My Dinners with Andrey: A True Story of the Cold War

A True Story of the Cold War

First I noticed his glossy nails; then his clean, small hands; then the bright-white calling card with the elegant black script that read, Andrey N. Suvorov, Third Secretary of the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Washington, D.C.

"Let me introduce myself," he said. I turned to see the amused blue eyes of a sturdy man of 30 or 35, well turned out in a soft-gray wool suit, a blond forelock boyishly draping his wide, pale brow, his cheekbones high, his cheeks rosy.

I looked at his card again. "I'm honored," I said.

He waved his hand and smiled. "Third secretary is nothing," he said. "It is a very junior diplomatic post. I am glorified errand boy. This is just to tell you"—and here he suggested, with a slight stiffening, an understated bow—"who I am."

That was almost six years ago, early in 1978. I had been staring out of a second-story window across a little Capitol Hill park as Valentine's Day dusk settled and the afternoon's drizzle hardened into a cold, fine rain. I was wondering unhappily how to get back to DuPont Circle dry without spending money I didn't have for a cab, hating myself for having decided on impulse to come to this affair. It was a wine-and-cheese reception at a small office with a big name, the National Center for Security Studies, a liberal think tank housed in what had once been a bit of a mansion with curving stairs, white woodwork and blue carpets. But the rooms on the upper floor were tiny and stuffed with files and desks, overheated now by the crowd of youngish Washingtonians of the near left nibbling brie and sipping Chablis and trading bits of political gossip, I among them nibbling, sipping and gossiping and basically doing what I was always doing those days, trying to find support for the organization I helped run, the Assassination Information Bureau. The A.I.B. had been formed in 1973 by a small group of Cambridge writers pushing to reopen the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., murder cases. We moved the A.I.B. to Washington in 1977 after the House set up the Select Committee on Assassinations. We were a duly certified tax-exempt public-education group, in town as watchdog to the new committee.

There are always lots of little outfits like the A.I.B. in Washington. The pauperized codirectors (such was my title) of the more or less left-wing ones always show up at liberal occasions such as this reception, and the sound of us all crowded together could be depressing. The stomach says to stay home. But then you think, No, this schooling at brie is part of your chosen job; you may get to make a point or a contact or a deal. So, suddenly, you go after all, and you forget your umbrella. The payoff comes when a young staff aide, commenting on the importance of your work, says, "We think you'd do better with UFOs."

I had gone off to stare in a sulk out the window at the rain, and that was when the tiny glint of a man's well-manicured thumbnail gave me my first inkling of the third secretary.

"You are a journalist, if I may ask?" he said. That was close enough. I let it stand. "While I am in your country, as a kind of hobby, you see, something I do on my own time, I want to study political groups outside the Government. You see? Not Democrats or Republicans. Would you please to be so good some time during next weeks to let me take you to dinner, so that we can discuss about this?"

If you were a child of Cointelpro and Watergate, you could not fail to assume that this man was being watched. You would also be watched if you had dinner with this man. Did the A.I.B. need an entry in its FBI file linking one of its codirectors to a Soviet diplomat? Would my having dinner with Andrey Suvorov help me or the A.I.B. do what we were trying to do? Was my interest in this person motivated by anything higher than common curiosity?

The answer was no on all counts. But my answer to his invitation was "Sure. That would be interesting. Do you want to set a date?"

He said he would prefer to check his schedule. He asked for my phone number and wrote it down with a silver ballpoint in a black-leather notebook. He took a short step back, again with the merest hint of a bow, a slight stiffening of the upper body. He said he was sorry he must leave so soon but that previous obligations summoned him. "Please, you should not try to call me at the Soviet embassy," he said, pulling on his trench coat. His eyes were hooded and droll. "The girls, you know, at the switchboard—they don't speak so good English. They probably would not recognize my name."

I could see him through the window as he walked to the curb. A car came along and picked him up, right away. A few seconds later, another car slid up the street behind it with its lights out in the rainy dusk. I felt a flutter of sanity: What's going on here? What does a third secretary want from me? What do I want from a third secretary? Who else is playing?

I was out of town when Suvorov phoned. "Your Russian friend called," said my officemate Jeff Goldberg. He was curious. Uneasily, I put him off.

Suvorov and I connected two weeks later, his high voice unmistakable over a scratchy connection: "Where do you suggest we meet?"

Mr. Eagen's is a small, dark pub below DuPont Circle. I thought of it because it was nearby and because I'd had a drink there the day before with a former Army Intelligence officer with whom I'd been discussing a book project. Going there the next day with Suvorov appealed to my taste for vulgar irony.

I was there well ahead of time, three P.M., waiting in a dark booth toward the back with a clear view of the front door, sipping a Jameson's. Andrey strode in ten minutes late and said right away that we should go up the avenue to a place he knew we would like better.

We went out into a dark, windy afternoon shot with sudden brightenings. A gust blew Suvorov's blond hair across his face and made him squint. "Have you read newspapers this morning?" he said.

The big story that day was news from the Soviet Union of a sudden across-the-board doubling of consumer prices. "This means very little," he said. "We sometimes really do experience failure, and then we do not deny it. But this is technical adjustment. Your papers exaggerate our problems all the time, you see?"

I did not see, though I was sure he could make a case; but there's a moment in a relationship with someone of another faith—of another faith fervently held—when you say "Give me a break" or else you say nothing. If you want to understand that other faith, you suffer its truisms. So I nodded yes to Andrey, made a sympathetic face and assured him that I, a veteran of the Sixties' New Left, knew what it was like to be trashed by the Western press.

He led us up Connecticut Avenue to a cozy Italian restaurant called Anna Maria's, where I enjoyed, courtesy of the Bolshevik Revolution, an early dinner with wine as I mainly listened to Suvorov tell me more about himself. He had been born in Moscow at the end of World War Two and still lived there. He had been trained as an economist. He had been in the army. He had studied at the prestigious Foreign Service Institute. He had been at the Washington embassy since late 1977, after a period in Moscow. His wife, Marie, was with him in Washington. They had no children. They were homesick for Moscow. The U.S.A. was hard duty. "You are constantly subjected to harassment. Everyone is suspicious of you. Everyone is hostile."

I was taking all this in with what I meant to be a friendly face, happy to eat and listen; then he took me off guard.

"What you are doing is dangerous," he said abruptly, though with no change in vocal expression.

"You mean meeting with you?" I said.

"About Kennedy," he said. "What if there really was a conspiracy? What if you are getting too close to it?"

"Many people are getting close to it together. There's no special danger to me."

He hesitated. "How can you succeed without a new source of information?"

I hesitated. "Do you know of a new source?"

"Oh, no," he chuckled. "I am not expert about this."

"But someone in your country is. Isn't it time for the Soviet government to tell what it really knows about Oswald?"

"What do you mean?"

"Your K.G.B. still insists that it never interrogated Oswald."

"But this is true," said Andrey with a puzzled smile, "is it not?"

"Maybe so, but it doesn't ring true. You know what I mean?" He still seemed puzzled. I said, "People in the United States tend to think that the K.G.B., which is known for its great skill, would not let an interesting person such as Oswald slip by (continued on page 128) Dinners with Andrey (continued from page 104) without so much as an interview."

"I am not expert," he smiled with soft eyes and spread hands. "But I know that Oswald was not a Soviet agent. My country did not want to kill your President."

I believed that, too, but that didn't mean they'd told the truth about Oswald. Most probably, the K.G.B. had milked him dry about the U-2, forgot about him and then, after November 22, 1963, could not bring itself to admit having had a relationship with him.

"Of course, you may be correct in your suspicions," said Suvorov. "Because, I mean, I am only third secretary, you see." He smiled. "What do I know? But I think this man Nosenko told your Government everything about this. Not true?"

Yuri Nosenko is one of the most enigmatic of the secondary figures in the Kennedy case, a K.G.B. colonel who defected in place to the United States in 1962 and came over bodily early in 1964. Nosenko claimed to have worked in the K.G.B. department responsible for the file on Lee Harvey Oswald. He said he was in a position to know that Oswald had not been questioned by the K.G.B., not recruited by it, not dispatched by it and, above all, not commanded by it to kill J.F.K.

Some people in the CIA doubted that Nosenko's story could be true. Those skeptics believed that he was, in fact, a dispatched agent of the very K.G.B. he was pretending to have betrayed and that his mission was to mislead us as to the nature of the Soviet relationship with Oswald.

Chief among those skeptics was James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton believed that an important Soviet stratagem for penetrating the CIA was the bogus defector. Defectors in those years were customarily met here with credulous gratitude. Angleton, in fact, was deeply committed to a K.G.B. defector of his own, one Anatoli M. Golitsin, code named Stone. Still, Angleton was now concerned that among subsequent defectors there might be a fake, a double agent, a mole. He believed that Nosenko was such a mole. And Angleton had Nosenko in his power.

For almost three years, Angleton subjected Nosenko to an interrogation that descended to naked psychological torture. Many discrepancies in Nosenko's story were established by this means, but Nosenko did not change his main story about Oswald.

Then, in mid-1966, Richard Helms became director of the CIA. One of his first acts was to order an intensive review of the Nosenko case; it was potentially explosive and it needed to be defused. The ultimate result of that review was that in 1968 the CIA reversed itself, accepted Nosenko as a bona fide defector, gave him back pay for the trouble Angleton's interrogators had put him through and hired him as an instructor in Soviet counterintelligence methods.

Nosenko's vindication was due also to the support received from no less than J. Edgar Hoover, who had believed him all the time. That was because Hoover also had a trusted K.G.B. defector, a man named (as came out much later) Victor Lessiovski (code named Fedora), who assured him that Nosenko was an honest traitor. So the question of Nosenko's bona fides came down to a dispute between Angleton's K.G.B. defector and Hoover's: two K.G.B. officers debating each other over the authenticity of a third's act of treason, all three of them self-declared enemies of their country.

