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Its character was Anglo-American and its origins in that deep sense of partnership in adversity that goes back to the First World War, although the council only came into being in the early eighties as a result of a dinner in an exclusive Washington club just after the Falklands War.

Membership was by invitation only and confined to those felt by the other members to be possessed of certain qualities. Among these were long experience, utter probity, sagacity, complete discretion, and proven patriotism.

That apart, those who had served in public office had to be retired from that office so that there could be no question of special pleading, while those in the private sector could remain at the helms of their corporations. Not all members were privately rich by any means, but at least two in the private sector were estimated to be personally worth a billion dollars.

The private sector covered experience in commerce, industry, banking, finance, and science, while the public sector included statesmanship, diplomacy, and the civil service.

In the summer of 1999 there were six British members including one woman, and thirty-four Americans including five women.

By the nature of the experience of the world that they were expected to bring to the collegial discussions, they tended to be in middle to late-middle age. Few had less than sixty years experience of life and the oldest was a very fit eighty-one.

The ethos of the council was to be found in Lincoln’s words, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” It met once a year, by agreement reached in harmless-sounding telephone calls, and in a place of great privacy. In each case the host was one of the wealthier members, who never declined the honor. Members paid their own way to an agreed rendezvous point, after which they became the guests of their host.

In the northwestern corner of Wyoming there is a valley known simply as Jackson Hole, named after the first trapper to have the grit to overwinter there. Bordered on the west by the towering Tetons and on the east by the Gros Ventre range, the valley is sealed in the north by Yellowstone Park. To the south the mountains converge and the Snake River rushes out between them in a canyon of white water.

North of the small ski town of Jackson, Highway 191 runs clear up to Moran Junction past the airport, and then on to Yellowstone. Just beyond the airport is the village of Moose, where a smaller road branches off to take visitors up to Jenny Lake.

West of that highway, in the very foothills of the Tetons, are two lakes: Bradley Lake, served by the torrent of Garnet Canyon, and Taggart Lake, served by Avalanche Canyon. Except for trail hikers the lakes are inaccessible. On the land between the two lakes, a tract backed by the vertical wall of the South Teton, a Washington-based financier called Saul Nathanson had built a hundred-acre vacation ranch.

Its situation granted absolute privacy to the owner and any guests. The land stretched from lake to lake on each side, with the sheer mountain behind. At the front the public trails ran below the level of the ranch, which itself was on a raised plateau.

On September 7, the first guests arrived by agreement at Denver, where they were met by Nathanson’s private Grumman and transported over the mountains to the Jackson airport. Far away from the terminal, they transferred to his helicopter for the five-minute lift to the ranch. The British contingent had gone through Immigration on the East Coast, so they too could bypass the terminal and change planes far from prying eyes.

There were twenty cabins at the ranch, each with two bedrooms and a communal sitting room. The weather being warm and sunny, with a chill only after sundown, many guests chose to sit on the verandahs in front of each cabin.

Food, and it was exquisite, was served in the single large lodge that formed the focal point of the complex. After meals, the tables were cleared and rearranged to permit plenum conferences.

The staff were Nathanson’s own, utterly discreet and brought in for the event. For added security, private guards posing as campers surrounded the ranch on the lower slopes to turn back any stray hikers.

The 1999 conference of the Council of Lincoln lasted five days, and when it was over no one knew that the guests had come, been, and gone.

On his first afternoon, Sir Nigel Irvine unpacked, showered, changed into slacks and a twill shirt, and went to sit on the timber deck in front of the cabin he would share with a former U.S. Secretary of State.

From his vantage point he could see some of his fellow guests stretching their legs. There were pleasant walks between the clumps of fir, birch, and lodgepole pine, and a path down to the edge of each lake.

