24
16 June 1964
WRIGHT PUTS HIS head round my door at a little after seven the following evening. ‘Leo Long … D-d-do you remember when he left the Commission in Berlin?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t. Try Evelyn.’
He nods. ‘Queen of the Files!’ Then he asks me if I’m working late. Why? Because there is something he would like to share with me. Only on reflection it can wait until morning.
‘All right, Peter,’ I say, lifting my jacket from the chair. ‘First thing tomorrow.’
A few minutes later I walk out of the building and into a shower of rain. One of the older Registry ladies is struggling to open an umbrella. ‘Not much of a summer,’ I say, and she smiles, pleased that someone above the ground floor has taken the trouble to notice her. I expect you’re watching, Peter, and I hope you applaud my gallantry as I take her umbrella and escort her a little way along my usual route home.
I have an hour to waste and I decide to spend it in a comfortable little boozer around the corner in Shepherd Market, where regular Mayfair shopkeepers rub shoulders with some expensive Bo Peeps and their sharp-suited clients. I watch them touch, and listen to their brittle laughter, and I’m reminded of Vienna after the fall, where in the rubble of defeat there was no shame in a mother lifting her skirt to feed her children, and where we played our first cold-war games. Elsa, you were kind to everyone. I was in love with adventure; I was in love with myself; I was in love with you and too stupid to own it, but now I have you I will do anything to keep you.
At just after eight the duty copper in the entrance hall of Leconfield House slides back the glass in his box to check my pass.
‘Working late, Mr Vaughan?’
‘I am, Bobby.’ (That is his name.)
The lifts to the fifth floor are monitored so I take one to the fourth and slip through the nearest emergency door on to a stair.
I have cooked up an excuse but I don’t need to serve it. The lights in the director general’s Secretariat are off, the desks have been cleared, and all I can hear is the ticking of an electric clock and the rumble of traffic in the streets below. Hollis is probably at his secretary’s home, his new deputy may be at his own, and good old clubbable Cumming, the head of D Branch, will be on his third at the Naval and Military. The DG’s personal office is at the end of the room so there’s time to fire an automatic lock if an intruder with a weapon tries to burst inside. But the right man armed with the right tools could have his door open in a jiffy.
There’s a walk-in cupboard in the outer office and I settle on the floor there with an ashtray, rising only occasionally to free my aching muscles. I’ve smoked half a packet of cigarettes and lived my life twice by the time they put in an appearance. I hear Clive’s flat Potteries voice approaching first; he sounds anxious. P-P-Peter is making a great effort to be easy, as if breaking into the director general of MI5’s office is quite routine. I hear the tinkle of Clive’s instruments, like percussion tuning up for a symphony. They’re a hair’s breadth away and if they took the trouble to look around they might wonder if the stationery cupboard was on fire. Click. Click. Pause. Click. Clive has it open and in they go. I creep out of my hole.
Wright is sitting at the DG’s antique desk, its top drawer open. ‘Hello, Peter,’ I say, before he can close it. ‘Anything interesting?’
‘Ch-Christ.’ He places a hand on his heart. ‘Harry!’
‘Your colleague, Harry, yes.’
He wets his lips – ‘How on earth …?’ – and looks pointedly at Clive. Poor Clive. His bag of tricks is open on the polished mahogany conference table. For a moment he looks bewildered, then plain furious. I feel obliged to say, ‘Nothing to do with Clive,’ even though we all know it’s a lie.
‘Bloody stupid, Peter. You’ll kiss goodbye to your pension if this comes out.’
‘C-come on, Harry. R-R-Roger’s one of our chief suspects. We have evidence …’
‘What evidence?’ The drawer in front of him is completely empty.
‘M-M-Mitchell’s office …’ he says, struggling to overcome his stutter. ‘R-Roger had time to clear it – remove the copy camera from the bottom drawer.’
I laugh, because he’s talking about those bloody marks in the dust again.
‘R-Roger has questions to answer,’ he says defiantly, ‘and I’m happy to discuss them, only this isn’t the place.’
Clive is packing away his instruments. ‘Lock up and go home,’ I say. ‘This isn’t going to blow back on you, is it, Peter?’ Wright glares at me over his glasses. He would toss me from the window if he could but he’s a technician so no one taught him how to. Clive, on the other hand … We leave him to spring-clean the DG’s office and make our way in silence to D3. I refuse a drink and a chair. No bonhomie, Peter, no insidious attempt to rope me into your conspiracy, please.
