A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  * * *

  When I arrived at Beaulieu, Kudashov was under the shade of a silver birch in the rose garden looking every inch the English country squire I imagined he would like to become. That's where I started our interview.

  “Where do you see yourself after Cilicia has been liberated from Moscow and she's here with you in England, Nikita? Is there a special place where you'd like to settle down?”

  He mentioned a place I knew vaguely, just over the border with Scotland in what's called the Lowlands, a place my father had taken me to when he and my mother were alive. It was a good many years ago, but I remember it being summer and very hot. We stopped for lunch in a restaurant, the outside of which was festooned with hanging baskets and window boxes of flowering plants of every colour. My father ate fish. I remember the day well, as after finishing his meal he had a severe attack of what he said was just indigestion and nothing to be concerned with.

  A few years after that trip to Scotland, he went to see his local doctor and complained of another attack of indigestion. Just hours after seeing his GP, and he agreeing with my father's diagnosis, my mother found him dead on their bed at home. The same GP was summoned and he diagnosed my father had died from a heart attack. Apparently, the symptoms of indigestion and an oncoming heart attack are quite similar.

  I have always wondered if it was a slight heart attack he suffered in that pretty restaurant. In my case, I prefer to think of myself as ignorant at that lunch rather than to know and accept I was utterly useless. I smiled as I wondered what that pretty young psychologist would make of my thinking I should have saved my father.

  * * *

  Whilst on the subject of saving people, I'd had a peek at one report a psychologist had written on me. It was after an incident in Ireland where I'd witnessed a prolonged death and been the cause of a quick one. The incident I'd spoken of was the one that gave me the most pain until, that is, Hannah died. Again, it had been my fault. I had allowed a woman to get too close and I hadn't arrived in time to save her. When I got to the warehouse when she'd been taken, there was only time to watch as her tortured body slowly drifted into death's outstretched arms that no paramedic could push aside. The effect that her death had on me was vented in a way that protocol strongly ordered never to do, nevertheless, having broken those rules I found that killing her killer had not removed the pain and nor had the therapy.

  The psychologist I'd told this story to suggested in her report that I attend the Harley Street practice of the retained civil-service medical therapist. Although it was only a 'suggestion', it was not one it would be wise to refuse. When I stole that glance, I didn't recognise who she was speaking of until I reached the end.

  His highly developed intelligence coupled with his direct motivated characteristics of determination, mixed with a single-minded selfishness and complete inconsideration for others, make West's case most interesting and his condition almost impossible to treat. His one redeeming quality is his complete devotion to and love of his job, and the pride he has in his personal performance both within and outside of its constraints. Although these emotions fall short of tempering his inconsiderateness in achieving his role and objectives, his recent display of ruthlessness is in my opinion an integral part of his self-absorption. It is my professional view that Patrick West is unreservedly suited to the role he is currently employed at.

  * * *

  My searching into Kudashov's future with his granddaughter resolved nothing. I hoped for better results as I moved the conversation on to both parts of Operation Donor.

  “I need to get everything down on tape,” I stated as the debrief began and I produced the small service issue tape recorder.

  “Most of what we'll be covering today we will have touched on or spoken more fully about already, but you know what institutions like the SIS are—red tape and paperclips. Everything in triplicate and then some more. Sorry, if this is all at bit tedious, Nikita, but you know how it is?”

  He made a few grimaces reminiscent of a man in pain when doing something he doesn't want to, but they'd disappeared by the time I began.

  “I'm going to start with Jana Kava. You were her handler on both parts of the Operation Donor that you were instrumental in setting up. Are we up and running with that, Nikita?”

  He moaned that we were covering old ground, but kept up with the story that had been told, until we came to Warsaw, the Polish colonel, and Gdańsk. I told him part of what I knew about Ryan without mentioning any detail. I said I knew Jana had fingered the colonel to keep our source, Vyacheslav Trubnikov's name, out of circulation from the KGB. He looked surprised and made no attempt to disguise it.

  “I'm impressed, Patrick. Yes, Dickie had a runner inside the CIA with access to the KGB. It was an enormous coup on his behalf. I'm a bit of what you English call a snob. I'm afraid I hate the word agent being used to describe me. The snob in me started in childhood, then it developed into something far deeper than mere pretentiousness. I was hubristic from birth of course with my bloodline, but my self-confidence grew stronger on marrying into the Romanov royal connection with Anna.

  “When Dickie Blythe-Smith had your chair, I was his special artist at the performance of espionage. Our relationship transcended any trade-craft instruction book platform. Together he and I wrote the sequence to that book, and you and I will write the novel that closes the series, Patrick.

  “Yes, Trubnikov needed protection but, more importantly, Dickie's inside runner needed Trubnikov on the stage and playing, not locked up in the Lubyanka or some version of it in India. Over the years, Dickie had his source reading signals, dossiers and picking the pockets of the rich, famous, and wicked. GB's SIS credentials were looked upon as the vertex of the shrouded world that no other nation could come close to toppling. I hope somewhere he wrote out in full all of what he did for successive governments of your country, and perhaps one day you may find where he hid his memoirs and go on and publish them.”

