The Miernik Dossier

by Charles McCarry

  “There was a password. I gave it because I wanted to be sure he’d come along willingly, not suspecting anything. I said, ‘Heaven is far away,’ which was the password the Russians had sent. The Russian peered at me through his glasses, still smiling foolishly, and said, ‘God is great.’ That was not the prescribed countersign, but these Russians are never straightforward; they don’t always come right out with things like passwords. I said ‘Where is God?’ The Russian said, ‘Allah is everywhere and near at hand.’ That was the countersign, or near enough. I shook hands with the Russian, told him how glad we were to see him, how grateful we were to him, and so on. He kept on being suspicious. At first he was not going to come with me, but when Siddik stepped through the broken wall behind him with his rifle, the Russian stopped arguing and walked to the Land Rover with us.

  “Qemal was astonished when he came back and found that we had taken the Russian. I took him aside and told him how I had found him. Qemal was extremely pleased. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘now you can have your revenge for Ahmed, and we can leave a signal the Russians cannot misunderstand to show that we are finished with them.’ Qemal said the Russians would certainly come looking for their man if he did not radio to them that all was well. He said we should kill the Russian and cut off his balls and hang him up the way we had done the others. Then we would radio the Russians and tell them to look on a certain hill for their Richard, who was unable to carry on and wished to return home.

  “So that’s what we did. The Russian tried to dissuade us. At first he kept telling us in Arabic that he wasn’t a Russian. He got out his passport which showed he was something else. Qemal read the passport and said it came from a country that was a colony of Russia. He talked Russian to the man. The man answered in Russian. We took him a long way, almost to the camp, before we killed him. He argued with us right to the end. ‘You are making a mistake, a terrible mistake,’ he said. ‘I am not this Richard. I know no Richard. I am a friend of Prince Kalash el Khatar. He is nearby. He will tell you.’ Qemal laughed at him. ‘Prince Kalash is my brother,’ he said. ‘I just spoke to him. He said nothing about any Russian friend. Prince Kalash has no Russian friends.’

  “The Russian, in the end, was very strange. He saw that we were going to kill him. He was a powerful man; he could have fought. But he did not. He submitted like a sheep. Siddik went to the camp and got the boards while Qemal and I talked to the Russian. When Siddik came back, we tied him on the crossed boards. Qemal took no part in any of this; Siddik and I did all the work. It was Siddik who used the knife.

  “The Russian hung there upside down, talking some foreign language in a voice that got louder and louder as Siddik cut him. It sounded like prayers. Only once did he make any fuss. He fainted when Siddik cut off his fingers. I slapped his face until he woke up. Then Siddik told him what he was going to do. When the knife went between his legs, the Russian roared, a huge sound. Not a scream. He roared like a stabbed lion. Then, naturally, he went unconscious again. I wanted to shoot him but Qemal said no-let him bleed. But before we left him I cut his wrists.”

  “I don’t think Qemal ever radioed the Russians where to find their man. He was going to do it this morning after we broke camp. But there was the rain in the night and then you attacked us. So it was all for nothing.”

  One cannot read the mind of a dead man, so it is impossible to know for certain what Qemal hoped to accomplish by the murder of Miernik. The Pole’s true identity did not matter to Qemal; perhaps he genuinely believed that Miernik and the Russian agent “Richard” were one and the same. Leaving aside the confusion over identity, Qemal’s motive seems clear enough: Baballah and the other terrorists wanted to kill someone in revenge for Ahmed’s execution. Better, from Qemal’s point of view, that they kill Miernik than Qemal. By encouraging, even ordering, Miernik’s death, Qemal demonstrated to his underlings that he was as angry at the Russians as they, and that he was free of the Russians’ control.

  87. REPORT BY CHRISTOPHER’S CASE OFFICER.

  1. Christopher delivered his excellent though typically literary report on the ALF/Miernik episode in Khartoum at 0230 on 21 July. This written account adds flesh to the bare bones communicated in my cable of 18 July, which was based on a hurried verbal debriefing of Christopher conducted by this officer in El Fasher. At both meetings the agent appeared to be in excellent physical condition. However, he has been through a somewhat trying experience, and his morale is understandably impaired.

  2. This officer notes, not in criticism but as a matter of observation, that Christopher is more than usually prone to believe that his understanding of this operation is more accurate than that of the case officer, the station, or the country desk at Headquarters. The death of Miernik made a vivid impression on him, and he gives it undue weight in his estimate of the overall value of the operation. The fact that he has become emotionally involved with Zofia Miernik undoubtedly colors his judgment to a certain extent.

  3. Christopher has reverted to his earlier view that Miernik was not, in fact, a Soviet agent. So convinced is he of the correctness of his view that he is able to rationalize all the evidence to the contrary that has come to us from a wide range of sources, including the information made available to us by the Sudanese Special Branch and by British liaison, whose own agent on the scene contributed valuable corroborative reporting, particularly on the role of Ilona Bentley.

  4. At Christopher’s request, his argument in support of his view in reference to Miernik was tape-recorded, and it is here presented verbatim (as edited by Christopher).

