Joe Roth lay on his cot in his bedroom in the isolated building on Alconbury field and wondered what to do. A task that six weeks earlier had appeared fascinating and likely to advance his career by leaps and bounds had just turned into a nightmare.
For forty years, since its creation in 1948, the CIA had had one obsessive concern: to keep itself pure from the infiltration of a Soviet “mole.” To this end billions of dollars had been spent in counterintelligence precautions. All staff had been checked and checked again, given lie-detector tests, questioned, vetted, and vetted again.
And it had worked. While the British had been rocked in the early fifties by the treachery of Philby, Burgess, and Maclean, the Agency had remained pure. The Philby affair had rumbled on as the ousted British SIS man had eked out a living in Beirut until his final departure to Moscow in 1963, but the Agency had remained clean.
When France was shaken by the Georges Paques affair and Britain again by George Blake in the early sixties, the CIA stayed unpenetrated. Through all of that time, the counterintelligence arm of the Agency, the Office of Security, had been headed by a remarkable man, James Jesus Angleton, a lonely, secretive, and obsessive man who lived and breathed for one thing: to keep the Agency free from Soviet infiltration.
Finally, Angleton had fallen victim to his own innate suspicions. He began to believe that despite his efforts, there really was a mole loyal to Moscow inside the CIA. Despite all the tests and all the vetting, he became convinced that a traitor had somehow gotten in. His reasoning seemed to be, “If there isn’t a mole, there ought to be. So there must be; so there is.” The hunt for the suspected “Sasha” took up more and more time and effort.
The paranoid Russian defector Golytsin, who held the KGB responsible for everything bad on the planet, agreed.
This was music to Angleton’s ears. The hunt for Sasha was stepped up. Rumor began that his name started with K. Officers whose name started with K found their lives being pulled apart. One resigned in disgust; others were dismissed because they could not prove their innocence—a prudent move, perhaps, but not very good for morale, which slumped. For ten more years, from 1964 to 1974, the hunt went on. Finally, Director William Colby had had enough. He eased Angleton into retirement.
The Office of Security passed into other hands. Its duties to keep the Agency free of Soviet penetration continued, but at a lower and less aggressive tenor.
Ironically, the British, having gotten rid of their older-generation ideological traitors, suffered no more spy scandals from within their intelligence community. Then the pendulum seemed to swing. America, so free of traitors since the late forties, suddenly produced a rash of them—not ideologues, but wretches prepared to betray their country for money. Boyce, Lee, Harper, Walker, and finally Howard had been inside the CIA and betrayed American agents working in their native Russia. Denounced by Urchenko before his bizarre redefection, Howard had managed to slip away to Moscow before he could be arrested. The affairs of Howard’s treachery and Urchenko’s redefection, both the previous year, had left the Agency with a very red face.
But all this was as nothing compared with the potential effect of Orlov’s claim. If it was true, the manhunt alone could tear the Agency apart. If it was true, the damage assessment would take years—the realignment of thousands of agents, codes, foreign networks, and alliances would last for a decade and cost millions. The reputation of the Agency would be badly damaged for years to come.
The question that raged through Roth’s mind as he tossed the night away was, “Who the hell can I go to?”
Just before dawn, he made up his mind, rose, dressed, and packed a suitcase. Before leaving he looked in on Orlov, who was sound asleep, and said to Kroll, “Look after him for me. No one enters, no one leaves. That man has just become incredibly valuable.”
Kroll did not understand why, but he nodded. He was a man who followed orders and never questioned why.
Roth drove to London, avoided the embassy, went to his apartment, and took a passport in a name other than his own. He secured one of the last seats on a private British carrier to Boston and connected at Logan Airport into Washington National. Even with the five-hour time saving, it was dusk when he drove a rented car into Georgetown, parked, and walked down K Street to the far end, close to the campus of Georgetown University.
The house he sought was a fine building of red brick, distinguished from others near it only by extensive security systems that scanned the street and all approaches to it. He was intercepted as he crossed the road toward the portico, and he flashed his CIA pass. At the door he asked to see the man he had come for, was told he was at dinner, and asked that a message be passed. Minutes later, he was admitted and shown into a paneled library redolent of leather-bound books and a hint of cigar. He sat and waited. Then the door opened, and the Director of Central Intelligence entered.
