The Spy Who Knew Too Much, page 26
Why? The body was cremated in great haste. In fact, it’d been burned to a powdery ash before any of the family had even identified the corpse. And the autopsy was perfunctory, as well as problematic. Both the CIA and FBI notified the Maryland state police that they—astonishingly—had no fingerprint records for this veteran agency officer. And a visual identification had been impossible; the body had been grossly distorted by its week in the water. Another problem: the body hauled out of the water, the autopsy report stated, was five feet seven inches tall and weighed 144 pounds. Paisley’s Merchant Marine file had him at five feet eleven inches and a robust 170. Was the corpse floating in the water John Paisley?
Why? The Coast Guard reported that on the night of Paisley’s disappearance “there was an unusual amount of communication traffic from the Soviet summer residence on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay.” What was going on? With whom were the radio operators in the waterfront Russian compound at Pioneer Point communicating? Was there an emergency? An intelligence operation in play?
Why? On that same busy night, a Polish merchant ship, the Franciszek Zubrzycki, had sailed in the moonlit darkness through the bay on its way to Baltimore Harbor. The next day it headed across the Atlantic to Rotterdam. Had it played a covert role in a spy mission? Had it picked up someone as it made its way through the Chesapeake? Was a secret traveler aboard when it headed across the Atlantic?
Pete thought hard about all these questions. He thought of all the equivocating theories he could present, all the caveats he could raise, all the qualms and qualifiers that any glib counterintelligence officer could reel off. And yet—he knew. He had no doubt.
He’s alive: John Paisley had not died that night on the Chesapeake Bay.
He’s alive: The gnarled and mangled corpse that was pulled out of the water was not John Paisley. It was not his remains that had been cremated.
He’s alive: The walls were closing in, and so Paisley had sent off a prearranged distress signal: Rescue me!
He’s alive: A KGB exfiltration squad had run the operation. A bullet shot into someone’s head. A corpse wrapped in diving belts. A nameless victim hurled into the sea. A staged suicide.
He’s alive: A ladder thrown over the side of a Polish merchant vessel as the ship’s engines slow in the midst of its late-night passage across the Chesapeake Bay. From the deck of a small craft floating by the hull, someone grabs the ladder and scurries up under the cover of darkness. He’s met on the deck and quickly escorted to a cabin below. He will not emerge from his hideout until the boat docks in Rotterdam.
He’s alive: Rather than deal with the public consequences of decades of deception, the embarrassed agency gamely plays along. Paisley was no one of consequence, the press is informed. No documents went missing, no secrets were stolen, no agents have been blown. There are no fingerprint records to identify the corpse. And anyway, it’s too late; the body has been cremated.
He’s alive: And somewhere in Russia, John Paisley, Moscow Center’s long-running mole, was enjoying a hero’s welcome.
OR HAD PETE GOTTEN IT all wrong? Had he clutched at clues that led to wild theories? Had he ferreted out sources who were unreliable, who had put a conspiratorial spin on what was ultimately just a sad yet all too human history? Had he, looking to justify a lifetime of his own professional choices, cooked up a case against a poor soul, transforming him into a wily traitor?
After all, he reminded himself reproachfully, there had been a Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Paisley’s death. Following a two-year investigation the committee had in 1980 decided that they had uncovered “no information which would detract from [Paisley’s] record of outstanding performance in faithful service to his country.” They had “found no information to support the allegation that Mr. Paisley’s death was connected in some way to foreign intelligence or counterintelligence matters.”
So was that really that? Was this, then, the final say? Pete, however, couldn’t help but notice that this was a carefully worded conclusion; “found no information to support” was a very lawyerly and restrained form of certitude. And it was further tempered by the committee’s decision to classify the full report. The details of its investigation into the crucial question of whether Paisley was murdered, committed suicide, or was still alive would, Pete despaired, remain secret, locked up forever in government vaults.
And even its public findings were provocatively undermined by an unlikely yet presumably knowledgeable source—Michael Epstein, the Intelligence Committee counsel who had directed the investigation. “Chances are we will never understand the outcome of the case. It is a mystery. We never really had the resources to . . . investigate it,” he said with discernible regret.
The counsel’s exasperation was also echoed in the Washington Post’s reporting on the secret Senate report. “To many persons familiar with the case,” the paper complained, the committee’s conclusion was “merely a chapter in a real-life mystery that may never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction.” And as Pete read on, he found another voice admitting to perplexity. In that same Washington Post account, no less an insider authority than the official CIA spokesman had this to say about Paisley’s death: “Nobody knows how it happened. We don’t know how he died.”
But, Pete had to concede, not knowing was, of course, not the same as guilt. Nor was a top secret classification evidence that the agency was deliberately holding back a disgraceful or embarrassing truth. It was the business of intelligence agencies to keep their workings secret. That sort of protectiveness was in their nature. This reticence did not prove anything. The reality was complex, and arguably wrongheaded, but not necessarily sinister.
