The treatment, or “handling,” of a defector varies widely from case to case, according to the emotional state of the defector or to the usages of the host agency undertaking the debriefing. The only common factor is that it is always a sensitive and complicated business.
The defector must first be housed in an environment that does not appear menacing but that precludes his escape, often for his own good. Two years before Orlov, the Americans had made a mistake with Vitali Urchenko, another walk-in. Attempting to create an air of normality, they had taken him to dinner in a Georgetown, Washington, restaurant. The man changed his mind, escaped through the men’s room window, walked back to the Soviet Embassy, and gave himself up. It did him no good; he was flown back to Moscow, brutally interrogated, and shot.
Apart from the defector’s possible self-destructive tendencies, he must be protected from possible reprisals. The USSR—and notably the KGB—are notoriously unforgiving toward those they regard as traitors and have been wont to hunt them down and liquidate them if possible. The higher the defector’s rank, the worse the treason, and a senior KGB officer is regarded as the highest of all. For the KGB are the cream of the cream, afforded every privilege and luxury in a nation where most live hungry and cold. To reject this lifestyle, the most cosseted the USSR has to offer, is to show ingratitude worthy of death itself.
The Ranch offered, apparently, security against reprisals as well as self-destruction.
The principal complicating factor is the mental state of the defector himself. After the first, adrenaline-packed rush into the West, many develop rethink symptoms. The full enormity of the step they have taken sinks in, the realization of never again seeing wife, family, friends, or homeland. This can lead to depression, like the down after the high of a drug-taker.
To counteract this, many debriefings start with a leisurely survey of the defector’s past life, a complete curriculum vitae from birth and childhood onward. The narration of the early years—description of mother and father, schoolday friends, skating in the park in winter, walks in the country in summer—instead of producing more nostalgia and depression, usually has a calming effect. And everything, every last detail and gesture, is noted.
One thing that debriefers are always keenly interested in is motivation. Why did you decide to come over? (The word defect is never used. It implies disloyalty rather than a reasonable decision to change one’s views.)
Sometimes the defector lies about his reasons. He may say he became utterly disillusioned by the corruption, cynicism, and nepotism of the system he served and left behind. For many, this is the genuine reason; in fact, it is by far the most common reason. But it is not always true. It may be that the defector had his hand in the cashbox and knew he faced harsh punishment from the KGB. Or he may have been on the threshold of recall to Moscow to face discipline for a tangled love life. A demotion, or a hatred of a certain superior, may have been the real reason. The host agency may be well aware of why the man really defected. The excuses are nonetheless listened to carefully and sympathetically, even though they are known to be false. And they are noted. The man may lie as to his motivations out of vanity, but he does not necessarily lie about real secret intelligence. Or does he ...?
Others tell untruths out of vainglory, seeking to embellish their own importance in their earlier life, to impress their hosts. Everything will be checked out; sooner or later, the hosts will know the real reason, the real status. For the moment, everything is listened to very sympathetically. The real cross-examination will come later, as in court.
When the area of secret intelligence is finally broached, pitfalls are set. Many, many questions are asked to which the debriefing officers already know the answers. Or if they do not, the analysts, working through the nights on the tapes, will soon find out by collating and cross-checking. There have, after all, been many defectors, and the Western agencies have a huge volume of knowledge of the KGB, the GRU, the Soviet Army, Navy, and Air Force, even of the Kremlin, on which to draw.
If the defector is seen to lie about things that, according to his declared postings, he ought to know the truth of, he immediately becomes suspect. He may be lying out of bravado, to impress; or because he was never privy to that information but seeks to claim he was; or because he has forgotten; or ...
It is not easy to lie to a host agency during a long and arduous debriefing. The questioning can take months, even years, depending on the amount of things the defector claims that do not seem to check out.
If something a new defector says is at variance with the believed truth, it could be that the believed truth was wrong. So the analysts check out the original source of their information again. It may be that they have been wrong all the time, and the new defector is right. The subject is dropped while checks are made, and returned to later. Again and again.
Often the defector does not realize the significance of some small piece of information he provides and to which he assigns no particular importance. But for his hosts, that seeming bagatelle may be the one missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle that has eluded them for a long time.
