The Company: A Novel of the CIA (83 page)

Reading off the questions in Russian, Manny worked his way down the list. Speaking in English, Kukushkin answered those that he could. There were a handful that he couldn't answer—the man's name had slipped his mind, he said—and several that he answered incorrectly, but he got most or them right. Agatha brought them cups of steaming tea at one point and sat with them while they drank it. Kukushkin asked her where she worked in the Patent Office and what kind of documents passed through her hands. Manny understood that he was gathering details for the report he would be obliged to write for the SK people. When they returned to Manny's list of questions, Kukushkin corrected one of the inaccurate answers he had given and remembered the nickname of the fat woman who had served tea in the third floor canteen in Moscow Centre: because of the mustache on her upper lip and her habit of wearing men's shirts, everyone had taken to calling her "Dzhentlman Djim." Manny was halfway through the last of Angleton's six pages when the telephone on the sideboard rang. Both the Russian and Manny stared at it. Agatha appeared in the bedroom doorway; behind her the television set was tuned to Candid Camera. "It could be my mother," she said hopefully.

"Answer it," Manny said.

"What do I say if it's not?"

"You don't say anything. You're starting an illicit affair with a married man. That's not the kind of thing you'd tell someone over the phone while he was here."

Agatha gingerly brought the telephone to her ear. "Hello?" Then: "What number are you calling?"

She looked at Manny and mouthed the words
search me
. "Well, you have the right number but there's no one here by that name... You're welcome, I'm sure." She hung up. "He wanted to speak to someone named Maureen Belton." She batted her eyes nervously and retreated to the bedroom.

Manny went over to the sideboard and picked up the phone. "Were you able to trace it?" He listened for a moment, then replaced the receiver and came back to his seat. "Too quick to trace. It was a man—he spoke with an accent."

"The SK is having her phone number. Maybe they checking to see if there is a woman here."

"That may be it," Manny agreed.

"So how am I doing with your questions and my answers?" Kukushkin asked when Manny reached the end of the six pages. You did just fine," Manny said.

" So we may talk now of how I can come over?"

Manny shook his head. "If only it was that easy, Sergei. Successful defections aren't organized in one night. Your answers must be analyzed by our counterintelligence staff—"

"By your Mr. Angleton," Kukushkin said.

"You know of Mr. Angleton?"

'Everybody at our embassy knows of your Mr. Angleton."

"If counterintelligence gives us the go-ahead, then we need to set up a safe house in the countryside and staff it, and then organize the actual coming over—we will need a time when you and your wife and your darghter leave the Russian compound together on a pretext. You must be able fill that briefcase with the secrets you promised us and spirit it out of the embassy. We must be able to bring you over and hide you away before the SK people know you are missing."

Kukushkin face darkened. "How long?"

"If all goes well it could be done in five to six weeks."

The Russian exploded out of his chair. "SASHA is back in Washington before five weeks!" He strode over to the window, parted the curtain and studied the dark street below. "In five weeks, Manny, I am a dead man."

"Calm down, Sergei. There is a way out of this."

"There is no way out of a coffin."

Manny joined Kukushkin at the window. "There will not be a coffin Sergei, if you give me the SASHA serials now—give us the first initial of SASHA's family name, give us the biographical detail, tell us when SASHA was absent from Washington."

Kukushkin turned away and prowled back and forth behind the couch, a caged panther looking for a way out of the trap he had fallen into. "So: how are you feeling when you play this blackmail game with me?"

Manny avoided Sergei's eye. "Lousy. I feel lousy, is how I feel. But we all have our jobs to do..."

The Russian grunted. "Being in your shoes I am doing the same. You and me, we are being in a lousy business."

"I didn't invent SASHA, Sergei," Manny said from the window. "I didn't create the situation where he returns to Washington in a little more than a week."

"How can I be sure you are not throwing me away like old rag after I deliver SASHA serials?"

"I give you my word, Sergei—"

"Your Mr. Angleton is not bound by your word."

"You have other things we want—most especially, we want to discover the identity of your mole inside the NSA."

