A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  “I think I told you that I was unsure, but thought I heard another voice in the background when Faversham contacted me on the embassy scrambled phone link after my elimination of Dalek's message hit Faversham's fax machine. When Miles started the first-phase debrief over the phone, it was a question he put to me that prompted me to think I was right and there was someone pulling Faversham's strings. He asked if either Dalek or his sister had said anything about a Russian? I told him a story Dalek had told me of a First Directorate KGB officer that had been on intimate terms with a Polish army colonel Jana and he regularly met.”

  Fraser was still standing but by now looking out of the huge windows overlooking the splendour of St James's Park. The window was open and he was consciously puffing his pipe so the smoke left the office. Lazily, I wondered why.

  “If that's true, and I'm coming round to believing your tale, Patrick; why did Dickie need the information from Jana Kava's Polish colonel about who the traitor was?”

  “Precisely, Fraser! That's where I've got to. Dickie didn't need the name of Cavershall. He had that from Prime. But when Trubnikov knew we knew about his love affair, his price for coming over to us was the Polish army colonel's life. Dickie's enticement was straightforward, 'Show me what you've got and we'll point the finger at your lover for you. If not, well, sorry about that, but we'll have to tell Moscow Centre what you and a colonel of the Polish army got up to. We have you hook, line, and sinker, old chap, but fear not; either way we will leave a series of clues leading back to a Czechoslovakian who was on the receiving end of military secrets given to her by your ex-Polish lover. The KGB will either love you as a patriot or shoot you as a spy. Your choice?'

  “And he did choose, Fraser. Trubnikov joined us with Cavershall holding his hand. Cavershall is told by Dickie to alert the American Embassy in Prague about their asset, Jana Kava, seeing a Polish army spy who's on the verge of jumping ship into their laps, but he's scared rotten of being caught. The Embassy is to give Jana Kava a lethal pill with instructions to pass it on to the colonel—'in case things turn nasty and we cannot get you out.' The only way Cavershall can get that message out and cover his back is by first using the Berlin station and then the Lucknow relay one until it hits Delhi. Dickie starts turning the screw on Trubnikov. He asks a simple favour. 'Tell your lover in Prague to give his Czech contact a message'.”

  Fraser's impatience was showing in his voice and on his face, but I firmly believed my theory would not be something Fraser would enjoy hearing, so I never stopped him asking his questions before I elaborated on it further.

  “I'm still confused, Patrick. If Cavershall's name was in Dickie's pocket, why did he keep that to himself? He never mentioned it to me, nor did I see it in any classified documents. Was Dickie still having a dig around after finding Prime and then Cavershall, do you think?”

  “I can't be sure, but I don't think so.” I didn't have time to finish my sip of whisky before Fraser fired another question at me.

  “Why so much chicanery over this name Cavershall? It was current to the day, not now! Why did it need being hidden in the cryptic message sent to the church where Jack Price and Job are buried? In any case, why leave it to chance that you would come along and work out his convoluted puzzle?”

  “I haven't completely solved Dickie's puzzle, Fraser; there is still a considerable way to go, but I believe we're closing in fast. There are several things confusing me at the present. One is I'm not one hundred percent sure the name Dickie sent to St Michael's is the only name he wants us to have. I don't mean us, as in you and I. I mean whoever found it.

  “Using the computers at Group and the AIS facilities at Greenwich, Michael Simmons has found that when Cavershall was at university he had a nickname derived from his father—Ryan Cavershall. Apparently, Ryan was preferred to Randall. In the preface to The Warsaw Pact Joint Enterprise Plan of 1981, there is a code for Ryan on the final sheet of that report. It's not obvious. It doesn't say 'Coded Ryan' or anything as plain as that, but read that final paragraph again, Fraser; it says, 'The purpose of operation Raketno Yadernoe Andropov Napadenie was to collect intelligence for potential contingency plans if the Reagan administration launched a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.'

  “That piece of text comes from a programme initiated in May 1981 by Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB. The 1981 report you read was sent to London one month later. Raketno Yadernoe Andropov Napadenie is an acronym for RYAN.”

