The Company: A Novel of the CIA (39 page)

Days later, Dulles (over the strenuous objections of Angleton, who wanted to "doctor" the speech to further embarrass the Russians and then wanted dribs and drabs to spin out the impact) released the text of the secret speech to the New York Times. Then he and the Wiz sat back to watch the Soviets squirm.

A friend of Azalia Isanova's who worked as a headline writer for the Party newspaper, Pravda, let her in on the secret as they queued for tea and cakes at a canteen on a back street behind the Kremlin: the American newspaper, the New York Times, had published the text of a secret speech that Nikita Sereeyevich Khrushchev delivered to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress. Khrushchev had created a sensation at the Congress, so the American newspaper claimed, by reproving "real crimes" committed by Joseph Stalin, and accusing the Great Helmsman of abusing power and promoting a cult of the individual. At first Azalia didn't believe the news; she suggested that the American Central Intelligence Agency might have planted the story to embarrass Khrushchev and sow dissension within the Communist hierarchy. No, no, the story was accurate, her friend insisted. His brother s wife had a sister whose husband had attended a close meeting of his Party cell in Minsk; Khrushchev's secret speech had been dissected line by line for the Party faithful. Things in Russia were going to thaw, her friend predicted gleefully, now that Khrushchev himself had broken the ice. "It might even become possible," he added, his voice reduced to a whisper, "for you to publish your—"

Azalia brought a finger to her lips, cutting him off before he could finish the sentence.

In fact, Azalia—trained as a historian and working for the last four years as a researcher at the Historical Archives Institute in Moscow, thanks to a letter of introduction from her girlfriend s father, the KGB chief Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria—had been compiling index card files on Stalin's victims. She had been enormously moved, years before, by two lines from Akhmatova's poem, "Requiem," which she had come across in an underground samizdat edition passed from hand to hand:

I should like to call you all by name,

But they have lost the lists...

Azalia had celebrated the death of Stalin in March of 1953 by beginning t0 compile the lost lists; cataloguing Stalin's victims became the secret passion of her life. The first two index cards in her collection bore the names of her mother and father, both arrested by the secret police in the late forties and (as she discovered from dossiers she unearthed in the Historical Archive Institute) summarily executed as "enemies of the people" in one of the basements of the massive KGB headquarters on Lubyanskaya Square. Their bodies, along with the dozens of others executed that day, had been incinerated in a city crematorium (there would have been a small mountain of corpses piled in the courtyard, and dogs had been seen gnawing on human arms or legs in a nearby field), and their ashes thrown into a common trench on the outskirts of Moscow. The great majority of her index cards were based on files she came across in cartons gathering dust in the Institute. Other information came from personal contacts with writers and artists and colleagues; almost everyone had lost a parent or a relative or a friend in the Stalinist purges, or knew someone who had. By the time of Khrushchev's secret speech, Azalia had quietly accumulated 12,500 index cards, listing the names, dates of birth and arrest and execution or disappearance, of the up-to-then nameless victims of Stalin's tyrannical rule.

Unlike Akhmatova, Azalia would be able to call them by their names. Spurred on by her Pravda friends suggestion, Azalia arranged a meeting with the cousin of a cousin who worked as an editor at the weekly Ogonyok, a magazine noted for its relatively liberal point of view. Azalia hinted that she had stumbled across long forgotten dossiers at the Historical Archives Institute. In view of Khrushchev's denunciation of the crimes of Stalin, she was prepared to write an article naming names and providing details of the summary trials and executions or deaths in prison camps of some of the victims of Stalinism.

Like other Moscow intellectuals, the editor had heard rumors of Khrushchev's attack on Stalin. But he was wary of actually publishing details of Stalin's crimes; editors who went out on limbs often fell to their deaths. Without identifying her, he would sound out members of the magazine's editorial board, he said. Even if they agreed to her proposition, it was unlikely that a final decision would be taken without first clearing the matter with high ranking Party officials.

