Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  Angleton decided that the description fit only one man: Averell Harriman, an intimate of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. Harriman was then scion of an immensely wealthy family. He had been governor of New York, Secretary of Commerce and, conveniently, ambassador to both Great Britain and the Soviet Union.

  Angleton launched an investigation that went nowhere. But that still didn't deter him. In February of 1968, in half-crazed words, Angleton pressed the new CIA director Richard Helms to “warn” President Johnson about Harriman.

  Helms refused. And the memos were acquiring a nastier edge all the time.

  “While we're investigating Harriman,” wrote GTH31761, “why not look into Thomas Jefferson as well? After all, he consorted with colored people and founded the seditious Democratic Party. More Cheers, idiots!”

  “Brontosaurus is totally unfit for HumInt consumption,” grumbled DCI Richard Helms himself in 1965. And with those comments, the project was spiked into extinction.

  Cooper looked at this one for several minutes, for it had earned an angry rejoinder from Angleton. But Golitsyn's fan club was diminishing. Golitsyn now maintained that the Sino/Soviet split was a ruse to trick the West into a false sense of security. And so was the unrest in Czechoslovakia in the Dubček spring. Then events undid both Golitsyn and his mentor. U-2 photographs of the Sino/Soviet border, showing weapons and troops on both sides, indicated that the rift was no fake. And the recent invasion of Prague by Soviet troops in August 1968 showed that the Czech uprising was far more than a staged event.

  “The audience for this kook is growing smaller by the day,” wrote a Soviet specialist in the CIA in early 1967. Golitsyn's remaining adherents were dubbed the Flat Earth Society within the agency. Project Brontosaurus collapsed into an agency tar pit almost instantly. Much of Angleton's clout within the agency collapsed with it, with one final death spasm.

  One theory arose that all that Golitsyn had accomplished with his cries of a mole was to throw the CIA into havoc for years. Yet Golitsyn couldn't have tied up the agency without help. Theorists looking for a culprit, wishing for a Soviet agent, felt their eyes slowly settle upon the one man who was able to guide Golitsyn's defection in that manner: James Jesus Angleton.

  Cooper closed the file. Only in the CIA, only in the world of espionage, could an image turn on itself in such a manner: The finest spy-catcher in American history ended his career under suspicion as a Soviet agent.

  Nosenko was released in 1967, given $80,000 and a new name and relocated to a distant address in the Old Confederacy. And the most basic story that Nosenko had come forward to spin—that the Soviet Union had had nothing to do with Lee Harvey Oswald or the Kennedy assassination—was bought as truth. Nosenko was in from the cold. The Sino/Soviet split was an accepted fact. The tombs of the Czech students and workers, who died in the summer of 1968, now gathered snow as a gray early winter gripped Soviet-occupied Prague.

  “Poor old Jim Angleton,” snickered GTH31761 in early 1968. “This is exactly where he went soft in the head, with the Nosenko-Golitsyn affair. He’s a bloody fool! It’s just a matter of time before DCIA Richard Helms, that gentlemanly planner or assassinations, puts Brother Angleton out to pasture. I do not use the term ‘gentlemanly planner of assassinations’ casually. I am sure Richard Helms will cherish the accolade.”

  There the file died. But the supervisory reader added a final little fillip in a tone of conclusion. “Cheers, ever after!” he wrote. “GTH31761.”

  Cooper closed the folder and leaned back. His thoughts sailed forward and back. He had been reading for four working days and didn’t feel any closer to his target than when he started.

  He looked at his watch. It was 3 p.m. He took a break and went for food and coffee in the guest cafeteria on the second floor. He was in the middle of a sandwich when Brett Molloy slid into a seat on the other side of the table.

  “How’s it going?” Molloy asked.

  Cooper leaned back, pushed the rest of his lunch aide and lit a cigarette. He offered Molloy a smoke also. Molloy declined with a polite wave of the hand.

  “Who the hell is ‘GTH34761’?” Cooper asked.

  “Who?”

  “The most important file is pockmarked with jabs from a reader named GTH34761.”

  “I have no idea,” Molloy said.

