| |
I climbed the thirty-two foot ladder with a seventy-five pound bundle of shingles digging into my right shoulder. No burden at all. Today, Friday, December 30th, the eve of New Year’s Eve, my spirits wanted to explode like a star burst of red, white, and blue. I felt like a true patriot making a small contribution to our national security. That was the only way I could justify to myself turning in a guy I liked personally.
Since I’d already met with Mr. KGB Khalatsyn yesterday, an FBI agent — hopefully not of the Church or Howdy Dooley variety — would show up today to debrief me.
I sensed 1984 was going to be the year my life turned around — spun actually, in a positive direction.
At the top of the ladder I heaved the shingles onto the deck — thud! The house was a two-story walker, a low pitched roof, on 199th Street and 67th Avenue in Fresh Meadows, Queens. The sun shined bright, and the temperature hovered somewhere in the 40s: a great day to be young, alive and a roofer. I was about to head back down to grab another load when Dom called to me. I looked up and saw only his head sticking above the peak. He worked the back while I shingled the front.
“Omo,” he said, nodding at something behind me, “ya friend is here.”
I turned around. A short guy in a brown suit and black topcoat stood across the street next to a weathered, light green four-door sedan. He smiled up at me, shading his eyes with his right hand. He wore glasses.
To Dom: “Excuse me while I go halt the spread of communism.”
“You’re crazy for getting involved with them guys.” He was referring to the FBI and the Soviets. He was a good and trusted friend. I told him everything — just in case.
Grinning, “I know, but crazy in a good way.”
Dom took his head and his smirk and dropped them both back below the ridge line. I climbed down the ladder and laid my tools – hammer, knife and apron — on the hood of the truck. I reached into the cab, grabbed an attaché case and put on my horn-rimmed glasses. Then I walked over and introduced myself to FBI agent Charlie Columbo.
Charlie looked to be in his early 40s. He kind of reminded me of the TV detective except for the glasses, a brown mustache, and two good eyes.
“Let’s sit in the car so we can talk,” Charlie said, holding the door for me.
I thanked him and jumped in the front seat. I’d made detailed notes immediately following last night’s meeting with Khalatsyn. I read aloud while Charlie did some serious note taking of his own. When I finished reading, Charlie showed me a photo. “This guy is white. Why are you showing me a picture of a white guy? I told you, Khalatsyn is black. How many black Russians do they have at the U.N.?” Charlie grinned. When he showed me the next picture, I bounced up and down in my seat like a little kid. “That’s him, that’s him!”
In the photo Khalatsyn walked along a path near a brick building. He wore a well tailored, dark three-piece suit. His right hand reached into the inside, left breast pocket of his jacket, and he looked over his left shoulder towards the camera. Khalatsyn carried himself in an aristocratic manner. I noted a smirk on his face, like he knew he was being photographed and by whom.
I told Charlie about the ad I’d seen in the SLA bulletin. Charlie said they’d check it out. I also gave them a photocopy of the latest list of material Khalatsyn had ordered. Charlie asked me if I thought Khalatsyn might be testing my competency.
“Yeah, some of those things do seem deliberately vague. And he wasn’t much help when I tried questioning him, either.”
“Did he ask to see a copy of your resume?”
“You mean like checking my credentials? No he didn’t.”
“That’s strange,” Charlie said out loud, “they usually do.”
“He didn’t ask to see my computer either — even stranger, huh.” Then, borrowing a piece of Charlie’s jargon to describe certain Soviets, I asked if Khalatsyn was a “bad guy.”
“At this point, he’s a diplomat. Whether he’s legitimate or not, we can’t say.” Charlie must have sensed my disappointment, because he added, “This is standard operating procedure for them. They could very well be cultivating you. Let’s wait and see what develops.” Then he smiled. “Just sit back and enjoy it. Think of it as a game of chess. It’ll be fun. You even get a code name.”
A code name! That sure lit my console. Only secret agents get secret code names.
