Every Spy a Traitor, page 16
It was long past eleven o’clock when they parted on the corner of Chiltern Street and Paddington Street, with much shaking of hands and Percy gripping him by the elbow and Pamela giving him another peck on the cheek and brushing her cheek against his and her scent lingered on his face.
He assured them he understood his instructions: he was to meet Pamela – Miss Clarke – at this very spot at eight o’clock on Monday morning and she would escort him to where he’d start his new role. And, yes, he quite understood his orders: he was not to breathe a word of this to a soul.
* * *
It was only over the weekend that he fully appreciated his predicament. He’d been so relieved they’d not known about his link with the Soviets that he failed to ask more questions and for time to think about things. After all, he didn’t even know the name of the branch of British Intelligence which according to Percy most people are unaware of and which he’d now rather too hastily signed up to.
It was bad enough that he’d been recruited as a Soviet agent. But now he was a British spy too. He’d read about double agents, but he doubted he was even one of those. His situation was considerably more complicated than that.
Double agents were controlled by one side while also ostensibly spying for the other side. But in his case, neither side knew he was also working for the other. At least he’d managed to avoid the Soviets, otherwise his life would be unimaginably complicated.
He did recall that there’d been some point during the meal on the Thursday when Percy had asked him if he was happy with ‘all of this’, as he put it, and Cooper had only hesitated very briefly before saying he was happy, because he knew by then it was too late.
They wouldn’t have approached him like this if they were going to allow him to decline their offer.
It was, he concluded, the most unspeakable dilemma.
And it was one he had no possibility of extricating himself from.
Part 2
Chapter 14
London
July 1938
Austin Branstone found it hard to fathom what an extraordinary eighteen months he’d experienced. More often than not he woke up convinced the whole business had been a dream.
Prior to January 1937 he’d become accustomed to the solitary and measured life of an academic specialising in Russian icons, but the approach from Moscow had changed that. The opportunity to study icons normally hidden away in the Kremlin was totally unexpected and seemingly too good to be true.
Austin Branstone may have been unworldly in many respects, but he liked to think he certainly wasn’t nearly as naïve as people often took him for: he knew full well he was being asked to be a spy and he appreciated he had little choice but to go along with it. After all, the Provost had promised him that if he did so then the College would grant him a paid sabbatical to complete his PhD.
And Moscow had gone well, despite all his misgivings and his fear of ending up in a prison camp, disowned by a British government that would no doubt deny any knowledge of him.
On his return from the Soviet Union, he’d barely been back in Cambridge for a few hours – he’d not finished unpacking – when he was summoned by Dr Paxton at Gonville and Caius.
Paxton had congratulated him and said he was pleased to see him back in one piece and his friends, as he called them, were especially interested in the man he’d met in the Kremlin and please could he tell him in as much detail as he could manage about what had happened.
Over the next week Branstone visited Paxton on a number of occasions to go through over and over again what had happened in considerable detail.
He told of how he’d seen the man leaving the Council of Ministers building, how his attention had been drawn by the man’s attire, which was certainly not Russian and of how Big Boris, who was meant to be following him, wasn’t doing so and when the man walked close to him there was something familiar about him…
And even this part of the encounter took hours to go through, as Paxton produced diagrams of the Kremlin and Branstone had to indicate who was where and when and then when he described the man’s attire they spent many hours poring over pictures of men’s clothing and he had to describe what he was wearing, even down to the shoes, which he couldn’t recall exactly other than they appeared to be very well made.
And at one meeting Paxton told him that a woman would be joining them, an artist he said, skilled at producing sketches of people from verbal descriptions, but Branstone was not to give her any details other than what he could recall the man looked like and most certainly wasn’t to mention anything about the Soviet Union.
But it turned out to be a futile exercise: the man had been wearing a hat, which had… well, not so much obscured his face, but made it difficult to recall details and when the sketch was shown to him the following day, he said it could look something like the man, but he wasn’t sure and Paxton looked annoyed and said frankly it looked like almost any chap in his early thirties.
And then they turned to the encounter in the Taynitskaya Tower.
‘I remember asking him if he knew where the Komendantskaya Tower was. That’s the Commandant’s Tower, which I knew is on the other side of the Kremlin. I said I was going round in circles, or words to that effect.’
‘And this was all in English?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Absolutely: I told you, I used it because I thought I recognised him… well recognise may be a bit strong, but he was certainly familiar.’
‘And he replied?’
‘He said he didn’t know and that he was stranger himself but if I kept walking round the wall, I’d come across it.’
‘And those were his exact words?’
‘More or less, sir, yes. I mean, not verbatim but as close as, dammit.’
Paxton had raised his eyebrows, surprised at Branstone’s tone. ‘And his accent?’
