The Book of Honor Read Online Free PDF Page B

which it estimated that the Soviets would be in no position to detonate such a device before mid-1950. Agency experts had predicted “the most probable date is mid-1953.” President Truman’s confidence in CIA estimates had to have been rattled.
    Two days after Truman’s announcement, on the morning of September 25, Mackiernan sent a telegram notifying the State Department that the provincial government of Xinjiang had accepted the authority of the Chinese Communist government in Beijing. It was to be Mackiernan’s last official telegram from Tihwa.
    Two days later, on September 27, Communist soldiers seized Tihwa and posted sentries at each of its four gates, watching all who attempted to enter or leave. Schoolchildren chanted “Long live Mao Zedong!”
    That evening Mackiernan prepared to flee. It was a perfect night— dark and moonless. At his house he and Vassily gathered classified papers and carried them to the small detached summer kitchen, tossing them by the armful into the fireplace. Vassily put a match to them. Then came the packing: ammunition, a radio to communicate with Washington, stacks of one-time pads, his Leica camera, army air force maps of the region, a compass, an aneroid barometer, and a sheath of personal documents containing, among other papers, his divorce decree and photos of the twins.
    He also packed several kilos of gold bullion with which to barter for whatever might be needed along the way. Then, as now, gold was sometimes provided to CIA officers facing unknown perils in the field.
    Mackiernan also packed two machine guns, several army sleeping bags, and a large tent. From his bedroom he removed a radio with keys for transmitting and receiving encrypted messages sent in Morse code.
    Virtually everything in Mackiernan’s sparsely furnished residence pertained to his tradecraft as a spy. In addition to his Leica camera he had a Minox miniature camera, chemicals needed to develop and print film, binoculars, a portable Geiger counter, a shortwave radio, and a cowhide briefcase with a lock. His bookshelves were lined with dozens of specialized books, many of them purchased in the famous Vetch Book Shop in Beijing. Among the titles:
Old Routes of W. Iran, The Thousand Buddhas,
Innermost Asia
(four volumes with maps),
Peking to Lhasa,
and
Peaks and
Plains of Central Asia.
    Mackiernan had gone over the escape plan with his tiny band of men. There was Frank Bessac, a twenty-eight-year-old Fulbright scholar and former paratrooper who had wandered into Tihwa only weeks earlier. A prodigious reader, Bessac was nearly blind without his glasses. And there were the three White Russians who had worked with the U.S. consulate: in addition to Vassily Zvonzov were Stephani Yanuishkin, thirty, and Leonid Shutov, twenty. From Wussman Bator, the Kazakh leader and resistance fighter, Mackiernan had purchased twenty-two horses and provisions to last several months. One of Wussman’s men was to meet Mackiernan east of Tihwa and lead them overland to a place where they might be safe before beginning the arduous—some would say impossible—trek to India over the Himalayas.
    Mackiernan had his .30-caliber revolver in a holster on his belt. Over his shoulder he slung a carbine. Shortly before midnight, he and Bessac drove through the main gate in a battered jeep. Exiting the city was not the problem—exiting the country was. Meanwhile, Zvonzov and his two companions, who knew that they would be executed for their anti-Communist activities if they were caught, scaled the city walls under cover of night and lowered themselves by rope to the other side. Three hundred kilometers away they rendezvoused with Mackiernan, Wussman Bator, and Wussman’s “Kazakh Hordes,” as Mackiernan would write in his log that would carry a stamp of “Top Secret.” So began a two-week trek eastward to Lake Barkol, closer to the Mongolian border.
    Fifteen miles east of Tihwa,