"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you cannot do." -Eleanor Roosevelt
"The Gambit Affair"
Alexander Waverly's plan had gone sour from the start and Napoleon Solo knew it had been a bad idea; but it was not his place to question it. No one questioned the old man's authority. Illya went along with the assignment willingly, doing as usual what he was told to do; though he too was of like mind with his partner.
And now the Russian was in the hands of the STASI, the secret police of the German Democratic Republic; having been captured while on a mission to free an American supposedly being held on espionage charges in East Berlin. Illya had gone there as part of a deal brokered by the C.I.A. for U.N.C.L.E. to retrieve the man, thereby keeping the folks from the "farm" at Langley free of overt involvement in the affair.
The Central Intelligence Agency liked to keep themselves a wash in plausible denialbility. Even though it was common knowledge they were behind many covert operations in the European arena; it was the public face they chose to wear, as if in a delusional way they could pretend they were sqeaky clean and free of being duplicitious. So when the operation failed Illya Kuryakin became their sacrificial lamb, abandoned to take the the fall; the finger of blame pointed at him and U.N.C.L.E. instead of them.
Waverly realized their machinations possessed inherent risks when he agreed to assist the C.I.A. but they were risks that he felt at the time were acceptable.
They greatest of these being that if Kuryakin were to be captured; there was a good chance that his number two agent could ultimately end up in the hands of the KGB. They were never happy about the Directorate's deal with U.N.C.L.E. to supply a Russian representative that would not act as a double agent and spy for his own country. They had as times attempted to convince Kuryakin of the error of his ways but without success, as his loyalties were now to the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. And now his former countrymen had tried the Russian in their own court of law and found him guilty of being a traitor; they being were very much aware of Kuryakin's intention to defect.
While Illya was still a Russian citizen and an agent of the GRU on loan to U.N.C.L.E.; the Glavnoye Razvedyalel'noye Upravleniye, considered him unofficially expendible to Soviet military intelligence.
If KGB got hold of him it was of no consequence to GRU; they would simply provide a replacement for Kuryakin if he were disposed of and continue to receive their intelligence reports from UNCLE as if nothing had happened. Theirs was an attitude of indifference.
It was this divergent posture towards him within the hierarchy of the Directorate that hounded Illya Kuryakin for years. When GRU was in favor, he was left alone. When the pendulum of power swung in the favor of the KGB; he was hounded by them.
He was still GRU and yet he was U.N.C.L.E.; though his loyalty to the latter had been declared by swearing an oath when he joined the organization, and proven by his actions countless times. But because of his GRU affilitions the C.I.A. would not let him be, though he and his partner had helped them out on numerous occasions.
Illya abhorred this sense of being a victim, of being at the mercy of these two adversaries and that was why he made his decison to defect to the United States and to become a citizen.
Another and more important reason for his determination was that of his family. His son Demya was born in America, and was a citizen, his home was there in New York with his wife Elliott and he had every intention of staying there with them as they were his life, his home and his haven from his shaded existence. So defection was a seemingly safe move to ultimately get both the C.I.A and KGB off his back, or so he thought.
His declaration to defect had become all the more reason why the KGB wanted to get their hands on him; once he became a U.S. citizen their attempts to repatriate him had too much potential to cause an international incident between their two governments and would no longer be worth the risk. His capture by the STASI now offered an opportunity the KGB could not pass on.
Upon arriving in German, Illya Kuryakin traveled through the security checkpoints at the Berlin Wall into East Berlin without incident as he had done so on previous missions. He carried false identity papers, identifying him as a German business man, nothing fancy or out of the ordinary as far as cover stories were concerned.
And now he walked quietly down a side street off the Friedrichstrasse to meet his C.I.A. contact as he pulled up the collar of his grey raincoat that matched they dreariness of the day. Everything was grey in this place, the buildings, the sky, even the people. East Berlin always seemed that way to him. It was not his favorite place to say the least.
