Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant

by Samantha Kate

  Like my aunt, Tanner had not married. ‘Never had the time,’ he told me on one of my early visits. He had interrupted his Oxford career when the army appealed for officer recruits with a knowledge of engineering. By 1944, when a landmine exploded just yards away from him in Normandy, rupturing the nervous system on his left side, he was a full colonel in the Royal Engineers at the age of only twenty-five. When peace broke out, he joined SIS and, on M’s accession to the top chair, was appointed his Chief of Staff, a position he held for twenty-one years.

  ‘Thought the world of your aunt,’ he told me. ‘Held the whole thing together. The Old Man would have been lost without her. Couldn’t find his pipe without her help, let alone his way around a Triple X decoder. Brilliant mind, but hopeless practically. Fell apart when he was pushed aside. Thought he’d be perfectly happy with his paints and his orchids and his naval-battle jigsaws. He wasn’t. According to your aunt, who visited him every other weekend, he was increasingly paranoid. He claimed to see Reds under every bed, and was convinced he was being poisoned. Drove poor old Hammond and his wife, who were only trying to look after him, into a home, and was so foully rude to his visitors that they soon gave up coming. Except Penny, of course. She rode all the waves and was with him the day before he died.’

  ‘Did you ever find Prenderghast’s ally in the Office?’ I asked. Tanner cleared his throat and got up from the faded velvet armchair in front of the fire, where he’d been idly fondling his labrador’s ears. He picked up a small replica of a cannon that was sitting on the mantelpiece, put it down again, and turned to face me. ‘Don’t believe he had one,’ he said finally. ‘Know there was talk of it at the time, and the Old Man was convinced we had another blind tunneller, but I never really thought so. It was the climate of the times. Moles were popping out from every cubbyhole – we thought there had to be another one because we couldn’t believe there wasn’t. Funny sort of logic, I know. But we dug hard and never found a trace. Led me to conclude that he was a figment of our oversensitive imaginations.’

  I shook my head. From what I had read in my aunt’s diaries, I knew that he was, at best, dissembling. ‘So what about the leaks?’

  He shrugged his shoulders and walked over to the window, where the sun was setting in a blazing riot of burnt umber over the Downs beyond. ‘There’s always seepage of some sort – idle gossip, signal intercepts, that sort of thing. For God’s sake, your aunt wrote a diary the entire time she was working for the Firm. Who knows who got hold of that? No, there was no other leak. The Office was secure, and to the best of my knowledge has not been penetrated at that level again.’

  After being persuaded to stay for cottage pie, I drove back late across country to Cambridge. I wasn’t persuaded that even Tanner believed what he was saying. From my aunt’s diaries, it was clear that she was convinced that there was a mole, and she wasn’t the only one. I went back to my rooms and reread the 1962 and 1963 diaries. There it was, in December 1962, in her own writing: ‘I told Bill, who raised his eyebrows. “We’ve been afraid of that,” he said. “Both Dorothy and X say it doesn’t add up; Prenderghast must have had a comrade on the inside. But he’s not admitting to anything.”’ In the volumes that followed, it became clearer still. Tanner was clearly holding something back from me. I would need to try another angle.

  At a dinner party in Cambridge shortly afterwards, I was placed next to an ageing modern-languages don from Corpus, who introduced himself as ‘Snuffy’ Wilden. When the conversation turned to espionage – as somehow, these days, it seems to quite naturally – he told me with some relish that he had ‘always been on the lookout for bright chaps and chappesses who might be interested in that line of business’. Fascinated, I asked how it worked. ‘Well, I was involved with the Firm myself after the war,’ he told me, ‘and, when I retired to teach up here, they asked whether I’d be prepared to do a spot of scouting. I accepted, of course; one gets an appetite for secrecy, you see, and once one’s been in that world it’s hard to let go. So I ask around, look for the usual signs – an aptitude for languages, an engaging character, some intimation of a desire for foreign adventure – sound them out gently, and then point them in the direction of the Firm. It’s all fairly open these days, of course – little of the old hush-hush stuff – but not unuseful for all that.’

