The Berlin Spies

by Alex Gerlis

  Edgar had only just clambered down from the helicopter when he was met by Ronnie Castle, the first time Edgar had seen him since April when he’d turned up at his home in Dorset with young Lassiter in tow. Now his usual bonhomie was absent.

  ‘You’re in trouble Edgar: deep, deep trouble. If it’s any consolation, so am I. This is a complete bloody nightmare. Can’t you tell Edgar? They’ve brought you here in a bloody helicopter! Have you any idea how hard it is to get a flight from the bloody RAF these days?’

  Castle carried on in this manner as they walked out of the field, over a small fence and down a long lawn towards the house – one of those requisitioned by the Service during the war, which they’d managed to hold onto.

  And now Edgar was in a large room in the basement, lit only by a few inadequate wall lights, making the centre of the room – where he sat alone –quite dark. Ahead of him, behind a large table, sat three figures in the shadows, like the hooded men of the Inquisition.

  None of them had said a word when Edgar entered the room. Edgar thought he was far too long in the tooth for this to bother him, but after five minutes of silence he began to feel unsettled. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light he recognised two of the men: an Assistant Director of the Service, and a former ambassador to Moscow, a man who now had some kind of a disciplinary and trouble-shooting role in the Service. The other man – whom Edgar did not recognise – appeared to be there in some kind of administrative capacity, making notes and taking sheets from the files in front of him and handing them to the other two.

  It was the former ambassador who had broken the silence. ‘We don’t approve of freelance operations Edgar.’

  On the very few occasions when Edgar had felt someone he was interrogating had gained the upper hand – albeit never for very long – it was when they became assertive, grabbing the initiative and trying to wrestle control of the interrogation. During the long silence preceding the ambassador’s words, Edgar decided this would be his best course of action.

  ‘Oh come off it. You know full well that all our operations are in effect freelance ones,’ he replied, managing to sound put out, even quite angry. ‘That’s how it works, isn’t it – in our game? Any operation worth its salt has a degree of deniability attached to it: keep a decent distance from HQ and the embassies, most of all from Whitehall, so if it all goes pear-shaped they can turn round and say “nothing to do with me, didn’t know anything about it.” Rather like you’re doing now.’

  The former ambassador shifted in his chair and glanced at the Assistant Director, who in turn concentrated on a sheet of paper passed to him by the other man.

  ‘I mean,’ said Edgar, feeling confident enough now to adopt a sarcastic tone, ‘all this nonsense getting me here. A military escort in Cologne, keeping me pretty much under lock and key last night, a helicopter – a helicopter for Christ’s sake – to bring me here. What on earth is this all about? ’

  ‘That, Edgar,’ said the Assistant Director ‘is exactly what we wanted to ask you.’

  Edgar leaned forward and concentrated his gaze at a point just above the three men. ‘Everything I’ve been doing was in the interests of the Service and – more importantly – this country. Earlier this year I was approached by a Soviet agent…’

  ‘Hang on Edgar – a Soviet contact? Surely…’ the former ambassador looked appalled.

  ‘All decent agents have contacts and sources from different sides. This agent is someone with whom I last had contact back in 1945, when we were on the same side, more or less. This time he was investigating a suspicion that Nazis had infiltrated his Service, and he had reason to believe that some may be operating over here. He warned me to be careful of traitors on our side. I made a few inquiries and together we discovered a BfV agent called Heinz Fleischhauer, originally Wilhelm Richter, was part of a crazy Nazi plot, as well as being a Soviet spy. I passed on what I thought was reasonable to my contact, and then was able to unearth what remained of this rather pathetic Nazi coterie in this country. In the process, I discovered that Lassiter was a Soviet agent, hence my reluctance to share what I knew. Before I could talk to anyone else I needed to travel to West Germany, where I met with Clive Cowley and some more pieces of this rather shabby jigsaw slotted into place. I realised that he too was a Soviet agent: my contact had warned me there was probably a mole in Bonn. I then went to Cologne to track down Heinz Fleischhauer, at which point I would of course have informed the Service. My idea was to make sure of his identity, flush him out into the open and then let Kemp have all the glory. But as we now know, events rather got in the way.’

