The Company: A Novel of the CIA (35 page)

Eugene could see trouble coming; Philby's eyes were clouding over. He put a hand on the Englishman's shoulder. "You've been on the firing line for twenty years. It's time for you to come home."

"Home!" Philby took a step back. "I am a C-c-communist and a M-m-marxist but Russia is not my home. England is."

Eugene started to say something but Philby cut him off. "Sorry, old boy, but I don't see myself living in Moscow, do I? What I relished all these years, aside from serving the great Cause, was the great game. In Moscow there will be no game, only airless offices and stale routines and dull bureaucrats who know whose side I'm on."

Eugene's instructions had not dealt with the possibility that Philby would refuse Starik's order to run for it. He decided to reason with him. "Their interrogators are skillful—they will offer you immunity if you cooperate, they will try and turn you into a triple agent—"

Philby bristled. "I have never been a double agent—I have served one master from the beginning—so how can I become a triple agent?"

I didn't mean to suggest they would succeed..."

Philby, his eyes narrowed, his jaw thrust forward, was weighing his chances and beginning to like what he saw. A thin smile illuminated his face; it made him look almost healthy. His stutter vanished. "All the government have to go on is circumstantial evidence. A bitch of a Communist wife twenty years back, governor, where's the tort? Half a dozen moldy serials, some coincidences that I can explain away as coincidences. And I have an ace up my sleeve, don't I?"

"An ace up your sleeve?"

"Berlin Base has a big operation going—a highly placed defector delivering them goodies twice a week. I passed this on to Moscow Centre but for reasons that are a mystery to me they didn't close it down. I can hear the dialogue now: do you really think this operation would still be running, governor, if I were on the KGB payroll? Not bloody likely! Christ, man, when you boil off the bouillon there is no hard evidence. All I need to do is keep my nerve and bluff it out."

"They broke Klaus Fuchs—they managed to get him to confess."

"You are relatively new at this business, Eugene," Philby said. He was standing straighter, gathering confidence from the sound of his own voice. "What you do not appreciate is that the inquisitors are in a desperately weak position. Without a confession, old boy, their evidence is conjectural—too bloody vague to be used in court. Besides which, if they were to take my case to court, they'd have to blow agents and operations." Philby, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet and circling Eugene, was almost prancing with excitement now. "As long as I refuse to confess, the jammy bastards won't be able to lay a glove on me, will they? Oh, my career will be out onto the hard but I will be free as a lark. The great game can go on."

Eugene played his last card. "You and I are foot soldiers in a war," he told Philby. "Our vision is limited—we only see the part of the battlefield that is right in front of our eyes. Starik sees the big picture—the whole war, the complex maneuvers and counter-maneuvers of each side. Starik has given you an order. As a soldier you have no choice in the matter. You must obey it." He held out the package. "Take it and run," he said.

16

WASHINGTON, DC, MONDAY, MAY 28, 1951

THE DIRECTOR'S REGULAR NOON POWWOW HAD BEEN CANCELLED and an ad hoc war council had been hurriedly convened in the small, windowless conference room across the hall from his office. The DCI, Bedell Smith, sitting under a framed copy of one of his favorite Churchill dictums ("Men occasionally stumble over the truth but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened"), presided from the head of the oval table. Present were the Barons who could be rounded up on short notice: the DD/0, Allen Dulles; his chief of operations, Frank Wisner; Wisner's number two, Dick Helms; General Truscott, who happened to be in Washington on Pentagon business; Jim Angleton; and (in Angleton's words, muttered as the participants queued for coffee in the corridor while the Technical Service's housekeepers swept the conference room for bugs) "the star of the show, the one and only... Harvey Torriti!"

General Smith, who had spent the weekend reviewing the Sorcerer's memorandum and Angleton's written rebuttal, wasn't "tickled pink," as he delicately put it, to discover he had been on the receiving end of one of Torriti's barium meals. "Nothings sacred round here," he griped, "if you think the leak could come from the DCI's office."

Torriti, shaved, shined, decked out in a tie and sports jacket and a freshly laundered shirt, was uncommonly low-keyed, not to mention sober.

"Couldn't make my case that the leaks came from Philby," he pointed out. "I hadn't foreclosed the alternatives."

