It was built by the Finns on contract, and was intended for the International Department of the Central Committee. But when it was finished, the ID people did not like it; they wanted to stay close to central Moscow; so it was given to the First Chief Directorate. It suits the FCD admirably, being well out of town and away from prying eyes.
Staffers of the FCD are officially undercover, even in their own country. Since many of them will have to go abroad (or already have been) posing as diplomats, the last thing they need is to be seen coming out of FCD headquarters by a nosy tourist who might put them on candid camera.
But there is one directorate within the FCD that is so secret it is not even based with the rest at Yasyenevo. If the FCD is secret, the S, or Illegals, Directorate is top secret. Not only do its agents not meet their FCD colleagues; they do not even meet each other. Their training and briefing is on a one-to-one basis—just the instructor and one pupil. They do not check in each morning to any office, since that way they might see each other.
The reason is simple in Soviet psychology: Russians are paranoid about secrecy and betrayal—there is nothing particularly Communist about this, it goes back to Tsarist days. The illegals are men (and occasionally women) who are rigorously trained to go into foreign countries and live under deep cover. Unfortunately, some illegals have been caught and have cooperated with their captors; others have defected and spilled all they know. Therefore, the less they know, the better. It is axiomatic in espionage that one cannot betray what or whom one does not know.
The illegals, therefore, are scattered among scores of small flats in central Moscow and report singly for training and briefing. In order to be close to his “lads,” the head of the S Directorate still keeps his office at the Center on Dzerzhinsky Square. It is on the sixth floor, three stories above that of KGB Chairman Chebrikov and two above those of the first deputy chairmen, Generals Tsinev and Kryuchkov.
It was to this unpretentious sanctum that two men came on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 18, while Preston was talking to Max Levinson, to confront the director, a seamy old veteran who had been in clandestine espionage all his adult life. What they presented to him did not please him.
“There is only one man who fits this bill,” he grudgingly admitted. “He is outstanding.”
One of the men from the Central Committee offered a small card. “Then, Comrade Major General, you will detach him from his duties forthwith and require him to report to this address.”
The director nodded glumly. He knew the address. When the men had gone he recalled their authorization again. It was from the Central Committee, all right, and though it did not say so in as many words, he had no doubt from whom it came with that kind of authority rating. He sighed resignedly. It was hard to lose one of the best men he had ever trained, a really exceptional agent, but there was no arguing with that particular order. He was a serving officer; it was not for him to question orders. He depressed a switch on his intercom. “Tell Major Valeri Petrofsky to report to me.”
The first plane out of Johannesburg for East London arrived on time at Ben Schoeman, the small, neat, blue-and-white airport that serves South Africa’s fourth commercial port and city. The police driver was waiting in the concourse and led them to a plain Ford sedan in the parking lot.
“Where to, Captain?” he asked. Viljoen raised an eyebrow at Preston.
“The railway headquarters,” said Preston. “More particularly, the administration building.”
The driver nodded and set off. East London’s modern railway station is on Fleet Street, and directly opposite stands a rather shabby old complex of single-story buildings in green and cream, the administration offices. Viljoen’s open-sesame identity card brought them quickly to the director of the finance department. He listened to Preston’s query.
“Yes, we do pay pensions to all retired railway staff still living in this area,” he said. “What was the name?”
“Brandt,” said Preston. “I’m afraid I don’t have a first name. But he was a shunter, many years ago.”
The director summoned an assistant and they all trooped down dingy corridors to the records office. The assistant burrowed for a while and came up with a pension slip.
“Here he is,” he said. “The only one we have. Retired three years ago. Koos Brandt.”
“How old would he be?” asked Preston.
“Sixty-three,” said the assistant after a glance at the card.
Preston shook his head. If Frikki Brandt had been the same age as Jan Marais, and his father about thirty years older, the old man would be over ninety by now. The director and his assistant were adamant. There were no other retired Brandts.
