There was still a hint of fog hanging, away to their right, over the stretch of woodland known as Fox Covert, presaging a warm clear day to come.
On the knoll that dominated the rolling stretch of ground known to generations of soldiers as Frog Hill, the group of mixed military officers took their station to observe the forthcoming army maneuvers that would simulate a battle at battalion strength between two matched sets of opponents. Both groups would be British soldiers, divided for the sake of diplomacy not into “the Brits” and “the enemy” but into the Blues and the Greens. Even the usual designation of one group as “the Reds” had been changed, in deference to the composition of the officers on the knoll.
Across the stretch of open country at the northern edge of Salisbury Plain, so beloved by the British Army as a perfect maneuver ground much resembling the Central German Plain, over which it had been assumed the Third World War might have to be fought, umpires were scattered who would award points that would eventually decide the outcome of the battle. Men would not die that day; they would just prepare to.
Behind the officer group were the vehicles that had brought them there: several staff cars and a greater number of less comfortable Land-Rovers in camouflage stripes or dull green. Orderlies from the Catering Corps set up field kitchens to provide the succession of mugs of steaming tea and coffee that would be demanded throughout the day and began to unpack a cold collation of snacks.
The officers milled about or stood stationary in the poses and activities of observing officers anywhere in the world. Some studied maps protected by plastic sheeting, on which notations in chinagraph pencils would later be made and erased. Others studied the distant terrain through powerful field glasses. Others conferred gravely among each other.
At the center of the group was the senior British general, the commanding officer of Southern Command. Beside him stood his personal guest, the senior ranking general of the visitors. Between and slightly behind them stood a bright young Subaltern fresh out of language school, who murmured a running translation into the ears of both men.
The British group of officers was the larger, just over thirty men. They all wore an air of gravity, as if well aware of both the unusualness and the importance of the occasion. They also seemed somewhat wary, as if unable quite to shake off the habit of years. For this was the first year of perestroika, and although Soviet officers had been invited to watch British maneuvers in Germany, this was the first time they had come to the heart of England as guests of the British Army. Old habits die hard.
The Russians were as grave as the British, or more so. There were seventeen of them, and each had been carefully picked and screened. Several spoke passable English and admitted it; five spoke perfect English and pretended not to.
The speaking of English had not, however, been the first priority in their selection. Expertise was the first consideration. Each Soviet officer was an expert in his field and well acquainted with British equipment, tactics, and structures. Their instructions were not simply to listen to what they were told, even less to accept it; but to study hard, miss nothing, and report back exactly how good the Brits were, what equipment they used, how they used it, and if at all, where their weak points lay.
They had arrived the previous evening after a day in London, much of it spent at their own embassy. The first dinner at the Officers’ Mess at Tidworth Army Base had been fairly formal, even a trifle strained, but without incident. The jokes and the songs would come later, perhaps on their second or third evening. The Russians were aware that among the seventeen of them, there had to be five at least who were watching the rest, and probably each other as well.
No one mentioned this to the British group, nor did the British see fit to point out that among their own thirty members there were four who were actually from Counterintelligence, the watchers. At least the British’ watchers were only there to watch the Russians and not their fellow countrymen.
The Russian group comprised two generals, one whose insignia showed him to be from Motorized Rifles, the other from the Armored Corps; a General Staff full colonel; from Military Intelligence one colonel, one major, and one captain, all “declared,” meaning they admitted they really were from Military Intelligence; a colonel of the Airborne Forces at whose open-necked combat blouse could be seen a triangle of blue-white-striped singlet, the insignia of Spetsnaz, or Special Forces; a colonel and a captain from Infantry and the same from Armored. In addition there was a half-colonel from Ops Staff, plus a major and two captains; and a colonel and major from Signals.
The Soviet Military Intelligence Corps is known as the GRU, and the three “declared” GRU men wore their proper insignia. They alone knew that the Signals major and one of the captains from Ops Staff were also GRU but undeclared. Neither the remainder of the Russians nor the British knew this.
The British, for their part, had not felt it necessary to tell the Russians that twenty operatives from the Security Service were posted around the officers’ mess at Tidworth and would remain until the Soviet delegation departed for London and the Moscow flight on the morning of the third day. These watchers were now tending the lawns and flower beds, waiting table, or polishing bits of brass. Through the night they would “spell” each other, taking turns to keep the mess building under observation from vantage points scattered in a wider ring. As the Chief of General Staff had mentioned to the OC Southern Command at a ministry briefing several days earlier, “One really would prefer not to lose one of the buggers.”
The war game began on schedule at nine o’clock and proceeded throughout the day. The paratroop drop by Second Battalion, Parachute Regiment, took place just after lunch. A major of Two Para found himself standing next to the Soviet Airborne Colonel, who was watching with the keenest interest.
