Command Authority

13

The new U.S. embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, was on A. I. Sikorsky Street, in a leafy section on the western side of the city. Deep within the walls of the sprawling compound, the CIA station occupied a six-room professional suite on the third floor of the main embassy building. During the day a small cadre of case officers, administrative assistants, and secretaries filled the cubicles and offices, but in the evening the space had a tendency to quiet down. Virtually every weeknight at nine p.m., however, the lights in the small but well-appointed break room flicked on, and a gaggle of mostly middle-aged, mostly white men pulled whiskey and scotch out of a cupboard and sat at one of the break room’s large round tables.

The chief of Kiev Station was a forty-eight-year-old New Jerseyan named Keith Bixby. He ran a sizable staff of case officers here at the embassy, each of whom was tasked with running agents in the Ukrainian government, military, and local businesses, as well as with reaching out to diplomatic personnel from other nations who were themselves stationed in the city.

For many years Kiev Station was given short shrift by Langley for the simple reason that the best and the brightest officers, along with the vast majority of the dollars, went to combating Islamic terrorism, meaning this and other former Soviet republics were relegated to yesterday’s news.

But this had changed, slowly, at first — with the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the reduction in focus on the Middle East in general — and then more quickly, with the ascendance of Valeri Volodin to power in Moscow and his imperialistic aspirations. The former Soviet republics began receiving more focus from Langley, and nowhere was that renewed focus more important than in Kiev.

Even though the CIA was putting resources into Ukraine again, it remained a tough posting for Keith Bixby and his team. The country was divided between the nationalistic and somewhat pro-Western west side of the nation, and the staunchly pro-Russian eastern side of the country. Russia itself was actively meddling in the nation’s affairs, and like a dark cloud, a very real threat of Russian military power being used against the nation hung over everyone’s head.

Keith Bixby had started his career as a young case officer in Moscow, but because of his organization’s focus on Islamic-based terrorism, he had spent the entire past decade in Saudi Arabia, scrambling to learn the lay of the land in a completely different environment and culture from what he was accustomed to. Only nine months earlier had that phase of his career ended, and he was given the top posting in Kiev.

And Kiev was, as far as he was concerned, ground zero in U.S. dealings with Russia.

Sure, COS Moscow would be a more prominent posting, but the Moscow Station chief’s movements were highly controlled and curtailed. Of course, Keith knew there were FSB agents here in Kiev, and they were no doubt monitoring U.S. embassy personnel to the extent they could. But Bixby and his case officers had a lot more mobility around the city and much more access to the cordons of local power than if they had been working in Russia itself, and for this reason he felt Kiev was a better and more important place to serve as COS.

Bixby worked extremely hard at his difficult job, and he’d been getting less than five hours of sleep a night ever since the conflict up north in Estonia, but he rewarded himself every evening by getting together a group of his staff to play Texas-hold-’em poker and drink Jack Daniel’s and Cutty Sark.

As much as he wished he could hang out in a local pub and take in the nightlife here in Kiev, his poker games were with his case officers, and they doubled as one more opportunity to talk shop each day. That wouldn’t be possible in the city, of course, so the office’s boring and antiseptic-smelling break room was the venue for the nightly event.

Some of Bixby’s best case officers were women, which came as no surprise to him, because Mary Pat Foley was known in CIA circles as perhaps the best on-the-ground case officer ever employed by the Agency. But every female case officer on Bixby’s staff had a family, and juggling their difficult jobs along with a domestic life was tough enough without adding on the additional chore of heading back up to the office each evening to play poker with the boss.

Keith and a half-dozen of his staff had been at their table for more than an hour when Ben Herman, the youngest case officer in the station, entered the break room with a folder in his hand.

One of the men at the table looked up from his cards and said, “Ben, if that folder in your hand is work, then get out of here. If it’s full of cash that you’re ready to lose, sit down and I’ll deal you in the next hand.”

The table erupted in laughter; it was funnier after a few shots of Jack, but COS Bixby waved away his subordinate’s comment and said, “You’ve got something you want to show me?”

Ben pulled up a chair. “Nothing earthshaking, but I thought you might be able to help.” The young officer opened the folder and pulled out several eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. Bixby took them and spread them out on the table over the poker chips and cards.

“Where did these come from?”

“I got them from a guy in the Ukrainian Army who got them from a guy in the SSU.” The Security Service of Ukraine was the federal law enforcement arm of the nation’s judicial system, akin to the FBI in the United States. “These photos came from the corruption and organized-crime division.”

