‘Right,’ I say.
A cab drops me in Piccadilly and I walk the short distance to Curzon Street to be sure I’m not among the first at Mitchell’s party. Five o’clock in the foyer and a gang of debs from the Registry is hurrying for a train to the country. I give my name at the desk, and while I wait for the usual security chit, the duty copper talks about football. Then I take the lift to the top, because the Pig and Eye is many floors and a cut above the basement bar at MI6. The Security Service opened it as a watering-hole after the war so that officers could drink and ramble on without fear of being overheard by a Russian spy. We didn’t realise in those days that he was sitting on the plush bench beside us, making a mental note for his real comrades.
Thankfully, there’s a decent turnout of officers from both Services this evening. The spirit of Vera Lynn hovers in the room, and I’m moved to order a gin and It for old times’ sake. Mitchell looks terrible. I catch his eye and smile, but he looks away at once.
Then Hollis brings us to order with a knife and a glass, and I’m reminded, by the cadence of his voice, that he’s the son of a bishop, and even the filthy joke he works into his peroration is delivered like a gospel reading. Graham Mitchell will always be a respected member of this club, he says. Someone in the congregation says, ‘Hear, hear,’ and someone else says the same. There’s no doubting the goodwill in the room, but I sense some awkwardness too. Heads are bowed and the brethren shuffle their feet, because they know Graham is leaving under a cloud. What’s more, he can feel their embarrassment. The PETERS investigation was supposed to be a secret but we don’t seem to be able to keep them any more. The DG’s praise is turning to ashes in his mouth. Mercifully, his speech is short, Mitchell’s reply even shorter: it’s plain in his face that he doesn’t trust himself to mutter more than a few platitudes without breaking down. There was a collection, there’s a presentation, more applause, and a few minutes later he’s gone.
When Hollis has left us too, a party of sorts begins. By popular demand, Harry Vaughan and another badly tuned piano. He feels a hypocrite because he has played his part in making Graham Mitchell’s life a misery, and now he’s laughing, joking and drinking gin. But old Harry’s an entertainer who must sing to be loved and to forget. A few songs, a few drinks – easy, until the following morning when he wakes with the sort of hangover a man a year from fifty should never inflict on his body and his mind.
I’m alone in my own flat so I must have had the sense not to disturb Elsa. My sheets are damp, I feel cold sweat on my skin and I think I’m going to be sick. The ghost of a memory is troubling me too, but my brain is so fuddled it takes a while to conjure it up. I remember I was making my way home through Pimlico when I heard something. I heard something, and I turned in time to see a man disappear into a doorway. Mac and trilby, I think, like the gnome with a cigarette I saw in Dolphin Square on my first night home. It was a glimpse, a gin-soaked second, and in the blinding light of day I can’t be sure mac-and-trilby man wasn’t just a shadow of my mind, my evil Russian fairy. We are old acquaintances. I meet him in my cups. He is Koschei the Deathless, because he hides his soul from his body. Now I’m going to be sick.
14
11 October 1963
IN A PLEASANT three-gin haze over the Atlantic I read in The Times that Burgess’s ashes have been interred in a churchyard in Hampshire. Was it his choice to come home? There must be dozens of plots for socialist heroes in Moscow. That his brother Nigel has insinuated him into consecrated ground makes me smile. I think of it as a final fitting contradiction to the end of a life made up of them, because he was the most dogmatic of atheists.
Slipping the newspaper into the seat pocket, I lean back to feel the cool jet from the air vent on my face. Some will say Burgess’s determination to avoid a corner of a foreign field implies an admission at the last that he’d got it wrong. Some will say so because it’s comforting to believe so. I don’t see it that way. Guy honestly thought he was doing his bit for a fairer classless country. But he was always the Eton schoolboy, Cambridge college clubbable Burgess too, a sentimental mother-loving homosexual, who would weep at the music of a chapel choir. That’s the Burgess who wished to fetch up in the family plot in a honey-stone, dove-cooing, bell-tolling English country churchyard: the sort of place his Communist comrades would like to level and sweep away. His heart ruled his head at the last, and those inclined to judge him only with the head will think him a hypocrite. But I say we’re all guilty of the same hypocrisy in some degree, and that such contradictions of the heart are what it is to be human.
