XIII
In the few spy novels that I read as a child, the role of the postage stamp was as grand as the item itself was small, and would yield only to that ofa torn photograph, the appearance of the other half of which often would clinch the plot. On the stamp's sticky side, a spy in those novels would convey in his chicken scrawl, or on a microfilm, the secret message to his master, or vice versa. The Philby stamp is thus a fusion of the torn man with the medium-is-the-message principle; as such, it is a collector's item. To this we might add also that the priciest things in the stamp-collecting world are those issued by political or geographical ephemera—by short-lived or defunct states, negligible potentates or specks of land. (The most-sought-after item in my childhood, I recall, was a stamp from Pitcairn Island—a British colony, as it happens, in the South Pacific.) So, to use this philatelist logic, the issue of the Philby stamp appears to be a cry from the Soviet Union's future. At any rate, there is something in its future that, in the guise of the CSS, asks for that. Actually, this is a fine time for philatelists, and in more ways than one. One can even speak of philatelist justice here— the way one speaks of poetic license. For half a century ago, when the CSS warriors were deporting people from the Baltic states that the U.S.S.R. invaded and rendered defunct, it was precisely philatelists who clinched the list of social categories subject to removal. (In fact, the list ended with the Esperantists, the philatelists being the penultimate category. There were, if memory serves me right, sixty-four such categories; the list began with the leaders and active members of political parties, followed by university professors, journalists, teachers, businessmen, and so on. It came with a highly detailed set of instructions as to how to separate the provider from his family, children from their mothers, and so forth, down to the actual wording of sentences like "Your daddy went to get hot water from the station boiler." The whole thing was rather well thought through and signed by CSS General Serov. I saw the document with my own eyes; the country of application was Lithuania.) This, perhaps, is the source of a retiring case officer's belief in the didactic power of a stamp. Well, nothing pleases the tired eyes of an impartial observer so much as the sight of things coming full circle.
XIV
Let's not dismiss, though, the didactic powers of the stamp. This one at least could have been issued to encourage the CSS's present and future employees, and was no doubt distributed among the former for free, a modest fringe benefit. As for the latter, one can imagine the stamp doing rather well witha young recruit. The establishment is big on visuals, on iconography, its monitoring abilities being justly famous for their -omniscience, not to mention omnivorousness. When it comes to didactic purposes, especially among its own brethren, the organization readily goes the extra mile. When Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU man who betrayed Soviet military secrets to the British in the ig6os, was finally caught, the establishment (or so I was told) filmed his execution. Strapped to a stretcher, Penkovsky is wheeled into the Moscow city crematorium's chamber. An attendant opens the furnace door and two other attendants start to push the stretcher and its contents into the roaring furnace; the flame is already licking the screaming man's soles. At this point a voice comes over the loudspeaker, interrupting the procedure, because another body is scheduled for this time slot. Screaming but unable to kick, Penkovsky is pulled back; another body arrives and, after a small ceremony, is pushed into the furnace. The voice comes over the loudspeaker again: now it's Penkovsky's tum, and in he goes. A small but effective skit. Beats Beckett hands down, boosts morale, and can't be forgotten: it brands your wits. A kind of stamp, if you wilclass="underline" for intramural correspondence.
