The Deceiver

“No. I am from Norway. Touring your British cathedrals.”

Kuchenko was dropped by the kindly driver in the center of the sleepy town of North Tidworth at ten minutes to seven. The driver drove on toward Marlborough. He would never see any reason to mention the incident again, nor would anyone ever ask him.

In the town center Kuchenko found a phone booth and at exactly one minute to seven dialed a London number, punch­ing in a fifty-pence piece to start the call. It was answered at the fifth ring.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Roth, Mr. Joe Roth,” said Ku­chenko.

“Yeah, this is Joe Roth speaking,” said the voice at the other end.

“Pity,” said Kuchenko. “You see, I really hoped I might talk to Chris Hayes.”

In his small but elegant Mayfair apartment, Joe Roth stiff­ened, and all his professional antennae went onto red alert. He had only been awake for twenty minutes, still in pajamas, unshaven, running a bath, and preparing his first coffee of the day. He had been crossing the sitting room from the kitchen, juice in one hand, coffee in the other, when the phone rang. It was early, even for him, and he was not a late riser, even though his job as Assistant Public Affairs officer at the Amer­ican Embassy just a quarter of a mile away in Grosvenor Square did not require him to check in until ten.

Joe Roth was CIA, but he was not the Company’s Head of London Station. That honor went to William Carver, and Carver was with Western Hemisphere Division, as all station heads would be. As such, Carver was “declared,” which meant that just about everyone who mattered knew what he was and what job he did. Carver would sit, ex officio, on the British Joint Intelligence Committee, the official representa­tive of the Company in London.

Roth came from the Office of Special Projects, a bureau formed only six years ago to handle, as its name implied, projects and active measures that Langley regarded as suffi­ciently sensitive to merit the station Heads later being able to claim innocence, even to America’s allies.

All CIA officers, of whatever department they come from, have a real name and an operational or professional name. The real name, in friendly embassies, actually is real; Joe Roth really was Joe Roth and was listed as such in the Diplomatic List. But unlike Carver, Joe was undeclared, except to a tiny caucus of three or four British counterparts, in the Secret Intelligence Service. And his professional name was equally known to only that same few, plus some of his colleagues back in America. To have it thrown at him down a phone line at seven A.M., and in a voice with a non-British accent, was like a warning buzzer.

“I’m sorry,” he said carefully, “You’ve got Joe Roth here. Who is that speaking?”

“Listen carefully, Mr. Roth, or Mr. Hayes. My name is Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov. I am a full colonel of the KGB.”

“Look, if this is a joke—”

“Mr. Roth, my calling you by your operational name is no joke for you. My defection to the U.S.A. is no joke for me. And that is what I am offering to do. I want to get to America—fast. Very soon now, it will be impossible for me to go back to my own side. No excuse will be accepted. I have an enormous amount of information of great value to your Agency, Mr. Roth. You must make your decision quickly, or I go back while there is time.”

Roth was scribbling rapidly on a jotting pad he had clawed off his sitting-room coffee table. The pad still had the scores from the poker game he had concluded late the previous evening with Sam McCready. He recalled later thinking, “Je­sus, if Sam could hear this now, he’d go apeshit.” He cut in.

“Where exactly are you now, Colonel?”

“In a phone booth in a small town near Salisbury Plain,” said the voice. Grammatically, the English was near perfect. Only the accent was clearly foreign. Roth had been trained to discern accents, place them. This one was Slavic, probably Russian. He still wondered whether this would turn out to be one of Sam McCready’s crazy jokes, whether he would sud­denly hear peals of laughter coming down the phone at him. Dammit, it wasn’t even April Fool’s Day. It was the third.

“For three days,” said the voice, “I have been with a group of Soviet officers attending British military maneuvers on Salisbury Plain. Staying at Tidworth barracks. My cover there was as Major Pavel Kuchenko of the GRU. I walked out one hour ago. If I am not back within one hour, I cannot go back at all. It will take me half an hour to get back. You have thirty minutes to give me your decision, Mr. Roth.”

