loose unless it’s warranted. The rules exist for a reason. Now, where do you stand?”
“Okay. Well…” I paused, collecting my thoughts. “I seem to be tracking an informational trail for some sort of courier network set up by Ed Lemaster back in the sixties, when he was an operative, on behalf of a source code- named Dewey, who may or may not have been known to, or even used by, the KGB. Its transit points were in Vienna, Prague, maybe also Budapest.”
She nodded, seeming to approve.
“What’s important is that you’re familiar with the name Dewey. That’s the key to the whole thing.”
“And what, exactly, do you mean by ‘the whole thing’?”
“Lemaster’s betrayal, of course. His spying for the other side. Not that anyone who counted ever believed in it. I practically drew them a map at one point, X marks the spot, but no one ever picked up a shovel to dig for treasure. Maybe they were afraid of what they’d find. And for a change it wasn’t just the field men who were playing the fool.”
“Angleton, you mean?” I was guessing, of course.
“Yes, Angleton. Poor dead Jim. If he’d only listened to me and a few others, well…”
I couldn’t help but recall that moment as a boy, when I’d encountered him on my bicycle as he tidied up in the wake of a murder. “Go home, son.” That’s probably what he’d be saying now. This time I wouldn’t scare so easily.
“Is he at the middle of this?”
“Him and his people. And the two Russians, of course. Angleton’s old pal Golitsyn, and his nemesis Nosenko. You know about that bloody mess, don’t you?”
“Only what I’ve read in books.”
“Books!” she scoffed. “They don’t know the half of it!”
Historians had nonetheless written plenty about Golitsyn and Nosenko, especially with regard to their role in Angleton’s ill-fated mole hunt.
“Golitsyn defected in what, the early sixties?”
“December of sixty-one,” she answered. “The fifteenth. We didn’t have much use for him at first, so he went over to help our cousins in London for a while. He returned in the summer of sixty-three, right after we’d moved into our new headquarters in Langley.
“Of course, you never would have known Jim Angleton’s office was brand spanking new. Every square foot of space was already piled with paper. File folders were part of the decor, along with a whole row of safes. Kept his blinds shut, with a single lamp on his desk that left everyone but him in the dark. He’d hunch there like a miser with his coins, counting all the facts to make sure they added up.”
“Was he already so paranoid?”
“Wrong word. The enemy was out to get us, and Jim knew it better than anybody. Once that bastard Philby burned him, he never recovered. Do you have any idea what it’s like to work for someone who’s so mistrustful, yet so brilliant? No matter what you said or did, Jim analyzed it to the last detail. As chief of research I was his main fact checker, but that didn’t mean I was above suspicion. Order the wrong damn thing for lunch at La Nicoise and he’d question you for ten minutes about your motives.”
“But he trusted Golitsyn.”
“Trusted him absolutely. Mostly because Golitsyn was just as suspicious of the Russians as he was. They both thought the Soviets were the world’s reigning supermen when it came to deception.”
“And then Nosenko defected?”
“Fourth of February, 1964. Golitsyn immediately pegged him as a plant, which was all Jim needed to hear. I believed it, too. Everyone in Jim’s shop did. So Nosenko basically went into a hole in the ground out at the Farm.”
“They kept him there awhile, didn’t they?”
“Nearly four years. But it was never airtight. The hounds in the Soviet division managed to get their people in to see him. They were quite enchanted by Nosenko’s stories, and when Jim heard they were feeding his tips to their field men, he was more convinced than ever that the Soviets were playing us for fools. The biggest problem was that Nosenko was directly contradicting Golitsyn, at least on some things. It was a threat to our worldview in Counterintelligence, so Jim mobilized for war. That’s when he hired his three agents, the ones nobody was supposed to know about. They didn’t even appear as a line item in our budget.”
“And one of them was Lemaster.”
“Code name Headlight. That was all I knew then, their code names. Headlight, Blinker, Taillight.”
A lineup, it occurred to me, that could easily have been incorporated into a title for a John Le Carre novel- Blinker, Taillight, Soldier, Spy- with only Lemaster’s code name missing from the formula.
“Why ‘Headlight’?”
“Jim rather liked the completeness of the set. Bumper to bumper, he had every signal covered, with himself at the wheel. It made things quite handy once the demolition derby of his Great Mole Hunt got under way. Because it was their job-their sole job-to verify Golitsyn and tear down Nosenko. Jim’s very own truth squad. And it was my job, of course, to dot their i’s and cross their t’s, fact by fact. I was a busy woman.”
She paused for a tiny sip of wine. Noticing my glass was empty, she refilled it. I had a feeling that even if we were to continue for hours she’d never empty hers. When information was being dispensed and discussed, she wanted to remain totally in control.
“So how did it go?” I asked. “Did the agents deliver?”
“For four months, nothing. Zilch. Jim was after me day and night. ‘Find a lead for them!’ Twirling his arms like some madman football coach on the sidelines. ‘You’ve been tracking these Moscow hoods for years, can’t you find them a single goddamn lead?’ And those poor boys were working like dogs, of course, filing reports two and three times a week. But even I could see it was all garbage. Things we already knew, or from such dubious sourcing that it was completely unreliable.
“Then, in early sixty-five, Headlight struck gold. A man he met in Budapest. On a tram car, of all places, right as he was rolling across the Danube on the Margit Bridge. Source Nijinsky.”
I was struck by the eerie symmetry of her story to Lemaster’s version of how he’d come up with Richard Folly in Budapest in ’67. Two characters, two strokes of fortune, both originating on the same tram line, three years apart. Maybe both were fiction.
“Nijinsky?”
“Like the dancer. Because he was so nimble. He had traveling papers for practically the whole East Bloc, the West as well. Headlight met him all over Europe. Everything he came up with made Jim smile. Finally, we had the confirmation we’d been looking for that Nosenko was a fraud, a plant, a cancer.”
“What about Blinker and Taillight?”
“Empty vessels, at least for a while. Believe me, they weren’t happy with the state of play. Headlight’s star was rising. Theirs were in eclipse. At least until Blinker met a disenchanted Soviet diplomat at some falling-down resort on the North Sea, up in Rugen. They arranged for a meet on friendlier territory in Hamburg, where we got him for a full six hours at a safe house. Source Kettledrum. Very talkative, very much in the know. But not at all what Jim wanted to hear.”
“He backed up Nosenko?”
“Not straight down the line. That was the beauty of it. Corroborated some things, but cast doubt on others. Whatever you thought of Nosenko, no one ever believed he was infallible. No defector ever was, which is why this source of Blinker’s made such an impression.”
“What did Angleton say?”
“That Kettledrum was a plant, of course. Golitsyn agreed. Perfect example of Soviet artfulness, they said. So they tag-teamed him, body slams week after week. Then, when one of Headlight’s reports from Nijinsky shot him down as well, that was all Jim needed. They threw Kettledrum to the wolves.”
“What do you mean?”
“They blew him to the Russians. Put out word that he’d been talking, but that we knew he was a plant. I think Jim wanted to see how quickly they’d snatch him back.”
“Did they?”
“Sent him straight to Moscow on a chartered Aeroflot out of Schonefeld-Berlin. Four days later we received a credible report he’d been executed. Not exactly the welcome home Jim had anticipated.”
