“I was thinking, just now before your late
arrival” the Old Boy said looking over the front window of a restaurant called
the Happy Hamburger “Do you recall when this was the Au Pied de Cochon? They
had an ancient large lobster in a tank in the window.
“I remember it well.” He said looking over the
building.
Because the Russian compound is just up the
street a mile or so, it was our meeting place for Soviets who were considering
a defection. It was also a favorite watering hole of little creature named
Vitaly Yurchencko. Do you know the name?
He frowned and then shook his head “No.” he
said “It doesn’t ring a bell”
“Towards the end of the Cold War Yurchencko
was assigned to the Russian compound up on Wisconsin Avenue as chief of
security, or, in other words, the guy that prevented defections. He was a
man-about-town, liked the Americans to call him “Vity”. He was a lush” the Old
Boy stopped and looked at his companion and said whispered “So many of those
Russians are you know” and then continued walking “Every bartender in every
posh tavern in town knew him”
One day, he walked into the FBI building
downtown asking to defect. He claimed to be frustrated with his stagnant life
as a Russian spy, his failed relationships with his wife and so on so and so
forth”
“He handed over to two of our own men as KGB
agents: Ronald Dallton and Lee Howard. We knew about them already and we had
been sending them disinformation for a year or so before Yurchenka showed up
but we could not be sure if the KGB knew that we knew about them. So we went
along with it.”
“Why would the KGB turn in double agents?” he
asked
“I suspect they knew we were on to them or
perhaps they were of no more use to them. Collateral damage, old boy. The price
for playing the game”
“He’ll live on in history as a fake defector,
but I spotted him as a fake from the start.” Defector indeed” he spat out the
last words “You see the KGB almost never used fake defectors. They are a proud
people, the Russians. Defection would be a propaganda problem for them. The
Soviet Union was a workers paradise, they said. So why would a ranking member
of the Intelligence community defect? That led to one of many misunderstandings
with that idiot Yurchenka. He assumed we would not leak his defection to the
media. We explained that had one of our defected to the KGB the Russian press
would never stopped writing about it. But he was in fact a legitimate defector
but he was insane. A very disturbed individual let me assure you. The entire
time we had him he was deeply, clinically depressed. He was in love with a
woman married, a true beauty, wife of a Russian diplomat. He convinced us that
she loved him as well. He said that if we could arrange for her to be with him
in America, he would give us all the information we could possibly want. So we
found the woman, he husband was assigned to the Soviet Embassy in Canada at the
time. She refused to meet with him. Said she was not in love with him and in
fact thought him something of a snake. Finally, we convinced her to meet him.”
“How much?” he asked.
“It cost the American taxpayer a cool half
million dollars, cash” The Old Boy said shaking his head “We arranged the
meeting in a hotel room. Once there she slapped him, called him a despicable
traitor and a disgrace to the Soviet Union and I believe she spat on him as
well before she stormed out.” He chuckled slightly “Turns out our Canadian people
didn’t think to search her. She was wired, with a camera. Goddamn KGB filmed
the whole thing. Took our money too”
As you can well imagine that only deepened his
depression. We pressed him for more information but said he had a stomach
ulcer. It was almost all that he talked about. Claimed that Russian Doctors
couldn’t cure him. We had him examined by the very best people. They could find
no ulcer. In fact they could not find anything wrong with him at all on any
level. We told him and that and he said we were lying and he became, if it were
humanly possible, more depressed.
Well by then, we’d had enough of comrade
Chebatriova but we still weren’t sure what he was or what purpose he may or may
not have been serving, or was he, as I advocated, simply a lunatic.? The Old
Boy turned and shrugged and then held up his right index finger “We had to find
out”
That night I was lying in bed, couldn’t sleep
started to think, and it hit me. The next morning I went down to the mail room
at Langley picked out a young man who I deemed might look good in suit and took
him to my office. We spoke and it turned out he was a recent grad
from…..”
