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Two days later Major Solomin, with a group of other Russian officers, made a dash from cover to the sea at Abyan Beach where the gigs from
Britannia
were rolling in the surf. British sailors hauled them out of the waist-deep water and within an hour the bemused Russians were spreading their borrowed bedrolls along the cleared floor of the queen’s private sitting room.

On her first mission
Britannia
filled up with 431 refugees, and on subsequent runs to the beach finally pulled 1,068 people from fifty-five nations off the sand. Between evacuations, she ran across to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa to discharge her human cargo. Solomin and his fellow Russians were flown home via Damascus to Moscow.

What no one knew then was that if Solomin still entertained any doubts about what he was going to do, the balance was tipped by the contrast between the easy camaraderie of the British, French, and Italians with the Royal Navy sailors and the bleak paranoia of the debriefings in Moscow.

All the CIA knew was that a man they thought one of their own had recruited three months earlier had disappeared back into the all-consuming maw of the USSR. Either he would communicate or he would not.

Throughout that winter the Soviet Division’s operational arm literally disintegrated piece by piece. One by one the Russian assets working for the CIA on foreign stations were quietly recalled on a variety of plausible excuses: your mother is ill, your son is doing badly at college and needs his father, there is a promotions board being convened. One by one they fell for the ruse and returned to the USSR. On arrival they were at once arrested and taken to Colonel Grishin’s new base, an entire wing partitioned off from the rest of the grim fortress of Lefortovo jail. Langley knew nothing of the arrests simply that the men were disappearing one by one.

As for those stationed inside the USSR, they simply ceased to give routine “signs of life.”

Inside the USSR there was no question of giving a man a call at the office to say “Let’s have coffee.” All phones were tapped, all diplomats tailed. Foreigners, by their dress alone, stood out a mile. Contacts had to be extremely delicate and were usually rare.

When made, they were usually by dead drop. This very basic ruse sounds crude but still works. Aldrich Ames used drops right up to the end. The drop is simply a small receptacle or hiding place somewhere—a hollow drain pipe, a culvert, a hole in a tree.

The agent can put a letter or consignment of microfilm in the drop, then alert his employers that he has done so by a chalk mark on a wall or lamppost. The position of the mark means: Drop so-and-so has something in it for you. An embassy car, cruising by, even with native counterintelligence coming up behind, can spot the chalk mark through the windows and drive on.

Later, an undeclared Officer will try to slip his surveillance and recover the package, possibly leaving money in its place. Or further instructions. Then
he
will snake a chalk mark somewhere. The asset driving by will spot it and know his delivery has been received but something awaits him. By dead of night, he will recover the consignment.

In this manner a spy can stay in touch with a spymaster for months, even years, without a face-to-face meet.

If the spy is way outside the capital where the diplomats cannot go, or even in the city but has nothing to deposit, the rule is that he will give a sign of life at regular intervals. In the capital, where the diplomats can cruise by, these may be more chalk marks, which by their shape and location mean: I’m fine but I have nothing for you. Or: I am worried, I think I am under surveillance.

Where distance prevents these secret messages, and the provinces in the USSR were always out of bounds to U.S. diplomats, small ads in the main newspapers are a favorite for a sign of life. “Boris has charming Labrador puppy for sale. Ring ...” might innocently appear among all the others. Inside the embassy, the controlling agents scan them. The wording is all. Labrador might mean “I’m fine” while spaniel could mean “I’m in trouble.” “Charming” might say “I’ll be in Moscow next week and will service the usual drop.” “Delightful” could mean “I can’t make Moscow for at least another month.”

The point is, the sign of life messages must happen. When they stop, there could be a problem. Maybe a heart attack or a highway crash and the asset is in the hospital. When they
all
stop, there is a very major problem.

That was what happened through the fall and winter of 1985 into 1986. They all stopped. Gordievsky made his desperate “I’m in deep trouble” call and was pulled out by the British. Major Bokhan in Athens smelled a rat and made a run for safety in the United States. The other twelve just vaporized.

