whom he would never meet. Penkovskiy’s response to the FLASH request from Washington was too rash. Already under suspicion, this finished him. He paid for his treason with his life. It was CARDINAL who first learned that he was being watched more closely than was the norm for a society where everyone is watched. He warned Penkovskiy – too late. When it became clear that the colonel could not be extracted from the Soviet Union, he himself urged CARDINAL to betray him. It was the final ironic joke of a brave man that his own death would advance the career of an agent whom he had recruited.
CARDINAL’s job was necessarily as secret as his name. A senior adviser and confidant of a Politburo member, CARDINAL often acted as his representative within the Soviet military establishment. He thus had access to political and military intelligence of the highest order. This made his information extraordinarily valuable – and, paradoxically, highly suspect. Those few experienced CIA case officers who knew of him found it impossible to believe that he had not been ‘turned’ somewhere along the line by one of the thousands of KGB counterintelligence officers whose sole duty it is to watch everyone and everything. For this reason CARDINAL-coded material was generally cross-checked against the reports of other spies and sources. But he had outlived many small-fry agents.
The name CARDINAL was known in Washington only to the top three CIA executives. On the first day of each month a new code name was chosen for his data, a name made known only to the highest echelon of CIA officers and analysts. This month it was WILLOW. Before being passed on, grudgingly, to outsiders, CARDINAL data was laundered as carefully as Mafia income to disguise its source. There were also a number of security measures that protected the agent and were unique to him. For fear of cryptographic exposure of his identity, CARDINAL material was hand delivered, never transmitted by radio or landline. CARDINAL himself was a very careful man – Penkovskiy’s fate had taught him that. His information was conveyed through a series of intermediaries to the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station. He had outlived twelve station chiefs; one of these, a retired field officer, had a brother who was a Jesuit. Every morning the priest, an instructor in philosophy and theology at Fordham University in New York, said mass for the safety, and the soul of a man whose name he would never know. It was as good an explanation as any for CARDINAL’s continued survival.
Four separate times he had been offered extraction from the Soviet Union. Each time he had refused. To some this was proof that he’d been turned, but to others it was proof that like most successful agents CARDINAL was a man driven by something he alone knew – and therefore, like most successful agents, he was probably a little crazy.
The document Ryan was reading had been in transit for twenty hours. It had taken five for the film to reach the American embassy in Moscow, where it was delivered at once to the station chief. An experienced field officer and former reporter for the New York Times, he worked under the cover of press attaché. He developed the film himself in his private darkroom. Thirty minutes after its arrival, he inspected the five exposed frames through a magnifying glass and sent a FLASH-priority dispatch to Washington saying that a CARDINAL signal was en route. Next he transcribed the message from the film to flash paper on his own portable typewriter, translating from the Russian as he went. This security measure erased both the agent’s handwriting and, by the paraphrasing automatic to translation, any personal peculiarities of his language. The film was then burned to ashes, the report folded into a metal container much like a cigarette case. This held a small pyrotechnic charge that would go off if the case were improperly opened or suddenly shaken; two CARDINAL signals had been lost when their cases were accidentally dropped. Next the station chief took the case to the embassy’s courier-in-residence, who had already been booked on a three-hour Aeroflot flight to London. At Heathrow Airport the courier sprinted to make connections with a Pan Am 747 to New York’s Kennedy International, where he connected with the Eastern shuttle to Washington’s National Airport. By eight that morning the diplomatic bag was in the State Department. There a CIA officer removed the case, drove it immediately to Langley, and handed it to the DCI. It was opened by an instructor from the CIA’s technical services branch. The DCI made three copies on his personal Xerox machine and burned the flash paper in his ashtray. These security measures had struck a few of the men who had succeeded to the office of the DCI as laughable. The laughs had never outlasted the first CARDINAL report.
When Ryan finished the report he referred back to the second page and read it through again, shaking his head slowly. The WILLOW document was the strongest reinforcement yet of his desire not to know how intelligence information reached him. He closed the folder and handed it back to Admiral Greer.
‘Christ, sir.’
‘Jack, I know I don’t have to say this – but what you have just read, nobody, not the president, not Sir Basil, not God if He asks, nobody learns of it without the authorization of the director. Is that understood?’ Greer had not lost his command voice.
‘Yes, sir.’ Ryan bobbed his head like a schoolboy.
Judge Moore pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it, looking past the flame into Ryan’s eyes. The judge, everyone said, had been a hell of a field officer in his day. He’d worked with Hans Tofte during the Korean War and had been instrumental in bringing off one of the CIA’s legendary missions, the disappearance of a Norwegian ship that had been carrying a cargo of medical personnel and supplies for the Chinese. The loss had delayed a Chinese offensive for several months, saving thousands of American and allied lives. But it had been a bloody operation. All of the Chinese personnel and all of the Norwegian crewmen had vanished. It was a bargain in the simple mathematics of war, but the morality of the mission was another matter. For this reason, or perhaps another, Moore had soon thereafter left government service to become a trial lawyer in his native Texas. His career had been spectacularly successful, and he’d advanced from wealthy courtroom lawyer to distinguished appellate judge. He had been recalled to the CIA three years earlier because of his unique combination of absolute personal integrity and experience in black operations. Judge Moore hid a Harvard law degree and a highly ordered mind behind the façade of a West Texas cowboy, something he had never been but simulated with ease.
‘So, Dr Ryan, what do you think of this?’ Moore said as the deputy director of operations came in. ‘Hi, Bob, come on over here. We just showed Ryan here the WILLOW file.’
‘Oh?’ Ritter slid a chair over, neatly trapping Ryan in the corner. ‘And what does the admiral’s fair-haired boy think of that?’
‘Gentlemen, I assume that you all regard this information as genuine,’ Ryan said cautiously, getting nods. ‘Sir, if this information was hand delivered by the Archangel Michael, I’d have trouble believing it – but since you gentlemen say it’s reliable …’ They wanted his opinion. The problem was, his conclusion was too incredible. Well, he decided, I’ve gotten this far by giving my honest opinions …
Ryan took a deep breath and gave them his evaluation.
‘Very well, Dr Ryan,’ Judge Moore nodded sagaciously. ‘First I want to hear what else it might be, then I want you to defend your analysis.’
‘Sir, the most obvious alternative doesn’t bear much thinking about. Besides, they’ve been able to do it since Friday and they haven’t done it,’ Ryan said, keeping his voice low and reasonable. Ryan had trained himself to be objective. He ran through the four alternatives he had considered, careful to examine each in detail. This was no time to allow personal views to intrude on his thinking. He spoke for ten minutes.
‘I suppose there’s one more possibility. Judge,’ he concluded. ‘This could be disinformation aimed at blowing this source. I cannot evaluate that possibility.’
‘The thought has occurred to us. All right, now that you’ve gone this far, you might as well give your operational recommendation.’
‘Sir, the admiral can tell you what the navy’ll say.’
‘I sorta figured that one out, boy,’ Moore laughed. ‘What do you think?’
‘Judge, setting up the decision tree on this will not be easy – there are too many variables, too many possible contingencies. But I’d say yes. If it’s possible, if we can work out the details, we