The DCI turned to the DDP. ‘Over to you, Richard, can you give us an update?’
The DDP’s presentation was long and detailed. It included a complex web of false flag ploys in conjunction with disinformation ops. The most important things were discreet channels of communication about which deniability was not just ‘plausible’, but ‘completely and utterly convincing’. The first and last rules were no fingerprints.
When the DDP had finished, the DCI looked at the Army Chief of Staff. ‘It’s a principle of strategy and statecraft that has been practised through the centuries: The enemy of your enemy is your friend.’
Waterloo Bridge, London: 7 January 1961
Catesby felt sorry for Bunty. Reading her file didn’t make him weep, but it did make him depressed about the whole business. Bunty was clearly the saddest character in the Portland ring. She didn’t know exactly what she was doing. And even if she knew it was wrong, she wasn’t doing it for money or ideology. She was doing it because she was lonely. Miss Bunty Gee was the ultimate spinster. Her day job was filing clerk at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment. Her other job, which occupied every evening and weekend, was looking after her elderly mother – and an even more elderly aunt and uncle who had moved in with her mum. Bunty’s life was a hell of lonely desperation. Harry, an alcoholic with a broken marriage, wasn’t exactly the best thing since sliced bread, but he was the last chance saloon for a dumpy spinster in her forties.
Harry was an even sadder character than Bunty, but he was too vain to admit it. After serving as a sailor during the war, he joined the civil service and was sent to Warsaw as a clerk in the office of the naval attaché. He became a heavy drinker and dabbled in the black market. He hung around with the wrong sort of people – and there were a lot of wrong sorts to hang around with. He was recruited as a spy by the UB, the Polish intelligence service. Harry liked the excitement and the access it gave him to sex and luxuries. It fed his vanity too – even though, in the hierarchy of agents, Harry was a bottom feeder.
Until that wet dreary January day on Waterloo Bridge, Harry had been one very lucky spy. Years before, his ex-wife had grassed him up as a suspected spy. But the Security Service hadn’t taken her claim seriously. She had also complained to the police about domestic abuse even though she had no bruises to show them. Harry was a womaniser and a drunk, but he usually limited his abuse to verbal assaults. The Security Service, which had its own fair share of drunks and bad husbands, dismissed Harry’s wife as merely a bitter and twisted woman who wanted revenge. Harry was lucky not to get caught for other reasons. He wasn’t very good at operating undercover. He splashed around his extra money in a flashy way with cars and a lifestyle that was far above his pay grade. He was also careless and forgetful when it came to spy-craft skills such as dead letter boxes and anti-surveillance precautions. His handler, Konon Trofimovich Molody, would gladly have dropped him if the intelligence Harry had been getting via Bunty Gee had not been so valuable.
Bunty had been a filing clerk at the Underwater Weapons Establishment since 1950. She was part of the office furniture. No one would ever have suspected Bunt-the-Frump with her broad Dorset accent of being a spy – although she did posh up a bit when she spoke on the phone. Tongues wagged when she started having an affair with Harry, but who could blame her? In fact, and against the odds, Harry treated her pretty well and even talked of getting married. He also taught her how to use a camera to photograph secret documents.
The most secret of these documents pertained to HMS Dreadnought, the Royal Navy’s first nuclear submarine. They were the details of Dreadnought’s devices that were used to detect other submarines. It had been part of a shopping list that Molody had passed on to Harry. And, appropriately, the film cartridges were in Bunty’s cloth shopping bag as she and Harry descended from the Weymouth train at Waterloo Station.
‘I hope,’ she said to Harry, ‘that Commander Johnson doesn’t turn out to be a drowner, because I’ve taken some awful risks for him.’
Harry patted her hand as they emerged from under the entrance arch into Waterloo Road. ‘He’s not one of your drowners, Ethel.’ Harry always called her by her proper name.
As a child in rural Dorset, Bunty had always been told to keep away from the water meadows when they were flooded. It was because of the drowners. These were beautiful creatures who were neither man nor woman. When the fields were in full flood, the drowners would lay out toys and sparkling trinkets to tempt children to reach into the water for them. And, as soon as they did so, the children would be sucked into the mud to become captives of the drowners and were never seen again.
