by Ian Fleming
‘Good evening, Comrades.’
A polite, careful murmur came from the three senior officers. Each one knew, and thought he was the only one to know, that the room was wired for sound, and each one, without telling his A.D.C., had decided to utter the bare minimum of words consonant with good discipline and the needs of the State.
‘Let us smoke.’ General G. took out a packet of Moskwa-Volga cigarettes and lit one with an American Zippo lighter. There was a clicking of lighters round the table. General G. pinched the long cardboard tube of his cigarette so that it was almost flat and put it between his teeth on the right side of his mouth. He stretched his lips back from his teeth and started talking in short clipped sentences that came out with something of a hiss from between the teeth and the uptilted cigarette.
‘Comrades, we meet under instructions from Comrade General Serov. General Serov, on behalf of the Praesidium, has ordered me to make known to you certain matters of State Policy. We are then to confer and recommend a course of action which will be in line with this Policy and assist it. We have to reach our decision quickly. But our decision will be of supreme importance to the State. It will therefore have to be a correct decision.’
General G. paused to allow the significance of his words time to sink in. One by one, he slowly examined the faces of the three senior officers at the table. Their eyes looked stolidly back at him. Inside, these extremely important men were perturbed. They were about to look through the furnace door. They were about to learn a State secret, the knowledge of which might one day have most dangerous consequences for them. Sitting in the quiet room, they felt bathed in the dreadful incandescence that shines out from the centre of all power in the Soviet Union – the High Praesidium.
The final ash fell off the end of General G.’s cigarette on to his tunic. He brushed it off and threw the cardboard butt into the basket for secret waste beside his desk. He lit another cigarette and spoke through it.
‘Our recommendation concerns a conspicuous act of terrorism to be carried out in enemy territory within three months.’
Six pairs of expressionless eyes stared at the head of SMERSH, waiting.
‘Comrades,’ General G. leant back in his chair and his voice became expository, ‘the foreign policy of the U.S.S.R. has entered a new phase. Formerly, it was a “Hard” policy – a policy [he allowed himself the joke of Stalin’s name] of steel. This policy, effective as it was, built up tensions in the West, notably in America, which were becoming dangerous. The Americans are unpredictable people. They are hysterical. The reports of our Intelligence began to indicate that we were pushing America to the brink of an undeclared atomic attack on the U.S.S.R. You have read these reports and you know what I say is true. We do not want such a war. If there is to be a war, it is we who will choose the time. Certain powerful Americans, notably the Pentagon Group led by Admiral Radford, were helped in their firebrand schemes by the very successes of our “Hard” policy. So it was decided that the time had come to change our methods, while maintaining our aims. A new policy was created – the “Hard-Soft” policy. Geneva was the beginning of this policy. We were “soft”. China threatens Quemoy and Matsu. We are “hard”. We open our frontiers to a lot of newspaper men and actors and artists although we know many of them to be spies. Our leaders laugh and make jokes at receptions in Moscow. In the middle of the jokes we drop the biggest test bomb of all time. Comrades Bulganin and Khrushchev and Comrade General Serov [General G. carefully included the names for the ears of the tape-recorder] visit India and the East and blackguard the English. When they get back, they have friendly discussions with the British Ambassador about their forthcoming goodwill visit to London. And so it goes on – the stick and then the carrot, the smile and then the frown. And the West is confused. Tensions are relaxed before they have time to harden. The reactions of our enemies are clumsy, their strategy disorganized. Meanwhile the common people laugh at our jokes, cheer our football teams and slobber with delight when we release a few prisoners of war whom we wish to feed no longer!’
There were smiles of pleasure and pride round the table. What a brilliant policy! What fools we are making of them in the West!
‘At the same time,’ continued General G., himself smiling thinly at the pleasure he had caused, ‘we continue to forge everywhere stealthily ahead – revolution in Morocco, arms to Egypt, friendship with Yugoslavia, trouble in Cyprus, riots in Turkey, strikes in England, great political gains in France – there is no front in the world on which we are not quietly advancing.’
