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

  “The meeting went well. A triumph of good chemistry. A triumph for the family traits, imperious authority blended with charm. This was the occasion when we first heard about Dmitri, you see,” Sparrow says. “January 17, 1963.” He loops a glance out toward Kessler’s notebook.

  “Dmitri who?” says Kessler.

  “Of course ‘Dmitri’ was not the way Fedorenko referred to him. That was simply a code name we chose in the following weeks.”

  “Who is Dmitri?”

  “Yes.” Sparrow offers a dainty smile. “That was precisely the question.” Then he hikes his eyebrows like tall Byzantine arches, a pedagogue’s coy mug to alert a slow student that some point or other has just been deftly made. “Wasn’t it.”

  “Dmitri was the mole.”

  “We never used that word. That’s a new word,” Sparrow quibbles. “It’s a spy-novel word.”

  “You had other terminology for the same thing.”

  “Yes we did,” says Sparrow. “A penetration. Less vivid, I’m afraid. But there you are. Truth be known, it isn’t always such a vivid profession.”

  “Your version does have its own sort of vividness,” says Kessler. “If you consider the sexual connotation.” Which connotation Sparrow shows no inclination to consider. After a queasy silence, Kessler adds: “And Dmitri, he was vivid enough.”

  “The notion of Dmitri, as offered by Fedorenko,” says Sparrow, “—yes, it was vivid indeed. All we had so far was the notion. You went over this part with Melvin, I take it. Is that right?”

  “I’ve heard bits and pieces about the penetration,” Kessler answers evasively. “I’d like to hear it again. Your version.”

  “Did Melvin call it a mole?”

  “I don’t recall,” says Kessler.

  Now they glare at one another, each refusing to yield. Seconds and more seconds pass. Claude Sparrow, steady and unblinking as a python on a branch, does not seem to be capable of discomfort or impatience during such a prolonged staring contest. Kessler discovers that he himself is capable.

  “Besides, Mel was a special case,” Kessler says finally. “Sometimes it was hard to distinguish. What was real, versus his own inventions and adornments.”

  “Yes. True enough, Mr. Kessler.” Gracious in his little victory, Sparrow turns easily, bringing his gaze back around to the line of brown treetops. “It sounds as though you knew Melvin Pokorny at least a little well.”

  “I suppose.”

  “But then you must have. He went all the way up to New Haven, seeking you out.” Sparrow repeats himself, not unconsciously: “Is that right?”

  “I knew him some.”

  “From your earlier work, writing about the Agency?”

  “I knew him some,” Kessler says again, stubbornly. “I used to live in Washington.” This line of questions from Sparrow is coming close to being troublesome. Kessler picks up his pen and notebook, and with hands that have grown clumsy from the cold, almost embarrassingly so, he makes a notation. Then he says: “January 17, 1963.” A way of changing the subject. “Fedorenko gets his audience with a Kennedy. In exchange, ‘Dmitri.’ Only not yet under that name.”

  “Not yet under any name.”

  “No. Merely someone. A person. Fedorenko has given you your first warning of a high-level penetration. I assume you mean a penetration at the Agency.”

  “Yes.” Immediately again Sparrow is the gracious, artless informant. “Oh yes. At the Agency, yes indeed.”

  “It must have been an alarming piece of news.”

  “Most certainly that.”

  “But Fedorenko couldn’t pinpoint Dmitri’s identity. Not like with the corporal.”

  “Not like with the corporal. God knows. No. This was quite different. Fedorenko swore to us on the graves of both grandmothers that there was a penetration. With equal vehemence, he swore that he didn’t know just who or just where. But he claimed he could help us figure it out.”

  “Did the Agency believe him?”

  “That’s no simple question to answer. It’s a long story itself,” Sparrow says.

  “Don’t we have all afternoon?” The sky over Washington is gray and cold like tarnished chrome but the sun, dim and heatless, is still high.

  “I believed him,” Sparrow says.

