Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  “You’d need a really smart banker,” Clauson observed, a little too coolly. Irving surmised he had a candidate in mind.

  “Who is also a big guy and good actor,” the reporter said. “And willing to take some risks. He may have to fool some of the real sleeper’s relatives back in the old country before it’s over.”

  “Even the wife he left behind, if she’s alive. That may be quite a challenge.”

  “Aah, twenty years, people change, people forget.” That was a weakness in his plan, and Irving wanted to slip past it.

  “Who do you have in mind to impersonate the sleeper?”

  Irving turned the query back on the questioner. “Need your help on that. Maybe somebody you’ve dealt with before.” It would help to have one of the many global bankers who had done chores for the Agency, maybe on contract, to give this impersonation the coloration of legality in case some regulatory agency got too curious. Also, someone who had shown an inclination toward espionage; though Irving did not want to exaggerate the danger, things could get a little messy for the phony sleeper at the moment of confrontation. He waved himself off that worry; surely the ringer could be extricated in time, and he’d be the star of the story, be a hero to the banking world, make a bundle in psychic income lecturing on the basis of the best-seller. Irving knew a White House aide who would put the successful impersonator up for the Medal of Freedom. “Who’s your candidate for the job?”

  “You want a choice of three?”

  Irving could not see himself running around the country interviewing heavyset bankers six foot four or taller and spreading the story of a secret Russian controlling billions of dollars in assets of the defunct Communist Party. The Wall Street Journal would print the rumor in a week and the competition would be baying and treading all over the trail. He told the counterspy to recommend the best of the bunch.

  Clauson held half of a cinnamon-raisin bagel in front of his mouth, which Irving presumed was to absorb the sound, or prevent lip-reading from outside, or whatever other surveillance the spooks fantasized about. “I have a friend in the marble halls of 21st Street. Might have a suggestion.”

  Irving took a fast mental walk up and down 21st Street in the nation’s capital. Not the State Department, on 23rd. The F Street Club? Brick, and on 20th. Finally the quarter dropped: the Federal Reserve buildings, both white marble. As casually as he could, Irving said, “If the Fed doesn’t know a banker who could fill the bill, nobody does. When can I see him?”

  “My friend might not want to see you. But I can be your conduit.”

  Clauson was keeping control, the first element of counterintelligence tradecraft. “You think he’ll have a linebacker-banker on tap who’s a little hard of hearing?”

  “You can always fake a little deafness,” the CIA man replied, lowering the bagel.

  “What’s that you say?”

  MOSCOW

  The archivist had standing instructions to alert Nikolai Davidov, new chief of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, if anybody—no matter what the authorization, no matter how powerful the countersigner—asked for any of the files even remotely touching on Aleksandr Shelepin, or any of that former KGB chief’s relatives or intimates.

  He looked up from the requisition in his hand at the man and woman behind the counter. The aging fellow wore the jacket of what had been a uniform, now bereft of insignia, a sign of a Red Army veteran in dignified financial distress. The striking young woman with him, her dark hair chopped too short, might have been his daughter.

  “This requisition is in good order,” the archivist said in a friendly way. Davidov had ordered him to adopt a cooperative demeanor whenever this circumstance arose, as it had before. All who came were taken to the correct cabinet in the right room, were left alone, were secretly videotaped as they looked in vain and left in frustration. Their requisitions, along with a photocopy of their identity papers and a transcript of their visit conversation, created a new file in a cabinet upstairs labeled “Shelepin searchers.” That one was fattening nicely, into its fourth drawer in a second cabinet, but nobody except the Deputy Director himself and a few of the KGB old-timers had access to it. When the archivist dared to suggest that the file be one of those entered into the new computer, he had been told it was not intended for easy recall. He wondered why Shelepin, the apostle of deception and disinformation who had been ousted by the Khrushchev reformers, was suddenly of such interest, but the archivist knew better than to ask his superiors.

  “The purpose of your research?”

  “Family history,” the man said.

  “I think an uncle of mine may have been related by marriage to someone in the Shelepin family,” the young woman explained. “I am a television journalist. It might make an interesting reportage.”

  The archivist nodded encouragingly, as if accepting all that. Her identity papers, in which the requisition was folded, showed her to be a Latvian—but a Russian Latvian, one of the “near abroad,” those waiting to be made citizens of the broken-away republic. Her television station, if he recollected correctly, broadcast in Russian, and was probably unpopular with native Latvians, who wanted the Russian-speakers out. Yet she had a Latvian name: Liana Krumins.

  Rather than let his curiosity show, he waved over his assistant and told him to accompany them to the stacks. When the trio were out of earshot, the archivist turned on the taping system and brought the picture of his visitors up on his monitor.

  “Is this where the files have always been?” he could hear the woman with the chopped-short hair ask the attendant.

  “You are in Lubyanka,” the guide answered. “Up to three years ago the rooms on this floor were prison cells.”

  “This is where the torture went on?” the man in the civilianized uniform asked. The archivist turned from the monitor and reached for the man’s internal passport: Arkady Volkovich, sixty-six, Russian from St. Petersburg. The stamping showed he had been to Riga four times this year.

