“You’re not suggesting, Eleanor, are you, that Kurt Kuhl was one of your—”
“I’m telling you that Kurt Kuhl has been in the clandestine service of the company longer than you’re old.”
“I find that very hard to believe,” Spearson said.
“I thought you might. Nevertheless, you have now been told.”
“My God, he’s an old man!”
“Seventy-five,” she said. “About as old as Billy Waugh.”
“Billy Waugh?”
“The fellow who bagged Carlos the Jackal. The last time I heard, Billy was running around Afghanistan looking for Osama bin Laden.”
Again he looked at her a long moment before replying.
“If what you say is true . . .”
“I just made this up to give you a little Christmas Eve excitement,” she said sarcastically.
“Then why wasn’t I told of this before?”
“You didn’t have the Need to Know. Now, in my judgment, you do.”
“And the ambassador? Did he know?”
“No. He didn’t have the Need to Know, either.”
“You made that decision, is that what you’re saying?”
“I was given the authority to tell him if I thought it was necessary. Or not to tell him.”
“That violates the Country Team principle.”
“The secretary of State signed on to what the DCI told me.”
“What was Kuhl doing for the CIA?”
“You want a thumbnail or the whole scenario?”
“I think I had better hear everything.”
“Okay. Kuhl was a Hungarian Jew. His family had been in the pastry shop business for a long time, way back before World War One. They saw what was happening and got out of Hungary to the States in 1939. Kurt was then ten years old, the youngest of their children.
“There was already a Kuhlhaus store in New York City and another in Chicago. The family went back to work in that business. When war came, his older brother, Gustav, went into the Army, was promptly recruited by the OSS, and was one of the original Jedburghs.”
“The original what?”
“Agents for the Office of Strategic Services trained at Jedburgh, Scotland, to jump into German-occupied Europe. Bill Colby, who, I’m sure you remember, went on to become DCI in ’73, was one of them. Gustav was captured in France, sent to Sachsenhausen, and executed there just before the Russians arrived.
“In 1946, just as soon as he turned seventeen, Kurt, by then an American citizen, enlisted in the Army. Getting to Europe to see what family assets he could salvage was one reason. Avenging his brother was another.
“He spoke German and Hungarian and Slovak, etcetera. He was assigned here as an interpreter at the Kommandatura—the Allied Control Commission. ‘Four men in a jeep.’ Remember that?”
Spearson shook his head.
“Toward the end of his tour, they found out that Corporal Kuhl had been sneaking in and out of what was then Czechoslovakia and Hungary and East Germany. That was in 1949. He should have been court-martialed, but somebody in the CIA was smart enough to offer him a deal.
“If he was willing to be of service, unspecified, if called upon, he not only would not be court-martialed but would be allowed to remain in Vienna to salvage what he could of the family business, and he would be helped to do that.
“He took the deal. I don’t know what he did between ’49 and ’56, but he was so helpful during the Hungarian uprising that the agency put him on the payroll, as field officer, clandestine service. He’s been on it ever since.”
“He’s been a spy all this time?”
“Not in the James Bond sense. What he has been doing—and if you think about it a moment, you’ll see how valuable this has been—is identify people the company could turn. He didn’t turn them. He just identified those people he thought could be turned. He became their friend, learned their strengths and weaknesses, and passed it to the company.
“The diplomatic and intelligence services of the old Soviet Union, and its satellites, as well as the Western countries, do—as we do—tend to move their people between assignments in an area. In this case, Eastern Europe. Their dips would be in Warsaw on one assignment, Vienna the next, maybe Rome, and later Budapest, then back to Vienna . . .”
“And we wouldn’t recruit them here, but when they were somewhere else?”
“Precisely. An Austrian passport was arranged for him. That happened to many ex-Hungarians who couldn’t get a Hungarian passport. He became a Viennese, the heir to the Kuhlhaus pastry shops. It was a perfect cover. When the wall came down, no one raised an eyebrow when Kuhlhauses were opened or reopened—in Prague, Budapest, all over—and no one thought it was in any way suspicious that Kurt Kuhl moved around Eastern Europe supervising his business.”
“Well, apparently someone did,” Spearson said. “If he was murdered.”
“Nobody ever accused the SVR of stupidity. I suppose we should have expected he would get burned. . . . My God, he was doing his job for fifty years. He didn’t think so. I tried to warn him it was just about inevitable.”
“You’ve been in touch with him?”
She nodded.
“About once a week. At the Kuhlhaus store on the Graben. He often took me in the back room for a little café mit schlagobers. And I will go to his funeral. I think it will probably be held in Saint Stephen’s. Over the years, he made a lot of important friends. I will go as an old customer, not as the counselor for consular affairs.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I hope nothing. But I thought you should know who he really was, and what he was doing, rather than be surprised when you read it on the front page of the Wiener Tages Zeitung.”
[FIVE]
Restaurant Oca
Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
1855 24 December 2005
In the opinion of Liam Duffy—a short, muscular, blond thirty-nine-year-old—there was a good deal to recommend the Restaurant Oca on a blistering hot Christmas Eve, starting with the fact that it would stay open until seven. Most other restaurants in this country of devout Catholics closed just after lunch to celebrate the night before Christ’s sacred birth.
The food was good, but the basic reason he had suggested to Mónica, his wife, that they take a ride out to Oca in Pilar from their apartment in Barrio Norte was the geese.
Oca was adjacent to a residential country club called The Farm. Just inside the gate to the guarded community of larger-than-ordinary houses, and immediately behind the restaurant, was a small lake that supported a large gaggle of geese.
The geese had learned to paddle up to the rear of the restaurant and beg for bread scraps. The Duffy kids—there were four, two girls and two boys, ranging in age from two to seven years—never tired of feeding them.
This meant that Liam and Mónica could linger over their dessert and coffee without having to separate the children from sibling disputes. These occurred often, of course, but far more frequently when the kids were excited, as they were by Christmas Eve and when the temperature and humidity were as oppressive as they were now.
Duffy ignored the waiter standing nearby with their check in hand as long as he could, but finally waved him over. Mónica collected the kids as her husband waited for his change.
From here, they would go to Mónica’s parents’ home in Belgrano for the ritual Christmas Eve “tea.” They would have Christmas dinner tomorrow with his parents and four other Duffy males and their families at their apartment in Palermo.
Mónica appeared with the children, holding the hand of the youngest boy and the ear of the elder. The other two children seemed delighted with the arrangement.