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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.

CHAPTER 4

BEFORE ANY OF THE REGULAR STAFF ARRIVED FOR WORK
Jock Macdonald was back at his desk. He had not slept, but no one would know it. A fastidious man, he had washed and shaved in the staff bathroom on the ground floor and changed into the clean shirt he kept in his desk.

His deputy, Bruce “Gracie” Fields, was awakened at his apartment and asked to be in by nine. Hugo Gray, now back in his own bed, received a similar call. At eight Macdonald asked the security staff, both senior ex-NCOs from the army, to prepare the bubble for a conference at 9:15.

“The point is,” explained Macdonald to his two colleagues just after that time, “yesterday I came into possession of a document. No need to tell you its contents. Suffice to say, if it is a forgery or a hoax, we are wasting our time. If it is genuine, and I don’t know that yet, it could be a significant input. Hugo, tell Gracie the background, will you?”

Gray filled in what he knew, what Celia Stone had told him.

“In a perfect world,” said Macdonald, using one of his favorite phrases and causing the younger men to cover their grins, “I’d like to know who the old man was, the manner by which he came into possession of what might be a seriously classified file, and why he chose that car in that place to deposit it. Did he know Celia Stone? Did he know it was an embassy car? And if so, why us? In the meantime, is there anyone in the embassy who can draw?”

“Draw?” asked Fields.

“As in create a picture, a portrait.”

“I think one of the wives runs an art class,” said Fields. “Used to be an illustrator of children’s books in London. Married to some fellow in Chancery.”

“Check it out. If she can, put her together with Celia Stone. Meanwhile I m going to have a chat with Celia myself. Two other things. Chummy may show up again try to approach us hang around the building. I’m going to ask Corporal Meadows and Sergeant Reynolds to keep an eye on the main gate. If they spot him, they’ll report to either of you. Try and get him inside for a cup of tea. Second, he may try other tricks elsewhere and get himself arrested. Gracie, don’t you have somebody in the police?”

Fields nodded. He was the longest-serving in Moscow of the three, inheriting when he arrived a range of low-level sources around Moscow and creating several of his own.

“Inspector Novikov. He’s with Homicide at the Petrovka headquarters building. Occasionally useful.”

“Have a word,” said Macdonald. “Nothing to do with documents thrown into cars. Just say there’s an old codger been pestering our staff out on the street, demanding a private interview with the ambassador. We’re not fussed about it, but we’d like to ask him to leave us alone. Show him the picture, if we get a picture, but don’t let him keep it. When’s your next meet?”

“Nothing scheduled,” said Fields. “I call him from phone booths.”

“Okay, see if he can help. Meanwhile, I’m going to go over to London for a couple of days. Gracie, you hold the fort.”

Celia Stone was intercepted in the lobby when she arrived and, somewhat startled, was asked to join Macdonald, not in his office but in Conference Room A. She did not know this room was the bug-proof one.

Macdonald was very kind and talked with her for almost an hour. He noted every detail and she accepted his story that the old man had pestered other staff members with his demands to see the ambassador. Would she agree to help draw up a portrait of the old tramp? Of course she would; anything to help.

Attended by Hugo Gray, she spent the lunch hour with the wife of the Deputy Head of Chancery who, with her guidance, produced a charcoal and crayon sketch of the tramp. A silver marking pen highlighted the three steel teeth. When it was finished Celia nodded and said: “That’s him.”

After lunch Jock Macdonald asked Corporal Meadows to draw a sidearm and escort him to Sheremetyevo Airport. He did not expect to be intercepted, but he did not know whether the rightful owners of the document in his briefcase might wish to recover their property. As an added precaution he chained the case to his left wrist, covering the metal with a light summer raincoat.

When the embassy Jaguar rolled out of the gates, all this was invisible anyway. He noticed a black Chaika parked down Sofia Quay, but it made no move to follow the Jaguar, so he thought no more of it. In fact the Chaika was waiting for a small red Rover to emerge.

At the airport Corporal Meadows escorted him to the barrier, where his diplomatic passport eliminated all controls. After a short wait in Departures he boarded the British Airways flight for Heathrow and after takeoff breathed a slow sigh and ordered a gin and tonic.

