‘Who?’
I hold up my hand. ‘Me, sir.’ The dunce from across the water.
He glares at me and pulls hard on his pipe. ‘All right, explain why not.’
Where to begin? With the VENONA first and the identification of the agent code named JOHNSON. My analysis points to Blunt, not Hollis. And the evidence for ELLI points to Kim. Philby was one of the KGB’s ‘Magnificent Five’, and at Cambridge with the other members of the ring. We know their names now, but my colleagues are too determined to ruin Hollis to recognise it. Philby is agent ELLI and he left us in ’63, never to return. Then I speak for Hollis who was the first to suspect Blunt and the first to press for files to be kept on every Communist in Britain. What about the successful operations that were run against the Party in his time at the top? And on I go while the temperature in the room rises. Because it’s impossible not to be personal when foul whisp’rings are abroad – I shake the report at FJ – infected minds, and if I have a criticism of Sir Roger it’s that he let the poison spread.
Wright protests, naturally. They all do. But to my FLUENCY colleagues I say, ‘This conspiracy only makes sense to you because you feed off each other. Step out of the bunker and breathe.’ And to FJ I say, ‘This is Jim Angleton’s doing, and if it’s more than madness, it’s a means to control both his Service and ours.’ And for a final flourish, well, I want to talk of the other list, the unofficial list, the one with the prime minister’s name at the top, but I hesitate. It’s so ‘monstrous’ it’s easy to deny. I debate it at the back of my mind, and before I reach a decision my chance has gone. FJ has heard enough of me: it’s a wonder he hasn’t chewed through the stem of his pipe.
‘Christ. This is an unholy mess,’ he says. ‘How much do the Americans know?’
‘We’ve kept J-J-Jim Angleton up to date,’ says Wright, ‘of course we have. H-Harry’s the sort of old-school Service liberal who likes to forget how much we owe the Americans.’
‘No, Harry!’ FJ raises his hand to shut me up. ‘This is my decision. I want FLUENCY to concentrate on the middling-grade agent. Top priority because he’s still in the building – if he exists. Understood? I want Hanley and the other candidates investigated first, then your outer circle – the people in government. In the meantime, I’ll consider what to do about Roger.’ He steps back to the conference table and places his fingertips on the FLUENCY report. ‘And this’ – he lifts a corner – ‘under lock and key, every copy.’
‘The c-combination safe in my office,’ says Wright.
‘Every copy. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to run this down to the ends of the earth – to the ends of the earth, you hear?’ And he walks away again.
We collect our papers in silence. No one looks at me. Perhaps they’re wondering whether we’ll be able to close the fissure that’s opened so publicly between us. Sod them. Let’s have an end to pretence. Wright lingers at the table while the rest of us file towards the door, Stewart’s wheelchair at our head. I’m carrying my copy of the report and concentrating hard on finding a way to keep it when FJ calls me: ‘A word, Harry.’
Wright’s shoulder brushes mine as he passes.
‘Sit,’ says FJ, waving me to a chair. ‘Scotch?’
‘Thank you, sir.’
There’s a bottle on the conference table. It’s an aggressive bottom-shelf whisky of the sort that leaves you with a foul mouth in the morning, and a more moderate man would refuse.
‘What a mess! And it’s becoming personal, isn’t it?’ He pours me a generous measure, then carries his own to the other side of Hollis’s old desk. ‘You’ve spoken to C?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘Well, I have. Sir Dick supports the FLUENCY recommendations. Press on, he says, and I agree. But you …’ He raises his chin belligerently. ‘Peter wants me to ask C to drop you from the committee, so tell me why I shouldn’t.’
‘If you’ve made up your mind he’s right, you should.’
‘I haven’t,’ he snaps, ‘but you’re the odd one out and I want to know why.’
‘Why? You trained as a lawyer, sir. Show me the proof.’
‘It isn’t clear-cut. It never is in these cases.’
I whistle through my teeth sceptically. ‘People are thinking like priests, not lawyers. We’re afraid because Jim Angleton and his friends in the Service keep telling us we should be, that the Russians are much better than us, that there are hundreds of Kim Philbys out there. We’re dancing to the CIA’s tune. It’s a bloody power grab – that’s what all witch-hunts turn out to be.’
