The Double Game

25

“She’s jealous, by the way, that girl you’re calling Litzi.”

It was an odd way for Humphries to begin, but I could hardly let it pass without comment.

“Jealous of you?”

She shook her head, frowning at the absurdity.

“Of you, and of what you know. But she must know things, too. You have to know at least part of the picture to be jealous of those who know the rest. And that’s where your colleague is now. Her face was broadcasting it from the moment you walked in the door.”

“And you know this how?”

“From more than forty years of observing other people just like her, in a business where what you knew defined your status. Reading files teaches you to read people, believe it or not.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

I’d brought the folder from the Mercedes, which turned out to be a mistake. She reached over and nimbly snatched it from beside me on the chair. Opening it, she flicked through the pages and sighed when she saw the Le Carre passage.

“Spare me the goddamned Connie Sachs crap, if you don’t mind.”

“But I didn’t-”

“No sense in denying it. I can see it in your stupid mooning face, the star-struck look of the devoted reader who thinks he’s finally found the real thing. Well, get it out of your head. The real Connie was some MI5 gal, Millicent Bagot. She died four years ago. Look it up, if that’s what you’re into. But I don’t come from a book, and no one ever wrote me into one. Letting Newsweek write that load of PR rubbish about the Hargraves case was a mistake, but no one asked me, of course. None of the old Agency spooks who wrote novels even knew who I was, and that’s the way I preferred it.”

“And what did you know about them?”

“Most of the time I only knew them by their cover names. It helped me stay objective when it came time to evaluate their reports. I briefed a few of them, of course, on paper anyway. Supplied them with all kinds of useful items, which they promptly forgot the moment they were in the field, in favor of their so-called instinct. It’s like when a crop scientist tests the soil to come up with the perfect formula for what to plant and how to tend it, only to have a bunch of stupid plowboys in heavy boots trample everything to mush, thinking they know better. Of course later, when they’re growing apples where they should have planted peaches, they bitch and moan when everything fails and ask why no one ever warned them. That’s what it was like being in research.”

She sipped her wine and smoothed her skirt, glaring at me as if I were another blinkered fool who would ignore her advice.

“So what have you been able to learn?” she asked. “What have you discovered?”

Whoa, now. Who was supposed to be getting information from this session, my handler or me? Was this going to turn into a face-to-face version of a dead drop, with Humphries reporting my latest findings?

“I’m the one who’s here for information.”

“Of course. But I need a reference point. For a researcher, context is everything. I’m not asking you to divulge operational detail, just fill me in on the big picture. And let me warn you now that I plan to be very tight when it comes to divulging actual names. Happy to give them when relevant, but there’s no sense in being fast and loose unless it’s warranted. The rules exist for a reason. Now, where do you stand?”

“Okay. Well…” I paused, collecting my thoughts. “I seem to be tracking an informational trail for some sort of courier network set up by Ed Lemaster back in the sixties, when he was an operative, on behalf of a source code-named Dewey, who may or may not have been known to, or even used by, the KGB. Its transit points were in Vienna, Prague, maybe also Budapest.”

She nodded, seeming to approve.

“What’s important is that you’re familiar with the name Dewey. That’s the key to the whole thing.”

“And what, exactly, do you mean by ‘the whole thing’?”

“Lemaster’s betrayal, of course. His spying for the other side. Not that anyone who counted ever believed in it. I practically drew them a map at one point, X marks the spot, but no one ever picked up a shovel to dig for treasure. Maybe they were afraid of what they’d find. And for a change it wasn’t just the field men who were playing the fool.”

“Angleton, you mean?” I was guessing, of course.

“Yes, Angleton. Poor dead Jim. If he’d only listened to me and a few others, well…”

I couldn’t help but recall that moment as a boy, when I’d encountered him on my bicycle as he tidied up in the wake of a murder. “Go home, son.” That’s probably what he’d be saying now. This time I wouldn’t scare so easily.

“Is he at the middle of this?”

“Him and his people. And the two Russians, of course. Angleton’s old pal Golitsyn, and his nemesis Nosenko. You know about that bloody mess, don’t you?”

“Only what I’ve read in books.”

“Books!” she scoffed. “They don’t know the half of it!”

