CHERYOMUSKI, MOSCOW DISTRICT, MONDAY, JUNE 4, 1951.

STARIK HAD CLAMBERED UP THE SPIRAL IRON STAIRCASE TO THE FLAT roof of the three-story mansion to get a respite from the telephones that never stopped ringing. Was it true, Beria wanted to know, that the two Englishmen who had been spying for the Soviet Union had already arrived in Moscow? At what point, Pravda's editor asked, would the two be available for interviews by Western journalists in order to prove to the world that they had defected of their own free will? The Politburo needed to know, Nikita Khrushchev insisted, whether the rumors circulating in the Kremlin about there being a third English defector were based on fact or wishful thinking.

Grinding a Bulgarian cigarette out under his foot, Starik made his way across the roof to the southeast corner and hiked himself onto the bal.u.s.trade. From beyond the forest of white birches came the pungent aroma of the dung that had been scattered from horse-drawn carts in the fields that the Cheryomuski collective would sow with feed corn if the weather held. Pasha Zhilov, a.k.a. Starik, had been born and raised in the Caucuses. His father, an acolyte who fasted on the Sabbath and read to his six children from the Book of Revelations before bedtime every night, died in a typhus epidemic when Starik was sixteen, and he had been sent to live with his father's brother in the Ukraine. Before the collectivization campaign of the early thirties, he used to accompany his uncle, a minor Bolshevik official charged with ensuring that private farms delivered the correct quotas to the state, on his trips through the countryside. The thing that Starik remembered most about these expeditions was the pure odors that reached his nostrils from the piles of manure steaming after a sudden summer cloudburst. Because Starik's uncle was extremely unpopular with the Ukrainian peasants-there were occasions when the tires of his car had been slit or sand had been thrown into its petrol tank-he was accompanied by a second automobile filled with armed militiamen who sometimes let the young Starik fire their Nagant rifles at beer bottles set out on a fence.

The boy had turned out to be a terrible shot; try as he would he couldn't prevent himself from wincing before he pulled the trigger. Clearly, his uncle would say with a laugh, Pasha's talents lay in other directions.

Gazing out over the birch trees, Starik smiled at the memory; how prophetic his uncle had been!

In the pale break between the dark storm clouds and the horizon, Starik could make out a large pa.s.senger airplane, its propellers droning in a throaty growl, descending toward the military runway that few in Moscow knew existed. If everything had gone according to plan, the Englishmen Burgess and Maclean would be aboard. They would be welcomed by a handful of generals in full regalia in order to make the defectors feel important, then whisked to a secret KGB training school for a long and detailed debriefing, the phase that Starik referred to as "the squeezing of the sponge." After which they would be turned over to the Party people and trotted out in front of the world's journalists to extract whatever propaganda benefits were to be had from the defections.

Starik's talents had lain in other directions, though there were not three people in all of the Soviet Union-in all the world!-who understood in a deep way what he was orchestrating.

What he was orchestrating was the demolition of the American Central Intelligence Agency from the inside.

The first stage of the meticulous campaign had involved letting selected cipher keys fall into the hands of the CIA's experts, permitting them to break out chunks of text concerning the Soviet agent code-named HOMER; the text led the Americans to the British diplomat Maclean. From Starik's point of view Maclean was expendable. His exposure had only been a matter of months; Starik had just accelerated the process.

The timing was critical. Starik knew that Philby would learn from Angleton that the Americas were closing in on Maclean. With the British gearing up for the interrogation process, Starik had planted the idea in Philby's head of sending Burgess back to warn Maclean. Then had come the stroke of genius: Burgess hadn't lost his nerve, as the Western newspapers reported; Starik had ordered him to defect with Maclean. Burgess had protested to the London rezident when he was informed of the order; he was afraid his defection would lead to the exposure of his old friend Philby, since he had been the one who introduced Philby into the British Secret Service to begin with; more recently, the two had even been sharing a house in Washington. The rezident, following Starik's instructions to the letter, had convinced Burgess that Philby's days as a spy were numbered: that, since the aborted Vishnevsky defection in Berlin, the noose had been tightening around his neck; that it was only a matter of days before he, too, would have to run for it; that he would be brought home before the Americans could arrest him; that the three Englishmen would be triumphantly reunited in Moscow for all the world to see.

