But the trouble was that he did want to join it. He wanted nothing more than to become part of the world of stern necessities he had followed for so long, but as it were from behind a one-way pane of glass. Integrity had disenfranchised him. From now on he could not hope to serve humanity except through the use of the vote.
His life was empty. His resignation had cut off his involvement, like turning off the television on a soap opera, with the deathless real-life dramas of the tapes.
He felt that he was useless. He considered suicide, but thought better of it. Then, having weathered a fairly routine and unremarkable nervous breakdown, became a contemplative monk—high Church of England.
Another spy I met at a cocktail party, said in the course of chat about this or that—it was in London, in the late Fifties—that at the outbreak of the Second World War he had been in Greece, or perhaps it was Turkey, where at another cocktail party, over the canapes, an official from the British Embassy invited him to spy for his country.
‘But I can’t,’ said this man. ‘You must know that perfectly well.’
‘But why ever not?’ inquired the official. A Second Secretary, I think he was.
‘Because, as of course you must know, I am a Communist Party Member.’
‘Indeed? How interesting? But surely that is not going to stand in the way of your desire to serve your country?’ said the official, matching ferocious honesty with bland interest.
Cutting this anecdote short—it comes, after all, from a pretty petty level in the affairs of men, this man went home, and spent a sleepless night weighing his allegiances, and decided by morning that of course the Second Secretary was right. He would like to serve his country, which was after all engaged in a war against Fascism. He explained his decision to his superiors in the Communist Party, who agreed with him, and to his wife and his comrades. Then, meeting the Second Secretary at another cocktail party, he informed him of the decision he had taken. He was then invited to attach himself to a certain Army Unit, in some capacity to do with the Ministry of Information. He was to await orders. In due course they came, and he discovered that it was his task to spy on the Navy, or rather, that portion of it operating near him. Our Navy, of course. He was always unable to work out the ideology of this. That a communist should not be set to spy on, let’s say, Russia, seemed to him fair and reasonable, but why was he deemed suitable material to spy on his own side? He found it all baffling, and indeed rather lowering. Then, at a cocktail party, he happened to meet a naval officer with whom he proceeded to get drunk, and they both suddenly understood on a wild hunch that they were engaged on spying on each other, one for the Navy, and one for the Army. Both found this work without much uplift, they were simply not able to put their hearts into it, apart from the fact that they had been in the same class at prep school and had many other social ties. Not even the fact that they weren’t being paid, since it was assumed by their superiors—quite correctly of course—that they would be happy to serve their countries for nothing, made them feel any better. They developed the habit of meeting regularly in a café where they drank wine and coffee and played chess in a vine-covered arbour overlooking a particularly fine bit of the Mediterranean where, without going through all the tedious effort of spying on each other, they simply gave each other relevant information. They were found out. Their excuse that they were fighting the war on the same side was deemed inadequate. They were both given the sack as spies, and transferred to less demanding work. But until D-Day and beyond, the British Army spied on the British Navy, and vice versa. They probably all still do.
The fact that human beings, given half a chance, start seeing each other’s points of view seems to me the only ray of hope there is for humanity, but obviously this tendency must be one to cause anguish to seniors in the diplomatic corps and the employers of your common or garden spy—not the high level spies, but of that in a moment. Diplomats, until they have understood why, always complain that as soon as they understand a country and its language really well, hey presto, off they are whisked to another country. But diplomacy could not continue if the opposing factotums lost a proper sense of national hostility. Some diplomatic corps insist that their employees must only visit among each other, and never fraternize with the locals, obviously believing that understanding with others is inculcated by a sort of osmosis. And of course, any diplomat that shows signs of going native, that is to say really enjoying the manners and morals of a place, must be withdrawn at once.
Not so the masters among the spies: one dedicated to his country’s deepest interests must be worse than useless. The rarest spirits must be those able to entertain two or three allegiances at once; the counter spies, the double and triple agents. Such people are not born. It can’t be that they wake up one morning at the age of thirteen crying: Eureka, I’ve got it, I want to be a double agent! That’s what I was born to do! Nor can there be a training school for multiple spies, a kind of top class that promising pupils graduate towards. Yet that capacity which might retard a diplomat’s career, or mean death to the small fry among spies, must be precisely the one watched out for by the Spymasters who watch and manipulate in the high levels of the world’s thriving espionage systems. What probably happens is that a man drifts, even unwillingly, into serving his country as a spy—like my acquaintance of the cocktail party who then found himself spying on the Senior Service of his own side. Then, whether there through a deep sense of vocation or without enthusiasm, he must begin by making mistakes, sometimes pleased with himself and sometimes not; he goes through a phase of wondering whether he would not have done better to go into the Stock Exchange, or whatever his alternative was—and then suddenly there comes that moment, fatal to punier men but a sign of his own future greatness, when he is invaded by sympathy for the enemy. Long dwelling on what X is doing, likely to be doing, or thinking, or planning, makes X’s thoughts as familiar and as likeable as his own. The points of view of the nation he spends all his time trying to undo, are comfortably at home in a mind once tuned only to those of his own dear Fatherland. He is thinking the thoughts of those he used to call enemies before he understands that he is already psychologically a double agent, and before he guesses that those men who must always be on the watch for such precious material have noticed, perhaps even prognosticated, his condition.