‘You always define a man by his friends, Harry,’ he says, as if counter-intelligence was his life’s work, not bugs and batteries. ‘R-Roger is trying to kill this investigation, cover it all up. Why?’
I don’t know if he has more than dust in a drawer. I do know I don’t want to debate it with him now. ‘Does Dick White know?’
He hesitates. ‘Of our concerns, yes.’
‘Our concerns’ means that Arthur Martin has carried them across the Atlantic.
‘You’ve broken into the DG’s office, Peter. How can I be sure you’re not the mole?’ He opens his mouth to protest but I don’t give him a chance. ‘I’ll talk to Dick in the morning.’
He twitches nervously – ‘If you must’ – but his expression is one of ‘damn you’ insolence. An end to pretence, we can’t stand each other.
‘Good night,’ I say. He doesn’t reply.
Tonight I run through the security routine in my own office with just a little more care. When I’m satisfied I’ve battened everything tightly I ring the duty officer at MI6 on the scrambler phone and write myself into Dick’s diary. Elsa was expecting me an hour ago, but my head is so thick with third-floor intrigue I walk home across the parks. Quicker, slower, stopping to light a cigarette, I take no notice of the time or if I have company. From St James’s to Birdcage Walk, then into the lane that cuts up to Queen Anne’s Gate – and it’s there he comes at me, jumping out of the shadow beneath a scaffolding rig to catch me one on the temple with a piece of wood. Down I go and roll, just quick enough to avoid a flying kick in the ribs. He’s in a black balaclava and mac but was in too much of a hurry to change his shoes. Such a basic mistake. The tradecraft instructors at the Fort would crucify you, Clive, and I would like to tell you so, only this time you manage to plant your shoe in my stomach and I’m gasping, and the pavement cracks are spinning. Driven only by instinct, I grab his ankle and try to haul him down. But he has twenty years on me, he’s stronger, and he lifts me by the collar and swings a fist into my face.
Now I’m conscious of my cheek against the kerb and something splashing my neck and head. The lights must have gone out for a moment because he has me pinned to the floor with his foot, and – chi cachu! – he is pissing on me. Flailing at his leg with my fist I throw him off balance and roll a few feet away. I expect him to boot me again, but he doesn’t. A young couple are cowering at the railings on Birdcage Walk, too shocked to come to my aid. Nevertheless, their presence is enough. ‘Yes, that’s enough.’ I have to spit blood from my mouth before I can shout it again. ‘Enough, Clive! Sod off!’
He flinches but says nothing, only turns and walks quickly away.
‘My God!’ Elsa clamps her hand across her mouth. Then she holds me very gently and steers me to the drawing-room couch. ‘Oh, Harry.’ Her hands are trembling and she chinks the whisky bottle on the rim of the glass. ‘You must see a doctor.’
‘No, cariad, no real damage.’ (Except to my pride.)
‘What’s that smell?’ she says, and I am obliged to own my humiliation. She wants to know more besides and is angry when I refuse to tell her. ‘Nothing or lies,’ I sa
y, ‘to protect you.’
‘No lies,’ she says.
By the morning everything aches. In the taxi across the river to Six, I consider what I should do with Clive. He’s a hood, Clive, and always will be. Only he came to me with a confidence and I broke it because it was too important to keep, and now Wright will kick him back on to the street. That will be punishment enough.
‘What happened to you?’ the friends say, when they see my face.
‘Fell among thieves,’ my reply, and they know better than to ask me more.
Dora Edwards brings me tea with an extra sugar. ‘He knows you’re here,’ she says.
I take a seat in Dick’s outer office and dream of cool green places. Half an hour later, I’m still waiting.
‘You still love me, don’t you, Dora? I wasn’t drunk. These bruises will fade.’
‘All right, I’ll remind him.’
But first she applies more lipstick, checks her hair, smoothes imaginary creases from her skirt. Only then does she knock lightly at his door and enter.
Dora and Dick: it’s Mills & Boon. No sex, of course: that’s too preposterous to contemplate. She returns just a minute later with a sweet smile of success.
