by James Philip
Roy Jenkins half rose to his feet.
“Ma’am, I...”
“Any member of Cabinet has the right to raise concerns with their monarch in their capacity as members of the Privy Council,” the Queen reminded him, more tersely than she had planned. “Let me make myself clear. The Prime Minister, the Chiefs of Staff and this Cabinet as presently constituted enjoys my full confidence.”
The silence was instantly oppressive.
“That is all!”
With this Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, and Defender of the Faith stood up, and while the senior members of Her government struggled to their feet amidst a cacophony of loudly squealing chairs on the wooden floor boards, she walked very slowly and regally out of the Junior Common Room of King’s College.
Chapter 12
Sunday 7th June 1964
Inverailort House, Lochaber, Scotland
The Royal Navy Westland Wessex flew up Lock Ailort and cast a long shadow as it squatted down on the lawn between the old house and the road which cut a ribbon of worn tarmac along the eastern side of the sea loch. The hamlet of Lochailort was hidden in the lengthening shadows of the late Highland evening as the last rays of the sun brightly illuminated the big house.
Sir Richard Goldsmith White, the Director General of the Security Services stepped down onto the firm dry turf and shook hands with the Commandant of the ‘Inverailort Estate’, Martin Furnival Jones. Like ‘Dick’ White the other man wore a civilian business suit; nobody in the small welcoming committee was in military uniform or openly displaying any kind of weapon. In fact there was nothing visible to a passing motorist, hiker or Red Dawn spy – other than the very occasional visit of a helicopter on a routine ‘training flight’ - to suggest that Inverailort House was the most secure ‘safe’ house in the United Kingdom.
Until the events of early April fifty-two year old Martin Furnival Jones had entertained the reasonable expectation of succeeding, in due course, his friend and chief, Sir Roger Hollis as Director General of MI5. However, the affair of the GCHQ code breakers locked up in Her Majesty’s Prison Gloucester for attempting to blow the whistle on the numerous shortcomings of that organisation – thereby technically contravening the provisions of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act as interpreted, somewhat high-handedly and certainly, eccentrically, by a certain cadre of senior officers close to the former DG – combined with the dreadful news from Malta and Iran of new disasters which the ‘intelligence’ community had singularly failed to predict, had cut short Hollis’s career.
And Furnival Jones’s career, also, it seemed.
Dick White would have understood if his old colleague from his own days in the Director General’s seat at MI5, vacated back in 1956 when he was transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to become that organ’s top man, still felt a little ‘tender’ about his sudden demotion. One day he had been in the ‘board room’ of the Security Service (MI5) and the next he was exiled to the Highlands to oversee the camp that accommodated MI5’s and MI6’s most intractable ‘incurables’.
In the jargon of the intelligence community ‘incurables’ described enemy agents, or one’s own agents who had become problematic, or particularly high value ‘assets’ who had come into the hands of the British Intelligence community whom nobody knew what to do with. ‘Incurables’ could not be allowed to mix with the general population, nor could their existence be admitted, axiomatically they had therefore to be kept safely and securely, preferably in a remote place under appropriate guard. Inverailort House was not quite the back of nowhere but in the British Isles it was as near as made no difference.
“This is all very mysterious,” Martin Furnival Jones observed as the two men walked up to the main house. Inverailort House – locally some people called it ‘Castle’ – had been a hunting lodge when the estate came into the hands of the Campbell family in 1828. The Campbells had developed the property with positively loving care and attention until the outbreak of the 1939 war; when it had been requisitioned by the War Office. During that war the estate had hosted the prototype Commando Training School, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), briefly the Army, and then for the second half of the war the Royal Navy, becoming HMS Inverailort. Having been returned to the Campbells after 1945 – minus the majority of its contents, lost in moves to and from storage in Fort William – it had been reclaimed by the government around the time of last year’s unpleasantness with the Americans. “You’re a long way from Oxford, Dick?”
