Triple (14 page)

Ken Folleff

Israeli agent named Nat Dickstein,had been spotted in Luxembourg and was

now under surveillance. Because of the circumstances, the report got less

attention than it deserved. There was only one man in the KGB who

entertai6ed the mildest suspicion that the two items might be connected.

His name was David Rostov.

David Rostov's father had been a minor diplomat whose career was stunted-

by a lack of connections, particularly secret service connections.

Knowing this, the son, with the remorseless logic which was to

characterize his decisions an his life, joined what was then called the

NKVD, later to become the KGB.

He had already been an agent when he went to Oxford. In those idealistic

times, when Russia had just won the war and the extent of the Stalin

purge was not comprehended, the great English universities had been ripe

recruiting-grounds for Soviet Intelligence. Rostov had picked a couple

of winners, one of whom was still sending secrets from London in 1968.

Nat Dickstein had been one of his failures.

Young Dickstein had been some kind of socialist, Rostov remembered, and

his personality was suited to espionage: he was withdrawn, intense and

mistrustful. He had brains, too. Rostov recalled debating the Middle East

with him, and with Professor Ashford and Yasif Hassan, in the

green-and-white house by the river. And the Rostov-Dickstein chess match

had been a hard-fought affair.

But Dickstein did not have the light of idealism in his eyes. He had no

evangelical spirit. He was secure in his convictions, but he had no wish

to convert the rest of the world. Most of the war veterans had been like

that. Rostov would lay the bait----~'Of course, if you really want to

join the struggle for world socialism, you have to work for the Soviet

Union"---and the veterans would say "Bullshit."

After Oxford Rostov had worked in Russian embassies in a series of

European capitals-Rome, Amsterdam, Paris. He never got out of the KGB and

into the diplomatic service. Over the years he came to realize that he

did not have the breadth of political vision to become the great

statesman his father wanted him to be. The earnestness of his youth

disappeared. He still thought, on balance, that socialism was probably

the political system of the future; but this credo no

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longer burned inside him like a passion. He believed in Communism the way

most people believed in God: he would not be greatly surprised or

disappointed if he turned out to be wrong, and meanwhile it made little

difference to the way he lived.

In his maturity he pursued narrower ambitions with, if anything, greater

energy. He became a superb technician, a master of the 'devious and cruel

skills of the intelligence game- and----equally important in the USSR as

well as the WW-lZe learned how to manipulate the bureaucracy so as to

gain maximum kudos for his triumphs.

ne First Chief Directorate of the KGB was a kind of Head Of[ice,

responsible for collection and analysis of information. Most of the field

agents were attached to the Second Chief Directorate, the largest

department of the KGB, which was involved in subversion, sabotage,

treason, economic espionage and any internal police work considered

politically sensitive. The Third Chief Directorate, which had been called

Smersh until that name got a lot of embarrassing publicity in the West,

did counterespionage and special operations, and it employed some of the

bravest, cleverest, nastiest agents in the world.

Rostov worked in the Third, and he was one of its stars.

He held the rank of colonel. He had gained a medal for liberating a

convicted agent from a British jail called Wormwood Scrubs. Over the

years he bad also acquired a wife, two children and a mistress. The

mistress was Olga, twenty years his junior, a blonde Viking goddess from

Murmansk and the most exciting woman he had ever met. He knew she would

not have been his lover without the KGB privileges that came with him;

all the same he thought she loved him. They were alike, and each knew the

other to be coldly ambitious, and somehow that had made their passion all

the more frantic. There was no passion in his marriage anymore, but there

were other things: affection, companionship, stability and the fact that

Mariya was still the only person in the world who could make him laugh

helplessly, convulsively, until he fell down. And the boys: Yuri,

Davidovitch, studying at Moscow State University and listening to

smuggled Beatles records; and Vladimir Davidovitch, the young genius,

already considered a potential world champion chess player. Vladimir had

applied for a place at the prestigious Phys-Mat School No. 2. and

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Ken Folleff

Rostov was sure he would succeed: he deserved the place on merit, and a

colonel in the KGB had a little influence too.

Rostov had risen high in the Soviet meritocracy, but he reckoned he could

go a little higher. His wife no longer had to queue up in markets with the

hoi polloi---she shopped at the Beryozka stores with the elite-and they had

a big apartment in Moscow and a little dacha on the Baltic; but Rostov

wanted a chauffeur-driven Volga limousine, a second dacha at a Black Sea

resort where he could keep Olga, invitations to private showings of

decadent western movies, and treatment in the Kremlin Clinic when old age

began to creep up on him.

