The Miernik Dossier (32 page)

In the end, my training brought me around to the conclusion that Miernik was, in fact, an agent. There was no other rational explanation for many of the things he did: the book code, the contact with Sasha Kirnov, the heavy-handed dramatization of his plight, the expertise with weapons, the mixture of self-revelation in unimportant matters and obsessive secrecy in others. I never entirely got rid of the instinctive feeling that he was genuine, and therefore innocent. But in a conflict between instinct and what appears to be objective evidence, the latter must always win.

In order to go on with what I was doing to Miernik, I had to believe that he was an enemy. Otherwise my activity, for all its surface of cleverness and technique, was stupid. My conclusion that Miernik’s behavior confirmed our suspicions was not—as I believed it to be—a return to objectivity. It was a ffight from it. My change of heart turned me (and, to the extent my reporting influences its judgment, turned Headquarters) away from a search for the truth. Everything after that was an attempt to achieve operational results.

All the evidence said to us: “Yes, Miernik is a Soviet agent.” All the evidence, that is, which we saw fit to consider. Existing simultaneously with the information that confirmed our suspicions was a second body of evidence, like a planet identical to Earth on the other side of the sun, which just as conclusively demonstrated that our suspicions were incorrect. We hadn’t the technique to see it. This is no one’s fault; it is in the nature of our equipment.

What we overlooked was this:
there was no purpose in what Miernik did.
His behavior from beginning to end was inconsistent with the simplest rules of tradecraft. Leave aside for a moment all the thoughts we put into his mind and into the minds of the Soviet service we assumed was handling him.

Concentrate on this: why, if the Soviets wanted to provide an extremely sensitive operation like the ALF with a white Communist as principal agent, would they choose to send him into the Sudan in a Cadillac with an American agent, a British agent, and a Sudanese aristocrat who had every reason to be hostile to anything that threatened the established order? Why expose him—virtually confirm his identity—to such an array of enemies? Why not just drop him into the desert on a moonlit night?

For that matter, why insert a KGB man into a highrisk situation like the one in which the ALF operated? His capture guaranteed the very thing the Soviets presumably would have wanted to avoid at all costs: confirmation that they were equipping and controlling the guerrillas. Even if they were too dense to realize that the ALF could not succeed and would eventually be swept up by the Sudanese, they must have seen that the presence of a Polish principal agent was unnecessary (they had perfectly adequate control through Ahmed and Qemal and their radio link) and unbelievably insecure.

I am going to say a very harsh thing that is directed as much (or more) against myself as against all you people who sit inside, making the plans that I carry out. /
think we ran Miernik as we did primarily for the fun of it.
We have come to look on our work, in the field at least, largely as a sport. Miernik provided an opportunity to match wits with the opposition. We knew from the start that we would win: we had physical control of their alleged agent, we had access to the Sudanese police and military, we had penetrated the ALF. All the opposition had was Miernik and a bunch of deluded tramps who couldn’t think for themselves or maintain decent security. It was a chance not just to beat the Russians for the umptyumpth straight time, it was an opportunity to humiliate the bastards. We would not have been human if we hadn’t seized this opportunity.

It cost Miernik (not to mention Firecracker and sixty other Arabs) his life.

When I found Miernik hanging on that cross with his scrotum in his mouth I saw in my mind’s eye all the complex machinery that had produced this simple result. It was our questions about Miernik (questions formulated by the best and most honest minds of a great nation) that drove Miernik to what he undoubtedly would have called his Golgotha. An illiterate tribesman with a knife provided Miernik with a final opportunity for the cheap dramatics that embarrassed me into suspecting him in the first place. We didn’t actually send him out to be killed. His death arose from a misunderstanding. Miernik’s murder is not, technically, on our heads. In fact, the man we sent into the desert wasn’t Miernik at all— that person was a creature of our imagination built out of spare parts left over from our previous experiences with wily Poles and sinister Russians. The real Miernik was that carcass on the cross, clumsy and ridiculous even in death, with the wounds he tried to show me at last made visible.

