A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  I think I murmured—not at all on taking her trophy into my possession. She looked tremendously solemn on the exchange, leaving me to marvel at how unflustered we both were as I removed the contents from the cherished envelope and spread them onto the dining room table. The handwritten message read: No One Is More Important Than Each—NOMITE. I almost fainted.

  The photographs showed images of Jana Kava. The first was a continuous reel showing Jana walking into an open, abandoned building site, kneeling on the ground, where indicated by the man at her back holding a gun, and then the same gun being pointed and placed at the back of her head and fired. The second photo was a single frame showing her body spread-eagled in a pool of blood. In that second photograph, the face of her killer was clearly visible.

  “A terrible thing for you to see, Mrs Price. I apologise on behalf on my department.”

  “There's absolutely no need to apologise, Mr West. When I was in the photographic section I'm very much afraid to say I saw far worse images than these. I hope you're able to save the situation with this,” she stated as I lamely stared at the photographed face of another cold-blooded killer.

  * * *

  This time I was sure I saw Fraser hop in delight as he opened his door to me some forty minutes or so after leaving Windsor. I hope it never ceases to amaze me how much time a police escort can save on a car journey. I was pondering on that fact, also wondering how fast the police motorcyclist could get the photographs from Windsor to Image Recognition and how long it would take to find a name to match the face of Jana's killer, when all of a sudden there he was in all his smiling scruffiness, shuffling from foot to foot.

  Despite my amazement over the speed of police escorted travel, I had no doubt Fraser's smile would have lasted for the time it might have taken me to walk the thirty odd miles. His I told you so, didn't I was the first utterance I warded away before Molly appeared with a tray full of plastic glasses and jugs of fresh lemonade for the outriders and protection officers. Molly was the type of person for whom onerous was not a word she would recognise. Everything she did was done freely, joyously, and with a selfless heart. Hannah was the same, and I was only just winning in pushing her memory to the back of my mind. I realise that will sound harsh; nevertheless, that's what I needed to do.

  * * *

  I can't recall whether I lit my cigarette first or it was his lighting of a hidden pipe; no matter, it was he who toasted me with the Jura for the capture of Hannah's killer and the tracking down of Jacqueline Price. Perhaps the ball was slowing as the path forward was becoming clearer. Fraser and I set about seeing how far forward we could see.

  * * *

  “I got my signal containing the new Soviet Union radio coding off from the British Embassy to the seventh floor on the afternoon of the thirty-first of August. The same day Jana Kava hands Kudashov an encrypted message from her Polish colonel, naming the American in GCHQ. Although that message was in the new coding, it never hit any screen. I can't think of a reason for that other than Dickie wanting to keep that name to himself and Kudashov somehow sending it without passing through counter-intelligence.

  “These photos of Jana Kava meeting her end are dated the following day. The only reason for ending her life must be because she knew something she wasn't supposed to and must have something to do with the Polish colonel. But is that why Dickie sent the photos to Jacqueline Price at the Imagery Control Commission in Germany? I know these are big assumptions, but let's go with it for a while. Dickie takes over the running of Kudashov when something or someone spooks him regarding your man Rothschild. Word comes back that there's a letter in Jana Kava's possession and London instructs Kudashov to get it by any means. How am I going so far, Fraser?”

  “Aye, I'm following you, Patrick. Carry on,” he replied studiously.

  “Right. Let's get going then. Michael has been doing some digging into the past from old Hardballs' legacy, the AIS installation at Greenwich.”

  “Heard anything of the bastard, have you, Patrick?” I anticipated his interruption as Geoffrey Harwood, alias Hardballs, was one of Fraser's pet hates.

  “No, I've not heard a thing. I expect he's in some South American jungle, setting up communication stations for the natives. Can I carry on, or are you going to butt in wherever you please?”

  “How's the leg? Need more whisky, do you, to take your mind off it?” he asked.