  “How on earth did a foreign operative get the Russian military to headline an operation with the initials of his code name?”

  “Easy when you have friends in high places, and Vyacheslav Trubnikov had some of the highest friends at the time, and that hasn't changed in twenty-five years. So, yes, Randall could have had it worded in such a way. Are you with me, Fraser?”

  “Oh, yes, laddie, every beautiful step of the way.”

  “In that case, here's the first one to mull over. From the photographs that went to Image Recognition, I circulated a cut-out of Jana Kava's killer's face and had it sent to all friendly intelligence services. I didn't say why I was looking. We had one positive recognition. It was from the CIA at Langley. They pinpointed him as assigned to an outstation from 1979 until 1985. It's the same place where Black-Op G3 forces were registered as operating from when Mossad informed us of an insertion by a G3 agent at the Iraqi's nuclear power project at Kirkuk back in 2003. Different time but the same players, Fraser. Jana's killer was definitely CIA special forces. Michael contacted the outstation in Delaware. The signal we had back claimed he died on Operation Eagle Claw in 1980 when President Carter authorised that failed attempt of the rescue of fifty-three hostages held inside the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran.

  Chapter Thirty: Friday's Drive

  The vaults at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office contained a myriad of compelling documents, memorabilia and written accounts of deeds best left unmentioned in public. Fraser had access to these vaults when chairman of the JIC, and there's no doubt he visited them and made use of what he needed in there, but during his tenure the code name Ryan was not known by him, nor relevant to any operations mounted in GB's name, nor was the name Vyacheslav Trubnikov important for his enquiries. However, Trubnikov was now important to me.

  Fraser had returned home to Molly, leaving me alone with my thoughts in the back of the ministerial car on the way to Beaulieu from Whitehall. I was closing my eyes, at times playing recognition games of whereabouts we might be on the oh so familiar journey, when I opened them. I was right a few times and wrong just as many, but in my dealings with Kudashov, I could not afford to be wrong by having my eyes closed in guessing games. That awareness would equally be applicable in my conversation with the Russian Ambassador to India, whom I planned to see very soon.

  * * *

  There were not many more 'missions' carrying the insignia RYAN filed in the vaults under Dickie's surname, but one of those that did, happened the year after the '81 report. It was allowed to be discovered by the CIA, who attributed it to a known Soviet defector and not to any agent named Ryan. This trick was successfully instigated one other time whilst Dickie was gainfully employed by the government of the day. Another of Ryan's operations was to leak a report in February 1983 of a top-secret KGB telegram to the London KGB residency, which was encoded and forwarded on to a personnel fax machine at an address accessed only by Dickie Blythe-Smith.

  The telegram stated: 'The objective of the assignment is to see that the Residency works systematically to uncover any plans in preparation by the main adversary USA and to organise a continual watch that will be kept for indications of a decision being taken to use nuclear weapons against the USSR or immediate preparations being made for a nuclear missile attack.'

  An attachment to that message listed tasks for London-based Soviet agents to complete and report on. These included: the collection of data on potential places of evacuation and shelter. An appraisal of the level of blood held in blood banks. O
bservation of places where nuclear decisions were made and where nuclear weapons were stored. Observation of key nuclear decision makers. Observation of lines of communication, post office activity, reconnaissance on the heads of churches and banks, and surveillance of security services and military installations. Added on was the activation of all the Soviet-funded infiltration of Trade Unions in the UK. Taken as a whole, this leaked message was devastating.

  When Dickie released the report, it was the view of the intelligence service that London was under immediate attack by the Soviet Union. I was unable to find two other faxed messages Dickie made reference to, but without the address or name of the sender—Two messages filed in vaults—was all I could find. Within the files I'd found there was nothing injudicious. All of Dickie's work was transparent, but in certain circumstances some files had been made difficult to find, given the normal set of conditions applicable to searches through top-secret archives. I vowed to search again for those missing two when time was less demanding.

