Witchfinder

by Andrew Williams

  ‘I’m sorry about this.’ She gestures to the room. ‘I was angry.’

  ‘And you’re not now?’

  She shrugs. ‘I hear you want to talk to me.’

  ‘I want us to talk.’

  Elsa closes her eyes momentarily. ‘Don’t start.’

  ‘Don’t start what?’ I snap at her.

  ‘It’s over.’

  I push the stool back and rise. ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘Wright? I didn’t know what to believe. You told so many lies – you were in the Party …’

  ‘For God’s sake, girl, for a few months …’

  ‘You should have told me! And SUBALTERN. Wright said a defector named you as the informer.’

  ‘And you believed him?’

  ‘And the file. I work … work for the Ministry of Defence. Wright asked me questions – I told him the truth. What did you expect me to do? I’m not like you.’

  ‘I shared things with you. You must have known he would use that against me. Christ, I was trying to protect you because I love you – protect us. You should have trusted me!’

  ‘Ha!’ She clenches her fists like a bantamweight boxer. ‘Protect us!’ she shouts. ‘Protect us! Stealing a file from MI5, lying to me. Sleeping with your secretary?’

  ‘She wasn’t … Yes. By doing all those things.’

  ‘Protect yourself.’ She’s trembling now. ‘You bastard!’ Her voice is quiet and low. ‘You’ve done this to us.’ She takes half a step as if to strike me but checks and holds up the palms of her hands. ‘It’s over.’

  They’re cheering on the radio. Another goal for England, I suppose. The dissonance here, now, in our sitting room, it’s worthy of the Marx Brothers. She takes a deep breath and I do the same. ‘I want my life in the Service to have meaning – it did in the war, and after, in Vienna. You remember, we were fighting to build a better country, a better world?’

  ‘That isn’t you,’ she says coldly. ‘I wonder if it ever was. You found the Service and you became the Service.’

  ‘Wfft. You think that little of me?’

  She only glares.

  ‘Look, the file,’ I say, ‘you would be in danger if I gave …’

  ‘I don’t want to know, Harry. I don’t. You must give it back.’ She looks away furtively. No one else would notice but I know her like no one else. ‘Oh, why don’t you turn it off?’ she says, gesturing to the radio, and in the next breath: ‘Let them have it, Harry. Make a clean break.’

  I laugh harshly. ‘Who asked you to come here? Wright? Maurice? He’ll listen to you, Mrs Vaughan. Tell him you’ll go back to him, and …’

  ‘Don’t be— No! I made my feelings quite clear about that.’

  ‘Did you, cariad?’

  She must hear the sadness in my voice; I hear only anger and contempt in hers. How did it come to this? I’m not sure I have any more fight in me. I have no more anger. I made such plans in my cell: leaving the Service, the job at the Economist, the girls – they’ll blame me, and I am to blame but not just me. I could tell her … They were stoking the fires for you too, my love, the ‘Jewess’ mole in Vienna. You were in the Party, weren’t you? Did you ever leave it? It has always been the forbidden question. But the file you want me to hand over, that bloody file, is your insurance, our insurance. You have seen only broken images. I would lead you from the wilderness, help you see things as they really are, but you’re too full of righteous anger to listen. Now trust has gone, nothing I say will save us. This is what FLUENCY has done. We stand in an empty room in our own home with six feet of polished floor as wide as the Grand Canyon between us.

  ‘For God’s sake, Harry, are you listening? Are you going to give it back?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, I’m not, cariad. Tell Maurice, “No.” He knows the reason why.’

  She opens her mouth but can think of nothing else to say. The football is droning on in the background, excitement at a new pitch.

  ‘You’re staying at the ministry?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  I shrug. ‘No reason.’

  She bites her top lip. ‘I have a meeting with the cabinet secretary next week. I’m on leave until then.’

  ‘Burke Trend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I nod.

  ‘You’ve heard from my solicitor? We have to wait a year.’

  ‘There’ll be no trouble. And this’ – I gesture to the room, the house – ‘all yours.’

