Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  “Everything has a name,” Rudawski offered as D.C. presided over a shaky stick shift.

  “Then it’s ‘Firebird’!” Charles said. “That’s what my Russian friend, the one you’re about to meet, calls it.”

  “Firebird. Like the ballet?” Rudawski asked.

  “What ballet? I was thinking about the new Pontiac.”

  “Stravinsky. It’s also a recurring theme of Russian folklore.”

  “This is where I’m a bozo,” said Charles, “and you did the classical education. Talk to me. What do I need to know? What’s this stupid bird all about?”

  “The Firebird is a classic fairy tale,” Rudawski explained. “The hero finds a clue, like a lost tail feather, to the location of the mythical Firebird, a bird with magical luminescent feathers, eyes of fire, and so on. Hero sets off to capture the bird, but of course the journey is long. Perilous. Magical in a bad sense. Ominous. Soon the hero wearies of the quest and begins to resent the circumstances that led him down this road.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Egghead. You know all the worthless intellectual crap.”

  “Thanks,” Rudawski said.

  “Well,” Charles said after a few more moments. “The gentleman we’re meeting today. I guess he’s the damned fucking feather.” Charles rubbed his ample chin. “Firebird!” he said again after a few moments.

  “The thing is,” Rudawski said, “the Firebird never gets captured but also never goes away. It just hangs on and on and on, presumably forever. Can’t get rid of it. Once you’re on the path, the path is endless. It’s part of the curse. Part of the bad karma.”

  D.C.’s expression darkened. “Yeah?” he asked. “Well, we shall see!”

  Chapter 7

  Fifty minutes later, David Charles and Rudawski found their way into a warren of back streets in the Algerian quarter just north of Père Lachaise cemetery, their guts jangled by Charles’s adversarial relationship with the four-on-the-floor gearbox. But Charles was a man with a mission now, ditching the Peugeot two-wheels-up on a sidewalk.

  “C’mon, Egghead!” he snorted as he rushed Rudawski to follow. Charles barged into a small café on the rue de la Réunion, Rudawski a step behind him. A waiter asked them something in French which Charles didn't acknowledge. Rudawski began to answer, but the Texan surged directly toward a booth at the rear of the room.

  Rudawski took a mental picture of the scene and held it for the rest of his life:

  A solitary man was seated alone. He had an excellent view of the door, as well as quick access to a service exit. He had been watching the two Americans since they had entered. Even now, he was simultaneously looking at them and staring past them, waiting to see who might follow. There were several empty tables in the back area, but the two that bordered Charles’ contact were occupied. Two men were in each, camped out over coffee which they weren’t drinking. Three of the men had their eyes trained on the front entrance and one was facing the rear. Rudawski figured that they were babysitters, most likely Charles’ since the single man in the farthest booth seemed to be flying solo. Rudawski, no one’s fool, looked at the four men’s shoes. American.

  The man they were there to see was massive, barrel-chested, large-armed, and ominous. He had a battered, frowning face and a high forehead with two large scars. He sat in a bluish-gray cloud of stinky French cigarette smoke, occupying a banquette intended for two. There was a large empty coffee cup in front of him and an untouched glass of water. A half-smoked pack of Gitanes lay near the water. A crumpled empty pack was near a full ashtray.

  Across the man’s lap, Rudawski noticed with a sudden kick in his chest, was a Russian pistol, a 9mm Makarov. Rudawski had seen a few of them around the U.S. Embassy. It had been part of his training to know the danger signs, particularly the make and model of the hand artillery. It announced a lot. Russians tended to carry Russian weapons. Soviet bloc people had Czech stuff. It made sense. Nothing was subtle.

  The man at the booth made no effort to conceal the handgun. Rather, he was advertising it. Rudawski assumed the Makarov was loaded. He also guessed that if this meeting went the wrong way, some of the people in this room might be dead in a few minutes, including himself.

  Charles eased Rudawski into a seat across from the Russian. Charles followed, sitting next to the younger man. “It's all right,” Charles whispered.

  The Russian kept his mouth shut. His zero-degree eyes said everything.