  When President Reagan deployed Pershing II nuclear-armed missiles in West Germany and then, almost immediately, began the Strategic Defence Initiative, it added up to more concerns for the Russian military and Politburo. Ryan reported on a crucial meeting between KGB high-ranking officers and the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance of the foreign intelligence service of the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic. That meeting concluded that a further 300 positions within the KGB were needed to combat what the Russians saw as American dominance of Europe. Each one of those posts was named and highlighted by Ryan in a signal of June 1982 that was lodged in file and signed off by Dickie, who retired that year.

  As well as the above, Ryan listed parts of confidential plans being drawn up in the USSR to launch a satellite containing various smaller ones, all capable of firing laser beams and designed as a countermeasure to anything the Americans might deploy in this SDI—Strategic Defence Initiative. It had huge costs involved and according to Ryan's source, a cost the Soviets might not be able to sustain. A serious position had arisen.

  Ryan's report suggested that a first strike policy might be the only option left to the Soviet Union if Reagan went ahead with the SDI programme. Fortunately for the world, nothing came of the Strategic Defence Initiative programme to antagonise the Soviet purse. We came close to the eradication of this earth that Ryan had little influence over, but Dickie Blythe-Smith did, with Bernard Nicholls and his Delineated Signal Intelligence Gathering having a lasting effect on the Soviet Union when the American President initiated a military exercise under NATO authority, coded Able Archer '83. That politically expedient exercise brought this planet as close to destruction that it had ever been.

  The last mention of agent Ryan was in a message dated 17th July 2000. It had been consigned to the vaults four days later and signed in by Sir Richard Blythe-Smith. Taken at face value the wording of the coded message held little of sensible content, being in some kind of cryptic form more suited to a crossword puzzle than an intelligence signal, but bearing in mind Dickie's reputation of never wasting words, it needed my unmitigated attention. However, the prospect of solving it was not close to hand: A Stone guards the money as it drains to the sea. The Russian is a danger, but it's the Finnish man you need to fear.

  Why the capital letter to Stone? The second part of the message referred to something I was already aware of. However, being aware of it made it impossible to forget.

  It seemed as though the falsified agent coded Ryan that Dickie and Randall Cavershall developed along with the Director General of GCHQ, was responsible in so many ways for stopping the world's self-destruction. As far as I knew, Bernard Nicholls was still alive, enjoying his fishing in Alta, and the name of Ryan, along with Randall Cavershall, was allowed to retire from its connection to the British SIS to any part of the world Randall chose.

  For the time being, I kept those final thoughts on Cavershall and his SIS-coded alias as Ryan to myself. I thought there was more to the open message that had been sent to St Michael's Church than a simple coding based on the middle name of a double-agent Dickie had discovered at GCHQ, but for now I wanted that left to me and me alone.

  * * *

  Despite my efforts to distance myself from my once marital state, all the thoughts spilling over in my mind were of Hannah. I could not shake the memory of those last shared moments with each other in the apartment, with me answering a call from the Prime Minister and her on the way out for the journey to Sussex. One of the fondest memories I had was of our first meeting in the offices of Group. Our awkwardness in me being her boss and she not wishing to jeopardise her job by having an unwise love affair. For most of my life I'd indulged in many sports and I confess, one of those sports was the pursuit, and hopeful capture, of attractive women. The chase was the adrenaline booster needed before one could enjoy the fruits of one's labour. Sadly, not always, was that the case. Sometimes I was the prey, but not every time was the thrill of being hunted rewarding when cornered.

  The same applied when I was the hunter. Such things were on my mind when I saw Hannah. I was the boy playing at life and she was my beautiful quarry. However, it didn't work that way. For no logical reason that I could acknowledge, we fell into that place that poets bewilderingly call the state of love, the same place I had spent my life successfully avoiding. Four years is not long for lasting memories, but long enough for the painful loss of no more to come.