“I see,” observed the Russian, “that you still favor the two-inch company mortar.”
“A useful tool,” agreed the Britisher. “Effective and still reliable.”
“I agree,” said the Russian in slow, accented English. “I used them in Afghanistan.”
“Indeed. I used them in the Falklands,” said the major from Two Para. He thought, but did not say, “And the difference is, we won in short order in the Falklands, and you are losing badly in Afghanistan.”
The Russian permitted himself a grim smile. The Britisher smiled back. “Bastard,” thought the Russian. “He’s thinking how badly we are doing in Afghanistan.”
Both men kept smiling. Neither could have known that in two years the remarkable new General Secretary in Moscow would order the entire Soviet Army to withdraw from the Afghan adventure. It was early days, and old habits die hard.
That evening the dinner at Tidworth barracks was more relaxed. The wine flowed; vodka, which the British Army rarely drinks, was in evidence. Across the language barrier an element of jocularity raised its head. The Russians took their cue from their senior general, the Motorized Rifles one. He seemed to be beaming at the translated conversation from the British general, so they relaxed. The major from Ops Staff listened to a British tank man tell a joke and nearly burst out laughing before realizing he was not supposed to understand any English and had to wait for the translation.
The major from Two Para found himself next to the declared major from Soviet Military Intelligence, the GRU. He thought he would practice his smattering of Russian.
“Govoritya-vi pa-Angleeski?” he asked.
The Russian was delighted. “Ochen malinko,” he replied, then dropped into halting English. “Very little, I am afraid. I try with books at home, but it is not so good.”
“Better than my Russian, I’m sure,” said the paratrooper. “By the way, I’m Paul Sinclair.”
“Please, I am so sorry,” said the Russian. He reached around and held out his hand. “Pavel Kuchenko.”
It was a good dinner and ended with songs in the bar before the two groups of officers trooped off to their rooms at eleven o’clock. A number of them would appreciate that the following morning would permit a lie-in—the orderlies were instructed to appear with cups of tea at seven o’clock.
In fact, Major Kuchenko was up at five and spent two hours seated quietly behind the lace curtains that covered the windows of his bachelor bedroom. He sat with all his lights out and studied the road that ran past the front of the officers’ mess toward the main gate leading to the Tidworth road. He spotted or thought he spotted three men in the half-gloom of very early morning who might be watchers.
He also spotted, precisely at six o’clock, Colonel Arbuthnot appear from the main doors of the mess almost beneath him and depart on what was apparently his regular morning jogging run. He had reason to believe it was a regular habit—he had seen the elderly colonel do exactly the same the previous morning.
Colonel Arbuthnot was not a difficult man to spot, for his left arm was missing. He had lost it years earlier while on patrol with his levies in that strange half-forgotten war in the hills of Dhofar, a campaign fought by British Special Forces and Omani levies to prevent a Communist revolution from toppling the Sultan of Oman and taking control of the Straits of Hormuz. A sentimental Army board had permitted him to stay on in the Army, and he was by then the catering officer at Tidworth officers’ mess. Every morning he kept in trim with a five-mile jog down the road and back, an accepted figure in white tracksuit with cowl hood and blue piping, the loose left sleeve neatly pinned to the fabric by his side. For the second morning, Major Kuchenko watched him thoughtfully.
The second day of war games passed without incident, and finally all the officers of both nationalities agreed the umpires had done a good job in awarding a technical victory to the Greens, who had finally dislodged the Blues from their positions on Frog Hill and secured Fox Covert from counterattack. The third dinner was very jolly, with copious toasts and later a much-applauded rendering of “Malinka” from the young Russian Ops Staff captain, who was not a spy but had a fine baritone voice. The Russian group was due to congregate in the main lobby after breakfast at nine A.M. the next morning to board the coach for Heathrow. The coach would come from London with two embassy staff on board to see them through the airport. During the singing of “Malinka,” no one noticed that Colonel Arbuthnot’s room, which was not locked, was entered by someone who left sixty seconds later as quietly as he had come and who later rejoined the group at the bar, coming from the direction of the men’s toilet.
At ten minutes to six the next morning a figure in white-cowled tracksuit with blue piping, the empty left sleeve pinned to the side, trotted down the steps of the mess and turned toward Main Gate. The figure was spotted by a watcher behind the glass of a window in an upper room of another building two hundred yards away. He made a note but took no action.
At the gate the Corporal of the Guard came out of the guardroom and threw up a salute to the figure as it ducked under the barrier. The runner, not wearing a cap, was unable to return the salute but raised a hand in salutation, then turned in the usual direction and jogged toward Tidworth.
