Milton Bearden Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 2

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part 3

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part 4

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Praise for The Black Tulip

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Marie-Catherine

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the Publications Review Board of the Central Intelligence Agency—in particular Molly Tasker and John Hedley—for reviewing the manuscript to ensure that it contained no information that was still classified. The CIA’s review was eminently fair and reflected sound judgment as to what was actually secret, and needed to be protected, and what was not. I am thankful for their prompt action and thoughtful assistance in telling a story that is based on my thirty years in the CIA’s Clandestine Services.

  Milt Bearden

  Nobody seems to know just when and where the black tulip story originated. One credible theory traces its origins to the early spring of 1980, and the death of a Lieutenant Semyon Popov in a field near Mazr-e Sharif. He died clutching a rare black tulip, native to northern Afghanistan. It was an exquisite flower. He had picked it himself just seconds before and was admiring it when a sniper’s bullet found his heart and ended his life. For some reason, the story goes, one of his comrades threaded the tulip into the buttonhole of the fallen soldier’s tunic, and he went home with it stuck on his chest.

  Sometime later in the war, the large transports flying dead soldiers home for burial took the name of the Black Tulip, and the rare flower of Afghanistan became established in the Soviet Union as a symbol of death.

  ONE

  ONE

  CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, May 28, 1985

  Alexander Fannin pushed through the yellow door marked 7D70— DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE, in neat block letters. The bright color always struck him as quaintly festive, out of place with the more subtly shaded universe that lay behind it, but he doubted Bill Casey even thought of it at all.

  Alexander smiled at his self-indulgent distraction. He had come to turn in his badge to Casey, shake the old man’s hand, and end his decade-long employment with the agency.

  He nodded to the DCI’s protective-security detail behind a glass-walled cubicle, two blank-faced, close-cropped young men in identical discount-house blazers, who exchanged stern, knowing glances. Their eyes never left the tall, dark-haired man casually dressed in a buff sport jacket, charcoal slacks, and blue turtleneck as he crossed to the open door of Casey’s office where his executive assistant, Dottie Manson, stood waiting.

  “Hi, Alexander,” she said, ushering him into the large, birch-paneled suite perched seven floors above the Virginia countryside. The lush foliage of late spring already shielded the Potomac River from view as it wound its way past the CIA’s Langley headquarters. “You’re looking relaxed for a man about to quit in a huff.”

  “Is that what he thinks?” Alexander asked, glancing around the empty office.

  “He’s in there.” Dottie pointed to the director’s conference room. “And that’s what I think, not what he thinks. He said you’re to wait here until he’s finished. He said you should read a book or something.”

  Casey’s office was comfortable, tastefully appointed, but rumpled like the man who occupied it. Alexander eyed the stack of new books on the corner of the desk—they ranged from American history to economics to oil politics—and knew that at the end of the week Dottie would send them with Casey when he flew up to Long Island for the weekend. On Monday he would probably recommend at least one with great animation. Casey was always telling people what books to read, even how to read them.

  Alexander took a seat on the overstuffed sofa and closed his eyes. He had no regrets. It was time to go.

  Alexander had been a natural for the CIA’s clandestine operations directorate. Born to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, both wartime refugees from Stalin’s U.S.S.R., he spoke each language without accent, along with near-native Polish and good German. He was recruited by the agency after a stint in the army flying helicopters in Vietnam, part of the time for CIA paramilitary operations. His first few years in the agency had been nonstop excitement, and even when a confused aimlessness set in and the agency’s mission blurred at the end of the turbulent seventies, he felt certain about who he was and the value of what he was doing.

  As soon as Casey was sworn in as DCI in 1981, Alexander felt renewed energy at Langley. From the start, he got on well with the flamboyant New York lawyer who brought the political clout of a close association with the new president.

  By the end of Casey’s fourth year, he and Alexander had developed an easy friendship. They charted the widening fissures in the Evil Empire from Warsaw to Moscow, and both agreed the time had come for more “creative efforts,” as the old man called them. They began making intricate, ambitious plans for what Casey called the endgame. Then Alexander’s troubles intervened.

  It started as a purely personal matter. While traveling in Asia a year earlier he happened to meet Katerina Martynova, a stunning Ukrainian woman, and fall in love.

  Katerina’s parents, refugees from wartime Ukraine, had met in the tight-knit Russian expatriate community in China during the turmoil of 1945. Lara Chumakova and Michael Martynov married in Shanghai and settled down to build their lives. But war and revolution forced them to flee with their infant daughter just ahead of Mao’s armies in the last days of 1949. They resettled again, this time among a growing population of Russians and Europeans who had fled China’s chaos for the safety of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

  Katerina’s father scraped together his Shanghai savings, borrowed a little money, and taking what seemed to some a foolhardy risk, imported a small stable of racehorses from Australia. Catching the wave of a post-war gambling boom, his modest initial investment at the high-rolling Happy Valley Race Course grew into one of the dozen largest trading houses in Hong Kong, Martynov Trading Corporation, later anglicized to Martin House. Katerina was schooled in Switzerland and France, and by the time she met Alexander, she was a rising star in East Asian political journalism. A year later when they decided to marry, the fallout was immediate.