He thought for a moment and said “One of those
colleges they have in one of the states”
He signaled that they should continue walking
while he checked the sky for impending rain “I asked him why he was with us and
he replied that he wanted to be a spy so I knew then that we had out man. I
called in the domestic people and we explained to the boy that we were
assigning him to act as a sort of bodyguard for recent Russian defector. He was
not ever, under any circumstances at all, to discuss his private life with
Chebatriova.
A few weeks later we pulled the kid in for a
talk and told him to disregard everything we had told him not to tell
Chebatriova and that he was to take Chebatriova out to dinner or drinks,
anywhere away from the safe house and tell Chebatriova everything about his
short career with our company. So the kid takes Chebatriova out to Au Pied de
Cochon and tell him everything that we told him not to tell him, his recent
narrow graduation form college and how he had worked in the stock room at Langley
and so on.
The kid says that Chebatriova eyes went as
large as plates, his mouth was open. He got the message. He was useless to us
and he knew and now we knew it. He says to the boy “They think I am joke?”
“I don’t know” answers the boy and at that Chebatriova
gets up and walks to the bathroom and climbs out a window. He walked up the
hill to the Russian compound. There had been two other re-defectors, Betova and
Chebatriova were their names and the KGB let be known far and wide that both
had been welcomed back with open arms. Yurchenka apparently thought the KGB
might treat him well if he returned. The Soviet Embassy called a press
conference where Yurchenka announced he had been kidnapped and drugged by us.
“Why did he bust out the window?” He asked “Why
didn’t he just walk out the front door?”
The Old Boy shrugged “Who knows? He was a
madman.”
“Do we know what happened to him?”
“Oh yes” the Old Boy smiled “Yurchencko
vanished for a while but several days after the Soviet Union fell a group of
KGB boys rounded up Yurchenka and those two other re-defectors, Betova and
Chebatriova, and shot them dead. Dumped them in the forest someplace. Our own
man, Lee Howard, the one Yurchencko gave us. He defected to Russia. Lived there
for some years. They married him off to a KGB agent. The same day they killed
Yurchenka, Betova and Chebatriova, she killed him. Karate chop to the neck.”
A short story: The
Company’s Dime
As always, the two old spies met instead at
the Tombs on 36th Street because meeting on the Hill was too obvious. The Tombs
was good enough to serve their purpose, especially during when the students
from Georgetown where in town. Their noise drowned out all conversations.
The lawyer, that’s what they called him, was a
contract man for the company. He worked on staff to a senior US Senator and the
company’s man on Capitol Hill. In that capacity he had sole access to a seven
figure slush fund and many other less impressive tools.
He had proven his worth to Langley when his
team of three information technology specialists and a Senate building janitor
hatched a successful break into a protected database used by Senate Intelligence
Committee staff. Once inside the data base, his team delated accurate files
that detailed the company’s most sensitive activities with “modified version”
files. Several years before that, another team he employed had placed monitors
on computers of every chief of staff on the Hill.
He met the two men from Langley as they all
entered the Tombs together. Taking a standard covert seat in back of the
restaurant they ordered lunch and with that done sat back in their seats.
The lawyer spoke first.
“You know the owner named this place after
T.S. Eliot’s poem, "Bustopher Jones: The Cat about Town."
“But it’s called the Tombs,” Ash said.
“Yes, of course, I meant the Tombs is
mentioned in the poem.”
“T.S Eliot knew about this place?” Ash asked
“Wasn’t he from Europe or something?”
“No,” the lawyer started hesitantly. “What I
meant was….”
In mid-sentence he realized that in his
attempt to explain himself, poetry and Eliot were fruitless. Company men are
not known for their literary interests.
“Why don’t we get down to it” Anderson said.
“Why are we here?”
Pleased to be onto a new subject and choosing
to overlooks Anderson’s obnoxious ways, the lawyer answered, “The Company’s
name is being mentioned on the Hill and not in a good way.”
“Nothing new there,” Ash smirked in an all too
blatant play to win Anderson’s approval.
