Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  The Russian stood, taking that as an insult. “Some operations will never be for sale,” he said. But he knew the literary middleman could be useful. “On the other hand, we might be able to come up with a revelation or two that causes the world to say—to react in the way you want.”

  The agent went to the window for a last look at the empty pedestal in the square that had returned to its pre-Soviet name. “Who do you suppose they’re going to put on that pedestal now?”

  “Nobody,” Davidov said firmly. “I spoke to the head of the First Chief Directorate himself about it this morning because some churchmen had a plan afoot to put an Orthodox cross there. We’re going to cart away the pedestal and plant flowers.”

  “Some pretty terrible things must have taken place right here,” Ace observed, his mood shifting perceptibly.

  “Mainly against Russians. We are not proud of those terrible times at all.” Davidov’s new office, on the square, was provided to him mainly for show; its location in downtown Moscow, its view of the Kremlin, and its marrow-chilling history of atrocities especially impressed foreign visitors. He did his real work “in the woods,” as the headquarters at Yasenovo, in a park beyond the outer ring road, was called. Davidov sensed that the American was coming around to the central purpose of his visit.

  The literary agent, channel to publishers in the West, contemplated the line of Kazakh vendors selling food and souvenirs in the square below, now renamed Lubyanka; Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s memory was being expunged from the city in every way possible.

  “If you run into any of Feliks’s people,” Ace McFarland said in a low voice that would be difficult for recorders to pick up, “I have a client who happens to be a great reporter.”

  Davidov said nothing to indicate he caught a reference to the Feliks people. He awaited the follow-up probe.

  “This fellow is not asleep,” the agent said, accentuating the last word. “Irving Fein is his name, the great reporter—you may have heard of him.”

  Davidov took that to be an oblique allusion to a sleeper agent. Though his heartbeat sped, he chose to ignore that probe as well. He wondered who McFarland represented in this and how much the client knew, but was not about to ask, in a room where their conversation could be so easily monitored by some of his colleagues who did not wish him well. He nodded a polite goodbye.

  “Irving’s good,” Ace put in, all innocence. “Never sleeps on the job. You ought to meet him.”

  The directorate chief escorted his visitor to the anteroom and turned him over to the tour guide for a look at the old cells.

  NEW YORK

  The smoked-glass walls of the Park Avenue reception room of “M. McFarland, Literary Representation” reflected the black looks of authors kept waiting.

  Irving Fein picked up, looked over, and put down each of the recent best-sellers of Ace’s clients that were spread all over the huge coffee table. He fidgeted at the wait and burned at the undeserved success of the formula freaks. Romances by hacks with slavish “followings” cozied up to how- to books by quack cosmetologists; musings of charlatan shrinks nestled among memoirs of former Presidents on paper that “bulked up” to doorstop thickness, leaning against horror novels that raced their screenplays to the public view.

  All those books, with the exception of the slim volumes of suicidal poetry by soulful wastrels that Ace took on as clients for the cachet, had what none of Irving Fein’s books ever had: “legs.”

  “Legs” were the result of the driving force of prose narrative and televisable personality that made a published product march smartly off the shelf into the buyer’s arms. Irving took from the table a spy novel by a guy he knew who used to be a good reporter and put it in his briefcase, as beat-up and disheveled as its owner. He felt no guilt at stealing a book; Ace probably had cartons of them.

  He squinted at himself in the expensively darkened glass and saw a raging flop d’estime. For a journalist who had started out so fast—a Pulitzer before he was thirty for a newspaper series on terrorists, a near miss on a National Book Award for his worst-selling tome on arms merchants—Irving Fein found himself kicking around the media, respected by peers but seen as trouble by editors, potent in print but unable to capitalize on what he wrote by touting it effectively on television. Maximum energy, zero synergy. His sources, secure in his protection, had stuck with him; no reporter alive had better-placed, more trusting sources, developed over years of manipulator-manipulatee symbiosis. But editors, younger and more remotely British every year, were slower to return his calls.