On those levels where the really great spies move, whose names we never hear, but whose existence we have to deduce, what fantastic feats of global understanding must be reached, what metaphysical heights of international brotherhood!
It is of course not possible to do more than take the humblest flights into speculation, while making do with those so frequent and highly publicized spy dramas, for some reason or other so very near to farce, that do leave obscurity for our attention.
It can’t be possible that the high reaches of espionage can have anything in common with, for instance, this small happening.
A communist living in a small town in England, who had been openly and undramatically a communist for years, and for whom the state of being a communist had become rather like the practice of an undemanding religion—this man looked out of his window one fine summer afternoon to see standing in the street outside his house a car of such foreignness and such opulence that he was embarrassed, and at once began to work out what excuses he could use to his working-class neighbours whose cars, if any, would be dust in comparison. Out of this monster of a car came two large smiling Russians, carrying a teddy bear the size of a sofa, a bottle of vodka, a long and very heavy roll, which later turned out to be a vast carpet with a picture of the Kremlin on it, and a box of chocolates of British make, with a pretty lady and a pretty dog.
Every window in the street already had heads packed behind the curtains.
‘Come in,’ said he, ‘but I don’t think I have the pleasure of knowing who . . .’
The roll of carpet was propped in the hall, the three children sent off to play with the teddy bear in the kitchen, and the box of
chocolates set aside for the lady of the house, who was out doing the week’s shopping in the High Street. The vodka was opened at once.
It turned out that it was his wife they wanted: they were interested in him only as a go-between. They wished him to ask his wife, who was an employee of the town council, to get hold of the records of the Council’s meetings, and to pass these records on to them. Now, this wasn’t London, or even Edinburgh. It was a small unimportant North of England town, in which it would be hard to imagine anything ever happening that could be of interest to anyone outside it, let alone the agents of a Foreign Power. But, said he, these records are open, anyone could go and get copies—you, for instance—‘Comrades, I shall be delighted to take you to the Town Hall myself.’
No, what they had been instructed to do was to ask his wife to procure them minutes and records, nothing less would do.
A long discussion ensued. It was all no use. The Russians could not be made to see that what they asked was unnecessary. Nor could they understand that to arrive in a small suburban street in a small English town in a car the length of a battleship, was to draw the wrong sort of attention.
‘But why is that?’ they enquired. ‘Representatives of the country where the workers hold power should use a good car. Of course, comrade. You have not thought it out from a class position!’
The climax came when, despairing of the effects of rational argument, they said: ‘And comrade, these presents, the bear, the carpet, the chocolates, the vodka, are only a small token in appreciation of your work for our common cause. Of course you will be properly recompensed.’
At which point he was swept by, indeed taken over entirely by, atavistic feelings he had no idea were in him at all. He stood up and pointed a finger shaking with rage at the door: ‘How dare you imagine,’ he shouted, ‘that my wife and I would take money. If I were going to spy, I’d spy for the love of mankind, for duty, and for international socialism. Take those bloody things out of here, wait I’ll get that teddy bear from the kids. And you can take your bloody car out of here too.’
His wife, when she came back from the supermarket and heard the story, was even more insulted than he was.
But emotions like these are surely possible only in the lowest possible levels of spy material—in this case so low they didn’t qualify for the first step, entrance into the brotherhood.
Full circle back to Our Man in the Post Office, or rather, the first of three.
After sedulous attendance at a lot of left-wing meetings, semi-private and public—for above all Tom was a methodical man who, if engaged in a thing always gave it full value—he put his hand up one evening in the middle of a discussion about Agrarian Reform in Venezuela, and said: ‘I must ask permission to ask a question.’
Everyone always laughed at him when he did this, put up his hand to ask for permission to speak, or to leave, or to have opinions about something. Little did we realize that we were seeing here not just a surface mannerism, or habit, but his strongest characteristic.
