Icon (28 page)

“And even if I agree with all you say, the dreadfulness of the manifesto and the probability it is true, what then?”

“I was wondering, Nigel ... those people I believe you are going to see in America next week …”

“Dear me, Henry, even you are not supposed to know about that.”

Coombs shrugged dismissively, but privately he was glad his hunch had worked. The Council
would
be meeting and Irvine would be part of it.

“In the time-honored phrase, my spies are everywhere.”

“Then I’m heartened things haven’t changed too much since my day,” said Irvine. “All right, supposing I am meeting some people in America. What about it?”

“I leave it to you. Your judgment. If you think the documents should be thrown away, please burn them both to small ashes. If you think they should cross the Atlantic, your choice.”

“Dear me, how very intriguing.”

Coombs produced a flat sealed package from his briefcase and handed it over. Irvine placed it in his own, along with the purchases he had just made at John Lewis, some needlepoint canvases for Lady Irvine who liked to stitch cushion covers on winter evenings.

They parted in the lobby and Sir Nigel Irvine took a taxi to the station to catch his train back to Dorset.

Langley, September 1989

WHEN Aldrich Ames moved back to Washington, his nine-year career as a spy for the KGB still had an amazing four and a half years yet to run. Rolling in money, he began his new life by buying a half-million-dollar house for cash and tooling into the parking lot in a brand-new Jaguar. All this on a $50,000-a-year salary. No one noticed anything odd.

Because he had been running the Soviet desk at the Rome mission and despite the fact that Rome came under Western Europe, Ames himself had remained part of the crucial SE Division. From the KGB’s point of view it was vital that he remain where with the right access he might once again look at the 301 files. But here he had a major problem. Milton Bearden had also just returned to Langley, having supervised the covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The first thing he did as new head of the SE Division was try to get rid of Ames. However, in this, like others before him, he was frustrated.

Ken Mulgrew, the quintessential bureaucrat, had risen through the non-operational side of the hierarchy to a post that put him in charge of personnel. As such, he was highly influential in staff allocations and postings. He and Ames quickly resumed their boozy friendship, with Ames able now to afford nothing but the best. It was Mulgrew who frustrated Bearden by keeping Ames inside the SE Division.

In the interim, the CIA had computerized masses of its most covert files, confiding its innermost secrets to the most insecure tool ever invented by man. In Rome Ames had made a point of educating himself to become computer literate. All he needed were the access codes to be able to tap into the 301 files without even leaving his desk. No more plastic shopping bags full of paperwork would ever be necessary. Nor would it ever be required of him to draw and sign for the most secret files.

The first slot Mulgrew managed to fix for his pal was that of European chief of the Soviet Division’s External Operations Group. But External Ops only handled Soviet assets who were outside the USSR or the Soviet Bloc. These assets did
not
include Lysander, the Spartan fighter who was in East Berlin running the KGB’s Directorate K; Orion, the hunter, inside the Soviet Defense Ministry in Moscow. Delphi the oracle was in the highest reaches of Moscow’s Foreign Ministry, and the fourth, the one who wanted to fly the Atlantic, code-named Pegasus, was in a sealed nuclear research facility between Moscow and the Urals. When Ames used his position rapidly to check on Jason Monk, who now outranked him as a GS-15 while Ames was still stuck at GS-14, nothing came up. But the absence of any reference to Monk in External Ops did tell him one thing: anybody run by Monk was inside the USSR. Scuttlebutt and Mulgrew told him the rest.

The word around the office was that Jason Monk was the best, the last great hope in a division ruined by Ames’s earlier treachery. The word also was that he was a loner, a maverick, who worked in his own way, took his own risks, and would long ago have been elbowed except for one thing: he got results in an organization that was steadily getting fewer and fewer.

Like any paper pusher, Mulgrew resented Monk. He resented his independence, his refusal to file forms in triplicate, and most of all his seeming immunity to the complaints of people like Mulgrew. Ames played upon this resentment. Of the two of them, Ames had the better head for drink. It was he who could keep thinking despite the fumes of alcohol, while Mulgrew became boastful and loose tongued.

