When Harry Met Sally - The Spy Scandal That Rocked Washington

Harry Perkins was an ordinary man - ordinary parentage, ordinary education, ordinary profession, and a very ordinary life; so when he found himself in Langley, Virginia he was as surprised as anyone. 

You see, Harry had no grand expectations, no special ambitions, and no desire to stand out among the crowd.  His ethos was one of quiet rectitude, simplicity, and keeping the straight and narrow; and it was for just these reasons that he was recruited by the CIA as the kind of unremarkable, silent man who would escape notice and recognition as an operative. 

He had been recruited in his senior year at Miami Of Ohio University - a quiet, second-rate but serious enough school which did not expect great things from its alumni but good ones.  It had not turned out statesmen, industrialists, or thinkers, but class after class of solid, well-prepared Americans. Miami had had no student riots, no campus shutdowns, no press.  It was a model of the kind of place that gave one a modest education for a modest price. 

In the old days the CIA recruited from the Ivy League, especially Yale.  It was looking for gentlemen of a certain pedigree, patriotic with a sense of noblesse oblige, and with no qualms about the lies, deceit, and trickery necessary for espionage.  More than anything, young men were recruited for their sexual confidence - men who did not need love or emotional complications to seduce and sexually engage random women. 

 

In the new days, recruitment became more subtle, more democratic, and less ambitious.  The company wanted men who would fly under the radar, undetected as they collected information, recruited foreign agents, and did the untasteful tasks of subterfuge required of them. 

The problem with this new ethos of modest ability was vulnerability.  No matter how much a recruit might be trained in spycraft, there was no undoing of his character.  In the case of Harry Perkins, he was more suited to a Do No Harm profession than one which demanded treachery and a whatever works philosophy. 

Yet, the young man's remarkable calmness - one bred of limited ambition but calmness nonetheless - was what attracted Langley recruiters.  The company needed men who would never, under no circumstances, get flummoxed. They were not looking for James Bond, but young men with a small town banker's mentality.  Solid as a rock and steady as she goes. 

 

As a matter of fact, small town banker was Harry's cover for his Langley connection, and he was instructed to tell friends, family, and neighbor that he had been working in the Federal Savings and Loan of Chillicothe, and was in Washington an assistant manager at one of the city's independent banks.

His real job was to penetrate the new Iron Curtain - the cadre of Russian allies in Eastern Europe, most notably Belarus, whose president had been just as antipathetic to the West as Putin, but whose security network was far less sophisticated. Information about Russian intent would be far more forthcoming in this second-rate ally than in the mother country. 

Now, Minsk is not exactly a delightful place; but then again, Harry had not been recruited as a playboy, rockstar spy but as a quiet, dutiful, and persistent one.  He was there in Minsk not in any official American capacity, of course, but as a member of the East-West Partnership Association, a non-governmental organization whose charter expressly took no sides in international debates, but worked to promote understanding and cooperation.  

 

Given CIA backing, it was engineered to tilt eastward - its representatives would be in 'difficult' Eastern European countries to show them how some Americans at least were not hostile to Russia or its allies.  The world was one, its logo impressively stated, and its members universalists. 

Vetted and cleared by Belarussian authorities, Perkins was welcomed as an emissary of peace and understanding and one who could influence Congress.  Part of the CIA's confectionary talent was to give a shell organization political influence, a smoke-and-mirrors, deft arrangement that might not fool the Russians, but could pull the wool over the eyes of lesser states. 

All was well and good, at least in Minsk where Harry was in his element - a modest man in a grey, flat, unexceptional country - but no one was prepared for the events at home. While Harry spent a good deal of time in Minsk, he had plenty of work to do at home, and he was increasingly brought in to high-level top secret meetings on Russia at which he met many Moscow agents and shared intelligence with them. 

The Moscow-Minsk axis was an important one, not because President Lukashenko was a bigtime player in the Great Game, but because of his alliance with Russia, his close friendship with Putin, and his public support of everything the man said and did, it was important to twin them geopolitically. 

As such Harry was privy to classified information which under normal circumstances would not have been shared with someone of his rank, but considered essential within the new 'axis' paradigm. 

Again, all well and good, except that no CIA training had prepared him adequately for counterespionage.  There were many Russian agents in the United States performing the same tasks that Harry and his Langley colleagues were; but there were some whose job was to learn about American espionage in Russia, and if possible to out the names of CIA operatives there. 

Sally Barker (real name Sasha Belenkaya) was one of Putin's handpicked agents.  She was his former mistress, a stunning beauty from the Caucasus, a mathematician, and the most subtle, engaging, seductive woman the President had ever met.  Paid a king's ransom, she was sent to America to penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of Langley. 

Sasha (Sally) was also an intuitive actor and could assume character, personality, comportment, attitude with little effort; and so it was that she became the cornflower blue-eyed, blonde Iowa farm girl that American men dream about.  She became demure, retiring, engaging, and respectful with a certain Midwestern smiling gaiety that made her even more appealing.

 

How she learned of Harry Perkins and designated him as her mark is a state secret - the Americans were tightlipped after the scandal was made public.  The humiliation of having been so easily betrayed was bad enough, but giving away how the awful episode ever happened was too much to bear. 

In any case, the two met, and the naive, lonely, and unschooled Harry was smitten. He was not the kind of man who attracted women like this.  Wallflowers were his beat, the drab, unhappy virgins that were the last to be picked and delighted when they were; not the likes of Sally who could have any man she wanted. 

At the same time, she was not the kind of brash, forceful woman that often came with Hollywood looks - just the opposite.  Sally was a simple, fresh, lovely young thing that would be quite at home on his family's farm. 

As much as Harry's handlers had trained him in the subtle arts of foreign espionage, they had never thought to alert him to the overtures of counterespionage agents.  He was simply too ordinary, too simple, and too straightforward to ever attract attention; and Belarus? Who cared? but of course that was exactly what the FSB (former KGB) intended when they uncovered - discovered - him.  They knew that the sweet kisses and warm embraces of Sasha, he would reveal far more than he should; and were quite well aware of the important intelligence 'axis' of the CIA. 

 

The only good thing that came out of the scandal was that Harry had a whopping good time with Sasha, the relationship with whom lasted a good long time indeed.  She was everything he had ever dreamed of and simply couldn't believe his good fortune.  Anything, absolutely anything was hers for the asking.

When the well had run dry and she had gotten what she had come for - the names of CIA agents in Moscow - she departed on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfort, leaving a tearful, snookered, and soon to be drawn and quartered Harry Perkins at the gate.  

Langley did its best to quiet the affair - Harry was not exactly Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen after all - but heads rolled and the agency was long afterwards in doubt and turmoil.  

'How could we have?', asked one CIA man. 'He was such a dweeb, a complete nerd, a fucking Ohio goatfucker'; but be that as it may, it simply goes to show that the agency should have stuck with Yale men.