At ten past six the corporal glanced up, stared, then turned to his sergeant.
“I’ve just seen Colonel Arbuthnot go past,” he said.
“So?” asked the sergeant.
“Twice,” said the corporal. The sergeant was tired. They would both be relieved in twenty minutes. Breakfast awaited. He shrugged.
“Must have forgotten something,” he said. He would regret that remark—later, at the disciplinary hearing.
Major Kuchenko ducked into some trees beside the road after half a mile and slipped out of the stolen white tracksuit and hid it in deep undergrowth. When he went back to the road he was in gray flannel slacks and tweed jacket over a shirt and tie. Only his Adidas running shoes were at odds with the outfit. He suspected but could not be sure that a mile behind him jogged an annoyed Colonel Arbuthnot, who had wasted ten fruitless minutes searching for his regular tracksuit before coming to the conclusion that his orderly must have taken it for laundering and not returned it. He was wearing his spare, and he had not yet noticed he was also missing a shirt, tie, jacket, slacks, and a pair of running shoes.
Kuchenko could easily have stayed ahead of the British colonel until Arbuthnot turned around to make his way back, but he was saved the trouble by a car that came from behind him and stopped at his wave. Kuchenko leaned toward the window on the passenger side.
“I’m awfully sorry,” he said, “but my car seems to have broken down. Back there. I was wondering whether I could get some help from a garage in North Tidworth?”
“Bit early,” said the driver, “but I can run you up there. Jump in.”
The paratroops major would have been amazed at Kuchenko’s sudden mastery of English. But the foreign accent was still there.
“Not from these parts, are you?” asked the driver by way of conversation. Kuchenko laughed.
“No. I am from Norway. Touring your British cathedrals.”
Kuchenko was dropped by the kindly driver in the center of the sleepy town of North Tidworth at ten minutes to seven. The driver drove on toward Marlborough. He would never see any reason to mention the incident again, nor would anyone ever ask him.
In the town center Kuchenko found a phone booth and at exactly one minute to seven dialed a London number, punching in a fifty-pence piece to start the call. It was answered at the fifth ring.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Roth, Mr. Joe Roth,” said Kuchenko.
“Yeah, this is Joe Roth speaking,” said the voice at the other end.
“Pity,” said Kuchenko. “You see, I really hoped I might talk to Chris Hayes.”
In his small but elegant Mayfair apartment, Joe Roth stiffened, and all his professional antennae went onto red alert. He had only been awake for twenty minutes, still in pajamas, unshaven, running a bath, and preparing his first coffee of the day. He had been crossing the sitting room from the kitchen, juice in one hand, coffee in the other, when the phone rang. It was early, even for him, and he was not a late riser, even though his job as Assistant Public Affairs officer at the American Embassy just a quarter of a mile away in Grosvenor Square did not require him to check in until ten.
Joe Roth was CIA, but he was not the Company’s Head of London Station. That honor went to William Carver, and Carver was with Western Hemisphere Division, as all station heads would be. As such, Carver was “declared,” which meant that just about everyone who mattered knew what he was and what job he did. Carver would sit, ex officio, on the British Joint Intelligence Committee, the official representative of the Company in London.
Roth came from the Office of Special Projects, a bureau formed only six years ago to handle, as its name implied, projects and active measures that Langley regarded as sufficiently sensitive to merit the station Heads later being able to claim innocence, even to America’s allies.
All CIA officers, of whatever department they come from, have a real name and an operational or professional name. The real name, in friendly embassies, actually is real; Joe Roth really was Joe Roth and was listed as such in the Diplomatic List. But unlike Carver, Joe was undeclared, except to a tiny caucus of three or four British counterparts, in the Secret Intelligence Service. And his professional name was equally known to only that same few, plus some of his colleagues back in America. To have it thrown at him down a phone line at seven A.M., and in a voice with a non-British accent, was like a warning buzzer.
“I’m sorry,” he said carefully, “You’ve got Joe Roth here. Who is that speaking?”
“Listen carefully, Mr. Roth, or Mr. Hayes. My name is Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov. I am a full colonel of the KGB.”
“Look, if this is a joke—”
“Mr. Roth, my calling you by your operational name is no joke for you. My defection to the U.S.A. is no joke for me. And that is what I am offering to do. I want to get to America—fast. Very soon now, it will be impossible for me to go back to my own side. No excuse will be accepted. I have an enormous amount of information of great value to your Agency, Mr. Roth. You must make your decision quickly, or I go back while there is time.”
