The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read online

  “Are you quoting?”

  “Yes. Claude Sparrow,” says Sparrow. “I’ve said it often.”

  “If history is just appearances, then what—”

  “No,” Sparrow interrupts. “Excuse me. I said ‘the control of’ appearances.”

  “All right. The control of. The recorded product. Then what do you call the effort to see through the appearances?” Kessler has especially in mind Mel Pokorny’s appearance as a victim of random violence on the floor of Biaggio’s grocery. “What’s that, then? Philosophy?”

  “No. But you’re close,” Sparrow says. He seems delighted to be asked. “I call it counterintelligence.”

  Here is a man with his own agenda. There will be no gain, Kessler senses, in trying to rein him around or hurry him on. Kessler has come hoping to hear what Claude Sparrow knows but prepared to settle, at least initially, for hearing what Claude Sparrow wants to say. The rest, at least initially, he will just have to guess at and wonder over—including the question of why Sparrow consented to meet him at all. At least initially, he will need to let Claude Sparrow control the appearances.

  “First I am going to tell you about two arrivals. Two comings,” says Sparrow in his strongest Confederate drawl. “Without knowledge of these, you can understand none of the rest.” He has straightened his spine, his eyes are widened and lit. He is straining so hard with that left hand on that right wrist, a nervous habit, a displacement of fervor, that Kessler imagines how the hand might come popping off. Alarming, but not impossible. Sparrow does seem to have the brittle and angular anatomy of a marionette.

  “Two arrivals.”

  “Bogdan Kirilovich Fedorenko. I’ll make an assumption, Mr. Kessler. I’ll assume that you’ve never heard of Bogdan Fedorenko.”

  “You’re right,” Kessler says, and again Sparrow is clearly delighted.

  Bogdan Kirilovich Fedorenko was a Ukrainian, a KGB officer assigned to the rezidentura in Paris during the early 1960s. He had diplomatic cover at the Soviet Embassy, Sparrow explains, a middling post within the visa section, but his real assignment was to service an agent. The agent was an American. Not an important man, not an influential diplomat or a high-ranking military officer, Sparrow insists; the truth of that, in fact, was ludicrously and maddeningly the opposite. This American, Fedorenko’s agent, was a nonentity. An aging Army corporal attached to the U.S. forces on NATO assignment, with a drinking problem, a dysfunctional personality, and a corrosive grudge against the officer corps of that service in which he himself could not even rise to the rank of sergeant. The man’s name doesn’t matter, says Sparrow. The man himself doesn’t matter. He was angry and ignorant enough to want to pass information to the Soviets, out of sheer blind spite, but that wouldn’t have mattered much either, in a sensible world, because the nonentity would have had no information to offer. He had been a rifleman in Korea, undistinguished, and had reenlisted for lack of alternative prospects, and turned up next as a clerk-typist at the U.S. command headquarters in West Berlin. In a sensible world he would have stayed there, Sparrow says, typing with two fingers and answering the phone. Or been shipped back to a quartermaster assignment in Arkansas, better still, handing out helmets and canteens to fresh-shaven draftees. Kessler can’t help but notice the personal bile in which these facts have been marinated. But of course this is not a sensible world, Sparrow tells him emphatically. And so our corporal, having applied for reassignment, saw his request granted. He came down to Paris as a guard at the Armed Forces Courier Center, the nexus for all sensitive NATO communications between Washington and the other nation members. This courier center was no more than an inconspicuous cement blockhouse within a chain-link fence on a far corner of tarmac at Orly Airport, but through it passed a breathtaking volume of quite secret cable and pouch traffic. Sparrow wrinkles his nose at the thought. He squints as though his eyes are burning from sliced onions. One or two nights a week for almost a year, he says, the corporal pulled graveyard shift guarding the cipher-room safe. It was there that Fedorenko ran the corporal as an agent, collecting his product and doling out meager payments. Not right there at Orly, these contacts, of course—they would meet at various points of safe rendezvous in the city. It was Fedorenko who taught the corporal, despite a certain doltishness toward any mechanical task more delicate than shoving a magazine into a .45, to take impressions of keys. To use a Minox camera. And it was Fedorenko who played nursemaid and counselor whenever the corporal undertook one of his crude joyless booze-and-whores crawls across Paris, the corporal doing his best, against all Fedorenko’s efforts, to get himself cashiered. The corporal was a mewling, self-pitying sot with a streak of harsh venality that might have been comic if relieved by the least touch of personal charm, which it was not. Fedorenko despised the man, Sparrow says with a vehement immediacy as though the sentiment were his own.

