In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  Dynamite.

  ‘We need to know who handled this traffic in Melbourne,’ said Malcolm. He drummed his fingers on the desk, thinking. By a stroke of luck, Roger Hollis was actually in Melbourne at the time, working with the Australians as they set up their own version of MI5. It meant he could get direct, untainted intelligence of what had happened there during the war.

  ‘Get a cable off to Hollis, Ann,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell him what we have, but stress that we need to know the who had access to the Ultra traffic going into Navy Office in Melbourne between the start of 1943 and the end of the war.’

  Ann remained beside his desk, the light of battle in her eyes. ‘Do you think someone betrayed this material to the Soviets?’ she asked. ‘If they did, he handed them victory against the Germans on the Eastern Front.’

  Malcolm tapped the pile of messages with his forefinger. ‘If we can find out who was receiving this stuff in Melbourne, and then find it in our Venona material, we will have collared the biggest traitor you or I are ever likely to come across.’

  Alan and Mary Hillgarth stayed with us for a weekend in the first week of August. They arrived just after lunch on the Friday, and because Alan had just spent some time at Broadway he brought news of the terrific flap which was gripping MI6. ‘You’re well out of it, Denis,’ he said slinging a suitcase out of the boot. ‘Suspicion everywhere. A fellow dare not turn his back on a colleague.’

  ‘What’s causing the trouble?’ Denis asked. ‘Not this fellow Gouzenko, surely?’ Igor Gouzenko had been a cipher clerk in the Russian Embassy in Ottawa before defecting to the Canadians in 1945. Since then he had been dribbling out information about Russian double agents in the West. He had caused a lot of worry for a lot of people but nothing concrete had ever come from his information because he only had the cover-names for the Soviet agents, not their real names.

  Alan chuckled. ‘Gouzenko is old news, Denis. What’s stirring the pot now is this new code-breaking exercise, Venona. Venona has implicated some pretty big fish. The latest to be landed is a British scientist who used to work on the Manhattan project. That gave the Americans some gyp, I can tell you. And we suspect there will be more.’

  ‘Nobody in MI6, I trust?’

  Alan straightened. ‘That’s the trouble,’ he said quietly. ‘The Venona material suggests that the Soviets had – or still have – assets in MI5 and MI6.’

  By tacit consent nobody talked about Venona after that. Alan needed space from the tensions pervading Broadway and Leconfield House, and I didn’t want Denis reminded of a world he was fast putting behind him.

  The next day we went to the races. Bobby Weld, a neighbour to the south of Almer, had a horse running at Salisbury that was supposed to be a dead-set certainty. That was all the excuse we needed to dress up and make a real day of it, buying badges for the County stand and enjoying a champagne lunch before the Welds’ horse was dreadfully trounced in his six-furlong sprint. But it was a tremendous day all the same: Salisbury is a beautiful course, we saw some superb racing, and on the way home we visited Salisbury Cathedral, said to be the second most beautiful cathedral in all England.

  ‘Do you miss Malaya at all?’ Mary asked as we stood in the shadowy nave, looking at the fine tracery of stonework above us.

  I didn’t even have to think before I answered. ‘Not at all. I loved Malaya, Mary. I loved our home at Whitelawns. But that’s all in the past. The Manor is our home now. It’s part of us, and we are part of it. Our children will be married in St Mary’s, and Denis and I will no doubt eventually moulder in its graveyard. It is comforting to be part of something that is so permanent.’

  I don’t think Mary quite understood me. She had been part of something huge and permanent all her life. Mary Sidney Katherine Alima Hope-Morley, as she had been born, was the grand-daughter of the Earl of Carnarvon, with royal connections and grand houses in both England and Ireland. To her, belonging was taken for granted. But she smiled, and pretended to understand, and took my arm. ‘I’m glad you feel part of Almer Manor,’ she said. ‘It is a really lovely home. So warm and friendly. I was telling Alan last night that I was sure you must have some happy ghosts about the place.’

  Happy ghosts. I smiled as a strange fancy occurred to me. Could it be that ghosts from the future could project their spirits back to the present? And if they could, might not the happy ghosts that graced the Manor be Denis and me?