Each individual control officer at Langley or abroad would know about his own missing asset and would report back. But Carey Jordan and the head of SE Division had the overview. They knew there was something badly wrong.

Ironically it was the very weirdness of what the KGB was doing that saved Ames. The CIA calculated that no one would dream of carrying out such a blitz of agents so quickly if the betrayer were still in the heart of Langley. Thus they were able to persuade themselves of what they wanted to believe anyway: they, the elite of the elite, could not be entertaining a traitor in their midst. Nevertheless, a frantic search had to be made, and it was, but elsewhere.

The first suspect was Edward Lee Howard, the linchpin of an earlier fiasco, by then safely tucked away in Moscow. Howard had been a CIA man, working in the SE Division and being briefed to take a posting to the Moscow embassy. He was even told operational details. Just before his posting it was discovered his finances were crooked and he took drugs.

Forgetting the golden rule of Machiavelli, the CIA fired him but left him running around for two years. Finally the CIA told the FBI, which hit the roof, put Howard under their own surveillance, then screwed up. They lost him, but he had seen them. Within two days, in September 1985, Howard was with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, which passed him via Havana to Moscow.

A check revealed Howard could have betrayed three of the missing agents, maybe even six. In fact he did betray the only three he knew about, but they had already been given away by Ames the previous June. All three were double betrayed.

Another lead came from the Russians themselves. Desperate to protect their mole, the KGB was mounting a huge diversion and disinformation campaign; anything to turn the CIA in the wrong direction. They succeeded. An apparently genuine leak in East Berlin revealed that some codes had been broken and signal traffic intercepted.

The codes were used by a major CIA covert transmitter at Warrenton, Virginia. For a year Warrenton and its staff were gone through with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing, no hint of a code break. If there had been a code break, the KGB would clearly have learned of yet other things, but on these they had taken no action. Therefore, the codes were intact.

The third seed the KGB sedulously planted was that they had done some brilliant detective work. This was met by amazing complacency at Langley where one report suggested that “every operation has within it the seeds of its own destruction.” In other words, fourteen agents had all suddenly decided to behave like idiots.

Some in Langley did not fall for the complacency. One was Carey Jordan, another was Gus Hathaway. At a lower level, learning through the internal grapevine of the problems tearing his division apart, was Jason Monk.

A check was made of the 301 files where all the details were stored. The findings were horrific. In all, 198 people had access to the 301 files. It was a terrifying figure. If you are deep inside the USSR with your life on the line, the last thing you need is for 198 complete strangers to have access to your file.

CHAPTER 6

PROFESSOR KUZMIN SCRUBBED UP IN THE EXAMINATION
room of the mortuary below the Second Medical Institute, facing with little pleasure his third postmortem of the day.

“Who’s next?” he called to his assistant as he dried off with an inadequate paper towel.

“Number one-five-eight,” said his helper.

“Details.”

“White Caucasian male, late middle age. Cause of death unknown, identity unknown.”

Kuzmin groaned. Why do I bother, he asked himself. Another tramp, another. hobo, another derelict whose bits, when he had finished, would perhaps assist the medical students in the academy three floors up to understand what protracted abuse could do to human organs, whose skeleton might even end up in an anatomy class.

Moscow, like any major city, produced its nightly, weekly, and monthly harvest of cadavers but fortunately only a minority required a postmortem or the professor and all his colleagues in forensic pathology would have ceased to cope.

The majority in any city are the “natural causes,” all those who die at home or in the hospital of old age or any one of a hundred terminal and predicted causes. The infirmaries and the local doctors could sign the certificates for those.

Then came the “natural causes, unforeseen,” usually fatal heart attacks, and again the hospitals to which the unfortunates were taken could cope with the basic, and usually very basic, bureaucratic formalities.

After these unfortunates came the accidents: domestic, industrial, and automobile. Moscow had two more categories that had grown massively over the years: freezing to death (in winter) and suicides. The numbers ran into thousands.

