The Ipcress File hp-1

by Len Deighton

  In that briefing-room in that Pacific USAF base a big truth slowly took shape in the minds of these airmen. There had been no American bomb exploded that year.

  The whole base swung into action. One after another the huge B29s trundled around the perimeter track and stepped off the end of the runway into the heavy tropical night air. This time, however, these were planes of the Atomic Bomb Detection Unit which had been formed only the previous year. Special aircraft scooping dust particles from the air as they retraced the path of the afternoon flight. Two Atomic Energy Commission laboratories in the United States had been alerted to stand by for the dust samples.

  It took five days before Washington had the detailed report. The explosion it said was almost certainly a bomb. (Until September 23 it was stated that there was a one-in-twenty chance that it wasn’t a bomb.) Moreover the particles indicated a plutonium device. This was an explosion six times more powerful than the Hiroshima one and not to be compared with the first American explosion at Alamogordo.

  At this time the organization called MANHATTAN DISTRICT (code-named Post Office Box 1663) which included the Los Alamos Weapons Laboratory near Santa Fé, New Mexico, the Isotope Separation Plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the plutonium piles at Hanford, Washington had all been handed over to the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC did the whole job, getting the ores of the fissionable heavy metals, uranium and thorium, converting them into concentrations of pure metal as well as supervising production of radio-active isotopes for ship and submarine propulsion and electricity generators.

  When the report of the dust particles came through to Washington it had a ‘Top Secret’ rating, and was delivered to William Webster, Chairman of the Defense Department’s atomic liaison committee who took it to the Secretary of Defense: Louis Johnson.

  Together they surveyed the guesses of their intelligence departments. The basis of US expectation of a Soviet bomb was the prediction made in 1945 by the chief of MANHATTAN DISTRICT Major-General L. R. Groves, who said it would take the Russians fifteen or twenty years. The Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr Vannevar Bush, said ‘ten years’, in his book Modern Arms and Free Men, which was at that moment on the press (the presses were stopped and the prediction erased). US Navy Intelligence told the Defense Department to expect it in 1965, the Army Intelligence said 1960. The USAF Intelligence report was considered panic stricken when it put up 1952 as the year. And yet here it was September, 1949, and the bang had sounded.

  The US Defense Department asked London for confirmation of the Siberian explosion and Ross made his name overnight. Ross had placed his contacts with pessimistic insight. Not only did he know about the explosion (Ross had had all BOAC aircraft fitted with scoops for two years before the bang), but through a couple of well-placed AEC officials he’d had access to the Washington report for nearly twenty-four hours by the time they came through on the transatlantic scrambled line. Just to rub it in, Ross sent the Americans a summary of the physicists working on the project (Peter Kapitza, Fersman, Frenkel, Joffe) and predicted with uncanny accuracy the awards the Soviet scientists were going to receive before they knew.

  From ‘Joe One’ onwards, Ross just couldn’t go wrong.

  The following recipes are reproduced by kind permission of Master-Sergeant J. B. Revelli, US Army.

  TOKWE TWIST: Stir and strain on to rocks: 2 OZ bourbon, ½ OZ benedictine. Twist of lemon peel. Serve.

  MANHATTAN PROJECT: To a Manhattan: (2 OZ whisky, ½ OZ sweet vermouth, dash Angostura and a cherry) add ½ OZ cherry brandy.

  GREENBACK (or Moolah, or Cabbage): Shake or stir: 1½ OZ whisky, 1 OZ dry vermouth, a sprinkle of green chartreuse and of green crème de menthe. Add green olive, decorate with a sprig of mint.

  GRENADE

  I could see Grenade’s small black eyeballs and long greasy hair, and a dour smileless face which lit up once per year. Before the war he was a radio ham and ran a little radio repair shop in Joigny, a Michelinstarred town a hundred kilometres south of Paris.

  Grenade was a resistance worker in 1940 when to work actively against the Germans was unfashionable enough to make being turned in to them by a dazed patriot a real risk. Grenade was a de Gaullist when everyone else in France was rooting for Marshal Pétain. He was a Gaullist when even the Allied Governments were doing deals with Darlan and Giroud helping them persecute anti-Axis agents and leaving de Gaulle to find out about the North African invasion from his newspaper. Grenade never faltered and never altered.

  He organized a train-wrecking group until it was penetrated and the survivors fled. Grenade drifted north to Paris without friends, work or papers. In Paris he met a couple of unemployed printers. By lavish promises of money he got access to a printing machine, and they began printing false passes and papers.