  ‘Good.’ Her face softens a little. ‘Right. Then I’ll leave you to the football.’

  ‘I think it’s almost over.’

  ‘Ah. Well, it isn’t your game, is it?’

  ‘Twenty seconds, twenty seconds, and Hurst and Ball are charging wide,’ the football man intones.

  I watch her shuffle backwards and her gaze roam to every corner of the room except mine. Cariad, I’m not going to stop you. Then she looks at me and I see she’s fighting back tears. She’s sorry, yes, but not enough to save us. ‘Goodbye, Harry,’ she says. ‘Please … be careful.’

  Why be careful? Why does it matter? It doesn’t bloody matter. That’s what I think as she turns her head to leave. ‘Be happy,’ I say. ‘Be happy, Elsa.’

  There’s shouting and cheering. Football man is screaming. Players are hugging each other, falling to their knees. The game’s over. They’ve won.

  1976

  Epilogue

  WITNESSES HEARD THE engine roar and car tyres on the granite setts, like a small earthquake. Silver Mercedes, two passengers, accelerating south-west towards the Danube canal. Frau Weber was driving to the elementary school where she teaches. She saw the Mercedes slew right and mount the low pavement. Another witness – twelve-year-old Rudy – says the victim turned to run but it was too late: he was tossed over the bonnet like a rag doll. That it was no accident was evident from their accounts of what happened next. The big Mercedes came to a halt after only a few metres, and as the young schoolmistress watched in her rear-view mirror, and Rudy cowered in the doorway of number 10, the driver changed gear and reversed at speed over the victim – just to make sure.

  Detectives identified him as Mr Henry Vaughan, a journalist who sometimes played the piano at a local café and was well known and liked in the district. The café owner described him as ‘honorary Viennese’. Vaughan rented a small apartment on Herminengasse in the Old Town. Neighbours said he wrote for English magazines and often went away on assignments, that his friends were journalists and musicians, his girlfriends too, and sometimes he would speak of his daughters, but they never came to visit. Yes, he was ‘political’, and journalists always make enemies, but no one could imagine who would want him dead.

  At home the big story was the prime minister’s resignation, The Times was the only newspaper to find space for a hit-and-run ‘accident’ abroad. None of the old crowd are left at the embassy in Vienna, the station chief is in his twenties, and if he knew Vaughan used to be one of us he didn’t consider it worth a mention in his rip-and-read report to London. It must have been a shock on the morning after the murder, 20 March, when Maurice Oldfield rang to say he was sending someone to investigate – me.

  I joined the Secret Intelligence Service a few months after Vaughan’s departure – in disgrace, they said. There were rumours he was a KGB mole, that he’d done a deal in return for his freedom, and when Dick White followed him out of the door it looked as if he was taking the blame for another embarrassing penetration of the Service. I remember our relationship with the Americans was frosty for quite some time. White’s successor was a colourless civil servant dedicated to doing nothing that might embarrass the government. Those were the doldrum years, when we were frightened of our shadows, and it was only in ’73 when Sir Maurice Oldfield became chief that morale began to improve. Michael Hanley was appointed director general of MI5 at about the same time, even though he was one of the officers the FLUENCY team had suspected of being a spy.

  As I rose through the ranks of the Servic
e I was briefed in general terms on the years we wasted hunting for a mole at the top, the lessons to be learned from the collapse of our operational efficiency and morale. In that mad time after Philby, the spycatchers were just about running the Service. I don’t know Peter Wright – he retired two months ago – and I’ve only met Jim Angleton once, but he was a CIA legend: the spies he hunted down, the black-bag operations he ran. I was flattered he made time to see me. It was only after the death of Harry Vaughan that I learned the truth about his involvement with FLUENCY and the OATSHEAF investigation.

  My mother’s German – it’s my first language – and I have spent four of the last ten years in Berlin, so I wasn’t surprised when C summoned me to his office two days after the assassination and handed me Vaughan’s file. I was surprised when he told me it was a matter of ‘national importance’ and that I was to tell no one in or out of the Service where I was going and why. ‘Report directly to me, Cath,’ he said, ‘only me. You’re on the next flight from Heathrow.’