The Nosenko story was developing an amazing sequel even as Suvorov and I discussed it. But only much later, four years after my episode with Andrey was over, could I realize that he and I had brushed the fringes of a serious struggle under way on many fronts—within the FBI, within the CIA, between the FBI and the CIA and between U.S. intelligence and Soviet intelligence—over the bona fides, or the quality of the treachery, of9:45 AM those three Red rovers crossed over. At issue was the integrity of the U.S. intelligence system. Are there moles in our secret gardens?

Suvorov picked up the check while suggesting that I think of writing something on J.F.K. for publication in a Soviet magazine. "Publication could be anonymous, naturally," he said. I nodded and agreed that it was an engaging thought. He asked if he could call me soon. I said I wouldn't mind. I had enjoyed preaching to him about Oswald. He hadn't been terribly defensive. I had to give him points for that. Why not do it again? Maybe I would even keep a few notes.

•

Wednesday, March 22. I answered the A.I.B. phone. The connection was crackly, but I could make out Suvorov's voice saying, "Hello? Is this Carl?"

"Yes, is this——"

He cut me off: "Hello, Carl, this is Andrew."

I listened to the static for a moment. Then I said, "Yes, Andrew."

He spoke deliberately. "Can you meet me for dinner tonight? At seven o'clock? By the fountain in DuPont Circle?"

"See you there," I said.

He was ten minutes late but in a jovial mood, laughing about calling himself Andrew. "This was just in case someone is listening into your telephone," he said. "They would not know who I was. You caught on quickly."

I beamed but sensed that he had checked off an item on a list of moves.

He led us to a place called Agostino's. It had plastic ivy and orange light but quiet tables and huge, philosophical drinks.

Andrey took a gulp of margarita and loosened his tie. The imitation candlelight ruddied his cheeks.

"Are you married?" he said.

"Not now," I answered.

"Marriage is sometimes difficult, you know," he said with a wry chuckle. His wife was having problems with D.C. life. "After all," he said, "I have my work. My work is often more than I can do without working many hours all the time. But, you know, you have to worry about how your wife feels, too. Marie wants to go home."

He waved off my sympathy with a sad smile and changed the subject. "You have never been to Soviet Union?" he said.

"It's my loss, I'm sure."

"Ah, you should come," he said. "A whole new world would open up to you." He smiled. "You have not seen the world if you have not seen Russia."

"It's tragic," I said, feeling pompous, "that modern people are so cut off from one another."

"Soviet Union is very large country. Very many different kinds of people."

"So one hears," I said, thinking he wouldn't hear the sarcastic edge. But he caught it and shot me a questioning look. I tried to make amends (I didn't want to offend him) by being more direct.

"Could I go to your country," I said, "and visit rebellious groups? Could I meet freely with Soviet dissidents?"

"But you are being unfair to a great nation," he said, "to see us all by these few troubled people. You hear only one side."

"No offense," I said, "but to dismiss criticism of the Soviet state as the problem of a 'few troubled people.' " I paused.

"Yes?" he said.

"You really should be proud of the dissidents, you know."

He gave me an amused tilt of the head. "They are all troublemakers," he said.

"Don't you think there are times when it's right to make trouble?"

He said, "You see the dissidents as martyrs to liberty because you don't know the facts." He said that pleasantly. "You don't know that these people are really antisocial thugs. And hooligans. Some of them are mad."

"Do you personally think that anyone who criticizes the Soviet government has to be crazy?"

"Of course not. You cannot think such a thing, really. There is much to criticize, much to improve. We drink too much vodka. Our workers are too slow. The black (continued on page 200) Dinners with Andrey (continued from page 128) market is too big. Too many petty officials have been corrupted."

"And as for political liberties?"

He leaned toward me with his elbows on the table and his glass in both hands, held below his chin. "You don't ask for things to be the way they are," he said. "One must live a life of service. Must! There is no other way. I want to be a good person. I must serve my country."

I sighed and sagged my shoulders just a bit and held his eye for two blinks and then looked away and said, "Well, there's truth on both sides, Andrew. I know what you mean. I feel much the same way."

And with that we got back to center, to our right faces and correct attitudes, and were soon buzzing smoothly on about Nosenko, moles, triple agents and other arcana of the spy trade, which appeared to fascinate him no less than me.

•

Friday, March 31. Nine days after my second dinner with Andrey. A cocktail party in the Rayburn Building to kick off a new organizing campaign for nuclear disarmament. I was looking for Gary Thomas, a journalist and former U.S. Army Intelligence officer with whom I had almost launched a book project.

I found him with the other journalists at the free bar and drew him aside with a fresh double vodka. Thomas was a large, shambling man of 30 with bushy hair and mustache.

"I need a favor," I said.

"How come?"

"There's a Russian diplomat named Andrey Suvorov, a third secretary. I think he's trying to romance me."

"Do tell."

"He's taken me to dinner twice and he's asked me to write something for a Soviet magazine."

"Suvorov."

"Andrey. A young guy."

"What do you make of him?"

"I assume he's not a free spirit. He seems to want to make friends. That might interest your old friends in the Justice Department, but if I approached them cold, they'd be suspicious. Can you help?"

"Would you talk to them?"

"Isn't it the right thing to do?"

He gave me a bit of a look, but I didn't feel I had to answer for his surprise. I let my question stand. "Sure," he finally said. "Let me get back to you."

A week later, over mugs of dark beer at Columbia Station Bar and Grill, Thomas told me that, in fact, his friends had a keen appetite for information on the third secretary. "They think he may be important," he said.

"So what happens next?" I said.

"Sit on it. They have to open up a case. That takes a few days. Someone from Justice will be in touch with you."

The first to get in touch, though, was Suvorov, who called the A.I.B. office in mid-April and got Jeff. When I got in, Jeff said, "The diplomat called. He said he'd call back. He called himself Andrew."

"He likes to do that."

"What's up with him?"

"I don't know, but I've been meaning to tell you that I'm going to talk to the FBI about him."

Jeff's dark brows came together. "Why would you do that?"

"It's obscure, but it feels right."

"How right?"

"Fifty-one percent."

"That much?"

"Easily."

"What about your reputation?"

"What reputation?"

"On the left."

"What left?"

"Come on."

"I think that being on the left in America shouldn't mean that you're indifferent to the Stalinism of the Soviet Union."

Jeff said, "I believe it's a serious mistake for you to get in over your head between two Cold War professionals who are basically trying to destroy each other." I had known beforehand that he wouldn't like it, but still I had to tell him about it. He was too sharp not to see that I was up to something. Besides, I needed someone to know what I was doing. Jeff might think I was nuts, butI knew he was totally on my side.

Andrey had not called back a few days later when a young woman with what Jeff called "a very sweet voice" called for me. She talked briefly with him about when I'd be back but wouldn't leave her name. She just said she would call again.

It wasn't until mid-May that we made a hookup. I was alone in the office early in the morning when her call came. From her hello, I knew it was the same woman Jeff had talked with. "Jeannie Sawyer," she said her name was, "from the Justice Department. I'm so happy that I've finally reached you." I immediately felt the surge of a new interest in this escapade. But then she said, "Would you please hold the line for Mr. Stassinos?"

"Oh," I said. "Sure."

A click and then, "Hello, this is Jim Stassinos speaking." His not a sweet voice but a gruff, chesty one that made you wish you'd worn a necktie. He would calm down later, but now he was as nervous as I was. "I understand," he said, "that we have a friend in common."

"I'm your guy," I said.

"Do you think we could meet?"

"Sure, but I haven't heard from this friend since the middle of March. He may have lost interest."

"I'd still like to discuss him with you."

I found him waiting for me at lunchtime the next day at Mr. Eagen's, with a pack of filter cigarettes and a cup of black coffee before him on the booth table. He was a short, dark, solidly built man with black, curly hair flecked with gray, curly gray sideburns, an olive complexion, round, liquid brown eyes and a skeptical, one-sided smile. He wore a blue blazer and gray checkered slacks with flared cuffs. Stassinos was a little younger than I was, a little older than Suvorov. His hands were small and thick, with stubby, hairy fingers. He smelled of after-shave, but his cheeks were dark with eager new growth.

"Jim Stassinos, FBI," he said, standing and offering his hand. "It's good of you to meet with us," he said, though he was alone. His voice now much lowered and a little raspy. A bit of the thug in the forward slouch of his heavy shoulders. But his brown eyes twinkled and looked straight at me, so it felt good to sit down with him.

"The pleasure is mine," I said.

He gave me a chance to order coffee but kept his eyes on me, friendly but direct. "I move we skip the ceremonies and go right to the point," he said.

I agreed. He pulled an envelope from his inside pocket. "Let's make sure we're talking about the same character," he said. He took out a black-and-white photo and turned it my way on the table.

The photo had been taken from an elevation of two or three stories across the diagonal of a downtown Washington intersection. It showed Suvorov striding off the curb at a crosswalk and turning toward the camera to check the traffic behind him. He was caught in a shaft of sunlight and his features were distinct. His face wore a sober, concentrated frown. "It's him," I said.

"And what is the nature of your contact?"

"He introduced himself last February at a public function on the Hill. He called later to ask me to dinner. He's taken me to dinner twice and seems to want something ongoing. But I haven't seen him for almost two months."

"He paid?"

"For dinner? Damn straight."

"Could I ask you how he paid?"

"Like, plastic or cash? Fresh twenties."

