Witchfinder

by Andrew Williams

  The following morning, I meet Martin and Wright to discuss just how the approach to Blunt will be done. It’s Martin’s show so he does most of the talking. I watch him crawl about his office and wonder at the change that has come over him in a year. He is full of righteous anger and so certain, he would pick a fight with the Queen. The management is doing everything it can to bury the truth, and if proof were needed, he says, the new report into the PETERS inquiry will conclude Mitchell is more likely to be innocent than guilty.

  ‘That’s the whitewash Hollis wants. You see, don’t you?’ he says, with pulpit fervour. ‘But he isn’t going to slip out of this one – Blunt changes everything. We will have our proof.’

  I don’t see and I say so, even though I know that owning to doubt is perilously close to heresy. Martin sighs with exasperation and wipes a hand across his brow, as a priest might with a simple sinner he is guiding to the light. Michael Straight’s confession blows open the Soviet network, he says. Blunt and his Cambridge comrades were recruited in the thirties, and they recruited men like Straight in turn, creating a series of concentric spy rings, just like the ones that were revealed by the VENONA decrypts in the United States.

  ‘Can we talk about Blunt?’ I say. ‘If he’s the fourth man, is it possible that Straight is the fifth?’

  Martin reaches down to a drawer, takes out a case file and tosses it across the desk to me. ‘Small fry – and here’s another.’

  The name on the cover is John Cairncross.

  ‘Cairncross was at Cambridge, he knew the others, but in my view he isn’t important enough to be one of the five. We’re looking for a special sort of agent, someone so highly placed in Counter-espionage he’s able to protect all the others.’

  Wright chips in, ‘Code name ELLI.’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me about Cairncross?’ I say.

  Martin shrugs. ‘I’m telling you now. We’ve just forced a confession.’

  ‘I’ll keep this,’ I say, rising from my chair with the file.

  I carry it back to my office, slam the door and kick the wastepaper basket so hard I manage to split the side. The sense I have of this ending badly is back with a vengeance. So I light a cigarette. I smoke it, and when I feel calmer I flip open the file.

  John Cairncross was picked up by a KGB talent-spotter when he joined the Foreign Office in 1936, and what a mine of information he turned out to be. He was with the code people at Bletchley Park during the war and for a time at MI6; after the war he was a senior civil servant at the Treasury. It was Burgess who finished him as an agent. Careless, drunken old Guy left a note in Cairncross’s hand in his flat when he defected in ’51, and Evelyn, the Queen of the Files, recognised his handwriting. No one with an iota of sense can have taken his cock-and-bull excuse seriously, yet he was permitted to walk. So, perhaps Martin has a case. Perhaps Cairncross was sheltered by a guardian angel in the Service, a red one, Blunt and Philby, too.

  Two things strike me about Cairncross’s history. The first, that he wasn’t born with a silver spoon like the others. He’s a clever poor boy from somewhere outside Glasgow, a people’s champion from the people. The second is that, with his curriculum vitae, it is reasonable to assume he was a grade-one source of intelligence for the other side, and that he may be a much bigger fish than Arthur Martin imagines.

  Wright puts his head around my door. ‘What d-do you think?’ he says, nodding to the file. I say I want to know why Martin is keeping this sort of thing from me. I don’t expect a straight answer and I don’t get one, just the line about Arthur flying solo on an old case.

  ‘They’re all old cases,’ I say. ‘It’s history until it isn’t. You should know that, Peter. Bleaching old bones is your business in research, isn’t it?’

  ‘Look, you’re back on board,’ he says, ‘and we haven’t st-started on Blunt yet. When we shake the tree, who knows what will fall out? It’s too soon to give up on PETERS.’

  I’m about to remind him the FBI is as sure as it can be that Graham Mitchell is in the clear when he says, almost as an afterthought, ‘Let’s not forget, he isn’t the only one who fits the profile.’ He gazes at me with a slight smile: I don’t think I’ve met anyone who takes more obvious pleasure in being conspiratorial.

  ‘You want to investigate Hollis?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Come on, Peter, that’s what you’re trying to tell me. Don’t be sly. You’ve almost finished with Mitchell and now you’re after the director general of MI5.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ he says defensively, ‘and I’ll thank you to keep your voice down. Sir Dick ruled that out. I’m just flying a kite. We know someone tipped off Philby, so who?’