Dick doesn’t look at me, only gestures at a chair. I watch him scratching away with his pen and remember Burgess and the barons called him ‘the Schoolmaster’ long before he took over the running of the school. Hands folded demurely in my lap like a Goody Two Shoes, I wait for some sympathy. When will he deign to acknowledge me?
‘I suppose you were drunk,’ he says, with disgust.
‘What a suggestion.’
He gives me a level blue stare, and the sun that was pouring through the many windows of his new office slips behind a cloud.
‘This I suffered in the line of duty,’ I say.
He puts down his pen. ‘All right, let’s hear it.’
So I tell him: an officer of Her Majesty’s Security Service tried to burgle its director general and he used Dick’s name to persuade a grunt in A Branch to help him with the necessaries. That man was Peter Wright. And I tell him that Martin and Wright are a law unto themselves. No one else knows where the PETERS investigation is going, except Angleton, because they’re his followers and they would tear the bloody place apart for him. I don’t tell Dick how I got the bruises; he doesn’t seem curious to know. Pushing his chair away he steps over to the window and gazes out across the slate, perhaps to blue remembered hills. It’s something he does when you bring him trouble.
‘If you knew Peter was going to burgle Roger, why didn’t you stop him?’ he says at last. ‘Why didn’t you speak to Arthur?’
‘I’m speaking to you, sir.’
‘No, Harry, you wanted to catch him out.’
‘Does it matter how I went about it?’
Dick turns and stands with his hands resting on the high back of his chair. ‘Peter overstepped the mark,’ he says coolly, ‘but taking it any further than a reprimand will serve no purpose.’
My turn to stare. ‘Further’ means to Hollis. ‘Further’ means he wants to bury it. Why? He’s no rule-breaker, he has no time for the robber barons, and Hollis was his choice to take the helm at Five. I watch him pick up a piece of paper from his desk and pretend to scrutinise it. Then his gaze lifts furtively over the top of it to me. ‘Anything else?’
Oh yes there is, Lord, yes. I once was blind but now I see. ‘You’ve spoken to Martin.’
He drops the paper back on his desk. ‘Arthur rang me last night. Told me Peter had made a grave error of judgement but it won’t happen again, and that he needs Peter on his investigation team.’
‘Bloody hell! I expect it was Martin’s idea to break into the DG’s office in the first place.’
Dick ignores me. ‘Roger should have let Arthur interrogate Mitchell. It was a mistake to shelter him.’
I laugh.
‘There are questions,’ he says defensively. ‘The Americans want us to consider all the possibilities.’
‘Are you going to tell Sir Roger he’s a suspect?’
‘No, and he isn’t. This is as far as it goes – for now. Is that clear? Not a word.’
‘Perfectly,’ I snap at him. ‘Couldn’t be clearer.’
Dick drops back into his chair and plants his elbows on the desk, his hands clasped in a big fist. ‘You’ve dragged your feet on this since the start, Harry.’
‘That’s from Martin.’
‘It’s from me!’
‘Really?’ I drawl.
‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ he says, and he bangs that big fist on the table so hard a cloud rises from the ashtray and settles like fallout on his papers and the sleeve of his blue linen jacket. ‘Roger’s a suspect because we all are.’
‘You asked me to be a small voice of calm, and to keep an eye on Arthur. He’s obsessive – you said so yourself.’
‘I remember what I said!’ There’s a very un-Dick-like bubble of saliva at the corner of his mouth and he clears it with a knuckle. ‘All right, you’ve said your piece. Get out.’
Cer i grafu. I haven’t said my piece yet. It’s quite simple, just one word. I catch him with it as he’s rising to show me the door: ‘OATSHEAF.’ He closes his eyes and inclines his head as if I’ve caught him very low: I have.
‘You’re prepared to let them investigate the leader of the Labour Party?’
‘Who told you?’
‘Angleton.’
‘I see.’ He eases back into his seat a second time. ‘It seems preposterous, I know, but we have to consider the Russians have agents of influence everywhere.’
‘Golitsyn says so.’
‘And others. I know a bit more about this than you do,’ he declares tartly. ‘Let me put it this way … Gaitskell’s death was suspicious. I don’t say more than that. It’s facts I’m interested in. Harold Wilson became leader of the Labour Party on the death of his predecessor. Fact. A highly placed KGB defector …’
‘Golitsyn.’
