DUTY AND HONOUR

Irina happened at the wrong time.

New York. The Andrzej Bielawski mission. The Centre had assigned me. And Irina Semenov. Why did it have to be Irina?

Elizabeth had not been called for it because she did not speak Polish. Bielawski had been a Polish political leader, who planned to tell the United Nations that he was going to form an anti-Soviet, Polish government-in-exile - at the height of their Solidarity movement

Our mission, it was easy enough - we did it by the numbers. If nothing else, it fulfilled an enduring fantasy of mine, one that I had not seriously thought about for 10 years - what if Irina had been assigned as the original Elizabeth Mary Korman of Chicago? What if Irina had ended up as Elizabeth Jennings of Falls Church, Virginia?

We'd not have waited until 1981 for 'Elizabeth' to have had some great awakening about her husband!

As it was, we ruined Bielawski. Mission, success. The Reagan administration was not going to back a rapist and woman-beater - Irina had been assigned as the recipient of that one.

Elizabeth had been right to be worried. About me and Irina. I thought that lying to Elizabeth would let things slide.

It wasn't the best time for me and Elizabeth. In 1981 we had just discovered each other as a 'spouse'. More to the point, she had discovered me as something other than as a Directorate S partner. After 16 years of our top-notch 'teaming', we'd discovered that elusive spark - what cemented married couples to one another. I'm serious.

But it wasn't to last.

The Centre, they'd just tortured us, me and Elizabeth - a loyalty test because of a then mole at the Rezidentura. Yes, I said, 'the Rezidentura'. Not among the Directorate S part of the KGB, it was someone emanating from the Embassy, someone who had been in the loop about the FBI encoding of their communications. Me and Elizabeth, we had cracked that one.

But the very next day - before the meet between the Rezident and Adam Dorwin - the FBI changed their communications codes. That could only mean one thing. Someone close was leaking information. (The Centre was to learn the hard way, that those sorts of 'ops' should be assigned to the likes of me and Elizabeth.)

When it was revealed to us what our torture had been about, Elizabeth had almost killed Claudia. Claudia had just called off her henchmen, saying that we'd passed our loyalty test. Us. Coming up to 16 years in America, and that was the thanks we got. Russians, we are fucking brutal. No wonder people defect.

MARRIAGE SURVIVAL

Yet, the only one to be questioned, was me. Not Elizabeth - but me. After assuring me that she was now feeling love for me, Elizabeth had turned around and sold me out to our own people. As she said, she had done it out of 'duty', it had been our job to report on one another.

Can marriage survive that? Is this what regular American couples contend with?

Worse, she lied to me about it. To my face. She claimed she had not told them about me talking about defection with the Timoshev thing. I believed her about that, because I'm still alive. But telling them, 'he likes it here too much', was enough for me to be waterboarded. Badly beaten with a phone book. At the first sign of a mole, it was us who were 'litmus tested'.

I say this in abject anger - beet-red in the face anger - I was no turncoat, I simply fit in! To America. Apparently, too well. But that's what I was supposed to do! That's part of the duty and honour I committed myself to way back in 1963….

….. or in 1959, the last time I was to see Irina Semenov - the love of my life. Who I was not to see again. Until…..

Until the Travel Associates of America convention in New York City - early 1981.

Why'd it have to be Irina?

SOLIDARITY

Elizabeth must have been really shaken by me yelling at her, yelling at her because her loyalty was to 'the cause', and not to me - the man who'd had her back all these years.

She kept telling me that she'd been so young when we'd been paired, that regardless of how well we worked, I was still a strange man living with her in strange surroundings. Sure, we worked well together, I don't think either one of us ever doubted that. A Directorate S dream team.

But she was now telling me that what she'd never felt for the first few decades of our life together - a life which included children (!) - she said she was feeling it now.

There I was in my room at The Carnegie Hotel, middle of the night. The phone rang. That had never happened before - ok, once, but that had been Elizabeth calling when Paige and Henry were really young, and she'd been assigned a mission she could not keep. The kids had been unwell.

But now, there was her voice, me in New York, she back home. The voice of the new, very different Elizabeth. All she said was, "I miss you." She had to phone just to say that?

Me, I hung up. And then Irina rolled over in bed and threw an arm around me.

HONESTY, THE BEST POLICY?

Me and Elizabeth? We were not exactly honest with each other. When the Bielawski mission was over, and I had arrived home to the kids, and with Elizabeth upstairs in the bedroom…. I was exhausted.

I'll write about Irina in a minute. I'll write about how she had floored me. Uprooted my life, once again as only Irina could do. Irina had been the only dream I'd ever had which was not a nightmare about work…..

But first, Elizabeth. She confessed to me her screw-up in relation to Claudia's interrogation and our torture at Claudia's hands….

EMJ: Philip, when they tortured us, I blamed you. For what happened, to me, to us. It wasn't your fault. I'm sorry.

PMJ: - silence -

EMJ: I missed you. I didn't want to, it just happened. I am missing you.

PMJ: - silence -

EMJ: I want us to be able to say what's true. I want us….

PMJ: (This was the new Elizabeth, struggling to verbalize feelings. Elizabeth and feelings!? Before Timoshev, she'd never even tried. As hyper-competent as she was in what our job was, this was foreign territory to her. Her feelings.)

EMJ: ….. it to be (sighed deeply) ….

PMJ: What?

EMJ: I want it to be…. (long awkward pause) … real. Do you think we could do that?

