A few hours later and half a world away, Yuri Kuznetsov sat drinking tea in the little café on Al Khateeb Lane, just across the grassy park from the Russian embassy in Damascus.
As the SVR’s number one man in the greater Middle Eastern theater, he had a car, a driver, and a murky agenda. But of all the things he might do, he liked lunching at this little café best. He lingered here often, sometimes for hours.
A mustachioed waiter appeared at his elbow, poured Darjeeling from a samovar, and placed sliced meats on the table with colonial formality.
It was early afternoon and the sun warmed his face through a large street-facing window. Though well into winter, it was a pleasant, cloudless sixty-five-degree day. After dozens of winters in Russia, the balding forty-nine-year-old reminded himself of his good fortune in being assigned here. Not Paris by any stretch, but it would do. An old friend of his in the twilight of his career had been just been assigned to Chechnya. Thinking of that old friend now, chewing his sliced chicken, Yuri shuddered. Chechnya.
He folded his day-old printout of the Moscow Times and bit into a pita, positioning the newspaper to his right, settling in for a long read, another of his secret indulgences. He always printed the online edition and took it with him to this café. He wasn’t able to enjoy the Times, an opposition paper, in the embassy, where someone could look over his shoulder. The uptight pricks over there only permitted Pravda, party-line pablum.
Today, the Times headline that caught his eye was about an oil deal between Gazprom, the state-owned Russian energy company, and the Iranian government. In exchange for drilling access to the Iranian oil fields just to the east of Iraq, the Russians would complete the construction of a half-finished nuclear reactor at Bushehr, an Iranian port city on the Persian Gulf.
Yuri had heard rumors about such a deal, but only just. Though he was the senior-ranking SVR spy in the Middle East, this was clearly one of those lucrative ruble-driven ventures that rolled down from the top. The kleptocrats that ran his country would have said it was none of his business—which only made sense in Russia. Nevertheless, he liked what he read, which was rare enough.
For once it wasn’t all about money.
Well, he corrected himself, of course it was about money.
But at least there was a strategic predicate. Russia had long coveted access to these fields. The pipeline would let them ferry oil directly to Russian tankers in the Caspian Sea, where Gazprom already had substantial refining operations. It was a bonanza for the company, sure, but it was also a bonanza for the Rodina herself, whether the greedy bastards had meant for it to be or not.
The Molotov cocktail throwers at the Times disagreed, of course. Given that the vice-chairman of Gazprom was a former puppet-president of Russia, Putin’s number two, the opinion writers used two columns to criticize the enormous payoff sure to head the way of Gazprom execs and, by extension, Russian government officials.
After finishing the editorial, Yuri looked up from the paper and removed his reading glasses, enjoying the sun on his face. He squinted against the street, framed by white government buildings of the austere, postmodern Islamist style. There weren’t many cars on the road—or pedestrians for that matter.
Damascus felt oddly at peace, despite the civil war raging away in the north, up past Homs. Yuri much preferred it down here in the quiet south, just over the hill from Lebanon and the balmy Mediterranean. A perfect climate.
Chechnya . . . He smiled and stirred three sugar cubes into his tea.
By the time he returned to the embassy, he had digested the rest of the Times along with a plate of cheese. He’d been putting on weight here. His pants were sticking to his thighs, hard to ignore in the rising afternoon heat. He knew he needed a new, fuller-cut suit. There was a tailor in Beirut, highly recommended by the Foreign Ministry pretty boys. In the meantime, he forced himself to take the three flights of stairs up to his office at the embassy. He arrived at his door puffing.
Breathing hard, the SVR Directorate PR major sank into his chair and looked over the report of one of his field teams. Though it was in the secure in-box on his computer, his secretary had printed it and laid it on his desk, per his standing instructions. He donned his reading glasses and soon forgot about his labored breath, his mouth falling open as he read.
A report on the Macedonian arms dealer he’d nabbed in Dubai.
Under Yuri’s orders, his team had executed the snatch because the dealer had been advertising a sensitive strain of the tularemia virus that could be weaponized. Assad’s army chief was interested since it would allow him to clear out the rebel population in Aleppo without blowing up more infrastructure. Because he was the head of the region’s SVR counterintelligence bureau, Yuri’s counterparts in Syria’s Military Intelligence Directorate had asked him to vet the deal first, see if it was legit.