Roth was scribbling rapidly on a jotting pad he had clawed off his sitting-room coffee table. The pad still had the scores from the poker game he had concluded late the previous evening with Sam McCready. He recalled later thinking, “Jesus, if Sam could hear this now, he’d go apeshit.” He cut in.
“Where exactly are you now, Colonel?”
“In a phone booth in a small town near Salisbury Plain,” said the voice. Grammatically, the English was near perfect. Only the accent was clearly foreign. Roth had been trained to discern accents, place them. This one was Slavic, probably Russian. He still wondered whether this would turn out to be one of Sam McCready’s crazy jokes, whether he would suddenly hear peals of laughter coming down the phone at him. Dammit, it wasn’t even April Fool’s Day. It was the third.
“For three days,” said the voice, “I have been with a group of Soviet officers attending British military maneuvers on Salisbury Plain. Staying at Tidworth barracks. My cover there was as Major Pavel Kuchenko of the GRU. I walked out one hour ago. If I am not back within one hour, I cannot go back at all. It will take me half an hour to get back. You have thirty minutes to give me your decision, Mr. Roth.”
“Okay, Colonel. I’ll go with it—so far. I want you to call me back in fifteen minutes. The line will be clear. You will have your answer.”
“Fifteen minutes. Then I walk back,” said the voice, and the phone went down.
Roth’s mind was racing. He was thirty-nine, and he had spent twelve years in the Agency. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. But then, many men spent their entire working lives in the Agency and never smelted a Soviet defector. But he knew about them, they all knew about them; all field operatives were briefed and lectured and trained to be aware of the constant possibility of a Soviet defection.
Most, he knew, came after initial, tentative approaches. Usually, they came after long thought and some preparation by the defector. Messages were passed to the known Agency men in the area: “I want to meet, I want to discuss terms.” Usually the potential defector was asked to stay in place and provide a stream of information before finally “coming over.” If he refused, he was urged at least to come with a bagful of documents. The amount he could send out before coming over or bring with him would affect his standing, his rewards, his life-style. In the trade, it was called the bride-price.
Occasionally, just occasionally, you got what is called a “walk-in.” The defector simply appeared, having burned his boats behind him, unable to go back. That left little choice; you either accepted the man or cast him back into a refugee camp. The latter was rarely done, not even in the case of a rather useless, low-level defector like a merchant seaman or a private soldier with nothing to offer. It was usually done only if lie-detector tests at the point of defection proved the man was a disinformation agent. Then America would refuse to accept him. When that happened, the Russians just bit the bullet, got their agent out of the refugee camp, and took him home.
On one occasion, to Roth’s knowledge, the KGB had traced a turned-down defector to a refugee camp and liquidated him because he had failed the polygraph test, even though he had been telling the truth. The machine had interpreted his nervousness as lies. Damned bad luck. Of course, that was in the old days; the lie detectors were better now.
And here was a man claiming to be a full colonel of the KGB who wanted just to walk in. No forewarning. No haggling. No suitcase full of documents fresh from the KGB Rezidentsia of his latest posting. And defecting right in the heart of England of all places, not the Middle East or Latin America. And to the Americans, not the Brits. Or had he already approached the Brits? Been turned down? Roth’s mind raced across the possibilities, and the minutes ticked away.
Five past seven—five past two in Washington. Everyone asleep. He ought to call Calvin Bailey, head of Special Projects, his boss. Now no doubt fast asleep in Georgetown. But the time—there wasn’t time. He flipped open a wall cabinet to reveal his private computer. Swiftly, he tapped himself into the mainframe deep beneath the embassy in Grosvenor Square. He put the computer into encrypted mode and asked the mainframe to consider senior KGB officers known to the West. Then he asked: Who is Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov?
One of the strange things about the covert world is the almost clublike atmosphere that can exist within it. Pilots share the same sort of camaraderie, but they are allowed to. Paratroopers have it also, and Special Forces. Professionals tend to respect each other, even across the barriers of rivalry, opposition, or outright hostility. In the Second World War the fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe and the RAF seldom hated each other, leaving such sentiments to the zealots and civilians. Professionals serve their political masters and bureaucrats loyally, but would usually prefer to sink a pint of beer with others of their own arcane skills, even the opposition.
In the covert world, careful note is taken of just whom the opposition is putting up at bat this week. Promotions and transfers in allied, rival, or enemy agencies are carefully noted and filed. In any capital city the KGB Rezident will probably know who the British and American stations heads are, and vice versa. In Dar-es-Salaam once, the KGB chief at a cocktail party came up to the British SIS station head with a whiskey and soda.
“Mr. Child,” he announced solemnly, “you know who I am, and I know who you are. Ours is a difficult profession. We should not ignore each other.” They drank to that.
