minimal; there were no crowds as he entered the square, just a few minor rallies, that was all, mostly extremist groups largely made up of pensioners from the old days of the Soviet Union and a smattering of far-right nationalists with skinhead views. After six years of disappointed dreams under the incumbent president, Viktor Yuschenko, Ukrainians seemed to believe that their political views no longer made any difference.
Laszlo crossed the square and made for a cafe in a side street that was to be the meeting place.
He entered the Reprisa cafe at 8:25 and, buying a short black coffee, he retreated to the back of the orange- coloured space and took a stool screwed to the floor and against a wall. There were a dozen or so people in the cafe; the strip lights were shockingly bright and seemed designed to put a customer off from staying too long. He withdrew a newspaper from inside his jacket and, with his back to the rest of the cafe, began to reread stories he’d read earlier in the day. He was patient and seemed incapable of boredom. Life, he thought, held few surprises, even a secret life.
He had read the paper from cover to cover and drunk two more short coffees before his elation at the thought of the forthcoming meeting began to be replaced by a feeling of anticlimax. He’d looked around the cafe from time to time. There were three high school girls sitting at a table. They looked at him, spoke in whispers, laughed occasionally and self-consciously in his direction, then returned to their own affairs. A man in a slightly grubby black suit sat in a far corner. There were two other men still wearing their hats and coats as they sat at the counter, and other, scattered groups dotted elsewhere who seemed to have no plans for the evening. But by 9 P.M. the cafe was beginning to thin out. Everyone who had any plans was heading off for their evening’s entertainment. In half an hour, only the lonely would remain, and then the cafe would close anyway.
It was not, Laszlo thought curiously, a good place for a meeting anyway; it was too bright, too sparsely populated, too public. And the small window of time for the meeting was unusual, too. There was just a half hour in which it could take place before the cafe closed; 8:45 until 9:15 P.M. was the time the contact had dictated. For a moment Laszlo felt unnerved, uncertain about his hopes for the evening.
He reviewed once more what they knew about the proposed contact on this evening, January 16, 2010. That he was a contact from the Russian side—Plismy seemed to be sure this was the case—though why he was sure was anyone’s guess. Code name: Rafael (chosen by the contact, not by them, not by Paris—the contact had insisted on that). Sex: male. Age: in his late thirties or early forties. Nationality: Russian, Middle Eastern, or from one of the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus mountains. This seemed unnecessarily vague, though agents often obfuscated details of their identity, for obvious reasons. Usefulness: unknown, but rumoured to be in possession of some highly sensitive information regarding the Kremlin’s intentions in Ukraine. Purpose of contact: find out those intentions. In other words, clear-cut, straightforward, and simple. At least, that was what it should have been, Laszlo thought. All he needed was for the damned contact to actually show up.
Laszlo now sat half turned towards the entrance to the cafe, willing “Rafael” to enter in the dying moments left. To his vague surprise, at just after 9:15 P.M., he saw a face he recognised. The man was walking head down, almost obscuring his identity, along the wet pavement outside the rain-streaked window. Laszlo had exchanged information with this man before—the man worked in the intelligence communications section at the Italians’ Kiev embassy. Behind him, at a distance of some twenty-five yards, Laszlo now saw a Romanian intelligence officer he also recognised. Coincidence? Possibly. Was the one following the other? Likely, he supposed.
Kiev seemed to have become a front line of sorts for the world’s intelligence agencies, and in particular those of Western Europe. The whole country was crawling with spies—officers, agents, informers…Kiev appeared to have become what Vienna had once been in the Cold War. It was bang up against Russia, as Vienna had once been before the Soviet collapse and the Russian retreat from Eastern Europe. And now, after twenty years of its own form of capitalism, Russia now transported its energy supplies at great profit to Western Europe’s hungry nations. And with its vast network of pipelines, Ukraine held the key to Western Europe’s energy needs. Without Ukraine’s willingness, or ability, to transport Russian oil and gas, the EU countries were beggared. That was why Russia’s meddling in the country was of the greatest interest to all.
The two men passed outside the window and out of sight. Laszlo turned, back to his study of the wall two feet away. A plasticised picture of the Orange Revolution met his gaze, a kind of photographic negative, tinged in orange. It seemed almost quaintly out of date—after only six years.