Historians had nonetheless written plenty about Golitsyn and Nosenko, especially with regard to their role in Angleton’s ill-fated mole hunt.

“Golitsyn defected in what, the early sixties?”

“December of sixty-one,” she answered. “The fifteenth. We didn’t have much use for him at first, so he went over to help our cousins in London for a while. He returned in the summer of sixty-three, right after we’d moved into our new headquarters in Langley.

“Of course, you never would have known Jim Angleton’s office was brand spanking new. Every square foot of space was already piled with paper. File folders were part of the decor, along with a whole row of safes. Kept his blinds shut, with a single lamp on his desk that left everyone but him in the dark. He’d hunch there like a miser with his coins, counting all the facts to make sure they added up.”

“Was he already so paranoid?”

“Wrong word. The enemy was out to get us, and Jim knew it better than anybody. Once that bastard Philby burned him, he never recovered. Do you have any idea what it’s like to work for someone who’s so mistrustful, yet so brilliant? No matter what you said or did, Jim analyzed it to the last detail. As chief of research I was his main fact checker, but that didn’t mean I was above suspicion. Order the wrong damn thing for lunch at La Nicoise and he’d question you for ten minutes about your motives.”

“But he trusted Golitsyn.”

“Trusted him absolutely. Mostly because Golitsyn was just as suspicious of the Russians as he was. They both thought the Soviets were the world’s reigning supermen when it came to deception.”

“And then Nosenko defected?”

“Fourth of February, 1964. Golitsyn immediately pegged him as a plant, which was all Jim needed to hear. I believed it, too. Everyone in Jim’s shop did. So Nosenko basically went into a hole in the ground out at the Farm.”

“They kept him there awhile, didn’t they?”

“Nearly four years. But it was never airtight. The hounds in the Soviet division managed to get their people in to see him. They were quite enchanted by Nosenko’s stories, and when Jim heard they were feeding his tips to their field men, he was more convinced than ever that the Soviets were playing us for fools. The biggest problem was that Nosenko was directly contradicting Golitsyn, at least on some things. It was a threat to our worldview in Counterintelligence, so Jim mobilized for war. That’s when he hired his three agents, the ones nobody was supposed to know about. They didn’t even appear as a line item in our budget.”

“And one of them was Lemaster.”

“Code name Headlight. That was all I knew then, their code names. Headlight, Blinker, Taillight.”

A lineup, it occurred to me, that could easily have been incorporated into a title for a John Le Carre novel- Blinker, Taillight, Soldier, Spy- with only Lemaster’s code name missing from the formula.

“Why ‘Headlight’?”

“Jim rather liked the completeness of the set. Bumper to bumper, he had every signal covered, with himself at the wheel. It made things quite handy once the demolition derby of his Great Mole Hunt got under way. Because it was their job-their sole job-to verify Golitsyn and tear down Nosenko. Jim’s very own truth squad. And it was my job, of course, to dot their i’s and cross their t’s, fact by fact. I was a busy woman.”

She paused for a tiny sip of wine. Noticing my glass was empty, she refilled it. I had a feeling that even if we were to continue for hours she’d never empty hers. When information was being dispensed and discussed, she wanted to remain totally in control.

“So how did it go?” I asked. “Did the agents deliver?”

“For four months, nothing. Zilch. Jim was after me day and night. ‘Find a lead for them!’ Twirling his arms like some madman football coach on the sidelines. ‘You’ve been tracking these Moscow hoods for years, can’t you find them a single goddamn lead?’ And those poor boys were working like dogs, of course, filing reports two and three times a week. But even I could see it was all garbage. Things we already knew, or from such dubious sourcing that it was completely unreliable.

“Then, in early sixty-five, Headlight struck gold. A man he met in Budapest. On a tram car, of all places, right as he was rolling across the Danube on the Margit Bridge. Source Nijinsky.”

I was struck by the eerie symmetry of her story to Lemaster’s version of how he’d come up with Richard Folly in Budapest in ’67. Two characters, two strokes of fortune, both originating on the same tram line, three years apart. Maybe both were fiction.

“Nijinsky?”

“Like the dancer. Because he was so nimble. He had traveling papers for practically the whole East Bloc, the West as well. Headlight met him all over Europe. Everything he came up with made Jim smile. Finally, we had the confirmation we’d been looking for that Nosenko was a fraud, a plant, a cancer.”

