Every Spy a Traitor, page 24
Phillips proceeded to tell them how in August the academic had spotted the man he’d last seen in the Kremlin leaving a tube station and to cut a long story short, well… he’d delayed reporting this, would you believe, and the day before he was due to come down to London to discuss it and hopefully help identify the man, he was found dead in his room, in Cambridge.
This had the desired effect because he now had the attention of everyone in the room: there was a good deal of muttering around the table and people looked up, now interested.
There was a long discussion about whether the man who’d met a Comintern agent in Paris in May was indeed the same man who’d been seen in the Kremlin the previous year and again in London in August, but the clear consensus was that the most sensible course of action – ‘sensible’ was a very MI6 word – was to proceed on the basis that they were one and the same man and therefore there was a traitor at the heart of the British establishment.
The most persuasive intervention was from Williamson, who said that in his experience it was hard enough for a Russian to get into the Kremlin, let alone a foreigner, but to get into the Council of Ministers building – which the traitor had been seen leaving – well this was most significant because the Council of Minsters was very much the inner sanctum of the Kremlin – the Holy of Holies, he added, to nervous laughter.
And Phillips then came to the point: the view of all branches of British intelligence and counter-intelligence and one strongly endorsed by the chief was that the search for this traitor was a priority.
‘An absolute priority, if I may so. Such unanimity is, you will appreciate, unprecedented. Whatever cases you’re working on at the moment, whatever agents you’re running – this goes to the top of your list. I hope that is clearly understood.’
And then one of the younger officers said that of course he understood the need to prioritise this case but didn’t it rather conflict with their being told in recent weeks that there should be increased focus on the threat of Nazi Germany rather than the Communists?
There was some muttering of agreement and Phillips thought that he’d never have dreamt of questioning a superior officer, but then this was the world they lived in.
‘One understands that, but treason is treason and needs to be dealt with.’
The man who’d asked the question had made a calculated decision. Of course, there was a risk in sticking his head above the parapet, so to speak. But he felt that by articulating what many round the table felt, it could actually draw attention away from him.
Coombe from the Balkans asked if there was really nothing further Phillips could share regarding the traitor’s identity and Phillips said a file would be circulated following the meeting summarising everything which was known.
‘Which is, I’m afraid, very little. We are dealing with a professional here, a person who would appear to be able to move around the Kremlin and then go into someone’s rooms at Cambridge without leaving a clue.
‘There is a possibly very significant development though, one which gives us some considerable hope of being able to identify the traitor. We’ve identified a person we’re confident may be able to help us. It’s someone we’ve had our eyes on a for a while: he’s a Soviet diplomat with whom we’ve had contact in the past and who we were confident of turning last February when he was based in Central Europe. He’s a very bright chap, resourceful and almost certainly a professional diplomat rather than a committed Marxist. He disappeared back to Moscow rather suddenly and we feared he’d suffered the fate accorded to so many of his comrades. But in the past week he’s emerged at a new posting in Northern Europe. We’re making contact with him now and we’re confident that once he joins us, he’ll be able to point us in the direction of this traitor.’
* * *
He left work at the normal time that day and took his usual route home, all the while checking he wasn’t being followed. It had crossed his mind after Phillips’ meeting that this could be some elaborate kind of trap, that maybe he was under suspicion all along, but they were being clever by calling such a large meeting and imparting just enough information to see what he did next.
But he was satisfied that he’d not been followed. Once home he went up to the attic and watched the street from behind a drawn curtain, carefully scanning every direction.
He acted normally enough after that, perhaps not as attentive to his wife during dinner and he apologised saying he had a bad headache and she suggested he go out for a walk to shake it off and he gave every impression of reluctantly agreeing to do so.
Ten minutes later he was in the telephone box behind the church, a place few people passed by in the dark, but he unscrewed the light bulb anyway and dialled HAC5453 and waited for it to ring four times before replacing the receiver and then counted slowly to twenty, his long breaths noisy and visible like cigarette smoke in the cramped telephone box, the only sounds that of his breathing and his foot tapping nervously on the concrete floor. Then he dialled the other Hackney number, HAC9792, and this time let it ring twice before replacing the dial and then another wait, this time for thirty seconds, and the telephone box felt as if it was deprived of oxygen and the small glass panels were steaming up.
The final number now, this one on the Stepney Green exchange, STE7312, and three rings before he replaced the receiver and when he did so he realised how fast his heart was beating and his throat felt tight, as if someone had their fingers round it and he leant against the side and lit a cigarette and thought it was a ridiculous way of letting them know he needed to meet urgently.
It was far too convoluted. He must tell Osip that.
After work the following day he travelled to the safe house on Stannary Street in Kennington, not far from the cricket ground and close to the park. Although in normal circumstances it was a straightforward enough journey from St James, his roundabout route had taken him close to an hour and a half and he was exhausted when he arrived.
The woman who opened the door said nothing by way of a greeting, telling him to go to the first floor where ‘the gentleman’ was waiting.
