Mission Compromised (3 page)

As a result of his precise routine, everyone agreed that Sr. Cabral was a man of habit. He arrived at work every morning at precisely 9:00 A.M. At exactly 2:30 every afternoon, following a modest meal, he would take a glass of good wine and lie down for a siesta, rising again at 3:30 to work straight through until 10:00 P.M. And, as was his practice, each and every Friday he would dismiss Paolo, his longtime loyal chauffeur, and drive himself to the palatial home set back from the Avenida da Boavista where he and his wife Marabella had raised seven children. Tonight, as every night, he looked forward to a comfortable and quiet, late dinner with Marabella.

At four minutes past ten, two quick explosions ripped Alvaro Cabral's Mercedes apart, and its only occupant was shredded into fragments along with the expensive automobile. One of the bombs had
been placed inside the driver's headrest, the other beneath the fuel tank. It took firefighters nearly twenty-five minutes to arrive and even longer to put out the blaze. By then a positive identification of the victim might have been impossible were it not for the tiny metal fish that survived intact in what was left of the victim's pocket. Everyone who knew Alvaro recalled that he'd had the little metal fish for years. Some speculated that it had been a symbol of Cabral Shipping in colonial times. An hour after the fire was out, the hastily summoned chief inspector of Lisbon's constabulary appeared on the doorstep of the house on Avenida da Boavista to inform Dona Marabella that she was now a widow.

Though the chief inspector's message was the worst news a loving wife could receive, she betrayed little of her horror and dismay as he delivered the awful pronouncement. She was, after all, a lady. And the chief inspector was a mere public servant.

After the police left, but before she called her children to tell them the terrible news about their father, Marabella picked up the phone and calmly dialed a phone number in Maryland, U.S.A. There was no answer at the only number she had for the American named Goode, so she then called her dead husband's friend at the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon. The widow Cabral never told the police or any of the many government ministers who attended her husband's funeral that Alvaro Cabral had, up until a year before his death, provided “delivery services” for the CIA.

The murder of one of Portugal's most successful shipping magnates was never solved. The Lisbon police and investigators from the Ministry of the Interior later told the black-clad Marabella that they suspected her late husband had been assassinated by a bomb intended for someone else, no doubt planted by one of the factions vying for
power in Angola. But just in case, they jailed, without trial, Paolo, the faithful family chauffeur.

 

Warsaw, Poland

________________________________________

Saturday, 15 November 1986

0100 Hours, Local

 

Father Wenceslas Korzinski shivered. It was a normal condition for anyone north of Warsaw this time of year, even inside. But out here, on the banks of the frozen River Vistula in the middle of the night, it felt like the wind had arrived directly from the Siberian steppes. It cut through a man like a knife.

Tonight's clandestine meeting with the Solidarity organizers had not gone well. There were those in the group who didn't trust him simply because he was a priest. They wouldn't give a cold kielbasa for the fact that he had been a Vatican code clerk, or that he knew the Polish Pope, John Paul II, personally. Some of the men saw religion as a weakness, a view that came as a by-product of living all their lives under Communism—the very system they intended to overthrow. They feared that, if captured, the priest would not have the strength to withhold information about their activities; he might betray them out of this weakness.

Their prejudice troubled Father “Ski.” They really didn't trust him—just because he wore a cassock instead of coveralls.
Somehow
, thought the thirty-eight-year-old full-time parish priest and part-time spy,
I've got to find a way to let them know they can trust me.

Not everyone in the small Solidarity cell distrusted Father Ski. Two among them, Nikolas and Winold, the Krukshank brothers, had helped him divert boxcars from a Soviet munitions train in February. The three of them had braved cold worse than this to disconnect seven
cars loaded with AK-47s, mortars, machine guns, and ammunition from the Russian freight train while it was on a siding near Plonsk.

But as Father Ski trudged along with his vaporized breath swirling around his head in the moonlight, he had to admit to himself that stealing the stuff wasn't nearly as hard as shipping it all the way east across Poland, through East Germany, and on to the West. That was the really hard part. And he knew that there were many others who were involved. He prayed frequently and fervently that all involved would be forgiven for breaking the Eighth Commandment. He prayed even more fervently that they would never be caught.

There were times, too, that he wondered why they were shipping Russian weapons to the West. Weren't NATO weapons supposed to be far superior to anything made by the Russians and their satellites? But he didn't let these incongruities or the fear of discovery stop him. If stealing Russian munitions would help bring down godless Communism, so be it.

