Proxy Spy

By Charles Frost

Henry Fuller takes a summer off from his petroleum newsletter business in New York to give professional lectures at US Army bases in Germany. There he meets Helga, who enlists his help to free her husband imprisoned in Hungary. Soon he finds himself enmeshed in Soviet Russia's conflict with post-Mao China. As the FBI and CIA (whose misdeeds are being revealed in Congress) work to unscramble one mystery after another, they discover that a KGB operation has put one of Fuller's business contacts in danger. Set in the Cold War period, the novel illustrates the tradecraft and bureaucratic organization of intelligence operations and explores the powerful human emotions that motivate people to spy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Frost
• Release date: Apr 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310972393

Book preview

Chapter 1

A Window On Washington

October 1976

Lieutenant Mikhail Chuvakhin considered himself lucky to be assigned the Washington courier run – most of the time. But this was the off week. The KGB pouch usually weighed thirty to forty pounds, permitting him to take back a few consumer items on the side. The wives of the top brass at the Moscow Center always had lists of little things they wanted from Woodie’s or Garfinkel’s. He was more than glad to do these errands for them. Take care of the wives of Main Directorate heads and above and you’ll make captain in the shortest possible time, his division chief had advised him. Every fourth week, however, the pouch bulged to over a hundred pounds.

The extra weight consisted of several dozen tape reels. The worst of it was that his courier run wasn’t over when he reached Moscow. On arrival at Sheremetyevo International Airport he had to wrestle the bulky pouch aboard a military bus for a 60-mile trip via the ring road to the Air Forces base at Vnukovo airport southwest of the metropolis. After a few hours rest while the pouch reposed in secure storage he would board a military flight and escort it to East Berlin the next day.

The Ilyushin was landing at Shoenefeld Airport in light morning fog. The ‘Heroin Special’ is late this morning, he joked with the copilot as they passed an Interflug airliner taxiing into the passenger terminal. The bargain-priced East German flight from Istanbul would be filled with returning Turkish guest workers who would shortly disembark for the city train that would take them the few miles into the western sectors of Berlin.

With a grunt of resignation Chuvakhin flexed his broad shoulders to the task and heaved the pouch into a KGB staff car waiting for him at the Soviet military hangar. After a 20-minute drive through the nearly deserted streets of East Berlin he reached the entrance through an electrified fence to a heavily guarded compound at Karlshorst, the headquarters of the KGB’s East European operations. The car drew up to a long low gray building. He instructed the receptionist to notify Major Borisov of his arrival and waited for the mail orderly’s cart to be brought to him.

Chuvakhin had a few minutes to exchange pleasantries with Borisov’s secretary, a flaming redhead from Leningrad. You should be tired after manhandling that beast halfway around the world, she said glancing at the mail cart. Are you in training for our Olympic weightlifting team by any chance, she quipped facetiously. That would be sweet compensation for this back-breaking job, he averred.

The buzzer rang at her desk. All right, muscleman, in you go, she said giving him a wink as she ushered him into Borisov’s spacious office. The walls were covered with flags of the Guards Taman’ Motorized Rifle Division and photographs from their Seventh of November parades in Red Square, his staff college diploma from the Frunze Military Academy, and other memorabilia. An autographed picture of Red Army General Tretiak, Commander of the Far Eastern Military District, was prominently displayed on his desk along with a picture of himself peering across the Manchurian border into China through high-powered binoculars. There were two other doors leading off the office: One to small registry section, where the pouch was now taken; and the other to a work area outfitted with about 30 cubicles and a classroom for training. Each cubicle had tape players, earphones and an English-language typewriter.

Borisov emerged briskly from the work area to greet Chuvakhin. He rang for his orderly, who brought in the strong cinnamon-and-orange flavored tea. Thanks, comrade. How is your operation going here, Chuvakhin asked.

Very promising, Borisov responded with a soldier’s positiveness. I’ve been specially looking forward to the arrival of this pouch. We received a signal from the Washington residency last week that you would be bringing the first tapes from a new circuit they have tapped into. At our end, we’re improving our computer programming with each batch you bring us. I’ve had five more officers detailed to the project to exploit the additional take.

My congratulations on your progress, Gregor Andreevich. You have a good thing going here, as they say in Washington. Chuvakhin had savored his tea that had now cooled to a comfortable temperature. Changing the subject abruptly Chuvakhin asked, Have you seen any good bargains here lately?

You have the heart of a shopkeeper, Mikhail Evgenyevich, Borisov bantered lightheartedly. Nothing very exciting, actually. The choice consumer goods, as you well know, are from the ‘decadent capitalist’ sectors across the Wall, he replied with a sneer. You can pick up almost anything on the black market here in East Berlin, but the prices are outrageous. Who’s so eager for this stuff, anyway?

