The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 38

Changing buses twice, Eugene made his way downtown to New York Avenue. Prowling the back streets behind the intra-city bus station, he noticed several prost.i.tutes huddled in doorways, stamping their feet to keep them from turning numb.

"Cold out tonight," he remarked to a short, plump bleached-blonde wearing a shabby cloth coat with a frayed fur collar and Peruvian mittens on her hands. Eugene guessed she couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen.

The girl pinched her cheeks to put some color into them. "I can warm it up for you, dearie," she replied.

"How much would it set me back?"

"Depends on what you want. You want to hump and run, or you want to go 'round the world?"

Eugene managed a tired smile. "I've always loved to travel."

"A half century'll buy you a ticket 'round the world. You won't regret it, dearie."

"What's your name?"

"Iris. What's yours?"

"Billy, as in Billy the Kid." Eugene produced one of the folded $50s from his jacket pocket and slipped it inside the wristband of her mitten. "There's a second one with your name on it if I can hang out with you until morning.

Iris hooked her arm through Eugene's. "You got yourself a deal, Billy the Kid." She pulled him into the street and stepped out ahead of him in the direction of her walk-up down the block.

Iris's idea of "around the world" turned out to be a more or less routine coupling, replete with murmured endearments that sounded suspiciously like a needle stuck in a groove ("Oh my G.o.d, you're so big... oh, baby, don't stop") whispered over and over in his ear. In the end the prost.i.tute had other talents that interested her client more than s.e.x. It turned out that she had worked as a hairdresser in Long Branch, New Jersey, before moving to Washington; using a kitchen scissors, she was able to cut Eugene's neck-length locks short, and then, as he bent over the kitchen sink, she dyed his hair blond. And for another half-century bill she was talked into running an errand for him while he made himself breakfast; she returned three-quarters of an hour later with a used but serviceable black suit and an overcoat bought in a second hand shop, along with a thin knitted tie and a pair of eyegla.s.ses that were weak enough for Eugene to peer through without giving him a headache. While she was out Eugene had used her safety razor to shorten his sideburns and to shave. At midmorning, dressed in his new finery and looking, according to Iris, like an unemployed mortician, he ventured into the street.

If he had owned a valise he would have sat on it for luck; he had the sensation that he was embarking on the second leg of a long voyage.

Strolling around to the front of Union Station, he made a point of walking past two uniformed policemen who were scrutinizing the males in the crowd. Neither gave him a second glance. Eugene picked up a Washington Post at a newsstand and carefully checked to see if there was a story about a Russian spy ring. On one of the local pages he found a brief item copied from a precinct blotter announcing the arrest of the owner of Kahn's Wine and Beverage, along with one of his employees, on charges of selling narcotics. They had been arraigned the night before; bail had been denied when it was discovered that both the girl and Kahn had been living for years under a.s.sumed names, so the article reported.

To kill time, Eugene bought a ticket for a bus tour that started out from Union Station to visit historical houses dating back to Washington's Washington. When the tour ended in mid-afternoon, he ate a cheese sandwich at a coffee shop and then made his way on foot to the Loew's Palace on F Street. He sat through Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Psycho, which he had seen with Bernice the previous week. Remembering how she had turned away from the screen and buried her head in his shoulder when Janet Leigh was hacked to death in the shower, he had a pang of regret for what Bernice must be going through now. She had been a good trooper and he had become attached to her over the years; chances were she would wind up doing time in prison for aiding and abetting a Soviet agent. Eugene shrugged into the darkness of the theater; the front line soldiers like Max and Bernice were the cannon fodder of the Cold War.

The film ended and the houselights came on. Eugene waited until the neater had emptied and then pushed through a fire door at the back into the alleyway. It was already dark out. Heavy flakes of snow were beginning to fall, m.u.f.fling the sounds of traffic from the street. Feeling his way along the shadowy alley, he came to the large metal garbage bin behind a Chinese take-out restaurant. He put his shoulder to the bin and pushed it to one side, and ran his hand over the bricks in the wall behind it until he came to the one that was loose. Working it back and forth, he pried it free, then reached in and touched the small metal box that he had planted there when he first came to Washington almost ten years before. He had checked it religiously every year, updating the doc.u.ments and ident.i.ty cards with fresh samples provided by the KGB rezident at the Soviet Emba.s.sy.