  Alexander’s formal notification of his intent to marry a foreign national tripped the CIA’s computers, and cryptic references to Katerina and her family’s suspected ties to underground Ukrainian opposition networks inside the U.S.S.R. scrolled out. Alexander knew about the contacts with the Ukrainian opposition but saw no incompatibility with his work for the agency. He had made his own discreet query of the database
s and thought the raw data on Katerina and her family noncontroversial; he dismissed it as the usual émigré gossip. It was manageable, he thought.

  But the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, Graham Middleton, seized on the tantalizing tidbits, seeing an opportunity to knock an adversary out of play. Middleton viewed Alexander’s quick rise as an obstacle to his own career, but most of all, Alexander’s unconventional origins offended his squeamish Ivy League sensibilities. He resented him even more after Casey arrived at Langley. Alexander, in turn, saw Middleton as a plodder, an agency “royalist” who hesitated to exploit the nascent weaknesses in the U.S.S.R.

  Now Middleton had exposed the one flaw that no one at the CIA, not even the DCI, could overlook, “a personal counterintelligence question.”

  Katerina had asked Alexander not to divulge to the CIA that her mother had a twin sister still living in Kiev and that the two women had for the last fifteen years carried on an elaborate secret correspondence. Their communication was disguised in the style of an ancient Russian fairy tale, “The Tale of the Maidens of Kiev,” and through this veiled exchange, the twins filled in the gaps in their lives since their separation in wartime Ukraine four decades before. As the fairy tale unfolded over the years, Katerina’s mother deduced that her sister’s son was an officer in the KGB, though she also believed that he despised the Soviet regime.

  Alexander knew that if he reported this information to the CIA, the agency would not hesitate to exploit it, and in the process put Katerina’s family at risk. He detailed his misgivings to Casey, acknowledging that he was prepared to resign quietly if the DCI thought it best. Casey instructed him to use the phrase “possibly/details lacking” to answer the portion of the CIA questionnaire covering family members of the prospective spouse who might reside in a Soviet-bloc country. And then he should sit tight and see what happened.

  What happened was a maelstrom in the counterintelligence staff. Middleton interpreted the statement as an outright obfuscation. He planted suggestions that Katerina Martynova was tethered to a KGB leash and was being run against Alexander. Counterintelligence specialists analyzed every sentence she had written in the Far Eastern Focus, drawing the ponderous conclusion that she had “sometimes been critical of U.S. foreign policy,” and that her criticisms of U.S. policy played to known KGB themes.

  As the scent of scandal in Casey’s inner circle spread, conspiracy theories multiplied. Middleton fed the speculation, shrewdly shifting the focus from Katerina to Alexander, weaving his origins into a pattern of deceit and betrayal. The fact that he was born to Russian-Ukrainian parents in a displaced persons camp in postwar Germany had been a strength Alexander brought to the CIA. But now increasingly convoluted scenarios were fed into the CIA’s notorious rumor mill, each new version more baroque than the last, and all bringing into question Alexander’s loyalties and raising the possibility that he had been under KGB control from the day he joined the agency. In an organization where truth was always fiercely guarded, rumor and fantasy made the rounds unshackled. Explanations of a recent string of “counterintelligence anomalies,” as they were solemnly called in the trade, were recast to coincide with Alexander’s association with Katerina. By then Alexander had had enough.

  On the advice of Lee Tanner, chief of the Soviet Division and a sensible, unflappable political hand, Alexander volunteered for a polygraph. After a grueling three-hour session he was given an unambiguous clean-pass by the Office of Security—“no deception indicated.” Undeterred, Middleton put out the line that the results might be “just a little too good.” Soon, competing theories on what was behind the results swirled through the corridors—self-hypnosis, drugs, special KGB training.

  Alexander saw it was too late to walk the story back; he told Casey he was resigning. Casey told him he wasn’t, and in a compromise Alexander had agreed to take a couple of weeks off. That was ten days ago.

  Bill Casey was already talking when he entered the office. “Thought I’d let you have two whole weeks off, did you?” he said, settling awkwardly into a chair.

  Alexander studied the white-haired old man, his blue chalk stripe, shoul-ders dusted with dandruff, the soup-stained regimental tie askew around a collar one size too large. The effect was a careless, gawky appearance that Alexander thought part of Casey’s charm. That and his gruff, unyielding loyalty.

  “I thought you’d decided to fire me before the two weeks were up. And if you don’t, I’ll quit. Which way do you want it?”

