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The ethos of the council was to be found in Lincoln’s words, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” It met once a year, by agreement reached in harmless-sounding telephone calls, and in a place of great privacy. In each case the host was one of the wealthier members, who never declined the honor. Members paid their own way to an agreed rendezvous point, after which they became the guests of their host.
In the northwestern corner of Wyoming there is a valley known simply as Jackson Hole, named after the first trapper to have the grit to overwinter there. Bordered on the west by the towering Tetons and on the east by the Gros Ventre range, the valley is sealed in the north by Yellowstone Park. To the south the mountains converge and the Snake River rushes out between them in a canyon of white water.
North of the small ski town of Jackson, Highway 191 runs clear up to Moran Junction past the airport, and then on to Yellowstone. Just beyond the airport is the village of Moose, where a smaller road branches off to take visitors up to Jenny Lake.
West of that highway, in the very foothills of the Tetons, are two lakes: Bradley Lake, served by the torrent of Garnet Canyon, and Taggart Lake, served by Avalanche Canyon. Except for trail hikers the lakes are inaccessible. On the land between the two lakes, a tract backed by the vertical wall of the South Teton, a Washington-based financier called Saul Nathanson had built a hundred-acre vacation ranch.
Its situation granted absolute privacy to the owner and any guests. The land stretched from lake to lake on each side, with the sheer mountain behind. At the front the public trails ran below the level of the ranch, which itself was on a raised plateau.
On September 7, the first guests arrived by agreement at Denver, where they were met by Nathanson’s private Grumman and transported over the mountains to the Jackson airport. Far away from the terminal, they transferred to his helicopter for the five-minute lift to the ranch. The British contingent had gone through Immigration on the East Coast, so they too could bypass the terminal and change planes far from prying eyes.
There were twenty cabins at the ranch, each with two bedrooms and a communal sitting room. The weather being warm and sunny, with a chill only after sundown, many guests chose to sit on the verandahs in front of each cabin.
Food, and it was exquisite, was served in the single large lodge that formed the focal point of the complex. After meals, the tables were cleared and rearranged to permit plenum conferences.
The staff were Nathanson’s own, utterly discreet and brought in for the event. For added security, private guards posing as campers surrounded the ranch on the lower slopes to turn back any stray hikers.
The 1999 conference of the Council of Lincoln lasted five days, and when it was over no one knew that the guests had come, been, and gone.
On his first afternoon, Sir Nigel Irvine unpacked, showered, changed into slacks and a twill shirt, and went to sit on the timber deck in front of the cabin he would share with a former U.S. Secretary of State.
From his vantage point he could see some of his fellow guests stretching their legs. There were pleasant walks between the clumps of fir, birch, and lodgepole pine, and a path down to the edge of each lake.
He caught sight of the former British Foreign Secretary and ex-Secretary-General of NATO Lord Carrington, a spare, birdlike figure walking with the banker Charles Price, one of the most popular and successful of American ambassadors ever to be sent to the Court of St. James’s. Irvine had been SIS chief when Peter Carrington was at the Foreign Office and therefore his boss. The six-foot-four-inch Price towered over the British peer. Further over, their host Saul Nathanson sat on a bench in the sun with American investment banker and former Attorney General Elliot Richardson.
To one side Lord Armstrong, former Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service, was knocking on the door of the cabin where Lady Thatcher was still unpacking.
Another helicopter clattered in toward the landing pad to deposit former President George Bush, who was met by ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. At one of the tables close to the central lodge an aproned waitress brought a pot of tea to another former ambassador, the British Sir Nicholas Henderson, who shared his table and his tea with London financier and banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.
Nigel Irvine glanced at his schedule for the five-day conference. There would be nothing that night. On the next day the membership would as usual break into its three committees, geopolitical, strategic, and economic. They would meet separately for two days. The third would be dedicated to hearing the results of their deliberations and discussing them. Day four would be for plenary sessions. He had been allocated an hour, at his own request, toward the end of that day. The last day would be consigned to further action and recommendations.
In the dense forests along the slopes of the Tetons a lone bull moose, sensing the coming rut, bellowed for a mate. On white-tipped wings an osprey drifted over the Snake, mewing in anger as a bald eagle invaded his fishing ground. It was an idyllic spot, thought the old spymaster, marred only by the black evil in the document he had brought with him fro
m a desktop in Russia.
Vienna, June 1990
THE previous December Ames’s job with External Ops of the Soviet Division had been phased out. Once again he was at a loose end and as far from the 301 files as ever. Then he landed his third job since returning from Rome. It was as branch chief for Czech Operations. But it did not authorize the computer-access codes to unlock the secret heart of the 301—the section containing the descriptions of CIA assets working inside the Soviet Bloc.
Ames protested to Mulgrew. It was unreasonable, he argued. He had once headed the entire counterintelligence desk for that very section. Moreover, he needed to cross-check for CIA assets who, although Russian, had worked in Czechoslovakia in their careers. Mulgrew promised to help if he could. Finally, in May, Mulgrew gave his friend the access code. From then on, at his desk in Czech section, Ames could surf the files until he came up with “Monk—Assets.”
In June 1990 Ames flew to Vienna for another meeting with his longtime handler Vlad, a.k.a. Colonel Vladimir Mechulayev. Since his return to Washington it had been deemed unsafe for him to meet any more Soviet diplomats because of the danger of FBI surveillance. So Vienna it was.
He remained sober long enough to take possession of a huge block of cash and to make Mechulayev ecstatic. He brought with him three descriptions.
One was of a colonel of the army, probably GRU, now in the Defense Ministry in Moscow but recruited in the Middle East in late 1985. Another was of a scientist who lived in a top-security sealed city but had been recruited in California. The third was of a colonel of the KGB, recruited outside the USSR, on the books for the past six years, now inside the Soviet Bloc but not in the USSR, who spoke Spanish.
Within three days, back at the First Chief Directorate’s headquarters building at Yazenevo, the hunt was on.
¯
“DO you not hear her voice upon the night wind, my brothers and sisters? Do you not hear her calling to you? Can you, her children, not hear the voice of our beloved Mother Russia?
“I can hear her, my friends. I hear her sighs through the forests, I hear her sobs across the snows. Why are you doing this to me, she asks. Have I not been betrayed enough? Have I not bled enough for you? Have I not suffered enough, that you should do this to me?
“Why do you sell me like a whore into the hands of foreigners and strangers, who pick upon my aching body as carrion crows ... ?”
The screen erected at the end of the huge communal lodge that formed the main conference center of the ranch was the largest available. The projector stood at the back of the hall.