The Russian settled onto the couch again, defeated by the logic of the situation. "What about medical help for my wife?"

"We can have her examined by specialists within days. If she needs treatment we can provide it."

"How examined within days?"

"The Russians at the embassy all get their teeth fixed in America—they use that Bulgarian dentist near the Dupont Circle subway stop who speaks Russian and doesn't charge a lot. If your wife suddenly had a toothache she would make an appointment. If she were going to have a root canal, she would need three or four appointments over a period of three or four weeks. We could organize to have a heart specialist in another office in the same building."

"And the Bulgarian dentist?"

"He would cooperate. He could pretend to do actual work on her and nobody would be the wiser."

"How are you being sure he cooperating?"

Manny only smiled.

Æ/PINNACLE thought about it. Manny came across the room and sat on the back of the couch. "Trust me, Sergei—give me the SASHA serials. If we can identify SASHA your troubles are over. We'll bring you and your wife and your daughter across under conditions that are as near to risk-free as we can make them. Then we'll make you an offer that will knock your eyes out. You won't regret it."

3

WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, MAY 24, 1974

TIME WAS RUNNING OUT ON THE SOVIET POLITICAL ATTACHE Kukushkin. His two-week window of opportunity had forty-eight hours left on the clock; if his information was correct, SASHA would return to Washington on Sunday and be back at his desk the following morning. Despite the task force's efforts to limit distribution of its product, SASHA would be bound to pick up rumors of a high-level defection in the works, after which he could be expected to alert the SK people at the Soviet embassy.

At the start, Angleton had been wary of Æ/PINNACLE. But his natural tendency to assume the worst case, when it came to defectors, started to crack the day Manny mentioned the serial concerning Moscow Centre's newly created Department D, the Disinformation Directorate in charge of coordinating the KGB's global disinformation campaign. Angleton had long ago inferred the existence of such a directorate from the fact that the world in general, and the American media in particular, had swallowed whole the rumors of a Sino-Soviet split, as well as the stories of Dubcek and Ceausescu and Tito seeking to distance themselves from Moscow. Angleton, who prided himself on being able to distinguish between KGB disinformation and real political events in the real world, knew intuitively that these were planted stories designed to lull the West into cutting military and intelligence budgets.

The SASHA serials that Manny brought back from his second rendezvous with Æ/PINNACLE made Angleton's head swim with possibilities. For the better part of two years he had been closing in on SASHA, gradually narrowing the list of suspects using a complex process of elimination that involved analyzing operations that had gone bad, as well as operations that had been successful. He felt that it was only a matter of months before he would be able to figure out, with near-certainty, the identity of SASHA. During those months, of course, SASHA could still do a great deal of damage.
Which was why the Æ/PINNACLE serials, used in conjunction with Angleton's own painstaking work, were so crucial. Back in his own shop, Angleton assigned a team of counterintelligence experts to each serial.

_SASHA, according to Æ/PINNACLE, would be away from Washington until Sunday, May 26, which probably meant that he would be back at Langley on Monday, the twenty-seventh.

—he was a Russian-speaker.

—his last name began with the letter K.

—when Kukushkin worked in Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate in Moscow Centre, he reported directly to Starik. In September of 1972, Kukushkin was asked to provide Starik with logistical support—highway and city maps, bus and train schedules, locations of car rental agencies—for one of his rare trips abroad, this one to the province of Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. In a casual conversation that took place when Kukushkin personally delivered the file to Starik's private apartment, located in a villa known as the Apatov Mansion near a village called Cheryomuski, Starik intimated that he was going abroad to meet someone. Only later, when Kukushkin became aware of the existence of a high-level KGB penetration of the CIA, code named SASHA, did he put two and two together; only SASHA would have been important enough to lure Starik overseas.

Even with these serials, identifying SASHA would be tantamount to stumbling across the proverbial needle in the haystack. The Company had something in the neighborhood of 22,000 regular employees and another 4,000 contract employees. The Clandestine Service alone had roughly 5,000 staffers worldwide; 4,000 of them worked in Washington and another thousand were spread across stations around the globe.

