It snowed – all of two inches – on Wednesday, which, true to form, totally paralyzed the city of Washington, D.C. As I drove downtown from my home in Great Falls, Virginia, I could not help but be reminded of something the famous Soviet KGB defector, Taris Yankivich Balsov, once told me, when I was but a young tyke, celebrating Take Your Children to Work Day with my father, who was tending bar at a reception for the U.N. Soviet delegation in New York: that the Kremlin had concluded the best time to attack the United States would be two hours after a snow storm with an accumulation of more than 25 centimeters had fallen on Washington.
I was initially quiet skeptical, since, even at that tender age, I could tell that Taris was three sheets to the wind; when your father’s a bartender, you learn to recognize the signs of inebriation in his customers quite early. What’s more, this was nearly a decade before he defected, in Prague, at night, with nothing but a suitcase, and a mad infatuation for an American woman; and even a child can figure out that a colonel in the Soviet KGB isn’t going to tell strangers, like me, anything that sounds like a state secret that’s actually true. But, fifteen years later, after the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union was tossed upon the ash heap of history, the KGB files were made public, I learned that Taris had, in fact, been telling me the truth. Maybe, back then, the Kremlin didn’t care if the White House and the Pentagon knew about America’s Achilles’ heel, or, more likely, Taris was so drunk, he figured it would be amusing to tell something that sounded so absurd to a little boy, whom he knew nobody would believe, should he repeat it.
Then when I came to Washington, I heard about the garden gnome, the one which stood twenty five centimeters tall in the courtyard of the old Soviet Embassy on 16th Street, and met plenty of people who claimed to have seen him, sporting his curious Bolshevik grin, holding a hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other. They used to say that gnome was custom made, that his face was, in fact, a pretty accurate portrait of Leon Trotsky. I guess somebody – surely not the ambassador, but somebody, maybe Taris or someone like him – was supposed to contact the Kremlin every time the snow covered that little sucker up to the top of his pointed red hat, the one with the yellow star on the front, just above his eyebrows. Well, of course that gnome’s hat would be red – aren’t those golf balls, designed for idiots crazy enough to play golf in the winter, also colored red for the same reason, because they can be easily seen in white snow? What that poor devil was supposed to do after he’d called the Kremlin, I guess God only knows. Get the hell out of Dodge, maybe; or not, depending on how fanatical a Commie the guy was. Anyway, Commies don’t believe in God, so if He knows, it’s dollars to donuts He ain’t telling nobody.
Those were the days, to be sure, when at least we had clearly identifiable enemies. Not like today, when we’re engaged in a war of theoretically infinite cost, commitment and duration with the noun “terrorism,” and our societal paranoia approaches a fever pitch that future historians will doubtless determine to have put the Red Scare to shame. That the Eternal Enemy was in reality named “Osama bin Laden,” instead of the fictional “Goldstein,” what will that have mattered? Not a whit, I am certain – the Eternal Enemy could have been named anything. Our leaders know that. The only essential thing needed to effect their continual control over us, is that an Eternal Enemy of some sort or another exist. Call it Communism, call it Islamofascism, call it Demon Rum, call it Pornography, call it Drugs – in the final analysis, the nomenclature selected is essentially trivial, just fill in the blank and start yammering, start poking and prodding, start jacking up the fear.
Yeah, that’s all there is to it, I was thinking, as the snow lingered, melting slowly under overcast skies and an intermittent, sorrowful rain this afternoon, and I made my way into an appropriately darkened and warm watering hole not too far from the Capitol.
It was one of those places where you can pay plenty for a drink if you want to. Bottles of brandy, some even older than Senator Byrd, locked behind the glass door of a cleverly constructed liquor cabinet above the bar, guarantee it. Similarly ancient bottles of Burgundy and Bordeaux can be ordered from the wine list, available from the sommelier, who will provide it with a smile as he tacks the establishment’s forty dollar corkage fee to your tab. But this bistro, of which I speak, does not intend to be an intimidating place. Should you go there, no one will pressure you to purchase rare wines, brandies or exotic liquors. They don’t need to – a rail drink costs nearly ten bucks and their cheapest beer is five and a half. But, truth be told, their rail booze is what most places call top shelf and their beers and ales are the best available. The food’s excellent, too, but I wasn’t there to eat. No, all I expected at the moment was a Bombay Sapphire with Schweppes tonic and half a key lime, and that’s what I got, and it was perfect.
