And Is There Honey Still For Tea?

by Peter Murphy

  He finished his vodka in one gulp, and ordered another, asking the barman to give me another of whatever I was drinking. I began to feel as though our conversation in Nuremberg, some three years ago, was continuing as if it had never been interrupted. I remembered why I liked Stepanov – the easy, open manner, the effortless conversational English, so unlike the Soviet stereotype.

  ‘So, how do you like The Hague? Are you enjoying working as a journalist?’

  ‘I am, actually,’ I replied. ‘It makes a welcome change from what I usually do.’

  ‘Of course. Arguing cases in the law courts is important, but not as enjoyable as chess, I think. You are playing well, even with so little time to devote to the game. I think, if you were not a lawyer, you would have been British champion by now.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘You keep up with my progress?’

  ‘I read the British chess magazines, of course,’ he replied. ‘It helps my English reading as well as telling me what is going on in your country. I have studied your games. Alexander is good, very creative, but I think you could be better, and certainly better than Golombek and the rest.’

  ‘What have you been doing since Nuremberg?’ I countered quickly.

  ‘Playing chess,’ he replied. ‘I have the title of grandmaster now.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said at once.

  We shook hands again. He paused to take a drink.

  ‘Thank you. But I know my limits, James. I am no Botvinnik. I am not even a Smyslov. I will never play in such a tournament as this. I will probably never even win my country’s championship. So I pursue other activities also.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Teaching the next generation. I teach at the chess academy in Moscow, give simultaneous exhibitions in schools, you know the kind of thing. We have so many talented young players, James. It is frightening. I see children of twelve who will beat me in two or three years’ time.’ He laughed. ‘This is sometimes depressing, of course. But this is also good, because it means the game continues to thrive, and the children can study chess at the same time as they pursue their general education. Those who are good enough can go on to play professionally.’

  I ordered us another drink.

  ‘I also work with the Government,’ he continued. ‘Ever since Nuremberg, they know I can interpret in English and German. I even picked up some French while I was there but not yet to the required standard. In any case they use me, particularly in connection with chess events. It is very sensitive for them, because they have grandmasters going abroad, and they must be involved in negotiations with the International Federation. I played a small part in the negotiations for this tournament. My God, James, you would not believe how hard-headed both sides were.’

  ‘I hear that there was some pretty hard bargaining,’ I said.

  ‘You would not have believed it. Where is the tournament to be? Who shall play? How many rounds? What shall be the official language? It went on and on. To tell you the truth, I am amazed that the tournament is being held at all.’

  I stared into my drink for some time.

  ‘Viktor, can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Is there any truth in the rumour that …’

  He suddenly roared with laughter.

  ‘That we will fix the tournament to let Botvinnik win? You ask me about this? You think I would answer this to an English journalist? You think I want to see my name in The Times of London, saying that the Soviet Union fixes chess tournaments? James, my dear friend, I will have to defect also. You must give me political asylum for this, I think.’

  I had to laugh.

  ‘I’m not asking as a journalist,’ I said. ‘I’m not asking for anything I can write. I’m asking as a friend, for very personal reasons. Off the record.’

  He stared at me for some time. He eventually nodded.

  ‘Then I will tell you the truth. No, there is no fix, James. Botvinnik will win, but he will win because he is the best player. As for Smyslov, his time will come, I think, but not yet. Keres – Keres I like very much, James, I like him personally. He is such a nice man, so modest, and he plays many brilliant games; but he does not have the depth of Botvinnik and, over the course of a long tournament, I do not believe he can prevail.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  * * *

  ‘You know why I am here, of course,’ he said, after a lengthy silence.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  He turned around to survey the bar. It was getting late and we were almost alone. The bartender looked as though he wanted to close up for the night as soon as he could, and go home. Viktor ordered one last drink for us, and paid the bill. We left our stools to move to a corner table.

  ‘Before I left Moscow,’ he continued quietly, ‘I was summoned to appear before the chief of a directorate of Moscow Centre. The Comrade Director told me that he had important contacts within the Security Services in Great Britain and also in the United States. There was an urgent need to exchange information. I was to be useful in making arrangements for this. He told me that it had been arranged with someone in London or Washington that, while in The Hague, I would meet a contact.’

  ‘Me?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘I had no idea who it was until I arrived here. I learned of your identity through a top-secret communication yesterday from Moscow Centre to our Embassy, where I am based during the tournament. When I saw your name, I was pleased, of course.’

  ‘And surprised?’

  He shrugged. ‘No, not surprised. It makes sense that they choose you, as we already know each other. But I am very pleased. James, listen, this is what I have been told. The Comrade Director wishes us to devise a system, whereby you can bring information to be conveyed to Moscow, and Moscow can send information back to London and Washington. I do not suggest that we discuss this yet. When the tournament moves to Moscow, they will make arrangements for us to talk in more secure surroundings. But the Comrade Director wishes me to know that he will do all in his power to help.’

  I looked questioningly at him.

