“You know,” Bill began his story, the hint of a didactic tone in his voice, “even professional spy organizations make mistakes sometimes. And we earn our keep to a large extent from the mistakes of our adversaries. We wait for them patiently, for years on end. The trick is to be able to spot them. The KGB—or SVR, as Russia’s foreign espionage service is known today—also makes mistakes. True, not very often. But it does make them. And a few months ago, just before my retirement, we stumbled upon one of them.” He gave Michael a look that said it was time for a refill. Michael obliged, adding two cubes of ice. Bill continued. “More than a year ago, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, with which we have a close working relationship, exposed a Russian agent in Montreal. How they got to him isn’t important right now. Something to do with identifying the source of technological know-how that was leaked and found its way to Russia. The man in question is a Canadian who emigrated from Czechoslovakia at an early age and arrived in Canada as a young refugee. He was believed to be a KGB officer who had been planted in Canada under a false Czech identity. On the other hand, he may have been a real refugee who was recruited by the Soviets only after he’d been living in Canada for years. Whatever the case, he studied electrical and computer engineering at McGill University, graduated as an honors student, and was hired by a Canadian avionics—aviation electronics—company, whose clients include among others the Canadian National Defense Ministry and also our Pentagon. The Russians very rarely meet with their agents. Every such meeting, and certainly one that takes place in the country in which the agent is permanently based, puts the said agent at risk. But sometimes there’s no alternative, you need to maintain direct contact with the agent so that he can hand over documents, so that you can pass on money or materials, so that you can thoroughly debrief him, so that you can keep his motivation at a high, preserve his courage, prevent him from acting in haste and doing something stupid. You know it as well as I do—an agent isn’t a robot. He’s an individual who requires human contact. With his handlers, too, especially with them.
“Like I said, meeting up with an agent in the country he calls home is risky. In our case, Canada would be the worst place in the world for the Russians to meet with this engineer, who was spying for them. Canada, naturally, is the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s home turf. That’s where it is strongest. There it can put its capabilities to full use. Canada is also a dangerous environment, because there’s always the risk of someone else being privy to the meeting: Colleagues from work, neighbors, family members, they all know the agent, they all see him on a daily basis and could notice a deviation from his regular routine. The Russians therefore wouldn’t stage any of the lengthy, in-depth operational meetings in Canada itself. Certainly not in Montreal. The SVR would wait for the agent to travel to a trade conference, in Paris, let’s say, or go on holiday with his family, to the Caribbean, for example. It’s easier for them to operate outside the agent’s natural territory, far from the watchful eye of the company’s security officer and the national security service. They can then create significant windows of time in which to meet face-to-face, for lengthy periods, with their man. But at some points it seems they had no choice, and they needed to contact him in Montreal itself. They could do so sometimes indirectly, and that’s usually preferable in terms of operational security, and sometimes they needed to make direct contact. Indirect contact can be facilitated by means of a drop point, or what we call a dead letter box.”
Ya’ara wondered why he was talking to them as if they were children, and explaining things they’d learned years ago. Perhaps it’s a syndrome that affects all retired secret service officials, the desire to emphasize at all costs just how much better they are than their younger successors. Bill Pemberton continued: “A concealed drop point under a shrub in a public park, or a wall in which one of the bricks is loose, something like that. Somewhere you can hide something—a letter or list of codes, even money—and then leave a signal to let the agent know that something is waiting for him at the prearranged drop point. Even if you haven’t read any John Le Carré—and I most certainly advise you to do so—you must have seen the BBC show Smiley’s People, in which a yellow chalk mark on one of the trees serves to initiate contact with the agents. Moscow Rules, he calls it. And they really were put into practice. By the Russians, and also the British, and maybe even us, too. Who knows?”
Bill Pemberton broke off suddenly, guarding his secrets, and appearing to have lost his train of thought for a moment. But he hadn’t. He sipped on his whisky and went on, his voice lower and his eyes half shut. “But as I said, this type of indirect contact isn’t always enough. And it, too, involves a fair amount of danger. The operation sometimes requires a meeting in person with the agent, even if a very brief one. To this end, the SVR maintains a network of, how should I say, perhaps couriers is the right word. We call them operative agents. Anyway, these couriers are trained to conduct brief rendezvous with their agents. In a crowded supermarket perhaps, on a park bench, at a train station. The courier and agent recognize each other, walk by each other, sit momentarily on the same bench maybe, something is passed from one hand to another, rolled up in a newspaper perhaps, maybe in a shopping bag filled with oranges. The courier is also sometimes required to convey a verbal message, because the agent needs to hear a friendly voice. So they do that, too.
“For reasons of operational security, the SVR assigns a courier to each of its agents. So that if an agent is exposed, or the courier is exposed, they’ll bring each other down and that’s it. Compartmentalization, as we call it in the professional jargon, or hedging. But when they’re pressed for time, or when a specific courier isn’t available or the particular mission is an urgent one and the commanding officer is eager to get it done and doesn’t give a shit about some theory that dictates how an agent should be handled—mistakes happen. Sometimes simply due to carelessness or negligence, or as a result of improper risk management. There’ll always be a reason, and it’ll usually be a good one even, and things work out in the end in general, because in most instances even when you make a mistake you don’t get caught.
“Until you do. And that’s just what happened in the case of our Canadian engineer. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service suspected him, followed him, and saw him meet with a young man on a park bench in the center of the city. Not far from the Prudential company’s building, if you’re familiar with it. A few minutes’ walk from his firm’s offices. In any event, the engineer got to the park and, according to the team on his tail, appeared tense and jittery. A few minutes later, a young man showed up and sat down next to him, without saying a word. And it was actually that lack of communication that caught the attention of the surveillance team. Usually if you want to sit down on a bench next to someone, you say something to them. You ask: Is this spot free? May I join you? Or you say something banal about the weather. In this instance—nothing. Not a word. Being antisocial or shy isn’t a crime, but the surveillance team deemed it suspicious, and that’s what counts. They filmed and photographed the encounter and then decided to abandon the engineer and follow the young man instead. After all, they could always go back to the engineer. He had a home. He had a job. They knew where to find him again. Anyway, a few minutes later, the young man got up from the bench and walked away. Again, without a single word to the engineer. The surveillance team wasn’t able to see if the two men had exchanged anything. They were too far away, and an analysis later of the photographs failed to yield anything concrete. The engineer had come and gone in the possession of a brown paper bag, probably containing a sandwich or a piece of fruit or something. And the young man had arrived empty-handed, but of course he could have been carrying something in the pockets of the light coat he was wearing.”