It was a fairly quiet morning, with but a few people going on about their business in and out of the shops and cafés. He knew of course he that was under surveillance; everyone in East Berlin was watching someone as there was a pervasive sense of paranoia in the city; much less the entire German Democratic Republic for that matter.
It seemed as though every other person was working for the Staatssicheheit_State Security. They employed nearly a quarter of a million people who worked as agents or informers, creating a monolithic spy network that became one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world, rivaling if not surpassing their sister organization, the KGB. Then there were the spies from every conceivable agency in the world there making dirty little deals there with each other. East Berlin was literally a city of spies.
The secret police operated seventeen prison camps through out the country, but unlike the Gestapo methods of torture and executions that preceeded them; the STASI strove for sublety. Their approach was less often to be physically abusive and leaned more towards a mental beating to their prisoners to overwhelm them psychologically. There were no icy gulags as there were in Russia, only cold cells where the minds and souls of their prisoner were numbed with their endless barrage of mental foreplay and misdirection.
Prisoners were held in complete isolation, cut off from the outside world. When death did eventually come, it was by the guillotine or a single shot to the back of the neck. In most cases the relatives of the executed were never even informed of either the sentence or the execution. And like their Nazi forebearers the STASI continued the repression and descrimintion against the Jews and the gypsies...
Illya continued to walk, watching out of the corner of his eye as a man pretended to be sweeping the sidewalk, another reading the news paper as they both cast their subtle glances in his direction. It was easy to spot them as the STASI always, for some reason, wore their hair in crewcuts. The Russian smiled at that.
He had no reason to think they were aware of his mission, as he had just arrived in the city; no these men were just part of the web of intrigue that existed from day to day there and they were watching him as matter of course as they watched everyone.
A white van turned the corner and now seemed to be following him as continued down the sidewalk, trying not to be obvious as he quickly glanced at it. It made him nervous.
The vehicle picked up speed, driving past him, then it's tires screeched to a stopped and a half dozen men leapt out from it; all with their hair shorn in the telltale crewcuts.
He tried to run, dodging his way down the sidewalk but it was no use as they hit him with a tranquilizer dart, sending him careening like a rag doll down to the hard concrete. They lifted his half-conscious body into the sedan then sped off; disappearing down the cobblestone street. No one really paid attention to what had just happened; it wasn't safe to be heedful of the goings on of the STASI.
They arrived at their destination in a part of the city that he did not recognize. Illya was cuffed and fully awake now as they lead him down twisting alleys and concrete-walled courtyards that were unusually empty, giving him an eerie feeling. Finally they arrived at a nondescript building in the center of the compound; one of many in the spider's web of the secret police.
The STASI was superficially granted independence from the KGB in ten years ago, but Moscow maintained liason offices in all eight of the main STASI directorates, each with it's own office inside the Berlin compounds and in each of the fifteen STASI district headquarters in East Germany. The KGB helped create the secret police of the GDR but then the STASI took on a life of it's own, sometimes surpassing their former teachers in their cruel methods.
But it was the presence of the KGB that had Kuryakin worried. He hoped that he would not be turned over to them, as that surely meant his death would be imminent.
The STASI were not quick to kill their prisoners and liked to toy with them like cats with their prey until they were no longer of interest and simply disposed of them; unlike the KGB who would torture and kill quickly.
Unless of course the prisoner was a special case...then that meant a slow death in the gulag. But slow or fast, it was still death. Kuryakin knew he was a special case and wondered how long the anticipated tug of war over him between the STASI and KGB would last before one of them won out? He just hoped for once it would not be the KGB, but he had his doubts.
He looked up at the shield displayed above the door as they dragged him inside; it's motto in German shouting blind Communist pride to him. He found it ironic to think that he once embraced that mentality.
"Shild un Schweit de Parte_shield and sword of the party,"
Illya Kuryakin knew that a new sword of Damocles was about to be dangled over his head.