  My orders were to recover any material that might compromise ‘the Service and the security of the country’. Had Vaughan been selling intelligence? Who was responsible for the hit?

  A team of municipal workers was still scrubbing the setts in Herminengasse and someone had laid flowers on the pavement close by. Vaughan’s flat was at the top of an elegant early-nineteenth-century mansion block painted sunshine yellow and white. The door was hanging off its hinges. Neighbours told the police that it was forced the day before the assassination, and that two unknown men were seen leaving the building in the middle of the afternoon. The intruders had ransacked the place. Vaughan didn’t report the break-in and he hadn’t found time to clear up the mess. I searched the flat too, and found bills and cuttings and sheet music, and photographs of a person of interest – his second wife, Elsa Frankl Spears. His passports were still there and in one of them there was an exit stamp dated two days before his death and the stub of a BEA airline ticket from London.

  It was impossible to know if anything of value to the Service was taken. The police were connecting the break-in and the murder, and when I arrived with my story of a ‘former diplomat’ they shifted the focus of their investigation to the agents of ‘a foreign power’. There was a sketchy description of the driver of the Mercedes – thirties, perhaps, swarthy, moustache – but Frau Weber couldn’t find his face in the police files. The usual suspects were the Russians or one of their satellites, and the best guess of the officer in charge of the investigation was that the hit team had crossed the border into Hungary while Vaughan’s body was still lying in the street.

  The detectives were happy to see it that way, but I’d read Vaughan’s file, I’d spoken to Sir Maurice, and it didn’t make sense to me. Why would Vaughan offer his ‘insurance’ to the Russians now, after ten years? Why would they eliminate their source?

  Vaughan was a journalist with a story, and the ticket stub was a clue. I asked London to check with the airline. Vaughan had bought his ticket on the morning of the seventeenth and flown direct to Heathrow on the same day. He had returned on the eighteenth when he must have discovered his apartment had been broken into. The following day, the nineteenth, he was murdered in broad daylight in the crudest manner and with no regard for local sensibilities. It was an assassination from the wild forties when the city was divided into military zones. The Russians are more careful these days.

  I began to wonder if Vaughan’s trip to London was connected in some way to his death. Check the newspapers who paid him for pieces, I said. What was he writing? Vaughan was sitting on a sensational front-page scoop – he had been for ten years. Had he decided it was the right time to sell it? Out of the blue – on the sixteenth – Harold Wilson announced he was going to resign as prime minister: his political career was over. The following day Vaughan flew to London. Coincidence? Sir Maurice didn’t think it could be. I don’t know who he spoke to after me – the director general of MI5, I imagine – but he rang me back a few hours later with the answer.

  Vaughan spoke to The Times about the FLUENCY investigation and promised the paper proof from ‘a file’. Naturally, the editor was cock-a-hoop at the prospect of a world-wide scoop. He wanted to splash the story before Wilson left office, and commissioned a mock-up of the front page with the headline: British and American Spies Plot Against the Prime Minister.

  Vaughan explained to the editor that he’d kept his word for ten years and would have kept it for another ten but for an article in a small-circulation British magazine that could only have come from someone close to the Service.

  The piece had been dismissed by Fleet Street newspapers as fantasy, because it trotted out the old FLUENCY allegations: Harold Wilson might have been compromised on a trip to Moscow; he might have accepted money from the Kremlin; his predecessor might have been murdered by the KGB. No proof was offered to back up the story, only the word of ‘a source close to MI5’. Peter Wright was the source – I know that now. Vaughan must have known straight away, and that he was flying a kite. There would be more leaks, more fake evidence. Wright is unrepentant. Obsessed. Can’t let it go, and neither, perhaps, could Harry. Did he act in defence of democracy, or to expose an old enemy? FLUENCY cost him his wife, his family, his purpose. When Wilson announced he was going, he went to The Times. But ten years wasn’t long enough, and with his death there is no story, no one to speak out, no file. It’s all deniable.

