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The Villa Golitsyn
A Novel
Piers Paul Read
PROLOGUE
ONE
Between 1963 and 1966 a state of undeclared war existed between Indonesia and the newly established Federation of Malaysia. Neither nation had the means to fight a conventional military campaign so the Indonesians – after a single attack upon the mainland of Malaysia – limited themselves to a barrage of anti-imperialist propaganda and covert infiltration of Indonesian guerillas from Kalimantan into Sarawak and North Borneo.
The frontier between the two states on this giant island ran for a thousand miles through mountains, jungle and primeval rainforest. It was impossible to guard it with barbed wire fences, raked earth and watchtowers so Britain – the old colonial power which had undertaken the defence of the new nation – established bases from which small patrols of a single platoon would fan out into the jungle. There they would hide out for two weeks at a time, waiting and watching for any infiltrators from Indonesia.
This strategy worked well. Since the British and Common-wealth troops had the advantage of surprise, it was always the Indonesians who were ambushed and either killed or put to flight. Such minor military setbacks did not worry Sukharno, the Indonesian president, to whom the actual fighting in Borneo was an unimportant adjunct to his political and diplomatic offensives; but the more radical elements in the Indonesian army – those, that is, linked to the Indonesian Communist Party – felt humiliated that the warriors of a newly liberated nation of the Third World should be so effectively frustrated by the soldiers of a neocolonial power. They looked for a dramatic victory over the British which would push the confrontation into open war.
Early in the morning of 9 June 1965, a detachment of Gurkhas – Himalayan mercenaries with a British officer in command – set off from their Battalion headquarters for a fourteen-day patrol. Two days later they laid an ambush at a prearranged position overlooking the upper reaches of the Kapuas River. The site was well camouflaged – invisible from the air and cleverly hidden from the ground in the jungle vegetation.
At dawn on 12 June it was attacked by Indonesian guerrillas. The lookouts were surprised and strangled, and the rest of the platoon were either shot dead in their sleeping-bags or were taken alive. Those that were captured did not live for long. Forgetting the enlightened dicta of Mao Tse-tung on the treatment of prisoners, the victors went berserk. First, in a frenzy, they hacked at the bodies of the dead Gurkhas; then, with more deliberation, they proceeded to torture those that were still living. Some had their eyes put out with sharpened sticks of bamboo; others lost their ears, noses and tongues before being burnt alive.
The most refined torments were kept for the British officer, Hamish Churton. His clothes were torn from his body, his genitals cut off with a parang, stuffed into his mouth and down his throat, and then his lips were sewn together with the canvas thread used by the Gurkhas to repair any tears in their groundsheets. While breathing through his nose in bubbles of blood he was made to watch the torture and execution of his men until he too was dispatched with a bullet in the back of the neck.
The corpses were discovered a week later by a brother officer leading another Gurkha patrol. The green tentacles of the jungle were already reaching over the heap of charred bodies, and columns of giant ants carried off small morsels of flesh that had been bitten from the bone; but enough remained to show what had been done to the men before they died. The officer took photographs of this evidence of atrocity and then ordered his men to wrap the bodies in the groundsheets of the dead soldiers and bury them in the ground.
When the British Army Command in Labuan was told of this incident in Sarawak there was an urgent conference of senior officers. The Director of Intelligence, a Brigadier Smythe, was asked to explain how such an ambush could have taken place, but Smythe, already shaken by the pictures of Churton and his men, could think of nothing to say except that the Indonesians must have stumbled upon the platoon’s position. It was a lame explanation. In so vast an area of impenetrable jungle the odds against accidentally finding a well-camouflaged position without alerting the lookouts posted around it were small; yet it seemed even less likely that enemy intelligence could have known of its exact position in advance. Only Brigadier Smythe in Labuan, and Churton himself, had had maps showing where he planned to be and the spot had only been chosen a week before he left on his tour of duty. The Command was obliged to conclude its conference without reaching any conclusions. The strategy for defending Sarawak and North Borneo remained the same.
Three weeks later, on the night of 30 June, events took place in Djakarta which went some way to solve the riddle. Communist officers in the Indonesian army attempted a coup d’état. They first made a preemptive strike against their right-wing commanders, dragging them from their beds to the Lubang Buaja training camp, where they were tortured, killed and thrown in a well; then they occupied various public buildings in the centre of the capital city.
The putsch failed. Certain key commanders had been overlooked – notably General Suharto. The Right regrouped and retaliated. The Leftist soldiers were surrounded and disarmed. A purge began. The hunters became the hunted. The army turned on the Communist Party, whose leaders fled from Djakarta to Central Java. The town house of the General Secretary, D. N. Aidit, was sacked and burned; but before it went up in flames his papers were recovered and removed to the headquarters of the Paracommandos. Among them was found a photographic print of a British army map giving the precise position of Hamish Churton’s base camp in Sarawak. Written on the back, in Aidit’s own hand, was the note: ‘From our comrade L in the British Embassy.’
