Stalin's Final Sting

by Andrew Turpin

“I have brought you here because I want to put this job into context,” Haroon said. “This pool shows you the ambitions the Soviets had for their occupation of Afghanistan—and it reminds me of the disgust I have always had for the way they operated.”

  Haroon gazed down through the smog over the city below, wiping the sweat and dust from his forehead. “They killed about two million Afghans during that time. I feel like I have got unfinished business with them. This pool is symbolic. They built it thinking they would hold the Olympics here. Instead, they were forced out, and the Taliban used it as a place to execute their prisoners. They shot them inside the empty pool and pushed others off the top diving board to their deaths on the concrete below.”

  Johnson pursed his lips. “Maybe the Russians also have unfinished business.”

  “Yes. I think they still want control of this country—but by another route. That is why they are bidding for the oil and gas fields.”

  “But the oil bid doesn’t explain why Severinov is being targeted for assassination,” Johnson said.

  He furrowed his brow. Since his discovery earlier that day that both Javed and Severinov were in Kabul and involved in the oil and gas sale process, his mind had been buzzing. Now there seemed to be only one logical answer.

  “If Javed was involved in the attempted hit on Severinov, as seems possible,” Johnson said, “then it’s most likely some sort of revenge mission linked to the destruction of the villages. Javed’s a professional energy industry guy now, not a mujahideen or a street thug, so he would need a good reason.”

  “Like I said yesterday,” Haroon said, glancing at Johnson, “track him down and find out.”

  Earlier, Johnson, Jayne and Haroon had visited the Street Ten address on Javed’s CV but had drawn a blank. The property, a renovated white-painted two-story villa that was set back from the street behind a tall wall, had been locked up with no sign of occupation. The windows were all closed. When they asked a neighbor, they were told that the owner hadn’t been seen for a couple of days. It appeared that Javed had left town, as Safia had suggested.

  Johnson told Haroon that he had decided to take a trip to Wazrar to try to track down Javed.

  Haroon pursed his lips. “Good idea. Just be careful driving down there.”

  “There’s a big US and Afghan army presence on that route. It should be okay.”

  “I think it would be better if I come with you, Joe,” Haroon said. “I speak the language better than you and know the people and the country.”

  With some relief, Johnson accepted the proposal. It made absolute sense.

  Haroon casually checked all around him, as he had done continuously during their entire walk up the winding dusty footpath that climbed from the city streets through a few rows of emaciated trees that were barely clinging to life.

  “If you’re going to get proof of Severinov’s wrongdoing in the ’80s, you’ll need documentary evidence,” Haroon said.

  “Except there won’t be any,” Johnson said.

  Haroon shrugged. “Probably not.”

  “Could there be anything of help?”

  Haroon paused for a few moments. “The only possible source I can think of would be the old KGB files, and they don’t exist anymore.”

  “The KGB files?”

  “The KGB country files from the ’80s—the KHAD was responsible for keeping them here in Kabul,” Haroon said. “All the detail would have been in there, if they hadn’t been destroyed.”

  There was no doubt it would all be in there, Johnson thought. The KGB and KHAD officers recorded everything—they had to. Not just about their opponents, their agents, and their informers, but about each other.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Johnson said. “The KGB would have destroyed the files when the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan.”

  Haroon nodded. “Yes. Transporting them would be too risky.”

  Johnson put his hands on his hips. “Is it worth double-checking? It would be good to be sure.”

  “I think we’d be wasting our time,” Haroon said. “Although I do know who might tell you what happened to them.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Someone I tried to recruit in 1987, the old head archivist in the KHAD, an Afghan. His name was Abdul Akbari. I used to call him ‘the keeper of the secrets’—he was in charge of the KHAD and KGB files here. He had the confidence of the top men in Moscow—I think because he provided such top-quality information. He had an office near the Dar-ul-Aman Palace, down in a basement where his vaults of files were kept.” Haroon pointed to the southwest of the city.

