Dirty Tricks, page 2
It seemed extraordinary to him that, with all its resources, the CIA could not provide a safe house for him. Instead his case officer, no doubt acting on instructions from above, had assured him that since that assassination attempt when a limousine had so obviously tried to run him down the safest thing in a free and open society was to keep moving around.
That experience had been frightening on two counts. The sight of the long-nosed vehicle accelerating towards him and mounting the side-walk, the sudden realization that its speed and direction were deliberate, and the frantic dive to a door which happened to be unlocked were terrifying enough. But that fear soon passed. What remained was the concern about the appalling carelessness of his CIA case officer in allowing him to stand alone in such a vulnerable situation while he made a telephone call.
The CIA knew beyond any doubt who he was. He had used several pseudonyms in the various places where he had worked abroad but Mr Falconer, who had spent much time with him in friendly interrogation, knew that he was truly Viktor Kovalsky, the most senior KGB officer ever to defect to the West, with the rank equivalent to major-general. As evidence of his confidence, Mr Falconer had even shown him the CIA dossier labelled ‘Kovalsky’ which contained so much personal detail of his prestigious career, including photographs taken surreptitiously.
The case officer had been replaced, presumably as a consequence, but the incident had deprived him of his confidence in the Agency to which he was now pledging his loyalty. He could not think of any of his former KGB colleagues who would have been so careless with such a valuable acquisition. That special item of information, which he had revealed at his first debriefing session three weeks previously, was surely enough in itself to merit the highest VIP treatment. Falconer was pretty poker-faced, but even he had been unable to conceal a look of delighted surprise.
Sitting in his shirt sleeves, the defector drew deeply on a cigarette as he watched the television screen. A diet of Western films and raucous advertisements with their unfamiliar jingles was not to his liking at all. He derived no pleasure from watching Indians die obligingly in the dust in ludicrous circumstances. He had never been able to understand why men who looked after cows should be romantic figures. Surely they must have been dirty and smelly. And at the moment he was rather allergic to guns.
Master of several languages and well-travelled through service in various Soviet embassies as a KGB officer posing as a diplomat, Kovalsky had long regarded himself as something of an intellectual, addicted to classical music, ballet and literature. Trivia and razzmatazz were not to his taste. He was a serious man and, above all, a professional. Hadn’t he been in line to become head of the First Chief Directorate, in charge of all foreign operations, until that sudden flight from Helsinki?
He looked at his new American digital wrist-watch. Where the hell was his case officer? He should have called for him more than an hour ago to take him down to lunch. There was no way that he was going to risk going down to the restaurant alone, so he turned down the sound of the television and lay back on the bed staring at the ceiling.
He would certainly have deserved that promotion with all the fringe benefits it would have brought, he told himself. His record had been one of steady achievement ever since he had so cleverly organized the diversion of a big shipment of Indian-made sub-machine-guns, ostensibly intended for Libya, to the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut in 1968.
That first connection with the PLO, which had brought him into personal contact with its leaders, like Habash and Arafat, had led him to make an ingenious suggestion which had been snapped up, not only by the then Chairman of the KGB, but by the Central Committee of the Party. The Committee had been so impressed that it had reversed its policy and authorized the provision of money, weapons, training and planning advice to the PLO terrorists which had enabled them to bring off airliner hi-jacks, kidnaps, assassinations and hostage situations.
The results had been so beneficial to the KGB that the terrorist support was soon extended to the Baader-Meinhoff group in West Germany, the Red Brigade in Italy, the IRA in the United Kingdom and to others under the same secret condition which gave seemingly mindless outrages precise purpose for the Soviet Union. The ingeniously simple arrangement which Kovalsky had initiated was that, whenever possible, the terrorists would give the KGB advance warning of any projected coup. Preparations could then be made for the KGB to use the turmoil and disruption created by the terrorist attack as cover for some operation of its own, while the police and security forces of the country concerned were severely stretched.
In that way the KGB had run caches of arms into West Germany while massive hunts were in progress for the killers of kidnapped public figures; it had infiltrated and withdrawn agents in and out of Greece while attention was concentrated on Athens Airport; it had smuggled explosives into France while all eyes were on terrorists holed up at Orly; and had strengthened its position in Turkey while the Egyptian Embassy there was under a seemingly stupid attack, which the PLO carefully went out of its way to condemn. In Britain the terrorist cover had been used so successfully to introduce arms and subversive agents that, on several occasions, it had concentrated Special Branch and other Security forces on to Heathrow and other airports simply by feeding a false tip into the Home Office or MI5.
The general disorder and debilitation of Western societies by the terrorists had been a bonus for the Soviet Union as a whole, but the big pay-off for the investment had been the extra KGB cover, which could be turned on almost whenever and wherever it was needed.
Such was Kovalsky’s reputation as an innovator as well as an operator that his close colleagues must have been staggered by his defection, for he had gone out on the crest of another major KGB triumph – the incredibly successful Soviet propaganda drive against the American manufacture and deployment of neutron bombs.
