XXIII
Blackout. Time for the credits. Ten years ago an emigre Russian publishing house in France published a book called A Hunter Upside Down. The title suggests one of those cartoon puzzles in which you have to look for the hidden figures: hunters, rabbits, farmers, birds, and so on. The author's name was Victor Henkin. He was Willie Fischer's sidekick from the good old Spanish days, and the Fischerabel story is what the book is all about, although it aims to be an autobiography. Some ofthe Orlov tidbits also hail from there. The book should have been a hit, if only because people in the know on the longer side of the Atlantic still believed that they had Rudolf Abel. By the same token, they still believed that Orlov, who had joined them, truly worked for that side whose decorations one may see proudly displayed on his chest in one of Orlov's rare close-ups, in a book published with great fanfare in the States well after Orlov's death in 1972. But no fanfare for Henkin's book. When an American publisher tried to get a contract for it, he ran into a copyright wall. There were also some minor scandals over alleged plagiarism in the German or French edition, it was in the courts, and for all I know Henkin lost. Now he works for a radio station in Munich that broadcasts into Russia—almost the flip side of the job he had for donkey's years at Radio Moscow broadcasting in French. Or else he is retired. A Russian emigre, with a highly checkered record . . . Not trustworthy,
172 I J О s E PH B R О D s K Y
presumably paranoid . . . Living in the past, ill-tempered . . . Still, he is free now, he's got the right papers. He can go to the Gare de Lyon, board a train, and just like fifty years ago, after a nightlongjourney, he can arrive in Madrid, the city of his youth and adventure. All he has to do is to cross the large station square and he'll be standing in front of the Nacional; he could do it with his eyes closed. Still with his eyes closed, he can enter a lobby that teemed fifty years ago with Orlovs, Fischers, Abels, Hemingways, Phil- bys, Orwells, Mercaders, Malrauxs, Negrins, Ehrenburgs, and lesser lights like himself: with all those who have taken part in our story thus far or to whom we, one way or another, owe credit. Should he open his eyes, however, he'll discover that the Nacional is closed. It's been closed, according to some—mostly the young—for the last ten years; according to others, for the last fifty. Neither the young nor the old seem to know who pays the property tax, but maybe in Spain they do things differently.
XXIV
And in case you think, dear reader, that we've forgotten him, let's extract Kim Philby from the crowd in the lobby, and let's ask him what he's doing there. 'Tm with the paper, actually," we'll hear. "Covering the war." Let's press him as to whose side he's on, and let's imagine that, just for an instant, he'll talk straight. "Switching at the moment. Orders." He may as well motion slightly upward with his chin, toward the sixth floor of the Nacional. For I am absolutely convinced that it was Orlov who told Kim Philby in 1937 in Madrid or thereabouts to change his tune in The Times from pro-Republican to pro-Franco, for reasons of deeper cover. If, as the story goes, Philby was meant to be a long shot aimed at the sancta sanctorum of British intelligence, he had better go pro-Fascist. It's not that Orlov foresaw which way the Spanish show might go, though he could have had an inkling; he simply thought, or knew, that Philby should be played for keeps. And he could think this way, or know this, only if he was privy to the file that the Russians by then had on Philby, who was recruited in 1933, or to the actual recruitment of Philby. The first is certain, the second is possible. In any case, Orlov knew Philby personally, which is what he tried to tell the hapless FBI man who interviewed him in 1944, in Iowa, I think, where he then dwelled, having emigrated to the United States from Canada. At that point, it seems, Orlov was finally ready to spill the beans; but the FBI man paid no attention to the mention of some Englishman with a stutter who worked for the Soviet Union, which, on top of everything, was at that time an American ally. So Orlov decided not to press this any further, and Kim Philby headed for the stamp.
XXV
With these beans still intact in his hippothalamus on the one hand, and on the other having penned a couple of novels filled with the standard field-man yarn, but of the Russian variety, Orlov was no doubt of some interest to the budding CIA in the late 1940s. I have no idea, dear reader, who approached whom: I haven't studied Orlov's life or its available record. Not my line ofwork. I am not even an amateur; I am just piecing all these things together in my spare time, not out of curiosity even but to quell the sensation of utter disgust caused by the sight of that literary paper's cover. Self-therapy, then, and who cares about sources so long as it works. At any rate, regardless of who approached whom, Orlov seems to have been retained by the CIA from the 1950s onward. Whether he was on the payroll or just freelancing is hard to say; but to judge by his decorations, as well as by the marginal evidence of his subsequent penmanship, it's a fair assumption. Most likely, he was engaged by the agency in an advisory capacity; nowadays this sort of thing is called consultancy. A good question would be whether the fellows back in Moscow knew of his new affiliation. Assuming, for Orlov's sake, that he didn't notify them himself, for that would still be suicidal, and assuming that the newly born agency couldn't be penetrated—if only for the sake of definitions—the fellows in Moscow were in the dark. Still, they had reason to believe that Orlov was around, if only as an aspiring thriller writer. As they had no news of him for a couple of decades, they may have wondered. And when you wonder, you imagine the worst. In a certain line ofwork, it's only prudent. They might even have wanted to check.
And they had the wherewithal. So they took it out of mothballs and put it in place. Still, they were in no hurry. Not until nineteen filthy-fine, that is. Then they suddenly felt pressed. And on Marchember umpteenth, Willie Fischer gets himself arrested in Brooklyn, New York, by those FBI men and declares, urbi et orbi: I am Rudolf Abel. And the tabloids go ape, in the States and all over the place. And Orlov doesn't squeak. Evidently he doesn't want to see his old pal again.
What was so special about nineteen filthy-fine, you may ask, and why was it imperative now to check the state of the beans in Orlov's hippothalamus? Even if they were still all there, hadn't they gone stale and useless? And who says old pals must be seen? Well, dear reader, brace yourself for loony assertions. For now we are going to show you, in a big way, that we haven't forgotten our subject. Now we are cooking literally with oil.
XXVIII
Contrary to popular demonology, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union was, from the beginning ofits existence, always opportunistic. I am using this term in its literal, not its derogatory, sense. Opportunism is the core of any foreign policy, regardless of the degree of confidence a state may have in itself. It means the use of opportunity: objectively present, imagined, or created. For most ofits sorry history, the Soviet Union remained a highly insecure customer, traumatized by the circumstances of its birth, its deportment vis-a-vis the rest of the world fluctuating between caution and hostility. (Nobody fitted the width ofthat margin better than Molotov, Stalin's Foreign Minister.) As a consequence, the Soviet Union could afford only objectively present opportunities. Which it seized, notably in 1939, grabbing the Baltic states and half of Poland, as offered to Stalin by Hitler, and in the final stages of the war, when the Soviet Union found itself in possession of Eastern Europe. As for the opportunities imagined—the 1928 march on Warsaw, the 1936-39 adventure in Spain, and the 1940 Finnish campaign—the Soviet Union paid dearly for these flights of fancy (though in the case of Spain it was reimbursed with the country's gold reserve). The first to pay, of course, was the General Staff, almost entirely beheaded by 1941. Yet the worst consequence of all these fantasies, I suppose, was that the Red Army's performance against a handful of Finnish troops made Hitler's temptation to attack Russia absolutely irresistible.