Stassinos had his hand-size spiral notebook out and with a black drugstore ballpoint zipped off two quick lines.

"OK," he said, clicking his pen, looking up, "we are definitely interested in talking with you about this person. We've been looking at him since he came on duty last year. It's been hard to get anything substantial, but check this out." From the same envelope, he now took a photocopy of a Washington Post story from the previous summer. The lead was: "On July 13 [1977], a Soviet operative concealing his identity showed up at the Library of Congress in quest of an unpublished comparison of U.S.–Soviet military strength—an example of the bold intelligence game played by the Russians." Three paragraphs down, the story identified the bold intelligencer: "Andrey Suvorov, third secretary of the Soviet embassy, appeared unannounced at 12:35 P.M. on July 13 on deck A of the Library of Congress, site of the foreign-affairs and national-defense section. Suvorov, suspected of K.G.B. connections, did not identify himself but asked for the U.S.–Soviet defense study prepared by [Congressional Research Service] analyst John Collins for the Senate Armed Services Committee. That report, detailing relative U.S. weakness, had been suppressed by the Senate committee's staff."

Stassinos offered an amended account. "The guy wanders right into the classified stacks," he said, a flash of gleeful admiration in his eyes. "Somebody comes across him and says, 'Who the hell are you?' He says, 'Hi. My name is Andy. I'm the librarian. Can I help you?' Ha! With this accent straight from Mother Volga!"

Third Secretary Suvorov had attracted the FBI's attention before then, primarily because of his lifestyle. Said Stassinos, "Most of the lower-level staff at the Soviet embassy, like Andy, they have to live very meager social lives. They don't make a lot of money and they have to send a lot of what they do make back home. Andy, on the other hand, moves around an awful lot for a third secretary. And has he talked about his wife?"

"Her name is Marie and he says she hates living here."

Stassinos chuckled. "I guess that's why she has to run amuck at Bloomie's twice a week," he said. "This is Marie."

Another photo, full length, of an attractive brunette in her late 20s wearing a dark, chic hostess gown and strappy shoes in a well-furnished interior that Stassinos would not confirm was within the Soviet embassy. "Andy and Marie," he said, "appear to be members of the White Russian elite within the Communist Party. He's the son of wellborn, well-to-do Muscovites, both of whom were public figures. His mother was a ballerina, and today she runs a dance school in Moscow. His father was a diplomat or a government official of some kind who was able to send Andy to the best schools. The signs are that he's an important person, not just a lowly third secretary. But is he a legitimate diplomat or a secret agent? We don't know."

"Now, when you say 'we,' of course," I said, "you mean——" I stopped, waiting for him to finish the sentence.

"You'd like to know who the hell I am, right?" he said with a little laugh. "Fair enough. I am a special agent of the FBI in the field of counterintelligence. I work out of the Washington station office at Buzzard's Point, and this is my I.D. The purpose of our C.I. work is to keep foreign secret agents from operating in the U.S. My group's special job is to watch the staff of the Soviet embassy. There are more than 700 people in the Soviet compound here, and 47 are diplomats. About 100 have diplomatic immunity. We believe that as many as a third of them may be illegal secret agents, people whose real base of operation is the K.G.B. and whose purpose is to carry out K.G.B.-directed espionage missions. We have to figure out which of them are the most probable spies and then try to figure out what they're doing and keep them from doing it in peace."

"You think Andy is one of those spies?"

"We don't like to reach unfounded conclusions as to such things," he said, sounding professional. "You tend to think, Why take a chance; if the cocksucker's at all funny-looking, assume he's K.G.B. and put him under a lamp. But you soon realize that you don't have those kinds of capabilities or all the legal space you'd like. So you try harder to make sure about the funny ones, like Andy. It would mean just as much to us to find out that he's a bona fide diplomat as to prove that he's really a spy. The expensive thing is not knowing.

"So, back to your question," he said—quickly making sure again that we were still alone in the back of the pub. "What we're getting from sources is that the K.G.B. is now operating a very large-scale penetration mission in this country, working mainly through the UN in New York and the Soviet embassy in Washington. So the bottom line is that we don't know a fucking thing for a fact, but the guy fits the picture. Does that bother you?"

"Why should it bother me?" I said with genuine innocence.

"Some people would get bothered dicking around with a dude who might be a James Bond of the K.G.B."

"What's he gonna do bad to me if he is?"

"Most likely, not a thing. The question is, How happy can you be with a 'most likely'? These are grown-up kids."

"Are you encouraging me to be apathetic, officer?" I said.

He grinned and shrugged. "You don't have to get involved at all, you know."

"I thought you guys were in favor of good citizenship."

"Sure," he said with a trace of a smirk.

"So why are you so hot to get me out of this? Don't you want to get a line on him?"

"Yeah," he said, not missing a beat, "but what do you want?

"Suvorov's words came to mind at that moment. It gave me a dark joy to make them mine in this dialog with the special agent. "I want to be a good person," I said. "I want to serve my country."

Stassinos gave me a detached, appraising look, not unfriendly. He said, "You are identical, as I understand, with a man by the same name who was a president of the SDS in the Sixties."

"Yes."

"I thought all you bums hated the FBI."

"That's about right," I said cheerfully. "Why shouldn't we, since the FBI played us so dirty?"

"Hey," he said quietly, turning up his hands.

"You went after King and you went after the movement," I said—calmly, I thought—"not just to keep an eye on us but to destroy us, which is different and worse. And you didn't do that because we were subversive but because an anal-compulsive Napoleon type named J. Edgar Hoover disagreed with our politics."

Stassinos slowly tamped out his cigarette and gave the ashes a long, sober look. He said, "A lot of people are down on Hoover now. In the bureau, too. Personally, I could've lived with him OK. But I think almost everyone realizes now that there were excesses on both sides during that period of time. I was sorry to learn of the bureau's contribution to it. In any event, here you are, talking to me."

"And you're wondering why."

"Maybe you smell a good story," he said with a crooked, questioning smile. "Maybe you're in cahoots with the Russian. Maybe you've figured out some new smartass way to embarrass the FBI."

I liked his manner. "Maybe I've just figured out that it's you assholes or nobody," I said. "I mean, move over, pal; it's my FBI, too."

He grinned. "Bear in mind that it's completely your decision. Any relationship between you and the bureau is purely voluntary and uncompensated on your part. But if you do go on seeing this man and if you are willing to continue talking him over with us, then I can say we'd appreciate it. He'll buy you steak and champagne, and we'll spring for coffee."

"Ideal," I said.

•

Three days later, May 15, a Monday evening, Andrey called to set up a dinner date for the next night. I informed Stassinos by phone the next morning, an excuse for five seconds with Jeannie's voice. Stassinos seemed unsurprised that Andy was continuing the thing.

The next night, at 7:30, I stood waiting for Suvorov outside Kramer's coffeehouse near DuPont Circle. He showed up five minutes late, handsome and trim in a tan blazer and a dark-green wool tie, and took us walking up Connecticut Avenue to Ellen's Irish Pub, a place with a dart-throwing atmosphere, like Mr. Eagen's. Maybe Andy thought I liked working-class situations. I ordered a Jameson's and ale and he ordered a Johnnie Walker Black Label and water.

He had prepared his opening and played it as soon as we were settled in a booth in the nearly empty back room. "There is certain information that I am trying to have," he said, staring at me intently. "I think it is in the Library of Congress. Tell me, do you think a Soviet diplomat such as myself can go to this Library of Congress and do some research?"

I assumed that that was to find out whether or not I had seen the Washington Post story. My correct answer, I thought, was to show not the least flicker of recognition, and I assume I succeeded, because he relaxed and dropped it.

Our drinks arrived, we raised a small toast and in a warm, friendly way he said that he had been thinking a lot about our last conversation. He was afraid, he said, that anti-Soviet propaganda had poisoned my mind. Not all or even many Soviet intellectuals became dissidents, and the Soviet people were not uncivilized, boorish slaves.

"So you must come to Soviet Union," he said, "to see for yourself what the Soviet people are like. It would open your eyes."

"I agree, my friend," I said, "but I have no way to do that."

"Ah!" he said, smiling. "But you see you are wrong about this. You have a friend." He indicated himself with a two-handed gesture and a warm smile. "I have friends in Intourist. There would be no problem with visa at all."

"Andrey, you ask me to be blunt with you. I'm a poor free-lance writer. Jeff and I run the A.I.B. office on a shoestring. My salary is tiny. There's no way——"

"No," he said, breaking in, lowering his voice, a frown of reassurance on his face. "Money is not a problem," he said. Then he smiled and quickly added, "I mean, it is a problem, but it is not a problem. Do you see?"

"You mean a trip could be arranged? I would be a guest?"

"I think, you know, maybe this is possible."

"But the problem that is a problem," I told him, "is that I have commitments to the J.F.K. case. Congressional hearings begin in a few months. I've been with this since 1973 and the case has never been closer to a breakthrough. This is no time for me to leave it."

"But you must realize you have found out all you will ever know. You cannot accomplish more without a new source."

"Tell your government about that. You could release the K.G.B.'s file on Oswald, which you say does not exist. Besides, we have accomplished things without new sources. The committee has already said it sees evidence of a conspiracy of some kind in the murder of King. It will say much the same thing about Kennedy this fall."

Andrey considered that, rubbing his chin, and said, "But sometimes, you understand, a writer should move on to other themes, don't you agree?"

He sure knew how to needle a guy. I had several friends who thought my absorption in the J.F.K. issue had become unhealthily obsessive.

