State Highways 203 and 304
Centreville, Maryland
0730 7 February 2007
There was nothing unusual about the GMC Yukon XL that turned off State Highway 304 into the gas station. Indeed, there were two near twins—three, if one wished to count a Chevrolet Suburban—already at the pump islands.
The driver of the arriving Yukon pulled up beside one of the pumps, got out, and fed the pump a credit card. Other doors opened and three men—all dressed in plaid woolen jackets—got out and walked quickly toward the men’s room, suggesting to a casual witness that it had been a long time between pit stops.
A Chrysler Grand Caravan turned off State Highway 203 and drove right up to the men’s room door. The van’s sliding door opened and three men—also in plaid woolen jackets and also apparently feeling the urgent call of nature—hurried into the restroom.
A minute or so later, the first of the men came out of the restroom, and got into either the Yukon or the Grand Caravan. In two minutes everybody was out of the men’s room. The Caravan backed up and stopped at a pump. The Yukon driver walked quickly to the men’s room.
By the time he came out, the driver of the Caravan had topped off his tank and returned to the wheel. By the time the Yukon driver got behind his wheel, the Caravan was out of the station. Ninety seconds later, so was the Yukon.
If anyone had been watching it was unlikely that they would have noticed that one of the men who had gone to the restroom from the Yukon had gotten into the Grand Caravan when he came out and that one of the Caravan passengers had gone to the Yukon when he came out of the men’s room.
The man in the front passenger seat of the Grand Caravan turned and offered the man who had just gotten in a silver flask.
“What is it they say about ‘beware of Russians passing the bottle’?” A. Franklin Lammelle, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, asked. “And it’s a little early for vodka, even for me.”
“It’s not vodka, Frank. It’s Rémy Martin,” Cultural Counselor Sergei Murov of the Washington embassy of the Russian Federation replied.
“In that case, Sergei, I will have a little taste,” Lammelle said, and reached for the flask. He held it up in a toast, and said, “Here’s to Winston Churchill, who always began his day with a taste of fine cognac.”
Both men were stocky, in their midforties, fair-skinned, and wore small, rimless spectacles. Murov had a little more remaining hair than Lammelle. They could have been cousins.
Murov was the SVR’s Washington rezident. Lammelle knew this, and Murov knew that Lammelle had known that since the Russians had proposed Murov to be their embassy’s cultural counselor.
Ten minutes later, the convoy turned onto Piney Point Farm Lane. A quarter of a mile down the lane, ten-foot-high chainlink fences became visible behind the vegetation on both sides of the road. On the fencing, at fifty-foot intervals, there were signs: PRIVATE PROPERTY! TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED!
Finally, the Caravan came to the first of two chainlink fence gates across the road. Outside the outer gate there was a black Ford sedan with MARYLAND STATE POLICE lettered on the body. Two state troopers in two-tone bro
wn uniforms sat in the front seats. When the Caravan came a stop, one got out of the passenger door and carefully examined the minivan, but made no attempt to do anything else. The three SUV’s parked on either side of the lane.
The outer gate swung open, and a man in a police-type private security guard uniform inside the second gate motioned for the Caravan to advance. When the van had done so, the outer gate closed behind it. The security guard came from behind the second gate, walked to the Caravan, and opened the sliding door.
When he was satisfied that there was no one in the vehicle determined to trespass on what—like the Russian embassy itself—was legally as much the territory of the Russian Federation as was the Lubyanka Square headquarters of the KGB in downtown Moscow, he signaled for the interior gate to be opened.
Frank Lammelle knew a great deal about what was known as the “Russian dacha on the Eastern Shore.” Some of what he knew, he had known for as long as he had been in the CIA. Back in the bad old days when Russia had been the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, young Frank Lammelle of the Clandestine Service had thought it was ironic that the ambassador of the USSR spent his weekends in a house built by John J. Raskob, almost a caricature of a capitalist. Raskob had been simultaneously vice president of General Motors and E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company—which owned forty-three percent of GM—and had ordered the construction of the Empire State Building in New York City with the mandate to the architect that it be taller than the Chrysler Building.
Raskob’s three-floor brick mansion had not been quite large enough to house him and his thirteen children, so he had built another one just about as large for them and his guests, who included such people as Walter Chrysler, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison.
The Soviet government had bought both houses from Raskob’s heirs in 1972 and later enlarged the estate by swapping land the Americans wanted in Moscow for land adjacent to the Maryland property.
The Russians then further improved the property by importing from Finland fourteen small “rental” houses for the use of embassy employees.
Some of what Lammelle knew about the Russian dacha on the Eastern Shore he had learned more recently. At five-thirty that morning, he had met with J. Stanley Waters, the CIA’s deputy director for operations, and several of his deputies in The Bubble at CIA headquarters in Langley. Only the people in The Bubble—plus of course DCI Jack Powell—knew that Lammelle had accepted Sergei Murov’s invitation to go boating in Maryland.
The meeting had been called both to guess the reason Murov wanted to talk to Lammelle—probably it had something to do with Congo-X, but no one was sure—and to prepare Lammelle for it.
To that end, the latest—just taken—satellite photos of the compound were shown. “Photos” was probably a misnomer, as these were satellite motion pictures. The infrared and other sensors showed life in only four of the rental cottages, including the two known to house the Russians’ communications center. The analysts agreed there was no significant change from the data taken over the past week.
The NSA at Fort Meade reported they had been unable to pull anything of interest from the ether—that is, any reference to Lammelle, Murov, or a meeting between the two—and that the level of traffic between Moscow, the dacha, the embassy in Washington, and the Russian Mission to the United Nations in New York City was normal. Nothing had been sent either in a code, or by any technical means the Russians erroneously believed had not been detected or cracked at Fort Meade.
The FBI liaison officer reported that the FBI agents tracking Murov had seen nothing out of the ordinary in his behavior, and that the FBI agents on-site—one of the two state troopers stationed around the clock at the gate was always an FBI special agent—had similarly seen nothing of special interest.
Lammelle had closed the meeting with a reminder that the visit had to be kept a secret. Secrecy was important because Senator Homer Johns (Democrat, New Hampshire), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who loved to be on TV and despised the CIA, would—should he learn of the meeting—love nothing better than to call DCI Powell to ask about the meeting, then quickly leak the secret to CNN and/or C. Harry Whelan, Jr., the syndicated columnist, who didn’t like the CIA either.