“Over the past 12 years,” the lawyer said, “a
man named John Cotton Teale has been a high-level staffer at the Environmental
Protection Agency. He’s 64 years old and works as a senior policy adviser in
the Office of Air and Radiation. His base salary is $164,700. He has been with
the agency for 19 years. His background is clean. We checked. He grew up in
Fairfax County, graduated from the University of Maryland and took his MA from
George Washington on the government’s dime. Divorced. His ex-wife is a managing
director at the Rockefeller Foundation. No children. Lives in Arlington, near
Marymount University. Starting about three years ago Teale started working on a
second Masters, in fine arts in writing. At about that same time he was often
away from his job and started to cultivate an air of mystery and explained his
lengthy absences by telling his bosses that he was doing top-secret work for
you guys.”
“For the company?” Anderson asked.
“Yes” the lawyer answered. “Was he?”
“No,” Anderson answered.
The lawyer looked Anderson directly in the eye
and waited.
“He is not with us,” Anderson said again.
“The problem is,” the lawyer continued, “he
travelled to China, South Korea, South Africa and England, Fiji, a couple of
dozen other places and all of it, first class air travel, first class hotels,
everything, picked up by EPA.”
“First class?” Anderson asked.
“Yes sir. He said it was a CIA requirement
necessary for deep cover agents. There was one flight, to London, that cost
taxpayers $14,000. A coach ticket would have cost just $1,000.”
“I’m a goddamn senior man with the firm and
even I don’t fly first class,” Anderson said.
“Last year he took off two months on sick
leave, paid of course, said he had picked up a case of malaria in the Amazon
while working for us. At the beginning of this year he took off for about six
months. He told his managers he was working on a research project or working
for Langley, for you guys.”
“And where was he for six months?” Anderson
asked.
“Based on phone records,” the lawyer said, “he
was at his beach house in Cape Cod. He has a summer place there.”
“He has a summer house?” Ash said, mostly for
his own benefit.
“And no one,” Anderson asked “not one single
person doubted any of this? They just took this nut at his word?”
“Yes and no. On the few occasions he was asked
to explain his expenses and his travel he always replied that he was, and I
quote “doing sensitive work for another agency.”
“And no one found this,” Ash searched for a
word, shrugged and said, “odd?”
“Apparently, no one checked,” the lawyer said.
“They just believed him. In fact last year his was given a $25,000 bonus as a
retention incentive so he wouldn’t leave the agency and go to work for an
energy company.”
A waiter brought water to the table. They
waited. When he left, they continued.
“Did he plan to leave the agency and go to
work for an energy company?” Anderson asked.
“No. The retention incentive is something the
EPA gives out to all its senior people.”
“Maybe we should all find a job with them,”
Ash smiled. No one looked at him.
“Anyway,” the lawyer continued, “he started
working a four-day work week.”
“I know the answer to this but let me ask
anyway,” Anderson said. “Did anyone ask why he was taking the fifth day off?”
“Yes. An administrator inquired and Teale
replied….in writing….let me repeat that….he replied in writing….that he had to
spend at least one day a week at Langley on paperwork.”
Anderson sat back in his chair and shook his
head in disbelief. “He didn’t try to hide this?”
“No. Not at all. In fact on his EPA electronic
calendar, he wrote that he was working at the CIA's Directorate of Operations.
He told several managers at the EPA that he had been assigned to an
interagency, special advisory group between the State, CIA, the White House and
for some reason, the EPA. Anyway, is he caught now?”
“How did they catch on to him?” Ash said as he
looked around for the waiter. “We should order, I have to get back.”
“One of EPA’s administrators got wind of
Teale’s remarkable expense account and started asking questions. The
administrator launched an in house investigation and then turned over her
findings to the Inspector General Office and they launched their own
investigation. They interviewed 140 people at EPA who knew about Teale’s
supposed secret agent background. Amazingly not one of them ever suspected
Teale was a fraud.”
“Let me interrupt you,” Anderson said as he
snapped his fingers in the air for the waiter. “Can we trust the Inspector
General’s office to keep this buried?”
“The EPA’s inspector general? Sure”
“Why?”
“Because the Inspector General’s role is to
investigate improprieties with their assigned branch of government and if they
find anything, they bury it. Basically the Inspector General’s job is to ensure
that the branch they work under is never embarrassed”
“Go on,” Anderson said as he turned to look
for the waiter.