  The Assistant Director leaned forward, the light catching his face full on. He looked impressed at Edgar’s performance in spite of himself.

  ‘Of course sir,’ continued Edgar, his tone now much more helpful ‘this is condensing a rather long tale. Naturally I’ll put everything in writing. Should you think I’ve been in any way disloyal, or broken any laws, I am quite prepared to explain myself to whomever…’

  ‘No, no, no,’ there was a hint of panic in the former ambassador’s voice. ‘’We’re not talking about blame here Edgar. We’re here to tie up loose ends.’

  ‘You – we – are most fortunate,’ said the Assistant Director, ‘these days the press and indeed the public attribute any act of apparently political violence in West Germany to the Red Army Faction or the Baader-Meinhof Group, whatever one calls them. The West German press and their counterparts over here have already decided that what happened in Cologne and Bonn yesterday were acts of terrorism carried out by the Red Army Faction.

  ‘It is plainly not in the interests of the West German government for it to be known that a senior officer in their BfV was both a Nazi and a Soviet agent. And I can assure you it is certainly not in the interests of Her Majesty’s Government for it to be known that Clive Cowley also worked for the Soviets, or that we had links with this Nazi. Frankly, it’s the last thing the Government needs at the moment.

  ‘The West Germans,’ the Assistant Director leaned forwards as if he were a judge delivering sentence, ‘will say the man who had his head blown off in Cologne was Heinz Fleischhauer, and he was a victim of the Red Army Faction. Everyone will forget about the poor young man you pulled off the street who ended up being shot by Fleischhauer.

  ‘I understand his body has already been disposed of. We’re getting some leeway from the fact that we’ve assisted in exposing a Soviet agent in the BfV. Notwithstanding your methods and singular lack of co-operation, they are nonetheless grateful. If the truth got out about Heinz Fleischhauer, it could bring down their Government.’

  ‘Likewise,’ said the former ambassador, ‘we are happy, if that’s the correct word, to brief the media that Clive Cowley was also killed by the Red Army Faction. I’m not sure whether this will stand up to a terrific amount of scrutiny –but we’ll just have to ride that storm.’

  ‘And what if the Red Army Faction turn round and say these killings were nothing to do with them – that would rather queer the pitch, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose they could do Edgar,’ replied the Assistant Director, ‘but it’s highly unlikely – if you think about it, it’s quite a coup to have the scalps of a BfV agent and a British diplomat attributed to them. Meanwhile, there’ll be lots of tributes Cowley doesn’t deserve. Callaghan was going to make a statement himself in the House this afternoon, but I believe they’ve now managed to persuade him it ought to come from the Foreign Secretary rather than the Prime Minister, so Crosland will deliver it.’

  ‘And that’s that?’

  ‘More or less Edgar, more or less,’ said the Assistant Director. ‘Of course your role in all this… well, quite unconventional and you broke countless rules. But at the close of play both us and the BfV have fewer Soviet agents in our midst, so that offsets everything else. As for this Nazi business, well, no reason to complicate matters, eh? War was a long time ago after all. Perhaps it’s time to retire properly Edgar, even though we ha
d reasonable grounds to assume you’d done that many years ago.’

  ‘My role,’ said the former ambassador, ‘as you may be aware, is ensure nothing goes wrong and when it does, manage it. The Americans have a typically crude but to the point phrase I heard in Washington last month: to stop the shit hitting the fan. Well, we’ve just about managed to keep the lid on this one Edgar, but only just: the shit hasn’t hit the fan. We got away with it. So did you. Take the advice you’ve just been given and call it a day.’

  They were all standing now, the three judges of the Inquisition and Edgar: a man reprieved.

