I don't know if the other stuff I wrote was lost. The stuff between the middle '90s and now, 2014. A lot had happened between that meeting with Arkady Zotov and the coffee with Stan Beeman - the latter at a Moscow Starbucks! It had opened earlier this year. I'll be honest with you, Starbucks was nice to have, finally; I'd always wondered what this 'Starbucks' phenomenon was about, it was so American. As I kept telling my daughter, I am grateful to Mother Russia for taking me in and pairing me with her. For giving me grandchildren. But Russian coffee sucks.
I don't smoke, but they say that about the cigarettes here too. Vodka is what Russia excels in.
PRESENT TENSE
Martha Hanson: I'm a grandmother, Stan. Something I never thought I'd be.
Stan Beeman: No shit? You beat me to it. Matthew's married but never had kids. I guess the closest is my other son, Henry. He's got kids, but they don't call me grandpa.
MH: Henry? From a later marriage?
SB: No, not really a son. Kind'a a pseudo-son. Henry kind'a adopted me and Renee when his parents…. look, it's a long story.
MH: Renee?
SB: Ya, my second wife. She's long-since been out of the picture. -pause- You know, Martha, that's one of my agenda items for this trip. -pause- Do you know anything of what happened to her?
MH: I don't know. Was she in The Bureau? Was she from Colorado?
SB: You know, Martha, I've been briefed for this trip. I'm not dumb. You just retired from the SVR.
MH: Hey, I never called you dumb, Stan. Where's that coming from? Not 'just retired', Stan. I left the SVR more than ten years ago.
-silence-
SB: What are you, Martha? 70?
MH: Thanks a lot, Stan! I'm 64! We're not exactly getting off on the right foot.
SB: That's because you're a goddamned traitor, Martha. -pause- There, I said it. I've been waiting a long time.
MH: If you think me a traitor, Stan, then you really don't know what happened thirty years ago. Besides, these days we're on the same side!
SB: So tell me, Martha, why aren't you a goddamned traitor?
MH: I was stupid. Stupidly gullible. -pause- Look, Stan, let's not do this. I got caught up in stuff I simply did not understand. -pause- I was in love, Stan.
-silence-
SB: Did you put the bug in Gaad's office?
MH: Another item on your agenda, Stan?
SB: I'm just getting started.
-silence-
MH: Ok, if I tell you, can we move on? For Pete's sake, I finished at the SVR managing cooperation with the CIA! I thought this coffee would be about me telling you of my daughter finishing first in her engineering class, all the while with two toddlers at home! I don't want to rehash…..
SB: Ya, ya, ya, pictures of the grandkids. Did you put the bug in Gaad's office?
MH: Yes. Satisfied?
SB: You know that Clark Westerfeld was never in love with you, Martha, don't you?
MH: You know that I spent ten years in the SVR office here in Moscow? I've seen more than I need about those days back in the US.
SB: What I don't get, Martha, is how easy you were turned. Or were you a mole already when I arrived in C.I.? I mean, you must have known that Gene Craft's death was no suicide. Gaad's death, no accident. Amador's death…
MH: Is this what we're going to do? If this is it, I have dinner to prepare for a brood. They're all coming over this evening. -pause- I think you've just ruined your invitation.
-silence-
SB: Let me let you in on who my neighbor was, Martha….
MH: Stan, stop! That part of my life? Gone. Dead and buried. -pause- You know what's happening to me this year? 2014? I realized that I now dream in Russian. That's the price I paid. -smile- One of my daughter's friends found out I was from Colorado. She now calls me 'John Denver'.
SB: What I don't get, Martha, I'll say it again - why'd you turn so easily? I mean, was Westerfeld that great a lay? Or were you 'deep cover' ever since the 70s?
MH: You really don't know what happened thirty years ago. It's amazing that the USA won the Cold War.
SB: We're still not done. Your Putin will not be satisfied with Crimea, will he? Is Vladimir Putin who you betrayed your country for?
MH: Not everything is geopolitical, Stan. -pause- How long have you been out of the game? The FBI, I mean.
SB: Since I was fifty, twenty years ago. -pause- I wasn't exactly 'drummed out'. I knew where too many bodies were buried. It was more American than that, more like 'bought out'. -pause- I'm not here to get melodramatic, Martha, but I always felt that my wife, Renee, was my Clark Westerfeld.
MH: Really!? -pause- Maybe we should meet again, Stan, and this time lower our shields. -pause- My daughter is against the idea, but maybe this is worth a trip back home.
SB: Not a good idea, Martha.
MH: I've been out of the SVR for years, but they say it could be done. Russia and the USA are now allies. Of sorts.
SB: Don't, Martha, don't. Trust me on this one.
-silence-
SB: If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, Martha, don't. You were a superb office manager to Frank Gaad - well, all except the marriage to the KGB thing. You ran C.I., not Gaad. But you're no operative. You'd last 20 minutes on American soil. Forget it, Martha. For one thing, you'd never see your grandkids again.
MH: We'll see what we will see. -standing, putting on her coat- I've not asked about my parents, Stan. And you've not offered. Suffice it to say that I've come to terms with their passing. I wish it had been different. I hear that they were shunned, once it got around what had happened to me. Strangely, I've come to terms with that as well. I think mom would have understood. Not dad, but mom.
