Krassilnikov let the CIA request pass without response. Having Tolkachev miss an emergency meeting might sharpen his adversary’s senses, but it wouldn’t be enough to convince the Americans that there had been a serious security breach. The CIA’s agents in Moscow frequently missed meetings for any one of a dozen reasons. He would toy with the Americans a little longer.
On June 5, the CIA aborted an attempt to meet with Tolkachev after a case officer detected KGB surveillance. Finally, Krassilnikov decided to end the game. At exactly 12:10 P.M. on June 13, a time set in the CIA communications plan months earlier, he opened the small fortochka at the top of the large set of windows facing Tchaikovsky Street in Tolkachev’s apartment.
Krassilnikov closed the little ventilation window exactly one-half hour later, as the communications plan called for. A CIA officer “read” the window signal in a routine drive-by, and by late afternoon of the next day, two CIA officers—Paul Stombaugh, whose KGB code name was Narziss, and a second officer given the KGB code name Lark—were both on the move. The Americans had taken the bait. Even the Moscow weather was cooperating; the skies had abruptly cleared after three days of thunderstorms.
Shortly after 5:00 P.M., Paul and Betsy Stombaugh were “called out” by static surveillance: The KGB was alerted that the couple had left home and were moving around the city. For the next three hours, they appeared to be on a routine shopping expedition. The Stombaughs made three stops at shops in various parts of Moscow, all frequented by diplomats. Their car was lost by surveillance on two occasions, but each time it was picked up by another static team in a different part of town and reported back to Krassilnikov’s command post. Krassilnikov had ordered the surveillance teams following both Stombaugh and the other officer to stay back as far as possible. He didn’t need close-in trailing surveillance, since the ultimate destination on this pleasant June evening was under his complete control. The CIA officers could make their runs as elaborate and as long as they liked, but eventually one of them would come to him and spring his trap.
By 8:00 P.M. Sharavatov began to feel it was Stombaugh making the run to meet Tolkachev. After their third stop, the Stombaughs were lost again for seven minutes, until Betsy Stombaugh was picked up shortly after 8:00 P.M. pulling into the parking lot of the Ukraine Hotel on the banks of the Moscow River. She was alone.
5
Moscow, 1901 Hours, June 18, 1985
Colonel Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, until four weeks earlier the acting Rezident of the KGB station in London, was at this moment trying to will himself into invisibility to everyone save the British Secret Intelligence Service in Moscow. Sweat beaded on his face as he stood stiffly in his gray raincoat, the shiny toes of his rubber boots evenly aligned just inches from the curb of Kutuzovsky Prospekt in busy central Moscow. He stared blankly out at the traffic whirring by him, wondering whether the perspiration was driven by the deep pit-of-the-stomach fear that had been his constant companion for the past four weeks or the Cuban rum he drank late into almost every night. Probably both, he decided.
He knew that his attempt to look like just another Muscovite struggling to get home at the end of a rainy day was futile. His peaked leather cap, an acquisition from his posting in Denmark, was out of place with his drab Russian raingear; and the newspaper-stuffed Safeway supermarket shopping bag he gripped in his left hand was, he was certain, a gigantic red flag fluttering in the faces of pedestrians hurrying toward the Kievsky metro station and the limousines filled with Party seniors whirring past him in the center lane of the wide boulevard. He was terrified that his appearance somehow screamed out, “He’s here, the runaway British agent, catch him before he gets away!”
But both the hat and the Safeway shopping bag were Oleg Gordievsky’s only links to those who might save him from the faceless executioner he knew would be waiting for him in that special dark corridor in the basement of Lefortovo Prison.
Counting the seconds as he trembled at the curb, exposed and vulnerable, Gordievsky prayed that someone from the SIS station would perform the promised nightly drive-by of this tiny pinpoint on the Moscow city map and see him as prescribed in his emergency instructions. If a British officer did spot him, that would set in motion an SIS plan to rescue him and get him out of the country.
The nightmare had begun shortly after Gordievsky’s summons from London to KGB Center in Moscow a month earlier. It was certainly not a development he thought menacing, though all sudden recalls are unsettling to Soviet intelligence officers who have “turned.” In this case, Gordievsky had been expecting a recall at some point so that headquarters could confirm his formal appointment as Rezident of the KGB’s London Station.
Through a series of well-choreographed expulsions of KGB officers in London, Gordievsky’s handlers had maneuvered their star agent into position to take over the top job in the United Kingdom. The previous acting KGB chief in London, the brilliant counterintelligence careerist Leonid Nikitenko, had weeks earlier been ordered out of Britain in the escalating spy wars between London and Moscow.
Since the time he had first volunteered to spy for the British while serving in Denmark more than a