In among the questions to which the answers are already known are the questions to which true answers are really valuable. This is the pay dirt. Can this new defector tell the host agency anything it doesn’t already know, and if so, how important?
In the case of Colonel Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov, the CIA came to the view within four weeks that it had fortuitously tapped into a mother lode of pure gold. The man’s “product” was fantastic.
For one thing, he was very cool and calm from the start. He narrated to Joe Roth the story of his life from birth in a humble shack near Minsk just after the war to the day he decided, six months earlier in Moscow, that he could tolerate no more of a society and regime that he had come to despise. He never denied retaining a deep love for his motherland of Russia, and he showed the normal emotion at the knowledge he had left it behind forever.
He declared that his marriage to Gaia, a successful theater director in Moscow, had been over in all but name for three years, and he admitted with expectable anger her several affairs with handsome young actors.
He passed three separate lie-detector tests concerning his background, career, private life, and political change of heart. And he began to reveal information of the first order.
For one thing, his career had been very varied. From his four years with the Third or Armed Forces Directorate, working inside the Joint Planning Staff at Army headquarters while posing as GRU Major Kuchenko, he had a wide knowledge of the personalities of a range of senior military officers, of the dispositions of divisions of the Soviet Army and Air Force, and of the Navy’s ships at sea and in the yards.
He provided fascinating insights into the defeats suffered by the Red Army in Afghanistan, told of the unsuspected demoralization of the Soviet troops there and of Moscow’s growing disillusion with Afghan puppet dictator Babrak Kamal.
Prior to working in the Third Directorate, Orlov had been with the Illegals Directorate, that department inside the First Chief Directorate responsible for the running of “illegal” agents worldwide. The “illegals” are the most secret of all agents who spy against their own country (if they are nationals of it) or who live in the foreign country under deep cover. These are the agents who have no diplomatic cover, for whom exposure and capture does not entail the merely embarrassing penalty of being declared persona non grata and expelled, but the more painful therapy of arrest, harsh interrogation, and sometimes execution.
Although his knowledge was four years out of date, Orlov seemed to have an encyclopedic memory and began to blow away the very networks he had once helped establish and run, mainly in Central and South America, which had been his previous area.
When a defector arrives whose information turns out to be controversial, there usually appear among the officers of the host agency two camps: those who believe and support the new defector, and those who doubt and oppose him. In the history of the CIA the most notorious such case was that of Golytsin and Nosenko.
In 1960, Anatoli Golytsin defected and made it his business to warn the CIA that the KGB had been behind just about everything that had gone wrong in the world since the end of the Second World War. For Golytsin, there was no infamy to which the KGB would not stoop or was not even then preparing. This was music to the ears of a hardline faction in the CIA headed by counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who had been warning his superiors of much the same thing for years. Golytsin became a much-prized star.
In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated, apparently by a left-winger, with a Russian wife, called Lee Harvey Oswald, who had once defected to the USSR and lived there for over a year. In January 1964, Yuri Nosenko defected. He declared he had been Oswald’s case officer in Russia and that the KGB had found Oswald to be a pain in the neck, had severed all contact with him, and had had nothing to do with the Kennedy slaying.
Golytsin, supported by Angleton, at once denounced his fellow Russian, who was interrogated extremely harshly but refused to change his story. The dispute tore the Agency into two camps for years and rumbled on for two decades. Depending on the outcome of the question of who was right and who was wrong, careers were made and broken, for it is axiomatic that the careers of those behind a major success will start to rise.
In the case of Pyotr Orlov, there was no such hostile action to be found, and the glory fell upon Calvin Bailey, the head of Special Projects, the office that had brought him in.
The day after Joe Roth began to share his life with Colonel Orlov in Virginia, Sam McCready quietly entered the portals of the British Museum, which was located in the heart of Bloomsbury, and headed for the great circular reading room under its domed cupola.
There were two younger men with him, Denis Gaunt, on whom McCready was putting an increasing degree of trust and reliance, and another man called Patten. Neither of the backup team would see the face of Keepsake—they did not need to, and it might have been dangerous. Their job was simply to idle near the entrances while perusing the laid-out newspapers and ensure that their desk head would not be disturbed by interlopers.
