The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

The past administration had selected Larson as DCIA in recognition of his moral rectitude, bureaucratic acumen, and top-flight recruitments (which Benford over the years had supported by vetting the assets as they came online). Sixty-five-year-old Larson looked the DCIA part: He was short, a bit stout, wore ginger-colored tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and sported what Benford called an Allen Dulles wannabe mustache. This, along with thinning white hair and white eyebrows so bushy that subordinates had to resist the temptation to run a comb through them, made him look like a college professor. But he was every inch the operator, and the troops respected him.

Larson was not popular with the current White House or with the derivative progressives on the National Security Council, the twentysomething English majors who were advising POTUS on Mideast policy. DCIA Larson moreover had obliquely contradicted his predecessor’s statement during the latter’s farewell foreign tour. “We don’t steal secrets,” the outgoing DCIA had said of CIA intelligence collection to an allied liaison audience. “Everything we do is consistent with US law. We uncover, we discover, we reveal, we obtain, we elicit, we solicit.”

Asked about his predecessor’s statement at a closed session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Larson unsmilingly and without a trace of irony had replied to the senators, “Fair enough. An asset, for instance, discovers the existence of a Russian mole in NATO headquarters, the CIA case officer solicits the info, the asset then reveals it, and thereby CIA obtains perishable counterintelligence information.” Partisan snitches reported the disloyal comment promptly, but Alexander Larson was not fired. He could not be fired. The reason was COPPERFIN.

During his fourteen years in the operational field, Larson had built the COPPERFIN espionage network, the massive, pervasive penetration of the entire State aerospace design, construction, and testing combine in the Russian Federation. Larson had personally recruited the first two Russian principal agents years earlier, one in India, the other in Brazil, who in turn had themselves recruited subsources in the Sukhoi, Mikoyan, Ilyushin, Tupolev, and Yakovlev design entities, all of which in 2006 had merged into OAK, Obyedinyonnaya Aviastroitelnaya Korporatsiya, the United Aircraft Corporation, located in the Krasnoselsky District in the central Moscow Okrug. Larson’s COPPERFIN agents regularly emptied the top-secret vaults of OAK to report on the advanced capabilities of fourth- and fifth-generation Russian fighters such as the Su-27, the MiG-29, and the new Sukhoi PAK FA. The US Air Force was ecstatic.

The administration’s intention to eventually jettison Alex Larson in favor of a DCIA more conformable to the White House’s pigeon-hearted foreign policy was stopped cold by howls from the Pentagon after the acquisition through the COPPERFIN network of the technical parameters of APFAR, Aktivnaya Fazirovannaya Antennaya Reshotka, the new Russian phased array radar, an inestimable prize. Next came the delivery of an actual Zvezda Kh-35U antiship missile, NATO designation KAYAK, but nicknamed the harpoonski because of its similarities to the US Harpoon missile. The Zvezda was brought across the Lithuanian border by a courier in the COPPERFIN network who bribed border guards to ignore the tail of the missile protruding from the broken-out back window of his UAZ Patriot, which was the only way he could fit the 520 kg, 380 cm missile into his compact SUV.

Immune from dyspeptic antagonists, DCIA Larson, in consultation with Simon Benford, launched his own active-measures campaign against the Putin regime—an offensive long overdue in the eyes of many to repay the Russians in their own coin for seven decades of disinformation, forgeries, and political meddling that was the Kremlin’s stock-in-trade. Larson became a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation, testifying in open committee sessions about congenital Russian use of active measures to influence political outcomes, mostly with mediocre results. He increased intel sharing with allied services, especially in Ukraine and the Baltics, which resulted in several flashy spy arrests of red-faced Russian intel officers. Their identities had been provided by DIVA and Larson had passed along his compliments to her via Benford. (The Director and DIVA had never met; Larson properly left the case in the able hands of Benford and company.)