“What then?”
“The Russians had turned one of our people; Darby wanted to get back at them. He wanted to send it back to them in spades. He wanted to send them a great big bomb that they’d take into their midst and that would blow up in their faces, causing them not only the maximum damage, but the greatest embarrassment as well.”
“Innes was the key.”
“He was our carrier,” Owens said. “And from day one it was Darby’s baby. No one—and I do mean no one, not even the ambassador—got in his way.”
The idea in conception was rather simple, as all good ideas are, but in execution it was damned difficult, according to Owens. The notion was that if the Russians had successfully turned Innes, and if our knowledge of it could be kept secret, Innes could prove to be of inestimable value to us. Yarnell’s plan was to give Innes a promotion to technical sergeant, put him in charge of CIA communications, and then begin pumping him with information so stunning that when he passed it over to his Soviet control officer, the man would be mesmerized, he would take whatever we wanted to give him. He would be ours.
“We set about to make poor sergeant Innes a superstar,” Owens said. “Within a month he was working directly for Darby, and within a few weeks we were pumping him with information.”
There were two classes of data fed to Innes, Owens explained. The first class was absolutely true things useful to the Russians. We had to mix the good with the bad in order to present a convincing front. The second, of course, was disinformation. On Mondays the select committee at the embassy—me as chief of station, Darby as Innes’s control officer, the charge d’affaires, usually an analyst or two, and at least the Military attache—would get together to work up the product we would force-feed the kid. During the remainder of the week, Yarnell would give it to Innes. Worked like a charm.”
“So Sergeant Innes actually passed good information across?”
“Yes.”
“A lot of information? Damaging information?”
“A big volume, yes. But most of it was pretty mild by comparison.”
“By comparison with what?” McGarvey asked.
“By comparison with some of the other stuff we fed him, as well as all the bogus shit Darby was coming up with. And some of that was very wild, believe me.”
“So, no matter what happened or didn’t happen, Sergeant Innes actually did pass along some valid intelligence to the KGB.”
“Only on Langley’s specific approval.”
McGarvey could understand at least the first part of the operation, and he could appreciate its boldness. He was, however, having a little trouble visualizing the actual method. He asked Owens about it.
“For the most part that was Darby’s province,” Owens admitted. “Sergeant Innes worked directly for Darby, so most of his briefings were done in private. It built up a barrier of trust. A barrier in the sense that Innes had eyes and ears only for Yarnell. It was the old charm all over again. Yarnell had totally taken over the kid, whom he began to refer to as ‘the Zombie’ during our Monday jam sessions.”
“You didn’t much like that?” McGarvey asked.
“It was enough that we were using the kid without calling him names behind his back.”
“How long did this go on?”
“Months.”
“Three months?” McGarvey asked. “Six? Seven?”
“Maybe a year. It was a long time. Darby wanted everything to be just right. He wanted the complete trust not only of Sergeant Innes, but of Innes’s Russian control officer as well. He wanted them eating out of his hand.”
“And they did?”
“They did.”
“How did Yarnell know this? I mean, did he give it twelve months exactly, and then after that time had passed he said now we make our move? What?”
“It was easier than that,” Owens said. “Yarnell figured he would have them by the balls on the day Innes came back with a specific question.”
“A question from his control officer?”
“Presumably.”
“Did he ask you, or did he ask Yarnell?”
“Darby was handling it on a personal basis, I’ve already told you that,” Owens flared.
“Then you don’t know what this important question might have been?”
“Goddamnit, I don’t know what the hell you’re getting at, McGarvey. Of course I knew.”
“How?”
“Darby told me, of course …” Owens suddenly trailed off, realizing what he was saying, at long last understanding what it was McGarvey had been getting at all along. “It was documented … I mean a lot of what we were feeding the kid was showing up …”
“You went on Yarnell’s word alone?” McGarvey asked as gently as he could, though the question itself belied any gentleness.
“He was a friend,” Owens replied. “Darby was the CIA in Moscow. I’d sooner have questioned the president.”
“What was the question?”
Owens took a moment to reply. He focused on McGarvey, then shook his head. “Hell, I don’t remember. It seemed important at the time. Something about satellites, I suppose, but for the life of me I can’t remember it now.”
“But it was Yarnell’s signal that the first phase of his operation was done.”
Owens averted his eyes. “After that it began to get nasty. Sergeant Innes, as well as his control officer, had bought the program, hook, line, and sinker—”
“According to Yarnell,” McGarvey interjected.
“According to Darby, all right.”
“So the question was asked, and presumably Yarnell gave him an answer to take back to his control officer. What then? Did it continue? I mean, did you give them more and more?”
“No,” Owens said. “It was time for the change.”
“For the next phase?” McGarvey prompted after a moment. Owens suddenly seemed less than eager to continue now that they had gotten this far. McGarvey lit them both another cigarette and then went into the kitchen, where he opened them each another beer. When he came back into the living room, the old man was sitting back in his overstuffed chair, his eyes closed. McGarvey stopped just inside the doorway and stared at the man. He could not see Owens’s chest rising or falling. For a terrible moment or so, he thought Owens was dead. But then the old man opened his eyes and looked over.