XV
Before we set out for the fun part in earnest, dear reader, let me say this: There is a distinction between the benefit of hindsight and having lived long enough to see heads' tails. This is not a disclaimer; quite the contrary, most of your author's assertions are borne out by his life, and if they are wrong, then he blew it, at least partially. Still, even if they are accurate, a good question remains. Is he entitled to pass judgment upon those who are no longer around—who have lost? Outlasting your opponent gives you the sense of membership in a victorious majority, of having played your cards right. Aren't you then applying the law retroactively? Aren't you punishing the poor buggers under a code of conscience foreign to them and to their times? Well, I am not troubled by this, and for three reasons. First, because Kim Philby kicked the bucket at the ripe age of seventy-six; as I write this, I am still twenhr-six years behind him in the game, my catching-up prospects being ver dim. Second, because what he believed in for most of his life, allegedly to its very end, has been utter garbage to me at least since the age ofsixteen, though no benefit of foresight can be claimed here, let alone obtained. Third, because the baseness of the human heart and the vulgarity of the human mind never expire with the demise of their most gifted exponents. What I must disclaim, however, is any pretense to expertise in the field I am wading through. As I say, I am no spy buff. Of Philby's life, for instance, I know only the bare bones, if that. I've never read his biography, in English or in Russian, nor do I expect I ever \\ill. Of the options available to a human being, he chose the most redundant one: to betray one set of people to another. This sort of subject is not worthy of study; intuition \\ill suffice. I am also not terribly good \\ith dates, though I normally try to check them. So the reader should decide for himselfat this .stage whether he is going to proceed with this stuff any further. I certainly will. I suppose I should bill the following as a fantasy. Well, it isn't.
XVI
On Marchember umpteenth, nineteen filthy-fine, in Brooklyn, New York, agents of the FBI arrested a Soviet spy. In a small apartment filled with photo equipment, on a floor strewn with microfilm. stood a little middle-aged man with beady eyes, an aquiline profile, and a balding forehead, his Adam's apple moving busily: he was swallowing a .scrap of paper containing some top-secret information. Othenvise the man ofrered no resistance. Instead. he proudly declared: "I am Colonel of the Red Army Rudolf Abel. and I demand to be treated as such in accordance with the Geneva Convention." Needless to say. the tabloids went ape, in the States and all over the place. The colonel was tried. got donkey years, and was locked up, if I remember correctly. in Sing Sing. There he mostly played pool. In nineteen sissy-through or thereabouts, he was exchanged at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin for Gary Powers. the unlucky U-2 pilot who made headlines for the last time just a few years ago when he went down again, this time near L.A., in a helicopter, and for good. Rudolf Abel returned to Moscow, retired, and made no headlines. save that he became the most feared pool shark in Moscow and its vicinity. He died in nineteen-cementy and was buried, with scaled-down military honors, at No- vodevichye Cemetery in Moscow. No stamp was issued for him. Or was one? I may have missed it. Or the British literary paper of humble origin missed it. Perhaps he didn't earn a stamp: what's four years in Sing Sing to a lifelong record? And besides, he wasn't a foreigner, just another displaced native. In any case, no stamp for Rudolf Abel, just a tombstone.
XVII
But what do we read on this tombstone? We read: Willie Fischer, a.k.a. Rudolf Abel, 1903-1971, in Cyrillic, of course. Now, that's a bit too long for a stamp's legend, but not for us. (Ah, dear reader, look at what we've got here: spies, stamps, cemeteries, tombstones! But wait, there's more: poets, painters, assassinations, exiles, Arab sheikhs, murder weapons, stolen cars, and more stamps!) But let's try to make this long story short. Once upon a time—in 1936-39 in Spain, to be precise—there were two men: Willie Fischer and Rudolf Abel. They were colleagues and they were close friends. So close that other employees ofthe same enterprise called them "Fischerabel." But nothing untoward, dear reader, they were simply inseparable, partly because of the work they did. Theywere a team. The enterprise for which they toiled was the Soviet intelligence outfit that handled the messy side of the Spanish Civil War's business. That's the side where you find bullet-riddled bodies miles away from the trenches. Anyway, the outfit's boss was a fellow by the name of Orlov, who prior to his Spanish assignment headed the entire Soviet counterintelligence operation for Western Europe out of an office in the Soviet Embassy in the French capital. We'll play with him later— or, as the case may be, he will play with us. For the moment let's say that Orlov was very close with Fischerabel. Not as close as they were with each other, but very close. Nothing untoward there either, since Orlov was married. He wasjust the boss, and Fischerabel were his right and his left hand at once. Both hands were dirty.