By bringing Burgess in, Starik wasn't giving up much; Burgess, a pariah who exasperated many of his British and American colleagues, was drunk most of the time, frightened all of the time, and delivering little intelligence of value.

Which narrowed the game down to Kim Philby. He was close to Angleton and had access to other top people in the CIA, and was still delivering a fair amount of secrets. But Starik knew from communication intercepts that the Vishnevsky affair had set off alarm bells. The shrewd American who ran the CIA's Berlin Base, Torriti, had picked up the scent; Philby's panicky message to Moscow Centre warning that Torriti was onto him could have been the result of a barium meal planted by Torriti to smoke Philby out. In any case, it would only be a matter of time before someone would make a case against Philby based on the Krivitsky serials and the dozens of recent CIA emigre infiltrations that had ended in failure.

The enigma in intelligence work was the wear and tear on the nerves and the intellect of the successful agent-there was no way to measure it or to alleviate it. Philby put on a good show but after twenty years in the field he was anaesthetized by alcohol consumption and frayed nerves. It was high time to bring him home. And the bringing in of Philby would serve a greater purpose.

Starik was playing a more subtle game than anyone suspected. Counterintelligence was at the heart of any intelligence service. Angleton was at the heart of American Counterintelligence. Starik had been studying Angleton since Philby had first reported his presence at Ryder Street during the war. Starik had continued to observe him from afar when Angleton was in Italy after the war, and later when he returned to Washington to run the Counterintelligence arm of the CIA. He had pored over Philby's reports or their rambling late-night conversations. Angleton talked endlessly about teasing seven layers of meaning out of any given situation. But Angleton had an Achilles heel-he could not imagine someone being more subtle than him, more elegant than him. Which meant that the person who could descend to an eighth layer of meaning had an enormous advantage over Angleton.

Like all Counterintelligence operatives, Angleton had a streak of paranoia; paranoia went with the terrain of Counterintelligence. Every defector as a potential plant; every intelligence officer was a potential traitor. Everyone, that is, except his mentor and close friend, Kim Philby.

By exposing Philby, Starik would push Angleton over the edge into real paranoia. Paranoia would infect his skull. He would chase shadows, suspect everyone. From time to time Starik would send over a "defector" to feed his paranoia; to drop dark hints of Soviet moles in the CIA and in government. If Starik orchestrated it carefully, Angleton would serve Soviet interests better than a real Soviet agent inside the CIA-he would tear the CIA apart looking for elusive Soviet moles, he would mangle the CIA's anti-Soviet elite in the process.

Only one thing hadn't gone according to plan: Philby had decided on his own not to run for it. He obviously preferred the creature comforts of capitalism; he lived to pull the wool over people's eyes, which fed his feelings of superiority. Playing the great game, Philby would protest his innocence from now to doomsday. And the MI 5 interrogators might not be able to prove otherwise to the satisfaction of a judge and jury in a court of law.

But Angleton knew!

And Angleton was Starik's target. Exposing Philby would break Angleton. And a broken Angleton would cripple the CIA. At which point there would be nothing standing in the way of the operation dubbed KHOLSTOMER, Starik's epic long-term machination to break the back of the Western industrial democracies, to bring them to their knees and clear the way for the spread of Marxism-Leninism to the far corners of the planet earth.

There was one other reason for pushing Philby to the sidelines-Starik had positioned his last, his best, mole, code-named SASHA, in Washington. He was someone with access to the Washington elite, including the CIA and the White House. His nerves intact, SASHA would pick up where Philby had left off.