The CIA mainframe computer in London is linked straight through to Langley, Virginia. In response to Roth’s question, little circuits began to run through lists of KGB officers known to the CIA. There were hundreds of “confirmed” and thousands of “suspected.” Mostly this knowledge came from defectors themselves, for one of the areas that debriefing officers are always keen to explore with a newly arrived defector is that of who is who these days, who has been transferred, who demoted or promoted. The knowledge grows with each new defector.
Roth knew that over the past four years, the British had been more than helpful in this regard, providing hundreds of names—many of them new, others confirmations of suspicions. The Brits attributed their knowledge in part to intercepts, in part to smart analysis, and in part to defectors like Vladimir Kuzichkin, the Illegals Directorate man they had spirited out of Beirut. Wherever Langley’s databank had got its original information, it did not waste time. Letters in green began to flash up on Roth’s small screen.
PYOTR ALEXANDROVITCH ORLOV. KGB. FULL COLONEL. PAST FOUR YEARS BELIEVED IN THIRD DIRECTORATE. BELIEVED MASQUERADING AS GRU MAJOR INSIDE RED ARMY JOINT PLANNING STAFF MOSCOW. PREVIOUS POSTINGS KNOWN AS OPS PLANNING MOSCOW CENTER AND FIRST CHIEF DIRECTORATE (ILLEGALS DIRECTORATE) YAZENEVO.
Roth whistled as the machine ended its knowledge of a man called Orlov, and he shut it down. What the voice on the phone had said made sense. The Third or Armed Forces Directorate of the KGB was that department tasked to keep a constant eye on the loyalty of the Armed Forces. As such, it was deeply resented but tolerated. AFD officers usually infiltrated the Armed Forces disguised as GRU or Military Intelligence officers. This would explain their being anywhere and everywhere, and asking questions, and keeping up surveillance. If Orlov had really been for four years posing as a GRU major on the Joint Planning Staff of the Soviet Defense Ministry, he would be a walking encyclopedia. It would also account for his being in the group of Soviet officers invited under the recent NATO-Warsaw Pact agreement to Salisbury Plain to watch the British war games.
He checked his watch. Seven-fourteen. No time to call Langley. He had sixty seconds to decide. Too risky—tell him to go back to the officers’ mess, slip into his room, and accept a nice cup of tea from a British steward. Then back to Heathrow and Moscow. Try and persuade him to do his run at Heathrow, give me time to contact Calvin Bailey in Washington. The phone rang.
“Mr. Roth, there is a bus outside the phone booth. The first of the morning. I think it is taking civilian cleaning staff to Tidworth barracks. I can just get back in time, if I have to.”
Roth took a deep breath. Career on the line, boy, right on the line.
“Okay, Colonel Orlov, we’ll take you. I’ll contact my British colleagues—they’ll have you safe within thirty minutes.”
“No.” The voice was harsh, brooking no opposition. “I come to the Americans only. I want out of here and into America fast. That is the deal, Mr. Roth. No other deal.”
“Now look, Colonel—”
“No, Mr. Roth, I want you to pick me up yourself. In two hours. The forecourt of the Andover railway station. Then to Upper Heyford USAF base. You get me on a transport to America. It’s the only deal I will take.”
“All right, Colonel. You got it. I’ll be there.”
It took Roth ten minutes to throw on street clothes, grab a passport, CIA identification, money, and car keys, and head downstairs for his car in the basement garage.
Fifteen minutes after putting down the phone, he eased his way into Park Lane and headed north for Marble Arch and the Bayswater Road, preferring that route to the scramble through Knightsbridge and Kensington.
By eight, he was past Heathrow and had turned south on the M25 then southwest along the M3, linking to the A303 to Andover. He entered the forecourt of the railway station at ten past nine. There was a stream of cars sweeping in to deposit travelers and leaving the forecourt within seconds. The travelers hurried into the station concourse. Only one man was not moving. He leaned against a wall in a tweed jacket, gray trousers, and running shoes and scanned a morning paper. Roth approached him.
“I think you must be the man I have come to meet,” he said softly. The reader looked up, calm gray eyes, a hard face in its mid-forties.
“That depends if you have identification,” said the man. It was the same voice as the one on the phone. Roth tendered his CIA pass. Orlov studied it and nodded. Roth gestured to his car, engine still running, blocking several behind it. Orlov looked around as if saying good-bye for the last time to a world he had known. Without a word, he stepped into the car.
Roth had told the Embassy Duty Officer to alert Upper Heyford that he would be coming with a guest. It took nearly two hours more to cut across country to the Oxfordshire base of the USAF. Roth drove straight to the Base Commander’s office. There were two calls to Washington; then Langley cleared it with the Pentagon, who instructed the Base Commander. A communications flight out of Upper Heyford to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, that afternoon at three P.M. had two extra passengers.