Dulles, puffing away on his pipe, remarked pleasantly, "According to Jim, you haven't made your case." He slipped his toes out of the bedroom slippers he always wore in the office because of gout and propped his stockinged feet up on an empty chair. "We need to tread carefully on this one," he continued, reaching over to massage his ankles. "Our relations with the cousins can only survive this kind of accusation if we're dead right."

Helms, a cool, aloof bureaucrat who had more in common with the patient intelligence gatherers than the clandestine service's cowboys, leaned toward Angleton's point of view. "Your line of reasoning is intriguing," he told Torriti, "but Jim is right—when you strip it down to the nitty-gritty what you're left with could easily be a series of coincidences."

"In our line of work," Torriti argued, "coincidences don't exist."

The Wiz, his shirtsleeves rolled up above his elbows, his chair tilted back against the wall, his eyes half closed, allowed as how the Sorcerer might be on to something there. A coincidence was like a matador's red cape; if you spotted one, your instinct told you to do more than stand there and paw at the ground in frustration. Which is why, Wisner added, he'd taken a gander at various logs after he'd read the Sorcerer's memorandum. Wiz flashed one of his guileless gap-toothed smiles in Angleton's direction. "On Monday, 1 January," he said, reading from a note he'd jotted to himself on the back of an envelope, "Torriti's cable arrived on Jim's desk. On Tuesday, 2 January, security logs in the lobby show Philby visiting both General Smith and Jim here. Starting in late afternoon on Tuesday, 2 January, radio intercept logs show a dramatic increase in the volume of cipher wireless traffic between the Soviet embassy and Moscow." The Wiz peered down the table at General Smith. "Seems to me like someone might have gone and pushed the panic button over there."

Torriti positioned a forefinger along the side of a nostril. It almost appeared as if he were asking permission to speak. "When all the pieces lock into place," he said, "we'd need to be off our rockers to go on trusting Philby. All I'm saying is we ought to ship him back to England COD, then get ahold of the Brits and lay out what we have and let them grill the shit out of him. They broke Fuchs. They'll break Philby."

"We'll look like horses asses if we go out there with accusations we can't prove," Helms said lazily.

"I don't believe I'm hearing what I'm hearing," Torriti groaned, struggling to keep the cap on his pressure cooker of a temper. "Here we have a guy who began his adult life as a Cambridge socialist, who got hitched to a Communist activist in Vienna..." He looked around the table to see if anything alcoholic had somehow ended up amid all the bottles of seltzer. "Holy shit, the fucker's been betraying one operation after another—"

"There are operations he knew about that weren't betrayed," Angleton snapped.

The Sorcerer exploded. "He knew I knew the identity of the Soviet mole who had compromised the Vishnevsky defection because I sent him a barium meal to that effect. Next thing you know some jokers lure me to a church and try to take me out of circulation. What does that add up to?"

Angleton dragged on his cigarette. "Philby knew that your hottest source in East Germany—"

General Smith ran his thumb down the numbered paragraphs in Angletons rebuttal. "Here it is—number three—you're talking about SNIPER."

"Philby was privy to the SNIPER material from day one," Angleton said. "Backtracking from what was passed on to us, the KGB could have easily figured out the identity of SNIPER. When Harvey discovered that SNIPER was a theoretical physicist and a deputy prime minister in the East German Government, this information was passed on as a matter of routine to the MI6 liaison man in Washington, Philby." He turned toward the Sorcerer. "SNIPER is still delivering, isn't he, Harvey?"

"Yeah, he is, Jim."

Angleton almost smiled, as if to say: I rest my case. Torriti said, very quietly, "He's delivering because he's a Soviet disinformation operation."

The Barons around the table exchanged glances. Truscott leaned back in his chair and eyed the Sorcerer through the haze of pipe and cigarette smoke. "I suppose you're prepared to elaborate on that."

"I suppose I am," Torriti agreed. He tugged two crumpled message blanks from the breast pocket of his sports jacket, ironed them open on the table with the flat of his hand and began reading from the first one. "This is a 'Flash—Eyes Only' that reached me here Saturday morning. 'From: The Sorcerer's Apprentice. To: The Sorcerer. Subject: ÆSNIPER. One: Something fishy's going on here, Harvey."'

