a thick turtleneck sweater and set about building a fire in the native stone fireplace while Angus sat expectantly at the door with his tail thumping against the floor. Satisfied that the logs were burning well, I donned an old sheepskin jacket and woolen watch cap and spent the next thirty minutes walking through the dense woods while Angus executed exuberant figure eights around me, occasionally diverted when his sensitive nose caught an interesting scent. This was our daily ritual.
By the time we returned the fire had caught in earnest. After sharing a spartan meal with the dog I poured myself a generous dollop of Laphroaig 10-year-old single malt and selected a cigar from my humidor’s dwindling supply of Habanos. Smoking fine cigars and drinking fine whiskey are comforting vices and well within the reach even of those modestly endowed with money. I was beginning to fear that the scotch had become too important but couldn't summon the courage to cut my intake.
Angus hopped onto the leather sofa beside me and placed his big head in my lap, hoping for an ear rub. I obliged. While the dog excelled at many activities, talking was not one of them, and the void of silence was filled with entirely too much thought. No matter how far I peered into the future, all I could see was the dog and me alone in this place.
My wife, Kate, and I purchased the cabin not far from Orkney Springs several years earlier during an uncharacteristically long stay in the United States. The nearest neighbors were the inhabitants of a turkey farm some two miles away down the mountain road. The place became a refuge for us every weekend, insulated by acres of primal mountain forest from whatever silliness might be going on in the world at large or inside the Beltway a hundred miles to the east.
Here we could pretend to be “normal” people rather than what we really were. Embraced by the absolute stillness of the mountain, somehow incongruous Tanqueray Ten martinis in our hands, it was hard to believe that life's pursuits to that point had made any difference at all in the wider world.
The practitioners of espionage refer to it as a “craft” rather than an occupation, but in fact it’s a lot like crack cocaine – one taste and you’re hooked. Like a viral contagion or sorcerer’s spell it takes hold of you and won’t let go. It opens your eyes to a parallel universe that overlays the quotidian existence of most people and affects their lives in ways they never know.
The trouble with intelligence work is that the product of your labor is only of value insofar as it is believed and acted upon by those who make policy – or
The trouble with intelligence work is that the product of your labor is only of value insofar as it is believed and acted upon by those who make policy – or “interpreted” by the analysts through whose hands it must pass before it reaches the policymakers. The judgmental capacities of Washington's political morass did not inspire confidence.
I am familiar with the face of the Enemy, and I know he is still there, in a different form but still dangerous.
I became convinced that evil existed at the age of ten. If I close my eyes, the black and white television images of the brutal 1956 Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution are still vivid, burned indelibly into that part of my brain that closes the synapses necessary to create motivation. Something had clicked in my young mind that led me to fight an empire destined eventually to collapse of its own weight but capable in the meantime of infecting the world with incredible evil.
The enemy was clearly identified. His persistent malevolence had been clear for the world to see in the faces of the Soviet gerontocracy. The increasingly wooden countenance of Leonid Brezhnev decomposed before our eyes, his voice slurring to gibberish and his movements becoming ever more labored and jerky, a perfect metaphor for the living corpse of the Soviet Union as it lurched on unaware that it was already dead, a terrifyingly grotesque zombie grasping at us out of our worst nightmares and holding large chunks of the world and their populations in thrall.
Now, with the USSR supplanted by the Russian Federation and under new management, the faces were different and younger, but the eyes still looked the same to me. Eternal Russia had suffered through autocracy, totalitarianism, and now had been seized by a kleptocracy.
On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and a stake was at last driven through the heart of Soviet communism. By 1991 the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Not long thereafter “new management” claimed control of CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and I was recalled to Washington from my assignment in Paris.
CHAPTER 5 - Exile
Barney Morley, the newly appointed Chief of the Russia Section, greeted me with a politeness so distant it was barely discernible. We’d gotten along reasonably well in the past, and the cool reception was a warning sign.
At six and a half feet he was a bear of a man with closely cropped red hair and a florid, acne scarred face. A Yale graduate, the scion of a prosperous New England family, he was smart, successful, and ruthlessly ambitious. Morley was not particularly happy to have been named Chief of Russia Section just when the Soviet Union was collapsing and with the importance accorded to the Russian target in free-fall.
Without preamble he declared in a flat voice, “The Cold War is over. We’re entering a new era with the Russians. These guys are no longer this Agency’s primary concern. We’re not going to waste a lot of energy chasing them around the world anymore.”
The Agency’s well-known predilection for East Coast Ivy Leaguers had not waned. The new Russia Section Chief was an experienced and resourceful officer but had little experience in Russian operations. What he did have was political clout on the Seventh Floor and a driving ambition to build his reputation and power. He was aiming for the Seventh Floor Director of Operations job. The Washington bureaucracy, including the CIA, was heavily populated with Morleys – ambitious and capable bureaucrats who sought power for its own sake – an entire city full of God’s gifts to the Peter Principle.
The Seventh Floor was enamored of technology, especially surveillance satellites. The risk-averse new boys and girls up there believed that intelligence acquired through technical means was more reliable than “HUMINT,” human intelligence, and they loved the big budgets that went along with the technical collection programs. The bigger your budget, the more power you have.
Spy satellites are great, especially their military applications, but I’ve always been fond of pointing out that satellites can take pictures of the tops of peoples’ heads, but pictures couldn’t tell you what was going on inside those heads.
Dealing with people close up and personal, however, is always messy. People are unpredictable, and operations can backfire or agents can turn, and public scandal and Congressional hearings are never far behind.
Satellites are far from earth, predictable, and practically risk free.
Morley didn't bother to hide his antipathy, a feeling I reciprocated because I suspected what was coming. Morley viewed me as part of the old guard of Soviet ops officers who had no place in the new Russia Section he had in mind. I have to admit he wasn�
��t wrong.
“You’re not a team player, Harry.” This was the ultimate condemnation in modern CIA-speak, but success had until now kept the bureaucrats at bay … until now.
“I think it would be a mistake to take eyes off the Russians, Barney.” It took an effort to maintain an even tone, to speak softly, knowing what was coming. But I wasn’t going to give Morley the satisfaction of seeing me grovel.
Morley was ready to pounce, even at this mild statement. He stared placidly at me, his eyes as merciless as a snake’s, as he intoned, “Guys like you are Neanderthals, Connolly. Things have changed, and you old KGB-chasers are out of synch with what modern intelligence is all about. What have the people in this Section ever done but walk around and service dead drops – ANCIENT tradecraft!” He waved his hand dismissively. “Hell, I just visited Moscow. It’s the damned Third World over there, and you still think they’re some kind of threat? We’re heading in a different direction in Russia Section, and I can’t afford old school thinking. You need to find another home in this building.”
I knew full well that Morley did not intend to stay long in Russia Section himself – just long enough to eviscerate it and then move up the ladder to a “better” job.
“You forget that agents have to be recruited and vetted first, Barney. And by the way, have you ever laid down a dead drop?”
Spies are worthless if the spymasters cannot communicate with them. During the Cold War, a misstep in Moscow meant an agent was likely to die in a dank corridor in the basement of Lefortovo with a bullet in the back of the head. That’s why case officers never referred to what they did as a "game" - the stakes were too high and the emotional toll of failure too great. The few spies we were able to place in the beast's heart were too precious and their situation too precarious for all but the most circumspect and calculated risks.
Communications are simultaneously the most necessary and dangerous activity in which the clandestine operator engages. If an agent cannot pass his information to his handlers, he is worthless. Morley’s dismissive remark about dead drops had raised my hackles.
Harry's Rules Page 2