“Then can you find me,” asked Preston, “the three oldest pensioners still alive and in receipt of their weekly check?”
“They’re not listed by age,” protested the assistant, “they’re listed alphabetically.”
Viljoen drew the director aside and spoke urgently in his ear in Afrikaans. Whatever he said had its effect. The director looked impressed. “Go ahead,” he told his assistant. “One by one. Anyone born before 1910. We’ll be in my office.”
It took an hour. The assistant produced three pension slips. “There’s one who’s ninety,” he said, “but he was a porter at the passenger terminal. One of eighty, a former cleaner. This one is eighty-one. He’s a former shunter from the marshaling yards.” The man was called Fourie and his address was given as somewhere up in the Quigney.
Ten minutes later they were driving through the Quigney, the old quarter of East London, dating back fifty years and more. Some of its humble bungalows had been well kept up; others were shabby and run-down, the homes of the poorer white working class. From behind Moore Street they could hear the clang of the railway workshops and the shunting yards, where the big trains are assembled to haul freight from the docks of East London up to the landlocked Transvaal via Pietermaritzburg. They found the house one block off Moore Street.
An old Colored woman answered the door, her face like a pickled walnut and her white hair drawn back in a bun. Viljoen spoke to her in Afrikaans. The old woman pointed toward the horizon and muttered something before firmly closing the door. Viljoen escorted Preston back to the car.
“She says he’s up at the institute,” Viljoen told the driver. “Know what she means?”
“Yes, sir. The old Railway Institute. Now they call it Turnbull Park. Up Paterson Street. It’s the social and recreation club for railway workers.”
It turned out to be a large, one-story building adjacent to three bowling greens. Beyond the doors, they passed an array of snooker tables and TV rooms before arriving at a flourishing bar.
“Papa Fourie?” said the barman. “Sure. He’s out there watching the bowling.”
They found the old man by one of the greens, sitting in the warm autumn sunshine nursing a pint of beer. Preston put his question.
The old man stared at him for a while before nodding. “Yes, I remember Joe Brandt. He’s been dead these many years.”
“He had a son. Frederik—Frikki.”
“That’s right. Good heavens, young man, you’re taking me back quite a bit. Nice kid. Used to come down to the yards sometimes after school. Joe used to let him ride the engines with him. Quite a treat for a lad in those days.”
“That would be the mid- to late 1930s?” asked Preston.
The old man nodded. “About then. Just after Joe and his family came here.”
“Around 1943 the boy Frikki went away to the war,” Preston suggested.
Papa Fourie stared at him for a while from rheumy eyes that were trying to look backward through more than fifty years of an uneventful life. “That’s right,” he said. “The boy never came back. They told Joe he had died somewhere in Germany. It broke Joe’s heart. He doted on that boy, had great plans for him. He was never the same, not after that telegram arrived at the end of the war. He died in 1950—I always reckoned of a broken heart. His wife wasn’t long
after him—couple of years, perhaps.”
“Awhile ago you said, ‘Just after Joe and his family came here,’ ” Viljoen reminded him. “Which part of South Africa did they come from?”
Papa Fourie looked puzzled. “They didn’t come from South Africa.”
“But they were an Afrikaner family,” Viljoen protested.
“Who told you that?”
“The Army,” said Viljoen.
The old man smiled. “I suppose young Frikki would have passed himself off as an Afrikaner in the Army. No, they came from Germany. Immigrants. About the middle of the 1930s. Joe never spoke good Afrikaans to the day he died. Of course, the boy did. Learned it at school.”
When they were back in the parked car, Viljoen turned to Preston and asked, “Well?”
“Where are the immigration records kept?”
“In the basement of the Union Building in Pretoria, along with the rest of the state archives,” said Viljoen.
“Could the archivists up there run a check while we wait here?” asked Preston.
“Sure. Let’s go to the police station. We can phone better from there.”