  Something happened that August that changed the course of history. One morning we woke up to hear the measured tones of the BBC newsreader announcing that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb in the wastes of Siberia. Denis looked at me and I looked at him, and we both knew that nothing would ever be the same again. Until then, only America had had the bomb, and that had been a guarantee that however much the Soviet Union might threaten, it could never harm the West. Because if it ever tried, the West could do to Russia what it had done to Japan a few brief years before. It had taken just two bombs to subjugate Japan. It might take half a dozen to deal with Russia, but in any case the war would be over in an afternoon.

  But out of the blue, the tables had been completely turned. Now the West also could be destroyed in an afternoon.

  The world was to live for another forty years under the shadow of nuclear war, but the threat was never to seem so stark or so immediate as it did on that sunny August day in 1949. I remember we went down to Poole after lunch to watch the children sailing a rented dinghy on the harbour and suddenly the people around us began pointing upwards to where a high-flying plane was ruling white contrails across the sky. There was a sudden fear, short but very real while it lasted, that it might be a Russian bomber.

  That evening, Clement Attlee made a speech to the nation on BBC radio. He was no Winston Churchill, and although he tried hard to be reassuring he only succeeded in sounding plaintive. ‘We have been betrayed from within,’ he said, his voice sounding thin and reedy over the airwaves. ‘Traitors, foul traitors, have sold the secret of the atom bomb to our enemies. Those traitors will be tracked down and destroyed, I promise you.’

  Denis switched off the set with a grimace. ‘Not much point locking the stable door after the horse has well and truly bolted,’ he said. ‘He would have been better off telling us what preparations they’ve made to deal with an attack.’

  ‘What preparations can they make?’ I asked miserably. My lovely, permanent new world might not be as permanent as I had thought it was, and the thought depressed me profoundly.

  We dined at Charborough House a few nights later, and the bomb cast a cloud over the gathering that not even Reggie’s affable good humour could dispel. Eventually we gave up talking about trivia and turned to the only subject on people’s minds.

  ‘I know it’s rather old fashioned to interpret the Bible literally,’ Ivor King said. ‘But I can’t help noticing how much all this looks like the beginnings of Armageddon.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Kathleen pleaded. ‘Armageddon was so final, wasn’t it? The whole world destroyed and so on?’

  Ivor spread his hands almost triumphantly. ‘But my dear Lady Drax – the righteous won, don’t you see?’ He was an extraordinarily intelligent man, our vicar, but as I have often noticed, intelligence can mean nothing in the face of utter faith.

  ‘I can’t see the point of winning if the whole world is destroyed in the process,’ I had to say.

  Those around us at the table tensed and I suddenly realised why. My words could be interpreted as defeatism, or even treachery, and in the times we had just entered such sentiments were dangerous.

  Reggie came to my rescue with a smile. ‘A nuclear war would play the deuce with my herd of pedigree deer,’ he said. ‘I’m prepared to sacrifice a lot for the good of my soul, but probably not that much.’

  That wasn’t good enough for a retired major with piggish eyes who was sitting directly opposite me. ‘If we had talked like you during the last war,’ he said, waving his fork at me, ‘Adolf Hitler would be in Down
ing Street right now.’

  Again Reggie came to my rescue. ‘I think I might have preferred Hitler to the mob in there now,’ he said. ‘At lease Hitler understood the enduring value of a good hunting estate. The way this lot are going there won’t be a covert left in England in twenty years.’

  But the major was not to be put off. ‘I don’t think it’s a laughing matter,’ he said stiffly. He waved his fork at me again. ‘You’re new here, but you should know by now that defeatism won’t be tolerated in this part of England.’

  Suddenly Denis was on his feet. He was smiling and nonchalant but there was huge menace in the speed at which he descended on the, and the whole room froze. He reached the major’s chair and dragged it back with the little man still in it. ‘If you speak to Norma like that, you answer to me,’ he said.