  Fein laid what he considered his personal curse on all of them—they should get beaten to a big story by a talk-show host with deep pockets. He reserved a special spot in his Media Hell for the tight-assed bookers of the television news-feature shows whose airy decisions about panelists and guests made all the difference in getting lucrative lecture dates. These well-bred young nepots—Irving was certain they were all related to big shots somewhere—kept telling him he had a “hot-personality” problem. Why was that? he asked himself, because the answer pleased him: the reason Fein came across as permanently angry was that he knew so much about what he knew, he found it hard to edit himself down to a zingy sound bite. That was why the roundtable shows shunned him. “When you go on,” one of the TV types had instructed him, “you mustn’t go on and on.”

  The media world was a year-round garden party, which was fine for the vendors of strawberries and cream but was hell for someone known to be the perennial skunk at the garden party. Whatever Fein wrote made the media-certified good guys look bad, which caused all sorts of media self-flagellation and earned him dirty looks from the clean and wholesome. Why was this? he asked himself in a long-running internal dialogue. He was ready with the answer: His stories were replete with villains and hypocrites, hollow hotshots and moral cowards, but never any heroes. Readers liked heroes, or at least villains with redeeming features, but this reporter made his targets look bad clear through.

  Irving Fein, resolutely independent operative, a free man with his own lance, could poke his head into any newsroom in town or bureau in Washington and get a wary welcome, but it had been a long time since he had had a major score, and everyone knew it.

  Now he had a lead on a big one. Like an oenologist sniffing an uncharted vintage before the first cases of wine got off the boat, Fein felt the thrill of knowing he was the first to tell that this one would develop mightily in time.

  The week before, he had received a blind tip on his answering machine about “the Feliks people” in Russia searching for a sleeper spy operating in America. He had tried this slim lead on a counterterrorism source at the CIA: Walter Clauson, last of the crowd brought in more than a generation before by the Agency’s legendary molehunter, James Jesus Angleton. Clauson had survived the Halloween Massacre of CIA hard-liners in the Carter years as well as the more recent post-Ames purge.

  “Mr. Clauson, this is Irving Fein. You’ve probably been reading my series on the Agency.”

  “I don’t like to get calls at home this early, Mr. Fein. Perhaps you can call me later at Langley.”

  Irving knew he had to get it all out in one breath. “I’m told you’re the one who tried to talk the FBI out of investigating the U.S. banker in Nairobi who was fronting for Iran in the Libyan tanker deal.”

  Clauson had slammed down the phone. Irving counted to twenty-six, his lucky number, and redialed; at the opening expostulation, he said, “Don’t hang up, I have something you want to know.” That usually stopped the intelligence types. “First I want you to know I respect you. It takes a lot of guts to hang up on Irving Fein, knowing what I can do to your career at the Company, and my hat is off to you.”

  He let the guy apologize at that point for having been testy at being awakened with an accusation of malfeasance. “Next let me tell you something you may or may not know: not everybody in the little house on F Street wishes you well.” The F Street property was a few steps from the Old Executive Office Building,
near the White House, where Bill Casey, as Director of Central Intelligence, had liked to hole up in the Reagan era. Fein assumed Clauson was working at the F Street building, and if his guess was off, no harm done, because most of the spooks at the Langley headquarters in Virginia thought the presidential ass-kissers of the F Street gang were undermining the cause of unpoliticized intelligence estimates.

  To the no-longer-sleepy counterspy’s izzatso, Fein responded: “I’d go further—these guys were on the phone to me this morning stabbing you in the back about—” He flicked the button in the phone cradle rapidly to break up his voice and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking this way. How about a cup of coffee at the Mayflower in an hour?”

  The reporter knew his spook had been hooked. Like most other bureaucrats, deskbound spymasters suspected some other department competing for their budget was dumping on their work. The suggested meeting time was too soon to set up serious surveillance, in case Clauson thought his phone was tapped and he would have to mislead the sweat merchants at his next scheduled fluttering.

