A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  “That seems an odd thing to say, Patrick. Any substance to that caustic remark?”

  “No, no! There's nothing he's done that either of us wouldn't. I'm just saying that not all are as patriotic as Dickie.”

  Before I was allowed to continue, there was a loud, disapproving hmm from Fraser.

  “Two messages went to Trubnikov from a remote exchange an agent working exclusively for Dickie had fictitiously set up in Cologne, in West Germany. From a secured, specially designed encrypting machine inside J section, GCHQ, the signal was bounced to an isolated relay point in Correos, Spain. It then went without showing its sender or its recipient to Trubnikov's Pravda newspaper desk in India. Following Dickie's directive, he sent his doomed Polish lover both instructions. The first was for him to ask his contact to obtain the lethal pill he wanted to take to avoid a painful death when he was discovered, as he knew he would be.

  “The ability to use that Spanish relay point came from Kudashov. You will have to live without proof for the time being on that, but it should be clear as we plough on, Fraser. Dickie wanted Kudashov to get that pill from the CIA because he knew the Polish secret police were watching the Americans and when they followed Kudashov back to Jana Kava, they watched where she went and handed the colonel on a plate to the Polish police and then the KGB. Why they waited three days before they arrested the colonel is for them to know and us to guess at. I would hazard a guess and say they wanted to see if he contacted any other army officer in the Kaliningrad barrack before they went for him.”

  When I told Fraser the second message Trubnikov received from Dickie and passed on to the Polish colonel, he was overtaken by sadness. I didn't think for one moment it was for himself. I knew it was for his friend. He removed the pipe from his mouth and slowly placed it in the ceramic ashtray he kept on his desk, then stared at his whisky glass in his left hand as though that was where he would find the answer if he looked hard enough. He did find an answer of sorts.

  “You can never forget loyalty, Patrick. You may in time forget how a person looked, or even their idiosyncrasies, but you can never forget how loyal they were to you and how much loyalty you gave them. If Dickie did order that, then he had a very good reason.”

  “Yes, he had a reason, but I'm not sure how good it was, Fraser.”

  * * *

  Whatever else Trubnikov was, a couple of things were abundantly clear; he was clever and practised in living as much by his instincts as his intellect. He was also a practical man. The only commodity he had to sell was secrets and in order to sell them he needed to accumulate as many as he could. He smelled an opportunity when so many messages were coming his way. Although he was far removed in distance from Poland, that would not stop his search for stock to sell. That was exactly what he was doing when he sent that last message to Warsaw. He was thinking about why anyone would send an agent to their death. What made it more bizarre was the fact they were sending a woman agent to her death. What did she know that needs to be silenced, he thought.

  'First they send this woman to point my lover out to the KGB. Then they send her to another place in Poland, this time the city of Gdańsk. The motive for sending the message in open text must mean the man who sends it wants it to be read. She is being sent to her death, but why?'

  Trubnikov became embroiled in the mystery he found himself involved with and, using the extensive connections he had within the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, it took him no time at all to discover the connection there was between Correos in Spain and Nikita Kudashov. It had taken George Stoneman a lot less time, as it was Nikita who initiated George into the Rosicrucian fraternity whose spiritual home, if folklore were to be believed, was where a Knight Crusader saved the life of Richard I, King of England, when he was returning from the Crusades to reconquer Normandy. That place was Correos in Barcelona, Spain. The difference between Stoneman's discovery and Trubnikov's was that Stoneman knew Kudashov as Klaus Mecklenburg.

  There were other things that Stoneman knew about Kudashov, that originally Trubnikov did not know. One of those was that his ancient family were the founders of Fraser's Circle of Eight. By the end of WWII, the Mecklenburgs had business interests that stretched from one side of the globe to the other. There was no country in the whole world where one could not purchase a product manufactured by some part of the Mecklenburg empire. George Stoneman was not the only person who was aware of the far-reaching Mecklenburg's power within this intriguing story of Machiavellian deceit and manipulation.

