The Blind Spy (29 page)

P
REPARATIONS FOR INFILTRATING Anna into Ukraine a third time were of an even higher order than for her previous operations. Her cover identity for the first entry, into Odessa, was evidently blown and a second identity had been provided for her operation on the northern border. Now Burt provided two more passports for this third entry. One identity she would use for passing through border controls and into the country, while the other was to enable her to change identities once she was across the border – and then only in an emergency. The first passport Burt had procured was American and the second, emergency passport gave her British nationality. Adrian in London had been, as ever, most obliging where Burt’s requests were concerned.

Under the first, American identity she was to enter the country as a tourist exploring the byways of the Crimea just as the summer season was beginning. She would be a camper, a walker, a birdwatcher, with an added interest in the ancient Greek sites along the coast and a diploma in archaeology to match. This identity was designed for someone to roam the huge national parks behind Sevastopol but principally to give her ready access to the area around its port. And she would be able, if necessary, to retreat into the mountains behind the city. In the second, British passport – to be used in dire circumstances only, and only once she was inside the country – she was an investor in tourist infrastructure representing a British hotel company that was looking for opportunities on the beaches of the Black Sea coast for developing its hotel trade. Burt gave Anna a full back-up of business cards and an office address in London corresponding with a genuine tourist investment company Cougar owned and kept for special purposes on the shelf. Phone lines attached to this known company were arranged. All calls for her from the Crimea – if any checks were made by the Ukrainians – would be diverted from the company’s offices to a special command centre Burt had also arranged in Mayfair. For this identity, she would take a different set of clothes, a different mobile phone and suitable business accessories which she would bury on entering the country.

‘What are we going to do when every country introduces biometric passports?’ Bob Dupont commented.

It was a question that all spy agencies were wrestling with. The days of a simple change of name and profession, with a clean passport and even full sovereign government support, were coming to a close. Soon, once you had entered a country, whether as an ordinary visitor or an undercover operative, there would be no opportunity for disguise on further visits. DNA would be the means of identification.

‘I guess we’ll find a way to change the human itself,’ Burt said. ‘Create an obstacle and we always come up with a way to subvert it, you can be sure of that. Our scientists are working on it now, believe me.’

But it was the thin fall-back plans should Anna make contact with Balthasar that bothered everyone the most. Burt had arranged a back-up team who would also infiltrate the country, Larry in charge as always. But of necessity this back-up team would have to remain in the background and steer clear of coming under observation themselves, should a meeting take place. Identities and further back-up had to be provided for the back-up team too.

‘There’s only so far you can be in the rear before you become completely useless,’ Larry objected. ‘I don’t like it.’

But Anna insisted that his team should remain at arm’s length. She was certain that she needed to act in an all-but-solo fashion, or there would be no meeting at all. Balthasar was treated by everyone with respect, but by Anna most of all. They all agreed that contact with him would be extremely sensitive, at best.

‘He’s used to operating in deepest cover,’ she pointed out. ‘In Chechnya. To survive years there without detection, his antennae are the surest there is.’

The third problem was with Balthasar himself. The idea of making contact with a highly skilled operative whose main intention might be to abduct her was hard enough to prepare for. But the added significance of an opponent who knew what you were thinking – as Mikhail insisted time and again was the case – created completely unique field rules. For two weeks, with the aid of three of Burt’s company psychologists, Anna practised controlling her thoughts and even her perceptions. Her role as a camper, a tourist with the exploration of Crimea’s beautiful parks as her sole aim, had to be perfected in a way that even an operative as seasoned as she was had not anticipated. Once she made contact with Balthasar – if that was to happen – no other thought could even enter her brain that could upset the carefully designed cover they were preparing for her. For long sixteen-hour days, then seventeen- and finally eighteen-hour days, she practised this mind control until, one day, she’d asked Mikhail. ‘But can he tell if you’re controlling your thoughts? If he can, then all this is a waste of time.’

‘I don’t know, Anna,’ was all Mikhail was able to tell her.

