SLEEPER SPY:
A Novel of Deception

[Aldrich Ames] said in an interview with a New York Times reporter at the Alexandria, VA, county jail in July 1994 that he could not remember everything he gave the Soviet agents because he was drunk every time he met them. Intelligence officials have confirmed that Mr. Ames's hazy recollections have proved a barrier to the investigations.
-- Tim Weiner, New York Times, August 25, 1995

The plaque on a bench in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, reads: The Bernard M. Baruch Bench of Inspiration. During the Truman years this was where the elder statesman liked to sit to hand out unwanted counsel to the President's administrators.

In the 1980s, this bench was sometimes occupied by two nondescript men in earnest conversation. They were friends. One of them, CIA chief William Casey, would ultimately call the other, New York Times columnist William Safire, three times in one day to deny Safire's allegations that there were threads linking a CIA accountant with a Swiss bank account set up for the Iran arms deal. The next day, Casey would have a seizure from which he would not recover.

In the 1970s, Barney's Bench, near Safire's office on Eye Street, might have been occupied by him and another man. An orchidophile and friend of poets Edward Estlin Cummings and Stephen Spender, James Jesus Angleton held a day job as head of counterintelligence at the cia.

During a dinner at the Army & Navy Club in Washington, Angleton told Safire about the assassination beetle, which glows like a firefly and replicates its code of mating flashes. Duped fireflies move in to mate and are devoured. This imaginary beetle, a metaphor for the deception technique used by master spies, was a manifestation of Angleton's fear that a Soviet mole (the correct term, according to Safire's 1980 On Language, is penetration agent) had burrowed "across the river" in Langley. Had Jimmy Carter taken heed of Angleton's warning instead of firing him, Aldrich Ames might have been caught then.

At 14:25 on August 30, 1995, a man in a trench coat approached me in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle. In a Bronx accent he whispered, "Come up in 15 minutes." A quarter of an hour later, William Safire, in town to promote his novel Sleeper Spy, offered me chocolate-covered strawberries. The strawberries reminded me of a reference to family jewels that I had read in a Safire column dated November 11, 1991:

Inside the KGB, Moscow "This work is not for me," said Vadim Bakatin, 54, the handsome and well-liked Gorbachev man, chosen with Yeltsin approval to reform the KGB. "I don't like secrets, but here you are dealing with secrets all the time." The way to dispose of the burdensome secrets of the monstrous past is to reveal them, I suggested during a two-and-a-half-hour session in his office on Lubyanka Square. So I asked him about the KGB family jewels.

Safire skilfully weaves many of the above elements into Sleeper Spy while he speculates on the present relationship between the CIA and the new KGB. The Russians reactivate a sleeper in the U.S. and feed him information from a mole in the Federal Reserve Bank. The sleeper ultimately has $100 billion to bring back the old hardliners in Russia. Only Irving Fein, the world's best reporter, can stop him.

Trying to get personal information from Safire was tough without any sodium pentothal. I was intrigued by Fein's obsession with legs and ankles: ". . . legs curved stunningly to perfect ankles; the ankle, he was certain, would just fit in the circle of his thumb and middle finger, a method of measuring ankle perfection with which he was blessed." I asked Safire if he had an ankle fetish. His answer was almost revealing. "It could be that I do. It's better than having a wrist fetish." I would guess that any resemblance between Irving Fein and William Safire is not coincidental.

If Safire's life is like a spy novel, it is no accident that Sleeper Spy reads true. Safire's parting shot to me was, "I have rescued the spy novel." Or, as Irving Fein says, "James, Jesus, and Angleton, save us from the cold. Moral relativism went out in the garbage with the Cold War. And stop looking at me in the fuckin' mirror."

While in search of Safire's recommended The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward is rereading Kenneth Roberts's Lively Lady and Eric Ambler's Judgment on Deltchev.

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