Sean Flannery
The Zebra Network
Preface
WASHINGTON
Accused Russian spy network kingpin James Franklin O’Haire, 42, pleaded guilty Monday to charges of espionage and income tax evasion.
Along with his younger brother, U.S. Air Force Captain Liam Casey O’Haire, 37, who pleaded guilty to the same charges last week, James O’Haire will likely be sentenced to life imprisonment. Both brothers would be eligible for parole in 25 years.
The O’Haires were indicted in July after a two-year investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Investigators charge that James O’Haire headed the spy ring that included seven other men and women besides his brother to hand over U.S. technical and military secrets to the Soviet Union.
The other seven, who also pleaded guilty, will be sentenced in U.S. District Court next month.
Investigators say the full extent of the damage the O’Haire spy ring inflicted on U.S. interests may never be known. But they say it is extensive” and includes information about the so-called Star Wars, Strategic Defense Initiative.
The last similar spy case in this country involved the Walker family in 1986.
Chapter 1
October had come early to Moscow. A few minutes after ten on an evening late in the month, the air was January-crisp. Snow lay everywhere in big dirty piles. Moscow was an eastern city; dark, brooding, mysterious. The onion domes of St. Basil’s on Red Square seemed a natural counterpoint to the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower. A trollybus rattled by. Two soldiers, drunk stupid on vodka, paused beneath a streetlight to pass their bottle. An official Zil limousine raced along the right-hand lane, ignoring the stoplights.
A tall, well-built American stepped from the doorway of a dumpy apartment building on Yelizarovoy Street, just around the corner from the Embassy of Chad. He hunched up his coat collar, looked both ways up the deserted street, and started on foot to where he had parked his car two blocks away. He was just a little disgusted with himself, and nervous. From time to time he looked over his shoulder as if he knew that someone or something might be coming after him. At the end of the block he looked back once more to the secondstory apartment window still lit with a dull yellow glow. He was never going back. No reason for it. Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. They were Voronin’s words. Cryptic. Spoken in a self-pitying drunken haze. Spittle had run down the cripple’s stubbled chin, his rheumy eyes hazed with cataracts, his fists pounding on his useless legs.
This is the end then, the American thought turning once again and heading the last blocks to his car. “When they start talking claptrap, boyo, it’s time to get yourself free lest you get caught with your paws up some girl’s panties.” For six months he’d worked Viktor Voronin, who had until eighteen months ago been an officer in the KGB. A stupid, senseless automobile accident had crippled the man for life. The KGB had retired him, of course, and he’d begun drinking on the same evening he got religion. No more wars, he rambled. A world state in which everyone is equal. The perfect socialism. But Voronin had been a gold seam. The mother lode. Some of what he had provided them had been stunning, hadn’t it? Worth the risks. But tonight the clock had run down. Voronin had finally slipped into a fantasy world in which he began to mix the truth with his wild imaginings. He could no longer be considered reliable. Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. What the hell was it supposed to mean? Zebra One, Zebra Two.
He decided that his final report could wait until morning. It would go out with the daily summaries to Langley by four in the afternoon, Moscow Civil Time. Operation Look Back was finished, and he was glad of it. From start to finish it hadn’t been his sort of project. “Listening to old bitter men vehemently denying their own countries, spewing out their hate and vindictiveness is like digging through someone’s rotting garbage looking for a decent meal,” he’d said.
At thirty-nine, David McAllister-Mac to his wife and friends did not like hiding in closets, skulking around dark corners, opening other people’s mail, or listening to their personal telephone conversations. An unlikely combination for a spy, he supposed, but then he’d never known a spy who was-likely. He was a cautious man, which came from his Scots’ heritage, though the nearest he’d ever come to his distant past was an admitted enjoyment of bagpipe skirling and a pride in his grandfather, Stewart Alvin McAllister, who’d come down to London from Edinburgh to straighten out the fledgling British Secret Intelligence Service during the first world war. His father, who had immigrated to the States in the early twenties, had joined the U.S. Army, had risen to the rank of brigadier general, and had been one of the shakers and movers of the OSS during the second world war, and the CIA afterward. The military, spying, and tradecraft… all these things were in McAllister’s blood. Not babysitting old bitter men with an axe to grind.
McAllister’s little Fiat was parked half up on the curb in the middle of a narrow, deserted block. He took out his car keys as he reached it at the same moment a pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street. He stopped and looked over his shoulder as another pair of headlights appeared from behind. Both vehicles stopped.
They’d blocked off his only exits. McAllister forced himself to remain calm as he stepped back and put his hand in his coat pocket, his fingers curling around the grip of his Beretta 9 mm automatic. Carrying a gun around Moscow is madness, his station chief had argued. “Until you need it,” he countered.
An amplified voice, speaking English, came from the end of the street. “Put your hands up, please, in very plain sight.”
McAllister hesitated. Two men stepped out of the doorway of an apartment building across the sidewalk from his Fiat. They were dressed in civilian clothes, but they were armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles. In unison they drew back the ejector slides.
Do not be foolish, Mr. McAllister. Do as you are told,” the amplified voice instructed.
Two other men appeared on the opposite side of the street. There were no lights in any of the apartments. The streetlights were out as well. He should have noticed. Above, on the roofs on both sides of the street, he could make out the shadowy figures of at least a dozen marksmen. They’d gone through a lot of trouble to get him. Because of Voronin? He doubted it. They would have arrested him there. Slowly he took his hand out of his pocket and then raised both hands over his head.
A short, very thin man dressed in a fur hat and bulky sheepskin coat came up the street. He was dark, in a Georgian sort of a way, and intense, his motions quick, birdlike. He stopped a couple of feet away.
“David Stewart McAllister,” he said, his English thick with a Russian accent. He smiled. “At last. You are under arrest.”
“Charged with what?” McAllister asked, keeping calm. He’d be reported missing within a couple of hours. Gloria would call the Embassy.
“Spying against the Soviet Union,” the little man said.
The morning came cold and dark gray as General Aleksandr Ilyich Borodin stepped from the elevator on the fourth floor of KGB’s Lubyanka Headquarters and charged down the corridor to his office, like a one-man freight train. He was a tall man, by Russian standards, thick of neck and broad of chest, with a nearly bald head and deep, penetrating eyes. Except for a certain overzealousness when it came to some of his projects, it was rumored that he could have risen to director of the Komitet. For the moment, it was said that wiser heads prevailed in the Kremlin which held him as director of the First Chief Directorate’s Special Counterintelligence Service II, charged with penetrating foreign secret intelligence operations.