In the course of the following year, largely as a result of the unsuccessful coup by the Communists, power in Indonesia passed from President Sukharno to General Suharto. This new leader made up his mind to end the confrontation with Malaysia and make his peace with Britain. His government agreed to pay for the rebuilding of the British Embassy which had been sacked three years before; and to mark the new spirit of cordiality the British Military attaché was given the map which had been found among Aidit’s papers.
The attaché realized at once that this not only explained the ambush of Churton’s platoon in Sarawak, but was also evidence of a spy in the Embassy in Djakarta. Without mentioning the matter to any of his colleagues, he sent the print with Aidit’s damning annotation back in the diplomatic bag to the Ministry of Defence in London, where an investigation was immediately started by the appropriate branch of Military Intelligence.
At first it was assumed that some native employee of the Embassy had been responsible, but this hypothesis collapsed because Churton’s map had never been in the Embassy, and during the confrontation no native-born Indonesians had been employed there. The investigating officers were therefore obliged to look for the traitor among the British diplomats, and they were soon able to narrow it down to two of the younger men who had been sent to Djakarta early in 1964. Each had a name which began with L, and both had stayed with Churton in Labuan for the week before he went on the fatal tour of duty in Sarawak.
The first, on the face of it, was quite implausible as a spy. His name was William Ludley. He was the son of a Conservative politician – a minister for a time in the go
vernment of Harold Macmillan – and an old Cambridge friend of Hamish Churton. He was handsome, charming and rich: it seemed almost fanciful to suggest that he would do anything either to endanger his friend or help the Communists in Asia.
The second, Leslie Baldwin – whom Ludley had brought along with him to stay with Churton in Labuan – was a more likely traitor. While Ludley had gone to one of England’s most celebrated public schools, Baldwin had been educated by the state. Ludley had taken his degree from Trinity College, Cambridge: Baldwin from Woodbridge Hall, Leeds. Baldwin’s father was a tax inspector from Keighley in Yorkshire, but to the gentlemen in MI5 anyone from the industrial areas of northern England was the son of a coal miner. They assumed that he had only been let into the Foreign Office as a sop to the egalitarian ethos of the times, and thought it only too likely that Baldwin’s sympathy with the masses from which he came should lead him to spy for the Communists in Indonesia. But just as they were about to make up their minds that Baldwin was the traitor, Ludley disappeared.
He did not disappear without notice. His father, James Ludley, died while out shooting in Yorkshire. William Ludley returned to England for the funeral, and then went straight back to Djakarta. From there he sent a letter of resignation to the Foreign Office in London, giving his new duties as heir to the Ludley fortune as the reason for curtailing his career. The Foreign Office, which as yet had not been told about the Djakarta leak, saw nothing unusual in this resignation and it was some weeks before Military Intelligence realized that one of their suspects was missing.
At first the news confused them. They thought that Ludley must have heard that he was under suspicion and decided to flee. But then they too decided that it was quite natural for a young man who had come into more than a million pounds and a beautiful house in Suffolk to leave his desk in the humid capital of an unfriendly country and return to England to enjoy a more leisured life. They could wait, after all, and if necessary talk to him in London.
They did wait, but Ludley, when he left Djakarta, did not return to England. He flew to Singapore and took a room in Raffles Hotel. He remained there for a fortnight and then disappeared.
The Foreign Office was now told, and for several months there was dread in Whitehall that Ludley, one of their prize high-fliers, would appear at a press conference in Moscow, Hanoi, Havana or Peking. Military Intelligence tried to find out what Ludley had done and who he had seen in Singapore but learned only that an English girl had joined him there, and had left with him on a flight to Madrid. Only four months after his disappearance did it occur to them to ask the London solicitors who managed the Ludleys’ affairs for the forwarding address of their client. They were told that he was living near Cordoba in Argentina on a ranch which belonged to his family.
There Ludley remained for many years and there the authorities were content to let him stay. He never returned to England. Had he done so they might have called him in to answer certain questions, but it would have been hard to convict him of treason on the evidence had they brought him to court, and the scandal would have embarrassed the government and demoralized the diplomatic service. Confident in their own minds that Ludley was the source of the Djakarta leak, the responsible officers investigating the affair decided to let him rot in self-imposed exile.
TWO
Ludley’s treason seemed to have no perceptible effect on the career of his colleague, Leslie Baldwin. This ginger-haired, north-country fellow-high-flier, cleared of suspicion by Ludley’s self-incriminating flight to the Southern Hemisphere, rose steadily through the different grades of the Foreign Service. No further breach of security came from the embassies in which he served, and if on occasions he was passed over for some of the more interesting and sensitive posts, it was not because of his link with Ludley but because of the prejudices of the snobbish selectors.