A warm whisper of air drifted in from the fertilized fields, bringing with it the rich aroma of dung and freshly turned earth. Starik savored the redolence for a moment. Then he started back towards the phones ringing off their hooks in his office downstairs. It was going to be a long Cold War.

Three of the girls sprawled on the oversized bed, their long white limbs entwined, their dark nipples pushing through filmy blouses, their bare toes playfully tickling Starik's thighs and p.e.n.i.s under his long rough peasant robe. The fourth girl lay stretched on the sofa, one leg hooked over the back. Her dress had ridden up her skinny body, revealing a pair of worn cotton underpants.

"Shhhhh, girlies," Starik groaned. "How are you going to concentrate on what I'm reading if you fidget all the time."

"Its working," one of the girls t.i.ttered. "Its getting hard."

The girl on the couch, who had been with Starik the longest, taunted the others with a pink tongue. "How many times must I tell you," she called from across the room. "It only gets hard when you talk directly to it."

The youngest of the girls, a curly-haired blonde who had celebrated her tenth birthday the previous week, crept under the hem of his robe. "Oh my dears, it's not hard at all," she called back to her stepcousins. "It looks ever so much like the trunk of an elephant."

"Speak to it, then," called the girl from the couch.

"But what in heaven's name shall I say?"

Starik grabbed an ankle and pulled her out from under the robe onto the bed. "I am not going to tell you again," he declared, wagging a finger at each of the girls in turn.

"Shhhhh," the girl on the couch instructed the others.

"Shhhhh," the curly-haired blonde agreed.

"We must all shhhhh," a porcelain-skinned girl with granny gla.s.ses declared, "or Uncle will become angry with us."

"Now, then," Starik said. He opened the book to the page where he'dleft off the previous day and began to read aloud.

"Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Gla.s.s, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday-the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight-"

"Oh, I did love the Knight," sighed the girl with blonde hair.

"You must not interrupt while Uncle is reading," instructed the girl from the sofa.

"-the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armor in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her-the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the gra.s.s at her feet-and the black shadows of the forest behind..."

"I am frightened of black shadows," the girl wearing granny gla.s.ses announced with a shiver.

"And I am frightened of forests," confessed the blonde.

"As for me, I am frightened of war," the girl on the sofa admitted, and she shut her eyes and covered them with her small palms to keep bad visions at bay.

"Dadya Stalin thinks there will be a war," the girl who had been silent up to now told the others. "I heard him say as much in the newsreel before the film."

"Uncle, will there be a war, do you suppose?" asked the curly-haired blonde.

"There won't have to be." Starik replied. "Some months ago I came across a thesis by a clever economist. The idea seemed outrageous when I first read it but then I began to see the possibilities- "

"What is a thesis?" "And what is an economist?"

"You ask too many questions, girlies."

"How can we be expected to learn, then, if we don't ask questions?"

"You can learn by sitting still as a church mouse and paying attention to what I say." Starik was thinking out loud now. "The thesis I discovered could be the answer..."

"A thesis is a weapon," guessed the girl in the granny gla.s.ses. "Something like a tank, only larger. Something like a submarine, only smaller. Aren't I right?"

Before he could reply, the girl on the sofa asked, "And what will become of our enemies, Uncle?"

Starik ran his fingers through the blonde curls of his niece. "Why, it's as simple as rice pudding, girlies-it may take quite a time but if we are patient enough we will defeat them without shooting at them."

"How can that be., Uncle?"

"Yes, how can you be so certain of such a thing?"

Starik almost managed a smile as he recited from memory one of his alltime favorite lines: "I am older than you and must know better."

Snapshot: an old magazine page proof originally intended for publication in mid-November 1956 but spiked at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency, which claimed that it had identified several employees in the full-page photograph and its publication could compromise their missions and ultimately endanger their lives. The photo, taken with a powerful telephoto lens and accordingly grainy, shows a group of people dressed in heavy winter overcoats-Deputy Director Operations Frank Wisner, Jack McAuliffe, and CIA counselor Mildred Owen-Brack among them-standing on a rise watching a line of refugees trudge along a dirt rut of a road. Some of the refugees carry heavy suitcases, others clutch children by their collars or hands. Jack seems to have recognized someone through the morning ground-mist and raised a hand in salute. Diagonally across the page a big man carrying a small girl on his shoulders appears to be waving back.