Grasping the packet of papers-there was a pa.s.sport in the name of Gene Lutwidge filled with travel stamps, a Social Security card, a New York State drivers license, a voter registration card, even a card identifying the bearer as a member in good standing of the Anti-Defamation League-Eugene felt a surge of relief; he was slipping into his second skin, and safe for the time being.

The phone call to the Soviet emba.s.sy followed a carefully rehea.r.s.ed script. Eugene asked to speak to the cultural attache, knowing he would fall on his secretary, who also happened to be the attache's wife. (In fact, she was the third-ranking KGB officer at the emba.s.sy.) "Please to say what the subject of your call is," intoned the secretary, giving a good imitation of a recorded announcement.

"The subject of my call is I want to tell the attache"-Eugene shouted the rest of the message into the phone, careful to get the order right-"f.u.c.k Khrushchev, f.u.c.k Lenin, f.u.c.k Communism." Then he hung up.

In the Soviet emba.s.sy, Eugene knew, the wife of the cultural attache would report immediately to the rezident. They would open a safe and check the message against the secret code words listed in Starik's memorandum. Even if they hadn't noticed the item in the police page of the Washington Post, they would understand instantly what had happened: Eugene Dodgson had been blown, his ciphers were compromised (if the FBI tried to use them to communicate with Moscow Centre, the KGB would know the message had not originated with Eugene and act accordingly), Eugene himself had escaped arrest and was now operating under his fallback ident.i.ty.

Precisely twenty-one hours after Eugene's phone call to the wife of the cultural attache, a bus chartered by the Russian grade school at the Soviet emba.s.sy pulled up in front of Washington's National Zoological Park. The students, who ranged in age from seven to seventeen and were chaperoned by three Russian teachers and three adults from the emba.s.sy (including the attache's wife), trooped through the zoo, ogling the tawny leopards and black rhinoceroses, leaning over the railing to laugh at the sea lions who ventured into the outdoor part of their basin. At the Reptile House, the Russians crowded around the boa constrictor enclosure while one of the teachers explained how the reptile killed its prey by constriction, after which its unhinged jaw was able to open wide enough to devour an entire goat. Two of the Russian teenagers in the group were carrying knapsacks loaded with cookies and bottles of juice for a late afternoon snack; a third teenager carried a plastic American Airlines flight bag. In the vestibule of the reptile house, the Russians crowded around as the cultural attache s wife distributed refreshments from the knapsacks. Several of the boys, including the one carrying the flight bag, ducked into the toilet. When the boys emerged minutes later the flight bag was nowhere to be seen.

Its disappearance was not noticed by the two FBI agents monitoring the school outing from a distance.

When the Russians returned to their bus outside, dusk was settling over Washington. Eugene, coming through the reptile house from the other direction, stopped to use the toilet. A moment later he retraced his steps, going out the other door and heading in the opposite direction from the Russians visiting the zoo.

He was carrying an American Airlines flight bag. Back in the tiny apartment he had rented over the garage of a private house in the Washington suburb of Tysons Corner, he unpacked its contents. There was a small General Electric clock radio and instructions on how to transform it into a shortwave receiver; an external antenna coiled and hidden in a cavity inside the back cover; a microdot viewer concealed as the middle section of a working fountain pen; a deck of playing cards with ciphers and new dead drop locations, along with their code designations, hidden between the faces and the backs of the cards; a chessboard that could be opened with a paperclip to reveal a spare microdot camera and a supply of film; a can of Gillette shaving cream, hollowed out to cache the rolls of developed film that would be retrieved from SASHA; and $12,000 in small-denomination bills bunched into $1,000 packets and secured with rubber bands.

That night Eugene tuned into Radio Moscow's 11 P.M. shortwave English language quiz program. He heard a contestant identify the phrase "Whiffling through the tulgey wood" as a line in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Gla.s.s Through the Looking Gla.s.s. "Whiffling through the tulgey wood" was one of Gene Lutwidge's personal code phrases. At the end of the program Eugene copied down winning lottery number, then took his lucky ten-dollar bill from his wallet, subtracted the serial number from the lottery number, which left him with a Washington phone number. At midnight, he dialed it from a phone booth.