FJ picks up his glass but lowers it again. ‘What about you, Harry? Above it all, are you? Peter thinks you’re hiding something from us.’
I laugh. ‘Of course he does.’
He stares at me. ‘We’ll see.’ Then his gaze drifts down to the FLUENCY report on the desk in front of him. ‘Give me a note. Put your reservations on paper and I’ll consider them.’
On my way to the door I notice that a portrait is missing from the photographic gallery of FJ’s predecessors. There’s a hook but the picture has gone long before it was able to leave a tobacco tidemark on the wall. Poor old Roger. He wasn’t a vain man but I hear he was as pleased as Punch when it went up and made a point of showing it to all those who visited him in his final days. But now, well, FJ’s secretary will have it in the bottom drawer of her desk. I smile sweetly as I pass her in the DG’s outer office and think almost wistfully of Val and her unshakeable faith in her lover.
If I return to the third floor for my coat and briefcase there’s a chance Wright will ask for my copy of the FLUENCY report. So I take the lift down to the Registry where one of the queens gives me a cardboard file. A wet winter night in the city at turning-out time and I must compete with theatregoers on Piccadilly for a cab to take me home.
Elsa is in bed with a Mary Stewart novel and doesn’t raise her gaze from the page. ‘There’s something in the oven.’
‘Sorry, darling, really I am.’ I drop the file at the bottom of the bed and take off my jacket. ‘The new DG kept us late.’
I’m not hungry but don’t want to say so. I burn my hand badly removing the casserole from the oven and have to hold it under the kitchen tap. When the rawness eases I kick off my shoes, hang my wet jacket on a chair and pad back through to our bedroom. Elsa has thrown back the covers and is on all fours reading the FLUENCY report. ‘You shouldn’t!’ I slap my hand on it. ‘It’s dangerous.’
‘Shouldn’t I?’ She grabs my wrist with one hand and snatches up the report with the other. ‘The case for the prosecution? Jenifer Hart’s here, I suppose?’
‘And other bad people. Give it to me, please.’
‘You’re very careless with secrets, Harry.’
‘Sometimes with my wife. The wife I’m trying to shelter from this mess because I love her so much.’
She lifts her eyes from the paper to mine. ‘That’s the first time you’ve said you love me in a long time.’
I reach out to tidy a strand of loose hair behind her ear. ‘You know it’s true, don’t you? I do love you very much.’
At last an affectionate smile. ‘Blimey, you are desperate. Here,’ and she hands me the report.
‘There you go, girl, cheapening my feelings.’
‘Let me be the judge of your feelings,’ she says, scrambling back under the covers, ‘when you come to bed.’
I laugh and start on my buttons. ‘Wildfire at Midnight?’ Her Mary Stewart novel is face down on the bedspread. ‘Let’s see!’
I keep my sub-miniature camera under a floorboard in the box room upstairs. A smart black Minox B, not much more than the length of my index finger with a chain to measure the focal point necessary for copying papers: the full twenty-four inches for a good A4 image. It was a gift from Jack Ellis. The box room is at the back of the house so I can close the shutters and light the report with a table lamp without arousing suspicion. By half past eight in the morning Elsa is at her desk in the ministry, by nine I
’ve finished. Just the list of names, the analysis and the case against DRAT. Half past nine: opening time at the bank on Poultry. The same young assistant manager takes me to the vault where I deposit a single roll of film and a few more pages of notes.
Ten fifteen: across the river to Century House to show my face to Lecky in the basement. Then I pop my head round Maurice’s door on the twelfth and arrange to meet him at his flat in the evening. Eleven o’clock, and I’m on my way to MI5 in Curzon Street.
Someone in D3 must see me paying off the cabbie because a reception committee greets me the minute I set foot in my office. To discuss ‘my role as MI6 liaison’, they say. No hard feelings about yesterday, only for the next few weeks the FLUENCY working party will be investigating the middle-grade mole in MI5 and will have no need of my assistance. Or, to put it more succinctly than Peter Wright is ever able to: bugger off, Harry Vaughan.
‘Where’s the report?’ says Evelyn. ‘Did you take it home?’
‘To the Registry,’ I say, waving the new file.
‘You were supposed to hand it to Peter.’
‘Did we agree that?’