  “It was the first time in my life,” Rudawski said to Cooper as he recalled the fine points of the scene, “that I ever felt ill at ease sitting with my back to a door. Then again, I was facing a gun for the first time, too.”

  “This is Pavel Lukashenko,” Charles said quietly, initiating the conversation. “Pavel is a Soviet citizen. He also says he would like to live in America.”

  “Well, America is a wonderful place. I think you’ll be comfortable,” Rudawski offered.

  “Very comfortable,” Charles added. “Now speak your damned Russian to him. He doesn’t speak a fucking word of English, or at least doesn’t admit to it. So get him singing.”

  The Russian glared. Rudawski started speaking Russian.

  The Soviet was at first startled, then eased into a conversation.

  “I felt this Russian's eyes boring into me the whole time,” Rudawski remembered. “I broke a hot sweat. I offered my hand. You know, for a handshake. As if I were at a Kiwanis meeting. The Russian glowered at my right hand for ten full seconds before he waved it away.”

  “Who was he?” Cooper asked. “And what did he want?”

  Lukashenko had been known to the CIA since April 1957 when he had tried to defect to the British in Helsinki. Lukashenko had been listed as a minor consular official. In reality, he had been the second ranking Soviet KGB official in Scandinavia. In return for £25,000 negotiable and lifetime asylum non-negotiable, Lukashenko had been prepared to deliver to NATO an index of rocket sites across northern Russia, as well as a complete up-to-date classified directory of Soviet air defenses—including locations, type of radar and potential arsenal—ringing the Arctic Circle. That was for starters.

  When Lukashenko had first contacted the British, he had not revealed his identity, merely dangling the bait in a message to a British political officer. He had asked that any affirmative response be signaled by an inquiry for a tourist visa directed to a Comrade Suslov in the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki. There was no Suslov in Helsinki, but any correspondence would cross Lukashenko's desk. Moreover, he insisted that any internal British communication about the offer travel back to London by diplomatic pouch. Lukashenko insisted that the Soviets had deciphered much of the British microwave traffic throughout Scandinavia, which, since Kim Philby and company were still in the treason business, was most likely the case.

  Lukashenko went back to his post in the Soviet consulate and waited. A day went by. Then another. The British dithered for forty-eight hours more. Next, they alerted Washington through their SIS liaison with the CIA. Only then was an inquiry made to Comrade Suslov on the availability of a visa for a visiting English scholar. By this time the offer in Helsinki disappeared.

  At first, conventional wisdom dictated that the defector must have been shot, then entombed in concrete in the embassy cellar, as was the charming Soviet habit. But no staffers had vanished from the Helsinki complex.

  There were unanswerable questions posed both in London and Washington. Why would such a promising source go cold? Similarly, Langley analysts asked why the British had taken two days to alert the Americans. The Americans and the British blamed each other, politely in person, then bitterly behind each other's back. Years later, the botched Helsinki defection remained an official mystery. But in Paris with Charles and Rudawski, Lukashenko had explained how it had looked from his end.

  “Three days after I make the offer, extra state security people arrive from Moscow and question everyone,” the Russian snarled to the two Americans, as Rudawski translated. “Routine, they say. Noth
ing routine! Obvious leak through British government!”

  Lukashenko remained incensed. He had dodged the bullet by overseeing on-site security in Helsinki. The Soviet presence had been a large one by western estimates, almost a hundred apparatchiks. There were perplexing questions in Moscow, in other words, just as in London and Washington: intelligence analysts in all three places kept scanning the list of two hundred names at the USSR's Finnish outpost.

  Lukashenko was aided by the large number of suspects as well as by personally inaugurating a mini-reign of terror among Soviet embassy personnel. Eventually, he produced as scapegoats a couple of none-too-bright informers from the Finnish underworld. He had concluded business with them, so once he received a green light from Dzerzhinsky Square, he sent local housekeeping to remove them from the active list. They were shot one night leaving a popular brothel with the unsubtle English name of “The Girl Farm.” Their bodies were wired to an old diesel engine and the remains were dumped a kilometer off shore in the Gulf of Finland.

