During the salad days of the Cold War, the breathless arrival in bustling Rome Station of first-tour case officer Tom Forsyth, fresh out of training at the Farm, was greeted variously by colleagues. A number of them helpfully showed Tom around Rome and pointed out the best trattorias for Roman cucina povera, peasant home cooking, and where to find a bottle of Cesanese del Piglio from Lazio. His branch Chief got him on the invitation list for half a dozen national day celebrations at foreign embassies where he could begin trolling for developmentals on his own. The reports chief sat him down and went over the target lists, so he’d know what to look for.
Senior Rome Station officer Gale Stack was fifty-five years old and close to retirement. Earlier in his career he’d had opportunities at management, but it hadn’t worked out due to competing priorities that included three-martini lunches, creative accounting on his ops revolving fund (RF), and chatting up bar hostesses. Stack resented that he’d never been appreciated for what he brought to the mix. He’d been stepped on and stepped over—plenty. The arrival of young Forsyth—they were in adjoining office cubicles—presented an opportunity for Stack to unload a bothersome case encrypted VZWOLVERINE. It was going nowhere, at least not with the amount of effort Stack was willing to put into it. The asset, a young Polish émigré named Witold Zawadzki had volunteered as an embassy walk-in, and Stack had elbowed other officers aside for the case. He thought it would be a gravy train—lots of intel for little work—as well as a nice line item on his RF for charging off lunches and dinners.
VZWOLVERINE was from an aristocratic family in Kraków, one of the szlachta, the Polish nobility, dating back to 1360 and King Casimir III the Great. Sent to Rome as a boy to live with an aunt, Witold, now twenty-five and an Italian citizen, hated the Soviets only slightly less than he hated the zdrajcy, the traitor Poles who sold out their own country. At their first agent meeting, the firebrand young Pole—nervous, thin, blond hair slicked back—looked intently at his white-maned case officer with the manicured fingernails, whose hand shook as he pulled the martini olive off a toothpick with his large white teeth. Witold leaned forward and told this CIA officer that he was willing to return to Poland, and that his family knew patriotic like-minded Poles in the government, the Party, and the military. Stack burped, signaled for another martini, and told VZWOLVERINE to order anything he wanted off the menu, anything at all.
At a second boozy lunch at the fabulously expensive seafood restaurant La Rossetta in the shadow of the Pantheon, VZWOLVERINE brought a list of influential Polish families who would, with careful encouragement, provide information on Polish Communist Party leadership, Soviet intelligence activity in Poland, and Warsaw Pact military readiness levels. Putting down his lobster claw, Gale Stack took the paper with a butter-slick thumb, put it into his coat pocket, and told Witold he’d “run traces” on the names. Stifling his ready temper, VZWOLVERINE told Stack that he wanted to talk to someone else in his organization. Alarm bell. Bad idea to let another Station officer get his nose under the tent to see how Stack was expensing meals off this case, never mind letting this wannabe freedom fighter complain about his handling officer.
Stack the next day told the branch Chief that VZWOLVERINE was a bitter émigré with no access to intel, and that he was recommending that Station cut the asset with a $1,000 termination bonus (he’d give the young man $500 and keep the rest as pocket money) and stop wasting time. The branch Chief wearily said okay, but something made him change his mind, and he told Stack, instead, to turn over the case to another officer, that maybe changing the chemistry would help. Alarm bell. An experienced Station officer would see the real story and report back. Then Stack remembered that new kid Forsyth in the next cubicle. He wouldn’t know the ropes yet; he’d be perfect. How about it? asked Stack. Easy case to cut his teeth on, push the asset to develop access, nice and slow. The branch Chief shrugged and said to go ahead.
That was the start of the WOLVERINE network. After a bibulous turnover meeting, Tom Forsyth and his new agent Witold Zawadzki warily began to feel each other out: Witold saw that his new rookie case officer was honest, energetic, and driven to be successful; Forsyth saw that the impatient young Pole’s fierce commitment needed to be controlled. Nothing would be accomplished by running suicide missions. VZWOLVERINE’s return forays to Poland started slowly—covered as commercial buying trips for an Italian design company—letting the SB, the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, the Soviet-controlled Polish intelligence service, get used to seeing the young man with the Italian passport come and go.
After two trips, VZWOLVERINE recruited a childhood friend, now a Polish Army captain, who was encrypted VZWOLVERINE/2. Family friends, VZWOLVERINE/3 and /4, a comely former art student, now special assistant in the party secretariat, and a police sergeant respectively, were acquired in the next six months. Witold’s next recruitment was VZWOLVERINE/5, his cousin, who was coincidentally a communicator in the headquarters of the Ministry of Interior, who processed KGB message traffic between Warsaw and Moscow. The intelligence streams started slowly. Reports were collected from those subagents by WOLVERINE/1 (as principal agent) and brought to Forsyth in Rome.
Rome Station management sat up and started taking notice, then Headquarters followed. The reporting from the WOLVERINEs was superb, including photography of classified Warsaw Pact and Soviet Red Army documents never seen before. Counterintelligence analysts looked at the take with a skeptical eye: too-good-to-be-true intelligence always aroused suspicions, but the reports were corroborated and they kept coming. Forsyth had to continually rein in Witold, to tell him to slow down, to balance production against risk. In his continuing effort to protect his WOLVERINEs, Forsyth trained Witold in clandestine photography, impersonal communications, secret writing, and advanced intel reporting, who in turn trained his network members inside Poland.
A month later, Witold presented Forsyth with an audio tape of a closed meeting of the frantic Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party arguing about whether to comply with or ignore an order from KGB Director Chebrikov to arrest fractious Wujek miners and Gdánsk shipyard workers in the Solidarity movement. WOLVERINE/3, the statuesque clerical assistant in the secretariat whose name was Agnes Krawcyk and who, alarmingly, was an adrenaline junkie, had stuck a microphone and small wire recorder (assembled by WOLVERINE/5, the electronics whiz named Jerzy) under the president’s dais before the meeting. Even as he submitted the reports—subsequently graded a rare O for outstanding—Forsyth freaked. The WOLVERINEs would not last if they kept taking the insane risks of the past months, he yelled at Witold. And the use of two WOLVERINEs in the same operation violated the tenet of keeping WOLVERINE network members compartmented from each other. It was risky enough that Witold knew everyone’s name. This had to stop.
Over a holiday dinner of zrazy zawijane, succulent roulade of beef with onion, mushrooms, and silky dark gravy, at his aunt’s Rome apartment, Witold smiled at Forsyth—how far they had come together—and said that given Forsyth’s motherly concern, he would postpone for now his plan to kidnap the KGB rezident in Warsaw and deliver him hog-tied to Forsyth in time for Christmas. They toasted with a glass of Chopin wódka. In the three years of Forsyth’s Rome tour, the WOLVERINE network had produced hundreds of intelligence reports of high interest, and had informed Washington policymakers on the dangerous last throes of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Headquarters promoted Forsyth and presented the Medal of Achievement to Witold.
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