  Kessler says nothing. He is waiting to see where it will go.

  But Fedorenko shared one trait with the corporal, says Sparrow. He was disgusted by his own situation. He was angry. This traces back to a whole network of factors in Fedorenko’s personal background, his career, his family history, which we needn’t go into right now, says Sparrow. His nationality, even. Fedorenko wasn’t a Russian, you should understand at least that. Emphatically no. He was a Ukrainian. And the KGB itself had never been his own dream of high bliss. Not like it is for some. He was in fact rather poorly suited to the role because, among other reasons, he was too direct. Too ingenuous. Some would say he was downright mulish. Well, yes, he could be. He hated subterfuge and dissimulation of any stripe, says Sparrow; no talent whatever for sycophancy, or for the sort of ever-calculating awareness of one’s own position in the crosscurrents of favoritism and disfavor that a KGB career seems to demand. Blunt-minded Fedorenko always wanted to say just whatever was in his head, spit it right out, Devil take you if you didn’t care for it. Of course he had learned early on, from necessity, to stifle this inclination—otherwise he would have long since been counting the trees, as he used to say. That was a Russian expression, one of Fedorenko’s favorites, Sparrow explains, meaning: Hello, Siberia. Or he would have joined the truly and permanently lost souls in the cellars of the Lubyanka building. But no, Fedorenko could control himself, at least to that measure required by good sense. He was mulish but not suicidal. For that matter, he was mulish about survival. Kessler has heard the tone of rough fondness creeping in. Now Sparrow stops talking altogether.

  Sparrow doesn’t seem to be silenced by any gorge-tightening accession of emotion; merely to be thinking. He frowns unself-consciously. It gives Kessler time to listen backward again over the last thing he heard: Fedorenko was mulish about survival.

  “One day he came across to us. An impulse that day, but an impulse that had long been contemplated, even long prepared for. His tour of duty in Paris was ending. He would be back in Moscow soon, at a desk—possibly for the rest of his life. A tidy little office on the third floor of the Lubyanka, beneath portraits of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky. No, Fedorenko wasn’t going. So he made his leap. Just took a taxi across the city and walked into our embassy. Where he all but handcuffed himself to a table.”

  “He defected,” says Kessler.

  “Yes of course. Not a social visit, no.” Sparrow doesn’t grace his own sarcasm with a smile. “Within eight hours we had got him over to Frankfurt, where there was a reception facility, a place for handling these things. Preliminary debriefing. By that time the Paris rezidentura had sensed something amiss and his colleagues were just frantic. Charging around the city, jostling people in bars, desperate to find their missing cow. Lodging hot complaints with the French that we or somebody had kidnapped him, an innocent Soviet diplomat. They were really most upset. Exceptionally so.”

  “Why was that?” Kessler asks.

  “Oh. Well. It might have been the corporal. That operation, you know, was just instantly blown.” This is offered with unmistakable lack o
f conviction, as though, for anyone dim and ignorant enough to believe that explanation, such credulousness would be its own proper punishment. Kessler senses the warning, but he has no inkling of what explanation might be better.

  “Or something else.”

  “Yes. Oh yes.” Sparrow keeps an empty face. “It might have been something else.”

  “What year is this, Mr. Sparrow?”

  “Nineteen sixty-three. January.”

  Kessler has brought a notebook and a ballpoint, which he set out on the bench within Sparrow’s view when he first sat down; since then he hasn’t touched them. The sight of a journalist not taking notes, he has learned, is sometimes incentive for an interview subject to reach deeper, feeling challenged to impress or to shock. Claude Sparrow is far from succumbing to any such cute manipulation. Nevertheless Kessler has no intention of scribbling a note or a number until he knows better what he is looking for.

  “It was before Tronko, then.”

  “Correct.”

  “Or before Tronko’s own defection, at least. But not before his first contact. Am I remembering that right? Tronko had already made friendly noises?”

