The Old Stooped Spy

The old spy leaned over the rail of the tug peering into the murky Chesapeake.  The water looked as inky as the sky and he could only differentiate the two by the opaque lights on the eastern shore. He was listening, from a safe vantage on the aft deck, for hidden sounds of danger, signs of potential chaos.  Always attentive, without appearing to be, he was using his senses, powers of concentration, intuition. What did the sluggish chug of the diesels reveal?  Was the captain slowing for a reason? Was there a misfiring piston, a metallic creak that meant the starboard side impacted some foreign object?  If x is present, then he must react with y or z or xya or xyab; a hundred variables shifting, permuting in his head.

He often couldn’t sleep at night from a mind that wouldn’t stop thinking, worrying. During the late 90s something went awry, his anxiety had turned irrational, to hysteria, like a satellite circuit that looped back into itself, a fact he tried hard to conceal. During a manic episode that manifested itself badly on the Embassy Row cocktail circuit, the hysteria had taken on a mind of its own and he’d been ordered to see a shrink at Langley. That ultimately hadn’t gone too well and he was forced into a desk job; then subsequently thrown a bone: non-official-cover at a news agency. Let out to pasture until retirement.  And that relatively easy let down only because of his one shining achievement for the agency:  in his early career he had played a substantial role in bugging the Zil stretch limos of some members of the Soviet Politburo. One of the few HUMINT cases inside the USSR the agency had leaked to media assets. And his team had reached near folk hero status at the operations division at Langley. Up there in the same league as the agents who had tracked down and killed Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia in 1967. In spite of setbacks the agency had been good to him.  And he wasn’t bitter, only resigned.

Tonight, as always, he’d done his due diligence. During a leisurely stroll he’d counted the lifejacket stowage bins, noted the three tarpaulin ensconced dinghies chained with rusting locks, memorized fire extinguisher locations. 

Musing over the rail, he wondered how many times had he boarded similar vessels in far-flung places. Crossing the Dardanelles from Canakkale at midnight with crates of guns and blackened faced stowaways, traversing the muddy Rio de la Plata between Uruguay and Buenos Aires when the wet cold air cut like razors, in ’86 when that old rust bucket had sunk in the Danube after banging a bridge piling at Linz, the chaos that might have become an international incident but for the quick thinking of the station chief in Vienna. In spite of the terror he sometimes felt, outwardly he was a calm multi-tasker, constantly observing without seeming to look, sneaking a panorama of the old ferry’s upper deck in the guise of turning to pitch out a cigarette butt. From a cigarette he’d feigned smoking, nonchalantly, while elbows rested on the rough metal rail. An invented vice that was part of the guise of becoming someone he wasn’t, throwing off surveillance, making his path hard to follow.  

Everything was part of the act because interrogators could use drug-induced confessions to obtain a near photographic snapshot of a person or place in time. Who needed surveillance cameras when there was sodium pentothal? They might coerce an old lady later: “Was the gentleman a smoker?”  And the likely answer:  “He chain-smoked over the rail, taking nips from a pint bottle of gin he occasionally took from his right coat pocket; he seemed rather lonely, mournful.” Behavioral skills had been inculcated at the Farm and later on the streets, the dead drops, chalk marks on park benches, electronic listening devices, the trained paranoia, the all important Moscow Rules (someone is ALWAYS listening, watching) spy craft that had not only stayed with him but become inherent to his personality--choosing the safest table at a restaurant (preferably with his back to a corner), taking a three hour walk to meet an operative only six blocks away so that all possible tails could be lost, always planning for imminent danger, escape routes, and, above all, plausible deniability. Becoming so deep in his cover that reality itself became blurred. Everything he ever discussed with his wife was a lie or at least based in falsehood. The personality within a personality within a personality; psychiatrists called it compartmentalization.   


He was one of the best street men the agency ever had.  And it was more than talent, a gift.  He could layout in his mind the floor plan of a building he’d only entered once, go to the bathroom in the middle of the night when visiting his family on holidays without waking anyone, change his physical profile five times in a crowded airport, sketch the faces of the three passengers who shared a subway car with him in Paris a week earlier.  He could carry on endless hours of one-sided conversations at cocktail parties where nothing was revealed about himself, unless it was a lie, while reams of appreciable data could be mined from the other party, dropped tidbits here and there that often turned to gold. 


He thought about a lifetime of, if not quite successes, then pivotal moments where his luck had held. 


(to be continued....)