He caught sight of the former British Foreign Secretary and ex-Secretary-General of NATO Lord Carrington, a spare, birdlike figure walking with the banker Charles Price, one of the most popular and successful of American ambassadors ever to be sent to the Court of St. James’s. Irvine had been SIS chief when Peter Carrington was at the Foreign Office and therefore his boss. The six-foot-four-inch Price towered over the British peer. Further over, their host Saul Nathanson sat on a bench in the sun with American investment banker and former Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

To one side Lord Armstrong, former Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service, was knocking on the door of the cabin where Lady Thatcher was still unpacking.

Another helicopter clattered in toward the landing pad to deposit former President George Bush, who was met by ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. At one of the tables close to the central lodge an aproned waitress brought a pot of tea to another former ambassador, the British Sir Nicholas Henderson, who shared his table and his tea with London financier and banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.

Nigel Irvine glanced at his schedule for the five-day conference. There would be nothing that night. On the next day the membership would as usual break into its three committees, geopolitical, strategic, and economic. They would meet separately for two days. The third would be dedicated to hearing the results of their deliberations and discussing them. Day four would be for plenary sessions. He had been allocated an hour, at his own request, toward the end of that day. The last day would be consigned to further action and recommendations.

In the dense forests along the slopes of the Tetons a lone bull moose, sensing the coming rut, bellowed for a mate. On white-tipped wings an osprey drifted over the Snake, mewing in anger as a bald eagle invaded his fishing ground. It was an idyllic spot, thought the old spymaster, marred only by the black evil in the document he had brought with him from a desktop in Russia.

Vienna, June 1990

THE previous December Ames’s job with External Ops of the Soviet Division had been phased out. Once again he was at a loose end and as far from the 301 files as ever. Then he landed his third job since returning from Rome. It was as branch chief for Czech Operations. But it did not authorize the computer-access codes to unlock the secret heart of the 301—the section containing the descriptions of CIA assets working inside the Soviet Bloc.

Ames protested to Mulgrew. It was unreasonable, he argued. He had once headed the entire counterintelligence desk for that very section. Moreover, he needed to cross-check for CIA assets who, although Russian, had worked in Czechoslovakia in their careers. Mulgrew promised to help if he could. Finally, in May, Mulgrew gave his friend the access code. From then on, at his desk in Czech section, Ames could surf the files until he came up with “Monk—Assets.”

In June 1990 Ames flew to Vienna for another meeting with his longtime handler Vlad, a.k.a. Colonel Vladimir Mechulayev. Since his return to Washington it had been deemed unsafe for him to meet any more Soviet diplomats because of the danger of FBI surveillance. So Vienna it was.

He remained sober long enough to take possession of a huge block of cash and to make Mechulayev ecstatic. He brought with him three descriptions.

One was of a colonel of the army, probably GRU, now in the Defense Ministry in Moscow but recruited in the Middle East in late 1985. Another was of a scientist who lived in a top-security sealed city but had been recruited in California. The third was of a colonel of the KGB, recruited outside the USSR, on the books for the past six years, now inside the Soviet Bloc but not in the USSR, who spoke Spanish.

Within three days, back at the First Chief Directorate’s headquarters building at Yazenevo, the hunt was on.

¯

“DO you not hear her voice upon the night wind, my brothers and sisters? Do you not hear her calling to you? Can you, her children, not hear the voice of our beloved Mother Russia?

“I can hear her, my friends. I hear her sighs through the forests, I hear her sobs across the snows. Why are you doing this to me, she asks. Have I not been betrayed enough? Have I not bled enough for you? Have I not suffered enough, that you should do this to me?

“Why do you sell me like a whore into the hands of foreigners and strangers, who pick upon my aching body as carrion crows ... ?”

The screen erected at the end of the huge communal lodge that formed the main conference center of the ranch was the largest available. The projector stood at the back of the hall.

Forty pairs of eyes were riveted upon the image of the man addressing a mass rally at Tukhovo earlier that summer as the sonorous Russian oratory rose and fell, the voice of the interpreter, dubbed onto the sound track, a subdued counterpoint.