"Gene, is that you?" the woman asked. To Eugene s ear, she sounded half a world and half a century away, a delicate bird whose wings had been clipped by age. She spoke English with a heavy Eastern European accent. "I placed an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the Washington Post offering for sale a 1923 Model A Duesenberg, the color of silver, in mint condition, one of only one hundred and forty sold that year."

"I understand," Eugene said. Starik was notifying SASHA that Eugene Dodgson had dropped from sight and Gene Lutwidge had taken his place. the cryptic advertis.e.m.e.nt would automatically activate an entirely different set of dead drops, as well as the code names identifying them.

"I received nine responses," the woman continued. "One of the nine inquired whether I would be interested in trading the Duesenberg for a black 1913 four-door Packard in need of restoration."

"What did you say?"

The woman on the other end of the phone line sighed. "I said I would think about it. The caller said he would phone again in two days' time to see if I agreed to the trade. The appointed hour pa.s.sed at seven this evening but he never called."

Eugene said, "I hope you find a customer for your Duesenberg." Then he added, "Goodbye and good luck to you."

The woman said, "Oh, it is for me to wish you good luck, dear child," and hung up.

Back in his apartment, Eugene consulted his new list of dead drops. A black 1913 four-door Packard in need of restoration-that was the code phrase indicating that SASHA would be leaving four rolls of microfilm, fifty exposures to a roll, in a hollowed-out brick hidden in the bushes behind the James Buchanan statue in Meridian Hill Park.

Bone-tired, Eugene set the clock radio's alarm for six and stretched out on the bunk bed. He wanted to be at the park by first light and gone by the time people started walking their dogs. He switched off the light and lay there for a long time, concentrating on the silence, staring into the darkness. Curiously, the specter of his mother, a ghostly figure seen through a haze of memory, appeared. She was speaking, as she always did, in a soft and musical voice, and using their secret language, English; she was talking about the genius and generosity of the human spirit. "These things exist as surely as greed and ruthlessness exist," she was saying. "It is for Lenin's heirs, the soldiers of genius and generosity, to vanquish Lenin's enemies."

The battle was, once again, joined. Eugene Dodgson had disappeared from the face of the earth. Gene Lutwidge, a Brooklyn College graduate who had been raised in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and was struggling to make a living writing short stories, had taken his place and was now operational.

The tall, rangy Russian with a scraggy pewter beard ducked through the door of the Ilyushin-14 and, blinded by the brilliant Cuban sunlight, hesitated on the top step of the portable stairs. The thin metal dispatch case in his left hand was attached to his left wrist by a stainless steel wire. Descending the steps, the Russian caught sight of a familiar figure leaning against the door of the gleaming black Chrysler idling near the tail of the plane. As the other pa.s.sengers headed in the direction of the customs terminal, the Russian broke ranks and started toward the Chrysler. Two Cuban policemen in blue uniforms ran over to intercept him but the man at the car barked something in Spanish and they shrank back. The Cuban stepped forward from the Chrysler and embraced the Russian awkwardly. Tucking an arm behind his visitor's elbow, he steered him into the back seat of the car. A bodyguard muttered a code phrase into a walkie-talkie and climbed into the front seat alongside the driver. The Cuban translator and a middle-aged secretary settled onto jump seats facing the Russian and his Cuban host. The driver threw the Chrysler into gear and sped across the tarmac and the fields beyond toward an airport gate guarded by a squad of soldiers. Seeing the Chrysler approaching they hauled the gate open. A lieutenant snapped off a smart salute as the Chrysler whipped past. The car jounced up an embankment onto an access road and roared off in the direction of the Havana suburb of Nuevo Vedado. Its destination: the tree-shaded villa two houses down the street from Point One, Castro's military nerve center.

