“And then what?” Ya’ara asked, after Bill paused and then remained quiet for a while.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. The team maintained its surveillance on the young man. He wandered around the city for a while, went into a café, returned to his hotel, and then remained there. Later that evening he went down to the bar, ordered something to eat, a club sandwich, fries on the side, a pint of beer. And that’s it. The following day he took a cab to the airport and boarded a plane to Amsterdam. End of story.
“But it wasn’t the end. The Canadians had photographs, and a visit to the hotel was all it took to get the young man’s name and the details of the credit card he had used. The airline and Border Control provided them with his passport details as well. Thomas Langham. British. An inquiry with the Brits revealed that a Thomas Langham did indeed appear in their records, but they had no additional information on him. They would check. Strange that he arrived from the Netherlands and then returned there, but it’s possible, it’s legit, it’s not a criminal offense. There are tens of thousands of Brits, and maybe even more, who don’t live on their small and crowded island. And the Canadians ran a check with us, too. They passed on the name and the photographs. Both to us and to the FBI. And it’s always an aging spinster on the desk who comes up with the goods. And that’s exactly what happened this time, too.”
Ya’ara lit up, seethed inside, in silence. Who the hell does he think he is—that chauvinist? Do I really have to travel halfway around the world only to run into smug, self-satisfied, judgmental, condescending men here, too? She didn’t know why she was so angry. Why she could feel tears boiling in her eyes. After all, it wasn’t as if she was hearing such things for the first time. And what had he actually said? Nothing terrible. Simply disrespectful. She could see that Michael had his eyes on her, and the look on his face told her that he knew exactly what was on her mind. He placated her with a concealed smile. She calmed down and remained silent. Bill continued.
“Maggie, one of our longest-serving desk officials, made the guy. The young man. She picked him out from a photograph of a class of cadets on an officers’ training course of the Red Army’s, Russian army’s, Special Forces, from June 2008. Refusing adamantly to make use of any facial-recognition software, she picked him out using a magnifying glass. My eyes are the best software, she kept on saying to us. As stubborn as a mule. But she was right; no man-made software was going to spot him in the second row, fifth from the left. Presumably he was handpicked by the SVR recruiters and transferred from the army to them. Young, daring, just starting out. And that’s how he spent his initial years in the organization. Doing rookie assignments. As a courier for a more important and senior agent. That’s how everyone starts out. So far, no mistake. A bit of bad luck perhaps. Anyway, that’s not the mistake I want to talk about. Agents do sometimes get exposed. Yes, the revelation that the young man was a Russian pretty much tied things up insofar as the case against the Canadian engineer was concerned. From an intelligence point of view at least. Our Canadian colleagues were left with the task of gathering sufficient evidence to prosecute and convict him in court. But that’s not the interesting part of our story. What’s interesting is the mistake the Russians made thereafter.
“They gave the young man another assignment to carry out. Unrelated to the Canadian agent. They had no idea that he had been uncovered, and they couldn’t have known, because the Canadians’ covert investigation into the engineer had yet to go public. Meanwhile, this so-called Thomas Langham, the Russian courier’s assumed English name, as you recall, was added to our list of suspects at all our border crossings. The instructions were clear: Encountering a man by the name of Thomas Langham, date of birth such and such, at any American border crossing requires an immediate report to the nearest FBI field office. The FBI has offices, and even operational squads, at all the major airports. When it comes to the smaller border crossings, a report has to be made to the local field office. Don’t detain the man, don’t touch his luggage, don’t take him aside for a customs check. Don’t do a thing. We don’t want him suspecting anything. Simply notify the nearest FBI office. If we’re lucky, we’ll be there and we’ll be able to follow him. If luck isn’t on our side, we’ll try to locate him via alternative means. If we don’t find him, we’ll wait for the next opportunity. Most important, we don’t want him to feel at risk and to cancel his plans.
“And we got lucky. The man who called himself Thomas Langham arrived in the U.S. via Boston’s Logan Airport, where we have a surveillance team on hand on a permanent basis. Fortunately, too, the Homeland Security officials weren’t as dumb as usual, and everything went smoothly. Langham landed, waited almost an hour in line, his name popped up on the blacklist, they asked him the usual questions, stamped his passport, and off he went. FBI officials were already waiting for him by the time he got to the baggage carousel, waiting and ready to follow him. Tracking him became a lot simpler from the moment they saw what car he got into. It may be pretty easy to spot a tail when you’re driving a car, but not if you’re being monitored from the air. And the FBI had a drone. I told you we got lucky. Because the drone was in working order. The weather was good. And Thomas Langham set out in the direction of Rhode Island.”
38
MOSCOW, FSB HEADQUARTERS, FEBRUARY 2013
“Names, names! The moron didn’t ask for names!”
Captain Viktor Demedev was tearing his hair out—metaphorically speaking. His hair was so short that no amount of trying would have allowed him to get a proper grip on it anyway. Demedev was a desk chief at the so-called Credibility Department, the department responsible for preventing both current and former FSB employees from leaking secrets. The department’s name, Credibility, was a remnant from the Stalinist period. Back then, they still opted for awe-inspiring names that only die-hard cynics dared to secretly term pompous, archaic, or pretentious. Whatever the case, despite the upheaval experienced by the Soviet Union, and despite the changes the KGB itself had undergone, the name, Credibility, still remained in place. However, even though its name remained a constant, the department’s methods had changed significantly. Its members during the darkest days of the empire were viewed as the KGB’s butchers. And the widespread purging operations, to which the security services, too, were subjected, were carried out within the KGB by its very own people. Arrests in the dead of night, harsh interrogation methods, psychiatric and psychological manipulations, secret trials, and when necessary—a bullet in the back of the head. Over the years, these all gave way to bureaucratic, systematic, and well-organized intelligence work, to tenacious yet pertinent and humane interview sessions, and softer and more contained resolutions than in the past. There were those who longed in whispers for the days when things were put to bed at lightning speed, leaving no loose ends at all. The work the department did, however, remained professional and thorough, accompanied by a stringent, sometimes zealous, sense of duty. After all, who’s going to protect the FSB, this huge and magnificent security service, if not the members of the department? With infinite patience and endless determination, only they had the wherewithal to identify the risks and weed out the rogue employees whose individual weaknesses posed a threat to the strength of the whole.