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“How long?”
“Oh, a few days in London to prepare, then America for a week. After that, I don’t know. Probably not again.”
“Well, I’ll be all right. Plenty to do in the garden. You’ll ring when you can?”
“Of course.”
Then he said: “It mustn’t happen again, you know.”
“Of course not. Now finish your tea.”
Langley, March 1990
IT was the CIA’s Moscow Station that sounded the first alarm. Agent Delphi had switched off. Nothing since the previous December. Jason Monk sat at his desk and pored over the cable traffic as it was decrypted and brought to him. At first he was worried, later frantic.
If Kruglov was still all right, he was breaking all the rules. Why? Twice the Moscow-based CIA had made the appropriate chalk marks in the appropriate places to indicate they had filled a drop with something for Oracle and that he should service that hiding place. Twice the alerts had been ignored. Was he out of town, suddenly posted abroad?
If so, then he should have given the standard reassuring “I’m okay” sign of life. They scoured the usual magazines, looking for the agreed small ad that would constitute an “I’m okay” message or the opposite: “I’m in trouble, help me.” But there was nothing.
By March it was looking as if Oracle was either completely incapacitated by heart attack, other illness, or serious accident. Or dead. Or “taken.”
For Monk, with his suspicious mind, there was an unanswered question. If Kruglov had been taken and interrogated, he would have told all. To resist was futile; it simply prolonged the pain.
Therefore he would have given away the places of the drops and the coded chalk marks that alerted the CIA to the need to pick up a package of information. Why did the KGB not then use those chalk marks to catch an American diplomat in the act? It would have been the obvious thing to do. A triumph for Moscow when they really needed one, for everything else was going America’s way.
The Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was coming apart. Romania had assassinated the dictator Ceaucescu; Poland was gone, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in open revolt, the Berlin Wall torn down the previous November. To catch an American in red-handed espionage in Moscow would have done something to offset the stream of humiliations the KGB was undergoing. And yet nothing.
For Monk it meant one of two things. Either Kruglov’s complete disappearance was an accident that would be explained later, or the KGB was protecting a source.
¯
THE United States is a land rich in many things, and not least of these are nongovernmental organizations, known as NGOs. There are thousands of them. They range from trusts to endowments for research into countless subjects, some of them of mind-numbing obscurity. There are centers for policy studies, think tanks, groups for the promotion of this and that, councils for the advancement of whatever, and foundations almost too numerous to list.
Some are dedicated to research, some to charity, some to discussion; others devote themselves to single-issue propaganda, lobbying, publicity, the enhancement of public awareness of this, or the abolition of the other.
Washington alone plays host to twelve hundred NGOs, and New York has a thousand more. And they all have funds. Some are funded,
in part at least, by tax dollars, others by bequests from those long dead, some by private industry and commerce, others by quixotic, philanthropic, or just plain lunatic millionaires.
They provide nesting roosts for academics, politicians, ex-ambassadors, do-gooders, busybodies, and the occasional maniac. But they all have two things in common. They admit they exist and somewhere have a headquarters. All except one.
Perhaps because of its tiny and closed membership, the quality of that membership, and its utter invisibility, the Council of Lincoln that summer of 1999 was probably the most influential of all.
In a democracy power is influence. Only in the dictatorships can raw power alone exist within the law. Non-elected power in a democracy therefore lies in the ability to influence the elected machine. This may be achieved by the mobilization of public opinion, campaigns in the media, persistent lobbying, or outright financial contributions. But in its purest form such influence may simply be quiet advice to the holders of elected office from a source of unchallenged experience, integrity, and wisdom. It is called “the quiet word.”
The Council of Lincoln, denying its own existence and so small as to be invisible, was a self-sustaining group dedicated to the contemplation of issues of moment, evaluation and discussion of such issues, and a final agreement on a resolution. Based upon the quality of its membership and the ability of those members to have access to the very pinnacles of elected office, the council probably had more real influence than any other NGO or a raft of them put together.
Its character was Anglo-American and its origins in that deep sense of partnership in adversity that goes back to the First World War, although the council only came into being in the early eighties as a result of a dinner in an exclusive Washington club just after the Falklands War.
Membership was by invitation only and confined to those felt by the other members to be possessed of certain qualities. Among these were long experience, utter probity, sagacity, complete discretion, and proven patriotism.
That apart, those who had served in public office had to be retired from that office so that there could be no question of special pleading, while those in the private sector could remain at the helms of their corporations. Not all members were privately rich by any means, but at least two in the private sector were estimated to be personally worth a billion dollars.
The private sector covered experience in commerce, industry, banking, finance, and science, while the public sector included statesmanship, diplomacy, and the civil service.
In the summer of 1999 there were six British members including one woman, and thirty-four Americans including five women.
By the nature of the experience of the world that they were expected to bring to the collegial discussions, they tended to be in middle to late-middle age. Few had less than sixty years experience of life and the oldest was a very fit eighty-one.