Burt’s concentration on Sevastopol and the area around the Russian Black Sea fleet base was also a mystery to all of them except Burt himself. Why not Odessa? Both Larry and Anna asked him to no avail. And if the Crimea was the focus, why only the Crimea? What about the northern borders with Russia where she had found the canisters? But Burt was adamant, for reasons he didn’t yet divulge, that Sevastopol was the key, not just to a meeting with Balthasar, but to any Russian move into Ukraine.

‘That is the weakest point,’ he told them, but he didn’t explain the significance of their other discoveries of Russian infiltration into other parts of the country.

‘They’re all secondary to Sevastopol,’ Burt stated emphatically. ‘In my opinion, they’re anyway just diversions,’ he added vaguely.

Then, three days before her departure, when they were meeting at a safe house of Cougar’s in the mountains of North Carolina, Burt laid out the operation itself and its background.

There were five of them in a long room in the huge, woodboarded attic of a clapboard house that overlooked the sea: Burt, Anna, Mikhail, Larry and Bob Dupont. Logan was explicitly excluded from the meeting. ‘He’ll join us later,’ was all Burt said. ‘When we’ve discussed what we need to discuss. Logan is involved only in one aspect of the Ukraine operation. What I’m about to say is for our ears only. And most importantly, Balthasar is for the ears of only those of us in this room.’

They sat at a polished oak trestle table that was more than thirty feet long. It was covered in maps, three dimensional terrain models, maritime charts, air, train, ferry and bus schedules for the Crimea, long-range weather reports in the northern Black Sea area; there were real-time TV screens on the walls that followed events in the Kiev parliament and news channels from Odessa and Sevastopol; and there were full moon and new moon tables and times and dates of the low-range Black Sea tides – though these last were left unexplained by Burt and, it was assumed by the assembled company, they were there just to provide any and every piece of information that could be extracted from the region.

Then Burt looked around the long room. It was illuminated by windows at either end, with strip lights tracked along the length of the ceiling. A coffee machine bubbled in a corner, there was a wine rack and cooler, and one of the staff below had laid out plates of sandwiches and biscuits, fruit bowls overflowing with every kind of fruit that would never be touched, and at the far end of the table near where Burt sat there was a modest humidor with a full selection of his favourite cigars. Burt placed his chubby hands on the table, the palms down, and commanded the attention of all of them.

‘On the twenty-second of January, three months ago,’ he began, using no notes, ‘Anna retrieved a set of naval department blueprints secreted from the Russian Defence Ministry that show Moscow’s plans for a modest enlargement of the port facilities at Novorossiysk, on the Russian side of the Kerch Straits from Crimea. Some days later, a severed head was delivered to a US embassy staff member in Kiev. The head belonged to a man who was a recent, and unidentified, Russian informant of the CIA station in Kiev. This informant reported what the CIA calls – using the informant’s words – a “terror ship” that had recently left the port of Novorossiysk. It left the Black Sea, changed its name twice and returned with what was apparently a secret cargo. It now lies fifty miles off the port of Sevastopol.’ He reached for a cigar, but used it merely as some kind of prop, stabbing the air with it, waving it as if he were drawing a picture in the air. Then he continued. ‘A week after the ship appears on our mental screens, Anna captured a reinforced steel canister on the Russian-Ukrainian northern border. It was one of several batches being smuggled into Ukraine by Russian special forces troops. From our sources in Russia, we believed it to contain toxic substances.’ Burt paused. ‘And then, to cap things off perfectly, we received, from usually reliable sources in Moscow, stories of a Moscow-backed plan to implicate an Islamic Tatar group in the Crimea, by the name of Qubaq. The idea – apparently – was to create a set of circumstances that would destabilise the Crimean region and then blame this group.’ He looked around the room. What he then said surprised his audience. ‘What – if any of this – do we believe?’ Burt stated with the majesty of a judge in the summing-up of a long case.

