“Who was chief of station during his tenure, then?”
Owens laughed. “I was given the job exactly one month after Yarnell was sent over. We worked together in Moscow for twenty-eight months, until the Russians finally kicked him out.”
They reached the house, but before they went in, Owens took a cigarette from McGarvey and they sat on the porch steps, smoking and looking into the wind at a cold sea filled with white horses. McGarvey, of course, had seen Yarnell in a different light than Owens. If Yarnell had been a Soviet agent he might have known about the missile bases on Cuba, and only when they had been discovered by another section within the agency did he “discover” them himself. To throw suspicion off himself, he drove his people hard, probably causing the best of his field men to quit in disgust, while secretly rewarding the inept operatives. Yarnell’s little stunt of pulling some of the Company’s best field men into head up a missions and planning department was nothing short of brilliant. He had emasculated our foreign intelligence service, evidently just as it was about to make some major discovery harmful to the Soviets. And pulling Owens with him out to Moscow was a stroke of genius. With his mentor running the operation, Yarnell would have had a totally free hand to do whatever he wanted. It made McGarvey sick to think how Yarnell had used Owens, and even sicker to think how wide open our embassy had to have been in those days.
But then, he thought, it was the nature of the business.
18
“Why did the Russians kick him out of Moscow?” McGarvey asked. “Seems to me he would have charmed them just as well as he had the Mexicans, unless the Russians were sore at him for his successes against CESTA.”
They’d gone inside where Owens had straightened out the kitchen and opened them each another beer before they settled back in the living room. The fire had died down a bit so the room wasn’t as hot as it had been before. The dog had not moved from its spot on the rug. McGarvey wondered if it was dead.
“He killed a man,” Owens said holding his beer bottle in both hands. His cheeks were rosy from the wind and chill air outside.
“In Moscow?” McGarvey asked, startled.
“In Moscow. He was one of ours. Darby just gunned him down. It wasn’t very pretty.”
“So the Russians kicked him out.”
Owens nodded. “I left a few months later.”
“In disgrace?”
“What?”
“I mean because of what Yarnell had done. You were his mentor, his chief of station.”
Owens laughed. “I don’t think you understand, McGarvey. Killing the kid was the culmination of a first-rate operation. Darby went home a hero and so did I. The only reason I stuck around was to pick up the few loose ends. And let me tell you, there were damned few of those. Darby ran a tight ship.”
McGarvey was amazed. He didn’t quite know what to say. “Yarnell was in his element.”
“You can say that again. He hadn’t been there thirty days when I arrived, and already he had developed half a dozen stringers, was having dinner and weekends on a regular basis with a couple of generals and a deputy on the Presidium staff, and he and our ambassador were on a first-name basis.”
“You would have been disappointed with anything less,” McGarvey suggested mildly.
“But it never ceased to amaze me. Remember, I’d been reading Darby’s field reports from Mexico all along, but this was the very first time I had ever been in the field with him. It’s one thing to read about it, it’s an entirely different matter to actually see it.”
McGarvey lit them both another cigarette. Owens seemed grateful for it. He started off in another direction.
“Those twenty-eight months we were together went by quicker than any two years plus I’ve spent, before or since. I was chief of station, but it was as if I were in school, at the feet of a master. Our product was brilliant. Beyond compare, that’s how they described our dailies in Langley. And I got most of the credit.”
True to form, Yarnell took a nice apartment near Moscow University, in a section of the city called Lenin Hills, though how he managed to get approval from the Soviet authorities to move up there was beyond most of the embassy staff. (To McGarvey’s question at this point as to why no one had become suspicious of Yarnell, Owens not only couldn’t provide an answer, he had no idea what McGarvey had implied.) There were a lot of comings and goings from his apartment at all hours of the day and night. Russians are great ones for having very late dinners, and then staying up half the night drinking spiced vodka and eating snacks and listening to music or poetry or dancing, or just talking. This was Yarnell’s sort of life, exactly, because he was a highly social animal. He was in his glory. Living life to the hilt.
Then came Operation Hellgate, which right from the beginning everyone realized was a horse of an entirely different stripe. This time Yarnell seemed somehow vicious. Mean. It was as if he were trying to get back at someone for something very terrible.
The business was something new, something disturbing, according to Owens. “Up to this point, Darby Yarnell had been the sort of a man who was able to clearly see both sides of any issue no matter its emotional content. He was a man who understood the little foibles and failings we’re all loaded with. But this time, McGarvey, it was different.”
In those days any major operation had to be first outlined in some detail and then sent to Langley for approval. Of course Yarnell’s projects always went through without a hitch.
“With Operation Hellgate, I sent him back to Washington to present his side of the issue in person,” Owens said.
“You were against it?”
Owens nodded.
“But in your estimation it was important.”
Owens looked up. “It was that—” He stopped a moment, apparently at a loss for the correct word. “It was that indecent.”
McGarvey was surprised at the choice. “He got his approval from Langley, I take it.”
“He was back within the week. And yes, he was given the green light. It was the only time I ever disagreed with him about a project. But I was overruled.” Owens shook his head sadly at the memory. “We talked about the operation, at least we did at first, until it actually got underway. Then we were very busy. He said that he agreed with me that it was a bad business, but that we hadn’t made the choice. It wasn’t either of us who was the traitor. But since it was staring us in the face—‘An opportunity of tarnished gold,’ he called it — we would be remiss in our duty if we didn’t go ahead. It was the basis on which, I suppose, Langley went along with him.”
Classified communications were taken care of by the air force and the National Security Agency, which loaned the embassy the operators and technicians and the cryptographic equipment. This was before the days when satellite communications were common. All long line, then. Classified information was sent via encrypted teletype to Washington. The Russians could and did intercept our encrypted messages all day long, but with the equipment we were using then, the codes were literally impossible to break. (It still held true today.) The days of the one-time cipher pad for anything other than confidential material were all but gone. An electronically-produced, totally random signal was mixed with the text, producing a signal that had no rhythm or meter, hidden or otherwise. Only a receiver in perfect synchronization with the transmitter could possibly reproduce the clear text. The system was called KW-26.