  “All you have heard is true,” the guide was saying to them. “This was the central spot for all the evil that was inflicted on the Soviet peoples for seventy years.”

  He opened the door to a cell and pointed, with perverse pride, to a wall with manacles still attached, an identifying sign beneath it. “It was felt that this was the most suitable place for the records of those years when the old KGB oppressed us. God knows, it’s secure enough.” Farther on, he touched another door: “This is where Wallenberg was executed. The Swedes were never told.”

  The archivist, watching from his station, switched to a camera in the room where searchers for these particular files were led. The man and young woman entered, were shown the drawer and given a work table. The guide said, “When you’re finished, call for me down the hall. Please be neat with the files, and bring what you want for photocopying. It’s five thousand rubles a page this month, or one dollar, or one mark. I should warn you, you may be searched afterward, because we don’t want to lose any original material.” He left them to the privacy of their monitored search.

  It seemed to the archivist, who had observed much idle rummaging since the files were half-opened to the public, that the man, who was leading the young woman through the search, knew the particular file he was looking for. He opened one drawer, checked the headings of the musty records, then went to another. In the third cabinet, he came across what he was apparently seeking, wrenched the file out of the tightly packed drawer, and placed it on the table. Before plunging in, the veteran looked at the three-inch-thick accordion-pleated file in its entirety.

  “It’s been sanitized,” he told the woman.

  “How can you tell?”

  He showed her the broken pleats that revealed an old file, once stuffed, now slimmed by gleaning; the strings that tied it were worn at their outer edges where they had once held the bulging contents. “But let’s go through it systematically,” Arkady said, emptying the contents on the table in an orderly fashion. “They may have missed a clue to the whereabou
ts of the son.”

  After turning over each page, he handed it to the young woman, who tidily replaced it in the folder. He stopped at a newspaper clipping. “The obituary of Shelepin’s brother. Make a list of these survivors.” She started to write down the names, but he stopped her. He shook his head in wonderment. “Must have been a hundred people go through this file, but they didn’t know how to look for the boy. Here—take this and this, and this, for the photocopier.”

  “Not the clipping? I want the clipping.”

  “Can’t draw attention to it.” He held it for a moment, apparently weighing the risks in stealing it. The archivist, watching the monitor screen, hoped he would, but the man returned it to the folder. “Now, do we dare ask for the file on—” He dropped his voice, lest the room was bugged, but the archivist could read his lips forming a “B.”

  “We’re here, why not?” The young woman was impulsive, perhaps daring; the observing archivist hoped it would lead her into trouble. “They can’t put us in jail for asking. It’s not as if he’s a nonperson anymore. This is not the old days.”

  “It’s not the new days either. You ask them,” he said, “after I leave. You’re the journalist.”

  RIGA, LATVIA

  The man in the khaki jacket with the insignia removed, Arkady Volkovich, insisted to his superiors in the Feliks organizatsiya that he had not made a mistake in letting Liana Krumins press ahead to the next file.

  “She is a journalist, a real one. It is not a cover,” Arkady explained. “I gave her a name to look up. Following it to the next file was the natural thing for her to do.”

  “Did it alert the archivist?” The question came from a former high official in the KGB, ousted as soon as the Yeltsin reformers took over, who had found a hard-liner’s home in the Feliks organization’s power goals and investigative techniques.

  “If it did, he gave no sign.” As Liana had gone off with the guide to the next filing room, Arkady had chatted up the apparatchik in charge, a drone more interested in his television set than his work. The Red Army veteran had told the archivist the file had been picked apart over the years and contained little of family interest. But the woman was a reporter, he added, and had to impress everyone with her thoroughness. Chopped her hair short to look like a man; never any makeup, not even to cover a pimple; furrowed brow, pursed lips—you know how they get. The archivist had acknowledged that with a grunt and presented no bureaucratic obstacles to Liana Krumins’s quest for the file on the survivor at Shelepin’s brother’s funeral.

  A heavyset woman with iron-gray hair at the middle of the table wanted to know what had happened after Arkady left Liana behind at Lubyanka. She spoke with authority. The veteran saw how everyone in the stark basement room, including the former high official of the KGB, deferred to her.

  “I waited across the square, as she and I had agreed,” he began. “At the bazaar where the Kazakhs sell their copper pots and pans. After about an hour and a half, she came out. You can’t cross the square because of the traffic going around the pedestal, so she turned left and walked down Mysnitskaya Ulitsa to the bookstore.”

  “Was she followed?”

  “No, Madame Nina. I would have seen.”

  “Were you followed?”

  “If so, they were very good.” The sauciness of that remark did not seem to please the woman at the center. Her impassive cross-examination troubled him. He knew her only by her first name, which was a diminutive at that; her hair was drawn back in a tight bun. In a matronly dress and a heavy cardigan sweater, she peered at him through thick glasses.

  Arkady was not fearful of the former KGB man, or of the Chechen hooligan with the assault weapon standing against the wall. As a courier in various branches of Internal Security, he had come across more than his share of those. But Madame Nina gave him the impression she could see through him, which troubled a man with much to hide.