It was not until the 1970s that Baldwin’s natural abilities gained for him some of the posts he deserved. When the Labour Party was returned to power in 1974 Baldwin’s northern accent, which had been tempered but not lost over the years in foreign capitals, came into its own. He seemed to be a perfect embodiment of the ‘new Briton’ that the government wished to project abroad. He was sent to Paris in 1974 and four years later, when he was forty, was mooted for one of the highest appointments in the Embassy in Washington.
It was then that someone remembered the Djakarta leak. It was mentioned at a meeting of the committee convened to confirm his appointment. The man who brought it up – the Head of Personnel – did so only in passing, as if it could not be considered a serious objection to the appointment: but the Permanent Undersecretary, aware that the post in Washington would put into the hands of the man who held it every military and diplomatic secret of the Western Alliance, insisted that they made doubly sure that their candidate, Baldwin, was not what he called ‘a hibernating traitor’.
It was therefore agreed that Baldwin should have a second clearance – not by Military Intelligence as before, nor by the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, but by the Security Service of the Foreign Office itself. The head of this department, a man called Edgar Fowler was asked to go over the old ground and report back to the Committee when it met again in October.
Fowler, a man of around fifty, had trained as a barrister, and had been drawn from the legal profession into the Foreign Office about five years before to apply the law’s more rigorous logic to questions of security. He was a patriotic man, obsessed with the defection of Donald Maclean and always afraid that the ideological bacillus which had raged through Cambridge in the 1930s might have infected later generations at that or other universities. Certainly, the Soviet brand of Communism had never again been fashionable as it was then; but Fowler suspected that many students in the 1960s who had later found service with the British government had been outraged by what the Americans had done in Vietnam and might as a result have offered their services to Communist powers.
In looking through the file on the Djakarta leak he was immediately dissatisfied. He accepted the evidence which made either William Ludley or Leslie Baldwin the source of the leak, and he agreed that Ludley’s subsequent behaviour made him look like the guilty man. He also noted that Ludley had been to Trinity College, Cambridge, the same college as Philby, Burgess and Blunt, and there had studied history under Edward Hallett Carr, whose philosophy of history Fowler mistrusted; but he also knew that appearances did not constitute proof and saw certain inconsistencies in the hypothesis that Ludley’s actions established his guilt.
If Ludley had betrayed Churton’s position to the Indonesian Communists, what was his motive? Certainly he could not have done it for money, because he had plenty of money of his own. He could only have done it from conviction, yet if Ludley had been a convinced Communist or fellow traveller, why had he fled rather than wait to betray other more important secrets later in his career? Had he known that he was discovered? But if so, and he had been afraid of arrest, why had he waited for his resignation to be accepted in London and then lingered for a fortnight in Singapore? And had he not, since then, continued to live in the non-Communist world where he might either have been extradited or eliminated? It would have been safer, if he had been afraid, to defect to Russia or China, but he had moved to Argentina and there had lived off the substantial investments in land and minerals made by his grandfather and now owned by him. Was that the behaviour of a convinced Communist? And where was he now? Not teaching English in Moscow or cutting cane in Cuba, but living an idle life in the South of France.
Thus Fowler was faced with the same problem as the investigators of fourteen years before – that it was impossible to establish with certainty which of the two men had photographed the map in Churton’s house in Labuan and passed on a print to the Communists in Djakarta. If both had been cross-examined at the time, one might have given himself away, or immunity might have been offered in exchange for a confession; but neither course of action had been taken and it seemed too late to do it now. Indeed
the only prudent course of action seemed to be to report back to the committee that Baldwin, through no fault of his own, could not be given positive clearance and must therefore be passed over for the post in Washington.
This logical conclusion, however, went against another of Fowler’s legal instincts – that a man was innocent until proved guilty. He had met Baldwin and admired him for coming so far from such an unprivileged background. It seemed inconceivable that he was either an active or a dormant spy, and it offended Fowler’s sense of fair play that the dictates of logic should destroy his career. He therefore looked for other solutions and came up with only one – that William Ludley himself should be made to admit his treason. Fowler felt sure that if only he could have Ludley before him, he would quickly catch him out in a thousand inconsistencies: but how could Ludley be brought back to England? Or how could Fowler get to see him in France?
For a moment he thought of going as a journalist to see Ludley in Nice; but the questions he would ask would soon give him away. He then thought of sending someone else, someone who knew Ludley and might coax him to confess over a period of time. This idea grew on him. He did not want to pursue Ludley and prosecute him, but simply satisfy himself that Ludley was the traitor. The only difficulty now was to find the friend.
PART ONE
ONE
Simon Milson had recently returned from a tour of duty as Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Jedda. He had been married and was now divorced, with a son at a Preparatory School in Sussex and a daughter who lived with his wife. He was tall and thin with a pale complexion, strong hair and a face which in repose had a look of romantic melancholy but often broke into a cynical smile. He was thought amusing by his colleagues, charming by his mother’s friends, and attractive by the secretaries in the office – all of which might have made his divorce seem strange had the rupture not happened in Jedda, where several diplomats had recently been abandoned by their wives.
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