Murov exhaled audibly again.
“One does not get to be the Berlin rezident of the SVR without a very well-developed sense of how to cover one’s back,” Murov said.
“I suppose that would also apply to the Washingt
on rezident of the SVR.”
Murov ignored the comment. He went on: “Dmitri learned what was going on ...”
“Why didn’t he go to his boss and say, ‘Hey, boss. My sister’s husband is trying to set me up. Here’s the proof.’”
“Because his boss was his cousin, Colonel V. N. Solomatin. I’m sure Vladlen would have believed him, but Solomatin’s superior was—is—General Yakov Sirinov, who runs the SVR for Putin. And Sirinov was unlikely to believe either Vladlen or Dmitri for several reasons, high among them that he believed Dmitri was a personal threat to his own career. The gossip at the time Sirinov was given his position was that it would have gone to Dmitri if Dmitri and Putin had not been at odds. And also of course because Vladlen and Dmitri were cousins.”
The odds are a hundred to one that I am being fed an incredible line of bullshit.
But, my God, what a plethora of details! Murov should have been a novelist.
Either that, or he’s telling me the truth.
Careful, Harry! Not for publication, but you’re really out of your league when dealing with the Washington rezident of the SVR.
“So Dmitri did what any man in his position would do.”
“The SVR Washington rezident, for example?”
Murov looked at him, shook his head, smiled, and said, “No. What the Washington rezident would have done in similar circumstances would have been to call Frank Lammelle, and say something like, ‘Frank, my friend, when I come out of Morton’s tonight, have a car waiting for me. This spy’s coming in from the cold.’
“Dmitri didn’t have that option. He was in Berlin. His sister was in Copenhagen. And they were being watched by other SVR officers. They couldn’t just get on a plane and come here. But what they could do, and did, was contact the CIA station chief in Vienna and tell her that they were willing to defect, and thought the best time and way to do that was to slip away from the festivities at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.”
“I don’t understand,” Whelan confessed. “What festivities? Where?”
“There was going to be a gathering in Vienna of rezidents and other SVR officers. As a gesture of international friendship, the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg sent Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s wax statue of Russian tsar Peter the First on a tour of the better European museums. First stop was Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.”
“Okay.”
“The CIA station chief set things up. The CIA sent a plane to Vienna with the plan that, as soon as Dmitri and Svetlana got into it, it would take off, and eight hours later Dmitri and Svetlana would be in one of those safe houses the agency maintains not far from our dacha on the Eastern Shore here.
“So far as General Sirinov was concerned, the business at the Kunsthistorisches Museum was going to provide him with two things. First, an opportunity to get all his people together without attracting too much attention. Second, when everybody was gathered, and people asked the whereabouts of Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, Sirinov was going to tell them they were under arrest for embezzling funds of the Russian Federation, and then put them on an Aeroflot aircraft to Moscow.”
“Sirinov ... is that his name?”
Murov nodded.
“He knew these two were going to defect?”
Murov nodded.
“And here is where the plot thickens,” Murov said. “There were CIA agents waiting in Vienna’s Westbahnhof for Dmitri and his sister. And there were representatives of the SVR waiting for them. And they never showed up.”
“What happened to them?”
“It took General Sirinov several days to find out. There were two problems. First, the officer responsible for meeting them at the railway station, the Vienna rezident, Lieutenant Colonel Kiril Demidov, was found the next morning sitting in a taxicab outside the American embassy with the calling card of Miss Eleanor Dillworth, the CIA station chief, on his chest. Poor Kiril had been garroted to death.”
“Jesus Christ!” Whelan exclaimed.
“And then, the second problem was that General Sirinov was naturally distracted by world events. You will recall that your President somehow got the idea that the Iranians were operating a biological warfare laboratory in the Congo and rather than bring his suspicions to the United Nations, as he was clearly obligated to do, instead launched a unilateral attack and brought the world dangerously close to a nuclear exchange.”
Do I let him get away with that?