Page 76 of Denied Access
“Sir, you asked me to helm the Latvian intelligence-gathering operation, but that no longer seems to be my number one priority.”
“Oh, I disagree. I think you’ll find that as chief of station, everything is a priority.”
Though she understood English quite well, Irene stared at the phone as if she were trying to decipher a foreign language. After an embarrassingly long pause, Irene responded with the most coherent retort she could muster. “Sir?”
“Come on, Irene. Don’t make me spell this out. As we speak, the wife of a CIA officer is languishing in a Russian prison, civil unrest is gripping Latvia, and a cabal of idiots in Congress is trying to muster support to defund the agency and derail my nomination. And did I forget to mention that our British allies think one of our assassins is engaging in gunfights in downtown London? This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. One of the fringe benefits of my new role is that I don’t have to care about seniority or any other such nonsense. Until this crisis blows over, I need someone I can trust leading Moscow Station. You, Irene, are that someone. Questions?”
Irene did not have questions so much as objections. Manyobjections. She’d never been the assistant chief of station or even the chief of base for the types of backwater postings that normally served as training grounds for the more critical stations like this one. Perhaps most important, Irene was not a Russia hand. She didn’t speak the language and had never worked the threat. Asking her to assume the role of chief of station was the equivalent of tapping Stan Hurley to lead the Peace Corps.
But she didn’t say any of that.
The CIA was not a military organization, but it did embody some paramilitary attributes, chief among those being a fanatical focus on mission. Her boss had just given her a mission. One did not decline a tasking from Thomas Stansfield.
“No questions, sir,” Irene said. “I’ll check in with the ambassador on Miss Henrik’s status just as soon as I get an update from the Latvian intelligence fusion cell I convened.”
“Good. Moscow Station has been afraid of its own shadow for far too long and our intelligence-gathering efforts are the worse for it. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, Irene. I can feel it. Whether the CIA officers under your command need an attaboy or a kick in the pants, I’ll leave for you to decide. Either way, I want those men and women hitting the bricks, meeting with assets, and stealing secrets. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. Then I’ll leave you to it.”
“Wait, sir, there is something else I need to tell you. Lieutenant General Grigoriy Petrov decided to personally welcome me to Moscow. Do you know him?”
Stansfield sighed. “I do. He’s former KGB. Now FSK. We have a rather long history.”
“He gave me a message for you. Made me repeat it back to him word for word.”
“What did he say?”
It was sometimes difficult to decipher tone on a secure call, as themultitude of encryption devices that rendered the communication secure also made a person’s voice sound more sterile. Even so, Irene thought she detected a hint of wariness in Stansfield’s reply.
“He said, ‘Oranienburg 1945.’ Does that ring a bell?”
The answering silence stretched long enough that Irene would have thought that the call had been disconnected were it not for the flashing green light. She cleared her throat and was preparing to speak when her boss’s voice returned.
“It does. Are you familiar with Operation Paperclip?”
“The Allied effort to find Nazi rocket scientists and repatriate them to America?”
“Exactly. As you might imagine, there was a Soviet counterpart to our operation. It was calledAlsosand its objectives were a bit different. Instead of only focusing on rocket technology, Alsos targeted another area of game-changing research.”
Kennedy instantly made the connection. “The atomic bomb.”
“Right again. The Nazis were frantically trying to develop a nuclear weapon up until the closing days of the war. Allied strategic bombing, along with the heroic efforts of Norwegian saboteurs, prevented Germany from obtaining the heavy water required to control a nuclear reaction, but their scientists had produced something else the Russians desperately needed. Uranium oxide. In the war’s closing days, the Nazis hid a large stash of the material in a suburb of Berlin called Oranienburg. The Russians discovered the uranium oxide’s location and sent a convoy of vehicles to secure it.”
“The Allies didn’t stop them?”
Stansfield cleared his throat. “The stash was clearly in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The debate about whether stealing the uranium oxide was worth enraging our Russian partners embroiled leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. While they were trying to reach a consensus, the Russian convoy edged ever closer to Oranienburg. I decided to act.”
“You?”
“That’s right. By the war’s end, I was a young but highly experiencedOSS officer. It was obvious to me, as it should have been to anyone with half a brain, that the Soviets would soon be our adversaries, and that the world would be a much more dangerous place if they succeeded in building a nuclear arsenal. I hoped that if I bought our leaders more time they would come to the correct decision, so I blew up a bridge as the Russian convoy was crossing it. It sounds barbaric, I know, but it was war. In order for my subterfuge to succeed, I had to ensure that there were no Soviet survivors.”
As Stansfield spoke, Irene pictured the scene in her mind’s eye. That’s when the remaining pieces tumbled into place. “But there was a survivor. Grigoriy Petrov.”
“His scout car had broken down several miles west of where I’d set up the ambush. He arrived in time to see me shoot the lone survivor as the man tried to swim for shore, but he was too far away to do anything. I later learned that the man I’d killed was a brilliant Russian physicist. His name was Nikolai. Nikolai Petrov.”
For the first time since the conversation had begun, Irene was grateful that it wasn’t occurring in person. She managed to stifle her gasp, but there was no hiding the look of horror she knew was etched across her face. “You killed Grigoriy’s brother?”