Midway through my second pull off that drink, though, I got something I didn’t expect, not in a month of Sundays, as a ham-fisted slap on the back, followed by a roar of greeting informed me that a Russian had sat next to me at the bar and decided to say hello.
“Tom! Tom Collins Martini,” the grizzled old guy proclaimed, raising his glass in a respectful salute, “son of the greatest bartender who ever lived. Za Vas!”
“Za druzhbu myezhdu narodami,” I replied, raising my glass to meet his.
He laughed, tossing off his shot of Stoli Okhotinichya, coughing a bit as the heat of the vodka mixed with his ironic mirth. “Yes! Yes, my friend, Tom Collins, peace among all nations! Peace! A piece of this neighbor’s land, a piece that neighbor’s land, and piece on earth for that [expletive] Hillary Clinton, so good, it turns her into real woman instead of nasty witch with only the handle of her flying broom for a friend at night!” He winked at me mischievously. “Young fellow like you, Tom Collins, maybe you want to give it a try, huh? Turn Hillary Clinton straight? [Expletive] leathery skinned old bat, with sagging [expletives] and drooping [expletives] – keep your eyes closed, think about Hillary Duff or somebody like that, yes? Yes, think about Hillary Duff – that way, if you yell, you yell out ‘Hillary’ and old bag think you mean her.”
It was Taris – I knew it was he, after the minute or so he had given me to rifle through my memory with his glosses on my toast, although, technically, I had voiced my glass of spirits for “friendship,” rather than “peace” – not that such hair-splitting distinctions would deter old Taris, drunker tonight than I had ever seen him. This, I might add, despite the fact that I had not seen him more than three or four times, including that meeting when I was a child, but once you’ve met someone like colonel Taris Yankivich Balsov, you never forget. What I found amazing, and I must admit, also somewhat flattering, was that this genuine Cold War villain, who, after all, had matched wits with real, live British MI-6 double-zero agents, and had been a personal friend of Stalin, for Christ’s sake, also remembered meeting me.
“What, am I so crazy, that I should put my dear Mr. Happy in that witch’s bottomless abyss?” I laughed quite sincerely at the thought. “It has teeth all around the edges, sharp as a feminist’s meaningless misandrogenous rhetoric! Its walls crush, mad will envy of men and all their accomplishments. Its nether shores seethe, berserk with frustration that women need men for procreation, bathed in hot Giger Alien acids that provoke fatal immune response! Poor Mr. Happy – he’d come out bent like a boomerang, limp and slimy like a dead lamprey and covered with scratches and sores, just as Monica Lewinsky told the grand jury Bill Clinton’s was!”
Taris started laughing like a Cossack watching a bear dancing.
“’Oh, oh, my liberal Democrat lover, come with me!’ That’s what she would shout, so loud Monica Lewinsky could hear it, far away in her kitschy dacha where she mixes her little bowl of tepid, ineptly seasoned home made borscht with this… and that… gentlemen’s faltering and unimpressive dollops of acrid and gelid sour cream. Push… push… push… Whoosh! Inside! I fall, and fall, and fall…”
Taris began laughing so hard, other patrons were turning around to see what was so funny.
“Then, finally, I hit bottom. Looking around, what do I see? Everywhere, there are skeletons in boxer shorts…”
Taris doubled over, pounding the bar with his fist.
“Fake Rolex watches and Chinese manufactured designer shoes lying here and there…”
“Yes! Yes! Exactly like that!” Taris managed between gales of uncontrolled laughter.
“Then, backing up, I bump behinds!”
Taris giggled like a school girl.
“Then, turning around I see. What is it? A big, bony dyke with more muscles than me!”
Taris brayed like a donkey.
“I see what she was wearing when she fell in, so very quickly I place both hands over my rump so as not get jumped and pegged right there. Then I say, ‘Hey, lady, help me find my car keys. I have a high power LED flashlight attached to the key ring and we can use it to find our way out of here.’”