Bodies recovered from the river, identified or not, went into three categories. Fully clothed, no alcohol in the system: suicide; clothed, hugely drunk: accident; swim shorts: accidentally drowned while swimming.

Then came the homicides. These went to the police, detective branch, which turned to Professor Kuzmin. Even these postmortems were usually a formality. The great majority, as in all cities, were the “domestics.” Eighty percent happened inside the home or the perpetrator was a family member. The police usually had them within hours, and the postmortem simply confirmed what was already known—Ivan had stabbed his wife—and helped the courts bring in a quick verdict.

After these came the bar brawls and gangland killings; in the latter case he knew the police conviction rate was a miserable three percent. Cause of death, however, was no problem; a bullet in the brain is a bullet in the brain. Whether the investigators ever found the hitman (probably not) was not the professor’s problem.

In all the above, thousands and thousands a year, one thing was certain. The authorities knew who the dead man was. Occasionally they had a John Doe. Cadaver 158 was a John Doe. Professor Kuzmin drew on his gauze mask, flexed his fingers inside the rubber gloves, and approached with a flicker of interest as his assistant drew back the sheet.

Ah, he thought, odd. Even interesting. The stench that would have caused a layman to gag at once left him unmoved. He was used to it. Scalpel in hand he circled the long table, staring at the damaged corpse. Very odd.

The head seemed intact apart from the empty eye sockets, but he could see that this damage was the work of birds. The man had lain for about six days undiscovered in the woods near the Minsk Highway. Below the pelvis the legs seemed discolored, as with age and putrefaction, but undamaged. Between thorax and genitals there was hardly a square inch not black with massive bruising.

Putting down the scalpel, he turned the body over. Same at the back. Rolling the corpse back again, he took his scalpel and began to cut giving his running commentary into the turning tape recorder. Later this tape would enable him to write up his report for the goons in Homicide down at Petrovka. He began with the date: August 2, 1999.

Washington, February 1986

IN the middle of the month to the joy of Jason Monk and the considerable surprise of his superiors in SE Division Major Pyotr Solomin made contact. He wrote a letter.

Wisely, he did not even attempt to contact any Westerner in Moscow and certainly not the American Embassy. He wrote to the address Monk had given him in East Berlin.

The giving of the address at all was a risk but a calculated one. If Solomin had gone to the KGB to betray the safe house, he would have had some impossible questions to answer. The interrogators would have known he would never have been given such an address unless he had agreed to work for the CIA. If he protested that he had only been pretending to work for the CIA, that would have been worse.

Why, he would have been asked, did you not report the approach immediately, on first contact, to the commanding colonel of the GRU in Aden, and why did you allow the American who contacted you to escape? Those questions were unanswerable.

So Solomin was either going to stay mum about the whole thing, or he was on the team. The letter indicated the latter.

In the USSR all mail coming in from or heading out to abroad was intercepted and read. Ditto all phone calls, cables, faxes, and telexes. But internal Soviet mail, by its sheer volume, could not be unless sender or recipient were under suspicion. The same applied to mail within the Soviet bloc, and that included East Germany.

The East Berlin address belonged to a subway driver who worked as a postman for the agency and was well paid for it. Letters arriving at his apartment in a run-down building in the Friedrichshain district were always addressed to Franz Weber.

Weber had actually been the previous tenant of the flat and was conveniently dead. If the subway driver had ever been challenged, he could plausibly have sworn that there had been two letters already, he could not understand a word of Russian, they were addressed to Weber, Weber was dead so he had thrown them away. An innocent man.

The letters never had a return address or surname. The text was banal and boring: Hope this finds you well, things here are fine, how are your studies in Russian coming along, I hope we shall renew our acquaintance one day, all best wishes, your pen pal Ivan.

Even the East German secret police, the Stasis, could have deduced from the text only that Weber had met a Russian on some kind of cultural exchange fest and they had become pen pals. This sort of thing was encouraged anyway.