The Deceiver (33 page)

He opened his attaché case and passed McCready a slim file. There were five sheets in the file, each with a photograph and a name. The first picture had beneath it
Donald Maclean
, and the second
Guy Burgess
. Both moles were by then dead and buried in their adopted Moscow. The third sheet showed the familiar face and name of Kim Philby, who was then still alive in Moscow. The fourth had the thin, ascetic features and the name of Anthony Blunt, who was then disgraced in England. McCready turned to the fifth page.

The photo was very old. It showed a thin young man with wild wavy hair and large, owlish glasses. Beneath the photo were two words.
John Cairncross
. McCready leaned back and sighed.

“Bloody hell, him all along.”

He knew the name. Cairncross had been a senior civil servant during and after the war, senior despite his youth. He had served in a variety of capacities—private secretary to War Cabinet Minister Lord Hankey; in signals intelligence at Bletchly Park, in the Treasury and the War Office. He had had access to nuclear secrets in the late forties. In the early fifties he had come under suspicion, conceded nothing, and been eased out. Nothing could be proved, so he was allowed to move on to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. By 1986, he was in retirement in France.

The Fifth Man. Keepsake had made good on his promise. The thirty-five-year hunt was over, and no more innocent men need be accused.

“Sam,” asked Gorodov mildly, “where exactly are we going?”

“My horoscope,” replied McCready, “says I am to travel west today. Yours, too.”

Thornton parked again in the trees of Gorki Park, changed places with one of the men in the rear, and went to work. The other man sat in the front pretending to be the chauffeur. No one would care to interfere with a Central Committee member’s limousine, even if they saw it. Senior Party members always shrouded the rear of their cars with inner curtains, and these were now drawn. Thornton worked on his client—he always referred to those he made up as his clients—by the sunlight that filtered through the curtains.

On went the thin, inflatable undervest to give the slimmer man the sturdy bulk of Rabbi Birnbaum. Then the white shirt, black trousers, tie, and jacket. Thornton affixed the rich gray beard and moustache, dyed the client’s hair to the same color, and appended the curling gray ringlets of the orthodox rabbi to his temples. With the addition of the black homburg and single handgrip, Rabbi Birnbaum had been recreated exactly as he had arrived the previous day—except that he was a different man. Finally, the car was changed back to a British Embassy vehicle.

The rabbi was dropped off at the entrance to the National Hotel, where he had a sustaining lunch, paid in U.S. dollars, and took a cab to the airport after lunch. He was booked on the afternoon flight to London, his ticket showing that he was connecting to New York.

Thornton drove the car back into the British Embassy compound with his other client crouched under the rug in the back. He went to work again almost at once, with an identical ginger wig and moustache, foundation creams, colorants, tinted contact lenses, and tooth stain. Ten minutes after Denis Gaunt, hot and itchy under the ginger wig he had worn all day for the benefit of the KGB, drove back in his Montego, the other man left for the airport in the Jaguar, driven by a real chauffeur. Within an hour Thornton, transformed into the Queen’s Messenger, was himself driven to Scheremetyevo by Barry Martins.

The rabbi drew the usual curious glances, but his papers were in order, and he was passed through the formalities in fifteen minutes and into the departure lounge. He sat and read his Talmud, occasionally murmuring prayers in an unintelligible mutter.

The man in the ginger wig and moustache was almost escorted to the door of the departure lounge, so numerous were the KGB team trying to ensure he neither passed nor received a message or package.

Last to arrive was the Queen’s Messenger, his attaché case chained to his left wrist. This time, Thornton’s precious workbox was in his own suitcase; he did not need anyone to carry it for him, as his case could not be searched.

Denis Gaunt remained inside the embassy. Three days later, he would be exfiltrated when another SIS man posing as a messenger would enter Moscow and pass Gaunt a passport in the same name as his own—Mason. At precisely the identical moment, two Masons would pass out through the controls at different points in the concourse, and British Airways would be briefed to board two Masons for the price of one.

But that afternoon the passengers for London were boarded on time, and the British Airways flight cleared Soviet air space at five-fifteen. Shortly after that, the rabbi lumbered to his feet and walked down to the smoking section, and said to the man in the ginger wig and moustache: “Nikolai, my friend, you are now in the West.”