That was five hours after everything had hit the fan from Tidworth to London and back. Long before takeoff, there was a most imperial row going on among the British Army, the Defense Ministry, the Security Service, and the Russian Embassy.
The Soviet group had assembled for breakfast around eight o’clock in the officers’ mess dining hall, by now chatting relaxedly to their British counterparts. There were sixteen of them by eight-twenty. The absence of Major Kuchenko was noted, but not with any sense of alarm.
About ten minutes before nine, the sixteen Russians reassembled in the main lobby with their baggage, and again the absence of Major Kuchenko was noted. A steward was dispatched to his room to ask him to hurry up. The coach stood outside the door.
The steward returned to say the major’s room was empty, but his gear was still there. A delegation of two British officers and two Russians went up to look for him. They established that the bed had been slept in, that the bath towel was damp, and that all Kuchenko’s clothes were apparently present, indicating he must be somewhere nearby. A search was made of the bathroom down the corridor (only the two Russian generals had been accorded private bathrooms), but the search drew a blank. Toilets were also checked, but they were empty. By now the faces of the two Russians, including the GRU colonel, had lost all trace of bonhomie.
The British were also becoming worried. A complete search of the mess building was made, but to no avail. A British Intelligence captain slipped out to talk to the invisible watchers from the Security Service. Their log showed that two officers in tracksuits had gone jogging that morning but only one had returned. A frantic call was made to Main Gate. The night log showed only that Colonel Arbuthnot had left and that he had returned.
To solve the problem, the Corporal of the Guard was summoned from his bed. He related the double departure of Colonel Arbuthnot, who was confronted and hotly denied he had ever left Main Gate, returned, and left again. A search of his room revealed that he was missing a white tracksuit, plus a jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. The Intelligence captain had a hurried and whispered conversation with the senior British general, who became extremely grave and asked the senior Russian to accompany him to his office.
When the Russian general emerged, he was white with anger and demanded an immediate staff car to take him to his embassy in London. Word spread among the other fifteen Russians, who became frosty and unapproachable. It was ten o’clock. The telephoning began.
The British general raised the Chief of Staff in London and gave him a complete situation report. Another sitrep went from the senior watcher to his superiors in the Security Service headquarters at Curzon Street, London. There it went right up to the Deputy Director General, who at once suspected the hand of TSAR, the friendly acronym by which the Security Service sometimes refers to the Secret Intelligence Service. It stands for: Those Shits Across the River.
South of the Thames in Century House, Assistant Chief Timothy Edwards took a call from Curzon Street but was able to deny that the SIS had had anything to do with it. As he put the phone down he pressed a buzzer on his desk and barked: “Ask Sam McCready to step up here at once, would you?”
By noon, the Russian general, accompanied by the GRU colonel, was closeted in the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens with the Soviet Defense attaché, who was posing as a Major-General of Infantry but actually held the same rank in the GRU. None of the three knew that Major Kuchenko was actually Colonel Orlov of the KGB—a knowledge confined to a very few senior officers on the Joint Planning Staff in Moscow. In fact, all three men would have been deeply relieved to know—few things please Russian Army men as much as the KGB with egg all over its face. In London, they thought that they had lost a GRU major and were deeply unhappy at Moscow’s expected reaction.
At Cheltenham, the Government Communications Headquarters, the nation’s listening post, noted and reported a sudden frantic increase in Soviet radio traffic between the embassy and Moscow, in both the diplomatic and the military codes.
During the lunch hour the Soviet Ambassador, Leonid Zamyatin, lodged a vigorous protest with the British Foreign Office, alleging kidnapping, and demanded immediate access to Major Kuchenko. The protest bounced straight back down from the Foreign Office to all the covert agencies, who in unison held up their lily-white hands and replied, “But we haven’t got him.”
Long before midday, the rage of the Russians was being matched by the puzzlement of the British. The manner in which Kuchenko (they were still calling him that) had made his escape was bizarre, to put it mildly. Defectors did not simply defect in order to go to a bar for a beer; they headed for sanctuary, usually one that had been prepared in advance. If Kuchenko had bolted into a police station—it had been known—the Wiltshire police would have notified London at once. With all the British agencies protesting their innocence, that left the possibility of other agencies based on British soil.
Bill Carver, the CIA station head in London, was in an impossible position. Roth had been forced to contact Langley from the air base to get clearance on the USAF flight, and Langley had informed Carver. Carver knew the rules of the Anglo-American agreement on such matters—it would be taken as deeply offensive for the Americans to spirit a Russian out of England under the nose of the Brits without telling them. But Carver was warned to delay until the military flight cleared British airspace. He took refuge in the ruse of being unavailable all morning, then asked for an urgent meeting with Timothy Edwards at three P.M., which was granted.