19.

MOSCOW, SAt.u.r.dAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1956.

IN AN OVERHEATED OFFICE ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE LUBYANKA headquarters in Moscow, a group of senior officers and Directorate chiefs of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosri, their eyes riveted on an Army radio on the table, listened through a closed-circuit military channel to the rough peasant caterwaul of the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, as he wound up his speech to the secret session of the Twentieth Party Congress. Staring out a window at the ice-shimmering statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky in the middle of the square below, Starik sucked absently on one of his hollow-tipped Bulgarian cigarettes, trying to calculate the likely effect of Khrushchev's secret speech on the Cold War in general; on the operation code named KHOLSTOMER in particular. His gut instinct told him that Khrushchev's decision to catalogue the crimes of the late and (at least in KGB circles) lamented Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world by his nom de guerre, Stalin, would shake the Communist world to its foundations.

About time, that was Starik's view; the more you were committed to an idea, to an inst.i.tution, to a theory of life, the harder it was to live with its imperfections.

Which is what he told Khrushchev when the First Secretary had casually raised the idea of a reckoning. The two, who knew each other from the Great Patriotic War, had been strolling along a bluff not far from where Europe's longest river, the Volga, plunges into the Caspian Sea. Four security guards armed with shotguns were trailing discreetly behind.

Khrushchev had recently outmaneuvered his Politburo colleagues in the long struggle for power that followed Stalin's death in March 1953 and had taken control of the Party. "So what opinion do you hold on the question. Pasha Semyonovich?" Khrushchev had asked.

"For too many years all of Stalin's kittens lived in dread, waiting to see whose head would be lopped off next. I myself never went to sleep without a satchel filled with toilet articles and spare socks under my bed. I would lay awake for hours listening for the sound of the Black Marias screeching to a stop in front of my building, come to cart me off to a camp in Vorkuta where the prisoners who are still alive in the morning suck on icicles of frozen milk."

Khrushchev stabbed at the air with a stubby forefinger. "There is something to be said for setting the record straight. But can I survive such revelations?"

Starik had considered the question. Denouncing Stalin as error p.r.o.ne-hinting that he was terror p.r.o.ne-would rock the Party that had delivered absolute power into his hands and then had failed to stand up to him when he abused it; when he executed scores of his closest a.s.sociates after a series of show trials; when he sent hundreds of thousands, even millions, of so-called counter-revolutionists to rot in the Siberian gulag.

"I cannot say whether you will survive," Starik had finally replied. "But neither you nor the Leninist system can survive"-he had searched for a phrase that would resonate with the peasant-politico who had risen through the ranks to become the Party's First Secretary-"without turning over the ground before you sow new seeds."

"Everyone can err," Khrushchev could be heard saying over the Army radio now, "but Stalin considered that he never erred, that he was always right. He never acknowledged to anyone that he made a mistake, large or small, despite the fact that he made not a few mistakes in the matter of theory and in his practical activity."

"What can he be thinking of!" one of the Directorate chiefs exclaimed. "Dangerous business, the washing of dirty linen in public," muttered another. "Once you start where do you stop?"

"Stalin was consolidating a revolution," snapped a tall man cleaning the lenses of his steel-rimmed eyegla.s.ses with a silk handkerchief. "Mao got it right when he said revolution was not a dinner party."

"To make an omelet," someone else agreed, "one is obliged to crack eggs."

"Stalin," a bloated KGB general lieutenant growled, "taught us that revolutionists who refuse to use terror as a political weapon are vegetarians. As for me, I am addicted to red meat."

"If Stalin's hands were stained with blood," one of the younger chiefs said, "so are Khrushchev's. What was he doing in the Ukraine all those years? The same thing Stalin was doing in Moscow-eliminating enemies of the people."

