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The light faded to gray but he could still hear the voice repeating words he could not understand. “ ‘Ave a beer, ‘ave a beer ...” Then the lights went out forever.
Washington, June 1985
TWO months almost to the day after he got his first cash payment of $50,000, Aldrich Ames, in a single afternoon, destroyed almost the entire SE Division of the Ops Directorate of the CIA.
Just before lunch, having raided the top secret 301 files, he swept seven pounds of classified documents and cable traffic off his desk and into two plastic shopping bags. With these he walked down the labyrinthine corridors to the elevators, rode to the ground floor, and let himself out through the turnstiles with his laminated ID card. No guard paused to ask what was in the bags. Climbing into his car in the huge parking lot, he drove the twenty minutes to Georgetown, the elegant section of Washington renowned for its European-style restaurants.
He arrived at Chadwick’s, a bar and restaurant under the K Street Freeway on the waterfront, and met the contact designated for him by Colonel Androsov, who as the KGB Rezident knew he himself would probably have been tailed by the FBI watchers. The contact was an ordinary Soviet diplomat called Chuvakhin.
To the Russian Ames handed over what he had. He never even demanded a price. When it came it would be enormous, the first of many that would make him a millionaire. The Russians, normally stingy with valuable hard-currency dollars, never even haggled after that. They knew they had hit the mother lode.
From Chadwick’s the bags went to the embassy and thence to the Yazenevo headquarters of the First Chief Directorate. There the analysts could not believe their eyes.
The coup made Androsov an instant star and Ames the most vital asset in the firmament. The FCD’s commanding general, Vladimir Kryuchkov, originally a snoop put into the FCD by the ever-suspicious Andropov but since risen to higher things, at once ordered the formation of a top-secret group to be detached from all other tasks and assigned only to handle the Ames product. Ames was code-named Kolokol, meaning Bell, and the task force became the Kolokol Group.
In those shopping bags were des
criptions of fourteen agents, almost the SE Division’s entire array of assets within the USSR. The actual names were not included, but they did not need to be.
Any counterintelligence detective, told that there is a mole inside his own network and told that the man was recruited in Bogotá, then worked in Moscow, and is now in service in Lagos, would work it out pretty fast. Only one career will match those postings. A check of the records usually suffices.
A senior CIA officer later calculated that forty-five anti-KGB operations, virtually the CIA’s entire menu, collapsed after the summer of 1985. Not a single top agent working for the CIA whose name had been on the 301 files continued to function after the spring of 1986.
¯
JOCK Macdonald’s first port of call on arriving in the late afternoon at Heathrow was the headquarters building of the SIS at Vauxhall Cross. He was tired, although he had dared to take a catnap on the plane, and the notion of going to his club for a bath and a real sleep was tempting. The flat he and his wife, still in Moscow, retained in Chelsea was not available, being let to others.
But he wanted the file in the briefcase still attached to his wrist under lock and key inside the HQ building before he could relax. The Service car that had met him at Heathrow dropped him in front of the green-glass and sandstone monster on the south bank of the Thames that now housed the Service since its move from shabby old Century House seven years earlier.
He penetrated the security systems at the entrance, assisted by the eager young probationer who had accompanied him from the airport, and finally lodged the file in the safe of the head of Russia Division. His colleague had welcomed him warmly but with some curiosity.
“Drink?” asked Jeffrey Marchbanks, indicating what appeared to be a wood-paneled filing cabinet but which both men knew contained a bar.
“Good idea. Been a long day, and a rough one. Scotch.”
Marchbanks opened the cabinet door and contemplated his repertoire. Macdonald was a Scot and took the brew of his ancestors neat. The divisional head poured a double tot of the Macallan, with no ice, and handed it over.
“Knew you were coming of course, but not why. Tell me.”
Macdonald narrated his story from the beginning.
“It must be a hoax, of course,” said Marchbanks at last.
“On the face of it, yes,” agreed Macdonald. “But it must be the most unsubtle bloody hoax I’ve ever heard of. Who’s the hoaxer?”
“Komarov’s political enemies, one supposes.”
“He’s got enough of them,” said Macdonald. “But what a way to present it. Damn well asking for it to be thrown away unread. It was only a fluke young Gray found it.”
“Well, the next step is to read it. You’ve read it, I suppose?”
“All last night. As a political manifesto, it’s ... unpleasant.”
“In Russian, of course?”
“Yes.”
“Mmmm. I suspect my Russian won’t be up to it. We’ll need a translation.”