  Lukashenko had learned his lesson. He would lay low for a few years, never trust the British again, and never deal with the poor whites of any embassy staff. This time in 1965 he was defecting directly to the U.S. Ambassador. Or, as he'd discovered the previous Thursday, when he'd made his initial pitch to Charles at an art gallery opening on the Avenue Bosquet, the acting ambassador, the shadow ambassador at the embassy, The Honorable David Charles.

  “It was a curious bit of timing,” Rudawski remembered. “Ambassador Bohlen wouldn’t have touched this guy with a broomstick. But David Charles wanted to quick deal. It was as if he had been in Paris just for this.”

  “Which means that he had prior knowledge some way,” Cooper said. “And made it his business to be there when the ambassador was away.”

  “Exactly,” said Rudawski. “The art gallery encounter was a set-up. But D.C. didn’t have anyone with him who spoke Russian. Or at least no one he could trust. So the café near Père Lachaise became the fallback.”

  “Why didn’t he take anyone from the consular staff?” Cooper asked. “Surely there must have been someone with more experience and a deeper security clearance.”

  “Obviously, he wanted to keep it outside of official channels.”

  “Why?”

  “That,” Rudawski said, “is what I’ve never known.”

  In Paris, Lukashenko sounded like a man anxious to get out of Russia. He ran through his life's history: parents, schooling in Odessa, a Red Army armored division on the German front in World War II, postwar recruitment by the NKVD, training, a lousy marriage to a state-supplied hooker, promotion within Soviet intelligence, and access to classified files. Lukashenko revealed the cover names with which he'd traveled. He had spent time in a KGB travel bureau around 1956 and could pinpoint where fake passports were made abroad. He had lists from many cities, from Cairo to Jakarta to Chicago and Montreal. Elaborating, he rambled through a casual discussion of letter boxes, safe houses, legmen, dead drops, and fronts around Paris.

  Then he emptied his pockets and showed off his overnight travel kit. There were two recessed fountain pens. One was a mini-transmitter. The other fired a twenty-two-caliber bullet. He also had a tape recorder built inside a cigarette box and, Rudawski's personal favorite, a camera concealed inside a Zenith pocket radio, Made in USA.

  Lukashenko remained in the midst of a cloud of tobacco smoke during this entire time, continually lighting a new butt with the glowing butt of a dying one.

  “In retrospect,” Rudawski told Cooper, “I've learned a little about the state of the espionage arts in 1965. None of this stuff was custom built. But it was the newest stuff on the line. I was going crazy just looking at it.”

  “But the Russian wasn't there to present a hardware exposition, I assume,” Cooper said.

  “Not at all. And Lukashenko wasn't fooling around with small potatoes like air defense sites, either. He told the ambassador that this time he said he had something big. Really big: the inside scoop on something that could rock U.S.–Soviet relations well into the next century.”

  He hadn't just spent the last few years in Paris trimming his toenails and contemplating the nudes at the art galleries, Lukashenko boasted. In 1962, he had been promoted to one of KGB Chief Yuri Andropov's top assistants abroad. For this task, he had been assigned the work name of Verlaine, a surprisingly whimsical allusion to his geographical placement.

  He remained a cultural attaché. By day, he coordinated visits by Soviet artists—musicians, dancers, writers, and painters—to France, and organized lectures at the French universities on Marxist theory or Soviet culture. By night, he sat by a receiver at a safe house in Clichy, guzzled Calvados and captured the high-speed high-frequency squirts that came by microwave from the United States.

  Lukashenko would decipher, write an opinion, and ship a transcript to Moscow by the next day's diplomatic pouch on Aeroflot. This way the microwave traffic was never subject to an intercept because the Americans were looking for it in the skies above Moscow. The CIA didn't know it was stopping in Paris on the way back to Mother Russia.

  To the astonished Rudawski, there was a cruel geometry to this meeting. Thinking back to some of the deciphered messages he had translated while at work in Panama, he realized that he and Lukashenko may have had their fingerprints on the same exchanges from time to time.

