Collusion

by Newt Gingrich

  Her husband read it aloud. “The Associated Press. Moscow dateline. Ivan Sokolov told reporters outside his apartment in Moscow today that any implication that he and his family were involved in a Russian intelligence-gathering operation to recruit Heidi Duncan as an American spy was a complete fabrication. ‘Cables posted by Maxi-Leaks are a CIA provocation,’ Sokolov said, ‘intended to embarrass Russian president Vyachesian Kalugin.’ Sokolov acknowledged that he and Mrs. Duncan had had an ‘intimate relationship’ but said they never discussed matters of national importance to the United States or Russia.”

  “He’s exaggerating. Flattering himself,” Heidi said. “I’m not an idiot. I wouldn’t cheat on you.”

  “You are an idiot,” Duncan said angrily, rising from his seat. “You met him alone in a hotel.”

  She hurried to where he was standing, threw her arms around his waist, laid her wet cheek against his chest, and quietly sobbed. He did not return her hug.

  Another knock on the suite door.

  “What the hell is it!” Duncan said.

  His top aide entered. Whispered to Duncan. After he had gone, Duncan said, “Heidi, clean yourself up. We’re leaving. I’ve been told to resign. We’ve been told to stay in seclusion until this blows over.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “I’m going to our home in Grand Cayman.”

  Her hands were trembling. She was hoping for comfort, support. Instead he walked toward the study. “You can come too if you haven’t made other plans. I’ve got a call to make. I’m not letting those bastards in Langley and Moscow get away with this.”

  Ambassador Duncan’s call to California senator Cormac Stone was unexpected. Stone had been one of Duncan’s harshest critics at his confirmation hearing.

  “Senator,” Duncan said, getting right to the point, “Director Harris and his chief of station in Moscow have humiliated my wife and me.”

  “I’ve been told about the cables,” Stone replied with no detectible sympathy.

  “Tip O’Neill said, ‘All politics is local,’” Duncan said. “My brief sojourn has taught me that all politics is personal. Director Harris is hiding information from your Senate committee.”

  “Mr. Ambassador,” Senator Stone replied, “you’re making a serious allegation.”

  “Harris is running a covert operation in Moscow outside regular channels—intentionally to keep you from knowing about it.”

  “Why? What sort of operation?”

  “He’s using Brett Garrett.”

  The line went quiet, and for several moments Duncan thought they’d been disconnected.

  Finally, Stone said, “I’m listening.”

  Thirty-Two

  CIA director Harold Harris reviewed a staff-prepared summary of the Maxi-Leaks cables while being driven to Capitol Hill. He’d been summoned by the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Harris viewed most members of Congress with contempt. They were meddlers. Outsiders. He’d spent his entire career in the intelligence world. The politicians peering over his shoulders had never recruited an asset, never ran a covert operation, never stolen secrets from a rival nation or lost an operative in the field. Even worse, politicians were notorious leakers—when it served their purpose.

  As he rode east on Constitution Avenue, Harris looked at the looming United States Capitol Building on the eastern end of the National Mall. Neoclassical architecture inspired by ancient Greece and Rome to evoke the ideals that guided the nation’s founders. Its final design chosen by President George Washington himself. Built, burnt, rebuilt, extended, and restored. Nearly six hundred rooms now on five levels. Northside: the U.S. Senate chamber. South side: the House of Representatives. Joined together by a rotunda topped by nearly nine million pounds of a cast-iron dome. The bronze statue of Freedom, often mistaken by tourists as a Native American statue, poised on the Capitol’s peak.

  Director Harris had been awestruck when he’d walked through the building as a teenager, brought by his parents on a family vacation. Majesty. The best and the brightest. Living gods. No longer. He knew its occupants too well.

