Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant

by Samantha Kate

  ‘Are you threatening me, Mr Macintyre?’

  The smile didn’t leave his face. ‘Of course not, Dr Westbrook. My aim is merely to help you.’

  ‘Then I can assure you that I will not publish any unsubstantiated allegations.’

  ‘Thank you. Perhaps it would be of some assistance if we were to read your manuscript before publication?’

  I shook my head and laughed.

  ‘Well, perhaps I could invite you to meet me for lunch one day?’

  I was momentarily wrong-footed. ‘Perhaps you could. Until then, thank you for the, er, help.’ I stood up, turned, and left without shaking his hand.

  That weekend I drove down to Wiltshire to see Bill Tanner. I told him what had happened. I told him that I had been warned, that his old firm appeared keen to block publication of the book. He sat quietly throughout, occasionally nodding. He exhibited no surprise.

  ‘You knew this was happening,’ I said finally.

  He nodded. ‘I had heard.’

  ‘The “sieve”, as you named it, did exist?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far. Perhaps even just the possibility is enough to frighten the Office.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. I think he – or she – was a reality. And that the revelation of their existence would provoke more embarrassment to your outfit than they are prepared to endure.’

  He got up and walked over to the drinks tray, where he poured himself a tumbler of whisky out of a cut-glass decanter, before walking back to the fireplace. ‘You remind me in so many ways of your aunt,’ he said. ‘She was convinced there was a mole too. I implore you to be careful. The consequences of arousing the ire of some of these people could be fatal.’

  I sat down as the implications of his carefully chosen words sunk in. I shook my head in disbelief, the words coming out slowly: ‘She died when her boat upended in a storm. There was an inquest. The coroner returned a verdict of accidental death.’

  ‘On what date did she lodge her papers and diary with the lawyers?’ he asked.

  ‘The letter she wrote to me was dated September 15th, 1990,’ I said, shaking my head again – ‘three and a half weeks before she died. No. It can’t be true.’

  He just looked at me. ‘Why don’t you go away somewhere and think it all through,’ he said gently. ‘You don’t know for sure that she wrote them at the time. You don’t know she didn’t add things to further her case. Think about what happened and whether you think your aunt’s version of history is worth fighting for.’

  Sitting here in Kenya, I cannot pretend that the option of burning this manuscript and going back to Cambridge to beg for my old job has not been playing at the front of my mind. But it is not an easy decision. I believe that these diaries may provide the only contemporary, unedited account of the day-to-day dramas in the Secret Intelligence Service. I believe they contain the clues that will lead me to a mole. The idea that my aunt may have been killed – perhaps for her conviction that this mole did exist; perhaps by Boris, in retribution for betraying him; perhaps by someone completely different – haunts me. I do not want to believe that, but I cannot ignore its possibility.

  In a way, however, it has made the decision for me. If she died because she knew who this mole was, I cannot let her death be for nothing; if she did not, then I have nothing to fear. I am almost certain that the mole existed, that Prenderghast had an ally within the Secret Intelligence Service, and I have a hunch that my aunt had worked out who it was. I have drawn up a short list of suspects, colleagues of hers close to the hub of power with access to highly classified information, and have resolved to devote the next year to following the clues left in the diaries. Many are unwitting, of use only with the benefit of hindsight; others, I believe, she deliberately hid within her words, wary as always of the possibility that her secret diaries might someday be read, perhaps against her wishes. By the end of one year, if I am no closer to the truth, then I will cease the chase.

  But a lot can happen in a year.

  About the Author

  Samantha Weinberg

  Kate Westbrook is the pseudonym of Samantha Weinberg, frustrated spy and author of the best-selling A Fish Caught in Time: the Search for the Coelacanth, and Pointing from the Grave, which won the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-fiction.

  Also by Samantha Weinberg

  Last of the Pirates: The Search for Bob Denard

  A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth

  Pointing from the Grave: A True Story of Murder and DNA

  1963: January – July

  1 Head of the Japanese secret service, a trained, kamikaze womaniser and bon viveur.

  2 Chief interrogator of the SIS and inventor of various techniques of reportedly painless information extraction that are used by intelligence organisations around the world to this day.

