Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  “MI5, which one is that again, Alice?” Liz just couldn’t keep the labels straight.

  “MI5, counterintelligence, catches spies in Britain. Like the American FBI or your Canadian Mounties. MI6 are the British spies abroad, like the CIA.” Alice smiled. “Look, there is a lot we haven’t told Feklisov—about Hoover and Folsom, about Burgess and what Tom did in Finland in ’51, and how the CIA treated him when he got back. Maybe it adds up to something that will scare Feklisov.” Then she laughed. “Or appeal to his better nature.”

  Liz joined in her laugh. “Well, why not tell him everything we know?”

  “Why not?” Alice’s voice had an edge of anger. “We don’t know why, but all that information was enough to get your husband killed, and he didn’t even know it!” Liz nodded. Alice pushed her cut cucumber sandwich away in disgust. “Nonetheless, we’ve got to tell him. We don’t have a choice at this point.”

  “Well, Feklisov hasn’t had us killed yet. Probably we can still trust him.” Liz smiled weakly and dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin.

  “The problem is getting in touch with him. I’m pretty certain my phone is being tapped, and I still feel as though I’m being followed . . . by Russians or by someone.” She remembered his last words to her. “He said he might be risking his life if he helped us. That means he’s afraid of his own side, not ours. With a diplomatic passport, MI5 can’t touch him.”

  “Give me his embassy card. I have an idea.”

  Alice passed it across the table.

  “Soviet consulate, to whom do you wish to speak?”

  Liz was surprised. The voice was English, plummy at that. She was in a call box at Victoria, with an extra earpiece that Alice was holding to her ear.

  “Commercial attaché, please.”

  “Which one, please.”

  “Ah . . . Mr. Feklisov.”

  “Very good.”

  “Hello, Feklisov here.”

  “Ah, Mr. Feklisov. My name is Sydney Carton. I am the directress of the Sefton Park Palm House in Liverpool. As you may know, like the rest of the country, we gave up a great deal of our wrought-iron gates and fences for the war effort.” She overemphasized wrought. Would the penny drop?

  “Yes, how can I help?”

  “Well, last month I saw a photo of the spectacular wrought-iron fence of the Mikhailovsky Gardens in Leningrad. We love wrought iron here in Liverpool, and we would like to encourage trade with the Soviet Union. So, I would like to invite you to visit Sefton Park so that we can discuss the purchase of . . . wrought . . . iron”—Liz felt like a foolish girl playing a dangerous game—“from the foundry that made those fences.”

  There was a period of silence on the other end of the line. “I should be pleased to come and discuss it. Let me see, Miss . . . what was your name again?”

  “Carton, Sydney Carton, like the character in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.”

  Feklisov laughed. “You mean the one who gives up his life for an innocent man?” The penny had dropped. “Well, Miss Carton—”

  “It’s Mrs., actually.”

  “I think I can get up there the day after tomorrow. Will that suit?”

  “Perfectly. I’ll meet you at the entrance to the Palm House in the middle of Sefton Park. Shall we say 2:00 p.m.?”

  “Very good.”

  Liz had travelled up the day before to visit her children, still in Birkenhead with Keith Spencer. Alice and Feklisov would meet her at the Sefton Park Palm House in Liverpool.

  Travelling from London Alice sat in second-class, nonsmoking, just to prevent herself from doing so. She wondered if Feklisov was on the same train. When she saw him descend from first class, she decided that sharing a cab was not opportune. But then Feklisov climbed aboard the double-decker bus she had mounted. They made the briefest eye contact, and there was that warm smile again, this time not really aimed at anyone, just the look of a happy man. He left the bus two stops short of the park. Evidently he wanted her to arrive before him.

  Liz was waiting, nervously smoking a cigarette, something she rarely did in public. Behind her stood the ornate white Victorian glasswork of the Sefton Park Palm House, vacant and uninviting in the winter cold.

  “He’s coming,” Alice said as she approached.

  “How shall we proceed?”

  “We’ve agreed. Tell him everything.” Alice went on, “I can’t explain it, Liz, but I trust him. I even like him a little.”

  “Hope I will.” Liz stubbed out her cigarette. She looked up to see a man in a dark overcoat enter the park and make for the Palm House.

  “Mrs. Carton?” He offered his hand to Liz. Looking at Alice he said, “Glad to see you again, Miss Silverstone.”