“What about Blinker and Taillight?”

“Empty vessels, at least for a while. Believe me, they weren’t happy with the state of play. Headlight’s star was rising. Theirs were in eclipse. At least until Blinker met a disenchanted Soviet diplomat at some falling-down resort on the North Sea, up in Rugen. They arranged for a meet on friendlier territory in Hamburg, where we got him for a full six hours at a safe house. Source Kettledrum. Very talkative, very much in the know. But not at all what Jim wanted to hear.”

“He backed up Nosenko?”

“Not straight down the line. That was the beauty of it. Corroborated some things, but cast doubt on others. Whatever you thought of Nosenko, no one ever believed he was infallible. No defector ever was, which is why this source of Blinker’s made such an impression.”

“What did Angleton say?”

“That Kettledrum was a plant, of course. Golitsyn agreed. Perfect example of Soviet artfulness, they said. So they tag-teamed him, body slams week after week. Then, when one of Headlight’s reports from Nijinsky shot him down as well, that was all Jim needed. They threw Kettledrum to the wolves.”

“What do you mean?”

“They blew him to the Russians. Put out word that he’d been talking, but that we knew he was a plant. I think Jim wanted to see how quickly they’d snatch him back.”

“Did they?”

“Sent him straight to Moscow on a chartered Aeroflot out of Schonefeld-Berlin. Four days later we received a credible report he’d been executed. Not exactly the welcome home Jim had anticipated.”

“Jesus.”

“Well put. Kettledrum died for our sins. Not that it fazed Jim. His argument was, well of course they killed him! The better to fool us! No freedom-loving democracy would have sacrificed a good man that way, of course, not for simply doing his job. But these were the Soviet supermen who had to win at any cost! And with no congressional committees to look up their skirts they were free to play as fast and loose as they pleased. Our people in the Soviet division went berserk when they heard that, and Jim went berserk in return. That’s when the real war began.”

“With the Soviet division?”

“Worse, far worse. A civil war, right within our own tight little borders of Counterintelligence. True believers versus the apostates. All the pitchforks were out. But of course Jim’s was the biggest.”

“Who opposed him?”

“Those names aren’t relevant, and I think you know why.”

Meaning one of them must have been my handler. I think.

“Which side were you on?”

“I stayed neutral. Records were an easy place to keep your head down. But for weeks nothing got done. Every report from Nijinsky and Headlight was hotly debated. The division was in gridlock. Finally even Jim knew there had to be either a truce or a resolution. He decided to settle it once and for all by summoning home all his agents-Headlight, Blinker, and Taillight. Each was to be fluttered under the most intensive conditions. Put up or shut up. Product testing at its finest.”

Polygraphed, she meant. A lie detector. I’d seen the term “fluttered” in at least a dozen different novels.

“That’s pretty extreme.”

“Oh, it was, and it was quite a day when they all flew in. For three days everyone in CI was on pins and needles as the testing proceeded.”

“And?”

“They all passed. Flying colors. Which to Jim only proved that Blinker must be KGB, because by then it was common knowledge how well trained their people were in handling polygraphs. Self-hypnosis, all sorts of tricks to equalize stress, whether you were lying or not. We tried to stay a step ahead of them, of course, but no one was ever sure if we were managing.”

Where had I read all of this stuff about polygraphs? Now I remembered. Orchids for Mother, a 1977 novel. Based on Angleton, in fact. It even used his Agency nickname of “Mother” for the main character. The author was Aaron Latham, who like me had been a reporter at the Washington Post, although well before my time. Supposedly his portrait of Angleton was one of the deftest ever penned, in fact or fiction.

“So the whole thing was a bust?”

“It did produce one little oddity. Jim asked me to collect the records of their previous flutterings, to compare notes. In rounding up that material I came across a curious cross-reference in Headlight’s file. Some episode involving a colleague in Belgrade who wasn’t even with the Agency. And from way back in fifty-nine, before Headlight was even Headlight. Lemaster had only been aboard two years, and here he was mixed up with some brouhaha over tampered polygraph results.”

