by Alan Judd
‘It puzzles me,’ said Matthew. ‘The old ideology, the communist ideal that motivated the likes of Philby and co., and George Blake, is busted. The Russians themselves don’t believe it – never did, really, it was always primarily a Western illusion. The press seems to have taken its place – MI5 had Shayler going public, we had Tomlinson, the Americans of course Wikileaks and Snowden. But what, in your opinion, could possibly motivate someone to spy for the RIS now?’
Peter twiddled the then unopened Gauloises packet on the desk before him. ‘Anti-Westernism, anti-Americanism in particular, the fact that the Russians still provide an alternative for the protest vote. Money – they still pay, I imagine? Then there’s admiration for the people, their stoical endurance of suffering and all that sentimental wartime legacy stuff. Then love of their literature – still a Dostoevsky fan, Charles?’
Charles nodded.
‘But that’s not enough to make Charles spy,’ said Frank.
‘No, but it might help set him on the road. It’s a gradual process, I suppose. I have some sympathy with it.’
‘You do?’
‘Imaginatively speaking.’
‘Then there’s MICE, of course,’ said Matthew. ‘Beloved by the Americans. Money, ideology, compromise, ego. Not bad but something of an oversimplification, I’ve always thought. What do you think, Peter?’ His tone was gentle and he paused for what seemed a long time but Peter did not respond. ‘What puzzles me, Peter, is what would make someone in the New York station start spying at that time?’
There was another pause. ‘If they did.’
‘If they did.’
They continued in hypothetical mode for most of the afternoon. Peter agreed that anyone in MI6 who spied for the Russians would know that the consequences for Russian agents he betrayed would be lengthy imprisonment at best, possibly death. He agreed too that this might weigh heavily on his conscience, that conceivably he might even welcome discovery or the chance to confess, especially if he had been pressured into spying. But such a person should still be punished, he thought. He should not be excused punishment because he had been put under pressure or because he had confessed. Questioned several times on this, Peter insisted: however understandable, or for whatever motives, betrayal was wrong. There were always alternatives. The session seemed to Charles more a seminar on agent motivation that an investigation but that, he realised as Matthew and Frank circled ever lower like leisurely red kites above his native Chiltern hills, was what they wanted.
It was only when Matthew showed him the leaked report that Peter showed signs of tension, not only by taking up his cigarettes at last but in slower, more studied and precise articulation. He also moved less, as if each movement had to be thought about in advance.
Surveillance covered him to his flat in Marylebone that evening. He stopped only to buy milk and provisions and stayed in all night, receiving two telephone calls and making none. Matthew, however, rang Charles at home.
‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow we deploy you. We stay in hypothetical mode with me suggesting he was blackmailed into doing it and you suggesting that that would be forgivable reason. He won’t want your sympathy, he’s too proud, but it might provoke him. We will also imply the possibility of immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession.’
‘Can we offer that?’
‘Of course not. It’s only ever been done with the blessing of the DPP once everybody’s sure there’s no hope of evidence for conviction. So we won’t be offering it. We’ll be talking about a hypothetical individual and whether it would be right that he should escape prosecution. Our friend has a strongly developed, if somewhat distorted, moral sense. This, allied with his pride, may tempt him to confess by asserting his superiority of motive.’
‘If he’s got any sense at all he’ll just stonewall. He could walk out and there’s nothing we could do, nothing that would hold up in court.’
‘If he had sense he’d never have done it in the first place. He’d have simply resigned. Then he could have done and said what he wanted, lived as he wanted.’
‘You’re sure he did do it?’
‘Of course I’m sure. There’s no doubt. What we know from your source of what Guk and Wolf said in Vienna, from the FBI about his cottaging in New York and from the CIA that the Russians have copies of reports he sent is more than enough to nail him in reality, if not in law. We can also now see the pattern in the carpet of his time in New York – initially open about his dealings with the Russians, all fully reported, then an abrupt stop. Apparent stop. That was when he was recruited. I suspect they discovered his sexual predisposition when he was a student in Moscow and when he appeared on their radar in New York the SVR residency traced him with Moscow and came up with that useful little nugget. So they exploited it. Not having doubts, are you, Charles?’
Charles was not so much doubtful as reluctant. The pile of files from which Matthew had produced the leaked report may contain more unanswerable stuff, but he almost didn’t want Peter to be guilty. That day, for the first time, he had sensed beneath the apparent insouciance of Peter’s act an almost lifelong struggle to keep up the much bigger act of pretending to be normal, to be like those he lived and worked among, to be one of them. As he became more brittle at the end of the afternoon Charles had sensed something alive and squirming beneath the ice of his act. He felt for him. But those red-striped files brooked no sentiment.
Friday began with coffee, Peter balancing two biscuits in his saucer and placing his cigarettes and silver lighter on the desk before him.
‘What I’d like to do this morning, Peter,’ said Matthew, ‘is to carry on from where we were yesterday. By which I mean that we should continue to discuss this case hypothetically, leaving aside your personal position in the matter.’
Peter’s cup was halfway to his lips. ‘Forget my personal position, did you say?’
‘That’s right. Whatever it may be. And give us the benefit of your opinion and advice unrelated to yourself.’