“Yes, my brothers, yes, my sisters, we can hear her. The men of Moscow with their fur coats and their doxies cannot hear her. The foreigners and the criminal scum who feast upon her body cannot hear her. But we can hear our mother calling to us in her pain, for we are the people of the great land.”

The young filmmaker Litvinov had done a brilliant job. Into the film he had inserted cutaways of moving pathos: a young blond mother, her baby at her breast, gazing adoringly upward toward the podium; a desperately handsome soldier with tears trickling down his cheeks; a seamed laborer from the land, his scythe across his shoulder, the years of hard toil bitten into his face.

None could know that the cutaway shots had been filmed separately, using actors. Not that the crowd was faked; from a high elevation other shots revealed ten thousand supporters, rank upon rank, flanked by the uninformed cheerleaders of the Young Combatants.

Igor Komarov dropped his voice from a roar to something a little above a whisper, but the microphones caught and brought it across the stadium.

“Will no one come? Will no one step forward to say: Enough, it shall not happen. Patience, my brothers of Russia, wait a little more, daughters of the Rodina …”

The voice rose again, moving up through the scales from a murmur to a cry.

“For I am coming, dear Mother, yes, I, Igor your son, am coming. …”

The final word was almost lost as the rally rose in unison to the prompted chant: “
KO-MA-ROV, KO-MA-ROV
.”

The projector was switched off and the image faded. There was a pause and then a collective exhalation of breath.

As the lights went up, Nigel Irvine moved to the head of the long rectangular refectory table of Wyoming pine.

“I think you know what you have seen,” he said quietly. “That was Igor Alexeivich Komarov, leader of the Union of Patriotic Forces, the party most likely to win the elections in January and project Komarov into the presidency. As you will have seen, he is an orator of rare power and passion, and clearly enormous charisma.

“You will know also that in Russia eighty percent of the real power already lies in the hands of the president. Since the time of Yeltsin the checks and curbs on that power, such as obtain in our societies, have been abolished. A Russian president today can govern more or less as he likes and bring in, by decree, any law he likes. That could well include the restoration of a one-party state.”

“Seeing the state they are in at the moment, is that such a bad idea?” asked a former ambassador to the United Nations.

“Perhaps not, ma’am,” said Irvine. “But I did not ask for this presentation to discuss the possible course of events after the election of Igor Komarov, but rather to present the council with what I believe to be some hard evidence as to that course, and the nature it will take. I have brought from England two reports, and here in Wyoming, using the office copier, have run off thirty-nine copies of each.”

“I wondered why I needed to bring in so much paper,” said their host, Saul Nathanson, with a grin.

“I am sorry to have worn out your machine, Saul. Anyway, I did not wish to carry forty copies of each document across the Atlantic. I will not ask you to read them now, but to take a copy of each and read them in privacy. Please read the report marked ‘Verification’ first, and the Black Manifesto second.

“Finally, I should tell you that three men have died already because of what you are about to read tonight. Both documents are so deeply classified that I must ask they all be returned for destruction by fire before I leave this compound.”

All levity had vanished by the time the members of the Council of Lincoln took their copies and retired to their rooms. To the bewilderment of the kitchen staff, no one appeared for supper. Meals were asked for and served in the cabins.

Langley, August 1990

THE news from the CIA stations inside the Soviet Bloc was bad and getting worse. By July it was clear that something had happened to Orion, the hunter. The previous week Colonel Solomin had failed to show up for a routine brush pass, something he had never failed to do before.

A brush pass is a simple device that normally compromises nobody. At a given moment, by pre-agreement, one of the parties walks down a street. He may be followed, he may not. Without warning he swings off the pavement and into the door of a café or restaurant. Any crowded place will do. Just before he enters, the other man has paid his bill, risen, and is walking toward the door. Without making any eye contact they brush against each other. A hand slips a package no larger than a matchbox into the side pocket of the other man. Both continue on their way, one in, the other out. If there is a tail, by the time the followers swing through the door there is nothing to see.