  I asked him if he had a contact there I could talk to about certain events in the 1960s. I explained that I’d made several written requests, all of which had been politely rebuffed. He gave a typical donnish snuffle, then got out a gold pen and wrote down a name and a number on the back of his napkin, which he told me to burn once I had committed them to memory. I wasn’t sure whether he was joking. ‘Don’t expect great things though, m’dear,’ he warned as I thanked him. ‘They might be out of the closet, so to speak, but they still guard their secrets closely.’

  The next day I telephoned Ferdy Macintyre, who the old don had described as ‘a senior chap there’. A woman answered and very politely took my name and number. She said she would pass on the message, though she advised me to put it in writing. Two days passed, and when I heard nothing I sat down to write a letter to Macintyre on Trinity College headed paper. I explained my position; I said that I was researching the Prenderghast affair and that I would appreciate assistance in verifying my sources and filling in some of the gaps.

  The following Monday I received an email from his secretary, requesting a list of questions. These I duly submitted, slipping in a brief query about whether the identity of Prenderghast’s accomplice within the Office had ever been determined. The reply arrived a week later and while, somewhat to my surprise, the rest of my questions had been carefully answered, no reference was made to Prenderghast’s sidekick. My original query had been omitted from the list. I sent my thanks, resubmitting the unanswered question. This time I received no reply.

  A few days later I ran into a colleague of mine from the history department – a distinguished professor of twentieth-century history, and a senior member of the college now headed by a former chief of MI6. ‘A word in your ear, Kate, if I may,’ he said, steering me into a small tea shop on King’s Parade, frequented exclusively by tourists. ‘I understand you’re doing some research into the Office,’ he said. Surprised, I nodded. It was some months before the publication of The Moneypenny Diaries, and, on my publisher’s urging, the project was being kept under wraps until its release date. ‘Look, not to beat about the proverbial, but you’d better be careful that you don’t make any unsubstantiated allegations concerning matters about which you have no proof. The Office takes seriously any breach of the Official Secrets Act, and would far prefer to take a look at any allusions that you might think of making in advance of publication, so as to avoid any messy legal wrangling. Do you get my drift?’

  I didn’t exactly, but I was beginning to find his confidential tone – not to mention his halitosis – claustrophobic, so I stood up and shook his hand. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t intend to step on anyone’s toes if I can possibly help it,’ I said. ‘And, as a historian, I wouldn’t dream of publishing untruths. Thank you for the tea.’ Without a backwards glance, I left the café and strode off along the road to Trinity, his words circling around in my head. I had received a warning from the Office. That much was clear. But why? And what were they afraid I might discover?

  Sunday, 1st September

  A strange afternoon with Eleanor. She came to me straight from lunch at the Dorchester with Dingle. When I opened the door, her face was slightly flushed and she announced that there was a change of plan: ‘Alexander says we must see The Birds.’ I was somewhat surprised. We had arranged to go to Tom Jones, which I thought would be a bit of bawdy light relief for her, portraying England in its sunniest light, as a place of fun and green meadows and high jinks. I asked her if she was sure. She said yes – could I believe it, she was an American and she’d never seen a Hitchcock movie before? If Alexander recommended it, then it must be worth seeing. I let it pass and we walked to the C
urzon. It’s my favourite cinema and soon to be closed down for renovations. Still, I was wary about The Birds.

  We settled down in the middle of the cinema and, from the opening announcements, I was filled with a sense of foreboding. One knows what Hitchcock horror can be like, of course, but I couldn’t help but view it through Eleanor’s eyes. Tippi Hedren arrives in a pretty seaside town outside San Francisco, bringing with her a pair of lovebirds for Rod Taylor. As she and Taylor go through the motions of flirtation, the town’s gulls start to behave increasingly erratically. I watched with mounting disquiet as the birds started to attack Tippi and the local people, crashing through shop windows, hunting down children. By the end of the film, Tippi was in a cage with birds swooping from all directions to attack, and the town had been devastated. What at first seemed so normal, so safe, a game for her, turns into hell on earth.

