The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 55

He decided to change the subject. "You still short-handed over in PR?"

Millie sighed. "Geraldine's decided to take that private sector job. And Florence is out on maternity leave-hey, she had an ultrasonograph yesterday and found out the baby is a girl. She was disappointed-her husband was hoping for a boy-but I told her she ought to count her blessings."

Jack was barely following the conversation. "Why's that?" he asked absently.

"I told her I was speaking from experience-it's hard enough to live with one man, two is twice as difficult. I mean, first off, when you have two men under the same roof they outnumber you-"

Jack was suddenly gaping into Millie's eyes. "What did you say?"

"I said two men in the house outnumber you-"

"Two men outnumber the wife?"

"What's wrong, Jack?"

"And the two men who outnumber the wife-one is the husband and the other is the firstborn son!"

"Well, yeah. It was just a joke, Jack."

"So if Florence were to give birth to a baby boy, I could send her a note saying 'Congratulations on the Second Man?'"

"Well, sure. If you count the husband as the first man."

Ebby had been on target: the answer was staring him in the face, it was just a matter of coming at the problem from the right direction. Jack bounded from the couch, plucked his sports jacket off the back of it and headed for the front door.

"Where are you going. Jack?"

"To find the first man."

Adelle was at her wit's end. She'd spoken with Director Colby twice in the past five weeks. The first time, he'd phoned her to apologize for hustling Leo off to Asia on such short notice; he'd asked her to pack a suitcase and had sent a car around to pick it up. When three weeks had gone by without word from Leo, Adelle had put in a call to the Director. It had taken her three more calls and two days to get past the gatekeepers. Not to worry, Colby had said when she finally managed to speak with him. Leo was fine and engaged in vital work for the Company; with Leo's help, Colby had said, he had high hopes that some extremely important matters might be cleared up. He was sorry he couldn't tell her more. Naturally he counted on her discretion; the fewer people who knew Leo was out of town, the better. Adelle had asked if she could get a letter through to her husband; the Director had given her a post-office box number that she could write to and had promised to call her the moment he had more news. Her two letters sent to the post-box had gone unanswered. Now, five weeks after their return from France, she still had no direct word from Leo. Vanessa was starting to ask questions; Daddy had never disappeared before like this, she noted. Another week and he'd miss Philip Swett's eightieth-birthday s.h.i.+ndig, a Georgetown bash that was expected to attract Congressmen and Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, perhaps even the Vice President. Vanessa, who doted on her father, looked so worried that Adelle swore her to secrecy and told Leo had been sent to Asia on an extremely important mission. Why would the Company pack the Soviet Division chief off to Asia? Vanessa wanted to know. It wasn't logical, was it? It wasn't necessarily illogical, Adelle said. Soviet Russia stretched across the continent to Asia; according to the newspapers, there were Soviet submarine and missile bases on the Kamchatka Peninsula that would be of great interest to the Central Intelligence Agency.

The answer satisfied Vanessa but it left Adelle with the queasy feeling that Colby was being less than straightforward with her. She decided then and there to see if her father could find out where Leo had been sent to, and why.

Philip Swett had grown hard-of-hearing with age and Adelle had to repeat the story several times before her father grasped the problem. "You trying to tell me you haven't seen hide nor hair of that husband of yours in five weeks?" he demanded.

"Not a word, Daddy."

"And that Colby fellow said he'd packed him off to Malaysia?"

"Not Malaysia, Daddy. Asia."

"By golly, I'll get to the bottom of this," Swett swore. And he put in a call to Henry Kissinger over at the State Department.

Kissinger returned the call within the hour. "Phil, what can I do for you?" he asked.

Swett explained that his son-in-law, Leo Kritzky, who happened to be the Soviet Division chief over at Langley, seemed to have dropped from sight. Colby was giving his daughter a song and dance about Kritzky being off on a mission to Asia.

"Where's the problem?" Kissinger demanded. Here he was, trying to trim American foreign policy sails to weather the Presidential impeachment tempest brewing in Congress; he didn't have the time or the energy to track down missing CIA personnel.

"Tarnation, Henry, the boy's been gone for five weeks and there hasn't been a letter, a phone call, nothing."

Kissinger's office rang Swett back that afternoon. One of the Secretary's aides had checked with Langley. It seemed as if Kritzky was on a personal mission for the DCI. The Company had declined to give out any further information and had made it clear that it didn't appreciate inquiries of this nature.

