OPINION

Spy-World Whodunits Were Better in Our Day

By Charles McCarry

It’s a case stranger than fiction. Or is it? As the investigation into the poisoning death of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko continues, CIA-agent-turned-novelist Charles McCarry imagines a retired Stalin-era spy reminiscing about actual KGB assassinations, and yearning for the golden age of espionage — when things were done right.

I hope you will not mind hearing from a confused old man who in the loneliness of his dacha thinks of you often — especially in the past weeks as a certain operation in London has undressed itself in the world press and even in our own Russian news media. Now I read that the British police are in Moscow interviewing suspects in the assassination of the traitor Alexander Litvinenko, that the German police are calling this “the Third Man case,” and that Interpol has entered the investigation. How fortunate we are that the police of Fiji are inactive for the moment because of a coup d’etat in their country!

Scotland Yard in Moscow, interviewing suspects with the assistance of Russian prosecutors? These same agents of capitalism being interviewed by Izvestia? And the assassin, ill and perhaps dying along with his target, rather than admiring his medal and drinking champagne with a ballerina in a safe house in the Crimea?

When I was your age, I thought the expression “The world is upside down” was just an expression. Now I know better.

In the days of the great spymaster Pavel Anatoliyevich Sudoplatov, under whom I had the honor of serving, assassination was the tool of tools in protecting the socialist motherland. As Comrade General Sudoplatov himself put it: “We did not believe there was any moral question involved in killing Trotsky or any other of our former comrades who had turned against us. ... [Moreover] we believed that every Western country hated us and wished to see our doom.”

Even so, we chose our targets carefully. Assassination had an important educational element. The first purpose of killing an enemy of the revolution was to punish the criminal. But an important secondary purpose was to educate others about the cost of treason.

It was not Comrade General Sudoplatov’s way to take out an ad in the newspaper announcing that so-and-so had been eliminated for such and such a reason. Instead, he designed each operation to be an object of fascination. He wanted the news of it to be learned as a secret, passed via word of mouth by those in the know. He wanted each assassination to become legend, to remain a secret that would tantalize, a secret that would terrify, a secret that would teach lessons that could never be forgotten.

Sudoplatov achieved his effects by the ingenuity of his methods. Early in his career he was given the assignment of liquidating a traitor who lived in Western Europe. He invited the target to a cafe and presented him with a box of chocolates. He knew, of course, that his target was not so stupid as to eat candy given to him by a courier from Moscow.

So he had our people design a time bomb that would fit into the bottom of the candy box. The top layer was made of chocolates. Ninety seconds after he left the cafe, the box exploded. By these ingenious means he not only solved the problem at hand but taught others who may have been committing treason in their hearts a lesson about our vigilance and the implacable justice of our cause.

Of course, there were others, such as the exile who had to climb a long flight of outdoor stairs on his walk home. One night, as he reached the top, breathing deeply, an assassin sprayed hydrocyanic acid, which smells like peach blossoms, into his face with an atomizer. He gulped the gasified poison and died instantly — of a heart attack, according to the police report.

Then there was the heavy smoker. We learned that he never seemed to have a match for his cigarette. When he asked the man who’d been assigned to kill him — a man who seemed a mere stranger in the crowd — if he had a light, our agent produced a cigarette lighter that was actually a tiny gun designed to fire a single bullet into the target’s brain. It worked perfectly: Another traitor died in a state of surprise and another warning was released like a butterfly to be seen and wondered about, but never to be captured.

The most famous example of this technique, which might be called death in a crowd, was the elimination of the journalist Georgy Markov in London in September 1978. The target stood in a bus queue at Waterloo Bridge. Our operative jabbed him in the leg with the sharpened end of his umbrella, injecting him with ricin, an untraceable, deadly poison made from the castor bean. British police did not even know that this turncoat had been killed until months later, when they exhumed his body and discovered the platinum pellet that had contained the poison.

I know that you will remember these famous assassinations from your KGB school days. But I remind you of them to make a point — in fact to offer praise as well as advice.

Here is the word of praise: If you ordered the liquidation of the traitor Litvinenko in Britain, you acted in a proud tradition. A man who was a danger to the motherland no longer endangers her. And who knows? Perhaps this outburst of media gossip was part of your plan. Perhaps, since we are all capitalists now, the objective was to advertise this new weapon and create a market for it among those who wish to commit suicide and kill at the same time. If so, you are infinitely subtler than even the genius who was Sudoplatov.

Certainly the weapon was in Sudoplatov’s tradition: It was ingenious, it was one of a kind and state of the art, and God knows the victim suffered in an exemplary fashion. Above all, it struck terror in the hearts not only of potential traitors, but also in the minds and hearts of all capitalists and even planted a new dream in the mother brain of terrorism.

But comrade, this particular weapon, this polonium-210, fails every Sudoplatov test. It is indiscreet. Every chair, every bed, every glass and plate, every toilet the assassin used is radioactive. The only thing that police need to trace it is a Geiger counter! By contrast, the devices we used in the past vanished. The cigarette-lighter gun was passed to another agent in the crowd, then to another and another. The hydrocyanic acid at the top of the stairs dissipated into thin air. The fatal umbrella disappeared in plain sight among millions more in rainy London. No evidence was ever left at the scene — just suspicion, just a warning, just fear.

Permit me to mention another serious disadvantage. This weapon often kills the assassin. On the bright side, if he is too sick to talk and soon dies, embarrassment may be avoided. Regarding embarrassment, let me suggest in friendly spirit that the ideal assassin should not only be properly trained but also self-disciplined. I read in Spiegel Online that Andrei Lugovoi, Litvinenko’s suspected killer, met the target in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London: Litvinenko ordered green tea; Lugovoi ordered gin — four to six glasses because “the portions in the West are so very small.” I suspect, as do the British police, that the isotope polonium-210 may have been poured into Litvinenko’s tea. My dear boy, the results do suggest that this is not a job for a man who has just drunk four to six glasses of gin.

Fortunately there is no afterworld, so Comrade General Sudoplatov is unlikely to find out.

He had a temper, you know.

Former CIA agent Charles McCarry’s 11th novel, “Christopher’s Ghosts,” is due out next spring. This essay was published in The Washington Post.

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