  The 'umbrellas' Dickie gave Trubnikov were the complications that glued the whole thing together. One of the parts to the umbrella was the indisputable facts Dickie passed on about how Kudashov had murdered his wife in the Prague apartment they shared when he was chief of police in that city. Jana Kava knew of the murder and that was the motive behind the reason she was sent to Gdańsk to die.

  Dickie protected Kudashov from apprehension by changing the files after Jana was shot. He had the photographs of her murder, taken to further lay the blame on the CIA, but he took precautions to evade repercussions coming Kudashov's way. Those precautions fell apart when George Stoneman recognised Nikita Kudashov as Klaus Mecklenburg.

  Chapter Thirty-Six: The Fascist Butcher

  I was playing back the tape recordings from the British Embassy gardens to Fraser, whose mood had not changed since hearing of Dickie's compliance in sacrificing Jana Kava for the real reason of keeping Anna Kudashov's murder by her husband a secret. He was listening, but I suspected his mind was working on the possible reasons for Dickie to protect Kudashov. Fraser was renowned for being impatient and I had no wish to keep him waiting too long, so I fast-forwarded to parts I thought might interest him more. When I found what I wanted, I pressed the play button again.

  “The head of your secret intelligence service, a Mr Blythe-Smith, and I met in Berlin when only a few bricks of the wall remained to be taken down. We had cross-messaged each other twice in the past, but this was our first face-to-face meeting. We had a few drinks at a restaurant on the west side of Berlin called Bar Schuschnigg. He was most insistent I spelled that name correctly, asking specifically to meet at that restaurant and stressing more than once that it was on the west side of Berlin. He said he'd been there once and wanted to meet somewhere authentic, not some plastic bazaar where the whisky tasted of the River Spree. But it was his assertion of the word west that now seems to have had a hidden purpose.

  “I found the place after some difficulty. I asked about five taxi drivers, none of whom had heard of it until the sixth one remembered where it used to be. He was surprised to find it where he remembered it to be, as it was in an area where all the properties had all been demolished. Your man was waiting inside. He was very uneasy. During the half an hour I was there, he kept looking over my shoulder to see if anyone had followed. No one entered the place and no one was waiting outside when I left.”

  I was watching Fraser, expecting to see some sign of recognition when Trubnikov pronounced the difficult name of the café, and then spelled it out loud in case his Russian accent confused the German name, but there was none. Then I remembered I was alone with Dickie in the Travellers Club when I first mentioned the name Schuschnigg. It was in relation to what had occurred in New York with Jack Price. I believed the family named Schuschnigg were related by birth to the parent family of our present monarch—the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha side.

  When I was recuperating near Brighton after returning from America, I had plenty of time on my hands for research and I found my earlier suspicions to be true. There was a family connection dating back to a marriage between an Ernest I, sovereign Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the great-great-great-grandfather of Queen Elizabeth, and his bride Charlotte Schuschnigg, a direct descendent of Leopold V, Duke of Austria. The same Leopold who held King Richard I, the Lionheart, for ransom.

  * * *

  The coincidence of the restaurant's name and place of meeting did not pass my attention, nor did Trubnikov's refer
ence to the two crossed messages between him and Dickie. Perhaps they were the two fax addresses he'd used that I had failed to find in the vaults. They were possibly filed under the name of Schuschnigg. I vowed to look if time permitted.

  'West' side of Berlin and Schuschnigg: the clues were there, but what lay behind the purpose? The net might be widening, but I felt it was closing in as well. The Embassy garden tape was still running.

  “Your Blythe-Smith looked tired, not through normal day-to-day tiredness, but more through a weariness of life, holding secrets that are not your own. You must know what I mean by that. It's the lies you have to remember and remembering to forget what the truth was, in case the two get mixed up. Anyway, he wanted all I had on Vladimir Putin. I had many names in my pocket that made larger bulges, but no. He wanted none of them.

