by Alex Dryden
“Don’t get in a state about it, Bob. Let’s just deal with what’s happening.” Burt’s mantra was always the same, familiar refrain to Cougar employees and, before that, to CIA recruits whom Burt had once taught at the CIA’s training centre, known as the Farm, in Virginia. “The only thing that matters is what happens”—no regrets, no self-chastisement, no anxiety—just act in the frame of what happens, that was Burt’s time-honoured method. “What happens is king, God, and all you need to know.”
“You want to talk with him in here?” Dupont asked.
“Yes, call Theo from the dedicated phone. I want to get him right away, give him no time to consider it.”
And so Dupont put a call through to Langley from Burt’s yacht. Lish came to the phone after a minute or two. When Burt took the phone from Dupont, he walked away from the table towards the stern of the ship and spoke to him from the far end of the operations room. After a five-minute conversation he returned, handing Dupont the phone as if he were unable to put it down himself.
“I have my own ideas about this,” he said, but he didn’t expand, nor did he relay the contents of the conversation he’d just had with Lish. “Now, let’s have an early dinner. You must be tired, Anna, and there’s something else I want you to do before the NATO meeting next week. And by the way, I want you at that meeting, Anna,” he said. “Alongside me.”
Dupont looked questioningly at him.
“Not this time, Bob. This time I’m taking Anna. She’s going to make a presentation.”
He looked at her, expecting a question, but she wasn’t going to give him the easy satisfaction and, once again, she saw he liked her self-contained coolness.
They dined onboard the ship. The Cougar, as well as the ranch in New Mexico and half a dozen other possessions of importance to him, had a crew of forty-five, and eight of them were chefs. “It’s the best food in the City of London,” Burt boasted, though clearly without intending anyone to believe him. Burt’s world was one of endless positive beliefs. He was the epitome of positive thinking no matter what the situation was.
Throughout the three-course meal, with the usual accompaniment of excellent wines, he regaled Dupont and Anna with stories of his youth in the CIA, stories both of them had heard before but which Anna listened to each time in order to spot the occasional inconsistency. Burt liked to elaborate—or fabricate—much of his experiences in the field. She doubted, in fact, that he had ever been to Novorossiysk at all.
After dinner, Dupont left the ship and Burt suggested that Anna should stay and sleep on the Cougar, instead of at the company apartment. She readily agreed. Pouring himself a brandy in the saloon, Burt sat in a large armchair.
“You were too young to have worked in the days of the Cold War,” he said.
“I joined the KGB in 1990,” she replied.
“And now the world is reshaping itself again,” he said. “Who will come nearer the top of the pile and who will drop back?”
She didn’t reply this time, knowing that these conversational brushstrokes were his way of getting to the point.
“The new Cold War is different from the old one only in terms of geographical location,” he said. “Once it was worldwide; arming African and South American potentates, spreading our rivalling ideologies thinly across the globe. Now the new Cold War is being fought in the former states of the Soviet Union. In central Asia it’s about oil and gas supply, as well as Russian and American military bases in countries like Kyrgizstan. American wars in Afghanistan and no doubt beyond Afghanistan before long require us having bases there. The Russians see our soft spot and try to exploit it. In the Caucasus, Russia invaded Georgia to prevent NATO expansion there. And then there’s Ukraine, Russia’s soul. That’s where we must look now.”
“Endless conflict,” Anna murmured.
“We find out who our enemies are in times of conflict,” he said. “And that is why we need conflict. Conflict cleans out the stables, reveals what lies underneath history’s layers. Conflict is necessary to see the enemy.”
“Haven’t the Americans had enough conflict?” she said. She got out of her chair and poured herself a brandy.
“America has made mistakes,” he answered. “America always sees the obvious at the expense of the obscure. It waited until it was attacked before it addressed the jihad. Now it talks of wars of prevention, of preemption—as if that were a new concept, but it’s always tried to preempt. Central and South America are one long, and generally disastrous, episode in America’s preemptive struggle against its enemies. But they were small fry. Deposing the odd dictator in the Third World doesn’t even sharpen the teeth. No. America has gotten scared of its real enemies. Maybe it always has been. Maybe it has only ever reacted against its real enemies, rather than acted. The Cold War was one long reaction.”
“What are you saying? That they should have nuked Moscow?”
Burt laughed. “No, nothing of the sort and you know it.”
“There were enough proxy wars to fill an encyclopaedia,” she replied. “What else could America have done?”
“I’m not interested in history, let alone potential history,” Burt said. “History never taught anyone anything. I’m interested in flushing out our enemies now. And I want you to pursue this theme for Cougar. In the field, if you insist. Though I’d rather you were directing operations.”
“You know the deal. I’ll only work in the field. That’s where I’m best.”
“I know that.”
“And you mean against Russia.”
“Yes. But the purpose is twofold. Russia is becoming the enemy again. But of equal importance, I want to know who Russia’s appeasers are in the West. I want to flush out Russia’s intentions but also find which way certain other countries in Europe will jump. With us—with America—or with Russia.”
“What has this got to do with Novorossiysk?”
