someone happened to drop a nuclear bomb on Madrid, this would be the safest place in the city. But with the guard outside dead, there wouldn’t be any way to get out again.
The room was filled with half a dozen noisy Teletype machines spewing out pages of Cyrillic text. Five of them monitored sensitive but ordinary diplomatic communications. But one machine was for top-secret material. It was a newer Western-made model that had been on the U.S. export prohibited list. But that hadn’t prevented its acquisition via an agreeable Middle Eastern exporting firm and its subsequent modification in a Moscow electronics lab. The U.S.-made hardware was more reliable than anything manufactured at home, the Raven reflected. But when it did break down, spare parts were a bitch.
However, that wasn’t his problem. He was more interested in the data than the terminal. It was on this line that he had picked up a lot of the information he’d passed on to the Falcon. Until nine months ago his personal code of honor had restricted the exchange to material that wouldn’t damage his country’s own national security. That meant he’d stayed away from almost anything with military ramifications. But then he’d gotten a hint of something that could change the whole balance of world power.
At first he had thought it was simply part of the extensive Soviet propaganda effort, the most effective tool of which was disinformation. Moscow had always prided itself on the creative use of half-truths and fabrications that were close enough to facts to sound plausible. The technique was used on every front. When Arkady Shevchenko had defected, he’d been smeared as an alcoholic and a womanizer to discredit his disclosures. After the accidental release of cyanide in Bhopal, India, TASS had rushed in to inform the world that the U.S. was testing deadly poison gas on a guinea pig community. And Moscow had even tried to scare black and oriental athletes away from the Los Angeles Olympics with a hate flier purportedly prepared by the Ku Klux Klan. At its most successful, this war of words had toppled whole governments. Even when the lies didn’t stand up to scrutiny, they cost the West millions of dollars to counteract the libel.
The Raven stepped over a snake pit of heavy extension cords and cables, heading for the Western-made machine against the wall. Though the noise level always gave him a headache, at least it wasn’t like the comms center in KGB headquarters, where the operators lost fifty percent of their hearing within five years. But the clatter here, he reminded himself, was a mixed blessing. It meant that there was no one assigned to the room who might be looking over his shoulder.
Quickly he began scanning the output of the last twenty-four hours for the information he hoped to pass to the Falcon. He was looking for references to material classified under the project name Topaz. The access was so tight, he doubted that even a dozen men knew the significance of the word.
He’d always harbored a grudging respect for the power of a successful disinformation assault. But under Topaz the trickery promised to escalate from shaping opinion to manipulating the spending of U.S. defense dollars. The first Topaz reference on this communication link nine months ago had aroused his curiosity. The weeks had crawled by as he’d doggedly chipped slivers of information from the monolithic bureaucracy. Even though he still didn’t have the whole story, what he’d learned made his blood run as icy as the Volga River in the dead of winter.
The scheme had been to trick the U.S. Defense Department into wasting billions of dollars by making the Western forces believe they had captured the nerve gas antidote Quadrozine. The Western commanders had snapped up the first part of the bait when they’d started making decisions based on “stolen” Soviet documents. The next phase of the operation had involved letting rebel forces in Afghanistan capture a
The room was filled with half a dozen noisy Teletype machines spewing out pages of Cyrillic text. Five of them monitored sensitive but ordinary diplomatic communications. But one machine was for top-secret material. It was a newer Western-made model that had been on the U.S. export prohibited list. But that hadn’t prevented its acquisition via an agreeable Middle Eastern exporting firm and its subsequent modification in a Moscow electronics lab. The U.S.-made hardware was more reliable than anything manufactured at home, the Raven reflected. But when it did break down, spare parts were a bitch.
However, that wasn’t his problem. He was more interested in the data than the terminal. It was on this line that he had picked up a lot of the information he’d passed on to the Falcon. Until nine months ago his personal code of honor had restricted the exchange to material that wouldn’t damage his country’s own national security. That meant he’d stayed away from almost anything with military ramifications. But then he’d gotten a hint of something that could change the whole balance of world power.
At first he had thought it was simply part of the extensive Soviet propaganda effort, the most effective tool of which was disinformation. Moscow had always prided itself on the creative use of half-truths and fabrications that were close enough to facts to sound plausible. The technique was used on every front. When Arkady Shevchenko had defected, he’d been smeared as an alcoholic and a womanizer to discredit his disclosures. After the accidental release of cyanide in Bhopal, India, TASS had rushed in to inform the world that the U.S. was testing deadly poison gas on a guinea pig community. And Moscow had even tried to scare black and oriental athletes away from the Los Angeles Olympics with a hate flier purportedly prepared by the Ku Klux Klan. At its most successful, this war of words had toppled whole governments. Even when the lies didn’t stand up to scrutiny, they cost the West millions of dollars to counteract the libel.
The Raven stepped over a snake pit of heavy extension cords and cables, heading for the Western-made machine against the wall. Though the noise level always gave him a headache, at least it wasn’t like the comms center in KGB headquarters, where the operators lost fifty percent of their hearing within five years. But the clatter here, he reminded himself, was a mixed blessing. It meant that there was no one assigned to the room who might be looking over his shoulder.
Quickly he began scanning the output of the last twenty-four hours for the information he hoped to pass to the Falcon. He was looking for references to material classified under the project name Topaz. The access was so tight, he doubted that even a dozen men knew the significance of the word.
He’d always harbored a grudging respect for the power of a successful disinformation assault. But under Topaz the trickery promised to escalate from shaping opinion to manipulating the spending of U.S. defense dollars. The first Topaz reference on this communication link nine months ago had aroused his curiosity. The weeks had crawled by as he’d doggedly chipped slivers of information from the monolithic bureaucracy. Even though he still didn’t have the whole story, what he’d learned made his blood run as icy as the Volga River in the dead of winter.
The scheme had been to trick the U.S. Defense Department into wasting billions of dollars by making the Western forces believe they had captured the nerve gas antidote Quadrozine. The Western commanders had snapped up the first part of the bait when they’d started making decisions based on “stolen” Soviet documents. The next phase of the operation had involved letting rebel forces in Afghanistan capture a
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