Still, Pete wasn’t the only one whose mind kept suspiciously wandering down these dark alleys. Twelve long years after the Brillig had been found floating on the bay, Senator Jesse Helms, a hard-charging conservative senator from North Carolina who served on the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, was posing official questions to his fellow senators about Paisley’s grim death. In 1989, he wanted to know whether “John Paisley had been a long-term Soviet mole at the CIA.” He wanted the committee to examine “evidence that he might have been recruited.” He demanded “the reasons why the U.S. government had waited an inordinate length of time to suspect Mr. Paisley’s probable dealings with Soviet bloc intelligence sources.” He wanted the committee to request an investigation that would once and for all resolve “whether the CIA had been penetrated by Soviet bloc intelligence sources.”
He was stymied. A majority of his fellow committee members voted him down. And the Paisley case, its intertwined secrets and its resonating mysteries, would as a result remain unresolved, troubling theories floating away on an ominous sea of suspicions.
FOR PETE, IT HAD BEEN a long journey. The relentless sleuth, he had traveled far. From a cozy safe house in Geneva to the venerated plains of Waterloo and on to a defector’s dinner party that gave birth to a family of spies. He had set out to avenge agents like Popov, Penkovsky, Trigon, and Shadrin who had paid for other men’s sins with their lives. He had fought hard to burst the barriers that still protected Nosenko’s secrets. In his old age, a retired spy, he had charged forward to protect the agency. Even when the institution to which he’d devoted his life did not want his help. Even when it lashed out at him, as well as at those with whom he’d been proud to serve. He had refused to retreat despite all the obstacles, all the humiliation hurled his way. And he had done it alone: his duty.
On the other hand, he readily admitted, “I would never get all the answers.” He had no doubt that Paisley was the mole he’d been pursuing. But that knowledge was not, he also realized, sufficient. For now all he could do was share his theory with friends, fellow veterans of the Cold War spy wars. Angleton, for one, listened and volunteered that he had no doubts that Paisley was exactly who Pete thought he was. Yet that, too, was only a small comfort.
“I have succeeded in digging out at least the broad outlines of the buried truth,” Pete would say in an attempt to find a measure of solace in his tempered success. But he was enough of a realist—and what veteran counterintelligence officer wasn’t in his weathered soul?—to grasp that the irrefutable proof he wanted would be forever hidden away in the enemy’s vaults along with all its other untold tales. The hunter would need to be able to look deep into the prey’s carefully concealed soul before such knowledge could be obtained. But the covert world doesn’t work that way. Adversaries hold on to their secrets with all their might. And that would never change.
Part V
“The Other Side of the Moon”
1990–2014
Chapter 32
FIRST THE WALL CAME TUMBLING down. Barbed wire, cinder blocks—all turned to rubble. Then it was as if the world itself was in upheaval. The new push-and-pull economics of perestroika. The new accommodating politics of glasnost. The Soviet Union Pete had plotted against, the murderous, tribal enemy he had fought tooth and nail, had felt the quivering intimations of its own weary mortality. And by 1990, as the new decade dawned, the Cold War had given way to a Cold Peace.
Pete was astonished. The unraveling of the Soviet Union, so sudden, so unanticipated, took his wandering thoughts back a lifetime earlier. In his schoolboy science class an inviolable truth had been drummed into him. “We will never see the other side of the moon,” the high school astronomy text had authoritatively declared. Yet that pronouncement had been discarded to the junk heap of obsolescent science; Pete had grown old enough to see the dark side of the moon prodded, photographed, and mapped.
And this reminiscence got him thinking. At first his musings were vague and mawkish, a senior citizen waxing sentimental about living long enough to see everything. But Pete’s thoughts soon hardened. He recalled that after the end of World War II former enemies had sat down together; professional soldiers, warriors bonded by the fraternity of shared experiences, had met to trade combat stories. And he wondered: “If the Cold War was really ending, might KGB veterans loosen up the same way?”
“Their side of old events,” he wanted to believe, “could break out some of the buried truth.”
His excitement rose at the prospect, but then his confidence abruptly waned and he found himself hesitating. Could he trust his own impulses? Was he just an old man—decades had passed since he’d been in the employ of the CIA—refusing to go gently into the good night? He’d earned his retirement. Why shouldn’t he simply sit back in his golden years with his books and his grandchildren and rejoice that his side had won the Cold War? Besides, he’d been down this long and winding road before. He had hacked his way through a jungle of betrayals in a search for the mole, and yet, if he were being brutally objective, all he had to show for his years of exhaustive pursuit was a theory. Walk away, he told himself. Your time has come and gone. The past is past, and one gray-haired retired spy poking into long-forgotten mysteries will not change anything.
But he couldn’t quit. The old questions still nagged. As did his sense of duty.
PETE, THEN, BEGAN TO PLOT his new, opportunistic mission. Flying solo, without either backup or, for that matter, the knowledge of any intelligence service, he’d reach out to his fellow ancient warriors who had spent clandestine lifetimes spying for the enemy. He’d try to convince these gray-faced former Soviet Bloc intelligence and counterintelligence officers that the time had come to talk. To sit down, loosen their professional inhibition, and with the liberating spirit of the new openness trade war stories.