General G. saw the eyes shining greedily round the table. The men were softened up. Now it was time to be hard. Now it was time for them to feel the new policy on themselves. The Intelligence services would also have to pull their weight in this great game that was being played on their behalf. Smoothly General G. leaned forward. He planted his right elbow on the desk and raised his fist in the air.
‘But Comrades,’ his voice was soft, ‘where has there been failure in carrying out the State Policy of the U.S.S.R.? Who has all along been soft when we wished to be hard? Who has suffered defeats while victory was going to all other departments of the State? Who, with its stupid blunders, has made the Soviet Union look foolish and weak throughout the world? WHO?’
The voice had risen almost to a scream. General G. thought how well he was delivering the denunciation demanded by the Praesidium. How splendid it would sound when the tape was played back to Serov!
He glared down the conference table at the pale, expectant faces. General G.’s fist crashed forward on to the desk.
‘The whole Intelligence apparat of the Soviet Union, Comrades.’ The voice was now a furious bellow. ‘It is we who are the sluggards, the saboteurs, the traitors! It is we who are failing the Soviet Union in its great and glorious struggle! We!’ His arm swept round the room. ‘All of us!’ The voice came back to normal, became more reasonable. ‘Comrades, look at the record. Sookin Sin [he allowed himself the peasant obscenity], son-of-a-bitch, look at the record! First we lose Gouzenko and the whole of the Canadian apparat and the scientist Fuchs, then the American apparat is cleaned up, then we lose men like Tokaev, then comes the scandalous Khoklov affair which did great damage to our country, then Petrov and his wife in Australia – a bungled business if ever there was one! The list is endless – defeat after defeat, and the devil knows I have not mentioned the half of it.’
General G. paused. He continued in his softest voice. ‘Comrades, I have to tell you that unless tonight we make a recommendation for a great Intelligence victory, and unless we act correctly on that recommendation, if it is approved, there will be trouble.’
General G. sought for a final phrase to convey the threat without defining it. He found it. ‘There will be,’ he paused and looked, with artificial mildness, down the table, ‘displeasure.’
5 ....... KONSPIRATSIA
THE MOUJIKS had received the knout. General G. gave them a few minutes to lick their wounds and recover from the shock of the official lashing that had been meted out.
No one said a word for the defence. No one spoke up for his department or mentioned the countless victories of Soviet Intelligence that could be set against the few mistakes. And no one questioned the right of the Head of SMERSH, who shared the guilt with them, to deliver this terrible denunciation. The Word had gone out from the Throne, and General G. had been chosen as the mouthpiece for the Word. It was a great compliment to General G. that he had been thus chosen, a sign of grace, a sign of coming preferment, and everyone present made a careful note of the fact that, in the Intelligence hierarchy, General G., with SMERSH behind him, had come to the top of the pile.
At the end of the table, the representative of the Foreign Ministry, Lieutenant-General Vozdvishensky of RUMID, watched the smoke curl up from the tip of his long Kazbek cigarette and remembered how Molotov had privately told him, when Beria was dead, that General G. would go far. There had been no great foresight in this prophecy, reflected Vozdvishens
ky. Beria had disliked G. and had constantly hindered his advancement, sidetracking him away from the main ladder of power into one of the minor departments of the then Ministry of State Security, which, on the death of Stalin, Beria had quickly abolished as a Ministry. Until 1952, G. had been deputy to one of the heads of this Ministry. When the post was abolished, he devoted his energies to plotting the downfall of Beria, working under the secret orders of the formidable General Serov, whose record put him out of even Beria’s reach.