Washington, April 1985

IF the Archangel Gabriel had descended on Washington to ask the Rezident of the KGB team in the Soviet Embassy which of all the officers in the CIA he would like to turn traitor and spy for Russia, Colonel Stanislav Androsov would not have hesitated long.

He would have replied: I’d like the head of the Counterintelligence Group attached to the Soviet Division of Ops Directorate.

All intelligence agencies have a counterintelligence arm working inside the apparatus with them. The job of the counterintelligence people, which does not always make them popular with their colleagues, is to check up on everyone else. It is a job that breaks down into three functions.

Counterintelligence will attend and play a leading role in the debriefing of defectors from the other side, simply to try to discover whether the defector is genuine or a cunning plant. A false defector may bring some real information with him, but his primary task is to spread disinformation: either to convince his new hosts they do not have a traitor in their own midst when they do, or in some other way to lead their hosts down a maze of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. Years of wasted time and effort can result from a skillful plant.

Counterintelligence also checks out those from the opposition who, while not actually crossing over in person, have allowed themselves to be recruited as spies but may in fact be double agents. A double is one who pretends to be recruited while in fact remaining loyal to his own team and acting on its orders. He will provide some granules of genuine information to establish his authenticity and then spring the real sting, which is entirely false and can create havoc among the people he is supposed to be working for.

Finally, counterintelligence has to ensure that its own side has not been penetrated, is not harboring a traitor at its own breast.

To accomplish these tasks, counterintelligence has to have total access. It can call up all the files on all the defectors and their debriefings, going back over years. It can examine the careers and recruitment of all current assets working for the agency deep in the heart of opponent territory and exposed to every conceivable danger of betrayal. And counterintelligence can demand the personnel file of every officer on its own side. All in the name of checking loyalty and genuineness.

Because of rigorous compartmentalization and the need-to-know principle, an intelligence officer acting as controller of one or two operations can betray those operations, but will normally have no idea what his colleagues are working on. Only counterintelligence has access to the lot. That is why Colonel Androsov, had he been asked by the archangel, would have chosen the head of counterintelligence for the Soviet Division. Counterintelligence people have to be the most loyal of the loyal.

In July 1983, Aldrich Hazen Ames was appointed to head the Soviet Counterintelligence Group of the SE Division. As such he had complete access to its two sub-branches: the USSR Desk handling all Soviet assets working for the United States but posted inside the USSR, and the External Ops Desk handling all assets then posted outside the USSR.

On April 16, 1985, short of money, he walked into the Soviet Embassy on Washington’s Sixteenth Street, asked to see Colonel Androsov, and volunteered to spy for Russia. For fifty thousand dollars.

He brought with him some small bona fides. He gave away the names of three Russians who had approached the CIA offering to work for it. Later he would say he thought they were probably double agents, i.e., not genuine. Whatever, those three gentlemen were never heard from again. He also brought an internal CIA personnel list with his own name highlighted to prove he was who he said he was. Then he left, walking for the second time right past the FBI cameras filming the front forecourt. The tapes were never played back.

Two days later he got his fifty thousand dollars. It was just the start. The most damaging traitor in America’s history, back to and probably including Benedict Arnold, had just started work.

Later analysts would puzzle over two enigmas. The first was how such a grossly inadequate, underperforming, alcohol-abusing loser could ever have risen through the ranks to such an amazing position of trust. The second was how, when the senior hierarchs knew by that December in their secret hearts that they had a traitor among them somewhere, he could have remained unexposed for a further—and for the CIA catastrophic—eight years.

The answer to the second has a dozen facets. Incompetence, lethargy, and complacency within the CIA, luck for the traitor, a skillful disinformation campaign by the KGB to protect its mole, more lethargy, squeamishness, and indolence at Langley, red herrings, more luck for the traitor, and, finally, the memory of James Angleton.

Angleton had once been head of counterintelligence at the agency, rising to become a legend and ending deranged by paranoia. This strange man, without private life or humor, became convinced there was a KGB mole, code-named Sasha, inside Langley. In fanatic pursuit of this nonexistent traitor, he crippled the careers of loyal officer after loyal officer until he finally brought the Operations Directorate to its knees. Those who survived him, risen by 1985 to high office, were desolated at the thought of doing what had to be done—searching with rigor for the real mole.

As for the first question, the answer can be given in two words: Ken Mulgrew.