  “I hope I do. That would very nice, Nikita. Would I find your name in those documents?” I asked.

  Chapter Thirty-One: Hammer and Sickle

  “You said Dickie only mentioned Kudashov's name once to you, Fraser; are you sure? Only Kudashov's story is that he was much more than just Dickie's ears and eyes on selective intel. He's implying he was Dickie's number one overseas intelligence agent in all spheres of interest until Dickie retired.”

  I called Fraser as soon as we were pulling away from Beaulieu on the homeward bound journey to Whitehall. Kudashov had answered all my queries with varying degrees of satisfaction. On more than three occasions he repeated his insistence of having another vital piece of information to reveal only when he had my confirmation that Cilicia was free from Moscow and en route to London. But I left Beaulieu still uncertain about his true reasons for wanting his granddaughter 'rescued'. I had no doubts as to her communications value, that had been proven, but I sensed another agenda brewing in his motives. He was an extremely persuasive and experienced intelligence operative, and I was reminded of my own explanation to Fraser of how I thought the equally experienced Dickie Blythe-Smith had led Randall Ryan Cavershall by the hand in turning Vyacheslav Trubnikov. Was Kudashov using the intelligence services of this country, hoping to conceal something of his own making?

  * * *

  Fate played a card as it often does, and as always happens, nobody could stop it or tell where it would lead. Fraser had been studying for the tenth time everything he had and everything else he could find on his pet subject of the Cambridge Spy Ring that existed from the thirties until the late fifties. He was looking at the fifth member who was identified as a part of that infamous passage of history: John Caincross.

  Caincross studied languages at the Sorbonne in Paris as well as at Trinity College, Cambridge. French, German, and Russian were his specialities. When he was in his final term in Paris, he had a brief but intense affair with an American girl who was studying the same languages as he. When they both came to En
gland their relationship continued, but at a steadier pace until the outbreak of WWII when the love of his life, Patricia Jacobson, returned home to America, where she followed Caincross's eventual footsteps by becoming a translator for her country's intelligence service.

  Before the war started, Caincross worked for both the Cabinet Office and the Foreign Office and sometime in 1937, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Around that time, Communism had become an attractive economic ideology in America and, again, nobody can be absolutely sure of the precise date, but Patricia joined the Communist Party of the United States of America. As Cold War tensions fuelled fears of widespread Communist subversion in the labour unions of America and then spread to government institutions, a list of possible subversives was put together, which became the starting point of McCarthyism in America. Patricia Jacobson's name was on such a list and, in time, she was due to appear before one of Joseph McCarthy's investigation committees into Communist affiliations within the FBI, for whom she worked.

  Joseph McCarthy's investigations led to a political opponent committing suicide because of pressure McCarthy was exerting on his homosexual son. The Democratic politician's suicide led to McCarthy's witch hunt being immediately discontinued. Fraser found records lodged in Washington DC, through his contacts in the FBI, of Patricia's active role in the Communist Party of the USA. She had escaped investigation by months.

  Fraser's searching did not end there. By 1941, Patricia was married to an army physicist working for the US Army Corps of Engineers at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on what became known as The Manhattan Project, or put more simply, working on the production of the world's first nuclear bomb. Whilst her husband worked in the army laboratories, she worked at the nearby Signal Intelligence Service as a translator of signals emanating from Oak Ridge to unrecognised transmission points. The Signal Intelligence Service suffered from an unescapable weakness in its lack of coordination with other communications services, notably that of the Department of State and the FBI. Meaning that nobody controlled the signals to and from Oak Ridge other than those who worked in the Signal Intelligence Service.

  Between 1941 and the end of WWII, Caincross worked at Bletchley Park, Great Britain's Code and Cypher School, where he passed on German military decoded secrets to the Russians and added to them when he joined the counter intelligence services at MI6, where his translation skills were put to use. When another of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess, fled Britain for Moscow, written notes from Caincross were found in his apartment.

  Those letters, Fraser told me, were never allowed to leave the vaults I've spoken of, and when I was back in my office at the Foreign and Commonwealth building, I accessed those vaults and read those letters. When finished with them I could just about hold myself back from calling Fraser. I decided to wait to tell him to his face.

  In them, John Caincross mentions his American married girlfriend, and how she had let slip a couple of messages to him using his Soviet code name of Liszt, containing specific details of core elements of the fusion component to the nuclear bomb her husband was working on. In one message she added: I believe what Joe is working on should be shared to those less fortunate than us. Maybe you could help in that way, John. Try to make sure the Russians have what the Americans have otherwise I fear for the safety of this world. That message was in plain text with no effort made to disguise its meaning.

  The man she called Joe was her husband. His full name was Joe Joseph Cavershall. When the Cavershalls had their only child, Randall, in 1942, Joe Joseph added the numeral of I after his own surname, giving his son Randall Ryan the honour of having the II after his.

  * * *

  By the time I reached Chearsley that evening I was fit to burst with what I'd discovered, along with something connected that Michael had found. My investigations came first.

  “Can you see the reason behind Dickie's cryptic NOMITE message, now, Fraser?” I breathlessly asked of an equally excited pipe-puffing guru.