Some Solidarity members had been picked up by the Ministry of Interior and questioned, but none were from the group that had hijacked the munitions train. Despite the harshness of the regime, cracks were beginning to show like fissures in the ice on the frozen Vistula. Word of an imminent Communist collapse was getting around—it even seeped through the walls of Lud Prison. Sometimes it came all the way back from those who had been dispatched to the
gulags
, the labor camps in Siberia. He used to report all this information, carefully encoded, to his CIA “handler,” until contact was abruptly severed last December; his CIA interlocutor had been replaced. A new man, named Goode—a man who spoke very poor Polish and cared little about information—had taken his place. All Goode wanted was action—and Russian rifles and grenades.

Goode had told him that he wasn't a part of the CIA. Father Ski didn't know whether to believe that, but there was one thing for certain: Goode's cash was fine. With it, earlier that year, Father Ski had financed the brazen train robbery. He bought train manifests, freight schedules, and even troop deployment orders. Goode's cash had paid for the entire operation and covered the cost of dispatching seven boxcars of Russian weapons on a long journey across Poland, into Germany, south to Austria, into northern Italy, through France, across Spain, and all the way to Lisbon. As much as he understood it, this oblique route was taken primarily to elude the more careful border checks between Western Germany and Belgium, where NATO had its headquarters.

Once the weapons arrived in Portugal, Goode had sent Father Ski and the Krukshank brothers a generous bonus. The priest used the additional funds to buy warm clothing, blankets, and some decent food for the frailest of his parishioners.

Father Ski was almost back to his tiny rectory and still musing about good deeds and forgiveness when they grabbed him. At first he thought it was the police and that he would simply be arrested for breaking curfew. He was about to tell them that he was on his way to visit a sick member of his parish—a story that Mrs. Schotler would verify—just as Goode had instructed. But before he could utter the lie, his head was shoved into a bucket of ice-cold water. They held him as he struggled, but he was not a physically powerful man. He held his breath as long as he could, but finally his instinctive processes overwhelmed the logical ones. He no longer had control over his natural motor functions. His head still submerged in the bucket of water, Father Korzinski sucked in the deep breath that he had to have to stay alive. Instead, water filled his lungs. He struggled some more but not for long. Once
he no longer had a pulse, the men poured a little schnapps in the dead priest's mouth and splashed some on his shirt. One of them placed the half-empty bottle in the pocket of Father Ski's overcoat, and then they dumped his body off the riverbank into the icy Vistula.

When a policeman walking his beat found the body at the river's edge just after dawn, he first thought it was just another drunk who had frozen to death, not at all uncommon in Polish winters. When the policeman saw the youthful face and the Roman collar, however, he immediately called his superiors.

Two hours later the priest's body was laid out on a porcelain table in the city morgue. When the aging coroner pried open the Reverend Father Wenceslas Korzinski's frozen fingers, he found a tiny metal fish. Though the body and clothes reeked of alcohol, the coroner found none in the young clergyman's stomach—information he didn't share with anyone. Why offer answers to questions that no one was asking?

The old medical examiner never did believe the story the authorities put in the next day's newspaper about the drunken priest drowning on his way back from visiting a prostitute. But the coroner didn't share that either.

 

Counter-Terrorism Operations Center

 

________________________________________

CIA Headquarters

Langley, VA

Saturday, 15 November 1986

1730 Hours, Local

 

“Uh-oh… go get the boss, Al. We've got a
flash-eyes only
cable for the director coming in from the London Chief of Station,” Communications Watch Officer Joe Kent said as he waited by a machine that looked for all the world like an ordinary computer printer, quietly chattering as it decrypted and stored the high priority
message. But before it could be printed on duplication-proof paper, an authorization code would have to be entered on the keyboard next to the decrypter.

Alvin Dewar had the weekend duty in the Counter-Terrorism Operations Center on the seventh floor of the CIA headquarters building. He groaned, “It's going to be another lousy weekend in the CTOC—I can see it coming.” Then the balding watch officer pushed himself back from his computer console and shuffled down the quiet hallway to a door labeled
DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR COUNTER-TERRORISM.
Dewar knocked twice, opened the door without waiting, and said, “Mr. Charles, we have a
flash-eyes only
coming in from COS London. Do you want me to enter your access code and bring it down?”

Alan Charles, the number-four man in the CIA chain of command, looked up with bloodshot eyes, gratefully distracted from the pile of paper on his desk, and glanced at his wristwatch. He replied, “No, I'll come down and acknowledge receipt. Thank you, Alvin.”