‘In what respect?’
‘Whether, if someone had done what we think, it would be reasonable to suggest to him that there might be circumstances which would excuse him from prosecution.’
‘Leave him with a gun, a bottle of whisky and an empty room, you mean?’
‘Nothing quite so melodramatic. We were thinking more in terms of his having been coerced into spying. Blackmailed through compromise. Whether you think it would be reasonable under such circumstances for someone to be excused prosecution in return for a full confession.’
‘I – I don’t know whether that would be reasonable.’ He sipped his coffee, lowering his eyes. ‘It’s been done before, hasn’t it, long ago, with Anthony Blunt? But I’d find it difficult to believe that now, under modern circumstances, it would be permitted. After all, if someone had done’ – he glanced at the stone fireplace – ‘what you say has been done, he presumably might have caused the imprisonment or deaths of agents within Russia. And I’m not sure that the authorities would be prepared to overlook such – such actions.’
Matthew nodded. ‘How do you think someone might feel, knowing his actions had such consequences?’
‘I think it would be on his conscience.’ There was a harsher note to Peter’s tone. ‘I think it would get to him.’
‘And there are various ways, I suppose, in which he might justify it to himself?’
The rest of the morning was taken up by another extended discussion of hypothetical justifications for treachery, with Peter again arguing against leniency. They broke early for lunch, considering over sandwiches upstairs whether they could continue into the weekend. Matthew thought not, for the same reasons that they could not risk a more hostile interrogation. Peter’s attendance was voluntary, this was not part of a legal process and anything he said, short of a full confession to which he adhered subsequently, would be inadmissible in court. Continuing into the weekend would also make it more difficult to claim to MI5 that this was merely an explora
tory interview with unexpected results.
‘So we’ve only got this afternoon,’ Matthew concluded. ‘I’ll bring you in, Charles, as Mr Nice Guy. Of course, we’re all Mr Nice Guy in this but you must be Mr Super Nice Guy. Make it appear that you’re looking for excuses for him. He refused the possible lifelines we threw him this morning but if you persist it might provoke him, put him on his moral high horse, as it were.’
Frank was called away to the ops room, returning ten minutes later. ‘Surveillance report that he’s eaten no lunch and went into St James’s Piccadilly and prayed. Or seemed to pray. I’m not sure they really know what praying looks like, they’ve never had one do that before, but they had a couple in with him and said he went to the quiet bit and knelt at a pew with his head bowed and hands clasped for twenty-three minutes. They had to do the same, complained that their knees hurt afterwards. Then he went for a walk in the park. He’s on his way back now.’
Matthew turned to Charles. ‘Not normally religious, is he?’
‘Not now but he was. He nearly became a Methodist minister before he went to university. Then he was a Christian Socialist, then a banker.’
‘Nothing about a religious vocation on his file.’
‘Probably because he didn’t do it. Files tend to record what we did, not what we didn’t. He told me when we were travelling in the States.’
When they reconvened after lunch Matthew opened the top red-striped file again, unhurriedly selecting three or four papers from the bottom half and placing them on the desk before him. They were covered in dense type. Frank made a note. The clock on the stone mantelpiece struck the quarter.
‘Before we continue,’ Matthew said, looking at the papers rather than Peter, ‘I want to introduce a personal note, in parenthesis, as it were. Your homosexuality.’ He pronounced the word carefully, syllable by syllable, looked up and placed his elbows on the table, his hands palm to palm. ‘We haven’t mentioned it before and I’m not going to dwell on it, unless you choose to deny it – which I hope you won’t?’
Peter stared.
‘Good. I mention it now only so that we’re all clear that it’s in the open. You are of course aware that lying about it in your positive vetting interviews, declaring that you weren’t, means that your PV certificate can be withdrawn which in turn would mean that you could no longer be employed by the Service?’
‘I was always aware of the possible consequences of my actions.’ Peter’s tone was as deliberate as Matthew’s.
‘Charles has a question arising from this.’
Charles couldn’t read Peter’s eyes – was he imagining the slight widening, was it a hint of playfulness, or appeal, or was it preparedness, acceptance of whatever was to come? ‘Peter, I want to return to the hypothetical, to consider whether there are circumstances in which someone might feel he has no choice but to spy for the Russian intelligence service. If, for example, he were put under pressure through imprisonment or torture or the vulnerability of family members or—’
‘Blackmail as a result of compromise?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course there are such circumstances. We all know that.’ Peter reached for his cigarettes.
‘And if he genuinely felt that he had no choice—’
‘But he would have a choice. Whatever he felt about it, he would have a choice and would be making one.’
‘Can you imagine a situation where any member of this service could be in a position where he had no option but to cooperate?’
‘No.’
‘You can’t? You really can’t?’
‘No.’ Peter lit his cigarette and sat back, exhaling vigorously before continuing in the harsher tone he had used before. ‘I shall tell you – the truth. I do not however want to benefit from any suggestions that I had no choice about what I did and that it should go unpunished. It is true that I have cooperated with the RIS. But you should know that it was not the RIS who approached me, but I who approached them.’
