Command Authority (21 page)

I
t was a frigid spring morning in Moscow, gray, with rain threatening. In Lubyanka Square, some four hundred fifty men and women stood stamping their feet to ward off the cold. All of those in attendance worked in the large neo-baroque building on the northern corner of the square, the main headquarters of the FSB and the former headquarters of the KGB.

Everyone in the crowd had been directed by e-mail and public-address announcements to leave their desks at ten in the morning to come out to the square. Here they chatted, many smoked, and they waited.

It was just past eleven now, but no one complained.

The square had been closed off before rush hour; no reasons why had been given to drivers and pedestrians, who were directed away from it to the overly congested side streets. The headaches it would cause for the simple people of Russia were not a concern for anyone in charge of this event. Even the Lubyanka metro station below the square had been closed. The drivers of the trains had been notified to slow but not stop, and armed guards waited on the edge of the tracks, making sure no one attempted to disembark from the passing cars.

There had been no explanation given as to why everyone was to stand in the cold and what would be going on out here today, although everyone in the square had a good idea, even though many of them could scarcely believe it.

In front of them was a forty-foot-tall object that had not been there in the center of the square the evening before. Although it was covered with a massive green curtain, the FSB employees in the square had little doubt as to what it was.

Under the curtain, all were certain, would be the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky that had stood in that spot for decades during the Soviet Union before its removal in 1991.

Dzerzhinsky was a hero of the October Revolution that brought Vladimir Lenin to power, and Lenin himself appointed him director of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage. The organization, known as the Cheka for its Russian acronym, was the state security service from the beginning of the Soviet Union until Joseph Stalin replaced it in the 1920s.

Dzerzhinsky was, therefore, the father of the Soviet state security apparatus. He received the nickname “Iron Felix” for his strict belief in harsh punishment, and his infamy grew across the Soviet Union during his decades in power as the founder of the Soviet gulag system.

The removal of the statue in 1991 had been tangible evidence that the old guard was no more. The reappearance of the statue, if that was indeed what was below the draping, would mean to the four hundred fifty FSB employees here to watch the unveiling that the retreat from the past was over and state security’s reascendence to the top of the order in Russia was finally complete.

President of the Russian Federation Valeri Volodin appeared a few minutes later. There was a roar in the crowd, due both to the appearance of their popular leader and as an early show of appreciation for what all expected was about to happen. He walked through the crowd, passing down a lane that opened for him compliantly with only some help from his armed security detail. Walking along with him was a tall man in his fifties; his features, like Volodin’s, were classically Slavic, but his eyes held none of the sparkle and charm displayed by the president’s.

This man was Roman Talanov, the director of the FSB. Many who worked in the building here in Lubyanka Square just on the other side of the forty-foot-high curtain had never even seen a picture of the man, and they could only assume this was Talanov by his placement alongside the president.

A hush came over the crowd as the two men stepped up to the draping. Each man stood to one side of the massive hidden object, facing the crowd.

The president looked to the closest members of the crowd standing around and smiled. With a wink, he said, “There will be no surprises.”

Everyone laughed. Everyone knew.

With a nod from the president, the two men pulled off the green curtain, revealing the forty-foot-tall statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky.

The men and women of FSB erupted in cheers that could be heard all the way to the Kremlin, four blocks away.

When the cheers died down, Valeri Volodin took a microphone that was handed to him.

He took a long breath, and then spoke with emotion. “Some of you are too young to remember Iron Felix standing here, keeping guard over our building. Maybe more of you remember the day he was knocked to the ground and dragged away.

“He was reviled by fools and foreigners. But we protectors of order knew the truth. Felix Edmundovich, and those very few men of his time who were like him, were the ones who ensured nearly a century of power.”

Now the crowd roared.

Volodin hammered his fist into the air. “This will be our new century of power! May someday brave and strong Russians stand here and talk of those who returned Iron Felix to his position so that a new, strong Russia could spring forth from that very building, from this very square!”

Volodin gestured to Talanov, who stood silently behind him with no hint of the emotion experienced by virtually everyone else in the square.

“Our struggles in the next few months will be great. But the rewards will be far greater. Roman Romanovich will lead you ably, and when you need to be inspired, just look out your window, or come out here, and gaze at this statue.” Volodin beamed. “We should all allow Iron Felix to guide us through the struggles ahead.”

Fresh cheers erupted and continued until Volodin left the square minutes later with a final wave to the crowd of intelligence personnel.

No one present was surprised by the fact that their director, Roman Talanov, had made no address to the crowd, and as the square began to clear out after the departure of Valeri Volodin, many noticed that Talanov was already gone. Most suspected he had drifted away, back to his office, while Volodin grabbed all the attention for himself.

—

T
he Crimea is a peninsula at the southern tip of Ukraine that dips into the Black Sea. Russians have called this area home since the Crimean War, when Turkey was defeated by the forces of Catherine the Great and a Russian citadel was established at Sevastopol. Joseph Stalin further “Russified” the area by deporting native Turkish-speaking Tatars to Central Asia and replacing them with Russians. In many cases, new Slavic inhabitants moved into the houses left behind by the displaced Tatars.

In the 1950s Khrushchev transferred the Crimea to Ukraine, one of the Soviet Republics. Clearly, he had no hint that his decision would ever create controversy, as he had no way of knowing the USSR would one day cease to be and Ukraine would have the freedom of self-determination.

Everyone knew Russia’s ambitions extended to the Crimea, but a few years earlier some steam was let out of the kettle when the pro-nationalist Ukrainian president was replaced by a pro-Russian successor. The fate of the Black Sea fleet in the port of Sevastopol seemed secure, and Russia went about its business.