That night Azalia Isanova was woken by the thud of feet pounding up the stairwell. She knew instantly what it meant: Even in buildings equipped with working elevators, the KGB always used the stairs in the belief that their noisy arrival would serve as a warning to everyone within earshot. A fist pounded on her door. Azalia was ordered to throw on some clothing and was hauled off to a stuffy room in Lubyanka, where until noon the following day she was questioned about her work at the Institute. Was it correct, the interrogators wanted to know, that she had acquired data on enemies of the people who had died in prison camps during the thirties and forties? Was it correct that she was exploring the possibility of publishing an article on the subject? Glancing at a dossier, another interrogator casually inquired whether she was the same Isanova, Az alia, a female of the Hebrew race, who had been summoned to a KGB station in 1950 and quizzed about her relationship with a certain Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin? Thoroughly frightened but lucid, Azalia kept her answers as vague as possible. Yes, she had once known Tsipin; had been told that continuing to see him was not in the state's best interests; by that time the relationship, if that is what it was, had long since ended. Her interrogators didn't appear to know about her index cards (which she kept hidden in a metal trunk in an attic in the countryside). After twelve and a half hours of interrogation, she was let off with a crisp warning: Mind your own business, she was sternly instructed, and let the Party mind the Party's business.

One of her interrogators, a coldly polite round-faced man who squinted at her through rimless spectacles, escorted Aza down two flights of wide stairs to a back entrance of Lubyanka. "Trust us," he told her at the door. "Any rectifications to the official history of the Soviet Union would be made by the Party's historians acting in the interests of the masses. Stalin may have made minor mistakes," he added. "What leader doesn't? But it should not be forgotten that Stalin had come to power when Russian fields were plowed by oxen; by the time of his death, Russia had become a world power armed with atomic weapons and missiles."

Aza got the message; Khrushchev's speech notwithstanding, real reform in Russia would only come when history was restored to the professional, as opposed to the Party, historians. And as long as the KGB had a say in the matter, that was not about to happen anytime soon. Aza vowed to keep adding to her index cards. But until things changed, and drastically, they would have to remain hidden in the metal trunk.

Lying awake in bed late that night, watching the shadows from the street four floors below flit across the outside of her lace window-curtains, Aza let her thoughts drift to the mysterious young man who had come into her life six years before, and gone out of it just as suddenly, leaving no forwarding address; he had disappeared so completely it was almost as if he never existed. Aza had only the haziest memory of what he looked like but she was still able to recreate the timbre and pitch of his voice. Each time I see you I seem to leave a bit of me with you, he had told her over the phone. To which she had responded, Oh, I hope this is not true. For if you see me too often there will be nothing left of you. On the spur of the moment, stirred by a riptide of emotion, she had invited him to come home with her to explore whether his lust and her desire were harmonious in bed.

They had turned out to be lusciously harmonious, which made his disappearance from the face of the earth all the harder for her to bear. She had tried to find him; had casually sounded out some of the people who had been at the Perdelkino dacha the day they met; had even worked up the nerve to ask Comrade Beria if he could discover where the young man had gone to. A few days later she had found a hand-penned note from Beria under her door. Continuing a relationship with Tsipin was not in the state's best interests, it had said. Forget him. Several weeks later, when the KGB called her in to ask about her relationship with Tsipin, she had managed to put him out of mind; all that remained was the occasional echo of his voice in her brain.

I am pleased with your voice, Yevgeny, she had told him. I am pleased that you are pleased, he had responded.

2

NEW YORK, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1956

A COLD WAR-WEARY E. WINSTROM EBBITT II, BACK IN THE STATES on his first home leave in nineteen months, had a three-week fling with an attractive State Department attorney that ended abruptly when she weighed her options and decided on the bird in hand, which turned out to be a promotion and a posting to the Philippines. Weekdays, Ebby briefed Company analysts on the increasingly tense political situation in the satellite states in the wake of Khrushchev's secret speech. (In June, Polish workers had rioted against the Communist regime in the streets of Poznan.) Weekends, he commuted to Manhattan to spend time with his son, Manny, a thin boy with solemn eyes who had recently turned nine. Ebby's ex-wife, Eleonora, remarried to a successful divorce lawyer and living in a sumptuous Fifth Avenue apartment, made no bones about the fact that she preferred the absentee father to the one turning up on her doorstep Saturdays and Sundays to bond with Immanuel. As for Manny, he greeted his father with timid curiosity but gradually warmed to Ebby, who (acting on the advice of divorced friends, of which there were many in the Company) kept the meetings low-key. One weekend they went to see Sandy Koufax pitch the Brooklyn Dodgers to victory over the Giants at Ebbets Field. Another time they took the subway to Coney Island (an adventure in itself, since Manny was driven to his private school in a limousine) and rode the giant Ferris wheel and the roller-coaster.