‘Yes, we did,’ she says.
‘Right-ho. As for my role as Six liaison, the new DG wants me to write a paper outlining my concerns. I guess I’m on board for as long he says so.’
Wright tries to smile; Evelyn doesn’t. ‘Then we must keep you informed,’ he says. ‘We do all want the same thing, don’t we?’
The interrogation of those who fit the profile of a ‘middling-grade’ agent begins at once.
Michael Hanley’s the first. He’s senior suspect, ‘a perfect fit’, according to Wright. Head of C Branch, a future DG, they say – or they used to. He’s a huge florid fellow and the corners of his mouth turn down as if he’s always in a temper. Monday morning at nine o’clock his secretary takes him morning coffee, but would he please leave it on his desk and report to the director general’s office.
‘An accusation has been made against you,’ says Furnival Jones. ‘You must submit to an interrogation, Michael.’ Hanley protests it’s a lie but he has no choice. He must surrender to the wild indignity of an interrogation by his boss. Two floors below, his accusers listen on headphones in the D1 operations room as FJ tries to get under Hanley’s skin. Troubled public-school boy (tick); Oxford leftie (tick); studied Russian at a language college visited by a KGB talent-spotter (tick); and Angleton’s man Golitsyn says he fits the profile (tick). Best of all, Wright has spoken to a psychiatrist who treated Hanley for a time. FJ asks him: ‘Guilty feelings you had to share with someone, Michael?’
‘No,’ says Hanley, ‘the burden of keeping secrets and telling lies, even to those I’m close to. You must have felt the weight of that burden too, sir?’
There’s no rough stuff this time but he is required to speak of his wife and his life at home, mistakes and intimate secrets, in the full knowledge that two floors below his colleagues are listening. It hurts; there will be scars. By five o’clock on Wednesday it’s over and the FLUENCY working party gathers in the D1 operations room to discuss the evidence.
‘Well?’ FJ is shell-shocked. ‘You should have seen the look on Michael’s face.’
‘He’s not our man,’ says Wright, and all of us agree.
‘Then you’d better start looking for someone else,’ he says – and that’s what happens.
40
17 January 1966
A TAP ON an office door, and would you please report to 523 on the fifth immediately. Wright sits there with a D Branch interrogator, while Evelyn and Stewart listen to a feed in Operations and note anything suspicious. I don’t know the suspects, it would take me days to master their files, so I step back from it to write my paper for FJ. At the end of each day I return my copy of the FLUENCY report to the safe in Wright’s office and try to gauge whether my comrades are closer to ‘a success’. If Evelyn isn’t knitting over a basket with a head in it then I know ‘enquiries are continuing’.
The interrogations are meant to be secret, but by the end of the first week there isn’t a soul in the building who doesn’t know Wright and his cronies are grilling the middle grades. On Friday, I make a rare visit to the canteen at lunchtime to grab a cheese and tomato sandwich, and the moment I join the queue the chatter and laughter stop. As far as the junior desk officers in front of me are concerned, I’m a member of Wright’s gang. They’ve heard about the nine o’clock knock and the interrogation that follows. Five suspects so far? Six? Colleagues above a certain rank are asking, ‘Will it be me next?’ I guess they’re calling it a witch-hunt already. The trouble is, Hanley was ‘the perfect fit’ until he wasn’t, and in search of another, FLUENCY is casting its net far and wide. Is it necessary? I don’t know. Is there some evidence of a recent leak? No one has said so. This may be a piece of our history too, and those of us fortunate to study it as a subject at university know how simple it is to manipulate.
I deliver my paper on the FLUENCY report to FJ on the last Monday in January. In the evening I meet Driberg in the draughty saloon bar of the Wheatsheaf. I’m late and Tom isn’t happy. ‘You promised me proof,’ he bellows across the bar, ‘and it’s been weeks!’ Heads turn to look for the man with the fruity upper-class voice.
‘Keep it down,’ I say, drawing a chair to the table. ‘These things take time – and I’ve been away.’
‘You read about my speech in the House? Page lead in The Times.’
‘Sorry, no, I didn’t.’
Tom frowns. ‘I’m trying to push parliamentary scrutiny of the intelligence services up the political agenda.’
‘Good.’
‘Names? Papers? Where are they?’