‘Certainly upper class, I’d say.’
And a long discussion had followed on exactly what Branstone meant by that and he said he couldn’t put his finger on it but after all Cambridge was full of people who’d been to public schools and who all spoke in a similar manner, as far as he was concerned, and he imagined it was the same at Oxford, even all those years ago.
Paxton paid particular attention to the chess tournament at Merton College in Oxford, which Branstone seemed to think was in 1930. No, he couldn’t be sure his opponent whom he’d beaten with the Scholar’s Mate was a student of Merton: he was sure there were students from at least two other colleges taking part and, no, he couldn’t recall the names of those colleges, though it was possible that at least one of them was a neighbouring college, but he really wasn’t sure.
Dr Paxton had become impatient and said everywhere in Oxford was near somewhere else because it was just a market town after all and they’d left the matter for a week or so and when they resumed, Paxton’s desk was covered in photographs he’d obtained from Oxford, mostly of students who’d been at Merton College from 1928 to 1932 but study them as he did – with a magnifying glass, for heaven’s sake – Branstone could not identify the man.
At one stage Branstone had suggested they check with Merton College and Paxton looked annoyed and said of course they’d done that and it appeared that Merton College had no records relating to its chess team and the same applied to the other colleges they’d enquired of, not least because they were talking eight years previously.
‘I have to say, Oxford colleges are most dilatory in their record keeping. Much as one would expect!’
* * *
The Provost had been as good as his word and Austin Branstone had indeed been granted a paid sabbatical, to cover the whole of the 1937–1938 Academic Year. He was even given better rooms in College, in Bodley’s Court.
He continued to meet regularly with Dr Paxton and the conversation would always be the same: yes, he’d been thinking about the Englishman in the Kremlin and, no, he was none the wiser as to his identity, and Paxton would look disappointed and said if you do recall anything you know where I am and Branstone nodded but thought that was highly unlikely, if not impossible.
Until that warm Wednesday morning in July.
* * *
By July 1938 Austin Branstone was making good progress with his PhD. His thesis was based on the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1650s and the ensuing effect on icons, with the traditionalists retaining the old style of icons which they believed had its origins in biblical times, whereas the more official church believed icons could reflect more modern Russian and European styles. He doubted he’d have been as advanced in his thesis had he not visited Moscow the previous year.
He was spending the last two weeks of July doing research at the British Library in Bloomsbury and the Provost had generously agreed to fund a stay in a small bed and breakfast hotel on Brunswick Square, which was a pleasant ten-minute stroll from the library.
It was a Wednesday morning in his second week in London and Branstone left the hotel just after nine and headed to the library. As he approached Russell Square tube station, he saw the same man he’d encountered a year before in the Taynitskaya Tower in the Kremlin and unquestionably the same person he’d faced across the chess board at Merton College some eight years before.
This time he was wearing a dark suit, carrying an umbrella in one hand with his other hand holding a hat and with a raincoat draped over the arm. The man paused outside the station and looked around, though thankfully not in Branstone’s direction. He then turned left towards Russell Square.
Branstone hurried across the road to follow the man. He wondered about shouting at him to stop and then thought it may be better to go up and greet him, but by the time the man had reached Russell Square, Branstone resolved he’d follow him as far as he could and if they passed a policeman on the way then he’d alert him.
As the man turned in to Russell Square, he approached a taxi on a stand outside a hotel. Branstone hurried after him, but by the time he reached the stand the man’s taxi was heading towards the centre of London and someone else was climbing into the one other taxi waiting there. There was nothing Branstone could do; by the time another taxi appeared it was hopeless. He could hardly tell the driver to follow a taxi which was now out of sight.
He stood disconsolately by the road, before heading to the British Library. It was frustrating to say the very least: the man had been within his grasp.
He was returning to Cambridge on the Friday evening, so on the Thursday and Friday morning he made a point of waiting outside the entrance to Russell Square station on Bernard Street at around the same time as he’d seen the man on the Wednesday. But there was no sign of him, and when he returned to Cambridge he spent the weekend worrying that he should have done something about the matter on the Wednesday, though he wasn’t sure what he could have done. He’d go and see Dr Paxton at Gonville and Caius once he was back in Cambridge next week. He’d know what to do.
Chapter 15
London
May–July 1938
‘What do we make of Cooper, then?’
The oldest person in the room replied to Percy Burton first. He was a formally dressed man who said in his middle-European accent he thought Cooper was a model student. ‘I found him to be an intelligent man: he grasped the rudiments of Marxism surprisingly quickly, as he did the structure and organisation of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and in this country. He even managed to remain awake throughout my sessions!’
