A Spy's Guide to Spy Thrillers: The Cardinal of the Kremlin
(Note: This is fourth in a series on how a spy reads spy thrillers. The first three were The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Day of the Jackal, and From Russia, with Love. To get the next one by email, sign up at the bottom of this page.)
In May 1987, a West German teenager flew a small plane across the Soviet border. Hundreds of miles later, he landed it next to Red Square.
The Soviet military was humiliated.
Gorbachev moved fast. His Defense Minister was out. The commander of air defense was fired.
Into the top job at the Defense Ministry went a general named Dmitry Yazov.
A year later, Tom Clancy put the real Yazov into a novel. As the Defense Minister of a Soviet leader fighting to keep his job.
The novel was The Cardinal of the Kremlin.
It’s a novel about a spy.
And about a fight over the third part of a group’s DADA Chain.
A fight over who decides.
In the novel, the CIA’s best source in Moscow is Colonel Mikhail Filitov. Code name: CARDINAL.
Filitov is a war hero. Three times a Hero of the Soviet Union. And personal aide to Defense Minister Yazov.
His secrets travel to the West through a chain of couriers. One of them is a woman named Svetlana, who works for British intelligence.
Her father is about to join the Politburo.
Then a small slip on the Moscow subway puts the KGB onto the spy network.
The KGB picks Svetlana up. Soon after, she’s back at work.
Then the KGB arrests Filitov. Along with the CIA officer trying to reach him.
At CIA headquarters, Jack Ryan is an analyst working on Boss Game questions about Soviet leadership.
Inside the Politburo, thirteen men vote. But only seven votes matter. Of the seven, four votes belong to the current leader, Narmonov. His rival, Alexandrov, has three.
And one of the four on Narmonov’s side is the father of Svetlana, who just got caught in a spy network.
Then Ryan notices something strange: The American ambassador protested the arrest of the CIA officer before the Soviet Foreign Ministry announced the arrest.
When the KGB catches an American spy, the Soviets usually tell the world immediately. They usually want to gloat.
So why was the Foreign Ministry slow?
Ryan’s answer: nobody told the Foreign Minister. He didn’t know about the arrest. Neither did Defense Minister Yazov, Filitov’s own boss.
Ryan knows the two men share one thing: They’re both on Narmonov’s side.
Which means somebody is playing a Boss Game.
Somebody wants Narmonov’s seat.
The KGB Chairman, Gerasimov, wants Narmonov’s seat. And the spy cases are his way in.
Alexandrov is too old to take the job himself. So he picked Gerasimov.
A Boss Game is a Zero-Sum Game over who is the Boss. Here, who gets to be General Secretary. But it’s played inside a Positive-Sum Game everyone wants to keep. Here, the Soviet Union.
A challenger in a Boss Game looks at what keeps the Boss in the job. For Narmonov, that’s his four votes on the Politburo. And the backing of his Defense Minister, who speaks for the army.
So Gerasimov goes after one of each.
Svetlana’s father gets a choice: his daughter in a labor camp, or his vote. The Gerasimov side thinks Svetlana’s father is theirs.
He isn’t. He goes straight to Narmonov and tells him everything.
Filitov is the second piece. With him identified as a spy, Gerasimov has leverage on Filitov’s boss Yazov, too.
Yazov doesn’t wait. At the next Politburo meeting, he quietly sides with Gerasimov.
Two of Narmonov’s men under pressure.
One went to his Boss. One went to the challenger.
A Boss keeps his men two ways. They believe in what he’s doing. Or they believe he’ll protect them.
Svetlana’s father believed in Narmonov. Yazov doubted Narmonov would protect him.
The plan is to build the pressure on Narmonov’s men. Then Narmonov will have a “heart attack.” A mild one. Enough to step aside.
No tanks in the streets. A quiet vote, and a cover story. Both sides want something left to rule when it’s over.
For the Americans, Gerasimov in charge could mean another arms race. So Ryan has two jobs. Get Filitov out. And keep Narmonov in.
He needs leverage on Gerasimov. He finds it in an old case: the Soviet submarine Red October (the movie version of that story is in A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies).
Gerasimov had used that incident to win the KGB the job of watching the military’s loyalty. And he’d told the Politburo the submarine was destroyed.
If the truth came out, Gerasimov’s trustworthiness would be in doubt.
Ryan flies to Moscow with the American arms team. He meets Gerasimov alone and hands him a key: the warhead-control key from Red October. Proof the submarine was never destroyed.
Then the choice: release Filitov and come to America. Or the story comes out.
Gerasimov fights back. When a player is losing, he changes the size of the game. KGB agents kidnap a top American missile-defense scientist. With secrets that big, maybe Gerasimov survives the scandal.
The FBI gets the scientist back.
Gerasimov’s plan was a good plan.
Except for one thing.
His leverage was secrets about other men’s people. A daughter. An aide.
And the Americans had a secret about him.
Gerasimov takes Filitov out of his cell himself. They board the American plane together.
Narmonov stays the Boss.
In a Boss Game, leverage sometimes involves a secret. Something somebody doesn’t want the group to hear.
When it does, the leverage works only as long as the secret stays a secret.
Svetlana’s father exposed his secret to his Boss. Once Narmonov knew, the threat was worth nothing.
Gerasimov couldn’t do the same. His secret was what he’d told the Politburo was a lie.
So when the Americans threatened to tell it, he had nowhere to go but away.
Maybe someone in your world has a secret. A mistake. A debt. An embarrassing fact.
It’s leverage only while it’s kept from the decision-makers. Someone who exposes their own secret to the decision-makers takes it away.
If you are the decision-maker, your people will only come to you if they believe you’ll protect them.
That belief gets built long before anyone walks in.
Three years after the novel came out, the real Yazov joined the coup against Gorbachev. The plotters announced that Gorbachev couldn’t serve “for health reasons.”
The coup lasted three days. Yazov was arrested.
The Cardinal of the Kremlin is here.
The DADA Chain is in A Spy’s Guide to Thinking. The Boss Game is in A Spy’s Guide to Strategy.
-John Braddock
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