Charlie added that whenever I called the FBI on the special phone number I’d been given by Agent Church, and even though it was a secure line, I should not use my real name. Since I got to choose my own code name, and given my sense of irony, I picked Julius as in Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a C.C.N.Y. alum like me. He was executed in the early 1950s for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.
Charlie mentioned that sometimes these cases went on for years; as far as I was concerned, the longer the better. He added that if it ever got to be more than I could handle I could back out anytime with no hard feelings from the Bureau. I assured him I was in for the duration. I said that I didn’t serve in Vietnam, and this was my chance to do the right thing by my country.
“I can assure you, this is very important to us,” Charlie said. “A copy of my report will be on the desk of a senior member of the Cabinet tomorrow morning.” He had to be speaking about William J. Casey, at the time the big boss man over at CIA.
Ego made a loud noise in my head: Double wow, John! This is big, really big! You’re gonna save America!
“Simply the fact that you’ve been able to identify Khalatsyn is extremely important to us,” Charlie said. “We can throw a net around him, watch him more closely. Totally neutralize the guy. This might be an important piece of a puzzle. Have a direct bearing on other cases and operations.”
He went on to praise my powers of observation and attention to detail. He was particularly impressed with the way I fielded Khalatsyn’s remark about the current strain in superpower relations. “If you had taken the attitude, ‘I hate America, I love communism,’ he’d see through you in a second.”
Like I said no problem because what I’d told Khalatsyn was what I truly believed.
“Next time, try and get as many personal details about him as you can, especially about his wife. Is he happy at home? Things like that.”
“Why is that important?”
Instead of an answer to my question, “You should see some of their wives. Surprised they don’t all defect.”
Thus my mental image of Mrs. Khalatsyn had been cast for all time: she-bear.
I showed them the two fifties Khalatsyn had given me. The bills were numbered consecutively, so I thought I should bring that to the Bureau’s attention. Charlie winced. Something about the bills spooked him. “Hold on to them a little longer,” he said.
I mentioned that I couldn’t hold those fifties too long because it was winter, the slow roofing season.
Charlie noticed my foreman, Dom, waiting for me in the truck. That ended my debriefing. I got out of the sedan and waved as he roared off, heading away from Union Turnpike, a main drag. Judging from the direction he’d just taken, I guessed he hadn’t spent much time in Queens.
I got into the truck with Dom. “You ain’t gonna believe what he told me, Dom.”
A squinty eyed, “Maybe you shouldn’t be telling me this, Omo.”
“Yeah, maybe, but I’m gonna anyway.” I saw no reason to play the closed mouth spy with Dom. I’d come of age in the sixties and seventies, so I’d be an idiot to totally trust the FBI. Dom I did trust, however; so if things ever went wrong between me and the Bureau, then the more close friends who knew about what was going on the better.
“He wants me to find out as much personal details about Khalatsyn’s home life as I can. Them other two schmucks I told you about, Church and Dooley, they said the same thing.”
Dom shrugged. “Fuck ‘em where they breathe.”
As Dom started to pull out — “Oh shit!” — he suddenly jerked the wheel hard heading us back towards the curb. We both bounced in our seats when we hit.
“What the fuck!” I said.
Dom had spotted Charlie bearing down on us at high speed. After realizing he was headed in the wrong direction, he must’ve made a U-turn. At the last second Charlie swerved to avoid barreling into the truck broadside. As he zoomed by, he waved to us out the window as if it was no big deal he almost had me and Dom sticking out of his fucking grill.
“Ya almost killed us!” Dom yelled out the window.
“Doubt he heard you, Dom. It’ll take at least three red lights for your words to catch that car. Geez!” I shook my head. “Nice guy, but he drives like an asshole.”
***
ACCORDING TO FBI AGENT Columbo, tomorrow morning the Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, would be sitting on the toilet reading a debriefing of roofer John Tettouomo in regards to Soviet Khalatsyn, Mikhail. Wow!