Alvin Dewar shrugged and walked back down the silent hallway to the door marked
CT OPS - RESTRICTED AREA.
He pressed his palm against the stainless-steel print—reader on the wall, simultaneously pressing his forehead against the optical scanner; he heard the electronic lock snap open.

Meanwhile, Alan Charles pushed himself back from his government issue mahogany desk, hauled his fifty-eight-year-old, six-foot-two-inch frame out of his government-issue leather chair, and took his government-issue headache down the hall to where Alvin Dewar and the communications duty officer were standing. They were looking at the decryption machine as though staring at it would make it function faster or allow them to see the contents of the message for which they weren't authorized clearance.

The CIA's communications system, perhaps the most sophisticated in the world, was designed so that only those with a legitimate “need to know” could gain access to certain messages and information. This message, from the CIA's senior officer in London, was addressed to the director of Central Intelligence and could only be read and printed at the top of the hierarchy—by Director Casey himself or by the Deputy DCI, Paul Mahan; the Director of Operations, Martin Mason; or by the Deputy Director for Counter-Terrorism, Alan Charles.

As Charles bent over the keyboard to enter his access code, Dewar and the duty officer looked away—the way honest people do when the person in front of them at the ATM machine enters their PIN.

In response to the typed-in code sequence, the machine printed out the message it had stored in its memory:

 

TOP SECRET WINTEL/NOFORN
FLASH
EYES ONLY FOR THE DIRECTOR

 

DTG:      152330ZNOV86

FROM:  COS LONDON

TO:        DCI

SUBJ:    EXTREME MEASURES

 

1. COS PARIS, COS LISBON, AND BASE CHIEF FRANKFURT REPORTING DEATHS OF FORMER REPEAT, FORMER AGENCY ASSETS IN PARIS, LISBON, AND WARSAW WITHIN PAST 12 HRS.

2. COS PARIS REPORTS FORMER ASSET DK LIMA DOA AT PARIS HOSPITAL W/O VISIBLE TRAUMA AT 2200 HRS LAST NIGHT. PRELIMINARY CAUSE OF DEATH: HEART ATTACK OR STROKE. FAMILY HAS REQUESTED AUTOPSY. WILL MONITOR AND APPRISE.

3. COS LISBON REPORTS FORMER ASSET GH WILLING KILLED BY CAR BOMB LIKELY DETONATED BY REMOTE CONTROL. LIAISON W/ NATIONAL POLICE INDICATES INVESTIGATORS
SUSPECT ANGOLAN TERRORISTS AND A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY. WILL APPRISE ON NATURE OF EXPLOSIVES USED WHEN AVAIL.

4. BASE CHIEF FRANKFURT ADVISES THAT FORMER ASSET BT ROVER FOUND DROWNED IN VISTULA RIVER N OF WARSAW. LOCAL AUTHORITIES CLAIM BT ROVER WAS QUOTE A PHILANDERING CLERGYMAN WITHOUT SCRUPLES WHO DRANK TOO MUCH AND WHO FELL THROUGH ICE ON HIS WAY BACK FROM ILLICIT LIAISON WITH A PROSTITUTE. UNQUOTE.

5. REQUEST ADVISE DCI ASAP. ALL THREE ASSETS WERE TERMINATED BY PARIS AND LISBON STATIONS AND WARSAW BASE LAST YEAR AT DCI DIRECTION AND TURNED OVER TO GOODE AT NSC.

6. PER GUIDANCE FROM DCI, THERE HAS BEEN NO REPEAT NO AGENCY CONTACT WITH ANY OF THE DECEASED ASSETS FOR MORE THAN A YEAR. AS DIRECTED BY DCI, GCHQ AND THIS OFFICE HAVE MONITORED GOODE'S CONTACT WITH THESE ASSETS SINCE AND REPORTED SAME VIA BACK-CHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS TO AVOID COMPROMISE.

7. AS DIRECTED, THESE DEATHS NOT REPEAT NOT REPORTED THROUGH NORMAL OPS CHANNELS. BREAK. END TEXT.

 

Without showing the cable to his two colleagues, Charles thanked them and returned to his office where he sat at his desk. When he had read the message through twice, Alan Charles picked up the secure telephone on his desk and waited for the Director of Central Intelligence to answer. It only rang twice. After Charles read the text of the message from London to the aging spy master, he paused for a few seconds, said “yes sir,” and set the phone back in its cradle.