A Very Private Plot Page 5
“Great sport, eh, Nikolai?” Andrei began. “It will not be so easy tomorrow, you will see. Well, but then tomorrow will not be so difficult, because our artillery is very heavy, and there will not be much counter fire. We will drive them up to shelters in the mountain, yes, and probably, yes, Muhammad Ezi will seek the greater refuge of the range, perhaps even the shelter of Pakistan. But the success of the operation will depend entirely on the air offensive, the fighters especially. We will not be able to use our artillery effectively into the ravine—”
“Why not?”
“Why not? My dear Nikolai … because the same artillery we will be using to assault Mountain ‘A’ will require four, five hours, maybe more, to transport around the mountain to get within firing range of the ravine. We rifle soldiers will be able to ascend and take our positions and begin firing into the ravine quickly, in less than an hour. So the heavy barrage will need to be from the airplanes. Without American-made interference—You have seen the American Stingers?… Of course not. We have been in the field only ten days, and on Thursday there were no Stingers, I do not know why.” The pitch of Andrei’s voice was interrogatory: “It is very surprising.
“Oh my God what I would do for some vodka, it is two days since I ran out. Do you know, Nikolai, I have absolutely no idea what you think of this madness we are engaged in. You are the most reserved man I have ever associated with! As a matter of fact, Nikolai, I do not really know why I continue to seek your company. We have slept in the same two-man shelter now for ten days. You listen to me, and sometimes you laugh, and you answer my questions. But I do not know what is on your mind, and surely you are the only officer in the army who does not complain of Moscow’s policy in this accursed war.”
Andrei put down his aluminum plate. He spoke now gruffly. “Say something, for the love of God, Nikolai, say something! You may not be able to say something two days from now, because you may be dead!” Andrei stared into the eyes of Nikolai and, grabbing his collar with one hand, shook him hard, though suddenly his voice modulated, as it traveled from exhortation to entreaty. Andrei Belinkov wanted desperately to hear Nikolai condemn the mad vicious bloody venture in which the Soviet Union was engaged “for no purpose except a meaningless enlargement of empire and the sweet smell of nearby Iranian oil. That’s the only purpose of it,” he half muttered. His hand loosened its grip on Nikolai’s collar and a tear came to his eye. He dropped his hand. “It is a quite dreadful way to die, is it not, Nikolai?”
Nikolai spoke now. His voice had acquired a new timbre, one Belinkov had not heard before.
“It is a terrible way to die, yes, Andrei. The death of the mujahedin who surrendered to us two weeks ago, that too was a terrible way to die.”
Belinkov turned away. “What are we supposed to do with the prisoners?”
Nikolai did not answer.
Belinkov relented. “You are right, it was a terrible way to die. I have not got used to it.”
Operation Bottleneck worked according to schedule for the first two days. Early on the third day, a Soviet surveillance plane flying at 50,000 feet reported that the mujahedin appeared to be consolidating on the southern base of Mountain “A” preparatory to crossing the ravine to the safety of the high range, two miles across. Colonel Dombrovsky was elated and ordered two battalions of light infantry to begin the forced march to the east side of the mountain, proceed to deploy, and fire at the enemy. Orders went out to the artillery to begin their arduous trek to both sides of the mountain. The radio from the surveillance plane alerted the Soviet fighters and bombers on standby 75 kilometers to the north.
One hour later, several hundred mujahedin began to cross the ravine. At 8:35 a.m. the Soviet air force could be spotted on the western horizon—as heavy a concentration of Su-17s and Su-25s, thought Nikolai, as one might expect to see flying over Moscow on May Day! He continued to lead his men, at quick-time, to the eastern side of the mountain, where they would squat down and contribute their own firepower to the slaughter. The bombers, he guessed, would come in at about 5,000 feet, the fighter planes at 1,000 feet. And now the explosive sounds of falling bombs began, synchronizing with the deadly rat-tat-tat of the fighters’ machine guns.