Despite my constant whining about working in one, libraries are true treasures. Where else could I go in the pre-Internet days of the 1980s to learn about the secret world of espionage? The first stop was just a short ride on the Broadway Local down to 116th Street. In Columbia University’s repository library of federal documents I found Intelligence Requirements for the 1980’s: Counterintelligence. From that source I learned the distinction between CI (counterintelligence) and CE (counterespionage). I also learned why the Bureau was so hot for information about Michael’s personal life.
To begin with CI is defined as information derived from CE. In addition, CE is aggressive. It uses the hostile service’s own operation to obtain information about that service: fancy academic language for kicking a guy in the ass with his own shoe.
I knew that as far as the spy game was concerned, I was a rookie. The Library-Man part of me knew he had to do some heavy-duty research to catch up and catch on. It wasn’t until I began reading that particular book (part of a multi-volume series) that I finally figured out why the feds were so hot for personal details about Khalatsyn. And why FBI agent Columbo’s report would be morning reading for DCI Bill Casey. Also, from reading books and journal articles, I soon discovered that very little in Spy Fact matched Spy Fiction. If Spy Fact ever looked for any recognizable semblance of itself in the world of mirrors, it would recognize only its outer garments: i.e. shirt and tie, but nothing of substance. Therefore, I decided to confine my reading to the memoirs of intelligence officers, broad overviews of intelligence services, and case histories. Back in the eighties, library shelves were packed with that stuff.
For Mikhail Khalatsyn, I figured the name of the game was industrial espionage. For the FBI it was counterespionage (CE). That was why the Bureau was so interested in personal details about target Khalatsyn. All counterespionage operations have three main objectives: identify, neutralize, and penetrate. Because of the nature of his contact with me, Khalatsyn had been identified with high probability as being a Soviet intelligence officer. He would be neutralized because his continuing efforts to recruit me, a controlled asset being directed by U.S. counterintelligence, meant the less time he had for recruiting other Americans. In addition, our side learned his areas of interest and recruiting methodology. That left only one thing, the ultimate. This was where CE got aggressive: to penetrate a hostile intelligence. DCI William Casey’s top priority during the Cold War was to recruit assets within the Soviet hierarchy, to have eyes and ears inside the Kremlin. That made the Khalatsyn Affair a very big deal.
The object of Casey’s program, a joint effort by CIA and the FBI, was to find Soviets based in the U.S. who might be turned, either willingly or unwillingly. The program, which began in 1980, was code named COURTSHIP. Information the FBI gathered on a Soviet intelligence officer, diplomat or private citizen stationed anywhere inside the continental United States went straight to COURTSHIP. The program worked like this:
A Soviet lands in the U.S.
A determination is made whether or not the man is an intelligence officer.
FBI agents open a window on the target looking for personal weaknesses or professional shortcomings that can be exploited.
CIA psychologists do a profile of the target to make an educated guess whether or not he is traitor material.
The target is then courted with flirtations and enticements, or blackmailed if necessary.
Why did some Soviet and Eastern European intelligence officers defect? It was not because they were men of principle who changed sides because we were the good guys and our cause just.
When CIA set up boards and committees to look for patterns of personality and background in those men who had already come over, they found none. The Agency concluded that there had been no strictly ideological defectors, only individual intelligence officers who defected for personal reasons. What personal reason could be so pressing to cause a man to give up his family, career and country to flee to the West? The most common cause of defections in the early 1950s was a shake-up in intelligence headquarters that threatened the life and security of many Soviet field officers. After Beria’s execution in 1953, many KGB officers in Tokyo and Vienna came over.
On a more personal level, citing cases from the 1950s, defectors deserted from the Soviet Zone of Occupation because they fell in love with German girls and were refused the right to marry foreigners. These defectors were not ignoble. They were simply human, men caught in unpleasant circumstances who sought a way out.
So what would cause an intelligence officer, either American or Russian, to betray his country? As many experts on the subject have written, there is but one root cause: MONEY. Lots and lots and lots of $,$$$,$$$.
Speaking of which, back in the winter of 1983/84, money was something I did not have lots and lots of.