A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  “She's not upset with you, Patrick, far from it. She was delighted you were coming, only sorry that you wouldn't be staying longer. No, it's with me that her displeasure lies. I do know she's worried about my health, but I can't change the inevitable. I restrict my smoking to one or two pipes a day and a few glasses of whisky. Nothing like the old days.”

  I interrupted him. “You should stop them both,” I declared forcefully.

  “And add what, an extra four hours or four days to my life? No, I shall enjoy whatever time I have left doing what I enjoy. Now, less of the morbid stuff and more of the pleasurable. You're right, the files were split, and for one important reason. I believe it was to benefit the Rothschild family. You see how delicate this could be for Hannah if I'm right. We must tread carefully. Let me be perfectly frank here and state that I have no evidence that anyone named Rothschild solicited or stole information from the secret intelligence service of this country. I'm in more or less the exact position of those who investigated Victor Rothschild and his connection to Kim Philby and the rest, before Philby was spirited away to Russia.

  “Victor baffled the intelligence services of this country back then and nobody could find anything concrete throughout his life, but it's my firm belief that somehow Jana's father, General Anotoly Vladislav Kava, got his hands on evidence to link Victor Rothschild to the KGB, and he told nobody until his son started to go off line with his support for Solidarity and other liberal pursuits he had, such as his sexuality. It's something I'm working on now this Kudashov has stuck his head above the parapet.”

  “What makes you think Jana Kava's father, the general and Victor Rothschild are connected?”

  “It goes back to my early days in MI5 when the names of the Cambridge lot were on everyone's lips. They were always suspected of having one more in their innermost circle that nobody could get close to. But Dickie Blythe-Smith and I were not like most people. My first meeting with Dickie was like yours—in his club, the Travellers, we became instant friends and that friendship I'm only too pleased to say lasted his lifetime. But I digress, forgive me.

  “In those bygone days of the early sixties, Dickie was Deputy Director General of the German desk in MI6. As a favour to a friend, he gave me the name of an attaché at the West German embassy in London who he said had a well-positioned contact in the StB in Czechoslovakia and was willing to trade.

  “I'll cut a long, convoluted story short and say that StB contact was General Kava, but nothing came of it. Some years further on, I was invited to listen in on two meetings conducted by Dickie and his duty officer, briefing a man and a woman who I was never introduced to, who were going to Prague to meet with someone and solicit what information they could get on Victor Rothschild. The second of those meetings took place after the general election at the end of June 1970. Dickie called me one night and asked if I wanted to be temporarily attached to the British Embassy in Prague to cover the back door if anything went wrong. Silly question. Of course I did.

  “Everything was in place by July that year, then out of the blue Dickie's duty officer calls me up and cancelled the whole op. Nobody ever gave me a reason, but later when Dickie and I worked together on that mission to get you, Job, along with that hare-brained genius Jack Price out of New York—before the FBI got their knickers twisted—he told me he had a call from the then new Prime Minister Edward Heath's office, telling him all funding for any of his overseas operations had been withdrawn until further notice. Dickie was further up the tree by then, but it still came as a shock hearing it directly from Number 10.”

  He stopped speaking and rose from the sofa, then withdrew a thin buff coloured file from the top drawer of his desk. The probing facial expression at me as he regained his sofa seat needed no verbal explanation. Fraser Ughert had been busy.

  “Is that to do with Victor Rothschild?” I asked incredulously.

  “Unfortunately, no. It's on Dalek Kava and his sexuality. Thought it might help.”

  “Yes, I knew Dalek was homosexual. Fraser, and I expect that's a dossier on either Dalek Kava or his lover, Alexandr Radoslav. Or it could be a map of the London Underground, I guess.”

  “Ha, bloody ha! I expect you know all there is to know about the Northern Underground line. It's on Radoslav, of course. As I understand things from the few files I could read in the time I've had—and remember my access to SIS files is restricted nowadays and has been for some while—you shot and dumped Kava's body in the Vltava River on Saturday the fifteenth, whereas Radoslav was found dead on the following Monday morning, the seventeenth, by the woman who kept house for them both. Now, if you didn't kill him before Dalek or double-back after you did, want to take a stab at who killed him, Patrick?”

  “No, I wouldn't. Guessing in this case is far from easy. I'm working on taking a stab at Petr Tomsa and Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov, and why the latter was never mentioned in the files, which leaves your question and mine floating in our tobacco smoke.”

  “Well, that's where I believe the Rothschilds' interest takes over. I met with Kudashov last Tuesday, but more on that later; he says he has no idea London was running two files. How would he, he asked, all smiling and innocent. It's my view that the Russian Satellite desk was manipulated in the Rothschilds' interests by someone as yet unknown. Your question dovetails into all of mine. How about you agreeing to assist Kudashov and work towards what he asked for, his granddaughter's extraction from Russia. Let's see how many people we can disturb in running that little operation, shall we?”

  “You know me, Fraser, I'll be running ops in Hell when I get there. Nevertheless, my weakness for the idea of a daylight raid on the residents of the leafy environs of Guildford will have to be tempered by certainty. I will not sanction anything that endangers anyone in the extraction of this girl in Russia, nor if olden days seventh-floor Guildford reputations are slandered without indisputable evidence. Retirement is one thing. Going looking for trouble without need at your age is another. Let's slow down and have a re-evaluation of what we've got.

