Yes, Hillsinger said. Sufficiently.
Hillsinger followed him outside and then into a room in another building. In that room were three CIA men: an older man from the Far East division named Danziger, whom Hillsinger knew slightly and did not like; Cressie, a junior member of Angleton’s Counterintelligence team, whom he knew only by sight; and then Raymond Todd, someone he didn’t know at all, from the Office of Security. They shook hands in silence. As a group they were not natural colleagues, the working concept of the Wise Men panel being to bring together divergent points of view.
Cressie, the Counterintelligence man, called the meeting to order despite being by far the most junior person in the room. That confirmed this as Angleton’s show.
We have a newer asset, Cressie said. There has been some controversy as to whether or not we accept him as a legitimate defector, and, at the suggestion of the Director, we are opening up this assessment to the collective mind. We are grateful that you all were able to come down here to help.
Cressie was obviously lying. Counterintelligence did not socialize their decisions. In Angleton’s view, no one’s security was tight enough, no one’s loyalty far enough beyond question, and everyone else’s historical view of the Soviet problem was superficial. Something else, Hillsinger thought, was happening here. The problem, however, was that, with the Director involved, he would have to play the whole thing relatively straight.
Between now and Sunday, Cressie continued, you will witness a limited debrief of Felix Subotin, an unratified defector out of the KGB’s Second Directorate. While Subotin first made contact with us in Geneva in 1962, he was not brought to the States until very recently. Much of his narrative is in conflict with the Astrakhov material you have just read. Your task, Cressie said, is to decide which man is lying.
Hillsinger knew that when Subotin first contacted the CIA station in Geneva, there was uncontained excitement. The cables from the field officers, normally so terse, used words like unprecedented and breakthrough. Subotin’s father was a decorated hero of the Red Army who later served as Stalin’s shipping minister, and the son claimed to have worked in a particular branch of the KGB that had never before produced a defector. Hillsinger himself had been asked by Angleton to consult on a minor angle touching Poland, Hillsinger’s area of particular expertise.
Cressie led the three men out of the room, out of the building, off the paved walkways, and into the woods. They walked down a winding, freshly-cut path, and soon arrived at a cleared spot in the woods with a large cabin. Two armed guards patrolled the perimeter.
As you see, Cressie said, we have built a dedicated facility for debriefing Felix Subotin.
Inside the large cabin was a small living room where two officers were playing cards—the on-premise security. Cressie led the group to a room with a one-way mirror and a bare interrogation setup on the other side. As of yet, that room was empty. He did not know anything about the hydraulics of Subotin’s emigration, but the building of a personal prison would suggest that things had gone wrong somewhere.
This is the debriefing room, Cressie said, unnecessarily.
Hillsinger did not talk to the others. He was sure everything on both sides of the glass was being recorded, and he assumed, too, that the three of them were chosen at least in part because they had no preexisting relationship. In that context, friendliness would read as a lack of objectivity.
On the other side of the glass, a man entered whom Hillsinger recognized as Miles Harris, Cressie’s direct superior at Counterintelligence. Harris was followed by the two security officers from the living room, each of them holding one arm of a handcuffed man who seemed unable to walk properly. The struggling handcuffed man was Felix Subotin. He looked like he hadn’t slept for days. To Hillsinger’s knowledge, what was happening here was almost unheard-of—a hostile, possibly even violent interrogation on U.S. soil, with a willing defector no less. The security officers removed Subotin’s handcuffs and placed him in a seat at the table. Harris passed Subotin a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
Now you give me cigarettes? Subotin said.
Certainly, Harris said.
Why? Subotin said. Now you have important guys here behind glass? Is that why cigarettes now? Who is here?
Just you and me, Harris said.
Subotin then turned to face the one-way glass.
They try to kill me, Subotin said. Now you know.
49
The living room fire was burnt down to stubs in corners, but it still gave good light. Billy saw that everyone was arranged so a little taste of the fire fell on some patch of skin, just enough to hold them until the sun came up again.
There was no liquor he wanted and it was too early for bed, so he decided to rebuild the fire. He was of course aware that fires on Seven were a source of proprietary feeling—the Old Man was more vigilant about the fireplaces than his money—but then the Old Man had not come down tonight. Fires and animals, Billy thought, belong to whoever takes care of them.
His route took him by John Wilkie’s left shoulder, which he tapped in passing. Wilkie nodded in return. The magnificent dinner had left John Wilkie feeling that the world was fundamentally as it should be. For example, it was difficult to cook lamb kidneys properly, but Martha had done it—and then there was the theater of the whole thing. Diana’s remarkable performance during cocktails, the dining room candles, his place card made from a clamshell, the elegant pacing, the wines, Lila’s odd speech about the Old Man, a late Calvados next to her by the fire. How it felt like they were all wrapped together inside this wonderful cocoon, so far from any civilization. It was Lila who had conceived and orchestrated the evening’s structure, who had conjured its pre-Socratic depth, but when he complimented her she shrugged and changed the subject. It was not, perhaps, a night she would choose to remember. Wilkie did have, once or twice, the melancholy thought that these moments of perfection come more often toward the end of something rather than its beginning. Sitting together after a dinner like this, he and Lila would normally have laughed about the sad eclipse of fingerbowls, or some other signpost of the absurd prewar gentility, but tonight she was preoccupied. Stupidly, Wilkie had mentioned Baffin Island in an attempt to clear the air, and Lila had sunk even deeper into the fire. So, using his near-silent voice, Wilkie retreated to their one evergreen topic—the iniquities of Billy Quick, who was now at work on the fire five feet away from them.
But Lila was not listening. She saw a wall of trees in front of her, and Catta shivering. She wanted to run—to act somehow, anyhow—but it seemed that every possible way was blocked. She would scream, but she had guests.