by Daniel Kemp
* * *
It was my contention that Sir Russell Macintosh did not die accidentally from an allergy to penicillin. Health records of staff employed at GB's embassies are stored on files lodged where the Foreign Office send their diplomats. This has always been the case, since the inauguration of the Foreign and Commonwealth's Office. Two copies are kept; one at the F&C here in London, and one wherever the diplomat was assigned. I found the original paper copy at the Foreign Office. Someone had redacted all the information about allergies. There was an autopsy report redacted where it should show the cause of death. Neither Fraser nor I were great believers in coincidences. Fraser had his own theories.
“Maybe that was what Dickie was trying to avoid—a quarrel between the diplomatic and the intelligence services that was building. There would be few walking away from that unscathed. Certainly Sir Russell would have rocked many boats if the affair between his wife and the head of MI6 was ever made public. And, of course, if Grant had done his job properly and found the sordid love affair Macintosh was having with a Russian spy in India, then we would have had another scandal on the Philby scale.
“Nobody would want another disgrace of that magnitude so Dickie quietly removes one of the problems, leaving Vyacheslav Trubnikov in place, undisturbed. I'm guessing of course, but maybe Dickie was ordered to hide it and he didn't fully agree. That's why he sent Miles Faversham to collect those Solidus papers from Kudashov using the Macintosh name. He left it out there for someone to find if they ever looked hard enough.”
“I think you're correct, Fraser, all apart from the bit where you said someone to find if they ever looked hard enough. I think Dickie left it out there for when someone did look hard enough, and I'm coming round to the opinion that he meant that person to be me.
“In May 1979, the general election returned Margaret Thatcher for the first time and a Conservative majority in the House of Commons of not many. If this sordid affair would have broken in the early days of her government, then who knows how history might have changed. Anyhow, there's no point us looking for the reasons behind Dickie's decision; they were multitudinous in everything he touched. But there is something else I want to do with Vyacheslav Trubnikov before we push him aside and deal with what I found at St Michael's Church.” He could hardly contain himself as I heard the frantic intakes of tobacco from his pipe. “I shall keep you guessing until later tonight. What time are you and Molly arriving?”
“Is your memory going, Patrick? You arranged the transport to pick us up from here at four, so allowing for the traffic, I guess we should arrive around five, or thereabouts. The show starts at eight, but Molly's meeting her friends in the American bar at The Savoy at seven-thirty. She'll have plenty of time to rearrange your kitchen in the apartment and your life in general, before she leaves. I'm surprised she's allowing the housekeepers to cook for us and didn't insist on doing that herself. When we were there she insisted on cooking.”
* * *
From Vauxhall and Sir John's lavish surrounds, Jimmy drove to Group's more modest and functional headquarters in Lavington Street, at the Borough, where we arrived by the time I had finished speaking on the phone to Fraser. Michael Simmons had temporarily returned to Group to access the AIS decoding machinery at Greenwich more effectively. I didn't ask for the technical reasons, I just nodded when he told me and left him to it.
As instructed, he had transferred all intercepted coded messages from the signalling facilities at RAF Menwith, originating from Delhi, India between 1975 and 1979 and intended for Moscow Centre. There were seventy-three in total. They had been worked on at the time of sending, but remained unreadable for Menwith Hill; however, with the facilities at Michael's fingertips, the encryptions could be deciphered and read.
I felt a tear in the corner of my eye as I walked past the office Hannah once occupied before we had married. However, by the time I was settled in the screening room I had composed myself and was ready for work. I had restricted those who attended to three: Michael Simmons, myself, and the station officer at Group. The screen showed a sequence of low-grade intelligence passed on to Moscow, then it stopped before automatically reloading with more images and began again each time a message had anything of a higher classification than a C rating. This filtering method went on for around thirty minutes, until the screen cleared and A+B rated messages were listed in date order. All was running without incident until a signal dated fourteenth of April 1979 appeared with an A rating beside a decoded CIA company insignia. It read: Soviet planning, preparation, operation, etc., gone.
