“Ah, there you have it,” said Sir Henry. “We don’t know. But, having read it, I think we agree we must know. So many questions. How the hell did this come to be written? Is it really the work of Igor Komarov? Is this appalling torrent of madness what he intends to fulfill if, or more likely, when he comes to power? If so, how was it stolen, who stole it, and why throw it at us? Or is it all a farrago of lies?”
He stirred his coffee and stared at the documents, both the original and Macdonald’s copy, with profound distaste.
“Sorry, Jock, but we’ve got to have those answers. I can’t take this up the river until we do. Possibly not then. It’s back to Moscow, Jock. I don’t know how you are going to do it; that’s your business. But we need to know.”
The Chief of the SIS, like all his predecessors, had two tasks. One was professional, to run the best covert intelligence service for the nation that he could. The other was political, to liaise with the Joint Intelligence Committee, the mandarins of the SIS’s principal customers, the Foreign Office, who were not always easy, to fight for budget with the Cabinet Office, and to cultivate friends among the politicians who made up the government. It was a multifaceted task and not for the squeamish or the foolish. The last thing he needed was to produce some harum-scarum story of a tramp throwing into the car of an extremely junior diplomat some file that now had footprints on it and described a program of deranged cruelty that might or might not be genuine. He would be shot down in flames and he knew it.
“I’ll fly back this afternoon, Chief.”
“Nonsense, Jock, you’ve had two miserable nights in a row. Take in a show, get eight hours in a bed. Grab tomorrow’s first schedule back to the land of the Cossacks.” He glanced at his watch. “And now, if you’ll excuse me ...”
The three filed out. Macdonald never made the theater or the eight hours in bed. There was a message in Marchbanks’s office, fresh from the cipher room. Celia Stone’s apartment had been raided and torn apart. She had come home from dinner and disturbed two masked men who clubbed her with a chair leg. She was in the hospital but not in danger.
Silently Marchbanks handed the slip to Macdonald who read it also.
“Oh shit,” he said.
Washington, July 1985
THE tip, when it came, was as so often in the world of espionage oblique, third-hand, and possibly a complete waste of time.
An American volunteer, working with a UNICEF aid program in the unlovely Marxist-Leninist republic of South Yemen, was back in New York on furlough and had dinner with a former classmate who was with the FBI.
Discussing the enormous Soviet military aid program being offered to South Yemen by Moscow, the United Nations worker described an evening at the bar of the Rock Hotel in Aden when he had fallen into conversation with a Russian army major.
Like most of the Russians there, the man spoke virtually no Arabic, but communicated with the Yemenis, citizens of a former Briti
sh colony until 1976, in English. The American, aware of the unpopularity of the United States in South Yemen, customarily told people he was Swiss. He told the Russian this.
The Russian, becoming increasingly more drunk and out of earshot of any of his fellow countrymen, launched into a violent denunciation of the leadership of his own country. He accused them of massive corruption, criminal waste, and not giving a damn about their own people in their efforts to subsidize the Third World.
Having delivered himself of his dinner-table anecdote, the aid worker would have passed out of the story, if the FBI man had not mentioned the matter to a friend in the CIA’s New York office.
The CIA man, having consulted his bureau chief, set up a second dinner with the aid worker at which the wine flowed copiously. To be provocative, the CIA man lamented how the Russians were making great strides in cementing friendships with the nations of the Third World, especially in the Middle East.
Eager to show off his superior knowledge, the UNICEF worker broke in that this was simply not so; he had personal knowledge that the Russians tended to loathe the Arabs and to become quickly exasperated at their inability to master simple technology and their ability to break or crash anything they were given to play with.
“I mean, take where I just came back from ...” he said.
By the end of the meal the CIA man had a picture of a huge military advisory group whose members were at their wits’ end with frustration and could see no point in their presence in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. He also had a description of a seriously fed-up major: tall, muscular, rather Oriental face. And a name: Solomin.
The report went back to Langley, where it came to the desk of the head of SE Division who discussed it with Carey Jordan.
“It may be nothing and it may be dangerous,” said the DDO to Jason Monk three days later. “But do you think you could get into South Yemen and have a talk with this Major Solomin?”
Monk consulted lengthily with the backroom experts on the Middle East and soon realized South Yemen was a tough nut. The United States was in deep disfavor with the Communist government there, which was being ardently courted by Moscow. Despite that, there was a surprisingly large foreign community, apart from the Russians. This included the United Nations, with three operations: FAO was helping with agriculture, UNICEF with the street children, and WHO with health projects.
However well one speaks a foreign language, it is a daunting prospect to pose as a member of that nation and then run into the real article. Monk decided to avoid pretending to be British because the Brits would spot the difference in two minutes. The same with the French.
But the United States was the principal paymaster of the United Nations and had influence, overt and covert, in a number of the agencies. Research revealed there was no Spaniard in the Food and Agriculture Organization mission to Aden. A new persona was created and it was quietly agreed that Monk would travel to Aden in October on a one-month visa as a visiting inspector from FAO headquarters in Rome to check on progress. He would be, according to his papers, Esteban Martinez Llorca. In Madrid, the still-grateful Spanish government provided genuine paperwork.
¯
JOCK Macdonald arrived in Moscow too late to visit Celia Stone in the hospital but was there the next morning. The Assistant Press Attaché was bandaged and woozy, but able to talk. She had gone home at the normal hour, she had noticed no one following. But then, she was not trained for that.
After three hours in her flat, she had gone out for dinner with a girlfriend from the Canadian Embassy. She had returned about 11:30. The thieves must have heard her key in the lock because all was quiet when she entered. She put on the light in the foyer and noticed the door to the living room was open and the room was dark. That was odd, because she had left a lamp on. The living room windows faced the central courtyard, and the light behind the curtains would indicate someone was at home. She thought the bulb must have blown.
She reached the door of the room and two figures came at her out of the darkness. One swung something and hit her on the side of the head. As she went down she half-heard, half-felt two men jumping over her and heading for the front door. She passed out. When she came to—she did not know how much later—she crawled to her telephone and rang a neighbor. Then she fainted again and woke up in the hospital. There was nothing more she could tell.