The Miernik Dossier

87. REPORT BY CHRISTOPHER’S CASE OFFICER.

1. Christopher delivered his excellent though typically literary report on the ALF/Miernik episode in Khartoum at 0230 on 21 July. This written account adds flesh to the bare bones communicated in my cable of 18 July, which was based on a hurried verbal debriefing of Christopher conducted by this officer in El Fasher. At both meetings the agent appeared to be in excellent physical condition. However, he has been through a somewhat trying experience, and his morale is understandably impaired.

2. This officer notes, not in criticism but as a matter of observation, that Christopher is more than usually prone to believe that his understanding of this operation is more accurate than that of the case officer, the station, or the country desk at Headquarters. The death of Miernik made a vivid impression on him, and he gives it undue weight in his estimate of the overall value of the operation. The fact that he has become emotionally involved with Zofia Miernik undoubtedly colors his judgment to a certain extent.

3. Christopher has reverted to his earlier view that Miernik was not, in fact, a Soviet agent. So convinced is he of the correctness of his view that he is able to rationalize all the evidence to the contrary that has come to us from a wide range of sources, including the information made available to us by the Sudanese Special Branch and by British liaison, whose own agent on the scene contributed valuable corroborative reporting, particularly on the role of Ilona Bentley.

4. At Christopher’s request, his argument in support of his view in reference to Miernik was tape-recorded, and it is here presented verbatim (as edited by Christopher).

CHRISTOPHER’S STATEMENT

This operation is now terminated in the field. The ALF has been neutralized, the Soviets have been thwarted-and Miernik is dead. In addition to all the evidence Headquarters will have from far-flung sources I think it is important that the analysts have my view of the situation. Of all the dozens of people who worked on this project, I alone was on the scene, knew the people, witnessed the events. That is an egotistical statement on its face, but I want my judgment on the record even if it is to be discounted.

It’s in the nature of our work that we never know how matters are going to turn out. We begin and end in the dark. There is an overlay of efficiency in everything we do. I’m convinced that there is no more intelligent or unemotional group of men on earth than ourselves. That, if I may say so, is our principal weakness. Because our people are so bright, because our resources are so huge, we consistently tinker with reality.

The Miernik operation is a classic example of this tendency. We began with a vague suspicion: that Miernik was being defected by the Poles. Tentative conclusion: Miernik is an agent. Obvious question: What is his assignment?

What we had at the beginning was a set of assumptions. It was proper to test those assumptions. After all, that is our job. But the testing process-calling up our own resources and those of friendly services all over the world-creates an almost irresistible psychological force. We are experts in suspicion. We search diligently for evidence that will confirm our suspicions. To transform a supposition into a fact is the sweetest reward a desk man can know. We do it all the time, and usually we are right. But sometimes we are wrong, and I believe that there is no possible way for us to know this.

You will recall, not without impatience, that I believed in the early stages of this operation that there was a strong possibility that Miernik was innocent. I am trained to regard all behavior as cover. At no time did I spontaneously believe anything Miernik said to me or indicated to me through his overt personal conduct. But I had an instinctive feeling that all the indications that he was an opposition agent were, just possibly, false. That attitude was also part of my training, and I am sure that Headquarters shared my reservations.

The difference is this: I knew Miernik personally. For you, the reservations were intellectual-routine professional skepticism. For me they were intestinal. There is no way to argue an intestinal case in cables and dispatches, or even in clandestine conversations with a case officer whose proper function is to discount the emotional reactions of his agent. We are, quite properly, interested primarily in information that is stripped of the background noise created by the personality of the source.

In the end, my training brought me around to the conclusion that Miernik was, in fact, an agent. There was no other rational explanation for many of the things he did: the book code, the contact with Sasha Kirnov, the heavy-handed dramatization of his plight, the expertise with weapons, the mixture of self-revelation in unimportant matters and obsessive secrecy in others. I never entirely got rid of the instinctive feeling that he was genuine, and therefore innocent. But in a conflict between instinct and what appears to be objective evidence, the latter must always win.

