Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  ‘Keep faith,’ Martineau wired from Moscow. ‘Peter not dead. Will rise again.’ It all sounded barmy, typical Martineau.

  During those uncomfortable weeks, the Peter cynics, nursing their wounds after Corless’s rise, regained lost ground.

  ‘Peter’s lost his tongue,’ Adrian Gardner said with malicious pleasure. ‘And Rupert’s lost his balls.’

  An anti-Corless whisper campaign spread like a bush fire. A number of us were sure Adrian Gardner was behind it. If he was, he concealed his involvement skilfully. Corless’s people advised a show of force. Corless had to fight his corner again and he showed great determination to do so. Over the years, steel had entered his soul and now he was a match for anyone.

  Whatever the reason for Peter’s loss of voice, he said, he had no doubt the ailment was temporary, patience would prompt his recovery and before long Peter would be returned to us.

  Corless was gambling his career on Peter’s return. We thought it was madness. All he had to go on was Martineau’s dotty telegram, and none of us would have staked sixpence on that. But Rupert was adamant. Peter was missing, not lost. He would return. It was just a matter of time.

  His courage and obduracy stemmed the tide. Rupert must know something no one else did, the whisperers said. How else could he make such a stand? Miraculously, in the face of such apparent certainty, the tide of hostility receded.

  A week later, without warning or explanation, Peter suddenly reappeared and once more the intelligence flowed. Somehow the lid on the Soviet Union had been prised open again and we could look in. The light was bad and we couldn’t see far, but Peter’s silence had shown us that without his connection we were totally in the dark. We had lived on a diet of surmise and prediction, which are never good for the decision-making process.

  ‘Peter risen,’ Martineau wired, ‘halleluja.’

  Once more the cynics retreated, Adrian Gardner among them. Corless’s star was on the move again but not quite with the heady speed he had experienced previously. The damage may have been limited by Peter’s Lazarus-like return, but damage there was. Seeds of doubt about the credibility of Peter the Great had been sown. The period of silence would not go away. Why had Peter vanished? What had happened? Was Peter still kosher? Explanations were asked for but none was forthcoming. Corless ignored the questions and got on with the business in hand.

  ‘Peter has come back to us’, he said. ‘We should rejoice.’

  That was his way of closing the door on an unhappy episode that he wanted to forget. The only test, he said, was the quality of Peter’s intelligence. If the early reports were anything to go by, it was proving to be better than ever. We had an inside view of the rapid expansion of the Soviet sphere of interest as communism engulfed Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, Yugoslavia and Albania. It was a progress we could do nothing to halt.

  Corless held centre stage once more, but there were assassins waiting in the wings, and Adrian Gardner was one of them. Corless had only to slip up once and his enemies on his own side would get him. He delighted in this new circumstance. That he was now a major player in departmental politics and a target of so much jealousy proved he had arrived where he wanted to be.

  By his own terms, Corless had made it.

  *

  The Soviet Intelligence Group, or SOVINT, was an ad hoc collection of working committees made up of intelligence officers, civil servants, seconded military and academics (economists, historians, specialists in politics, Russian speakers) whose task was to interpret any information coming out of the Soviet Union. The aim was to build up a picture of what was going on in Russia by pulling together all the available evidence and submitting it to a critical and high-level analysis.

  SOVINT’s findings were then passed to the appropriate authority in Whitehall (nuclear issues to the Ministry of Supply, politics to the Foreign Office and so on, with copies of every report to a special Committee of the Cabinet), in the belief that this continuous stream of information would assist the decision-making process in the difficult post-war years when no one was sure which way the Soviets would jump. In the eyes of its progenitors in the Cabinet Office, this loose association of experts was SOVINT’s strength. The ability to call in experts when they were needed while otherwise leaving them undisturbed was seen as a time-and money-saving device, and satisfactorily progressive.

  ‘A structure to fit these hard-pressed times,’ was Rupert Corless’s verdict.