The police station is also on Fleet Street; it is a three-story yellow-brick fortress with opaque windows, right next to the drill hall of the Kaffrarian Rifles. Preston and Viljoen put in their request and lunched in the canteen, while up in Pretoria an archivist lost his lunch hour while he went through the files. Happily they had all been computerized by 1987 and the file number came up quickly. The archivist withdrew the file, typed up a résumé, and put it on the telex.
In East London the telex was brought to Preston and Viljoen over coffee. Viljoen translated it, word for word.
“Good God,” he said when he had finished. “Who would ever have thought it?”
Preston seemed pensive. He rose and crossed the canteen to speak to their driver, who was at a separate table. “Is there a synagogue in East London?”
“Yes, sir. On Park Avenue. Two minutes from here.”
The white-painted, black-domed synagogue, surmounted by the star of David, was empty this Thursday afternoon save for a Colored caretaker in an old Army greatcoat and wool cap. He gave them the address of Rabbi Blum in the suburb of Salbourne. They knocked on his door just after three o’clock. He opened it himself, a stalwart bearded man with iron-gray hair who appeared to be in his mid-fifties. One glance was enough; he was too young. Preston introduced himself and asked, “Can you tell me, please, who was the rabbi here before yourself?”
“Certainly. Rabbi Sharpiro.”
“Have you any idea if he is still alive and where I might find him?”
“You’d better come in,” said Rabbi Blum. He led the way into his house, down a corridor, and opened a door at the end. The room was a bedsitter, in which a very old man sat before a gas fire sipping a cup of black tea. “Uncle Solomon, there’s someone here to see you,” he said.
Preston left the house an hour later and joined Viljoen, who had returned to the car. “The airport,” Preston told the driver, and to Viljoen, “Could you arrange a meeting with General Pienaar for tomorrow morning?”
* * *
That Thursday afternoon, two more men were transferred from their posts in the Soviet armed forces to special assignment.
About a hundred miles west of Moscow, just off the road to Minsk and set in a large forest is a complex of radio dish aerials and supporting buildings. It is one of the USSR’s listening posts for radio signals coming in from Warsaw Pact military units and from abroad, but it can also intercept messages between other parties far outside the Soviet borders. One section of the complex is screened off and is solely for KGB use. One of the man detached for special duty was a warrant officer radio operator from this section.
“He’s the best man I’ve got,” complained the commanding colonel to his deputy when the men from the Central Committee had left. “Good? I’ll say he’s good. Given the right equipment, he can pick up a cockroach scratching its arse in California.”
The other posted man was a colonel in the Soviet Army, and if he had been in uniform, which he seldom was, his flashes would have indicated that he was with the artillery. In fact he was more scientist than soldier, and worked in the Directorate of Ordnance, Research Division.
“So,” said General Pienaar when they were seated in the leather club chairs around the coffee table, “our diplomat, Jan Marais. Is he guilty or not?”
“Guilty,” said Preston, “as hell.”
“I think I’d like to hear you prove that, Mr. Preston. Where did he go wrong? Where was he turned?”
“He didn’t and he wasn’t,” answered Preston. “He never put a foot wrong. You have read his handwritten autobiography?”
“Yes, and as Captain Viljoen may have pointed out, we, too, have checked everything in that man’s career from his birth to the present day. We can find not one discrepancy.”
“There aren’t any,” said Preston. “The story of his boyhood is absolutely accurate to the last detail. I believe he could even today describe that boyhood for five hours without repeating himself once and without being wrong in a single detail.”
“Then it’s true. Everything that is checkable is true,” said the general.
“Everything that is checkable, yes. It is all true up to the point when those two young soldiers dropped from the tailboard of a German truck in Silesia and started running. After that, it’s all lies. Let me explain by starting at the other end, with the story of Frikki Brandt, the man who jumped with Jan Marais.
“In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. In 1935 a German railway worker named Josef Brandt went to the South African legation in Berlin and pleaded for an emigration visa on compassionate grounds—he was in danger of persecution because he was a Jew. His appeal was heard and he was granted a visa to enter South Africa with his young family. Your own archives confirm the application and the issuance of the visa.”
