Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  That was the truth as far as it directly affected each of them and their organizations; her separate activity with her husband in Riga to get a cut of the fortune was strictly the private business of the von Schwebels.

  She heard the public address system voice in Finnish and told them coldly, “They are calling the Riga flight. Because your two agencies have decided to work together, you have been able to force me to betray two men I deeply respect. I have given you Walter Clauson, one of the great minds in espionage, and Mort Speigal, who has become my good friend. I hope you are satisfied.”

  “I presume you intend to warn them they have been compromised,” said Davidov. “Do not.”

  “They have no place to run to,” Fein added. “I will conduct their interrogation and we will see how much of what you told us is true.”

  She picked up her pocketbook and pulled her rollaway bag out into the corridor without a bon voyage. They had squeezed her hard, and she had been forced to reveal much, because the combination of KGB and CIA interrogators was like a nutcracker on a double agent. At least they did not associate her with the death of the private banker in Bern.

  She wondered if she should try to get a message to the sleeper; perhaps Berensky/Dominick could warn Clauson and Speigal, or put them out of their misery.

  “Class act,” said Irving.

  “Lies with a nice intricacy,” Davidov replied, “like a fine oriental rug.”

  “You ever tie into that, Niko?”

  The context made the American’s colloquial meaning clear, and Davidov replied obliquely, “We were friends once.” Not so; Finns were tough for Russians, even as fellow agents; he had tried to breach that Mannerheim Line and been thrown back with such adroitness and good humor that he was unsure to this day if he had been permanently rejected. “The man who has dominated her life has been the sleeper, and it is difficult to imagine they dealt with each other only from afar. I would put that on your dunno sheet, along with the true identity of the sleeper.”

  “Lookit, I understand if you don’t trust me. I gave you a bum steer on Dominick last time. I have since found out from Viveca that my boy Eddie is damn well Berensky, and I was a horse’s ass.”

  To confirm his suspicion about Berensky’s self-impersonation had been Davidov’s purpose in providing Irving with the address in Arizona so valuable to him. “How did Viveca find out?”

  “The hard way. Nibbled the wrong ear.”

  A slipup at an intimate moment; Davidov was surprised that the sleeper had let himself get caught that way. “At least he didn’t kill her, the way he did Clauson.” The death of the CIA official had not been announced, and apparently Sirkka thought he was still alive, but Davidov’s Washington sources were alert. “I liked the way you let Sirkka continue to believe Clauson is among the living.” He concluded his compliment with “Even if you had to confirm you are a CIA operative.”

  “Confirm, conshmirm. Believe what you like.”

  “I take it that Speigal is also no longer working for Russian Foreign Intelligence.”

  “No freebies,” said Fein. “You got something to trade? Like—was Clauson really a Soviet mole in the CIA? Or is Sirkka von Schwebel making it all up?”

  “Walter Clauson was a KGB mole in the CIA for more than twenty years until Berensky killed him last month.”

  Long, head-in-hands take by the reporter. “Twenty years. Then he fooled Angleton, even. Our own little Philby.”

  “He fooled you, too?”

  “Suckered me to a fare-thee-well. I came to Clauson, a pretty good source over the years, with a lead on the sleeper story. Who knew he was a mole? And not your run-of-the-mill mole, but one who had gone into business with the sleeper in a little private project to rip off the whole world?” Irving looked slightly ill as the extent and import of his gullibility sank in. “So when I gave him my great idea for an impersonator, he protected his operation by sending me to the sleeper himself. They had total control.”

  “Don’t flagellate yourself,” Davidov told him, tending to believe his story. “It happened to be the luck of the world’s greatest reporter to have as a source the world’s greatest double agent, who happened to be in business with the world’s greatest sleeper agent. Of course they penetrated your operation and turned you without your knowing it. It was second nature to Clauson. And Berensky has been a splendid actor all his life.”

  “Gotta find out why Dominick—Berensky, that is—killed old Walt. That’s a loose end.”