McCready made for a reading table largely enclosed by bookshelves and courteously asked the man already seated there if he minded the intrusion. The man, his head bowed over a volume from which he took occasional notes, silently gestured to the chair opposite and went on reading. McCready waited quietly. He had selected a volume he wished to read, and in a few moments one of the reading room staff brought it to him and as quietly left. The man across the table kept his head bowed.
When they were alone McCready spoke. “How are you, Nikolai?”
“Well,” murmured the man, making a note on his pad.
“There is news?”
“We are to receive a visit next week. At the Rezidentsia.”
“From Moscow Center?”
“Yes. General Drozdov himself.”
McCready made no sign. He kept reading his book, and his lips hardly moved. No one outside the enclave of book-lined shelves could have heard the low murmur, and no one would enter the enclave. Gaunt and Patten would see to that. But he was amazed by the name. Drozdov, a short chunky man who bore a startling resemblance to the late President Eisenhower, was the head of the Illegals Directorate and rarely ventured outside the USSR. To come into the lion’s den of London was most unusual and could be very important.
“Is that good or bad?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Keepsake. “It’s certainly odd. He is not my direct superior, but he could not come unless he had cleared it with Kryuchkov.”
(General Vladimir Kryuchkov, since 1988 Chairman of the KGB, was then Head of the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence arm.)
“Will he discuss with you his illegals planted in Britain?”
“I doubt it. He likes to run his illegals direct. It may be something to do with Orlov. There has been the most almighty stink over that. The two other GRU officers in the delegation are under interrogation already. The best they will get is a court martial for negligence. Or maybe ...”
“Is there another reason for his coming?”
Keepsake sighed and raised his eyes for the first time. McCready stared back. He had become a friend of the Russian over the years, trusted him, believed in him.
“It’s just a feeling,” said Keepsake. “He may be checking out the Rezidentsia over here. Nothing concrete, just an odor on the wind. Maybe they suspect something.”
“Nikolai, it cannot go on forever. We know that. Sooner or later, the pieces will add together. Too many leaks, too many coincidences. Do you want to come out now? I can arrange it. Say the word.”
“Not yet. Soon perhaps, but not yet. There is more I can send. If they really start to pull the London operation apart, I will know they have something. In time. In time to come out. But not yet. By the way, please do not intercept Drozdov. If there are suspicions, he would see it as another straw in the wind.”
“Better tell me what he is coming as, in case of a genuine accident at Heathrow,” said McCready.
“A Swiss businessman,” said the Russian. “From Zurich. British Airways, Tuesday.”
“I’ll ensure he is left completely alone,” said McCready. “Anything on Orlov?”
“Not yet,” said Keepsake. “I know of him, never met him. But I’m surprised at him defecting. He had the highest clearance.”
“So do you,” said McCready. The Russian smiled.
“Of course. No accounting for taste. I will find out what I can about him. Why does he interest you?”
“Nothing concrete,” said McCready. “As you said, an odor on the wind. The manner of his coming, giving Joe Roth no time to check. For a sailor jumping ship, it’s normal. For a colonel of the KGB, it’s odd. He could have done a better deal.”
“I agree,” said the Russian. “I’ll do what I can.”
The Russian’s position inside the embassy was so delicate that face-to-face meetings were hazardous, therefore infrequent. The next was set up at a small and seedy café in Shoreditch, London’s East End. Early in the following month, May.
At the end of April, the Director of Central Intelligence had a meeting in the White House with the President. Nothing unusual in that; they met extremely regularly, either with others in the National Security Council or in private. But on this occasion the President was unusually flattering about the CIA. The gratitude that a number of agencies and departments had directed toward the Agency as a result of information stemming from the Ranch in southern Virginia had reached as high as the Oval Office.
The DCI was a hard man whose career went back to the days of the OSS in the Second World War, and he was a devoted colleague of Ronald Reagan. He was also a fair man and saw no reason to withhold the general praise from the Head of Special Projects responsible for bringing in Colonel Orlov. When he returned to Langley, he summoned Calvin Bailey.
Bailey found the Director at the picture windows that occupy almost one side of the DCI’s office on top of the CIA headquarters building. He was staring out toward the valley, where the wash of green trees in spring leaf had finally obscured the winter view of the Potomac River. When Bailey entered, he turned with an expansive smile.