Thus it was that one late night in September 1989, when the subject had once again come around to the loner, Mulgrew blurted out that he had heard Monk ran an agent who was “some bigwig he recruited a couple of years ago in Argentina.”

There was no name and no code name. But the KGB could work out the rest. “Bigwig” would indicate a man of Second Secretary rank or up. For “a couple of years ago” they fixed on a period from eighteen months back to three years.

Checks with Foreign Ministry postings to Buenos Aires culled a list of seventeen possibles. Ames’s tip that the man had not been reposted abroad cut the list to twelve.

Unlike the CIA, the KGB’s counterintelligence arm had no squeamishness. It began looking at sudden access to money, an improved lifestyle, even the purchase of a small apartment …

¯

IT was a fine day, that first of September, with a breeze off the Channel and nothing between the cliffs and the far coast of Normandy but wind-tossed white-capped waves.

Sir Nigel strode the clifftop path between Duriston Head and St. Alban’s Head and drank in the salt-tanged air. It was his favorite walk, had been for years, and a tonic after smoky boardrooms or a night of studying classified documents. He found it cleared his head, concentrated the mind, blew away the irrelevant and the deliberately deceiving, brought into focus the essential core of a problem.

He had spent the night bent over the two documents given him by Henry Coombs and he had been shocked by what he read. The detective work that had been carried out since a tramp had tossed something through the door of Celia Stone’s car met with his approval. It was the way he would have done it.

He recalled Jock Macdonald vaguely, a young trainee running errands at Century House. Obviously he had come a long way. And he was convinced by the conclusion: the Black Manifesto was neither forgery nor joke.

That brought him to the manifesto itself. If the Russian demagogue really intended to carry out that program, something would happen that took him back to a hideous memory from his youth.

He was eighteen when, in 1943, he had at last been accepted into the British Army and sent to Italy. Wounded in the big push on Monte Cassino, he had been invalided back to Britain and on recovery, despite pleas to rejoin a combat unit, had been posted to Military Intelligence.

It was as a lieutenant just turned twenty that he had crossed the Rhine with the Eighth Army and come across something no one of that age, or indeed of any age, should be forced to see. He was summoned by a shocked infantry major to come and look at something the infantry had found in its path. The concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen left older men than he with nightmares they would never shake off.

He turned back inland at St. Alban’s Head, following the track to the hamlet of Acton where he would turn again and follow the lane to Langton Matravers. What to do? And with what chance of having any effect at all? Burn the documents now and be done with it all? Tempting, very tempting. Or take them to America and perhaps risk ridicule from the patriarchs with whom he would spend a week? Intimidating.

He unlatched the garden gate and crossed the small patch where Penny raised fruit and vegetables in summer. There was a bonfire, some cuttings smoldering away. But at the heart the embers were hot and red. So easy to stuff the two files into the fire.

Henry Coombs, he knew, would never mention the subject again; never ask what he did, nor seek any progress report. Indeed, no one would ever know whence the documents had come, for neither man would talk. It was part of the code. His wife called from the kitchen window.

“There you are. Tea’s in the sitting room. I went into the village and got muffins and jam.”

“Good, love muffins.”

“I should know by now.”

Five years his junior, Penelope Irvine had once been a raging beauty, sought after by a dozen richer men. For reasons of her own she had chosen the impecunious young intelligence officer who read poetry to her and hid behind a shy exterior a brain like a computer.

There had been a son, just the one, their only child, long gone, fallen in the Falklands in 1982. They tried not to think about it too much, except on his birthday and the date of his death.

Through thirty years of the Secret Service she had patiently waited for him while he ran his agents deep inside the USSR or waited in the bitter chill of the shadows of the Berlin Wall for some brave but frightened man to shuffle through the checkpoint to the lights of West Berlin. When he came home, the fire was always burning and there were muffins for tea. At seventy, he still thought she was beautiful and loved her very much.

He sat and munched and stared at the fire.

