The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel by Jason Matthews (17)

The WOLVERINEs

During the salad days of the Cold War, the breathless arrival in bustling Rome Station of first-tour case officer Tom Forsyth, fresh out of training at the Farm, was greeted variously by colleagues. A number of them helpfully showed Tom around Rome and pointed out the best trattorias for Roman cucina povera, peasant home cooking, and where to find a bottle of Cesanese del Piglio from Lazio. His branch Chief got him on the invitation list for half a dozen national day celebrations at foreign embassies where he could begin trolling for developmentals on his own. The reports chief sat him down and went over the target lists, so he’d know what to look for.

Senior Rome Station officer Gale Stack was fifty-five years old and close to retirement. Earlier in his career he’d had opportunities at management, but it hadn’t worked out due to competing priorities that included three-martini lunches, creative accounting on his ops revolving fund (RF), and chatting up bar hostesses. Stack resented that he’d never been appreciated for what he brought to the mix. He’d been stepped on and stepped over—plenty. The arrival of young Forsyth—they were in adjoining office cubicles—presented an opportunity for Stack to unload a bothersome case encrypted VZWOLVERINE. It was going nowhere, at least not with the amount of effort Stack was willing to put into it. The asset, a young Polish émigré named Witold Zawadzki had volunteered as an embassy walk-in, and Stack had elbowed other officers aside for the case. He thought it would be a gravy train—lots of intel for little work—as well as a nice line item on his RF for charging off lunches and dinners.

VZWOLVERINE was from an aristocratic family in Kraków, one of the szlachta, the Polish nobility, dating back to 1360 and King Casimir III the Great. Sent to Rome as a boy to live with an aunt, Witold, now twenty-five and an Italian citizen, hated the Soviets only slightly less than he hated the zdrajcy, the traitor Poles who sold out their own country. At their first agent meeting, the firebrand young Pole—nervous, thin, blond hair slicked back—looked intently at his white-maned case officer with the manicured fingernails, whose hand shook as he pulled the martini olive off a toothpick with his large white teeth. Witold leaned forward and told this CIA officer that he was willing to return to Poland, and that his family knew patriotic like-minded Poles in the government, the Party, and the military. Stack burped, signaled for another martini, and told VZWOLVERINE to order anything he wanted off the menu, anything at all.

At a second boozy lunch at the fabulously expensive seafood restaurant La Rossetta in the shadow of the Pantheon, VZWOLVERINE brought a list of influential Polish families who would, with careful encouragement, provide information on Polish Communist Party leadership, Soviet intelligence activity in Poland, and Warsaw Pact military readiness levels. Putting down his lobster claw, Gale Stack took the paper with a butter-slick thumb, put it into his coat pocket, and told Witold he’d “run traces” on the names. Stifling his ready temper, VZWOLVERINE told Stack that he wanted to talk to someone else in his organization. Alarm bell. Bad idea to let another Station officer get his nose under the tent to see how Stack was expensing meals off this case, never mind letting this wannabe freedom fighter complain about his handling officer.

Stack the next day told the branch Chief that VZWOLVERINE was a bitter émigré with no access to intel, and that he was recommending that Station cut the asset with a $1,000 termination bonus (he’d give the young man $500 and keep the rest as pocket money) and stop wasting time. The branch Chief wearily said okay, but something made him change his mind, and he told Stack, instead, to turn over the case to another officer, that maybe changing the chemistry would help. Alarm bell. An experienced Station officer would see the real story and report back. Then Stack remembered that new kid Forsyth in the next cubicle. He wouldn’t know the ropes yet; he’d be perfect. How about it? asked Stack. Easy case to cut his teeth on, push the asset to develop access, nice and slow. The branch Chief shrugged and said to go ahead.

That was the start of the WOLVERINE network. After a bibulous turnover meeting, Tom Forsyth and his new agent Witold Zawadzki warily began to feel each other out: Witold saw that his new rookie case officer was honest, energetic, and driven to be successful; Forsyth saw that the impatient young Pole’s fierce commitment needed to be controlled. Nothing would be accomplished by running suicide missions. VZWOLVERINE’s return forays to Poland started slowly—covered as commercial buying trips for an Italian design company—letting the SB, the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, the Soviet-controlled Polish intelligence service, get used to seeing the young man with the Italian passport come and go.