  CHRISTOPHER’S STATEMENT

  This operation is now terminated in the field. The ALF has been neutralized, the Soviets have been thwarted—and Miernik is dead. In addition to all the evidence Headquarters will have from far-flung sources I think it is important that the analysts have my view of the situation. Of all the dozens of people who worked on this project, I alone was on the scene, knew the people, witnessed the events. That is an egotistical statement on its face, but I want my judgment on the record even if it is to be discounted.

  It’s in the nature of our work that we never know how matters are going to turn out. We begin and end in the dark. There is an overlay of efficiency in everything we do. I’m convinced that there is no more intelligent or unemotional group of men on earth than ourselves. That, if I may say so, is our principal weakness. Because our people are so bright, because our resources are so huge, we consistently tinker with reality.

  The Miernik operation is a classic example of this tendency. We began with a vague suspicion: that Miernik was being defected by the Poles. Tentative conclusion: Miernik is an agent. Obvious question: What is his assignment?

  What we had at the beginning was a set of assumptions. It was proper to test those assumptions. After all, that is our job. But the testing process—calling up our own resources and those of friendly services all over the world—creates an almost irresistible psychological force. We are experts in suspicion. We search diligently for evidence that will confirm our suspicions. To transform a supposition into a fact is the sweetest reward a desk man can know. We do it all the time, and usually we are right. But sometimes we are wrong, and I believe that there is no possible way for us to know this.

  You will recall, not without impatience, that I believed in the early stages of this operation that there was a strong possibility that Miernik was innocent. I am trained to regard all behavior as cover. At no time did I spontaneously believe anything Miernik said to me or indicated to me through his overt personal conduct. But I had an instinctive feeling that all the indications that he was an opposition agent were, just possibly, false. That attitude was also part of my training, and I am sure that Headquarters shared my reservations.

  The difference is this: I knew Miernik personally. For you, the reservations were intellectual—routine professional skepticism. For me they were intestinal. There is no way to argue an intestinal case in cables and dispatches, or even in clandestine conve
rsations with a case officer whose proper function is to discount the emotional reactions of his agent. We are, quite properly, interested primarily in information that is stripped of the background noise created by the personality of the source.

  In the end, my training brought me around to the conclusion that Miernik was, in fact, an agent. There was no other rational explanation for many of the things he did: the book code, the contact with Sasha Kirnov, the heavy-handed dramatization of his plight, the expertise with weapons, the mixture of self-revelation in unimportant matters and obsessive secrecy in others. I never entirely got rid of the instinctive feeling that he was genuine, and therefore innocent. But in a conflict between instinct and what appears to be objective evidence, the latter must always win.

  In order to go on with what I was doing to Miernik, I had to believe that he was an enemy. Otherwise my activity, for all its surface of cleverness and technique, was stupid. My conclusion that Miernik’s behavior confirmed our suspicions was not—as I believed it to be—a return to objectivity. It was a ffight from it. My change of heart turned me (and, to the extent my reporting influences its judgment, turned Headquarters) away from a search for the truth. Everything after that was an attempt to achieve operational results.

  All the evidence said to us: “Yes, Miernik is a Soviet agent.” All the evidence, that is, which we saw fit to consider. Existing simultaneously with the information that confirmed our suspicions was a second body of evidence, like a planet identical to Earth on the other side of the sun, which just as conclusively demonstrated that our suspicions were incorrect. We hadn’t the technique to see it. This is no one’s fault; it is in the nature of our equipment.

  What we overlooked was this: there was no purpose in what Miernik did. His behavior from beginning to end was inconsistent with the simplest rules of tradecraft. Leave aside for a moment all the thoughts we put into his mind and into the minds of the Soviet service we assumed was handling him.

  Concentrate on this: why, if the Soviets wanted to provide an extremely sensitive operation like the ALF with a white Communist as principal agent, would they choose to send him into the Sudan in a Cadillac with an American agent, a British agent, and a Sudanese aristocrat who had every reason to be hostile to anything that threatened the established order? Why expose him—virtually confirm his identity—to such an array of enemies? Why not just drop him into the desert on a moonlit night?

  For that matter, why insert a KGB man into a highrisk situation like the one in which the ALF operated? His capture guaranteed the very thing the Soviets presumably would have wanted to avoid at all costs: confirmation that they were equipping and controlling the guerrillas. Even if they were too dense to realize that the ALF could not succeed and would eventually be swept up by the Sudanese, they must have seen that the presence of a Polish principal agent was unnecessary (they had perfectly adequate control through Ahmed and Qemal and their radio link) and unbelievably insecure.

  I am going to say a very harsh thing that is directed as much (or more) against myself as against all you people who sit inside, making the plans that I carry out. / think we ran Miernik as we did primarily for the fun of it. We have come to look on our work, in the field at least, largely as a sport. Miernik provided an opportunity to match wits with the opposition. We knew from the start that we would win: we had physical control of their alleged agent, we had access to the Sudanese police and military, we had penetrated the ALF. All the opposition had was Miernik and a bunch of deluded tramps who couldn’t think for themselves or maintain decent security. It was a chance not just to beat the Russians for the umptyumpth straight time, it was an opportunity to humiliate the bastards. We would not have been human if we hadn’t seized this opportunity.