  The mud grew worse, the shrubs and trees broke into leaf, before Fedorenko saw the last of that enclosed garden behind the safe house on the south side of Baltimore. Sparrow had many further strolls with him there—although much more of their time together, over the next three months, was spent at a large round oaken table in the dining room of the house, a room that was otherwise almost entirely bare. Sparrow and Bogdan Kirilovich (as Sparrow, describing the scene to Kessler, now calls him) sat on straight chairs. Littering the table before them, during these sessions, were pens and yellow pads, a teapot in a cozy, cups. Inside the light fixture overhead was a microphone and in the basement was a recorder attended by a technician in headphones, all of which Fedorenko knew nothing about but presumably could have guessed. Sparrow took notes on one pad, yet that was only the thinnest pretense; the main record of this debriefing, they both understood, would be the transcript of the tapes. After each several hours they paused, unbent their legs, made a circuit of the garden or else went to a sideboard in the next room where an elderly woman, Fedorenko’s official housekeeper, would have set out plates of herring and caviar and sausage, also a bottle of Stolichnaya and a few small glasses that seemed originally to have held jelly. Bogdan Kirilovich once asked Sparrow, with deep and genuine curiosity, about the figures printed on those glasses. The glasses were symptomatic of Agency parsimoniousness toward the furnishing of safe houses generally, a chronic annoyance for which the trolls in Management and Services were held blameful, and Sparrow had a moment of embarrassment. Well, they were fairy-tale characters, in a sense, he explained to Fedorenko; the glasses were meant for children. Fedorenko looked shocked: children drank vodka in this country? No no, the children would drink their orange juice from such glasses, after the jelly had been all eaten, Sparrow explained. Bogdan Kirilovich now understood. Of course. Orange juice and jelly for children, very good. He pressed to know which fairy-tale characters these might be, adding expansively that he had warm recollections of many Ukrainian fairy tales from his childhood in a village near Krivoy Rog. Ukrainian fairy tales, American fairy tales: maybe they weren’t so very different? Well, Sparrow said, this one was called Donald Duck. This other was evidently Snow White. This one, though Sparrow couldn’t be sure, was to the best of his imperfect knowledge an individual named Goofy. It is one of Sparrow’s most vivid memories from that period, he tells Kessler: Fedorenko, convulsed with laughter over the jelly glasses. In later weeks, when they adjourned to the sideboard, there would often be an elaborate exchange of jocular courtesies as to who should be so favored, that afternoon, as to take his vodka from Goofy. Of course that was on those days, only those, when the sessions were flowing smoothly.

  There was a great sense of urgency surrounding the debriefing of Fedorenko, that winter and spring, because of Dmitri. Everyone at Langley felt it. The Attorney General felt it, keeping himself informed by way of phone calls to Herbert Eames. Fedorenko claimed to feel it, this urgency, though for days in a stretch he would seem blithely impervious. Claude Sparrow most certainly felt it. At the Agency they had all imagined they were under egregious pressure of time when the problem had been still merely a treasonous corporal somewhere in NATO communications, but that earlier week of panic now seemed risible, Sparrow says. A grass fire. A lark. Compared to the problem of Dmitri. Sparrow himself went short of meals and sleep. He drove back and forth between Langley and the safe house, virtually every day for three months, coping with Bogdan Kirilovich’s imperfect memory on one end and Eames’s nervous impatience on the other, just one leg of the drive taking him more than an hour in traffic, and it became rare that he ever saw
the front door of his own home before nine at night. He devoted himself entirely to this effort, leaving all other business of the Counterintelligence section in the hands of his chief deputies, Pokorny and Roger Nye. He practically lived on herring and cold tea. When he slept, his mind worked at fitting Fedorenko’s material into untried and more promising patterns—most unrestfully, says Sparrow. Everything was Dmitri. We must triangulate on this Dmitri. Find Dmitri. Sink Dmitri. Sparrow gives another of his encrypted smiles. We were all afever, we were frantic, but at least the sense of purpose was quite high, he tells Kessler. In some ways it was an exciting time. There was great urgency. This sounds, to Kessler’s ear, like a very odd sort of nostalgia.

  “We hardly dreamed, of course, that we’d still be at it ten years later,” says Sparrow. “Sniffing around, halfhearted, for Dmitri.”