After two trips, VZWOLVERINE recruited a childhood friend, now a Polish Army captain, who was encrypted VZWOLVERINE/2. Family friends, VZWOLVERINE/3 and /4, a comely former art student, now special assistant in the party secretariat, and a police sergeant respectively, were acquired in the next six months. Witold’s next recruitment was VZWOLVERINE/5, his cousin, who was coincidentally a communicator in the headquarters of the Ministry of Interior, who processed KGB message traffic between Warsaw and Moscow. The intelligence streams started slowly. Reports were collected from those subagents by WOLVERINE/1 (as principal agent) and brought to Forsyth in Rome.

Rome Station management sat up and started taking notice, then Headquarters followed. The reporting from the WOLVERINEs was superb, including photography of classified Warsaw Pact and Soviet Red Army documents never seen before. Counterintelligence analysts looked at the take with a skeptical eye: too-good-to-be-true intelligence always aroused suspicions, but the reports were corroborated and they kept coming. Forsyth had to continually rein in Witold, to tell him to slow down, to balance production against risk. In his continuing effort to protect his WOLVERINEs, Forsyth trained Witold in clandestine photography, impersonal communications, secret writing, and advanced intel reporting, who in turn trained his network members inside Poland.

A month later, Witold presented Forsyth with an audio tape of a closed meeting of the frantic Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party arguing about whether to comply with or ignore an order from KGB Director Chebrikov to arrest fractious Wujek miners and Gdánsk shipyard workers in the Solidarity movement. WOLVERINE/3, the statuesque clerical assistant in the secretariat whose name was Agnes Krawcyk and who, alarmingly, was an adrenaline junkie, had stuck a microphone and small wire recorder (assembled by WOLVERINE/5, the electronics whiz named Jerzy) under the president’s dais before the meeting. Even as he submitted the reports—subsequently graded a rare O for outstanding—Forsyth freaked. The WOLVERINEs would not last if they kept taking the insane risks of the past months, he yelled at Witold. And the use of two WOLVERINEs in the same operation violated the tenet of keeping WOLVERINE network members compartmented from each other. It was risky enough that Witold knew everyone’s name. This had to stop.

Over a holiday dinner of zrazy zawijane, succulent roulade of beef with onion, mushrooms, and silky dark gravy, at his aunt’s Rome apartment, Witold smiled at Forsyth—how far they had come together—and said that given Forsyth’s motherly concern, he would postpone for now his plan to kidnap the KGB rezident in Warsaw and deliver him hog-tied to Forsyth in time for Christmas. They toasted with a glass of Chopin wódka. In the three years of Forsyth’s Rome tour, the WOLVERINE network had produced hundreds of intelligence reports of high interest, and had informed Washington policymakers on the dangerous last throes of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Headquarters promoted Forsyth and presented the Medal of Achievement to Witold.

When the Soviet Union imploded in 1989 and Poland came back into the light, Forsyth proposed that his five WOLVERINEs be kept together and on the active-duty roster. He envisioned the team traveling as commercial reps for various Polish companies selling machine tools, pumps, and software in denied areas—North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia—countries murderously difficult for traditionally covered CIA officers. The statuesque Agnes Krawcyk, moreover, had joined the Faculty of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow where she finally earned her degree as a licensed conservator of antique terra-cotta, plaster, and ceramic artworks. Forsyth envisioned operational foreign travel for Agnes with cover as a restorer of art.

With relative freedom of movement in these countries, said Forsyth, the team could discreetly conduct required operational acts. The WOLVERINEs had been trained over the years and were proficient in street surveillance, surreptitious entry, site casing, recruitment, and intelligence reporting. All of them spoke fluent Polish and Russian, as well as the requisite French, German, and Satellite Proto English. They were self-sufficient, aggressive, natural risk takers, and fiercely loyal to Forsyth, who was like a god to them. Then Headquarters intervened.

There was protracted bureaucratic wrangling over Forsyth’s proposal for the WOLVERINEs. The new breed of CIA leadership—mostly politically ambitious former analysts and administrators who for decades had resented the verve and hegemony of the Directorate of Operations and now perversely sought to reform the DO into oblivion—viewed these five fanatic Slavs (or whatever they were) as retro Cold War dinosaurs. Besides, collection in the modern age was shifting to drones, and satellites, and massive electronic listening posts. Classic HUMINT (human intelligence) such as an officer talking to a clandestine source, the one sure way to obtain the plans and intentions of the opposition, was atrophying as an overly dangerous and time-consuming method of collection. Most CIA bureaucrats frantic to avoid operational flaps wanted nothing to do with case officers, collectors, operators, cowboys, scalp takers, mustangs, old whores, headhunters, or five fucking Eastern European WOLVERINEs for that matter, who could create only blue ruin and wind them up in front of a congressional oversight committee.