  * * *

  A few days after Hannah's passing, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Nigel Hicks, the same man who had telephoned after her assassination and said nothing about taking things easy, came to see me in my office. The purpose of his visit was to offer the professional expertise of the in-house Ministry's medical 'therapy' services. During the first five-year period in the intelligence business, I had the misfortune to be 'invited' to visit the psychology practice five times over deaths that were either of persons close to me or someone I had killed in the line of duty. The purpose was to see if my psyche was damaged in any way because of the perceived 'trauma' involved in such occurrences.

  I was not traumatised by any of them, neither was I traumatised in a psychological way by Hannah's murder. I did not take up Sir Nigel's offer. However, by one of those contrived accidents that are too obvious for everyone's benefit, the psychologist Sir Nigel had in mind was a very presentable young woman of fewer than thirty years' experience of everyday life and a mere ten years' experience of vocational training. She bumped into me the Thursday evening following Hannah's assassination when I was on my way to meet my wise and all-knowing colleague in the Foreign Office before I met with Sir John Scarlett.

  I had never met this particular psychologist before; she was far too young for that. By anyone's standards, she was courteous and polite in a professional manner. It crossed my mind that she could be of help in silencing those voices in my mind.

  * * *

  Kudashov was not yet a memory, nor was there a place reserved in any corner of my mind for his name, but as I played this childish game of 'guess where we are in the car', I did wonder if he would become a bad or a good memory.

  Word from his handlers at Beaulieu was that he was unhappy and impatient with whatever they did for him, asking time after time when next he was going to see me. Although this visit had to happen, I had arranged it on the spur of the moment due to the constant pressure the Foreign Office was apply regarding the Indian situation, and the one the Prime Minister asked me personally to deal with, that of the International Atomic Energy Agency in regard to America's plans to invade Iran. Sir John Scarlett had made contact with the Director General of the IAEA through an emissary at the United Nations and put the suggestion that Iran be declared unstable in the eyes of his organisation.

  Unfortunately for the powers that be, those that make up the invisible government that control the machinery of elected governments that both the British Prime Minister of 1878, one Benjamin Disraeli, and a little later in time, the American Pres
ident, one Theodore Roosevelt, spoke of, the Egyptian lawyer who headed the International Atomic Energy Agency could not be influenced. He spoke as he found, and declined to tell a lie to appease those with hidden agendas, some of which were contained in that Gladio B file.

  On the surface, none of that was of any concern to Kudashov, but he knew of the corrupted file and as yet I did not know how much he knew. He did know of Henry Mayler and the plans he and another Rosicrucian, a Lebanese Assyrian billionaire, drew up to build a home for Armenians, Assyrians and Kurds in the once Kingdom of Cilicia in the south of Turkey, bordering the Mediterranean. Did Kudashov know of the plans to invade Iran and lessen the western world's dependence on Saudi Arabian oil, thereby creating a vacuum for unrest in that crucial Islamic country?

  If the invasion of Iran went ahead, and the Gladio plans were realised, parts of the world would then be controlled as if they were pieces on a chess board, being moved by unaccountable and invisible hands for nothing more than their greedy gratification. For a time, I took tremendous pleasure in knowing that Fraser and I had stopped these people four years ago, but it was our intervention that directly led to Hannah's death. Those chilling words on the scrap of paper about death being the most grateful recipient of life were stencilled in my mind that, despite my childish game of peek-a-boo at the countryside, just would not stop rattling around.

  Michael Simmons had run every feasible check available to certify Kudashov's assertion of being responsible for the case files on the Kavas at the beginning of Operation Donor. There was nothing to disprove his claim; in fact, there were more positives showing his hand to them than not. For the May '81 report, and then the one on the first of March 1982, Kudashov was in Vienna, Austria on 'Police Business.'

  Technology beyond my comprehension unearthed two microwave signal messages emanating from a one-way, single-use dispatch radio corresponding to dates in both March and May from an address in Vienna of a company used by the SIS in the early eighties. That MI6 company, registered as a specialist art-framing business, then filtered it and sent it via an art gallery in Old Bond Street, London to the Russian counter-intelligence desk, seventh floor, Century House. Again, this amounted to no more than circumstantial evidence of Kudashov's story being true, but very seldom in my line of work is there any indisputable evidence of certainty.