Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All About You
Chapter 7
“Let’s go to the canteen. God knows I need a cup of coffee. I suspect you do as well. Regrettably, I’ll have to escort you at all times in the building given our draconian security rules,” Pet spoke. “The security weenies insist on compliance with the protocols and I’d be remiss if I didn’t follow them. I’d also receive a few days of unpaid vacation for my negligence. On my salary, I couldn’t afford the pay loss,” she laughingly said.
I understood the need for security. I was an alien combatant in her country’s eyes and potential threat to its security. However, I had to laugh at the thought of an escort policy, flashing back to the State Department in the mid to late 1990s and the department’s open door policy at its headquarters in the Harry S. Truman building. It was laughable, but the situation wasn’t a bit funny.
The State Department’s Black Dragons, its senior careerists, unwisely decided to do away with the building’s escort policy involving foreign visitors from former Soviet bloc countries. In their collective wisdom, communism had failed and nationalism had succeeded with one country after another breaking away from the Soviet orbit. It was the time of Glasnost, openness, and the dawn of a new era in foreign relations, believing in their own naiveté with regard to Russia.
Spying on one another was passé or so the Dragons thought at the time. It turned out they were only whistling past the graveyard. Espionage was called the world’s second oldest profession for good reason and for the Russian SRV and its predecessors it had never gone out of style. Not surprisingly, the Diplomatic Security Service strongly objected to the change, but was overruled by the seniors who knew what was best about everything, especially security matters.
It didn’t take long for the SVR to exploit the stupidity of the Dragons. Known SVR operatives were identified chatting up our Foreign Service officers in the Truman building’s cafeteria and freely roaming the corridors of Mother State. They were like kids in a candy shop with free reign to sample any sensitive goodies that came their way. Access to the restricted areas and offices posed little problem to them as illustrated by the Stanislav Gusev case.
The restricted conference room on the 7th floor of the building was located a stone’s throw away from the Secretary of State’s suite. Classified discussions by a variety of different offices took place there with the purported assurance that the conversations would remain secret and away from prying ears. The discovery of a small listening device, a bug, hidden in a piece of trim molding in the room, quickly disabused them of that erroneous notion. No one had a clue how long the device had lay hidden or how it wormed its way into the woodwork.
A joint FBI—DSS investigation discovered a very sophisticated SVR operation in progress targeting the purportedly sacrosanct innards of the Truman building. SVR officer Gusev had been spotted parking his car directly across the street from the conference room on several occasions. The surveillance of him and his vehicle ramped up as a result. He would typically sit on a park bench and read The Washington Post for about an hour or so before leaving. This routine went on intermittently for several weeks. On one occasion, he was observed trying to read the paper upside down!
He was detained by the FBI since he was legal with diplomatic immunity and shortly booted out of the country for activities incompatible with his diplomatic status. The polite way of saying he was spying. He was declared persona non grata by the U.S. government and given 48 hours to leave the country. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations saved him from prosecution and imprisonment.
Just a few years before this incident, one of the largest U.S. embassies in the world was being constructed in Moscow. Despite the best efforts of the Diplomatic Security Service and the Intelligence Community to protect it from technical penetration, it was compromised early on.
All materials brought to the site were rigorously inspected by Navy Seabees and construction surveillance specialists. However, the structure’s prefabricated concrete pillars and crossbeam members were constructed by the Russians offsite and thus off-limits to U.S. inspectors. The large, prefabricated pieces couldn’t be x-rayed or otherwise technically inspected. The best the inspectors could do was to eyeball the pieces to determine if they’d been tampered with. It turned out the Russians had cleverly secreted a network of wiring and devices within them to create a highly sophisticated listening system. Construction was halted while the gray beards in Washington tried to come up with a solution.
For more than a decade, the hulking red brick office building in downtown Moscow had stood unused, unfinished and riddled with sophisticated electronic sensors. The structure was abandoned in 1985 when U.S. security officials discovered that Soviet workers had studded it with so many listening devices and eavesdropping bugs that it was essentially a state-of-the-art, eight-story microphone. The entire structure had been compromised by the SVR! So what to do?
The fix to the problem was dubbed project Top Hat. In 1995, workers began to tear off the facade and walls and knock off the top two floors of the building. Then a new, four-story top hat of secure offices was built on what was left of the structure. The solution was still imperfect, but a reasonable workaround given the circumstances. Most of the original six floors were still vulnerable to electronic spying, so only non-sensitive administrative offices were located there.