  “Come on, Brett. Cut me a small break off the record.”

  “Coded names are for the big shots. I can prowl for you if you want, but I doubt if it would do much good.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Why? You parked in a meter?”

  “I’m getting anxious to get back to New York.”

  “If you can hang around until late tomorrow morning, I’ll see what I can find for you.”

  Cooper thought for a moment. “Tell me flat out: am I here so we can actually help each other or am I here to be jerked around?”

  “If the Agency wanted to jerk you around and send you in the wrong direction, we could have left you in New York and let you do it by yourself. We want some answers and so do you.”

  “Okay,” Cooper said, speaking softly. “So let’s ratchet it up a notch. David Charles. That was the name a man used who came to visit the U.S. Embassy in Paris in February 1965. He interacted with a potential Soviet defector who disappeared soon after David Charles appeared. Conventional wisdom was that the defector was repatriated and shot. That’s how the Russians handled those things. Code name: Firebird. That mean anything?”

  “Nothing offhand,” he said.

  “The defector’s name may have been Lukashenko. And the full name that David Charles used was David R. Charles. ‘R’ may have stood for Robert. I don’t know. Three given Christian names shoved together to make it as memorable as vanilla ice cream. Engine, coal car and caboose. Seems a little fake, a name like that,” said Cooper.

  “Like Chester Arthur? Or Ray Charles?”

  “Is there a file on David Charles? Anything? If so, that’s what I want. Come on. Help me and we’ll print flattering fake news stories about the agency in that tabloid rag we publish in New York. Our publisher is a fan of Allen Dulles. Don’t stiff us, Brett.”

  “Hang around into tomorrow afternoon,” Molloy said affably. “I’ll see if I can talk to a few people.”

  Cooper returned to the reading room by 3:45 p.m.

  Two hours passed. Cooper picked through some associated files and again found nothing on David Charles, Lyndon’s Man, the oilman and diplomat of two weeks. For all intents and purposes, Charles did not exist. At least, he did not exist in any file to which Cooper was privy in the Soviet Registry. That begged a larger question. Why did the official version of Rudawski's life merge perfectly with what Margot's father had said, except for the Paris incident of 1965?

  Cooper then ran the word ‘Firebird’ through the files from different directions. He found nothing. He ended his day by reading one dreary file that some busybody in Switzerland had come across while casually going through the suitcase of a high ranking Polish trade delegate while the later was conducting some personal business at a Geneva brothel.

  The busybody—a third-floor cleaning lady who picked up dollars on the sly by snooping in Eastern European luggage—had used a Minox spy camera to photograph the whole eighty-page document. The document was a Soviet Foreign Service exercise in weighing the advantages and disadvantages of negotiating with a besieged President, Johnson, who was weighed down by political considerations over the war in Southeast Asia. The conclusion: by putting some pressure on Ho Chi Mihn the Soviet Union might be able to win some concessions on the American naval presence in the Mediterranean as well as nuclear warheads in Turkey.

  Cooper wondered why this had been included as “supporting” in the matters he was investigating. Then he found a note at the end.

  “Most logical venue for any peace talks re Vietnam,” read the note. “Paris! US embassies should enhance staff just in case.”

  “Enhance staff” meant increasing the
CIA presence, Cooper knew. Then he looked at the signature. Once again, “GTH34761.”

  Jesus, the man was everywhere!

  Cooper logged out of the CIA. He had a quiet dinner, phoned Lauren to on the pretext of saying hello, but actually to confirm that she had gotten home safely to her charming roach motel. Then he collapsed into bed and slept.

  Chapter 38

  The October afternoon had been abnormally warm in Bushwick, Brooklyn. To cool off, the neighborhood kids sought out the nearest soda or ice cream vendor while their equally oppressed elders found refuge anywhere with air conditioning. The indoor newsstands were popular, for example, with their endless array of horse race handicapping publications and the friendly fat guy with combed-back hair behind the counter who was always on the phone. For others in the neighborhood, there were further options.

