Every Spy a Traitor, page 6
It was midnight when they agreed it was time to leave. As they were settling the bill – Ernst insisted on paying, it was their pleasure, he said – he added they were leaving Switzerland in the morning. It was time to return to Berlin.
Ernst handed him a piece of paper with their address written on it. ‘You are to promise to visit us. Berlin will capture your imagination in a way novelists can only dream of. You’ll find the ending to your novel there, my friend.’
‘Ah, but will it be a happy one?’
Ernst and Ida went quiet and looked at each other, as if they’d been asked a difficult question. ‘Only history can decide that.’
Chapter 5
Moscow
May 1937
‘You will be contacted by a person addressing you as Archie who gives you my regards and asks if you’d like to join them for coffee and Cognac: you are then to do what they say.’
But Archie hadn’t expected to wait more than five years to be contacted: he sometimes wondered if they’d forgotten about him, though in his heart of hearts he knew they’d catch up with him sooner or later.
What he didn’t expect was that it would be a woman doing the catching up. It was a damp March afternoon and he was hurrying to Waterloo after work because they were going away for the weekend and as he reached the south side of Westminster Bridge a woman in a smart raincoat and a beret with a feather in it bumped into him and when he apologised, insisting it was his fault, she said not to worry and her friend Emil sends his regards and would Archie like to join her for a coffee – and Cognac?
They never had the coffee, or the Cognac. Instead, they had a brief conversation in the shadow of County Hall: he was to go to Austria and she gave him a book of matches from a Viennese cafe. That was the number to call: ask for August, he’ll arrange to get you to Moscow.
‘They want you there before the end of May. You’ll be in Moscow for a week.’
* * *
He booked a week and a half’s leave and told his wife he needed a break and was going walking in the Austrian Alps and said of course she was welcome to join him, which he knew full well she’d decline, as she didn’t even like walking down to the village shop.
In Vienna, August gave him an Austrian passport in the name of Leopold Steiner and put him on a train to Budapest and, twenty-four hours later, he was sitting in a stuffy room in Moscow with Emil, who he’d last seen in France nearly six years before, and a man called Nikolai, who seemed to be in charge.
‘You haven’t aged at all, Archie.’
‘Nor have you, Emil.’
‘You still look like that man who was your king.’
‘Edward – the one who abdicated?’
‘Such a strange business: we never allowed our last tsar the chance to abdicate. But we need to get to work. Five days, Archie, that’s all we need.’
‘Is it really worth the risk? Surely all this could be done in Europe.’
‘We are in Europe.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘It is nearly six years since I recruited you,’ said Emil. ‘You were told then to start your new job and to concentrate on that for a few years so as to allow no reason for anyone to be suspicious of you. And that has been the case: we are delighted with how much you have progressed in your job. You are clearly very well thought of.’
‘Which is why we now believe this is the time for you to move to the next phase of working for us,’ said Nikolai. ‘But there is so much to discuss before that can happen. You need extensive briefings on the kind of intelligence we need and how you should gather it and then how to pass it on to us. It is a complicated and perilous business and the briefings and training we need to give you cannot be done through dead letter boxes in London parks and a snatched hour here and there in a safe house. We need the time here in Moscow, believe me.’
* * *
By the end of the five days, he certainly did believe them. He’d been taken to a large and surprisingly well-furnished house surrounded by high walls in a place called Bordino, a suburb of Moscow, to the north-east of the city centre. A succession of men came, each to brief him extensively on what intelligence they were looking for him to supply to the Soviet Union.
The sessions were quite repetitive because he wasn’t permitted to take notes and the strain of concentrating so hard was exacerbated by sitting in the dark at the rear of the room, with the men who’d come to brief him sitting in pools of bright light at the front. Such was the degree of suspicion that they couldn’t risk any of them being able to identify him. Nikolai sat alongside him for most of the sessions and if he wanted to ask a question, he’d beckon him over and do it through him.
Then there were the sessions with the experts brought in to teach him what they called the tricks of the trade: how to secretly photograph documents as quickly and clearly as possible; how to leave – and receive – messages for and from his main contact in London; how to behave around a dead letter drop; how to ensure he was not being followed and how to behave if he ever came under suspicion.
And that session didn’t mean being suspected of being a spy, because they said that, in all honesty, if it came to that then the game was pretty much up. For someone in his position to be suspected of being a Soviet spy meant they must have some evidence. What this session was so useful for was how to cope with being caught unawares – in other words, how to avoid ever being suspected of being a spy.
‘In many situations, someone comes under suspicion not because they’re actually caught spying but because they’re doing something that is a bit out of the ordinary, which may cause eyebrows to be raised. Let me give you an example. Say you need to photograph a document in a colleague’s office after everyone has left for the night and that person returns unexpectedly, possibly to collect something they’d left behind and finds you in there. How would you get out of that one?’
Archie said he wasn’t sure, and it was certainly a tricky one and he couldn’t think off the top of his head.
