He did notice about his young friend that he was less than charitable in his attitude toward those who disagreed with him, or indeed toward those who got in his way in any matter, whether it was a student competing with him for the higher grade in a physics paper or a rugby player on the other team or a Cambridge Union orator who disagreed with him, particularly if the form of that disagreement was patronising. Timothy Bethell, defending the policies of the British Government, had remarked a few weeks earlier that such criticisms as were being made of ‘the speaker’ (it was Bertram Heath) would ‘lighten the political burden of the nation, especially if, as a consequence, he were to devote himself exclusively to rugby, in which activity he is said to excel, perhaps to the point of failing to recognise that he is in this chamber supposed to treat arguments other than as footballs. They really are different things, Mr. Heath.’ There was great jubilation in the chamber, most of it at Bertram Heath’s expense.
The following night, returning from a convivial supper with friends, Timothy Bethell, rounding the corner of Trumpington Street to approach his college, was accosted by a large man wearing a mask who proceeded to administer a beating so severe as to result in Bethell’s hospitalisation with a fractured jaw. There was great commotion at the college, and suspicion instantly fell on Thomas Brady, the boxing champion of Clare College, whose steady girlfriend of several months had only the week before been annexed by Timothy Bethell. Brady was asked informally by common friends to account for his whereabouts at the time of the assault, and although he pleaded most vigorously his innocence, in fact he had no way of proving that he was on a bus returning from London where he had done nothing more mischievous than go to the cinema. Some believed Brady, some did not. Alistair Fleetwood did.
The time had come, Fleetwood decided late that spring, and he dutifully consulted Alice Goodyear Corbett, asking her permission to proceed.
It had been a revelation to Bertram to learn that in addition to everything else the man he admired most in all this world was also in fact a clandestine revolutionary, wholly mobilised behind the cause of the working classes. He joyfully accepted a commission as a revolutionary colleague. They spoke for hours on end about the excitement of their common purpose. It disappointed Heath only to learn that he would need to submit to the same discipline Fleetwood had submitted to, namely to recede from his firebrand mode as socialist and fellow traveller, but he was willing to do everything necessary to qualify fully.
So that by the time he was in his final year, Heath had crossed the aisle to the Liberal party in the Cambridge Union, and his high BTU former colleagues thought him a spent case in whom the fires of idealism had burned out. Though they conceded that nothing else in Heath had burned out: he had become the captain of the rugger team, and was regarded as certain to get a first in physics.
Bertram Heath was in Cambridge that summer doing a research project under the supervision of Fleetwood, and they dined together twice, sometimes three times a week in the suite Fleetwood had already begun to aggrandise with a cook-butler who served tolerable food, and a young but discriminating wine cellar. They ate now in the airy dining room, the windows on the side open to let in the summer air. Heath had been heatedly denouncing the pact; Fleetwood had patiently counselled him to wait, wait, wait, that the wisdom of it would one day transpire. He acknowledged that communists would now be on the defensive everywhere, but that what mattered was not such setbacks as these, but progress in major, historical terms. That, he reminded his impatient and severe young friend, ‘can’t be measured by today’s headlines.’ And then, of course, the headlines a week later brought news that Hitler had invaded Poland. And forty-eight hours after that, the government of His Britannic Majesty George VI declared war, for the second time in a generation, against Germany.
The Army Recruiting Office ruled that certain categories of scholars should not be drafted into the army: they would be more valuable performing special services. Fleetwood fell instantly into such a category, Heath marginally. Fleetwood was asked to report to Bletchley Park where he learned that he was to help with the whole cryptographic enterprise. He had his misgivings, which he confessed to Alice by radio. He was not disposed to help an imperialist power in a fight against Adolf Hitler so long as Hitler was an ally of the Soviet Union. She counselled him to protect his cover by agreeing to serve. And while there at Bletchley Park he could keep Moscow informed of all technological developments that might prove useful, meanwhile being as sluggish as he thought he could get away with in contributing to the war effort against the Soviet Union’s ally.
Fleetwood spoke with Heath about coming along into the Government Code and Cypher School. Heath on the one hand longed for more active work, but could not envision himself fighting on air, land, or sea against an ally of the Soviet Union. So he permitted Fleetwood to exercise his considerable influence to bring him into the bustling operation at Bletchley.
At Bletchley, Fleetwood learned what he could from his fellow scientists, but mostly he absorbed himself in a series of experiments about which he spoke little, even to Heath, who throughout the long period that lay ahead of them was manifestly demoralised. Heath was frequently late in coming to work. He was seen at the local bars with different women who, after a few days, were given the option of sleeping with Heath or being dropped by him like a stone. He calculated one night, as he left the hotel room he had hired for two hours, ahead of the American WAC lieutenant who would leave a decorous few moments later, that his rate of scoring came to about fifty-fifty, and those were reasonable odds. He cared nothing for any of the women he spent time with. His mind was occasionally stimulated at Bletchley, and he became a skilled radio operator, bringing his considerable knowledge of physics to his aid in helping to solve special problems.