But of all people, I thought, Suvorov ought to understand the objective grounds for that obsession. If a full-out Congressional investigation were about to reverse Warren and assert that Oswald had been part of a conspiracy, then Oswald's murky ties to the Soviet Union were about to become by magnitudes more sinister. Even now, I argued to Andrey, Nosenko was once again being grilled by Congressional staff attorneys convinced that his story was shot through with fatal contradictions. Even if Andrey were only a third secretary, how could he be so uninterested in that drama? "I think you're missing a big bet," I told him. "You should care more than you seem to do about this."

But Andrey was looking away. A lean, tough-looking, middle-aged black man in fresh, faded jeans and a dark-plaid shirt with a jacket slung over his shoulder had staggered drunkenly into the back of the pub, where Andrey and I sat alone except for two oblivious sweethearts across the room. The black guy swayed up to the jukebox, fed it, then swayed back to wait for his quarters to take effect. Disco. This I was dimly aware of as a blur off to my left. The blur should now, by rights, have teetered off back to the bar in the front room. But instead, he took two careening steps sideways and backward and, with arms flailing the air for balance, came wheeling down upon our table. With a final pirouetting surrender to gravity, he plopped down heavily right next to Andrey, leaned himself full into Andrey's shoulder and gave him a long grin of large, white teeth showing crowns of gold.

"Hey, baby, my man," he said to Andrey in a thick street dialect, "what's happening?"

Andrey was in a state of Red alert. He had pulled himself back into the corner of his seat, as far away from our uninvited guest as he could be, trying manfully to smile and go along with the joke but clearly not sure that a joke was what it was.

"Who in the name of hell are you?" he said at last, the only time I ever heard him curse. I thought he did it well, the problem of an outmoded idiom in this case offering a small rhetorical triumph.

"Me?" said the black guy with a sharp smile. "Who am I?"

"What do you want?"

"My name is Jim, Jim. You dig? I wanna cigarette."

"Jim? Your name is Jim?"

"Hey, Jim, how ya been, baby!" He waved one hand in Andrey's face, magicianlike, while with the other he groped at his chest, displacing the handsome green tie. "I wanna cigarette, Jim."

"Jim?" said Andrey, trying to laugh.

He gave me a lost look. I wriggled in my seat and moved my mouth, started several gestures as though I were about to say something that would break the spell, but I couldn't find the handle.

"Hey, Jim," said Jim in a crooning tenor, "you got a smoke for a veteran?"

Jim reached for Andy's pack of cigarettes on the table.

"I have only one left," said Andrey. He rescued his remaining cigarette with a fine, deft, unanswerable snatch. Jim never had a chance for it.

"Hey, baby," sang Jim in a soothing, drawn-out tone into Andrey's ear, "lemme ax you sumpin'."

"Pardon me?" said Andrey, trying to speak with great correctness but giggling little puffs of voiceless, unamused laughter.

"Are you a Slav?" said Jim to Andrey in a cultivated voice.

Andrey did a double take. "A Slav?"

Jim only looked at him. He did not repeat the question or try to improve upon it.

Andrey looked at me desperately, then down at Jim. "Yes," he said finally, deepening his voice, "I am a Slav."

I, too, was startled by the question and the sudden change of manner.

"Why do you ask him that?" I said.

"Why not?" said Jim.

"I mean, what do you especially know about Slavs?"

Jim measured me with a long look, seeming less and less drunk by the second, though he still leaned up against Andrey.

"I know about Slavic peoples," said Jim in a mellow, deep voice. He was older than I had thought, over 50. He turned from me to peer directly at Andrey. "I was a friend of Milovan Djilas. You know the name."

Andrey pretended not to understand. Djilas was a Yugoslav revolutionary hero of World War Two who later broke with Soviet communism and wrote several powerful and influential attacks on Stalin and the Soviet system. I thought it was a cute trick but that it blew the whole thing. Andrey now knew—or had to assume— that Jim was a plant. But then, maybe, that was the point.

"Excuse me," said Andrey with a grim face, his cheeks flushed; and when Jim didn't move quickly enough, he gave him a shove, which I thought was pretty brave.

"Hey, baby," said Jim with a laugh, dropping back into street speech, "don' be blue, I ain't gon' do nothin' bad to you!"

"I'm getting some cigarettes," said Andrey. He did not want physical confrontation. There were several obvious reasons for avoiding that. Yet he was not about to accept being crowded this way. "Please!" he said sharply.

Jim jumped. "Be cool, be cool!" he laughed in a high shuffler's voice, sliding gracefully out of the booth and making way for Andrey, who gave me a nod toward the door. I wondered whether or not I should wave to Jim, but he was already back into his drunk routine, reeling gracefully toward the men's room.

Andrey was nervous, and I could see why. Jim might well be a random guy from the neighborhood. On the other hand, Andrey was under a kind of primal obligation to assume for the sake of argument that Jim was a counterintelligence operative playing a little game with his head. The message of the game was that Andrey must be living within a much tighter surveillance net than he had thought. Or that something was wrong with his spycraft. Or that someone was snitching. Would the thought cross his mind that his problem might be me?

He said as we walked toward DuPont Circle that the evening's episode was a perfect example of the harassment to which he was continually subjected here. He felt depressed and disappointed. His wife was miserable. "She is bored and homesick for Moscow," he said. "And I, too, am homesick. I have too much work to do. I have to follow the U.S. Congress, you know, and I have to follow dissident groups and individuals, and I think it is too much. Marie and I, we do not even know if we should have our first child. So I think it is time to take vacation."

We had reached his car, parked on a cross street. He forced a smile he seemed not to feel. "I will be in touch with you again about middle of September," he said. "I hope you have good fortune with your projects. And after summer, maybe we can meet again to discuss politics?"

I assured him I'd still be there. We shook hands. He got in, waved, started off, then stopped and lowered the window. He said, "It must be dangerous for you to meet with me. Maybe someone will try to do you harm?"

I thanked him for his concern and said I doubted that I was in any danger. He smiled softly, more genuinely than before, perhaps reassured that he had done nothing to endanger me. Did he care about that? Or was I wrong?

"See you in September," I said, and we shook again. Then he drove off.

I walked home under a waxing moon and told Jeff that the whole thing was over. Andrey had been startled by his shadow and had pulled out of the game.

The next afternoon, I told Stassinos approximately the same thing but more hotly. "What was the point of giving Andy a reason to be suspicious of me?"

"You're being paranoid," he said. He was amused by Andy's problems with Jim.

"I thought you told me we were playing with grown-up kids here."

"You can make yourself crazy this way, my friend. This guy Jim was not our man, I promise you that. He was not FBI."

"If Jim wasn't FBI, what was he?" I said.

"Hey, big guy, the world is filled with private maniacs."

"Stass, please," I said with what I took to be a weary sigh, "remember that I'm older and more experienced than you. Stop lecturing me on life. Just tell me what I want to know."

"Yes, and what's that?" he said with a little smirk.

"If Jim was somebody's guy—OK?— and if he was not the FBI's guy—OK?— then whose guy might he have been?"

Stass looked at me and chuckled. "Army? Navy? Air Force? Marines?" I had to laugh. "It's that nutty?"

He smiled pleasantly. "Can you live with it?"

"Since the whole thing's all over, anyway," I snapped, "sure. Since the Army or the Navy or the Air Force or the Marines or the CIA or the DIA or the NSA has already scared the fish away."

Stassinos said, "He'll be back."

"You seem serenely confident."

"Because to him, you're the fish."

•

It was, in fact, July when Andrey called next, two months ahead of schedule. He wanted to meet right away, that night, at a French restaurant called Alouette out in Arlington, Virginia, beyond the wild Potomac. That was new with him. Before, he had always agreed to meet me someplace within easy walking distance of my office at DuPont Circle. And it turned out not to be the only thing that was new.

Right away, he was bitching, but in a cheerful, energetic way. He couldn't make his vacation, after all, though he had left Washington in June, after our last strange session. He was still working too much and Marie was ready to quit. But since he was here, he was here; and one of the good sides of it, he said, was that we could resume our friendship.

After bitching was security. "Do you think," he asked, "that your group or you yourself are under surveillance?" I threw up my hands. He said, "We should be taking more precautions."

By that time, we were settled, drinks in hand, and he could begin his main moves.

First, he said with excitement, the idea of my taking a long trip to the Soviet Union had been officially approved. The ticket would be provided and my expenses taken care of. Definitely. He seemed pleased. I believe I seemed pleased.

Second, how would I like a front-row seat at the Moscow Olympics of 1980? Then, after the Olympics, I could travel for two or three months in the Soviet Union. I could spend the last two weeks of my stay in Moscow as Andrey's guest, vodka and ladies the main agenda items.

Then he asked me what it would cost me to get to the restaurant and back and could he please reimburse me, since it was for his benefit that we had met in Arlington. What was it, a buck or so for the Metro? Maybe six bucks for a cab ride back? "It is my fault," he said casually, reaching for his wallet, "for making you come so far. Let me repay you for these expenses."

I cheerfully declined.

Stassinos said, when we met the next day, that I was silly not to have taken the money. "For once, Andy's right. He made you go a long way out of your way to meet with him where he wanted to meet. He cost you a little pocket change. It would've been reasonable for you to take his dough. That's what he was playing for. That's why he had you go way the hell to meet him—just so it would be so reasonable for you to take his dough. That's exactly what he wanted you to do. Start getting used to taking money from him. It's part of the recruitment process."

Stassinos had met me at the Capital South Metro station. "You've changed your appearance," he said as he came on foot up First Street, noticing that I had had my annual haircut since I'd seen him last. We walked a block to his big green Buick. "Our friend prowls this part of the Hill," he said, "so we'll get out of here."