He found Osip in a bedroom, sitting on a chair with his back to a window with the curtains drawn, a single bed in front of him and a chair on the other side of the bed for him to sit in, his back to the door, which he was told to close.
‘So, who is trying to kill you, Archie?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
The Russian shifted his considerable frame in the small chair and he wondered whether it was going to hold his weight. The room was warm but the Russian was still wearing his large overcoat and a scarf. His trilby and gloves were on the bed between them, and he couldn’t help noticing it had a floral pattern embossed on it.
‘You used the “most urgent” code. Here we are. I hope this is not to ask for more money.’
‘You know I rarely ask for money and I thought this code was urgent rather than most urgent. And, if I may say, it’s a complicated way of contacting you, don’t you think? Ring one number, four rings or is it three and then wait and then another number and then… What if someone was on to me?’
‘Then you have another number to call: you know that. Is someone on to you?’
He knew it was by and large pointless to argue with a Russian, they always knew best and wouldn’t concede an inch, so he decided to leave it for now and removed his own coat and unbuttoned his jacket and frankly would have given anything for a whisky. He looked around the room and his eye caught on an embroidered quote in a frame above the bed:
God bless this house and all who sleep in it
He’d thought carefully about how much he was going to tell Osip. If he told him how British Intelligence was convinced there was a traitor somewhere at the heart of the establishment and seemed to have evidence pointing to him, then he feared that the OMS would feel he was no longer worth the trouble, that he’d served his purpose and was now disposable.
So, he didn’t mention what Phillips said about the contact in Moscow who knew he’d met a Comintern contact in Paris, and the encounter with that wretched man in the Kremlin and how he saw him outside Russell Square station and then killed him in Cambridge… not even a hint of all that. But he did tell him about the diplomat. That was enough.
‘I am told that there’s a Soviet diplomat who the Service has had its eyes on for a while: he’s described as being a professional diplomat and very bright and resourceful. They hoped they were going to turn him last February when he was based somewhere in Central Europe but he returned suddenly to Moscow. Last week he emerged at a new posting in Northern Europe. He’s about to be approached, if he’s not been already.’
‘No name?’
He shook his head. ‘You ought to be able to work it out from that, surely?’
* * *
When Phillips’ group reconvened the following Wednesday, there was a markedly sombre atmosphere in the room. The purpose of the meeting, Phillips said, was to inform them that there’d been a very serious setback in the hunt for the traitor: a most upsetting and frankly worrying development.
‘At our last meeting I said we were hopeful that a Soviet diplomat we were in the process of recruiting would lead us to the traitor. Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that on Monday morning the naked body of a man was found in a lake in the centre of The Hague. His throat had been cut and it appears his body had been placed there sometime on the Sunday.
‘The Hague Station has excellent contacts with the local police who’re convinced the body is that of a recently arrived third secretary, a man called Andriy Oleksandrvych Kovalenko. I’m afraid that Kovalenko is – was – the man we were in the process of recruiting.’
Phillips spread out his hands to indicate the hopelessness of the situation.
‘And you think a third secretary would have been able to identify a traitor here in London?’
‘Possibly not immediately, Williamson, no. But the reason we’ve been keen on Kovalenko for so long is that we thought he was the kind of person who’s smart and inobtrusive and would be able to dig around for information. After all, we only needed one decent clue.’
There was a consensus that this was bad luck and, indeed, most unfortunate and then the discussion opened out as to how everyone was getting on with their hunt for the traitor and no one had anything of any consequence to report and Phillips said he’d call another meeting in a week or so, unless they caught the man before then, and no one could work out whether that was an attempt at humour or misguided optimism.
Chapter 21
London
October 1938
Charles Cooper had become a fully fledged Annexe agent in the July, after acting as an accomplice for the assassination carried out by the man called Murray in Brussels.
At the beginning of August, he’d met Pamela for one of their weekly catch-up sessions and she said there could be a problem.
‘One of our informers told us about a man called Frank Reynolds who they’d spotted at a lot of Communist Party meetings recently and—’
‘You mean me!’
‘Yes, but let me finish, please. This informer knows nothing about you, of course, he was simply passing on what he had heard and seen. When he asked a Party official about you there was some remark along the lines of “we’d like to know ourselves”.’
‘Oh Christ.’
‘That’s not necessarily a bad thing, our informer took it that they’re interested in you in a positive way. But nonetheless, perhaps you’ve been seen around too frequently. We think it would be a good idea if you weren’t seen at any meetings for the rest of August. Your cover story is that you’re a door-to-door salesman—’
‘Of kitchenware…’
‘Let people know you’re moving on. And then we’ll see.’
Which is how Charles Cooper came to spend August back living as Christopher Shaw at his apartment on Dorset Square, a preferable existence to that of Frank Reynolds in an unpleasant and noisy lodging house in Hackney.
And he used his time wisely, starting a complete re-write of his novel, and he went back to the idea of it being about the diamond thief called Louise moving elegantly but furtively around Europe and now he was free from the shackles of his erstwhile Soviet masters the story no longer needed to be encumbered by political rhetoric.