  I was thankful for it being warm when I was shot and it not being in the damp of winter when the rheumatism in my right foot and right leg was at its worst of being debilitating and painful. If I'd had that to endure, as well as the wound in my other leg, then I could guarantee my irritability would have been bordering on the obscene. I poured a large glass of pain-removing Jura and moved the speculation along.

  “Michael Simmons found an internal GCHQ intelligence report dated June 1979, alleging some pirating of hypersensitive analysis of Iranian intel transmissions received at a UK listening outpost at RAF Cyprus. An investigation was undertaken straight away, but wasn't ended in my opinion until Dickie told Sir John Scarlett to write it up as a Nil-Find and Dickie closed the real case file with a hundred-year seal. Most of that is factual, so here comes my hypothesis.

  “The Americans get edgy when the investigation starts to really get going at Cheltenham, so they come to an arrangement: 'We'll give you a name,' they say, 'if you help us find a rat at home leaking secrets about a spy-plane factory in the Nevada desert.' We might have known of that desert facility already but, if not, we would have known eventually, so it's no great loss to the Americans them telling us, but they stand to gain an awful lot on the GCHQ front if we stop looking once they have given us Geoffrey Prime. They made a mistake though. Dickie didn't stop looking. He stopped when he found the real mole.

  “This is where my train of thought is coming up against a wall and I need your help, Fraser. I can't place the Victor Rothschild of the sixties in the Geoffrey Prime timeframe of the GCHQ of the eighties. Nor can I find a reason for needing confirmation of Rothschild's involvement with the Cambridge Five. I think you have the answer to that one and there's maybe more you need to reveal now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Revelations

  Fraser had the room, and the room consisted of only me. I certainly was not sorry I was alone as his stories were always told in such a way that other considerations were forgotten or pushed aside for a different time. In my case, that applied to Hannah and my leg. As it was obvious Fraser and I were going to drift past midnight in our examination of facts and theories, I stood down Frank, Jimmy and the rest of my escorting cavalcade, accepting Molly Ughert's offer of a bed for yet another night in peaceful Buckinghamshire.

  When Dickie Blythe-Smith sat in my chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Fraser Ughert was Director General of Group. They were the greatest of friends and trusted each other and nobody else. Victor Rothschild's friendship with Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five, was a similar kind of relationship, but built on reliance not respect.

  On 12 December 1957, Aileen Philby, Kim Philby's wife, was discovered dead in the bedroom of her house in Crowborough, Sussex. Her friends believed she had killed herself with drink and pills. However, the head of MI5 believed she had been murdered by her husband, or a friend, because she knew too much. Kim Philby had no money of his own to speak of, but somehow he found enough to set up home in a village outside of Beirut, then took an apartment in the Lebanese capital before travelling extensively throughout the Middle East, always in a rich degree of comfort.

  By January 1963 it became clear that Philby's spying activities for the Russians had been discovered and he had no choice but to leave his new wife and Beirut. Using what was suspected to be a combination of Soviet influence and Rothschild money, Philby was allowed by MI6 to escape through Syria, then overland to Armenia, and then to Russia. The security service did not want an embarrassing public trial and it was decided that it was not the time to look too far into the class-ridden secret intelligen
ce service.

  However, two men did look: Fraser Ughert and Dickie Blythe-Smith. Both were in different departments of internal security. That was where the fascination with Victor Rothschild began for them. For Fraser, it led to a disciplinary hearing that set his career back a few years, allowing Dickie to race ahead in the promotion stakes. Perhaps it was Dickie being older that made him the diplomat to Fraser's youthful 'bull in the china shop' syndrome, but neither strategy unearthed any concrete evidence to confirm the pair's worst fears, that Moscow had a prodigy planted inside British intelligence, but the pair smelled something odd and refused to let it lie. If, they argued, they could prove Victor Rothschild was the sixth member of the Cambridge spy-ring, they could confirm that the thirty-year-old American university graduate who started work in the same J30 section of J Division 'Special Sigint' at GCHQ four years before Prime was posted there, was the real McCoy, planted by Moscow with help from Rothschild's recommendation. Dickie could then confirm the name when he received the coded signal I sent from Warsaw on the thirty-first of August. The question left from that argument was: what was hidden in the NOMITE signal that then went to Jacqueline Price?

