Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  Philip lived in a handsome Regency house in Dorset, very much a gentleman’s residence. Once when I was staying there, he invited Fred Warner to dinner. A member of the Foreign Office, he had been a friend of the Soviet agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean and had accompanied Kim Philby on some motorbike trip in Europe, bringing on himself the nickname of Red Fred as well as numerous interrogations with the security services. He had been posted to Burma, and in an encounter that had entertained a small circle, David Winn had advised Fred to learn Burmese so that he could earn a living translating Burmese poetry when the going became really rough. Reminded of this tease, Fred hit the table so hard that he brought down the delicate candlesticks. Philip followed it up with another invitation to Fred, keeping me in the picture. “I will tweak and probe till candles once more leap from sconces as Diplomat’s Shoe Strikes Table.” Fred was selling his Dorset estate, “so may well regret yet his inadequate grasp of Tamil, or whatever language it was David Winn advised him to master against a destitute old age.” Philip would have wished to be a successor to Layard, Kinglake, Burkhardt, Mungo Park, Richard Burton, Speke, the adventurous men who opened paths all over the world and whose books, preferably first editions, he collected single-mindedly. Surely one of the most surprising novels in English literature is Philip’s Captain Vinegar’s Commission, a pastiche of this Victorian genre with its military and imperial undertones.

  For lengthy periods he abandoned home and civilized life, and on returning he was in the habit of isolating himself again in some bleak place where he could write up the latest experiences without distraction. He did not feel justified in “making the house miserable whilst I worked, a place of whispers and tiptoes and dying fires and silent meals.” In his heartfelt words about the self-discipline imposed by blank paper, “I behave like a savage, speak to no one, act furtively, kick the dog, have always taken cottages before (where, like Baudelaire, I can be self-catering and fais bouillir et mange mon cœur).” Some colorful idea, some recapitulation of the past, in the case of Kars and Khiva the romance of distant inaccessible places, had a grip on his imagination. He and I had a joke correspondence using paper and envelopes that bore no relation to where we actually were but spun a misleading story. Letterheads I received from him include the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, M. V. Innisfallen of the City of Cork Steam Packet, the Gellert Hotel in Budapest, the Hotel Bulevard in Bucharest, the British Embassy in Rome (dated long after his service as honorary attaché) and the Turban Amasya Oteli. Also postcards variously postmarked from Tallinn, Urfa, Prague, the Algonquin in New York and Hawthornden Castle where writers are supposed to stay in and write, that is to say another House of Correction.

  Always cadaverous, losing most of his red hair as he aged, he was not the weakling that he might have appeared to be. He was resting on the bed in a Moscow hotel when a man came into the room carrying a knife and demanded money. Philip immediately grappled with him, and eventually managed to hold him down on the bed and wrest the knife away. The man then fled. Philip had suffered several cuts. The woman receptionist on that floor of the hotel must have heard the scuffle but refused to respond. The blood on Philip’s arms was not enough for the police in the local station to register the assault.

  Here is a letter ostensibly from Celik Palas Oteli in Bursa, written after what he calls a ramble in the Levant. Unusual as others may have judged him to be, Philip evidently had come to terms with himself. “I found I had manufactured for myself a Hero-Narrator … an attitude not wholly in accordance with my real one when confronted with the ups and downs of solitary travel. You leave things out – the dull bits – and after re-writing a time or two, you have clean forgotten them. By dull bits I mean trying to find somewhere to have breakfast in a shabby dusty Turkish town, after sharing your bedroom with two stout Turks, when every eating shop seems to be selling only corba iskembe. Still, there’s nothing like Travel: I had, I suppose, six days out of the month which I will never forget, and what other recreation could claim so high a proportion of bulls-eyes? Only when crossing the Syrian border from Urfa to Aleppo (which took eight hours at the mercy of some very reckless young urban guerrillas) did I think that a 47-year-old father of four with a comfortable home was possibly in the wrong place. Syria is in the hands of the successors of those bashibazuks and Arnauts and Nizam deserters who terrorised the Ottoman Empire. But an hour or two at Baron’s Hotel of course restored me to absolute trust in the flatness of the earth under an Englishman’s feet.”