“What can I say? Congratulations are in order, Cal. The Navy Department loves it, says keep it coming. The Mexicans are delighted; they just wrapped up a network of seventeen agents, cameras, communication radios, the works.”
“Thank you,” said Calvin Bailey carefully. He was known as a cautious man, not given to overt displays of human warmth.
“Fact is,” said the DCI, “we all know Frank Wright is retiring at the end of the year. I’m going to need a new DDO. Maybe, Calvin, just maybe I think I know who it ought to be.”
Bailey’s morose shrouded gaze flashed into a rare smile. In the CIA the Director himself is always a political appointment and has been for three decades. Under him come the two main divisions of the Agency: Operations, headed by the Deputy Director Ops (DDO), and Intelligence (analysis), headed by the Deputy Director Intel (DDI). These two posts are the highest to which a professional can reasonably aspire. The DDO is in charge of the entire information gathering side of the Agency, while the DDI is in charge of analyzing the raw information into presentable and usable intelligence.
Having delivered his bouquet, the DCI turned to more mundane matters. “Look, it’s about the Brits. As you know, Margaret Thatcher was over.”
Calvin Bailey nodded. The close friendship between the British Prime Minister and the U.S. President was known to all.
“She brought with her Sir Christopher. ...” The DCI mentioned the name of the then chief of the British SIS. “We had several good sessions. He gave us some really good product. We owe them, Cal. Just a favor. I’d like to clean the slate. They have two beefs. They say they’re very grateful for all the Minstrel product we’ve been sending over, but they point out that as regards Soviet agents being run in England, so far it’s useful material but all code-names. Can Minstrel recall any actual names, or offices held—something to identify a hostile agent in their own pond?”
Bailey thought it over.
“He’s been asked before,” he said. “We’ve sent the Brits everything that remotely concerns them. I’ll ask him again, have Joe Roth see if he can remember a real name. Okay.”
“Fine, fine,” said the DCI. “One last thing. They keep asking for access. Over there. This time around, I’m prepared to indulge them. I think we can go that far.”
“I’d prefer to keep him over here. He’s safe here.”
“We can keep him safe over there. Look, we can put him on an American air base. Upper Heyford, Lakenheath, Alconbury. Whatever. They can see him, talk to him under supervision, then we bring him back.”
“I don’t like it,” said Bailey.
“Cal—” there was a hint of steel in the DCI’s voice—“I’ve agreed to it. Just see to it.”
Calvin Bailey drove down to the Ranch for a personal talk with Joe Roth. They talked in Roth’s suite of rooms above the central portico of the Ranch house. Bailey found his subordinate tired and drawn. Debriefing a defector is a tiring business, involving long hours with the defector followed by long nights spent working through the next day’s line of questioning. Relaxing is not usually on the menu, and when, as often happens, the defector has established a personal relationship with his chief debriefing officer, it is not easy to give that officer time off and replace him with a substitute.
“Washington is pleased,” Bailey told him. “More than pleased—delighted. Everything he says checks out. Soviet Army, Navy, and Air Force deployments, confirmed by other sources of satellite coverage. Weapons levels, readiness states, the Afghan mess—Pentagon loves it all. You’ve done well, Joe. Very well.”
“There’s still a long way to go,” said Roth. “Lots more still to come. There must be. The man’s an encyclopedia. Phenomenal memory. Sometimes stuck for a detail, but usually recalls it sooner or later. But ...”
“But what? Look, Joe, he’s pulling apart years of patient KGB work in Central and South America. Our friends down there are closing down network after network. It’s okay. I know you’re tired. Just keep at it.”
He went on to tell Roth of the hint the DCI had given him about the forthcoming vacancy as Deputy Director Operations. He was not usually a confiding man, but he saw no reason not to give his subordinate the same kind of boost the DCI had given him.
“If it goes through, Joe, there’ll be a second vacancy, head of Special Projects. My recommendation will count for a lot. It’ll be for you, Joe. I wanted you to know that.”
Roth was grateful but not ecstatic. He seemed more than tired. There was something else on his mind.