  It cost Miernik (not to mention Firecracker and sixty other Arabs) his life.

  When I found Miernik hanging on that cross with his scrotum in his mouth I saw in my mind’s eye all the complex machinery that had produced this simple result. It was our questions about Miernik (questions formulated by the best and most honest minds of a great nation) that drove Miernik to what he undoubtedly would have called his Golgotha. An illiterate tribesman with a knife provided Miernik with a final opportunity for the cheap dramatics that embarrassed me into suspecting him in the first place. We didn’t actually send him out to be killed. His death arose from a misunderstanding. Miernik’s murder is not, technically, on our heads. In fact, the man we sent into the desert wasn’t Miernik at all— that person was a creature of our imagination built out of spare parts left over from our previous experiences with wily Poles and sinister Russians. The real Miernik was that carcass on the cross, clumsy and ridiculous even in death, with the wounds he tried to show me at last made visible.

  5. Despite his obvious reservations, Christopher has continued to operate with his normal loyalty and efficiency. He has obtained Miernik’s diary (transmitted herewith for translation and analysis), and he has intervened with Zofia Miernik with a view toward making her available for a full debriefing by the Geneva station. In order to provide Miss Miernik with an incentive for cooperation, Christopher has been instructed to tell her that our interviews are a normal procedure preliminary to granting her status as an immigrant to the United States under the Polish quota. Christopher had suggested that Miss Miernik be granted immediate citizenship under a special congressional bill, but he is now persuaded that the interests of the government, and those of Miss Miernik, will be better served through the quieter process of ordinary immigration.

  88. PERSONAL LETTER TO CHRISTOPHER FROM THE CHIEF OF HIS OPERATIONAL DIVISION.

  12 August

  Dear Paul:

  There are a good many things I want to say to you that are better said in a personal letter than in an official communication. I hope that you will read this note patiently and with an open mind—and with some awareness of the value I place on our friendship and the high regard in which you are held by the company as a whole.

  First of all, I think (and so does everyone else) that you did an absolutely first-class job in connection with Miernik and the ALF. Knowing your feelings about this assignment, I hesitated a long time before writing up a proposal that you be decorated for your work. I suspect that you do not want recognition of this sort, in this particular case, but all here agree that you richly deserve it, and perhaps in later years you will look more kindly on your medal. (Not that you’ll ever actually look on it—after it’s awarded it will be locked up forever in the Director’s safe along with all the others earned by men like you.)

  All of us here have considered very carefully the reservations you expressed to Bill concerning the mistake you think we made about Miernik. It was an eloquent and persuasive statement. I do not for a moment discard the possibility that your judgment is correct. If it is true that we shoved Miernik toward a useless death out of a misunderstanding of his role, then we have a great deal to be sorry for. However, I believe that the evidence is sufficiently weighty on the other side of the question to merit your keeping open the possibility that Miernik was exactly what we suspected him to be.

  I will not review all the bits and pieces you already know about, although I think you should give some consideration to such things as his being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time (with a radio homing device in his camera) to be picked up by the ALF.

  (We do have information from a sensitive source in Warsaw that a colonel in the Polish intelligence service—the man in charge of their part of the ALF operation—was demoted at the request of the Russians three days after the ALF was destroyed and Miernik got himself killed. Moreover, on the day of Miernik’s contact with Firecracker [Qemal], the Soviet transmitter in Dar es Salaam made no fewer than six attempts to raise their agent “Richard” in coded broadcasts to the ALF. They got no answer. If Miernik was not Richard,” then where was the real “Richard”? The Sudanese scoured the desert for this elusive character, but never found him. Isn’t it possible that you found him, hang
ing on that cross?)

  I would like to tell you about Miernik’s diary, which is available to us thanks to your good work, and which we have had translated. It is a remarkable document. It reveals a man torn between two parts of his nature. One part is the one you came to believe in so strongly—the sensitive, intelligent, ugly, and misunderstood Miernik. The other part, less specifically drawn, but nevertheless very easy to see between the lines, is the one we believe to be the “real” Miernik.

  After reading the diary, there is no question in my mind that he was an agent, and an exceptionally clever one. This conclusion is not based on any specific confession of Miernik’s, but rather on the style and tone of what he wrote. The diary is a chart of his inner thoughts. The dominant thought was a fear of discovery, a suspicion of the motives of everyone he came in contact with, a determination to do his duty however distasteful he found it. If you wish, you can read the whole thing the next time you’re home; I think that doing so would make you feel better—but I think, too, that you should put a little time between yourself and the events that have so disturbed you before you sit down with the diary. The file cards carried by Miernik are a detailed rundown on every aspect of the country and its leading personalities. It is impossible to explain why he would compile such data in the absence of an operational purpose.