  Liz interrupted. “Actually, my name is—”

  “Never mind; I like the name Carton. It was a nice touch, and it’s enough that Miss Silverstone and I are old friends. Shall we walk? It’s always better to conduct this sort of conversation outside.”

  They had not been walking for more than a few minutes when Alice began, “My friend here—” She paused, and Feklisov volunteered, “Mrs. Carton?”

  “Yes, my friend is the widow of the man who was pushed onto the tracks to frame Thomas Wrought. She has a good deal to tell you.”

  Feklisov nodded. “Begin.”

  “It’s a long story, sir.”

  “We have the afternoon.”

  “Very well. Alice will correct me if I forget anything.” She took up Tom’s narrative from before the war, beginning with Julie Rosenberg, through his run-ins with Folsom, his OSS work in Finland, and his experiences in New York after the war, including the Cohen-Krogers, his brief return to Finland, and the events that led him to meet with Allen Dulles, and finally Folsom’s role in his dismissal from Howard.

  When she had finished, Feklisov said, “You forgot the Pulitzer Prize in history, Mrs. . . . Carton.”

  Liz smiled sardonically. “That brings us to what I learned in Washington, DC, last week.”

  Feklisov listened impassively as they walked, the gravel crunching under their feet. He was concentrating, seemingly oblivious of passers-by. Only when she came to the name Guy Burgess did he stop her.

  “Guy Burgess, the drunk and disorderly MI6 agent we owned when he was in Washington during the war? Please repeat.”

  Liz did so. “Mr. Rustin told me that he knew Burgess in Washington after the war and once met him together with Folsom in 1946.”

  “Go on, please.”

  Liz finished her report—Folsom’s meeting with Rustin, his bluster about J. Edgar Hoover, Thurgood Marshall’s report about Hoover, and Folsom’s move from the FBI to the senate committee. “There it is, Mr. Feklisov.”

  “So, ladies.” He smiled with the grin of a Cheshire cat. “I think you have everything you need to figure this out for yourselves. Tell me what you think has happened.”

  Liz spoke first. “Let me have a go.” The three stopped and faced one another. “Remember why Tom was fired from the OSS the first time, in 1946?”

  Alice answered, “Because of his party membership before the war.”

  “Yes, but why was that a problem for the OSS?” Feklisov sounded like a schoolmaster.

  Liz answered, “Because the head of the FBI, Hoover, was trying to kill off the OSS by discrediting it.”

  Feklisov now chuckled. “Very good, Mrs. Carton.”

  “Oh, stop calling me that; my name is Elizabeth Spencer. Call me Liz.” They all three laughed.

  Alice now took up the thread. “So, five years later, in 1951, Hoover is still trying to get hold of American foreign intelligence, but by now it’s the CIA he has to kill off. How can he do it? Well, by not sharing intelligence with the CIA, or even by working with Soviet agents to destroy CIA networks abroad.” Liz and Alice both looked at Feklisov. His face was immobile. There was nothing for Alice to do but continue. “This gets a bit speculative, Mr. Feklisov. But somehow Hoover knew that British double agent Burgess had identified the CIA network
in Leningrad along with the British agents there. Hoover didn’t tell the CIA, and the American agents were left in the wind. Tom could have brought them out along with the British agents he went in for. He learns about the exposed American agents from the British agents he did bring out and tells the head of the CIA—Dulles—as soon as he gets back from Finland. But of course it’s too late for the CIA to do anything.”

  Liz looked quizzical. “How could Hoover and the FBI know about MI6’s operation, but the CIA not know?”

  “Oh, that’s not surprising, Liz.” Alice looked at her brightly. “Remember about MI6, intelligence abroad, and MI5, counterintelligence in Britain?” Liz nodded. “Well, if MI5 liaises with the Americans to catch spies, who will their counterpart be? FBI, of course. MI6 operates spies in cooperation with the CIA.”

  Liz wasn’t following. “So?”

  But Feklisov was and began nodding his head.

  Alice began again. “It’s MI5—counterintelligence within Britain—that dealt with Burgess’s defection. They warn MI6—foreign intelligence—that Burgess knows about British agents in Russia. MI6 asks for help from the CIA. But MI5 doesn’t tell MI6 about the American agents whose identities Burgess also knew. They tell their American opposite number, Hoover’s FBI, about the threat to American agents, assuming they’ll pass it along to the CIA. But Hoover does nothing. He sits on the information and doesn’t tell the CIA. End of CIA’s Leningrad network.”