»»»»
It was a Saturday and there was little traffic on Waterloo Bridge. This made it easier for Skardon’s watchers. They already had Molody under surveillance and were in contact with the cars. It looked like Harry’s luck was running out. Meanwhile, Molody had parked his car near Somerset House and was enjoying the river view from Victoria Embankment. He checked his watch and headed for the bridge.
Bunty had first met Molody a few months earlier during another trip to London. Harry had introduced Molody as Alexander Johnson, a commander in the United States Navy, who was a counter-intelligence specialist. ‘Johnson’ had explained that his job was to check up on how the British handled secret technical information that the Americans shared as a result of the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement. It wasn’t spying, just a ‘verification exercise to build confidence between close allies’. But Bunty didn’t know what to believe. There had been times, usually during heavy drinking sessions, when Harry bragged about being a Soviet spy. Bunty hoped it had just been alcohol-fuelled bravado and Harry’s constant need to impress.
The view from Waterloo Bridge gave Harry and Bunty a perfect excuse to pause and loiter halfway across the bridge. It was a stunning vista of the Thames sweeping past the Houses of Parliament and included almost every other London landmark. Bunty hugged Harry’s arm. She was wearing a fake wedding ring and was looking forward to a night in a luxurious West End hotel. Harry, a Lincolnshire lad, was also dazzled by London but didn’t like to admit it. He was hoping they could get tickets to Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be at the Garrick. Bunty, on the other hand, would have preferred Flower Drum Song, a musical about wealthy Chinese refugees assimilating into life in the USA. Harry thought it sounded a bit soppy, but would probably go along with her wishes.
The watcher from an observation post on the top floor of Somerset House was the first to signal that Molody was on Waterloo Bridge. For the benefit of the snatch teams in the cars, he counted down the remaining yards to the RV point as Molody nonchalantly strolled across the bridge hands in pockets. Did he have a gun?
Bunty smiled when she spotted ‘Johnson’. She found him handsome and utterly charming, but certainly beyond her fondest dreams. For a split second, she wondered if he might be a drowner after all.
»»»»
Special Branch were in Jaguars and Rovers; MI5 and SIS were in boring Humbers. Catesby and his colleagues were there as invited guests to admire the other Security Services. And they were good. Two Jags and a Rover were the first to pounce as they screeched to a halt next to the three spies. A dozen Special Branch poured out on the footpath, all dressed in identical beige Mackintoshes and trilbies. Why, thought Catesby from the SIS Humber, don’t they just wear uniforms? Four Special Branch were waving pistols. Please, Catesby prayed, don’t shoot them. Molody took his hands out of his pockets to show that he was unarmed. He seemed the calmest person on the bridge.
The arrest went like a textbook snatch. When Harry twigged what was happening, he grabbed Bunty’s shopping bag with the films so that he could throw it into the river. But he was rugby tackled and handcuffed by two Special Branch while the bag was still in his girlfriend’s hand. Bunty seemed the most confused and stunned of the three. It must have taken her a while to realise that she was going to be spending the night in a cell instead of a posh hotel. Catesby felt awfully s
orry for her as he watched her run her finger over her fake wedding ring in the desperation of lost hope.
The whole thing was over in less than a minute. The Special Branch cars and their prisoners were the first to go. Catesby’s driver started the engine, but before he could pull away there was a tapping at the passenger window. Catesby wound down the glass. It was Jim Skardon. Catesby looked at his MI5 colleague.
‘Lovely piece of work, Jim. Congratulations.’
‘Can we have a chat?’
‘Sure, hop in.’
‘Why don’t you get in my motor? I’m all alone.’
‘Sure.’
Skardon drove south over the bridge and parked his Humber Hawk next to a derelict warehouse overlooking a crumbling wharf. The tide was now ebbing fast and carrying with it the detritus of London. Catesby liked being near the river. The sailors in his family always called it ‘the London River’. It only became the Thames above London, where deep-sea ships can’t go. Catesby’s grandfather used to skipper a ‘stackie’, one of the Thames barges that shuttled Suffolk hay down to London and returned with cargoes of London horseshit to replenish the hayfields.
