Monk kept his eyes on the falling wine, the hand steady.
“Sure. My people will always go to the wire for you, if you need help. It’s part of the code.”
“It must be good to work for people who live in such freedom,” said Turkin. Finally Monk put down the bottle and looked across the table. He had promised no pitch, but it was the Russian who had made it—to himself.
“Why not? Look, my friend, the system you work for is going to change. Soon now. We could help it change faster. Yuri will grow up to live as a free man.”
Andropov had died, despite the medications from London. He had been succeeded by another geriatric, Konstantin Chernenko, who had to be held up under the armpits. But there was talk of a fresh wind blowing in the Kremlin, a younger man called Gorbachev. By the coffee Turkin was recruited; from henceforth he would stay “in place” at the heart of the KGB but work for the CIA.
Monk’s luck was in that his superior, the Chief of Station. was away on vacation. Had he been in place Monk would have had to hand Turkin over to others to handle. Instead it fell to him to encode the top secret cable to Langley describing the recruitment.
Of course there was initial skepticism. A major of Line KR right in the heart of the KGB was a top prize. In a series of covert meetings throughout Madrid for the rest of the summer, Monk learned about his Soviet contemporary.
Born in Omsk, western Siberia, in 1951, the son of an engineer in the military industry, Turkin had not been able to get into the university he wanted at the age of eighteen and had gone into the army. He was assigned to Border Guards, nominally under the control of the KGB. There he was spotted and posted to the Dservinsky High School, counterintelligence department, where he learned English. He shone.
With a small group he was transferred to the KGB foreign intelligence training center, the prestigious Andropov Institute. Like Monk, on the other side of the world, he had been tagged as a high-flier. On graduating with distinction Turkin was permitted to join Directorate K of the First Chief Directorate—counter-intelligence within the intelligence-gathering arm.
Still only twenty-seven, Turkin also married in 1978 and had a son, Yuri, the same year. In 1982 he got his first foreign posting, to Nairobi; his primary task was to try to penetrate the CIA Station in Kenya and recruit agents either there or throughout the Kenyan establishment. It was a posting to be cut short prematurely by his son’s illness.
Turkin delivered his first package to the CIA in October. Knowing that a complete covert communications system had been set up, Monk took the package back to Langley personally. It turned out to be dynamite. Turkin blew away just about the entire KGB operation in Spain. To protect their source, the Americans would release what they had bit by bit to the Spanish, ensuring that each roundup of Spaniards spying for Moscow would appear as a fluke, or good detection by the Spanish. In each case the KGB was permitted to learn (via Turkin) that the agent himself had made a silly mistake leading to his own capture. Moscow suspected nothing, but lost its whole Iberian operation.
In his three years in Madrid Turkin rose to become deputy Rezident, which gave him access to just about everything. In 1987 he would transfer back to Moscow and after a year became head of the entire Directorate K Branch within the KGB’s huge apparat in East Germany until the final pullout after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and then of Communism and the reunification with West Germany in 1990. In all that time, although he passed hundreds of messages and packages of intelligence through dead drops and cutouts, he insisted that he be handled by only one man, his friend-across-the-Wall, Jason Monk. It was an unusual arrangement. Most spies have several handlers, or “controllers,” in a six-year career, but Turkin insisted and Langley had to put up with it.
When Monk got back to Langley that. fall of 1986 he was summoned to the office of Carey Jordan.
“I’ve seen the stuff,” said the new DDO. “It’s good. We thought he might be a double, but the Spanish agents he has blown away are Grade A. Your man’s on the level. Well done.”
Monk nodded his appreciation.
“There is just one thing,” said Jordan. “I didn’t get into this game five minutes ago. Your report on the recruitment strategy is adequate, but there’s something else, isn’t there? What were his real reasons for volunteering?”
Monk told the DDO what he had not put in the report, the illness of the son in Nairobi and the medications from the Walter Reed.
“I ought to can your ass,” said Jordan at length. He rose and walked to the window. The forest of birch and beech running down to the Potomac was a blaze of red and gold, the leaves just about to fall.
“Jesus,” he said after a while. “I don’t know any guy in the agency who would have let him get away without a favor for those drugs. You might never have seen him again. Madrid was a fluke. You know what Napoleon said about generals?”
“No, sir.’’
“He said I do
n’t care if they’re good; I want ‘em lucky. You’re weird, but you’re lucky. You know we’ll have to transfer your man to SE Division?”
At the very top of the CIA was always the Director. Under him came the two main Directorates, Intelligence and Operations. The first, headed by the Deputy Director (Intel), or DDI, had the task of collating and analyzing the great mass of raw information pouring in, and to produce from it the intelligence digests that would go out to the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, Pentagon, et al.
The actual gathering was done by Operations, headed by the DDO. Ups Directorate subdivided into divisions according to a global map—Latin American Division, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and so forth. But for forty years of the Cold Wan, from 1950 to 1990 and the collapse of Communism, the key division was Soviet/East European, known as SE.
Officers in other divisions were often resentful that even though they might cultivate and recruit a valuable Soviet asset in Bogotá or Djakarta, he would after recruitment be transferred to the control of SE Division, which would handle him from then on. The logic was that the recruit would be transferred one day from Bogotá or Djakarta anyway, probably back to the USSR.
Because the Soviet Union was the main enemy, SE Division became the star unit in Ops Directorate. Places were sought after. Even though Monk had majored in Russian at college, and spent years perusing Soviet publications in a back room, he had still served a tour in African Division and was even then assigned to Western Europe.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“You want to go with him?”
Monk’s spirits leaped.
“Yes, sir. Please.”