  ‘By this, he means that I can provide you with money to defray any necessary expenses while you are abroad, if your own people do not give you enough. He will also ensure that you always have a visa to enter the Soviet Union, and you will be given a press pass in connection with any chess tournament you wish to observe or report on as a journalist. While in the Soviet Union you will not be harassed or troubled by minders. And eventually …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If, after some period of time, you wish to come over to us, or if it becomes necessary for you to do so, you would be given employment in connection with chess. What this would be, I cannot say, but it can be negotiated.’

  I felt overwhelmed. In my head I was hearing Anthony’s voice again, and then Roger’s. I closed my eyes, and I saw Bridget, and my clerk, and the Manor, and they all seemed unreal, as if they belonged to another world. Was this happening? Who was I, and what world did I live in? I was no longer sure. I had to get out of there and clear my head. I stood.

  ‘Look, Viktor, I’m really tired, and I have a report to file. Can we talk again, another time?’

  He showed not the slightest irritation.

  ‘But of course, James. Perhaps tomorrow evening?’

  ‘Yes, tomorrow evening,’ I agreed. ‘Here, after dinner?’

  I had spoken too quickly. I was not sure I would be ready to talk in such a short space of time. It was not good tradecraft to repeat the venue, and I was momentarily embarrassed by that alone; we should have gone somewhere different. I was about to offer an alternative, but he seemed perfectly relaxed, and agreed immediately.

  ‘I will come here for dinner,’ he replied. ‘I understand the food is excellent. I will see you here in the bar afterwards.’

 
* * *

  When we met the next evening, we drank for some time, and then he took me for a long walk, how long I could not say. But I remember that we passed the Binnenhof and the Buitenhof and the Mauritshuis at least twice, and walked through many nameless little streets full of tall, narrow houses and, in the cold night air of The Hague, I talked to him; talked, with barely a pause to draw breath, until I had bared my soul for him to see.

  * * *

  In the middle weeks of April, in a comfortable safe house in Moscow, with limitless supplies of vodka, black bread, and caviar to sustain us, Viktor and I met nightly after the tournament had ended for the day; and worked out a system for conveying information securely back and forth between London, Washington, and Moscow. It was simplicity itself.

  44

  I do not know what I had expected life as a spy to be like. It was not a life I had ever planned for myself. For some years, all went smoothly. I duly received an invitation to attend the Soviet Chess Championship in Moscow in November 1948, and I was invited to the championship each year thereafter up to, and including, 1960. I was invited to send my passport to the Soviet Embassy for my visa to be renewed; in fact it was upgraded to a five-year visa with almost no restrictions. The Soviet championship is an event like no other. No other national championship can boast anything like the number of grandmasters competing. Previous form is no guarantee of success, and even world champions cannot assume that they will win their country’s title. The 1948 championship was won jointly by David Bronstein and Alexander Kotov. It was not until 1952 that Botvinnik took the title again, and by that time both Smyslov and Keres had put their names on it. Each year I was provided with a press pass and afforded every facility to prepare my reports, including personal interviews with the leading contenders. And when I returned to London, I picked up my practice where I had left off, and visited the Manor with Bridget whenever we could. It was during this period that I made my only trip to the United States, where I saw New York and Boston, and Paul Morphy’s house in Rue des Ursulines in New Orleans.

  Viktor also arranged for me to give simultaneous exhibitions at the Moscow Chess Academy, during which I played against some thirty ten- to fourteen-year-olds, some of whom were terrifyingly good. The first time I did this, I had thirty-two opponents, and lost to two thirteen-year-olds. Needless to say, their victories were loudly hailed as a triumph of the Marxist-Leninist method over capitalism and the bourgeois life-style – disregarding the overall result of the match, which was that out of thirty-two games, I won twenty-eight and drew two, a statistic which should have suggested that the bourgeois cause was not entirely hopeless. I did not mind in the least. I was quite ready to put up with a little joshing. The truth was that I was overwhelmed by my first experience of the Academy. I was lost in admiration of the scale and excellence of its teaching régime, and envious of the opportunities which would open up for these gifted young players. I could only imagine, with an ache in my heart, what might have happened if such an academy had been available in England for players such as Hugh Alexander and myself.

  Whenever I was in Moscow, they put me up at the Peking Hotel, an absurdly grandiose neo-classical building on Ulitsa Bolshoya Sadovaya. It was pretentious and decidedly mediocre by western standards; not even its most enthusiastic patron could describe it as luxurious. It had all the usual failings of the Soviet hotel. There were periodic power failures and the phones never worked properly when you needed them to. But by Moscow standards it was well above average. The accommodation and food were acceptable and the hotel has a pleasant view over Triumfalnaya Ploschchad, one of the city’s better squares. I must admit that once I got used to it, I felt very comfortable there. The staff never seemed to change and, after several stays when I was welcomed by the same familiar faces, it became something of a home from home. I actually began to fall in love with it in a strange kind of way. I was also acutely aware of its convenience from the point of view of my hosts. The Peking was a favourite haunt of KGB officers, and at times the entire place resembled one gigantic safe house. Viktor and I never had any difficulty in finding a secure venue for our meetings. When the Soviet championship was held away from Moscow, I always spent time in the capital once it had ended. I always assumed, without even troubling to verify the fact, that the KGB had bugged every phone in the hotel and kept me under constant surveillance. Once or twice I actually caught them at it, to my pleasure, but I would never have dreamed of complaining.