Skardon spoke first. ‘Something ain’t right.’
‘I totally agree.’
‘The whole thing reeks, but I don’t know where the smell is coming from.’
At first Catesby wondered if Skardon was being rude about his granddad’s stackie, but then realised he was talking about intelligence matters. ‘I hope…’ Catesby had to be careful. Intelligence between SIS and Five was not always shared. ‘I suppose you know there was a tip-off from the Poles. Not the UB, but a military defector. If you didn’t know this already, you didn’t hear it from me.’
‘You’re not giving anything away. The Polish tip-off was passed on to us. But it wasn’t specific. There wasn’t enough information to nail down Molody – or even that pathetic couple.’
‘Then how did you know?’
‘The information came from a totally anonymous source. The source gave us all Molody’s aliases and his London address. Mr Anonymous also informed us that Molody was born in Russia and gave us the details of his Russian family and background – which, of course, we couldn’t check. But the source told us that Molody had stolen the identity of a dead Canadian child, the Gordon Lonsdale identity he was operating under. And that’s how he came unstuck. We got the RCMP to check the dead kid’s medical records in Ottawa. The child had been circumcised and, according to two of Molody’s girlfriends, this is certainly not the case with him. We then put Molody under surveillance and tracked him to a safe deposit box he uses on Chancery Lane, under another alias of course.’
Catesby smiled. ‘I assume you did a black bag job on the safe deposit.’
Skardon nodded. ‘We did the safe box and found tiny one-time cipher pads hidden in a porcelain figurine and microdot copies of secrets stolen from Portland. Then we put everything back just as we found it.’
‘Down and dusted.’
‘Molody is. But why? Who grassed him and for what reason?’
‘What do you think, Jim?’
‘I think Molody was a helluva fine agent. One of the best and most dedicated I’ve ever encountered. In fact, he was just another professional like us, but working for the other side. I respect him. He wasn’t a scumbag traitor.’
‘But who grassed him?’
Skardon shrugged and looked at the river. ‘It must have been the Sovs themselves – and there’s only one reason why they would sacrifice one of their best agents.’
‘Go on.’
‘Moscow Central wants to protect someone who is even more important than Molody. Someone who is running an even bigger spy network that is ripping out the very heart of Britain’s most vital secrets. It’s scary.’ Skardon smiled. ‘This business does make you paranoid. I hope I don’t sound like an alarmist. But that’s my theory. What’s yours?’
Catesby told him.
»»»»
The news of the arrest of Molody and the Portland spies broke two days later. It was a banner headline in every newspaper. Esteban, a wealthy Cuban exile from Castro’s revolution, was absolutely delighted. He invited his best girls for a party, but didn’t tell them why.
Broadway Buildings, London: April, 1961
Catesby felt lucky to be at the meeting. In fact, he felt lucky to still be in the service. His sister had lost her job at GCHQ because she was deemed a security risk. It was a messy situation involving her duplicitous boyfriend. Catesby had been subjected to months of vetting, but had proved as clean as a disinfected and bleached whistle. There may have been those who still had doubts, but Catesby wasn’t going to lie low. He held forth at the meeting, loud and brassy.
‘This guy is completely genuine. Not a shadow of a doubt. And how do we know that he is genuine? Because he is totally bonkers. If you don’t believe me, call in a psychiatrist. Moscow Central would never use someone who is that unbalanced as a fake double.’
There was a heated debate within SIS and MI5 about whether or not Oleg, codenamed HERO, was a Soviet plant. If HERO was genuine, it would be the biggest intelligence coup that the West had ever scored in the Cold War. The secret inter-agency meeting to discuss HERO had been adjourned in C’s office on the fourth floor of Broadway Buildings. It was the only floor of Broadway that wasn’t a dingy labyrinth of plywood partitions, frosted glass and grey curling lino. When you emerged from the squalor of the claustrophobic creaking lift you stepped into a magic world of finery. The corridor was covered with thick burgundy carpet and the walls hung with Turners, Constables and Gainsboroughs from the Government Art Collection’s VIP vaults – but no Poussins. C’s office itself was a serious treasure trove of eighteenth-century joinery. The conference table and the chairs were priceless Chippendale. You sat down very gingerly and didn’t rock backwards on the rear legs – or do handstands on the arms of the chair, as had one SAS major to the taxpayers’ cost.