  They designated a spot and met. Fein trolled at first with a sampling of all he knew about CIA politics, especially a deal between the new Director of Central Intelligence and the Justice Department to turn all the rest of counterintelligence over to the FBI. Nothing spooked the old spooks more than the thought of losing the counterspy operation worldwide to another agency.

  Then Irving did some serious fishing. The Russian mafiya—with a y, distinct from the Sicilian variety—was well known and its ties to officialdom had been long suspected, but who were “the Feliks people”? And what was this about their search for a lost or defected agent in America, who supposedly had the key to some vast fortune?

  All the reporter had to start with was the blind tip about a “sleeper”—an agent planted in America by the KGB long ago and never activated—plus a notion that it had to do with serious money being socked away for later Russian use. No more than the outline of a story, devoid of detail. The voice-mail message told him to contact “one of the old Angleton types” at the Agency to find out more, which pretty much narrowed the field down to Walter Clauson. Irving Fein acted as if he knew much more, of course; he was aware that spooks always preferred to confirm or amplify rather than to hand over something new.

  He got little out of Clauson; the man was a pro, searching to find out how much the reporter knew, trading his ability to confirm for the revelation of what cards the reporter held in his hand. Irving bluffed, pretending to withhold information about what he knew lest Clauson pass that along to a friendlier reporter, more easily controllable.

  He waited for questions from the CIA man, and derived a little nourishment from the counterspy’s probe about who in the Agency had suggested that Clauson might be knowledgeable about a sleeper agent. That could mean that Clauson could not be sure of containing the story within the Agency, or it could mean Clauson had told one of his agents to tip Fein and was being smart now in covering that up. Of those two possibilities, Irving was inclined to believe the first—that Clauson did not know Irving’s initial source, a disembodied voice with no credibility at all. If that judgment was correct, then it followed that Clauson was willing to engage with Fein for a good reason: to control, contain, or at least monitor the reporter’s investigation.

  That’s what Bill Casey had done with Bob Woodward, at least at the start, but the reporter had later prevailed on the superspook to open up more. Then Woodward had parlayed leads dug out of Casey into detailed responses from others in the Agency who didn’t like the Director. The trick was to fool the would-be container of the story, and Irving Fein was certain he now played that game better than anybody. Just to begin to play it again gave him his much-needed news hit—that rush of hunger to the heart piqued by the scent of an exclusive that would peel the onion of post–Cold War espionage down to where the tears were.

  Clicking high heels snapped the ruminating Fein back to the present. He was in a superagent’s reception room, not on a park bench trying to milk an intelligence official.

  The woman had a familiar face, atop a long, endangered-species coat, followed by a couple of breathless sycophants. She appeared in the dark mirror, on the way to the elevator. He swung his eyes over from the referent to the real thing—a woman with almost regular features and hair that was so naturally sandy-blond and casually combed it had to have taken hours to create. Fein almost said, “Don’t I know you?”—which meant she was a television regular, not an anchorperson but a featured performer, and he remembered that he liked this one. She seemed to have a measure of gravitas on the air, some crispness of assurance that other pretty faces lacked. The name escaped him; she was still a personality, not yet a celebrity—a face, not yet a name.

  Standing at the elevator, she jabbed compulsively at the button already lit; she looked back at him with eyes that struck the reporter slumped on the couch as registering a lack of interest bordering on distaste.

  Fuck you too, lady, and the horse you rode in on, he said to himself. Irving determined that his first question to her, if she came over to him and tried to make conversation, would be “Do you have any idea how many leopards, the fastest animal alive in a short dash, died to make that coat that some network muckeymuck probably paid for?” That would not merely wipe off the expression of mild disdain but rattle her teeth, which he judged too perfect not to be capped.

  His opportunity did not arise. The elevator arrived and the young woman and her retinue marched into it. Not so young, reckoned Irving; mid-thirtyish. On second thought, to those who are late-fortyish, mid-thirtyish is young; mid-thirtyish is what people who called themselves thirtysomething wished they were. His spirits sunk further. She was not too young for that coat, which she probably paid for herself, because performers in that business pulled down ten times what they were worth as journalists. So what if it was a leopard? He didn’t like cats.