Serov, a Hero of the Soviet Union and a veteran of the famous predecessors of the M.G.B. – the Cheka, the Ogpu, the N.K.V.D. and the M.V.D. – was in every respect a bigger man than Beria. He had been directly behind the mass executions of the 1930s when a million died, he had been metteur en scène of most of the great Moscow show trials, he had organized the bloody genocide in the Central Caucasus in February 1944, and it was he who had inspired the mass deportations from the Baltic States and the kidnapping of the German atom and other scientists who had given Russia her great technical leap forward after the war.
And Beria and all his court had gone to the gallows, while General G. had been given SMERSH as his reward. As for Army General Ivan Serov, he, with Bulganin and Khrushchev, now ruled Russia. One day, he might even stand on the peak, alone. But, guessed General Vozdvishensky, glancing up the table at the gleaming billiard-ball skull, probably with General G. not far behind him.
The skull lifted and the hard bulging brown eyes looked straight down the table into the eyes of General Vozdvishensky. General Vozdvishensky managed to look back calmly and even with a hint of appraisal.
That is a deep one, thought General G. Let us put the spotlight on him and see how he shows up on the sound-track.
‘Comrades,’ gold flashed from both corners of his mouth as he stretched his lips in a chairman’s smile, ‘let us not be too dismayed. Even the highest tree has an axe waiting at its foot. We have never thought that our departments were so successful as to be beyond criticism. What I have been instructed to say to you will not have come as a surprise to any of us. So let us take up the challenge with a good heart and get down to business.’
Round the table there was no answering smile to these platitudes. General G. had not expected that there would be. He lit a cigarette and continued.
‘I said that we have at once to recommend an act of terrorism in the intelligence field, and one of our departments – no doubt my own – will be called upon to carry out this act.’
An inaudible sigh of relief went round the table. So at least SMERSH would be the responsible department! That was something.
‘But the choice of a target will not be an easy matter, and our collective responsibility for the correct choice will be a heavy one.’
Soft-hard, hard-soft. The ball was now back with the conference.
‘It is not just a question of blowing up a building or shooting a prime minister. Such bourgeois horseplay is not contemplated. Our operation must be delicate, refined and aimed at the heart of the Intelligence apparat of the West. It must do grave damage to the enemy apparat – hidden damage which the public will hear perhaps nothing of, but which will be the secret talk of government circles. But it must also cause a public scandal so devastating that the world will lick its lips and sneer at the shame and stupidity of our enemies. Naturally Governments will know that it is a Soviet konspiratsia. That is good. It will be a piece of “hard” policy. And the agents and spies of the West will know it, too, and they will marvel at our cleverness and they will tremble. Traitors and possible defectors will change their minds. Our own operatives will be stimulated. They will be encouraged to greater efforts by our display of strength and genius. But of course we shall deny any knowledge of the deed, whatever it may be, and it is desirable that the common people of the Soviet Union should remain in complete ignorance of our complicity.’
General G. paused and looked down the table at the representative of RUMID, who again held his gaze impassively.
‘And now to choose the organization at which we will strike, and then to decide on the specific target within that organization. Comrade Lieutenant-General Vozdvishensky, since you observe the foreign intelligence scene from a neutral standpoint [this was a jibe at the notorious jealousies that exist between the military intelligence of the GRU and the Secret Service of the M.G.B.], perhaps you would survey the field for us. We wish to have your opinion of the relative importance of the Western Intelligence Services. We will then choose the one which is the most dangerous and which we would most wish to damage.’
General G. sat back in his tall chair. He rested his elbows on the arms and supported his chin on the interlaced fingers of his joined hands, like a teacher preparing to listen to a long construe.
