Witchfinder

by Andrew Williams

  ‘Key for the cupboard?’

  ‘Top right drawer of the desk.’

  ‘Very wise,’ I say. ‘You made the right choice.’

  While I’m tying his hands the telephone rings and I ignore it, but a minute later it rings again. Someone seems to want to speak to Duty urgently. ‘Any idea who that will be?’ Wylie doesn’t reply. He’s ashamed; he shouldn’t be.

  ‘Never argue with a gun,’ I say. ‘If I was a proper bastard I wouldn’t have given you any chances.’

  But the telephone is unsettling. Sooner or later the caller will send a search party to the duty office.

  I have the key; have I the combination? Linda was so sure. I walk back to the lifts and on into the Secretariat. Still no one. The brass hats on the fifth floor are never in at this hour; there may be juniors on the third; there are the queens on the ground, and perhaps an election knees-up in the bar, but I’m a familiar face and there’s a good chance news of my fall from grace has yet to trickle from the fifth to the rest.

  The light above the DG’s door is red to remind me I’m not in his diary. The long walk in through rows of desks with covered typewriters is to allow time for the DG to activate the new electronic lock that turns his office into a fortress, only I’ve got the key. The lock slides back with a satisfying clunk. I close the door behind me and switch on the lights and it’s the stern portrait of the first director general who greets me: Vernon Kell was no friend to democracy. Against the wall to the right of him, the DG’s black cabinet safe, as brutally utilitarian as a cannon in the captain’s cabin of a man-of-war. Inside the safe are the secrets director generals don’t trust anyone to keep, and when they’re shredded and burned they will be completely deniable.

  Thumb and two fingers lightly on the combination dial I turn it forward and back to Linda’s birthday in March – 2 and 0 and 3 – and then the years she was married to her soldier husband – 1 and 5 – and I jerk the handle down before I have time to doubt her. The lock retracts with a clunk, and in the seconds it takes me to swing the safe door open I love her.

  Furnival Jones’s medals and honours are in flat black display cases on the top shelf. On the other three: neat stacks of buff-coloured personal files in moisture-resistant polythene bags, and three of the Y Boxes MI5 uses for material on people it suspects of spying, like me. That’s where I begin, and the first box I pull from the shelf has my name taped to the top! I haven’t time to examine it and it might spoil the surprise to come, so I reach for the second of the boxes, and written in small black letters is Norman John WORTHINGTON. With a little shudder of pleasure I break the seal to check my friend Norman is prime minister of our glorious country. There’s a thick personal file in the box and, yes, there is no doubt about it: there are reports on Harold Wilson from as far back as the forties. The OATSHEAF evidence is here too, and telephone-tap transcripts of conversations the PM has had with his business friends, Kagan and Sternberg. I want it all; I have it all, and I must leave with it at once.

  I shove the empty Y Box back on the shelf, and it’s only as I’m swinging the safe shut that I remember there’s another. I have what I came for and there isn’t a second to waste, but I’m a spy, best beloved, and my bloody insatiable curiosity always gets the better of me. Oh, and this time I’m glad. In fact, I feel a surge of joy better than sex, better than the music of Miles Davis, because the name on the third box is Sir Richard Goldsmith WHITE. I skip through some of the material and Dick is being treated as a suspect too – a candidate for the mole at the top of the service, the master spy ELLI. I take just enough to embarrass.

  There are a couple of empty burn bags for the confidential waste in the outer office and I use one to carry the files. The telephone begins to ring as I’m emptying them into the bag: who the hell’s going to answer it at this hour? Perhaps the balloon’s gone up already and FJ is on his way to the office. I retrace my steps as far as the emergency stairs opposite Banking, and canter down five flights to the only other exit from the building. Until now everything has gone smoothly, but I don’t have to try the doors to know they’re locked and barred and I have no choice but to leave by the lobby. I can only pray that Mr Wylie is still tied to a chair. I will emerge from the boiler-room corridor with a sack over my shoulder, like a coalman, and if Bobby Roberts has his wits about him he’ll ask me why I didn’t take the lift, like a proper gentleman.