  “A fundamental difference in motivation, of course.” Davidov enjoyed being the instructor’s instructor; the world of rational journalism could never keep pace with the world of empiric espionage in epistemological constructs. “Clauson set up the rogue operation for the straightforward purpose of making an enormous fortune, to be shared with the sleeper, with a small percentage to Speigal and Sirkka. But Berensky was in the plot to assemble a fortune for a political purpose and to justify his life’s work. The essential interests of the two men were in conflict from the start. In the end, one had to kill the other.”

  “Yeah, but Clauson was the go-between for leaks from the Fed. Berensky didn’t know Mort Speigal from Adam. Clauson was the cutout, which was his life insurance policy.”

  Davidov made a guess. “There came a moment when Berensky made a direct connection to Sirkka, and through her closed his circuit to the mole at the Fed, Speigal. At that moment, Clauson was a dead man.”

  “You’re only guessing,” said Fein, “but you’re a good guesser. When I get back to Langley, I’m going to have a little chat with the DCI and maybe arrange for her rapid retirement.”

  “Too bad. You respect Dorothy Barclay, I take it.”

  “Lookit. I know it looks like I am in the CIA’s pocket on this, and they jerked me around pretty good, but I’m not an agent or an asset. I was hooked in by Clauson.”

  “How did he hook you?”

  Irving gave that some thought. “The blind tip that started me on this, left on my message machine. Said I should check with one of the old Angleton types. That drew me to Clauson, because he was the only logical one I’d call. He sent me that tip, to get me to call him. I was suckered.”

  “That is believable.”

  “It doesn’t mean there’s no wall between spooks and reporters. Do you believe me about that, too?”

  “I do.”

  Fein squinted at him. “Why?”

  “I am, as your dossier on me explains, an epistemic logician. Your employment by the CIA makes so much logical sense that it becomes illogical. Real life is rarely so symmetrical.”

  “Cut the shit, Niko. Why do you believe me?”

  “Because I am not authorized to deal with the CIA directly on this matter. But the Chief Directorate authorized me to deal with the press. By accepting your protestations that you are a pure journalist, not a CIA agent or asset, I protect my bureaucratic position back home.” If anything would have the ring of truth to it, that would.

  Davidov listened to the airport loudspeaker making a last call for the plane to Riga. “This has become a conversation all in Column B, for your benefit,” he said. “Now for me—what’s become of Mortimer Speigal?” He suspected the FBI had caught the Fed mole and the CIA was blocking a prosecution in the hope of turning him. Davidov could not allow his newly expanded economic counterintelligence unit to appear to be misled by disinformation.

  “I shook him up with a few questions,” Fein replied, “and he blew his head off with his handy-dandy .38. Didn’t like publicity or something. Then I changed his message to Sirkka from a buy to a sell. I thought that would cost Berensky a bundle, but the Fed Chairman changed his mind at the last minute and so the message I sent along made megabucks. Gigabucks.”

  That was like a shortwave burst from an agent behind the lines. Davidov permitted himself to blink. After he separated out its dramatic components, the Russian considered the implications of Fein’s revelation. With Speigal dead, and Sirkka blocked, and his cutout Cla
uson removed, Berensky was cornered. Very rich and thus powerful, the sleeper was no longer anonymous and no longer the possessor of the infallible crystal ball. The flushed-out spy would have to make his decision and cast his lot with either Moscow or the mafiya right away.

  The KGB man judged that illumination by the reporter to be a fair return on his investment in Irving of the information about Clauson’s molehood. “What bothers me,” Davidov said to his fellow traveler on the journey to the fortune, “is that Berensky now has a clear field in Riga. All he has to do is prove to Madame Nina’s politburo that he is who he is, and show good faith by turning over a sample of his assets. Then he’ll be able to take over the major criminal authorities in Russia and most of the near abroad, along with a large part of the KGB and Foreign Intelligence. And if he promises to pay the army veterans a pension with a piece of his billions, Berensky could move right into the Kremlin.”