There was a new man this time, waiting for us in the car. Much older than Stassinos and (so Stassinos said) an expert analyst in the Soviet-embassy section of the FBI's counterintelligence group, Elmer Rawls was a large man with a massive, bald head and a pale, gloomy face etched all over with little lines. He said little as we drove to a restaurant in Foggy Bottom named The Pagoda. He sipped once or twice at a black coffee while I told my story and answered Stassinos' questions—about Andrey's early return, his news about my trip to the Olympics, his eagerness to put money in my hand.

Finally, Rawls cleared his throat. Stassinos and I both turned to him right away, a sign that his antlers were bigger than ours. Rawls's voice was a quiet rumble and there was a schoolmasterish clip to his words. He carefully folded, unfolded and refolded his napkin as he talked.

"We definitely believe Suvorov is an agent of the K.G.B.," he said. "He is young, of course, and relatively inexperienced. But he's pretty good. He's got a little flair. He seems to be gutsy. He's very good at shaking a tail in a car. He's apparently made a mistake in judgment about you, but he is talking routinely with several other people who are not talking to us. Stass could tell you this as well as I. I've come along especially to say that the information you've given us is helpful, and though there's nothing we can do in return, we hope you'll continue in this relationship."

"You mean, go to Russia as a guest of the Revolution?"

"Of course, it's your own decision."

I agreed with him about that and suggested we wait and see what happened.

•

Two and a half months later, I awaited Andrey outside the Rive Gauche in Georgetown for drinks. He was his usual ten minutes late. He came striding up the street in a three-piece pinstripe suit and said we must go to another place. We wound up at a bar called Mitchell's.

He put it up front that he had already had a few drinks. It was his birthday. He was 32. Marie had fixed a little something, so he could stay only a few minutes.

"But"—and here he put his elbows on the table, came in closer, put a serious frown on his face and looked slowly to one side and then to the other—"I am very glad that you see me tonight. I have decided that I am going to write a magazine article for publication in the Soviet Union—in some magazine, I don't know which one—to go through the Kennedy assassination, you see, especially about Yuri Nosenko." He wanted anything I could give him on Nosenko, and he wanted it fast. Could I please meet him tomorrow with the requested documents?

"Well," I said, "but I have a ticket to go to Boston tomorrow."

His jaw dropped a foot and his cheeks had a mottled, stung blush. He looked away for a second, then, collecting himself, back at me. He badly needed the Nosenko documents so that he could begin his article. Could I stay in D.C. long enough to supply him with the papers he needed?

"I leave early in the morning."

He looked at me. "Tomorrow?"

"An matin" I said. "Early."

"Yes," he said. "I understand."

I think he was at that moment a little tired of me. He gave a despairing shrug. Consolingly, I said, "Why do you need the stuff so fast? I'll be back in a week."

"Do you understand, the magazine, they give me a deadline."

"I thought you said you didn't know yet which magazine this was for."

"It is very complicated." He gave a short, mirthless chuckle. "It is very hard to explain."

"Well, look," I said. "Maybe I can get on a later flight." I knew for a fact that I could. And it didn't matter when I got to Boston, anyway. The A.I.B. files had the documents he absolutely had to have in order to get up to speed on Nosenko. The only problem would be to copy them.

Andrey's relief was a thing to behold. But he cut the celebration short with a panicky look at his watch. He gulped his drink and stood up. Would I please meet him tomorrow night at nine at theSaigon Inn, well beyond the Metro lines in Falls Church, Virginia? He was sorry he once again had to ask me to go so far, but it was safer this way, and I would just have to take a cab and let him reimburse me.

"Please?"

"OK."

By that time, we were crossing the street. As we waited between two parked cars, I felt his hand take mine and close my fingers around a small wad of paper. Still looking away from me up the street, he said, "You must allow me. Just to pay your cab fare. It is nothing."

At least that much was the truth. I met briefly with Stassinos the next day so the FBI could copy the documents I had pulled for Suvorov. On the drive to his office, I showed him what Suvorov had given me—four bucks.

"My first trick," I said.

Stassinos laughed and said, "Be glad it's for your country."

At nine sharp that night, for my country, I stepped out of a cab at the Saigon Inn in Falls Church. When the cab had disappeared and the vast, darkened parking lot had been still for a few moments, I heard the click of Andrey's heels, and then there he was, and he took my hand warmly and said how much he appreciated this. He wouldn't forget it.

As soon as we were seated in the dark, almost empty restaurant, he said, "So? Were you able to find documents for me?"

"Have I got some red-hot docs for you, my friend!" I said and reached into my tote bag for the neatly taped-up manila envelope I'd brought for him. "No, no!" he whispered sharply, restraining my hand and giving the room a quick check. "Not here! Later!"

He held himself stiffly a moment; then, satisfied that no one had caught my blunder, he relaxed and smiled one-sidedly. He said with hooded eyes, "There are simple precautions, you understand, that should become a habit for us. We do not want to be photographed trading things, you see. So we do not do such things as these in public places."

"You know there's nothing classified in these documents," I said, half wondering if he did actually know that.

"Yes, but you can see how it might be manipulated by a liar with a camera," he said. "I feel harassed all the time," he said, drawing on a cigarette. "You don't know! They think I am a spy! The FBI says I am K.G.B.! Can you believe it? "

"Isn't it just part of the duty tour?" I said. "Weren't you prepared for it?"

"Listen to me," he said. "I am simple kind of guy. I love my country, I love my people, I love my wife. I worry about when we can have babies, not about American military secrets or something like that. They treat us both like we are spies. They follow Marie wherever she goes. I'm telling you, such thing would not happen in Moscow."

He smiled, reminding himself of a happier subject, and stopped to tell me that the details of my trip were being worked out and that I would probably hear something next month. But I thought he was not just pretending to be upset. His English got bad. He picked at his meal and frequently cast his eyes around the room. Then, all at once, he put his napkin on the table and took out his wallet.

"I am terribly sorry," he said, "but we must leave at once."

"Really?" I said. I'd been savoring the spicy beef and had half my plate to go.

"Please come," he said quietly, with a little smile but with eyes that said move. He tossed a generous amount of money onto the table and pushed back his chair. He already had his coat on while I was still trying to wash down one last morsel.

As soon as we reached the darkness of the parking lot, he said to me, "Please. I am going to drive you back to Washington. To DuPont Circle, OK? But once we are inside the car, you understand, please do not speak anything. OK? Perfect silence, you see?" I nodded. He continued, "When we are in the car, you will please simply leave the package of documents on the seat. And the envelope that I put on the seat, you see, you must pick that one up. OK? And put it right away in your pocket. OK?"

His car looked like the most bare-bones Ford you could buy, but the motor jumped to life and hummed with great inner strength. He switched on the radio and turned it up loud. It was tuned to a coun-try-and-western station that happened to be on a Hank Williams kick. In the darkness of the car, locked in my little vow of silence as we slipped back into Washington, I could fondle my envelope of the people's rubles while listening to Your Cheatin' Heart.

Stassinos was impressed the next morning at breakfast in a downtown diner when I showed him and Rawls the crisp new 20 Andy had given me. "Big bucks!" he said. "That's a 500 percent increase over your first payoff! Hell, the next time you could be looking at three figures! Not bad! This guy's really hot for you!"

They were impressed most of all that Suvorov had trusted me inside his car. Along with the passing of money for favors and the adopting of low-level security measures, that relative confidence was, they thought, another step in the K.G.B. recruitment process.

Rawls said he thought we were now well launched into deep water. "They think they've got their hands on a usable person here. They don't find that many."

"Why would the K.G.B. be so interested in me?"

"Why not?" said Stassinos. "They know your record. Count on it, the K.G.B. has a bigger file on you than we have."

But I couldn't believe Suvorov had gone to that party looking for me in particular.

"You're right," said Stassinos. "Andy went to a fishing hole and he got a nibble out of you, and then he went back to his computer and found out that you were a pretty good fish."

"Are you trying to swell my head?"

"I'm calling you a fish."

Rawls had been looking me over intently through this exchange. Now he said, "Would you go to the Soviet Union as Suvorov's guest?"

"I'm not burning to. If you thought it would be useful, I'd think about it." Rawls looked at Stassinos and said, "Maybe we should get more aggressive with Andrey."

"Like how?" I said.

"For a start, we might find some more Nosenko documents to his liking."

He asked me when I'd be back from Boston. I said in a week. He said he and Stassinos would spend some time thinking and that we'd talk more when I got back.

•

The House Select Committee's revision yet again of Nosenko's bona fides had implications equally significant for the K.G.B. and the FBI. Each side would finally realize that. Yet, at first, neither Andy nor Stass would listen to me when I blathered about it. Why not? Because both accepted the shared consensus of their institutions that the Kennedy assassination, politically speaking, was insignificant. They both believed that addicts of Dallas conspiracy theories were mere eccentrics. Both Stassinos arid Suvorov had a use for me, but at first neither one could believe me—no matter how I said what I had to say. The question in my mind then was whether it would be Andy or Stass who caught on first. Now, with Andy's announced intention to do a magazine article on Nosenko, it was obvious that he was firmly on course. He would read the history of Nosenko's treatment within the CIA since 1964 and, being a bright person, he would see that the issue with Nosenko was no longer the status of Oswald but, rather, the integrity of U.S. intelligence agencies against Soviet penetration efforts. If Nosenko were a mole, then what about that other defector, the good and trusted one—code named Fedora—in whom the FBI of Hoover and beyond had placed its trust since the early Sixties? If Fedora were a mole, then the FBI had been led around by the nose by Soviet intelligence for about 16 years.