Over the radio Khrushchev rambled on, his voice rising like that of a woman in lament. "Stalin was the princ.i.p.al exponent of the cult of the individual, the glorification of his own person. Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all."

From the radio came a sharp burst of what sounded like static but was actually an ovation from the delegates to the Party Congress. After a moment the closed circuit went dead. The sudden silence unnerved the men gathered around the radio and they turned away, carefully avoiding each other's eye. Several wandered over to a sideboard and poured themselves stiff whiskeys. A short, nearly bald man in his sixties, an old Bolshevik who resided over the Thirteenth Department of the First Chief Directorate, nicknamed the Wetwork Department because it specialized in kidnappings and killings, strolled across the room to join Starik at the window.

"Good thing the speech was secret," he remarked. "I do not see how the Communist Party leaders who rule the Socialist states of Eastern Europe in Stalin's name-and using Stalin's methodology-could survive the publication of Khrushchev's revelations."

Starik, the Centre's presbyter by dint of his exploits and experience, dragged the cigarette from his lips and stared at the bitter end of it as if there were a message concealed in the burning embers. "It will not remain secret for long," he told his colleague. "When the story becomes known it will break over the Soviet camp like a tidal wave. Communism will either be washed clean-or washed away."

Half an hour after the formal closing of the Twentieth Party Congress, Ezra Ben Ezra, the Mossad's man in Berlin known as the Rabbi, picked up a tremor from a Communist source in East Berlin: a political event registering nine on the Richter scale had occurred in Moscow; delegates to the Congress, sworn to secrecy, were scurrying back to their various bailiwicks to brief the second echelon people on what had taken place.

As it was a Sat.u.r.day the Rabbi had his Shabbas goy, Hamlet, dial the Sorcerer's private number in Berlin-Dahlem and hold the phone to his ear. "That you, Harvey?" the Rabbi asked.

Torriti's whiskey-slurred voice came crackling down the line. "Jesus, Rabbi, I'm surprised to get ahold of you on the Sabbath. Do you realize the risk you're running? Talking on the phone on Sat.u.r.day could get you in hot water with the Creator."

"I am definitely not talking on the telephone," the Rabbi insisted defensively. "I'm talking into thin air. By an absolute coincidence my Shabbas goy happens to be holding the phone near my mouth."

"What's cooking?" the Sorcerer asked.

The Rabbi explained about the tremor from his Communist in East Berlin. The Sorcerer grunted appreciatively. "I owe you one, Ezra," he said.

"You do, don't you? As soon as the sun sets and Shabbat ends, I shall mark it in the little notebook I keep under my pillow." The Rabbi chuckled into the phone. "In indelible ink, Harvey."

Working the phone, Torriti made some discreet inquiries of his own, then dispatched a CRITICAL to the Wiz, who had succeeded Allen Dulles as the Deputy Director for Operations when Dulles moved up to become Director, Central Intelligence. The Moscow rumor mill was abuzz, the Sorcerer informed Wisner. Nikita Khrushchev had made a secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress during which he had criticized the cult of the individual, which was said to be a euphemism for Stalin's twenty-seven-year reign of terror. The revelations were bound to send a shudder through the Communist world and have a profound impact on the Cold War.

In Washington, the Wiz was impressed enough to hand-carry Torriti's CRITIC directly to Dulles, who was winding up an off-the-record briefing to the New York Times's James "Scotty" Reston. The DCI, puffing on a pipe, waved Wisner to a couch while he finished his pitch. "To sum up, Scotty. Anybody looking at the big picture would have to give the Company points for its triumphs. We got rid of that Mossadegh fellow over in Iran-when he nationalized British Petroleum we installed the pro-American Shah in his place, thereby securing oil supplies for the foreseeable future. Two years ago we gave moral support to the people who ousted that Arbenz fellow in Guatemala after he took Communists into his government. The Wiz here had a hand in that."