Under normal circumstances I wouldn't have given it much more than a cursory inspection before passing it on to Sir John's desk. It was from a CIA officer operating in an Eastern Bloc country, signalling a Russian foreign intelligence agent stationed in India, who relayed the coded signal on to Moscow Centre. But it was the originating country that hit me hard in the stomach. It was sent from Prague in Czechoslovakia. From inception to finish I was led to believe there was never a CIA ground presence anywhere in Czechoslovakia. If that presence existed in 1979, why would it have disappeared by 1982 when I went there and why would there be no record of them being there held in the United Kingdom? If my initial thoughts about Dalek Kava's weakness being used by the CIA were wrong, then he was in no position to get movement intelligence of Soviet planning in 1979. No, Dalek Kava might well have had a connection through his father to the Czech secret intelligence, but he was not connected to America's overseas intelligence. There was a Soviet double agent inside Czechoslovakia in '79 that Dickie was showing us. The trouble was we needed to rid ourselves of the blinkers that were narrowing our vision.
* * *
I wanted a few more answers from Kudashov, whom I was sure would be more inclined to open up on the things he was holding back after a successful raid on the Zaragoza laboratories and a triumphant extraction of his granddaughter for Moscow. However, if he continued to withhold information, I would be in a stronger position to force his hand by threatening to turn Cilicia loose and anonymously notifying the Russians of a botched abduction by some Chechen rebels with whom they were at war.
Despite feeling more optimistic than ever in finding the reasons behind 'the mystical ball' that Dickie started to roll in 1982, my apprehensive feeling persisted for no discernible reason. I put it down to just butterflies failing to settle with all that was going on around me. I wanted to run some things past Fraser before confronting Kudashov, and if my suspicions were right, then I needed to do that before Sunday's operation took precedence over other matters.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Two Russians
Molly had left to rendezvous with her old friends from Fraser's service days at the American Bar first, before enjoying the Gilbert and Sullivan dramatic operetta of Iolanthe at the Savoy Theatre. The three of us had dined together and afterwards she commended my housekeepers on their culinary skills and thoroughness in their other duties.
“I'm impressed,” she declared emphatically when her PPO escorted her to the waiting car for the short journey. As soon as the car pulled away from the courtyard below the panoramic windows of the apartment, Fraser lit his first pipe since his early evening arrival and I fetched the Jura.
We smoked, imbibed, and exchanged a variety of thoughts over the Macintosh, Grant, Trubnikov trilateral affair and reached an agreement that my theory of Grant's omission of Macintosh's indiscretions was done purely to save reputations, especially that of Elizabeth Macintosh. We went through Major Swan's operational plans for Sunday and even examined the funeral plans that Hannah's brother had supervised, before the real fun started.
I showed Fraser the confidential signal of April 1979 that I'd seen earlier that day, explaining how, in my opinion, none of what Michael discovered in the signals from Menwith Hill was easy to understand unless we both thought along the lines that Dickie Blythe-Smith would adopt in the early eighties if he wanted a name to be hidden.
* * *
In June 1981, an
intelligence information report was addressed to the Russian counter-intelligence desk from an untraceable relay point in Warsaw, Poland. It provided an in-depth study of long-term and short-term planning, preparation, operation and evaluation of Eastern Bloc exercises. Included in the paper was an explanation of the purpose and nature of each series. In essence, it was a follow-on from the signal of April '79, but this report had far more significant detail. Among the many attachments was a calendar plan of the 'Most Important Training Enterprises of the Soviet Armed Forces' for one year, and an orientation plan for the following five.
Seeing the '79 draft, I can say it was good. High quality stuff, but insignificant compared to its big sister of '81. That one was red-hot material with intelligence information ranging from the training of technical communications troops to the training directive of the Soviet Ministry of Defence, and the list of joint multi-national Air Defence exercises. It would have blistered fingers of the top-floor analysts when they handled it in 1981.