“Maybe something. But that’s for down the line a little. I need to send someone into Ukraine again. If it’s you, you need to leave tomorrow in order to be back in Brussels in time.”
“Is it important that I come to Brussels?”
“I’d like you to be there.”
She didn’t enquire why.
But for once Burt explained. “I think you’ll have something bang up to date from your trip—if you decide to go.”
And then Burt stood and withdrew a set of maps from a chart desk. They were aerial and satellite maps, as well as regular ones for roads and terrain.
“These are the interesting ones,” Burt said and pointed at a pile of satellite photographs that had come with the maps. “From Cougar’s own satellite in the past two weeks. And this one from the U.S. WorldView satellite.”
She didn’t ask him how he’d obtained the latter but stood and looked down on a faux chart table on which Burt had placed the maps. The maps were high-definition studies of Ukraine’s border with Russia, but to the north of the country, far away from the Crimea from where she’d just returned. They focused on the Kursk area on the Russian side and Sumy on the Ukrainian side. In each of the satellite pictures, two unmarked military trucks, in various states of magnification, were shown proceeding towards the Ukrainian border from the Russian side and by various roundabout routes.
“The interesting thing,” Burt said, “is that they seem to be receiving privileged passage on the Russian side from Russia’s border patrols. They go unmolested by small roads and tracks to a mile from the border. Then they stop.” He looked at her. “What I want to know is, what are the intentions of the men inside them? Satellites can’t tell us that.”
10
JANUARY 19
THE TWO UNMARKED GUNMETAL GREY TRUCKS displayed no lights as they moved slowly along the track towards the no-man’s-land of the border zone. After the deliberately roundabout journey from Kursk that had taken four hours instead of the usual two and a half, the trucks had finally reached their first destination, the jumping-off point, and they pulled up just over three mi
les from the border. The next three miles from here to Ukraine was traditionally accessible only with military or KGB passes.
The muffled engines of the trucks went quiet and the men inside sat in silence, three in each truck, while the dusk drew in around them. It wasn’t a long wait. When the darkness had deepened into a cold January night all six men then stepped out, stood near the trucks blowing on their hands and stamping their feet. But all the time they looked towards the border.
The men wore combat fatigues and, like the trucks, they had no insignia to identify them as officers of military counterintelligence from the Russian 3rd FSB Division. But all the men displayed the word “Patriotiy,” written in black, across the shoulders of their jackets. It was more of a gang slogan, an embroidered tattoo, than any identification. Each man had sewn on the word himself.
As the last of the sun’s light faded from the distant horizon, the vast flat steppe around them absorbed the night and disappeared.
The oldest of the men, a veteran colonel in his forties, pulled open the driver’s door of the first truck and took out a backpack. There were no spoken orders. It was evident they all had their tasks and it had been rehearsed meticulously. The colonel stood for a moment and listened. The night was still. There was no sound to disturb the silence, no wind, no water, no human or even animal presence. The moon was four days old, a thin silver sliver in the eastern sky that offered no light even when the clouds briefly parted. The veteran looked into the blackness. Three miles ahead of them and to the west, now lost in the darkness, was the 1,200-mile-long border that separated Russia and Ukraine.
He checked that there were no lights that shouldn’t be there, no random border patrol vehicles on either side. They should all have been pulled back to let his mission through, but you never knew. The Forest’s chain of command was obsessed with secrecy, even when it was necessary to be open enough to keep away prying eyes. He was looking with his naked eye for lights first of all. He already knew there was no human habitation along this stretch of the border—that was why it had been chosen—and the only lights he could see were the sparsely placed border posts that displayed a few glimmering yellow arc lamps in the far distance. But the border posts were two miles to the north and south of where the trucks were going—where they should be. The colonel spat on the frozen earth. In any case, it was a border that the six men—and their masters in Moscow—believed shouldn’t be there at all. The Patriotiy wanted the border removed so that Russia and the historical birthplace of Old Rus were one again. To the colonel and his men, the darkness and the thinly stretched border posts seemed to exist for the sole purpose of tempting men to cross without papers.
Without a word, the men climbed back into the trucks, and now under the cover of darkness drove a farther two miles down a more derelict cart track this time, and always towards the border.
The mission had been planned in great detail, just like all the others. Four days before this particular night, at Kraznomenniy Street in Moscow, a building secretly owned by Russia’s Interior Ministry, the mission had been laid out before the six men. It was the shortest time line and one that left as little room for error as possible. Three Interior Ministry officials were in attendance. The ministry officials were the formal representatives of the Patriotiy, which was a wide, shadowy grouping of KGB officers that reached from the lowest ranks to the senior leaders of the intelligence services. For the purpose of this meeting at Kraznomenniy, the three officials were all either in or approaching their sixties, all ranking KGB veterans of the Russian war in Afghanistan launched on Christmas Day 1979, and all nursed the anger and resentment of Russia’s intelligence services and special forces at the motherland’s humiliating defeat back then. In the intervening period up to the present day they and their colleagues had ascended the ranks of the ministry, thanks to their KGB backgrounds, and now controlled a powerful clique inside the Interior Ministry, one of Moscow’s more powerful centres of authority. The ageing officials were gifted with powers that ranged from control of Russia’s prisons to censorship of the media, and “special operations” on Russian territory.