  HERBERT GOLD

  Biafra Goodbye

  1972

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1972, I moved from Hayward to the far larger and more important California State University at Berkeley. Besides creative writing, I also had to teach a class in English literature. At the first of these classes, a man my age introduced himself as my Vietnam instructor. And what might that be? I asked. The class will only want to talk about Vietnam, he answered, you don’t have the right information, I’ll deal with the questions. There won’t be any, I told him, because I’d send such questioners to the South East Asia department. You won’t get away with that, my instructor promised.

  Early in the morning, I would walk across a beautifully tended grass lawn with water sprinklers adding to the freshness. Rioters had smashed the big plate-glass window of my classroom. Fearful that refitted glass was bound to attract more of the same violence, the authorities had boarded up the window. Entering that darkened room, I was invariably taken aback by the message daubed in huge black letters on the board: “Go fuck yourself teacher pig.” On one typical occasion, my assistant threw her copy of Nostromo across the room, asserting tearfully to one and all, “I’m not going to read this shit.” She had become a radical feminist, it turned out, because her father did not have the money to pay for the violin lessons she’d set her heart on. On another occasion amid a lot of laughter I had to admit that I didn’t know what the word “roach” meant to druggies. One fine day Allen Ginsberg and three thousand innocents sat crosslegged outside on the campus grass and kept up for hours their chant of Om Mani Padme Hum. To generalize, most of those who had anything to do with the university appeared to believe that if they didn’t know something it wasn’t worth knowing.

  Those were strange times in a strange place. There was a sense that the past was giving way to a future that declined to be born. Everybody around seemed to be busy filling their lives with nothing. At Berkeley, someone tried to set fire to the rare books section of the library, where Sir Francis Drake’s navigational map was on display. Professors in their angry hundreds crowded in to the auditorium intending to wreck a speech that Ronald Reagan, then Governor of the State, was to give. Such was his charm that almost instantly they showed they couldn’t applaud loud enough or long enough. Flower children drifted from Haight-Ashbury to take part in demonstrations against the Vietnam war. Many were barefoot but the police and the National Guard wore boots. One of my students, Mark, was bright and at the sight of him in the front line chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” I asked him to name the countries clockwise adjoining Vietnam. The anger in his face showed that I had broken a spell. Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver led the Black Panthers from fortified headquarters in the city. Posed photographs showed them cradling rifles. “Off the pigs” was their call to arms.

  Herb Gold took me in hand. Other writers were recognized locally, for example the poet Louis Zukovsky or Sol Stern, editor of the magazine Ramparts, but Herb was the only one with a national reputation. So famous was he that whoever scribbled graffiti on the walls of public lavatories had come up with “Herb Gold has exceeded his ecological quota” and he could only have thought that his joke rested on common knowledge about Herb’s numerous wives and children. More graffiti in the same hand read, “Donald Duck is a Jew.” Salt, Fathers and other novels of his dealt with love and death, origins and family life, in short the great themes of classic fiction. His essays appeared in Commentary, Harper’s and even Playboy. I told him I could never be an American wr
iter, the country was too big and diffuse for storytelling. We all have our patch, he answered. The essays and articles collected in The Magic Will and My Last Two Thousand Years make sense of the life he is living: no flower child he. He took me to one quite smart party of friends. He and I were the only ones to leave when they passed around what I then knew was a roach, reducing conversation to childish giggling.

  As part of my San Francisco experience, he also arranged for us to have tea with Margot Fitzjames, a made-up name if ever there was one. A high-class Madame, she moved in the best circles and was said to be extremely expensive. Our meeting, she had agreed beforehand, was purely for social purposes, not business. When she received us in her large and elegant drawing room, she was wearing only a bath-robe. Most probably she was in her forties. While we were sipping our tea and making small talk, an inner door opened and in came a young man, possibly a teenager. He was fully dressed. Sheepishly, he sidled past without a word and saw himself out. We pretended not to have noticed. Herb reported that in a telephone call the lady had praised our good manners.