  “I say we accompany Sirkka to Riga.”

  Davidov produced two tickets. “That has been my plan.”

  He had no plan, only several options dependent on the sleeper’s state of mind, which he hoped was undecided. Perhaps he could appeal to the practical side of Berensky’s patriotism, advocating the investment in a vital capitalist infrastructure. Or there might be a way of driving a wedge between Madame Nina and Berensky, assuming a natural rivalry for the leadership of the Feliks people. Failing that, Colonel Nikolai Andreyevich Davidov had been invested from the start with the authority to terminate the longtime KGB sleeper operation with what the Americans once were said to call “extreme prejudice,” a nice euphemism for execution. The best outcome of his quest was to return the fortune to the treasury of the legitimate Russian government; the fallback goal was to deny it, at any cost, to the force that would use its vast resources to oust the present government and perhaps destabilize the world.

  They nodded cheerfully to a surprised Sirkka on the plane and squeezed into a pair of seats three rows behind her.

  Irving, fastening his belt, startled him with “You got the hots for Liana, huh?” Davidov did not react, which did not stop his seatmate. “Lemme give you some advice. She’s a reporter. You ever have the hots for a girl reporter before?”

  “No,” the KGB man replied, careful to give little away. “I have never had the hots for a woman journalist.”

  “You can insult ’em, you can run ’em ragged, you can browbeat ’em, you can steal ’em blind. They lap it up, makes ’em feel like one of the guys.” He wriggled around. “How do these commie seat belts work?”

  Davidov reached over and clicked the Russian-made buckle into place. When Irving seemed to lose his train of thought, Davidov said, “They lap it up.”

  “Yeah. But double-cross ’em on a story and you’re a shit in their eyes for the rest of your life. And they’ll keep after you till they run you into the ground. Now here we are, you and I, with the knowledge that Liana is the sleeper’s daughter, which she doesn’t know.”

  “And we are now certain that the sleeper is Edward Dominick, which she also does not know.”

  “She’s gonna find out pretty soon, maybe from her pappy himself, because she’s hungry, like a reporter has to be. And then it’ll hit Liana that we knew all along and didn’t tell her. That’s gonna piss her off at me—which is too bad, I like the kid—but it’s gonna knock you clean out of the ring, if you get what I mean.”

  “I take your point,” Davidov said, familiar with the boxing metaphor. He resolved to inform Liana at the first opportunity, or at least to use the sleeper’s daughter in such a way as not to let her think he had betrayed her trust, such as it was. “From your generous advice, I take it that your own hots are directed to the woman in Arizona.”

  “That murdering sumbitch loverboy Dominick broke her spirit, that and the way everybody in her miserable fucking world of backstabbing bastards piled on.” He concluded his outburst with a sigh. “No family loyalty, the way print reporters have, or used to. I think about Viveca a lot. I think about her all the time, for crissake.”

  Davidov, who still discounted much of what Fein had said, and had been unable to get an explanation of the “fireflies” reference out of him, detected a note of sincerity in that. He would have felt sympathy for the man defeated for the affection of his beloved by a skilled seducer, were it not for his rage at Fein’s almost casual conquest of the woman Davidov thought about constantly. “Surely Viveca Farr was encouraged by your visit.”

  “When I tried to tell her to cheer up, she went into a deep funk. Here’s some good advice about handling depressed women, Niko: never tell ’em to cheer up. Never offer a smidgin of optimism, because they take that as proof you despise their beloved despair.”

  “Maybe she isn’t cut out for the reporting busines,” Davidov offered.

  “She’s not. Not everybody is. But she’s still entitled to a life.” His head back and eyes closed to take a nap, the American asked out of the blue, yawning: “Was Nosenko a dangle?”