And for the purpose of this mission—code-named with utmost simplicity “Repossession”—the independent state of Ukraine, a land with its own culture and language and with an application to join the European Union, was considered by all concerned to be part of Russia’s territory.
Inside the higher echelons of the KGB, the interior ministry clique was openly known as the Patriotiy. But outside it, they were only the subject of gossip in street cafés, rumour and conspiracy theories. The clique was an unofficial branch of Department S however, itself a highly secret body within the KGB responsible for aggressive measures on foreign soil. In the usual arrangement of the structure of Russian dolls regularly adopted by the KGB’s special forces, a discreet distance was placed between the actual perpetrators of terrorist attacks on foreign soil and their ultimate controllers. There were the men on the ground—in this case, the six men. Above them were the Interior Ministry officials. Then came the shadowy figures from Department S, then an irregular KGB committee set up for the purpose that it answered to the head of the intelligence service, then a Kremlin intelligence liaison, and finally the prime minister himself, Vladimir Putin. If anything went wrong with this mission—a high-risk smuggling operation onto another country’s sovereign territory—the six men would simply be declared independent mafiosi out for their own commercial gain. The men were happy enough with that denial, even though it meant they might take a big fall if they were caught.
The senior official, a KGB general from the ministry, had convened the meeting on a day in early January when an intense snow flurry that developed into a blizzard had dusted then clogged Moscow’s chilled streets. The sky had then cleared, the sun had appeared, and, for a moment, the city seemed to dangle the promise of spring before its inhabitants. Icicles that formed on the eaves began to melt and occasionally fell dangerously from the eaves of high buildings, exacting their usual, fatal toll on unwary pedestrians. But by the evening of the day of the briefing, winter had exerted its grip once more.
In his introduction to the six men, the general echoed the words of Russia’s prime minister Putin almost exactly two years before, in April 2008.
“Ukraine is not even a state,” he stated. In the ornate wood-panelled room in the secret government building on Kraznomenniy Street, the general thus gave the men the righteous cause for their mission—a terrible injustice done against them personally and against the integrity of Russia. Like Putin before him, the general explained to the six men that Ukraine consisted partly of Eastern Europe and was partly a gift from Russia—mistakenly made—in 1991. Now, in the depths of the winter of 2010, it was time to redress this terrible wrong.
Sitting at an oversize and heavily built polished desk under the Russian eagle, he told them: “Your mission is crucial to the future greatness of Russia and a decisive step in atoning for past mistakes.” Words like “justice” and “atonement” were central to the hurt suffered by Russia’s elite spy community and to the mythologising of Russia’s mission. Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, was the birthplace of Russia a thousand years before, the cradle of Russian civilisation.
But the general didn’t mention that this mission, which the six men were to perform, was just one of tens, perhaps hundreds, of similar operations. For the six men, it was as if they, and they alone, stood between Russia’s historical greatness and another humiliation similar to the ones they believed they had already suffered. For them, it was a chance to begin the reversal of a process of retreat that had seared the Russian soul for more than twenty years.
Three of the six men had been released early from prison for the mission, including the colonel commanding the mission. But they had been given the lightest of sentences for conducting illegal killings, massacre, and torture in the Chechen wars. Theirs had been a new type of Russian show trial whose purpose was the opposite of the usual show trials. It was in order t
o find their innocence—or lack of culpability—not guilt, while at the same time appeasing Western calls for justice in Russia to be free and fair. First, then, their trials were a pretence for Western observers that justice in Russia was working. But in reality they were a clear signal that things were back to how they had been under the Soviet Union. No matter what offences they had committed, the KGB would look after its own, welcome them back into the fold after their derisory short sentences, and then swiftly promote them through the ranks.
The other three men were fully paid-up officers of the Vympel group, the special forces team engaged in “social warfare” based at the Forest.
After the general laid out the broad purpose of the mission and the historical rightness of it, he departed and left his two lieutenants to lay out the details on the ground. It was, in essence, a straightforward smuggling mission across the lightly guarded border between Russia and Ukraine. The porous borderlands between the two countries were regularly travelled by commercial smugglers who transported anything from pork fat—a delicacy beloved by Ukrainians—to nuclear materials. The lieutenants from the ministry brought out maps and grid references; set out times, distances and moon phases; and, finally, the methods of communication with a team of two or perhaps three men on the other side of the border in Ukraine.
Out on the steppe, the advancing night had turned the temperature to well below freezing. The leader of the six men nodded to the driver in the first truck and the vehicle pulled up a second time, now just a mile from the border. The truck behind pulled up in line. The leader stepped out, looked inside the truck, and motioned silently to the two men remaining. In the second truck, a similar silent order was given. The six men descended, opened the muffled rear doors of the trucks, and waited again. Either they would be met tonight on the far side, or they would return on the following night, and then the night after that, until a way was clear.
