Konstantin Volkov was an unassuming man of indeterminate age, which made him perfect for his role. He was deputy Vice-Consul in the Soviet Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey or at least that was his official title. What actually consumed most of his time was being Deputy Head of NKVD in the country, although he had simply had enough of that post and was looking for a way out.
For some time he had been gathering intelligence from messages that passed through his hands, steadily building up a portfolio of information from agents across the globe for his ‘insurance policy’, a stock of restricted information with which to attract foreign intelligence agencies to ‘look after’ him.
A secret meeting had been arranged on 5th July with a member of the US mission, in order for Volkov to make his play. The two men secreted themselves deep in the rear of a modest coffee shop and, once the identity of the American had been established, immediately got down to details. Wreathed in thick tobacco smoke, Volkov gave his starting position. In exchange for $27,000 and political asylum, he would hand over the details of numerous Soviet agents in Turkey and Britain. The American, actually a very out of his depth young Marine Captain, offered nothing but promised to report back to his superiors and then bring Volkov the reply.
To be frank, the offer was not taken seriously and, in any case, Turkey and Britain being riddled with Soviet agents was not a huge concern for the Marine’s boss, an ageing US Army Lieutenant Colonel, soon to retire on health grounds.
None the less, the man was still professional enough to send the young Captain out for another clandestine meet five days later, this time with a request for proof, and more to the point, proof that was of value to the United States.
The Captain arrived first and Volkov arrived shortly afterwards. Expecting an answer to his question, he was extremely surprised and very upset to discover that he would not be offered what he wanted during this meeting.
There was nothing he could do except try and satisfy the requests put to him.
Fresh in his mind was a message he had encoded for sending via his Turkish contacts, and so he spoke of it. He assumed this eventually went to the Turkish Embassy in Washington but knew no more. The contents were also unknown to him but he was conscious of the fact that it was an extremely important agent for whose messages, incoming or outgoing, he was to be brought into the embassy no matter what time of day or night a message arrived. The young Captain made written notes, which made Volkov very uncomfortable.
“Enough!” he hissed. “Remember what I tell you. No writing.”
“OK sir.” He made a point of dramatically finishing the sentence he was writing. “Anything else I can pass on to my boss?”
“Just that there is much concern that you may have broken our NKVD, diplomatic and trade ciphers and so we are moving to a new code system in the next two months.”
“Well there is not a lot there for my boss to sell this idea sir.”
The more Volkov thought about it, the more he agreed. The Turks would fall over themselves for his info. The British would wet their pants when he revealed what he knew. Why on earth had he gone to the Amerikanisti? The answer to that lay with British Military Intelligence. He could not trust them, for they were infiltrated by the NKVD.
His mind wandered back to finding something of import for the moment.
Once, when the route had first been established, he had partially decoded the NKGB version of a message, from an agent AKONHOST. It had made little sense to him but he did remember one word.
“Manhattan, my Directorate knows about Manhattan.”
The Captain looked amused.
“Sir, everyone knows about Manhattan. It’s on all the maps.”
Both men stood up, one to go and one to remonstrate but who then thought better of it. One resolved to file a relatively useless report with his boss and the other resigned to the fact that he had made an error approaching the Amerikanisti and would carefully approach the British instead. Very carefully obviously, with conditions of who was to know what and how communications should be managed, but he was sure they would like to know what he knew about the depths to which Soviet Intelligence had them penetrated!
They went their own ways with neither a shake of the hand nor another word.
Chapter 14 – THE REPORT
Those who talk on the razor edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.
The Captain compiled a written report on the meeting that was concise and accurate, even down to the Russian’s useless joke at the end of the meeting.
The report was placed on the Lieutenant Colonel’s desk on a day he was on sick leave, and so was not processed for sending forward until the following day.
He viewed it with no great interest but sent it forward with grade 1 priority solely based on the stuff about code changing.
It was a low traffic day on the 12th, so the report made its way through to the FBI in Washington in record time.
The ‘stuff’ on code changing arrived and produced a seismic wave at Project Venona, a joint US Army-FBI attempt to decode Soviet communications. Not only was it a heads-up that change was possible it was also indicative of the fact that the Soviets were sensing an extra pair of eyes reading their private thoughts.
The report also took other routes at a more leisurely pace.
It was Friday the 13th by the time it arrived in the FBI building. Agent Drew Hargreaves had drawn the short straw and was undertaking the communications review occasionally done on the letters of all staff at a certain location in New Mexico.
Having just been wholly bored reading women’s talk for half an hour, he was at the coffee machine when a new report arrived. He signed for it, mainly as he was the nearest and could hardly run away in any case, and took it with him into his booth.
Something different to run his eyes over before he got back the serious business of reading what the fashion of the moment was.
The report had been sanitised and all hint that it originated from a possible defector had gone. That meant that it held little of substance.
Hargreaves opened it and speed-read the page, somewhere in his brain noting ‘Turkish’ but not processing the word as he was compulsively drawn to the final paragraph.
“Sweet Lord on high, sweet lord on high.”
His brain raced with thoughts. ‘Manhattan; the Soviets know about Manhattan. Sweet lord on high. They know about Manhattan.’
“Sweet lord…”
His mind flicked deliberately and accessed his memory covering the word ‘Turkish’ and he read that section more closely.
His left-hand reached out and he re-read the file cover note for the private Los Alamos correspondence he had been reading.
Hargreaves was a god-fearing southern boy, brought up in the State of Mississippi. Crippled in a farming accident at the age of nine, he threw himself into academia, earning top honours in college and subsequently choosing a life of service to the government that had provided his education. He entered the FBI in 1938 and found his niche in intelligence. He was a first-rate analyst and never accepted coincidences.
He also never, ever cursed.
“Fuck.”
And so it was that he held in his right hand a low-level report from Istanbul containing the codename of the most important project his country was undertaking in modern-times, coupled with inference of important spy information going through the same country. In his left hand a file cover-sleeve that indicated that this particular scientist corresponded regularly and at length with a cousin employed at the Turkish Embassy.