  There was a moment of deathly silence in which I could see the major’s mouth working as he tried to get a word out. But abruptly Denis was sick of the whole business and pushed the chair back in with a gesture of contempt. ‘Half a mind to challenge the fellow to a duel,’ he mused aloud as he wandered back to his chair. ‘Cues at twenty paces in the billiard room, and the first to make a fifty break the winner.’

  It could have gone any way, but Reggie laughed and the whole room laughed with him.

  We won that round against the rising tide of fear and intolerance, but something corrosive and evil was in the air. In America, the ambitious young senator Joseph McCarthy began to collect material about any of his colleagues whose voting record wasn’t gung-ho against the Reds. The era of ‘un-American activities’, of McCarthyism, had been born.

  It was raining gently but Malcolm Bryant still took his regular lunchtime walk through Green Park. He had found that a walk cleared his head, and in these frantic days it behoved everyone to keep a clear head. Leconfield House was in turmoil, and had been since the Russians had exploded their bomb.

  MI5 and OSS, its American counterpart, had failed, and their joint failure had put the West at mortal risk. The repercussions were still reverberating through the world’s intelligence community, with finger-pointing and frantic witch hunts the order of the day. It was now known that Venona had revealed the Soviet penetration of Project Manhattan, but although traitors had been identified – the Rosenbergs in America, Klaus Fuchs in Britain – nothing had yet been done about them.

  Because of a little thing called scruples: Venona material by its very nature was illegal and could not be used as evidence. But now it was time for scruples to be bent.

  In Leconfield House, the scramble was on. A bill had been put together that would ensure that Klaus Fuchs would be shot or at least put away for life. Other bills were being assembled, and rumour had it that at least one of them was against a senior officer within British Intelligence.

  Malcolm grinned savagely. That one was his baby.

  But getting the evidence was going to be difficult. For a start, Roger Hollis was proving difficult. Malcolm had asked him a perfectly simple question: who had handled the Ultra cables that had gone to Melbourne between 1943 and 1945? Hollis had obfuscated. He had sent nothing from Australia where he had been for months, and on his return had mumbled about the need to clear any material with MI6 before passing it across.

  ‘Why?’ Malcolm had stormed. ‘We’re all on the same side, aren’t we? Why the devil would MI6 want us to hold back?’

  Hollis had frowned and shrugged in his characteristically thoughtful way. ‘I will need more time,’ he had said.

  But there was an even greater problem facing Malcolm. The Soviet traffic out of Australia during the war had been coded using the least well known of the five one-time pads used by the Russians. It had been on the GRU-Naval network, of which only about ten per cent of words had been deciphered. Malcolm had trekked out to Bletchley Park several times, spending hours with Meredith Gardner and other codebreakers on the Venona project, but with little result.

  ‘Time,’ Meredith had said succinctly, repeating Hollis’s mantra. ‘We will need lots of time. At a rough guess, I’d say it will be five or even ten years before we can break out enough of the GRU-Naval cipher to make sense of anything.’

  ‘No shortcuts?’ Malcolm had asked, his heart sinking.

  Meredith had smiled a little thinly. ‘If you can find a Rosetta stone for GRU-Naval code, you might break out a whole passage, which would shorten things considerably. What I mean is that if you can recognise the start and finish of a quotation, and match the GRU-Naval version against it, you might well break out a hundred words or so in one go.’

  Walking in Green Park, the soft rain on his face, Malcolm pondered Meredith’s words. The trick of course was to find where a quotation started and where it finished, and then to identify what was being quoted.

  It seemed an utterly impossible task, and he turned up his collar and started back towards Mayfair and Leconfield House.

  The solution came suddenly and easily, as if whispered to him by a god. Take the name of one of the German commanders mentioned in the Ultra material – Manstein for example – and fit the pattern in which the name occurred against any similar pattern in the Russian material. Breaking out the name of a German commander in the Russian material would be comparatively easy. The Russians had to spell all proper names in their ciphers, so each proper name in the text began with the code word for ‘spell’ and ended with the code word for ‘endspell’.

  Those words were known in all versions of the Russian cipher, including Type Five used by GRU-Naval.

  He hurried back to the office he shared with Ann Last, and slung his raincoat and dripping hat on the bentwood stand. ‘I’ve just had a bit of an idea,’ he said, as calmly as he could. ‘Bring over the Russian Front messages, will you, Ann?’