When it appeared that Headquarters’ ignorance and acedia would prevail, and that the WOLVERINEs would be put out to pasture, a crisis arose in 2001 involving CIA employees in Syria. Three visiting analysts—two women and one man—from the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis (NESA) had ignored Damascus Station guidance to stay within the embassy compound in central Damascus on Abu Ja’far al Mansur Avenue. They were in Syria to gather “ground truth” on the Syrian civil war, and thought they knew what they were doing. Two of them spoke rudimentary Arabic. They set out on a Tuesday morning, intending to visit the offices of the International Red Cross on Arwada Square, the Italian Hospital on Omar Al-Mukhtar Avenue, and the Souq Al Khoja on Al Thawra Street, a total round-trip of three hours and ten miles.

When they did not return to the embassy at the close of business, the security officer called the metropolitan police who several hours later found the body of one of the women in the eastern suburb of Jobar, on the ground floor of the burned-out Teacher’s Tower Building, a blackened ten-story shell amid rubble and rusted tanks with hatches flung open and tracks thrown off the drive wheels. The forty-six-year-old divorced mother of two had been wired in her Maidenform underwear to a rusted bedspring propped upright against a shrapnel-pocked wall, and a plastic cable tie had been cinched around her neck. With a shrug, police said it might have been rogue soldiers from the National Defense Forces, or Sunni-led insurgents, or a Hezbollah unit, who could tell, but they expected the torture tape would be delivered to the embassy in several days.

That night, the security officer received a frantic call from the other two analysts. They had narrowly escaped being taken by running down an alley when their taxi had been blocked by two cars. They had flagged down an elderly man in a dented truck and offered to pay him to drive them to the embassy, but Hezbollah roadblocks and a thunderous explosion a block away had panicked the driver who instead drove the protesting analysts to his house in the village of As Saboura, eight miles west of the city along Route One. The old man and his wife were terrified that local Islamist insurgents would discover the Americans and murder them all—the streets at night were full of roving armed bands of men in keffiyeh head scarves. The analysts were trapped, unable to move. They had water and had been fed—the old lady made a batch of kurrat-barasya, a fragrant Syrian leek-and-lamb stew, to last the week. They spent the night on the couch, listening to voices in the courtyard. They didn’t have much time: some neighbor eventually would notice and talk, or militants might search the houses.

Complicating matters further was that someone in the police had whispered to the local Iranian Qods Force commander that two CIA officers were stranded and hiding somewhere in Damascus. The call went out from Tehran to compliant Syrian security organs, militia, and army units to find and apprehend the perfidious Americans who, significantly, were not accredited to the Syrian government, and therefore had no diplomatic immunity. Despite repeated protests from the acting ambassador, Hezbollah roadblocks were set up around the US Embassy. Station officers tried several times to get clear and drive to the village, but had to abort when they picked up heavy harassing surveillance. They stood down.

At Headquarters, the dire situation in Damascus was the first topic of discussion during the nightly Director’s executive-review meeting in the seventh-floor conference room. The caliphs in Langley who normally sat in the high-backed chairs waiting for orders from downtown were gloomy: they had a dead analyst on their hands, and the possibility of losing two more would be no end of trouble. No one had any ideas, nor was anyone going to suggest a solution, and conversation withered. The dyspeptic silence was broken when now Chief EUR Forsyth submitted to the collected leadership that his team of Polish agents could infiltrate Damascus without attracting attention, make contact with the two surviving analysts, and exfiltrate them out of Syria, probably west to Lebanon. There would be no contact with the beleaguered Station. Faces around the table brightened. This was a solution on two levels: either the analysts would be rescued, or the train wreck of a blown op could be blamed on Forsyth and his polka-dancing retinue.

Three WOLVERINEs flew into Damascus International via the intermittent Syrian Air flight from Algiers, posing as representatives of the Polish Business Board looking for business opportunities in new urban-renewal projects, a cover that was marginally plausible given the growing devastation of the suburbs of Damascus. Two other WOLVERINEs, including Forsyth’s friend Witold, traveled by jeep from Lebanon and staged in Jdeidat Yabous, a Syrian town forty-five kilometers west of Damascus. It was three kilometers from the Lebanese border, the official border crossing. Witold and his colleague arrived in a white Toyota Land Cruiser with the logo of Heritage for Peace on the door, a familiar organization dedicated to protecting World Heritage sites and antiquities in Syria. No locals paid them any attention.