  He had learned that after the breakup of the Bratsky Krug, or Circle of Brothers, in the early 1990s, a new criminal politburo had been formed. Seven avtoritety, authorities, controlled the major population centers from Petersburg to Vladivostok, each with its representatives from the new capitalist mafiya, the old vory underworld, the former KGB, the Caucasian enforcers. The summit meetings of the inner avtoritet were held in Riga, capital of newly free Latvia, out of reach of the new KGB and with easy air access to the West.

  All this heralded the post-communist era of institutionalized corruption, but Madame Nina’s presence gave an old-Soviet Lubyanka quality to every meeting of the organization. Arkady tried again, this time with no hint of disrespect. “She was the one who pushed on to asking for the Berensky file. I don’t think either of us was followed afterward. These days they don’t have so many people to follow everybody around.”

  “You are certain of that.”

  She evidently didn’t believe him; he knew better than to profess his loyalty, because that would further erode his credibility. “There was ice and snow that night all over the sidewalks outside Lubyanka,” he offered. “In the old days of the KGB, there was not a snowflake that fell that was not swept away immediately, from the front door all the way past the bookshop down to the all-night café for the drivers. But the sign on the door now says ‘Federal Security Ministry’ and it seems the new KGB doesn’t have the budget anymore to sweep the street or follow every suspect. I doubled back to see if any tracks in the snow had followed hers. She was not followed.”

  “And after she came out of Lubyanka, when you made contact again with our journalist asset,” the woman with the pale, hard face asked, “what did she report?”

  That was the difficult part for Arkady. “She had been told there was some trouble getting the Berensky family dossier, Madame Nina. They told her it might have been misfiled in the transfer of papers. She did not see it.”

  “Does that sound plausible to you?”

  He had to be careful here. “No. I suppose the archivist wanted to send the file she requested to Nikolai Davidov first. She said they told her to come back in a week.”

  Madame Nina waited. When he added nothing, she asked, “To be told that took her an hour and a half inside?”

  “That worried me, too, Madame. This Krumins girl is not one of us, of course. I do not know why she was chosen to help us in the search for Berensky.” At Madame Nina’s glare, he added hastily, “Nor do I have any need to know. But her purpose is not our purpose. She is in this only to feed the curiosity of her television viewers.”

  “Our purposes run parallel,” the woman in authority said, “at least for now. Is she aware of the risk to herself in this search?”

  To Arkady, who had come to admire Liana Krumins, that was the maddening part. “She has no way of knowing she is running any risk at all. We led her to a story about a missing agent for her television program, and now she assumes she is off on her own. That is how journalists think.”

  He would not say so, but he had begun to worry about the short-haired young woman’s safety. Liana was independent-minded. She had sided with the Latvians against the Russians before independence, which had taken great courage and had cost her time in jail; then she had sided with the Russians on human-rights grounds when the Latvians tried to push Stalin’s colonialists out. Liana’s politics were passionately against whatever was the popular grain; soon after Independence Day, her intensity in front of a camera and her willingness to touch on controversy had made her the most avidly watched television reporter in Riga. She seemed to relish taking risks on the air, much as she had put her own freedom at risk when the Baltics were under Soviet rule. Arkady suspected there was more danger to her in pursuing this story than he or she knew.

  The Feliks people’s idea—which Arkady considered a sound one, given her journalist’s credentials—was to set her on the sleeper’s trail and then follow her. But the avtoritet had no guarantee she would let them follow. Nor could the Feliks people be sure that the new men at the KGB would not follow her, too.

&
nbsp; Arkady had picked up a rumor that of all those searching for the sleeper, Liana Krumins of Riga television would be the one that the unknown spy would choose to contact. He did not know why and was too cautious to ask; he was not yet among the most trusted. It was unfortunate that the inquisitive young woman did not know the risk she was running, perhaps acting as both hound and bait, but she struck him as someone who if she knew would probably run the risk anyway.

  Madame Nina seemed to read his thoughts: “Does she suspect why she was chosen to be given this information?”

  “I guess she thinks we think she is a good investigator.” That was safe to say. He would ask nothing further about the organization’s interest in her but would keep his ears open. It would be interesting and perhaps profitable to learn why she, of all the journalists in the former Soviet republics, had been selected by the Feliks people to lead the search back to Berensky in his American identity.

  Over a beer in the little all-night café down the street from Lubyanka, Arkady had told Liana to stay in close touch with her initial contact—himself—and urged her not to trust others among the Feliks people or to go off on her own. He hoped she had taken his advice to heart. The veteran in the demilitarized jacket said nothing to the committee of this unauthorized warning. He found Madame Nina to be more menacing, in her command presence and her ingrained doubt about those she interrogated, than most of the security apparatchiks had been in the old days.

  After informing Arkady that someone else would follow Liana back to Lubyanka next week, the impassive woman at the center of the table formally dismissed him. Arkady suspected that Madame Nina, first among equals in the tightening alliance of old apparatchiks and new capitalists, of resentful nationalists and outright gangsters, did not trust anyone to associate with Liana Krumins for too long.