  Quite deliberately, and in our view, very properly, the Cabinet Office decreed that the precise nature of our work was to be kept secret. In any civil service, there is nothing like a hint of secrecy to arouse intense speculative interest, not to say suspicion, and SOVINT became the focus of wide attention within days of the creation of our strange, unshapely federation of talents, ‘our archipelago of specialists’ as Corless once described it to me.

  Those of us who were seconded to SOVINT from the Intelligence Service (Corless, Colin Maitland, Adrian Gardner, Arthur Gurney and myself) found it difficult to adjust to the broadness of our role until the arrival of Peter information, when Corless successfully forced through his plan for the Peter Committee. Our definition was now much tighter: we were the guardians of this rare seam of Soviet information, its richness and the accompanying secrecy being the cause of so much of the jealousy against Corless. In this role our group concentrated solely on Peter, its purpose being to decrypt and interpret Peter intelligence.

  We were a small and disparate group, some long-standing players in the intelligence game (Maitland, Gardner, Gurney all ex-SOE and SIS), others like myself with only our wartime experience. We had what Adrian Gardner always described as our two minders, Guy Benton from the Foreign Office (‘too effete to sit with foot soldiers like us,’ Adrian Gardner used to say) and Gordon Boys-Allen, a serving naval officer now seconded to the Ministry of Defence, whom even the gentle Arthur Gurney dismissed as ‘nice but dreadfully dim’.

  An unlikely collection with an unusual purpose, yet under Rupert Corless’s chairmanship, and with his dogged protection of our sphere of interest, we flourished. Painstakingly we built up a picture of tyranny, its people crushed into servility, its economy remorselessly directed towards the creation of a gigantic war machine on which the success of its political policy rested. Our central concern was the Soviets’ progress on their nuclear bomb. How close were they to emulating the Americans’ nuclear achievement? One year? Two? More? Any activity that speeded up the process was seen as strengthening the threat posed by the huge Soviet army which already cast its dark shadow westwards, a vast bird of prey. Slowly but inexorably we imagined it coming our way. Greece. Italy. France. Sometimes in my nightmares I heard tanks and the crunch of marching boots.

  *

  ‘The question we are faced with,’ Corless tells us, ‘is which of our two professors is stealing secrets for the Soviets? Professor Geoffrey Stevens, nuclear physicist and Nobel prizewinner, or Professor Edgar Lodz, theoretical physicist? Both are leading lights in our thermonuclear development programme.’ Corless’s gaze settles on me. ‘Cambridge is your parish, Monty. What can you tell us about Stevens and Lodz?’

  Unexpectedly I am the centre of attention. I am quite unprepared for this.

  ‘The first thing that anyone connected with the university will tell you is that these two men hate each other’s guts. They’re bitter rivals.’

  I tell the Committee what I know.

  Stevens is a professor of nuclear physics whose work in the ’thirties, with a Finn called Laurentzen, earned him a Nobel Prize in the year before war broke out. In his early years in Cambridge Stevens made his reputation working with Rutherford and Kapitza at the Cavendish before setting up his own laboratory with Laurentzen, a partnership that lasted until 1938. During the war, he did not go to America to join the Los Alamos Project, though he made a number of visits to New Mexico and is well known to Oppenheimer and his colleagues there. He is generally recognized as the source of
inspiration behind much of British nuclear research. He and his small team are rumoured to be working on the initial design of a ‘superweapon’, a thermonuclear device of prodigious destructive capacity to replace the atomic bomb.

  ‘In your opinion,’ Arthur Gurney asks, ‘is Professor Stevens a likely candidate to betray secrets to an enemy?’

  ‘I have known Professor Stevens for twenty years,’ I reply. ‘He is many things I heartily dislike, but I cannot see him giving secrets to the Russians.’

  ‘Selling secrets?’ Corless asks. ‘He’s got a second wife, a young family. Does he have money worries?’

