Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

General Sergei Murov and his security detail had not gone to Havana openly. That would not be in the tradition of the Cheka and its successor organizations. Instead, their documents identified them all as members of the Greater Sverdlovsk Table Tennis Association and Mr. Murov as Grigori Slobozhanin, the chief coach thereof.

His true identity was known of c

ourse to General Jesus Manuel Cosada, who had replaced Raúl Castro as head of the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI, when Señor Castro had replaced his brother, Fidel, as president of the Republic of Cuba.

General Cosada therefore ordered that the visiting Ping-Pongers be housed in the five-star high-rise Meliá Cohiba Hotel on Avenida de Maceo, more commonly known as the Malecón, the broad esplanade that stretches for four miles along the coast of Havana.

He did so for several reasons. He knew that General Murov and President Castro were close personal friends, for one thing, and for another that the Presidential Suite was equipped with state-of-the-art cameras and microphones—some of them literally as small as the head of a pin—with which the visit of General Murov could be recorded for posterity and other purposes.

General Cosada’s expert in this type of equipment, Señor Kurt Hassburger, who had immigrated to Cuba from the former East Germany and really hated Russians, had also installed a microphone and transmitter in the lid of the cigar humidor Señor Castro would give—filled with Cohiba cigars—to General Murov as a little “Welcome Back to Cuba” memento.

When General Cosada and President Castro entered the Presidential Suite carrying the humidor of cigars, they were wearing the customary attire of senior officials of the Cuban government.

In the early days of the Cuban revolution, the Castro forces had raided a government warehouse and helped themselves to U.S. Army equipment the Yankee Imperialists had given to the Batista regime. This included U.S. Army “fatigue” uniforms and combat boots, which Fidel promptly adopted as the revolutionary uniform, primarily because they were far more suitable for waging revolution than the blue jeans, polo shirts, and tennis shoes he had been wearing.

When the revolution had been won, Fidel and Raúl and their subordinates had continued to wear the fatigues because—depending on who you were listening to—they represented solidarity with the peasants and workers or because they were much more comfortable in the muggy heat of Cuba than a suit and shirt and necktie would have been.

The fatigues President Castro and General Cosada were wearing today were of course not the ones liberated from Batista’s warehouse—there was a tailor on the presidential staff who made theirs to order—but they looked like U.S. Army fatigues.

General Murov thought their uniforms made them look like aging San Francisco hippies. Or Wanna-Be-Warriors at a Soldiers of Fortune convention.

Murov was far more elegantly attired. When he had been the cultural attaché of the Russian embassy in Washington he had regularly watched J. Pastor Jones and C. Harry Whelan, Junior, on Wolf News to keep abreast of what the American reactionaries were up to.

Their programs were in part sponsored by Jos. A. Bank Clothiers and the Men’s Wearhouse. Eventually, their advertisements got through to him and he investigated what he thought were their preposterous claims by visiting an emporium of each.

There he found that not only was the reasonably priced clothing they offered superior to that offered for sale in Moscow, but that they really would give you two suits—or an overcoat and a suit, or two overcoats, or a half dozen shirts and neckties and a sports coat and slacks—absolutely free if you bought one suit at the regular price.

He found this fascinating because recently, having nothing better to do, he had been flipping through the SVR manual on rezident operations and had come across an interesting item buried in the manual as a small-font footnote. It stated that anything purchased, including items of clothing, deemed by the rezident as necessary to carry out intelligence missions could be billed to the SVR’s Bureau for the Provision of Non-Standard Equipment.

Murov had turned almost overnight into a fashion plate. And he was not only happy with the way he looked—as the spokesman for Men’s Wearhouse said he would be—but convinced that the SVR man who had written the footnote was right on the money. How could one be a really good spy wearing clothing that made one look as if one was drawing unemployment?

This of course applied to the staff of the rezident, the junior spies, so to speak. They shouldn’t look like they were drawing unemployment, either. He went to the management of both Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank and asked them if he could throw a little business their way, what could they do for him? Not in terms of free sports coats, but in cash?

A mutually agreed upon figure—5.5 percent of the total—was reached, and Murov sent his staff to both establishments with orders to acquire a wardrobe in keeping with the high standards expected of SVR spies, and not to worry about what it cost, as the bill would be paid by the SVR’s Bureau for the Provision of Non-Standard Equipment.

President Castro handed General Murov the humidor of Cohibas, and Murov handed General Cosada the case of Kubanskaya.

“Fidel sent these for you,” Raúl said.

“How kind of him.”

“I really appreciate the Kubanskaya, Sergei,” Raúl said. “You can’t get it in Cuba.”

“I understand we’re selling a lot of it to Venezuela,” Sergei replied.

“Yeah, but between us, it’s hard to get from there, too. Fidel is a little overenthusiastic about that ‘Drink Cuban’ program of his. It means we’re supposed to drink rum and it’s treasonous to the revolution to import spirits made anywhere else. So I have to remember to hide my Kubanskaya when he comes by the house. And whenever I take a chance and get the Bulgarians to slip me a case on the quiet through their embassy here, the sonofabitches are on the phone next day asking, ‘So, what are you going to do for Bulgaria now?’”

“Bulgarians do tend to be a bit greedy, don’t they?” Sergei asked rhetorically. “Did you ever see them eat?”

“I’d hate to tell you what Fidel calls them,” Raúl said.

“How is Fidel?”

“He sends his regards along with the cigars.”

“Well, thank him for the Cohibas when you see him.”

“I will. You’ve heard he’s stopped smoking himself?”