At our next meeting, Andrey had reserved us a front-row table for belly-dance night at the Greek Islands Taverna on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. He was in an -exuberant mood. The dancers were gorgeous. The Greek salad was the best ever. We did in several bottles ofrelsina. He cut off my feeble efforts, tossed out between dancers or courses or bottles, to start what I supposed to be the mandatory political conversation. We staggered down the steps several hours after we had bounded up them without having said anything of substance except that he and Marie had just about decided to go ahead and have a kid and let the Devil worry about it.

But the merriment ceased as soon as we found the shadows of the side street where his car was parked. Now he straightened up, stopped weaving and slurring his speech.

We were walking slowly. Washington can be warm in November. He said, "The information you have given me."

"Yeah?" I said, still into the drunken-buddy mood.

"It is very helpful, you know."

I looked at him. He was looking at me. I felt myself straighten. "I'm glad to hear it," I said. "I hope your article is coming along well."

"It is not exactly an article."

"Oh, no?"

"It is more like what you would call a paper. An academic paper."

"Very good, Andy. I'm proud of you. You're actually going to deliver a paper?"

"Yes," he said, quite pleased. "And all because of you, my friend!"

"At an academic conference?"

"Well," he said, pulling a bit of a smirk and hooding his eyes, "perhaps academic (continued on page 214) is not correct. It will be in Armenia."

"Oh? Soon?"

"Within the month. We are awaiting word. We are packed. Marie is very excited. Also, I am very excited. It is our vacation. It is a ski resort in Armenia.We will spend two weeks there before going to Moscow. At the ski resort, you see, I will give a paper about Mr. Yuri Nosenko."

"To a group of scholars on skis?"

"Well, you could say it will be a group of about 30 very sophisticated people."

"Very sophisticated?"

"Yes. And so I must ask you once again, my friend, for more help, so that I will do a good job in Armenia and not play the fool out of myself."

"Hey," I said, "anything you need."

"Yes! OK! Hey!" he said with a laugh. He was happily excited. "Now! Do you have any more documents about Nosenko that you have not yet given me?"

"Not primary documents but side stuff with a few odd details. Maybe a few pieces. I'd have to go through our index."

"Could you? Please? You know, I will pay for your expenses and your trouble."

"No problem."

"Now. Could you introduce me to your friends on the Select Committee?"

Compute it. I'd have to tell them, too, about the FBI. "I might see what can be arranged," I said, killing it.

"Good. Now. Also. What can you give me to read about these two other people, Fedora and Stone?"

That cinched it. Andrey had grasped the meaning of Nosenko's current plight. There wasn't much I could give him on Stone or Fedora—some book references, some obscure articles we happened to have in the A.I.B. files. The main thing, to me, was that Andrey was already asking for this stuff to present it to 30 "sophisticated" people in Armenia while I was still trying to get Stassinos to concede that I might have a point.

Andrey and I agreed to meet in two days at the Independence Avenue entrance of the Hirshhorn museum. The day before that, I saw Stassinos for a few minutes to pick up the documents the FBI had found for Andy and to tell him of Andy's surging interest in Nosenko. The documents were uncensored FBI reports on Nosenko from 1964. Useless. As for Andy's enthusiasm, Stassinos assured me that he was just leading me on. "Have it your way, Stass," I said.

The next day was springlike, drenched in sun and cooled by pleasant breezes. Andrey and I wandered among the sculpture strewn across the Hirshhorn's plaza, and then, under a gigantic space frame, he stood at arm's length and asked for the package I had brought him. Still at arm's length, he opened the package and took out the three documents, holding them up in a fan as though to show a third eye that this particular deck contained three cards. Then he put the documents back in the package, nodding his head in evident approval of what he had seen. And when that was done (as I stood mesmerized by the display, which systematically flouted every little trick of spycraft I thought he'd been trying to teach me), he reached inside his breast pocket and produced an ordinary white envelope, business size. He held it out before him like an m.c. on a game show, opened its flap, withdrew two $20 bills, looked at me with a smile, returned the bills to the envelope and handed the envelope to me. I shut my mouth in time to take it and say, "You're very kind. I see we have new security procedures."

He laughed. "Can you meet me here again in a month with the new documents you mentioned?"

"No problem. I mean, it is a problem, but it is not a problem." So we set up for three o'clock at the Hirshhorn again, December 14, 1978.

One month later, minus a day, I met Stassinos briefly to pick up the new FBI reports that he and Rawls had found for Andy. Late that night, Jeff and I were at the A.I.B. office, trying to get our newsletter out. Jeff finished his chores first and sat back to check out this latest FBI package. I was dimly aware that he was leafing through the pages; and then he stood up, scratched his balding head and shot me a heavy look. I tried not to notice, but then I said irritably, "Jeff, please. I'm trying to do this intro. What is it?"

"Did you look at this?" he said in a soft but ultimately defiant voice.

"What?" I said. "You saw me just get back here, same time as you."

"Well," he said, "come and look at it." I sighed my best deliver-me-fromnonsense sigh and went over to the table where he had laid out the four documents that Stassinos had given to me earlier.

"Look at those," Jeff said. I looked.

"Don't you see anything weird?"

They were uncensored versions of four FBI documents that the FBI had previously released in censored form, each spread out fanwise. I saw nothing weird.

"Don't read it," he said, "look at it."

He was right. As soon as you looked at, rather than read, the pages spread out before you, you saw that each of the four title pages differed from all the other pages in bearing a light-gray copying mark, or blemish, in the shape of a childishly drawn cloud. Of the some 150 pages, only the four title pages had that mark. It was differently placed on each one.

Jeff said, "I'm sitting here thinking the FBI could afford a better copier than this and I'm casually leafing ahead to find something else to sneer about; and suddenly, I realize that the rest of this copying is really clean. And just by coincidence, I suppose, each one of those pages happens to be the top page. You see what I mean?"

"Tell me what you mean," I said without irony.

"What I'm saying," said Jeff, "is what is this? Is this a way to identify a document and follow its circulation through a distribution network? Is it a way to see who Andy's plugged into?"

I spent the balance of the night in fitful, deflated meditation, chagrined to think that I had managed both to be made a fool of and to be put in obscurejeopardy. I was annoyed—metaphysically, transcenden—tally annoyed—at the people at Buzzard's Point. I felt that I had played out my string with Stass and Andy alike, to no one's edification, least of all my own.

So I stalked to the office early the next morning in a cold, drizzly mood. Before coffee, I called the airlines for a seat to Boston that day, getting, by chance, a flight that left at the precise moment at which I was to have met Andrey at the Hirshhorn. Nice, I thought. Then I called the FBI, wanting to chew Stassinos out and hoping even within my cold, clammy anger for a few seconds of sunshine with Jeannie. Instead, I got a gruff young man who told me that Mr. Stassinos was not available. What a bring down. "Please tell Stassinos," I said, "that he plays crummy games. Tell him that I left town and stood up our friend. Tell him that he will answer to heaven for his sins. Now say it all back to me." The guy got it in one, gruff voice and all. "Thanks, soldier," I said, feeling free and real, and rang off to head for Boston, wondering, like a happy fugitive, how many had been hired to watch me not show up at the Hirshhorn.

•

But, finally, I could see no reason why the FBI should want to cashier me to the K.G.B. I decided that if the FBI had handed me documents capable of arousing the K.G.B.'s suspicions, it must have been through clumsiness, not malice.

So I had already made up my mind to go back to the thing if Andrey should phone again. And on the tenth of February 1979, a Saturday, a bit less than two months after I'd stood him up and four days short of the anniversary of our first meeting, he did. He thought we should celebrate our anniversary, he said. He mentioned nothing about the aborted Hirshhorn date.

So now I had to talk with Stassinos. I still had the four FBI documents with the interesting cover pages that he had given me for Andrey in December. The issue had to be confronted and straightened out, because if I had to lie to both sides, then what did I think I was doing and for whom did I think I was doing it?

Stassinos met me the next day at Mr. Eagen's. It was not one of our nicer sessions. I more or less slapped the offending documents down on the table in front of him and demanded to know how the FBI could be so unprofessional. He rejoined that I had a vivid imagination and was always seeing plots. My answer was that he had no imagination at all and couldn't see a conspiracy if it advertised in The Wall Street Journal.

He scooped up the documents from the table and said, "Look, I can see what your problem is with these blips. I promise you I'll look into it. And we'll get new title pages. OK?"

He rapped the papers endwise on the table to give his final utterance on the subject a bit of a thump. Inadvertently—he was, after all, in the act of confessing past problems, and for him to have knowingly risked a new problem at that very moment implied a level of perversity of which I thought him incapable—inadvertently, 1 assumed at the time, he had scooped up my notebook along with the documents. I reached for it as he was about to shovel it into his attache case. "Hey, my notebook!"

It fell open on the floor. "Sorry about that," said Stass. He bent quickly to retrieve it. I flashed on Andy going after his last cigarette. "Ha!" said Stass. "I see you can spell my name!" He scanned the open page quickly. "OK, fella, hand it over," I said, giving what I meant to sound like a friendly order. I lifted it out of his hands. He was smiling in amused disbelief.

"How far back does that go?" he said.

"To the beginning, what else?" I said. "Why? Didn't you yourself tell me it was a good idea?"

"To keep notes on Andrey, yes."

"For me, it was the whole thing."

"You've kept notes on me, too?"

"Why not? Haven't you kept notes on me?" I smiled.

He paused. He rubbed his nose. "You probably shouldn't do that." "Why not?"

"Why would you want to have notes on me?" he said.

"Because you're a colorful character."

"You going to write this shit up?"

"Maybe someday. You want to play yourself in the movie?"

He gave me a level look. "Well, as you know, you're on your own here. I can't stop you. But if you're just in this for the story you can get out of it, I have to say you're making me look like a pretty piss-poor judge of character."

