The Black Tulip

by Milt Bearden

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers; Spy Thrillers; Political Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

“In this suspense-filled thriller, the man who ran the closing phases of the Afghan war for the Agency takes his readers on a stunning voyage of discovery through that clandestine world, from Kabul to Hong Kong and the Moscow of the Evil Empire.”—Larry Collins, co-author of Is Paris Burning?

Set in the treacherous mountains of Afghanistan and the equally hazardous headquarters of the CIA Operations Directorate in Washington, The Black Tulip is a fast-paced thriller, based on real events, by the legendary spy who masterminded the plot to arm Afghan freedom fighters in their holy war against the Soviets. A longtime veteran of the CIA, Bearden knows the tricks of the trade, the price of honor, the bonds of blood, and the enduring lure of retribution.

Praise for The Black Tulip

“An irresistible page-turner . . . especially vivid because we know the author was a witness to events.”—The Wall Street Journal 

“Milt Bearden really delivers. With thirty years in the CIA to back it up, he knows what he’s talking about. . . . A terrific book.”—Robert De Niro

“A heart-stopping tale of espionage and betrayal. Forget Tom Clancy: this is the real thing.”—Richard Holbrooke

“A truly engrossing espionage read . . . Bearden explains how the CIA supplied Afghan guerrillas with the hardware—rockets, Stinger surface-to-air missiles, and night-vision equipment—which enabled them to chew a vastly stronger Soviet force to bloody ribbons. . . . Highly recommended.”—The Washington Times

Release date: January 22, 2002

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 336

Sample

ONE
 
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, May 28, 1985
 
Alexander Fannin pushed through the yellow door marked 7D70— DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE, in neat block letters. The bright color always struck him as quaintly festive, out of place with the more subtly shaded universe that lay behind it, but he doubted Bill Casey even thought of it at all.
 
Alexander smiled at his self-indulgent distraction. He had come to turn in his badge to Casey, shake the old man’s hand, and end his decade-long employment with the agency.
 
He nodded to the DCI’s protective-security detail behind a glass-walled cubicle, two blank-faced, close-cropped young men in identical discount-house blazers, who exchanged stern, knowing glances. Their eyes never left the tall, dark-haired man casually dressed in a buff sport jacket, charcoal slacks, and blue turtleneck as he crossed to the open door of Casey’s office where his executive assistant, Dottie Manson, stood waiting.
 
“Hi, Alexander,” she said, ushering him into the large, birch-paneled suite perched seven floors above the Virginia countryside. The lush foliage of late spring already shielded the Potomac River from view as it wound its way past the CIA’s Langley headquarters. “You’re looking relaxed for a man about to quit in a huff.”
 
“Is that what he thinks?” Alexander asked, glancing around the empty office.
 
“He’s in there.” Dottie pointed to the director’s conference room. “And that’s what I think, not what he thinks. He said you’re to wait here until he’s finished. He said you should read a book or something.”
 
Casey’s office was comfortable, tastefully appointed, but rumpled like the man who occupied it. Alexander eyed the stack of new books on the corner of the desk—they ranged from American history to economics to oil politics—and knew that at the end of the week Dottie would send them with Casey when he flew up to Long Island for the weekend. On Monday he would probably recommend at least one with great animation. Casey was always telling people what books to read, even how to read them.
 
Alexander took a seat on the overstuffed sofa and closed his eyes. He had no regrets. It was time to go.
 
Alexander had been a natural for the CIA’s clandestine operations directorate. Born to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, both wartime refugees from Stalin’s U.S.S.R., he spoke each language without accent, along with near-native Polish and good German. He was recruited by the agency after a stint in the army flying helicopters in Vietnam, part of the time for CIA paramilitary operations. His first few years in the agency had been nonstop excitement, and even when a confused aimlessness set in and the agency’s mission blurred at the end of the turbulent seventies, he felt certain about who he was and the value of what he was doing.
 
As soon as Casey was sworn in as DCI in 1981, Alexander felt renewed energy at Langley. From the start, he got on well with the flamboyant New York lawyer who brought the political clout of a close association with the new president.
 
By the end of Casey’s fourth year, he and Alexander had developed an easy friendship. They charted the widening fissures in the Evil Empire from Warsaw to Moscow, and both agreed the time had come for more “creative efforts,” as the old man called them. They began making intricate, ambitious plans for what Casey called the endgame. Then Alexander’s troubles intervened.
 
It started as a purely personal matter. While traveling in Asia a year earlier he happened to meet Katerina Martynova, a stunning Ukrainian woman, and fall in love.
 
Katerina’s parents, refugees from wartime Ukraine, had met in the tight-knit Russian expatriate community in China during the turmoil of 1945. Lara Chumakova and Michael Martynov married in Shanghai and settled down to build their lives. But war and revolution forced them to flee with their infant daughter just ahead of Mao’s armies in the last days of 1949. They resettled again, this time among a growing population of Russians and Europeans who had fled China’s chaos for the safety of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.
 