“Okay, Colonel. I’ll go with it—so far. I want you to call me back in fifteen minutes. The line will be clear. You will have your answer.”

“Fifteen minutes. Then I walk back,” said the voice, and the phone went down.

Roth’s mind was racing. He was thirty-nine, and he had spent twelve years in the Agency. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. But then, many men spent their entire working lives in the Agency and never smelted a Soviet defector. But he knew about them, they all knew about them; all field operatives were briefed and lectured and trained to be aware of the constant possibility of a Soviet defection.

Most, he knew, came after initial, tentative approaches. Usually, they came after long thought and some preparation by the defector. Messages were passed to the known Agency men in the area: “I want to meet, I want to discuss terms.” Usually the potential defector was asked to stay in place and provide a stream of information before finally “coming over.” If he refused, he was urged at least to come with a bagful of documents. The amount he could send out before coming over or bring with him would affect his standing, his rewards, his life-style. In the trade, it was called the bride-price.

Occasionally, just occasionally, you got what is called a “walk-in.” The defector simply appeared, having burned his boats behind him, unable to go back. That left little choice; you either accepted the man or cast him back into a refugee camp. The latter was rarely done, not even in the case of a rather useless, low-level defector like a merchant seaman or a private soldier with nothing to offer. It was usually done only if lie-detector tests at the point of defection proved the man was a disinformation agent. Then America would refuse to accept him. When that happened, the Russians just bit the bullet, got their agent out of the refugee camp, and took him home.

On one occasion, to Roth’s knowledge, the KGB had traced a turned-down defector to a refugee camp and liquidated him because he had failed the polygraph test, even though he had been telling the truth. The machine had interpreted his nerv­ousness as lies. Damned bad luck. Of course, that was in the old days; the lie detectors were better now.

And here was a man claiming to be a full colonel of the KGB who wanted just to walk in. No forewarning. No hag­gling. No suitcase full of documents fresh from the KGB Rezidentsia of his latest posting. And defecting right in the heart of England of all places, not the Middle East or Latin America. And to the Americans, not the Brits. Or had he already approached the Brits? Been turned down? Roth’s mind raced across the possibilities, and the minutes ticked away.

Five past seven—five past two in Washington. Everyone asleep. He ought to call Calvin Bailey, head of Special Pro­jects, his boss. Now no doubt fast asleep in Georgetown. But the time—there wasn’t time. He flipped open a wall cabinet to reveal his private computer. Swiftly, he tapped himself into the mainframe deep beneath the embassy in Grosvenor Square. He put the computer into encrypted mode and asked the mainframe to consider senior KGB officers known to the West. Then he asked: Who is Pyotr Alexandrovitch Orlov?

One of the strange things about the covert world is the almost clublike atmosphere that can exist within it. Pilots share the same sort of camaraderie, but they are allowed to. Paratroopers have it also, and Special Forces. Professionals tend to respect each other, even across the barriers of rivalry, opposition, or outright hostility. In the Second World War the fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe and the RAF seldom hated each other, leaving such sentiments to the zealots and civilians. Professionals serve their political masters and bureaucrats loyally, but would usually prefer to sink a pint of beer with others of their own arcane skills, even the opposition.

In the covert world, careful note is taken of just whom the opposition is putting up at bat this week. Promotions and transfers in allied, rival, or enemy agencies are carefully noted and filed. In any capital city the KGB Rezident will probably know who the British and American stations heads are, and vice versa. In Dar-es-Salaam once, the KGB chief at a cock­tail party came up to the British SIS station head with a whiskey and soda.

“Mr. Child,” he announced solemnly, “you know who I am, and I know who you are. Ours is a difficult profession. We should not ignore each other.” They drank to that.

The CIA mainframe computer in London is linked straight through to Langley, Virginia. In response to Roth’s question, little circuits began to run through lists of KGB officers known to the CIA. There were hundreds of “confirmed” and thou­sands of “suspected.” Mostly this knowledge came from defectors themselves, for one of the