  But Bobby’s listening to his radio. I’m almost across the lobby before he sees me. ‘Mr Vaughan!’ The door of the security alcove opens. ‘Mr Vaughan.’

  I turn to him – ‘In the flesh, Bobby’ – and hold up the sack. ‘I have what I came for.’

  ‘Not good,’ he says, walking towards me, ‘not good at all.’

  I grip the gun in my coat pocket. ‘What isn’t good, Bobby?’

  ‘You was right, sir. The socialists are going to win a majority.’ Poor Bobby looks at me like a whipped dog.

  ‘That’s the trouble with democracy,’ I say, and he agrees.

  ‘Can I shake your ’and, sir?’ he says. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’

  Good luck to you too, Bobby. I’m sorry for the trouble that’s coming your way, but excuse me if the rain falling on my face has never felt softer, and London air has never tasted sweeter. You bastards, I have you.

  51

  I ARRIVE AT THE Snowdon boarding house to find the other guests gathered in the lounge watching television. Mrs Morris tries to persuade me to join them for a sherry. ‘Mr Parry’s a salesman like you,’ she says. I thank her but decline, and would she be good enough to furnish me with a late key? ‘Oh, I’ll be up all night,’ she says.

  My room is a double on the second floor with a view over railway tracks. The walls are damp, the paper peeling in the corners, the ceiling’s canary yellow with cigarette smoke and there are honeymoon stains on the bedspread. A night train rattles the glass, and when I switch on the TV for the BBC’s election report, the presenter is lost in a blizzard. The ambience reminds me of the war years, when I was young and able to make sense of everything.

  There’s a cheap plywood desk under the window, and with both bedside lamps I’m able to create a circle of light for the camera. Then I pour a large whisky and settle on the bed with the papers. I begin at the back of the Wilson file with what I take to be the birth certificate of Mr Norman John Worthington. It was written by B1a only weeks after Wilson was elected to Parliament in 1945.

  The security interest attaching to Harold Wilson and the justification for the opening of a file derives from comments made about him by certain Communist members of the Civil Service which suggest he has a similar political outlook.

  Wilson was negotiating a trade deal with the Soviet Union, and for good security reasons, the Service was desperate to prevent him succeeding. Our wartime ally was now our enemy but Labour was so anxious to come to a trading arrangement that it authorised the secret export of a new fighter engine and was within a hair’s breadth of selling Moscow the entire plane.

  Wilson was observed to be close to Politburo Member and Trade Minister, Mikoyan, and to indulge in epic all-night drinking sessions with him. Another minute raises the possibility of a blackmail plot for the first time. Wilson was believed to have become close to both a woman on his staff and a Russian national, and the KGB may have photographs of a compromising nature. No evidence was offered for this assertion, no names, no dates.

  There was another flurry of minutes and briefing papers in 1951 when Wilson resigned from the government. The CIA was reported to be concerned about his attitude and suspected him of being a fellow traveller. And to judge from the drip, drip of rumour and conjecture that made its way into his file in the fifties the Service took the possibility seriously. Twelve visits to Russia in ten years, and meetings with top Soviet leaders: Mr Wilson is taking the road to Moscow. A note in Peter Wright’s hand offers the view: No one should ever be permitted to become Prime Minister after twelve trips to Moscow.

  Wilson seems to have done
some work in the fifties for a company importing timber from Moscow. Is he taking bribes for political favours? the deputy DG enquired. And the Service started to monitor the activities of business associates, like Kagan and Sternberg, the newspaper man Robert Maxwell, and Bernstein, the chairman of Granada Television. Moscow station complained that Wilson frequently goes off the radar in Russia, and a joint Five and Six report concluded he was engaged in an ‘improper relationship’ with his political secretary, and was probably sleeping with the Labour MP Barbara Castle, too. And there’s another note from Wright: Evidence suggests Wilson was compromised on one of his visits to Moscow, between 1956 and 1959, and that the KGB has pictures and tapes of him with his secretary. Evidence? There isn’t any in the file.

  That brings me to the OATSHEAF investigation. In the first few weeks of 1963, intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic were thrown into a flat spin by the defection of Philby, then the election of a new Labour leader. Was it another great victory for Moscow? Wright and Angleton believed so, and Golitsyn confirmed their suspicions. Wright wrote a memorandum with the title ‘Two Years of Soviet Victories’ for the benefit of Dick and FJ.