The tall, handsome former golden boy of MI5 was drawn and weary, a little worn down. The whole Red Dawn-Krasnaya Zarya farrago had blown up in his face and but for Roger Hollis’s own, less than stellar performance and it having very much been on Hollis’s watch that the IRA had very nearly murdered the Queen a second time inside a little over four months at Brize Norton, it would have been White’s head not Hollis’s figuratively on the block.
White’s double agent inside Red Dawn, Arkady Pavlovich Rykov had been a triple agent, loyal to the KGB all along, sowing misinformation and uncertainty in his path. In his heart he had suspected as much from the outset; and then the October War had changed everything, he had convinced himself that perhaps Rykov was a man on the run from his enemies. Rachel Piotrowska, the woman he had originally sent to Istanbul to assassinate Rykov had caught up with him in the chaos of the days after the war, heard him babbling in his sleep about Krasnaya Zarya, an organisation White had specifically not briefed her about ahead of her mission, and suddenly White, his best and most trusted agent, and the KGB’s most feared mad dog killer had been playing a wholly different, terrifyingly high stakes game of poker. He ought to have known that Rykov, or whoever he was because he had never claimed that the legend of Arkady Pavlovich Rykov was his real name, was too good to be true. If he had known eighteen months ago what he knew now he would have ordered Rachel to cut Rykov’s – or rather, the man they knew as Arkady Pavlovich Rykov’s – throat while he slept. That he had not issued that order was a thing that would haunt him forever. However, what was done was done. He was the man in charge of the Security Services and he could not afford the luxury of dwelling on his past mistakes.
“I’m not checking up on you, old man,” Dick White assured the Commandant of the Inverailort ‘home for incurables’. “I know I can rely on you to run a tight ship without the DG looking over your shoulder all the time.”
The two men trudged up the steps to the big house.
“I shouldn’t complain,” Furnival Jones conceded. “At least I’m not banged up in Government House at Cheltenham like poor old Roger Hollis listening to the bloody planes taking off and landing at all hours of the day and night.”
Dick White had always highly regarded Jones. Like himself he was a Cambridge man – Gonville and Caius College – who had come into the secret world via a law career abbreviated by the outbreak of World War II and six years in the Army. There was much to respect in the man’s no-nonsense nature and professionalism and sooner or later, political tempers having cooled somewhat in Oxford he planned to bring him back into the mainstream. That said, ‘political tempers’ were not about to ‘cool’ any time soon; and for the time being the other man was best kept out of the limelight and Inverailort was pretty much ideal for that.
“Roger will only be asked to remain in Cheltenham until his de-briefing sessions are completed, Martin,” Dick White informed his colleague. “Contrary to what you hear people saying he is not under house arrest.”
“But he will be under observation the rest of his life,” the Commandant of Inverailort House retorted mildly.
“Yes, well,” the Director General of the Security Services shrugged, “that’s the fate that awaits us all, isn’t it!”
Inside the house the evidence of the building’s World War II occupants was preserved by the stencilled names left untouched on the doors; ‘W.R.N.S.’, ‘SHIP’S OFFICE Typing Pool’, ‘CAPTAIN
’S SECRETARY’, each sign still relatively freshly painted as if the ghosts of the naval officers, seamen and WRENS who had worked at Inverailort in that war in 1945 still walked its corridors.
Furnival Jones led his chief upstairs to his office and retrieved a bottle of malt whiskey from a nondescript cabinet by the window. The setting sun blazed into the first floor room as the two former MI5 men clinked glasses.
“Old times and old friends,” they chorused.