  Liz added a thought. “Maybe the beginning of the end of the CIA, Hoover hopes.”

  Alice took up her thread. “But then he has to worry about Burgess, late of MI6 in the States but now defected to Moscow, who may know about him or at least about his man Folsom.”

  Liz raised her hand as if to stop this line of argument. “Unless Hoover knew all along that Burgess was a Russian agent, in fact was his conduit to Soviet intelligence in a war both were waging against the CIA.” The women both turned to Feklisov. He still said nothing.

  “We’ll take your silence as agreement, or at least as ‘no comment.’” Alice smiled at the Russian agent.

  Feklisov merely said, “Go on. Get past 1951 to the present, or at least to 1957, in Washington.”

  Liz began again. “Folsom leaves the FBI to work for a Southern US senator, Eastland. Then Eastland becomes head of the communist witch-hunt committee and Folsom its chief investigator. Folsom discovers Tom is in DC. It would be easy for some liberal journalist—say Drew Pearson—to find Tom and use what he knows about Folsom’s black-market past to embarrass the committee and the senator who put Folsom on his staff.”

  “So,” Alice concluded the line of reasoning, “before that could happen, Folsom had to get Tom Wrought out of Washington, and used the threat of subpoenaing the president of Howard University before the senate committee to do so.”

  “Right. But it still doesn’t rise to the level of a reason to frame Tom for murder.” Liz was firm.

  Both women were silent for long enough that Feklisov felt the need to help them. “So, now we come to last year and this year. What has Thomas Wrought done to bring himself again to the attention of the CIA and the FBI?”

  Alice hit her head in a gesture of mock anger. “The anonymous articles in the Tribune, of course. Someone saw them, presumably CIA London station, began to make enquiries, learned who wrote them. CIA Washington sends a message to the FBI asking whether they have a file on Tom Wrought. Hoover asks why, and they tell him exactly what Tom had done for them back in ’51 in Finland: bringing out British agents but not American ones because the CIA didn’t know they were in danger. Tom knew enough to figure out someone had betrayed the American agents. In fact, Tom even said so to the CIA when he got back.” She looked at Feklisov. “Hoover realizes Tom is a mortal threat and does something about it.”

  “But why, Miss Silverstone? Why is Hoover suddenly afraid in 1958 that Tom Wrought knows it was him—the very head of the FBI, not some underling—who betrayed the CIA agents in 1951, that it was Hoover himself who didn’t pass on what MI5 told the FBI? Mr. Wrought didn’t accuse Hoover when he talked to the CIA chief in 1951.”

  Suddenly Alice looked like a schoolgirl just waiting to blurt out the right answer. “Because of those anonymous articles in the Tribune. Tom’s guesses about the FBI and the CIA were too good. They frightened Hoover. Maybe he knew more. Or someone was telling him more, someone who knew enough to implicate Hoover directly. Maybe he thinks Tom wasn’t even guessing at all, but using information passed along by the Russians. And he was afraid there’d be more. It was enough to make Tom Wrought worth silencing.”

  Feklisov looked immensely well satisfied. “You had all the pieces, Miss Silverstone. You only needed to put them together.”

  Liz now spoke up. “I want to be sure I get this right, Alice. It’s the mathematician in me.” Liz set to work on the steps as if it were a proof. “So, it starts when CIA London sees Tom’s anonymous guesses in the Tribune—the ones about the Rosenbergs, and then the ones about Dr. Zhivago. They nose round and find out Tom wrote them. A report goes to CIA Washington, and they ask Hoover what the FBI has on one Thomas Wrought.” Liz paused, but Alice only nodded. So she began again. “Hoover asks why, and they send him the articles Tom wrote in the Tribune plus the 1951 CIA file on Tom. That file will certainly have notations about his interview with Dulles, the CIA chief, when Tom told Dulles about the US assets hung out to dry at the same time he rescued the British agents. In 1951 Tom wouldn’t have known enough to figure out it was the FBI, or Hoover himself, who failed to warn the CIA. But by 1958 he’s in London, where it looks like Soviet intelligence is leaking titbits to Tom. Maybe they were about to leak that Hoover himself was responsible.” Liz looked as though she was about to prove the Pythagorean theorem. “Ergo suddenly Hoover has a very strong motive to have Tom put away, perhaps hung, and certainly discredited before he writes any more anonymous articles.”