Katerina’s father scraped together his Shanghai savings, borrowed a little money, and taking what seemed to some a foolhardy risk, imported a small stable of racehorses from Australia. Catching the wave of a post-war gambling boom, his modest initial investment at the high-rolling Happy Valley Race Course grew into one of the dozen largest trading houses in Hong Kong, Martynov Trading Corporation, later anglicized to Martin House. Katerina was schooled in Switzerland and France, and by the time she met Alexander, she was a rising star in East Asian political journalism. A year later when they decided to marry, the fallout was immediate.
 
Alexander’s formal notification of his intent to marry a foreign national tripped the CIA’s computers, and cryptic references to Katerina and her family’s suspected ties to underground Ukrainian opposition networks inside the U.S.S.R. scrolled out. Alexander knew about the contacts with the Ukrainian opposition but saw no incompatibility with his work for the agency. He had made his own discreet query of the databases and thought the raw data on Katerina and her family noncontroversial; he dismissed it as the usual émigré gossip. It was manageable, he thought.
 
But the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, Graham Middleton, seized on the tantalizing tidbits, seeing an opportunity to knock an adversary out of play. Middleton viewed Alexander’s quick rise as an obstacle to his own career, but most of all, Alexander’s unconventional origins offended his squeamish Ivy League sensibilities. He resented him even more after Casey arrived at Langley. Alexander, in turn, saw Middleton as a plodder, an agency “royalist” who hesitated to exploit the nascent weaknesses in the U.S.S.R.
 
Now Middleton had exposed the one flaw that no one at the CIA, not even the DCI, could overlook, “a personal counterintelligence question.”
 
Katerina had asked Alexander not to divulge to the CIA that her mother had a twin sister still living in Kiev and that the two women had for the last fifteen years carried on an elaborate secret correspondence. Their communication was disguised in the style of an ancient Russian fairy tale, “The Tale of the Maidens of Kiev,” and through this veiled exchange, the twins filled in the gaps in their lives since their separation in wartime Ukraine four decades before. As the fairy tale unfolded over the years, Katerina’s mother deduced that her sister’s son was an officer in the KGB, though she also believed that he despised the Soviet regime.
 
Alexander knew that if he reported this information to the CIA, the agency would not hesitate to exploit it, and in the process put Katerina’s family at risk. He detailed his misgivings to Casey, acknowledging that he was prepared to resign quietly if the DCI thought it best. Casey instructed him to use the phrase “possibly/details lacking” to answer the portion of the CIA questionnaire covering family members of the prospective spouse who might reside in a Soviet-bloc country. And then he should sit tight and see what happened.
 
What happened was a maelstrom in the counterintelligence staff. Middleton interpreted the statement as an outright obfuscation. He planted suggestions that Katerina Martynova was tethered to a KGB leash and was being run against Alexander. Counterintelligence specialists analyzed every sentence she had written in the Far Eastern Focus, drawing the ponderous conclusion that she had “sometimes been critical of U.S. foreign policy,” and that her criticisms of U.S. policy played to known KGB themes.
 
As the scent of scandal in Casey’s inner circle spread, conspiracy theories multiplied. Middleton fed the speculation, shrewdly shifting the focus from Katerina to Alexander, weaving his origins into a pattern of deceit and betrayal. The fact that he was born to Russian-Ukrainian parents in a displaced persons camp in postwar Germany had been a strength Alexander brought to the CIA. But now increasingly convoluted scenarios were fed into the CIA’s notorious rumor mill, each new version more baroque than the last, and all bringing into question Alexander’s loyalties and raising the possibility that he had been under KGB control from the day he joined the agency. In an organization where truth was always fiercely guarded, rumor and fantasy made the rounds unshackled. Explanations of a recent string of “counterintelligence anomalies,” as they were solemnly called in the trade, were recast to coincide with Alexander’s association with Katerina. By then Alexander had had enough.
 
On the advice of Lee Tanner, chief of the Soviet Division and a sensible, unflappable political hand, Alexander volunteered for a polygraph. After a grueling three-hour session he was given an unambiguous clean-pass by the Office of Security—“no deception indicated.” Undeterred, Middleton put out the line that the results might be “just a little too good.” Soon, competing theories on what was behind the results swirled through the corridors—self-hypnosis, drugs, special KGB training.
 
Alexander saw it was too late to walk the story back; he told Casey he was resigning. Casey told him he wasn’t, and in a compromise Alexander had agreed to take a couple of weeks off. That was ten days ago.
 
Bill Casey was already talking when he entered the office. “Thought I’d let you have two whole weeks off, did you?” he said, settling awkwardly into a chair.
 
Alexander studied the white-haired old man, his blue chalk stripe, shoul-ders dusted with dandruff, the soup-stained regimental tie askew around a collar one size too large. The effect was a careless, gawky appearance that Alexander thought part of Casey’s charm. That and his gruff, unyielding loyalty.