Speeding along a broad boulevard lined with flame trees and bougainvillea, Manuel Pineiro, the chief of Castro's state security apparatus, instructed the translator to tell their guest how pleased the Cubans were to welcome Pavel "emyonovich Zhilov on his first visit to Communist Cuba. Starik caught sight of a group of elderly men and women doing calisthenics in a lush park and nodded his approval; this was the Cuba he recognized from dozens of Soviet newsreels. Turning back to Pineiro, he offered an appropriate response: it went without saying that he was delighted to be here and eager to be of service to the Cuban revolution. The two men filled the quarter-hour ride to Nuevo Vedado with small talk, chatting-through the interpreter, a diffident young man hunched forward on his seat and nodding at every word-about what they'd been up to since they'd last met in Moscow. They brought each other up to date on common acquaintances: the German spy chief Marcus Wolf who had achieved considerable success infiltrating Reinhard Gehlen's West German intelligence organization; a former Soviet amba.s.sador to Cuba, who had fallen afoul of Khrushchev and been sent off to manage a shoe factory in Kirghizstan; a gorgeous Cuban singer, who was rumored to be having a lesbian affair with the wife of a member of the Soviet Central Committee. Pineiro, an early and ardent Fidelista who had been educated at New York's Columbia University before joining Castro and his guerrillas in the Sierra Maestras, wanted to know if the stories in the American press about Leonid Brezhnev, currently chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, were accurate. Had Brezhnev set his sights on succeeding Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Party? Did he have supporters in the Politburo? How would the tug-of-war between the two factions affect Soviet policy toward Cuba?

It was only when the two men and the young translator were alone in the "secure" room-within-a-room on the top floor of Pineiro's villa that they got down to the serious business that had brought Starik to Cuba.

"I have come to alert you to the critical danger that confronts the Cuban revolution," Starik announced. Producing a small key, he unlocked the stainless steel bracelet, opened the dispatch case and took out four manila folders with security notations marked on the covers in Cyrillic. He opened the first folder, then, eyeing the translator, frowned uncertainly. Pineiro laughed and said something in Spanish. The young translator said in Russian, "He tells you that I am the son of his sister, and his G.o.dson."

Pineiro said, in English, "The boy is my nephew. It is okay to speak in front of him."

Starik sized up the translator, nodded and turned back to Pineiro. "The information we have developed is too important, and too secret, to risk sending it through the usual channels for fear the Americans may have broken our ciphers, or yours. For reasons that will be apparent to you we do not want them to know that we know. The American Central Intelligence Agency"-Starik remembered Yevgeny teaching him the English words for glavni protivnik, and used them now-"the princ.i.p.al adversary..." He reverted to Russian, "...is arming and training a force of Cuban exiles, recruited in Miami, for the eventual invasion of Cuba. This force includes a brigade of ground troops and several dozen pilots of B-26s expropriated from a fleet or mothballed bombers near the city of Tucson in the state of Arizona. The CIA's B-26 bombers differ from your Cuban air force B-26s in as much as they are fitted with metal nose cones where yours have plastic nose cones."

Pineiro extracted some deciphered cables from a thick envelope and ran his thumb nail along lines of text. "What you say does not come as news to us, my dear Pasha," he said. "We have, as you can imagine, made an enormous effort to develop a.s.sets in Miami; several of them actually work for the CIA's Miami Station, located on the campus of the University of Miami. According to one of my informants the Cuban mercenaries, known as Brigade 2506, are being trained by the Americans at Retalhuleu in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Guatemala and now numbers four thousand."

Starik, an austere man who, in a previous incarnation, might have been a monk, permitted a weak smile onto his lips; the expression was so rare for him that it somehow looked thoroughly out of place. "The number of four thousand is inaccurate," he told Pineiro. "This is because they began numbering the exiles starting with twenty-five hundred to mislead you. The mercenary bearing the number twenty-five-oh-six was killed in a fall from a cliff and the brigade adopted his number as its official name."

"There are only fifteen hundred, then? Fidel will be happy to learn of this detail."

"The invasion is scheduled for early in the month of April," Starik said. "Current plans call for three civilian freighters to ferry half the brigade of mercenaries, some seven hundred and fifty men, to Cuba, though it is not excluded that this number could increase to fifteen hundred if more ships are brought into the operation."

Pineiro pulled another of the deciphered cables from the pile. "We have an agent among the longsh.o.r.emen loading one of the freighters, the Rio Escondido, at its anchorage on the Mississippi River. The ship is carrying a communications van, large stores of ammunition and a quant.i.ty of aviation gasoline."