After a desultory call on the Ministry of Housing and Construction, the WOLVERINEs in Damascus determined they were black and operated flawlessly. They located the house by geolocating the analysts’ cell phones in As Saboura with a CANINE unit, a CIA proprietary GPS-satellite tracking system, operated from an innocuous seven-inch tablet, and accurate to five meters. The exhausted analysts were shaken awake at four in the morning by VZWOLVERINE/4, the Polish ex-police sergeant who somehow had entered the little house without a sound. They were bundled into a waiting car and driven north on Highway One where they met Witold’s Toyota at dawn. Transferring to Witold’s vehicle, the CIA analysts were given khaki field shirts and jeans, floppy hats, desert boots, and Belgian passports. Witold then drove to the border, timing the crossing at noon when truck traffic was heaviest and potbellied customs officers were thinking about lunch. One of the Syrian customs men fingered the alias Belgian passport of one of the terrified analysts, and asked him a question in French, a language he did not speak. The swooning analyst instead threw up the remains of leek-and-lamb stew on the customs man’s boots. Witold ruefully explained that his colleague had drunk water from a stream below the last village, and had been sick for the last two hours. Shaking his head at the ajami, these non-Arabic barbarians—everyone knew to drink from streams before they ran through towns—the customs man waved them through. The analysts were on a Paris-bound flight from Beirut the next morning. The other three WOLVERINEs meanwhile returned to Damascus for another meeting with the flummoxed minister, dropped off the rental SUV, and flew out to Abu Dhabi the next day. No trace, no flap, no fuss, courtesy of the WOLVERINEs. Damascus Station breathed a sigh of relief, the grandees at Langley preened, and Forsyth had his WOLVERINE team intact.

The WOLVERINEs remained on active duty for another three years, but with their sponsor and advocate Tom Forsyth assigned abroad and then Headquarters-bound, they were eventually retired, and were paid their sizable annuities that had accrued over the years. There was an awkward awards ceremony in Headquarters during which the five WOLVERINEs were presented with individual Distinguished Service medals, a Meritorious Unit Citation, as well as engraved brass-and-wood mantel clocks with a world-time bezel and CIA logo on the face. The presenter who read the citations—she had been born the year Witold had eluded the guard dogs in the Kampinos Forest outside Warsaw—had a little trouble with the Polish names, but the Deputy Director had memorized gratulacje, “congratulations” in Polish, which he kept repeating while shaking hands.

Thanks to their performance in Syria, Forsyth kept the WOLVERINEs on the reserve list, but there was only intermittent work, and they all eventually dispersed to comfortable if spiritless retirements. Three returned to Poland and their families. Agnes, the only woman of the network, was single, earthy, and still a wild child. She settled in Southern California, and found work restoring art at the Getty Museum. Witold, forever serious and driven, and chronically unmarried, chose to live in New York, where he occasionally did freelance security consulting.

So Forsyth’s unexpected call for the WOLVERINEs to pack their bags and meet in New York City was the long-hoped-for recall from their blancmange existences. The rendezvous was set at the exclusive Tiro A Segno Club (established 1888) on Mulberry Street in the Village, where Witold—thanks to his Italian citizenship—was a member. It was a special place: The club’s façade of three nondescript brownstones was identified only by a brass plaque and a red canopy. The entrance foyer was graced by two antique shotguns hung on the wall. The adjoining bar room, sitting rooms, and card rooms were all wood and leather, and the table in the billiard room was gorgeous in orange felt. The dining room was bathed in subdued lighting from copper-bowl pendants, and the intimate tables sparkled with crystal and white linen. The air of the club was heavy with fragrant savory things going on in the Italian kitchen. Members of Tiro (as it was called) knew one another and nodded politely.

Witold had booked the narrow private room with a table that could seat thirty, and had ordered a simple dinner of buttery imported mozzarella di bufala with prosciutto, a sinfully rich lobster risotto, and fresh fruit for dessert. The WOLVERINEs were all there early, greeted by Witold with a glass of prosecco. Their faces lighted up when Forsyth entered the room, and the Poles moved to shake his hand and buss him on both cheeks, a happy Cold War reunion. It had been too long. Faces turned again to the door as Nate Nash walked into the room. Attentive and fit, dark and intense, Nash wore a blazer over a pinstripe shirt with a dark-blue tie. The WOLVERINEs made their individual canny assessments: Witold carefully observed how Forsyth addressed Nash to gauge the young man’s status; Ryszard, the former army captain watched how Nash made eye contact when speaking; Piotr, the former police sergeant registered the strength of Nash’s handshake; Agnes from afar appraised Nash’s shoulders under his blazer.

“You all have been lazing around,” said Forsyth. “We have work to do.” Piotr the ex-cop huffed.