‘On the way,’ I say. ‘Patience, Tom, please.’
‘I don’t have any – never have. When?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Then why did you drag me out here?’
‘To reassure you, and to arrange a secure channel,’ I say. ‘If you hear from Mr Green, you should ring this number’ – I’ve written it on a piece of paper for him – ‘seven in the evening sharp.’
That makes him feel better. Like Burgess, he has a school-dormitory passion for secrets but he isn’t very good at keeping them. I want him to be indiscreet, but not about me. That’s why he’s still waiting for something to make the front pages.
We don’t talk for long because a young man at the bar has caught his eye. ‘Tight little arse,’ he says, picking up his drink. ‘Time to turn on the charm.’
*
Great excitement the following morning. I’m shuffling back to my office with a cup of tea balanced on two files when I hear clapping in the operations room at the end of the corridor. It can only mean one thing. ‘We have him,’ says Stewart. ‘We bloody well do!’ He’s sitting with the sound feed from the fifth floor, Evelyn and a D Branch interrogator called James at his side.
‘Who do we have?’
‘Gregory Stevens,’ he says, ‘the acting head of the Polish Section. Peter said he was next best fit after Hanley and he was right. He just came out with it. Confessed. “Me,” he said, “all true. I confess.”’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Still up there. The DG’s security man is on the phone to Special Branch. They’ll want to interview him under caution.’
‘Right.’ I put down my files and lift the saucer from my cup. ‘Quite a turn-up for the books.’ Stewart is smiling, which I suppose is reasonable in the circumstances.
‘Is there anything else in his background?’
‘Half Polish. Bit of a fantasist, his psychiatrist says.’ He pushes a file towards me. ‘Do you have a psychiatrist? Am I the only person in this building who doesn’t? The shrink says we can’t rely on Stevens to tell the truth.’
‘Oh? Does he know his patient works for MI5?’
‘Shush!’ Evelyn is gesturing furiously at us, one half of a headset pressed to her ear.
‘Look at page six,’ Stewart whispers. ‘He vis
its Poland regularly – with permission, of course – but as you see,’ he taps a passage halfway down a page of the transcript, ‘his uncle is active in the Polish Communist Party.’
‘And he’s been open about it?’
Stewart doesn’t reply because we’re both watching Evelyn, whose face is contorted as if she’s in pain. ‘He’s laughing,’ she says, pressing fingers to the birthmark on her cheek.
I snatch the other set of headphones from the table before Stewart has a chance and, yes, he is laughing. He must be falling off his chair.
I hear Wright say, ‘Are you all right, Stevens?’
And I hear Stevens say, ‘Perfectly all right,’ and laugh a little more.
Then Wright’s voice again: ‘I’m n-n-not sure I understand you? What is it?’
I exchange glances with Evelyn. ‘How hard has Peter pushed him?’ I ask. Stevens speaks before she’s able to.
‘Well, you were determined to find a spy, Wright, weren’t you?’ he says, his voice trembling. ‘I’m giving you what you want. I knew you would get excited about my Polish family.’
I hear the rustle of papers being gathered together, then Wright says, ‘We’ll end it there, Stevens,’ and his chair screeches as he gets to his feet. ‘The director general will want to speak to you.’
I drop the headphones on the table and Stewart grabs them. ‘What was that about?’
‘You tell him, cariad,’ I say to Evelyn. There’s a nasty red weal on her neck. ‘He’s unstable,’ she says, ‘and after this … he’s going to have to go!’
Stewart has no idea what we’re talking about.
‘It was all a joke – he was joking,’ I explain. ‘Stevens is innocent.’
‘What?’
‘Well, it was more of a protest than a joke.’
‘Shit,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Sorry, and all that.’
Oh, the look on Evelyn’s face. Vaughan or Stevens? Given an opportunity she would choose to guillotine me first. One day she may have a chance.
Evelyn is right about one thing: Stevens has gone from the building within an hour, never to return. ‘Terrible waste. He was very able,’ Stewart admits to me a short time later. A number of Stevens’s colleagues in D Branch feel the same. Over the next few days the temperature on the third floor and in the Registry drops to freezing. One of the interrogators tells me there are whispers in the building of ‘the special unit’ in D Branch using Gestapo-style tactics.
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