  I’m not sure we do know, but I’m not going to fight that battle now. I watch his fingers trail across the corner of my desk as he takes a step back to the door.

  ‘Don’t you think we should consider other possibilities?’ he says, glancing up at me from beneath his Old Testament eyebrows.

  ‘Do you want me to talk to Dick?’

  Wright considers this a moment. ‘I expect things to become clearer when Arthur has spoken to Blunt.’

  ‘So, that’s no.’

  ‘It isn’t the time,’ he says, reaching for the door. ‘I just w-want to let you know where we are. You want that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. Thanks.’ I can’t afford to be at war with both of them.

  When he’s gone I sit on the desk with my feet on a chair and consider how much of what he says I believe. He denies he wants to investigate Hollis: that’s a lie. He says he’s going to wait for Dick’s approval: I guess that’s another. I remember Angleton floating the same possibility on a haze of smoke and whisky: Mitchell isn’t the only one who fits the profile, you know.

  I guess Anatoli Golitsyn is pointing the finger at Hollis now, and Wright is sounding me out to see if I can be trusted to keep my mouth shut while he investigates.

  And I wonder at my naivety, at my stupidity. This is more than a mole hunt: they’re going to take possession of the house, or they’ll bring it down trying to, and Sir Dick White is too confused and feeble-minded to stop them.

  Out, Harry. Get out. Elsa would like me to – it’s time. She knows someone who knows someone who works for the Economist. ‘It would suit you, Harry.’ Well, maybe. Maybe.

  19

  16 March 1964

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY we meet to discuss PETERS. Hollis makes the mistake of summoning us too early, and while we wait in silence in his outer office, the temperature steadily rises. Martin is a caged bear. I catch his eye momentarily and I see confidence, close to arrogance. I watch him flick through his copy of D1’s report, like an actor rehearsing for the last time before taking the stage. He’s marked some of its pages: those will be his big scenes.

  A green light flashes above the door and we all troop into the DG’s office. He rises from his desk beneath the bay window to greet us, then takes his place at the head of the conference table. I find myself sitting opposite a photograph of Dick White on the wall reserved for the former heads of MI5, which is fitting because I am his holy ghost.

  D1 Investigations – young Ronnie Symonds – has pulled the evidence together for Hollis and is invited to speak on his report. He has time for only a short summary before Martin launches his assault. ‘The unthinkable turns out to be true,’ he says. ‘Blunt changes everything. We now know there was a spy inside MI5, that the KGB has penetrated both Services, and the conspiracy is bigger than any of us could imagine. But we can nail the truth if we act quickly, and we must begin in the 1930s.’ Lifting the report by its cover, like rotten fish, he drops it back on the table with a smack. ‘This exercise has achieved nothing,’ he says. ‘We will only discover the identity of the mole at the very top of MI5 today if we take a giant step back to when our enemy was actively recruiting at Cambridge and elsewhere.’

  And with that, all hell breaks loose. Cumming, the new head of D Branch, loses his temp
er, mild-mannered Symonds, too. The PETERS investigation team has barely managed to lay a glove on Mitchell, they say, and yet it has the temerity to call for a knockout count. PETERS is a dead case and pressing ahead will only do more damage to the morale of the Service. The DG asks for my opinion, so I speak for Martin and a broader, deeper investigation, because I know that’s what Dick White wants me to do.

  Martin thanks me later. I’m picking up a file from the Registry and he’s returning one, and as he sways forward to whisper in my ear I catch the whisky on his breath. ‘Symonds is a coward,’ he says, ‘Cumming is a fool, and Hollis is a coward and a fool.’ We’re standing at the desk in the central hall where the indexes and most of the files are stored on shelves. Registry queens are loading files on to trolleys and pushing them on tracks to the box lifts that carry them to case officers on the floors above.

  Martin is curious. ‘The Klugmann file,’ I say. ‘Thought I’d take a look before you make the approach to Blunt.’

  Klugmann was at Cambridge with Blunt and the others; he’s been on the Service’s radar for years. It’s a safe thing to say.