“Right! Right!” Taris chortled, “Like Carlsbad Caverns, it must be!”
“And she says, ‘To hell with that, straight boy, take your hands off your butt and help me find my keys or damn me if I don’t peg you right here!”
Taris sat bolt upright, laughed until the rafters shook and signaled the bartender while pointing at me. “Anything he wants until he leaves!”
“’What’s so special about your God damned keys?’ I say. ‘Before I fell in, me and Hillary were doing it under my Hummer,’ the dyke says, ‘it’s got Hewlett Packard GPS with a Google Maps API, and if we can find that sucker, we can drive out of here!’”
Okay, I admit it. Sometimes, I’m too funny. When I let go with the punch line on that one, Taris laughed so hard, he pitched over backwards off his bar stool and fell on the floor. At that point, the manager came over and warned me not to be so damn funny, as he put it, and also reminded me that this was my second warning. I’m not worried, though. The head waiter knows how I tip.
With the help of a couple of friendly and well mannered bouncers, I soon had Taris transferred from the relatively precarious perch of a bar stool to the much more forgiving plush leather embrace of a booth, where he had acquired a shot glass and bottle of Rød Aalborg aquavit, encased in a discreet three eights inch coating of ice, and made good on the first installment of his promise to buy me drinks until I took my leave of the establishment for the evening. I decided on a Gentleman Jack and Schweppes ginger ale. No point in bankrupting poor old Taris, after all.
“Yes, yes, like your father, you tell the best jokes,” Taris complimented, slamming his shot glass on the table, pouring himself another, “and you tell right, to make person laugh. Which I could use,” Taris said, shaking his head sadly.
“What’s the matter, Taris?” I asked.
“Today, young fellow… today was my last day at… what can I say without the FBI put forty fingers up my [expletive]? My last day at ‘a certain government agency.’”
“You mean,” I clarified, “the CIA?”
“You said that phrase,” Taris pointed out, his words quite heavy with drink, “not Taris Yankivich Balsov, who would never say it.”
“Of course. So what’s next in you illustrious career?”
Taris shook his head sadly, then downed another shot, then stared at the table top. “Me? Let me tell you what I got. I got going away party with lousy food, no open bar and no caviar. I got insincere speech full of platitudes from Yale faggot who probably would like if Hillary’s friend pegged him – probably very much. I got lousy sixty-three thousand dollar severance check, stinking forty-one thousand relocation package, with warning I cannot go OCONUS without permission, no less! And stingy, tiny little one point three million pension.” Taris poured himself another shot of Rød and pounded it down, miserable. “’One point three million?’ I say. ‘Cannot buy cardboard box on vacant lot in Potomac, Maryland for one point three million.’ They say ‘It’s very generous by most standards, Mr. Balsov.’ I say, ‘Okay, give me the God damned one point three million and I say to hell with you, and that’s fine with me, then.’ What do they say? ‘Oh, no, is annuity. Paid out over thirty years.’ And then I say, ‘Thirty years? What, am I going to live until I am one hundred and six?’ And they say, ‘You never know how long you are going to live, Mr. Balsov.’”
“Sounds like the typical run-around anybody gets when they ask for a lump sum on an annuity,” I observed, “but hey, if you combine it with your savings and maybe get another job…”
“Another job?” Taris poured himself another shot. “I contact Kennedy School of Government, Brookings Institution, Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, you name it… all over country.” He sobbed, he poured, he swigged, he sobbed again. “Nobody want poor Taris Balsov.”
“Well, that’s just a total shame, Taris, after all the things you did, after all the risks you took, after all you left behind when you defected…”
“Tatanya…” he sniffed, “… how I missed her some times.”
“Your wife?”
“No, was not married. Tatanya was cleaning woman in Kremlin. Worked late. Skinny, flat, bony, rough hands, like sand paper. Eyes were too close together; no white part, how you say it, beady, yes beady, and very dark. Not much to look at, kind of scary to look at, actually. But…” Taris took another shot of Rød. “Ammonia. She’d inhale the ammonia from her cleaning bucket… then get down on her knees…”
Taris slammed his hand on the table staring me dead in the eye. “You just can’t get that kind of action here!”