France’s view, he knew, was to bypass Ukraine’s interests and befriend Russia. Soon, anyway, there would be pipelines directly from Russia underneath the Baltic that would curtail Ukraine’s importance as a go-between. But France had its own, and possibly unique, policy. The Anglo-Saxons seemed intent on keeping the two countries separate, to keep Ukraine independent of the Kremlin. Good luck to them, Laszlo thought—but in his opinion, that wasn’t going to happen. The forces against it were too great. So the intelligent thing to do—France’s secret policy —was to prepare for the eventuality of Ukraine’s return to Russian rule—direct or indirect was unimportant—after more than twenty years of the country’s independence.
By 9:30 P.M. the last moment for the meeting had passed. Now that no one had shown up and when he was alone in the cafe with only the two men in coats and hats, Laszlo realised that his expectations for the evening were not going to be met. The cafe was closing. There was no fallback venue, which was odd, too. It was over, at least for tonight. The contact, he guessed hopefully, must simply have been delayed.
Laszlo paid now, for his three coffees in an hour, and he left the cafe just as a woman with a broom swept up the day’s detritus from beneath the chairs and tables. He decided to walk and ended up back at the theatre where he retrieved his coat.
The nonappearance of the man who called himself Rafael was a recurrent theme in Kiev on that night of January 16, and not just in Kiev. In other towns and cities across Ukraine—not to mention one proposed meeting by a lakeside near the Russian border that the unfortunate head of intelligence at the Chinese embassy pointlessly attended—Ukraine’s spy community was coaxed to attend meetings that never took place. Rafael turned out to be a chimera. In total, the embassies of fourteen different countries sent out their intelligence officers on this wild goose chase. Rafael had spun his web so effectively that none of those contacted knew any more by the end of the night than what Rafael had chosen to give them—which was very little, and even that, it was assumed, would turn out to be false.
But with the intelligence community living on top of itself in the city and though meetings between the officers of different agencies were largely covert, soon the rumour began to pass around the watering holes and restaurants of Kiev that everyone Rafael had contacted had fallen for Rafael. It started with an apparently innocent question from an intelligence officer at the German embassy to his opposite number at the Spanish embassy: “Come across a source who calls himself Rafael?” was the casual remark. Then the question was repeated in bars, until it left the street talk of the spies and graduated to informal chats between the chiefs of the different national agencies involved.
At first there was reluctance. Nobody wanted to admit they’d been fooled until someone else admitted it first. And nobody even admitted to knowing anything about anyone called Rafael. But soon everyone grew to the understanding that they had all been set up, equally and with no shame, and then the discussions between rival and allied agencies became more open. Rafael made it onto the agendas of interagency meetings, he was tagged by NATO, and he was openly discussed now in the bars and restaurants of Kiev whenever any two officers from different countries crossed paths, either by design or by accident. Rafael was an embarrassment, then he became a joke, an anecdote, until finally he was filed away at the very back of the fine minds who’d been taken in, to be forgotten at the earliest possible convenience. Why did he do it? Whoever this Rafael was, it was generally assumed that he was just some clever student who, instead of hacking his way into national computer networks, preferred a more earthy approach in order to mess around with the world’s intelligence efforts. And so, finally, Rafael was laid to rest, and the world moved on.
On the following day, a Sunday, all eyes in Kiev and in the political world at large were anyway focused on the first round of the elections. Yulia Timoshenko and Viktor Yanukovich were the victors. He was Russia’s preferred candidate for ultimate victory, it was noted, while Ms. Timoshenko appeared to be available for wooing by all sides, West and East.
At the American embassy in Kiev, at number 6 Mykoly Pymonenka Street, the Rafael affair, or incident—or spoof, as it was commonly known—caused a similar confusion, and then an irritation, as it had caused elsewhere. Sam MacLeod, the CIA’s station head had, in fact, despatched a relatively junior officer to a meeting with Rafael at a small town in the Carpathian Mountains—a day trip that was enjoyed by the officer despite its lack of success. And, as elsewhere in Kiev’s intelligence community, Rafael was swiftly relegated to an elaborate prank by the Americans.
