The Deceiver

The DCI was a Catholic, long widowed, and a strict moral puritan, and he was known in the corridors of Langley as a tough old bastard. He rewarded talent and intelligence, but his passion was loyalty. He had known good friends go to the torture chambers of the Gestapo because they had been betrayed, and betrayal was the one thing he would not tolerate under any circumstances. For traitors, he had only a visceral loathing. For them, in the mind of the DCI, there could be no mercy.

He listened carefully to Roth’s narration, staring at the gas log fire where no flame burned on such a warm night. He gave no sign of what he felt, save a tightening of the muscles around the dewlapped jaw.

“You came straight here?” he asked when Roth finished. “You spoke to no one else?”

Roth explained how he had come, like a thief in the night into his own country, on a false passport, by a circuitous route. The old man nodded; he had once slipped into Hitler’s Europe like that. He rose and went to fill a tumbler from the brandy decanter on the antique side-table, pausing to tap Roth reassuringly on the shoulder.

“You did well, my boy,” he said. He offered brandy to Roth, who shook his head. “Seventeen years, you say?”

“According to Orlov. All my own superior officers, right up to Frank Wright, have been with the Agency that long. I didn’t know who else to come to.”

“No, of course not.”

The DCI returned to his chair and sat lost in thought. Roth did not interrupt.

Finally the old man said, “It has to be the Office of Security. But not the Chief. No doubt he’s totally loyal, but he’s a twenty-five-year man. I’ll send him on vacation. There’s a very bright young man who works as his deputy. Ex-lawyer. I doubt if he’s been with us more than fifteen.”

The DCI summoned an aide and caused several phone calls to be made. It was confirmed the deputy Head of the Office of Security was forty-one and had joined the Agency from law school fifteen years earlier. He was summoned from his home in Alexandria. His name was Max Kellogg.

“Just as well he never worked under Angleton,” said the DCI. “His name begins with K.”

Max Kellogg, flustered and apprehensive, arrived just after midnight. He had been about to go to bed when the call came, and he was stunned to hear the DCI himself on the line.

“Tell him,” said the DCI. Roth repeated his story.

The lawyer took it all in without blinking, missed nothing, asked two supplementary questions, took no notes. Finally he asked the DCI: “Why me, sir? Harry’s in town?”

“You’ve only been with us fifteen years,” said the DCI.

“Ah.”

“I have decided to keep Orlov—Minstrel, whatever we call him—at Alconbury,” said the DCI. “He’s probably as safe there, even safer, than back over here. Stall the British, Joe. Tell them Minstrel has just come up with more information of only U.S. interest. Tell them their access will be resumed as soon as we’ve checked it out.

“You’ll fly in the morning”—he checked his watch—“this morning by designated flight straight to Alconbury. No holds barred now. Too late for that. The stakes are too high. Orlov will understand. Take him apart. I want it all. I want to know two things, fast. Is it true, and if so, who?

“As of now, you two work for me—only for me. Report direct. No cut-outs. No questions. Refer them to me. I’ll handle things at this end.”

The light of combat was in the old man’s eyes again.

Roth and Kellogg tried to get some sleep on the Grumman from Andrews back to Alconbury. They were still ragged and tired when they arrived. The west-east crossing is always the worst. Fortunately, both men avoided alcohol and drank only water. They hardly paused to wash and brush up before going to Colonel Orlov’s room.

As they entered Roth heard the familiar tones of Art Garfunkel coming from the tape deck.

Appropriate, thought Roth grimly. We have come to talk with you again. But this time there will be no sounds of silence.

But Orlov was cooperation itself. He seemed resigned to the fact that he had now divulged the last piece of his precious “insurance.” The price of the bride had been offered in full. The only question was whether it would be acceptable to the suitors.

“I never knew his name,” he said in the debriefing room. Kellogg had elected to have the microphones and tape record­ers switched off. He had his own portable recorder and backed it up with his own handwritten notes. He wanted no other tape to be copied, no other CIA staff present. The technicians had been sent away; Kroll and two others guarded the passage beyond the now-soundproofed door. The techni­cians’ last job had been to sweep the room for bugs and declare it clean. They were plainly puzzled by the new regi­men.

“I swear to that. He was known only as Agent Sparrowhawk, and he was run personally by General Drozdov.”

“Where and when was he recruited?”

“I believe in Vietnam in ’68 or ’69.”

“Believe?”

“No, I know it was Vietnam. I was with Planning, and we had a big operation down there, mainly in and around Saigon. Locally recruited help was Vietnamese, of course, Viet Cong; but we had our own people. One of them reported that the Viet Cong had brought him an American who was dissatisfied. Our local Rezident cultivated the man and turned him. In late 1969 General Drozdov personally went to Tokyo to talk with the American. That was when he was code-named Sparrowhawk.”

“How do you know this?”

“There were arrangements to be made, communication links set up, funds to be transferred. I was in charge.”

They talked for a full week. Orlov recalled banks into which sums had been paid over the years, and the months (if not the actual days) on which these transfers were made. The sums increased as the years passed, probably to account for pro­motion and better product.

“When I moved to the Illegals Directorate and came di­rectly under Drozdov, my association with Case Sparrowhawk continued. But I was not now concerned with bank transfers. It was more operational. If Sparrowhawk gave us an agent working against us, I would inform the appropriate department, usually Executive Action—known as ‘wet af­fairs’—and they would liquidate the hostile agent if he was out of our territory or pick him up if he was inside. We got four anti-Castro Cubans that way.”

Max Kellogg noted everything and reran his tapes through the night. Finally he said to Roth, “There is only one career that fits all these allegations. I don’t know whose it is, but the records will prove it. It’s a question of cross-checking now. Hours and hours of cross-checking. I can only do that in Washington, in the Central Registry. I have to go back.”

He flew the following day, spent five hours with the DCI in his Georgetown mansion, then closeted himself with the re­cords. He had carte blanche, on the personal orders of the DCI. No one dared deny Kellogg anything. Despite the se­crecy, word began to spread through Langley. Something was up. There was a flap going on, and it had to do with internal security. Morale began to flag. These things can never be kept truly quiet.

At Golders Hill in North London there is a small park, an adjunct to the much larger Hampstead Heath, that contains a menagerie of deer, goats, ducks, and other wildfowl. McCready met Keepsake there on the day Max Kellogg flew back to Washington.

“Things are not so good at the embassy,” said Keepsake. “The K-Line man, on orders from Moscow, has started asking for files that go back years. I think a security investi­gation, probably of all our embassies in Western Europe, has been started. Sooner or later, it will narrow to the London embassy.”

“Is there anything we can do to help?”

“Possibly.”

“Suggest it,” said McCready.

“It would help if I could give them something really use­ful—some good news about Orlov, for example.”

When a defector-in-place like Keepsake changes sides, it would be suspicious if he produced no information for the Russians year after year. So it is customary for his new masters to give him some genuine intelligence to