It was late in the meeing, at that stage when the floor is well-loaded with empty coffee cups, beer glasses, and full ash trays. Some people had already left.
He wanted to know what he ought to do: ‘I want to have the benefit of your expert advice.’ As it happened he had already taken the decision he was asking about.
After some two years of a life not so much double—the word implies secrecy—as dual, his boss in the Central Post Office called him to ask how he was enjoying his life with the Left. Tom was as doggedly informative with him as he was with us, and said that we were interesting people, well-informed, and full of a high-class brand of idealism which he found inspiring.
‘I always feel good after going to one of their meetings,’ he reported he had said. ‘It takes you right out of yourself and makes you think.’
His chief said that he, for his part, always enjoyed hearing about idealism and forward-looking thought, and invited Tom to turn in reports about our activities, our discussions, and most particularly our plans for the future, as well in advance as possible.
Tom told us that he said to his boss that ‘he didn’t like the idea of doing that sort of thing behind our backs, because say what you like about the reds, they are very hospitable’.
The chief had said that it would be for the good of his country.
Tom came to us to say that he had told his boss that he had agreed, because he wanted to be of assistance to the national war effort.
It was clear to everyone that having told us that he had agreed to spy on us, he would, since that was his nature, most certainly go back to his boss and tell him that he had told us that he had agreed to spy. After which he would come back to us to tell us that he had told his boss that . . . and so on. Indefinitely, if his boss didn’t get tired of it. Tom could not see that his chief would shortly find him unsuitable material for espionage, and might even dismiss him from being a sorter in the Post Office altogether—a nuisance for us. After which he, the chief, would probably look for someone else to give him information.
It was Harry, one of the other two Post Office employees attending Left Club meetings, who suggested that it would probably be himself who would next be invited to spy on us, now that Tom had ‘told’. Tom was upset, when everybody began speculating about his probable supercession by Harry or even Dick. The way he saw it was that his complete frankness with both us and his chief was surely deserving of reward. He ought to be left in the job. God knows how he saw the future. Probably that both his boss and ourselves would continue to employ him. We would use him to find out how our letters were slowly moving through the toils of censorship, and to hurry them on, if possible; his chief would use him to spy on us. When I say employ, I don’t want anyone to imagine this implies payment. Or at least, certainly not from our side. Ideology had to be his spur, sincerity his reward.
It will by now have been noticed that our Tom was not as bright as he might have been. But he was a pleasant enough youth. He was rather good-looking too, about twenty-two. His physical characteristic was neatness. His clothes were always just so; he had a small alert dark moustache; he had glossy dark well-brushed hair. His rather small hands were well-manicured—the latter trait bound to be found offensive by good colonials, whose eye for such anti-masculine evidence—as they were bound to see it, then if not now—was acute. But he was a fairly recent immigrant, from just before the war, and had not yet absorbed the mores. He probably had not noticed that real Rhodesians, in those days at least, did not like men who went in for a careful appearance.
Tom, in spite of our humorous forecast that he would be bound to tell his boss that he had told us, and his stiff and wounded denials that such a thing was possible, found himself impelled to do just that. He reported back that his chief had lost his rag with him’.
But that was not the end. He was offered the job of learning how to censor letters. He had said to his boss that he felt in honour bound to tell us, and his boss said: ‘Oh for Christ’s sake. Tell them anything you damned well like. You won’t be choosing what is to be censored.’
As I said, this was an unsophisticated town in those days, and the condition of ‘everybody knowing everybody else’ was bound to lead to such warm human situations.
He accepted the offer because: ‘My mother always told me that she wanted me to do well for myself, and I’ll increase my rating into Schedule Three as soon as I start work on censoring, and that means an increment of £50 a year.’
We congratulated him, and urged him to keep us informed about how people were trained as censors, and he agreed to do this. Shortly after that the war ended, and all the wartime cameraderie of wartime ended as the Cold War began. The ferment of Left activity ended too.
We saw Tom no more, but followed his progress, steady if slow, up the Civil Service. The last I heard he was heading a Department among whose duties is censorship. I imagine him, a man in his fifties, husband and no doubt a father, looking down the avenues of lost time to
those dizzy days when he was a member of a dangerous revolutionary organization. ‘Yes,’ he must often say, ‘you can’t tell me anything about them. They are idealistic, I can grant you so much, but they are dangerous. Dangerous and wrong-headed! I left them as soon as I understood what they really were.’
African Stories Page 84