“Is he causing problems?” asked Bailey. “Has he got everything he wants? Does he need female company? Do you? It’s isolated down here. It’s been a month. These things can be arranged.”
He knew Roth was divorced and single. The Agency has a legendary divorce rate. As they say at Langley, it comes with the territory.
“No, I’ve offered him that. He just shook his head. We work out together. It helps. Run through the woods until we can hardly stand. I’ve never been in such good shape. He’s older, but he’s fitter. That’s one of the things that worries me, Calvin. He’s got no flaws, no weaknesses. If he got drunk, screwed around, got maudlin for thinking about his homeland, lost his temper—”
“You’ve tried to provoke him?” asked Bailey. Provoking a defector into a rage, an outburst of pent-up emotions, can sometimes work as a release, a therapy. According to the in-house psychiatrists, anyway.
“Yes. I’ve taunted him with being a rat, a turncoat. Nothing. He just ran me into the ground and laughed at me. Then he got on with what he calls “the job.” Blowing away KGB assets worldwide. He’s a total pro.”
“That’s why he’s the best we’ve ever had, Joe. Don’t knock it. Be grateful.”
“Calvin, that’s not the main reason he bugs me. As a guy, I like him. I even respect him. I never thought I would respect a defector. But there’s something else. He’s holding something back.”
Calvin Bailey went very quiet and very still. “The polygraph tests don’t say so.”
“No, they don’t. That’s why I can’t be sure I’m right. I just feel it. There’s something he’s not saying.”
Bailey leaned across and stared hard into Roth’s face. An awful lot hung on the question he was about to ask.
“Joe, could there be any chance, in your considered view, that despite all the tests, he might still be a phony, a KGB plant?”
Roth sighed. What had been troubling him had finally come out.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know. For me, there’s a ten-percent area of doubt. A gut feeling that he’s holding something back. And I can’t work out, if I’m right, why.”
“Then find out, Joe. Find out,” said Calvin Bailey. He did not need to point out that if there was anything phony about Colonel Pyotr Orlov, two careers in the CIA were likely to go straight into the trash can. He rose.
“Personally I think it’s nonsense, Joe. But do what you have to do.”
Roth found Orlov in his living room, lying on a settee, listening to his favorite music. Despite the fact that he was virtually a prisoner, the Ranch was equipped like a well-appointed country club. Apart from his daily runs in the forest, always flanked by four of the young athletes from Quantico, he had access to the gymnasium, the sauna and pool, an excellent chef, and a well-stocked bar that he used sparingly.
Soon after arriving, he had admitted to a taste for the ballad singers of the sixties and early seventies. Now, whenever he visited the Russian, Roth was accustomed to hearing Simon and Garfunkel, the Seekers, or the slow honeyed tones of Elvis Presley coming from the tape deck.
That evening when he walked in, the clear childlike voice of Mary Hopkin was filling the room. It was her one famous song. Orlov jackknifed himself off the settee with a grin of pleasure. He gestured at the tape deck.
“You like it? Listen.”
Roth listened. “ ‘Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end. ...’ ”
“Yeah, it’s nice,” said Roth, who preferred traditional and mainstream jazz.
“You know what it is?”
“That British girl, isn’t it?” said Roth.
“No, no—not the singer, the tune. You think it is British tune, yes? From the Beatles, perhaps.”
“Guess so,” said Roth, now also smiling.
“Wrong,” said Orlov triumphantly. “It is old Russian song. Dorogoy dlinnoyu da nochkoy lunayu. ‘By a long road on a moonlit night.’ You didn’t know that?”
“No, I certainly didn’t.”
The jaunty little tune ran to its end, and Orlov switched off the tape.
“You want we should talk some more?” asked Orlov.
“No,” said Roth. “I just stopped by to see if you were okay. I’m going to turn in. It’s been a long day. By the way, we are going back to England soon. Let the Limeys have a chance to talk to you for a little while. All right by you?”
Orlov frowned. “My deal was to come here. Only here.”
“It’s okay, Peter. We’ll be staying for a short while on an American Air Force base. To all intents and purposes, still in America. I’ll be there to protect you from the big bad Brits.”
Orlov did not smile at the joke.
Roth became serious. “Peter, is there a reason you don’t want to go back to England? Something I should know?”