“Gee, Taris, I guess not. It’s so retro, so existential, so military-industrial, so… Soviet…”
“Damn right… is Soviet!” Taris laid his head down on his crossed arms and cried a Russian river. “Those [expletives] in Langley. They think… they think they can just throw me away like a used condom in one of their safe houses!” He looked up at me, his eyes so rimmed with red, I could have sworn he’d been back in Kremlin for a few seconds, huffing ammonia with Tatanya the Bony Scary Cleaning Woman. “No! And I’ll tell you why, too,” he confided, leaning close, whispering “because they say they destroyed the tapes, but I, Taris Yankivich Balsov, I have copies!”
Without breaking Taris’ secret agent embrace, I whispered back “Ah, exactly which tapes would those be?”
Taris has a rather impressive case of halitosis, but until this evening, I had never been close enough to realize that. So I held my breath and concentrated on what he said, waiting for him to release me. “What tapes? Are you kidding me, Tom Collins? The tapes that I heard them say, up on the Hill just an hour ago, are like Rosemary Woods’ Eighteen Minute Gap! I’m talking about the video tapes of CIA operatives interrogating Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners – the ones the CIA tried to destroy back in 2005. They think they got all the copies, but they’re wrong!”
At last, I was released, free to breath the sweet air on my side of the booth. Given that, no point in wasting time, I figured. “What’s on those tapes, then?”
“Me!”
“You?”
“That’s right, me – Taris Balsov, master of espionage interrogation.”
“Performing the interrogations?”
“Does the chef at a five star restaurant make the salads? Does he prepare the souffles? Does the Postmaster General deliver your junk mail?”
“No, of course not. So what do you do?”
“I oversee the interrogations. I correct the techniques. I evaluate the performance.”
“Do you appear in them?”
“No, but you can hear me off camera, managing… that way you say it… managing by exception. When I see mistake, I correct it, immediately. When they chose ‘technique C’ to follow ‘technique A’ and I knew it was supposed to be ‘technique B’ I tell them. And you know what?”
“What?”
“We got results, that’s what! Just like I did in Lubyanka!”
“Golly gee, Colonel Balsov, what kind of stuff did you advise the CIA do to those poor benighted misguided halfwit jackoff camel driving towel heads, anyhow?”
Taris helped himself to another shot of Rød as a waiter bent over to sop up the water that had dripped off the bottle’s ice sheath, despite the management having provided Taris with a sterling silver champagne bucket to keep the bottle in.
“Everything good here, gentlemen? Care to see a menu?”
“Up your [expletive], baby boy,” Taris exploded, “damn Harvard acting and drama major poofy-toofy!”
“Juilliard, actually, sir,” our waiter sniffed, “and I studied opera. Wagnerian tenor,” he informed us, as he sauntered off.
“Look here, Collins,” Taris told me, in a matter-of-fact tone, “when you have somebody in your prison, your jail, whatever, and you have things lying around from motor pool shop, from inside your armory, from electronics laboratory, from biological laboratory, even, then you can do anything you want.”
“Like water boarding?”
“Water boarding?” Taris chuckled. “Is what your cool dude teenagers do at the beach, no?”
“What I was referring to, Taris, is the practice of strapping the victim to a board and then pouring water into his lungs so as to simulate drowning.”
“Simulate? What do you mean, simulate? Is drowning, just that, nothing else. You do it wrong, prisoner dies. Is up to you to save his life, to keep him from drowning, because that’s what you are doing, you are drowning him. After a few times, even most stupid Arab [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] will figure that out. Either you talk, and you tell the truth, or Taris will torture you – with this water board or with something else. Now,” Taris said, leaning closer for emphasis, so the reek of his halitosis was just discernible, “you upchuck the real goods, you worthless goat herder, you perverted sheep [expletive], and we check them out. You tell the truth, you give us what we want, what we need, then no more torture. Otherwise, you are back here with Uncle Taris and his Band of Merry Men, over and over and over again, to torture you until we are satisfied. Completely satisfied.”
“And that works?”
“Worked on Abu Zubaydah.”