  Two recent parolees from Attica Correctional Facility, Thomas Russo and James Lugio, were accustomed to hot days. Their prison cells hadn’t had air conditioning. This evening, they sought refuge from the heat by dining in a private shaded patio in the back of Frankie Cee’s Italian-American Restaurant on the 300 block of Knickerbocker Avenue. There was a breeze, there were fans, there was chilled chianti and there was usually a welcoming atmosphere.

  Russo and Lugio were dining with Frankie Cesare, the snarly restaurant owner, and a Sicilian bodyguard named Mikey Delvecchio from Palermo. Delvecchio had been assigned to watch over Russo and Lugio. During the 1960s, the New York crime families had imported several dozen vicious young men from Sicily to work as drug traffickers and hired guns. Due to their rapid staccato speech, the Sicilians were called “Zips” by the Americans. For the past few days, the mob had slapped Mikey on Russo and Lugio as a bodyguard to make sure they didn’t get into any more post-prison trouble. Russo and Lugio were in enough trouble already. Frankie Cee was in some local trouble, too, since he was buying his supplies from a discount guy over in Fort Lee, rather than the shell company controlled by the Brooklyn bosses.

  Born in New York City, Russo was a stocky man with broad shoulders, a sculpted torso and dark hair. On his left arm, he had a tattoo: two hearts and a dagger. Russo wore large tinted sunglasses. He preferred orange T-shirts, bright red shorts, baseball jackets, striped track suits, multicolored socks and blue jeans. Russo was known to be an opinionated violent man who was quick to fight and slow to give up a grudge. When he had been in prison, a former friend had cuckolded him by laying his wife. Russo found the man a week after he’d gotten out of prison, beaten him and then drove an industrial ice pick through the victim's chest into the hardwood floor below. The police required a tire iron to pry the body loose.

  James Lugio the opposite. Since emerging from prison, Lugio had refashioned himself to make him stand out from the other ethnic Italians. He had once looked like any other street thug. Now he fancied stylish clothing, aviator sunglasses and European man purses, usually Gucci. A devout man, Lugio wore his shirt unbuttoned with a gold crucifix hanging from his neck: Jesus on the cross nestled onto his fine and luxuriant chest hair. Word on the street: Lugio had helped murder the man who had cuckolded his pal Russo. Then they had attended to one other grudge but had bungled that one. It remained a lavori in corso, a work in progress.

  For a while, Lugio was a regular habituate of his cousin’s deli run by his family located at Second Avenue and 76th Street on Manhattan’s upper East Side, out of which he ran a numbers shop. The deli had burned down in January 1967 but in its place, Lugio had built an apartment building with a sleek Italian cafe and restaurant called Que Cosa. Lugio's moniker was "The Big Guy" because he stood close to six feet four. He wasn’t just a hood. He was a big hood.

  At ten forty p.m., two out-of-town men in ski masks and wearing gloves entered Frankie Cee’s in Bushwick. Someone shouted, “Everybody down!” The two men rushed through several startled diners toward the outdoor patio. There, one masked man riddled Russo and Frankie Cesare with bullets from an automatic pistol. The other gunman blew The Big Guy’s head off with a shotgun blast, then blew a hole in his torso with a second slot. Mikey the bodyguard eased back from the table and was not hit by gunshots, only by blood and fragments of bone.

  The executioners dropped their weapons and fled in a stolen black 1965 Corvair that was waiting out front, driven by an experienced wheelman. They dumped the car an hour later under the Williamsburg Bridge. So swift were the assassins that a half-smoked cigarette was still clenched between Russo’s fingers when police arrived. The headless Lugio still had his fork clenched in his hand.

  Photographers and TV cameras captured the scene. They headlined it. As Russo, Lugio and Cesare were carried out in bags, they passed under the restaurant's sign, which Cesare had hand-lettered himself only a week earlier. It said, "Special Attention Always to Outgoing Orders!” It was on the front page of both the Eagle and the Daily News.

  The police would later catch up to Mikey the Zip as he tried to get on a flight to Rome from JFK. His lawyer beat him to the police station. Questioned, Mr. Michael Delvecchio had nothing to offer in terms of information. He had been sitting at a table where three people were murdered, but he had been leaning down to pick up a napkin, he said, when the fireworks began.