"A portion of the aviation gasoline is in tanks below deck, the rest in two hundred fifty-five-gallon drums lashed to the deck's topside," Starik told the Cuban. "With all this gasoline on the main deck, the Rio Escondido will be a juicy target for your planes. Note, too, that the brigade's B-26 bombers will strike three times before the landings, once on D-day minus two, a second time on D-day minus one, a third on the morning of the landings. The princ.i.p.al targets of the first two raids will be the airplanes parked at your air bases, and the air base facilities themselves. The third raid will attack any or your planes that survived the first two raids, plus your command-and-control centers, your communications facilities and any armor or artillery spotted by the U-2 overflights near the invasion site."

"We know that the Americans plan to send the Cuban counterrevolutionists ash.o.r.e at Trinidad," Pineiro said. He was anxious to impress his guest with the work of the Cuban intelligence community. "They selected Trinidad because of its proximity to the Escambray Mountains. They reasoned that if the landing failed to spark a general uprising or an Army' mutiny and the invaders then failed to break out of the beachhead, they could slip away into the mountains and form guerrilla bands that, sustained by air drops, could prove to be a thorn in the side of the revolution."

Starik consulted a second folder. "It is true that the CIA originally targeted Trinidad but, at the insistence of the new President, they recently moved the landings to a more remote area. Even Roberto Escalona, the leader of the brigade, has not yet been informed of the change. The plan now calls for the establishment of a bridgehead on two beaches in a place called the Bay of Pigs."

Pineiro had a.s.sumed that the KGB had excellent sources of information in America but he had never quite realized how excellent until this moment. Though he was too discreet to raise the subject, it was clear to him that Starik must be running an agent in the upper echelons of the CIA, perhaps someone with access to the White House itself.

"The Zapata swamps, the Bay of Pigs," he told Pasha excitedly, "is an area well known to Fidel-he goes down there often to skin-dive." He pulled a detailed map of southern Cuba from a drawer and flattened it on the table. "The Bay of Pigs-it is difficult for me to believe they could be so foolish. There are only three roads in or out-causeways that can be easily blocked."

"You must be careful to move your tanks and artillery down there in ones and twos, and at night, and camouflage them during the day, so that the CIA does not spot them and realize you have antic.i.p.ated their plans."

"Fidel is a master at this sort of thing," Pineiro said. "The mercenaries will be trapped on the beach and destroyed by artillery and tank fire."

"If the American Navy does not intervene."

"Do you have information that it will?"

"I have information that it will not." Starik opened yet another folder. "The Americans will have the aircraft carrier Ess.e.x and a destroyer squadron standing off your coast, not to mention the air-bases available in Key West, fifteen minutes flying time from Cuba. The young Kennedy has specifically warned the CIA that he has no intention of committing American forces overtly, even if things turn against the Cuban mercenaries on the beaches. But the CIA people in charge of the operation believe that, faced with the destruction of the Cuban brigade on the Bay of Pigs, the President will give in to the logic of the situation and, to avoid a debacle, commit American planes and ships to the battle."

"What is your a.s.sessment?"

"The young President will come under enormous pressure from the CIA and the military clique to intervene if disaster threatens. My feeling, based nothing more than instinct, is that he will resist this pressure; that he will write off his losses and move on to the next adventure."

They discussed various details of the CIA operation that the Russians had knowledge of: the arms and ammunition that would be available to the Cuban invaders on the beach, the communications channels that would be used from the beach to the American flotilla off the coast, the makeup of the Cuban government in exile that would be flown to the invasion site if and when the beachhead was secured. Pineiro asked what the Soviet reaction would be if the American President gave in to the pressure and used American ships and plans overtly. Starik himself had briefed Nikita Khrushchev on the CIA plans to mount an invasion of Cuba, he told his Cuban colleague. They had not discussed what mthe Soviet side would do in the event of overt-as opposed to covert-American aggression; that was a subject that Fidel Castro would have to take up with First Secretary Khrushchev, either directly or through diplomatic channels. Again, all exchanges between the two sides should be limited to letters carried by hand in diplomatic pouches, lest the America code-breakers learn that the CIA plans had leaked. Pressed, Starik offered his personal opinion: in the event of overt American intervention, the best that the Soviet side could do would be to threaten similar intervention in, say, Berlin. This would focus the attention of the American President on the risks he was running.

