The Deceiver

areas that debriefing officers are always keen to explore with a newly arrived defector is that of who is who these days, who has been transferred, who demoted or promoted. The knowledge grows with each new defector.

Roth knew that over the past four years, the British had been more than helpful in this regard, providing hundreds of names—many of them new, others confirmations of suspi­cions. The Brits attributed their knowledge in part to inter­cepts, in part to smart analysis, and in part to defectors like Vladimir Kuzichkin, the Illegals Directorate man they had spirited out of Beirut. Wherever Langley’s databank had got its original information, it did not waste time. Letters in green began to flash up on Roth’s small screen.

PYOTR ALEXANDROVITCH ORLOV. KGB. FULL COLO­NEL. PAST FOUR YEARS BELIEVED IN THIRD DIRECTOR­ ATE. BELIEVED MASQUERADING AS GRU MAJOR IN­SIDE RED ARMY JOINT PLANNING STAFF MOSCOW. PREVIOUS POSTINGS KNOWN AS OPS PLANNING MOS­COW CENTER AND FIRST CHIEF DIRECTORATE (ILLE­GALS DIRECTORATE) YAZENEVO.

Roth whistled as the machine ended its knowledge of a man called Orlov, and he shut it down. What the voice on the phone had said made sense. The Third or Armed Forces Directorate of the KGB was that department tasked to keep a constant eye on the loyalty of the Armed Forces. As such, it was deeply resented but tolerated. AFD officers usually infil­trated the Armed Forces disguised as GRU or Military Intel­ligence officers. This would explain their being anywhere and everywhere, and asking questions, and keeping up surveil­lance. If Orlov had really been for four years posing as a GRU major on the Joint Planning Staff of the Soviet Defense Ministry, he would be a walking encyclopedia. It would also account for his being in the group of Soviet officers invited under the recent NATO-Warsaw Pact agreement to Salisbury Plain to watch the British war games.

He checked his watch. Seven-fourteen. No time to call Langley. He had sixty seconds to decide. Too risky—tell him to go back to the officers’ mess, slip into his room, and accept a nice cup of tea from a British steward. Then back to Heathrow and Moscow. Try and persuade him to do his run at Heathrow, give me time to contact Calvin Bailey in Wash­ington. The phone rang.

“Mr. Roth, there is a bus outside the phone booth. The first of the morning. I think it is taking civilian cleaning staff to Tidworth barracks. I can just get back in time, if I have to.”

Roth took a deep breath. Career on the line, boy, right on the line.

“Okay, Colonel Orlov, we’ll take you. I’ll contact my British colleagues—they’ll have you safe within thirty min­ utes.”

“No.” The voice was harsh, brooking no opposition. “I come to the Americans only. I want out of here and into America fast. That is the deal, Mr. Roth. No other deal.”

“Now look, Colonel—”

“No, Mr. Roth, I want you to pick me up yourself. In two hours. The forecourt of the Andover railway station. Then to Upper Heyford USAF base. You get me on a transport to America. It’s the only deal I will take.”

“All right, Colonel. You got it. I’ll be there.”

It took Roth ten minutes to throw on street clothes, grab a passport, CIA identification, money, and car keys, and head downstairs for his car in the basement garage.

Fifteen minutes after putting down the phone, he eased his way into Park Lane and headed north for Marble Arch and the Bayswater Road, preferring that route to the scramble through Knightsbridge and Kensington.

By eight, he was past Heathrow and had turned south on the M25 then southwest along the M3, linking to the A303 to Andover. He entered the forecourt of the railway station at ten past nine. There was a stream of cars sweeping in to deposit travelers and leaving the forecourt within seconds. The travelers hurried into the station concourse. Only one man was not moving. He leaned against a wall in a tweed jacket, gray trousers, and running shoes and scanned a morn­ing paper. Roth approached him.

“I think you must be the man I have come to meet,” he said softly. The reader looked up, calm gray eyes, a hard face in its mid-forties.

