Witchfinder

Home > Fantasy > Witchfinder > Page 20
Witchfinder Page 20

by Andrew Williams

Lecky and I are handling the MI6 files. Departments keep their own archives but there is a small registry and we have an office on the same corridor. It’s the only truly dark corner in our new twenty-two-storey glass and concrete headquarters. A dark corner is the worst place to keep a secret in a building full of spies, and within hours we’re welcoming snoopers from the floors above. They pretend to believe our cover story – it’s polite to – but not Elliott. ‘Harry, old boy,’ he says, ‘you and Lecky are spycatching and everyone knows it. That’s all anyone seems to do these days. Work of vital national importance, I’m sure, only when was the last time we did something brave?’

  In my first two days I read forty files and smoke a hundred cigarettes, and soon our office resembles Angleton’s own, with files stacked high on a row of tables. I wonder if the dust that has gathered on them over many years is some sort of hallucinogen, and if you inhale too much of it you begin to suffer from extreme paranoia. Stuck here in the bowels of Dick’s folly, all I’ll learn of the larger FLUENCY investigation will be what Wright chooses to share with me. It’s clear from our first meeting that he will make the hunt for the mole an excuse to open all the files, and he’ll turn back pages, without understanding, to a time when young men and women who wanted to overcome Fascism and poverty and the exploitation of the weak chose to become Communists. A few gave themselves body and soul to the Party but for most it was a student affair that ended with the coming of war, then the fall of the Iron Curtain. Now they are loyal servants of the establishment they wished to sweep away, and the only crime they committed all those years ago was to care more about poverty and politics than was wise. I don’t know, but I’m afraid for Elsa. Because in these times, now we are nice to the Jews, we seem ready to send to the stake anyone who carried a Party card.

  On my third day I tell Lecky I’m moving back to Five and the files will have to be transferred to me by courier. ‘I’ll let the tenth floor know now,’ I say, and I back out of the door straight into a secretary carrying two cups of tea. I’m still dabbing the wet patches on my trousers when a man wearing grey slacks and onyx cufflinks in his shirtsleeves, steps into the lift beside me.

  ‘Hello, Arthur.’

  ‘Harry.’

  As always, Martin has the present and correct air of a colonial policeman, and the tight, polite smile of sufferance he reserves for people he doesn’t much care for, like me.

  ‘An accident?’ He nods at my trousers.

  ‘You, too, I hear.’

  He grunts. ‘You mean Hollis?’

  Ping. The lift doors open on the tenth floor and we step out in tandem. ‘Well, I’m here now,’ he says. ‘C has asked me to act as a consultant to FLUENCY. I hope that won’t prove too difficult for you. Goodbye, Harry, always a pleasure.’

  I watch him walk towards C’s office and wonder at the folly of appointing a man with a Kremlin-size grudge against his old boss as consultant to the new working party. Dick has made another awful decision. Roger was his deputy and chosen successor at Five, and in rescuing Arthur, he may as well have daubed a board ‘SUSPECTED TRAITOR’ and hung it around Roger’s neck.

  That’s what I tell Maurice when I see him in his office a few minutes later, and to judge from the silence he agrees.

  28

  5 November 1964

  ‘I’M GOING TO review the VENONA,’ I say.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘“It’s all in the files,”’ you said. I think we’ve missed something.’

  Wright frowns and touches the end of his nose. ‘It’s not your area.’

  ‘No, but I have an idea …’ Do I really need his permission?

  The VENONA signals are held in a secure room on the fifth floor at MI5. I can’t go through them all, and happily I don’t have to, because men like Arthur Martin have been poring over them for a decade. I have only a field agent’s knowledge of codes, but I know the Soviets. I know how agents and their controllers think and, Guy, I remember your lies, your evasions, your gallows humour. So I read, and I pace the room with a cigarette and I THINK. I search a fog of memories, wander back to New College Lane, and on into Bentinck Street, pass the sex shops in Soho, climb the steps of the Reform Club, where Guy leans over the balcony with a naughty-boy smile: ‘Are you looking for me, Harry?’