Pineiro pointed with his chin toward Starik's manila folders. "There is a fourth folder you haven't yet opened," he said.

Starik kept his eyes fixed on Pineiro's. "Hand in glove with the invasion," he said, "the CIA is planning to a.s.sa.s.sinate Castro."

The young translator winced at the word "a.s.sa.s.sinate." Pineiro's high brow furrowed. The red beard on his chin actually twitched as his Russian visitor pulled a single sheet from the fourth folder and began reading from it aloud. Pineiro's nephew translated the words phrase by phrase. The CIA had summoned home its Berlin Base chief of many years, a Sicilian-American who had been in contact with the Mafia during the war, and ordered him to develop a capability to neutralize foreign leaders who obstructed American foreign policy. Castro was the first target on the list. The former Berlin Base chief, whose name was Torriti, had immediately contacted various American Cosa Nostra figures, including the head of the Chicago Cosa Nostra, Salvatore Giancana. Giancana, in turn, had come up with a Cuban on the island willing to slip poison into one of Castro's drinks.

Giancana had refused to identify the killer even to the CIA, so the Russians were unable to pa.s.s his name on to the Cubans. "We know only that sometime in the next month he will be given a bottle filled with aspirins, three of which will contain deadly botulism toxin," Starik said.

Pineiro asked how the poison pills could be distinguished from the ordinary aspirin. Starik had to admit that he was unable to provide an answer to that crucial question. Pineiro, feverishly jotting notes on a pad, wanted to know if any other details of the plot, however small, were available. The Russian reread his sheet of paper. There was one other thing, he said. The Cosa Nostra apparently expected to exfiltrate the killer from Cuba after the a.s.sa.s.sination by means of a fast boat. To Pineiro, this seemed to be a telling detail and he said so. It indicated that the attempt on Castro's life would be made not far from a port.

Starik could only shrug. "I leave it to your service," he said, "to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle."

Pineiro said with a cold glint in his eye, "We will."

Minutes after eleven there was a soft drumbeat on the door of the suite on the top floor of the hotel in a Havana suburb. His spidery legs jutting from a coa.r.s.e nightshirt, Starik padded over to the door and looked through the fish-eye lens of the peephole. Three little girlies, their thin bodies squat and foreshortened in the lens, stood giggling outside the door. Starik threw the bolt and opened it. The girls, wearing white cotton slips, their bare feet dark with grime, filed silently past into the hotel room. The tallest of the three, whose dyed blonde hair curled around her oval face, started to say something in Spanish but Starik put a finger to his lips. He circled around the girls, taking in their jutting shoulder blades and flat chests and false eyelashes. Then he raised the hem of their slips, one by one, to inspect their crotches. The bleached-blonde turned out to have pubic hair and was immediately sent away. The two others were permitted into the enormous bed planted directly under the mirrors fixed in the ceiling.

In the immutable dusk of his corner office on the Reflecting Pool in Washington, James Jesus Angleton crawled like a snail across "Eyes-Only cables and red-flagged index cards and hazy black-and-white photographs, leaving behind a sticky trail of conjecture.

Lighting a fresh cigarette, Angleton impatiently whisked ashes off the open file folder with the back of his hand. (His two-and-a-half pack a day habit had left his fingertips stained with nicotine, and his office and everything in it saturated with tobacco smoke; people who worked in Angleton's counterintelligence shop liked to say they could sniff the paperwork and tell from the odor whether a given doc.u.ment had already pa.s.sed through the chief's hands.) He reached again for a magnifying gla.s.s and held it above one of the photographs. It had been taken with a powerful telephoto lens from a rooftop half a mile from the airport and enlarged several times in one of the Company's darkrooms, leaving a grainy, almost pointillistic, image of a man emerging from the dark bowels of an Ilyushin freshly landed at Jose Marti Airport after one of the twice-weekly Moscow-Havana runs. The man appeared to shrink away from the dazzling burst of sunlight that had struck him in the face. Speckles of light glanced off something metallic in his left hand. A dispatch case, no doubt; standard KGB procedures would require that it be chained to the courier's wrist.

But this was clearly no run-of-the-mill courier. The figure in the photo was tall, his face thin, his eyes hooded, his hair thinning, his civilian suit badly cut and seriously in need of a pressing. A long, unkempt wispy white beard trickled off of his chin.

