They had met when Stone was in his last year at Yale.
Stone had been taking a seminar in Soviet politics taught by a large brassy woman who had emigrated from Russia after World War II. He was the star of the class; here, studying the very thing that his father had once done for a living, he had found his natural milieu, the first subject in college he really cared about, and he began to shine.
One day after class the teacher asked him whether he’d like to have lunch the next day at Mory’s, the private club on York Street where the professors ate Welsh rarebit and complained about Guggenheim fellowships they hadn’t received. She wanted him to meet a friend of hers. Charlie showed up, uncomfortable in his blue blazer and the Yale Co-op tie that was threatening to strangle him.
Sitting at the small wooden table next to his teacher was a tall crewcut man with thick black glasses. His name was Saul Ansbach, and for much of the lunch Charlie had no idea why they’d invited him. They chatted about Russia and the Soviet leadership and international communism and all that sort of thing, but they weren’t just talking; later he realized that Ansbach, who at first said he worked for the State Department, was actually testing him.
When it came time for coffee. Stone’s teacher excused herself, and then Ansbach tried for the first time to recruit him for an intelligence program about which he remained vague. Ansbach knew that Charlie was the son of the infamous Alfred Stone, who’d been condemned as a traitor in the McCarthy hearings, but he didn’t seem to care. He saw instead a brilliant young man who had demonstrated an extraordinary flair for international politics and Soviet politics in particular. And who was also the godson of the legendary Winthrop Lehman.
Charlie, who considered the CIA vaguely sinister, said no.
Several times before he graduated, Saul Ansbach called, and each time Charlie politely told him no. A few years later, after Stone had embarked upon an illustrious career as a scholar in Soviet politics, teaching at Georgetown, then M.I.T., Saul asked again, and this time Stone finally gave in. Times were different; the CIA seemed far less odious. Intelligence work increasingly appealed to him, and he knew that now, with his reputation, he could have things his way.
He set down his conditions. He’d work when he wanted to (and climb mountains when he wanted); he wanted to work at home in New York and not have to move back to Washington, whose govern-merit buildings and white pedestrian “malls” gave Stone the shudders – to say nothing of dreary old CIA headquarters in Langley. And – since he was giving up the security of academic tenure – they’d pay him very, very well. For work he so enjoyed that he’d do it for free.
You never know, he later thought, how one quick decision can change your life.
Now Saul walked to the heavy mahogany double doors and shut them, emphasizing the gravity of what he was planning to say.
“It better be important,” Stone said with false gruffness, about to observe that being plucked from the mountaintop was a little like being interrupted during sex before you’re finished. But he held his tongue, preferring not to have Saul ask when Charlie had last seen his estranged wife, Charlotte. Charlie didn’t want to think about Charlotte right now.
If you tell yourself, Don’t think about white elephants, you will. The last time he saw her.
She is standing in the hallway. Her bags are packed for Moscow. And her eyes, unforgettable: too much makeup, as if her sense of palette had left her. She’d been crying. Stone is standing next to her, tears in his eyes, too, his arms half outstretched to touch her once more, to change her mind, to kiss her goodbye.
Ah, now you want to kiss me, she says sadly, turning away, a beautiful doll with smudged eyes. Now you want to kiss me.
Saul sank into his own chair, exhaling slowly, and picked up a dark-blue folder from his desk. He waved it and said, “We just got something in from Moscow.”
“More garbage?” Most of the intelligence the CIA receives from the Soviet Union consists of rumor and unsubstantiated gossip; the Agency’s Kremlinologists spend much of their time doing close analysis of information that is publicly available.
Ansbach smiled cryptically. “Put it this way: this file has been seen by exactly three people – the director, a transcriptionist cleared straight to the top, and me. Is that sensitive enough for you?”
Stone nodded appreciatively.
“I realize you don’t know much about how we get the intelligence we do,” Saul said, leaning back in his chair, still holding the file. “I like to keep collection and analysis separate.”
“I understand.”
“But I’m sure you’re aware that since Howard we’ve had hardly any assets inside Russia.” Ansbach was referring to Edward Lee Howard, a CIA Soviet Division case officer who defected to Moscow in 1983, rolling up virtually all the CIA’s human sources in the U.S.S.R. – a devastating blow from which the Agency had never fully recovered.
“We’ve recruited another,” Stone prompted.
“No. One of the few we had left was a driver in the KGB’s Ninth Directorate. Code-named HEDGEHOG. A chauffeur assigned to various members of the Central Committee. We got him early, with steady money, paid in rubles, since hard currency would be too risky.”
“And in return he listened to what was going on in the back seat.”
“We gave him a recorder, actually. He concealed it under the back seat.”
“Clever fellow.”
“Well, he’d been noticing that one of the people he was assigned to had been having an awful lot of late-night meetings outside Moscow with a number of other high-powered people, and his ears pricked up. We got several tapes from him. Unfortunately, the poor shmuck didn’t know how to operate a tape recorder. He kept the volume dial all the way down, so the sound quality is lousy. We’ve been trying to run a voice-print ID on the speakers, but the rumble is too loud. We managed to transcribe most of it, but we have no idea who’s involved, who’s doing the talking.”
“And you want to figure out what’s going on,” Stone concluded. He was looking not at Ansbach but at the framed prints of mallard ducks and botanical oddities that hung on the wall above the wainscoting. He admired Saul’s attempts to make headquarters resemble a baronial estate more than an office. “But, Saul, why me? You’ve got others who can do this.” He crossed his legs and added studiedly: “Who were already in town.”
Ansbach, by way of reply, handed him the blue folder. Stone opened it, frowned, and began reading.
After a few minutes of silence, he looked up. “All right, I see you’ve highlighted the parts you want me to pay attention to. So we’ve got two guys talking here.” He read aloud the yellow-highlighted fragments, skipping as he read, conflating them into one long string.
“ ‘Secure? … The Lenin Testament … Only other copy, Winthrop Lehman has … the old fart got it from Lenin himself … the tin god … can’t do anything to stop it …’ ”
Stone cleared his throat. “This Winthrop Lehman – I assume they’re talking about the Winthrop Lehman.”
“You know another one?” Ansbach asked, spreading his hands with his palms up. “Yeah. Your Winthrop Lehman.”
“No,” Stone said softly. “Now I see why you wanted me.”
Winthrop Lehman, who would become his godfather, had been national-security adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. In 1950 he had hired a brilliant young Harvard historian named Alfred Stone – Charlie’s father – as his assistant. Later, even during Alfred Stone’s disgrace, the so-called Alfred Stone affair, when Senator Joseph McCarthy had successfully branded Alfred Stone a traitor on a trumped-up charge of passing secrets to the Russians, Lehman had stood by him. Lehman, the statesman, aristocrat, and what news magazines had dubbed “philanthropist” (which simply meant he’d been passingly generous with his vast fortune), was now eighty-nine years old. Stone was aware that he would not have been recruited to Parnassus were it not for some behind-the-scenes power-brokering on the part of the enormously influential Lehman.