Contrary to popular belief, the neutron bomb had been under development by the United States since the early 1960s, and from the moment the KGB got a whiff of its potentiality it had become a prime target for elimination by any means that might be engineered. Here was the very weapon the Red Army generals feared most – a small bomb or missile-warhead generating such a flux of lethal atomic particles that it could kill tank crews sheltering behind the thickest armour-plate. The further advantage to a defending army was the minimal damage it would cause to civilian buildings.
The virtual certainty that it would soon be possible to marry this weapon to extremely accurate missiles meant the 50,000 battle tanks, in which the Red Army had invested so much money and so much confidence, could be severely blunted or even neutralized. And it was on them that the Generals depended for maximum shock effect in the event of a war in Europe.
It had been his old friend Sergei Yakovlev, with whom he had first been recruited into the KGB, who, in his sojourn as Chief of the Disinformation Department, responsible for disseminating false reports, had so brilliantly foreseen how to stop the Americans from producing the neutron weapons. What a flier that Sergei had been! What escapades they had enjoyed together! Now, deservedly, he was right at the top, Chief of the entire KGB and a member of the Politburo – a further reason why promotion would surely have come his own way, perhaps eventually to the post he coveted most, one of the six deputy-directorships.
With characteristic insight Yakovlev had seen that the key to killing the neutron bomb lay in West Germany. The weapon was of no value for the defence of the United States, which was never likely to be attacked by tanks. Its sole value lay in preventing or defeating a Soviet strike in Central Europe. It would be pointless for the Americans to make it if the West Germans refused to have it on their soil. So that was the Yakovlev solution, namely a massive propaganda drive centred on West Germany to brand the neutron bomb as a criminal weapon deliberately designed to murder people and save buildings, a capitalist bomb which only a villainous, Imperialist nation could have invented, a bomb that killed slowly by atomic radiation, recalling all the horrors of Hiroshima.
When Yakovlev had sold his propaganda plan to the Soviet leadership he had immediately nominated Kovalsky, his old friend and fellow recruit, to control the operation against West Germany. And he had certainly controlled it with patience and faultless efficiency, the defector told himself as he lit yet another cigarette. Hadn’t Yakovlev himself, in front of other superiors, slapped him on the back and talked of ‘the Kovalsky touch’?
His first move had been to penetrate the West German leadership, and this he had accomplished through the planting of Guenther Guillaume, a professional Communist spy, into the entourage of the Chancellor, Willi Brandt. Guillaume had operated so superbly that he had become Brandt’s closest confidant, and amongst the stream of information he funnelled back to Kovalsky was a continuing assessment that the leading German politicians could be deceived into opposing the neutron weapon which, in truth, could be their best safeguard against Soviet attack.
At the right moment a propaganda campaign against the weapon, which had been carefully planned for many months, was launched by Communist front organizations in Germany, Britain and Washington. After a softening up, which had been greatly assisted by pacifists, nuclear disarmers and others, the Kremlin leadership itself joined in the struggle. In the result, Jimmy Carter, the US President of the day, publicly agreed to delay production of neutron weapons and never to deploy them in Europe without the agreement of the countries concerned. And, as Yakovlev had cleverly foreseen, none of those countries would want to be the first to acquiesce.
In Moscow the campaign had been hailed as one of the most significant propaganda victories of all time. It had marked out Yakovlev as the next Chief of the KGB, the appointment being sure of the backing of the Red Army generals who, for the foreseeable future, could continue to put their faith in massed tank attack.
Ah, Kovalsky thought, that had been a triumph indeed! And he had played a pivotal role in it. Now, instead of reaping his rewards, he was lying bored stiff in a lonely hotel bedroom in the capital of Russia’s most powerful enemy.
He had arrived on an American cargo ship from Helsinki where he had been visiting the Soviet Embassy for routine discussions with the KGB Resident there. The Resident was such an old friend that he could only have believed he had been kidnapped. Yet here he was, haggard, hard-up and looking older than his fifty-two years with his balding hair and rimless glasses, a full-blown defector apparently being hunted down by his former colleagues.
Kovalsky had often wondered about the defector’s way of life: what it must be like to be suddenly and permanently cut off from one’s roots. Now he knew and it did not suit him. Gone were the dignity and the security of belonging to an élite corps. Gone was the sense of belonging to anything; of any continuing purpose. Instead of a desk diary filled for weeks ahead with appointments and assignments, he faced a desert of empty days. Even the countryside, which he had admired during a brief professional visit to Washington some years previously, seemed alien and unfriendly, even though in late May it was lush and green, the woods being particularly splendid. The Russia with which he was familiar was mostly flat and featureless but, like the North African desert, which he knew from his service in Tripoli, it engendered a deep-seated longing. Who was that British poet who had written:
Breather’s there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
It would be no good asking his case officer for the name – if ever he arrived. His mental processes seemed to be limited to one purpose: that of extracting every possible item of information from his charge’s memory store. They had gone over the same ground so many times, not only in formal interrogation sessions, but while they were taking exercise or dashing from one address to another in fast cars.