  Davidov recalled what he had read about that defection of thirty years ago. CIA counterintelligence worried that Yuri Nosenko had been sent over as a false defector to reassure the Americans that the KGB had had no part in the Kennedy assassination. Davidov had pulled that file out for possible sale before being visited by Ace McFarland in Moscow; in it was a statement that of all defectors, the one Director Andropov most wanted to see dead was Nosenko. Now, that would suggest that Nosenko was a real defector, handing over damaging information about the KGB; but the other possibility was that he was a successful dangle and the KGB Director was worried he might someday be broken. Such limits to certainty were at the heart of epistemology, mankind’s sustained attempt to push the envelope of knowledge about knowledge.

  “No freebies,” the KGB man parroted. A few minutes later, as Irving began to snore, Nikolai said, “The files contain proof that Nosenko was a real defector, not a dangle.” He could not be sure that Irving’s snoring was not a deception, but he presumed that the reporter—if aware and falsely snoring—could not be sure the KGB official was not aware of that.

  RIGA

  “You need an ally,” Karl von Schwebel told him. “You cannot go into this alone.”

  “I always like to have allies,” Dominick responded cordially. “I’m a born coalition-builder.”

  “Be serious.” The media baron—a bogus title to which he never objected—saw an opportunity to position himself near the center of the largest financial arrangement in history. “First, I have to know—are you actually Berensky, as my wife believes? Or are you a remarkably skillful impersonator, as I believe? Or are you both, if that’s possible?”

  “My name is Edward Dominick. I’m a Memphis, Tennessee, banker, and I’m told you own the company I hired to protect me from snoopers. The way I figure it, that means I have no secrets from you.”

  “You are telling me that you are indeed the impersonator,” said von Schwebel, trying to fix a position without losing momentum, “working with Fein and probably the CIA to find the assets the real sleeper has amassed.”

  “You’re free to draw whatever inference you like, my friend.” Dominick, seated comfortably in his hotel suite, was giving nothing away; von Schwebel, who came equipped with an electronic device to jam any transmitters or recorders, was not to be so easily put off.

  “You don’t seem to realize that your life is hanging by a thread.” The German let that statement lie there unadorned.

  After a moment, Dominick—Berensky/Dominick—said, “You’ve got my attention, Karl. Who’s out to get me?”

  “Both sides. The Feliks people headquartered here, if they come to believe you are an impostor, are prepared to kill you. There is some talk of trading you for the chief Chechen murderer, now being held by the KGB, but frankly Chechens are cheap.”

  “You said both sides.”

  “And Davidov of the KGB is prepared to order your elimination—if he believes you are the real sleeper about to transfer the assets to what he ca
lls the mafiya.”

  The visitor from Memphis smiled, impressing the German as a man who enjoyed the most perilous predicament. “Then I could sure use an ally, as you say. What can you do for me?”

  “Provide you with information that might save your life. Of equal importance, I can support your bona fides as the sleeper to the Feliks organization. That will help you make your deal.” He noted that the Memphis man had dropped his pose of nonchalance and was at last showing a serious interest. “That involves considerable risk to me, as the fate of a fellow named Arkady Volkovich shows. When I take such a risk, I expect a handsome return.”

  “Tell me first who is saying what about me here.”

  Von Schwebel was prepared to put a sample on the table. “I have reported to Madame Nina, and to the board that calls itself the politburo, that you are an impostor, that your operation is a CIA front. That puts you in danger with them.” With some relish, the media owner revealed the range of his usefulness: “My wife, Sirkka, with whom the sleeper has had contact through an intermediary, believes you are the true Berensky, and has so informed Davidov. That puts you in danger from the KGB, because it convinces them that you can deliver the fortune to whomever you choose.”

  “You married well. It’s helpful when a husband and wife can agree to disagree, and work both sides of the street. On your side, what other reports are coming in to the Feliks people about me?”

  “I take it you want to know what sort of an impression you made on your first wife at Claridge’s.”

  “That would be valuable to me,” Dominick acknowledged.

  “More than valuable,” the German pressed. “It is central to your credibility. If she has reported you are her husband, you must appear contrite at leaving her. If she has accused you of being an impostor, you must recall to the committee her hatred and jealousy.”