Orlov shrugged. “Nothing specific, Joe. Just gut feeling. The farther I am away from the USSR, the safer I feel.”
“Nothing will happen to you in England. I give you my word. You going to turn in now?”
“I stay up for a while. Read, play music,” said the Russian.
In fact, the light burned in Orlov’s room until half-past one in the morning. When the KGB assassination team struck, it was a few minutes before three.
Orlov was told later that they had silenced two guards on the perimeter with powerful crossbows, traversed the lawn at the rear of the house undetected, and entered the house via the kitchens.
On the upper floor, the first Roth or Orlov heard was a burst of submachine-gun fire from the lower hall, followed by the rapid pounding of feet up the stairs. Orlov awoke like a cat, came out of his bed, and was across the living room in no more than three seconds. He opened the door to the landing and caught a brief glimpse of the night duty guard from Quantico swerving off the landing and down the main stairs. A figure in a black cat-suit and ski mask, halfway up the stairs, loosed a brief burst. The American took the blast in the chest. He sagged against the banister, his front a wash of blood. Orlov slammed his door and turned back toward the bedroom.
He knew his windows would not open; there was no escape that way. Nor was he armed. He entered the bedroom as the man in black ran through the door from the corridor, followed by an American. The last thing Orlov saw before he slammed his bedroom door shut was the KGB assassin turn and blast the American behind him. The killing gave Orlov time to throw the lock.
But it was only a respite. Seconds later, the lock was blasted away and the door kicked open. By the dim light shining in from the corridor beyond the living room, Orlov saw the KGB man throw down his empty machine-pistol and pull a Makarov 9mm automatic from his belt. He could not see the face behind the mask, but he understood the Russian word and the contempt with which it was uttered.
The figure in black gripped the Makarov two-handed, pointed it straight at Orlov’s face, and hissed, “Predatel!” Traitor.
There was a cut-glass ashtray on the bedside table. Orlov had never used it, since unlike most Russians, he did not smoke. But it was still there. In a last gesture of defiance, he swept it off the table and sent it spinning toward the Russian killer’s face. As he did so he yelled back, “Padla!” Scum.
The man in black side-stepped the heavy glassware that was scything toward his face. It cost him a fraction of a second. In that time the Quantico security-team leader stepped into the living room and fired twice with his heavy Colt .44 Magnum at the black-suited back in the bedroom doorway. The Russian was thrown forward as the front of his chest exploded in a welter of blood that sprayed the sheets and the coverlet on the bed. Orlov stepped forward to kick the Makarov from the falling man’s hand, but there was no need. No one stops two Magnum shells and keeps fighting.
Kroll, the man who had fired, crossed the sitting room to the bedroom door. He was white with rage and panting.
“You okay?” he snapped. Orlov nodded. “Someone fucked up,” said the American. “There were two of them. Two of my men are down, maybe more outside.”
A shaken Joe Roth came in, still in pajamas.
“Jesus, Peter, I’m sorry. We have to get out of here. Now. Fast.”
“Where do we go?” asked Orlov. “I thought you said this was a safe house.” He was pale but calm.
“Yeah, well, apparently not safe enough. Not anymore. We’ll try and find out why later. Get dressed. Pack your things. Kroll, stay with him.”
There was an army base only twenty miles from the Ranch. Langley fixed things with the army commander. Within two hours Roth, Orlov, and the remainder of the Quantico team had taken an entire floor of the bachelors’ quarters building. Military police ringed the block. Roth would not even drive there by road; they went by helicopter, setting down right on the lawn by the Officers’ Club and waking everyone up.
It was only temporary housing. Before nightfall, they had moved on to another CIA safe house, in Kentucky and much better protected.
While the Roth/Orlov group was in the army base, Calvin Bailey returned to the Ranch. He wanted a full report. He had already spoken to Roth by phone to hear his version of events. He listened to Kroll first, but the man whose evidence he really wanted was the Russian in the black ski mask who had confronted Orlov at point-blank range.
The young officer of the Green Berets was nursing a bruised wrist where Orlov had kicked the gun from his hand as he fell. The special-effects blood had long been wiped off him, and he had changed out of the black jumpsuit with the two holes in the front and removed the harness containing the tiny charges and sacs of realistic blood that had burst all over the bed.