Kovalsky had interrogated enough people himself in his time to be familiar with the routine, and he admired the case officer’s skill and persistence in posing the sudden question which seemed innocuous but was ingeniously loaded. Still it was unbelievably tedious when one was on the receiving end.
The case officer’s excuse was that the questions might stimulate the memory to release some half-forgotten fact or incident which might be of significance. But Kovalsky understood their prime purpose well enough. There was still suspicion that he was not genuine, but what the CIA called a ‘mole’, a double agent still loyal to the KGB sent to ingratiate himself with secret documents and information and then to mislead and disrupt. Well, he could cope with such doubts, however long they lasted; however searching the inquiries.
What could possibly have happened to the case officer? He had never been late before. A car breakdown perhaps? But he should have telephoned.
He stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, stretched and bent down to look at the snapshot of his wife and daughter which he had propped against the hairbrush on his dressing-table. He had taken it on that wonderful holiday at Sochi on the Black Sea where he and his family had been sent by a grateful Government for a mission well achieved. Tamara, his wife, a dumpy woman with blonde hair in plaits wound above her head, posed no great loss to him. They had married too early – ‘when he was a corporal’, as that scoundrel Napoleon would have put it – and he had been out of love with her, and certainly out of lust, for years. But his fourteen-year-old daughter, who had arrived late in a marriage he had written off as childless, was a different matter. Leaving her had been a major sacrifice for him and a cruel blow to her. He could only hope that it would be worth it.
He glanced again at the watch which, together with his American clothes and his latest American name, had been given to him by his new masters. He put on his jacket for something to do and put the snapshot in his inside pocket. The case officer had told him to carry nothing that could identify him, but he needed a physical link with the person whom he still regarded as his real self.
As he moved to turn up the television again there was a knock on the door – five knocks in fact. It was the prearranged signal, two knocks, pause, one knock, pause, two knocks. At least he would have some company even if it meant coping with the fractured Russian, which the case officer was cramming, obviously for some coming assignment in Moscow.
Kovalsky opened the door with a broad smile, but did not see the case officer. A stranger stood there. A weasel-faced man with a rather large-brimmed trilby hat. He was pointing a Luger Parabellum pistol ominously fitted with a fat silencer.
Concentrating his gaze on the pistol, Kovalsky was momentarily too terrified to speak as he recognized it as the weapon favoured by Executive Action hit-men of the KGB when they wanted to leave evidence that an execution had been their work.
The stranger motioned him inside with threatening stabs of his gun and shut the door behind him. Then, keeping Kovalsky covered, he turned up the television set as loud as it would go. He made no reply to Kovalsky’s Russian protestations as he pumped two bullets into his captive’s chest and then shot him in the head for good measure.
If anyone was passing in the corridor at that moment the muffled shots raised no interest. They were a standard component of the television violence which was the normal environment for a modern hotel bedroom.
The assassin searched his victim’s clothing but found nothing except the snapshot, a wad of dollars and some small change. He took the snapshot and slipped it into the briefcase which already concealed his pistol, but left the money. He checked there were no identification marks on the clothing. Then he opened the door gently, saw that the corridor was clear, hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the knob outside and walked slowly out of the hotel, avoiding the lifts.
Chapter Three
As Ed Taylor, chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s mission in London, stepped down from Concorde at Dulles Airport on that warm afternoon, the extreme humidity proclaimed that Washington had been built on a swamp. Carrying the raincoat he had needed in London and swinging a pigskin hold-all, he walked briskly to the cab-rank, a sturdy, somewhat overweight, soberly dressed figure with a pleasant face which smiled easily. As he directed the driver of the Yellow Cab to an address off Connecticut Avenue, he was still wondering not so much why he had been recalled so hurriedly for a meeting with John Falconer, but why it was to be held at Falconer’s private house instead of at the Langley Headquarters.
Like all the officers of the Clandestine Services, where the very nature of the work bred exaggerated caution and suspicion, Falconer was intensely secretive at any time, so much so that some regarded him as near-paranoid. However, Taylor was puzzled by his insistence that nobody at Langley or even in London should know of this sudden recall. It had to be something of exceptional sensitivity and urgency. After turning over every likely possibility during the flight he felt sure that it could only be about the international situation, which seemed to be sliding towards disaster hourly. But there was little about it that was not common knowledge and the main subject of current newspaper comment.
He opened the Washington Post he had bought at the airport. Though Iron Curtain censorship had never been more rigorous, the evidence of serious unrest in the Warsaw Pact countries was undeniable. There were strikes in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and dissidence bordering on riots in the Soviet Union itself – in Georgia, Armenia and the Ukraine. There was even evidence of disaffection in the Red Army, with growing resentfulness against the three years of compulsory service under conditions which the young soldiers knew to be extremely harsh compared with any Western force.
The signs all pointed to the probability that the Soviet empire was beginning to crack under the strain of internal pressures. And that was bad. Any destabilization of the relationship between East and West was dangerous to peace. It would suit the West, as well as Russia, for the dissidents to be suppressed, however brutally, though Western politicians would have to continue to make noises about it.