Swett recognized a brush off when he saw one. By golly, he was going to have a word with that Colby fellow if he ran into him. There had been a time when Harry Truman tried out his speeches on Swett, when Dwight Eisenhower sought his advice, when young John Kennedy ruminated aloud in his presence about the imbecility of allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to organize an invasion of Cuba. Come to think of it, Charles de Gaulle had put his finger on the problem before he died four years before: Old age was a s.h.i.+pwreck, he'd said. This time next week Swett would be pus.h.i.+ng eighty from the wrong side. Pretty soon folks wouldn't even return his calls.

Stretching out on the couch, Philip Swett made a mental note to phone his daughter when he woke up from his afternoon nap. Chances were Kritzky was off in Malaysia, just as Colby said; chances were he'd be back in time for Swett's d.a.m.n birthday party. Swett wouldn't lose any sleep if he didn't show up. Always wondered what the devil his mule of a daughter saw in Kritzky. Recently she'd dropped hints that their marriage wasn't all that swell. Well, if she decided to divorce that Jewish fellow, he for one wouldn't shed any tears...

Philip Swett's lids twitched shut over his eyes with a strange weightiness, blotting out the light with such finality he wondered if he would ever see it again.

A filament of moonlight stole through the gap between the curtains on the window and etched a silver seam into the wooden planking on the floor. Wide-awake on the giant bed, Manny pressed his ear against Nellie's spinal column and eavesdropped on her breathing. The night before, high on daiquiris and Beaujolais Nouveau, they had wandered back to her apartment from a small French restaurant in Georgetown. Manny had been quieter than usual. Kicking off her shoes and curling up on the couch next to him, Nellie had sensed he was preoccupied with something other than her. "I could take your mind off it," she had murmured, teasingly pressing her lips into his ear, her breast into his arm. And shrugging off the shoulder straps of the silky black mini-dress, she'd done just that. There had been an impatient exploration of possibilities on the couch. Then they'd padded into the bedroom and made love a second time with lazy premeditation, spreadeagled across fresh sheets scented with lilac. Afterward, losing all sense of time, they had talked in undertones until traffic ceased to move through the street below Nellie's apartment.

In the early hours of the morning Nellie had gotten around to the subject that was mystifying her. "So why?"

"Why what?"

"Why tonight? Why did you f.u.c.k me?"

"I didn't f.u.c.k you, Nellie. I made love to you."

"Oh, you certainly did, Manny. But you haven't answered the question. Why tonight?"

"I figured out that the object of intercourse is intimacy, and not the other way round. For reasons I can't explain it suddenly seemed very important-I needed a close friend close."

"That may be the nicest thing a man's ever said to me, Manny," she had whispered in the slow, husky rasp of someone slipping into delicious unconsciousness. "Incest definitely beats... masturbation."

Now, while she slept, Manny's thoughts drifted back to his most recent session with ae/PINNACLE. Late in the afternoon he'd debriefed Kukushkin in the living room of Agatha's apartment near Rockville, scribbling furiously even though the tape recorder was capturing every word the Russian uttered. Kukushkin seemed edgier than usual, prowling the room as he delivered the latest batch of serials.

-Moscow Centre had forged the letter from Chinese Premier Minister Chou En-lai, published in an African newspaper the previous month, which seemed to suggest that Chou considered the Cultural Revolution to have been a political error.

-the KGB was financing a costly world-wide campaign in support of ratification of the Revised ABM Treaty, limiting the Soviet Union and the United States to one anti-ballistic missile site each.

-the Russians, convinced that Nixon was lying when he claimed to have cancelled the American biological weapons program in the late 1960s, had gone ahead with their own program, with the result that they were now capable of arming intercontinental ballistic missile warheads with anthrax bacteria and smallpox viruses.

-the Kremlin had reason to believe that Taiwan was attempting to buy nuclear technology from South Africa, developed over the past few years in partners.h.i.+p with Israel.

-the KGB had buried bugs inside the electric typewriters used in the American emba.s.sy in Moscow while the typewriters were being s.h.i.+pped from Finland on Soviet trains; the bugs transmitted what was being typed to a nearby listening post in short bursts and on a frequency used by television transmitters so that security sweeps through emba.s.sy detected nothing out of the ordinary.

"So, Manny, there it is-your weekly ration of secrets."

"Is everything normal at the emba.s.sy?"

Kukushkin had settled onto the couch and had looked at his wrist.w.a.tch; he wanted to be back at the emba.s.sy when his wife returned from the dentist. "I think so."

"You only think so?"

"No. I can be more positive. Everything appears normal to me, to my wife also." The Russian had flashed a lopsided smile. "I appreciate you worry about me, Manny."

"If anything were to happen... if there were to be an emergency, you have the safety razor with the numbers on the handle."