The hairs on my neck stood up. Dad and I were in Belgrade then. It was the year my mother left us. And now I knew Lemaster had been there as well, long before Dad and he had supposedly become friends.

“Tampered with how?”

“The initial results indicated some sort of security breach, but apparently some junior diplomat had helped clean it up, or vice versa. The file didn’t make it clear. Nothing all that unusual, I suppose. Fluttering was all the rage in those days, and it’s never been infallible. But for whatever reason this other fellow intervened.”

“Why?”

“The file didn’t say. I tried checking with State, but they told me to fuck off. ‘Personal and confidential.’ Agency personnel people told us the matter was a moot point, because the test had been retaken with perfect results. But, well, I suppose now the implication is obvious. Maybe that was Lemaster’s one weak moment, but some friend of his with better connections helped clean it up.”

I tried to keep my voice from shaking as I asked the next two questions.

“Who was the junior diplomat?”

“His name is irrelevant.”

“Was it Warfield Cage?”

She narrowed her eyes and slowly set down her wineglass, reappraising me.

“How did you come up with that name, Mr. Furse?”

“My methodology isn’t relevant.”

She very nearly smiled. Then, in an act that I took as a major concession, she fetched the bottle and poured herself a refill, although she of course topped off my glass as well. I needed it.

“I suppose I should take that as a good sign,” she said. “Your work must be further along than I thought. Where were we?”

I concentrated, trying to regain my composure. No wonder Dad had always glossed over where he’d first met Lemaster. Had his actions helped a mole go free, and then thrive?

“We were still discussing the war. The believers versus the apostates.”

“Yes. The showdown with the polygraphs. It took the fight out of everybody. Jim, too. Even Nijinsky’s reports lost their edge. They were hazier, more tentative. As if he’d been spooked. Gradually Jim turned his attention elsewhere. Other suspicions, other targets. And we all know how that turned out.”

“Badly.”

“For everyone, Jim included. And that might have been the end of it if I hadn’t found one last loose thread. A tiny one, barely showing. But when I pulled it, a whole row of stitching came loose, right there in the middle of Jim’s favorite garment.”

“Headlight?”

She nodded, pausing to collect herself for the final run. I sipped more wine. She put a hand to her glass, then pushed it gently away. Whatever she was about to tell me called for the utmost sobriety.

“It was a small thing.” Her voice was quiet, but steady. “An old filing from some source of the Soviet division’s, completely unimpeachable, mostly because for years the material he’d been providing at such extreme danger to himself had, unfortunately, been quite unspectacular. One of those poor souls who thinks he knows more than he does. But he was occasionally useful for verification, so they kept him active.

“Well, one day I’m cross-referencing one of his filings with some of our Prague material when I spot a throwaway item about a source the Soviets were in contact with there and in Budapest. Code name Dewey. Not much detail otherwise. Just a handful of dates and places where Dewey had supposedly been active. No other mention of him before or since, and its significance might have slipped right past me if I hadn’t just been reviewing the movements for all three of our field men-Headlight, Blinker, and Taillight-for Jim’s final postmortem on our sad little civil war. One word caught my eye. ‘Bookstores.’ Apparently this Dewey fellow liked using them for meeting places, exchange points. So did Headlight.”

I leaned forward, watching her closely. She stared toward the corner, into some faraway space.

“I took the few dates and places I had for Dewey and checked them against the movements for our three lads. There were five points of intersection, and every one of them was a match with Headlight.”

“Did you show Angleton?”

“And have him explain that this was just Headlight’s means of covering for Nijinsky? Or some diabolical plant by Nosenko? No. We were being peacemakers by then. Love was in the air. So I took it very quietly to one of the generals on the rebel side. It raised his eyebrows, of course. If it had been a month earlier he would have screamed it from the rooftops. But with the new truce mentality he proposed that we keep it under wraps and try to build on it. We knew we’d need more before we could ever take it forward.”

One of the generals. Meaning my handler, most likely.

“And did you?”

She shook her head.

“We couldn’t advance it, couldn’t back it up. Besides, everyone was still licking their wounds, and soon there was another in-house political battle to deal with.”

“The Soviet division again?”

She nodded.

“Flak from an old case officer of Headlight’s who’d apparently been one of his first handlers back in Belgrade. Claimed all our digging around was raising hell with his old networks. Code name Thresher.”