Complying, Yuri’s operatives set up a first-rate surveillance package only to discover that the Macedonian seller had been in contact with suspected CIA officers right smack in the middle of Dubai. Without telling the Syrians, Yuri had ordered his men to scoop the Macedonian for questioning. He’d taken direct action because he thought he might expose a CIA operation against Syria, something he could use, a feather in his cap career-wise.
Reading the report now, he realized the take was even better than he’d hoped. Under “enhanced interrogation” at the SVR safe house in Al Aweer, the Macedonian had told of a two-million-dollar payoff to come from the Americans. He’d given the names of accounts and contacts. The SVR team asked him to confirm the identity of the CIA operatives they’d surveilled. On and on.
Amazingly, the dealer hadn’t even had access to the virus strain. He was going to use the money from the CIA to try to go buy it himself from another set of criminals. In effect, he had bluffed the CIA.
Ballsy, thought Yuri, leaning back in his chair, its springs clicking under the strain. He couldn’t believe what people would do for a couple million bucks. The report went on with some pictures of the suspected CIA officers. One of them was a woman, good-looking, late thirties maybe, intense face, thick eyebrows, dark hair dangling beneath a hijab.
The Macedonian thought she might have been the leader, according to the lead interrogator. She’d been to a meet once, the asset said, but she’d worn a blond wig then. He said she’d ordered the other guys around like they worked for her, but she was never identified. He didn’t have a name for her, of course. But in one of the photos, there was a reasonably clear view of her face.
Yuri went to the digital dossier on his aging desktop PC. He clipped the most prominent photo of each of the CIA operatives, but especially the woman. He attached it to a general cable for SVR headquarters, along with a request for information. If he could figure out who she was, he could set up more surveillance and beat the CIA at whatever game they were playing.
Not a bad day. Not bad at all.
Around sunset, there was a knock at his office door. It was Putov, Yuri’s weaselly faced deputy. Putov looked at Yuri and tapped his watch. They were on their way to a meet at a brothel where they intended to lure a Syrian official for blackmail. The idea was to get him to rat out rebel sympathizers. It was work.
Still. Work at a brothel.
But the next morning, Yuri awoke in a funk. Things at the whorehouse hadn’t gone as planned. He’d found himself too preoccupied with the implications of uncovering the CIA team operating in his midst to get in the mood.
In the main drinking parlor, he’d ignored his girl, who, he’d sensed, had been making ill-considered references of him to the others. Coming to this drunken realization, he’d lost his temper and backhanded her like an annoyed bear coming out of hibernation. A ruckus with security, hushed words in the corridors, Putov spiriting him out into a waiting car.
In the end he’d come home to his apartment alone, where he’d sat up until three, smoking and drinking vodka. Now, this morning, he poured himself strong coffee and shouldered into his too-tight suit jacket, his head splitting.
Back at the office he logged on to his secure messages and found that the SVR Operations Center in Yasenevo had replied to his request for information. Their reply made Yuri sit up straight. The head splitting abated.
They knew the CIA woman.
While their reporting was light on sources and methods, Yuri figured they must have done an AI facial recognition search and returned with a hit. She was reportedly a high-level CIA operative who had exited the UAE under a different alias and disguised with an auburn wig. There was a picture of the passport. Yuri knew SVR had a line into the passport agencies of a number of countries; evidently, the UAE was one of them.
The completeness of the SVR information was breathtaking. Her real name was Meredith Morris-Dale and she worked, they believed, for Edward Rance, the head of CIA’s Counterproliferation Division. She and Rance had met with Jeff Dorsey, CIA’s head of National Clandestine Service, only twenty-four hours earlier.
Incredible information, thought Yuri, rubbing his temples. A big fish. She’d been in Dubai for the Syria bioweapons operation only forty-eight hours ago and was sitting down with CIA’s top spy in Langley immediately afterward. This meant that she was likely the mastermind behind CIA operations in his neck of the woods.
It also meant that if the CIA went snooping around the new Russia–Iran deal, she would probably play a leading role.
The information referenced reports from an SVR undercover officer code-named Zoloto, Russian for “gold.” Given the detail of the reporting, Yuri assumed Zoloto to be an illegal SVR operative who worked in the US under nonofficial cover—the shadowy world of Directorate S. Gold indeed.
His head was beginning to clear. He made a request to his superiors to initiate a full-surveillance operation on Meredith Morris-Dale in the hopes of intercepting whatever her next operation was. He marked it priority one, mission critical, a Krasniy Odin. For extra insurance, he noted that it was critical to the success of the Russo–Iranian nukes for oil deal.
That would get the fat cats’ attention.