5. Despite his obvious reservations, Christopher has continued to operate with his normal loyalty and efficiency. He has obtained Miernik’s diary (transmitted herewith for translation and analysis), and he has intervened with Zofia Miernik with a view toward making her available for a full debriefing by the Geneva station. In order to provide Miss Miernik with an incentive for cooperation, Christopher has been instructed to tell her that our interviews are a normal procedure preliminary to granting her status as an immigrant to the United States under the Polish quota. Christopher had suggested that Miss Miernik be granted immediate citizenship under a special congressional bill, but he is now persuaded that the interests of the government, and those of Miss Miernik, will be better served through the quieter process of ordinary immigration.

88.  P
ERSONAL LETTER TO
C
HRISTOPHER FROM THE CHIEF OF HIS OPERATIONAL DIVISION
.

12 August

Dear Paul:

There are a good many things I want to say to you that are better said in a personal letter than in an official communication. I hope that you will read this note patiently and with an open mind—and with some awareness of the value I place on our friendship and the high regard in which you are held by the company as a whole.

First of all, I think (and so does everyone else) that you did an absolutely first-class job in connection with Miernik and the ALF. Knowing your feelings about this assignment, I hesitated a long time before writing up a proposal that you be decorated for your work. I suspect that you do not want recognition of this sort, in this particular case, but all here agree that you richly deserve it, and perhaps in later years you will look more kindly on your medal. (Not that you’ll ever actually look on it—after it’s awarded it will be locked up forever in the Director’s safe along with all the others earned by men like you.)

All of us here have considered very carefully the reservations you expressed to Bill concerning the mistake you think we made about Miernik. It was an eloquent and persuasive statement. I do not for a moment discard the possibility that your judgment is correct. If it is true that we shoved Miernik toward a useless death out of a misunderstanding of his role, then we have a great deal to be sorry for. However, I believe that the evidence is sufficiently weighty on the other side of the question to merit
your
keeping open the possibility that Miernik was exactly what we suspected him to be.

I will not review all the bits and pieces you already know about, although I think you should give some consideration to such things as his being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time (with a radio homing device in his camera) to be picked up by the ALF.

(We do have information from a sensitive source in Warsaw that a colonel in the Polish intelligence service—the man in charge of their part of the ALF operation—was demoted
at the request of the Russians three days after the ALF was destroyed and Miernik got himself killed.
Moreover, on the day of Miernik’s contact with Firecracker [Qemal], the Soviet transmitter in Dar es Salaam made no fewer than six attempts to raise their agent “Richard” in coded broadcasts to the ALF. They got no answer. If Miernik was not Richard,” then where was the real “Richard”? The Sudanese scoured the desert for this elusive character, but never found him. Isn’t it possible that
you
found him, hanging on that cross?)

I would like to tell you about Miernik’s diary, which is available to us thanks to your good work, and which we have had translated. It is a remarkable document. It reveals a man torn between two parts of his nature. One part is the one you came to believe in so strongly—the sensitive, intelligent, ugly, and misunderstood Miernik. The other part, less specifically drawn, but nevertheless very easy to see between the lines, is the one we believe to be the “real” Miernik.

After reading the diary, there is no question in my mind that he was an agent, and an exceptionally clever one. This conclusion is not based on any specific confession of Miernik’s, but rather on the style and tone of what he wrote. The diary is a chart of his inner thoughts. The dominant thought was a fear of discovery, a suspicion of the motives of everyone he came in contact with, a determination to do his duty however distasteful he found it. If you wish, you can read the whole thing the next time you’re home; I think that doing so would make you feel better—but I think, too, that you should put a little time between yourself and the events that have so disturbed you before you sit down with the diary. The file cards carried by Miernik are a detailed rundown on every aspect of the country and its leading personalities. It is impossible to explain why he would compile such data in the absence of an operational purpose.