  “Vladimir and I had spoken often and the last time we did, he told me that he saw his future elsewhere than the foreign intelligence service, and had resigned. He was to enter politics in St Petersburg as soon as he was sure he had all the right backing of past colleagues of the KGB that he needed. He asked for mine and I willingly gave it. We were close friends then and still are.

  “In public, he said he'd resigned from the KGB because of the coup against Gorbachev. He said he did not agree with what had happened and did not want to be part of the intelligence community in the new administration. But shit to that. If that were true, then why did Boris Yeltsin, who overthrew Gorbachev, allow Vladimir to carry on? Anyone with common sense would have thought Yeltsin's first move would have been to instruct the KGB to shoot those with a high profile who did not support him. Blythe-Smith told me he was watching the situation in St Petersburg and Moscow very carefully. The only thing I could think of was your man believed as I did; Putin had something on Yeltsin that kept him alive and would accelerate his journey further up the ladder.

  “I asked your man for money for what I knew. It wasn't a lot that I had on Vladimir and it all happened a long time ago in 1977, two years after we both joined the KGB, but your head man listened to my outline and then offered me something far more valuable than money.”

  I stopped the tape and asked Fraser if he wanted to go on and hear things about his family he wouldn't want to hear. He told me I was stupid and just to carry on, regardless of personal feelings. “At my age, laddie, there's nothing that needs special treatment. I've used enough honeyed words as well as harsh ones during my time, and my admiration for my old friend will not be destroyed by anything a Russian will say. Let the tape play, Patrick, there's a good chap.”

  Yes, there was a degree of scepticism in his voice without some of the conviction he had previously, but Fraser was Fraser with all the bravado in the world still inside his angina-ridden body. I knew what was on the tapes and I suspected he did too, and although I would have preferred him to disclose it, his pride would not allow him to give in and tell tales of the past. He wanted to see the fight through, so I rewound the tape to the something far more valuable bit.

  “He said it was to be my ticket for life. I could play the kingmaker at any time just by knowing it. He said it was no use to British intelligence as they would never be able to use it effectively, but I could if I ever needed to. It was about a German who adopted a Russian legend to hide his family's secrets. His real name is Klaus Mecklenburg and he is still alive. During the war, it was his family's money that bought him and the rest of his tribe their liberty from the Red Army.

  “Once I had the name of this German, I did not leave it there. Your man would have known that. He knew the type of man I was. There is no money for me in secrets that I know nothing of, is there? I traced as much of the Mecklenburgs' family history after the War ended as I could. Dietmar Mecklenburg was the first of the family who interested me.

  “He was a Nazi staff general. Came from some aristocratic military academy that I've forgotten the name of. He never saw action; he never stood trial. His money saw to that. I have the names of those who accepted his bribes, if you want them. Somehow, though, I doubt anyone inside your SIS would be very interested, as the British intelligentsia fared well with his money.”

  There was a pause to the tape here when he stopped walking and picked a peach from one of the trees, eating it as he scrutinised my face, looking for signs of any gallant riposte showing in my eyes. Finding only a mirror of his own absence of chivalry, he carried on in both his consumption of the peach and his recollections of his studies.

  “In 1945, Dietmar held his grateful hand out to the Americans for their largesse and, with their money freshly invested in his businesses, his profits soared to unbelievable heights. His three remaining soldier brothers returned to their palatial, unscathed homes and likewise continued making money, as did the sons of those mentioned. But there was one Mecklenburg who did not fare well when the hostilities ended and sense prevailed. His name was Adelar, an SS colonel and elder brother to Dietmar and Klaus, but younger than the two others. Nearing the end of the war, the German High Command named him the Slav Eater.