Though he was not accustomed to receiving youthful and relatively junior CIA staffers at his home, except on a summons, he seated himself in a leather club chair, gestured Roth to sit opposite him, and quietly asked for the meaning of the visit. Carefully, Roth told him.
The DCI was over seventy, an unusual age for the post, but he was an unusual man. He had served with the OSS in World War II running agents into Nazi-occupied France and the Low Countries. After the war, with the OSS disbanded, he had returned to private life, taking over a small factory from his father and building it to a huge conglomerate. When the CIA had been formed to succeed the OSS, he had been offered a chance to join by the first Director, Allen Dulles, but had declined.
Years later, a wealthy man and a major contributor to the Republican party, he had noticed and attached himself to a rising ex-actor who was running for the governorship of California. When Ronald Reagan won the White House, he had asked his trusted friend to take over the CIA.
The DCI was a Catholic, long widowed, and a strict moral puritan, and he was known in the corridors of Langley as a tough old bastard. He rewarded talent and intelligence, but his passion was loyalty. He had known good friends go to the torture chambers of the Gestapo because they had been betrayed, and betrayal was the one thing he would not tolerate under any circumstances. For traitors, he had only a visceral loathing. For them, in the mind of the DCI, there could be no mercy.
He listened carefully to Roth’s narration, staring at the gas log fire where no flame burned on such a warm night. He gave no sign of what he felt, save a tightening of the muscles around the dewlapped jaw.
“You came straight here?” he asked when Roth finished. “You spoke to no one else?”
Roth explained how he had come, like a thief in the night into his own country, on a false passport, by a circuitous route. The old man nodded; he had once slipped into Hitler’s Europe like that. He rose and went to fill a tumbler from the brandy decanter on the antique side-table, pausing to tap Roth reassuringly on the shoulder.
“You did well, my boy,” he said. He offered brandy to Roth, who shook his head. “Seventeen years, you say?”
“According to Orlov. All my own superior officers, right up to Frank Wright, have been with the Agency that long. I didn’t know who else to come to.”
“No, of course not.”
The DCI returned to his chair and sat lost in thought. Roth did not interrupt.
Finally the old man said, “It has to be the Office of Security. But not the Chief. No doubt he’s totally loyal, but he’s a twenty-five-year man. I’ll send him on vacation. There’s a very bright young man who works as his deputy. Ex-lawyer. I doubt if he’s been with us more than fifteen.”
The DCI summoned an aide and caused several phone calls to be made. It was confirmed the deputy Head of the Office of Security was forty-one and had joined the Agency from law school fifteen years earlier. He was summoned from his home in Alexandria. His name was Max Kellogg.
“Just as well he never worked under Angleton,” said the DCI. “His name begins with K.”
Max Kellogg, flustered and apprehensive, arrived just after midnight. He had been about to go to bed when the call came, and he was stunned to hear the DCI himself on the line.
“Tell him,” said the DCI. Roth repeated his story.
The lawyer took it all in without blinking, missed nothing, asked two supplementary questions, took no notes. Finally he asked the DCI: “Why me, sir? Harry’s in town?”
“You’ve only been with us fifteen years,” said the DCI.
“Ah.”
“I have decided to keep Orlov—Minstrel, whatever we call him—at Alconbury,” said the DCI. “He’s probably as safe there, even safer, than back over here. Stall the British, Joe. Tell them Minstrel has just come up with more information of only U.S. interest. Tell them their access will be resumed as soon as we’ve checked it out.
“You’ll fly in the morning”—he checked his watch—“this morning by designated flight straight to Alconbury. No holds barred now. Too late for that. The stakes are too high. Orlov will understand. Take him apart. I want it all. I want to know two things, fast. Is it true, and if so, who?
“As of now, you two work for me—only for me. Report direct. No cut-outs. No questions. Refer them to me. I’ll handle things at this end.”
The light of combat was in the old man’s eyes again.
Roth and Kellogg tried to get some sleep on the Grumman from Andrews back to Alconbury. They were still ragged and tired when they arrived. The west-east crossing is always the worst. Fortunately, both men avoided alcohol and drank only water. They hardly paused to wash and brush up before going to Colonel Orlov’s room.
As they entered Roth heard the familiar tones of Art Garfunkel coming from the tape deck.
Appropriate, thought Roth grimly. We have come to talk with you again. But this time there will be no sounds of silence.
