The Devil's Alternative (4 page)

“What is happening there?” asked Matthews.

“Something odd, sir. Something strange is happening to the Soviet grain crop. All this remaining sixty percent is spring wheat, put down as seed in March and April after the thaw. It should be coming up sweet and green by now. It’s coming up stunted, sparse, sporadic, as if it had been hit by some kind of blight.”

“Weather again?” asked Matthews.

“No. They had a damp winter and spring over this area, but nothing serious. Now that the sun has come out, the weather is perfect—warm and dry.”

“How widespread is this ... blight?”

Benson came in again. “We don’t know, Mr. President. We have maybe fifty samples of film of this particular problem. We tend to focus on military concentrations, of course—troop movements, new rocket bases, arms factories. But what we have indicates it must be pretty widespread.”

“So what are you after?”

“What we’d like,” resumed Poklewski, “is your go-ahead to spend a lot more time on this problem, find out just how big it is for the Soviets. It will mean trying to send in delegations, businessmen. Diverting a lot of space surveillance from non-priority tasks. We believe it is in America’s vital interest to find out just exactly what it is that Moscow is going to have to handle here.”

Matthews considered and glanced at his watch. He had a troop of ecologists due to greet him and present him with yet another plaque in ten minutes. Then there was the Attorney General before lunch about the new labor legislation. He rose.

“Very well, gentlemen, you have it. By my authority. This is one I think we need to know. But I want an answer within thirty days.”

General Carl Taylor sat in the seventh-floor office of Robert Benson, the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, ten days later and gazed down at his own report, clipped to a large sheaf of photo stills, that lay on the low coffee table in front of him.

“It’s a funny one, Bob. I can’t figure it out,” he said.

Benson turned away from the great, sweeping picture windows that form one entire wall of the DCI’s office at Langley, Virginia, and face out north by northwest across vistas of trees toward the invisible Potomac River. Like his predecessors, he loved that view, particularly in late spring and early summer, when the woodlands are a wash of tender green. He took his seat on the low settee across the coffee table from Taylor.

“Neither can my grain experts, Carl. And I don’t want to go to the Department of Agriculture. Whatever is going on over there in Russia, publicity is the last thing we need, and if I bring in outsiders, it’ll be in the papers within a week. So what have you got?”

“Well, the photos show the blight, or whatever it is, is not pandemic,” said Taylor. “It’s not even regional. That’s the twister. If the cause were climatic, there’d be weather phenomena to explain it.

There aren’t any. If it were a straight disease of the crop, it would be at least regional. If it were parasite-caused, the same would apply. But it’s haphazard. There are stands of strong, healthy, growing wheat right alongside the affected acreage. The Condor reconnaissance shows no logical pattern at all. How about you?”

Benson nodded in agreement.

“It’s illogical, all right. I’ve put a couple of assets in on the ground, but they haven’t reported back yet. The Soviet press has said nothing. My own agronomy boys have been over your photos backwards and forwards. All they can come up with is some blight of the seed or in the earth. But they can’t figure the haphazard nature of it all, either. It fits no known pattern. But the important thing is I have to produce some kind of estimate for the President for the total probable Soviet grain harvest next September and October. And I have to produce it soon.”

“There’s no way I can photograph every damn stand of wheat and barley in the Soviet Union, even with Condor,” said Taylor. “It would take months. Can you give me that?”

“Not a chance,” said Benson. “I need information about the troop movements along the China border, the buildup opposite Turkey and Iran. I need a constant watch on the Red Army deployments in East Germany and the locations of the new SS-twenties behind the Urals.”

“Then I can only come up with a percentage figure based on what we have photographed to date, and extrapolate for a Soviet-wide figure,” said Taylor.

“It’s got to be accurate,” said Benson. “I don’t want a repeat of 1977.”

