An Honorable Man (12 page)

Mueller waited for Vasilenko to dress. The two men sat opposite each other in the living room, adversaries, one with a new advantage, the other cautious, wary, glum, but also restless and
impatient. There were new rules of engagement between them, and it didn't matter who they had been, or pretended to be in their previous meetings. The old game had taken a turn.

“What do you want?” Vasilenko asked.

“A name.”

“Who?”

“A man. He is with us, but he works for you.”

“I wouldn't know. I'm not in counterintelligence.”

“How do I know?”

“I'm telling you. I will report this. They'll send me back to Moscow Center. So what. We'll see what happens. I'll take my chances.”

“No one has to know,” Mueller said. “We can keep this quiet. Protect you. It's a name we want. You'll be kept out of it.”

Vasilenko emitted a gruff, sarcastic laugh. He lit a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and drew deeply, relaxing himself. He stared at Mueller with disgust.

“We will pay,” Mueller said. “When we get the name you won't have obligations to us. This”—he gestured to the bedroom—“forgotten.”

“No one forgets.”

“We can be generous too.”

“How much?”

“How much do you need?”

Vasilenko drew on the cigarette and contemplated Mueller. He threw out a figure.

Mueller looked skeptical. “Why fifty thousand?”

“I don't need that much, you're right. And if I spent it how would that look?”

“Why fifty thousand?”

“To reassure myself that you think highly of what I will give you.”

Mueller acknowledged how Vasilenko could bargain even when he had no leverage. It was a confidence that Mueller respected. It suggested that Vasilenko knew there was an endgame that had yet to play out.

In the pause that followed, and in the body language spoken, Mueller knew he had an understanding.

“I will give you instructions,” Vasilenko said. “Where to meet. When. I will come to you. Don't approach me anymore.” Vasilenko gave the ground rules and set expectations. He said he'd see what he could discover. For security reasons everything was compartmentalized. He was NKVD, so he didn't see cables or messages from GRU counterintelligence. He might hear something, get a hint, circumstantial information, a fragment that he could provide that might add to a profile. At the door he turned. “I will contact you when I know something.”

  •  •  •  

Mueller informed the director and the Council that Vasilenko was turned, but he cautioned against quick results. If nothing else, he would confirm the Agency had been penetrated. Not everyone was convinced of that. Mueller's report on the meeting was “eyes only” for the Council. It didn't go into the file that was shared weekly with FBI counterintelligence. There was an interagency arrangement that all contact between CIA and Soviet staff be shared with the FBI liaison. This formal reporting of meetings was the way FBI distinguished authorized contact
from potential recruitment of double agents. Mueller's reports had described Vasilenko as an expert in metallurgy who was able to discuss advances the Soviets had made in high-temperature alloys for ballistic missile parts. Vague stuff. But enough detail to convince Walker. Mueller had made most of it up reading
Popular Mechanics
.

He met Vasilenko again a week later. They'd worked out a way to communicate. A vertical chalk mark on a mailbox in Georgetown was the signal. Mueller had come alone to the safe house on L Street. Two knocks followed by a third. Mueller let Vasilenko in and made sure there was no one in the stairwell. Habit.

“Here is what I have,” Vasilenko began. An aluminum moon filtered through the gauzy curtain illuminating his face. His expression was grim, serious, but defeated too. A compromised man. Mueller took notes.

“My first suspicions came in the fall, 'forty-nine. I was in Vienna. Everyone in Moscow Center knew the CIA was mounting a campaign to recruit a network of spies inside the Soviet bloc. We saw evidence of one incident after the other. Hungarians hijacked a C-47 on its way to Munich and then diverted it to the Carpathian Mountains, landing near Lvov with a dozen paramilitary troops. You call them freedom fighters,” Vasilenko said with disdain. “We tracked a ship that left Malta and went to Rome and Athens with a handful of volunteers—criminals mostly—and mercenaries who were put in small craft to land off the coast of Albania. Then we got intelligence you'd recruited Albanians in Trieste and put them on planes piloted by Poles and sent them to parachute near Tirana.”