  “I remember you speaking about Akbari at one of our meetings in Islamabad,” Johnson said. “Did you recruit him in the end?”

  “No, although I think he was tempted. I met him twice—I took a big risk—and felt he always had an underlying sympathy for the mujahideen and what we in the ISI and you Americans were trying to do against the Russians, whom I do not think he liked. I never heard him say anything in support of the invasion and the occupation. I always had the impression he was taking money from the KGB but had no loyalty to them, although he must have been doing an outstanding job to keep his position. He also seemed to hint that he might be willing to supply us with information if the time and the terms were right. So it was worth a try—it might well have worked if I had more time.”

  Johnson removed his pack of Marlboros from his pocket and offered them to Haroon, who took one. Johnson put a cigarette in his mouth, flicked his lighter, and then lit first Haroon’s, then his own.

  “What happened to your man Abdul, then?” Johnson asked.

  “I heard he fled Afghanistan, like so many others.”

  “Where to?”

  “I have no idea,” Haroon said. “But I doubt it was done legally. Not unless he was going to spill his secrets in exchange for something. And as I told you, I tried to get him to do that and did not get anywhere. So he probably told a sob story to immigration officials somewhere in the world about how the Russians had hounded him out of his village and got asylum. He is probably sitting right now in a bar in Rio de Janeiro or somewhere, sipping a whiskey.”

  “He’s not going to be much use to us, then,” Johnson said. It was likely, he thought, that Akbari had simply vanished amid the tidal wave of six million Afghans who had fled to Pakistan, Iran, and then to other countries all over the world during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and the Taliban terror from the 1990s onward.

  “No, not much use. He probably got himself a fake passport like everyone else and started a new life,” Haroon said.

  “Would he have been responsible for destroying the files?”

  “I would assume the Russians did all that,” Haroon said. “There must have been mountains of them. They would not trust anyone else to do it.”

  That was a certainty, Johnson thought. He glanced around him again as three men walked past. A couple of boys were flying kites at the other side of the pool.

  “I think we’ve spent long enough here,” Johnson said. “I don’t like to be in one place for too long in this city, not with the threat level as it is.”

  Haroon nodded. “Agreed. I think we should walk back.” They set off back down the track.

  Johnson mulled over what Haroon had said. He could now try asking Vic or Neal to do a trace on Abdul Akbari, but if he had left under a false passport, the archivist’s real name would be a dead end.

  “Who would have supplied a fake passport to someone like Abdul?” Johnson asked. “There couldn’t have been many high-quality passport forgers in Kabul at that time.”

  Haroon stopped and faced Johnson. “That is a good question. There were actually a few who were on the ISI payroll whom we used when we were smuggling people out of Afghanistan. I will dig out their details. It was a long time ago, but it is worth a try.”

  Chapter Ten

  Thursday, May 30, 2013

  Washington, DC

  The cheap burner phone rang only a couple of minutes
after Robert Watson had sat down on the bench. He had bought the device an hour earlier and had given the number to only one person. He knew who it was.

  “Yes,” he said in his gravelly voice, shaped over the years by a steady flow of nicotine, whiskey, and coffee.

  “Are you in place?” the caller asked.

  “Yes, the runway’s clear.” Watson glanced around him, as if to reassure himself that the green light he had just given EIGER was in fact the correct signal. There was indeed nobody else in sight.

  “Good. I’m in the parking lot. I’ll walk down there. See you in five minutes.” The call ended, and Watson put the phone back into his pocket.

  The meeting place, at Great Falls Park, next to the Potomac River in Washington, DC, was one Watson had used occasionally during his CIA career when he needed to make covert calls to any one of his several unofficial contacts around the globe. Now he needed to be doubly careful, given his fugitive status in the US.

  Almost unconsciously, Watson patted his jacket pocket, where he was carrying his Dirk Leman passport.