And then—Nikolai stared in disbelief. Six fighter planes, almost as if exercising a joint maneuver, abruptly left their offensive configuration. Three exploded before hitting the ground. The ten surviving planes in the squadron, executing the Soviet plan, consummated their 180-degree turn at the south end of the ten-mile-long ravine and whizzed back to strafe again the mujahedin, whose numbers, designed to swell as Muhammad Ezi’s regiment made their way to the range, were however rapidly diminishing. Suddenly, four more fighters were struck, three going down directly in flames; one, with a smoky contrail as if gasping for air, lost its altitude slowly, crashing, finally, an eternal twenty seconds later, into the west face of the range. The surviving six fighters abandoned the cauldron, and suddenly the bombing fleet dematerialized into the horizon.
It was then that the rebels’ rifle fire concentrated on the Soviet battalion that had been poised to fire into the ravine, by now almost empty of targets as the mujahedin completed their ambush. Nikolai shouted at his men to take cover. It seemed only seconds before Nikolai heard a bullet’s thud a few yards ahead of him. And it was only minutes later that he discerned that the heavy rifle fire was coming not only from ahead of him, from the southern flank of the mountain, but from behind. The mujahedin had descended from their mountain crevices, taking positions to the rear of the Soviet regiment, which now was taking concentrated fire from ahead and behind. Belinkov’s voice came in over the radio to Nikolai. “The bastards are everywhere. Dig in. I am radioing to the artillery to head back and give us cover.”
Soon after midday, Soviet artillery began to pepper the northern flank. The withering fire from the rear gradually decreased and the order came to the Soviet commanders to turn about and make their way back to where they had come from. Nikolai shouted out the order for his platoon to retreat. Platoon B provided cover from the front. At this moment, standing to shout out his commands, Nikolai felt the bullet in his thigh. He dived down and began to crawl. He could no longer run, though he’d have felt no safer doing so.
It was midafternoon before there was anything like a reassembly at the regimental station from which the offensive had begun. Thirty-five men in Nikolai’s platoon were checked in, ten of them wounded. Twenty-five were not accounted for. The casualties in the other platoons were comparable.
Colonel Dombrovsky did not appear, and no one came forward to testify to what had happened to him. It was not until nightfall that the military radio from Kandahãr brought them the news: a radio intercept of the enemy revealed that Dombrovsky had been taken prisoner.
Andrei Belinkov made it back with a dozen survivors of his own platoon. He went to the field hospital and found Nikolai. Only penlight flashlights were permitted and it was with a pen-light trained on his thigh that Nikolai saw the scalpel dig into his flesh to bare the cavity in which the bullet lay. He did not remember the yank that dislodged it, feeling only the intense pain and hearing the voice of Andrei (“Easy, Nikolai Grigorovich, the worst is almost over …”), who held a second flashlight for the pharmacist’s mate officiating. He remembered hearing the voice of another officer saying hoarsely to Belinkov, “A bloody ambush. The whole thing. Including two weeks ago—no Stingers—whole thing—bloody ambush.”
Nikolai woke the next day in a truck in which he and a half-dozen—a dozen?—other soldiers lay, some of them moaning, all of them freezing in the cold as they made their bumpy way back to the division headquarters fifty kilometers away. Every day for four days Andrei would come and exchange a few words with him. They spoke about every subject except the war, except the killing. Nikolai spoke of his childhood, ascribing his orphan status to a local plague, and then about his college years. Andrei spent relaxing moments describing the sports he had so much enjoyed, the karate lessons he had mastered, and t
he friends in boyhood who joined him in attempting to eke some pleasures from their drab lives. Where-were-you-when-Stalin-died did not work for them, since neither had been alive in 1953, but they did recall the great Olympic triumphs of the gymnast Nikolai Andrianov in Montreal in 1976. Neither of them brought up the American boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980. That had been a reaction to the Soviet Afghan offensive that had brought them here, an engagement they would not willingly evoke.