Oh, the wives on the Central Committee circuit, I assume. They must have something different to show off their status. And the usual bootlickers who give presents to the right people so they can move up faster. That’s what my boss tells me, at any rate. There’s a lot of truth in what he’s saying, I’m sure, but there could be more to it than that. I’ve suspected for some time now that he’s got something going with one of those high-level wives. There’s no shortage of boredom in that set, you know. Once you have your dacha, your commissary account, your chauffeured Zim, and your children have been admitted to the special Party schools, what is there to look forward to? Most are content to enjoy their privileges, but there are a few who start looking around for extra excitement – Party intrigue or an affair.

Well, I see that life at the top in Moscow hasn’t changed much, Borisov observed. Anything new at the Center, Misha? he inquired addressing Chuvakhin with the more familiar diminutive of his given name.

China is on everybody’s mind these days. The ‘main enemy’ remains the same, of course, Chuvakhin replied referring to the United States in the standard phraseology of KGB doctrine. But lately all departments of the First Chief Directorate that have any capability against the China target are getting some new tasking. Our advisors to the fraternal services are directing them to shift resources to collect more information inside China and within Chinese embassies. Why, even the Cuban DGI is being asked to give Chinese affairs a higher intelligence priority.

Borisov was pensive. This is quite a change. What has happened to bring this about, he asked.

We hear enough theories to fill a book. It’s pretty safe to say that the Center is having a difficult time figuring out what the new leaders who have taken over from Mao are going to do. I don’t think they expect political rapprochement with America for some time because of the impasse over Taiwan, but there’s been speculation that some of the old China hands favor at least technical cooperation with the West.

My, my, how the world turns, Borisov mused.

One thing is certain, though …

What’s that, Misha? Borisov interrupted attentively.

Any comrade who can bring in new intelligence on China will be decorated by Andropov himself, Chuvakhin responded with a smile.

Well, said Borisov with almost studied casualness. "It would seem that China is now ‘the land of hope and glory,’ as the British are fond of saying.

An apt expression, Gregor Andreevich. And I believe you’re right. Chuvakhin glanced at his watch. "Well, I must be going. Thanks for the tea. I’ll see you next month. Do svidaniye."

So long to you, too. Keep a few of those goodies for yourself. I expect to hear soon that those New Class wives in Moscow have ensnared you. They laughed.

After Chuvakhin left, Borisov buzzed his secretary. Inform the new officers to report to the classroom at 1:30 this afternoon.

Good afternoon, comrade officers, Borisov began, standing behind an austere lecturn. "Welcome to Kombinatsiya OKNO. Since you are all fluent in English, you know that means ‘Operation WINDOW,’ and that’s the way I will refer to it from now on. You are part of an intelligence project that is very important to the security and prosperity of the motherland. It gives us military, economic and political information that our ‘principal adversary’ would not want us to know. ‘WINDOW’ gathers this intelligence by intercepting communications in and out of Washington. In a few minutes I will show you how this is done.

Here I must remind you of the extreme sensitivity of communications intelligence. You have all been vetted to the fullest degree for access to this special category information. You are not to discuss ‘WINDOW’ information with anyone outside our work group except specially designated persons in certain ministries and state committees who have been cleared for this material. These persons are listed in the ‘WINDOWS List’ kept in my custody. There are very few persons on that list in forward areas besides ourselves, I might add. Here in the DDR, only Commander-in-Chief Ivanovsky and his intelligence chief at Group Headquarters are routinely briefed on ‘WINDOW’ intelligence that concerns the Warsaw Pact. I myself sometimes travel to Zossen-Wunsdorf to give those briefings. Third Shock Army Headquarters at Magdeburg have contingency clearances and could be cut in should they need to know. The fraternal forces in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary are not – repeat, not – aware of the ‘WINDOW’ breakthrough. We have to minimize the risk of compromise through defections.

Borisov called for the lights to be dimmed and the slide projector to be turned on. Here is our embassy in Washington, he intoned professorially as a four-storey Victorian mansion came into focus. That’s our original building and, incidentally, still the official address of our mission there. It’s on 16th Street only four blocks from this… The projector clicked, throwing on a standard tourist color slide of the White House. The projector clicked again. Let’s switch back to the Embassy again. This time we have a view from a nearby building so that you can see more closely what is on the embassy roof. The dominant feature, of course, is the antenna you see there that looks something like an old lady’s parasol, he said using his pointer to pick out an array of parallel hollow steel tubes extending horizontally from a support column almost as thick as a flagpole. That antenna is oriented toward Moscow and is used for long-distance low frequency radio communications. Nothing surprising about that, of course.