  For one week only in September 1945 we managed to harvest radio traffic between Moscow Centre and London. The signals revealed an inner circle of five KGB agents working in British intelligence. We know the code names of three of the five: Guy Burgess was HICKS, Donald Maclean was HOMER, and Kim Philby was KGB agent STANLEY. And there is something else: the CIA’s favourite defector – Golitsyn – says the KGB’s ‘magnificent five’ were at university together. Burgess, Maclean and Philby were students at Cambridge, and so was their friend Anthony Blunt. Martin and Wright won’t accept that Blunt is the fourth man because Moscow let him leave the ring after the war, but in a wilderness of mirrors it is sometimes impossible to see what’s staring you in the face. I remember Blunt in Bentinck Street. I can see him sitting on the couch, protective, sober, watchful, especially when Guy was talking about politics or sex. No, the only mystery to me is the identity of the fifth member of the ring.

  Two of Wright’s candidates I rule out straight away. I met James Klugmann at a politics evening in Oxford, and remember him as a podgy, myopic, softly spoken ideologue, who made no secret of his sympathies. And Long … well, there is nothing magnificent about poor Leo Long. The one who fits is Cairncross. Clever, committed and Cambridge, he admits passing our most important code secrets to the Russians.

  ‘I’ve written something for you,’ I say to Maurice.

  His apartment is on my way home, a stone’s throw from our old headquarters on Broadway. His dinner guests have left and I find him practising hymns on the piano for the service at St Matthew’s on the morrow. Bells and smells C of E, he says. He plays the organ there because he likes ‘a bit of theatre’, and because the curate’s wife is ‘one of us’, by which he means she’s a spy. ‘Sit. Sit. You look shattered. A glass of wine?’

  ‘Maurice, we can stop this investigation now. We know the Ring of Five … Blunt is the fourth man, and I’m convinced John Cairncross is the fifth.’

  Maurice drops his chins to his chest, adjusts his glasses and runs his fingers through his auburn hair, showering dandruff on the collar of his charcoal grey cardigan. On the shelf behind his head, a book on dairy farming and another on medieval stained glass. Maurice is as subtle as a fugue by Bach, but with the smell of the Derbyshire crew yard on his boots, and that is his singular charm.

  ‘Your analysis of the evidence is compelling,’ he says, when he has listened to my explanation. ‘Yes, you may be right.’ Then he clutches the arms of his chair and leans forward to peer at me through his thick glasses. ‘Is this personal, Harry?’

  ‘Personal?’

  ‘What I mean … Do you have something to hide, Harry?’

  ‘We all have something, Maurice. And we’re bloody good at hiding it. But that isn’t the point.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Look, we know the names of the five.’

  ‘That may be,’ he says, easing back in his chair, ‘but it’s too soon. FLUENCY will have to run its course. Why? Because there have been too many mistakes – reputations are at stake. And, thanks to Philby, some of our friends – you know their names – are convinced the Russians have agents everywhere. They seem to think the enemy has special powers. So, like the old witch trials, FLUENCY will roll on until energy and passion are spent. But …’ he purses his lips for a moment ‘… Post tenebras spero lucem. Let’s hope that after darkness there will be light.’

  Fine. But who will the darkness take, Maurice?

  The following morning I’m in the kitchen making tea and toast for Elsa when the bell at St Matthew’s tolls to summon the faithful. I imagine Maurice hunched at his organ, fat fingers stroking a prelude as members of the congregation gather for mass and the clergy robe in the vestr
y. His parting shot to me was, ‘if you can lay your hands on the Gouzenko file … The defectors are the only other reliable source we have for an agent ELLI.’

  But for the next couple of days I’m too preoccupied with a stack of dusty files from Six, which on close inspection prove to be of no consequence. It is the librarian’s life, but without even the frisson of an occasional quiet encounter with a woman, when eyes meet across shelves on a dull day and it’s possible to imagine she’s hungry for sex on no acquaintance at all.

  I expect to have to go on hands and knees to Wright for the Gouzenko files but, as luck would have it, Lecky has the ones I need in our little basement office at Six.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ he enquires.

