by Jeremy Duns
‘And what does Nigeria have to offer us?’ asked Farraday innocently.
‘Oil,’ I said.
Pritchard flashed me a contemptuous look. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers, Paul.’ It was a nice little dig – I was known for my contacts in Fleet Street. ‘Contrary to public perception, the Biafrans never had all of Nigeria’s oil.’
‘They had rather a lot of it, though. Rather a lot of it that we would prefer remained in our hands. No?’
He leaned forward, glowering across the table. ‘There’s much more at stake here than oil. This is about the four hundred million pounds we’ve invested in the country – and the stability of the whole region. If Nigeria falls to Communism, the rest of the continent could follow.’
‘The “domino” theory? I thought that was a Yank idea.’
He refused to be goaded. ‘Even the Yanks are occasionally right.’
‘And who are they supporting in this thing?’ said Farraday. ‘The Americans, I mean.’
Pritchard turned to him. ‘Well, so far they’ve been officially neutral, but broadly on our side. They’ve left us pretty much alone, though – too busy trying to find ways out of Vietnam and beating the Russians to the moon. That may change now, though, as Nixon made a lot of noise about the Biafrans’ plight during his election campaign. The Prime Minister has made much of the fact that he hasn’t committed British troops in Vietnam, but the Americans aren’t ecstatic about that arrangement and their good will may soon run dry. I don’t think they are going to start supporting the Biafrans – yet. However, there are plenty of other powers already supporting them. France has been supplying them with arms through the Ivory Coast and Gabon in increasingly large quantities in the last few months. De Gaulle would like to protect francophone influence on the continent and sees the plight of “les pauvres biafriens” as a way to win back popularity after the mess of the student riots last year. He also wants access to Biafran oil, of course. Then there’s China, who are apparently lending the rebels their support simply to show up the Soviets as imperialist lapdogs for allying themselves with us and the Americans. It’s hard to gauge what impact these skirmishes they’re having with the Russians along their border might have, but it could mean that they step up their involvement in this conflict as well. Also supporting the Biafrans are the Israelis, who seem to believe that they’re stopping the next Holocaust, and Haiti, who we have reports recognized the rebel regime this weekend – we’re not quite sure what their reasons are. Finally, South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal are all selling the rebels arms simply because they’re happy to help one gang of wogs continue to butcher another.’
The room went quiet while everyone took this in.
‘And the Biafrans, knowing all this, continue to buy arms from these parties?’ Farraday asked.
‘They have little choice.’
‘Poor bastards.’
‘Poor us, rather,’ Pritchard replied. ‘As a result of support from this motley crew, the Biafrans have managed to hang on by the skin of their teeth for nearly two years. We only agreed to supply arms to the Nigerians on the calculation that the whole affair would be over in a couple of weeks. The British public’s disapproval of our involvement is now at an all-time high, partly because of “kwashiorkor”. That’s this disease the children get when they’ve not enough protein. It fills their stomachs with fluid – you’ll have seen the footage, I expect. The Biafrans are now calling it “Harold Wilson Syndrome” and putting that on their death certificates, because they blame him in particular and the British government in general for not allowing enough food and aid through. We also have reports of the PM’s name being used as a swear-word in Biafra.’
‘Well, it’s been that over here for a while!’ said Quiney, eliciting a few quiet chuckles around the table.
Pritchard smiled. ‘Yes, even his own party seems to be turning against him now. That’s largely down to his stance on Biafra, and the pictures that are coming out of it. Liberal do-gooders don’t seem so worried when the starving look like they’re starving, but when they develop pot bellies it shocks them so much they feel compelled to organize jamborees and start marching on Trafalgar Square. Last week, The Times ran a series of articles claiming that the Nigerian pilots are deliberately bombing Biafran civilians. In response to increasing calls for him to resign, the PM announced he will fly out to Lagos this Thursday, supposedly to find out the facts of the war for himself and report back to Parliament.’
Of course. I’d seen it in the papers, but hadn’t realized it was so soon. I asked if there was any ulterior motive to the trip, such as peace negotiations.
‘Partly,’ said Pritchard, ‘although everyone’s started playing that down in the last day or two. There was a similar plan last year for him to go out as a kind of super-mediator, but it was vetoed by the Nigerians, who are very touchy on the issue of outside interference. Ojukwu, the Biafrans’ leader, has made it clear he will only meet Wilson within the borders he currently controls. Agreeing to that would enrage the Nigerians, though, because it would look like we were giving Biafra recognition – that’s how the Biafrans would play it, anyway. Because of the pressure here, the government needs to be seen to be doing something, but our Nigerian sources say there’s little expectation Wilson’s visit will help matters beyond possibly improving the PR situation. But even that might backfire – he was going to go out there with some spades and agricultural tools until someone pointed out it might be reported he was smuggling in arms.’
‘And the Biafrans?’ said Farraday. ‘What do our sources there tell us?’