“The IG’s office compared Beale’s cellphone
records to his travel expenses and determined that when he claimed to be in Pakistan
and other locations on CIA business, he was really at his Massachusetts’
vacation home.”
“Doing what?” Anderson asked.
“Writing. Teale is an amateur novelist.”
“Let me guess,” Ash added, “spy novels. He
writes spy novels.”
“Probably.”
“Why did I know that?” he sighed, smiled too
fondly and shook his head.
“Well, the IG’s office called Langley, told
them the story and Langley confirmed that he wasn’t with you guys.”
“But Langley never followed up?” Anderson
asked.
“No.”
“And Langley never notified the interior
decorators?” Anderson asked. The interior decorators was company speak for
internal security operations within the company.
“Apparently not,” the lawyer said. “Anyway the
IG’s people contacted Teale and told him they wanted him to meet them at Langley.
Rather than appear at the meeting, Beale admitted his deception. He’s under
house restriction.”
The waiter, a senior at Georgetown Ash
reckoned, appeared, apologized for his lateness and took their orders. Two
Manhattans, wet. All good company men are drinkers. Three salads, three steaks,
coffee. It was on the company’s dime. When the waiter left the lawyer
continued, “He’s into the EPA for an estimated $886,000, in the form of
unearned pay.” The lawyer continued, “And then there’s fraud, and conspiracy.
At the least he’s looking at eight years in federal prison. At the least.”
“The EPA will never press this thing,” Ash
said confidently. “They’ll look like idiots.”
“They don’t have a choice,” the lawyer said.
“Somebody squealed to Senator Stroman’s office. Stroman heads up the
agricultural committee, he’s from Iowa, a farming state where the EPA is
considered a branch of the Nazi party. There’s an election coming. Stroman
wants a piece of the EPA’s ass and he’s going, very, very public with this thing.”
“So why are we here?” Anderson asked.
“It’s a heads up. Stroman doesn’t like you
guys much either. He’s going to drag the company into this thing because Teale
is sticking to his guns on being part of CIA.”
Anderson sat up straight in his chair, leaned
forward and smiled. “You can assure the people on the Hill that the company is
clean on this one. Absolutely and completely clean.”
Then he leaned back, looked the lawyer
straight in the eye, nodded and said,
“Now where’s that fucking waiter?”
When the meal finished and the lawyer was
gone, Ash and Anderson stepped out onto the street.
“I think we’re okay on this one,” Ash said.
“No one believes Teale, they figure he’s a nut and besides he doesn’t really
know anything.”
“Anderson pulled his lips together tightly,
“I’m not so sure.”
“What was he doing for us?” Ash asked.
“Teale? Checking air radiation levels in
countries where we’ve let off a few next generation germ bombs. That kind of
stupid horse shit. Something to do with cancer. The company figured he already
had a good cover to get into those places, he already knew the local scientific
community.”
They fell silent and walked down 31st street.
“I think Teale needs to be taken out of this
equation,” Anderson said. “Without Teale they have nothing and a heart attack
makes sense. He’s the right age for one. Under a lot of pressure, out of a job,
facing jail time. He had a heart attack.”
“Chief,” Ash said, “like I said, Teale doesn’t
really know anything and you know how Langley doesn’t like domestic accidents.
They can be messy.”
Anderson stopped walking, turned and stood
very close to Ash and said in a hushed tone, “What can get messy is if someone
figures out all the other active participants we have in the rest of
government, the GSA, DID, National Archives….all of them working for us and
charging their time to every agency in government.”
“The National Archives?” Ash said.
“Sure, you never know, we might need to change
history someday. Look at it this way, we have, what? A thousand active
participants in the federal government alone, then you toss in a few thousand
more in state and local governments. All of them working for us on somebody
else’s dime. That gets around and we’re in the midst of a self-made shit storm
that could bring down everything and I mean everything. Okay Teale went
overboard. We should have kept better track of him. It was a screw up. But we
can’t have this. We won’t have this. He’s under house restriction. Go there.
Bring the right people. They know what to do. This has to happen.”