  In fact, it proved even easier than he had hoped to match a section of text from the Ultra material with a passage from the GRU-Naval material. The occurrences of the name Manstein in the Ultra material matched exactly with the pattern of an undeciphered proper name in the third or fourth Russian cable that they tried. They didn’t even have to translate Manstein – it translated itself: such conformity could only mean that the undeciphered name must be Manstein.

  At seven o’clock, with the rain clearing to reveal a glorious, freshwashed London evening outside his window, Malcolm got up from his desk and stretched luxuriously. ‘I’ll run these two texts down to Bletchley Park tomorrow and see what they can do,’ he said. And then he smiled. ‘I think we may have got hold of something, don’t you, Ann?’

  Ann smiled back. ‘I know we have got hold of something. The trick now is not to let go.’

  In the warm, still days of early October, Ian Fleming rang us from London. He was in love, a fairly normal state with Ian, and he wanted us to come up to meet his lady, Anne Rothermere. ‘I’ve got four tickets for Charlie’s Aunt,’ he said. ‘Please come up. We’ll have supper at the Dorchester afterwards. You’ll love Anne, I know you will.’

  It seemed important to him, so I agreed. Mr Frampton had the Wolseley serviced, I shook out a town dress or two, and we drove up to London through the quiet amber countryside – to find ourselves ambushed by the master of intrigue. Anne Rothermere was in fact Lady Anne Rothermere, and very much married to someone else. All Ian’s friends had put an embargo on joining the two of them socially, which is why he’d had to reach out so far from London to make up his foursome.

  ‘This is very naughty of you, Ian,’ I said seriously while Anne was powdering her nose. ‘Your friends are obviously trying to tell you something. If Denis and I had known the true state of affairs we wouldn’t have joined you either.’

  Ian had looked at me with hurt schoolboy eyes. ‘I love Anne,’ he said. ‘I truly do. It’s not my fault she’s not free.’

  I sighed with exasperation. ‘Ian, you are charming and intelligent, but one day you really will have to grow up. Think of poor Anne. Is there any future for her with you? If there isn’t, she’s risking social disgrace and possibly divorce b
y being seen out with you like this. Do you really want her to be hurt that badly?’

  Denis hated this sort of discussion and put his hand on mine. ‘Ian knows perfectly well what he’s doing,’ he said, ‘don’t you, Ian?’

  But Ian was looking at me with a truly puzzled look on his face. ‘You really think I might hurt her?’

  ‘Not intentionally,’ I said. ‘But the situation you have put her in is as old as the hills, and it quite often ends in tragedy for the girl.’

  ‘I do love Anne,’ Ian said. ‘This time it’s different. I know that sounds like the oldest cliché in the book, but it is different this time.’ He sat thinking for a moment, and then sipped at his Black Russian. ‘I trust her. Me – the born cynic. I trust her with my life, Norma. I’ve told her things that could have me shot, but I don’t care because if she did ever betray me I’d prefer to be dead.’

  It sounded an awful lot like how I felt about Denis so I reached out and took his hand. ‘Then do something about it,’ I said earnestly. ‘I don’t know what – you’re the one with the fertile brain. But do something before you lose her.’

  Ian did, of course. He took her away to Goldeneye, his beloved home in Jamaica. But that was all in the future. Before then he was to write Casino Royale and give birth to the legend of 007. With its publication in 1952, Ian would emerge from the shadow of his brilliantly successful brother Peter, and achieve a maturity that had avoided him for thirty years.

  According to his creator, secret agent 007 James Bond was an amalgamation of everyone Ian had known in Naval Intelligence. He’d known Denis well, because they were both personal assistants to their respective DNIs in Australia and Britain. In later years, when I had read the James Bond books, I wondered just how much of Denis had gone into the mix. After all, he was, like James Bond, a naval officer and a member of British Secret Intelligence. Both were urbane, suave, sophisticated men of the world, calm in a crisis and inscrutable under pressure. But, more intriguingly, Denis’s wartime secret service number was also 007.