The photos were several shots of the same group of six men, all wearing coats and standing in front of a restaurant, smoking cigarettes and talking. They were definitely Slavic in appearance; five of them looked like they were in their late twenties to mid-thirties; one man was much older, perhaps in his late fifties.

Bixby whistled. “Look at these blockheads. OC?” OC was shorthand for organized crime.

Herman reached for a bag of pretzels on the table and grabbed a handful. “Yeah, they think so. This group was photographed meeting with enforcers for the Shali Wanderers, which is a franchise of a Chechen group active here in Kiev.”

Bixby gave Herman a look. “Kid, I didn’t just ship in this morning.”

“Oh… sorry, boss. I count tanks and helicopters. OC isn’t my beat. I’d never heard of the Shali Wanderers before today. I guess I’m not all that familiar with the mafia guys running around Kiev.” Herman had spent nine years in the Marine Corps, and his area of focus was the Ukrainian military.

“No problem.” Bixby looked at the pictures more closely. “Why did SSU send these pictures to the Ukrainian Army?”

“They were running surveillance on the Chechens, and then these guys turned up. They followed them back to the Fairmont Grand Hotel, and realized they had booked the entire top floor for a month. It’s obvious they are OC, but they aren’t local. One of SSU’s crime guys thought these guys looked military, or ex-military, so he sent it over to the Army to see if they recognized any of the faces. They didn’t, so a contact of mine in the Ukrainian Army reached out to me.”

Ben added, “They do look military, don’t they?”

Bixby was still going through the photos. “The younger guys do, that’s for sure. The older dude, not so much.”

Keith passed the pictures around to the other men at the table. At first no one recognized any of the men, but the last man at the table, a senior case officer named Ostheimer, whistled.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“What do you see?” asked Bixby.

“The older dude. I’ve got a name for him, sort of.”

“Spit it out.”

“He’s Russian, I think. They call him Scar.”

“Charming.”

“A couple years ago when I was posted in Saint Petersburg, this guy popped up on the radar. There was a BOLO for him with the local cops, they had a picture and his nickname. As far as OC guys go in this part of the world, he’s done a damn fine job of keeping himself off the radar. Nobody knows his real name. Scar’s gang was wanted for bank robberies and armored-car heists and contract hits on local government officials and businessmen.”

Bixby joked, “I don’t even want to know where his scar is.”

All the men at the table laughed.

Ben Herman said, “I guess since I’m the low man on the totem pole, it’s my job to find out.” He muttered, “For this I got a master’s in international affairs?”

Bixby said, “Fun and games aside, this Scar guy is clearly in charge of these younger men. Look at the pictures. The military dudes are holding doors for him, lighting his cigarette.”

“Could be his security team,” someone suggested.

“Doesn’t look like security to me. Their coats are zipped up, so they aren’t packing heat for defensive purposes, and they aren’t looking out at the street for threats. No. These are hard-charging frontliners. Looks like a squad of ex-Spetsnaz guys or something.”

“And a Russian crime boss is running them?” Ben said with surprise.

“Would be odd,” Bixby admitted.

Ostheimer said, “What’s even stranger is this allegation they are meeting with Chechen mobsters. Those are some strange bedfellows for ex-Spetsnaz types. OC here in Kiev is so entrenched, there are shootouts in the street anytime one goon tries to operate on another’s turf. I don’t understand how the hell some Russian guy can just waltz into town like he owns the place without getting his ass tossed into the Dnieper.”

Ben said, “I’ll send a cable back to Langley to see if anyone knows anything about Scar.”

Ostheimer shook his head. “I checked when I was in Saint Pete. His file was thin. Maybe they’ve got more on him, but I kinda doubt it.”

Bixby handed the pictures back to Ben. “With everything else we’ve got going on, I don’t want anyone getting distracted by this. I’ll make some calls tomorrow and reach out to some of the older Russian hands at Langley and see if that nickname makes anything click with them. A guy his age would have been early thirties in the Wild West days of the nineties. If he was a player in Moscow who survived that shooting gallery, someone might recognize him.”

Bixby drained the rest of his drink and dealt the next hand. He figured he’d go ahead and lose his last fifty bucks quick so he could go home and get some sleep, because he liked to get an early start.

Being COS in Ukraine was a challenging posting, indeed.