  ‘Philby,’ I say, which is an acceptable answer to almost any question at the moment. ‘Cross-checking his movements in September ’forty-five.’ Because September 1945 is key. In the first week of September Igor Gouzenko walked away from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa with a briefcase full of secrets and a story about a double agent at the top of British intelligence. By a remarkable coincidence another defector on the other side of the globe – Volkov – was preparing to do the same. According to Gouzenko, the identity of agent ELLI was known to only a few but he worked in ‘Five of MI’. Volkov didn’t live long enough to tell his story – Philby betrayed him to his controller – but he was able to warn us of a double agent, the ‘acting head of a department of British Counter-espionage (or Counter-intelligence) Directorate’. Volkov was KGB, Gouzenko one of the Soviet military’s creatures. But put the evidence from the two defectors together and you have a highly placed Soviet agent, code name ELLI, working for ‘Five of MI,’ who was ‘acting head’ of a counter-espionage department in London.

  Ten floors above me at Century House the director of Requirements is sitting at a desk sturdy enough to bear the ton of briefing notes he releases to Whitehall every week and wide enough to reassure him that it is still a noble and worthy task for a robber baron.

  I ring Elliott and say, ‘Have you a moment?’

  ‘Far too many,’ he replies.

  A few minutes later his secretary, Marjorie, shows me into his office, and from his grand desk he takes whisky and two thick crystal tumblers. He has made space in the room for a number of pieces of fine furniture – a serpentine-fronted walnut chest, Dutch floral marquetry chairs, a burgundy club couch. He says they are an act of defiance, a rejection of our brutal concrete and glass home and the ‘modern’ Secret Service Dick would like it to represent. ‘Modern’ means an end to the buccaneering spirit of the past, ‘modern’ is ‘clear lines of reporting’, and ‘value for money’, and ‘internal reviews’, as the last of the barons are eased out to be replaced by milksops, who would rather do nothing than risk a mistake. ‘Modern’ is spending time and energy investigating ourselves. Thanks to Dick White, we are becoming the sort of Communist institution we were working to destroy. Is it any wonder that a man like Wright is king of our dunghill?

  Elliott pushes a glass towards me. ‘Is this just a social?’

  ‘No. I need your encyclopaedic knowledge of the Russian Secret Service.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Gouzenko – remember him? How likely is it that military intelligence in Moscow knows the identity of the KGB’s agents and illegals in London?’

  He considers his hands, spread on the desk in front of him, then considers me. ‘Not Philby, if that’s who you mean. The KGB and GRU are not good neighbours. Oil and water.’

  I nod slowly.

  ‘Want to tell me what this is about, old boy?’

  ‘No, old boy, I don’t, but there’s one more thing. Philby – what was he doing in September ’forty-five?’

  ‘Don’t you have access to his file? Section V – Counter-intelligence – here at SIS in London.’

  ‘Confirmed head?’

  ‘Acting, if I recall … Is that all?’

  ‘For now,’ I say, lifting the whisky to my lips to hide a smile.

  In only a few weeks my colleagues on the FLUENCY working party have compiled a list of two hundred allegations, dating back to the First World War. Twenty-eight are category C, which means they’re credible. In the language of counter-intelligence they’re deemed to be ‘true bills’. It is truly remarkable what people can find when they’re desperate to find something. I’m reminded of the chapel in Maerdy again, where the minister used to preach Mark 5:36: Be not afraid, only believe. Well, my colleagues believe. We meet in Wright’s office to bat their ‘true bills’ back and forth across the table. Their faces are tense with excitement and perhaps a little guilt, because secretly they relish the prospect of calling senior officers to the judgment seat. I hear Patrick Stewart opine that Gouzenko’s ‘Five of MI’ must mean MI5, and I bite my tongue. Then Evelyn points out Hollis was head of MI5’s F Division – Counter-intelligence – in 1945, and glances are exchanged around the table. No one mentions Section V at MI6 and the obvious candidate – Philby – and I follow Maurice’s advice and say nothing: this investigation has a long way to go.

  Wright does raise the subject in a roundabout way. ‘You’ve been l-l-looking at the VENONA, Harry?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and I have some thoughts. Perhaps I can bring them to our next meeting.’

  ‘G-g-good, good,’ he says, with a note in his voice that suggests the contrary. ‘Evelyn’s been working on VENONA too.’

  ‘Two cryptonyms in particular,’ she says. ‘If we leave the question of the missing members of the Ring of Five for a moment …’ Opening the file in front of her, she takes out a signal and slides it into the middle of the table. ‘From Moscow Centre to the KGB resident in London.’