“I usually take a nap this time of the afternoon,” he apologized. “The beer and all makes me sleepy.”
“Go ahead,” McGarvey said, coming the rest of the way in and setting the beer down on the big oak coffee table. “I have plenty of time.”
Owens shook his head. “I’d just as soon go on. Get it over with.”
McGarvey figured what the old man meant was he wanted to finish the story so McGarvey would get the hell out of his house and leave him alone. It was just as well. McGarvey sat down and put his feet up.
“The next phase of the operation?” he prompted again.
“Darby wanted everything to be one hundred percent,” Owens picked it up. “He figured that the kid, no matter how good he and his control officer had become as a team, could not have passed over more than twenty-five or thirty percent of the material he had been given. It left a hell of a lot of fantastic misinformation rattling around in Innes’s head. Darby was crazy to get the entire bundle across. It was like fishing, he told me. ‘Getting nibbles is fun and all, watching the bobber going up and down gets the blood pumping, but I want the big strike, I want the bloody marlin, the sailfish, a whale.’ He changed his tactics from that point on. Sergeant Innes had been his pal, and now Darby set out to manufacture an enemy instead. It was something to watch how Darby used the same old charm, only now in reverse, to get the sergeant to understand that he was no longer trusted. It was subtle at first. So subtle, in fact, I don’t think Innes had any inkling for the first few weeks. But then we started to see it on the kid’s face, in the way he acted, in the things he said. Or didn’t say. I suspect he lost a lot of sleep in those days. I d
on’t think I could have taken it as long or as well as he did.”
“How did Yarnell manage to accomplish this, exactly?” McGarvey asked.
Owens shrugged. “It was nothing obvious at first. Darby just stopped sending some of the agency’s traffic through Innes. He began using some of the other operators. A few here and there at first, more and more as time went on.”
“He was counting on the other operators to mention it to Innes, I imagine. Make him think about it, worry about it.”
“Exactly,” Owens said. “And of course it worked. We all watched as Sergeant Innes disintegrated. That in itself wasn’t such a pretty sight.”
“But there was more.”
“Much more,” Owens said tiredly. “The most important parts were yet to come.”
The wind had started to blow in earnest now. McGarvey wondered if the return flight scheduled for eight that evening would be able to take off. Of course, if it did not, he could rent a car and drive back down to the city or stay in a motel here. Actually it did not matter one way or the other to him if he rested up here at this end or back in Washington. He had a feeling he knew what was coming in Owens’s story and what he would have to do about it ultimately, yet he wanted to stay to hear it to the end. And afterward, he wondered as he listened to the wind howl around the eaves … well, afterward he would just have to see.
“Did Sergeant Innes ever come to you or anyone other than Yarnell for advice or help?” McGarvey asked. “Did he ever once question why he was being cut off from the job he had been trained for and promoted to? For a year the kid was a superstar, now all of a sudden he’d developed a social disease.”
“He never said a word.”
“What about his mail to his wife? Was it monitored?”
“We opened his mail,” Owens said. “But he never mentioned a single thing about his work. Mostly he wrote about Moscow, the people, the weather, and the food—and about how much he missed her.”
“Not traitor talk,” McGarvey suggested gently, looking at his shoes.
“He was a cool customer. He was playing it close. I’d have done the same thing had I been in his place. At least I would have tried.”
McGarvey thought about himself and Kathleen in the early days. He’d never told his wife any secrets, of course, and yet a lot of his job had come home with him, had seeped into his relationship (enough to cause the divorce), seeped into his telephone calls when he was away, and into his letters, some of which had to be voluntarily censored. He was a professional. Sergeant Innes had supposedly begun as an amateur and had learned his tradecraft on the run from his Russian case officer. It did not make a lot of sense to McGarvey, the kid’s sudden professionalism, unless he was a cold fish after all, a young man with nerves of steel or without a conscience. But even then, when things apparently began to go sour at the embassy, he would have mentioned something in his letters, let some clue drop; at the very least he might hint to his wife that he no longer enjoyed Moscow, that he was homesick, that he was counting the days until he came home. An eighteen month assignment, Owens had said. By that time Sergeant Innes was getting to be a shorttimer. He said as much to Owens.
“Oh sure, by then Innes only had a few months to go. We discussed that very thing during our Monday planning sessions. It came down to two choices: either we could extend Innes, tack some extra time onto his assignment—which we figured would have made him and his case officer skittish—or we could push him into doing what Yarnell wanted from the beginning.”
“Which was?”
“For the kid to jump,” Owens said.
“Why?”
“To legitimize him, for one, and so that he would bring the rest of his disinformation over with him.”
They had their timetable then; it was some eighty-five or eighty-six days before Innes was to ship out. So Yarnell stepped up his efforts to convince the kid that his arrest was not only possible, but was indeed likely and imminent. More and more, Innes was isolated from the cryptographic section on little errands around the embassy. For two weeks he worked in the consular section processing visa applications. For nearly a month he worked keeping track of visiting American tourists of the VIP variety. Boring work for Innes.
