Misery Loves Company: The Life & Death of Bruce Gilden Page #5

I've since come to understand

That serving in the trenches of the Colr

Is no less important.

And as john Milton said,

"they also serve

Who only stand and wait."

I appreciate this...

All of you.

Now Im gonna get back to my desk

And get on with the tedious day-to-day business

Of winning the cold war.

Leo, welcome back.

If you never forgive me, Leo, I understand.

There's nothing to forgive.

You're my best friend.

????

I, uh...

I have an announcement to make.

James Angleton,

To my great regret,

Made his intentions of retirement clear to me

Earlier this morning.

I don't need to tell anyone here

That his contributions to the company

Are nothing short of legendary.

Jim, any, uh...

Any parting words?

Lenin once said,

"the West are wishful thinkers,

"so we will give them

What they want to think."

The soviets have a master plan--

Feeding layer upon layer of disinformation

To the whishful thinkers of the West to make them think

That we are winning the cold war.

Nothing...

Could be...

Further from the truth, gentlemen.

Over the last 20 years, the CIA has transformed

Fr ark of informants,

Double agents, caseworkers

To a shadow of the former self.

All the handiwork...

Of a soviet mole inside the CIA

Named Sasha.

Starik and Sasha have made certain

The world view of America has shifted

From a beacon of hope and justice...

To a, uh...

Tyrannical, power-mad,

Colonialist juggernaut.

Of course, these facts

Were not handed to me on a silver platter.

I teased them.

I ased them from the wildeess

With excruciating attention

To the minutiae.

It takes the patience of a saint.

Philby, the KGB, Sasha--

They've tried to discredit and destroy me for years,

And now, of course, they have.

Gentlemen, you do not realize

That you are surrounded by a wilderness of deception.

Thank you, Jim.

We will try our best

To muddle through without you.

You will be missed.

I know it's you, Sasha.

The rabbi found Kukushkin

Far too easily.

Starik never would have been that sloppy...

Never.

I bear you no hard feelings, Jim.

Yes? whatever you said

Scared the hell out of them, comrade Starik.

They should be scared. The Gorbachev is a pawn.

He's being used by the Americans.

The politburo are terrified the Americans will wipe out

Our second strike mobile train platforms,

Leaving us vulnerable to invasion.

How did you do it?

Well, the facts spoke for themselves.

The Americans' "able archer" plan

Is for a preemptive nuclear strike.

I embellished nothing.

The cold war must continue, comrade colonel.

I know how your mind works.

I am not swayed as easily as the rest of them,

But i must congratulate you, Starik.

You would have made a brilliant chess grand master

If you ever played.

But i did.

I did.

hello, Eugene.

Sasha.

Starik has convinced Gorbachev

That America is planning a first strike

In an operation known as "able archer."

You and i both know the whole idea is pure nonsense.

The Russians have a mobile second strike capacity

Aboard railroad flatcars--

Shuttling around 300 miles of track.

The Americans know full well that a second strike launched

From the Russian rail platforms would annihilate

The eastern seaboard of the united states.

And what happens to the world then, Eugene?

I don't know, Sasha.

You told me long ago

What Starik said to you.

That we should promote

The Generosity of the human spirit.

So tell me, Eugene,

What does launching a preemptive strike

To provoke nuclear holocaust

Have to do with promoting

The Generosity of the human spirit?

I'm--Im trying to make sense of this, ladies.

Well, the new computers can analyze so much data

That we can now run all the old leads

That were never followed up.

Because it was just too time-consuming.

Mm-hmm. And there just weren't enough man hours--

Woman hours--and the stuff just laid around forever.

So we analyzed old transcripts

Of radio Moscow from the 1950s...

Mm-hmm, to look for patterns or repetitions or sentences,

Phrases that might appear out of context... Under the assumption KGB agents abroad

Might be receiving coded messages from these shows. Yes, I-i get that part.

Well, we found something in the old transcripts--

A pattern in a nightly quiz show. You did?

I adored "Alice in Wonderland"

As a kid, and in the 23 years

This radio program has been airing--

That's 1,200 50-minute broadcasts... Yeah.

The Lewis Carroll quotations have appeared 24 times.

Now they instantly caught my eye,

Because i could answer all the quotations.

No, the Russians wouldn't be so sloppy

As to use a radio program to broadcast messages. Of course not,

But we learned

In all of our counterintelligence seminars

That sometimes these codes are merely recognition symbols--

Special sentences intended for the agent

To let him know that there'll be something

Appearing for him later on in the program.

And after every Lewis Carroll quotation,

There was an announcement of a winning lottery number.

Huh.

Angleton once told me that soviet agents

Were given American $10 bills

To use in some kind of a-a code system

That we just couldn't break.

We think they took the serial number off of--

Off the bill and subtracted it from a lottery number

That was broadcast on the radio.

Presto.

They'd wind up with a phone number of a contact.

I still don't see how you get a phone number

Unless you have the particular serial number of the $10--

You found the bill?

Not the actual bill, director.

My team hunted down all the serial numbers

From every $10 bill printed

Between 1945 and 1951--

The likely date that a soviet agent

Would have used for a code bill.

Six years of bills?

Over $67 million worth.

We narrowed it down by assuming

That the soviet agent would have lived in Washington,

So we used area code 202 as a Rosetta stone.

The computer told us

That the 8-digit serial number on the bill

Would have to begin with a three and a zero--

Cut down the number of bills to a manageable size

It was a matter of burning the midnight oil

To narrow it down to a single $10 bill.

We took the phone numbers

We got from the Russian radio program,

Matched 'em with phone records from D.C.

We came up with a polish immigrant.

She's been moving to a new apartment

With a new phone number almost every year

Since 1955.

She's 69 years old,

Never had a job, and it's not clear

Where she gets money to pay the rent.

We think she's the go-between,

And i think she will lead us to Sasha's cutout.

maybe she's dead.

Let's go check and see if she's dead.

She's not ad.

I heard the toilet flush a half-hour ago.

she's got her favorite soap operas--

Oh, wait a minute.

Keys.

Look, I think she's going for the door.

She's saying good-bye to the cat.

????

thanks.

She's at the checkout counter.

I got it!

Give me the camera. Yep.

Here.

One more. Yep.

Got it.

she's half a block away.

Do you want me to slow her down?

Negative. We're out.

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