  1963

  January: Philby is tipped off by the mole at the top of the MI5, and Hugh Gaitskell is poisoned.

  February: Harold Wilson becomes leader of the Labour Party.

  June: the KGB engineers the disgrace of Minister of War, John Profumo, in an effort to precipitate the fall of the Conservative Government.

  1964

  October: Labour wins the British General Election and a Soviet agent of influence enters Number 10: Harold Wilson.

  December: Wilson’s failure to offer material support for American action in Vietnam is more evidence of Communist influence on British policy.

  Wright was circumspect while Hollis was in charge, but FJ had barely got his feet under the DG’s desk before he came under pressure to authorise a press campaign to discredit the new prime minister. We have a higher duty to the country and to our allies, Wright argued, and if we do not bring about a change the matter may be taken out of our hands.

  Only one of our allies would have the will and the means to interfere, but Wright spelt it out for Dick and FJ in any case: Counter Intelligence Chief, CIA, has offered his full support for any action we deem necessary to ensure a satisfactory solution to this problem, he wrote.

  I’ve reached the front of the file. There’s one more memorandum, and it is the maddest and most frightening thing I’ve come across in more than twenty years as a spy. Dated the day after Angleton’s secret visit to London a fortnight ago, it was written by Wright and sent to the heads of both MI5 and MI6:

  I cannot stress enough the importance of immediate action if we are to retain the special relationship with the Americans. The CIA is losing patience and it is prepared to think the unthinkable. In a private discussion after our meeting of 14 March, Jim Angleton indicated the CIA was anxious to ‘relieve us of our problem’. He said, ‘These things can be managed!’ I did not consider it wise to enquire further at this stage, but whatever you imagine will be close to the truth! I do not have to remind you that our government’s refusal to offer the United States its full backing for the war in Vietnam has left us with precious few friends in Washington.

  His cryptic little phrase ‘whatever you imagine’ is like a punch in the guts. Imagine? I don’t need to. Rising from the bed I step across to the window and open it for some air. The draught swirls the smoke from most of a packet of cigarettes into crazy patterns that remind me of the night Angleton told me Wilson was an agent. I had no doubt then that he was capable of imagining anything. An accident, perhaps, an act of terror, or an inexplicable illness: the sort of murderous caper the CIA likes to pull in banana republics. Who can be sure of what is moving in the darkness of that man’s mind?

  I use two films preparing the first package, two more on the second, and I’m starting on the third when the BBC calls it for Labour, with a majority of more than fifty seats. By now the brass will know what I’ve done. I only have time to glance at Dick’s file but I recognise the acidity of the prose. His friendship with Anthony Blunt and his failure to deal with Philby in the fifties, his generally poor record: Evelyn holds back nothing. Did he permit Philby to escape to avoid embarrassment and criticism of his record?

  I slip the file into a large padded envelope with a note, To Dick, with my compliments! Harry, and I address it to Sir Dick White and mark it Personal.

  Only the hardcore boozers are left in the Snowdon’s lounge and they’re too engrossed in each other and the television to notice me. Elsa’s sports car is parked around the corner, and as I start it, I own to a feeling of quiet satisfaction. Bowling through empty streets with the car’s roof down, that quiet satisfaction swells in me like the final movement of a great symphony. Drunk on my own audacity I open the throttle and fill the city with the roar of the engine. First package of films to the Daily Mirror at Holborn Circus for immediate delivery to Watkins on the night news desk. The second package I drop into a pillar box near St Paul’s; the third at the Palace of Westminster. On a night such as this, I think it is safe to assume Tom Driberg was elected to serve another term, and will be back to pick up his correspondence.

  Special Branch will have the make and plates of the car by now and will be searching our house for clues as to my whereabouts and intentions. But I have the last package, Dick’s, to deliver – and I’m giving him the gun too. So I park the Sprite a few streets from Queen Anne’s Gate and walk. The lights are blazing at number 21, Dick’s driver is parked outside, and there’s a policeman on the door. They will know nothing of my activities or the panicky conversations taking place inside.