  “The Tito-inspired partisans fighting for their freedom in Yugoslavia, knew him by another name—the Fascist Butcher of Communists. He was captured at the end of that theatre of war, and interviewed by a British army intelligence officer who—after hearing his testimony and then the evidence from some twenty odd survivors of his men's torture of the Slav men, women, and children— summarily executed him by firing a single round into his head from under his chin. The execution was concluded away from witnesses, deep inside a forest a few kilometres from Zagreb. A private matter between a man with an idealistic conscience and the other, a pernicious exponent of evil. You see I had a long time to do my homework on what happened to the Mecklenburgs, and my research was done confidentially, without any witness to what I'd seen. I'm a keen advocate of keeping research personal.”

  He stopped walking to look at me. “Do you know who that British army intelligence officer was, Mr West?”

  * * *

  “Did you know then that he was talking about my father, Patrick? Is that why you thought I might prefer you not to run the tape?” Fraser asked whilst he refilled my glass and his.

  With the tape recorder stopped, Fraser told me more or less exactly the same as what Trubnikov had said, who had every detail of what happened to Major General Adelar Mecklenburg, of the Waffen SS from the account given by Major General Stuart Ughert at his court-martial at Aldershot Officers' Academy in December 1946, where the youngest major general in the British Army was found innocent of all charges on a directive received from the Ministry of War, co-signed by the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. The only witnesses to the crime of murder was the dead Adelar and Major General Ughert himself.

  * * *

  Fraser leant across the occasional table, switching on the tape-recorder.

  “The transcript of the military hearing, along with the document sent by Prime Minister Attlee is readily available, you know. I was told it was safely kept in the Ministry for Defence vaults. Can't be much of a secret if it's as open as that, can it? This information comes free of charge, as long as you leave me alone to hold the real secret that Mr Blythe-Smith gave me and do with it as I please. If you interfere, then I think those human rights activists you hear more and more of nowadays might kick up a storm and embarrass a very close friend of yours. In today's cordial world between the East and the West, I would not like that to happen.”

  * * *

  “I appreciate the earlier thought, Patrick, but I did know of that episode of my family history. Something you would not know is that when Tito became President of Yugoslavia, he invited my father to visit the country where they had added his name to a roll call of honour to the dead in Belgrade. I think I was sixteen when he, my mother and I went to the ceremony. What struck me the most was the devastation of the place.

  “During the war, my mother and I moved from our home on the outskirts of Edinburgh to a place called Fortrose, on the coast not far from Inverness, to escape th
e bombing. Apparently, we had been offered evacuation to Canada, but she turned down the offer. She was a very forceful and proud Scottish lady, was my mother. She undertook some of my education, leaving the essentials to the Fortrose village school. The two together must have done something right as it was because of them I managed to graduate to university. It was that background of small-town life on the coast in the Highlands of Scotland that made Belgrade so stark and unusual to me. The time I had in Yugoslavia opened my eyes, not only to the devastating destruction of war, but also to the fact that different cultures must exist together in order to survive.

  “I had read some material I'd found on this man Tito before we left, and although his politics were alien to what I'd been brought up to believe, when I was given the opportunity to listen to a couple of public addresses he made, I could understand how difficult the blending of so many aspirations must be for a politician. We were guests in the country for about a month. I don't remember much, other than it being stiflingly hot with only dust to breathe in the towns, but fresh delicious fruit available throughout the tree-lined countryside, and my mother bitterly complaining how there was no tea anywhere and the coffee was like treacle. My mother died within a year of our visit and father went downhill quite rapidly following on from her death.

  “During his service life he was a very smart man, but at home he was the exact opposite, dressing in an infuriatingly casual way that brought many a rebuke from my chapel-going mother, but he took no notice. He told me in a loud voice to not let anyone tell you how to dress. I think I got the 'scruffy' reputation from him, but I'm proud my stubbornness came from both of them. My mother was always clipping me around the ear for not polishing my shoes or tying my tie incorrectly for school. If she had lived to see how I dressed when at university, then I think she might have killed me.”