Vasilenko paused. “All the missions were neutralized by us. Some men were killed when they landed, and we captured others. A few radios got working and sent out a report, but they were eliminated quickly. They had no chance.” Vasilenko wiped one palm against the other, theatrically. “Finished.”

Another pause. “I heard about these failures from colleagues and we were all pleased. But we knew we weren't that good to eliminate every mission, or the CIA was that sloppy to run operations and have them all compromised. You lost three hundred men. Maybe more. No one survived. There was only one answer. We had penetrated the CIA. Our luck could not be so good. There had to be a source. That's what we all suspected.

“I was Directorate K working in the Second Bezirk, by the Prater Park in the Leopoldstadt district, the European Division. There were rumors, but NKVD was compartmentalized. My wife and I were transferred to Moscow Center a few months later. I didn't know anything else. You don't talk about these things with colleagues. You ask questions and then Counterintelligence comes to you and says, ‘Why are you asking questions.' So that was that. But I had a friend. Let's call him Vladimir.”

“What's his name?”

“Is that necessary?”

“Yes.”

Vasilenko lit a cigarette. The red end glowed in the dark room. “He had nothing to do with any of this, but fine. Vertov. Alexie Vertov. He was ambitious. He was a GRU lieutenant in his forties, when you need to be promoted to colonel or it means you are passed over, your career is finished. Vertov confronted his
superior and asked for a promotion and this man said, ‘Alexie, you have a lot of nerve. Do your job. Do good work. People notice. Don't push it.' So Vertov's promotion was rejected.”

Vasilenko looked at Mueller. “Why am I making a big deal out of this Gogolian incident, trivial at first glance?” Vasilenko leaned forward. “It was motivation for his anger. He got drunk with me and he said he'd read cables from our embassy in Washington that talked about a double agent. Moscow Center gave him the name Sasha. You call him Protocol. His handler has the code name Nightingale, but Vertov knew the code, and he knew this was Chernov. Vertov continued to talk too much.”

“And?”

“Arrested.” Vasilenko drew a cutting finger across his neck. “We all take risks,” he said in a voice that drifted off. When he continued his voice was quiet, and he spoke in the rush of words of a man wanting to finish up an uncomfortable confession. “I found out more when I was transferred to Washington. There is a room on the top floor of the embassy that has been sealed with lead in the walls so FBI across the street can't listen. The room is off-limits, but one day I was called in to see Chernov. There is a map on the wall with flags pinned to the designated locations around the city. These are Protocol's dead drops. This is how information is conveyed. A post office box in one neighborhood. A chalk mark. Same as us. The exchange is made. He takes the shopping bag of money and leaves a shopping bag of secrets. They don't meet here. Too dangerous.”

“Where?”

“Once in Istanbul. Berlin twice.”

“Why?”

“Change procedures, arrange banking. Coordinate communications. Make human contact. Each side tests the mental state of the other.”

“Rome?”

“Perhaps. This is what I've heard. You asked what I know. This is what I know.”

“How is he paid?”

“I said, cash in a shopping bag.”

“That's all.”

“There is an account in Bern. A dead drop there with cash deposits that go into a numbered account.” Vasilenko added with sarcasm, “For his retirement.”

“Which bank?”

“I don't know.”

“Dates?”

“I don't know.”

“Hotels?”

“I don't know.”

“So, it's someone from headquarters who's been to Bern in the last five years. That narrows the field,” Mueller said sarcastically. “What good is this? It's vague, general. We can't use this.”

“You've been to Bern.”

Mueller stared at Vasilenko. “I'll pass that along to my colleagues in case they've overlooked it.” Mueller twirled a pencil on his knuckles and considered the man slumped opposite him. “Let's back up. Tell me about Chernov.”

“He has two lives, like the philanderer Gurov, one known,
open, seen if you want to see it, and the other hidden, a secret. He is GRU and
rezident,
and a protégé of Malenkov. He joined the Soviet Army, fought at Stalingrad, and was in the first unit to enter Berlin in the last days of the war. He was put in charge of ex-Nazis.”

