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dossiers that night, confirming what the UPDK snoops had
already reported about our Praga restaurant dinner reserva-
tions and our scheduled trip to Leningrad.
JACOB AND I followed the haughty uniformed doorman of the
Praga, who led us into the elegant restaurant s main foyer, re-
plete with a glowing crystal chandelier, gilt-framed mirrors,
and a curving white marble staircase. He escorted us up the
gleaming steps to the office of the Administrator, then mo-
tioned for us to take chairs along the wall.
The Administrator, a woman in her forties with lacquered
hair and tobacco-stained teeth, sat behind her huge desk, ener-
getically scolding
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 215
an offending employee. The man stared at the floor, visibly
trembling, and I wondered what his crime had been. When
the  Red Queen finally finished with him, she allowed him
to leave with his head still on his shoulders. Only then did she
turn to us and briefly inspect the invitation card the doorman
had left on her desk. She snatched up a heavy telephone that
looked like an artillery radio transmitter from the Battle of
Stalingrad, and spoke brusquely into the receiver. Seconds
later, a maître d stood at attention in front of her desk, and
she issued curt instructions.
The maître d then guided us along palatial corridors past
large private dining rooms echoing with the voices of rowdy
patrons. I caught glimpses of burly nomenklatura, wearing the
inevitable ill-fitting Brezhnev Special suits and uniforms
sprinkled with medals. There were also a number of attractive
young women in evening dress dining with these old croco-
diles, an overt sign of decadence I hadn t expected. In several
rooms, raucous New Orleans hot jazz or 1930s swing combos
added to the cacophony.
We mounted another set of marble stairs and emerged into
a tasteful winter garden, where an attentive waiter led us to a
ringside table on the dance floor. The band played a fair imit-
ation of Woody Herman, much to the delight of the gyrating
Russians, many dancing wildly with no one in particular but
having the time of their lives.
 Would the gentlemen like drinks? our waiter asked cour-
teously in fluent English. I had a sinking feeling that we were
receiving special treatment, that we had indeed been expected
and were right now under active surveillance.
Playing the unsophisticated bumpkins, Jacob turned to the
waiter with a helpless grin.  What do you suggest?
Moments later, we were spreading Beluga caviar on thinly
sliced,
216 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
well-buttered black bread and sipping icy Stolichnaya vodka,
poured from a crystal flask into thimble glasses. As the waiter
removed our borsht bowls and laid out the platter of flaky
cheese tort and chicken Kiev, I pondered the serious operation-
al problems we had identified during this initial survey.
SOON AFTER OUR arrival, Jacques had emphasized the funda-
mental element of operational life in Moscow and told us
never to forget it:  By their very nature, Russians are distrust-
ful. He reminded us that there were centuries of autocratic
Russian history preceding the six decades of Communist dic-
tatorship.  Lenin and Dzherzhinsky didn t invent the Secret
Police, Jacques said. The tsar had maintained a dreaded secur-
ity service, the Okhrana. But the Bolsheviks had quickly elim-
inated its officers, rather than incorporate them into the new
Cheka. Under the tsar, the Bolsheviks had survived only be-
cause their clandestine skills and early tradecraft enabled them
to escape the Okhrana. They turned these skills to advantage
when establishing their own security police and espionage
service.
Russians had been practicing the art of surveillance for
hundreds of years. Their imaginations were rich with possibil-
ities, and if they were traditionally distrustful of each other,
they were doubly so of foreigners. Add to that the reality of
life in Brezhnev s Soviet Union, in which trafficking in contra-
band and bribery were rampant, and you had a huge pool of
well-qualified potential candidates from which to draw recruits
to the surveillance Directorates.
And our Soviet opposition knew how vulnerable they were
to high-level espionage. In the early 1960s, the KGB had been
badly burned by the Penkovsky case. Colonel Oleg Penkovsky,
an experienced officer in the Soviet GRU military intelligence,
was a  walk-in agent-in-place,
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 217
with an ax to grind against his superiors, who had thwarted
his career due to the fact that his father had been a Tsarist army
officer who fought against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil
war. On a warm August night in 1960, he accosted a startled
American tourist near Red Square and passed him a message
for the American embassy, stating Penkovsky had information
of  exceptionally great interest that he wished to deliver to
the CIA. The tiny Agency operation in Moscow that existed at
the time was unable to contact Penkovsky, so he approached
the British, who completed the recruitment. Within months,
Penkovsky was delivering some of the highest quality intelli-
gence that either the CIA or British MI6 had ever received in
the Soviet Union.
Dispatched to London on a Soviet  research committee,
Penkovsky underwent vigorous CIA-MI6 debriefing and agent
training. He then revealed that Nikita Krushchev s Politburo
planned on installing intermediate-range nuclear missiles in
Castro s Cuba. Almost as an afterthought, Penkovsky turned
over reams of detailed information on advanced Soviet
weaponry.
Back in Moscow, this flood of high-grade intelligence contin-
ued, creating a classic case officer-agent liaison problem. If
either CIA or MI6 officers operating under diplomatic cover [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]