“Verdict?” asked Bailey.
“He’s for real,” said the Russian-speaking officer. “Either that, or he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. That I doubt. Most men do.”
“He didn’t suspect you?” asked Bailey.
“No, sir. I saw it right in his eyes. He believed he was going to die. He just went right on fighting. Quite a guy.”
“Any other choices?” asked Bailey.
The officer shrugged. “Only one. If he’s a phony and thought he was being liquidated by his own side, he ought to have yelled something to that effect. Assuming he cares about living, that would make him about the bravest guy I ever met.”
“I think,” Bailey said to Roth by telephone later, “that we have our answer. He’s okay, and that’s official. Try and get him to recall a name—for the Brits. You’re flying over next Tuesday, military executive jet, to Alconbury.”
Roth spent two days with Orlov at their new home, going back over the sparse details the Russian had already provided from his days in the Illegals Directorate concerning Soviet agents planted in Britain. As he had specialized in Central and South America, Britain had not been his primary concern. But he racked his memory all the same. All he could recall were code-names. Then at the end of the second day, something came back to him.
A civil servant in the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall. But the money was always paid into the man’s account at the Midland Bank in Croydon High Street.
“It’s not a lot,” said the man from the Security Service, MI-5, when he was given the news. He was sitting in the office of Timothy Edwards at the headquarters of his sister service, the SIS. “He might have moved long since. Might have banked under a false name. But we’ll try.”
He went back to Curzon Street in Mayfair and set the wheels in motion. British banks do not have the right of absolute confidentiality, but they decline to hand out details of private accounts to just anybody. One institution that always secures their cooperation, by law, is the Inland Revenue.
The Inland Revenue agreed to cooperate, and the manager of the Midland in Croydon High Street, an outer suburb of south London, was interviewed in confidence. He was new to the job, but his computer was not.
A Security Service man sitting with the real Inland Revenue inspector took over. He had a list of every civil servant employed by the Ministry of Defense and its many out-stations over the past decade. Surprisingly, the chase was very quick. Only one MOD civil servant banked at the Midland in Croydon High Street. The records of the accounts were sent for. The man had two, and still lived locally. He had a checking account and a higher-rate savings account.
Over the years a total of £20,000 had been paid into his deposit account, always by him and always in cash and fairly regularly. His name was Anthony Milton-Rice.
The Whitehall conference that evening involved the Director General and Deputy Director General of MI-5 and the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in charge of Special Branch. MI-5 in Britain cannot make arrests—only the police can do that. When the Security Service wants someone picked up, the Special Branch is called in to do the honors. The meeting was chaired by the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He started the questioning.
“Who exactly is Mr. Milton-Rice?”
The Deputy Director of MI-5 consulted his notes. “Grade-two civil servant on the staff of the Procurement Office.”
“Pretty low grade?”
“Sensitive work, though. Weapons systems, access to evaluations of new armaments.”
“Mm,” mused the Chairman. “So what do you want?”
“The point is, Tony,” said the Director General, “we have very little to go on. Unexplained payments over a period of years into his account—not enough to hold him, let alone get a conviction. He could plead that he backs the horses, always on track, gets his cash that way. Of course, he might confess. Then again, he might not.”
The policeman nodded his agreement. Without a confession, he would have a bad time trying to persuade the Crown Prosecution Office even to bring a case. He doubted the man who had denounced Milton-Rice, whoever he might be, would ever appear in court as a witness.
“We’d like to shadow him first,” said the Director General. “Around the clock. If he makes one contact with the Russians, he’s in the bag, with or without a confession.”
It was agreed. The watchers, that elite team of MI-5 agents who—on their own turf, at least—are reckoned by all the Western services to be the best tailers in the world, were put on alert to envelop Anthony Milton-Rice the following morning as he approached the Defense Ministry with an invisible surveillance for twenty-four hours in every day.
Anthony Milton-Rice, like so many people with a regular job, had regular habits. He was a man of routine. On workdays he left his house in Addiscombe precisely at ten to eight and walked the half-mile to East Croydon Station—unless it was raining heavily, in which case the bachelor civil servant took a bus. He boarded the same commuter train every day, flashed his season ticket, and rode into London, descending at Victoria Station. From there, it was a short bus ride down Victoria Street to Parliament Square. There he got off and crossed Whitehall to the ministry building.