Now look at this object here. He warmed to his subject as he pointed to a tarnished bronze structure that rose about four feet above the roof line. "We call this the ‘revolving skylight.’ Working at night, after the FBI surveillance agents had gone off duty, our technicians removed one of the panes of glass in the skylight and replaced it with a panel made of non-reflective material. They then replaced the base of the skylight from the inside so it could rotate and mounted a disk antenna inside. The modified skylight could then be discreetly rotated to intercept local signals.

Which brings us to this picture, Borisov beamed. The screen reflected the image of a 12-storey building of undistinguished architecture. "Here is the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company headquarters building in downtown Washington. Notice the four transmitter ‘horns’ on the roof. These ‘horns’ beam thousands of telephone calls every hour through the air by microwaves. American telephone companies find microwave circuits more efficient than landline cables for handling high volumes of long-distance calls. Ultra-high frequency radio signals, as you know, can be narrowly focused and transmitted line-of-sight from one relay tower to the next. Telephone messages from distant cities come into Washington via the microwave grid and are patched into the local dialing system. Similarly, outgoing long-distance calls are collected within the Washington dialing area, switched onto microwave carriers and routed in an appropriate direction.

Now anyone close enough to these microwave beams can pick up telephone conversations with the proper equipment. Our embassy building happens to be only a kilometer from the Telephone Building. Using the sophisticated electronic gear installed in the ‘revolving skylight’ we have been eavesdropping on calls being transmitted in several directions in and out of Washington. It’s especially easy to pick up the northwest pair of beams between the Telephone Building and the microwave repeaters you see on the radio mast in this slide. Watch, I’ll show you.

The projector was switched off and the lights turned back on. Borisov pointed to a table. Gather ’round, please. There was a shuffling of chairs as the officers formed a group around the table as Borisov unfolded a street map of Washington and spread it out. You’ll observe the White House with 16th Street running due north from it. And here is our Embassy on 16th Street between L and M Streets, he said poking the map with his pointer. The Telephone Building is over here on 13th Street near these two intercity bus stations called Greyhound and Trailways. The repeater station I just showed you is on a high point out here where Nebraska Avenue crosses Wisconsin. Take my pointer and connect these two points. What do you observe?

The Embassy is almost on a straight line connecting these two points, Comrade Major, one of the young officers responded brightly.

"Khorosho. The microwave beams pass practically overhead." There were murmurs of admiration from the group.

Ah, but, comrades, Borisov held up a warning finger to caution them. "The work is only half done when the Communications Directorate people at the residency have intercepted and recorded these conversations. That’s where you come in. This ‘WINDOW’ material is useless to us unless we can organize it. We have to be able to sift out the conversations that contain some useful information from the many of little or no intelligence significance. The conversations that you will listen to are not what Americans would regard as of a sensitive nature. But routine business calls, if they are systematically collated, can point to high-technology projects and provide a fruitful source of leads for our covert operatives.

"We are using high-speed computers, the best available in the socialist countries, to exploit this material. They first decode the routing indicators that precede each message to sort through the traffic for transmissions to phone numbers we have selected that might yield information of intelligence value. We have entered many numbers from the Pentagon telephone directory, for example. Our computers are also programmed to select conversations for you to analyze on the basis of keywords. We have built up a list of keywords like ‘airframe’ and ‘embassy.’ As you monitor these conversations you can help us expand our list of keywords.

That’s all for today, comrades. Tomorrow I will show you how we use this keyword program with the computers in the basement.

The young officers jumped to attention. "Spacibo, Comrade Major," the leading junior officer sang out as Borisov retired to his office.

Chapter 2

Meeting By Accident In Frankfurt

Summer 1976

Fuller put his German phrase book down on the bench beside him and looked at his watch. The clock-tower on the cathedral was chiming 5:00. Clouds were beginning to cover the late afternoon sun. It’s time to go, he thought, realizing it would soon be too cool for the light jersey and slacks that he was wearing. He had enjoyed the Zoological Gardens mixing with the Sunday crowds. Yet he felt detached from the merrymaking of the families pursuing their weekend pleasures. Somehow taking the summer off in Europe wasn’t coming up to expectations.

His spirits sank further when he returned to the VW he had parked on the street. Damn, he exploded. The left headlight was smashed and the fender badly dented in. This is all I need, he almost screamed. He visualized repeated visits to the rental car agency to fill out endless insurance forms. Germans are so thorough, he recalled with dismay.