  TOP SECRET

  From: MOSCOW

  To: LONDON

  20 September 1945

  To Bob.

  Your no. 1436. JACK and ROSA should not, repeat, not be met in public.

  No. 6869 VIKTOR

  ‘That’s our old friend General Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin. Code name, VIKTOR. Head of Foreign Intelligence at the KGB at the tender age of thirty-one. Clever boy. He was on the point of being executed in one of Uncle Joe’s purges when his talent for preying on his fellow man was recognised at the last minute. VIKTOR was responsible for stealing all those precious atomic secrets from the Americans. If JACK and ROSA were working directly to VIKTOR, their intelligence must have been prized.’

  ‘They m-may still be active,’ says Wright.

  Evelyn’s shoulders pivot forward and back, like a hen ruffling her feathers before settling on an egg. ‘All we can say with certainty is that they were active in London in September ’forty-five, and their names always appear in the VENONA signals together.’

  She has a mad twinkle in her eye. Old ham: she’s challenging us to work it out. ‘They’re a couple, dears,’ she says, with faux-exasperation. ‘A couple! We’re looking for a husband-and-wife team.’

  Hilton whistles through his teeth. ‘Like the Rosenbergs in America.’

  ‘Are they our problem or yours?’ says Lecky.

  ‘Ours. They were able to access Security Service files,’ says Evelyn, ‘but they may have left Five some time ago. They could be with you at Six, or in Whitehall.’

  Wright is glowing with excitement. ‘You remember S-SNIPER? The CIA’s man in the Polish Secret Service? Came in from the cold in ’sixty-one. He claims the Russians have a middle grade in British intelligence.’

  Lecky laughs – ‘Oh, come on, Peter’ – and slaps the edge of the table. ‘SNIPER’s as mad as a hatter. Convinced he’s the last Tsar of Russia, or is the tsarevich …’

  ‘But a g-good memory for intelligence. Jim A-A-Angleton’s sure SNIPER’s allegation is a true bill.’

  Evelyn ruffles her shoulders. ‘What Peter is trying to say is, we can’t lose sight of the ones who didn’t make the top floor, the middle-rankers, the sub-agents, the agents of influence.’

  ‘The JACKs and the ROSAs.’

  ‘Precisely.�
��

  Evelyn takes two photographs from her file and turns them towards us. One is of a young woman in her twenties, with fine dark hair swept short behind her ears, slightly sunken eyes, delicate features and a rectangular smile. The second picture is of the same woman but nearer to me in age. Then Evelyn sweeps a third photograph round, and this time the woman is arm in arm with Herbert Hart. Clever Herbert, Rees used to call him. He was at New College before us. A lawyer, a philosopher, and best buddies with Professors Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire. Clever Herbert worked at this place – at MI5 – during the war.

  Wright plonks his forefinger on the photograph. ‘Herbert Hart, f-formerly of this parish. You must know him, Harry?’

  ‘A little. Sir Dick White knows him better. They were in B Division together during the war.’

  Wright can smirk like no one else I’ve met. ‘Hart served with B-B-Blunt, too. Now he’s professor of jurisprudence at Oxford. And the woman in the photographs is his wife, Jenifer, with one n. Not a good wife, because she sleeps with his friends.’ He pauses. ‘I’m s-s-sorry, does anyone here know her?’

  I resist the urge to dry my palms on my trousers. ‘She’s a friend of my wife,’ I say, which of course he knows.

  ‘Is she?’ says Wright. ‘Well, Mrs Hart is an Oxford don, like Herbert now. In fact, they met at Oxford and married in …?’

  Evelyn obliges: ‘’Forty-one. Jenifer was working at the Home Office.’

  ‘Where, of course, she would have had access to intelligence.’

  ‘Herbert, Agent JACK?’ Patrick Stewart pushes his wheelchair from the table. ‘Oh, no. Really, Peter, I’d be astonished.’

  ‘We know his wife is a C-Communist. They were both privy to grade-one intelligence.’

  ‘How do you know she’s a Communist?’ I ask.

  ‘Blunt’s assistant, Harry. Phoebe Pool was a courier for Blunt and our old friend Otto. I think we can assume Otto recruited Jenif-f-er and probably Herbert too.’

  I have a malicious urge to remind him there’s just one f in ‘Jenifer’.

 

‹ Prev