‘We don’t have any reliable Biafran sources at the moment,’ Pritchard replied, an edge to his voice. ‘I visited Nigeria in December, and Lagos is still a little haphazard.’ The colonial Stations had all been under Pritchard’s control when he had been in Five, but they had been next to useless without the Service’s input. Now they were finally under Service control, but it was clearly taking him longer than he liked to move things on.
‘Are we informing the Prime Minister’s office of the situation?’ asked Godsal.
‘No,’ said Osborne. ‘Nothing is to leave this room. That includes the PM’s office, the FO, the Americans, and even our friends in Five.’ He glanced at Pritchard. ‘Especially our friends in Five. They might conclude that the PM is Radnya.’
Osborne had made a late play for the mantle of head jester. Some of the far right-wing officers in Five – a few of them Pritchard’s cronies – had convinced themselves that Wilson was a Russian agent. I’d even asked Sasha about it. He wasn’t. It was just another whispering campaign against him. The previous spring, there had even been rumours that Cecil King, owner of the Daily Mirror, had been plotting to overthrow the government with the support of Lord Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle. Nothing had come of it, of course.
Osborne waited for the tittering to die down before turning back to Pritchard. ‘Isn’t it a little convenient that a defector has turned up on the eve of this trip?’
‘Slavin may be a plant, you mean?’ Pritchard asked. I had asked Chief the same thing.
Osborne reached for the carafe in the centre of the table. Very deliberately, he poured some water into his glass, his eyes firmly on his task.
‘It would be a pretty little trap,’ he said coolly. ‘Don’t you think? Get us all running around for another traitor.’
Pritchard gave one of his soft smiles. ‘But which is it, William? Either the Russians are so fiendishly clever that they’ve managed to keep one of their agents running in this organization for over twenty years or they’re so fiendishly clever that they’re sending us false defectors to claim that they have.’
Osborne sipped his water.
‘Neither’s an especially appetizing prospect,’ Pritchard went on mercilessly, ‘but considering that we have already discovered – at quite some cost – that we were, in fact, penetrated by the KGB, very successfully, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to inves
tigate the possibility that others remain in our ranks, undetected.’
‘Hear, hear,’ I said.
The two of them looked at me in surprise – my usual line, of course, was that it was divisive and paranoid to search for phantom Philbies among us.
‘Look at the interview,’ I said. ‘If it’s a ploy, it’s not a very clever one. Slavin specifically states that Radnya was a British intelligence officer recruited in Germany at the end of the war. It can’t be too hard to draw up a list of everyone we had involved in secret work in that area at that time. If we gave them all polygraph tests, we’d soon find out if Slavin’s telling the truth.’
There was no response for a few seconds, and I wondered if I’d misjudged it. I got worried when Pritchard cleared his throat, but Osborne beat him to it.
‘I’m not sure we’re quite at the stage of deciding how to go about investigating this, Paul,’ he said, blinking furiously as he pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. He could usually rely on me to head off Pritchard’s demands for more mole-hunts, so it was natural he’d be peeved. ‘At any rate, I think it would, in fact, be rather difficult to draw up a list of everyone we had involved in intelligence in Germany in 1945. There were hundreds of people engaged on that sort of work. We also have no idea where the double is now – if he’s become the Director-General of the BBC or Home Secretary, a request for a polygraph would need a lot of evidence to justify it.’
I nodded, conceding defeat, but he’d made the point I’d been angling for: there were hundreds of possible suspects.
‘Can I just ask a silly question?’ said Farraday, and everyone busied himself trying to look puzzled by such an idea. ‘If this chap’s not a plant and there really is another double, can someone give me a simple explanation as to why? I mean, why they want to betray us. I can’t really understand it – surely they read the news? How can they keep believing they’re on the right side with tanks rolling into Prague and so on? Or did they all fall in love with Russian dolly-birds who turned them onto it?’
‘Not all of them go for dolly-birds,’ put in Pritchard archly. It was like Hancock’s Half Hour.
‘But seriously,’ continued Farraday, turning to me, ‘Paul, has your department done any sort of thinking about this, about what makes these people tick? Perhaps it will help us find this one – we could look at family backgrounds or what-have-you.’
They were looking at me intently so I took it they actually expected an answer. ‘The only certain thing,’ I said, after I had taken out a pack of Players and lit one, ‘is that every double agent is different. The most common reasons for betraying one’s country, as far as we can establish, are ideological conviction, disaffection with authority, pride – they get a perverse kick out of deceiving everyone around them – blackmail, and good old-fashioned pieces of silver.’ I could have added a new one: hopeless credulity.
I took a drag of the cigarette. ‘As to how a person can continue to serve a cause in the face of events that compromise its principles, which would appear to be the case with Philby and his friends, well, nothing’s ever black and white, is it? After all, we all believe we’re on the side of good, despite the fact that Henry has just given us a lot of information about how our government is contributing to the deaths of thousands of innocent people in a war in Africa because we don’t want anyone else to get their hands on the oil there.’ I put up a hand to stop Pritchard from interrupting. ‘I know, it’s not just about oil, and I’m simplifying, but hopefully you can still see my point. If you happen to think we’re doing the wrong thing in Biafra – and most people in the country do – it doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to abandon everything else you believe to be good about the way we do things and start working for the Russians.’