“You kept us waiting long enough,” he said.

“I wasn’t sure you hadn’t grown fat and slow in retirement,” said Forsyth deadpan.

“Piotr is the fattest,” said Jerzy, the electronics whiz. “Too much sernik, Polish cheesecake.”

“Do not worry about me,” said Piotr. “You should worry about losing your hair.” The rangy Jerzy’s hair was thinning on top.

“Thomas, as you can see, discipline is as bad as ever,” said Ryszard. “These worthless fellows have not changed.”

“Enough,” said Witold, always in command. “Thomas, tell us what work you have for us.” He was ever the aristocrat, dressed in a light-charcoal double-breasted suit.

“Russia, the Crimea, Sevastopol.”

“Fenomenalny, marvelous,” said Ryszard. “The weather will be warm and sunny.”

“How long?” asked Witold. He sipped his prosecco, looking at Nate over the rim of his glass.

“Two days, three; the target is a warehouse,” said Forsyth. Faces turned to Nate again.

“But first tell us something of this young man,” said Agnes. She was tall and sharp featured, with gray eyes and thick black hair that fell to her shoulders. She had a snow-white streak in her hair, a white forelock that began at the forehead and swept back. She was wearing a black knit sweaterdress that clung to a body that hinted at Mount Rushmore.

“This is Nathaniel Nash,” said Forsyth. “I’ve worked with him for six years. He will be coordinating the operation.” The Poles were silent.

“Coordinating, or leading?” asked Piotr.

“Leading. He has significant experience in denied-area operations,” said Forsyth.

“May I ask where?” said Witold softly. Forsyth knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

“Moscow,” said Nate, speaking for the first time. “Helsinki, Rome, Athens.” Agnes thought he was attractive, the confident man-boy.

“Vy govoríte po-rússki?” asked Ryszard. Do you speak Russian?

“I studied in college and kept it up afterward,” said Nate in Russian. The Poles instantly heard in his accent and phrasing that he was fluent, probably better than any of them.

“He’s the best officer I’ve seen on the street, ever,” said Forsyth. Nate looked at his shoes. Yeah, good on the street, my ass in a sling, he thought. Piotr sipped his drink, and Agnes tilted her head, still looking at him.

“Thomas, forgive me, but I’m thinking Pani Nathaniel, Mr. Nate, is too young to be that good,” said Piotr. Heads turned. Everybody knew Piotr the cop—he was testing. Forsyth held his breath. Come on, Nash, he thought.

“If I agreed with you,” said Nate in colloquial Russian, looking Piotr in the eyes, “we’d both be wrong.”

There was a moment of silence, then Witold held out a glass to Nate. “Care for some prosecco?” he said.

After the mozzarella, they had twenty-five minutes before the risotto would reach the final mantecatura stage where cold butter is stirred into the finished rice, so Witold suggested they go down to the basement firing range. The name “Tiro A Segno” in fact means shooting gallery and the incongruous fifty-yard range with three leather-padded firing points was popular with members. Piotr looked at Nate and pointed to the bolt-action rimfire rifles at two of the shooting positions, put on earmuffs, slapped the four-round magazine into the rifle, and worked the bolt to jack a round into the breach. Nate did the same, and both men rested their elbows on the leather padding and looked through the sighting scopes. The paper targets were simple three-ring bull’s-eyes hung on tracked clips that could be run the length of the spotlighted range, to vary distances or to be retrieved up close for inspection.

Agnes moved to stand behind Nate and whispered udachi, good luck, in Russian. The little rifles popped and each target flapped as the .22 rounds tore ragged holes in the center of the paper—excellent, tight groups on both bull’s-eyes. At the fourth shot, both Forsyth and Witold saw Nate’s rifle barrel waiver for a second. The rifles were safed and the targets run back to the firing line. Nate’s target was perfect; all the rounds had gone through the same expanded hole in the smallest ring. There was a bellow from Piotr. His target had a hole outside the rings, near the edge of the paper—a disastrous “flyer.” Nate shook Piotr’s hand with a serious expression. Piotr looked over at Forsyth and Witold, who were smirking, red faced. He looked back at Nate, who was still serious, but his eyes were twinkling. Piotr finally got it: Nate had shot across the lanes to place the apparent pulled shot into Piotr’s target, an old range-master’s prank Gable had once pulled on Nate himself. Piotr held on to Nate’s hand, glowering.

“Beris druzhno, ne budet gruzno,” said Nate in Russian. If all of us take hold of it together, it won’t feel heavy. Piotr clapped Nate on the shoulder.

“Now I will buy you a drink,” he said.