  Since getting involved in ZenForce Group’s bid for the Afghanistan assets, Watson had, as usual, checked whether there was anyone linked to opposing potential investors with whom he had a history. In the particular world that he inhabited, it was almost inevitable that familiar faces would pop up. He had a system of grading them according to likely threat, using a traffic light mechanism.

  However, in the case of this particular project, there were very few players previously known to Watson.

  One such person was the Russian oligarch Yuri Severinov, with whom Watson had an arrangement in the 1980s. Watson had been on the KGB payroll then for a while, and both men had taken a cut of the proceeds from fiddling a US scheme to buy back unused Stinger missiles that had been supplied to mujahideen leaders. They combined their information about which mujahideen had weapons. Then Severinov sent two of his tame Spetsnaz guys on nighttime raids of the mujahideen camps, killing the tribesmen and confiscating the weapons, thus allowing him and Watson to cash in on the repurchase.

  Since then, Watson and Severinov had bumped into each other occasionally but knew that each had enough knowledge to bring the other down, so they maintained a mutual standoff.

  Watson had gone one step further, though—enabling him to double his returns. The mujahideen whose names Watson handed over to Severinov for targeting by the Spetsnaz were the same ones to whom he had earlier, equally fraudulently, sold Stingers via a back door route. All such missiles were meant to have been routed to the mujahideen via the ISI. As far as Watson was aware, Severinov knew nothing of this doubling-up.

  All in all, the illegal trade in Stinger missiles had been a massive cash cow for Watson. He had pocketed more than two million dollars—not something that his bosses at Langley had ever been aware of. He assumed that Severinov had done almost as well.

  Now Watson was unsure whether Severinov would have discovered his involvement as an adviser to ZenForce Group, which was a bidding rival to Severinov’s Besoi Energy. Either way, although Severinov was a threat in the business sense, Watson wasn’t particularly concerned in the personal sense: Severinov got a green light on the traffic light system.

  There was one other individual whose presence Watson had become aware of and about whom he was now going to brief EIGER. He leaned back on the bench and waited.

  Soon he spotted a figure walking along the path from the direction of the parking lot. EIGER, wearing a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and a tweed cap, had arrived. In the nearly thirty years that the two men had worked together, EIGER and Watson had almost never met twice in the space of two days—normally their meetings were many months apart. But since it was highly likely that this could be his last trip to the US for some considerable time, Watson had decided to make it a face-to-face meeting, which in any case he viewed as generally safer than using electronic communications.

  EIGER sat next to Watson on the bench.

  “What do you have?” EIGER asked, forgoing any attempt at the usual pleasantries.

  The bench, at the side of a hiking path, was a good distance from any bushes, significantly reducing the risk of hidden eavesdroppers. There was also significant cover noise from the river waters below, which would help mask their voices if long-distance microphones were being used as part of any surveillance. Still, Watson was confident there was none of that. He was black, of that he was certain.

  Watson ran his hand through his shaggy white hair, then removed a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. The sheet contained a list of American nonmilitary nationals known to be working in Afghanistan.

  “We have a problem,” Watson said. His bony, wrinkled finger traced through the list of names and their respective passport numbers and dates of birth until it came to rest about three-quarters of the way down the page. He tapped vigorously on the name shown at that point.

  “This guy is the problem,” Watson said, adjusting his tortoiseshell glasses.

  EIGER leaned over to look at the sheet. “Where did you get this list?” he asked.

  Watson couldn’t resist a smile. “Let’s just say it came from a contact in the State Department.”

  EIGER grinned. “The State Department. Of course. Very good. Anyway, continue. Who’s the problem?”

  “Joe Johnson. He’s a war crimes investigator. Former CIA, used to work under me. He’s the bastard who’s responsible for me now being in exile. He uncovered a Syrian arms deal that I was running out of Croatia last year, and I had to make a sharp exit from the US. Well, there was a bit more to it than that, but that’s basically it.”

  “So what’s he doing in Afghanistan?”

