Dan Fesperman - The Double Game

“With the Soviet division?”

“Worse, far worse. A civil war, right within our own tight little borders of Counterintelligence. True believers versus the apostates. All the pitchforks were out. But of course Jim’s was the biggest.”

“Who opposed him?”

“Those names aren’t relevant, and I think you know why.”

Meaning one of them must have been my handler. I think.

“Which side were you on?”

“I stayed neutral. Records were an easy place to keep your head down. But for weeks nothing got done. Every report from Nijinsky and Headlight was hotly debated. The division was in gridlock. Finally even Jim knew there had to be either a truce or a resolution. He decided to settle it once and for all by summoning home all his agents-Headlight, Blinker, and Taillight. Each was to be fluttered under the most intensive conditions. Put up or shut up. Product testing at its finest.”

Polygraphed, she meant. A lie detector. I’d seen the term “fluttered” in at least a dozen different novels.

“That’s pretty extreme.”

“Oh, it was, and it was quite a day when they all flew in. For three days everyone in CI was on pins and needles as the testing proceeded.”

“And?”

“They all passed. Flying colors. Which to Jim only proved that Blinker must be KGB, because by then it was common knowledge how well trained their people were in handling polygraphs. Self-hypnosis, all sorts of tricks to equalize stress, whether you were lying or not. We tried to stay a step ahead of them, of course, but no one was ever sure if we were managing.”

Where had I read all of this stuff about polygraphs? Now I remembered. Orchids for Mother, a 1977 novel. Based on Angleton, in fact. It even used his Agency nickname of “Mother” for the main character. The author was Aaron Latham, who like me had been a reporter at the Washington Post, although well before my time. Supposedly his portrait of Angleton was one of the deftest ever penned, in fact or fiction.

“So the whole thing was a bust?”

“It did produce one little oddity. Jim asked me to collect the records of their previous flutterings, to compare notes. In rounding up that material I came across a curious cross-reference in Headlight’s file. Some episode involving a colleague in Belgrade who wasn’t even with the Agency. And from way back in fifty-nine, before Headlight was even Headlight. Lemaster had only been aboard two years, and here he was mixed up with some brouhaha over tampered polygraph results.”

The hairs on my neck stood up. Dad and I were in Belgrade then. It was the year my mother left us. And now I knew Lemaster had been there as well, long before Dad and he had supposedly become friends.

“Tampered with how?”

“The initial results indicated some sort of security breach, but apparently some junior diplomat had helped clean it up, or vice versa. The file didn’t make it clear. Nothing all that unusual, I suppose. Fluttering was all the rage in those days, and it’s never been infallible. But for whatever reason this other fellow intervened.”

“Why?”

“The file didn’t say. I tried checking with State, but they told me to fuck off. ‘Personal and confidential.’ Agency personnel people told us the matter was a moot point, because the test had been retaken with perfect results. But, well, I suppose now the implication is obvious. Maybe that was Lemaster’s one weak moment, but some friend of his with better connections helped clean it up.”

I tried to keep my voice from shaking as I asked the next two questions.

“Who was the junior diplomat?”

“His name is irrelevant.”

“Was it Warfield Cage?”

She narrowed her eyes and slowly set down her wineglass, reappraising me.

“How did you come up with that name, Mr. Furse?”

“My methodology isn’t relevant.”

She very nearly smiled. Then, in an act that I took as a major concession, she fetched the bottle and poured herself a refill, although she of course topped off my glass as well. I needed it.

“I suppose I should take that as a good sign,” she said. “Your work must be further along than I thought. Where were we?”

I concentrated, trying to regain my composure. No wonder Dad had always glossed over where he’d first met Lemaster. Had his actions helped a mole go free, and then thrive?

“We were still discussing the war. The believers versus the apostates.”

“Yes. The showdown with the polygraphs. It took the fight out of everybody. Jim, too. Even Nijinsky’s reports lost their edge. They were hazier, more tentative. As if he’d been spooked. Gradually Jim turned his attention elsewhere. Other suspicions, other targets. And we all know how that turned out.”

“Badly.”

“For everyone, Jim included. And that might have been the end of it if I hadn’t found one last loose thread. A tiny one, barely showing. But when I pulled it, a whole row of stitching came loose, right there in the middle of Jim’s favorite garment.”

“Headlight?”

She nodded, pausing to collect herself for the final run. I sipped more wine. She put a hand to her glass, then pushed it gently away. Whatever she was about to tell me called for the utmost sobriety.

“It was a small thing.” Her voice was quiet, but steady. “An old filing from some source of the Soviet division’s, completely unimpeachable, mostly because for years the material he’d been providing at such extreme danger to himself had, unfortunately, been quite unspectacular. One of those poor souls who thinks he knows more than he does. But he was occasionally useful for verification, so they kept him active.

“Well, one day I’m cross-referencing one of his filings with some of our Prague material when I spot a throwaway item about a source the Soviets were in contact with there and in Budapest. Code name Dewey. Not much detail otherwise. Just a handful of dates and places where Dewey had supposedly been active. No other mention of him before or since, and its significance might have slipped right past me if I hadn’t just been reviewing the movements for all three of our field men-Headlight, Blinker, and Taillight-for Jim’s final postmortem on our sad little civil war. One word caught my eye. ‘Bookstores.’ Apparently this Dewey fellow liked using them for meeting places, exchange points. So did Headlight.”

I leaned forward, watching her closely. She stared toward the corner, into some faraway space.

“I took the few dates and places I had for Dewey and checked them against the movements for our three lads. There were five points of intersection, and every one of them was a match with Headlight.”

“Did you show Angleton?”

“And have him explain that this was just Headlight’s means of covering for Nijinsky? Or some diabolical plant by Nosenko? No. We were being peacemakers by then. Love was in the air. So I took it very quietly to one of the generals on the rebel side. It raised his eyebrows, of course. If it had been a month earlier he would have screamed it from the rooftops. But with the new truce mentality he proposed that we keep it under wraps and try to build on it. We knew we’d need more before we could ever take it forward.”

One of the generals. Meaning my handler, most likely.

“And did you?”

She shook her head.

“We couldn’t advance it, couldn’t back it up. Besides, everyone was still licking their wounds, and soon there was another in-house political battle to deal with.”

“The Soviet division again?”

She nodded.

“Flak from an old case officer of Headlight’s who’d apparently been one of his first handlers back in Belgrade. Claimed all our digging around was raising hell with his old networks. Code name Thresher.”