“So, you think if the Congress or the Supreme Court stopped the CIA and the Defense Department from using water-boarding during interrogations of illegal combatants, that would be a big problem when it comes to obtaining vital information?”
Taris tossed off another shot, grinning.
“Oh come on, Tom Collins, now you ask questions like some kind of news media interviewer or something. Surely, you don’t think banning one particular form of torture is going to make any difference, do you?” Taris drove his point home with a smart slam of his empty shot glass. “The only requirements… the only constraints, my friend, are to leave no marks…” Taris helped himself to another refill, knocking it back with obvious gusto. “No bleeding, no bruises, and no scars. It can’t look like they’ve been tortured, that’s all. You can put them in a cold room, throw ice water on them. You can beat them in various ways that don’t leave bruises. You can make them stand for days at a time. You can make them go weeks without sleep. You can make them… listen to Bon Jovi.”
“Oh, my God!”
“I know what you are thinking, Tom Collins. Even I would think twice about forcing a prisoner to listen to Bon Jovi. But I have done it…”
“Sweet Jesus, no…”
“And worse! Def Leppard, Kevin Federline, Wayne Newton, Merle Haggard, Pat Boone, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, even… the 1910 Fruit Gum Company.”
“My God!”
“Anything to make them talk, Tom Collins! Anything!”
“Oh, the humanity!”
“Come on, don’t be such a wussie! I did it for your country, you ungrateful [expletive]!”
“I… I’m just having trouble coping with the barbarity, Taris,” I pleaded, “I was raised to believe in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man!”
“You, of all people, should know that only applies in the abstract! When push comes to shove, governments have to know things! And that’s were people like me, Taris Balsov, come in! But do they show any gratitude afterwards?”
“So, the tapes show you getting what the United States needed to know? They show Abu Zubaydah betraying his comrades?”
Taris settled back with an air of satisfaction. “They show that, and plenty more. They show him and four other major Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders completely spilling their guts.”
“So, the real controversy here is that these tapes show that water boarding works?”
“No, the real controversy is not that at all. None of the tapes show any of the illegal combatants revealing strategically valuable information during or after we water boarded them.”
“Okay,” I whispered, “you can tell me, then. Which techniques actually proved effective?”
Taris laughed, this time quite maniacally. “No, no… I’m not telling anybody. Not until I write very good book, with good millions advance, then make deal to sell tapes to media for big millions, not this piddling million-three in monthly checks, thirty years full of bull [expletive] those [expletive] [expletive] over in Langley think I should get. Then you will read, Tom Collins, then you will know. But…” he winked, suddenly mischievous, “I give you hint: ‘one, two three, red light.’ Now,” he said, looking mournfully at his empty bottle of Rød, “let’s go outside and hail me a cab home.”
And so we did. I walked the old Russian to the curb, stepped out into the street and hailed him a taxi, slipping the driver a fifty dollar bill, admonishing him to play it strait and narrow, and jotting down the cars company, cab number and license plate, after which I returned to the curb, satisfied that I’d done my part to ensure Taris’ safety.
“It’s all yours, Taris,” I told him, giving the traditional Russian man-to-man hug, “and I’ve chipped in fifty bucks to get things started for you.”
“Good boy, Tom Collins,” he murmured, tossing up tiny clouds of halitosis, “I always remember. You take care of yourself.”
With that, he stepped into the street and walked toward the cab. Just before opening the passenger’s door, he turned, smiled and waved at me.
At that point, of course, a CIA car ran over the pathetic SOB, killing him. It was expertly driven, as would be expected, and didn’t even scratch the cab. I know it was a Company hit, because, after dragging Taris’ body halfway down the block, the car backed up on him, then ran over him again, then disappeared down the street, blasting through red lights in front of at least two DC and one Federal Protective Services police cars that I could see, and most likely some more that I couldn’t.
Well, what could I do? I got in the cab and had it take me three blocks from my parking garage and let me off at a street corner. At least the taxi driver got a fat fare.
Anyway, it was still early, so I drove back to Great Falls on the Maryland side of the river and stopped by the Irish Inn at Glen Echo for dinner. If you’re ever inside the Beltway, drop by – the food’s a very good deal for the price.