  To run counter to law and order was patriotic and their patriotism was in no way muted by the fact that they made a great deal of money. Some of it went into political and anti-German organizations, and without Grenade’s profits from printing food, clothes and petrol coupons, one of the escape chains to the Pyrenees would have collapsed before it finally did. Over thirty Allied airmen passed through Grenade’s flat and that was only an overflow accommodation. After the war such groups tended to hang on to each other and adapt to the new circumstances. They made papers and passports for ‘displaced persons’ who were rich enough to buy, and at one time even forged Camel cigarette packets.

  In June, 1947 Grenade had been mixed up with the Perrier gang who worked from the Acceuil Café on the Left Bank, and had completed a lucrative line in hundred-dollar American Express travellers’ cheques. Apart from the red serial numbers being a little dark, and the watermarks being printed instead of impressed, they were pretty good. They fetched about a third of their value on the blackmarket, and eagerly at that. Some were detected going across the border in diplomatic bags. Grenade got into the story because he had found a method of microfilming certain diplomatic mail. When under pressure from American Express the French police staked out the courier routes, they found Grenade with 50,000 dollars of forged signed travellers’ cheques. French Intelligence for whom Grenade had worked off and on since the first radio contacts in September, 1940 were now unable to extricate him since there were political involvements. I’d known Grenade about two years and liked him. With little or no risk to me I decided he could be of use as a close friend. I knew that a contact of mine with access to US Army documents had a brother who’d come through the Paris escape route in 1944. I let him think it was Grenade’s. Although there was no way of telling for sure, I like to think that it was, too. He wrote up a document, one showing Grenade as a US Army agent investigating forgeries of US military scrip money and inserted it into the files. I then leaked the information to one of the American Express detectives, and to the 2nd secretary of a senator. At the first opportunity after charges against Grenade were dropped, the forged papers were destroyed. Now Grenade was returning the favour.

  JULIUS CAESAR

  Scene III. The Same. A street near the Capitol. Enter ARTEMIDORUS reading a paper.

  Caesar, beware of Brutus; take heed of Cassius; come not near Casca; have an eye to Cinna; trust not Trebonius; mark well Metellus Cimber; Decius Brutus loves thee not; thou hast wronged Caius Ligarius. There is but one mind in all these men, and it is bent against Caesar. If thou beest not immortal, look about you: security gives way to conspiracy. The mighty gods defend thee! Thy lover, ARTEMIDORUS.

  NEUTRON BOMB

  Even from a normal-style H-bomb there is a bombardment of neutrons, but the fireball generally eats them up before they get anywhere. Now a neutron bomb uses a pure-fission type of reaction, and has no fission-trigger. It gets its ‘bounce’ from a temperature of 1,000,000 degrees centigrade, generated externally. The explosion releases neutrons which don’t have an electrical charge (therefore atoms don’t repel them) and which travel far and fast until the air absorbs them.

  These neutrons penetrate bui
ldings, water, etc., but destroy only living matter, leaving machinery in perfect working order. The Tokwe explosion was of a small tactical-size neutron weapon, although, for security reasons, it was isolated within the pretence of a huge H-explosion. Neutron bombs do not use expensive or rare ingredients and therefore information about them is as eagerly sought by the smaller powers as by the larger.

  REG CAVENDISH

  I looked at the sepia photo of Reg Cavendish — Charlie’s son — who looked down from the top of the writing cabinet in one of those boat-shaped forage caps that we had all looked so silly in. I remember the day Reg got that hat. He was a tall gangling boy with ginger hair that he held lowered in sympathy with the more stunted members of the human race. He was the brightest pupil in the sixth form but was never made a prefect because, ‘…there’s such a thing as being too gentle Cavendish and it’s called slackness.’ Reg just smiled a small smile, he wasn’t a great talker. That’s why we were such inseparable friends I suppose — I was the most vociferous boy there — when Reg was with me he wasn’t required to say much.

  Reg was most at home in the country, he knew about cumulonimbus and isobars and could tell a Song Thrush from a Fieldfare at fifty yards, which is pretty impressive if you can’t tell a Barn-Owl from a Buzzard. Reg knew about moles and foxes and Latin names of wild flowers. Reg came to terms with life in the army, he quietly did everything better than anyone else. Reg’s style of leadership was to be out in front where things were hardest and most dangerous and he used firepower with the same economy that he used words. Reg didn’t have to convert to the idea of airborne warfare, he’d never known any other kind. Dropping out of an aeroplane as an overture to battle was as natural as pipeclayed breeches, burnished firelocks and heel-balled cartridge boxes had been to other soldiers in other times.

  He became Regimental Sergeant Major Cavendish; one of the youngest RSMs in the British Army during the Tunisian campaign when the parachute brigade was used as infantry. It was here he got the nickname ‘Springer’.