  When he answered, “No, Patrick, I can't,” I swooped like an eagle when ready to attack its prey.

  “It's the 'each', at the end of Jack Price's acronym of No One is More Important Than Each, Fraser. Joe Cavershall was the first and Randall the second part of each. Together they are two parts of a three-part puzzle, with Patricia making up the third part. Dickie was able to turn Randall into working for us because of what his mother had done. He told Randall that if he disclosed anything about the operations, Dickie would have the Hammer and Sickle flag with the Russian emblem permanently added to the family name.”

  Michael Simmons had found that Randall Ryan Cavershall II was posted to Germany in October 1991 to witness the last of the Wall coming down. He was there as leading GCHQ representative, waiting to co-read the signal traffic from Berlin Central travelling east. It was rightly expected to hit new heights in transmissions. To allow for what was technically named open-space-impetus, Randall had his office full of signal intercepting machinery away from Berlin, in Cologne, Germany. From retirement, Dickie Blythe-Smith had selected its location, on an empty floor of a block of offices next to the one occupied by the German Federal Intelligence Service, to one of which Kudashov was a regular visitor.

  “There's no record of the two ever having met, but wouldn't it be strange if they did?” Fraser asked, expecting me to agree, but I failed to reply.

  Between a few glasses of Jura and possibly the same number of pipe refills, but not as many as the Dunhills I smoked that evening, the taped transcript of my earlier meeting with Kudashov was combed through, then re-examined under Fraser's finely tuned ears whilst I drew the first of my square grid panels to take on the flight to India.

  On the first sheet of paper, I had the names of all those who benefitted from the demise of the Polish colonel Jana Kava pointed out to the CIA's Black-Op G3 assassin. During my nine-hour flight to India I planned to draw as many grids as I needed to maximise the answers to the remaining questions of what each had in common, and to find the missing strand that pulled them together. Fraser's view on Victor Rothschild's career as a concealed Soviet spy was changing, partially due to the evidence I'd uncovered in the Foreign and Commonwealth vaults misfiled under Ryan, and not with the plethora of papers categorised under Cambridge Five.

  Fraser showed me papers he'd had for years in the quest for truth of the Cambridge Spy Ring, which had been hidden by Philby when he fled to Russia. They showed Victor Rothschild, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt being members of the Apostles, a campus society characterised by Marxist intellectual speculation and homosexual activity, but there was nothing to suggest Rothschild was under Soviet control. Rather, the evidence Fraser had amassed implied Rothschild was pursuing another aim entirely—the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, a family dream fulfilled in the aftermath of the Second World War. Stalin was among the first to support the fledgling State of Israel; after all, a large portion of its immigrants had come from the Eastern Bloc and he wanted a Communist state in the region. Perhaps it could be proven that Rothschild advised the Soviet leadership on affairs to do with Israel and, in so doing, help to hasten Britain's weakening grip on the Palestine Mandate, but it was an inevitable outcome, no matter how it was dealt with.

  Fraser was coming round to believe that it was through Rothschild's actions that Kim Philby was finally exposed to be the ringleader of the Cambridge spy ring because of Philby's published antisemitism. Flora Solomon, an ardent Zionist whom Philby unsuccessfully had attempted to recruit in the 1930s, became incensed at his pro-Arab, anti-Israel journalistic slant and decided to reveal what she had known for decades. Solomon reported Philby to a figure perched high in the British security establishment: Lord Victor Rothschild.

  All that made interesting reading before my flight to India, where I had no intentions of staying long in Delhi. My idea was to meet with Vyacheslav Trubnikov tomorrow lunchtime, Saturday, and fly home on the 10:20 flight to Heathrow leaving Delhi on Sunday morning. I was to be out of England until S
unday afternoon. If the flight was on time, then I could meet Major Swan and his team at the SBS barracks in Dorset by four in the afternoon and catch up with Kudashov at Beaulieu, early evening, when I could inform him of the mission at Zaragoza. I would be tired, but that tiredness might keep thoughts of Hannah aside.

  I suggested to Fraser that sometime over the weekend he contact Samuel Rothschild, praising his relative's judicious handling of foreign affairs when advisor to the governments of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, and praise him for his continuing contribution to the UK's relationship to Israel. I implied that could be the gesture that would open the door to his Circle of Eight families.

  * * *

  My sleep that night was again plagued by nightmarish visions of the bullet hitting Hannah's head last Thursday. This time I cradled her head, turning her face towards mine as she smiled, then drifted from my grasp. The nightmare continued with me on the floor of an unfamiliar large, ministerial limousine searching the open space for signs of her, but all I could see was a headless body sitting bolt upright, supported by a seat belt. When I couldn't find her, I opened the car door and left. I never saw which direction I went in and that's what woke me. I was sweating even though the air conditioning was working, and alcohol never had that effect on me.

  I showered, dressed, and packed my overnight travel bag, making sure I had all my diplomatic travel papers, then opened a grid, this one with the name of Vyacheslav Trubnikov in the centre of it, and then I added the names of those who benefited from an association with him. I spent the four hours I had before I was due to leave with the computer off and my mind focused on what was to happen in Delhi.