But without waiting for an answer – as everyone around the table was accustomed after one of Burt’s rhetorical flourishes – he continued again. ‘The general background to all this is that Russia has been agitating in Ukraine since the country’s independence. This has been the case mainly since 2000, when Putin came to power. In more recent years, agitation has developed into what might be called a concerted subversion of Ukraine’s political, military and intelligence structures. That began in earnest in 2004 when Moscow tried to fix the elections there and was only defeated by the Orange Revolution. Today, Moscow’s candidate is in power, the revolution has failed, and Ukraine’s future is undecided; whether it is to be part of Western democratic culture or fall back under the influence – perhaps more than that – of Russia.’ He waved the cigar then pointed it like a weapon. ‘So far this has been largely a propaganda war instigated by Russia against Ukraine. But is it just propaganda? In this case – as in most others – we should always listen to what the world’s leaders actually say. In the twentieth century that would, perhaps, have avoided several catastrophes. And what did Putin say about Ukraine? In April 2008, he said to President Bush, “Ukraine is not even a state.” He described how large parts of it were a “gift” from Russia. My belief is that we should listen to what our leaders say, particularly those who don’t have to appeal to a fully democratic electorate. What I believe is that Putin wishes to take back this so-called “gift” of Russia’s. The question is, How will he do so?’

Burt leaned back in his chair, finally placed the cigar into his mouth and, with his head tilted slightly back, lit a long match that ignited the end of the cigar until he eventually sat blowing clouds of blue-grey smoke towards the ceiling. Then he looked down again at the table.

‘So let me begin by assessing what we can be expected to believe of the recent events I’ve just described,’ he said. ‘And, of course, what we should not believe. First of all, the plans for the enlargement of Novorossiysk’s port are negligible in terms of the facilities that the Russian Black Sea fleet needs to operate. In other words, despite Moscow’s assertions at international conferences and private meetings that it is planning to relocate its fleet to the Russian port and away from Ukrainian territory, no such intention exists. It plans to remain in Sevastopol, come what may. I call this Russia’s Strategic Aim One. From the plans themselves, I think we can believe this aim.

‘Second, the canisters, which arrive on Ukrainian soil backed by rumours and some evidence of Russia distributing its passports to Ukrainian citizens in the north of the country, and by stories of weapons caches there.’ He looked up at the watchful faces of the group at the table to indicate something momentous. ‘For weeks now our labs have been conducting tests on the canister you brought back from Ukraine, Anna,’ he announced. ‘Now, at last, we have the results. It’s taken so long because they couldn’t quite believe it. What the canister contains is a mixture of Georgian mineral water, iodine, camphor and a small amount of sulphuric acid. The mineral water was the hardest ingredient to identify.’ He paused again to let this sink in. ‘In other words, there is no poison, no secret weapon, no threat to Ukraine – at least from these canisters,’ he added darkly.

This revelation seemed to throw all of the party into confusion except, mysteriously, Burt.

‘Then why did the Russians spend so much time and subterfuge smuggling them into the country in the first place?’ Bob Dupont asked reasonably.

‘Exactly,’ Burt said. ‘Why?’

Mikhail looked up from his usual position of staring at the table, as if in some form of deep meditation, and said in a level voice: ‘So they wanted us to think it was important. They hadn’t anticipated that Anna or anyone else would actually capture any of the canisters. What they were expecting – requiring, in fact – was that our satellites and any other observation would pick up their movements, the military vehicles, even the special forces personnel involved. They wanted us to see the smuggling operation, without knowing that what they were smuggling was harmless.’

All around the table pondered this for a moment before Burt spoke.

‘When all this began,’ he said, ‘it was against a background of Russia ramping up its hostilities towards Ukraine in the northern sector of the country. Handing out Russian passports, the so-called weapons caches and planned strike action and revolution. Then came the canisters in a highly-organised, obviously subversive smuggling operation across the border. All these things were taking place in the north-eastern sector of the country along the borders with Russia. But if the canisters can be shown to be a charade – a lie, effectively – then may we assume that all these actions in the north-east of the country are so much chaff the Russians are throwing up in order to divert our attention?’