Jonathan de Shalit: Traitor

MOSCOW, SVR HEADQUARTERS, JUNE 2013

By nine in the evening most of the workers had already left the facility. The warm light of the long summer day streamed diagonally through the wooden shutters of the SVR chief’s expansive bureau. Dust danced on the rays of sunlight, broken up by the straight lines of shade. Sitting as comfortably as their chairs would allow them in the conference area at the far end of the room were the commander of the SVR and the head of the Tenth Directorate. The commander’s bureau chief, who had just carefully placed a frosted bottle of vodka and two chilled glasses on the table in front of them, exited quietly to leave the two men on their own. The SVR commander’s fine gray jacket was hanging over the backrest of the chair across from his desk, where he had placed it earlier. His severe back pain, the result of a gunshot wound sustained during a shootout in a coastal city in southern England, back at some point during the Cold War, dictated that his bureau be furnished with simple, stiff wooden chairs. Sometimes he’d suggest to a guest in the office that those were the kind of chairs that had stood in his childhood home, in a small and meager village in the heart of the wilderness that lay hundreds of kilometers east of Moscow. But that was simply one of the proletarian cloaks in which he liked to drape his image. He had grown up in fact as the only child of educated and well-to-do parents in Leningrad, his father a professor of Semitic languages and his mother an electrical engineer, both loyal party members, both fierce fighters, albeit painfully young, during the Great Patriotic War. They were the ones who had instilled in him his values and his dedication to the greater cause, which from his perspective had never waned. His steely character wasn’t the product of financial hardship and an arduous life in the wilderness, but of a zealous love for the motherland and a constant desire to excel and earn the attention of his parents, and their praise, too, on rare occasions. He opened the top button of his impeccably clean white shirt and loosened the tie knot around his neck. Sitting across from him, on a rudimentary chair, was the head of the directorate, who stretched his legs out in front of him and emitted a sigh of weariness and contentment to mark the passing of a long day.

“We did it,” said the SVR commander. “We pulled it off in the end.”

“But we took a hard knock,” the head of the directorate responded soberly.

“We managed to make the most out of adverse circumstances,” the commander said. “Remember our history, it’s not the first time we’ve sacrificed a rook to save the king. And the queen sometimes, too. We can’t be greedy, Alexander. It’s impossible to win on all fronts all the time. We were facing a catastrophe and we came through. And that’s our true advantage. The ability to survive long-term campaigns despite the losses. That’s the main thing, don’t forget—to always be one step ahead of your opponent. To hang in just one minute longer than he does. To take what you can. To sacrifice what needs to be sacrificed. To know your capabilities and what’s beyond them. And to get back on your feet as soon as possible.”

Alexander, the head of the Tenth Directorate, gazed at his commander in admiration. He wasn’t simply a darling of the party who had been appointed to his position thanks to political loyalty. Although he was indeed blessed with political aptitude of the highest order. It was a prerequisite for all secret service chiefs, unless they wanted to be eaten alive. But his commander was first and foremost a covert fighter, daring, ruthless, cool-headed, who could see several moves ahead, like a seasoned chess player. He recalled how several months ago—as dusk was falling just as it was around them right now, after they had concluded the arrangements concerning Cobra—he had been summoned back to the commander’s bureau to review together, in private, the file of a second high-level agent they had in Israel. Although the Israelis were on the hunt for Cobra, there was something else troubling the commander. Something had led him to request the highly classified file pertaining to Viper. And only then was the real operation set into motion. That evening they sealed, for better or worse, the fates of Viper and of Cobra. The one was spared, without ever knowing at all just how close he had come to his end. The other, like the light from a distant star, continued to shine, but was long since dead.

“Let’s reconstruct what they know about Cobra,” the commander had said to him then. And without the assistance of anyone else, they sat down together and recorded in detail everything that Katrina had told the young Israeli woman who had questioned her at her home in Dimitrovgrad. It wasn’t much. A general physical description, an estimated date of birth, the handler’s cover name, a round of meetings in Geneva. “Something’s troubling me,” the commander had said at the time, “and when I’m troubled, I usually have good reason to be so. It’s easy to push feelings of uneasiness aside. But I’ve already paid a very heavy price to learn that those elusive feelings are actually the ones you have to pursue. They usually count for something. Look here. Katrina told them that Cobra’s birthday fell in late January or early February. Let’s see now,” he said quietly, as if he were talking to himself, “let’s see.” He opened the dossier on Viper, smoothing down the cover with the palm of his hand even though it didn’t show a single crease, and focused on a greenish piece of paper, the document that listed the agent’s personal particulars.

“Here,” the commander said quietly. “Look. Viper’s date of birth. February 3, 1961. And there’s something else you should see.” He began paging through the heart of the dossier, the part that contained the operational reports. “Look—1989. Viper was still a kid in terms of running an agent. Just starting out. We summoned him to a round of meetings in Lausanne, but we cut corners. We used the same logistics team for both rounds of meetings, both the one with Cobra and the one with him, so that we wouldn’t have to fly in a second team. Look, the directive from headquarters: ‘For purposes of efficiency, the two rounds of meetings should be held one after the other, while ensuring they are kept completely separate and conducted under different field conditions.’ Do you get it, Alexander? We brought Cobra to Geneva and then went on to meet with Viper in Lausanne. Take note, we even made sure that they’d pass through different airports. Viper received explicit instructions to arrive in Zurich and continue from there by train. Cobra’s file contains an instruction to fly directly into Geneva. And truthfully, it all seems just fine. Reasonable planning. Legitimate considerations. Professional decisions—different arenas, separate arrival routes, a staggered timetable. All good. But the picture the Israelis see is of a different resolution. They know too little. Only a few general details. And that actually puts us even more at risk. You see: They’re looking for Cobra and they could accidentally get their hands on Viper.”

“Do you really think so?”

“You never know. But they’re on the hunt. They know they have a spy somewhere high up in the government establishment and they won’t rest until they find him. They don’t know they have two. They could accidentally stumble upon our man whom they don’t even know about yet. We had no way of knowing in 1989 how things would turn out some twenty-four years down the line. You can put it down either to substandard operational planning or simply bad luck. I don’t know. But their hunt can’t be allowed to lead them to Viper. He is not expendable. That is not an option as far as I’m concerned.”