Kukushkin nodded wearily; they had been over this before. "I twist the grip to adjust the setting of the blade. If I set the grip precisely between number two and number three and twist counterclockwise, a hidden chamber in the bottom of the handle snaps open. Inside is a frame of microfilm containing emergency procedures for establis.h.i.+ng contact in both Was.h.i.+ngton and Moscow."

"Are you still on good terms with your rezident, Borisov?"

"It would seem so. He invited me into his office for a cognac late last night. When I said him he looks gloomy he laughed a Russian laugh-which, for your information, is a laugh with more philosophy than humor in it. He said Russians are born gloomy. He is blaming it on the winters. He is blaming it on the immensity of Russia. He says we are afraid of this immensity the way children are afraid of the dark-afraid there is a chaos somewhere out there waiting to strangle us in its tentacles. I said him that this explains why we put up with Stalin-our dread of chaos, of anarchy, pushes us to the other extreme: we value order even if it is not accompanied by law."

Manny had watched Kukushkin's eyes as he spoke; they were fixed intently on his American friend and filled with anguish. The nail of his middle finger, flicking back and forth across his thumbnail, had fallen silent. A sigh had escaped from his lips. Was Kukushkin the genuine defector he claimed to be or a consummate actor putting on a good imitation of treason?

Leo Kritzky's fate was riding on the answer to this question.

Kukushkin, suddenly eager to bare his soul, had plunged on. "I am going to tell you something I never before told to a living person, Manny. Not even my wife. There was a Communist, his name was"-even now, even here, Kukushkin had lowered his voice out of habit-"Piotr Trofimovich Ishov, who fought with great heroism in our Civil War and rose to the rank of colonel general. In 1938, I am eleven years old at that moment, Piotr Ishov vanished one evening-he simply did not return to his flat after work. When his much younger wife, Zinaida, made inquiries, she was told that her husband was caught plotting with Trotsky to murder Stalin. There was no trial-perhaps he refused to confess, perhaps he was too beaten to permit him to confess in public. Within days Zinaida and Ishov's oldest son, Oleg, were arrested as enemies of the people and deported to a penal village in the Kara k.u.m desert of Central Asia. There Zinaida committed suicide. There Oleg died of typhus fever. A youngest son, a child of eleven, was given over for adoption to a distant relative living in Irkutsk. The relative's name was Klimov. I am that child, Manny. I am the son of the enemy of the people Ishov."

Manny had instantly recognized this as the defining moment of their relations.h.i.+p. Reaching over, he had gripped Kukushkin's wrist. The Russian had nodded and Manny had nodded back. The silence between them had turned heavy. Manny had asked, "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"Before... you were not yet my friend."

One thing had puzzled Manny. "The KGB would never have recruited you if they had known about your past."

"My adopted father, Ivan Klimov, worked as a structural engineer in an aviation plant in Irkutsk. After the Great War he was transferred to Moscow and eventually rose through the nomenklatura to become a sub-minister for aviation attached to the Ministry of Armaments. He understood that I would never be admitted to the Party or a university, never be permitted to hold an important job, if my history became known. The Klimovs had lost a son my age in a car accident in 1936. When they were transferred to Moscow, with the help of a nephew who worked in the Irkutsk Central Record department they managed to erase all traces of my past. In Moscow Ivan Klimov pa.s.sed me off as his legitimate son, Sergei."

"My G.o.d," Manny had whispered. "What a story!" What bothered him most about it was that n.o.body could have invented it.

Jack fed some coins into the pay phone in the parking lot of the sprawling National Security Agency building at Fort Meade, Maryland. "It's our worst nightmare," Jack confided in Ebby. "I can't say more-this is an open line. I'll be back by three. You'd better convene a war council. Everyone in the task force will want to be in on this."

Colby was the last to turn up for the meeting. "Sorry to be late," he said, settling into an empty seat. "I had to take a call from the White House. That Indian atomic test has them going up the wall." He nodded at Jack. "You want to start the ball rolling."

"Director, gentlenien, ae/PINNACLE was on the money," Jack began. "The Russians do have a mole inside the NSA." He noticed a faint smile creeping onto the lips of James Angleton, slouched in his seat at the head of the table. "We came at the 'Congratulations on the Second Man' serial from another angle." Here Jack nodded at Ebby. "If you start from the premise that the husband is the first man and the firstborn baby is the second man, the pieces fall into place. There were twenty-three NSA employees who had children born in January. Of these twenty-three, seventeen were firstborn sons. Working from phone logs, what records they have in the NSA travel office and the master logs, we were able to establish that the father of one of these seventeen boys was in Paris during Christmas of '72, Copenhagen during Christmas of '73 and Rome during Easter of this year. This, you'll remember, matches the pattern of the KGB's face-to-face debriefings that ae/PINNACLE pa.s.sed on to us."