But Orlov was cooperation itself. He seemed resigned to the fact that he had now divulged the last piece of his precious “insurance.” The price of the bride had been offered in full. The only question was whether it would be acceptable to the suitors.
“I never knew his name,” he said in the debriefing room. Kellogg had elected to have the microphones and tape recorders switched off. He had his own portable recorder and backed it up with his own handwritten notes. He wanted no other tape to be copied, no other CIA staff present. The technicians had been sent away; Kroll and two others guarded the passage beyond the now-soundproofed door. The technicians’ last job had been to sweep the room for bugs and declare it clean. They were plainly puzzled by the new regimen.
“I swear to that. He was known only as Agent Sparrowhawk, and he was run personally by General Drozdov.”
“Where and when was he recruited?”
“I believe in Vietnam in ’68 or ’69.”
“Believe?”
“No, I know it was Vietnam. I was with Planning, and we had a big operation down there, mainly in and around Saigon. Locally recruited help was Vietnamese, of course, Viet Cong; but we had our own people. One of them reported that the Viet Cong had brought him an American who was dissatisfied. Our local Rezident cultivated the man and turned him. In late 1969 General Drozdov personally went to Tokyo to talk with the American. That was when he was code-named Sparrowhawk.”
“How do you know this?”
“There were arrangements to be made, communication links set up, funds to be transferred. I was in charge.”
They talked for a full week. Orlov recalled banks into which sums had been paid over the years, and the months (if not the actual days) on which these transfers were made. The sums increased as the years passed, probably to account for promotion and better product.
“When I moved to the Illegals Directorate and came directly under Drozdov, my association with Case Sparrowhawk continued. But I was not now concerned with bank transfers. It was more operational. If Sparrowhawk gave us an agent working against us, I would inform the appropriate department, usually Executive Action—known as ‘wet affairs’—and they would liquidate the hostile agent if he was out of our territory or pick him up if he was inside. We got four anti-Castro Cubans that way.”
Max Kellogg noted everything and reran his tapes through the night. Finally he said to Roth, “There is only one career that fits all these allegations. I don’t know whose it is, but the records will prove it. It’s a question of cross-checking now. Hours and hours of cross-checking. I can only do that in Washington, in the Central Registry. I have to go back.”
He flew the following day, spent five hours with the DCI in his Georgetown mansion, then closeted himself with the records. He had carte blanche, on the personal orders of the DCI. No one dared deny Kellogg anything. Despite the secrecy, word began to spread through Langley. Something was up. There was a flap going on, and it had to do with internal security. Morale began to flag. These things can never be kept truly quiet.
At Golders Hill in North London there is a small park, an adjunct to the much larger Hampstead Heath, that contains a menagerie of deer, goats, ducks, and other wildfowl. McCready met Keepsake there on the day Max Kellogg flew back to Washington.
“Things are not so good at the embassy,” said Keepsake. “The K-Line man, on orders from Moscow, has started asking for files that go back years. I think a security investigation, probably of all our embassies in Western Europe, has been started. Sooner or later, it will narrow to the London embassy.”
“Is there anything we can do to help?”
“Possibly.”
“Suggest it,” said McCready.
“It would help if I could give them something really useful—some good news about Orlov, for example.”
When a defector-in-place like Keepsake changes sides, it would be suspicious if he produced no information for the Russians year after year. So it is customary for his new masters to give him some genuine intelligence to send home to prove what a fine fellow he is.
Keepsake had already given McCready the name of every real Soviet agent in Britain that he knew about, which was most of them. The British had clearly not picked them all up—that would have given the game away. Some had been shifted away from classified material, not in an obvious manner but slowly, in the course of “administrative” changes. Some had been promoted in rank but been moved out of the handling of secret matters. Some had had the material crossing their desks doctored so that it would do more harm than good.
Keepsake had even been allowed to recruit a few new agents to prove his worth to Moscow. One of these was a clerk in the Central Registry of the SIS itself, a man utterly loyal to Britain but who would pass on what he was told. Moscow had been quite delighted by the recruitment of Agent Wolverine. It was agreed that two days later, Wolverine would pass to Keepsake a copy of a draft memorandum in Denis Gaunt’s hand to the effect that Orlov was now ensconced at Alconbury, where the Americans had fallen for him hook, line, and sinker—and so had the British.