Hearing the name created a prickly sensation in my fingertips.

“Thresher? You’re sure?”

“I wasn’t cleared to know his real identity.”

But I knew it, of course. Breece Preston. Dad had mentioned that Preston and Lemaster might have worked together early on, but he hadn’t known the nature of their relationship, or that the location was Belgrade.

Or had he? Those previous gaps in his knowledge now seemed dubious in light of the news about the fudged polygraph.

“Are you all right?” Humphries was peering at me in apparent concern.

“I’m fine. Just trying to keep everything straight. So, this flap with Thresher?”

“Yes. It made us more cautious than ever. Even if we’d been able to build a better case, I’m not sure how aggressively we could have pushed it.”

“So the whole thing just went away?”

“You have to realize that by then Jim was on the verge of self-destruction, and Lemaster was starting to publish his books. In seventy-four they forced Jim out. A month later Lemaster quit. Just as well, because as soon as Jim left the division quietly began calling in our field men. Blinker, then Taillight. Even if we’d been inclined to open things back up, there was no longer a pressing operational reason to do so.”

She seemed almost ready to conclude, so I asked about some of the particulars of Vladimir’s old memos while I still had the chance.

“What did you know about source Leo, or code name Oleg?”

“KGB men. Leo was one of Oleg’s travelers. Prague, mostly. A waste of time, usually. When he wasn’t whoring he was usually drunk. Oleg sat back on his throne in Moscow and moved pieces across the board. Some people thought he was their Jim Angleton, hunting moles. Others were convinced he was running them.”

“Did you ever come across the names Karloff, Fishwife, or Woodman?”

She furrowed her brow.

“No. Never.”

“What about a source Glinka?”

“That rings a bell.” She paused, gazing off into the corner again. “Yes. From the early seventies. His name showed up in a single report, an intercept out of Leipzig. He was after someone named Pericles, who some of the boys on the Soviet desk were convinced for a while was a possible American mole.”

“Pericles?”

“Jim dismissed it as rubbish. Not that it was much to begin with.”

“Why did he dismiss it?”

“Why do you think? Because the only one of our own sources who ever mentioned the name was Nosenko. If there was anything more to it, then I never heard.”

“So, after Angleton was gone, no more civil war?”

“Peaceful coexistence. And that’s probably how things would have remained if not for that damned interview Lemaster gave in eighty-four. Some scribbler in Washington with an ax to grind.”

This certainly explained at least one reason my handler hadn’t told her my real name. That plus Dad’s possible role. She obviously had nothing but disdain for the Fourth Estate, and for William Cage in particular.

“I’ve seen that piece,” I said. “The one where Lemaster said he’d considered working for the other side?”

She nodded.

“It was like he was teasing us, telling us we’d missed our chance and would never catch him now. I always wondered what Jim made of it, but by then his health was failing, and by all accounts he still believed deeply that Nosenko was a plant. Then he died, of course. May of eighty-seven. I did hear something strange at his funeral. When the Agency went to clean out his house they found a signed copy of Lemaster’s mole novel, The Double Game. ”

“Is that really so surprising?”

“That’s not the odd part. Apparently Jim had scribbled all through it. Page after page, marked and annotated, with tabs and Post-its. Just like he would have done with a field report. Nutty, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Unless he knew how to read between the lines better than the rest of us.”

“So you think he was guilty. Headlight, I mean.”

“I used to. Now? Some nights when I go back over everything in my head it never seems quite as damning. A few points of intersection on a map. Some unexplained coincidence. A source who was probably too good to true. There was always something missing, and I could never decide what. And even if Nijinsky was a bad egg, I suppose Headlight could have been played as much as the rest of us.”

“A victim of his own ambition?”

“Something like that. What finally prompted the reopening of this case, can you tell me? I have my own theory, of course. That damn funeral had to be part of it. An ill wind from start to finish, and a ghost in every corner.” The Nethercutt funeral, no doubt, although I didn’t dare mention that I’d been there. “But beyond that, what can you tell me?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid.”

“Yes. Thought you’d say that.”

Then she nodded as if I’d passed a security test, little suspecting that I wanted to know the answer more than she did.