But all the time Pete would be the purposeful fieldman. The convivial conversations, the companionable picking through the bones of long-buried operational corpses, would be cover for a more sophisticated mission. Pete wanted the information that would help him at last fully understand what he had previously missed. He needed the firm knowledge that would empower him to once and for all shove away all the lies and myths that the agency, weary and complacent, had decided to accept as truths. He wanted to shake the deep-rooted tree of conventional intelligence wisdom until the mole fell from its branches.
Yet for Pete it was not only about the past. He’d be sounding an alarm. A historical pattern of treachery would be exposed, and with the recognition of new impending danger, a lackadaisical spy service would be mobilized. The warning would be explicit: There’s every reason to believe the pattern of treason was still active. New moles had almost certainly burrowed in.
There was also something else goading him on. Although it was not in his nature to articulate this element, Pete was driven by a deeply personal motive. The tirades of abuse that for years had been directed at him, the wounding taunts of “genuine paranoia,” of “unsupported suspicions,” of “insidious conclusions,” all the—he’d nearly bellow—“demonstrable untruths” that had been piled on would crumble under the weight of the irrefutable evidence he’d assemble. His tarnished reputation would be polished, and the now reflexively dismissed legacy of his generation—the accomplishments of patriots like Angleton, Rocca, and Deriabin—would be restored.
And so he went to work. It was laborious, an introduction made here, a letter sent there. Year after year throughout the freewheeling openness of the 1990s until the new century when the Russian Bear started howling with its old menacing growl, Pete was busy making once unimaginable connections. He talked and drank (and drank) with nearly twenty Soviet Bloc intelligence veterans. Under the operational pretexts of conferences or research projects or a documentary in the making, he hurried off to meet with his former adversaries as they passed through Brussels, or Paris, or Berlin. And he took trips deep into what once had been forbidden territory, huddling with old foes in the cooling breezes of the Black Sea resort of Sochi or strolling convivially through Red Square as if unaware of the menacing proximity of the Lubyanka and the sad ghosts haunting its torture chambers.
Not that it was always easy; some wounds never heal. There was the senior KGB general who, teeth bared, admonished, “Remember, we are still working against you.” Just as another Moscow Center veteran fixed Pete with an unforgiving stare when he offered an icy reminder: “The KGB is not dead.”
But by and large they were surprisingly openhearted, the discussions not sinuous but frank. Veterans who had known the same late-night terrors, who had listened for the heavy tread of footsteps on the stairs or a vengeful pounding on the door, were a community; they had shared common hazards, they had lived lives sharpened by the constancy of similar fears. And so “they seemed pleased and intrigued,” Pete marveled, “to talk.” Away from the eyes and ears of Moscow Center, they responded spontaneously and with gratifying detail to Pete’s insider questions. But they also understood, Pete felt, that he wouldn’t misuse their trust. It was never articulated, but a line had been firmly drawn: “I would not ask them to betray their undiscovered spies in the West.”
THE DAYS OF PEEKING THROUGH keyholes were over. Instead, the doors were as good as flung wide open. Pete was ecstatic. There he was celebrating in the modest Moscow apartment the state had bestowed on a two-star KGB general for his years of loyal service, a long night fueled by bottle after bottle of vodka, and when the new dawn broke through the window, they were still talking away. Or there was Pete making every effort to hold back his bemused smile as his proud KGB host marched him through the gilded showcase that was the luxurious bathroom complete with golden toilet that had belonged to Victor Abakumov, the infamous Smersh killer and cheerleader for the Great Purge. And there was Pete, his eyes nearly welling with victorious tears, as he stared at the now humbled statute of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founding father of the KGB, toppled from his lofty pedestal in front of the Lubyanka. The other side of the moon, indeed.
It was in this deliberate way, gregariously plundering the deep institutional memories of his ex-foes, that Pete learned about the existence of a special army of spies inside Moscow Center. Its operations had been kept secret from the rest of the service. Its ambitious chief was General Oleg Gribanov, the head of the Second Chief Directorate, the KGB division responsible for counterintelligence and internal security within Russia. He had long been a tenacious spy catcher; in the West he’d been known with frosty respect as “the Soviet J. Edgar Hoover.” The new covert unit, however, would focus on “operational deception.” It was named the Fourteenth Department.
Chapter 33
THE INN WAS IN THE pretty garden village of Prenden, a lush sweep of green lawns and towering copses of trees in the heart of the Wandlitz District that had once been the summer playground of East Germany’s Communist Party elites. But by 1994 the country had already been united for four reparatory years, and on a bright spring day like this, Pete believed, it might have been quite easy to forget about its fractious history if it weren’t for the cavernous underground complex buried down the road. “Honecker’s Bunker,” the locals called it in homage to the Communist Party leader who had ordered the construction. Eighty-four thousand tons of reinforced concrete had been poured in preparation for the inevitable day when nuclear missiles would darken the skies and East Germany’s National Defense Council, for the greater good of the socialist revolution, of course, would hurry inside to take cover.
