Lightner, the political expert, had this answer. "His father was a Member of Parliament and saw to it his son was offered a position in MI5. The son was accepted on short notice and assigned to K4, analyzing and combating Soviet espionage in the UK. Haha, funny. He also ran access agents. However, ULYSSES is sectioned off. Ziegler can't know his name, so we've made a complete circle here."
"But the fact ULYSSES exists… Ziegler got that somehow."
"I said he's bizarre," Donovan said, "not stupid. He has eyes, and he has access when no one's looking. A priori."
Emma held up her hand. "You're not going to believe this part. Ziegler lived alone after a brief shack-up with a woman who fancied herself a Paris fashion doyenne. One day, the same woman ran screaming from his flat that he was threatening to eat her with a fork. She was nude and had a minor stab wound on her upper shoulder."
"Holy shit!"
"But Ziegler flashed his MI5 ID at the investigating officer, and the man abruptly broke off the investigation. It's here in the police report I requested."
33
Ziegler repeatedly returned to the Westminster Station, looking for a thumbtack in the wooden frame around the Arrivals and Departures sign, but was disappointed each time. He then decided Anchev had somehow missed the communique, so he snuck up Anchev’s flat again, just after midnight, and folded and inserted a list of Soviet intelligence agents the Brits were recruiting to spy. He peered through the mail slot to confirm his offering had passed through. Then he ran off.
Anchev found the list on his floor the next morning. “My God!” he cried. “Who is this Lana?” It was time to respond.
Anchev appeared at the Buckingham Underground station at five a.m. the following morning. This would be Westminster Circle. He carefully looked around, and when no one was watching, he pinned a single thumbtack into the side of the Arrivals and Departures listing. He quickly shot a glance around again. No one saw; it was too early in the morning for a crowd.
That night, Lana slipped the third message through the mail slot. Lana would meet him at the Coach House the next day at two p.m. He would be wearing a purple waistcoat. Anchev was to wear purple as well.
Anchev dug through his closet. Nothing. So, he sent an aide out shopping that morning for a purple shirt. In 1962, men’s shirts were rarely purple. However, the aide returned two hours later, bearing a purple shirt with frills down the front. “Really?” said Anchev with a frown. “This is it? I’ll look like a lounge singer in Berlin.”
“My apologies, General,” the aide said as he backed out of Anchev’s office.
With a sigh and a reminder to himself that he was doing it for Party and motherland, Anchev changed into the shirt. Indeed, he did look like a lounge singer, the mirror told him, a lounge singer with a noticeable gut. But purple was purple.
At two p.m., he walked into the bar at the Coach House, went to the end, and eased himself down onto a stool. The bartender came over. Anchev seldom drank during the day, so he ordered a Coke. As if a ghost had insinuated itself next to him, Ziegler appeared.
Anchev assessed the man. The MI5 spook was hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, a desperate look permanently pasted to his face, looking more denizen than human. He was intoxicated, the smell of booze wafting off him as he had difficulty arranging himself on the barstool.
He wasted no time once he was plumb. “I am Lana. You’re Anatoly Anchev. We have your picture at MI5. The purple was an after-thought.”
“Well, Lana, you have provided some serious information to us. How can we thank you for that?”
“I want five-hundred pounds each month. We’ll meet right here. You bring it in a paper bag and leave it on the bar. I’ll come over from my table and pick it up. Do it while the bartender is at the other end.”
It sounded like a plan with problems already, but Anchev didn’t argue. “What might we expect in return?”
“One of your agents is spying for London and turning over huge volumes of sensitive documents every day. I can give you his name. That’s the first five-hundred pounds.”
Anchev nodded and kept nodding, saying, “I think we have agreed, then. When should we meet again?”
“One week. I will have your spy’s name and a list of his most recent documents turned over. You can judge for yourselves.”
“That keeps my interest up. What else can we look forward to?”
Lana rolled his eyes and looked up at the ceiling. “You haven’t asked about my department yet.”
“Based on what you’ve turned over, I am assuming you’re counterintelligence. You are what we call a spy catcher.”
Lana laughed and made a pistol with his fingers. He shot it like a gun as he said, “You nailed me! I love the KGB.”
“Please, keep your voice down. We’re in a public place.”
Lana looked around exaggeratedly as only intoxication would want. “Right-o.”
“One week, then. Five-hundred pounds for a name. Until then.” The general downed his Coke.
“Don’t forget,” Lana called to the general’s back.
Lana ordered a glass of red wine to celebrate. Then he found a seat just two tables down from the coffee-swilling, sandwich-chewing MI5 agents who had just witnessed the entire transaction. Two other agents pursued Anchev on his trip back to the Soviet Embassy and confirmed who he was. Since the pictures they snapped matched the man’s face, it was more ritual than necessity.
“In hindsight,” Donovan would be heard to say, “we should have seen him coming. But sometimes one gets through, and it’s nobody’s fault. It’s part of the game, and sometimes the game wins.”
Now that Ziegler was confirmed, Donovan's team was anxious to obtain his confession. But MI5 would want the collar, which ULYSSES did not want because of publicity and such. So, Donovan delayed since Ziegler possessed top-secret information that Donovan didn’t want to get away from the ULYSSES division inside MI5.
“Let’s think this through,” Donovan told MI5 when they called to report on Ziegler. “He possesses top-secret information I cannot allow to escape from ULYSSES. “We will debrief him first. And then we will give you a tape-recorded confession when we are finished.”
MI5 had no choice but to agree. ULYSSES was off-limits to everyone but the ULYSSES team.
34
Nikolai returned to the safe house on August 10 and requested an update on the Lana search.
"How close are we?" he asked the team.
Bolling said, "We have confirmation."
"Has he been arrested?"
Donovan fielded this one. "It isn't that easy. We must debrief him. He knows enough about our international intelligence operations to ruin us. We're working with the Crown Prosecutor to put him in solitary confinement without access to the outside world for the rest of his life. That's what it's going to take. We're moving in that direction, but it's taking time."
"I understand," Nikolai said, "but that doesn't make me feel any better. I'm walking on eggshells. Every face I see, I ask, is that them coming for me? It's hard to sleep at night."