  “According to the State Department list, he’s visiting the International Criminal Court, holding talks about a potential investigation,” Watson said.

  “Why’s he going to be a problem in Afghanistan?” EIGER asked. “He’s not likely to latch onto what we’re doing—he’s on a completely different task, isn’t he?”

  Watson snorted. “You would think so. But based on past experience, the story could be different. I think part of the problem is that I had him fired from the CIA in Islamabad. He botched an operation inside Afghanistan. Anyway, he doesn’t seem to waste any opportunity to get his teeth into me. He’s sharper than he seems. He’s working with a British woman, Jayne Robinson, who’s ex-MI6. The two of them had an affair in Islamabad. That’s another reason he was fired.”

  This more than explained why he had Johnson marked down as a red light in his file.

  EIGER leaned his tall frame back on the bench and folded his arms. “So you’ve got two ex-spooks with some sort of grudge against you. I only get worried if it impacts my day job. Otherwise, it’s immaterial. But I’m assuming that you can take care of that?”

  Watson remained silent for a few seconds. “Yes, don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  “And what about the Russians?” EIGER asked. “How dangerous are they?”

  “As rival bidders, they’re dangerous. They’ll be very interested in the sale because Putin and his crew will see it as strategic,” Watson said. “In the personal sense, I don’t think so.”

  “Right. Have you briefed Zilleman?” EIGER asked. “He’s arranging the financing today. The money is coming into Zürich this afternoon from Hong Kong, so we’ll be good to go as soon as this deal can be tied up.”

  “I will do so later.”

  “Good, make sure you do. If we’ve got more than $11 billion at stake, we can’t afford for things to go wrong, can we?”

  Thursday, May 30, 2013

  Wazrar

  A flurry of dust, caught by the wind, flicked into Sandjar Hassani’s eyes, and he reflexively turned his head sideways. He was on his way back home from a secluded place near the burial ground in Wazrar, where he had gone to just spend time quietly thinking about his two eldest children, both boys.

  He hadn’t seen either of them for eight years. Both had long fled from A
fghanistan to Pakistan, and from there, one had moved on to the United Kingdom, the other to Germany. One day they would return, he hoped.

  Although he often visited his thinking spot, as he called it, the route he had taken back to his house was not his normal one.

  Sandjar, a skinny man with a craggy face that looked as though it had been chiseled from stone, had decided to take the somewhat circuitous route down past Baz Babar’s property out of curiosity. He had been more than intrigued to see Baz back in his home village, arriving in a black Toyota pickup truck earlier that day with another man in the passenger seat whom he didn’t recognize, although it had been hard to see through the glare reflecting from the windshield.

  His cell phone beeped as a text message arrived. Two months earlier, Sandjar mused, that wouldn’t have been a possibility in Wazrar. But like many rural areas of Afghanistan, Wazrar now finally had a cell phone mast, perched on a concrete plinth on a hilltop just outside the village—in fact, Sandjar had helped to install it.

  Since 2004, he had worked for Afghan Wireless, the cell phone company partly owned by the Afghan Ministry of Communications, as a tower technician, carrying out installations and upgrades of cell phone masts. The work was mainly in Paktia Province, where Wazrar lay, and neighboring Khost Province, on the border with Pakistan.

  The job had in many ways made it worth spending four years studying physics at university in Khost in the 1990s, after the Russians had departed. But though the role was secure, the salary was low, and Sandjar was responsible for supporting an extended family of sixteen people.

  More immediately worrying, he had two younger sons who had remained at home and were now on the verge of getting married. The Afghan tradition of paying a bride price meant Sandjar was facing two enormous bills: the family of one bride was demanding 600,000 afghanis, or roughly $8,500, the other 750,000 afghanis, or $10,500.

  Therefore, he had felt compelled to find other means of earning money. Almost by default, he had fallen back on what he was good at and what he had long ago realized was valuable currency in that part of the world: trading information.