“That’s right.” General Pienaar nodded. “There were many Jewish immigrants to South Africa during the Hitler period. South Africa has a good record on that issue—better than some.”
“In September 1935,” continued Preston, “Josef Brandt, with his wife, Ilse, and his ten-year-old son, Friedrich, boarded ship at Bremerhaven, and six weeks later they disembarked at East London. There was then a large German community and a small Jewish one there. Brandt elected to stay in East London, and sought a job on the railways. A kindly immigration official informed the local rabbi of the arrival of the new family.
“The rabbi, an energetic young man named Solomon Shapiro, visited the newcomers and tried to help by encouraging them to join the Jewish community life. They refused, and he assumed they wished to try to assimilate into the Gentile community. He was disappointed but not suspicious.
“Then, in 1938, the boy, whose name was now Afrikanerized into Frederik, or Frikki, turned thirteen. It was time for his bar mitzvah, the coming-of-age for a Jewish boy. However much the Brandts might wish to assimilate, that is an important ceremony for a man with an only son. Although none of them had ever been to shul, Rabbi Shapiro visited the family to ask if they would like him to officiate. They gave him a flea in his ear, and his suspicions hardened into certainty.”
“What certainty?” asked the general, perplexed.
“The certainty that they were not Jewish,” said Preston. “He told me so last night. At a bar mitzvah, the boy is blessed by the rabbi. First the rabbi must be convinced of the boy’s Jewishness. In the Jewish faith, that is inherited through the mother, not the father. The mother must produce a document, called a ketubah, confirming that she is Jewish. Ilse Brandt had no ketubah. There could be no bar mitzvah.”
“So they entered South Africa under false pretenses,” said General Pienaar. “It was a hell of a long time ago.”
“More than that,” said Preston. “I can’t prove it, but I think I’m right. Josef Brandt was correct when he told your legation all those years ago that he was under thre
at from the Gestapo. But not as a Jew. As a militant, activist German Communist. He knew if he told your legation that, he’d never get a visa.”
“Go on,” said the general grimly.
“By the time he was eighteen, Frikki was completely imbued with his father’s secret ideals; he was a dedicated Communist prepared to work for the Comintern.
“In 1943 two young men joined the South African Army and went to war: Jan Marais, from Duiwelskloof, to fight for South Africa and the British Commonwealth, and Frikki Brandt to fight for his ideological motherland, the Soviet Union.
“They never met in basic training, or on the troop convoy, or in Italy, or at Moosberg. But they met at Stalag 344. I don’t know whether Brandt had worked out his escape plans by then, but he picked for his companion a young man tall and blond like himself. It was Brandt who initiated that run into the forest when the truck broke down.”
“But what about the pneumonia?” asked Viljoen.
“There was no pneumonia,” said Preston, “nor did they fall into the hands of Catholic Polish partisans. More likely they fell in with Communist partisans, to whom Brandt could talk in fluent German. They would have led Brandt to the Red Army, and thence to the NKVD, with the trusting Marais tailing along.
“It was between March and August 1945 when the switch took place. All that talk about freezing cells was rubbish. Marais would have been squeezed for every last detail of his childhood and education, and Brandt would have memorized it until, despite his poor written English, he could write that curriculum vitae with his eyes closed.
“The NKVD probably gave Brandt a crash course in English as well, changed his appearance a bit, put Marais’s dog tags around his neck, and then they were ready. With his usefulness ended, Jan Marais was probably liquidated.
“The Soviets roughed Brandt up a bit, gave him a few chemicals to make him realistically ill, and handed him to the British at Potsdam. He spent time in a hospital at Bielefeld, and more outside Glasgow. By the winter of 1945 all South African soldiers would have gone home; he was unlikely to run across anyone from the Wits/De La Rey Regiment in Britain. In December he sailed for Cape Town, arriving in January 1946.
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