There was a ripple of laughter and then the man next to him spoke. ‘Thank you, Alfred. I also found him to be a first-class recruit. He picked up the key principles of how to follow someone in an effective yet inobtrusive manner almost immediately and when we set him off to see how he coped with being followed himself… well, I have to be honest, he shook off a couple of our very experienced chaps without any problem. It was almost as if he…’
‘As if he what, Tony?’
‘As if he was familiar with the techniques, which I have come across before, recruits who intuitively know what to do. I’m told he was less confident at the farm though: he’s not what I’d call a tough character.’
‘And the interrogations?’
‘Relied a lot on his charm and his verbosity and was good at spinning out his story, but I’m not convinced that if he were really under pressure…’
‘Pamela, what do you make of him? You spotted him in the first place.’
‘I’m not sure: bright, obviously, and terribly likeable while at the same time being able to remain inconspicuous, which are qualities we really do look for. But I too remain to be convinced how much steel he really has.’
There was silence as Percy Burton closed his eyes in deep thought and then nodded, having made up his mind.
‘I think we’re agreed we carry on with Cooper.’
* * *
It was all rather rushed and somewhat confusing, not unlike the first day at school, and it had begun at eight o’clock on the Monday morning when he’d done as instructed and met Pamela on the corner of Chiltern Street and Paddington Street. She’d been more formal and business-like than previously – certainly no peck on the cheek or hand on his arm and as far as he could tell, no perfume. She glanced at her watch as if to check he wasn’t late and then apologised for the rain and said they ought to get a move on and to follow her.
They hurried across Baker Street and then down Dorset Street, where she paused outside the Swiss Embassy to ask him if he was all right and for a moment he wondered if they were going into the embassy, but she carried on and were soon outside a six-storey Regency building in need of a lick of paint on the west-side of Bryanston Square, with a brass plaque announcing this was ‘The Ministry of Transport’. The entrance hall was divided into two areas: one large and open with people visible through it; the other area smaller, with a guard standing in front of a closed door, who inspected Pamela’s pass and nodded when she pointed at Cooper and said he was with her.
The guard pressed a buzzer and almost immediately the door opened and he followed Pamela down a tunnel-like corridor, at the end of which was another guard behind a desk who unlocked a door to let them through.
As far as Cooper could tell, it seemed they’d entered a building behind the first one. He was shown into a small, windowless room and Pamela suggested he hang up his coat and he was to wait there because someone from Personnel would be coming in to see him.
He was left alone for a few minutes before a woman entered and announced herself as being from Personnel and when Cooper said he hadn’t caught her name she looked at him in a disapproving manner.
‘That is because I didn’t give it. You need to understand that in here few people give their names and you most certainly should not ask. Before you are taken to see Mr Burton, I have to go through some matters with you.’
She glared as Cooper took out his notebook and a pen.
‘You can put those away for a start. We most certainly do not take notes in here. As far as the world outside is concerned, you are employed by a section of the Ministry of Transport that deals with the regulation of inland waterways. The main part of this building, through which you entered, is indeed part of the Ministry of Transport. You should not volunteer details about your employment, but that is what you tell them if anyone asks. This document is a briefing on the work of the inland waterways section: you should read it so you are familiar with what you are meant to be doing here.’
She then explained that for the purposes of his employment he would receive his salary from the Ministry of Transport and it would be paid into his Martins Bank account, one month in arrears, and that he would not be part of any superannuation scheme. If he was unwell or had any welfare concerns, he was to contact her and she would make what arrangements were necessary because they preferred medical and related matters to be dealt with by approved people, given the highly sensitive nature of the job.
‘And now, you need to read this. I will leave you for a while and when I return, you’ll sign it.’
The document was the Official Secrets Act, 1920 and reading it made Cooper break into a cold sweat. Each page sounded more portentous than the previous one and when he’d finished reading it his throat was tight and he had a headache and he turned back to Section 2 which described how an offence would be committed under the act if someone was in contact with ‘a foreign agent… for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State, obtained or attempted to obtain information which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy’.
It rather neatly described what the Soviet Union expected of him.
Cooper realised he’d been a fool: he could have declined Burton’s offer the previous week in the restaurant or he could have told Pamela that morning that he’d had second thoughts, that he realised he wasn’t up to it and if the truth be told was a bit of a… well, coward, actually, and he really wasn’t the right man for the job. But as was his want he’d been agreeable and hadn’t wanted to say ‘no’ and just as he’d allowed himself to be swept along by Eduard and the Maurers in Berlin and tricked into going to Moscow, so the same was happening here in London. Being press-ganged into joining Soviet Intelligence was bad enough. Adding British Intelligence to that doubtful curriculum vitae was deeply regrettable. One of his school reports had described him as being too eager to please. ‘Too biddable.’