Angleton shuffled through a pile of top-secret cables and dragged one out onto his blotter. A Company a.s.set in Havana had reported on a conversation overheard at a c.o.c.ktail party; Che Guevara and Manuel Pineiro had been describing a meeting in Moscow with a bearded KGB chief known to the Russians as Starik. The Cubans, always quick to a.s.sign nicknames to people, had taken to calling him White Beard.

The cigarette glued to Angleton's lower lip trembled at the possibility- at the likelihood even!-that he was, after all these years, looking at a photograph, albeit a blurred one, of his nemesis, the infamous Starik.

Angleton stared intently at the photograph. The word KHOLSTOMER came to his lips and he uttered them aloud into the silence of his office. Recently, one of the legal a.s.sistants in the Public Prosecutor's office in Rome- a middle-aged paper pusher who, unbeknownst even to the Rome CIA station, was on Angleton's personal grapevine-reported hearing rumors that the inst.i.tute for Religious Works, the Vatican bank, may have been laundering large amounts of hard currency being siphoned out of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The original tip had come from an Italian Communist who worked as an informer for the Prosecutor's Office; according to the informer, the money-laundering operation, some of it tied to loans to the Banco Abrosiano, Italy's largest private bank, went under a code name known only to a handful of the bankers involved: KHOLSTOMER. The sums of moneys mentioned had so many digits that the Public Prosecutor had actually laughed in derision when the rumors were brought to his attention. A very junior prosecutor had been a.s.signed to the case, nevertheless; his investigation had been cut short when a speedboat he was riding in capsized while crossing the lagoon off Venice and he drowned. Soon after, the Communist tipster was found floating face down in the Tiber, the apparent victim of a drug overdose. The Public Prosecutor, unmoved by the coincidence of these deaths and convinced that the whole affair was political propaganda, had decided to drop the matter.

Angleton shifted the magnifying gla.s.s to a second photograph. Like the first, it had been enlarged many times and was slightly out of focus. Pineiro himself could be seen reaching up awkwardly to embrace the taller man. The fact that Pineiro, the chief of Cuban intelligence, had personally come to the airport to greet the Russian reinforced the idea that the visitor, and the visit, must have been extraordinarily important.

Grabbing the bottle, Angleton poured himself a refill and gulped down a dose of alcohol. The warm sensation in the back of his throat steadied his nerves; these days he needed more than the usual amount of alcohol in his blood to function. a.s.suming, for the moment, that the man in the photograph was Starik, what was he doing in Havana? Angleton peered into the twilight of his office, looking for the thread that would lead him in the direction of answers. The only thing that would bring Starik himself to Cuba was to deliver intelligence that he didn't want to trust to other hands or send by cipher for fear that American cryptoa.n.a.lysts would be able to read his mail. Castro already knew what every Cuban in Miami knew (the New York Times had, after all, published the details): the Company was training Cuban exiles on a coffee plantation in Guatemala with the obvious intention of infiltrating them into Cuba in the hope of sparking a counterrevolution. What Castro didn't know was where and when the exiles would strike. Within the CIA itself this information was closely held; there weren't more than half a hundred people who knew where, and two dozen who knew when.

Over the years, American cryptographers had broken out snippets of clear text from enciphered Soviet messages and discovered garbled references which, when pieced together, seemed to point to the existence of a Russian operating under deep cover in Washington using the code name SASHA. a.s.suming, as Angleton did, that SASHA was a Russian mole in the heart of the Company, one had to presume the worst case: that he was among the happy few who knew the date and precise target of the Cuban operation. SASHA might even have caught wind of the super-secret ZR/RIFLE, the executive action program being organized by Harvey Torriti to a.s.sa.s.sinate Castro. In his mind's eye Angleton could follow the chain links: SASHA to cutout to Starik to Pineiro to Castro.

The existence of a cutout intrigued Angleton. Weeks before, he had been on the receiving end of a private briefing from one of Hoover's underlings. The department had unearthed an old Communist named Max Cohen, who had changed his ident.i.ty and gone underground in 1941, probably on orders from his KGB handler. Kahn, as he was now called, wasn't giving the FBI the time of day: he claimed his arrest was a case of mistaken ident.i.ty; claimed also that he knew nothing about the young man named Dodgson who delivered liquor for him, or the cache of espionage paraphernalia the FBI discovered under the floorboards of the closet in Dodgson's studio apartment over the store.