  * * *

  “I can understand what you were trying to do about Moscow's intervention inside GCHQ, Fraser, but why didn't Dickie tell you the name of whoever it was in there, and why enmesh it such a convoluted way as this? It's making me ask if the mole inside GCHQ was American or Russian? No One Is More Important Than Each, or NOMITE, was Jack Price's name for the group he enrolled me in before we went on the operation in New York. That ended up with you and Dickie coming out to America. It's also where my fictitious sister Fianna died. Now there is only you and me alive who know what the abbreviation stands for,” Fraser interrupted me.

  “I had never heard of it until you just mentioned it, Patrick.” We were walking in the fresh evening air of summer, but it wasn't helping to clear away the mist in my mind.

  “Okay, so that leaves only me knowing it. So why on earth send something to someone who he had no idea would still be around to find it?” I was talking for the sake of it, throwing words at a puzzle, hoping some might stick to a place on the board. Fraser wanted to play the same game.

  “My first thought is that does not sound like Dickie at all. There wasn't much spontaneity about him. He was a meticulous man, where it was details that held the importance for him. Mind you, I know he admired Jack Price. Mentioned his name to me many times in a reverent kind of way. Used some of Jack's operations as examples when giving lectures at Beaulieu House. There were two things he prized in service officers and both he said you had in abundance: composure and the ability to react to the situation. That's why he bumped you up into the full blown intelligence service. You've come a long way, Patrick, with a few bumps along your road, I'll grant you. You will get over Hannah, you know.” It looked as though he was about to let sentimentality in the door.

  I slammed it shut. “How did you like the tapes, Fraser?” I asked needlessly, but it did take his mind back to where I wanted it.

  “Loved them. I could picture it all unfolding as I listened, especially the rift between Khrushchev and the staunch Stalinists. At the time, that rift almost led to another Russian revolution. I didn't know the full history of the Kudashovs, but they were certainly a resourceful lot to survive both Communism and Fascism. One can only imagine how much hatred General Kava had stored away to scream and shout at Khrushchev as he did. He must have known it was the end for him. Brave man to do that.” By the reflective expression he wore, it was clear we were edging back towards sorrow.

  “Shall we make our way back, Fraser? I could do with a livener.”

  “So I could I, dear boy. By the way, were there any more tapes of your conversation with Kudashov, as he had me drooling over the prospect of him making the connection between Rothschild and GCHQ?”

  “There's one, yes, but he doesn't mention Rothschild. He does, however, shine some more light on why he came to us and it involves the death of Paulette Simona, aka Claudette Avogova in the aircraft crash on the Sunday before he met you. I'm sorry for not telling you sooner, but what with everything else that's been happening I'm getting dizzy with it all. The tapes where Kudashov tells me the final parts of his story I've had to lock in the vaults at the Foreign Office, for reasons that will emerge as we go on.

  “Having listened to him, I'm in agreement about his life being in danger; hence, the trickery in first taking him openly to the deportation centre at Croydon and then sending him to Beaulieu in the back of the coroner's van. He's safe in the New Forest for now at least, but I believe he's in more danger than he realises. And what's more, if my worse misgivings are true, then so is his granddaughter. But I wish I knew it all.

  “On the day the final bricks of the Berlin Wall were carted away, Kudashov was in the Federal Intelligence Service offices in Cologne, Germany. He was there on our business unconnected with the demolition. As you have been aware for some years he was our eyes and ears on the German and American relationship to certain countries in the Middle East. In short, during the Cold War, Kudashov was our insider in the West German Federal Intelligence Service. I've read the case file of how it was he who supplied the information about the assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador in London in June '82.”