His career was at a crossroads. He was fifty this year. He spent about half

his time behind a desk in Moscow, the other half in the field with his own

small team of operatives. He was already older than any other agent still

working abroad. From here he would go in one of two directions. If he

slowed up, and allowed his past victories to be forgotten, he would end his

career lecturing to would-be agents at KGB school No. 311 in Novosibirsk,

Siberia. If he continued to score spectacular points in the intelligence

game, he would be promoted to a totally administrative job, get appointed

to one or two committees, and begin a challenging-but safe--career in the

organization of the Soviet Union's intelligence effort-and then he would

get the Volga limousine and the Black Sea dacha.

Sometime in the next two or three years he would need to pull off another

great coup. When the news about Nat Dickstein came in, he wondered for a

while whether this might be his chance.

He had watched Dickstein's career with the nostalgic fascination of a

mathematics teacher whose brightest pupil has decided to go to art school.

While still at Oxford he had heard stories about the stolen boatload of

guns, and as a result had himself initiated Dickstein's KGB file. Over the

years additions had been made to the file by himself and others, based on

occasional sightings, rumors, guesswork and good old-fashioned espionage.

Ile file made it clear that Dickstein was now one of the most formidable

agents in the Mossad. If Rostov could bring home his head on a platter, the

future would be assured.

But Rostov was a careful operator. When he was able to

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pick his targets, he picked easy ones. He was no death-01%. glory man: quite

the reverse. One of his more important talents was the ability to become

invisible when chancy assignments were being handed out. A contest between

himself and Dickstein would be uncomfortably even.

He would read with interest any further reports from Cairo on what Nat

Dickstein was doing in Luxembourg; but he would take care not to get

involved.

He had not come this far by sticking his neck out.

The forum for discussion on the Arab bomb was the Middle Fast political

committee. It could have been any one of eleven or twelve Kremlin

committees, for the same factions were represented on all the interested

committees, and they would have said the same things; and the result would

have been the same, because this issue was big enough to override factional

considerations.

The committee had nineteen members, but two were abroad, one was ill and

one had been run over by a truck on the day of the meeting. It made no

difference. Only three people counted: one from the Foreign Ministry, one

KGB man and one man who represented the Party Secretary. Among the su-

pernumeraries were David Rostov's boss, who collected all the committee

memberships he could just on general principles, and Rostov himself, acting

as aide. (It was by signs such as this that Rostov knew he was being

considered for the next promotion.)

Ilie KGB was against the Arab bomb, because the KGB's power was clandestine

and the bomb would shift decisions into the overt sphere and out of the

range of KGB activity. For that very reason the Foreign Ministry was in

favor-the bomb would give them more work and more influence. T'he Party

Secretary was against, because if the Arabs. were to win decisively in the

Middle Past, how then would the USSR retain a foothold there?

The discussion opened with the reading of the KGB report "Recent

Developments in Egyptian Armaments." Rostov could Imagine exactly how the

one fact in the report had been spun out with a little background gleaned

from a phone call to Cairo, a good deal of guesswork and much bullshit,

into a screed which took twenty minutes to read. He 'had done that kind of

thing himself more than once.

Ken Folleff

A Foreign Ministry underling then stated, at some length, his

interpretation of Soviet policy in the Middle East. Whatever the motives of

the Zionist settlers, he said, it was clear that Israel had survived only

because of the support it had received from western capitalism; and

capitalism's purpose had been to build a Middle East outpost from which to

keep an eye on its oil interests. Any doubts about this analysis had been

swept away by the Anglo-Franco-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. Soviet

policy was to support the Arabs in their natural hostility to this rump of

colonialism. Now, he said, although it might have been. imprudent-in terms

of global politics-for the USSR to initiate Arab nuclear armament,

nevertheless once such armament had commenced it was a sh2ightforward

extension of Soviet policy to support it. The man talked forever.

Everyone was so bored by this interminable statement of the obvious that

the discussion thereafter became quite informal: so much so, in fact, that

Rostov's boss said, "Yes, but, shit, we can't give atom bombs to those

fucking lunatics."

"I agree," said the Party Secretary's man, who was also chairman of the

committee. "If they have the bomb, they'll use it. That will force the

Americans to attack the Arabs, with or without mikes-I'd say with. Then the

Soviet Union has only two options: let down its allies, or start World War

Three."

"Another Cuba," someone muttered.

The man from the Foreign Ministry said, "Tbe answer to that might be a

treaty with the Americans under which both sides agree that in no

circumstances will they use nuclear weapons in the Middle East." If he

could get started on a project like that, his job would be safe for

twenty-five years.

The KGB man said, "Then if the Arabs dropped the bomb, would that count as

our breaking the treaty?"

A woman in a white apron entered, pulling a trolley of tea, and the

committee took a break. In the interval the Party Secretary's man stood by

the trolley with a cup in his hand and a mouth full of fruitcake and told

a joke. "It seems there was a captain in the KGB whose stupid son had great

difficulty understanding the concepts of the Party, the Motherland, the

Unions and the People. The captain told the boy to think of his father as

the Party, his mother as the Mother-

so