“You’re going away again,” she said quietly.

“I think I must.”

“How long?”

“Oh, a few days in London to prepare, then America for a week. After that, I don’t know. Probably not again.”

“Well, I’ll be all right. Plenty to do in the garden. You’ll ring when you can?”

“Of course.”

Then he said: “It mustn’t happen again, you know.”

“Of course not. Now finish your tea.”

Langley, March 1990

IT was the CIA’s Moscow Station that sounded the first alarm. Agent Delphi had switched off. Nothing since the previous December. Jason Monk sat at his desk and pored over the cable traffic as it was decrypted and brought to him. At first he was worried, later frantic.

If Kruglov was still all right, he was breaking all the rules. Why? Twice the Moscow-based CIA had made the appropriate chalk marks in the appropriate places to indicate they had filled a drop with something for Oracle and that he should service that hiding place. Twice the alerts had been ignored. Was he out of town, suddenly posted abroad?

If so, then he should have given the standard reassuring “I’m okay” sign of life. They scoured the usual magazines, looking for the agreed small ad that would constitute an “I’m okay” message or the opposite: “I’m in trouble, help me.” But there was nothing.

By March it was looking as if Oracle was either completely incapacitated by heart attack, other illness, or serious accident. Or dead. Or “taken.”

For Monk, with his suspicious mind, there was an unanswered question. If Kruglov had been taken and interrogated, he would have told all. To resist was futile; it simply prolonged the pain.

Therefore he would have given away the places of the drops and the coded chalk marks that alerted the CIA to the need to pick up a package of information. Why did the KGB not then use those chalk marks to catch an American diplomat in the act? It would have been the obvious thing to do. A triumph for Moscow when they really needed one, for everything else was going America’s way.

The Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was coming apart. Romania had assassinated the dictator Ceaucescu; Poland was gone, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in open revolt, the Berlin Wall torn down the previous November. To catch an American in red-handed espionage in Moscow would have done something to offset the stream of humiliations the KGB was undergoing. And yet nothing.

For Monk it meant one of two things. Either Kruglov’s complete disappearance was an accident that would be explained later, or the KGB was protecting a source.

¯

THE United States is a land rich in many things, and not least of these are nongovernmental organizations, known as NGOs. There are thousands of them. They range from trusts to endowments for research into countless subjects, some of them of mind-numbing obscurity. There are centers for policy studies, think tanks, groups for the promotion of this and that, councils for the advancement of whatever, and foundations almost too numerous to list.

Some are dedicated to research, some to charity, some to discussion; others devote themselves to single-issue propaganda, lobbying, publicity, the enhancement of public awareness of this, or the abolition of the other.

Washington alone plays host to twelve hundred NGOs, and New York has a thousand more. And they all have funds. Some are funded, in part at least, by tax dollars, others by bequests from those long dead, some by private industry and commerce, others by quixotic, philanthropic, or just plain lunatic millionaires.

They provide nesting roosts for academics, politicians, ex-ambassadors, do-gooders, busybodies, and the occasional maniac. But they all have two things in common. They admit they exist and somewhere have a headquarters. All except one.

Perhaps because of its tiny and closed membership, the quality of that membership, and its utter invisibility, the Council of Lincoln that summer of 1999 was probably the most influential of all.

In a democracy power is influence. Only in the dictatorships can raw power alone exist within the law. Non-elected power in a democracy therefore lies in the ability to influence the elected machine. This may be achieved by the mobilization of public opinion, campaigns in the media, persistent lobbying, or outright financial contributions. But in its purest form such influence may simply be quiet advice to the holders of elected office from a source of unchallenged experience, integrity, and wisdom. It is called “the quiet word.”

The Council of Lincoln, denying its own existence and so small as to be invisible, was a self-sustaining group dedicated to the contemplation of issues of moment, evaluation and discussion of such issues, and a final agreement on a resolution. Based upon the quality of its membership and the ability of those members to have access to the very pinnacles of elected office, the council probably had more real influence than any other NGO or a raft of them put together.