  Initially, work was brisk. With Kim in Turkey, with Guy and Donald in the United States, I brought a good deal of information with me which I had encrypted, and which Viktor and I decrypted together when I arrived. Towards the end of my stay we would encrypt information destined for London and Washington, which I would decrypt for my contact at the Embassy when I returned home. The method Viktor and I had devised was virtually risk-free; as long as the final meeting in London went smoothly – and my contact and I were obsessively careful about our tradecraft – my work was undetectable.

  But there were already clouds on the horizon. They were clouds I could do nothing about, but they made me anxious. I saw Anthony every so often at Apostolic meetings – I had taken my wings after the War and so was no longer obliged to attend meetings, but I still went up to Cambridge occasionally, simply because I love the place, and attended meetings whenever I could. I never failed to attend the annual dinner in London. Anthony hinted that both Guy and Donald were drinking far too much and there had been a number of unpleasant public incidents which were causing ripples, if not yet waves, within the Foreign Office. In Guy’s case that hardly came as a surprise, but the same could not be said for Donald. Anthony surmised that his marriage was not going well. Sure enough, before the end of 1948, Guy had been transferred to the Far East section; while Donald was posted to Cairo as First Secretary. Neither move caused the work to dry up, but my contact told me that the information was harder to come by and, in some instances, of inferior quality. Things improved again in 1949 when Kim was appointed Washington representative of the Security Services, and so began to have access to much of the same kind of information as Guy and Donald had previously. And in 1950 Guy returned to the United States as Second Secretary at the British Embassy. But in the same year, Donald was ordered back to England after a particularly bad episode of binge drinking turned violent and a colleague was seriously injured in his own home. I took Donald for dinner at the Reform once or twice after his return. He had been ordered to undergo intensive counselling, but he seemed distant and withdrawn. I did my best to reach out to him, but other than confirming Anthony’s speculation about his marriage, he gave me no real clue about what had happened to him. Then, on 25th May 1951, disaster struck.

  * * *

  For weeks after Guy and Donald disappeared, having ostensibly left for a short leisure break on the Continent, the press and Parliament had a field day, speculating about what might have happened to them, and whether they were truly Soviet spies. I could have answered both questions for them immediately. But for some reason, the authorities never quite put all the pieces together; it was not until February 1956 that Guy and Donald gave a press conference in Moscow and removed all doubt on the subject.

  Donald had resumed work in November of the previous year, having apparently convinced the Foreign Office that he had recovered from whatever was ailing him and was no longer liable to engage in embarrassing public acts of drunkenness and violence. In all likelihood, he was allowed to resume work mainly to ensure that the authorities could keep an eye on him and tighten the noose which had already been placed around his neck. It seems likely now that he and Guy had finally attracted too much attention. Despite mounting evidence, the CIA’s anglophile James Jesus Angleton, who had trained under Kim in England as his relatively new agency was still in the throes of being established, had steadfastly refused to believe that officers of the Secret Intelligence Service or the Foreign Office were capable of the treachery of betraying
their country. Ironically, it was a state of mind that exactly mirrored that of the Service itself. The FBI, on the other hand, had no such illusions and no such loyalty. J Edgar Hoover had kept up a steady barrage of pressure against both Angleton and the White House, demanding a full inquiry into the possibility that British officers were giving away American secrets to the Soviets. He was winning the argument.

  Guy had gone from bad to worse. His public conduct grew so egregious, culminating in an attempt to claim diplomatic immunity for several speeding offences in a single day, that Ambassador Franks was left with no alternative but to remove him from his post and return him to England. Worse, when Guy had arrived in the United States in September 1950, he had stayed with Kim at his house on Nebraska Avenue, on what Kim assured his reluctant wife would be a temporary basis. In fact it turned into a lasting arrangement and, as a result, Kim was implicated in some of Guy’s drunken escapades and, eventually, in the suspicion that had grown up about him in Washington. He was too close to the target. Shortly after Guy and Donald disappeared, Kim was recalled to London. During 1952, he was closely interrogated in a so-called ‘secret trial’ in a frantic effort to incriminate him. I heard from Anthony that the interrogation had been conducted by a Silk, Helenus Milmo, and I realised with horror that there would have been nothing illogical if the Service had asked me to do it, given my wartime experience. Miraculously, the case against Kim for being the ‘Third Man’ was never quite proved. In 1955 a Government White Paper conceded as much. Kim was dismissed from the Service, notwithstanding, but almost immediately started work as a foreign correspondent for The Observer, based in Beirut, and there were persistent rumours that he continued to work for the Service using that cover. For me, these were terrible times.