  He was not being summoned before the full Senate committee today at the Hart Senate Office Building, where he had testified two years earlier about the bungled Cameroon operation and Brett Garrett. This time Harris was reporting in a much more intimate setting. He exited his car and went through a private entrance into the Capitol Visitor Center, an underground labyrinth below the East Capitol grounds. Nearly 700,000 square feet on three basement levels tucked beneath well-tended grass and shady old trees. He doubted if any of the three million visitors who annually toured it were aware it contained the intelligence committee’s SCIF tucked deep within its bowels. Pronounced “skiff,” the acronym stood for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—a secure vault whose thick walls were lined with acoustic attenuation technology to prevent audio penetration. It was protected around the clock by U. S. Capitol Police and routinely swept for listening devices.

  By law, Congress was entitled to know the country’s most carefully held secrets. Simply by getting elected, any member could request intelligence reports. What was distributed to them, however, was deliberately parceled out and Harris had become adept at keeping information hidden.

  Harris had been warned that the only attendees today would be the committee’s chairman, the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the committee’s vice chair—Senator Cormac Stone—the same senator who had chastised him about his handling of the Cameroon rescue, the man who detested the CIA, the one whose son had been killed.

  Together these four senators ruled their chamber and Director Harris expected all of them to be outraged by the Maxi-Leaks disclosures.

  To the average voter, a senator was a senator, a House member, a House member. In the halls of Congress, few were equal. The bottom-feeders were House freshmen. Two-year terms blew by quickly. Some were voted out of office without ever learning the deliberative body’s unspoken rules. Every member of Congress could introduce a bill. Brag about that legislation to the hometown media. But legislation went nowhere unless the leadership in both chambers willed it. The Senate and House majority and minority leaders, along with their whips, controlled the ship. They kept their power by politicking. Rewards. Punishment. Nothing moved without a favor, a promise, a handshake. To survive, you had to play by the rules, be part of the team. On the campaign trail, every wannabe railed against the Washington establishment. Once under the Capitol dome, those who didn’t join its chorus perished. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? A Hollywood fantasy. Everyone collected favors. Everyone bartered. Everyone took a knee.

  Of the four senators waiting for Harris, none had played the game better than California’s Senator Stone. He’d walked the halls for forty years, ranking him ninth historically in Senate longevity. An untouchable. A left-wing liberal from a previous generation who’d happily discovered a new wave of young voters to support his “progressive” agenda—that was the new buzzword. Progressive!

  California had sent Ronald Reagan to Washington in the 1980s. The conservatives’ ultimate superhero. That was then. Today nearly 45 percent of California voters were registered Democrats, compared to only 25 percent Republicans. Of the remaining independents, a majority voted for “progressive” candidates. More important, California voters had money. Silicon Valley and Hollywood. More billionaires than any other state.

  Senator Stone had amassed a war chest richer than any potential challenger by preaching that socialism wasn’t a dirty word. It was the perfection of a benevolent federal government.

  The disdain that Director Harris felt toward Congress was mirrored by the contempt that Senator Stone felt for him and the entire intelligence community. In Stone’s view, the government had created a bloated, unwieldy, monstrous, top-secret underworld after the 9/11 attacks. Some 1,271 different government organizations and 1,931 private companies collected data at more than ten thousand locations under contracts with U.S. intelligenc
e agencies. Senator Stone had been horrified by President George W. Bush’s infamous Patriot Act. Unidentified roving wiretaps. Lone-wolf warrants for electronic surveillance. Big Brother had taken control. Senator Stone viewed himself as the final guardian at the gate, fighting to keep the beast from entering.

  Harris left his cell phones outside the spy-proof chamber. Entered and found the senators waiting. He was told to sit at the witness table facing the four Lords of the Senate. They peered down at him from cushioned chairs arranged much like a small amphitheater.

  The committee’s chair asked the first round of questions. Were the CIA cables leaked on Maxi-Leaks authentic? Yes, they were. Did the director know who had leaked them? No, but a diligent investigation was under way and COS Marcus Austin had been recalled to Langley for disciplinary action. Why had the CIA not informed Congress about Heidi Duncan’s liaisons with the son of a Russian oligarch? The agency lacked sufficient evidence of any wrongdoing. It operated on evidence, not gossip.

  And so it went for twenty minutes.

  Harris felt satisfied by his responses when the chairman finished interrogating him.