“How do you know this?”

“I know. If you don't believe me, fine. We're done.” Vasilenko leaned forward.
“I know.”

Mueller considered the story. “Go ahead.”

“He took charge of all the files Goebbels kept on Jews, American spies, bankers with ties to the black market, all the information he could use against people. Chernov took it all. He is a ruthless man. He took all these Nazi and Abwehr files, everything the German military left behind, including the inventories of art taken from Jews in Berlin and Vienna. He took everything to GRU headquarters in East Berlin. That is what I know.”

Vasilenko's cigarette had burned down and he tapped the fragile ash on the saucer he held in one hand. There was a long silence.

Mueller put aside his pen and notepad. What was true? What was false? How much was rumor, worthless? How much was bad information planted to take the investigation down a rat hole? Mueller didn't think it worthless or false. Vasilenko had too much at stake—either way. A man with a family whose future was at risk. Mueller felt empathy for him—a man reduced to looking out for himself, for whom ideology was now a luxury, country an accident of birth, who saw his life through the focused lens of survival. He was at the beginning of his betrayal. The easy part
was the talking, and the sudden blows would come afterward, and with it would come regret for the moment of weakness when the easy choice to speak showed its terrible consequences. That's when the other blow hit, coming quietly from within. The slow realization that he'd never have a country again. The first breakdown happened quickly in the chaos of a desperate moment, and the second kind happened slowly over time, as invisibly as dusk.

“Tell me about this man you call Sasha,” Mueller said. “What do you know? How did he meet Chernov? How was he turned?”

“I don't know his name.” Vasilenko said. “I know they met in Vienna in 'forty-eight. How was he turned?” Vasilenko glared at Mueller. “A stupid question. How was I turned!” He snapped his response and slumped into his chair, sullen, lip quivering.

Upset, Mueller thought.
Good
. “Who ran him?”

“Chernov.”

“From the beginning?”

“From the beginning.”

“Was he part of a network?”

“No. Alone. He was too important to put in a network. Risk being exposed?”

“His first success? In Vienna?”

“There were no successes in Vienna. There was only hunger everywhere, in all the zones. The French zone, American zone, British zone, Soviet zone. Misery and hunger and cold. The old Vienna was gone and there were only food lines and rusted tanks no one had moved from the streets. Each side handed out cheap money to buy votes of wild political parties. The terrible winter of 'forty-eight was followed by a disastrous summer. Bodies
of the starved floated on the Danube. Then there was May fifth. I remember that day. The terrible food riots that started at the Prater Park Ferris wheel in the second district. Mobs moved to the Innere Stadt.” Vasilenko paused. “Successes? No. Currency manipulation. Starving children. Streetlamps smashed. Who gained? We did. The Allies were blamed.”

Mueller was quiet. “I remember.”

“Of course. You were there.”

Mueller picked up his pad and pen. “Let's back up again. What do you know about him?”

Vasilenko was silent again. He looked out the window at the moon hanging in the sky. When his eyes turned to Mueller he was once again calm, deliberate, contemplative. “The thing you most need I don't have. What have I found? Write this down. I won't do this again. Fragments. Hints. His real name has an
L.
That I know from sloppy encryption. He is American, but that you could have assumed so I am not surprising you. Parents or grandparents are German, or maybe Austrian. That's it. You have everything.”

They stood. Mueller moved to the window and stood to one side, hidden from view, and looked down into the street. There was a car parked where there hadn't been one earlier. It idled. Lights on the dashboard illuminated the driver.

“Your people?” Mueller asked.

“Yours,” Vasilenko said.

FBI?
Mueller hesitated. “We'll go out the back.”

The alley was narrow and dark, cluttered with garbage cans. High up on the walls were small apartment windows. A woman
raised her voice at a child. Somewhere a radio played. Their clipped steps on the concrete echoed between the buildings. At the street, Vasilenko looked left, then right. He raised the collar of his bulky overcoat and hurried toward K Street. Mueller watched a minute before he stepped out of the alley and headed in the opposite direction.