The CIA staffers in the decoding rooms at RAF Menwith Hill said the signals of '79 and '81 were virginal. Unblemished by any outsiders' dirty prints placed on them. Although I have to reluctantly believe that to be strictly true, I'm of the mind that somehow Dickie Blythe-Smith had the information of both signals as they went out from Czechoslovakia and then the one from Poland. If I was right, it would explain how the Polish colonel that Jana Kava contacted could have known the GCHQ insider.
Carrying along the line of my hypothesis, the sensitivity of those '79 and '81 signals could have been why Kudashov messaged the name the Polish colonel had given Jana in the Odessa coding straight to Dickie on the top-floor. That was logical, if I could ignore why Dickie would take all this trouble to hide a name that at least one other person would know.
I could understand how Kudashov did not know the name of GCHQ's insider, because the name was written in the new code, the key to which I had only just relayed on to London. If the signal containing the CIA insider's name had been sent in the Soviet Union new military code, then eventually all at the Russian desk would know it. That would not be Dickie Blythe-Smith's plan, nor was it his plan to show it to Kudashov and let him use Odessa rules and relay it on to the top floor—eyes only, Dickie. No, Kudashov would easily be able to decrypt the first Soviet coding working backwards from his Odessa coding.
That didn't sound like Dickie's way of operating. If you're on your own at the top of the tree, then you're on your own if you come down to play with other people's toys. Dickie had another code, and I was betting someone outside of my narrow vision had given it to the Polish colonel.
There was only one person who could do that—the rogue CIA foreign intelligence agent who sent London the '79 and '81 Warsaw Pact information report. Both were important turning points for British intelligence but, as I said, the '81 was dynamite, whereas for my theory to work, the '79 intel was a Russian-inspired ticket to buy into our complete organisation and I thought I knew where that ticket took the Russian agent. Something happened between 1979 and 1981 that changed the philosophical political leanings of a CIA operative working for the KGB into working for us. Easy, eh? All that was left was to find out what that was.
* * *
I went looking for a file Hannah had been working on and had taken to Sussex on her last journey; the one on Geoffrey Prime, whilst I left Fraser to begin to read the parts of the 1981 document, entitled Diagram of Conversion Needed For Soviet Command Structure To Move From Peace To War. Heavy reading for most of us, but to Fraser with his Cold War background and thirst for conspiracies, an Enid Blyton Famous Five novel.
The Warsaw Pact Joint Enterprise Plan consisted of a schedule of all joint exercises—combined Armed Forces, special forces level, army level, air defence, long range bombers, naval squadrons and rear services. The plan also included scheduled meetings of Warsaw Pact Military Council: chiefs of the General Staff; chiefs of Intelligence; heads of branches of arms and services; directorates of reconnaissance; air defence, and; anti-aircraft troops. Also included were radar installations along with their communication systems. Air force divisions and numbers. Naval squadrons and rear echelons. Numbers of rocket and artillery troops, engineering troops and chemical troops and to crown it all—communication log-ins for daily encryptions and online relay signal stations. The Holy Grail!
Exercises and deployments with the cryptonym 'ZAPAD' were organised and conducted by the General Staff of the Soviet Defence Ministry. These were seen as the eve of victory over the West using conventional forces and, if necessary, limited first-strike nuclear weapon. When in the ultimate final throes of this coded exercise, or as was foreseen, the real thing, command would be handled by the Central Politburo only.
The report went on to say that as of the end of 1981 there had been only two ZAPAD exercises, and they differed from each other so much that really they were two different types of exercises under the same cryptonym. The first exercise was conducted in May 1977 on the territories of the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. It utilised the command structure, staffs and designated units of the Soviet armed forces from the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany and the western military districts of the USSR, as well as armed forces of Poland, GDR, and Czechoslovakia.
