The shadows over Georgetown deepened that summer night, as did the shadows in an old man’s mind. The DCI sat alone and thought of the old days, of friends and colleagues, bright young men and women whom he had sent beyond the Atlantic wall and who had died under interrogation because of an informer, a traitor. There had been no excuses in those days, no Max Kelloggs to sift the evidence and produce an overwhelming case. And there had been no mercy in those days—not for an informer. He stared at the photo before him.
“You bastard,” he said softly, “you double-dyed traitorous bastard.”
The following day a messenger entered Sam McCready’s office at Century House and deposited a chit from the cipher room. McCready was busy; he gestured to Denis Gaunt to open it. Gaunt read it, whistled, and passed it over. It was a request from the CIA in Langley: During his vacation in Europe, Calvin Bailey was to be provided with access to no classified information.
“Orlov?” asked Gaunt.
“Gets my vote,” said McCready. “What the hell can I do to convince them?”
He made his own decision on that. He used a dead-letter drop to get a message to Keepsake, asking for a meeting without delay.
In the lunch hour McCready was informed in a routine note from Airport Watch, a division of MI-5, that Joe Roth had left London again for Boston, still using the same phony passport.
That same evening, having gained five hours crossing the Atlantic, Joe Roth sat at the refectory table at the DCI’s mansion. The Director sat opposite him, Max Kellogg to his right. The old man looked grim, Kellogg merely nervous. At his home in Alexandria he had slept for most of the twenty-four hours between his arrival there the previous evening and the telephoned summons to return to Georgetown. He had left all his documents with the Director, but they were again in front of him now.
“Begin again, Max. At the beginning. Just the way you told it to me.”
Kellogg glanced at Roth, adjusted his eyeglasses, and took a sheet from the top of the pile.
“In May 1967, Calvin Bailey was sent as a Provincial Officer, a G-12, to Vietnam. Here is the posting. He was assigned, as you see, to the Phoenix Program. You’ve heard of that, Joe.”
Roth nodded. At the height of the Vietnam war, the Americans had mounted an operation to attempt to counter the drastic effects being secured by the Viet Cong on the local population through selective, public, and sadistic assassinations. The notion was to use counterterror against the terrorists, to identify and eliminate Viet Cong activists. It was the Phoenix Program. Just how many Viet Cong suspects were sent to their maker without benefit of evidence or trial has never been established. Some have put the figure at twenty thousand; the CIA put it at eight thousand.
How many of the suspects were really Viet Cong remains even more problematic, for it soon became the practice for Vietnamese to denounce any person against whom they had a grudge. People were denounced on the basis of family feuds, clan wars, land squabbles, even debts owed and never to be collected if the creditor was dead.
Usually the denounced person was handed over to the Vietnamese secret police or the army, the ARVN. The interrogations they underwent and the ways they died tested even oriental ingenuity.
“There were young Americans, fresh out of the States, who saw things down there that no man should be asked to watch. Some quit, some needed professional help. One turned, in his mind, to the very philosophy of the men he had been sent to fight. Calvin Bailey was that man, as George Blake had turned in Korea. We have no proof of that because it happened inside a human head, but the evidence that follows makes the supposition totally reasonable.
“In March 1968 came what we believe to be the climactic experience. Bailey was present at the village of My Lai just four hours after the massacre. You recall My Lai?”
Roth nodded again. It was all part of his youth. He recalled it all too well. On March 16, 1968, an American infantry company came across a small village called My Lai, where they suspected there might be Viet Cong or sympathizers hiding. Exactly why they lost control and went berserk was only inadequately established later. They started firing when they could get no response to their questions, and once it started, it did not stop until at least 450 unarmed civilians—men, women, and children—lay dead in mangled heaps. It took eighteen months for the news to leak out in America, and three years almost to the day for Lieutenant William Calley to be convicted by court-martial. But Calvin Bailey had reached the spot after four hours and seen it all.
“Here is his report at the time,” said Kellogg, passing over several sheets, “written in his own hand. As you can see, it was
written by a badly shaken man. Unfortunately, it seems this experience turned Bailey into a Communist sympathizer.
“Six months later, Bailey reported he had recruited two Vietnamese cousins, Nguyen Van Troc and Vo Nguyen Can, and infiltrated them into the Viet Cong’s own intelligence setup. It was a major coup, the first of many. According to Bailey, he ran these men for two years. According to Orlov, it was the other way around. They ran him. Look at this.”
He passed Roth two photographs. One photograph showed two young Vietnamese males, taken against a background of the jungle. One man had a cross over his face, indicating he was now dead. The other photograph, taken much later and in a setting of verandah with rattan chairs, showed a group of Vietnamese officers at ease, being served tea. The steward was looking up at the camera and smiling.
“The tea-server ended up as a boat-person, a refugee, at a camp in Hong Kong. The photo was his prize possession, but the British were interested in the group of officers and took it from him. Look at the man to the steward’s left.”
Roth looked. It was Nguyen Van Troc, ten years older but the same man. He wore a senior officer’s shoulder boards.
“He’s now deputy head of Vietnamese counterintelligence,” said Kellogg. “Point made.
“Next, we have Minstrel’s assertion that Bailey was passed on to the KGB right there in Saigon. Minstrel named a now-dead Swedish businessman as the KGB Rezident for Saigon in 1970. We have known since 1980 that the businessman was not who he said he was, and Swedish counterintelligence long broke his cover story. He never came from Sweden, so he probably came from Moscow. Bailey could have seen him whenever he wanted.
“Next, Tokyo. Minstrel says Drozdov himself went there in the same year, 1970, and took over Bailey, giving him the name Sparrowhawk. We cannot prove Drozdov was there, but Minstrel is dead accurate on the dates. And Bailey was there on those dates. Here is his movement order by Air America, our own airline. It all fits. He returned to America in 1971 a dedicated KGB agent.”
After that, Calvin Bailey had served in two posts in Central and South America and three in Europe, a continent he had also visited many times as he rose in the hierarchy and undertook flying visits to inspect out-stations.
“Help yourself to a drink, Joe,” growled the DCI. “It gets worse.”
“Minstrel named four banks into which his department in Moscow had made transfers of cash to the traitor. He even got the dates of the transfers right. Here are the four accounts, one in each of the banks he named: in Frankfurt, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Vienna. Here are the deposit slips, large sums and in cash. Payments all made within a month of the accounts being opened. Four tellers were shown a photograph; three identified it as the man who opened the accounts. This photograph.”
Kellogg slipped a photograph of Calvin Bailey across to Roth. He stared at the face as if at the face of a stranger. He could not believe it. He had eaten with the man, drunk with him, met his family. The face in the photo stared back blankly.