Later, on the way back to Manhattan, Manny was gnawing on a frozen Milky Way when, out of the blue, he said, "What's a Center Intelligence Agency?"

"What makes you ask?"

Mommy says that's what you work for. She says that's why you spend s0 much time outside America."

Ebby glanced around. The two women within earshot seemed to belooking out the car windows. "I work for American government—"

"Not this Center Intelligence thingamajig?"

Ebby swallowed hard. "Look, maybe we ought to discuss this another time."

"So what kind of stuff do you do for the government?"

"I'm a lawyer—"

"I know thaaaat."

"I do legal work for the State Department."

"Do you sue people?"

"Not exactly."

"Then what?"

"I help protect America from its enemies."

"Why does America have enemies?"

"Not every country sees eye to eye on things."

"What things?"

"Things like the existence of different political parties, things like honest trials and free elections, things like the freedom of newspapers to publish what they want, things like the right of people to criticize the government without going to jail. Things like that."

Manny thought about this for a moment. "Know what I'm going to be when I grow up?"

"What?"

Manny slipped his hand into his father's. "I'm going to protect America from its enemies same as you—if it still has any."

Ebby had to swallow a smile. "I don't think we're going to run out of enemies any time soon, Manny."

"He told me he wanted to protect America from its enemies but he afraid there'd be none left by the time he grew up," Ebby explained. The Wiz tossed off his Bloody Mary and signaled a passing waiter : two more. "Not much chance of that," he said, chuckling under his breath."

"That's what I told him," Ebby said. "He seemed relieved." Ebby and the DD/0, Frank Wisner, were having a working lunch at a corner table in a private dining room of the Cloud Club atop the Chrysler Building. When two more drinks were delivered to the table, the Wiz, looking more drawn and worried than Ebby remembered him, wrapped his paw around one of them. "To you and yours," he said, clinking glasses with Ebby. "Are you surviving home leave, Eb?"

"I suppose so, Bill. Actually, it's as if I landed on a different planet. I had dinner with three lawyers from my university the other day. They've grown rich and soft—big apartments in the city, with weekend homes in Connecticut, country clubs in Westchester. One guy I worked with's been named a junior partner. He pulls down more in one month than I make in a year."

"Having second thoughts about the choice you made?"

"No, I'm not, Frank. There's a war on out there. People here just don't seem concerned about it. The energy they invest in working out stock options and mergers... hell, I keep thinking about those Albanian kids who were executed in Tirane."

"Lot of people will tell you it's the folks in academia who're wrestling with the really big questions—like whether Joyce ever used a semicolon after 1919."

The comment drew an appreciative snicker from Ebby.

"Sounds to me like you're 'bout ready to get back into harness," Wisner said. "Which brings me to the subject of this lunch. I'm offering you a new assignment, Eb."

"Offering implies I can refuse."

"You'll have to volunteer. It'll be dangerous. If you nibble at the bait I'll tell you more."

Ebby leaned forward. "I'm nibbling, Frank."

"Thought you might. The mission's right up your alley. I want you to get your ass to Budapest, Eb."

Ebby whistled under his breath. "Budapest! Don't we have assets there already—under diplomatic cover, in the embassy?"

The Wiz looked off to the side. "All of our embassy people are tailed, their offices and apartments are bugged. Ten days back the station chief thought he'd shaken his tail, so he slipped a letter into a public mail box addressed to one of the dissidents who'd been supplying us with information. They must have emptied the box and opened all the letters, and that led them to the dissident. The poor bastard was arrested that night and wound up on a meat hook in a prison refrigerator." Wisner turned back to Ebby. "I'm speaking literally. We badly need to send in a new face, Eb. Because of security considerations, because sending someone in from the outside will emphasize the seriousness of the message being delivered."