General Smith leaned forward. "It starts off with 'Something fishy's going on here, Harvey?"'

"That's what it says, General."

"Is that a cryptogram?"

"No, sir. It's plain English."

The DCI nodded dubiously. "I see. And precisely what is the something fishy that was going on?"

Torriti smiled for the first time that morning. "It's like this," he began. "A while back, acting on my instructions, my Apprentice, name of John McAullife, planted a teardrop microphone in the floorboards of SNIPER'S apartment. McAullife is the officer who's been running SNIPER'S courier code-named RAINBOW..."

At their Friday night meeting in the rehearsal hall. Jack had dipped two fingers into Lili's brassiere and pressed the backs of them against her flesh as he kissed her. When his fingers came out, the square of silk filled with minuscule writing was between them. Later, at Berlin-Dahlem, Jack slipped the silk between two pieces of glass, adjusted the desk lamp and, leaning over a magnifying glass, slowly worked his way through the latest "get" from SNIPER. Not surprisingly, he found details of bacteriological warfare testing on the Baltic island of Rügen, uranium production in the Joachimstal area of the Harz Mountains, the most recent Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia. That was followed by a long quotation from a letter from Walter Ulbricht to the Soviet ambassador complaining about comments supposedly made about his, Ulbricht's, commitment to Communism by his Party rival, Wilhelm Zaisser. After that came a long list of Soviet Army units that, according to an internal Soviet study, were quietly being rotated through a training program designed to prepare combat troops for bacteriological warfare. The Friday "get" from SNIPER ended with the names of middle-level West German government and private enterprise functionaries who were hiding compromising Nazi-party pasts and were thus vulnerable to blackmail.

Bone tired after a long day, Jack switched off the desk lamp and rubbed his eyes. Then, suddenly, he found himself staring into the darkness, thinking hard. Something fishy was going on! He snapped on the desk lamp and, dialing the combination of a small safe, retrieved the most recent transcript of the conversations recorded by the teardrop microphone in SNIPER'S floorboards. Leaning over the desk, he compared the microphone's "get" with the latest material from SNIPER. Slowly, his mouth gaped open. The details of bacteriological warfare testing on Rügen, of uranium production in the Harz Mountains, of the recent Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia had all been subtly altered. The teardrop and the silk were delivering two different versions of the same information. Even more crucial, the silk made no mention at all of the MI6 watch list in the hands of the Polish intelligence service, UB, or the presumption that there might be an important Soviet spy in British intelligence who had provided it.

Did this mean what he thought it meant?

Jack grabbed a message blank and began scrawling a "Flash—Eyes Only" for the Sorcerer in Washington. "Something fishy's going on here, Harvey," he began.

Dressed in the cobalt blue coveralls of an East German state electrical worker, Jack leaned against the kiosk on the south side of Alexanderplatz, eating a sandwich made with ersatz Swiss cheese and skimming the editorial page of Saturday's Communist Party newspaper, Neues Deutschland. Surveilling the far side of Alexanderplatz over the top of his newspaper, he repeated from memory the Sorcerer's answer to his overnight "Something fishy" bulletin. "Hit RAINBOW over the head with it," Torriti had ordered. "Today. I want her answer in my hands when I go into the lion's den Monday at nine."

Jack saw Lili emerge from the private dance school minutes after the noon siren had sounded. She stood for a moment as the lunch hour crowd flowed around her, angling her face toward the sun, relishing its warmth. Then she slung her net catchall over a shoulder and set off down Mühiendammstrasse. She queued to buy beets from an open farm truck, then ducked into a pharmacy before continuing on her way. Jack waved to the Fallen Angel, who seemed to be dozing behind the wheel of the small Studebaker truck that transported bone meal fertilizer into the Soviet zone. He spotted Lili and started the motor. Cutting diagonally across Alexanderplatz, Jack came abreast of her as she waited for the light to change.

"Guten Morgen, Helga," Jack said tensely, slipping his arm through hers. "Wie geht es Dir?"

Lili turned her head. A look of pure animal dread filled what Jack had always thought of as her bruised eyes. She glanced around frantically, as if she would take flight, then looked back at him. "You know my real name?" she whispered.

I know more than that," he said under his breath. He raised his voice and asked, "Wie geht es Herr Loffler?"