  Rudawski said nothing.

  All this time, Lukashenko continued, he was assisting Andropov, whom he despised, and helping perpetrate the greatest operation against the West that had ever taken place. But he was also keeping a separate diary of everything that had happened. This book was half of his ticket to the west. The other half was an internal memorandum of the KGB, he said, a thirty-six-page pamphlet which he'd smuggled out of the Soviet Union page by page. It was directly above the signature of Andropov.

  There were five of these pamphlets in existence, Lukashenko had claimed, and he had constructed a sixth to bargain his way to the west. The pamphlet was a report to Chairman Khrushchev on the highest penetration of Western intelligence since Kim Philby. There had been several major defections to the West between 1958 and 1965, Lukashenko reminded his audience, starting with Igor Popov, a Russian, in 1953, and continuing with Michal Goleniewski, a Pole in 1959.

  “He claimed that the previous defections fit into one overall pattern. It was all part of ‘Firebird,’ and Western intelligence had missed the biggest point,” Rudawski said. “For all their 'experts' on the Soviet bloc, they still weren't on to the biggest intelligence scam of their time. And yet it was within their possession and Lukashenko could lead them to it.”

  “Maybe someone was sitting on it,” Cooper suggested.

  “Lukashenko indicated that the west missed it because the key to the whole picture hadn't been located. And that's what he had. His information would prove which defectors were credible. His defection would put the previous four defectors in perspective. He said he could tie together ten years of KGB disruption of the west. He said it started in the 1950’s with the poisoning of a British elected official, which gave rise to an access of the KGB right into 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s residence. It continued through the U-2 flights and the capture of Francis Gary Powers, and into Lee Oswald’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination. It was one weird little witch’s brew that Lukashenko was selling. And David Charles was there to buy it.”

  “What would make you believe him?” Cooper asked.

  Margot was using a linen handkerchief to remove sweat from her father's hairline. He gamely stayed with his story.

  “I was skeptical at the time, too,” he said. “But Lukashenko must have had something.”

  “How do you know? Did you see it?”

  “I never saw his material,” the dying man explained. “I never saw the Russian again. And for that matter, David Charles was recalled in another ninety-six hours as well.”

  “What?” Cooper asked.

  Charles and Rudawski conclud
ed that Lukashenko needed to be passed on to higher authorities. Lukashenko was yammering for money and a decision, but it wasn't Charles's official function to come up with either. Thus, circumstances forced Charles to expand the audience.

  They had a direct phone circuit in the embassy in Paris called the Red Line, open to the State Department twenty-four hours a day.

  “The Red Line was thought to be secure, but you never knew,” Rudawski said. “David Charles wanted to phone Washington. I urged him to put everything in writing, instead. We finally constructed some text predawn on the morning of April 16, 1965.”

  “'Constructed?' You mean, wrote?” Cooper asked, glancing up.

  “David Charles was street smart and spy smart. But he couldn't write an effective extortion note, much less an accurately detailed memo,” Margot's father said. “So I wrote a ten-page memorandum of what I saw and heard. Its contents were kept from the rest of the Paris staff. What do you think the professional State Department people did in those days, other than keep CIA bulls from shooting themselves in the foot? Charles had a sense of the dramatic,” the story continued. “So he directed our memo all the way to the top. To the Secretary of State.”

  “Dean Rusk?” Cooper asked.

  Rudawski nodded.

  “Just curious: Did you use that ‘Firebird’ codename or nickname that you shared with Charles?” Cooper asked.

  “No. That remained just between David Charles and myself.”

  “Okay,” said Cooper. By chance, his eyes rose to the only other person in the room, Margot. Their eyes locked.

  “I never heard the word used, myself, in that context until a few days ago,” Margot said. “When dad told me that he wanted to talk to someone.”

  “Okay,” Cooper said.

  “The memo to Dean Rusk was confirmed, ‘RECEIVED—ADVICE TO FOLLOW IN 24 HOURS.’” Rudawski said. He paused. “Next, silence. Two solid days of the most damnable silence I'd ever experienced.”