The FBI had stumbled across Kahn by chance. He had mailed a greeting card to an old Party friend on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his marriage; Kahn had been the best man at the wedding. The card, which the FBI intercepted, had been signed "Your old comrade-in-arms who has never forgotten our friendship or abandoned the high road, Max." Fingerprints on the envelope and the card matched those of the Max Cohen who had dropped from sight in 1941. The card had been mailed from Washington, DC. Working from the cancellation stamp on the envelope the FBI had been able to pin down the post office, then (on the a.s.sumption that Max Cohen might have kept his given name) went over the phone book looking for white males with the given name of Max in that neck of the Washington woods. There turned out to be a hundred and thirty-seven Maxes in that particular postal zone. From there it was a matter of dogged legwork (photographs of the young Max Cohen were doctored to see what he might look like twenty years later) until the FBI narrowed the search down to Max Kahn of Kahn's Wine and Beverage. Agents had shadowed him and his two employees for weeks before they decided to risk searching the suspects' homes when they were out. It was then that the FBI hit pay dirt: in the studio over the store, the agents discovered a cache of ciphers and microfilms, a microdot reader, a small fortune in cash, along with a radio that could be tuned to shortwave bands. Hoover had hoped that one of three Soviet agents would lead him to Americans who were spying for the Soviet Union but, after ten days, he lost his nerve; fearful that one of the three might have spotted the FBI surveillance, he decided to take them into custody. The one who went by the name of Dodgson-a male Caucasian, age 31, medium height, st.u.r.dy build with sandy hair-had somehow slipped through the FBI net.

When he phoned the girl she managed to blurt out a warning. After that he simply vanished, which indicated to Angleton that he must have been meticulously trained and furnished with a fallback ident.i.ty. Although Eugene Dodgson was said to speak American English without a trace of a foreign accent, Angleton didn't rule out the possibility that he might be a Russian pa.s.sing himself off as an American.

Angleton would have given up cigarettes for the rest of his life to interrogate this Dodgson character. Agonizing over the problem, he reflected once again on the central reality of counterintelligence: everything was related in some way to everything else. A North Vietnamese defector who asked for asylum in Singapore was related to the fragment of a message that MI6 had deciphered from the London KGB rezident to Moscow Centre, which in turn was related to the disappearance in Germany of a secretary who worked part time for Gehlen's organization. Hoping to stumble across missing pieces of the puzzle, Angleton had asked the FBI for a list of Kahn's customers since the liquor store opened for business in the early 1940s. Philby's name had leapt off the page. On several occasions in 1951 Eugene Dodgson had delivered liquor to Philby's address on Nebraska Avenue. Suddenly it all made sense: Philby had been too valuable to let the KGB people at the Soviet emba.s.sy, constantly surveilled by FBI agents, come into contact with him. Starik would have set up a cutout operation, using someone living under deep cover. Dodgson, whether Russian or American, had been the link between Philby and his Soviet handler from the time he came to work at Kahn's. Which meant that Dodgson was also the cutout between the Soviet mole SASHA and the KGB.

Going over Kahn's list of deliveries since Philby quit Washington with a fine-tooth comb, Angleton discovered last names that corresponded to the names of one hundred sixty-seven current full-time CIA employees and sixty-four contract employees.

Fortifying his blood with another shot of alcohol, he started working down the list...

5.

WASHINGTON, DC, TUESDAY, APRIL 4, 1961.

"DO I HAVE IT RIGHT?" JACK KENNEDY ASKED d.i.c.k BISSELL AFTER the DD/0 finished bringing the President and the others in the room up to date on the invasion of Cuba. "For the first air strike, sixteen of the brigade's B-26s, flying from Guatemala, are going to attack Castro's three princ.i.p.al airports. An hour or so later two other B-26s filled with cosmetic bullet holes will land in Miami. The Cubans flying the two planes will claim that they defected from Castro's air force and strafed his runways before flying on to Miami to ask for political asylum."