Bread in the Oven
Twelve years ago, when LTJG Audrey Rowland, in the suite of the Metropol Hotel, told Kremlin recruiter Anton Gorelikov to go fuck himself after he had proposed an arrangement by which she would share classified information on US Navy weapons research projects with Russian military intelligence in exchange for cash payments and discreet career assistance, Gorelikov was delighted. In the handbook of intelligence recruitments, this blasphemy was not a refusal. The young woman had not said no and, more important, she had not indignantly declared her intention to report the pitch to American counterintelligence officials, which would have definitively blown the approach. Her thirty-minute dalliance with an SVR Sparrow clearly was a reportable contact that would have had grave consequences for her promising navy career. Gorelikov assessed that she would be motivated by her desire to keep the episode secret. There was something more, he thought. This young woman was ambitious, and she already had shown herself to be a brilliant researcher in a critical program, a gold-plated skill that would guarantee rapid advancement in a male-dominated US Navy, which clearly was important to her. She also carried some as-yet undefined baggage regarding men, which perhaps manifested itself in her sexual behavior, even at her young age. Ambition leavened by ego, seasoned by a forbidden taste for tribadism. A potent recruitment cocktail. He had let her consider overnight—in the espionage lexicon otherwise colloquially known as leaving the bread in the oven.
When Audrey Rowland the next day archly stipulated that she would limit her reporting strictly to the railgun project, Gorelikov graciously agreed to her condition. He knew the hook was set. Most agents start by declaring moral limits to their treason, insisting on close-ended arrangements, usually limited to a single topic, in exchange for keeping their original transgressions secret. What none of them immediately realized was that agreeing to provide any secrets to Moscow multiplied the initial infraction a hundredfold, enveloping the agent in the spider’s web for as long as the Russians stipulated, or until she lost access, or until her luck ran out and the mole hunters called her in for the inexorable interviews. Gorelikov knew from long experience that the inevitable outcome—the universal fate of all agents—was that Audrey eventually would be blown by careless tradecraft at the hands of a ham-fisted GRU handler or, more likely, by a CIA source inside GRU who would report the existence of a Russian mole in the US Navy. The goal, therefore, had been to compartment the case, and run the asset for as long as possible, extracting as much intelligence as quickly as was secure. Audrey Rowland’s survival as a reporting source was not Gorelikov’s bureaucratic responsibility, but he told himself he’d rather it be handled by the SVR, a service more adept at handling foreign sources, or better yet, by an anonymous illegal, impossible to trace and trebly compartmented.
Now the lofty Vice Admiral Rowland—encrypted MAGNIT—nevertheless had defied the actuarial odds for agent survival. She had been reporting for twelve years—there had been breaks in contact, unsuccessful turnovers to unacceptable new handlers, and a hiatus after a security scare—but she had been on the books since her recruitment in the Metropol.
VADM Rowland had, as Gorelikov predicted, long ago become accustomed to the act of espionage. She initially rationalized the treason by telling herself that sharing science with Russia would level the technology playing field, engender mutual confidence, and actually lessen the chance of a third world war, a conflict no sane person thought would be survivable for either side. She enjoyed the florid notes of thanks and admiration from astonished Russian scientists praising her technical brilliance, just as she reveled in the yearly meetings with Uncle Anton, who was elegant, well dressed, and urbane, and could discuss art, or music, or philosophy as well as the limits of shipborne phased array radar, or the megawatt generating capacity of the Zumwalt-class destroyer.
The relationship between agent and masters matured. As MAGNIT’s performance continued unabated, and her reliability ratings remained at the highest level—all services constantly assess their canaries, for the first sign of trouble in a case is an anomalous change in intel production—Gorelikov, at Putin’s direction, began parallel handling: GRU officers handled MAGNIT inside the United States, although they were little more than mailmen, collecting drops and passing requirements. Gorelikov, however, began meeting MAGNIT during her annual personal leave, her one break from her otherwise total devotion to the laboratories, Special Access Programs, personnel management, and budget-oversight duties that consumed her. Everyone knew that stork-like Admiral Rowland chose rugged campestral destinations for her solo monthlong holiday travels: hiking in Nepal; photo safaris in Tanzania; camping in Jamaica; or kayaking down the Amazon. To colleagues unaccustomed to seeing rawboned Audrey Rowland in anything but her uniform, vacation photos of her in hiking shorts, boots, cargo pants, or a wet suit usually raised eyebrows and occasioned muttered comparisons to Ichabod Crane.
Meetings with Anton were arranged on the margins of Audrey’s exotic vacations, in luxurious rented houses in the nearest large cities to avoid extra travel and incriminating stamps in her passport. The agent’s initial, delusional rationalization for spying evolved under the philosophical tutelage of Uncle Anton, who sought to keep Audrey motivated. The notion of “level playing fields” seemed less relevant in the New Cold War of active measures and cyberoperations. Anton instead often raised the inequity of the system for women in the navy, drawing from Audrey’s progressively less-guarded comments about a childhood clearly and completely dominated by an overbearing father, a rakish naval aviator who cowed his quiescent wife and as much as told Audrey he would have preferred a son. If her father were alive today, Audrey told Anton, he would have to salute her. Anton agreed that women had the same problem in Russia: forced by society, customs, and institutions to let men steal emotional strength away from them. Anton’s wry empathy struck a chord in Audrey. What she was doing—passing secrets, meeting furtively, accepting payment from the Kremlin—she was doing for herself, and she was doing it to excel in her career despite the men, despite the system. The growing balance in her Center-managed accounts—she already had five million dollars’ worth of the Kremlin’s euros, Krugerrands, and uncut diamonds—was further personal validation that this was due her.