Red Rabbit

“Why do people disparage my honorable profession?” Moore asked the ceiling. “If anybody saves their system, it will have to be a lawyer, gentlemen.”

“You think so, Arthur?” Greer asked.

“You can’t have a rational society without the rule of law, and you can’t have the rule of law without lawyers to administer it.” Moore was the former Chief Judge of the Texas State Court of Appeals. “They don’t have those rules yet, not when the Politburo can reach out and execute anyone they don’t like without a semblance of an appeals process. It must be like living in hell. You can’t depend on anything. It’s like Rome under Caligula—if he got a notion, that notion had the force of law. Hell, though, even Rome had some laws the emperors had to abide by. Not our Russian friends.” The others couldn’t really appreciate how horrid a concept that was to their Director. He’d once been the finest trial lawyer in a state noted for the quality of its legal community, and then a learned judge on a bench replete with thoughtful, fair men. Most Americans were as accustomed to the rule of law as to the ninety feet between bases on a baseball diamond. For Ritter and Greer, it was more important that, before his legal career, Arthur Moore had been a superior field spook. “So, what the hell do I tell the President?”

“The truth, Arthur,” Greer suggested. “We don’t know because they don’t know.”

That was the only truthful and rational thing he could say, of course, but: “Damn it, Jim, they pay us to know!”

“It comes down to how threatened the Russians feel. Poland is just a cat’s paw for them, a vassal state that jumps when they say ‘jump,’” Greer said. “The Russians can control what their own people see on TV and in Pravda—”

“But they can’t control the rumors that come across the border,” said Ritter. “And the stories their soldiers tell when they come home from service there—and in Germany, and in Czechoslovakia, and in Hungary, and what they hear on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.” CIA controlled the first of those outlets directly, and, while the other was theoretically almost independent, that was a fiction nobody believed. Ritter himself had a great deal of input on both propaganda arms of the American government. The Russians understood and respected good agitprop.

“How squeezed do you suppose they feel?” Moore wondered aloud.

“Just two or three years ago, they thought they were on the crest of the wave,” Greer announced. “Our economy was in the toilet with inflation and we had gas lines, the Iran mess. They’d just got Nicaragua to drop into their lap. Our national morale was bad, and…”

“Well, that’s changing, thank God,” Moore went on for him. “Full reversal?” he asked. It was too much to hope for, but at heart Arthur Moore was an optimist—otherwise, how could he be DCI?

“We’re heading that way, Arthur,” Ritter said. “They’re slow to catch on. They are not the most agile of thinkers. That’s their greatest weakness. The top dogs are wedded to their ideology to the point that they can’t see around it. You know, we can hurt these bastards—hurt ‘em bad—if we can analyze their weaknesses thoroughly and come up with a way to exploit them.”

“You really think so, Bob?” the DDI asked.

“I don’t think it—I damned well know it!” the DDO shot back. “They are vulnerable, and best of all, they don’t yet know that they are vulnerable. It’s time to do something. We’ve got a President now who’ll back our play if we can come up with something good enough for him to invest his political capital. Congress is so afraid of him, they won’t stand in the way.”

“Robert,” the DCI said, “it sounds to me like you’ve got something rattling up your sleeve.”

Ritter thought for a few seconds before going on. “Yes, Arthur, I do. I’ve been thinking about this since they brought me in from the field eleven years ago. I haven’t written a single word of it down.” He didn’t have to explain why. Congress could subpoena any piece of paper in the building—well, almost any piece—but not something carried only in a man’s mind. But perhaps this was the time to set it down. “What is the Soviets’ fondest wish?”

“To bring us down,” Moore answered. That didn’t exactly require a Nobel-class intellect.

“Okay, what is our fondest wish?”

Greer took that one. “We aren’t allowed to think in those terms. We want to find a modus vivendi with them.” That was what The New York Times said, anyway, and wasn’t that the voice of the nation? “Okay, Bob. Spit it out.”

“How do we attack them?” Ritter asked. “And by that I mean nail the bastards right where they live, hurt them—”

“Bring them down?” Moore asked.

“Why the hell not?” Ritter demanded.

“Is it possible?” the DCI asked, interested that Ritter was thinking along such lines.

“Well, Arthur, if they can aim that big a gun at us, why can’t we do it to them?” Ritter had the bit in his teeth now. “They send money into political groups in our country to try and make it hard on our political process. They have antinuclear demonstrations all across Europe, calling to eliminate our Theater Nuclear Weapons while they rebuild theirs. We can’t even leak what we know about that to the media—”

“And if we did, the media wouldn’t print it,” Moore observed. After all, the media didn’t like nuclear weapons either, though it was willing to tolerate Soviet weapons because they, for one reason or another, were not destabilizing. What Ritter really wanted to do, he feared, was to see if the Soviets had influence on the American mass media. But even if it did, such an investigation would bear only poisoned fruit. The media held on to their vision of its integrity and balance as a miser held his hoard. But they knew without having the evidence that KGB did have some power over the American media, because it was so easy to establish and exercise. Flatter them, let them in on supposed secrets, and then become a trusted source. But did the Soviets know how dangerous a game that could be? The American news media did have a few core beliefs, and tampering with them was like tinkering with a live bomb. One wrong move could be expensive. No one in this Seventh-Floor office was under much illusion about the genius of the Russian intelligence service. It had skilled people, certainly, and trained them thoroughly and well, but KGB also had its weaknesses. Like the society it served, KGB applied a political template to reality, and largely ignored the information that didn’t match up with the holes. And so, after months, even years, of painstaking planning and preparation, they often had operations go bad because one of their officers had decided that life in the land of the enemy wasn’t quite so bad as it was portrayed. The cure for a lie was always the truth. It just had a way of smacking you in the face, and the smarter you were, the worse it hurt.

“That’s not important,” Ritter said, surprising both his colleagues.

“Okay, keep going,” Moore ordered.

“What we need to do is examine their vulnerabilities and attack them—with the objective of destabilizing their entire country.”

“That’s a very tall order, Robert,” Moore observed.

“You take an ambition pill, Bob?” Greer asked, intrigued even so. “Our political masters will blanch at that large an objective.”

“Oh, I know.” Ritter held up his hands. “Oh, no, we mustn’t hurt them. They might nuke us. Come on, they’re a hell of a lot less likely to lash out than we are. People, they are afraid of us, a lot more than we are of them. They are afraid of Poland, for Christ’s sake. Why? Because there’s a disease in Poland that their own people might catch. It’s called rising expectations. And rising expectations are the one thing they can’t satisfy. Their economy is as stagnant as stump water. If we give them a little push…”

“‘All we have to do is kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will collapse,’ “ Moore quoted. “That’s been said before, but Adolf had himself a nasty little surprise when the snow started falling.”

“He was an idiot who didn’t read his Machiavelli,” Ritter retorted. “First, you conquer ‘em, then you murder ‘em. Why give them warning?”

“Whereas our current adversaries could have taught old Niccolo a lesson or two,” Greer agreed. “Okay, Bob, exactly what do you propose?”

“A systematic examination of Soviet weaknesses with an eye to exploitation. In simplest terms, we investigate the possible shape of a plan to cause great discomfort to our enemy.”

“Hell, we ought to be doing that all the time anyway,” Moore said, agreeing at once with the concept.