When the door closed behind the Soviet ambassador, Dr. Pelt opened a side door to the Oval Office. Judge Moore came in.
“Mr. President, it’s been a while since I’ve had to do things like hide in closets.”
“You really expect this to work?” Pelt said.
“Yes, I do now,” Moore settled comfortably into a leather chair.
“Isn’t this a little shaky, Judge?” Pelt asked. “I mean, running an operation this complex?”
“That’s the beauty of it, Doctor, we’re not running anything. The Soviets will be doing that for us. Oh, sure, we’ll have a lot of our people prowling around Eastern Europe asking a lot of questions. So will Sir Basil’s fellows. The French and the Israelis already are, because we’ve asked them if they know what’s happening with the stray missile sub. The KGB will find out quickly enough and wonder why the four main Western intelligence agencies are all asking the same questions — instead of pulling into their shells like they’d expect them to if this were our operation.
“You have to appreciate the dilemma the Soviets face, a choice between two equally unattractive scenarios. On the one hand, they can choose to believe that one of their most trusted professional officers has committed high treason on an unprecedented scale. You’ve seen our file on Captain Ramius. He’s the Communist version of an eagle scout, a genuine New Soviet Man. Add to that the fact that a defection conspiracy necessarily involves a number of equally trusted officers. The Soviets have a mind block against believing that individuals of this type will ever leave the Workers’ Paradise. That seems paradoxical, I admit, given the strenuous efforts they expend to keep people from leaving their country, but it’s true. Losing a ballet dancer or a KGB agent is one thing — losing the son of a Politburo member, an officer with nearly thirty years of unblemished service, is quite another. Moreover, a naval captain has a lot of privileges; you might call his defection the equivalent of a self-made millionaire leaving New York to live in Moscow. They simply will not believe it.
“On the other hand, they can believe the story we planted through Henderson, which is also unattractive but is supported by a good deal of circumstantial evidence, especially our efforts to entice their crewmen to defect. You saw how furious they are about that. The way they think, this is a gross violation of the rules of civilized behavior. The president’s forceful reaction to our discovery that this was a missile submarine is also evidence that favors Henderson’s story.”
“So what side will they come down on?” the president asked.
“That, sir, is a question of psychology more than anything else, and Soviet psychology is very hard for us to read. Given the choice between the collective treason of ten men and an outside conspiracy, my opinion is that they will prefer the latter. For them to believe that this really was defection — well, it would force them to reexamine their own beliefs. Who likes to do that?” Moore gestured grandly. “The latter alternative means that their security has been violated by outsiders, but being a victim is more palatable than having to recognize the intrinsic contradictions of their own governing philosophy. On top of that we have the fact that the KGB will be running the investigation.”
“Why?” Pelt asked, caught up in the judge’s plot.
“In either case, a defection or a penetration of naval operational security, the GRU would have been responsible. Security of the naval and military forces is their bailiwick, the more so with the damage done to the KGB after the departure of our friend Andropov. The Soviets can’t have an organization investigating itself — not in their intelligence community! So, the KGB will be looking to take its rival service apart. From the KGB’s perspective, outside instigation is the far more attractive alternative; it makes for a bigger operation. If they confirm Henderson’s story and convince everyone that it’s true — and they will, of course — it makes them look all that much better for having uncovered it.”
“They will confirm the story?”
“Of course they will! In the intelligence business if you look hard enough for something, you find it, whether it’s really there or not. Lord, we owe this Ramius fellow more than he will ever know. An opportunity like this doesn’t come along once in a generation. We simply can’t lose.”
“But the KGB will emerge stronger,” Pelt observed. “Is that a good thing?”
Moore shrugged. “Bound to happen eventually. Unseating and possibly killing Andropov gave the military services too much prestige, just like with Beria back in the fifties. The Soviets depend on political control of their military as much as we do — more. Having the KGB take their high command apart gets the dirty work done for them. It had to happen anyway, so it’s just as well that we can profit by it. There’s only a few more things we have to do.”
“Such as?” the president asked.
“Our friend Henderson will leak information in a month or so saying that we had a submarine tracking Red October all the way from Iceland.”
“But why?” Pelt objected. “Then they’ll know that we were lying, that all the excitement over the missile sub was a lie.”
“Not exactly, Doctor,” Moore said. “Having a missile sub this close to our coast remains a violation of the agreement, and from their point of view we have no way of knowing why she was there — until we interrogate the crewmen remaining behind, who will probably tell us little of value. The Soviets will expect that we have not been completely truthful with them on this affair. The fact that we were trailing their sub and were ready to destroy it at any time gives them the evidence of our duplicity that they’ll be looking for. We’ll also say that Dallas monitored the reactor incident on sonar, and that will explain the proximity of our rescue ship. They know, well, they certainly suspect, that we have concealed something. This will mislead them about what it was we really concealed. The Russians have a saying for this. They call it wolf meat. And they will launch an extensive operation to penetrate our operation, whatever it is. But they will find nothing. The only people in the CIA who know what is really going on are Greer, Ritter, and myself. Our operations people have orders to find out what was going on, and that’s all that can leak out.”
“What about Henderson, and how many of our people know about the submarine?” the president asked.
“If Henderson spills anything to them he’ll be signing his own death warrant. The KGB deals severely with double agents, and would not believe that we tricked him into delivering false information. He knows it, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on him in any case. How many of our people know about the sub? A hundred perhaps, and the number will increase somewhat — but remember that they think we now have two dead Soviet subs off our coast, and they have every reason to believe that whatever Soviet sub equipment turns up in our labs has been recovered from the ocean floor. We will, of course, be reactivating the Glomar Explorer for just that purpose. They’d be suspicious if we didn’t. Why disappoint them? Sooner or later they just might figure the whole story out, but by that time the stripped hulk will be at the bottom of the sea.”
“So, we can’t keep this a secret forever?” Pelt asked.
“Forever’s a long time. We have a plan for the possibility. For the immediate future the secret should be fairly safe, what with only a hundred people in on it. In a year, minimum, more likely two or three, they may have accumulated enough data to suspect what has happened, but by that time there won’t be much physical evidence to point to. Moreover, if the KGB discovers the truth, will they want to report it? Were the GRU to find out, they certainly would, and the resulting chaos within their intelligence community would also work to our benefit.” Moore took a cigar from a leather holder. “As I said, Ramius has given us a fantastic opportunity on several levels. And the beauty of it is that we don’t have to do much of anything. The Russians will be doing all the legwork, looking for something that isn’t there.”
“What about the defectors, Judge?” the president asked.
“They, Mr. President, will be taken care of. We know how to do this, and we rarely have a complaint about the CIA’s hospitality. We’ll take some months to debrief them, and at the same time we’ll be preparing them for life in America. They’ll get new identities, reeducation, cosmetic surgery if necessary, and they’ll never have to work another day as long as they live — but they will want to work. Almost all of them do. I expect the navy will find places for them, paid consultants for their submarine warfare department, that sort of thing.”