  ‘Talent-spotter for the Party,’ says Martin. ‘A posh romantic – makes no effort to disguise his sympathies.’ He hands a file back to one of the girls and watches me fill in a request form for mine.

  ‘Actually, I’m glad I’ve met you, Harry,’ he says, and as we walk to the lifts he instructs me on the report I must make to Dick. A lift door opens and he steps inside, and it’s only then that I remember my fountain pen in the Registry.

  ‘And make sure you return the Cairncross file to Peter!’ he shouts through the grille.

  My pen is in the requests box where I made a point of leaving it, and I use it to fill in forms for two more names. The central hall is a little quieter but there are no short-cuts and it will be half an hour before I’ll know if they’re in the index. So I leave my number with the duty officer’s assistant and ask him to ring me. I have time to run Cairncross along the corridor and be back at my desk for his call.

  A tea trolley is passing the third-floor lifts and, with Chinese steps, I balance a cup on Cairncross as far as Counter-intelligence Research, which, to my surprise, has been deserted by its crew. In the war years there was always someone at the helm. A phone’s ringing and I’m about to pick it up when I realise D3’s door is ajar.

  ‘Hey, Peter, where is everyone?’

  No reply.

  I knock – ‘Peter?’ – and push. His door is open, his safe is open. The housekeepers would throw the book at him. I’m a spy so I do what spies do – I pull the door shut behind me. Inside the safe, there’s a copying camera, two buff personal files and some analysis of Russian radio traffic in London. I don’t have time to examine the files but note the names ZAEHNER and HAMPSHIRE. I know them a little. Rees was the connection, the Service and Oxford, too. They’re professors of something at the university now. Back they go, with the Cairncross file I’ve brought with me. Then I close the safe and spin the combination.

  Wright’s desk is locked but his diary is in his tray. I check this week and next, and an entry on the twenty-fourth catches my eye: 11 at the Bodleian, then Franks at 3. The Bodleian is the university library where I daydreamed my way through a history degree. What does he want with Oxford? There’s nothing else of note. I see Peter’s birthday is on 9 August, the day our allies dropped their A-bomb on Nagasaki. I return the diary to the top of his tray and take a deep breath. But there’s no one to offer an excuse to: D3 sails on without its captain and crew.

  The second I step into my own office one of the queens rings to let me know I can pick up the files. The duty officer’s charmless assistant is picking his nose at the front desk. ‘No record of a Phoebe Pool,’ he says, ‘but there’s a Jenifer Hart in the index – one n. Married to Herbert.’

  ‘Formerly of this parish?’

  ‘The very same,’ he says, and slides the file across to me.

  I sign for Hart and Klugmann and am turning to leave with both when I notice Who’s Who on a shelf of reference books behind the duty officer’s desk. Spies are official nobodies until they retire, when the Service’s senior officers slip into its pages as War Office civil servants. Herbert Hart is there. Another of the old boys who became a professor at Oxford University; married to Jenifer, the daughter of Sir John Fischer Williams. Address: Banbury Road, Oxford. I make a note. Then I flick back through the pages in search of a Franks. The only one who matters in Oxford is the civil-service Franks, our ambassador in Washington after the war. Baron Franks now – his peerage the most recent of his many honours – philosopher, businessman, consummate diplomat, and for the last year or so provost of Worcester College, Oxford. What business does Wright have with Franks?

  I walk back up the stairs and I’m still blowing hard when I run into him a few yards from my office.

  ‘What the h-h-hell are you playing at?’

  I give a slight smile that must look like a grimace. ‘A key,’ is all I have the breath to say.

  ‘D-d-did you go through my safe?’

  ‘Tried to spare your blushes.’ I imagine he marked the position of the files in his safe because that’s what I do. ‘We don’t have secrets, do we?’

  ‘That isn’t the point.’

  ‘I’m sick of being kept in the dark.’

  We stare at each other belligerently for a moment. Then he shrugs and smiles his thin smile. ‘My fault. L-l-left that silly bitch Phyllis to hold the fort, and she buggered off to the canteen.’

  I don’t know Phyllis; I don’t expect I’ll get a chance to now.

  ‘But the files,’ he says, ‘we’re running a few routine checks. Nothing to do with that other matter, the PETERS investigation.’

