“Okay, you found him, you recruited him, you run him.”
Monk was transferred to SE Division within a week. He was tasked to run Major Nikolai Ilyich Turkin, of the KGB. He never returned to Madrid to reside, but he visited, meeting Turkin covertly at picnic sites high in the Sierra de Guadarrama, where they would talk of a thousand things as Gorbachev came to power and the twin programs of perestroika and glasnost began to relax the rules. Monk was glad, because apart from an asset he regarded Turkin as a friend.
Even by 1984 the CIA was becoming, and some would say had already become, a vast and creaking bureaucracy, dedicated more to paperwork than pure intelligence gathering. Monk loathed bureaucracy and despised paperwork, convinced that what was written down could be stolen or copied. At the ultra-secret heart of the paperwork of the SE Division were the 301 files, which listed the details of every Soviet agent working for Uncle Sam. That fall Monk “forgot” to list all the details of Major Turkin, code-named GT Lysander, in the 301 files.
¯
JOCK Macdonald, Head of Station for the British SIS in Moscow, had a dinner he could not avoid on the night of July 17. He returned briefly to his office to deposit some notes he had made during dinner—he never trusted his apartment not to be burgled—and his eye fell on the black-covered file. Idly he flicked it open and began to read. It was in Russian, of course, and typed, but he was bilingual.
In fact he never went home that night. Just after midnight he called his wife to explain, then returned to the file. There were some forty pages, divided into twenty subject headings.
He read the passages concerning the reestablishment of a one-party state and the reactivation of the chain of slave-labor camps for dissidents and other undesirables.
He perused the tracts dealing with the final solution of the Jewish community and the treatment of the Chechens in particular plus all the other racial minorities.
He studied the pages concerning the nonaggression pact with Poland to buffer the western border and the re-conquest of Belarus the Baltic States and the southern republics of the former USSR, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova.
He ingested the paragraphs dealing with the reestablishment of the nuclear arsenal and the targeting of the surrounding enemies
He pored over the pages describing the destiny of the Russian Orthodox Church and all other religious denominations.
According to the manifesto the shamed and humiliated armed forces now brooding sullenly in tents, would be rearmed and reequipped, not as a force for defense but for re-conquest. The populations of the reacquired territories would work as serfs to produce food for the Russian masters. Control over them would reside in the ethnic Russian populations in the outer territories, under the aegis of an imperial governor from Moscow. National discipline would be assured by the Black Guard, increased to a force of 200,000 men. They would also handle the special treatment of the anti-socials—liberals, journalists, priests, gays, and Jews.
The document also purported to reveal the answer to one enigma that had already puzzled Macdonald and others: the source of the Union of Patriotic Forces’ limitless campaign wealth.
In the aftermath of 1990, the criminal underworld of Russia had been a vast patchwork of gangs who, in the early days, conducted vicious turf wars, leaving scores of their own dead on the streets. Since 1995, a policy of unification had been in progress. By 1999, all Russia from the western border to the Urals was the fiefdom of four great consortia of criminals, chief among them the Dolgoruki, based in Moscow. If the document before him was true, it was they who were funding the UPF, to earn their reward in the future, the elimination of all other gangs and the supremacy of their own.
It was five in the morning when, after the fifth rereading, Jock Macdonald closed the Black Manifesto. He sat back and stared at the ceiling. He had long ago given up smoking, but now he longed for a drag.
Finally he rose, locked the document in his safe, and let himself out of the embassy. On the pavement, in the half light, he gazed across the river at the walls of the Kremlin beneath whose shadow an old man in a threadbare greatcoat had sat forty-eight hours earlier and stared at the embassy.
Spymasters are not generally conceived to be religious people, but appearances and professions can be misleading. In the Highlands of Scotland there is a long tradition among the aristocracy of devout adherence to the Roman Catholic faith. These were the earls and barons who rallied with their clansmen to the banner of the Catholic Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, to be wiped out a year later at the field of Culloden.
The Head of Station came from the heart of that tradition. His father was a Macdonald of Fassifern, but his mother had been a scion of the house of Fraser of Lovat and had brought him up in the faith. He began to walk. Down the embankment to the next bridge, the Bolshoi Most, then across toward the Orthodox St. Basil’s Cathedral. He skirted the onion-domed edifice and wended his way through the waking city center toward New Square.
It was as he was leaving New Square that he saw the first early-morning queues for the soup kitchens beginning to form. There was one just behind the square, where once the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR had held sway.
A number of foreign charitable organizations were involved in the relief aid to Russia, as was the United Nations on a more official basis; the West had donated as generously as earlier to Romanian orphanages and Bosnian refugees. But the task was formidable, for the destitute from the countryside poured toward the capital, were rounded up and expelled by the militia, and reappeared again either as the same people or their replacements.
They stood in the predawn half light, the old and ragged, the women with babies at their breasts, the peasantry of Russia unchanged since Potemkin in their ox-like passivity and patience. In late July the weather was warm enough to keep all alive. But when the cold came, that bitter cutting cold of the Russian winter. ... The previous January had been bad, but as for the next ... Jock Macdonald shook his head at the thought and marched on.
His path brought him to Lubyanskaya Square, formerly known as Dzerzhinski. Here for decades had stood the statue of Iron Feliks, Lenin’s founder of the original terror machine, the Cheka. At the back of the square stood the great gray and ocher block known simply as Moscow Center, headquarters of the KGB.
Behind
the old KGB building lies the infamous Lubyanka jail where confessions too numerous to count had been extracted and executions carried out. Behind the jail are two streets, Big Lubyanka and Little Lubyanka. He chose the second. Halfway up Lubyanka Malaya is the Church of St. Louis, where many of the diplomatic community and some of the few Russian Catholics go to worship.
Two hundred yards behind him and out of his vision because of the KGB building, a number of tramps were sleeping in the broad doorway of the giant toy shop, Detskiy Mir, or Children’s World.
Two burly men in jeans and black leather jackets walked into the shop doorway and began to turn the sleeping bodies over. One wore an old army greatcoat with a few soiled medals clinging to the lapel. The men stiffened, then bent over him again, shaking him out of his slumber.
“Is your name Zaitsev?” snapped one of them. The old man nodded. The other man whipped a portable phone out of his blouse pocket, punched in some numbers, and spoke. Within five minutes a Moskvitch swerved to the curb. The two men hustled the figure between them and threw him into the rear, piling in on top of him. The old man tried to say something before he went in, and there was a glint of stainless steel at the front of his mouth.
The car raced around the square, drove behind the great building that once housed the All-Russian Insurance Corporation before becoming a house of terror, and roared up Lubyanka Malaya, passing the figure of a British diplomat on the pavement.
Macdonald let himself into the church with the aid of a drowsy sacristan, walked to the end of the aisle, and knelt in front of the altar. He looked up and the figure of the crucified Christ looked down. And he prayed.
A man’s prayers are a very private thing, but what he prayed was: “Dear God, I beg you, let it be a forgery. For if it is not, a great and dark evil is going to descend upon us.