  ‘Package for the chief,’ I say, and thrust it at the copper.

  ‘You can deliver it yourself, sir,’ he says, turning to knock on the door.

  I drop it on the step before he has a chance to, and walk away. He calls after me, and I expect him to give chase, but it’s only a few yards to the corner, and I run as fast as I can the second I’m out of sight.

  The election party’s over at the Snowdon and Mrs Morris is collecting the dirty glasses. She says I seem very cheerful for such an early hour, and that I must be Labour. Harold Wilson is on the television in my bedroom promising to grow the economy. I switch him off and ring Reception for an outside line.

  ‘Elsa? Is that you?’

  ‘They said you might.’ She’s upset.

  ‘And “they” are listening, I suppose.’

  She doesn’t reply.

  ‘Try to think the best of me, whatever “they” tell you.’

  ‘What have you done, Harry?’

  ‘I’m trying to sort this out,’ I say. ‘I can’t tell you how – they know … Look, I just want you to know I love you and that I’m doing this for both of us, and—’

  ‘Where are you, Harry?’

  Ych-y-fi. That hurts.

  ‘I mean … you’re not going anywhere, are you?’ she says quickly.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Are you close?’

  ‘Yes, I’m close. But I’m going to sleep now, cariad. Only remember I love you and remember who I am – the person you know. I promised you I would arrange things. I have.’

  ‘Harry. Wait, Harry. Where are you?’

  I move the receiver slowly away from my ear and hang up. Her persistence has shaken me. It feels as if someone is pressing my chest with weights, like the ones they used to force witches to confess. The files are open on the bed, and I clear them on to the floor so I can lie back with my eyes shut. Harry Vaughan was friends with Guy Burgess: they’ll tell her I’m a spy and try to pin the collapse of SUBALTERN on me. But it won’t wash because there’s too much in these files. And I’m here to answer for everything. Her sports car is parked on the street outside, the lodging house is called the Snowdon, and there’s a Welsh salesman in Room 8 who bears more than a passing resemblance to a film star. I reach over t
o the bedside table and pour a very stiff whisky. The chase is over and I’m completely knackered.

  I wake with the empty glass still balanced on my chest, every muscle taut, every nerve. The light of a grey morning is filtering through the muslin curtains. The door’s shut, the room empty, but something has dragged me back from fathoms deep. The bedsprings groan as I roll on to my side and place the tumbler on the table, so I wait for the rattle of a passing train to swing my legs around and rise. They’ll come – I’ve made it easy – but I hope we can do things in a civilised way. My mouth is sticky and dry, as if I’ve run a marathon, so I step over to the washbasin, fill my hands and splash a little water on my face, and I’m just reaching for the hand towel when crash! Someone has put a boot to the door. Again! And the frame splinters at the lock. No point in protesting there’s no need for rough stuff because I can see that’s the way they want it to be: six of them and Clive, with his Browning pointing at my chest. ‘Take it easy,’ I say, my hands in the air, but his face has an ugly expression. He’s pumped up for a fight, and so are his companions.

  ‘On the floor, on the floor!’ As I’m bending forward, he catches me on the temple with the butt and down I go with stars. Knee in the small of my back, arms dragged back to cuff me, and it hurts like hell. But I laugh, and I can’t stop laughing, until he rolls me on to my back. ‘What the fuck do you have to laugh about, Vaughan?’

  ‘Ffŵl Ebrill!’

  He looks at me dumbly.

  ‘April Fool’s Day,’ I say. ‘I just remembered. It’s today!’

  Clive isn’t amused. Clive punches me in the face.

  52

  WE’RE NOT LIKE ordinary men and women: we have secret knowledge, we have comic-book powers, the law is something we honour more in the breach than the observance. You can’t stick to the rules when you’re fighting a war – that’s what they tell you – and it’s flattering, it’s glorious, what an adventure, free to, in Peter Wright’s words, bug and burgle at the behest of the small circle who wield power in the name of ‘the state’. Only I’m their enemy now and those powers are directed at me, and the ancient right of habeas corpus that prevents every man from being held unlawfully does not apply to this one.