“That depends if you have identification,” said the man. It was the same voice as the one on the phone. Roth tendered his CIA pass. Orlov studied it and nodded. Roth gestured to his car, engine still running, blocking several behind it. Orlov looked around as if saying good-bye for the last time to a world he had known. Without a word, he stepped into the car.

Roth had told the Embassy Duty Officer to alert Upper Heyford that he would be coming with a guest. It took nearly two hours more to cut across country to the Oxfordshire base of the USAF. Roth drove straight to the Base Commander’s office. There were two calls to Washington; then Langley cleared it with the Pentagon, who instructed the Base Com­mander. A communications flight out of Upper Heyford to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, that afternoon at three P.M. had two extra passengers.

That was five hours after everything had hit the fan from Tidworth to London and back. Long before takeoff, there was a most imperial row going on among the British Army, the Defense Ministry, the Security Service, and the Russian Embassy.

The Soviet group had assembled for breakfast around eight o’clock in the officers’ mess dining hall, by now chatting relaxedly to their British counterparts. There were sixteen of them by eight-twenty. The absence of Major Kuchenko was noted, but not with any sense of alarm.

About ten minutes before nine, the sixteen Russians reas­sembled in the main lobby with their baggage, and again the absence of Major Kuchenko was noted. A steward was dis­patched to his room to ask him to hurry up. The coach stood outside the door.

The steward returned to say the major’s room was empty, but his gear was still there. A delegation of two British officers and two Russians went up to look for him. They established that the bed had been slept in, that the bath towel was damp, and that all Kuchenko’s clothes were apparently present, indicating he must be somewhere nearby. A search was made of the bathroom down the corridor (only the two Russian generals had been accorded private bathrooms), but the search drew a blank. Toilets were also checked, but they were empty. By now the faces of the two Russians, including the GRU colonel, had lost all trace of bonhomie.

The British were also becoming worried. A complete search of the mess building was made, but to no avail. A British Intelligence captain slipped out to talk to the invisible watch­ers from the Security Service. Their log showed that two officers in tracksuits had gone jogging that morning but only one had returned. A frantic call was made to Main Gate. The night log showed only that Colonel Arbuthnot had left and that he had returned.

To solve the problem, the Corporal of the Guard was summoned from his bed. He related the double departure of Colonel Arbuthnot, who was confronted and hotly denied he had ever left Main Gate, returned, and left again. A search of his room revealed that he was missing a white tracksuit, plus a jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. The Intelligence captain had a hurried and whispered conversation with the senior British general, who became extremely grave and asked the senior Russian to accompany him to his office.

When the Russian general emerged, he was white with anger and demanded an immediate staff car to take him to his embassy in London. Word spread among the other fifteen Russians, who became frosty and unapproachable. It was ten o’clock. The telephoning began.

The British general raised the Chief of Staff in London and gave him a complete situation report. Another sitrep went from the senior watcher to his superiors in the Security Service headquarters at Curzon Street, London. There it went right up to the Deputy Director General, who at once sus­pected the hand of TSAR, the friendly acronym by which the Security Service sometimes refers to the Secret Intelligence Service. It stands for: Those Shits Across the River.

South of the Thames in Century House, Assistant Chief Timothy Edwards took a call from Curzon Street but was able to deny that the SIS had had anything to do with it. As he put the phone down he pressed a buzzer on his desk and barked: “Ask Sam McCready to step up here at once, would you?”

By noon, the Russian general, accompanied by the GRU colonel, was closeted in the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens with the Soviet Defense attachй, who was posing as a Major-General of Infantry but actually held the same rank in the GRU. None of the three knew that Major Kuchenko was actually Colonel Orlov of the KGB—a knowl­edge confined to a very few senior officers on the Joint Planning Staff in Moscow. In fact, all three men would have been deeply relieved to know—few things please Russian Army men as much as the KGB with egg all over its face. In London, they thought that they had lost a GRU major and were deeply unhappy at Moscow’s expected reaction.

At Cheltenham, the Government Communications Head­quarters, the nation’s listening post, noted and