The Russians didn’t last as our new best friends for very long.
***
Pet snapped me out of my reminiscing by saying it was time to put our heads together. I looked forward to the experience and wondered if she’d go all the way with a Vulcan mind meld. But that was not to be. She’d probably think such an outrageous thing would be too kinky and alien, especially before a first date.
Her office was on the 3rd floor and a bit down on its luck so to speak. The walls needed paint and the window curtains had faded over the years. Otherwise, it appeared functional as well as institutional. I started our get-together by asking the question that had intrigued me since the beginning. How did Vladimir earn his nickname and why was he such a scary character? I guess that was really two questions in one. She became serious and quickly lost the smile on her face. She also gave the questions some thought before replying.
“Vlad the Impaler was a KGB officer who retired before my time. He was what we call a Neanderthal, a knuckle-dragger and an embarrassment to the organization. He’s a ruthless thug and killer. Vlad was a product of a different time and place and would never be hired now,” she solemnly spoke while looking out the window. She seemed to be reluctant to talk about him and his past.
Maybe she was naïve or simply trying to be politically correct with a foreign guest. Then again, perhaps she was compartmentalizing things in her mind. I wasn’t sure which, but the SRV still employed skilled assassins to do its dirty work. One only had to look back over recent history to the umbrella poisoning of Georgi Markov with ricin in London in 1969 and later the polonium-210 poisoning of Alexander Livinenko also in London in 2006 and, of course, the infamous Skripol poisonings in 2018. Each of the assassinations or attempts was linked to the SRV or its predecessor organizations. All the men were harsh critics of the Kremlin’s leadership and the killings were both hands-down, no-doubts-about-it events. But I saw no point in arguing the point. What was the point at this point? I pointedly wondered to myself. It would be pointless.
“The impaler part comes from his use of an ice pick for his killings,” Pet continued. “The legend around here is he liked the close-up and personal aspect of that method of death and reportedly enjoyed watching the life force fade from his victims’ eyes. He’s a sadist and sociopath who supposedly reveled in his handiwork. That’s all I really know about his past. It’s his future we should be focusing on.”
She was right of course. Who could argue with a gorgeous lady with brains to boot? Not me certainly, although I wasn’t sure how to stop my tail from wagging so vigorously.
I couldn’t help myself and I started nodding off while Pet was still talking. The time change was killing me, as it usually did. I always needed a couple of days to recuperate from these trips. My sea legs were still wobbly.
Pet noticed my condition and made a suggestion.
“Dick, let’s wrap up the meeting early today. Go back to your apartment and take a nap. If you’re like me, you need to sleep off the jet lag. My trips back and forth between Minsk and Radcliffe always wiped me out too.”
Damn, that’s why she had such Americanized speech; by attending college in Boston, no less. I thought I detected a very slight accent and was right, but wrong about its origin. It was the high-browed, New England hoity-toity patois that I heard!
“I took the liberty of scoring us a couple of tickets to the Bolshoi for tonight’s performance. I hope you don’t mind, but I thought it a good way to kick off our new partnership. Tomorrow’s soon enough to start our search for Vlad. Meet me at six sharp at the theatre. It’s only a few blocks from your apartment. If you get lost, simply mention Bolshoi to any passerby and they’ll point you in the right direction.”
I took up Pet on her offer and headed to my new home for a few hours of much needed sleep. I was exhausted and the three cups of strong, black coffee couldn’t keep me awake.
Before leaving, Pet mentioned what I was hoping to hear.
“Dick, I owe you an apology. I wasn’t able to find you better accommodations on such short notice and had no choice but to put you up at that dreadful Kruschevski last night. I know it’s a dump and I’m terribly sorry.”
She said she had few options given the dearth of hotel rooms in the city due to the national holidays underway in Russia. She also mentioned she didn’t get much advance notice of my arrival and that complicated matters greatly. She claimed her admin people had to scramble to find me a room close to the Lubyanka, but couldn’t come up with any better accommodations on such short notice. I tended to believe her and I was somewhat relieved with her explanation of the circumstances that led me to my most inhospitable digs. She promised me a better apartment in the next couple of days. I’d hold her to her promise. Truthfully, I’d hold her regardless of the circumstances.