Taylor winced at the memory, even though he had not been Director of the NRO in that year. In 1977 the American intelligence machine had been fooled by a gigantic Soviet confidence trick. Throughout the summer, all the experts of the CIA and the Department of Agriculture had been telling the President the Soviet grain crop would reach around 215 million metric tons. Agriculture delegates visiting Russia had been shown fields of fine, healthy wheat; in fact, these had been the exceptions. Photoreconnaissance analysis had been faulty. In the autumn the then Soviet President, Leonid Brezhnev, had calmly announced the Soviet crop would be only 194 million tons.

As a result, the price of the U.S. wheat surplus over domestic requirements had shot up, in the certainty the Russians would after all have to buy close on 20 million tons. Too late. Through the summer, acting through French-based front companies, Moscow had already bought up futures for enough wheat to cover the deficit—and at the old, low price. They had even chartered dry- cargo shipping space through front men, then redirected the ships, which were en route to Western Europe, into Soviet ports. The affair was known in Langley as “the Sting.”

Carl Taylor rose. “Okay, Bob, I’ll go on taking happy snapshots.”

“Carl.” The DCIs voice stopped him in the doorway. “Nice pictures are not enough. By July first I want the Condors back on military deployment. Give me the best grain-figure estimates you have by the end of the month. Err, if you must, on the side of caution. And if there’s
anything
your boys spot that could explain the phenomenon, go back and reshoot it. Somehow we have to find out what the hell is happening to the Soviet wheat.”

President Matthews’s Condor satellites could see most things in the Soviet Union, but they could not observe Harold Lessing, one of the three first secretaries in the Commercial Section of the British Embassy in Moscow at his desk the following morning. It was probably just as well, for he would have been the first to agree he was not an edifying sight. He was pale as a sheet and feeling extremely sick.

The main embassy building of the British mission in the Soviet capital is a fine old pre- Revolution mansion facing north on Maurice Thorez Embankment, staring straight across the Moscow River at the south facade of the Kremlin wall. It once belonged to a millionaire sugar

merchant in tsarist days, and was snapped up by the British soon after the Revolution. The Soviet government has been trying to get the British out of there ever since. Stalin hated the place; every morning as he rose he had to see, across the river from his private apartments, the Union Jack fluttering in the morning breeze, and it angered him greatly.

But the Commercial Section does not have the fortune to dwell in this elegant cream-and-gold mansion. It functions in a drab complex of postwar jerry-built office blocks two miles away on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, almost opposite the wedding-cake-style Ukraina Hotel. The same compound, guarded at its single gate by several watchful militiamen, contains several drab apartment buildings set aside for the flats of diplomatic personnel from a score or more of foreign embassies, and is called collectively the “Korpus Diplomatik,” or Diplomats’ Compound.

Harold Lessing’s office was on the top floor of the commercial office block. When he finally fainted at ten-thirty that bright May morning, it was the sound of the telephone he brought crashing to the carpet with him that alerted his secretary in the neighboring office. Quietly and efficiently, she summoned the commercial counselor, who had two young attachés assist Lessing, by this time groggily conscious again, out of the building, across the parking lot, and up to his own sixth-floor apartment in Korpus 6, a hundred yards away.

Simultaneously, the commercial counselor telephoned the main embassy on Maurice Thorez Embankment, informed the head of Chancery, and asked for the embassy doctor to be sent over. By noon, having examined Lessing in his own bed in his own flat, the doctor was conferring with the commercial counselor. To his surprise, the senior man cut him short and suggested they drive over to the main embassy to consult jointly with the head of Chancery. Only later did the doctor, an ordinary British general practitioner doing a three-year stint on attachment to the embassy with the rank of First Secretary, realize why the move was necessary. The head of Chancery took them all to a special room in the embassy building that was secure from wiretapping—something the Commercial Section was definitely not.

“It’s a bleeding ulcer,” the medico told the two diplomats. “He seemingly has been suffering from what he thought was an excess of acid indigestion for some weeks, even months. Put it down to strain of work and bunged down loads of antacid tablets. Foolish, really; he should have come to me.”

“Will it require hospitalization?” asked the head of Chancery, gazing at the ceiling.

“Oh yes, indeed.” said the doctor. “I think I can get him admitted here within a few hours. The local Soviet medical men are quite up to that sort of treatment.”