  It was a truly disturbing film. I worried about what it would do to Eleanor’s fragile mental state. Why had Dingle been so determined that she see it? Eleanor sat throughout without moving a muscle. When we emerged from the dark, she was pale and silent and shivering. I took her by the arm and led her to the bar at Claridge’s. It was only after two double brandies that the colour seeped back into her face. ‘What a horrible story,’ she said. ‘I love birds. We had several in pretty little cages in Beirut. In his last letter, Kim wrote that he had bought me a gold canary and a pair of blue and green budgerigars for the flat in Moscow. I wish we hadn’t seen this.’ Then she smiled. ‘It’s only a film, though. Come on, let’s have another drink.’

  We sat in deep armchairs and talked and gradually the colour returned to her face, but she was still obviously agitated. ‘Guy Burgess died on Friday,’ she said. ‘I read about it in today’s paper. What a sad life. Kim was fond of him. He talked about him occasionally. He told me how Guy had insulted the wife of a high-ranking CIA official at one of his dinner parties in Washington, shortly before he fled to Moscow. I asked him whether he had known that Guy was working for the Russians.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Eleanor laughed drily. ‘He said that Guy was such a flamboyant creature that no one in their right senses would recruit him as a spy. Typical Kim – avoiding the question without appearing to. He’s a very clever man. He’s got the best mind of anyone I’ve met. He’s also a romantic. When I was with him, he always made me feel like the most special person in the world. Now I wonder, was it true?’ Her voice dropped and she looked down. ‘In those quietest moments in the middle of the night, when everyone is asleep and dawn is still a few hours off, I wonder whether it was all a sham: whether the Russians told him to marry an American to deflect suspicion from his true passion?’

  I wanted to lean forward and hug her. Her pain and confusion were achingly evident. I didn’t know what to say; I had no more insight into Philby’s motives than I did into M’s love life. Before I could say anything, she appeared to collect herself. ‘No, I know that’s rubbish. He loves me and I’m still not sure he went to Moscow of his own accord, whatever Alexander says. They kidnapped him. He couldn’t have lied to me for so long. He couldn’t have.’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s eight o’clock. How about another brandy?’

  As I walked home after escorting her back to her lodgings, some hours later, I wondered again why Dingle had been so insistent she saw that film. I assume he meant to unsettle her, to show how seeming normality can be turned upside down? Or did he mean to show her the dangers of an unfamiliar world?1 I suppose he knew that Kim had bought her the birds.

  Even after so many years at the Office, I don’t fully understand the mind of a professional intelligence officer. It seems to operate in extra dimensions, considering whys and wherefores, bluffs and counter-bluffs that most of us would not think to conceive. Is R like that too, I wonder? Sometimes I realise that, however much time we spend together, I still have so much to learn about him. Perhaps that is part of his attraction: he’s a book that I could never finish?

  The longer he’s away, the more I yearn for his gentle humour and quick-fire mind. Wherever I go outside the Office, I find myself imagining what it would be like if he was with me. When he’s back, I want to take him up to Cambridge to meet Helena and Lionel. I’m sure they will like each other. I hope so. My sister and my – I don’t now what to call R: what is he to me?

  Tuesday, 3rd September

  Yesterday morning, M asked me how I was getting on with Mrs Philby. I told him we had established good relations.

  ‘She likes you?’

  ‘I think so,’ I replied.

  ‘Trusts you?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘How does she feel about her husband?’

  I told him that I believed she loved him very much.

  ‘He’s a bounder you know,’ M said. ‘Treated his previous wife very unkindly. She was the mother of his five children; went round the bend. I suspect she guessed what he was up to. He used to taunt her with his mistress’s virtues. She loved him very much, too,’ M said drily. ‘D’you think the current Mrs Philby plans to join him out there?’

  ‘I believe she hopes to,’ I replied.

  ‘I had better have a word with her. Set it up, please. Better not in here. Have a word with CME.’