  “Yes, Patrick. A devious man is this Kudashov, and a very clever one as well. A political decision was taken after I presented the information and it went before the Cabinet. I can only remember Dickie mentioning Kudashov the once though. It was in connection with an operation he was running in Odessa, independent of those at the Russian desk. Never told me what it was of course, and I never knew why he told me the name of Kudashov, or Odessa. When I was chair of JIC, I saw Kudashov's name a few times forwarded on from the secret intelligence service, but he was not involved in anything major like this.”

  * * *

  I loved Fraser Ughert like I would a father, and to me I guess he had become that figure in my life. I knew his moods and I knew how good he had been as chairman of joint intelligence. His was a huge role I had to fill. From the day I accepted the position I had sought Fraser's advice whenever I thought he would add something I could have missed. We had reached his office by the time we resumed our conversation. I started where reminisces had taken over.

  “Because the final parts of the Berlin Wall were still being demolished, the West German intelligence service had their attention elsewhere and Kudashov says he got a glimpse at a reel of microwave radio signals emanating from a NSA relay point in Mannheim. He photocopied one. But his luck didn't stop there. The NSA signal operative had left the coding running on the screen for all to see. He added that to his miniature Minox camera. When his granddaughter was safely ensconced in Moscow Centre, he gave her what he photographed that day. He doesn't know the technical terminology for what she did with those encrypted codes, but in them she identified signals linking the laboratory at Nikel in Russia to a part of the American CIA and our friend, the Russian oligarch Bohdan Dimitriyevich Valescov, from poor old Henry Mayler's Rosicrucian order.

  “Kudashov has heard of Valecov and heard of his fortune and the ways he protects it. You see, Kudashov is of the same persuasion as you, my friend. He believes Valecov is one of that eight number of immensely wealthy families who wish to further their worldwide hold on the rest of us.

  “I haven't got it all from Kudashov about what he knows of Nikel, but he admits that his initial designs for the information he was compiling were selfish. He became interested in the area when his son and his daughter-in-law's plane mysteriously crashed near there. He believed then, and still does, that Ludvík and his wife Karina had nothing to do with the laboratory. He also believes that they may have seen something on their fishing holiday that meant their plane had to be brought down. In the crash report he saw, it noted that a fuel line had a clean cut to it. This, he suspects, is a clear sign of sabotage.

  “He met Claudette Avogova at a party that I h
aven't yet had a chance to look into. That's one of the points I need to discuss in the future. As we know, the real Claudette went missing in 2001 and so Kudashov not only worked with her, but also with this Paulette Simona. I want that to come from Kudashov slowly. There is one thing he has said about Paulette Simona that's interesting. Her identity had been changed by the CIA, but she never attended any face-to-face briefing, nor knew her handler by sight.

  “She was presented with an inch-thick dossier, told to read and digest it by her flight time, which was the following day. She rightly assumed a cover name would be needed because of the sensitivity of the work, and it was a formality in the way it was handled, but luckily for us she was wrong. We have a friend who has a friend in the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology who's looking into it as we speak.”

  “Do we know how her plane was brought down, Patrick?”

  “The Norwegian civil air authorities examined the wreckage and wrote it down to engine failure, but I've requested they hold on to what they have until an air investigation team from Farnborough arrive. The earliest time that can happen is Friday. I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was shot down. It might be difficult to discover as it sustained heavy damage when it crashed.”

  “No, nor would I be surprised,” he mumbled as his pipe smoke swirled around his head. “Did Spencer Morrell say that the CIA had a look at the name Jana Kava was given in Warsaw and passed on to Kudashov?”

  “He says no. Says that any Jana, as Petr Tomsa, file he has, was heavily redacted from our end. He's playing the knowledge they had of Kudashov close to his chest. Can't say I blame him either. Least said, soonest mended kind of thing.”

  “Okay, yes, I can get that too. So how many people saw the coded name that Kudashov got from Jana Kava and sent to the Soviet Satellite desk, Patrick?”

  “Only two, Fraser. Kudashov and the only one who could decode it—Dickie!