There was a brief silence as the two diplomats exchanged glances. The commercial counselor shook his head. Both men had the same thought; because of their need-to-know, both of them were aware of Lessing’s real function in the embassy. The doctor was not. The counselor deferred to Chancery.

“That will not be possible,” said Chancery smoothly. “Not in Lessing’s case. He’ll have to be flown to Helsinki on the afternoon shuttle. Will you ensure that he can make it?”

“But surely ...” began the doctor. Then he stopped. He realized why they had had to drive two miles to have this conversation. Lessing must be the head of the Secret Intelligence Service operation in Moscow. “Ah, yes. Well, now. He’s shocked and has lost probably a pint of blood. I’ve given him a hundred milligrams of pethidine as a tranquilizer. I could give him another shot at three this afternoon. If he’s chauffeur-driven to the airport and escorted all the way, yes, he can make Helsinki. But he’ll need immediate entry into hospital when he gets there. I’d prefer to go with him myself, just to be sure. I could be back tomorrow.”

The head of Chancery rose. “Splendid,” he pronounced. “Give yourself two days. And my wife has a list of little items she’s run short of, if you’d be so kind. Yes? Thank you so much. I’ll make all

the arrangements from here.”

For years it has been customary in newspapers, magazines, and books to refer to the headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, or MI6, as being at a certain office block in the borough of Lambeth in London. It is a custom that causes quiet amusement to the staff members of “the Firm,” as it is more colloquially known in the community of such organizations, for the Lambeth address is a sedulously maintained front.

In much the same way, a front is maintained at Leconfield House on Curzon Street, still supposed to be the home of the counterintelligence arm, MI5, to decoy the unneeded inquirer. In reality, those indefatigable spy-catchers have not dwelt near the Playboy Club for years.

The real home of the world’s most secret Secret Intelligence Service is a modern-design steel- and-concrete block, allocated by the Department of the Environment, a stone’s throw from one of the capital’s principal Southern Regional railway stations, and it was taken over in the early seventies.

It was in his top-floor suite with its tinted windows looking out toward the spire of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament across the river that, just after lunch, the Director General of the SIS received the news of Lessing’s illness. The call came on one of the internal lines from the head of Personnel, who had received the message from the basement cipher room. He listened carefully.

“How long will he be off?” he asked at length.

“Several months, at least,” said Personnel. “There’ll be a couple of weeks in hospital in Helsinki, then home for a bit more. Probably several more weeks’ convalescence.”

“Pity,” mused the Director General. “We shall have to replace him rather fast.” His capacious memory recalled to him that Lessing had been running two Russian agents, low-level staffers in the Red Army and the Soviet Foreign Ministry, respectively—not world-beating, but useful. Finally he said, “Let me know when Lessing is safely tucked up in Helsinki. And get me a short list of possibles for his replacement. By close of play tonight, please.”

Sir Nigel Irvine was the third successive professional intelligence man to rise to the post of Director General of the SIS. The vastly bigger American CIA, which had been brought to the peak of its powers by its first Director, Allen Dulles, had, as a result of abusing its strength with go-it- alone antics, in the early seventies finally been brought under the control of an outsider. Admiral Stansfield Turner. It was ironic that at exactly the same period a British government had finally done the opposite, breaking the tradition of putting the Firm under a senior diplomat from the Foreign Office and letting a professional take over.

The risk had worked well. The Firm had paid a long penance for the Burgess, MacLean, and Philby affairs, and Sir Nigel Irvine was determined that the tradition of a professional at the head of the Firm would continue after him. That was why he intended to be as strict as any of his imme- diate predecessors in preventing the emergence of any “Lone Rangers.”

“This is a service, not a trapeze act,” he used to tell the novices at Beaconsfield. “We’re not here for the applause.”

It was already dark by the time the three files arrived on Sir Nigel Irvine’s desk, but he wanted to get the selection finished and was prepared to stay on. He spent an hour poring over the files, but the selection seemed fairly obvious. Finally he used the telephone to ask the head of Personnel, who was still in the building, to step by. His secretary showed the staffer in, two minutes later.