“How are things with Orlov?” inquired Keepsake.
“Everything has gone quiet,” said McCready. “I had one half-day with him, got nowhere. I think I sowed some seeds of doubt in Joe Roth’s mind, there and in London. He went back to Alconbury, talked again with Orlov, then shot off back to the States on a different passport. He thought we hadn’t spotted him. Seemed in a hell of a hurry. Hasn’t reappeared—at least, not through a regular airport. May have flown direct into Alconbury on a military flight.”
Keepsake stopped tossing crumbs to the ducks and turned to McCready. “They have talked to you since, invited you back to resume?”
“No. It’s been a week. Total silence.”
“Then he has produced the Big Lie, the one he came to produce. That is why the CIA is involved within themselves.”
“Any idea what it could be?”
Keepsake sighed. “If I were General Drozdov, I would think like a KGB man. There are two things the KGB has always lusted after. One is to start a major war between the CIA and the SIS. Have they started fighting you?”
“No, they are being very polite. Just noncommunicative.”
“Then it is the other. The other dream is to tear the CIA apart from the inside. Destroy its morale. Set colleague against colleague. Orlov will denounce someone as a KGB agent inside the CIA. It will be an effective accusation. I warned you; Potemkin is a long-planned affair.”
“How will we spot him if they don’t tell us?”
Keepsake began to stroll back to his car. He turned and called over his shoulder, “Look for the man to whom the CIA suddenly grows cold. That will be the man, and he will be innocent.”
Edwards was aghast.
“Let Moscow know that Orlov is now based at Alconbury? If Langley ever finds out, there’ll be a war. Why in heaven’s name do that?”
“A test. I believe in Keepsake. I’m convinced he’s genuine. I trust him. So I think Orlov is phony. If Moscow does not react, makes no attempt to harm Orlov, that will be the proof. Even the Americans will believe that. They’ll be angry, of course, but they’ll see the logic.”
“And if by any chance they attack and kill Orlov? You’re going to be the one to tell Calvin Bailey?”
“They won’t,” said McCready. “As night follows day, they won’t.”
“By the way, he’s coming here. On vacation.”
“Who?”
“Calvin. With wife and daughter. There’s a file on your desk. I’d like the Firm to offer him some hospitality. A couple of dinners with people he’d like to meet. He’s been a good friend of Britain over the years. Least we can do.”
Glumly, McCready stumped downstairs and looked at the file. Denis Gaunt sat opposite him.
“He’s an opera buff,” said McCready, reading from the file. “I suppose we can get him tickets for Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, that sort of thing.”
“Jesus, I can’t get into Glyndebourne,” said Gaunt enviously. “There’s a seven-year waiting list.”
The magnificent country mansion in the heart of Sussex, set amid rolling lawns and containing one of the country’s finest opera houses, was and remains a most sought-after treat for any opera lover on a summer’s evening.
“You like opera?” asked McCready.
“Sure.”
“Fine. You can mother-hen Calvin and Mrs. Bailey while they’re here. Get tickets for the Garden and Glyndebourne. Use Timothy’s name. Pull rank, swing it. This miserable job must have some perks, though I’m damned if I ever get any.”
He headed for lunch. Gaunt grabbed the file.
“When’s he due?” he asked.
“In a week,” called McCready from the door. “Call him up. Tell him what you’re fixing. Ask what his favorites are. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right.”
Max Kellogg shut himself inside the archives and lived there for ten days. His wife in Alexandria was told he was out of town and believed it. Kellogg had his food sent in, but he mainly survived on a diet of coffee and too many filter kings.
Two archive clerks were at his personal disposal. They knew nothing of his investigation but simply brought him the files he wanted, one after the other. Photographs were dug out of files long buried as being of little further use or relevance. Like all covert agencies, the CIA never threw anything away, however obscure or outdated; one never knew whether someday that tiny detail, that fragment of newsprint or photograph, might be needed. Many were needed now.
Halfway through his investigation, two agents were dispatched to Europe. One visited Vienna and Frankfurt; the other, Stockholm and Helsinki. Each carried identification as an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a personal letter from the Secretary of the Treasury asking for the cooperation of a major bank in each city. Aghast at the thought that it was being used to launder drug money, each bank conferred among its directors and opened its files.