‘You’d need to be prepared before you go in. How about you were to say your pencil was blunt and you needed a pencil sharpener because you’d lost yours?’
‘That’s a reasonable idea, I suppose.’
‘So, what do you do?’
‘I’m not following you.’
The man bathed in the pool of bright light sighed. ‘You need to anticipate that possibility and be prepared accordingly. So, before you go into the office you make sure you have a very blunt pencil in your hand and also that you’ve concealed the pencil sharpener in your own office. Do you follow me? Or maybe have a note for them in your hand, which you can say you were about to leave on their desk: maybe inviting them for dinner at your club, that’s what you do, don’t you?’
‘Do what?’
‘Entertain colleagues at gentlemen’s clubs?’
‘Sometimes, yes.’
‘And if you’re in a part of London you don’t normally frequent on your way to meet your contact and you bump into someone from work, what would you do then?’
‘Turn the table on them? If I’m not expected to be in the area, then what are they doing there?’
‘Possibly, but they’ll have a good reason because they’re not a Soviet agent, but you are. What excuse do you have up your sleeve?’
‘Stamps, maybe? I could say I’m a philatelist and am meeting a fellow collector?’
The other man half nodded. ‘Not a bad idea, but it’s a bit convoluted. Show an interest in church architecture: find out the names of nearby churches and say you’re on your way to visit one of them. We often talk of the importance of having a backstory but equally, we need a front story – anticipate a crisis and be prepared for it. You cannot eliminate risk, because espionage is, by its very nature, a most dangerous occupation. But you can minimise that danger.’
That evening a man who looked like a weightlifter turned up and joined Nikolai and him in a room overlooking the garden.
Nikolai explained that he worked for the OMS – the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, which was the organisation responsible for communist parties abroad. The OMS was its most secret section, responsible for subversion and espionage. Nikolai explained that the OMS was not to be confused with the NKVD.
‘And Osip here, he works for the OMS in London. He will be your main contact.’
‘And me?’
‘You work for the OMS also.’
There was a long silence during which time Nikolai watched the Englishman carefully, but there was no sign of any reaction. He’d noticed this about him and was impressed with how calm and unflappable he was. Being enigmatic was a fine quality for a spy.
‘You’ll continue to be known as Archie.’
Archie had never liked Archie: it was the name of one of his grandfather’s most vicious dogs, but he suspected that was going to be the least of his problems.
* * *
There’d been some propaganda too, as if he needed persuading he was on the right side. He managed to subdue any cynicism about these matters and was on his best behaviour as he was shown round what were clearly model collective farms and immaculate tractor factories full of happy workers.
On his fifth day in Moscow, he was taken to the Kremlin and to a special lunch in his honour in the Council of Ministers building overlooking Lenin’s mausoleum. It was a strange affair, a minister of something or other present as a mark of how important he was, and he thought the whole business was most peculiar. Everyone else drank excessively but he remained sober. He’d learnt this on his first day in Moscow: the only way to survive was to feign some condition or the other which prevented him from drinking alcohol.
After the lunch, Nikolai and Osip both looked exhausted and said it would be another hour and a half before the car arrived to return them to Bordino. If he wished, he could wander around the Kremlin alone for an hour at the most, which he did.
And which was how he came to encounter the strange Englishman in the Secret Tower.
Chapter 6
Moscow
May 1937
‘This Branstone chap—’
‘The icon man who looks as if he should be in one himself?’
‘Yes, thin, with ears that stick out, probably how Russian saints looked – when they had them, that is!’
‘What about him, Milo?’
‘The set-up seems rather… odd, as does he. There must be a bloody good reason why London is so keen for us to use him. You seem to be the one your Head Office trusts, George.’
They were in a secure room in the basement of the British Embassy on Sofiyskaya Naberezhnaya, just yards from the Moskva River in the heart of the Soviet capital and despite the time of year the remnants of the Russian winter still held some kind of grip on the city, reluctant to give way. George Banks was one of the British Intelligence officers based at the embassy; Milo Smart – the Honourable Milo Smart, indeed – was a senior attaché there and because the Foreign Office had an innate dislike and distrust of anything to do with espionage, part of his job was to have an oversight of his colleague’s work. The awkwardness of the relationship was exacerbated by the fact that the two men – both in their late forties – had been at school together: Banks a year above Smart.
‘It’s a long story, Milo. Are you sure you have the time?’
Milo Smart glanced at his watch as if to demonstrate that he didn’t really, but… ‘Go on, George, but preferably not too long, please.’
George Banks settled back and adopted a demeanour indicating he wouldn’t be rushed. ‘The Service has a chap at Cambridge called David Paxton: he’s a Fellow at Gonville and Caius, spots potential recruits to the Service – suggests names and does some checking on people who’ve been recommended to us. He has trusted contacts in most of the colleges and occasionally is approached if a matter that may be of interest or concern to us crops up. In January he was approached by the Provost of King’s because one of his Fellows – Branstone – had been approached by the Soviets to see if he fancied spending three months in Moscow studying their icons, all expenses paid, plus a generous stipend. Branstone’s regarded as an authority on Russian icons even though he’s only in his early thirties. Apparently, the Soviets want him to help with authenticating and cataloguing their icons in the Kremlin.’