I touch the elbow of a passing stewardess. ‘Same again, please.’
‘Certainly, sir,’ she says, with a smile I won’t forget in a hurry.
Our flight is due into Washington in about four hours. Maurice Oldfield is going to meet me and brief me, then take me to CIA headquarters at Langley, so this gin will be my last.
Maurice is at the wheel and we’re heading east on the interstate through Arlington. The meeting at Langley is off. Harry Vaughan, you’re a beggar in this town. ‘The British aren’t that welcome,’ says Maurice, ‘not since Philby made us look like clowns.’
I have a lot in common with Moulders, and that’s a good reason for liking anyone. He’s wartime and scruffy and baggy and effeminate, and he plays the organ and drinks whisky, and after a few of those he’ll tell a good story of growing up on a sheep farm in Derbyshire. I hear he’s homosexual, but if that’s true he has the good sense to deny it. He is Charles Laughton to my Dirk Bogarde.
We cross the Potomac and turn towards the heart of white imperial Washington, where he describes the scene a few weeks ago when a quarter of a million people – most of them Negroes – marched for jobs and freedom, and a civil-rights leader called Martin Luther King spoke of his dream that one day America will end segregation and offer blacks the rights the country’s founding fathers promised whites. I like the sound of King’s dream and say so, and Maurice agrees. ‘We must be a beacon of freedom – and of course we are,’ he says, without irony. ‘We’re the free world.’ I tell him to save it for his next Washington dinner party.
Then left on to 17th, and as we drive towards the White House, he says, ‘They have President Kennedy, we have Harold Macmillan. Doesn’t that tell you all you need to know about America and Britain? By the way, Jim Angleton says he’s briefed the president on PETERS.’
‘And did Kennedy have a view?’
‘Jim didn’t say. I expect it was information only. The president has plenty on his plate, what with the civil-rights unrest and the war in Vietnam … You’re at the Mayflower? Jim prefers La Niçoise on Wisconsin Avenue – if he decides to meet you for lunch.’
‘You speak with such reverence, Maurice. Don’t call him Jim, call him Jesus.’
‘I would if it would help,’ he says coolly, ‘but he’s touchy about the Jesus. He doesn’t like people to know his mother was Mexican.’
I’ve come back to the Mayflower for the memories. January 1946. Room 235. We had tracked the Nazi beast to his lair and where better to celebrate than in the land of plenty? There was a girl, of course, because the best memories are the ones you share. We’re on Connecticut now and I can see the Stars and Stripes over the hotel entrance, but Maurice is changing down and parks his big Chevy short.
‘I like you, Harry.’ He blinks at me through his glasses.
I raise my eyebrows. ‘But?’
‘A word to the wise. Jim Angleton is the best contact we have at the CIA. He has more reason than most to cut the Service loose, but he’s still a believer. So, be nice. Be very nice. Don’t fuck things up!’
Room 235 is nothing like the room I remember after the war. The first thing I do is telephone almost my only friend in the CIA. I worked with Jack Ellis in the forties, he knows Elsa and we were both at his wedding in Washington. Jack’s in the Soviet Division at Langley now, and at this hour he’ll be at his desk, but I ring his home and speak to his wife, Michelle. She’s deli
ghted and wants me to come over for drinks this evening. Half an hour later the phone rings and Jack is on the line from Langley, and his voice … I know something’s wrong. Not at the house, he says, not in a bar, it has to be somewhere private: the park near his home in the Georgetown district. Do I remember the bridge? ‘This is crazy, Jack,’ I say. ‘Are we going to play this by Moscow Rules?’ The line goes dead.
The taxi drops me in Lover’s Lane and, after consulting the map at the gates, I pick up the path along the stream towards the old pump house and the bridge. It’s a balmy evening and the park is a picture of deep maple reds and browns and golden tulip-tree yellows. A young couple are canoodling on a bench, a middle-aged man in university corduroy strolls by, and there’s laughter and children’s voices somewhere over the hill, but the sun is blinking through the trees and will be gone altogether in an hour. The park is almost deserted on the pleasantest of evenings.