SB: Your life is here, Martha. Take it from an old friend. Keep it that way.
-silence-
MH: Suddenly, I'm an 'old friend'. Right. -pause- This boy of yours, 'Henry'. I've not asked about him, either. -pause- After torturing myself all those years, it seems I'm at peace with that, too. -long pause- How long are you in Moscow?
SB: I'm headed to Smolensk tonight. Some old friends there. Then I have a day back here before the flight home.
MH: Give me a call when you get back in. I'll see what I can find out about Renee Beeman. -pause- Say hello to your Smolensk pals for me. Call me.
RENEE BEEMAN
Not KGB, never was SVR. There were old, heavily redacted reports from a Directorate S 'illegal' about Stan Beeman. Obviously not all the reports there should have been. Lots had obviously been lost when the USSR fell. To my trained eye, the gaps were glaring. Even factoring in Russian inefficiency. But there were reports as to how Beeman might be vulnerable to the right kind of female overtures.
I briefly conspiratorialized the gaps. I mean, what had Stan Beeman always said, that there are no coincidences? I had been in the SVR for as long as I'd been in the FBI, clerically I mean - pushing paper, leaving the paper-trail that was supposed to inform future investigations. I knew my way around. I knew what should be there. And if it wasn't, that would say something, too. I knew which archive or which filing-cabinet things would/should be in, or be cross-referenced with. I knew which office handled which kind of paper.
The downfall of the USSR and the rebuilding within the Russian Federation played havoc with what had been my life-blood: the files.
What can be known? Directorate S illegals on the scene in the 1980s had had subsequent wonderings about a woman named 'Renee', who showed up in Stan's life just after the first reports. They then had had their suspicions, had asked for direction in how to handle her. As for as the record seemed, they never got a reply.
And I think I know why.
REPORTING TO ONESELF
Arkady Zotov, he was still alive in 2014. In his late eighties. I was to know him well.
I held in my hand a report from the, then, Washington D.C., Soviet Rezidentura about an encounter between the Resident and a man who could only have been a Directorate S illegal. The illegals were so deep cover, that those two people should have never met, not at all. That's one reason why this report stood out.
The Resident? He had been no less than Arkady Zotov! He was reporting from an alternate video-store, one that had Russian language/produced films for VCRs.
The illegal? I have my suspicions, but since Zotov was not supposed to know who he was, the report made no identifying indication. All it said was, "Directorate S agent threatened The Centre, saying that if his children were ever dragged into illegals-work, he'd quit and both he and his wife would disappear with them." (Italics are mine.)
Yes, that's what Zotov had written. "His wife". Zotov as Resident recommended to The Centre that both of the Directorate S illegals be recalled and sanctioned. As I was now conversant in the going's-on of both KGB as well as SVR, I then did a deep-dive into other files as to what had transpired. Who would have received that report? Had they in fact been recalled? Had they been 'sanctioned'? In the old USSR, being 'sanctioned' was never good.
So imagine my surprise when I traced out the accountability path, that that report generated. I found out the reason why neither the recall nor the sanction had been acted upon.
The sanctioning forms, where did they end up? They ended up on the desk of the Assistant Director of the Overseas Centre, known to overseas operatives as 'The Centre'.
Who was that Assistant Director but no less than Arkady Zotov, freshly officially expelled as Resident of the Washington Rezidentura, and who landed in Moscow with his new position. He received his own request.
It was no wonder that given the date on the form, that it had not been signed. I can only guess the reason why Zotov would not have signed-off on his own request. Maybe he had a change of heart about the husband-wife illegals. Maybe he didn't want to be seen in his organization as being at both ends of a sanctioning, which probably would have had severe repercussions.
So, in searching out the status of Renee Beeman, I discovered documented proof that those illegals were married, and had children. I obviously was not going to share this with Stan Beeman when he got back from Smolensk.
Also, it was sufficiently 'past tense' that I would not resume my unhealthy obsessing about a man who'd been a phantom, who'd lied about everything. Who'd ruined my life, but similarly gave me a life with a daughter here, and grandchildren who I adore.
Ok, that part is not for Stan. That was for me.
RENEE BEEMAN PT 2
Renee Beeman? The best I could tell him was that Renee might have been just herself, good old fashioned American fly-fisherwoman, Renee Beeman. Who Stan had got lucky with after what I heard had been a messy divorce.
So was she KGB or SVR? Probably not. But the files still smelled.
In the last years of the Soviet Union, and growing exponentially in the Boris Yeltsin period, were the oligarchs. These were the men who bought out old Soviet industry for fire-sale prices. Became billionaires overnight.
Before Renee Beeman had started with the FBI in 1987, she'd worked for businesses and organizations with Russian oligarchs as significant shareholders, before they were well known. These oligarchs had been unpopular in the post-Soviet times, thought of on Moscow's streets as kleptocrats. They were known for "arbitraging" (look that one up) the difference in world prices and Russian prices for commodities to make vast fortunes.
What little paper there was on Renee, seemed to point that way. If I were then to guess? If Renee had not been a red-blooded American girl, she may have been an oligarch's version of a deep-cover spy, living a normal life in the US. Spying for them so as to help them with their competitive edge.
But who really knew? I needed to collect a lot more information before I can present this to Stan Beeman.