Thus it went for two abysmal years, past the fall of France, through the Battle of Britain, through the bombings and blackouts, the shortages and rationing, and the general dreariness. His superiors no longer thought of him as a brilliant young scientist capable of creative work. It could be said that they lost interest in him. But all that changed on June 22, 1941, when Adolf Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union.
A week later, Fleetwood was working feverishly on projects directly related to the war effort. And one week later, Bertram Heath was receiving basic training at a camp for commandos in the south of England.
11
It had not been easy.
‘You’d think we were asking to inspect their ladies’ boudoirs,’ Anthony Trust said, stretching his legs over the coffee table.
‘Interesting idea,’ Blackford replied.
‘Maybe that’s where The Spook’ (as they had taken to calling the vegetable-mineral-animal they were looking for) ‘is hiding.’
‘If so, Anthony, you’ll be the first person to find it.’
But Rufus had entered and the schoolboy banter, at which they had had considerable experience since they had been, indeed, schoolmates at Greyburn College, ended abruptly. Trust removed his legs from the table.
‘It is set for ten tomorrow morning,’ Rufus reported, sitting down opposite. ‘I began by asking our friends if Pulling and Spring could study the electronic schematics but they said,’ Rufus paused, as though taking a deep breath before elaborating a profound ambiguity, ‘“No.”’ That was as theatrical as Blackford had ever seen Rufus. ‘It became necessary,’ Rufus said, back now in his understated mode, ‘to pursue the matter.’
The ‘matter’ had gone all the way to the P.M., and finally Anthony Brogan simply overruled MI5 head Sir Eugene Attwood, who had several times remarked that in modern history no one had ever invited a foreign power, never mind how friendly, to ‘ransack’ its private communications facilities. The Prime Minister assured Sir Eugene that ‘ransacking’ the Code Room was hardly what the American specialists intended to do. The fact was, a monstrous leak had been unmistakably deduced, the result of which was that the passage of all American intelligence communications and high security
information was as of this minute suspended, pending the elimination of that leak. ‘It has to be in our organisation or in theirs, inasmuch as the leaked information passed through both arteries and no other.’
Attwood finally agreed to cooperate, but only after wresting from the P.M. the promise that two equivalent British experts be present when time came to ‘sweep’ (having capitulated, he now used a gentler word than ransacked) U.S. Embassy quarters. Moreover, as a matter of pride, the American Embassy would be first: ‘We are, after all, sir,’ Attwood had reminded the Prime Minister, ‘in Great Britain, not in America, and I should think the presumption would be not that the host country was delinquent in security matters, but that the foreign country was. So we should begin by inspecting their quarters, and only then, our own.’ Brogan sighed and said he would make the suggestion to Rufus, who said that was fine by him; he had no interest in the matter of precedence. And so, on that Monday morning, Bruce Pulling and Hallam Spring of the CIA arrived with Rufus and Anthony Trust at Number Two Grosvenor Square, where they were met by two agents of MI5.
The two British technicians were amiably treated by Hallam Spring as first they waited in the reception room, and then rode up in the lift together, entering the Code Room without any discernible tension. This would not have been so if Bruce Pulling, a short, hairy man in his thirties, had met them alone, because Pulling had a distracting habit, whatever the company he found himself in, or the circumstances, of leaning over and making notes on his notepad, causing light banter to come to an excruciatingly self-conscious halt. But while his colleague made his notes, Hallam Spring chatted.
There they were, in a simple enough, utilitarian room, but a room designed to receive and to transmit data of trivial but also of momentous consequence. Rather like the room that holds the electric chair, Anthony thought: all of the support systems are outside.
No files cluttered the room. Just the two chairs for the two clerks (top-secret material was never handled by only a single employee). A steel table running across two thirds of the middle of the room. The transmitting unit, set on its own table on the left against the wall, adjacent to the paper shredder. The other walls were bare; not even a picture of President Eisenhower.
On the table at the centre, the teletype machine, its electric wires running down to an elaborate electrical socket-grid underneath. Immediately on its right, the encoder; on its left, the code-to-print transcriber.
The number one communications clerk would receive from the embassy official the sealed message to be transmitted. The clerk would open it and place it flat on the table beside the keyboard.
He would then type out the message, which would emerge—on oily yellow inch-wide scrolled paper, with perforated dots that corresponded to the letters being typed—from a slot on the left of the machine onto a horizontal three-inch open tray. Gravity would impel the paper, on reaching the end of the tray, down onto a stainless-steel receptacle on the floor.
After the message had been typed out, the number two clerk would collect the scroll of perforated paper and feed it into the third machine, which looked like a large electric typewriter. The perforated tape would activate the typewriter, which would type back the message on regular office-sized paper, on a roll that issued out of the back of the machine, once again dropping slowly into another receptacle.
When this operation was completed, clerk number two would pick up the printed copy and read aloud to clerk number one, who would check what he heard against the original. When there was an error he would stop the reader, make the correction on the teletype, and the reading would resume.
When the clerk-reader had finished, clerk number one would take the numbered corrections from the roll and apply them over the indicated lines (every line was numbered)—a routine splicing operation.
The edited tape was then fed into the encoder, whose internal arrangements changed once a day, pursuant to radio impulses reaching it from Washington.
