[Icelander]

Going over the debrief from Davey Connor’s last meet, Harvey couldn’t help but smile. The boy had done good in his first contact with Joel Vortisch and brought back a dangling lure fit to land a fat carp. Vortisch claimed that this defector was Oberfeldwebel Hans Franck and that he was assigned to the communication centre for the Ministerium für Nationale Verteidigung. He also gave Connor a transcript that he claimed was a coded transmission and the decrypted translation.

Harvey had sent it off to his archivist section as soon as he got it the day before yesterday, hoping to find a match in the archived raw data from the Tunnel, what the wags liked to call Harvey’s Hole, especially after the damn Russkies had made such a big deal about revealing it when they found it. The crypto-geeks said that the using the translation he gave them as a crib, they were getting useful results from a certain old code and that they were 60% confident that this was a real decrypt. Big Bill gave a dark chuckle when he heard that. Just as long as you’re sure.

Even with such a lukewarm endorsement, Harvey lost no time in authorising Connor to lay in the piping for the extraction. Franck claimed that he was in East Berlin for a week to meet family and that he had to cross the border before his vacation was up. Even an off-chance that he was really a code clerk for central army communication meant that this was suddenly the most important thing on everyone’s desk. Or would be, if Harvey ever let anyone see it who wasn’t specifically needed for the operation. At the moment, the only ones who needed to know the full story were himself and the kid. The Watchers knew what they saw and nothing more. They didn’t get names for the people they watched and they didn’t need names.

Davey Connor worked like a man possessed and turned in a raw draft of an operational draft that very day. Big Bill had reviewed his plans with a gimlet eye, only to find nothing wrong with them. His Watchers would infiltrate in the afternoon, using another smuggler than Joel Vortisch. Not that they didn’t trust him, but, well, they didn’t trust him. Davey and three drunk men belonging to the staff of the US Embassy in Bonn would then drive over the border openly, using his diplomatic passport. They’d do some touristy sight-seeing and then visit the brothel that usually served as the cover story for such night-time crossing. Davey, of course, would have rolled out of the car as it passed a particularly hard to watch corner and made his way to the safe house. Then he’d conduct his business and meet the embassy car again on another corner which offered little in the way of surveillance opportunities.

The actual extraction would use a similar method, except that the embassy car would be French, not American. The French diplomat who sometimes obliged them by allowing them to ride in his car when he had business in East Berlin did not to Big Bill’s knowledge work for the SDECE. He did, however, have a Polish wife who was quite sure that the Soviets who occupied her homeland were every bit as bad as the Nazis who had once occupied his. Another difference was that instead of Connor meeting back up with the car, only Hans Franck would cross in the diplomat’s car, safely lodged in the trunk. French diplomats, as indeed all NATO diplomats, ignored the Vopo border stations as beneath their notice as a matter of principle and anxious to be seen to respect diplomatic niceties, the East German authorities had allowed this state of affairs to persist while they were trying for international recognition.

The boy had just checked in, around 0130. His first solo meet in East Berlin had gone well. Franck had come to the safe house on time and the Watchers said they were sure he wasn’t followed. This time he didn’t have a sexy folder with secret files, but he did impart an astonishing amount of during his chat with Connor. He gave credible answers to the list of questions Harvey had asked him to meet, neither too unfamiliar with his supposed past to feel amateurishly fake nor too pat and certain, so that he felt like he was going through a legend. Davey Connor conscientiously made the point that a false-flag defector probably would be instructed to hem and haw a bit, but also said that in his judgment, Oberfeldwebel Hans Franck was as kosher as latke. Big Bill grinned as he recognised one of his own sayings.

Harvey also knew that even if the defector was false, they’d bring him over anyway. There were two reasons for that. First was that a false defector had to give a certain amount of true information to establish his bona fides if he hoped to be able to reliably feed his targets misinformation. It should be possible to carefully check information that a defector gives against secondary sources and thus sift the wheat from the chaff. The second reason was harder to grasp, but understanding it was key to understanding the business of intelligence. It was that listening to a man lie could give you almost as much information as listening to him telling you the truth. By hearing what lies a false defector told and how he told them, a canny listener, such as Big Bill fancied himself, could learn many things. For one, he could learn what Moscow Centre wanted him to think.

Harvey leaned back in his chair and poured another generous slug of VAT 69 into his plastic glass. It was a grand game, intelligence. Perhaps the grandest game of all. And while someone could consider it insane to risk the lives of several men for a reward that might be nothing more than getting to listen to someone lie to you, Harvey knew better. Just as the natural purpose of dollars was to be spent in order that the Company might better defend America from its enemies, so the natural purpose of local agents and junior officers was to be risked for the same goal.