Then he discovered a note that had been left under the windshield wiper. The note, in a neat flowing hand, was to his surprise in English instead of in German:

Sorry I bump your car. My fault. Don’t call insurance company. My friend can fix just like new. Please call me after 6:00 today. Helga Stroessel.

Helga! What an exotic name! She didn’t sign the note Frau Stroessel. Would that mean she was not married? A blond Teutonic fraulein, perhaps. How old would she be? Would she be available? This might be rather interesting, he surmised.

While turning over these questions in his mind Fuller reflected on how little social life he had permitted himself since college. His first affair had been a shattering experience. During his sophomore-junior summer he had worked as a busboy at an island resort in Maine. He was almost immediately drawn to Angela, one of the waitresses at a beachfront restaurant where he worked. She was undoubtedly attractive though she didn’t have the prettiest face. She was trim, short and well-tanned. Her honey blond hair was neatly braided so that it never got in her way. She moved with almost athletic purposefulness and wasted little motion in carrying trays and serving food at her tables. Her pert little breasts were devilishly distracting as they bounced lightly with her brisk movements.

We’re both off tomorrow. Let’s rent bikes and ride the Beach Road, he had suggested. She accepted, and they spent several of their days off exploring the island. One afternoon as they were biking a shower came up suddenly and they took cover under a rock ledge. The temperature dropped after the sun was obscured by thunderclouds. He took off his football jacket and put it over her shoulders. He put his arm around her to stop her shivering. Soon he had both arms around her and was kissing her madly. He reached under her blouse and began to fondle her breasts. Hey, Henry, that’s far enough, Angela had said firmly but without rancor.

Later at work he would try to catch her eye while she was serving table and to intercept her near the employee lockers. That had really upset her. Good grief, what is she getting steamed off about? he wondered. I’m only showing interest. It’s not like I was harassing her. Though he couldn’t understand her reaction he felt confident he could talk out the problem, whatever it was, with her. He prided himself on being a good talker, after all. OK, something’s bothering you. What is it? he queried her as they were going through their closing-up routine. She cut him short. I don’t want to talk here. Let’s walk.

The mildly humid night air enclosed them as they left the restaurant. The beach was bathed in a pale moonlight, the stillness broken only by the gentle lapping of the surf. They walked slowly along the beach and sat down on the dune. Don’t get me wrong, she said. I’m not offended by your attentions, but we must have an understanding. I don’t want you to make eyes at me and hover around me while I’m on duty. ‘Her Highness’ doesn’t like any display of affection – not among the help anyway. Makes the customers think we don’t have our minds on our work, she says.

You don’t realize how much you’re demanding, he chuckled. It will take a supreme effort to regard you dispassionately. I believe I can manage it, but only while we’re on the job. You are so cute when you’re scolding me, I could look forward to it. She gave him an affectionate pat on the nose. He embraced her, and she responded to his eagerness. They sank back into the sand. Before long they were lying together, their clothes piled under them. I love you, Angela, he had murmured countless times then and afterwards. For the rest of the summer their days off together usually ended in the room that she rented in an off-beachfront house.

About six weeks after he returned to MIT he received a phone call from Angela. She spoke hesitantly, obviously distressed. Henry, she sobbed, you said you would love me always, didn’t you?

Yes, of course I did. What’s wrong, dear?

I think I’m pregnant.

Are you sure? he asked hopefully.

I am now. I went to see the doctor today. She says there’s no doubt about it.

Oh my God, he groaned.

I tried to be careful, but I guess I wasn’t careful enough.

Don’t blame yourself, sweetheart. It was more my fault than yours, he replied gallantly.

Will you still love me, Henry? she wept piteously.

Of course I will.

You’re not going to leave me because of this, are you?

No, of course not, Angela darling. I’ll take care of you. I’ll talk with my dad. We’ll work things out. He sounded more reassuring than he felt.

On a visit home in Marblehead that weekend he took his father aside. Dad, you won’t be pleased with me, but I have a problem I’ve got to deal with. I got a girl in trouble this summer and I’m going to marry her.

His father sat down on the sofa slowly cupping his chin in his hands. After a long thoughtful moment he spoke. Well, son, I appreciate your coming to me in this matter. I admire, too, your desire to do the right thing. But let’s look at this problem realistically. You couldn’t support a wife and a baby and continue your education. If you had to drop out of university she and the baby would be much poorer for it. Besides that, you and she would both be unhappy with your fate – and most likely with each other as well. Knowing that your prospects were blighted by taking on a responsibility like this too soon would be a real happiness destroyer. At this stage in your life your first commitment should be to finish your education and get on with your career.

Yeah, Dad, I see your point. But an abortion is something that she – and I – will have to live with for the rest of our lives, he protested.

"I’m glad you see that, son. But that’s the reality of