The morning after the conference about him, he did exactly the same. He did not notice the group of youths who boarded at Norwood Junction. He noticed them when they entered his open-plan carriage, jammed with other commuters. There were screams from the women and shouts of alarm from the men as the teenagers, engaged in an orgy of casual robbery and assault called “steaming,” swept through the carriage snatching women’s handbags and jewelry, demanding men’s wallets at knifepoint, and threatening anyone who seemed to oppose, let alone resist, them.
As the train hissed into the next station up the line, the crowd of two dozen young thugs, still screaming their rage at the world, quit the train and scattered, jumping the barrier and disappearing into the streets of Crystal Palace, leaving behind them hysterical women, badly shaken men, and frustrated Transport Police. No arrests were made—the outrage had been too fast and unforeseen.
The train was delayed, wreaking havoc on the commuter schedules as other trains backed up behind it, while Transport Police boarded to take statements. It was only when they tapped the commuter in the pale-gray raincoat dozing in the corner on his shoulder that the man toppled slowly forward onto the floor. There were further screams as the first blood from the thin stiletto wound to his heart began to seep from beneath the crumpled figure. Mr. Anthony Milton-Rice was very dead.
Ivan’s Café, appropriately named for a meeting with a Russian, was situated in Crondall Street in Shoreditch, and Sam McCready, as always, arrived second, even though he had been the first in the street outside. The reason was that if anyone was being tailed, it would more likely be Keepsake than him. So he always sat for thirty minutes in his car, watched the Russian make the meet, then gave it another fifteen minutes to see if the asset from the Soviet Embassy had suddenly grown a tail.
When McCready entered Ivan’s, he took a cup of tea from the counter and wandered over to the wall where two tables were side by side. Keepsake occupied the one in the corner and was engrossed in Sporting Life. McCready unfolded his Evening Standard and proceeded to study it.
“How was the good General Drozdov?” he asked quietly, his voice lost in the babble of the café and the hissing of the tea urn.
“Amiable and enigmatic,” said the Russian, studying the form of the horses in the three-thirty at Sandown. “I fear he may have been checking us out. I will know more if K-Line decide to visit, or if my own K-Line man gets hyperactive.”
K-Line is the KGB’s internal counterintelligence and security branch, charged not so much with espionage as with keeping a check on other KGB men and looking for internal leaks.
“Have you ever heard of a man called Anthony Milton-Rice?” asked McCready.
“No. Never. Why?”
“You didn’t run him out of your Rezidentsia? A civil servant in the Ministry of Defense?”
“Never heard of him. Never handled his product.”
“Well, he’s dead now. Too late to ask him who did run him. If anyone did. Could he have been run directly from Moscow through the Illegals Directorate?”
“If he was working for us, that’s the only explanation,” muttered the Russian. “He never worked for us in PR-Line. Not out of the London Station. As I say, we never even handled such product. He must have communicated with Moscow via a case officer based here outside the embassy. Why did he die?”
McCready sighed. “I don’t know.”
But he did know that unless it was a remarkable coincidence, someone had to have set it up. Someone who knew the civil servant’s routines, could brief the thugs on his regular train, his appearance—and pay them off. Possibly Milton-Rice had not even worked for the Russians at all. Then why the denunciation? Why the unaccounted-for money? Or perhaps Milton-Rice had indeed spied for Moscow but via a cutout, unknown to Keepsake, who in turn reported directly back to the Illegals Directorate in Moscow. And General Drozdov had just been in town. And he ran the Illegals. ...
“He was denounced,” said McCready. “To us. And then he was dead.”
“Who denounced him?” asked Keepsake. He stirred his tea, though he had no intention of drinking the sweet, milky mixture.
“Colonel Pyotr Orlov,” said McCready quietly.
“Ah,” said Keepsake in a low murmur. “I have something for you there. Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov is a loyal and dedicated KGB officer. His defection is as phony as a three-dollar bill. He is a plant, a disinformation agent. And he is well-prepared and very good.”
Now that, thought McCready, is going to cause problems.