  Now it was Senator Stone’s turn. He held up a newspaper. Harris had assumed it was going to be the New York Times or Washington Post. It was not.

  Moskovskiy Komsomolets.

  Large photos of Russian deputy foreign minister Yakov Prokofyevich Pavel and his grandson Peter. Kidnapped. A shoot-out on Moscow’s streets.

  “Is this your handiwork?” Stone asked.

  Harris had prepared for questions about Maxi-Leaks. Not this. He quickly deduced that Ambassador Edward Todd Duncan had tipped off Stone. He had to assume that Duncan had regurgitated everything that he’d known about Pavel before leaving for the Geneva summit.

  “I am aware of the newspaper article,” Harris said nonchalantly.

  “I didn’t ask if you were aware of the article. I asked if you are responsible for the events it describes.”

  Harris was venturing into dangerous territory. By law, President Randle Fitzgerald and his cabinet were required to “fully and currently” inform both the Senate and the House intelligence committees about every covert action. No exceptions. Even if a president felt it was necessary to limit the most sensitive information, he still was required to notify the top congressional leadership. Smuggling Pavel out of Russia was undoubtedly a covert operation that the president should have informed Congress about, but Harris knew Fitzgerald hadn’t. Harris knew because he hadn’t kept the president informed after their initial discussion and viewing of Pavel’s video offer to defect. Instead, he’d chosen to go off the grid. His actions made both Fitzgerald and, more important, him guilty of breaking the law—but only if caught.

  Although Harris was not under oath, whatever he said would come back to haunt him. He girded himself.

  “I am not responsible for the events described in that newspaper article,” Harris said.

  “I know you weren’t personally in Moscow. I’m asking if your agency was involved in this car chase carnage?”

  The lawyer in Harris sought loopholes, and he immediately recognized one. Brett Garrett was not a CIA employee.

  “Senator, no one from the CIA was responsible for the car chase described in that article.”

  Senator Stone had questioned hundreds of federal bureaucrats during congressional hearings, and he recognized when a witness was playing verbal dodgeball.

  “Let’s cut to the quick, shall we?” Senator Stone said. “Is a covert CIA operation currently under way to extricate Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Yakov Pavel from Russia?”

  “As the senator already knows, the agency is always open to recruiting high-level sources who we believe can help us.”

  “That’s not what I asked. I asked if a covert operation is currently under way to smuggle Pavel out of Russia—an operation, about which neither you nor the president has informed us?”

  “I do not believe the newspaper article states there was any U.S. involvement in the car chase incident,” Harris replied.

  “I don’t give a damn what this article claims,” Senator Stone said, clearly becoming angry. “Are you and the agency currently engaged in a covert operation to smuggle Pavel out of Russia? It’s a direct question. Yes or no?”

  “Senator, as I just explained, I would be derelict in not pursuing all possible and probable means to recruit human assets, especially someone as important as Deputy Minister Pavel. We are constantly testing the waters with dozens of potential sources, but that doesn’t mean we get involved in car chases and shoot-outs on Moscow’s streets.”

  “You’re trying to avoid giving me a direct answer. Let me simplify my question. Is the president aware of a covert operation to smuggle Pavel out of Russia?”

  “I cannot say what the president may or may not be aware of, only what communications I have engaged in with him.”

  Stone’s eyes narrowed. He’d heard enough evasion. “Have you told President Fitzgerald about a CIA covert operation to extricate Deputy Minister Pavel out of Russia?” he demanded, adding, “This is the fourth time I have asked you this same question, sir. I expect you to answer it.”

  But it wasn’t the same question.

  Director Harris had been forcing Senator Stone to repeat his question for a clever reason. He’d hoped Stone’s rephrasing would give him a lawyerly out and, this time, it had. “Have you told President Fitzgerald about a CIA covert operation . . .”

  While Harris and the president had discussed Pavel’s possible defection, Harris had not finalized that operation until after their initial talk. Because of that, Harris had never actually told the White House about a covert operation. It was hair-splitting, but hair-splitting mattered when you had something to hide—a lesson well established when then president Bill Clinton and his attorneys argued about the definition of what constituted “sexual relations.”