"You and Andy both, right? He thought I would buy into Stalinism for the sake of the Revolution. And you thought I had no personal viewpoint.You're a fine pair of lads. A little poker game together would be a lot of fun. But let me put your mind at ease about it. I'm not doing this thing with you and Andy because I'm trying to make out. I'm doing it because I'm trying to make a point."

"And what is that point?"

I gave him a level look. "I'll tell you when I find out."

I met Stass the next day to pick up the recopied documents and sat in his car at a bus stop just long enough to check out the new title pages. They seemed OK, but I took them back to my office to run them past Jeff. He looked, compared, held the new pages up beside the old pages and nodded.

•p

Andrey was at our rendezvous ahead of me for the first time ever, even though I was my usual five minutes early. He intercepted me two blocks from the meeting point—again we were in Arlington—and led me to a different restaurant, O'Car-roll's, a seafood place.

His return to Europe had done him good. I never saw him so jaunty. He was wearing a shaggy scarf and heavy leather gloves and a tan British driving cap and a deep-brown jacket over a maroon tur-tleneck and a new pair of prefaded Levi's jeans. It was a cold day, but, unlike the numbing drench of the Valentine's Day of a year before, today we had bright sun. Andrey's cheeks were rosy and his eyes twinkled against bright piles of new snow. His report to the sophisticated group of 30 at the Armenian ski resort could not possibly have been better received, he said. He would have use for any documents or other information on Nosenko and related characters that I might come across in the future, always with the understanding that his government would cover my costs. He even had a list of particular items he wanted to see. The list included everything I had mentioned before of any passing relevance to the Nosenko bona fides controversy.

"You're in luck," I said, leaning toward him and lowering my voice. "Resting against the leg of my chair is a package of documents that I had ready for you back in December when last-minute changes forced me to miss our date. Those documents apply to your interest in Nosenko. They are uncensored FBI file reports available to me through my contacts on the staff of the Select Committee."

I could see concealed ecstasy in his eyes. "Your trip to the Soviet Union," he said, "is now totally approved. I personally, when I was in Moscow last month, have seen the required signatures on all the papers. You will have a big seat at the Olympics. You will be the guest of my government. And when the games are over, we will take you on a trip all over our country, two or three months if you like, whatever is best thing for you. OK? Then you come to Moscow. I will be in Moscow then, too. Marie and I will show you a Russian Moscow," he said proudly, bringing out his baritone voice. How young he seemed then. How much more exuberant and naive than Stassinos. You wanted it not to be the Cold War.

•

That took us into a period about two months long, rather like a cruise phase, in which our dinners were routine almost to the point of formal design. I would arrive five minutes early. He would arrive ten minutes late. Sometimes, by car, he would take me to a restaurant other than the one at which we met. I would never say a word inside his car, and always he had loud C&W music on the radio. Once we were settled at our drinks—he never drank vodka—he would tell me about some new praise he had won for his Nosenko work. I would dole out another document or two, all in the most secretive possible manner (he never repeated his strange performance at the Hirshhorn). There would be an envelope by the napkin or on the car seat with one or two 20s—never more. There would be some new reassurance about my Olympics trip, some new laugh about the drunken, womanizing good time we were going to have in Moscow.

Two events from that otherwise smooth period were precursors of the ending of it all, which would first trickle and then flood. Both involved Stassinos. The next time he picked me up for the usual debriefing with coffee, Stass drove us into the suburbs and picked an instant-burger joint in the mostly empty parking lot of an immense shopping mall. He parked his car—the dirty green Buick with a ride like a water bed—far from the restaurant and far from any other cars. He locked up, then opened the lid of the trunk and tossed his topcoat and attache case inside. "Why don't we just grab a bite first," he said, "then come back to the car to go over your notes? That way, we don't get mustard on things. OK?"

"Sure," I said and tossed my topcoat in beside his.

"You can leave your notebook, too. It'll be safe. Come on, I'll spring for deluxe. We'll do business later."

"What if the Russians come and steal your car?" I laughed.

"Suit yourself," he said. He slammed the trunk lid down sharply, as though miffed at me for tittering at his little trick.

That incident made me resolve to find a secure place for my notebook. It had been my habit till then to leave it openly about, usually on a corner of my desk or in an unlocked drawer. It was no secret from Jeff. No one else was ever in the office without one of us also being there. Who needed more security than that? But now I decided that I did. I wanted the notebook handy, because I often jotted in it. So I taped a label on the front reading Medical Evidence in the Robert Kennedy Case and put the notebook with three others exactly like it, also filled with scribblings of mine but on matters completely unrelated to Stass and Andy, into an oversize manila envelope, identical to seven others, similarly stuffed. All eight envelopes were marked A.I.B. DRAFTS, and each had a volume number. My notebook was in volume six. The entire series was in the second drawer down of the fourth of five four-drawer filing cabinets that stood along one wall. The office overflowed with papers and folders and envelopes in sometimes towering stacks. The security of my secret notebook was that of the needle in the haystack.

The other thing that happened then, and gave the quality of the encounter a strange turn, came near the end of this cruise phase, in late March 1979. I had met with Suvorov the day before: a few more documents of ever more questionable use to him, a few more rubles for me, a few more huzzas to the magnificent feast awaiting us in the motherland. Now I was in the back seat of the cushy green Buick, going over my notes. Stass was in the front passenger seat, scribbling in his steno pad with a 29-cent ballpoint pen. Behind the wheel was the young man I knew only as Dave, large, square-shouldered and clean-cut, who had carried the documents in and out that day at Buzzard's Point when the FBI had done its first bit of copying for me.

Presently, Stass complained to Dave that taking notes in a moving car was no fun. Could we pull off the beltway and park someplace?

Dave found a turnoff into a huge shopping mall and was smoothly pulling the overpowered Buick into an empty part of the lot when, suddenly, under his breath, he said, "Jesus Christ, will you look at that!" There was urgency in it. Because I was sitting directly behind him, I couldn't see what he was looking at.

"I don't fucking believe it!" said Stassinos. "Get the fuck out of here!"

Dave did as he was told. He had been introduced to me as a former jet pilot. Now he seemed to kick in the afterburner and lay the big, sloppy bomber of a car way over on its side and then power out of the threatened fishtail with a straight, full-throttle shot up the on ramp into an open patch in the expressway traffic.

Stassinos looked at me and laughed. He said, "Hey, my friend, that was close!"

"What?" I said. "What's happening?"

"Can you believe that it was his car back there? In the parking lot?"

"His?"

"Our friend's."

I suppose I gaped. "You mean you just saw Andy's car?"

Dave said, "You got it. I almost parked by it."

"Did you see him?" I said.

"No," Stassinos said, then asked Dave, "Did you?"

"I didn't see him," Dave said, "but I saw his car. I read his plate." He had by now got us up to altitude and back down to cruising speed.

"They never come out here," Stass said.

"I see," I said.

"But you know," he said, turning to Dave, "the Russians are inveterate shoppers. They're crazy about big sales. We could go back there—not that we're gonna—and find a sale of flat goods or something, I guarantee." Stass looked pretty satisfied with that explanation.

He had his mouth open and his hand moving to say something else on the same theme when, as abruptly as before but now a lot louder, Dave cried, "My Godl God damn it!" He quickly yawed the heavy Buick in behind the diesel rig we had been just about to pass. An exit came right up and Dave had us on it in a split second. "It was another Soviet car!" he said, jerking his thumb back toward the beltway.

"No shit," said Stass quietly, shaking his head.

Said I with honest wonder, "There sure are a lot of Russians around here."

"See?" Stass said with a surge of feeling. "They cut our funds, cut back our capabilities, and next thing you know, you're finding these people all over the place. There's just no way to tell now where you're not gonna run into these people."

I said, "Would they recognize our cars as well as our people recognize their cars? Could we have been spotted on the belt-way by Marx and Engels fans?"

"My friend," said Stassinos with a dark little laugh, "you will never have a way of knowing that."

"We have no way to know what they know?"

"The trouble with the fucking Russians," said Stassinos, suddenly a touch angry again and looking away from me, "is that they are so much like us fucking Americans that we could wipe each other's asses and never know the difference. It's what makes all this so unpredictable."

It was Jeff's suspicion, when I filled him in on it, that the entire run-in with the "Soviet cars" might have been staged for my benefit. But neither of us could imagine what the Feds might have been trying to prove.

•

My last dinner with Andrey was on a • Saturday in mid-April 1979,at Le Jardin, a pleasant, leafy place near Washington Circle, where he had the boeuf Robespierre and I the swordfish Danton. If he or his shopping companions had seen us on the beltway, he gave no sign of it. The only thing different, I thought, was that I was at the bottom of my Nosenko barrel and he was beginning to murmur polite disappointment with the quality of the most recent contributions.

"I will call you in a month," he said cheerfully.

I said, "I look forward to it," also cheerfully. There was so little to report to Stassi-nos that I handled it by phone.

The adventure seemed to be settling of itself. In two more weeks, the bottom dropped out.I went to the office early that morning, because I wanted to add a few lines to the notebook. I opened the second drawer of the fourth file and pulled outthe envelope marked A.I.B. DRAFTS, VOL. (>, noticing right away that theenvelope was too loose. Inside were three notebooks instead of four. The one I wanted, naturally—the Stass-and-Andy book—was the missing one.

My first thought, facing such a void, is generally of the form Where could I have put it? Gradually, a more frenzied attitude evolves. Over and over in the next three days, I retraced my steps back to the last time I could remember having the book in my hand. I searched all the other places I had been. I looked in all the other envelopes in the drawer, in all the other drawers, in all the other filing cabinets, in and on and under my desk and Jeff's, everywhere, over and over. I could not convince myself that I had simply mislaid it. It was always too much on my mind for that. By the end of day three, I was sold on the thought that someone had taken it.