Tellers were summoned from their desks and shown a photograph. Dates and bank accounts were quoted. One teller could not remember; the other three nodded. The agents took receipt of photocopies of accounts, sums deposited, transfers made. They took away samples of signatures in a variety of names for graphology analysis back at Langley. When they had what they came for, they returned to Washington and put their trophies on the desk of Max Kellogg.
From an original group of more than twenty CIA officers who had served in Vietnam in the relevant period—and Kellogg had expanded the time frame to include a period of two years on either side of the dates quoted by Orlov—the first dozen were quickly eliminated. One by one, the others went out of the frame.
Either they were not in the right city at the right time, or they could not have divulged a certain piece of information because they never knew it, or they could not have made a certain rendezvous because they were on the other side of the world. Except one.
Before the agents arrived back from Europe, Kellogg knew he had his man. The evidence from the banks merely confirmed it. When he was ready, when he had it all, he went back to the house of the DCI in Georgetown.
Three days before he went, Calvin and Mrs. Bailey with their daughter, Clara, flew from Washington to London. Bailey loved London; in fact, he was a staunch anglophile. It was the history of the place that enthused him.
He loved to visit the old castles and stately mansions built in a bygone era, to wander the cool cloisters of ancient abbeys and seats of learning. He installed himself in a Mayfair apartment that the CIA retained for the housing of visiting VIPs, rented a car, and went to Oxford, avoiding the motorway and meandering instead through the byways, taking lunch in the sun at The Bull at Bisham, whose oak beams were set before Queen Elizabeth I was born.
On his second evening, Joe Roth stopped by for a drink. For the first time he met the remarkably plain Mrs. Bailey and Clara, a gawky child of eight with straight plaits of ginger hair, eyeglasses, and buck teeth. He had never met the Bailey family before; his superior was not the sort of man one associated with bedtime stories and barbecues on the lawn. But the frostiness of Calvin Bailey seemed to have mellowed, though whether it was the fact of enjoying an extended vacation among the operas, concerts, and art galleries that he so admired, or the prospect of promotion, Roth could not tell.
He wanted to tell Bailey of the strain caused by Orlov’s bombshell, but the DCI’s orders had been adamant. No one, not even Calvin Bailey, the Head of Special Projects, was to be allowed to know—yet. When the Orlov accusation had been either shown to be false, or had been justified with hard evidence, the top echelon of the officers who ran the CIA would be personally briefed by the DCI himself. Until then, silence. Questions were asked, but none answered, and certainly nothing was volunteered. So Joe Roth lied.
He told Bailey the debriefing of Orlov was progressing well but at a slower pace. Naturally, the product Orlov remembered most clearly had already been divulged. Now it was a question of dragging smaller and smaller details from his memory. He was cooperating well, and the British were happy with him. Areas already covered were now being gone over again and again. It took time, but each recovering of an area of product brought a few more tiny details—tiny but valuable.
As Roth sipped his drink, Sam McCready turned up at the door. He had Denis Gaunt with him, and introductions were made again. Roth had to admire his British colleague’s performance. McCready was flawless, congratulating Bailey on a remarkable success with Orlov, and producing a menu of proposals the SIS had come up with to enhance Bailey’s visit to Britain.
Bailey was delighted with the tickets to the operas at Covent Garden and Glyndebourne. They would form the high point of the family’s twelve-day visit to London.
“And then back to the States?” asked McCready.
“No. A quick visit to Paris, Salzburg, and Vienna, then home,” said Bailey. McCready nodded. Salzburg and Vienna both had operas that were among the pinnacles of that art form anywhere in the world.
It turned into quite a jolly evening. The overweight Mrs. Bailey lumbered around dispensing drinks; Clara came to be presented before bed. She was introduced to Roth, Gaunt, and McCready, who gave her his lopsided grin. She smiled shyly. Within ten minutes he was delighting her with conjuring tricks. He took a coin from his pocket, flicked it in the air, and caught it, but when Clara forced open his clenched fist, it was gone. Then he produced the coin from her left ear. The child shrieked with delight. Mrs. Bailey beamed.
“Where did you learn that sort of thing?” asked Bailey.
“Just one of my more presentable talents,” said McCready.
Roth had watched in silence. Privately the troubled CIA agent wondered if McCready could make the allegations made by Orlov disappear with the same ease as the coin. He doubted it.