  The enlisting of writers in a political cause is a feature of twentieth-century literature. Books like Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam or Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile, put together after a three-week whistle-stop tour of Sandinista Nicaragua, are only extended anti-American manifestoes. Herb Gold’s Biafra Goodbye is a plea to approve what was essentially an act of secession from the state of Nigeria. He took up the Biafran cause, as far as one can see, because these people were being maltreated and it was only human to come to their side. Herb may also have had a sense that the crushing of the Christian Ibos of Biafra by the Hausas and other Muslim tribes was an early portent of the rise of militant Islam.

  Over the years we kept up a sporadic correspondence. A letter dated 23 August 1982 enclosed an article he had published a couple of weeks previously in the Los Angeles Times. A woman had said to him, “Herb, Have You Heard the Startling News? The Holocaust Never Happened Like They Say.” The paper made these words the title of the piece. This woman was university-educated and devoted to the arts, Herb says, and on top of that she’d been the hostess of the party Herb and I walked away from rather than be stupefied with pot.

  OLEG GORDIEVSKY

  Next Stop Execution

  1995

  THE DOYEN OF THE post-Communist Russian community in Britain is Oleg Gordievsky. I once likened him to Alexander Herzen, the most brilliant of Russian political exiles in the nineteenth century, whose proposals for liberalizing Czarism in his day might have forestalled the Bolshevik revolution. Gordievsky is not an intellectual, to be sure, but his life is a commentary on the central political drama in the Russia of his day: namely how to become a free individual in a free society. In a KGB career in which he rose to the rank of colonel, he was able to observe from the inside how the Soviet Union rested on terror. Since Communism is an ideology whose end justifies all means of violence and injustice, it was therefore impervious to reform. His decision to work against it, to pass information and Soviet documentation to MI6, or British intelligence, required exceptional courage as well as moral conviction. Promotion to be the KGB Resident in London was an unexpected opportunity to be within easy touch of his handlers.

  Those with knowledge of such matters say that he was a classic double agent, in charge of Soviet subversion and espionage in the country while keeping the British completely informed. To the general public nowadays, it seems, the Cold War is the quarrel of a past beyond recall in which defectors on both sides are much of a muchness, engaged in shady business of the same sort. The historic reality is that the likes of Kim Philby had given up freedom in favor of Communism, while Gordievsky gave up Communism in favor of freedom.

  With fatal symmetry, two members of the CIA, Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, were double agents, and when they defected in 1985 to Moscow they cast suspicion on Gordievsky though they had no proof he was working for the British. The KGB summoned him back to Moscow and interrogated him under drugs. “I had prepared myself psychologically all the time for this possibility,” Gordievsky was to tell me. “I had programmed myself to deny. If I made it difficult for them, I thought I might survive.” The most likely outcome was a short spell in one of the underground cells of the Lubyanka, and a bullet in the nape of the neck. Presumably the KGB allowed him to stay out of prison in the hope of catching him doing something that justified the death sentence.

  Anticipating just such an emergency, Gordievsky’s handlers in MI6 had a pre-arranged plan to smuggle him out of the country secretly in defiance of internationally agreed codes of conduct, a stunt for which exfiltration is the proper term in the idiom of the trade. Quite senior personnel from the British Embassy were to rendezvous with him deep in the Russian countryside, hide him in the boot of their car, cross the Soviet border and drive on into Finland. So far as is known, this incredible adventure is the sole example of successful exfiltration.

  Researching my account of the implosion of Soviet Communism, I met Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Main Directorate of the KGB in the Gorbachev period and therefore harmed by Gordievsky’s defection. He said, “The KGB has a long memory, and a long arm, and it doesn’t like traitors.” Vladimir Putin had come up through the ranks of the KGB to start his first presidency in 2000. Promotion of a secret policeman within the Kremlin inner circle seemed a refutation of everything Gordievsky stood for. Putin is on record with the sinister threat, “Traitors kick the bucket for themselves, believe me.” Salman Rushdie is now not the only person living in this country under sentence of death from a foreign power.

