Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

He ignored my sarcasm. “You do not wonder how this happens so fast… how my seventy-year-old nation explodes?”

“No.” I stopped dressing and stared at him. “I figured it was a big, rotten piece of garbage that had no reason to hold together. You build a house on a lousy foundation, sooner or later, it’s going to crash down.”

“Is too simplistic. Please do not get confused with your moral relativism. Your country expands in same way as Russia does. American armies march westward and conquer Spanish, Mexicans, Indians, Filipinos, Hawaiians. You defeat them, and you absorb them. Russia does this same thing. You have civil war and we have civil war. You have Ku Klux Klan, and negro demonstrations, and Puerto Rican terrorists, and we have separatist splinter groups. Yet, both nations outlive these things, yes?”

“Your point being?” I asked, not completely buying into his analogies, because frankly there was a world of difference. Well, maybe not a world, but enough to be significant.

He continued, “Inside one year, my country explodes into pieces. For seventy years, one government, one philosophy, one currency, then suddenly, one nation becomes fifteen. You see no oddity in this? This was not planned, was nobody thinking ahead about this. Suddenly, many, many millions of people are thrown into decades of deprivation and poverty and instability.”

“Had to happen sooner or later. It was a rotten system.”

“Major, please, I am not bemoaning loss of Communism. I am not some old apparatchik who misses old glories. I am like scientist, looking for reasons. How can this thing happen so fast? Forget your American prejudices and assumptions.”

“Keep going.”

“Was made to happen in this way. Impulses are there, yes, but big assistance was given. A glass statue can be frail, but somebody must knock it off table to make it shatter.”

“And what? You think we were behind it? Hey, pal, you’ve been reading too many of the brochures the CIA writes about itself.”

“Your CIA cannot do this… I know this. Was too vast, too knowing. This had to be an internal thing.”

All very interesting; however, it was time to bring the conversation back on track. I asked, “And this has something to do with why you met Morrison?”

“Yes. Viktor Yurichenko, my boss, heard my concerns, and he agrees something is propelling our country toward this cataclysm.”

I instantly found myself taking Arbatov more seriously, because Yurichenko had an incredible reputation, and if they both believed something stank to high heaven, maybe there was a turd in the punch bowl, geopolitically speaking, of course.

He continued in his earnest tone, “Then Viktor tells me to go look for plotters in trouble spots. I am doing this on pretext of assessing situations, but I am looking really for whoever is intervening in these factions, is prodding them, is organizing demonstrations and exacerbating local political anxieties.”

“And did you find them?”

“Was too hidden. But I was becoming even more convinced something was there.”

“Why?”

“Was too orchestrated. Someone knowing of our seams and stresses was tugging out stitches. You are knowledgeable about chaos theory, yes? Even in most frantic events there must be patterns, logical progressions, but to find these progressions, separate forces must be slowed and studied.”

“Okay, so?”

He was becoming animated, and clearly agitated, but whether from passion or frustration I couldn’t tell. He said, “This was our problem. Was happening too fast… overpowering Gorbachev and his government, avalanches of protests, and local political decisions, and criminal acts, and even revolutions. Everywhere this is happening, fires in every corner. There has to be some trigger, yes? There was too much synchronicity, too much unapparent coordination.”

“Unapparent coordination?”

“Yes… was made to appear uncoordinated.” Realizing he was a little over my head, he explained, “Imagine you are cancer researcher and twenty children from one small village get cancer. You search for similarities in children’s habits, what foods they eat, what liquids they drink… nothing can be found. Still, you are knowing something must be there, some force connecting these diseases.”

“Okay.”

“Then there is Yeltsin.”

“Right, then there was Yeltsin. What about him?”

“You never became curious how this secretary of one city was able to overturn entire political establishment of our Soviet nation? In your country, this would be like your New York City mayor seizing your government, tearing up your Constitution, burning your Bill of Rights, and inventing new government. Except under Soviet system secretaries were even less powerful, less important than your American mayors. How was this possible?”

“Because your people wanted freedom?” I suggested. “Because they were poor and wretched and wanted better lives? Because Communism sucked?”

He shook his head at my sophisticated insight and said, “You do not know Russians. We have famous reputation for suffering. What is your word? ‘Stoic,’ yes? Read our literature… is about suffering. Study our history. Consider Russia’s most fabled leaders: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Lenin, Stalin. In what way all these people are alike? All are mass murderers. Does America have such homicidal icons? Your George Washington, your Abraham Lincoln, your FDR, they were famous killers?”

I guessed he had a good point. “Okay, then how did Yeltsin do it?”

“I never learned, but was connected as well. How else can Yeltsin outmaneuver everybody?”

Until this point, he’d nearly had me convinced, nodding along nicely, following his logic, and so on. I fixed him with a stony look and said, “Look, we have a problem here. According to our intelligence, your boss, Yurichenko, approached Yeltsin near the beginning and struck a deal. Our people say Yurichenko helped him rise.”

“Yes, was true. When Viktor sees him breaking through, we know something is badly wrong, so Viktor cultivates this relationship with Yeltsin. He insinuates himself inside. We know Yeltsin has powerful allies, but who? Viktor was not able to discover this answer.”

“And what? When Yeltsin finally came to power, he rewarded your boss by making him head of the SVR?”

“Was big irony, yes? Viktor was very trusted by Yeltsin… this was his reward for Viktor’s help.”

“And you were giving all this to Morrison?”

“Pieces, only. I was not knowing in the beginning what I was looking for.”

“And why’d you go to Bill?”

“This was last resort for me. When I could not find what was happening, I wanted to discuss American interpretations of these developments. Sometimes, those looking into a house see better than those inside, yes?”

I had to take a moment to ponder all this. I had my pants on by then and that helped.

I asked, “Did Yurichenko know you were meeting with Morrison?”

He looked conflicted, as if this was something he was ashamed to admit. “No. Uh, Viktor would never permit this. We are very close, but Viktor is product of our old system and would consider it a most serious betrayal.”

“Do you know who in the CIA got access to your reports, knew of your existence?”

“Bill and Mary, of course. And only deputy directors of intelligence and operations were… uh, in the loop? This is correct?”

“I think that’s correct, although Morrison told me a CIA psychiatrist was involved as well. He said it was a standard practice to keep you from going nuts on them.”

“Then you see where I am having big problem?”

I nodded, but as I mentioned before, spies are con men, and maybe the SVR had a bunch of Hollywood types who worked in the basement and cooked up these things. Actually, that was too wild-assed for even me to believe.