Then Sam McCready bought champagne for them both, and for the Queen’s Messenger. The scam had worked because McCready had noticed that he, Gaunt, and Gorodov were all of the same height and build.

With the gain in time caused by flying west, they landed at Heathrow just after seven. A team from Century House, alerted by Martins from Moscow, was there to meet them. They were enveloped as they left the aircraft and spirited away.

As a concession, Timothy Edwards allowed McCready to take Nikolai Gorodov to his own apartment in Abingdon Villas for the evening.

“I’m afraid, Colonel, the real debriefing must start in the morning. A very agreeable country house has been prepared. You will want for nothing, I assure you.”

“Thank you. I understand,” said Gorodov.

It was just after ten that evening when Joe Roth arrived, summoned by a phone call from McCready. He found two SIS heavies in the hallway and two more in the corridor outside McCready’s modest flat, which surprised him.

McCready answered his ring on the doorbell, appearing in slacks and sweater, a glass of whiskey in his hand.

“Thanks for coming, Joe. Come on in. There’s someone I have wanted you to meet for a long time. You’ll never know how much.”

He led the way into the sitting room. The man at the window turned and smiled.

“Good evening, Mr. Roth,” said Gorodov. “Good to meet you at last.”

Roth stood as if paralyzed. Then he slumped into a chair and took McCready’s proffered whiskey. Gorodov seated himself opposite Roth.

“You’d better tell it,” said McCready to the Russian. “You know it better than I.”

The Russian sipped his drink as he pondered where to begin.

“Project Potemkin started eight years ago,” he said. “The original idea came from a junior officer, but General Drozdov took it up personally. It became his personal baby. The aim was to denounce a senior CIA officer as a Soviet plant, but in a manner so convincing and with such a wealth of apparently fireproof evidence that no one could reasonably not be taken in.

“The long-term aim was to sow years of feuding inside the Agency and thus destroy morale among the staff for a decade and wreck the relationship with the SIS in Britain.

“At first, no particular officer was the target, but after half a dozen were considered, the choice fell on Calvin Bailey. There were two reasons for this. One was that we knew he was not a much-liked man inside the Agency because of his personal manner. The second was that he had served in Vietnam, a suitable place for a possible recruitment.

“Calvin Bailey was spotted as a CIA agent in Vietnam purely as routine. You know we all try to identify each other’s staffers, and when we do, their movements and progress up the promotions ladder are carefully noted. Sometimes a lack of promotion may sow resentment, which can be exploited by a cunning recruiter. Well, this you know—we all do it.

“Also like the CIA, the KGB throws nothing away. Every tiny scrap of information, every fragment, is carefully kept and stored. Drozdov’s breakthrough came when he was once again examining the material that came to us from the Vietnamese after the final fall of Saigon in 1975. Most of your papers were burned, but in the confusion some survived. One mentioned a certain Nguyen Van Troc, who had worked for the Americans.

“That paper was the end for Van Troc. He and his cousin were picked up—they had not managed to escape. The cousin was executed, but Van Troc, although brutally interrogated for many months, was finally sent to a North Vietnamese slave labor camp. That was where Drozdov found him, still alive in 1980. Under torture, he confessed he had worked for Calvin Bailey inside the Viet Cong.

“The Hanoi government agreed to cooperate, and the photo session was set up. Van Troc was taken from the camp, fattened on good food, and dressed in the uniform of a colonel of Hanoi’s intelligence arm. The photos were taken of him enjoying tea with other officers just after the invasion of Cambodia. Three separate tea-servers were used, all Hanoi agents, and then sent to the West with their photos. After that, Van Troc was liquidated.

“One of the stewards posed as a boat-person and showed his proud possession to any British officer in Hong Kong who would look at it. Finally, it was confiscated and sent to London—as planned.”

“We sent a copy to Langley,” said McCready, “just as a courtesy. It seemed to have no value.”

“Drozdov already knew Bailey had been involved in the Phoenix Program,” Gorodov resumed. “He had been spotted by our
Rezi
dent
in Saigon, a man posing as a Swedish importer of liquor for the foreign community. And Drozdov learned that Bailey had been at My Lai when Bailey gave evidence at the court-martial of that young officer. You are very open with your public records in America. The KGB scours them avidly.