On the fourth day, using crutches, Nikolai made his way to the canvas-covered army theater, where movies and documentaries were shown. Three hundred men and officers were assembled there, under regimental orders, to view a documentary flown in from Moscow. Andrei Sakharov had denounced the Afghanistan war from his exile in Gorky, the announcer reported. The camera then focused on Sergei Chervonopisky, a thirty-two-year-old former major in the Soviet airborne troops who had lost both legs in the war. He was one of 120 Afghan war veterans in the Congress. Chervonopisky lashed out at Sakharov for telling the reporter from a Canadian newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen, that Soviet pilots sometimes fired on Soviet soldiers to prevent them from being taken alive by Afghan rebels.
“To the depths of our souls we are indignant over this irresponsible, provocative trick by a well-known scientist,” Chervonopisky declared. He accused Sakharov of trying to discredit the Soviet armed forces and attempting “to breach the sacred unity of the army, the Party, and the people.” The camera turned then to General Secretary Gorbachev. He was joined by the entire Politburo in a standing ovation for Chervonopisky’s censure motion. Chervonopisky had shouted out, “The three words for which I feel we must all fight are state, motherland, and communism.” Speaker after speaker heaped opprobrium on Sakharov. “Who gave him the right to insult our children?” a middle-aged farm worker had declared indignantly.
Nikolai Trimov closed his eyes and formulated a sacred pledge. Something that had been gestating deep within him since he first absorbed the details of The Episode from the lips of a schoolmate six years before, and fused them with what he had learned about the death of his grandparents.
Nikolai resolved to assassinate the leader of the Soviet enterprise. That meant, to kill the General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev.
CHAPTER 8
APRIL 1995
Wearing light corduroys and a crew-necked gray sweater, Blackford opened the door of his house in Virginia to Arthur Blaustein, chief counsel to the Senate Committee on Intelligence. Blackford had read several months ago—and this morning had got from Nexis a copy, to refresh his memory—the profile of Blaustein published in the Washington Post the day his appointment was announced by Senator Blanton.
Arthur Blaustein was born in 1960, the son of a federal judge in Milwaukee. At the University of Wisconsin he majored in Russian studies and served as editor of The Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper. In a widely discussed editorial published a week before the 1980 election, the student newspaper, at the direction of editor Blaustein, endorsed the candidacy of Barry Commoner and LaDonna Harris, who were running for President and Vice President on the American equivalent of a Green ticket, calling for environmentalist totalism and unilateral disarmament. From there to the law school at Harvard, after which Blaustein clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. From there he went to work for independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, who was investigating Iran-Contra, the gravamen of which was that the Reagan administration had illegally supported the Contra movement in Nicaragua, using funds illicitly obtained for that purpose. Blaustein was prominently associated with the trials of John Poindexter, Oliver North, and Richard Secord. He was highly visible in the prosecution of Elliott Abrams and Caspar Weinberger, whose prosecutions were aborted by the controversial pardons handed down by President Bush in the last days of his presidency.
One week ago, the Senate had voted a contempt citation against Blackford Oakes. The sergeant at arms to whom the matter was assigned had yesterday announced that the malefactor, Blackford Oakes, should report to Room S321 in the Capitol at noon, April 19. This was a most unusual procedure, reactivating congressional punitive dramas associated for the most part with the nineteenth century.
The news story describing the Senate vote and the order given to the sergeant at arms explained the procedure in some detail. Any failure by Mr. Oakes to report as ordered would result in his arrest. The debate in the Senate had featured the spirited opposition of senators from the right and from the left. The conservatives were antagonized by what they viewed as recriminatory persecution of a Cold War hero. The civil liberties left railed against the resurrection of a congressional power so long unused, a power that permitted the legislature to transgress against the doctrine of habeas corpus: What the detention of Blackford Oakes amounted to was punishing a citizen without trial, in flat violation of due process. Senator Simon argued that the Fourteenth Amendment had de facto anachronized this ancient and arbitrary power of the Senate and of the House to incarcerate intransigent witnesses, and that to revive the power now would set civil liberties back “by a century.” Senator Blanton countered with the argument that to fail to exert the authority of the Senate was in effect to fail to exercise the responsibility of the Senate adequately to inform itself before proposing legislation. Senator Hatch stressed that Blackford Oakes, although practically nothing had been published about his career, was known within the intelligence community to have risked his life more than once to further U.S. interests; that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had availed themselves of his special skills, entrusting him with special responsibilities; and that to punish him now, “using Tower-of-London sanctions,” would be to punish someone whose valiant conduct in the past was entirely consistent with his reluctance now to give out information that might endanger the lives and careers of men and women who had helped the United States during the dangerous days of the Cold War. Senator Hatch’s speech was the grist for one hundred editorials the next day.