While counterintelligence went about the tedious business of searching the Central Registry—they had to sort through thousands of files by hand— Manny organized the medical visit for Kukushkin's wife, a short, heavy woman whose close-cropped hair was beginning to turn white... with worry, Manny supposed. Her name was Elena Antonova. On cue, she complained of a toothache and asked the Russian nurse at the embassy to suggest a dentist. The nurse gave her the phone number of the Russian-speaking Bulgarian dentist near Dupont Circle whom everyone at the embassy used.

Miraculously, someone had canceled and there was an opening on the following day. The dentist, actually a Company contract employee, had given Mrs. Kukushkin a formal written diagnosis without even examining her; she was suffering from an abscess at the root of the lower first bicuspid which would require between three and four appointments for root canal work, at a cost of $45 per visit.

Manny was loitering in the corridor when Elena Antonova emerged from the dentist's office, an appointment card in her hand. He gestured for her to follow him up two flights to an office with the words "Proffit & Proffit Attorneys at Law" stenciled on the glass door. Inside, Manny introduced Kukushkin's wife to a heart specialist, a Company contract employee with a top secret security clearance. The doctor, who went by the name M. Milton when he moonlighted for the CIA's Office of Medical Services, was fluent in Russian. He led her into an inner office (equipment had been rushed in the night before) for an examination that lasted three quarters of an hour. Then, with Manny present, the doctor delivered his prognosis: in all likelihood, Elena Antonova was suffering from angina pectoris (he would make a definitive diagnosis when her blood tests came back from the laboratory), the result of a high cholesterol count that was causing a narrowing of the arteries carrying blood to her heart. Dr. Milton proposed to treat the problem with a combination of beta-blocking agents to decrease the work of the heart and slow the pulse rate, and vasodilators designed to increase coronary circulation. If the condition persisted, Mrs. Kukushkin might eventually require coronary bypass surgery but that decision could be made at a later date.

Manny accompanied Mrs. Kukushkin to the elevator and, speaking Russian in an undertone, promised her that on her next visit to the dentist, the doctor will have prepared the necessary medicine disguised as ordinary over-the-counter pills that women used to alleviate menstrual cramps.

"Bohhoe spasibo," she whispered. She tried to smile. "I will tell you—I am terrified. If they find out about this it will be terrible for us: for Sergei, for me, for our daughter, Ludmilla.

"We will do everything under the sun to prevent them from finding out," Manny promised her.

At Langley, Angleton emerged from a sick bed—he had come down with Asian flu and was running a fever—to attend the regular afternoon task force meeting down the hall from the DD/O's office. Wrapped in an overcoat and a scarf, he settled sluggishly into his habitual seat at the head of the table. The skin on his wrists and face was almost translucent, his shirtfront was drenched in sweat; beads of perspiration trickled down the side of his nose. For the first time in memory he didn't immediately light a cigarette. "My people have gone
over the serials with a fine-tooth comb," he announced, his voice low and trained. "And we've added a serial of our own that has been on a back burner for years. My tentative conclusion is that Æ/PINNACLE could be the rarest of orchids, a genuine defector bearing real secrets."

Colby looked across the table at his DD/0, Elliott Ebbitt. It was easy to see that both men were stunned.

"Are you telling us that you've identified SASHA?" Jack asked.

Angleton only said, "You're not going to like it."

"You want to walk us through it," Colby said impatiently. He doodled with the point of a number two pencil on a yellow legal pad, creating an endless series of linked circles.

Aneleton's lanky body could be seen trembling under the overcoat. "Working from Æ/PINNACLE's four serials," he began, "my people have narrowed the list of suspects dramatically. I'll start with the first three serials. There are one hundred and forty-four Russian speaking Company employees whose last name begins with K and are expected to be away from Washington until Sunday. Of these hundred and forty-four, twenty-three were also out of Washington at some point during the period Kukushkin claims SASHA was away, which was in September of 1972."

Colby designed a very elaborate "twenty-three" on his pad, replete with curlicues. From his place at the far end of the table, Manny watched Angleton slouch back into his seat, almost like an animal gathering itself for a kill.