The second ZAPAD exercise was conducted in September 1981, exclusively on Soviet territory. The only participants allowed were Soviet armed forces from the Baltic and Belorussian military districts, the Soviet Baltic Fleet, and Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. Delegations of leaders of the respective defence ministries were invited as observers. Very importantly—no Warsaw Pact forces were involved.
The purpose of the first ZAPAD exercise in 1977 was to test the new concept of management by the Soviet Supreme High Command and the commanders of the divisions of the military, the strategic deployment of Warsaw Pact forces for war and the conduct of those forces for offensive engagements in the long-term theatre of military operations. Conclusions drawn from this exercise subsequently helped the Soviets to force through a new wartime command formation.
The aims of the second ZAPAD exercise in 1981 were not clear. From fragmentary information, it appeared that the more important aims could have been: testing of the newest weapons systems and equipment of the Soviet armed forces, and the then development of recommendations for further technical improvement by the internal armaments industry. It could also have been for the testing of new concepts of conducting offensive operations by the use of a new concept called Operational Manoeuvre Groups (OMGs). Fast moving troop deployments aimed at securing identified Western key command centres. The report contained those centres.
Conclusions with command configuration, along with points of incursions and seizures, were listed on seventeen sheets of decoded script. In essence, where the '79 intelligence opened a window onto various Soviet military based organisations, the 1981 report gave the USSR's exclusive plans for war. The status required to access this magnitude of classified material must have been at the highest level of command. Possibly this was a Russian American who could speak and behave as a Russian of influence and had a background in espionage. The information was so good, he could even have been a member of the Politburo.
* * *
Christopher Irons telephoned at the prearranged time for a three-way conversation with his old boss, Fraser, and his new one, me. One new piece of information was added to the puzzle as we went through the details of Cilicia Kudashov's staged abduction. Fraser had unearthed some information that was missing about the Director of the Communication Centre where she was departmental head of a separate 'K' section, monitoring the decryption machines that dealt exclusively with NSA/CIA transmissions. The head of the department's name was Anatoly Vladimirovich Malikova. More important than his name was his status; he was a nephew of Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov's wife, Anna.
At first I queried Fraser's information, believing that Kudashov would have told me that it was his wife's nephew who was holding Cilicia,
but then I remembered his warning about how the plan would be jeopardised if he was not told before it went ahead. Could that have a bearing on the family relationship Anatoly Vladimirovich Malikova held?
Fraser had come across it during his continued interest in Victor Rothschild and the spreading influence he had on the society that Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby moved in, but more so in the case of Kudashov's newly exposed relative and his connection to John Caincross, the fifth member of the unholy Cambridge five. It was here that I realised Dickie had a big ball rolling and all I had on it was a fingertip.
* * *
Caincross was a translator and integral part of Bletchley Park, the WWII codebreakers, who was considered to be the British intelligence officer who leaked details of German army lines of attack at the Battle of Kursk to the Soviet Army, and thereby delivered a massive defeat to the German High Command. According to archives discovered in 1945, Caincross supplied the Soviets over five thousand documents, mostly about the Nazis, but a considerable amount concerning the future capabilities of Great Britain and the Commonwealth in peacetime. Included in his treachery were future plans regarding sovereignty issues over India and other such commitments in the Far East. His contact inside the KGB for all the information he sent was a Major General Vladimir Anatolyevich Malikova, the father of Anatoly Vladimirovich Malikova. Neither of us believed that to be a coincidence.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Prime Time
RYAN was the four-letter name Dickie sent under the cryptonym of NOMITE and I found his full name, Randall Ryan Cavershall II, first recorded at GCHQ in May 1973, listed under the following account: vetted January at Oxford. Leading language graduate, honours and distinction, Russian dialect translator, attached to J Division. In 1977, following Geoffrey Prime's resignation from GCHQ over his dislike at delivering lectures about message analysing, Ryan was moved up to fill the gap Prime left in the J30 section of Special Sigint that dealt exclusively with Soviet intelligence.