  After some discussion, we decided it would be easiest for Eleanor if the meeting took place at Dingle’s flat and that I shouldn’t be present. ‘Don’t want you to be tarred with his brush if he gets a bit firm,’ was how Dingle put it. So he and Margaret invited her to lunch today. When they were finished, he telephoned M, who went directly to join them. He returned to the Office a little over an hour later and made no comment as to how it had gone.

  This evening, soon after I arrived home, my phone rang. It was Eleanor. She sounded distinctly shaky. I told her to get in a taxi and come straight round to the flat.

  It was raining and she looked miserable when I opened the door to let her in. She had a silk scarf around her head but no coat, and her thin cotton dress stuck to her skin. I think she’d been drinking. Her hands were shaking a little. I gave her a towel and made her a cup of strong tea.

  ‘I met your Chief this afternoon,’ she said. ‘He’s an impressive character, doesn’t pull his punches.’

  I said nothing and she continued.

  ‘It was after lunch today. He arrived at Margaret and Alexander’s apartment and we were left alone in their drawing-room with coffee and a bottle of brandy. He took neither. We started talking about Kim. I told him that I couldn’t have been more surprised when he disappeared, and that I believed he’d been taken against his will. I told him that I still can’t believe Kim was a Russian agent. He said firmly that I had to. He claimed that he had known for the last seven years that Kim had been working for the Russians without pay. He asked if I could identify Kim’s friend, who had come to the flat offering his help in easing my journey to Kim. He showed me a book full of photographs – and there he was, a stocky young man with thinning blond hair. I couldn’t help but point out his picture. I hope I haven’t done anything wrong.’

  She started kneading her handkerchief. I looked down. It was large, white and man-sized, with the initials H.A.R.P. [Harold Adrian Russell Philby – Kim’s full name] embroidered rather shakily in the corner in navy thread.

  ‘I started to cry. In front of your Chief. He just sat there. I don’t think he knew quite what to do. You see, I’m beginning to accept that what he said is true. What do I do now? Apart from Annie, Kim is all I have. He’s everything to me. All I dream about is going out to join him, giving him a happy home. It must be difficult for him too, mustn’t it?’ She looked up at me, almost beseechingly, tears once again in her eyes. I didn’t know what to say. I went to sit next to her on the sofa and put my arms around her as she wept and wept.

  Sunday, 8th September

  Bill came by my office on Friday afternoon. He had a smile on his face. ‘Just spoken to Molony. James’s making good progress. Nearly back to his old self. Why don’t you po
p down to see him? He’d love a visitor. I think he’s bored out of his wits. The worst thing is that M gave orders that he was to be cared for by male nurses only.’ Bill chuckled. ‘Not exactly 007’s cup of tea.’

  The thought of James being tucked up in bed by effete men in white uniforms made me laugh. ‘All right,’ I told Bill. ‘I’ll try to go down there tomorrow.’

  It was a beautiful morning. I took Rafiki for a walk in the park, popped in to R’s flat to water his plants – he must be back soon, surely – then came home to change. I had great problems deciding what to wear, which annoyed me. Indecision is a waste of energy and I wasn’t sure that James deserved it. On the one hand, I strongly believe that one should always wear bright, cheery colours to hospitals, but a part of me still wanted James to suffer for what he had done. I compromised with a white shirt and turquoise skirt. Work clothes.

  I hadn’t been to The Park before and wasn’t sure what to expect. I suppose I had a vague idea that it would be a large grey institution, with barred windows and burly orderlies walking around with bunches of clanking keys hanging from their belts.

  Fortunately, it defied the caricature and instead lived up to its name. I turned off the A2 at Ashford and, after a few more miles, found myself at an imposing pair of wrought-iron gates. There was a discreet sign on the manicured grass to one side: ‘THE PARK. PRIVATE.’ As I pulled in, I noticed the blinds twitch in the gatehouse window. I pressed on the intercom and announced my name. After a few minutes, the gates began to swing open.