  Harris said, “Senator Stone, I have not informed President Fitzgerald about any such covert operation.”

  “Isn’t it true, Director Harris,” Stone asked, “that you sent Brett Garrett, a dishonorably discharged former Navy SEAL and the man responsible for my son’s murder, to get Pavel and his grandson out of Russia? And neither you nor the president informed this committee—as required by law?”

  “With all due respect, Senator, Brett Garrett is not a CIA employee.”

  “Did you or did you not arrange for Brett Garrett, as a civilian, to go to Moscow to escort Pavel and his grandson out of Russia?” Senator Stone shouted, finally losing his temper.

  “Again, Garrett is not under my employ or direction.”

  Stone leaned forward and glared at Harris.

  “Do you recognize the name Jack Strong?” he asked.

  “I do not.”

  “Perhaps you knew him by his SEAL nickname, Bear?” Stone continued.

  “Senator, I do not remember the individual to whom you are referring.”

  “Bear—Jack Strong—was on the Cameroon rescue mission two years ago with my son. You may be interested to know he now works here at the Capitol and he recently came to see me.”

  Harris remained Sphinx-like.

  “Do you recall your sworn testimony before our committee two years ago when you testified that you had ordered Brett Garrett not to rescue other hostages? If your memory fails you, I will read it because I have a transcript.”

  Without waiting, Senator Stone read from a paper:

  Question asked by Senator Stone: “What specific order did you give Chief Garrett when he informed you of this second hostage?”

  Answer: Director Harris: “I specifically told Chief Garrett not to put his men in harm’s way by attempting to rescue that second worker.”

  “Director Harris, is that still your answer—that Garrett disobeyed a direct order from you?”

  “I’d have to review my notes.”

  “Stop this charade, Director Harris!” Stone snapped. “Jack Strong claims you gave Garrett permission to rescue
that second hostage—that Garrett persuaded you by mentioning the hostage was a young girl and the same age as your granddaughter—that you told Garrett you’d—quote—‘have his back’—if things went bad.”

  Harris hadn’t seen this coming.

  Senator Stone continued: “Director Harris, I believe you committed perjury when you testified two years ago about the events in Cameroon. You hid information and lied to protect yourself just as, I suspect, you are lying again right now. Your actions and conduct are a clear display of the utter disregard that you have for us and the United States Congress. Sir, I’m putting you on notice. I intend to seek your removal as director.”

  Harris accidentally bit the side of his cheek while clenching his teeth.

  “Now I have one final question,” Senator Stone said sternly. “Where is Brett Garrett right now? Is he with Deputy Minister Pavel and his grandson? Is he attempting to smuggle them out of Russia?”

  “Senator,” Harris replied, looking defiantly into Stone’s eyes, “I honestly do not know where Garrett, Pavel, and his grandson may be.”

  Thirty-Three

  Brett Garrett regained consciousness on the cargo floor of an Mi-26 Russian air force helicopter. Handcuffed, legs bound. The hovering aircraft’s interior was massive. Capable of transporting ninety Russian troops. Garrett counted fourteen other passengers, including Pavel, Peter, and General Gromyko. The rest were Gromyko’s men, some of whom had helped subdue him on the train before Gromyko’s boot toe had knocked him out.

  The helicopter landed with a jolt. Four guards carried the manacled Garrett outside. He didn’t resist. Pointless. Instead, he took note of their destination. They’d landed in a clearing edged by forest some twenty meters from a windowless, one-story bunker. Pavel and Peter, who were not restrained, were escorted from the aircraft.

  Through a heavy steel door they entered. Down a brightly lit corridor they went. Stopping finally at a metal door at the end of the hallway. An electronic keypad. Beep. Ding. Each a slightly different tone. An electronic bolt slid open. Garrett was carried inside. He lifted his head just in time to keep it from smacking the concrete floor when he was dropped. Pavel and Peter followed him inside. One of Gromyko’s men tossed a pail into the room. “To pee,” he said.