  3 Harry St. John Bridger Philby (1885–1960), also known as Sheikh Abdullah, a renowned Arabist, explorer, writer and eccentric.

  4 John Booker, PhD, Chief of Soviet Section – in his day, Oxford’s youngest maths graduate, at the age of sixteen years and six days. Famous among his peers for being able to think to eleven decimal places, and calculate the odds of any eventuality in the blink of an eye – hence his nickname. During the war, he was siphoned directly into the decryption huts at Bletchley Park, where he worked alongside Alan Turing on breaking the Enigma codes. He joined SIS in 1945. Fluent in five Slavic languages.

  5 JM’s gunmetal grey standard poodle, with an outsized character and the instincts of an actor. At the utterance of the word ‘dead’, he would collapse to the ground with his head on one side and his four legs in the air.

  6 Code-named Source Ironbark. During the eighteen-month period that he was in play, he passed over innumerable priceless intelligence documents to his Western handlers.

  7 John Dennis Profumo (1915–2006), Conservative Secretary of State for War, told the House of Commons in March 1963 that there was ‘no impropriety whatever’ in his relationship with Keeler. However, it emerged that the married Old Harrovian had enjoyed a brief but passionate relationship with her, having been introduced to her by the ‘society osteopath’ Stephen Ward. Ward was prosecuted for living off immoral earnings, but committed suicide on the last day of his trial. Keeler was tried and imprisoned on related charges. Profumo resigned, and devoted much of the rest of his life to charity work in London’s East End.

  8 Mary Goodnight, attractive blonde secretary to the oo section. Enjoyed a passionate but ultimately unsustainable liaison with 006.

  9 Loelia Ponsonby, secretary to the oo section until she retired to marry the heir to a dukedom.

  10 Sometime CIA agent and employee of Pinkerton’s Private Detective Agency. First encountered by Bond in the casino at Royale-les-Eaux, where they became firm friends and subsequently partners on numerous missions.

  11 Head of Admin and James Bond’s bête noire, after he served under him on a committee investigating the impact of the Burgess and Maclean defection. Described by Bond as a bigot, ‘the office tyrant and bugbear … cordially disliked by all … the one man who has real impact on the office comforts and amenities and whose authority extends into the privacy and personal habits of the men and women of the organisation’.

  12 Joe Gilmore, the legendary long-serving head barman at the Savoy and author of Joe Gilmore and his Cocktails.

  1963: August

  1 The proverbial ‘good cop’in the two-man re-entry interrogation team.

  2 The West-London headquarters of X Section, the department concerned with the cross-examination of foreign spies and of suspected double agents within the Secret Intelligence Service.

  3 The statement read, ‘The Ministry of Defence is delighted to announce that Commander James Bond, CBE, who was posted as missing, believed killed, while on a mission to Japan last November, has returned to this country after a hazardous journey across the Soviet Union which is expected to yield much valuable information. Commander Bond’s health ha
s inevitably suffered from his experiences and he is convalescing under medical supervision.’

  4 The third ‘C’ was shot with a poisoned dart through the open back window of his official car at the traffic lights on Hyde Park Corner. The assassin was never caught. From then on, it was official policy to rely on air conditioning to cool the car in summer.

  5 Bond habitually slept in a navy silk pyjama coat – loose almost to his knees, with wide, short sleeves and a belt around his waist instead of buttons.

  6 His razor of choice was a heavy-toothed steel number, bought from Hoffritz on Madison Avenue in New York.

  7 Konstantin Volkov was a senior Soviet intelligence officer in Istanbul. He contacted the British Embassy in 1945, wishing to defect and promising to name three Soviet agents working in Britain – two for the Foreign Office and one for SIS. Fortunately for Philby, the papers landed on his desk. He contacted his Russian handlers immediately, while stalling the British end of the operation. By the time authorisation had come through to contact Volkov, the would-be defector was already on his way back to Moscow, and a bullet in his head.