  Even after years in the department I am still not used to the way in which, because of the nature of the work we do, any evidence, however intimate, is grist to the intelligence mill. I shrug my shoulders and say nothing. I make a note that Corless will expect me to check Stevens’s bank account.

  ‘What about Lodz?’

  I tell the Committee that I’ve never met Lodz. What I know of him I have gathered second-hand from Stevens and my other Cambridge connections.

  ‘Eddie Lodz is Austrian by birth. Brought up in Vienna. Went to university in Germany, studied with Heisenberg in Göttingen, and came to England as a political refugee in the early ‘thirties just before things got tough for Jews in Germany. Cambridge snapped him up because of the reputation he had already established. Married an English woman, the daughter of the master of his college. Of the two, he’s reckoned to be cleverer than Stevens, but less pushy, less forceful. A kinder man, in every respect.’

  ‘He could be a communist. Vienna was a hotbed of communist activity before the war,’ Benton says.

  I tell the Committee that there is no evidence whatsoever to link Eddie Lodz in any way with communism. Corless thanks me for my contribution and moves the discussion forward. Full reports on both men, including the state of their private finances, will be presented to the Committee within twenty-four hours. He has already asked Colin Maitland to get the Registry to dig out all files with any reference to either man.

  ‘If we’re in the hands of the Registry,’ Adrian Gardner whispers to me, ‘it will be twenty-four days before they can even spell either name correctly, twenty-four months before we get any reports. By which time all that will be left of the planet will be a huge mushroom cloud hanging in space.’

  ‘On the face of it,’ Corless sums up, ‘the idea of Professors Lodz or Stevens giving nuclear secrets to the Soviets looks unlikely. But we can’t ignore a message from Peter just because we may not like what he tells us.’

  I am to go to Cambridge with a small specialist team and find out what I can. We are to work discreetly and thoroughly. Until I report back, Peter’s allegation is to be kept strictly within the Committee: it is not to be released to anyone, not even to SOVINT.

  ‘No formal action on Peter’s allegation is to be taken until we can confirm the charge.’ Corless reminds us that inaction, even if temporary, may be the best way of preserving Peter. For the present, we are to work entirely on our own on this one.

  ‘What about the minutes?’ Gurney asks as we push our chairs back into place. ‘We have a wide circulation list. Eyes only, of course, but many recipients. What do I do?’

  This is serious stuff. We are stopped in our tracks. Gurney looks haunted with anxiety. What is to happen to the minutes?

  ‘Bugger the minutes,’ Gardner says, and for once the feeling of the room is with him. ‘They can wait. Peter’s more important.’

  Gurney looks very unhappy. ‘It’s very irregular,’ he says. ‘I don’t think our masters will be happy about this.’

  ‘Stuff our masters,’ Maitland says, seizing his chance for ascendancy. ‘Lose them for a few days, Arthur. No one will notice.’

  ‘Who reads them anyway?’ Gardner whispers to me, with a wink.

  Corless nods his agreement. Not a single word about what we are doing is to leak out. Gurney is to sit on the minutes until he receives further instructions.

  ‘Your decision, Rupert, of course,’ Gurney says. It is as close as he will ever come publicly to dissent.

  *

  We spent two weeks in an icy, mist-ridden Cambridge and found no evidence that Stevens had met any known members of the Communist Party, let alone strangely accented men in ill-cut suits; nor that he had corresponded with scientists in Moscow or indeed anywhere else in the Soviet Union, or had any contact with anyone remotely connected with Russia or the Russians. Indeed, no meeting of any kind had taken place that could not be completely and promptly explained as part of Stevens’s academic duties or his activities as a scientific adviser to the Government. The truth, however uncomfortable, was inescapable. Professor Stevens was clean.

  By the time I got back to London a new message had come through from Peter. This time he named Stevens as the traitor.