The coup de grace came when Innes had barely a month to go. “Darby had made up this message to the DDO back at Langley. It was supposedly sent out over my signature. The flimsy was sitting on Darby’s desk when young Innes was brought upstairs. Darby contrived to have himself called out for a moment, leaving Innes plenty of time to go snooping and find the thing laying there out in the open. And we made sure he took the bait. Darby was watching from the next office through a peephole. He wasn’t going to go back in there until Innes read it. But it didn’t take very long, let me tell you. Of course, by that time Innes was getting pretty gun-shy. He was trying to cover his ass seven ways to Sunday. He picked up on that message within ten seconds of the moment Yarnell stepped out.”
“So he jumped,” McGarvey said.
“That night. I don’t know exactly how he did it on such short notice. Might have simply taken a bus over to the Lubyanka and knocked on the door. He may have had an emergency setup with his control officer. But by morning when he didn’t show up for work we knew he had gone over.”
“You mean to tell me after all of that you didn’t follow him to make sure?”
“Of course not, McGarvey. We were trying to legitimize him. If there had been so much as a hint of a tail on him, that night of all nights, and his Russian control officer had gotten wind of it, the jig would have been up. They would have shot him themselves.”
“What was your posture at the embassy?” McGarvey asked. “How was this handled, in the open I mean?”
“We went through all the moves, if that’s what you mean. Conducted our own little search, of course. Then we contacted the Moscow city militia, the police, and told them one of our people was missing, and that we suspected foul play. We had to go through the maneuvers. We had to make it seem as if we were worried about him and that his disappearance had come out of the blue.”
“What did that produce?”
“Nothing, not a damned thing,” Owens said. He was looking inward, his thoughts traveling backward in time. “It struck me as a little odd, though. That one aspect.” He looked up. “If the kid was going over, I would have thought he’d have asked for political asylum. The Russians would have made a big hoopla. They would have crowed about it. Shown him off on television. But there wasn’t a damned thing.”
“Maybe they weren’t so sure of him themselves.”
Owens nodded. “Darby suggested the same thing. Said we would have to continue making some noises, but that for the most part we were going to have to keep our mouths shut. He wanted us to go on an emergency footing, call in our field people across the entire Eastern Bloc because as soon as Innes started to talk in detail, the Russians would expect it of us.”
“Did we pull our people in?”
“No. Langley overruled that.”
“Was Yarnell angry?”
“Not angry, worried. He didn’t care who got the credit when something went right, or who got the blame if things fell apart, he just didn’t want to see any blood shed.” Owens saw the sudden intense look of incredulity on McGarvey’s face. “He didn’t want to see any innocent blood shed.”
“Was there?”
“No more than normal attrition. Innes only had bogus information for the most part.”
“What happened next?” McGarvey asked. Owens was beginning to wind down. McGarvey suspected that the story was nearly finished.
“We spent a few days looking as if we were licking our wounds, and then we began making serious noises about getting him back.”
“How?”
Owens chuckled. “I picked up the telephone and called the centre. Lubyanka. Identified myself and told them we wanted Sergeant Innes returned or we were going to make a very large stink. Kidnapping, since Innes had not yet asked for political asylum
.”
“You didn’t get through to anyone, did you?”
“No one important. But our message had been received. Their incomings, just like ours, are automatically taped. And the telephone numbers are no great secret. We figured by then that the Russians might be getting skeptical of the kid’s information. We wanted to make absolutely sure they believed him. If we treated him as if he were real, it would go a long way toward convincing them.”
“Did it work?”
“Not right off the bat. It did eventually, of course. We made enough noises so that the Russians finally agreed to a trade. Sergeant Innes for Yuri Suslev, a spy we had nicked in Washington four months earlier.” Owens seemed a little pale. The flush from the wind had faded. He got to his feet, stretched, and went to a window where he looked outside across the porch toward the rising waves pounding the beach below. There was a wistful set to his shoulders, as if he had gone as far with his story as he wanted to go because the telling had drawn him back to an earlier age when he was active. He had come face-to-face, via an unpleasant memory, with his own age.
McGarvey got to his feet, too, and threw another log on the fire, poking the dying flames to life. “Who was Innes’s control officer, did you ever find that out?”
“A young man, coincidentally the same one who had run CESTA,” Owens said.
McGarvey turned away from the fire to look at the old man. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gotten a little thin. “Baranov?” he asked.
Owens turned. “As a matter of fact, yes, that’s the one. A real sharp cookie. I suppose there was some kind of a vendetta between him and Yarnell for Mexico City. So Innes became a special case for both of them.”
19
It was nearly time to leave. There was little or no doubt in McGarvey’s mind what was coming next. Owens had come back to his chair so that he could be nearer to the fire. The wind in the flue sounded cold; it made the room a little smoky.
“Did you ever meet him? Baranov?” McGarvey asked.
Without Honor Page 19