  ‘Didn’t look. You can rest easy.’ I could challenge him with his visit to Franks but that isn’t how we’re going to play this game: while he was staring at me stony-faced, I was turning possibilities over in my mind, and I’m quite sure there’s a connection with the mole hunt. I’m just waiting for the vital spark.

  He nods – ‘Okay, Harry’ – and turns as if to leave but changes his mind. ‘By the way, how do you think R-R-Roger handled the meeting?’

  Is it the twitching of his lips? Perhaps his trouble with Roger? Doesn’t matter. Everything falls into place in an instant.

  ‘What do you think, Peter?’ I say as cover.

  ‘It’s Arthur. I think he’s close to snapping. He can’t understand why Roger’s determined to throw our investigation.’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘We d-do.’

  ‘The new report doesn’t exonerate Mitchell entirely, it recommends we consider other candidates.’

  ‘But is R-R-Roger ready to? We’ll see.’ He pauses. ‘We can count on your support when the balloon goes up?’

  ‘I’ll do my job, Peter,’ I say.

  I used to like Wright – at least, I didn’t actively dislike him. When he’s gone I dig out a copy of the Western Region timetable. There’s a nine o’clock from Paddington that will allow him time to walk from the station to the Bodleian Library for eleven. I expect he’ll spend a few hours with cuttings books from the twenties, student papers, reports of political meetings, and then he’ll makes his way to Worcester College, and that’s where his real business will be. I don’t know what I can do, but if he’s turning the clock back that far I must too, because Oxford is where it all began.

  20

  24 March 1964

  RAIN IS BEATING the pavement and staining the heads of the emperors at the gates of the Sheldonian Theatre mustard-yellow. A little further along the street, a posse of undergraduates in short black Commoners’ gowns shelters in the portico of the Bodleian Library, even though college lunch bells are calling. Broad Street is deserted but for a porter in a bowler hat, who sails past the shop window on his bike, head bent close to the handlebars. I watch him with a token book open in my hands and I’m jostled by so many boisterous memories I wonder the sales
assistant doesn’t accuse me of causing a disturbance and ask me to leave.

  Among the group of undergrads on the steps of the Bodleian I see the shadow of the boy Harry. He clings to the stone like soot, or like dust on a calf-bound copy of something so obscure it’s kept to dress the shelves above the honours board that bears the names of those who are supposed to live for evermore, the shelves beyond the reach of even serious students because the library ladder is six rungs too short.

  Oxford belonged to middle-class Englishmen, like Mitchell and Hollis. It was just one more step along a time-honoured path from a boarding-school cloister to government and the professions, and, yes, the intelligence services too. At dinner under a high oak-beamed medieval roof in Hall, I listened to their displays of self-assurance, shouted the length of long tables. They knew they were going to rule the Empire, but their speech and manners were as foreign to me as those of its humblest Indian coolies.

  ‘Do you know the Angleseys?’ a New College aristocrat asked me once.

  ‘There’s only one,’ I said.

  I understood later that he was talking about a titled family, and that a duke or marquess or earl somewhere could take the dark isle of Wales we call Ynys Môn for his name.

  Most Welsh students went to Jesus, their own little college colony on Turl Street. I knew a few of them in my first year, and they viewed their time at Oxford as a sabatical abroad. ‘Stay away from Jesus or you may as well have stayed at home,’ Goronwy Rees said at our first meeting – and I did. That was in 1933. Rees was just back from Berlin and someone – I forget whom – asked him to address our Labour Club. He spoke with the chapel eloquence of his preacher father, and even now, here in this bookshop, the memory of his passion and his poetry brings a little lump to my throat.

  Rees spoke of how socialism was dying as Hitler and the Nazis tightened their grip on Germany, and that what had been just a nightmare had become the everyday. Sixty million people were proud to be governed by ‘a gang of murderous animals’, he said. It was ‘the betrayal and death of every human virtue’. No mercy; no pity; no peace; madness shouted every day on the wireless and in the newspapers. Germany would be saved only if right-thinking people everywhere were prepared to stand up to Fascism, he said – and so it was to be, from that night, in student papers and political clubs, in college beer cellars and butteries, egged on by my new friend and all his clever friends, for the rest of my time at Oxford and after.