  “Rome. Summer of 1962. That’s correct. This business with Fedorenko was a year before Tronko announced his desire to defect.” The words are chosen pointedly and “desire” is another that comes out, under Sparrow’s accent, flat as a praline. “But not before the first of—as you so aptly put it—Tronko’s noises.”

  Difficulties had begun arising before Bogdan Fedorenko was even shipped off from the Frankfurt reception center. In fact that transfer was delayed, over a week passed and Fedorenko still in Germany, because the preliminary debriefing was proceeding so poorly. More accurate to say it wasn’t proceeding at all. Fedorenko refused to talk. He had taken a personal dislike to the debriefing officer, he was being intractable, making ridiculous unreasonable demands, possibly he was just a KGB provocation, not a genuine defector after all—each of these notions was floated, sent back by cable to Langley, says Sparrow, where Sparrow himself and others were waiting eagerly to get their first glimpse of the man. Sitting in Langley, they couldn’t know what to credit. It was an infuriating, befuddling week and a hard decision—a decision that had to be made quickly but without adequate data. They faced much the same thing a year later with Tronko and managed in that event, Sparrow says parenthetically, from the far corner of his mouth, to be even more befuddled. Bring him to Washington or not? Ever mulish, Bogdan Fedorenko had folded his arms on his broad peasant chest and told the debriefing man, in effect, to go to hell. He wasn’t offering any information until certain demands were met.

  Well, this was unexpected, Sparrow explains. It simply wasn’t the way the game was played.

  A defector, especially a Soviet defector and more especially still a KGB man, is generally in poor position to haggle, Sparrow says. He is offering himself for sale on what is distinctly a buyer’s market. Misjudging his value, turned down on the first approach, he can be whisked home and tried for treason by his own people. Maybe there won’t even be the formality of a trial. He can be counting the trees; he can simply be dead. Very little bidding and no holdouts, generally, in the defection trade. But whether from luck or good planning or his own natural brashness, Fedorenko from the beginning had several advantages. First, he had simply marched into the embassy, rather than making a safer and more discreet approach to an American diplomat or an intelligence officer, so his crossing was a fait accompli before anyone back in Washington could deliberate. Secondly, he had documents in his possession, just a few tantalizing samples, that proved his penetration of the Armed Forces Courier Center—though he refused at this point to give the identity of the agent. Obviously Fedorenko wasn’t protecting the wretched corporal, Sparrow says; he merely knew how to hold and play his cards. There were some heads at Langley who found this insupportable. They were in fact little short of hysteria. Take the shit-dipped bastard right back to Paris and throw him out of a car in his skivvies, dump him off on a street corner, let the KGB have him, these persons said. Kessler is mildly startled to hear the prim Claude Sparrow go into character, quoting them. It was a taxing week, Sparrow says. Acrimonious discussion. You will understand, Sparrow says, that I prefer to mention no names.

  “Mention some names,” says Kessler.

  “Jed McAtee,” says Sparrow.

  The Director himself overruled this hysteria, fortunately, and Fedorenko was at last flown to Washington. He still hadn’t offered anything for his keep. All Langley had were the cold documents and the warm body. The documents proved—or at least suggested a frightening plausibility to Fedorenko’s claim—that there was an artery open somewhere in NATO communications, most likely at the courier center, and that information of the highest sensitivity was not just bleeding away but being pumped. A really disastrous hemorrhage, according to Sparrow. It simply had to be stanched, at once, without excuse or further delay. What were the options? Well, close down the courier center completely, lock the place up and detain every courier and cryptographer and guard who worked there or had recently passed through, put them all under security review and interrogation—which of course would soon leak to the press, cause a panic of distrust among the allies, and make the United States look as though it were staggering around wrathful and blind as Polyphemus. Or else find the particular agent. Whom Bogdan Fedorenko already knew by name. So you see, says Sparrow. For this piece of information, it was a seller’s market.

  We put Fedorenko into a nice little house with a confined garden, up in the suburbs of Baltimore, a friendly and deceptively relaxed environment, says Sparrow, and one of McAtee’s people went up there to talk with him. To find his price. Reach an agreement, get him talking, and for God’s sake do it fast, were the instructions to McAtee’s fellow. But don’t let Fedorenko know just how desperate we are.

  “Who was that?” says Kessler. “McAtee’s fellow. Was it Lentzer?”