Senator Nunn said that he would vote against the contempt citation. He delivered a speech on the need for covert action to defend American interests, and nominated Blackford Oakes as an “unsung hero” of the Cold War. The Washington Times quoted a paragraph from the senator’s speech: “Consider the moral dilemma in which the Blanton Committee and its energetic counsel, Mr. Blaustein, have put the 69-year-old American, legendary in the shadowy world in which so many enemies of America have lived and worked. That much of their work was frustrated is owing to the efforts of such as Mr. Oakes. And now we wish to put him in jail for the crime of respecting pledges he made in pursuit of his country’s objectives.” Several opponents of the Blanton Committee’s war on covert activities spoke up, declaring the objective of the Blanton Committee to be dangerous. The majority leader reminded the honorable gentlemen that they were not here to debate CIA policy but to reaffirm the division of powers under the Constitution. It was then that Senator Albright announced that she felt she had no alternative but to vote to punish someone who disdained, in effect, a Senate subpoena. “We cannot leave it to individual consciences whether to cooperate or not with congressional committees charged with gathering information on the basis of which laws are made,” Senator Albright kept stressing the point.
The vote was 65–30 to punish Blackford Oakes.
It was one hour after the vote was taken that Blackford got the telephone call. Blaustein sought a private session with Blackford, “any time today after 4 p.m.”
“I told him,” said Bob Lounsbury, his spectacles as always at the end of his nose, his ballpoint pen, as always, doodling on his yellow pad, “that of course I would need to be present at such a meeting. He asked me to ask you, on his behalf, to meet without me. I told him I would relay the request and advise against granting it.” Lounsbury was known in the legal community as the most unambiguous naysayer since the hanging judges of frontier days.
“Oh hell, Bob. I know that’s the way lawyers act. And there are good reasons for it. But look. I come out of a different tradition from you guys. I�
��ve met with maybe a hundred people in the last forty years to discuss critical matters, including my own safety, more hazardous than any problems I have with the U.S. Senate. Which simply wants to send me to the joint until Senate pride is assuaged. I’ve told too many people too many times I have to see you alone to say No to Blaustein, when he says the same thing to me. If he yaks on about legal questions I can easily shut up. Or call you up. Or tell him unless he goes away I’ll … have him assassinated! Tell him to come to the house at six.”
Lounsbury knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with his old friend, client, and classmate.
“But you can tell me this, Bob,” Blackford went on. “Is there a typical maneuver done by congressional counsel before actually dispatching somebody to jail? And by the way I forgot to ask you, but when I was at school I think I remember that in the early days of the republic, recalcitrants were jailed—is my memory correct on this?—within the walls of Congress? Have they now got themselves a Lubyanka somewhere nearby?”
“I knew you’d ask that, and I’ve done the research. The best treatment has been missed by the press. It’s in”—Lounsbury shuffled some papers—“it’s in the ‘Public Officials Integrity Act of 1977,’ a ‘Report of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate,’ page ninety-six. And what it says is, ‘Subsection (g) expressly provides that the enactment by Congress of a mechanism for the civil enforcement of a subpoena does not affect the power and authority and absolute discretion of Congress, or an appropriate House of Congress, to choose to enforce a subpoena by either of the two existing methods rather than by initiating a civil enforcement action.’ Now this, a civil action, is what they haven’t done to you—yet. ‘The first of these two existing methods is certification by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate or the Speaker of the House of Representatives to the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia of a matter pursuant to section 104 of the revised statutes (2 U.S.C. 194). This procedure provides for a criminal prosecution brought by the United States Attorney to punish an individual or entity for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena or order.’