  Ten years after defecting, Gordievsky published his autobiography, Next Stop Execution. It was a sensation. Taking his life in his hands, he had surely contributed to the ultimate defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, perhaps second only to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as an individual fighting for freedom. He also exposed a number of Westerners who were Soviet agents. One was a journalist called Richard Gott whom I happened to have met and knew to be a useful idiot of no real interest. A very different agent was Michael Foot, at that time leader of the Labour Party opposition in Parliament to the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The KGB had given him £37,000, something he claimed he could not remember.

  On a winter evening in 2001, Gordievsky came to my house. In accentuated English, the vowels liquid in the Russian style, he liked to continue fighting the good fight. A little earlier in a pub, he said gravely, he had spotted the head of a British trade union whom he himself had recruited as a KGB paid informer. Recognizing that he might be exposed then and there, this man had taken to his heels. Simon Heffer had written in the Daily Telegraph that Gordievsky’s information that Jack Jones (another trade union leader and very influential) was a Soviet agent “may or may not be true.” Gordievsky’s rejoinder was deadly: “I was his last case officer, meeting him together with his wife, who had been a Comintern agent since the mid-1930s.… I had the pleasure of reading volumes of his files, which were kept in the British department of the KGB.” Or again, A. N. Wilson, an idiomatic master of misrepresentation, in 2004 had written an article in the Evening Standard taking the line that the Soviet threat to Britain during the Cold War was “nonsense.” Another deadly rejoinder from Gordievsky began with the reprimand, “It was not a very enlightened remark” and went on to enumerate the Soviet troops and missiles that had been in place to destroy Britain.

  The murder in November 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko is a landmark in the annals of crime. An ex-KGB officer, he was a ranking Lieutenant Colonel. His story always was that he had been ordered to kill Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch who had been close to Vladimir Putin but had fallen out with him and settled in exile in London. Instead, Litvinenko befriended Berezovsky and campaigned against Putin; he was also in the habit of dropping in on Gordievsky for a meal or a chat. Flying in from Moscow, two hit-men left a trail of polonium-210, a rare radioactive substance that poisons and kills those who come into contact with it. Litvinenko d
ied rather slowly, and on his deathbed he accused Putin of responsibility for murdering him. Gordievsky has no doubt about it. Discovered dead in his house, Berezovsky was supposed to have put an end to his life, but the KGB has a well-tested saying that any fool can commit a murder but it takes an artist to commit a suicide. Fear for his own security obliges Gordievsky to live under a different name, therefore it is only tradecraft to be sure not to use his real name on an envelope. In a letter to me arranging that this time we’d meet at his house, he refers to “the cannibal Putin.” Those cold eyes of his, said Gordievsky, are all anyone needs to know about the man who has built Russia into “a neo-totalitarian country.”

  Postscript. The Spy and the Traitor, Ben Macintyre’s biography of Gordievsky, makes it plain that the exfiltration was a chancy business that very nearly went wrong at several points. Two couples from the Embassy and MI6 went far beyond the call of duty. At a crucial checkpoint on the border, a security guard with a sniffer dog approached. One of the two British women had her baby with her, and with brilliant timing this baby had just filled her nappy. The mother laid her on the boot of the car in which Gordievsky was hiding in order to change the nappy. The dog was put off. Had the British personnel been caught out and detained, the Anglo-Soviet relationship would have been in the balance and we would never have heard the end of it. A Prime Minister less anti-Communist than Mrs. Thatcher might have refused to permit the exfiltration to go ahead, which would have spared Gordievsky the ordeal in the boot but almost certainly cost him his life. Ben honors Gordievsky’s profound historical importance and stupendous bravery. Incidentally, Ben is the son of Angus Macintyre, a lifelong friend who sadly was killed in a car accident just after he’d become President of Hertford College, Oxford. Ben’s sprawling signature familiarizes my copy of his book.