In order to go on with what I was doing to Miernik, I had to believe that he was an enemy. Otherwise my activity, for all its surface of cleverness and technique, was stupid. My conclusion that Miernik’s behavior confirmed our suspicions was not-as I believed it to be-a return to objectivity. It was a ffight from it. My change of heart turned me (and, to the extent my reporting influences its judgment, turned Headquarters) away from a search for the truth. Everything after that was an attempt to achieve operational results.

All the evidence said to us: “Yes, Miernik is a Soviet agent.” All the evidence, that is, which we saw fit to consider. Existing simultaneously with the information that confirmed our suspicions was a second body of evidence, like a planet identical to Earth on the other side of the sun, which just as conclusively demonstrated that our suspicions were incorrect. We hadn’t the technique to see it. This is no one’s fault; it is in the nature of our equipment.

What we overlooked was this: there was no purpose in what Miernik did. His behavior from beginning to end was inconsistent with the simplest rules of tradecraft. Leave aside for a moment all the thoughts we put into his mind and into the minds of the Soviet service we assumed was handling him.

Concentrate on this: why, if the Soviets wanted to provide an extremely sensitive operation like the ALF with a white Communist as principal agent, would they choose to send him into the Sudan in a Cadillac with an American agent, a British agent, and a Sudanese aristocrat who had every reason to be hostile to anything that threatened the established order? Why expose him-virtually confirm his identity-to such an array of enemies? Why not just drop him into the desert on a moonlit night?

For that matter, why insert a KGB man into a highrisk situation like the one in which the ALF operated? His capture guaranteed the very thing the Soviets presumably would have wanted to avoid at all costs: confirmation that they were equipping and controlling the guerrillas. Even if they were too dense to realize that the ALF could not succeed and would eventually be swept up by the Sudanese, they must have seen that the presence of a Polish principal agent was unnecessary (they had perfectly adequate control through Ahmed and Qemal and their radio link) and unbelievably insecure.

I am going to say a very harsh thing that is directed as much (or more) against myself as against all you people who sit inside, making the plans that I carry out. / think we ran Miernik as we did primarily for the fun of it. We have come to look on our work, in the field at least, largely as a sport. Miernik provided an opportunity to match wits with the opposition. We knew from the start that we would win: we had physical control of their alleged agent, we had access to the Sudanese police and military, we had penetrated the ALF. All the opposition had was Miernik and a bunch of deluded tramps who couldn’t think for themselves or maintain decent security. It was a chance not just to beat the Russians for the umptyumpth straight time, it was an opportunity to humiliate the bastards. We would not have been human if we hadn’t seized this opportunity.

It cost Miernik (not to mention Firecracker and sixty other Arabs) his life.

When I found Miernik hanging on that cross with his scrotum in his mouth I saw in my mind’s eye all the complex machinery that had produced this simple result. It was our questions about Miernik (questions formulated by the best and most honest minds of a great nation) that drove Miernik to what he undoubtedly would have called his Golgotha. An illiterate tribesman with a knife provided Miernik with a final opportunity for the cheap dramatics that embarrassed me into suspecting him in the first place. We didn’t actually send him out to be killed. His death arose from a misunderstanding. Miernik’s murder is not, technically, on our heads. In fact, the man we sent into the desert wasn’t Miernik at all- that person was a creature of our imagination built out of spare parts left over from our previous experiences with wily Poles and sinister Russians. The real Miernik was that carcass on the cross, clumsy and ridiculous even in death, with the wounds he tried to show me at last made visible.

5. Despite his obvious reservations, Christopher has continued to operate with his normal loyalty and efficiency. He has obtained Miernik’s diary (transmitted herewith for translation and analysis), and he has intervened with Zofia Miernik with a view toward making her available for a full debriefing by the Geneva station. In order to provide Miss Miernik with an incentive for cooperation, Christopher has been instructed to tell her that our interviews are a normal procedure preliminary to granting her status as an immigrant to the United States under the Polish quota. Christopher had suggested that Miss Miernik be granted immediate citizenship under a special congressional bill, but he is now persuaded that the interests of the government, and those of Miss Miernik, will be better served through the quieter process of ordinary immigration.