PMJ: (my one foray into honesty) I don't know.

EMJ: I would try. Will you try?

PMJ: (embracing Elizabeth) ….. yes.

As you will see, I had chosen Elizabeth. Maybe I shouldn't have. All of that was happening out of order, because I was not considering what had already happened back in New York, at the Carnegie Hotel. Then continued at the train station to Montreal, where Irina begged me to come with her. She begged me to use her money to run away with her, go someplace where we'd never be found.

Back to our Falls Church bedroom, me and Elizabeth.

EMJ: Um, I have to ask you something. (long pause) …. just promise you'll tell me the truth.

PMJ: (promising it way too soon, before I'd heard the question)

EMJ: Did something happen between you and Irina? Do you still love her?

In all our time together, I'd spoken of Irina maybe twice in 16 years. Elizabeth had divined that all by herself, not from any deep conversation we'd ever had. Overtly, I rarely spoke of Irina, it hurt too much. I mean, I had divined exactly the same about her and Gregory Thomas, without much talk between us. That one had been plain as day.

PMJ: Nothing happened. (pause) There's only you, It has always been you.

When we embraced, I knew that eventually that that bomb would go off. The price of dishonesty. But as you will see below, it was more complex than that.

MISHA SEMENOV

I had a son. Another one, this one with Irina. A son she had kept from me since perhaps 1959. If I'd known that the night I killed Timoshev, maybe I wouldn't have.

A son, maybe 22 years old, Mischa (!), a soldier in the military - more than likely swallowed up by Soviet forces trying to pacify Afghanistan.

There was the glorious night with Irina at the Carnegie…. there was Elizabeth's call…. I hung up on Elizabeth for saying that she missed me, and I returned to Irina. As one does.

The next day, I walked Irina to Grand Central Terminal. I shouldn't have.

She talked about her feelings of guilt, guilt about the work she did for The Centre back home. She talked about how Andrzej Bielawski had, at the core, been a good man. We'd destroyed a good man. Bielawski had lost his family to his Polish Solidarity work, and that had driven him into exile. He had as much 'duty and honour' as any of us - maybe more.

Yet our mission was to ruin him. It seemed that Irina and I made a good Directorate S team, too. She could have easily have been 'Elizabeth Korman' all those years - in Falls Church rather than Montreal as 'Anne'.

At Grand Central she said, "come with me. We can dump this life. I have money. Between the two of us, we have the skill to disappear, they'll never find us. How many Andrzej Bielawski's are in our future, where all we accomplish is to ruin good people?"

God Almighty, those had been my words to Elizabeth the night Timoshev had been in the trunk of our car, in our lazy suburban garage. Except now fleeing New York for Montreal, I would have had a real son, Mischa, someone I could acknowledge with my real identity.

Not what I was doing to Paige and Henry.

Paige and Henry. And yes, Elizabeth.

AVOIDANCE OF CONSEQUENCES

If I were to board that train to Montreal, what would become of the 'family' that I knew? What would become of Paige and Henry, not to mention Elizabeth - who'd already been tortured, even if she'd not been questioned?

It's the reason we'd not told either The Centre or Claudia that we'd sat on the information about Alexander Haig - we'd exercised discretion, rather than simply passing info up the chain and letting the responsible authority sort it out. As per protocol. We had no discretion, yet we exercised it. We had made that decision for them - and if they ever found out, we'd be finished.

Me leaving for Montreal, then disappearing? What would happen to Elizabeth? To the kids? Some other Directorate S operative in America would draw an assignment to get rid of them. That was for sure. That would be their duty.

"I have family, Irina," I told her as a refusal.

"The Centre, Mischa, it doesn't care about you. The Centre, Mischa, it doesn't care about your family. What's going to happen to you? I mean, what's going to happen when you're assigned the next Andrzej Bielawski? How many more innocents?…" Irina said, pleading for me.

So it was I said goodbye to Irina. She was older, was not the young idealistic 'Commissariat for the Leadership Group' member I'd once known her as.

She was now a mother. Of my son. She now had 15 years of her own missions in Canada on behalf of The Centre. She had had enough, as I had had with Timoshev in our possession - before my marriage intervened, before my love for Elizabeth - Nadezhda - intervened.

"Duty and honour, Mischa," Irina quipped as her Montreal train was called. "Duty means that you have to tell The Centre what I've just told you." Looking straight into my eyes she asked, "are you going to tell them about me, Mischa?"

She was the mother to my son. Of course I was not going to 'rat her out'. Elizabeth had done that to me, because she understood her duty. She understood duty to people who show very little loyalty in return.

LIES AND DAMNED LIES

Once home, it was clear that Elizabeth was way farther along the way of our marriage than I was. She was going to try - knowing her, she would give all her non-operational attention to her marriage, to make it work.

To make 'us' work, the 'us' that was something other than the finest Directorate S, illegal team that the Soviet Union had ever put into the field.

What was it that made us the best? Perhaps the only metric that mattered was our longevity.

We should have been home by 1970. That was more than ten years ago. Many of us illegals had not survived - they'd perished not from lack of skill, but mainly from unanticipated misfortune.

All of this, then, was the story of Irina. It was not over.

Lies, they have consequences. Elizabeth, she was no dummy. I had hitched myself to her for the duration, no matter what awful thing we were about to be assigned.

Or what Elizabeth was to discover.

(to be continued)