Matthew picked up his pen. ‘Thank you, Peter,’ he said quietly. ‘When was this?’
Peter spoke for the rest of the afternoon, a trickle that became a torrent of relief and justification. He insisted that he had not been blackmailed into spying for the Russians, that the process of what he called his self-recruitment had been brewing for years, that it had been a principled and considered decision arising from the loss of his Christian faith – ‘I could no longer accept that it was founded on reality’ – and his growing appreciation of the Russian soul. They had always been a profound and religious people and although their great experiment with communism had gone wrong they had at least struggled to achieve a more just and equal society, one that espoused the values of the Christian Gospels minus the superstition. Their nationalism and their aggressive self-interest were understandable in view of Napoleon’s and Hitler’s invasions and American and Western hostility. The corruption of their current polity was the contagious effect of American materialist culture. The Americans were the world’s villains.
‘Disliking Americans is fine if that’s how you feel,’ said Matthew. ‘But why spy for the Russians against your own country?’
‘More tea?’ asked Frank.
Peter nodded to Frank. ‘I was a foot soldier in this war. I knew the Cold War was technically over but there’s still a war, a permanent struggle for values, justice and equality. I came to the conclusion that right was on the other side. The logical thing if I wanted to do good, therefore, was to change sides, not to run away from the war.’
‘Whom did you approach?’ asked Charles.
‘Grigory Orlov, second secretary in the Russian mission to the UN. We had him down as a straight diplomat, MFA rather than RIS. As did the Americans. I had legitimate cover reasons for dealing with him and I figured he’d be under less scrutiny than any of the identified or suspect intelligence officers.’
‘How did you convince him you were genuine?’
Peter paused while Frank handed him his tea. ‘I gave them some names, names of one or two cases I knew about. So that they could check them out and see I was genuine.’ He spoke into his tea.
Matthew held up his pen. ‘Peter.’ Peter looked up. ‘Which names?’
‘I’m not sure I can remember now. Firefly, Bookend, one or two cases like that, fairly old ones.’
Matthew noted them. ‘Restless?’
‘Yes, I think so, Restless was one of them. I think you’re right. I’m not sure he’s still going, is he?’
‘He’s dead. They shot him. Wife and family imprisoned.’
Peter stared. ‘They told me they wouldn’t do that.’
‘Of course. They always say that. Then they do it. And the other names?’
Peter shook his head. ‘Come on, you can’t expect me to remember them all. It was a while ago now and I didn’t exactly do any homework for this.’
‘Tell us what you can remember.’
He named agent cases and technical operations, agreeing some that were suggested to him, denying others. They all three noted them, though they’d be on tape anyway. Most meant nothing to Charles. Asked which documents he’d photographed and handed over, Peter shrugged. ‘Anything, anything I could, whatever I thought might be of interest.’
‘The whole caboodle, then,’ said Matthew.
‘Yes, the whole caboodle,’ he asked defiantly of Matthew. ‘Am I permitted to go to the loo?’
‘You know where it is. You might ask in the secretaries’ room if there’s any chance of another pot of tea.’
‘Was that wise?’ asked Frank when the door closed. ‘Might he not scarper?’
‘He might, he could at any time and there’s nothing we can do about it. He could simply deny everything he’s said and we wouldn’t be allowed to produce it as evidence, tape or no tape. What we have to do is keep him sweet and get him to make a formal statement to the police. We’ve got to set that up with Five. There’s more to come, he’s keeping something back, something personal. We want
him to walk and talk, walk and talk. Walking is conducive to confidences. You can help, Charles.’
‘Take him for a walk?’
‘As far as necessary. And talk, talk in pubs, by firesides, on footpaths, everywhere. Your mother still lives near Henley? Take him down for the weekend, as your friend, if your mother’s up to it. Be very nice, don’t argue with him, just seek to understand. Get him to open up about his personal life on rambles through those beechwoods. I don’t believe that this ideological self-recruitment, this love of Mother Russia, this I-did-it-all-myself is the whole story. That is, I do believe he believes it – now – but there’s something else. There always is. We need to know everything. Meanwhile, we’ll set up Five and the police at this end and I’ll ring and tell you when to bring him in.’
‘But what if he decides to make a bolt for it, as Frank says? The RIS will have agreed an exfiltration plan with him, won’t they? We’ll look pretty silly if he just disappears. It’ll be us getting Gordievsky out of Moscow in reverse. Can’t he just be held?’
‘We’ve no usable evidence. We need his written confession and he won’t confess if he feels coerced. We have to hold his hand. That means you, Charles. You were his friend. You must become so again. Hold his hand all weekend.’
10
Looking back on that weekend was like recalling an old film in parts. They ate and drank and walked and talked, as Matthew had ordered. Charles’s mother was pleased and flustered to hear her son was coming down for the weekend with a friend she’d never heard of. She got food from the freezer despite Charles’s insistence that they would eat before they arrived – ‘In case you couldn’t find anywhere open, dear.’
In fact, they had a curry after picking up Peter’s travelling bag from his flat, allowing the Friday evening rush out of London to ease. It was during that meal that Peter first indicated the nature of his relationship with Grigory Orlov, the Russian second secretary in New York.