  Casey didn’t return Alexander’s smile. “I’m not going to fire you, and you’re not going to quit. Not until you get back from Moscow.”

  “Moscow?”

  “Tanner wants you to call out Tokarev. He’s missed his last three scheduled meetings, and Moscow Station is locked up too tight to try an emergency contact. Can’t make a move without dragging around thirty KGB guys. You’ve got to go in and find him. Tanner tells me he’ll come out for you, but only for you.”

  “Why didn’t Tanner ask me himself?”

  “Because he knew I would make the decision. That’s what I do around here.”

  “Okay, Bill. But why go in? Tokarev’s always been jittery; he’s a flaky guy. It’s what made him come to us in the first place. We’ve let him put himself on ice before. Why take a huge risk now, before we know if there’s really a problem?”

  “You’ve been cut out of this operation since . . .”

  ‘Since my loyalties were called into question by your counterintelligence chief,” Alexander snapped.

  “All right. What you don’t know is that Tokarev was scheduled to make a delivery a month ago—the mother lode on the radar and weapons systems for their next generation of interceptors. It’s the last batch for the project, the culmination of years of work.”

  Alexander weighed the old man’s request carefully, but his anger was clear. “Bill, this isn’t some half-baked test to prove my loyalty, is it? You know, send Fannin in to ferret out Tokarev. If it works, Fannin’s clean; if it fails, and Tokarev’s rolled up, then we’ll know Fannin’s dirty. I might expect something like that from Middleton. You’re not pulling some crap like that on me, are you?”

  “You know I’m not. We need this stuff from Tokarev. Christ, this guy’s literally been our secret hand designing the avionics of every fighter the Soviet Union will be flying into the next century. Nobody’s going to play around with this operation.”

  There was another long pause. “I’ll do it because it needs to be done. And because you’ve asked me to do it. But it changes nothing. I’m still finished here.”

  “Alexander, I want you to know that I understand what you’re going through. When everything else has been stripped away, all we really have is our honor and our loyalties. I know what Middleton’s doing to you, but that’s his job, ferreting out the moles. It’s a brutal job, but it’s got to be done. You know that.”

  “That’s bullshit, Bill! Middleton’s settling a score and you know it.”

  “Yes, I do. But I also believe the KGB’s gotten to us somewhere. That’s why I can’t, don’t even want, to rein him in.”

  “I’m not arguing that. It’s clear either somebody in here is working for the other side, or the other side is reading our communications. All I’m saying is that I’m not the problem and that Middleton’s crossed over the line in the way he’s come after me.”

  “Go to Moscow and find Tokarev. Then come back here and we can talk this over. And remember what I always say.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It only hurts for a day.” Casey rolled his eyes and shook his head, giving Alexander a rare glimpse of the pain he had been enduring under constant attacks from the media and Congress.

  “I’ll go to Moscow, Bill. But when I get back there won’t be any need to talk this through again. I think you know that.” Alexander rose. “I’ll go see Tanner now.”

  Casey smiled. “Don’t bother. He’ll meet you in Berlin. He’s already on his way with your Polish docum
ents and stuff, and he’ll take you through Checkpoint Charlie for your drop-off in East Berlin. Then you’re on your own, as usual.”

  “You never have doubts, do you, Bill?”

  “You can’t have doubts about the important things. You leave tonight. And, Alexander.” The old man smiled broadly. “Don’t get caught. Middleton tells me there’s not enough good trading material in the whole free world to get you back if they get you.”

  Moscow, 2336 Hours, May 31, 1985

  Adolf Tokarev felt his heart stop when the harsh ring of the telephone shattered the quiet of his drab Moscow apartment. He had turned off his television set over an hour before, just as the evening news finished, and was sitting in the darkness trying to deal with his fear. He had been on the roller coaster for almost ten years. There had been highs and lows ever since he decided to betray the Soviet state, but mostly highs from the delicious, exaggerated sense of well-being and power his ability to damage the system generated in him. He was immune, he’d told himself. Now, he was frozen in terror. He was even more terrified than the time two years ago when word began to filter out that the Committee was hunting down a CIA spy in one of the aviation-design bureaus.

  That night he had removed the cyanide pill from its embedded concealment in the thick frames of his glasses. It had been implanted there by CIA technicians, and he had been instructed that if he bit down hard on the pill, death would be almost instantaneous. He became so certain of his compromise that he had gone to a hastily called meeting with the pill tucked in his cheek, convinced he was walking into a KGB ambush. Later, when he told his CIA contact, Janos, the man lost his temper. Get rid of the pill! he demanded. He hated them; there were better ways to deal with your own compromise. Besides, Janos cheerily told him, the Committee would take care of him just as fast—with a bullet in the head.

  Now as he sat in his apartment listening to the telephone scream, he wished he had the pill back. After the fifth ring, he answered.