‘Christ, yes. Golitsyn says Wilson’s a Russian agent. Fact. So we keep an open mind.’
An open mind? ‘Have you seen the opinion polls?’
‘Of course I have!’ He looks nervous and he should be. Turning politicians over is something they do in Moscow and in banana republics. ‘We’re checking to satisfy the Americans,’ he says, as if the order has come from the president, when the only person he must satisfy is Angleton.
‘Roger knows about OATSHEAF. It’s for his people to sort out,’ Dick says – a little desperately, I think.
‘Right.’ I frown and touch my lip to demonstrate to him how bewildering it seems to be. ‘But isn’t Roger a suspect, too? DG and prime-minister-to-be … We’ve lost the cold war already.’
I shut the door quietly with his parting shot ringing in my ears: ‘Not a word to anyone.’ Anyone means anyone but especially Elsa. If OATSHEAF goes off in Whitehall we’ll have to scrape Dick and Roger off the walls. Half an hour later, I’m still in the building talking expenses with the personnel people when one of the girls from the top floor sidles up to me with a message from Dick: he wants to see me again. This time Dora Edwards barely lifts her eyes from her typewriter. (How does she know?) I’m to go straight in, she says. Half an hour later I step out on a one-way ticket back to Vienna. Just a few months, he says, to bring home a Hungarian colonel. Someone who knows the lie of the land there, he says. What he doesn’t say but we both know to be true is that he doesn’t trust me any more. I’m out in the cold.
25
20 August 1964
LUKAS, THE CORPORAL in Watchtower 9 near ížov, was surprised when a portly colonel of the border guard appeared at dusk on the longest day. The colonel was alone and on foot when colonels generally like to travel in big cars and with an entourage. He was even more astonished when the colonel pulled a gun on him.
Towers are manned by two guards: a conscript who can never be relied upon, and a regular with a machine gun who must be. Lukas was a r
egular, but not a good comrade. An informer overheard him complaining about the ‘Party Hitlers’ who refused his wife treatment for cancer in Brno – now she was dead. That was why the colonel had chosen number 9. The field police were coming to arrest Lukas, he said, if not tomorrow, some time soon. The choice was simple: through the wire to the West or a secret policeman’s cell. Lukas didn’t hesitate. What was more, he persuaded the conscript who was on duty with him to come too.
From the last dark fringe of trees in Austria I watched them march along the guard road. Beyond it there’s a control strip lit by arc lights, a ditch and anti-personnel mines suspended on a wire fence. But my reception party had prepared everything. The colonel came to a halt directly opposite the hole we had cut for him and began to lecture Lukas on security. To make his point he stepped over the tripwire into the control strip. The guards in the adjoining watchtowers will have slipped the catches on their automatic weapons. A sudden movement and BANG. I’ve seen it happen twice: one wounded and hanging on the wire, one dead. But I had a good feeling about the colonel. He walked across the control strip with the proprietorial air of a country squire at a pheasant shoot, trailing Lukas and the conscript after him, like faithful retainers. Shots were fired at the last to be sure, but well wide of their marks, and I guess they were meant to be.
And now Colonel Buky is living in a safe house in a smart district of Vienna. He wants to get drunk, he wants to get laid, he wants schillings, lots of them, and a home in the country, but he has only snippets of intelligence that might be of use to the military to offer in exchange: just the location of a few tanks here, a few planes there, a new piece of kit. We processed hundreds of men like the colonel after the rising in Hungary in ’56. The border was a simple wire fence in those days – so the Commies could roll through the rest of Europe, the hawks in Washington said. We’re still preparing for that invasion, even though we know they’re not coming.
When the girls visit I’ll take them to the border and name the spirals of smoke rising from the villages on the other side: ‘Girls, this is a quiet part of the line.’ Here, our agents and their agents go about the routine business of sowing mistrust, and the only casualty is truth. The real battle is fought in places like Vietnam, where people run around paddy fields with Kalashnikovs. Forget historical materialism and dialectical materialism: those people are fighting for freedom from poverty. One day freedom may have its day, but for now Eastern Europe belongs to Russia, and Western Europe is marking time, and all we can do is hope the ideologues on both sides who want to win the war tomorrow don’t turn the world into a nuclear desert.
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