McCready caught his eye, reading his thoughts. Gently, he shook his head. Not now, Joe. Not yet. He turned his attention back to the now-devoted little girl.
The three visitors left after nine o’clock. On the pavement McCready murmured to Roth, “How goes the investigation, Joe?”
“You’re full of crap,” said Roth.
“Do be careful,” said McCready. “You’re being led up the garden path. By the nose.”
“That’s what we believe of you, Sam.”
“Who’s he nailed, Joe?”
“Back off,” snapped Roth. “As of now, Minstrel is Company business. Nothing to do with you.”
He turned and walked quickly away toward Grosvenor Square.
Max Kellogg sat with the DCI in the latter’s library two nights later with his files and his notes, copies of bank drafts, and photographs, and he talked.
He was tired unto death, exhausted by a workload that would and should normally have taken a team of men double the time. Dark smudges ringed his eyes.
The DCI sat on the other side of the old oak refectory table he had caused to be placed between them to carry the paperwork. The old man seemed hunched into his velvet smoking jacket. The lights shone on his bald and wrinkled head, and beneath his brows his eyes watched Kellogg and flicked over the proffered documents like those of an aged lizard.
When Kellogg had finally finished, he asked, “There can be no doubt?”
Kellogg shook his head. “Minstrel provided twenty-seven points of evidence. Twenty-six check out.”
“All circumstantial?”
“Inevitably. Except the testimony of the three bank tellers. They have made positive ID—from photographs, of course.”
“Can a man be convicted on circumstantial evidence alone?”
“Yes, sir. It is well precedented and amply documented. You do not always need a body to convict of murder.”
“No confession needed?”
“Not necessary. And almost certainly not forthcoming. This is one shrewd, skilled, tough, and very experienced operator.”
The DCI sighed. “Go home, Max. Go home to your wife. Stay silent. I’ll send for you when I need you again. Do not return to the office until I give the word. Take a break. Rest.”
He waved a hand toward the door. Max Kellogg rose and left. The old man summoned an aide and ordered a coded telegram on an “eyes only” basis to be sent to Joe Roth in London. It said simply: “Return at once. Same route. Report to me. Same place.” It was signed with the code word that would tell Roth it came directly from the DCI.
The shadows over Georgetown deepened that summer night, as did the shadows in an old man’s mind. The DCI sat alone and thought of the old days, of friends and colleagues, bright young men and women whom he had sent beyond the Atlantic wall and who had died under interrogation because of an informer, a traitor. There had been no excuses in those days, no Max Kelloggs to sift the evidence and produce an overwhelming case. And there had been no mercy in those days—not for an informer. He stared at the photo before him.
“You bastard,” he said softly, “you double-dyed traitorous bastard.”
The following day a messenger entered Sam McCready’s office at Century House and deposited a chit from the cipher room. McCready was busy; he gestured to Denis Gaunt to open it. Gaunt read it, whistled, and passed it over. It was a request from the CIA in Langley: During his vacation in Europe, Calvin Bailey was to be provided with access to no classified information.
“Orlov?” asked Gaunt.
“Gets my vote,” said McCready. “What the hell can I do to convince them?”
He made his own decision on that. He used a dead-letter drop to get a message to Keepsake, asking for a meeting without delay.
In the lunch hour McCready was informed in a routine note from Airport Watch, a division of MI-5, that Joe Roth had left London again for Boston, still using the same phony passport.
That same evening, having gained five hours crossing the Atlantic, Joe Roth sat at the refectory table at the DCI’s mansion. The Director sat opposite him, Max Kellogg to his right. The old man looked grim, Kellogg merely nervous. At his home in Alexandria he had slept for most of the twenty-four hours between his arrival there the previous evening and the telephoned summons to return to Georgetown. He had left all his documents with the Director, but they were again in front of him now.
“Begin again, Max. At the beginning. Just the way you told it to me.”
Kellogg glanced at Roth, adjusted his eyeglasses, and took a sheet from the top of the pile.
“In May 1967, Calvin Bailey was sent as a Provincial Officer, a G-12, to Vietnam. Here is the posting. He was assigned, as you see, to the Phoenix Program. You’ve heard of that, Joe.”