  Bogdan Kirilovich had much to tell, much to offer, not only in the matter of Dmitri but also concerning the particular corner of the KGB that had produced a Dmitri—and produced in addition numerous lesser agents on roughly the same pattern. Fedorenko’s memory was especially rich with detail regarding these lesser fry, scattered broadly throughout the Western intelligence and security services; and where he lacked detail, he offered deduction and supposition; and sometimes, as events proved, he was startlingly accurate in what he claimed to know about such cases, the lower- and middle-echelon KGB penetrations. His help was just crucial in routing out certain nasty folk. No one can dispute that, Sparrow says—suggesting to Kessler that someone must have reason to try. Other times Fedorenko was . . . yes, well, faulty. Confused and faulty. Not so very many times, Sparrow says, given all that the man delivered. Kessler makes a mark on his pad and Sparrow’s eyes shift, jealously, to watch him do it. But Sparrow doesn’t stop talking.

  All considered, Bogdan Fedorenko was perhaps the most valuable defector we’ve ever gotten, he says. Still, any defector is only so precious as what you make of him. A defector, understand, is not a bag of golden coins. A defector is a field of golden wheat, that’s more like it—a crop that requires careful harvesting. No. No, my metaphor is not apt, Sparrow says, raising one pinkened hand. It omits the element of art, he says. Carefulness isn’t enough. That raw offering, that crop, it needs to be artfully harvested—or, oh, choose any analogy you like. Anyway, this is why it had to be myself, or another person of high competence, long experience, driving out there all that dreary spring to lead Bogdan Kirilovich through the maze of his own memory. Not someone like Scott Wickes. Otherwise you do worse than waste time. You squander and ruin the defector himself. Debriefing can only happen properly when those recollections are fresh. Otherwise, no. No, it won’t do. Kessler has noticed by now that Sparrow’s nostrils dilate with each mention of Scott Wickes. He scribbles a note.

  Again Sparrow seems too aware of the note taking, so Kessler diverts him with a question: “Which particular corner?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Of the KGB. Fedorenko helped to illuminate one particular corner, the same corner that had produced a Dmitri. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “It was Fedorenko’s own corner. Yes. That’s why he could tell us about it.”

  “Which was that?”

  “Counterintelligence.”

  Kessler shifts his own long wool coat more tightly around himself, raising the collar and fastening the highest button. Tomorrow, he resolves, I’ll come in long johns and an extra sweater.

  But not counterintelligence in the same limited and defensive sense we tend to use that term, Sparrow explains. For the Soviets it carries quite a different meaning. Counterintelligence for them is something altogether more aggressive, more preemptive, directed outward and across toward the opponent’s intelligence organs rather than inward toward the security of one’s own. For the Soviets, in essence, it means penetrations. Fedorenko during his tour in Paris, masquerading as a visa officer while running an agent within the NATO courier center, was engaged in what they would call a counterintelligence operation. Us, our side, we are obliged to sit properly in our offices, reading debriefing transcripts and surveillance logs and personnel files, waiting patiently for our turn with the occasional defector, says Sparrow, shaping the words with his teeth.

  Kessler sees another point of rancor. He suspects that Claude Sparrow and he could devote the whole of an afternoon just to Sparrow’s personal peeves and grudges, an excellent way to waste precious time and be drawn all hell away from the matter of interest; and he recalls the domestic wiretap operation that played a large part, supposedly, in getting Sparrow fired. He feels some temptation to ask: “What about listening in on the phones of the NSC staff, Mr. Sparrow? That’s not preemptive counterintelligence?” But he forbears. Anyway Kessler knows what the man would say. “Of course it was. Unfortunately I was not permitted to continue it. I was not permitted to continue at all.” The official version. Kessler would rather hear about Bogdan Fedorenko. Intuition warns him that Claude Sparrow may be far more percipient and credible when he is talking about Russians, or even Ukrainians, than when he is talking about himself.

  Formally it was known, Fedorenko’s division, as Special Service Two within the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Sparrow had long nursed a certain curiosity about that particular service, he says, in what Kessler can recognize as gin-dry ironical understatement, Sparrow’s closest approximation of humor. It was, Sparrow says, for obvious reasons a pet subject of his, Special Two.