  5

  DANNY

  ‘Danny! Danny!’

  I was hardly out of the taxi before Celia had thrown herself into my arms.

  ‘We thought you’d be here on Christmas Eve. The children were so looking forward to it. Come along and bring your things. Everything’s ready for you. Your room’s made up. I even saved some Christmas pudding.’

  My stepmother was much younger than my father. She had been one of his students at a time when the relationship between my parents had hit one of its coldest patches, and I suppose my father had found Celia’s warmth impossible to resist. To this day I am sure he engineered the discovery that he had a mistress. He wanted, if nothing else, to surprise my mother, to show her she had misjudged him. In my darker moments, I think he rather enjoyed showing her he had power over women, or one woman at least, and an attractive, young one at that.

  There was no explosion after the revelation that my father had been unfaithful, only a deeper and more wounded silence in the house. From the little I saw, there was no attempt at reconciliation, only a slow and painful settling of accounts and then my mother left. She had always hated Cambridge and now there was nothing to keep her. Much later there was a divorce, rather messy as they were in those days, but my father rode the storm and settled into a new life with this woman half his age.

  Celia was clearly happy with him. She produced three children in quick succession but cleverly found time, when my father was home, to devote herself to him. She was an uncomplicated woman; my father knew he was the centre of her life and in his own way he loved her for it.

  ‘Geoffrey’s in the study.’

  In my presence she always referred to my father as Geoffrey. ‘Go and say hello. I’m saving the children for later. That’s your penance for not seeing them open their stockings.’

  ‘How is he?’

  For a moment she hesitated, a look of anxiety suddenly clouding her naturally open expression. If she wanted to tell me something, she changed her mind abruptly.

  ‘He’s working too hard but there’s nothing surprising in that. Go on in. He’s expecting you.’

  My father’s study was a large, untidy room at the back of the house overlooking fields that marked the outskirts of Cambridge. The relics of a long academic career were scattered like trophies everywhere, books, papers, journals, files, proofs in bundles, covering shelves, chairs, even now invading the carpet. There never had been room to sit. Now you could hardly stand. The disorder in which he lived was in reverse measure to the order of his mind.

  I found him as I had left him over a year before, glasses halfway down his nose, working on some papers spread out on an illuminated lectern.

  ‘Daniel. At last. How are you?’

  ‘Hello, Father.’

  We shook hands. I knew there would be no mention of my year’s absence. To hear my father you would think he had seen me only a week before. In his mind, it probably felt like that.

  ‘Celia was worried. She thought you were lost. I said people in the army don’t get lost, they only get mislaid.’

  ‘Then you don’t know much about the army.’

  ‘Come and
sit down.’ He cleared a space for me on the sofa, piling papers and books on the floor. ‘Every year I promise myself I’m going to have a spring-clean, make the place habitable, but I never get round to it. Either that or I’ve got no sense of time. Are you with us for long?’

  ‘A couple of weeks’ leave, then back to Berlin.’

  ‘I don’t envy you that.’

  ‘I’ll give it all up one day soon,’ I said without thinking.

  ‘Does that mean you’ve made up your mind to come back?’

  I hadn’t expected our quarrel to surface quite so soon, and my defence was unprepared.

  ‘It means I’ll leave the army some day.’

  ‘You know my thoughts on that,’ my father said. ‘You’re wasting your life. It’s time to get out now.’

  The last time we had been in this room together we had argued bitterly and both said things we regretted. I had told my father that I had passed up an opportunity to leave the army, and the sudden virulence of his attack on my decision forced me into a stubborn defence, a refusal to accept any part of his argument. My pigheadedness, as he called it, only helped to redouble his anger. The memory of that unhappy evening was one of the reasons I had stayed away from Cambridge for almost a year. The last thing I wanted was to stir it all up again.

  ‘For the moment it suits me,’ I said, more out of weariness than defiance. ‘There’s nothing else I want to do.’