  ‘But what about Lassiter’ said Edgar. ‘If he’s a Soviet agent…’

  ‘Lassiter?’ The Assistant Director shook his head, in sorrow as much as anything else. ‘That will all be taken care of.’

  ***

  Around the time Edgar arrived at Savernake that Thursday morning, Lassiter had been escorted from his office on the eighth floor of the MI6 headquarters and taken to a room deep in its basement.

  He confessed surprisingly quickly, though he was anxious to play down what he was actually confessing to. Nothing really, the odd snippet… had every intention of reporting it all in due course… more a misjudgment than anything else…

  No-one believed a word he said, not that they showed Lassiter how they felt. It was the Assistant Director who found himself alone with Lassiter in his cell that evening.

  ‘Tell us everything Lassiter – and I mean absolutely everything – and we’ll regard that as sufficient mitigation. You’ll have to leave the Service, of course: we’ll concoct a plausible enough reason and you’ll disappear from view. We’ll want to keep tabs on you, will need to know where you are and what you’re doing and all that. You’ll need a job, something harmless.’

  Hugh Lassiter found it hard to disguise his relief, though he wondered what kind of job they’d regard as ‘harmless’: as long as it wasn’t something manual. ‘And that would be doing you a favour too, I suppose.’

  ‘In what way would that be Lassiter?’

  ‘Well,’ Lassiter lounged back in his chair in a louche manner, crossing his legs so the right foot was resting on his left knee, and chuckled. ‘A court case would be in no-one’s interests, would it?’

  The Assistant Director pushed a thick pad of A4 paper towards Lassiter. ‘Start writing, Lassiter, and don’t stop until you’ve put everything down: how you were recruited, who your contacts were, operations you’ve been involved in. Everything. As far as we’re concerned, no detail is too minor. Once you’ve done that we’ll ask you a few questions.’

  Later that night the Assistant Director admitted to the former ambassador that he’d found something odd about Lassiter’s reaction.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I told him that if he told us absolutely everything then we’d regard that as sufficient mitigation…’

  ‘As we agreed.’

  ‘As we agreed, indeed. But he never bothered to ask me what the consequences would be if he didn’t tell us everything. I’d have thought that was the obvious question to ask.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the former ambassador, ‘the unasked question. We know all about those.’

  ***

  Lassiter had underestimated what was expected of him. He was kept in a bleak cell in the basement with a bed, a toilet and sink, and a desk for him to write at. For the next week Lassiter was subject to a strict routine: the harsh lights would go on at seven in the morning and, after breakfast, two interrogators would come in for a session which would last at least three hours. They would leave him with a series of questions to answer and topics to cover, and he’d be alone with his writing pad for a few more hours before the next round of questioning began. There were four interrogators altogether, two teams of two, and despite his best attempts he was unable to build a rapport with any of them. They would point out flaws or gaps in his account and raise questions they wanted answered. The process continued for a week.

  Hugh Lassiter told them how he had been recruited in 1964 while he was a student at Oxford University, and in East Berlin for a term. He described how he became a Marxist, an act which on reflection was little more than a passing interest, a juvenile affectation – except in a drunken moment he let it be known to one of his lecturers in East Berlin that he’d be willing to help the Soviet Union. He imagined this would mean putting up posters on College noticeboards of tractors and happy workers on the banks of the Volga. He most certainly hadn’t imagined this would involve actually committing espionage, but by then it was too late. He told them how he’d been instructed to apply for the Foreign Office and from there was recruited into MI6. And how he had been controlled by a succession of handlers at the Soviet Embassy in London (names Lassiter, we want every single bloody name) and that his main role – one he was never terribly happy with or even fully understood, if he was honest – was to look after a group of old Nazis.

  His final interrogation took place on the Thursday, one week after he’d been arrested. On the following Monday, eight men gathered in a secure room a dozen floors up from where Lassiter languished. The four men who had been interrogating him were there, along with the former ambassador, the Assistant Director of the Service, Ronnie Castle – Lassiter’s erstwhile boss – and a younger man with long hair and a dark complexion, who sat behind the Assistant Director and the former ambassador and was introduced as Richard but did not speak once during the meeting, spending most of it toying with his spectacles.