Whether Miernik was or was not the agent sent out by our friends in Moscow to case-officer the ALF is, in reality, beside the point. We could not foresee that events would develop as they did, but in the end the Sudanese dealt with the ALF in a way that made Miernik’s presence irrelevant. There was some revulsion here over the methods used by the Sudanese army and police: all that killing really was unnecessary and counterproductive. The fact that Firecracker was killed out of cardessness was particularly hard to take. We felt that we owed him something better than that. The Sudanese not unnaturally decided to keep the whole affair quiet, so the idea we had for a really embarrassing exposure of Moscow’s hand in Africa went by the boards. Personally, I think this is just as well: the heroic death of the ALF martyrs was more likely to be an inspiration than a discouragement to other potential terrorists.

You may read the foregoing paragraph as confirmation of your belief that your own assignment was without value. Far from it: we wanted to cover all bets, and you covered Miernik in a style that few could equal. I believe we had the right man, did the right thing, and produced the right results. That’s all that matters. Forget Miernik and go on to something else. You have a brilliant professional future before you. Let’s get on with it.

I can understand why you want to avoid any further reporting on the people who were with you in Sudan. As Bill has already told you, we think you should drift out of these relationships as naturally as possible and as soon as possible for security reasons. We have some residual curiosity about Ilona Bentley. There’s no question that she fingered Miernik, although the results were not what she expected—and maybe not what the Russians expected, either. We taped a pretty hysterical encounter between her and her Soviet case officer, a fellow named Kutosov who operates out of Paris. She accused the Soviets of having murdered Miernik. Kutosov denied it, of course, and blamed it on the stupidity of natives. And on us. They’ve guessed that Firecracker belonged to us, and they naturally conclude that we put him up to the killing of Miernik. Bentley may even believe this, for all we know. As nearly as we can make out, the Soviets recruited her around 1957, promising special treatment and perhaps even release for a Hungarian she knew (knew in the biblical sense) in return for her cooperation. After she got involved, she grew to like the work for its own sake. Kutosov is still running her on a variety of low-grade operations, according to our cousins in London. We don’t imagine that she’ll hold up for very much longer, considering her emotional pattern and the fact that she’s thoroughly blown to half the services in the world.

If I were you, I’d abstain from any more quick tours of Czechoslovakia. The Czech officer commanding the area of the frontier where you crossed over with Zofia defected a couple of weeks ago. His superiors began to wonder where he was getting all his money. Among the things he told the debriefers was this: Sasha Kirnov was shot dead by the KGB man, Shigalov, in the woods behind you as you made your way across the frontier. There are any number of ingenious theories as to why this was done. The most probable one is that the Soviets thought Kirnov had been doubled. He was in contact with a third-country agent in Vienna named Heinz Tanner who had been co-opted by the British. And one of our people in South America had been seeing a lot of Kirnov socially, trying to set him up for defection or recruitment. Our fellow had no luck. Neither, in the end, did Sasha.

We hope to see you before much longer. Betty still wonders when you’ll find the right girl and has a whole platoon of prospective brides lined up in anticipation of your next visit to Washington. If I were you, I’d leave all that for old age. If I have anything to do with it, you’re going to be too busy for a family for a long time to come.

Best regards,

J
ACK

89.  F
ROM THE DEBRIEFING OF
Z
OFIA
M
IERNIK
.

The months have gone by, and now we never speak of what happened in Sudan. It’s curious how little difference Tadeusz’s absence makes. When Father died, there was a hole in the world. Tadeusz left no trace of himself. Perhaps I’m older and more used to things. One does get used to things, I’ve found.

I don’t even have a photograph of my brother. I suppose the only pictures of him in existence are in the files of the Polish police; even Tadeusz couldn’t escape their cameras. He used to say that the police alone can certify that one is alive, with their passports and identity cards. I can certify that he is dead. I have a witness in Paul Christopher, and I still have Tadeusz’s ashes in their urn. I keep them at the back of the closet. There seemed to be no point in burying them in some Swiss cemetery that I would never visit. This way I am obliged to think of him every time I open the door to take down a dress. Tadeusz doesn’t haunt me. God knows where his ghost has gone—back to the Polish woods where our mother was killed, perhaps.