  He had collected a whole room’s worth of files devoted to it, all of them filled with speculation, outsiders’ gossip, guesswork. No real hard facts. Special Two was still, for Langley, just a magic lantern show. Until Fedorenko. Special Service One, they were familiar enough with that, and with its unexceptional role in transmitting intelligence data to Politburo members. Hardly more than a courier agency, Special One was not in fact very special. Not to Claude Sparrow’s mind or imagination. Special Two, however—and Kessler watches Sparrow’s eyes widen dizzily.

  He always had known it was there, because it had to be, and within the First Chief Directorate somewhere; but he had known nothing about it. Not the name, not the identities of the main personnel, nothing of its methods or its operations. These things are generally kept compartmentalized in the KGB just as at Langley; and neither Sparrow nor anyone else in the Agency had ever before laid hold of a warm body fresh from Special Service Two. It was the dark side of the moon. Hence the great preciousness of Fedorenko, when he suddenly came blinking in for a landing, like an Apollo craft back from the far loop, loaded with photos and one scoop of very exotic gravel.

  After the NATO business, Fedorenko’s first real bit of usefulness—or rather, Sparrow corrects himself, the first indisputable bit, and Kessler guesses this hedge to be an allusion involving Dmitri—after the NATO business, Fedorenko’s first big contribution was what he told them about Special Service Two. He had enabled them at Langley finally to place KGB counterintelligence on the organizational chart, and to know it by a name. And not only that, but details. Bogdan Kirilovich described the line of command, the chain of bosses’ bosses, from his own immediate supervisor to the chief of Special Two and on to the KGB Chairman. He described the suite of offices Special Two occupied, on the third floor of the Lubyanka, in the newer half of the building. The floor number itself was a valuable datum, which Sparrow had evidently received greedily and clutched to his cold little soul—because the third was a prestige floor at the Lubyanka, as they already knew, with the Chairman’s big office there near the junction of the old half of the building and the annex. Such proximity, it could be confidently hypothesized, must reflect Special Two’s high standing in esteem and power within the full KGB. Also that proximity offered hope for a morsel or two of executive gossip overheard, perhaps, in the Chairman’s office down the corridor. Sparrow and Fedorenko spent an entire morning bent over the oaken table just on this matter of office layout, Bogdan Kirilovich drawing floor plans from memory
on a yellow pad while Sparrow demanded more detail and the correction of small discrepancies and still more detail until, dreamy-eyed, Sparrow himself could walk in his mind down that corridor, feel the ugly pink and green runner under his feet, then the bare parquet as he turned and entered a large antechamber, strode past the male secretary in blue uniform, passed through the swinging gate of a low wooden railing, another glass door, an inner office, and seated himself at the desk of a man named L. V. Nechaev.

  The desk was an old wooden one, Bogdan Kirilovich told him, crude of design but expansive, and in all likelihood utterly bare. To its right, within reach, was a table upon which sat six separate black telephones. Comrade L. V. Nechaev was the chief of Special Service Two.

  Fedorenko himself, during the two years he spent in Moscow before being sent out to Paris, had worked in a much smaller office and one with no window onto the courtyard, though furnished otherwise in roughly the same austere style. He had possessed only three telephones. He never dealt directly with Comrade Nechaev, a fact for which he was grateful, and had been called into the chief’s office on just a single nerve-jangling occasion, to deliver a short verbal account of some operation passing across his desk that had come to Nechaev’s attention; he was questioned fiercely on that occasion, not by Nechaev himself but by a deputy while Nechaev sat silent, and then was dismissed with a curt wave. Fedorenko felt great relief, getting out of the office quickly and with his whole skin. Comrade Nechaev had no reputation for kindliness or approachability. But neither did he (as Fedorenko told Sparrow, who tells Kessler) have a reputation of the opposite sort, for cruel petulance toward his subordinates. No. That sort were common enough, certainly, on a bureaucratic anthill the tone of which had been set by Stalin and Yezhov and Beria; but no, Nechaev wasn’t dreaded as another like those. There was no trapdoor beneath the Armenian carpet covering the parquet before his desk, that carpet upon which Fedorenko had briefly stood; no greased chute, either figurative or literal, from there to the basement cells. Not so far as anyone knew, not so far as gossip dared whisper. The problem was that Comrade Nechaev had no reputation whatsoever. Daring or not, gossip seldom whispered his name at all.