I could see only three suspects. Of the three, Suvorov would have the most to learn from the book but could have only general reasons to think it might exist. He had never seen it or heard me talk about it. Jeff was a theoretical suspect, but he said he hadn't done it, and I believed him.

That cut the list down to Stass and company. Since Stass first realized he was in my little book, he had been obsessive and negative about it. He didn't know where I kept it at the office, but he knew what it looked like. How simple for a confederate of his to see me go into my office carrying it and come out later not carrying it.

But I knew what Stass would say. My paranoia was acting up because I had lost the notebook. And losing it was better, anyway; why did I need it? Good riddance, he would say.

Even so, I decided to tell him that the thing was gone and seemed stolen, since his was the only FBI in town. I had already picked up the phone when I thought, for form's sake, that I should make one more basic tour through the now ritualized stations of my search, starting with the place where the notebook should have been—envelope six, drawer two, cabinet four. That was so I could convincingly say to Stass's challenge that, yes, I had just looked again and it was gone.

But then there it was, just where it was supposed to be—one of four spiral-bound notebooks neatly filling an envelope marked A.I.B. DRAFTS, VOL. 6, square in the middle of drawer two, cabinet four.

I called Jeff, who was still back at the house. "This thing was missing, was it not? You, too, looked in the place where it belonged and saw that it was not there?" Confirmed by Jeff in those basics, I dialed Stassinos with great righteousness.

Jeannie's angelically simple, unadorned, sweetened, morning-sunshiny voice—she could effortlessly get all that into "Hi, there!"—restored my spirits and made me feel lucky. I might have drawn the gruff voice.

"I have to talk to Stass," I said, "and it should be soon."

"He's not at his desk, but he'll be glad you called. Can I give him a message?"

"Just tell him there was a note of despair in my voice and that I was calling from the ledge outside the tenth floor of the Soviet embassy."

She giggled, sunshine sparkling on the morning dew. "I believe the Soviet embassy is only three stories tall."

"Then tell him whatever he'll believe. I need him."

In less than two minutes, Stass rang. "What's the matter, big guy?" he said, sounding concerned.

"Nothing physical, but I've got a problem that just developed and I want to talk with you about it."

"Be at the drugstore in a half hour."

He pulled up in the Buick. Someone was in the back seat. It was Rawls, the large, dour man with the massive head who, months before, had pronounced Andy a spy, not a diplomat, and had put an elder's blessing on Stassinos' emerging relationship with me. It would have been a little easier with just Stass, but the presence of Rawls would make it definitive.

Stass drove us to a shady spot on a quiet street in the embassy section. It was a bright morning early in May.

"Try to believe this," I said. "I'm sure you remember my notebook on Andy and you. I know it's your favorite thing of mine. Four days ago, I discovered that it was missing from the place where I had hidden it. I searched for it everywhere and couldn't find it. Then, this morning, mysteriously, I found it back where it belonged. To me, that raises the question, Who could be doing this to my notebook? It has to be you or the other guy. Let me finish. If you're the ones who took it, then it's a cheap trick, but it doesn't change anything, because if you read it, the only thing you found out is that I've been straight with you, even if I have also counted the moles on your faces. But if it was Andy or a pal of his who took it, then a true cat has got out of the bag, and I would have to worry about that. Am I wrong?"

"I can see what you mean," Stass said solemnly.

I looked from him to Rawls. Both men had their impassive G-man faces on. I think they wondered whether or not I was putting a sting on the FBI. So I said, looking at Rawls, "All right, take it as hypothetical. Just suppose things happened the way I said. What inferences would you draw from such events?"

Stassinos said quietly, "I don't know what to tell you."

But I was looking at Rawls, who finally said in his deep voice, "Many mysteries in life, you know, are never cleared up."

"Begging your indulgence, sir," I said, "but very few of them have to be. This one is not like that. This is not a mystery that I can live with."

"Well," said Rawls, stirring a bit, "if this is what you're asking, let me assure you that the FBI has not burglarized your office, nor would we consider it."

Stassinos said, "If it were our job, you would never have known it."

I said, "And if Andy did it?"

Stassinos said, "He doesn't work that way."

"What if he knows somebody who does work that way?" "You're being hypothetical again."

"It's the only way I can get you to talk about anything real. Besides, it's not hypothetical to me. My mind is clear and settled. This notebook was first there, then not there, and then there again, and that could not happen by magic. If you insist that the borrowing of the notebook was not an FBI project, then I have to choose one of two nasty explanations. Either you guys are lying to me or Andy knows that I've been talking to you. And I can't accept either. Can you see that?"

They both nodded gravely. Stassinos said, "What if your premise is wrong and it was a third party?"

I said, "You mean as in Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines?"

He shrugged. "You could wait and see if Andy's behavior changes."

"Is that what you would do?"

"In your place? I might try living in another town."

"My very sentiments," I said. "I'm getting out. Here's the last batch of your pseudo documents back. Andy finds this stuff boring, and I can't blame him. Anyway, I'm not going to see him again.The next time he calls, I will give one excuse after another."

"And your big trip to the Olympics?" said Stass.

"I spit in the milk of my big trip."

Rawls rumbled and stirred in the back seat. "This notebook," he said. "Is it in your possession again?"

"Who knows?" I said. "Maybe somebody stole it again since I've been with you guys. If not, then, yes, I have it."

Said Rawls, "What you have told us about Mr. Suvorov this past year has been very helpful to us. You have our thanks for that cooperation. Your help has been, of course, strictly voluntary and uncompen-sated, nor have we entered into any kind of written or unwritten agreement. If you choose now to terminate the arrangement, that is your decision entirely and the bureau respects your right to do so. We will ask, however, that you do continue to maintain discretion."

"And that means," said Stass quickly, "get rid of that fucking notebook!" "All right," I said, "bend over."

He laughed. He knew he shouldn't have said it. He had an odd twinkle in his eye. Sometimes, I wonder if he said it because he sensed that Rawls was about to and he knew that it would be better for me to say no to him than to Rawls. At other times, I'm sure Stass thought I made the whole thing up. "Look," I said, "don't worry about it. I'm in no hurry to explain you to my friends."

They dropped me where they had picked me up.

I left D.C. soon to begin a new job in Boston. In mid-July, I went back to Washington and found at the office a message to call Jeannie. In melodious harp tones, she informed me that Stassinos was not at his desk at just that time, but she was sure he'd call me back quite soon. The entire adventure, I thought while listening to Jeannie with the light-brown voice, was so I could hear this woman on the telephone; Jeannie must be the secret heroine of this otherwise pointless and disappointing Cold War story. "How does the FBI dare speak with such a voice?" I noted on one of the last pages of my notebook.

July 18, 1979. Stassinos called, wanting to meet in an hour.

We cruised the quiet embassy area. He'd been thinking a lot about all that had happened, he said. He was sure I meant only the best. But that notebook of mine was something he wished did not exist.

"I had to stick my neck out for you with my superiors," he said. "I hope you don't prove me a bad judge of character."

"You've said that before," I said. "I couldn't care less that you stuck your neck out, which I never asked you to do. And I don't understand why you're pretending to sweat this so bad. If I yelled out the whole story from the rooftops tomorrow, the only one who'd really be hurt would be Andy—provided, that is, that you're right about him and he really is a K.G.B. spy. If you're wrong, he gets a big laugh and you look silly. Where is the great harm in either case?"

"You're telling me you're going to write this up and publish it?"

"I'm telling you to lighten up. You were so sure I could live with my doubts about who stole my notes. OK. You can live with yours about what I mean to do with them."

He smiled ruefully and stared out the car window at the hot, breezy day. "Maybe you and me," he said, "we ought to go off somewhere and tie one on.

I laughed in surprise. "Your bottle or mine?"

•

It never happened. That was the last time I saw Stass. I talked with him by phone once more. I had called in a message, hoping to hear earth chimes again, but my luck had run out and I got gruff throat instead. Stass returned my call in a half hour.

That was in early August 1979. Jeff and I had just heard that morning from our contact on the Select Committee staff that Nosenko had given way and was now admitting that he was a mole, that hehad been lying for all those years about the K.G.B. and Oswald. The K.G.B. had talked extensively with Oswald.

"I thought you should be among the first to know about this," I told Stass.

He was quiet. "How sure are you?"

"I am a hundred percent sure that this is what I just heard from somebody whom I believe to be in a position to know. I'm sure you'll see the implications."

I said it not merely to gloat. I thought it was important for the FBI to think about it. Stass seemed bored but thanked me for the info and asked if there had been any further word from Andy. Itold him no and repeated the old promises.

At the end of that year, on December 27, 1979, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, and shortly I became just one of many Americans who would not go to the Moscow Olympics. The contact Andy promised from a Soviet travel agent never happened.

Two years later, in the fall of 1981, two respected journalists with independent sources insidethe FBI, Henry Hurt of Reader's Digest and George Lardner, Jr., of The Washington Post, reported that the FBI now believed that Fedora was a mole, after all, loyal all along to the"Soviet Union and the K.G.B., while whispering sweet nothings into Hoover's ear. I wondered whether r not Stassinos or Rawls—or Suvorov—would remember our conversations when they reflected on that news.

My little improvised gesture of patriotism, by sheerest coincidence, might thus have had a small, practical effect on the much larger story of the search for the putative mole in the U.S. intelligence system—if the FBI had been able to take seriously a word I said. That it could not is, to me, a great, rich irony—the irony that the Cold War has come to be about.

"At issue was the integrity of the U.S. intelligence system. Are there moles in our secret gardens?"