  ‘I read your report over the weekend,’ said the Assistant Director. ‘In essence, he’s a fucking traitor.’ The four interrogators looked surprised at their boss’s choice of vocabulary. ‘Has he told us everything?’

  ‘He’s told us everything he’s going to tell us sir,’ replied one of the interrogators.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning we have no doubt there’s plenty more he knows, but which he’s not going to tell us. He’s a real pro, a proper KGB spy. This “reluctant spy, not really a traitor” stuff is all nonsense – it’s a front, standard Moscow stuff. He’s too smart to give us low-grade, useless material, but nor is it top grade. It’s names of people who’ve already been burnt or who are back in the Soviet Union, that kind of thing.’

  ‘How much,’ said the former ambassador, ‘of what he knows do you think he’s told us?’

  ‘We doubt he’s told us half of what he knows sir – and the half he’s keeping back would be the most important part, obviously.’

  ‘And if we were to give you another week?’

  ‘I doubt sir,’ said the main interrogator, ‘we would get much more out of him at all.’

  ‘How about,’ asked the former ambassador, ‘if we were to sanction less conventional methods of questioning?’

  Awkward coughs around the room.

  ‘That doesn’t work sir, in our opinion: you can’t put too much trust in anything someone tells you in those circumstances.’

  The Assistant Director closed his file and looked up at the four interrogators. ‘Thank you very much for your efforts gentlemen. You may leave now.’

  When they had left the room the Assistant Director addressed Ronnie Castle, thus far a shocked but silent observer.

  ‘Tell us where we are with his letters and all that business Ronnie.’

  ‘We have his letter of resignation from the Service here sir, dated one week ago. His colleagues have been told he’s resigned because of ill-health: we’ve alluded to a rather sudden and upsetting diagnosis. Lassiter’s sent them all a rather nice card with a picture of a chap playing golf on it, wishing them all the best for the future. He’s written to his parents explaining that he is being sent abroad on a long and most sensitive assignment – he’s sure they’ll understand and be discreet et cetera – and it may be many months before they should expect to hear from him. We allowed him to follow this up with one phone call to them, very tightly controlled, but it’s helped convince them. Can I just say sir, not for one moment did I su
spect Lassiter of…’

  The Assistant Director held up his hand. ‘Of course Ronnie, we know that. You may leave now.’

  They waited for a few moments after Ronnie Castle had closed the door.

  ‘I suppose,’ said the Assistant Director, ‘those letters and the phone call buy us some time?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the former ambassador. ‘A good few months I’d have thought.’

  ‘More than enough time, more than enough.’ The Assistant Director and the former ambassador nodded at each other before turning round to the younger man who was sitting behind them, still fiddling with his spectacles.

  ‘Very well then Richard: over to you.’

  ***

  In the trade they’re known as one-night stands: properties taken on as short-term rentals by the Service and used as one-off safe houses, often for just one day – or night. This one-night stand was a recently rented modern detached house on the outskirts of St Albans, just north of London. The house was at the end of a road on the edge of a new development, with fields to one side and behind it. Most importantly, the house boasted a large garage which the estate agents helpfully described as being ‘integral to the house.’ It was, in Richard’s opinion, ideal for the task in hand.

  Hugh Lassiter had been driven there on a Tuesday, the day after the meeting in the secure room. They’d waited until nearly nine o’clock in the evening before taking him up a floor to an underground garage, and into a Rover with blacked out rear windows. An hour and a quarter later the Rover drove straight into the integral garage of the detached house near St Albans, no neighbours or passers by any the wiser about who had just entered it.

  As dinner was being prepared Ronnie Castle sat down with Hugh Lassiter at the dining table, going through all the paperwork pertaining to his new life and showing him an attaché case stuffed with used banknotes, enough to ensure a comfortable future.