  1963: September

  1 Film historians now see The Birds as an allegory about the spread of Communism into the West. The birds represent the Warsaw Pact nations swooping in to threaten – and ultimately overpower – humanity and the institutions of Western democracy, which is incapable of defending itself.

  2 In the guise of a wealthy Swiss naturalist named Dr Guntram Shatterhand, Blofeld had bought a fortress on Japan’s south island of Kyushu, and created a Garden of Death, with beds of rare and lethal plants, and ponds stocked with piranhas, which acted as a magnet to Japanese ‘suicide tourists’, in search of a dramatic and painful end.

  3 Irma Bunt, Blofeld’s consort and partner in crime – ‘a stumpy woman with the body and stride of a wardress’.

  4 The alter ego adopted by Bond when he first encountered Blofeld and Bunt, in Blofeld’s Swiss-mountaintop lair.

  5 The feared former KGB headquarters in central Moscow was originally built in 1898 to house the offices of the All-Russia Insurance Company, and was renowned for its beautiful parquet floors. During Stalin’s Great Purge, the offices become so overcrowded with secret police that another two buildings were constructed on adjacent blocks.

  6 KGB term for an undercover agent, a Soviet national who assumed a foreign identity by adopting the papers of a real person who had died – or of a fictional one created by the KGB.

  1963: October

  1 Larger than life, Harlem-dwelling black hoodlum and SMERSH power-broker, who had convinced his followers that he was the living corpse of Baron Samedi, the Prince of Darkness.

  2 See end of chapter.

  3 The name given by the Americans to the intricate and protracted procedure performed to shake off any unwanted surveillance.

  4 One of Hugh Moneypenny’s fellow agents on Operation Ruthless – a mission to try to secure a German decoding machine, by crashing a captured German bomber in the English Channel. The plan, to overpower the crew of the German rescue launch and take their decoder, failed when they were confronted with a well-armed minesweeper instead. Two of the British crew managed to escape, while Moneypenny, the pilot, and a marine were taken captive.

  1963: November

  1 A former regius professor of history at Oxford, employed by M to oversee the analysts. Known to his colleagues as ‘Lazy Five Brains’, he specialised in pungent character assessments of both allies and targets.

  2 Their mother, Irene Moneypenny, was an innocent victim of rampaging Mau Mau warriors in what has become known as the Lari Massacre on 26 March 1953.

  3 In the Oval Office, on 22 August 1962.

  1963: December

  1 ‘Freedom’ in Kiswahili.

  2 M’s country house, a pretty Regency manor on the edge of Windsor Forest.

  3 Bond’s response read, ‘REFERRING YOUR REFERENCE TO AYE HIGH HONOUR EYE BEG YOU PRESENT MY HUMBLE DUTY TO HER MAJESTY AND REQUEST THAT EYE BE PERMITTED COMMA IN ALL HUMILITY COMMA TO DECLINE THE SIGNAL FAVOUR THAT HER MAJESTY IS GRACIOUS ENOUGH TO PROPOSE TO CONFER UPON HER HUMBLE AND OBEDIENT SERVANT STOP EYE AM A SCOTTISH PEASANT AND WILL ALWAYS FEEL AT HOME BEING A SCOTTISH PEASANT AND EYE KNOW COMMA SIR COMMA THAT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND MY PREFERENCE AND THAT EYE CAN COUNT ON YOUR INDULGENCE ENDIT OHOHSEVEN’.

  1964: January

  1 The cover organisation used for years by British secret-service agents working abroad.

  1964: March

  1 Collateral Fatality Forms.

  2 Jane Moneypenny does not mention how and when she wrote her account of her time behind the Iron Curtain. However, the diary entries that cover this period were picked out by a document expert as having been written at the same time, which indicates that she filled in the diary from memory after her return.

  1964: April

  1 The Soviet security directorate and secret police, forerunner of the KGB. The NKVD’s major responsibility was to deal with ‘enemies of the people’. In the two decades before its name change in 1946, millions were rounded up and sent to the Gulag and hundreds of thousands were executed by the NKVD.