  Once London knew the truth it wanted me home, and Sir Maurice was suddenly too busy to speak to me. Why? He must have worked it out straight away. I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t going to let it rest until I could be. On a filthy wet Sunday evening I returned to Vaughan’s apartment on Herminengasse and combed the place thoroughly for some sort of covert listening or recording device, and this time I did my job properly. There was a hole two inches in diameter in the sitting-room wall that was consistent with the insertion and clumsy extraction of a probe microphone, and a wire in the telephone was disconnected rendering the handset useless. It would have been a simple repair for a man like Vaughan, with technical training, but for some reason he had decided to leave the phone inoperable.

  I believe Vaughan removed two bugs from his home in the days before his death, perhaps more. My guess is that he had lived with them for some time, and his decision to remove them signalled to the agency monitoring his activities that he was preparing something. Vaughan possessed one huge secret: the intelligence from the WORTHINGTON-OATSHEAF file. Was he going to sell it? Was he going to publish it? After ten years the alarm bells were ringing, and Vaughan was a problem again. Angleton retired last year, leaving the mess he had created for someone else at the CIA to clear up – which the Agency did with great efficiency. The neatest solution was to dispose of Vaughan and blame the Russians, confident MI6 wouldn’t enquire too closely.

  Is there a copy of the WORTHINGTON file at Langley? I have no proof. The Times will send a reporter to Vienna where the criminal police will hint that it was the KGB. The reporter will seek confirmation from us through the usual channels, and we will encourage him, with a nod and a wink, to report that it was a Russian hit, and the paper will be happy because it still has a story, and we will be happy it’s the one we want it to tell. The Service will sit on Wright. The cover-up will be complete. The circle intact. Another blow struck in the Cold War.

  Sir Maurice says we will never know for sure. But he knows. I know.

  ‘Vaughan didn’t want to be paid for The Times piece,’ I say.

  ‘Clean hands to show to the world’s press. They weren’t, of course … his hands. How could they be?’ Sir Maurice takes off his glasses with both of his own and pinches the bridge of his nose.

  ‘You mean he …’

  ‘That he was working for the other side? No, I don’t believe so. There was some evidence his ex-wife, Elsa … We couldn’t be sure.’ He pauses. ‘Where’s the funeral?’

  I mention the name of a municipal cemetery in south London.

 
; ‘Gracious. Who chose that place?’

  ‘One of his daughters, sir.’

  ‘Headstone won’t be up five minutes. Some spotty youth who hates the world will kick it over.’ He sighs heavily and puts his glasses back on. ‘Would you mind organising a wreath?’

  A Chronology

  1934 Soviet ‘illegal’ ARNOLD DEUTSCH, code name OTTO, arrives in Britain to recruit a network of spies. His first important recruit is KIM PHILBY, who recommends his Cambridge University friends GUY BURGESS and DONALD MACLEAN. They are inspired by an image of Russia as a worker-peasant state, and freedom from the old class system of interwar Britain.

  1935 MACLEAN is recruited to the British Foreign Office, and begins to supply his Soviet controller with intelligence.

  1936 British socialists and Communists support Spain’s Republican government in the civil war against General Franco’s Nationalist forces. Republican forces are supplied by the Soviet Union, the Fascists by Nazi Germany. PHILBY works behind Fascist lines for The Times, and uses his cover to spy for the Russians.

  1937 By the time OTTO is recalled to Moscow he has recruited more than twenty agents, of which the ‘Cambridge spies’ are to prove the most successful.

  1938 BURGESS joins Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

  1939 In the summer the Soviet Union signs a secret agreement with Nazi Germany – the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact – delineating spheres of influence in Europe. On 1 September, the Germans invade Poland, and Britain and France declare war. Some British Communists who looked to the Soviet Union for a lead in the struggle against Fascism turn their back on the Party; the Cambridge spies remain.

  1939–45 PHILBY works for MI6, BURGESS joins MI5, and MACLEAN continues at the Foreign Office. During the course of the war the Cambridge spies pass thousands of pieces of high-grade intelligence to the Soviet Union.