  Finally Feklisov spoke. “Yes, Hoover must have become convinced that your Mr. Wrought knows quite enough to destroy him.”

  “There’s just one more loose end, Mr. Feklisov,” Alice insisted. “Where does this Mr. Kim Philby fit in? That man who called Michael Foot. Could he be Hoover’s man in MI5?” Alice looked towards Liz and added, “British counterintelligence.” Then both women looked at Feklisov.

  Feklisov stood there, deciding what to say. Finally he spoke. “Ladies, you have figured everything out, and you didn’t need my help. That’s good, because if I gave you any more, my life would be forfeit.”

  “Answer the question, Mr. Feklisov! Is Philby the FBI contact in MI5?”

  “He can’t be. He was MI6—a spy abroad, not MI5 working in Britain—and he hasn’t been with MI6 since 1951. He was suspected of being a double agent working for us but was cleared by the prime minister, Mr. Macmillan, when he was foreign secretary, in 1955. It was in the papers.”

  “Look, Mr. Feklisov, we’ve figured out why Tom was framed. So what? We can’t do a thing about it. No one will believe us. We don’t have any leverage.” Liz reached out and put her hand on his arm. “Isn’t there anything you can do to help us?”

  Then Alice spoke. “Last week you told me you hated Hoover for what he did to Ethel Rosenberg when he knew she was innocent.”

  “Her kids weren’t the only ones who lost a parent to Hoover,” Liz said. “There’s mine too. Well, this is your chance to do something, and it needn’t cost you your life. Give us something we can use.”

  “Very well. I tell you only one thing. KGB knows that the American FBI has a”—Feklisov paused and produced a Russian word, pirs, then found the English—“a mole in British counterintelligence. You know what it is, a mole? Give him to the British, and you may get your Mr. Tom Wrought back.”

  “But how do we do that?” Liz implored.

  “I am afraid I cannot help you, ladies. I have already said too much. Remember, a word from either of you about the Krogers, and all three of us will be dead—four, if you include Wrought.” He look
ed at his watch. “Now I must catch the 4:05 back to London, or I will be missed.”

  There was a spring in his step as he left the two women. They were resourceful. They would, he was sure, find their way to MI5. If they did, they might well force the Americans’ mole there to orchestrate the release of Wrought. Unless the mole had them both killed first. No. He’d have to forbid that, or lose the Krogers. After all, the Americans’ mole was his too. Still, the dividends for the KGB were considerable. Suspicion between the British services, reduced exchanges of information with the Americans, protection for Philby and for the other Soviet agents still in MI6. It was more than a fair exchange. All while protecting his friends in Ruislip, the Krogers. But it wasn’t the whole reason Alexandr Semyonovich Feklisov had been prepared to risk his own position in the KGB to help the two women. He was finally surrendering to sentimentality.

  Liz and Alice were seated in an otherwise empty smoking compartment on the evening train to London. They too had gone their separate ways from Sifton Park, still anxious about being followed. Liz had moved between three or four different compartments on the train just to be sure she was not shadowed. Alice had boarded just as the train pulled away. Now they felt they could breathe a little.

  Liz offered Alice a cigarette, which she took gratefully and drew on deeply. “How do we get to MI5?” Liz asked.

  “That’s what I have been trying to figure out. I’ve two ideas.” Alice was thinking aloud. “Who do I know who’d have contacts that deep in government? Well, there’s Mr. Foot, who edits the Tribune. But who knows? The government may think he’s a spy.”

  Liz added to the objection. “And there’s the chance he’d try to publish any story he gets his hands on.” She paused. “What’s your other idea?”

  “Rather a mentor of mine, Victor Mishcon. Knows everyone in the Labour Party. Can probably get us in to see the former prime minister, Atlee, or the leader of the opposition, Gaitskell.”

  “I think I have an idea,” Liz said, brightening. “Remember Tom’s friend in Oxford, Isaiah Berlin? He spent time in Washington during the war and in Russia after the war for the Foreign Office. Berlin must know people in MI5 and MI6. Anything we tell him or he tells us would be under the political radar at least.”