  In the fighting around ‘Longstop’—the most costly of the whole campaign — Reg was in a 15-cwt lorry that lost its way while in convoy, went off the road and struck a mine. The German engineers had sown s-mines around the big ones. As the soldiers jumped down these leapt high in the air and exploded metal ball-bearings. The Afrika Korps put mortar fire amongst the flashes and screams as dawn came.

  It’s hot in Tunisia even in May and the heights of Longstop Hill housed a thousand keen German eyes. The bangs and smack of grenade and mortar rolled across the slopes and so did the sweet smell of hot dead flesh. Big black sated flies hovered and waited for Von Arnim’s mortars to search them out and convert them to carrion. Men died all day. Some died very quickly, some took an infinite time and some slipped into impercipient dolour and came to a very private arrangement with death. Wince, writhe or ease a cramped foot, reach for a hard-tack biscuit, stifle blood, swat a dozen flies on your eyelid, touch the hot metal of your gun, these were things men did a finger-squeeze before they died. ‘We went to ground like mouldwarps,’ Reg said.

  Slowly inch by inch it became night. A man moved but did not die. The shattered group dragged their desiccated bodies out of the moulds they had formed in the dirty sand and shuffled off, without saliva enough to spit. All the survivors had to do was walk back to their lines through a minefield. Only Reg and two lance-corporals made it. They got promotion and a 48-hour pass.

  By the July of 1943 there was a change in Reg. His eyes watched over your shoulder and he looked at the ground too much. Reg had seen a lot of combat. Reg was part of the airborne attack against Catania in that July. They were blasted out of the sky in error by the Allied Fleet. He didn’t need his parachute that night, his Dakota crashed. Before the night was over Reg had gained two superficial wounds, a DCM and a twitching muscle near his left eye. They sent him on leave in Tunisia that Autumn. By now he looked nearer 40 than 20, seldom smiled and spent all his leave writing next-of-kin letters.

  It was one A.M. on D-day that Reg dropped into the River Dives in full equipment. He got fifty men and an officer through chest-deep swamp and undergrowth by hitting the slowest. He wasn’t a lot of fun by now. He was tense and irritable and spent every minute of every leave visiting the relatives of the dead. I told him it wasn’t doing any good. He had developed a stammer and his coordination wasn’t all it should be. ‘Mind your own business,’ he said, so we went to see the relatives. Hollow houses and gutted people were at both ends of dirty blacked-out trains.

  ‘Springer’ Cavendish still survived, soldiers were still drawing lots to go in his aircraft, his operations, his ‘stick’. ‘Springer’; Reg was you see. Always Springer survived and what’s more he brought others back with him like the time he brought back a song-bird in a cage bent almost flat. They were both whistling.

  When, some weeks after Arnhem had grown quiet, Reg and four other airborne soldiers paddled across the lower Rhine in a Wehrmacht inflatable boat the 1st Airborne knew it had lost 7,605 soldiers of the 10,000 who had gone in. It seemed as though Reg was indestructible. He wasn’t. A rations lorry hit Reg as he was coming out of the Montgomery Club in Brussels. It was four days before VE day.

  The Adjutant of Reg’s unit phoned me. What should he tell Reg’s father? Should he record it as it was? He could hardly believe it himself. He said that Reg was with him when he first jumped. He said it three times. I was going to London that night. I said I’d tell his father.

  DETENTION CENTRES

  The last time we had seen anything on this sort of scale was when the Home Office pulled in all aliens during the war. At that time Olympia was used to house them before they were moved to the Isle of Man. But then there had been no need to keep them separate, and the numbers were kept down by the movement to the internment camps. This was a much more complex job.

  TAP

  Work by Dr Holger Hyden, professor of Histology at Goteberg, revealed that Tricayandaminopropene, a substance made by manipulating the molecular structure of a series of chemicals, can change the brain’s nerve cells and the cells of membrane that sheath the cells.

  The fatty substance and protein of the nerve cells is increased by 25 per cent.

  In surrounding membranes the quantity of the molecule RNA was decreased by almost 50 per cent.

  From this change the suggestibility of the subject is increased by the functional change of these important substances.

  About the Author

  Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

  After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school — first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery — a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

  Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.

  Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim — Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.

  As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood—‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’—and his books have now deservedly become classics.

  Примечания

  1

  Permanently open line.

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  2

  The Denning report published September, 1963 reve
aled that the Home Secretary is in control of British Counter Intelligence.

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  3

  See Appendix: Medway II, p. 327.

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  4

  See Appendix, p. 327.

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  5

  ONI — Office of Naval Intelligence US Navy.

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  6

  See Appendix: Indian Hemp, p. 328.

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  7

  VIRTUTI MILITARI, The Polish VC.

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  8

  Name withdrawn from MS.

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  9

  Criminal Records Office.

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  10

  See Appendix, p. 329.

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