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Forgetting the golden rule of Machiavelli, the CIA fired him but left him running around for two years. Finally the CIA told the FBI, which hit the roof, put Howard under their own surveillance, then screwed up. They lost him, but he had seen them. Within two days, in September 1985, Howard was with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, which passed him via Havana to Moscow.
A check revealed Howard could have betrayed three of the missing agents, maybe even six. In fact he did betray the only three he knew about, but they had already been given away by Ames the previous June. All three were double betrayed.
Another lead came from the Russians themselves. Desperate to protect their mole, the KGB was mounting a huge diversion and disinformation campaign; anything to turn the CIA in the wrong direction. They succeeded. An apparently genuine leak in East Berlin revealed that some codes had been broken and signal traffic intercepted.
The codes were used by a major CIA covert transmitter at Warrenton, Virginia. For a year Warrenton and its staff were gone through with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing, no hint of a code break. If there had been a code break, the KGB would clearly have learned of yet other things, but on these they had taken no action. Therefore, the codes were intact.
The third seed the KGB sedulously planted was that they had done some brilliant detective work. This was met by amazing complacency at Langley where one report suggested that “every operation has within it the seeds of its own destruction.” In other words, fourteen agents had all suddenly decided to behave like idiots.
Some in Langley did not fall for the complacency. One was Carey Jordan, another was Gus Hathaway. At a lower level, learning through the internal grapevine of the problems tearing his division apart, was Jason Monk.
A check was made of the 301 files where all the details were stored. The findings were horrific. In all, 198 people had access to the 301 files. It was a terrifying figure. If you are deep inside the USSR with your life on the line, the last thing you need is for 198 complete strangers to have access to your file.
CHAPTER 6
PROFESSOR KUZMIN SCRUBBED UP IN THE EXAMINATION room of the mortuary below the Second Medical Institute, facing with little pleasure his third postmortem of the day.
“Who’s next?” he called to his assistant as he dried off with an inadequate paper towel.
“Number one-five-eight,” said his helper.
“Details.”
“White Caucasian male, late middle age. Cause of death unknown, identity unknown.”
Kuzmin groaned. Why do I bother, he asked himself. Another tramp, another. hobo, another derelict whose bits, when he had finished, would perhaps assist the medical students in the academy three floors up to understand what protracted abuse could do to human organs, whose skeleton might even end up in an anatomy class.
Moscow, like any major city, produced its nightly, weekly, and monthly harvest of cadavers but fortunately only a minority required a postmortem or the professor and all his colleagues in forensic pathology would have ceased to cope.
The majority in any city are the “natural causes,” all those who die at home or in the hospital of old age or any one of a hundred terminal and predicted causes. The infirmaries and the local doctors could
sign the certificates for those.
Then came the “natural causes, unforeseen,” usually fatal heart attacks, and again the hospitals to which the unfortunates were taken could cope with the basic, and usually very basic, bureaucratic formalities.
After these unfortunates came the accidents: domestic, industrial, and automobile. Moscow had two more categories that had grown massively over the years: freezing to death (in winter) and suicides. The numbers ran into thousands.
Bodies recovered from the river, identified or not, went into three categories. Fully clothed, no alcohol in the system: suicide; clothed, hugely drunk: accident; swim shorts: accidentally drowned while swimming.
Then came the homicides. These went to the police, detective branch, which turned to Professor Kuzmin. Even these postmortems were usually a formality. The great majority, as in all cities, were the “domestics.” Eighty percent happened inside the home or the perpetrator was a family member. The police usually had them within hours, and the postmortem simply confirmed what was already known—Ivan had stabbed his wife—and helped the courts bring in a quick verdict.
After these came the bar brawls and gangland killings; in the latter case he knew the police conviction rate was a miserable three percent. Cause of death, however, was no problem; a bullet in the brain is a bullet in the brain. Whether the investigators ever found the hitman (probably not) was not the professor’s problem.
In all the above, thousands and thousands a year, one thing was certain. The authorities knew who the dead man was. Occasionally they had a John Doe. Cadaver 158 was a John Doe. Professor Kuzmin drew on his gauze mask, flexed his fingers inside the rubber gloves, and approached with a flicker of interest as his assistant drew back the sheet.
Ah, he thought, odd. Even interesting. The stench that would have caused a layman to gag at once left him unmoved. He was used to it. Scalpel in hand he circled the long table, staring at the damaged corpse. Very odd.
The head seemed intact apart from the empty eye sockets, but he could see that this damage was the work of birds. The man had lain for about six days undiscovered in the woods near the Minsk Highway. Below the pelvis the legs seemed discolored, as with age and putrefaction, but undamaged. Between thorax and genitals there was hardly a square inch not black with massive bruising.
Putting down the scalpel, he turned the body over. Same at the back. Rolling the corpse back again, he took his scalpel and began to cut giving his running commentary into the turning tape recorder. Later this tape would enable him to write up his report for the goons in Homicide down at Petrovka. He began with the date: August 2, 1999.
Washington, February 1986
IN the middle of the month to the joy of Jason Monk and the considerable surprise of his superiors in SE Division Major Pyotr Solomin made contact. He wrote a letter.
Wisely, he did not even attempt to contact any Westerner in Moscow and certainly not the American Embassy. He wrote to the address Monk had given him in East Berlin.
The giving of the address at all was a risk but a calculated one. If Solomin had gone to the KGB to betray the safe house, he would have had some impossible questions to answer. The interrogators would have known he would never have been given such an address unless he had agreed to work for the CIA. If he protested that he had only been pretending to work for the CIA, that would have been worse.