The problem with HERO was that he was a ‘walk in’, an agent who hadn’t been coerced or targeted, but simply offered his services out of the blue. ‘Walk ins’ were always suspected as plants. HERO was a colonel in GRU, Soviet military intelligence, but even more important was his personal closeness to people at the very top. The two loudest HERO sceptics were from Five. Catesby called them Fox and Ferret because of their pointy faces and demeanour.
Fox retaliated first, ‘HERO is sane as well as cunning. If, Catesby, you find his behaviour unbalanced, it could well be an act that he puts on to deceive people such as yourself.’
Catesby gave a weary sigh. ‘You’re making a reductio ad absurdum. Shall I translate?’
Fox was a self-taught engineer in the scientific and technical branch of MI5. He came from a humble background and hated being patronised – especially by someone from an even more humble background. The fact that Catesby had made it to Cambridge and into the ‘officer class’ enraged Fox. To Catesby’s discredit, he loved to rub that fact in Fox’s face. They loathed each other. Henry Bone had once described their mutual loathing as ‘the rage of twin Calibans seeing their own faces in a mirror’. Catesby knew it was a nasty crack, but laughed. He realised Fox didn’t even know what Bone was talking about.
Dick White, the chief of SIS, intervened in his typical emollient way. ‘It’s not possible, William, to submit HERO to a psychiatric examination, as desirable as that may be.’ White nodded to Fox. ‘I appreciate your reservations that HERO may be a KGB plant and we take note of the report you submitted.’
Catesby nodded. ‘May I continue?’
‘Just a second, William.’ White gave an admonitory stare. ‘I’d like to say something about your comment that HERO is “unbalanced”. Betraying your country is almost always the act of an unstable and maladjusted personality. The traitor is often warped by a sense of grievance and desire for revenge.’
Catesby kept a blank face. He didn’t want to disagree with the boss in public, but there were many other reasons for turning against
your country. White’s portrait of a traitor did, however, apply to HERO.
White gave Catesby a softer look. ‘Other than Shergy, who can’t be here this evening, you’ve spent more time with HERO than any of us. Can you tell us the latest?’
‘He wants to meet the Queen. In fact, he can’t understand why the Queen hasn’t asked to meet him. He also wants to meet President Kennedy. The Cousins, ever helpful, have promised…’
‘Which cousins are you talking about?’ interrupted Fox.
‘Our CIA colleagues who are jointly running HERO with us.’ Catesby gave Fox what Henry called his ‘supercilious smile’, knowing that Fox wouldn’t know what supercilious meant. ‘I am sure, Peter, that you know who they are – and that’s why Shergy can’t be with us. He’s dealing with them. As I was saying, the Cousins have promised HERO a meeting with Kennedy if HERO can arrange a trip across the Atlantic. They do make us look mean-spirited for not having wheeled in Her Majesty wearing a crown and ermine. I suggested Lord Mountbatten as an alternative, but HERO wasn’t impressed.’
Henry Bone intervened. ‘The difficulty in dealing with HERO is that the Americans keep outbidding us in catering to his ego needs and indulging his whims.’
Catesby nodded a thank you to Henry. ‘And the photo sessions proved the point. HERO asked to be photographed in the uniform of a British Army officer. So we dressed him up as a colonel in full kit with Sam Browne belt and the bullion lion and crown cap badge of a senior staff officer. I thought he looked the part. But the Yanks trumped us with a brigadier’s uniform and a chest full of medals. It was the over the top, HERO looked a right tosser.’
‘Don’t dismiss the photos, William,’ said Bone. ‘If HERO ever has second thoughts, those snaps are going to provide a lethal blackmail threat.’
‘Good point. But even more lethal is HERO’s recklessness. When our session at the Mount Royal Hotel ended it was already past midnight, but HERO insisted on doing the nightclubs. He picked up a girl and didn’t get back to his quarters at the Sov Embassy until seven a.m.’
The Whitehall Mandarin Page 17