By the end of August, he was up to sixty-five thousand words and pleased with how it was coming together. He was unsure as to how the story was going to end, but excited to see how it developed: the plot felt as if it had a life of its own. It was just a shame that at the end of the month he needed to return to work.
* * *
They were sitting around a table in a darkened room in The Annexe and it was as if Percy Burton and Pamela were a married couple proudly showing their holiday snaps and Cooper a polite guest. On the table a noisy slide projector was throwing a bright light onto the wall opposite and Percy Burton was in a bit of a flap as he tried to sort a box of slides into the correct order and eventually Pamela Clarke took over.
As the image of a station appeared on the wall, Percy began his commentary. ‘This is the nearest station… Covent Garden on the Piccadilly line. This shows the main entrance on Long Acre and here… next slide, please, Pamela… is the side entrance on James Street and if one heads south down James Street and across Floral Street… thank you, Pamela… then one ends up on King Street by the side of St Paul’s Church… there we are… which was, I believe, designed by Inigo Jones, of whom I’m afraid we have no photograph! Next slide please, Pamela.
‘And then as we walk down King Street towards Bedford Street one moves from the holy to the profane because this building – number sixteen – is the headquarters of the British Communist Party and has been since 1921, I’m told. The next few slides show the building from different angles.’
Percy Burton sat back and they watched in silence as a dozen or more photographs of the exterior of the four-storey building appeared.
‘Nothing of the interior, sir?’
‘No,’ said Pamela, ‘but we do have one or two old diagrams, architectural drawings really. However, what really matters is how you get into the building and what you do when you’re there. Mr Burton, sir?’
Percy Burton had lit a cigarette and in the darkened room it was only possible to make him out by the red glow of the tip.
‘The Communist Party relies for the most part on volunteers, unpaid labour: that’s your best way in.’
‘Rather exploitative for communists, wouldn’t you say, sir?’
‘Indeed! But you’ll need to be very careful, Cooper. MI5 and the Special Branch claim to have agents inside King Street and that may well be true, though going by the quality of their intelligence they’re not very good ones.’
‘In what sense, sir?’
‘In the sense that they seem to be incapable of discriminating between political agitation and espionage and other activities carried out by and on behalf of a foreign power, namely the Soviet Union. But the communists know full well that the British state, as they call it – the Establishment, if you like – are spying on them, so they’re alert to the point of paranoia as to who may be a spy. Certainly, anyone volunteering to work at their headquarters will be looked at very carefully.’
‘And my cover story?’
‘Pamela, perhaps you could explain…’
‘You’ll move into a house in Willesden where your cover is that you’re looking after an infirm elderly gentleman at night. There will be a nurse caring for him during the day and you take over in the evening, meaning you’re free during the day. The elderly gentleman who’s lived there for a number of years is a retired army officer and very much one of us. Another agent will be there during the day so the whole story checks out.’
‘You’ll need to be aware of who’s who at King Street and what they do and who they associate with and where their offices are. Pamela, please?’
The first slide came into view: a large, thickset man with what his mother would call an interesting face and a trace of a smile.
‘That’s Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the Communist Party, a post he’s held since 1929. Very much Stalin’s man in London. Uncompromising and blunt, we’re told. I doubt you’ll get too close to him as a volunteer, but you never know, and we do need to know who appears to be close to him. Next slide, please, Pamela.’
Their faces appeared on the wall, accompanied by Burton’s commentary: Willie Gallacher, Communist Member of Parliament for West Fife since 1935… JR Campbell, editor of the Daily Worker and also a member of the Politburo… Rajani Palme Dutt, Balliol College Oxford and very close links indeed to Moscow, highly placed in the Comintern.
He asked Cooper if he’d heard of the Comintern and he replied, asking if it was something to do with communist parties outside of the Soviet Union.
‘I’m glad you’ve been paying attention! Palme Dutt is an intellectual, something the Party was very suspicious of until recently. Another intellectual is this chap… James Klugman: he’s a Jew, born in this country, Trinity College Cambridge, and also very strong links to Moscow, quite possibly even to the NKVD, though that’s based on a single unsubstantiated line in an MI5 report. We do know though that Klugman has a habit of disappearing onto the Continent for months at a time. Can we have the next slide, please, Pamela?’
Bill Rust… former editor of the Daily Worker, always in and out of Moscow… as is this man, Dave Springhall: former head of the Young Communist League and involved with Comintern… possible links with Soviet Intelligence.
More faces appeared on the wall, people who they couldn’t put a name to, and part of Cooper’s job would be to assist with that and not to worry, he’d be given copies of all these photographs. One of these nameless men did catch Cooper’s eye, a very thin man with a large moustache, ears which stuck out and thinning hair. There was a startled expression on his face. He looked familiar: Cooper was convinced he’d seen him before, but for the life of him couldn’t place him and he could hardly ask Pamela to go back on that one slide.