This all changed when a new pro-nationalist administration ascended in Kiev, shortly after Valeri Volodin took power in Moscow. Since then, the entire Crimean peninsula had been a hotbed of unrest, with protests in the streets, political murders and kidnappings, and even rumors of armed gang activity supported by Russia against public officials who did not support Russia’s annexing of the peninsula.

It was clear that the hands of the FSB were all over the Crimea, using all means imaginable to foster interethnic discord.

The Crimean city of Sevastopol is the home port of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and twenty-five thousand Russians live and work within the city for the fleet alone. The residents of Sevastopol are not shy about their affinity for the Motherland of Russia. It was one of the few places on earth where statues of Stalin and Lenin had stood unmolested even in the tumultuous nineties, and now, more than two decades after Ukrainian independence, Sevastopol was as Russian a city as Moscow itself.

Statues of Vladimir Lenin still grace the parks of the city of Sevastopol. The Russians here weren’t just pro-Russian, but pro-Soviet.

Keith Bixby had arrived in Sevastopol just an hour earlier, after an eleven-hour drive from Kiev. With him were two other case officers, a twenty-seven-year-old ex–Marine officer named Ben Herman, and a forty-eight-year-old Princeton grad named Greg Jones. The three had driven in two big SUVs loaded down with food and emergency equipment, but they carried no weapons with them, because though the men were “covered” intelligence officers, meaning they carried diplomatic credentials with them, their vehicles were not marked as diplomatic.

Their destination here in the Crimean port city was an old Cold War–era radar installation and military barracks repurposed as a functional but ugly residence. There was a high brick wall around the one-acre property, and inside stood a single three-story building with balconies on all sides and all floors, much like a small beachfront hotel.

This nondescript property in front of a drab park was a CIA SMC, or Special Mission Compound, and the facility held the CIA code name “The Lighthouse.” It was staffed by four technical experts from the CIA, half a dozen private contractors from a U.S. security company, as well as a four-man Advance Force Operations team from U.S. Joint Special Operations Command’s Delta Force. All fourteen of these personnel either carried on their person or had access to a carbine rifle and a handgun, and there were a few small grenade launchers to launch tear-gas grenades locked in the cabinet that served as the armory.

This wasn’t much in the way of firepower, but this was only the Lighthouse’s internal security. A second cordon protected the building; this was made up of a half-dozen Ukrainian security guards who were stationed at the main gate. Most of these men were off-duty police, and each carried just a pistol and a shotgun, but the Americans had a good relationship with the Ukrainians and knew they would warn of any threats.

The security guards knew only that the location was associated with the Partnership for Peace, a NATO program that fostered relationships with non-NATO nations. That none of the foreigners inside wore NATO uniforms had been noticed by the men, but no one thought this location was anything more than some sort of civilian liaison administrative building for an obscure and mostly irrelevant NATO program.

The CIA compound had been in operation here for years, but it had been difficult to keep covert as the tide of public opinion in the area had turned more violently pro-Russian in the past months, especially since the Russian fight with NATO in Estonia. Despite the difficulties of operating in the volatile environment, however, the place had most definitely paid dividends to the United States’ understanding of the Black Sea fleet.

When Russia rearmed the fleet and refurbished equipment and weapons, Delta Force men based at the Lighthouse had photographed key components of the equipment. When the U.S. Navy cruiser
Cowpens
docked in Sevastopol a year earlier, the men of the Lighthouse had monitored the local reaction to gauge the level of support, or lack thereof, for the United States and NATO in the region. And then, just days earlier, when the port went on emergency activation because of Volodin’s surprise military drills, the Delta and CIA men had recorded audio and video of the process that could be extremely helpful in case of actual naval war in the region.

Even though the majority of the population in the Crimea was decidedly pro-Russian, Ukraine was on friendly terms with the CIA, and Ukrainian intelligence had been aware of this CIA signals intelligence location.

And this was now a problem. The revelation that one of the top men in Ukrainian security services had been caught passing secrets to the FSB had set off panic buttons all around the CIA. Keith Bixby had, seemingly, a thousand holes in his ship he needed to fill now that much of his operation had been potentially exposed to the opposition, but nothing on this long list was as important as getting everyone, and everything, out of Sevastopol.

If the Russians invaded, they would move troops directly into the Crimean peninsula, and they would head straight for Sevastopol. Once here, it would not take long before the Russian Army showed up outside the front gate of the Lighthouse, asking if they could come inside and take a look around.

Bixby was a hands-on station chief, and he had spent much of the day with a screwdriver, disassembling racks of electronic gear so that it could be loaded up into an SUV and driven away. At the moment, he was shredding documents in a long room of cubicles on the third floor of the building.

Twenty years earlier, there would have been days’ worth of docs to shred here, but he thought he’d have every scrap of paper in the building destroyed in a couple of hours.

While he worked, the other men disassembled computers, removing hard drives, put small bills of local currency into envelopes to pay off local support personnel, and performed other rushed duties involved with decommissioning a secret intelligence installation on the fly.

It would take a full day of this work before they’d be able to load the Delta men, the CIA men, and the security contractors into the SUVs parked in the parking circle in front of the building and start the long drive back to the capital. Most of these men, as well as Bixby himself, would then fly out of Ukraine.

The men of the Lighthouse weren’t needed in country now that the Lighthouse was shutting down, but Keith was leaving because it was assumed by all that he had been thoroughly burned to the Russian opposition by the second in command of the SSU.

It was just past nine p.m. now, and Bixby worked alone. A walkie-talkie was on the table in front of him so he could listen to comms among the other sixteen men in the building. As he reached for a manila folder full of radio traffic transcripts, the voice of one of the Lighthouse CIA technical staff members came over his radio: “Keith. Can you come downstairs?”

Keith fed the transcripts through the shredder while he answered with the other hand. “Unless it’s a really big deal, I’d rather you came up to me.”