Carver was late—he had sat three blocks away in his car until he learned on the car phone that the flight was airborne. By the time he saw Edwards, it was ten past three and the American jet was clear of the Bristol Channel and south of Ireland, next stop Maryland.
By the time Edwards confronted him, Carver had already received a full report from Roth, brought by a USAF dispatch rider from the air base to London. Roth explained that he had been given no choice but to take Kuchenko/Orlov at zero notice or let him go back, and that Orlov would absolutely come only to the Americans.
Carver used this to try to take the sting out of the insult to the British. Edwards had long since checked with McCready and knew exactly who Orlov was—the American databank consulted by Roth just after seven A.M. had come from the SIS in the first place. Privately, Edwards knew that he too would have acted exactly as Roth had, given the opportunity of such a prize, but he remained cool and offended. Having formally received Carver’s report, he at once informed his own Defense Ministry, Foreign Office, and sister service, Security. Kuchenko (he saw no need to tell everyone that the man’s real name was Orlov—yet) was on American sovereign territory and out of any British control.
An hour later, Ambassador Zamyatin arrived at the Foreign Office in King Charles Street and was shown straight to the office of the Foreign Secretary himself. Though he purported to receive the explanation with skepticism, he was privately prepared to believe Sir Geoffrey Howe, whom he knew to be a very honorable man. With a show of continuing outrage, the Russian went back to the embassy and told Moscow. The Soviet military delegation flew home late that night, deeply dejected at the prospect of the endless interrogations that were in store for them.
In Moscow itself, a blazing row had been raging between the KGB, which accused the GRU of not exercising sufficient vigilance, and the GRU, which accused the KGB of having treasonous officers on its staff. Orlov’s wife, deeply distraught and protesting her innocence, was being interrogated, as were all Orlov’s colleagues, superiors, friends, and contacts.
In Washington, the Director of Central Intelligence took an angry phone call from the Secretary of State, who had received a deeply pained telegram from Sir Geoffrey Howe over the handling of the matter. As he put the phone down, the DCI looked across his desk at two men: the Deputy Director (Operations) and the Head of Special Projects, Calvin Bailey. It was to the latter that he spoke.
“Your young Mr. Roth. He certainly stirred up a hornets’ nest on this one. You say he acted on his own authority?”
“He did. As I understand it, the Russian gave him no time to go through channels. It was take it or leave it.”
Bailey was a thin, astringent man, not given to making close personal friendships in the Agency. People found him aloof, chilly. But he was good at his job.
“We’ve upset the Brits pretty badly. Would you have taken the same risk?” asked the DCI.
“I don’t know,” said Bailey. “We won’t know until we talk to Orlov. Really talk.”
The DCI nodded. In the covert world, as in all others, the rule was simple. If you took a gamble and it paid rich dividends, you were a smart fellow, destined for the highest office. If the gamble failed, there was always early retirement. The DCI wanted to pin it down.
“You taking responsibility for Roth? For better, for worse?”
“Yes,” said Bailey, “I will. It’s done now. We have to see what we’ve got.”
When the military flight landed at Andrews just after six P.M. Washington time, there were five Agency cars waiting on the tarmac. Before the service personnel could disembark, the two men whom none of them recognized or would ever see again were escorted off the plane and enveloped by the dark-windowed sedans waiting below. Bailey met Orlov, nodded coolly, and saw the Russian ensconced in the second car. He turned to Roth.
“I’m giving him to you, Joe. You brought him out, you debrief him.”
“I’m not an interrogator,” said Roth. “It’s not my specialty.”
Bailey shrugged. “He asked for you. You brought him out. He owes you. Maybe he’ll be more relaxed with you. You’ll have all the backup—translators, analysts, specialists in every area he touches on. And the polygraph, of course. Start with the polygraph. Take him to the Ranch—they’re expecting you. And Joe—I want it all. As it comes, at once, my eyes only, by hand. Okay?”
Roth nodded.
Seventeen hours earlier, when he donned a white tracksuit in a bedroom in England, Pyotr Orlov, alias Pavel Kuchenko, had been a trusted Soviet officer with a home, a wife, a career, and a motherland. Now he was a bundle, a package, huddled in the back of a sedan in a strange land, destined to be squeezed for every last drop of juice, and certainly feeling, as they all do, the first pangs of doubt and maybe panic.
Roth turned to climb into the car beside the Russian.
“One last thing, Joe,” said Bailey. “If Orlov, who is now code-named Minstrel, turns out to be a no-no, the Director is going to have my ass. About thirty seconds after I have yours. Good luck.”