  The nickel dropped; actually, it was a quarter now. Her name was Viveca something; he could hear a voice saying, “Newsbreak, Viveca something reporting.”

  “Saw Viveca out there,” he told never-call-me-Ace when he finally got into the agent’s office. “Good kid. She could make it.”

  “You know her?” At Irving’s shrug, McFarland assumed a worried-about-my-client pose. “I worry about that girl. So much talent, such a great future, yet so vulnerable.”

  She hadn’t seemed so vulnerable to the reporter. “Armor-plated” would have been his choice of an adjective. “You going into television agenting, Matt? At your age?”

  “I will soon be an octogenarian,” said the agent with pride, contemplating his well-shined shoes, placed on the footstool because his feet did not reach the floor. Fein thought of buying him a set of spats, if they still made spats; that would fit the image Ace cultivated of the intellectual dandy. “But no, like the proverbial shoemaker, I will stick to my last, that of literary representative. I lived by the written word, I will die enhancing the value of the written word.”

  “So what’s with you and Miss Talking Head?”

  “As you might deduce, intrepid investigator that you are, Viveca Farr is considering writing a book. I am encouraging her. A substantive book would add depth to her reputation as a newsperson. It would dissuade journalists like yourself, Irving, from thinking of her as just another pretty face.”

  A title for her book leaped to the reporter’s mind—Dancing on the Glass Ceiling—but he had his own fish to fry and didn’t want to waste time on someone else’s. He drew his chair close to Ace and lowered his voice. “You got into Lubyanka? Did you see the new guy, Davidov?”

  “The chief of the Fifth Directorate received me, yes. He is interested in using my services in bringing some of the files to public view.”

  “Did he offer any hot stuff—moles, traitors, real news? The Second Man?”

  Ace shook his head. “So far all that’s on the table is stale historical files. The only surprise was the man himself. Never thought someone so h
igh up in Russian security would be such a combination of intellectual and matinee idol.”

  “But a goniff at heart. You gave him the little zinger about the Feliks people?”

  “I did, in precisely the words you suggested. ‘If you run into any of Feliks’s people,’ I said, ‘I have a client who happens to be a great reporter.’ ”

  “And how did he react to that?”

  “No reaction. Stone face.”

  “Balls!” Irving got up and started pacing, smacking the walls in the space between famous clients’ pictures. “You used the word ‘asleep’?”

  “Yes, as you instructed. ‘This fellow is not asleep,’ I said about you. Again no reaction. Then again, ‘Never sleeps on the job.’ Frankly, it sounded a bit heavy-handed, saying it twice.”

  “And he didn’t rise to it? Not even a flicker?”

  “I don’t know if the Russians have a word for ‘poker face,’ but that was his expression.”

  Irving stopped abruptly as a thought began to form. “Absolutely no reaction is a reaction. If he knew nothing about the friends of Feliks, the KGB man would have said something like ‘sure’ or ‘maybe, one of these days.’ But if Davidov just went blank, then he’s hiding what he knows about them, and maybe about a sleeper.” He drew back his lips in a kind of smile. “Lousy poker player. Doesn’t belong in that job.”

  “Perhaps I could be of greater assistance, Irving, if you took me into your confidence. I am aware only that ‘Iron Feliks’ Dzerzhinsky was a presence that struck fear into Russians right up to our times. When freedom came to Moscow, his statue was ripped off the pedestal in the square in front of the former prison. You have not vouchsafed to me the significance of ‘Feliks’s friends,’ or of the need to impress the KGB with your lack of sleep.”

  “Ah, the old vouchsafecracker at work.” Irving put out of his mind Ace’s inability so far to get him a decent book contract. “Can’t tell you yet. But now I can go back to my sources—having put a probe right into that goddam yellow building—and gotten a panicked reaction from the smoothie who’s fronting for them.”