Jack Ellis is on the other side of the stream and lumbers across the bridge to greet me with a big Texan smile.
‘What’s this about, Jack?’
‘Counter-intelligence has us by the balls!’
We embrace – he’s put on weight – then he takes my arm and we walk on slowly. ‘Karlow was the first. I didn’t know the guy: he was a specialist in Technical Services. Lost a foot fighting for his country. They don’t have a shred of evidence, but he’s gone all the same. If sacrificing a foot isn’t enough to prove you love your country …’
‘Angleton?’
‘Guess you’re here to see him. Well, I can tell you, he’s slicker than a boiled onion.’
I offer him a cigarette. ‘You’re watching your back?’
‘Damn right. Sounds silly, but you sent us Philby. It isn’t safe to be seen with a Brit.’
‘Come on!’
‘No, seriously, Harry. Have you met Anatoli yet?’
‘Anatoli Golitsyn? No, I haven’t had the pleasure.’
‘So vain he can strut sitting down. Won’t talk to anyone at the Agency who speaks Russian in case we’re Commies. He’s managed to convince Angleton the Russians have an agent at the top of the CIA – more than one.’
‘He may be right.’
‘Well, maybe,’ he drawls.
We amble into a glade with a last patch of sun and stop to smoke our cigarettes.
‘They’ve suspended the head of our division,’ he says. ‘Angleton’s convinced he’s one of them.’
‘Is it possible?’
‘How the hell do I know? His Russian’s good, he was in Berlin a few years, and the way things are …’
‘That’s all it takes.’
‘Yep.’ He drops his cigarette butt and grinds it into the gravel with the toe of his shoe. ‘That’s all it takes.’
15
12 October 1963
SECURITY SAYS TO Maurice, ‘How are you today, sir?’ and waves us through the gate to the parking lot in front of the main building. The Company moved headquarters from the city to leafy Langley in Fairfax County a year ago and I remember Spies in the Suburbs was a headline in one of the newspapers. My first impression is of a new concrete university or Mormon tabernacle, where students wear the same crisp white shirts, dark suits and shiny black shoes. We’re here to visit the Faculty of Counter-intelligence, and I admit, I’m as anxious as a tart in church.
‘That’s the conference bubble.’ Maurice points to a large domelike building opposite the car park. ‘The statue in front of it commemorates the first spy to die for America – hanged by us during their war of independence.’
A member of Angleton’s staff is waiting in the lobby. ‘Welcome to the CIA,’ he says, gesturing to the large marble representation of its seal set into the floor. The walls and pillars are dressed in the same black and white marble, the space too bright and clinical to be welcoming. Our young guide leads us to the security desk to arrange passes, and while he talks, I gaze about the lobby and am struck by the synchrony of suits and shirts and marble, like a chequerboard with black and white pieces. Because this is America, and these are American spies, a verse from the Bible is carved into the wall opposite the entrance: ‘And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free.’
Maurice follows my gaze. ‘That verse begins, “Continue in my word then are ye my disciples,”’ he says. ‘Well, here we are!’
James Jesus Angleton rises but doesn’t step out from his desk to greet me. He’s more than six feet tall and as thin as a rake. I shake his hand firmly and feel his skin slide over his knuckles. His face is pinched and seems the more so because he’s wearing a very large pair of black-framed spectacles. His mouth is unusually wide and straight, his eyes hazel, and he has a good head of dark brown hair, with a little more grey at the temples than me. I know he’s a couple of years younger, and that he has his complexion from his Mexican mother. His suit looks expensive, and I guess from his appearance and the neat columns of paper on his king-size desk that he is a fastidious man – counter-intelligence officers should be. He sits with his back to a window and the blinds are drawn even on this dull day. I expect he shuts the light from the room the better to see. I picture him poring over files in the smoky circle of his desk lamp, his imagination roaming corridors, continents, time for patterns that will reveal America’s enemies within. Maybe. But he’s also an actor – we all are – and this is his stage, and in the swirling smoke and gloom, his face almost hidden by those glasses, he is the wise and inscrutable spycatcher.