‘You mean to say they don’t have any experts of their own?’
‘There’s a very good reason why they want Branstone. There’s a large collection of icons in the Tretyakov Gallery, not terribly far from where we are now. But there are a lot more icons in the Kremlin and since the revolution the Soviets have given the impression of caring little about them and, as a consequence, little is known about them. When Paxton contacted the Service, they were terribly interested and started to look into the matter. They asked our station in Paris to check it out and they discovered that the man who’d made the original approach to Branstone – a Marcel Lefèvre – is working with the Soviets running a black market in Russian icons.’
‘Do you really mean to suggest that the Soviets – the bloody Communists – are selling icons on the black market?’
‘Apparently so, Milo; our people in Paris got chapter and verse on it from their French colleagues. There are large Russian emigre communities in France and Switzerland with a number of very wealthy people keen to get their hands on medieval Russian icons. For the Soviets, it’s a way of raising hard currency, which they desperately need, and they couldn’t care less about the icons because they’ve abolished religion, haven’t they? I’m told that a decent icon from the fourteenth or fifteenth century can fetch around fifty thousand French francs.’
‘Which is how much?’
‘A shade under five hundred pounds, Milo.’
Milo Smart let out a long whistle. ‘Good heavens: it takes me six months to earn that!’
‘And me slightly longer. Anyway, this is where our Mr Branstone comes in. The emigres don’t entirely trust the Soviets and potential purchasers of icons need to be satisfied as to their provenance. What we understand happens is that when an icon is put up for sale by the Soviets, a buyer makes an offer by writing a letter claiming that very same icon was in their family for many years and they’d like it back and are prepared to pay a certain amount to cover expenses. This is all a bit of fiction, which enables the icons to be taken out of Russia and become the legal property of the purchaser.
‘Up until last August, the all-important provenance was provided by a respected Swiss art historian called Bucher, but he died. There was a delay until the Soviets and the emigres could agree on another expert to provide the provenance, hence the approach to Mr Branstone.’
‘And Branstone is aware of all this?’
‘Certainly not, he was just thrilled to be invited. It was made clear to him that permission to come here would only be granted if he met with some friends of Paxton in London and co-operated with them. He subsequently met a couple of my colleagues from Head Office and, not to put too fine a point on it, was press-ganged into working for the Service. Hard to imagine a less suitable recruit, if you ask my opinion. Reluctant, sickly, nervous… you remember the type from school, Milo: the ones who were always homesick, preferred to spend their time in the library rather than playing sports. The ones I daresay we bullied.’
‘Probably did them no harm, George.’
‘One would hope so, but I sometimes shudder when I think about how we behaved. When Branstone arrived here last month I had two clandestine meetings with him – by way of introduction and to pass on the secret camera. I have to say, it didn’t raise my hopes. Told Head Office as much, he struck me as far too nervous to be of any use.
‘I said if anything cropped up of particular interest then he could contact me by leaving a message with the concierge at the Moskva, where he’s staying. And I received a message this morning: Branstone is very anxious to meet up. I’m seeing him tonight.’
‘And do you think it’s safe, George?’
‘Thank you for asking, Milo: I’d like you to join me!’
* * *
Austin Branstone’s meeting with colleagues of Dr Paxton had been held in a room on the upper floor of St Ermin’s Hotel two days after his encounter with the Provost.
In front of him were a man whose name he was never given and Dr Paxton, who rather succinctly summarised the circumstances of the invitation to Moscow.
The man who’d not been introduced spoke with a soft Scottish accent. ‘And I understand you’re keen to go to Moscow?’
‘I am indeed, it’s an opportunity I never imagined I’d be afforded. The chance to see the collection of icons in the Kremlin is… well, I find it difficult to express how important that is.’
‘And you speak Russian, I understand?’
‘I do, sir.’
‘But you didn’t study it as an undergraduate?’
‘No, sir: my degree was in Divinity, which is how I became interested in icons – they’re religious paintings, I’m sure you’re aware. Once I began to pursue this interest at post-graduate level, I decided that learning Russian would be most helpful. I seem to have an aptitude in the language, even if I say so myself.’
The room fell silent and Branstone watched as the two men glanced at each other and there was some nodding and then the Scotsman leant forward.
‘Let me just say this, Mr Branstone: it is in the national interests of the United Kingdom to have a more informed and thorough understanding of what is going on in the Soviet Union. Although we have diplomatic representation in Moscow, it is nonetheless a very difficult country to operate in. Our officials at the embassy find their movements are restricted and are always followed around. Therefore, for someone such as yourself to be invited to Moscow and to be allowed into the Kremlin is an opportunity we cannot allow to pass.’