  “No. Not this time. Scott Wickes was the man’s name. Which I tell you only because he is out of the Agency now. He worked closely with Lentzer though, yes. A bit later.” Sparrow sits. He appears to have lost the thread of his thought, although Kessler considers that unlikely. Kessler waits through another full minute before saying:

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Fedorenko in a nice little house with a garden. An open artery at the courier center, blood everywhere.”

  “Hmm?” says Claude Sparrow. He blinks at Kessler from a great distance.

  Kessler is perplexed. Can this be an act?

  “You were about to tell me about getting the agent’s name. The corporal. From Fedorenko.”

  Sparrow gapes serenely. “Yes,” he says at last. “I was. Well, but you already know the answer to that. The corporal. He was quickly arrested. He had been too stupid to escape east with the help of his friends. And then again maybe they didn’t want him. He merely waited a week, dithering, growing more nervous, and finally went AWOL. To Marseille. We found him there, drunk, in a hotel.” The momentum seems to be gathering again and Kessler is wary of interfering, but he says:

  “Scott Wickes had found the price.”

  “No. Decidedly not. Wickes was a dreadful failure with Bogdan Fedorenko.”

  “Who, then?”

  “We gave Wickes two days. Nothing. He accomplished nothing. We couldn’t afford more delay. So I began going up there myself.”

  “And he told you about the corporal. While the two of you strolled back and forth in that garden.”

  “Precisely correct, Mr. Kessler. It was January. Brown grass, bare shrubs and trees, just like this. I remember it quite vividly. Not as cold as this, though. There was mud.”

  “What was the price?”

  Sparrow tightens his lips, letting his head dip through a series of tiny nods. “Fedorenko did require special handling. He had certain demands. I’ve told you what Frankfurt initially cabled us—th
at he was making what they called ridiculous and unreasonable demands? Well, Frankfurt was just embarrassed. Difficult demands, yes. Demands that might be beyond our power to satisfy, yes, perhaps. Not necessarily ridiculous. Fedorenko had simply insisted on being debriefed at the highest level.”

  “He wanted to talk directly to Eames?”

  “Oh my, no. That would have been easy enough. He wanted to talk to the President.”

  Almost a week had passed with the corporal still in place, undetected, and not only Frankfurt but Langley also embarrassed by the fact that their crucial new source refused to deal with them at all, insisting instead with that famous mulish will of his that he would tell what he had to tell only in a private audience with John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Fedorenko knew the “Fitzgerald” and used it unfailingly when repeating his terms; evidently he thought of it as a patronymic.

  “Why Kennedy?” says Kessler.

  “Why indeed? That’s what Wickes, and the others before, had kept asking him. Yet they weren’t really asking. They were badgering. All they saw was a pudgy Ukrainian major who still smelled of boiled cabbage, a KGB thug, a Communist, demanding to be ushered into the august presence. They were not willing to discuss it as even a conceivable possibility. So they got nowhere with Fedorenko.”

  “Did he imagine the corporal was that important? Important enough for Kennedy to handle it personally?”

  “No. Fedorenko wasn’t stupid,” Sparrow says brusquely. “It wasn’t the corporal he wanted to talk about.”

  “Something else.”

  “Something else.”

  “And John Kennedy was the only person in the U.S. Government that he thought he could trust. For this something else. All right,” says Kessler. “I’m following you now.”

  “Yes,” says Claude Sparrow.

  It was in fact out of the question, as Sparrow himself knew. But nothing was to be gained from sheer negativity. Sparrow had succeeded with Fedorenko, during those walks back and forth in the muddy garden, by offering a reasonable compromise. Fedorenko went for it. Within forty-eight hours Sparrow had delivered up the corporal’s name, back-checking was under way to determine what documents and codes had been exposed at Orly during his tour there, damage-control instructions had gone out by cable, and a quiet contingent including French counterintelligence officers, U.S. Army MPs, and a senior case officer from the Agency’s Paris station were already converging on Marseille. Three days later a small meeting was held at the Justice Department, in the personal office of the Attorney General. Warm vodka was served—Stolichnaya—and herring. The group consisted of Robert Kennedy, Bogdan Kirilovich Fedorenko, Herbert Eames, and Claude Sparrow. Jedediah McAtee had been pointedly disinvited, on word that came down from the host.