General Vozdvishensky was not dismayed by his task. He had been in intelligence, mostly abroad, for thirty years. He had served as a ‘doorman’ at the Soviet Embassy in London under Litvinoff. He had worked with the Tass Agency in New York and had then gone back to London, to Amtorg, the Soviet Trade Organization. For five years he had been Military Attaché under the brilliant Madame Kollontai in the Stockholm Embassy. He had helped train Sorge, the Soviet master spy, before Sorge went to Tokyo. During the war, he had been for a while Resident Director in Switzerland, or ‘Schmidtland’, as it had been known in the spy-jargon, and there he had helped sow the seeds of the sensationally successful but tragically misused ‘Lucy’ network. He had even gone several times into Germany as a courier to the ‘Rote Kapelle’, and had narrowly escaped being cleaned up with it. And after the war, on transfer to the Foreign Ministry, he had been on the inside of the Burgess and Maclean operation and on countless other plots to penetrate the Foreign Ministries of the West. He was a professional spy to his finger-tips and he was perfectly prepared to put on record his opinions of the rivals with whom he had been crossing swords all his life.
The A.D.C. at his side was less comfortable. He was nervous at RUMID being pinned down in this way, and without a full departmental briefing. He scoured his brain clear and sharpened his ears to catch every word.
‘In this matter,’ said General Vozdvishensky carefully, ‘one must not confuse the man with his office. Every country has good spies and it is not always the biggest countries that have the most or the best. But Secret Services are expensive, and small countries cannot afford the co-ordinated effort which produces good intelligence – the forgery departments, the radio network, the record department, the digestive apparatus that evaluates and compares the reports of the agents. There are individual agents serving Norway, Holland, Belgium and even Portugal who could be a great nuisance to us if these countries knew the value of their reports or made good use of them. But they do not. Instead of passing their information on to the larger powers, they prefer to sit on it and feel important. So we need not worry with these smaller countries,’ he paused, ‘until we come to Sweden. There they have been spying on us for centuries. They have always had better information on the Baltic than even Finland or Germany. They are dangerous. I would like to put a stop to their activities.’
General G. interrupted. ‘Comrade, they are always having spy scandals in Sweden. One more scandal would not make the world look up. Please continue.’
‘Italy can be dismissed,’ went on General Vozdvishensky, without appearing to notice the interruption. ‘They are clever and active, but they do us no harm. They are only interested in their own backyard, the Mediterranean. The same can be said of Spain, except that their counter-intelligence is a great hindrance to the Party. We have lost many good men to these Fascists. But to mount an operation against them would probably cost us more men. And little would be achieved. They are not yet ripe for revolution. In France, while we have penetrated most of their Services, the Deuxième Bureau is still clever and dangerous. There is a man called Mathis at the head of it. A Mendès-France appointment. He would be a tempting target and it would be easy to operate in France.’
‘France is looking after h
erself,’ commented General G.
‘England is another matter altogether. I think we all have respect for her Intelligence Service,’ General Vozdvishensky looked round the table. There were grudging nods from everyone present, including General G. ‘Their Security Service is excellent. England, being an island, has great security advantages and their so-called M.I.5. employs men with good education and good brains. Their Secret Service is still better. They have notable successes. In certain types of operation, we are constantly finding that they have been there before us. Their agents are good. They pay them little money – only a thousand or two thousand roubles a month – but they serve with devotion. Yet these agents have no special privileges in England, no relief from taxation and no special shops such as we have, from which they can buy cheap goods. Their social standing abroad is not high, and their wives have to pass as the wives of secretaries. They are rarely awarded a decoration until they retire. And yet these men and women continue to do this dangerous work. It is curious. It is perhaps the Public School and University tradition. The love of adventure. But still it is odd that they play this game so well, for they are not natural conspirators.’ General Vozdvishensky felt that his remarks might be taken as too laudatory. He hastily qualified them. ‘Of course, most of their strength lies in the myth – in the myth of Scotland Yard, of Sherlock Holmes, of the Secret Service. We certainly have nothing to fear from these gentlemen. But this myth is a hindrance which it would be good to set aside.’
‘And the Americans?’ General G. wanted to put a stop to Vozdvishensky’s attempts to qualify his praise of British Intelligence. One day that bit about the Public School and University tradition would sound well in court. Next, hoped General G., he will be saying that the Pentagon is stronger than the Kremlin.