‘But the Russians are supplying arms, too,’ said Farraday, and a couple of others nodded.
‘All right,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Bad example. Suez. Kenya. Aden. Take your pick of situations we’ve made a mess of one way or another in the last couple of decades. How do we continue to do our jobs in the face of this knowledge? We look at the wider picture, of course. I imagine it works much the same for the other side. And from what we know of the KGB’s methods, I doubt it’s all that easy to supply them with secret material for years and then one day announce an attack of conscience and ask if you can swap sides again, without them getting rather peeved, and perhaps sending a man with a silencer after you. The longer in, I suspect, the harder it would be to extricate oneself. And this chap seems to have been in for rather a long time.’
I paused. How could I possibly explain to these people, even in abstract terms, the ups and downs of my journey with Communism, from my tentative steps with Anna to my convert’s zeal after her death – or staged death, as it now appeared – through to agonizing doubts and resulting confrontations with Yuri, and later Sasha, over everything from documents I didn’t want to hand over to, yes, tanks rolling into Prague. I decided I couldn’t, so I concentrated on my cigarette and waited to see if they had any more idiotic questions. But they didn’t – they all seemed to have gone rather quiet.
‘Thank you, Paul,’ said Osborne. ‘Most illuminating, and some food for thought for us all. I’m not sure what it is you think we did wrong in Kenya, exactly, but perhaps that’s for another day.’ He gave a slight nod to Farraday to indicate he was closing the issue. ‘Perhaps you can tell us more about this woman who seems to be involved – Grigorieva? Do you have anything on her?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘there is something.’ I took my briefcase from the floor and placed it on the table. ‘I had a look around Registry this morning and found this in “Germany 1945”. I think it confirms that Slavin is very unlikely to be a plant.’
I’d read all of Father’s files several times – I’d had to, for cover. But Sacrosanct had been off the books, so they hadn’t contained anything about that. I hadn’t known he had asked Chief to take Anna into custody, though, or that Chief had written a report about the incident. Along with his other military records, it had been carried over to his Service file, and once I’d found the relevant bundle it had been easy to locate. I sprang the briefcase open, took out the photostats I’d made and passed them round.
‘As you can see, this is extracted from the monthly reports that Chief wrote in September 1945, when he was head of the British army headquarters in Lübeck in Germany. If you turn to the top of the third page’ – I waited for people to do so – ‘you’ll see the entry headed “Anna Maleva”. Chief – or Brigadier Colin Templeton, as he then was – relates how he had been tipped off by SOE officer Lawrence Dark – my father – that Maleva, a nurse in the Red Cross hospital in Lübeck, was in fact a KGB agent. Chief took a small team to her quarters to detain her on the night of the 28th, but when they arrived she was dead, shot through the chest.’
A police car raced through the street below, its siren blaring, and I let it pass before continuing.
‘Now, if you turn to page four of the dossier, you will find a photograph of Maleva, given to Chief by Major Dark for the purposes of identification. The photostat hasn’t come out too well, so let’s look at the original.’ I walked over to the projector and placed it in the slot. I dimmed the lights, and the picture appeared on the wall.
The photograph had not aged well in the file. The edges were turning brown, and there were black spots across her forehead and her eyes. It had been taken outside the hospital: she was in her uniform, smoking a cigarette. I had naively thought that Father had simply abandoned me, but he had been keeping an eye on the hospital all along.
I pressed the lever to turn back, and the picture of Anna in Lagos filled the wall again. I flicked it forward and back a couple of times and then stopped. ‘As you can see, it would appear that Maleva was not, in fact, killed in 1945, but is currently working in the Soviet Embassy in Lagos under the name Grigorieva.’
There was silence for a few moments. In my peripheral vision, I could see that Pritchard had his head
down and was reading the file. I was taking a huge risk bringing this to the table, because I was revealing a direct link between Slavin’s allegations and my father’s work in Germany. As Pritchard knew what that work had been, and that I had been involved in it, he would naturally now suspect me. But there were no records on that operation – he could suspect me all he wanted, but if he couldn’t prove it I didn’t care. And I was fairly confident that he wouldn’t be overly keen to confess to his part in an assassination squad, even after all these years.
‘She was quite a looker, wasn’t she?’ Godsal was saying. ‘The mouth’s a touch thin, but still… she’d probably have got me to sign the Five Year Plan.’ Nobody laughed. Godsal, I should note, has a face like a deranged horse.
‘What would the Russians have had to gain by faking her death?’ asked Farraday.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Chief will be able to tell us more about the situation when he gets here.’
As if on cue, there was a knock on the door. All eyes swivelled as Smale entered.
‘Well?’ said Osborne.
‘No sign of him,’ said Smale: he must have been wondering why everyone in the room was staring at him so intently. Osborne nodded for him to carry on. ‘Barnes went over and called me back. Says he seems to have packed his bags and left in the middle of the night. Didn’t cancel his milk or papers.’