Both MI5 and MI6 were clubbish institutions, MI5 particularly and both men had been immersed in its culture for more years than they cared to remember. Dick White had run MI5 in the first half of the 1950s like a convivial, somewhat relaxed version of the gentleman’s club he had joined in the late 1930s. Hitler’s war had introduced a host of new faces but in the higher echelons of the Security Service nothing much had changed; likewise in MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. In hindsight this was probably what had allowed those unspeakable bastards Philby, Burgess, Maclean and their collaborators Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross to get away with spying for the Soviets for so long. It was likely that Philby, Burgess and Maclean had been killed in Moscow on the night of the October War, Cairncross had succumbed to illness the last winter and Blunt – despite his protestations that he was a changed and ‘loyal’ man - was a ‘guest’ at nearby Arisaig House.
“I trust our friend from Bucharest and her ladyship are bearing up?” Dick White inquired obliquely, permitting the suggestion of a smile to flit across his lips if not his grey eyes.
Furnival Jones chuckled.
“I swear the blasted man thinks he owns the place!”
“That’s the nature of the beast.”
“That’s true. Comrade Nicolae and her ladyship are inseparable. I think the little creep is actually quite fond of her and she seems devoted to him. Odd, don’t you think? What was left of her family got killed because of him and yet she behaves as if she is his wife?”
Dick White thought about the proposition.
“They went through a lot together,” he offered. “Including being shipwrecked, twice.” Then it was time for business. “The Americans want to talk to him.”
“I thought we were operating an ‘at arm’s length policy with the Yanks’?”
“Officially. Unofficially, we’re back in bed with them. Don’t expect them to come charging to our rescue in the Middle East or the South Atlantic, or anywhere else but my orders vis-a-vis co-operation with our ‘old friends’ in Langley are somewhat conditional.”
That was a white lie and Dick White understood that his old friend would see through it. He had been ordered to turn Jericho over to the Americans but it had been made crystal clear that the National Security Agency was going to have to wait a while before it received the real ‘gold dust’. What had been turned over thus far was merely a small and not very helpful contractual down payment ahead of the delivery of the first tranche of ‘Fulbright Plan’ aid. It was all rather crass but then half the country was in ruins and nobody was about to take John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s – or any of his friends’ – words at face value ever again until the UAUK saw the colour of his money.
If the Yanks wanted Jericho – and they did want it, very badly – they were going to have to pay through the nose. The Prime Minister had made an agreement ‘in principle’ with the President of the United States, but nothing ‘of substance’ was going to get handed over until the Chancellor of the Exchequer confirmed receipt of eye watering quantities of dollars in his Treasury. The CIA and NSA bigwigs – Dick White’s transatlantic opposite numbers – were already chaffing at the bit, under the mistaken impression that business as usual had been resumed. Soon, very soon, they would be incensed that material that they honestly believed they had a right to receive actually had a price, a very stiff price.
Having spent most of the last two decades in bed with his American counterparts, the new ‘special relationship’ came hard to Dick White. He had tried to explain to the Prime Minister that the ‘US Intelligence Community will feel betrayed’ but Mrs Thatcher had swotted away his concerns.
‘Then so be it. The wounded feelings of our former allies are the least of my concerns!’
Martin Furnival Jones raised an eyebrow, knowing that he had just been permitted a glimpse of the business being conducted at the ‘top table’ of his old friend’s new National Security Service club.
“Conditional, Dick?” He asked.
“That comes straight from the Prime Minister’s lips,” he was informed.
“What about Jericho?”
“Jericho is bust. But yes, my orders include handing over Jericho; but not in any way in a lock, stock and barrel sense.” Dick White smiled sardonically. “Albeit little by little.”
Furnival Jones whistled.
“What do we get in return?”
“A second Marshall Plan.”
“But we’re on our own in the Gulf?”
“That’s the way it looks.” Dick White drained his glass. He had already reported to Airey Neave, his political master that the ‘background chatter’ coming out of the CIA and the NSA was ‘inconsistent’ with the agreement the Prime Minister believed she had brought back from Hyannis Port. Either the President had sold the Prime Minister a proverbial pup, or the Kennedy Administration was not talking to his counterparts; neither option boded well for the future. “Let’s speak to Comrade Nicolae. I have some news for him.”