  He hadn’t seen anything. Nor could he offer a theory as to why he had been left unharmed. In the end, he had a vision. He suggested that Santa Rosalia, the lovely patron saint of his home island, may have interceded in his behalf.

  FBI and New York City homicide detectives assigned to the case, however, had more secular theories, though they were equally unprovable.

  For the time, they released the witness. Santa Rosalia could be quite a powerful lady.

  Chapter 39

  Cooper returned to the reading room at the CIA the following morning. As he re-read certain files, several strange notions took shape.

  Fact: There was a strange interplay between the files he had seen and the events that Rudawski had recited. A defector named Lukashenko, according to Rudawski, casually known as Firebird, had come forward in Paris in February of 1965, offering to resolve the biggest intelligence secret of the time. This had happened as Nosenko fell into disfavor with Angleton.

  First notion: Could the defector, Firebird, have known of Nosenko’s plight and have been sent to the West to tip the scales one way or another? But how could Firebird have known unless he was getting feedback through spy channels from Langley? Or in Moscow. And if so, wouldn’t that have proven Golitsyn’s premise that there was a mole deep in the CIA?

  Second notion: There was a connection between Nosenko and Firebird. Similarly, there was something strange about the omnipresent nature of GTH31761’s pervasive smirking comments. The anonymous agent must have had some significant influence within the CIA. What would account for such an interest? Who could it have been?

  Cooper flipped the file open again and looked at the dates of GTH31761’s entries. There were twenty-six. They began when Nosenko first appeared and they ended thirty-eight days before Cooper put his hands on the file. The fact that GTH31761 had had the temerity to criticize the bosses also suggested that he had influence within the agency. GTH31761 had even had the last word, the snide comment amount Helms, the “gentlemanly” murderer.

  Third notion: Ominously, whoever this cipher was, he was still be on the case. Thirty-eight days previously. The timing was remarkable! Equally suspicious: GTH31761 had straddled the Nosenko-Golitsyn conundrum, discrediting Nosenko at first, then belittling Golitsyn, and taking simultaneous swipes at Angleton and the Kennedys at the same time.

  Nervy. Ballsy. Scandalous. Borderline seditious.

  So what if David Charles had turned up in Paris in February 1965 and intentionally compromised Firebird and Firebird was whisked back to Russia and executed? One had to then conclude that the self-described David Charles had been in on safeguarding some sort of secret.

  A big secret? More than one? The biggest secret of the decade?

  Reviewing the files and their multiple cross-r
eferences, Cooper looked again for Stanley Rudawski, former diplomat and career member of the Foreign Service. The file listed Rudawski’s embassy posts and assignments. That part made sense. There was no mention in the file, however, of the time that he and David Charles were new best friends.

  In Margot's father's version the connection existed. In Langley, it didn't.

  Cooper searched for David Charles. He couldn't find him. Nor, in the accounts of Ambassador Chip Bohlen’s tenure in Paris, was there any reference to a trip back to the United States in February 1965. No Lukashenko, either. Or were they there under other names?

  There was a moment in the afternoon when he absently gazed upward from reading. Mr. Ludlow, arms folded, was staring right at him. A real Congregationalist hammer, this guy, thought Cooper, who immediately shifted his eyes back to his reading.

  Half an hour later, Cooper went to a cafeteria for lunch. He returned at one thirty. Molloy was waiting for him in an empty reading room with a sealed file in his hand. The folder was orange: one level down from the top stuff and two levels up from what Cooper had been reading.

  “Ah. Cooper!” Molloy said. “I pulled some strings,” he said in a softer voice. Mr. Ludlow was not present. “David Charles,” said Molloy, handing him the file. “I can give you this for today and tomorrow. But you never saw it, all right?”

  “All right,” Cooper said.

  “And I checked into your GTH person also,” Molloy said. “That form of identification is used by ‘special section’ people, specialists who’ve been consulting unofficially for years. They have high clearance and carry oversight.”