Roth nodded. At the height of the Vietnam war, the Americans had mounted an operation to attempt to counter the drastic effects being secured by the Viet Cong on the local population through selective, public, and sadistic assassinations. The notion was to use counterterror against the terrorists, to identify and eliminate Viet Cong activists. It was the Phoenix Program. Just how many Viet Cong suspects were sent to their maker without benefit of evidence or trial has never been established. Some have put the figure at twenty thousand; the CIA put it at eight thousand.
How many of the suspects were really Viet Cong remains even more problematic, for it soon became the practice for Vietnamese to denounce any person against whom they had a grudge. People were denounced on the basis of family feuds, clan wars, land squabbles, even debts owed and never to be collected if the creditor was dead.
Usually the denounced person was handed over to the Vietnamese secret police or the army, the ARVN. The interrogations they underwent and the ways they died tested even oriental ingenuity.
“There were young Americans, fresh out of the States, who saw things down there that no man should be asked to watch. Some quit, some needed professional help. One turned, in his mind, to the very philosophy of the men he had been sent to fight. Calvin Bailey was that man, as George Blake had turned in Korea. We have no proof of that because it happened inside a human head, but the evidence that follows makes the supposition totally reasonable.
“In March 1968 came what we believe to be the climactic experience. Bailey was present at the village of My Lai just four hours after the massacre. You recall My Lai?”
Roth nodded again. It was all part of his youth. He recalled it all too well. On March 16, 1968, an American infantry company came across a small village called My Lai, where they suspected there might be Viet Cong or sympathizers hiding. Exactly why they lost control and went berserk was only inadequately established later. They started firing when they could get no response to their questions, and once it started, it did not stop until at least 450 unarmed civilians—men, women, and children—lay dead in mangled heaps. It took eighteen months for the news to leak out in America, and three years almost to the day for Lieutenant William Calley to be convicted by court-martial. But Calvin Bailey had reached the spot after four hours and seen it all.
“Here is his report at the time,” said Kellogg, passing over several sheets, “written in his own hand. As you can see, it was written by a badly shaken man. Unfortunately, it seems this experience turned Bailey into a Communist sympathizer.
“Six months later, Bailey reported he had recruited two Vietnamese cousins, Nguyen Van Troc and Vo Nguyen Can, and infiltrated them into the Viet Cong’s own intelligence setup. It was a major coup, the first of many. According to Bailey, he ran these men for two years. According to Orlov, it was the other way around. They ran him. Look at this.”
He passed Roth two photographs. One photograph showed two young Vietnamese males, taken against a background of the jungle. One man had a cross over his face, indicating he was now dead. The other photograph, taken much later and in a setting of verandah with rattan chairs, showed a group of Vietnamese officers at ease, being served tea. The steward was looking up at the camera and smiling.
“The tea-server ended up as a boat-person, a refugee, at a camp in Hong Kong. The photo was his prize possession, but the British were interested in the group of officers and took it from him. Look at the man to the steward’s left.”
Roth looked. It was Nguyen Van Troc, ten years older but the same man. He wore a senior officer’s shoulder boards.
“He’s now deputy head of Vietnamese counterintelligence,” said Kellogg. “Point made.
“Next, we have Minstrel’s assertion that Bailey was passed on to the KGB right there in Saigon. Minstrel named a now-dead Swedish businessman as the KGB Rezident for Saigon in 1970. We have known since 1980 that the businessman was not who he said he was, and Swedish counterintelligence long broke his cover story. He never came from Sweden, so he probably came from Moscow. Bailey could have seen him whenever he wanted.
“Next, Tokyo. Minstrel says Drozdov himself went there in the same year, 1970, and took over Bailey, giving him the name Sparrowhawk. We cannot prove Drozdov was there, but Minstrel is dead accurate on the dates. And Bailey was there on those dates. Here is his movement order by Air America, our own airline. It all fits. He returned to America in 1971 a dedicated KGB agent.”
After that, Calvin Bailey had served in two posts in Central and South America and three in Europe, a continent he had also visited many times as he rose in the hierarchy and undertook flying visits to inspect out-stations.
“Help yourself to a drink, Joe,” growled the DCI. “It gets worse.”
“Minstrel named four banks into which his department in Moscow had made transfers of cash to the traitor. He even got the dates of the transfers right. Here are the four accounts, one in each of the banks he named: in Frankfurt, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Vienna. Here are the deposit slips, large sums and in cash. Payments all made within a month of the accounts being opened. Four tellers were shown a photograph; three identified it as the man who opened the accounts. This photograph.”