Clerk number one that took the encoded paper and walked to the heavy transmitting unit to the left of the table. He inserted the roll into a slot at waist level, and a tractor feed chug-chugged the scroll through the mechanism. As this was being done, an identical roll of paper was emerging in the office of the State Department or the CIA, depending on the designated destination.
Meanwhile, clerk number two was feeding the non-coded tape into a shredder. After the encoded roll had been ingested by the transmitter and returned through a second slot below the first, that roll was also fed into the shredder.
The original message was put back into the envelope, resealed, and a button inside the Code Room depressed. The duty officer outside would reply with the signal for that day, a signal divulged to clerk number one only after he had gone into the signal office for duty.
On hearing the proper signal, clerk number one would open, from inside the Code Room, the heavy steel door, and return the sealed envelope to the duty officer, who would take it for filing in the principal vault of the embassy, located in the basement, about which someone had once said that a force ‘on the heavy side of Hiroshima’ would be required to open it forcibly.
There are rote procedures all secret service sweepers have in common. They begin by searching for electronic bugs. Never mind that the four technicians knew that audio bugs were not the suspected problem. They began searching for them even as a physician, called in to attend to a cyst, begins by taking the patient’s blood pressure. As a matter of professional deference, the Britishers, following Pulling and Spring about, did not make identical soundings—that is, if the Americans found nothing under the lamp light, the British team would assume there was nothing under the lamp light. Occasionally they might go further, for instance by taking readings on the steel wall with their electrical impulse recorders at shorter intervals than Spring and Pulling. But that kind of thing is done unprovocatively.
Then the major job began, the careful disassembly of the four basic electronic units: the teletype, the encoder, the code-to-print unit, and the transmitter. Were there any extraneous wires there? Any hidden tubes that might be used for transmission? Any suspicious circuitry? On the transmitter: was there anything, really, to look for, given that it was fed tape already coded, and that that code was assumed to be unbreakable? A Soviet radio disk, catching and recording those transmissions, lacking the code, would be helpless in trying to penetrate those signals. And that code, assuming that by extraordinary enterprise the Soviets succeeded in getting its key, would expire at midnight that night.
So having one by one exonerated the three other instruments, when it came to the transmitter mostly they just sat and stared at it. Conversation gave out. They found themselves leaning against the wall, three of them, while Pulling sat on one of the chairs, writing on his notepad.
They had found nothing.
And, at Leconfield House on Curzon Street where three hours later they completed a similar search of the British installations, they found: nothing.
Rufus received the report fatalistically. At least, under present arrangements, he had a little time. Because, effective two days before, no clandestine messages of substance were being sent from Washington to London, either to the U.S. Embassy or to Leconfield House. The volume of transactions was not reduced; it was contrived to send classified material of a noncritical kind. Scheduled, in about a week, would be a transmission revealing that Counterintelligence had discovered the identity of a particular KGB agent working with the United Nations and travelling frequently to London. Rufus would time what happened next, and note how long it would be before that agent, whose identity and activity had been detected a year earlier but who had proved of no particular use to the CIA, was recalled to the Soviet Union.
And so Rufus began to conceive an elaborate plan. But, difficult though it would undoubtedly be to execute, the burden was great to expose The Spook. Whatever it was. Whatever he was. Whatever she was. Whatever he-she-it was.
12
Rufus’s plan calle
d for Blackford’s going to Washington. He had informed Blackford that he would serve as Rufus’s personal aide in developing the plans for the operation and in coordinating with Anthony Trust and his small but highly trained staff. The evening before the day of his planned departure, Blackford went to Trust’s apartment on Baker Street and from there to a neighbourhood restaurant Trust spoke about with some enthusiasm.
Still, their spirits were low. The ignominious failure of Operation Tirana continued to fester, and the continuing insecurity of the existing situation was a reminder of their humiliation and of the terrible ends that had resulted from a security failure for which, by definition, they—not the enemy—were guilty. It is a government’s duty to provide for its security. Sure, Rufus had a plan, not all the details of which had yet been disclosed. But would even the penetration of the Soviet Embassy yield the secret? Short of holding a dagger up to the throat of KGB chief Boris Bolgin, neither Anthony Trust nor Blackford Oakes knew what could be done.
And, in the meantime, top secret U.S.-British communications were being transmitted as if by pony express. An urgent communication by President Dwight Eisenhower to Prime Minister Anthony Brogan had either to be telephoned directly over the protected line or else written out and transported physically across the ocean and hand-delivered.
Both official London and official Washington deemed this a singular humiliation, and if Rufus hadn’t solemnly decreed that until further notice no reliance was to be placed on conventional electronics, President Eisenhower would have pounded his fist on his desk in the Oval Office and ordered Allen Dulles to reinstitute regular communications via regular channels. He was tempted by one of his advisers who argued that the tragedy of Tirana had to be the result of one of those awful coincidences: a single mole, accumulating the diverse data from here and there, putting them all together, and delivering the package to the KGB. There was, he insisted, no other possible explanation. But Eisenhower agreed to go along with Rufus. For the time being.
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