“Anyway, it seemed that a likely scenario for a change of allegiance in Bailey had been established. His 1970 visit to Tokyo had been noticed and noted—purely routine. Drozdov only had to brief Orlov to say that he, Drozdov himself, had been in Tokyo on a certain date to take over the running of an America CIA renegade, and when you checked—presto—the same dates. Of course, Drozdov was not there at all in 1970. That was added later.

“From that point on, the case against Bailey was built up, brick by brick. Pyotr Orlov was chosen as the disinformation agent about 1981; he has been in training and rehearsal ever since. Urchenko, when he foolishly came back and before he died, provided valuable information on exactly how you Americans treat defectors. Orlov could prepare himself to avoid the traps, beat the polygraph, and always tell you what you wanted to hear. Not too much, but enough that when you checked it out, it fit.

“After Drozdov picked Bailey as the victim, Bailey went under intensive scrutiny. Wherever he went, it was noted. After he rose in rank and began to travel to Europe and elsewhere to visit the out-stations, the bank accounts began. Bailey would be spotted in a European city, and immediately a bank account would be opened, always in a name he might choose, like that of his wife’s married sister or his maternal grandmother.

“Drozdov prepared an actor, a dead ringer for Bailey, to fly at a moment’s notice to open these accounts so that the bank teller would later recognize Bailey as the client. Later, large sums were deposited in these accounts, always in cash and always by a man with a strong Central European accent.

“Information learned from a variety of sources—loose talk, radio intercepts, phone taps, technical publications (and some of your American technical publications are incredibly open)—was attributed to Bailey. Even conversations in your own embassy in Moscow are tapped—did you know that? No? Well, more of that later.

“What Drozdov did was change the dates. Pieces of secret intelligence that we did not learn until the early eighties were, according to Orlov, acquired in the mid-seventies and attributed to Calvin Bailey. All lies, but cunning. And of course, Orlov memorized it all.

“Triumphs secured by the KGB against the CIA were attributed to Bailey. CIA operations that went sour were attributed to Bailey. And always the dates were changed so that it looked as if we had found out earlier than we possibly could have—without a CIA traitor, that is.

“But two years ago, Drozdov still lacked something. He needed inside-Langley gossip, nicknames known only inside the building—your own professional name of Hayes, Mr. Roth. Then Edward Howard defected to Russia, and Drozdov had it all. He could even name hitherto unknown successes secured by Bailey and rehearse Orlov to say they had been permitted by the KGB to secure the promotion of their agent, Sparrowhawk. Of course, these successes were not permitted by Moscow—they were hard won by Bailey.

“Finally, Orlov was allowed to come over, in a manner so bizarre that he could later claim he feared he would be stopped and betrayed by Sparrowhawk if he did it any other way. For the same reason, he had to go to the Americans, not the British. The British would have questioned him about other things.

“Then he came and denounced two KGB agents just before they were liquidated. It was all pretimed. But it looked as if there were a leak in Washington, feeding his debriefing details back to Moscow. When the customer was ready for the bait, he finally came clean with news of a Soviet mole high in the CIA. No?”

Roth nodded. He looked haggard. “That assassination attempt against Orlov at Alconbury. Why?” he asked.

“That was Drozdov overinsuring. He did not know about me, of course. He just wanted to pile on a bit more evidence. The killer was one of the best—a very dangerous lady. She was briefed to wound, not kill, then make her escape.”

There was silence in the room. Joe Roth stared at his drink. Then he rose. “I must go,” he said shortly.

McCready accompanied him out into the passage and down the stairs. In the hall he clapped the American on the back.

“Cheer up, Joe. Hell, everyone in this game makes mistakes. My Firm has made some real beauties in the past. Look on the bright side. You can go back to the embassy and cable the DCI that everything’s worked out. Bailey’s in the clear.”

“I think I’ll fly back and tell him myself,” muttered Roth, and left.

McCready escorted him to the door of the building, puzzled by his friend’s silence. When he returned to the door of his apartment, the two bodyguards parted to let him through and closed it after him. In the sitting room, he found Gorodov sitting staring at a copy of the
Evening Standard
that he had been glancing through while he waited. Without a word, he flicked it across the table and pointed to a series of paragraphs on page five.