Kellogg slipped a photograph of Calvin Bailey across to Roth. He stared at the face as if at the face of a stranger. He could not believe it. He had eaten with the man, drunk with him, met his family. The face in the photo stared back blankly.
“Minstrel gave us five pieces of information that were in the possession of the KGB that should never have entered its possession. And he gave the times those pieces entered their possession. Each piece was known to Calvin Bailey and only a few others.
“Even Bailey’s triumphs, the coups that secured him his promotions, were fed to him by Moscow—genuine sacrifices made by the KGB to enhance their man’s standing with us. Minstrel names four successful operations conducted by Bailey. And he’s right—except that he claims they were all permitted by Moscow, and I’m afraid he’s right, Joe.
“That makes in all twenty-four precise items extracted from Orlov, and twenty-one check out. That leaves three, much more recent. Joe, when Orlov called you that day in London, what name did he use?”
“Hayes,” said Roth.
“Your professional name. How did he know it?”
Roth shrugged.
“Finally we come to the two recent killings of the agents named by Orlov. Bailey told you to get the Orlov product to him first, by hand, right?”
“Yes. But that would be normal. It was a Special Operations project, bound to be serious material. He would want to check it over first.”
“When Orlov fingered the Brit, Milton-Rice, Bailey got that first?”
Roth nodded.
“The Brits three days later?”
“Yes.”
“And Milton-Rice was dead before the Brits could get to him. Same with Remyants. I’m sorry, Joe. It’s watertight. There’s just too much evidence.”
Kellogg closed his last file and left Roth staring at the material in front of him: the photos, the bank statements, the airline tickets, the movement orders. It was like a jigsaw puzzle assembled, not a piece missing. Even the motive, those awful experiences in Vietnam, was logical.
Kellogg was thanked and dismissed. The DCI stared across the table.
“What do you think, Joe?”
“You know the British think Minstrel’s a phony,” said Roth. “I told you the first time I came what London’s view was.”
The DCI made an irritable gesture of dismissal. “Proof, Joe. You asked them for hard proof. Did they give you any?”
Roth shook his head.
“Did they say they had a high-placed asset in Moscow who had denounced Minstrel?”
“No, sir. Sam McCready denied that.”
“So they’re full of shit,” said the DCI. “They have no proof, Joe—just the loser’s resentment at not having gotten Minstrel to themselves. This is proof, Joe. Pages and pages of it.”
Roth stared dumbly at the papers. To know that he had worked closely with a man who was steadily and with deliberate malice betraying his country over many years was like having a chunk blown out of his midriff. He felt sick. Quietly he said, “What do you want me to do, sir?”
The DCI rose and paced his elegant library. “I am the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Appointed by the President himself. As such, I am asked to protect this country as best I can and may, from all her enemies. Some within, some without. I cannot and will not go to the President and tell him we have yet another massive scandal that makes all previous treacheries right back to Benedict Arnold look like nickel-and-dime affairs. Not after the recent series of breaches of security.
“I will not expose him to the savaging of the media and the ridicule of foreign nations. There can be no arrest and trial, Joe. The trial has been here, the verdict has been reached, and the sentence must be from me, God help me.”
“What do you want me to do?” repeated Roth.
“In the last analysis, Joe, I could steel myself not to worry about the broken trusts, the traduced secrets, the loss of confidence, the wrecked morale, the scavenging media, the snickering foreign nations. But I cannot expel from my mind the images of the agents blown away, the widows and the orphans. For a traitor, there can be only one verdict, Joe.
“He does not return here, ever. He does not soil this land with his feet ever again. He is consigned to outer darkness. You will return to England, and before he can skip to Vienna and thence across the border into Hungary—which is assuredly what he has been preparing to do ever since Minstrel came over—you will do what has to be done.”
“I’m not certain I can do that, sir.”
The DCI leaned over the table, and with his hand he raised Roth’s chin so that he stared into the younger man’s eyes. His own were as hard as obsidian.
“You will do it, Joe. Because it is my order as Director, because through our President I speak for this land, and because you will do it for your country. Go back to London and do what has to be done.”
“Yes, sir,” said Joe Roth.