Sleeper Spy Read Online Free PDF

assumed Clauson was working at the F Street building, and if his guess was off, no harm done, because most of the spooks at the Langley headquarters in Virginia thought the presidential ass-kissers of the F Street gang were undermining the cause of unpoliticized intelligence estimates.
    To the no-longer-sleepy counterspy’s izzatso, Fein responded: “I’d go further—these guys were on the phone to me this morning stabbing you in the back about—” He flicked the button in the phone cradle rapidly to break up his voice and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking this way. How about a cup of coffee at the Mayflower in an hour?”
    The reporter knew his spook had been hooked. Like most other bureaucrats, deskbound spymasters suspected some other departmentcompeting for their budget was dumping on their work. The suggested meeting time was too soon to set up serious surveillance, in case Clauson thought his phone was tapped and he would have to mislead the sweat merchants at his next scheduled fluttering.
    They designated a spot and met. Fein trolled at first with a sampling of all he knew about CIA politics, especially a deal between the new Director of Central Intelligence and the Justice Department to turn all the rest of counterintelligence over to the FBI. Nothing spooked the old spooks more than the thought of losing the counterspy operation worldwide to another agency.
    Then Irving did some serious fishing. The Russian mafiya—with a
y
, distinct from the Sicilian variety—was well known and its ties to officialdom had been long suspected, but who were “the Feliks people”? And what was this about their search for a lost or defected agent in America, who supposedly had the key to some vast fortune?
    All the reporter had to start with was the blind tip about a “sleeper”—an agent planted in America by the KGB long ago and never activated—plus a notion that it had to do with serious money being socked away for later Russian use. No more than the outline of a story, devoid of detail. The voice-mail message told him to contact “one of the old Angleton types” at the Agency to find out more, which pretty much narrowed the field down to Walter Clauson. Irving Fein acted as if he knew much more, of course; he was aware that spooks always preferred to confirm or amplify rather than to hand over something new.
    He got little out of Clauson; the man was a pro, searching to find out how much the reporter knew, trading his ability to confirm for the revelation of what cards the reporter held in his hand. Irving bluffed, pretending to withhold information about what he knew lest Clauson pass that along to a friendlier reporter, more easily controllable.
    He waited for questions from the CIA man, and derived a little nourishment from the counterspy’s probe about who in the Agency had suggested that Clauson might be knowledgeable about a sleeper agent. That could mean that Clauson could not be sure of containing the story within the Agency, or it could mean Clauson had told one of his agents to tip Fein and was being smart now in covering that up. Of those two possibilities, Irving was inclined to believe the first—thatClauson did not know Irving’s initial source, a disembodied voice with no credibility at all. If that judgment was correct, then it followed that Clauson was willing to engage with Fein for a good reason: to control, contain, or at least monitor the reporter’s investigation.
    That’s what Bill Casey had done with Bob Woodward, at least at the start, but the reporter had later prevailed on the superspook to open up more. Then Woodward had parlayed leads dug out of Casey into detailed responses from others in the Agency who didn’t like the Director. The trick was to fool the would-be container of the story, and Irving Fein was certain he now played that game better than anybody. Just to begin to play it again gave him his much-needed news hit—that rush of hunger to the heart piqued by the