‘Mr Vaughan,’ he says, offering me a cigarette, ‘I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted trip. There’s nothing you can tell me I don’t already know.’
‘Harry, please. I don’t know what you know.’
‘Everything, and from the director general of MI5.’
‘And Arthur Martin, of course. But Sir Dick wants the CIA to hear from our side of the Service. You know, he’s taken a personal interest in PETERS.’
Angleton leans forward to tap the ash from his cigarette. ‘Didn’t I say? I know everything. For instance, you used to be friends with Guy Burgess.’
Maurice shifts in the chair beside me. ‘Jim, I don’t think that’s quite fair.’
‘No, Maurice.’ I touch his arm. ‘Jim’s right, but not friends like you and Kim Philby were friends, Jim.’
Angleton pushes his glasses to the bridge of his nose. I meet his gaze, and the silence grows.
‘We’ve had our fingers badly burned, it’s true,’ says Maurice, coming to our rescue. ‘C is determined it isn’t going to happen again.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ I say. ‘To ask for your help.’
Angleton considers this for a moment. ‘All right, let’s hear it.’
So I tell him what we know for certain (nothing), but there’s some evidence to suggest a Soviet agent at the top of Five (circumstantial), that the mole may be former DDG Graham Mitchell (unlikely), but in any case there will be no repeat of the cock-up with Philby, and the investigation team is authorised to do whatever it considers necessary to clean up the Service.
‘But it isn’t, is it?’ he replies. ‘You didn’t interrogate Mitchell.’
‘That was Sir Roger Hollis’s decision. But if there’s more evidence?’
He stares at me. He hasn’t stopped staring. That he should so devoutly wish to make me feel uncomfortable is unsettling and at the same time amusing.
‘We’re reviewing all our joint operations with you British,’ he says at last, ‘and we’ll be sure to let Sir Dick know if we find something.’ Then he spreads his bony hands on top of his desk signalling his intention to rise.
‘That’s very reassuring, Jim,’ I say. ‘Don’t you think so, Maurice? Graham Mitchell was working so closely with the Agency and the FBI. If there’s nothing obvious to suggest he was leaking intelligence …’
‘This isn’t your field, is it, Mr Vaughan? These things take time. So …’
He gets to his feet and we must follow. We are followers. Our audience is over and old Harry didn�
��t manage to charm. Not even the faintest crack in the ice. He likes orchids – Maurice says so – but I know nothing about them. So, as we shuffle to his door, I say, ‘You’re right, this isn’t my area of expertise, but I have been in this game a long time and intelligence is about people and a study of people. I know Graham Mitchell isn’t our mole.’
‘You know?’ Angleton stops and turns to gaze at me again. ‘Let me tell you, History has many cunning passages, Mr Vaughan, it deceives with whispering ambitions, /Guides us by vanities. Who knows what we’ll find when we investigate those joint operations?’
‘We would see a sign!’ I fire back. ‘Only signs are so often taken for wonders when they are nothing of the sort, and when they fail us we can find ourselves trapped in a wilderness of mirrors.’
He claps his hands. ‘Touché! Mr Harry Vaughan, touché!’ He takes off his glasses and examines them. ‘Well, well … Shall we say twelve thirty? I have a table at La Niçoise. Maurice, you can come too.’
‘What on earth happened there?’ says Maurice when we’re walking to his car.
‘I’m not entirely sure, but I think we have Mr T. S. Eliot to thank for a sudden change of fortune.’
Upon such small things … At lunch we learn that Angleton corresponds with Eliot and counts him as a friend, and that he’s on good terms with a number of poets. He says Mr Eliot is a genius, and in the next breath that they have a great deal in common: brought up in the Midwest of America, students at Oxford University, ‘and great Anglophiles – although my faith is being tested,’ he says. I ask him if he reads the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Yes, he says, but Thomas doesn’t have the intellectual rigour and depth of Mr Eliot. Dylan has passion, I counter, and Eliot’s so deep it’s impossible to see the bottom – and so on, and so on, for three martinis.
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