"Who is it?" Colby asked. He could tell from the way that his DD/0, Ebbitt, avoided his eye that it was going to be pretty bad.

"His name is Raymond R. Shelton. He's a forty-eight-year-old middle-grade NSA staffer who has been a.n.a.lyzing transcripts of Russian intercepts-"

"That's all we needed," Colby muttered.

Angleton raised the eraser-end of a pencil to get Jack's attention. "Were you able to work up any corroboration aside from the business of the first son and the travel pattern?"

Ebby said, "The answer is affirmative."

Jack provided the details. "ae/PINNACLE also mentioned that the mole had a habit, a weakness for women and gambling. The implication was that he couldn't make ends meet on his NSA salary, which in Shelton's case is twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars, and sold out to the Russians for cold cash."

Colby said to himself, "I don't know which is worse-selling out for cash or because you believe in Communism."

"Four years ago," Jack went on, "Shelton's wife filed divorce papers against her husband and named a second woman. The wife eventually reconciled with her husband and dropped the case. The security people looked into it at the time and came across evidence that Shelton, who was a natty dresser with a reputation as a skirt chaser, may have been playing around. They also discovered what they called a 'manageable' poker habit that had him dropping fifty or a hundred on a bad night. Shelton was warned he'd be fired if he continued gambling. He denied the womanizing part and vowed to give up poker, which apparently mollified the security people. In any case, the work he was doing was so important that his section head and the division director both vouched for him."

Colby asked, "Who knows about Shelton outside this room?"

"I had to bring the chief of security at Fort Meade into the picture," Jack explained. "I didn't tell him how we found out about the second-man message or the travel dates."

Angleton was scratching notes to himself on a yellow legal pad. "Who or what's going to keep the NSA security chief from blowing the story to his superiors at Fort Meade?" he asked.

Jack looked across at Angleton. Their eyes met. "I took the liberty of reminding him that Bill Colby wasn't only the CIA director; he was the director of the entire American intelligence establishment, including NSA, and as such would bring the appropriate NSA topsiders in on the situation when he considered it appropriate. For now, the Shelton affair is being closely held."

"Okay," Colby grunted. "Time for the other shoe to drop."

Angleton put a fine point on the question. "What exactly does this Shelton do for a living?"

Jack nodded to himself. "He's in charge of the team a.s.signed to one of NSA's most productive intercept projects, a top-secret BIGOT listed operation code-named IVY BELLS."

"Christ, I walk sterilized chunks of the IVY BELLS product up to the White House from time to time," Colby said.

Ebby said, "I'm sorry, Jack-I'm not familiar with IVY BELLS."

Jack said, "I wasn't either until this morning. Turns out that American submarines have fitted a small waterproof pod onto a Soviet underwater communications cable lying on the ocean floor in the Sea of Okhotsk off the Soviet Union's Pacific coast. The cable is packed with Soviet military lines. The pod is probably the most sophisticated eavesdropping device ever conceived. It wraps itself around the target cable and taps into the lines electronically without actually touching the wires themselves. When the Soviets raise the cables for maintenance, the pod breaks away and sits undetected on the seabed. Tapes in the pod can record Soviet military channels for six weeks, at which point our sub returns, frogmen retrieve the tapes and install new ones. The tapes are sent to NSA for transcription and deciphering. The messages are old but they are br.i.m.m.i.n.g with information about Soviet ballistic missile tests-"

"Soviet missiles test fired from the Kamchatka Peninsula land in the Sea of Okhotsk," Colby noted.

"Which means that reports of their successes or failures pa.s.s through our pod," Ebby observed.

"The Russians are so confident their underwater lines are untappable that they don't use high-grade cipher systems," Jack went on. "On some of the channels they don't bother enciphering their transmissions at all."

Manny caught Jack's eye. "I'm missing something. If the guy in charge of the NSA team handling the IVY BELLS material is a Soviet agent, it means that the Russians know about the pod-they know their undersea cable is being tapped. So why didn't they shut it down?"

Jack said, "If you were the KGB would you shut it down?"

Manny's mouth opened, then closed. "You're all one jump ahead of me, aren't you? They won't shut it down because they don't want us to walk back the cat and stumble across their mole at NSA."

"There are also advantages to knowing your phone's being tapped," Ebby said. "You can fill it with disinformation."

Colby said, "The Soviets could have been overstating the accuracy of their missiles or the success rate of their tests. We'll have to go back and reevaluate every single IVY BELLS intercept."

Manny said, "When we take Shelton into custody-"

Angleton interrupted. "Arresting Shelton is out of the question."