It was over a month since the Director General of the Security Services had spoken to the former First Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of Rumania.
Nicolae Ceaușescu was sitting in a threadbare armchair in the bedroom at the back of the house he shared with his companion, the Greek-Cypriot woman called Eleni. Eleni was a handsome woman in her forties with straw blond hair and suspicious blue-grey eyes who seemed uncomfortable, overdressed in the garb of a British housewife. Instantly the two men came into the room she pulled up a chair beside Ceaușescu and clasped his left hand.
The man had been reading a book; Greenmantle by John Buchan.
The one-legged former master of the Rumanian Secret Police and until the Red Air Force wiped Bucharest off the map with a huge city killer thermonuclear bomb the heir apparent to the dictatorship of his country, put down his book and extended his free hand to Dick White.
“Apologies for disturbing you this late in the day, Nicolae,” the spymaster grimaced. Although he intensely disliked and mistrusted the prized asset who had fallen unexpectedly into his hands after the Battle of Malta; liking somebody and doing business with them were two entirely separate things, and in common with any commodity, Nicolae Ceaușescu needed to be cashed in before time and events eroded his remaining ‘book value’.
“I am honoured to be visited at any hour by the Director of British Intelligence, Sir Richard,” the man in the chair replied, in English significantly more fluent than had been the case on their last encounter.
“I see you are becoming acquainted with Lord Tweedsmuir’s writings?” Dick White parried, wondering if the pale, diminished man in the armchair would understand.
“John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir,” the other man shrugged, as if disappointed by the small test.
“Your English is much improved, Nicolae?”
Ceaușescu nodded.
“Are you both well?” The spymaster inquired solicitously.
“Yes,” Eleni replied, as if her mouth was full of pebbles. “Thank you, sir.”
“Good. I have news for you, Nicolae.”
The man in the chair did not ask if it was good or bad news because he understood that any news brought to him by the chief British spymaster was not going to be all good.
“Your wife and at least two of your children, Zoia and Nicu are being held in the Soviet Union. We think somewhere in the Sverdlovsk area. We have no news of the whereabouts of your eldest son, Valentin. So far as we can ascertain your wife and youngest children are being treated decently.”
Nicolae Ceaușesc
u pursed his lips momentarily.
“If the Russians discover that I am alive that will change,” he said coldly, without angst. If the KGB did not put bullets in the back of their necks his wife and daughter would be sent to a Red Army ‘comfort brigade’, his youngest son to a penal battalion, all three to be fucked and worked to death. That was the way of things and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. His former family were dead to him now. “One day they will discover it. We both know that.”
Dick White did not linger on the subject.
“I want you to talk to representatives of the American Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. They have sent a team to England to de-brief you.”
Nicolae Ceaușescu snorted softly.
“And if I refuse to talk to the Yankees?”
Dick White was silent.
If the ‘special guest’ of the Inverailort House for ‘Incurables’ elected not to play ball then his wife and surviving children’s fate would be sealed. Before the October War Dick White might have blanched at this; not now. The Prime Minister had made an apparently Faustian Pact with the American President, one day – possibly very soon - it might bring her down, but in the meantime the survival of country and its ongoing capacity to wage war in the Middle East and the South Atlantic hung in the balance. Set against that the lives of a middle-aged woman and her teenage children in Sverdlovsk was a price well worth paying for the greater good. Or that at least, was what he told himself no matter how dirty he felt inside.
As he had planned – meticulously scripted, in fact - he began to explain that the Americans wanted to assure themselves that they could trust what Dick White’s people were telling them. Conditional disclosure was not enough. Either the intelligence partnership was ‘open’ in both directions or it was not. The de-briefing of a key current ‘asset’ like Nicolae Ceaușescu was the first acid test of the renewed ‘special relationship’.
“What is in it for me?” Ceaușescu asked bluntly.