The Ranch was and remains a CIA safe house, a genuine farm in the horse-raising country of southern Virginia. Not too far from Washington, it is buried in deep woodland, railed and fenced, approached by a long driveway, and guarded by teams of very fit young men who have all passed the unarmed combat and weapons training courses at Quantico.
Orlov was shown to a comfortable two-room suite in restful colors and with the usual appurtenances of a good hotel—television, video, tape player, easy chairs, small dining table. Food was served—his first meal in America—and Joe Roth ate with him. On the flight over, the two men had agreed they would call each other Peter and Joe. Now it appeared their acquaintance was going to be extended.
“It won’t always be easy, Peter,” said Roth as he watched the Russian dealing with a large hamburger. He might have been thinking of the bulletproof windows that would not open, the one-way mirrors in all the rooms, the recording of every word spoken in the suite. And the rigorous debriefing to come.
The Russian nodded.
“Tomorrow we have to start, Peter. We have to talk, really talk. You have to take a polygraph test. If you pass that, you have to tell me ... many things. Everything, in fact. Everything you know or suspect. Over and over again.”
Orlov put down his fork and smiled.
“Joe, we are men who have lived our lives in this strange world. You do not have to”—he searched for the phrase—“mince the words. I have to justify the risk you have taken for me, to get me out. What you call the price of the bride, yes?”
Roth laughed.
“Yes, Peter, that’s what we need to have now. The price of the bride.”
In London, the Secret Intelligence Service had not been entirely inactive. Timothy Edwards had quickly learned the name of the missing man from the Ministry of Defense—Pavel Kuchenko. His own databank had quickly revealed that that was the cover-name of Colonel Pyotr Orlov of the KGB Third Directorate. That was when he summoned Sam McCready.
“I’ve screwed our American Cousins as hard as I can. Deep offense taken, outrage at all levels—that sort of thing. Bill Carver is deeply mortified—he sees his own position here as damaged. Anyway, he will press Langley to give us the lot, as and when it comes. I want to form a small group to have a look at the Orlov product when it reaches us. I’d like you to be in charge—under me.”
“Thank you,” said The Deceiver. “But I’d go for more. I’d ask for access. It could be that Orlov knows things that are specific to us. Those things won’t be high on Langley’s list. I’d like access, personal access.”
“That might be hard,” mused Edwards. “They’ve probably got him stashed in Virginia somewhere. But I can ask.”
“You’ve got the right,” insisted McCready. “We’ve been giving them a hell of a lot of product recently.”
The thought hung in the air. They both knew where most of the product had been coming from these past four years. And there was the Soviet Army War Book, handed over to Langley the previous year.
“Another thing,” said Sam. “I’d like to check on Orlov with Keepsake.”
Edwards stared hard at McCready. Keepsake was a British “asset,” a Russian working for the SIS. He was so highly placed and so sensitive that only four men in Century House were aware who he was, and less than a dozen knew that he existed at all. Those who knew his identity were the Chief himself, Edwards, the Controller Sovbloc, and McCready, his case officer, the man who “ran” him.
“Is that wise?” asked Edwards.
“I think it is justified.”
“Be careful.”
The black car, the following morning, was clearly parked on a double yellow line, and the traffic warden had no hesitation in writing out a ticket. He had just finished and slipped the polythene envelope under the windshield wiper when a slim, well-dressed man in a gray suit emerged from a nearby shop, spotted the ticket, and began to protest. It was such an everyday scene that no one noticed, even on a London street. From afar, an onlooker would have seen the normal gesticulations from the driver and the impervious shrugs from the traffic warden. Tugging at the warden’s sleeve, the driver urged the official to come to the back of the car and look at the plates. When he did, the warden saw the telltale CO plate of the Diplomatic Corps next to the registration plate. He had clearly missed it, but was unimpressed. Foreign diplomatic staff might be immune from the fine, but not from the ticket. He began to move off.
The driver snatched the ticket off the windshield and waved it under the warden’s nose. The warden asked a question. To prove he really was a diplomat, the driver delved into his pocket and produced an identity card, which he forced the warden to look at. The warden glanced, shrugged again, and moved away. In a rage the driver screwed up the parking ticket and hurled it into the car before climbing in and driving off.
What the onlooker would not have seen was the paper stuck inside the ID card saying: “Reading Room, British Museum, tomorrow, two P.M.” Nor would he have noticed the driver a mile later smooth out the crumpled ticket and read on the reverse side: “Colonel Pyotr Alexandrovich Orlov has defected to the Americans. Do you know anything about him?”
The Deceiver had just contacted Keepsake.