  “There is one thing that concerns me most at the moment. It is the form of nepotism within the SIS at its Russian counter-intelligence desk. I had someone at Group do some preliminary digging and he found that Francis Henry Grant, the head of that desk in 1982, was stepfather to the present incumbent, Sir Brian Macintosh. Sir Brian's mother Elizabeth lost her first husband indirectly to syphilis. Sir Russell Macintosh was the UK's cultural attaché stationed in Delhi between 1977 and 1979, when he was sent home for medical reasons. It's likely he became infected before the couple moved to India as, when his condition was diagnosed, there was very little the physician could do other than prescribe a massive dose of penicillin. Unbeknown to both the hospital, where he was treated, and the clinician who administered the antibiotic, Sir Russell Macintosh was tragically allergic to penicillin. Elizabeth married Francis Henry Grant in 1981 and Grant accepted Macintosh's child as his own.

  “Sir Brian was twenty-four when his mother remarried and never changed his name from Macintosh. Whether he chose to keep his birth father's name to avoid accusations of privilege, or his choice was an honourable decision, is neither here nor there; it should have been examined more closely and critiqued. Is there, I'm asking myself, some link between Sir Brian Macintosh and Kudashov? Or, now as you have introduced the Rothschild name, a connection between them all? Positively intriguing, don't you agree?”

  “Even more so, Patrick, as when Kudashov said that he and I had been friends for years, he was lying. The first time I've ever met him was when I told you; Tuesday this week. Lunch at your club was only the second time I've clapped eyes on him!”

  “Why didn't you say something?” I asked, beginning to see a joke coming from somewhere.

  “Dickie mentioned him a few times and his name crossed my desk, but I didn't want to spoil the fun we can have,” he replied, straight-faced.

  Chapter Six: Norway

  “Kudashov found me,” Fraser stated as though I shou
ld have already known that to be the truth.

  “He says he saw me at your wedding reception at Claridge's and he recognised me from my much younger days in the British legation in Cairo in 1958. He was in Cairo on commercial business, or so he says. He asked the concierge at Claridge's for my address, but came up short on that one. As you know, Marcel is a great friend of Molly and me, and he would never divulge personal information. According to Kudashov, his interest was of no importance then, but four years later his granddaughter, this Cilicia Kudashov, comes to him when he was in his apartment in central Moscow and tells of an American NSA programme that she can decipher. She wants to escape to the West, she says, but can't because there's a brute of a Russian in charge of her department who fancies her, moved her into his luxurious apartment, and wants to shower her in money and furs. Furthermore, Kudashov says she will tell us, if we rescue her, how the Americans have the ability to hack into the mobile phones of international heads of government and most of those involved in NATO. Not really pleasant having one's conversations listened into by anyone, but when done by a so called friend and ally, most disconcerting and downright rude. Makes one wonder if they are on our side at all, but then again I have thought that for years. Mine you, if we found out how to use it—it would pay dividends listening in to a handful of Yanks we have interesting files on.

  “Some little time before you were on that operation in Czechoslovakia, I came across an incident with Kudashov's fingerprints on it that flagged up on the counter-intelligence NATO desk I was working at the time. I was in the extreme edge of northern Norway on the border with Finland and Russia. Originally, my role was to work with the Norwegian intelligence service in laying down a 'Stay Behind' line of defensive attributes. It was for the inevitable overrun of Soviet military in that region that could not be stopped, but could be slowed down to enable a counter that might force the Kremlin to reconsider going any further. I was not privy to it all but we were well aware of President Ronald Reagan's belligerence towards Russia and we would not have been at all that surprised had the whole exercise escalated into its worse possible scenario.

  “Anyway, back to Kudashov. I was operating along the border with a small group of engineers from 3rd Parachute Regiment and a two-man Gurkha detachment. You would have loved it all, Patrick. War games for the boys. The Norwegians had lit up a recently installed ground-to-air missile battery and radar plotting position. Despite knowing where the damn things were, they had no intel from a ground perspective. It was my job to calculate how easy or difficult it would be to get in and out without being seen and blow the whole place up without leaving any traceable impression. Bear in mind that nobody wanted any stupidity in these things to occur. My written orders were to tread lightly and not to enter Soviet territory. I had no idea how to do my job without entering Soviet territory, so I ignored the written ones that were to save someone's arse and went in.

  “I and the Gurkha sergeant got past the wire and inside the base completely undetected. Once settled in there, we went through a couple of routines linked to the remainder of the patrol who were still on Norwegian soil, designed to throw the signature data banks of the radar off-line and bugger up the guidance control on the missile battery. We got out, went back to the NATO command, made my report, then we all went off to the barracks, had a good a drink and knees-up, and forgot about it.

  “Two days later, my director at counter-intel was on the phone with a story emanating from a source he wouldn't name who worked inside what then remained of British Leyland. This source claimed that a Labour politician, someone military intelligence were already looking at and code-named COB, gave some photographs to a Communist Party trade union shop steward showing a group of British commandos having breached international law by crossing the Soviet border without a signed invitation. This COB politician chappie told everyone he could that the photograph clearly demonstrated Margaret Thatcher was as much a warmonger as President Reagan. But he didn't stop there! He stated he had first-hand information that the Red Army had been mobilised and the Eastern Bloc countries were at the highest level of alert they had ever been. War was the next step, he preached, and they listened. His aim, so my director's source claimed, was to cause as much disruption within the Transport and General Workers Union as he could and thereby cripple, or at least disorganise, all movement within this country.

  “And this was where Kudashov steps into the game. As my director was telling this story to me and requesting my immediate return to London, it transpired that the Director General at MI6 was briefing the Prime Minister and her Cabinet over exactly the same photographs. Only his information repudiated everything the pictures were meant to represent. The London Evening Standard ran the story the government press secretary gave them, with some of the pictures that night, and the national press covered it the following day. I never found out until I was moved up to the seventh floor in 1993 who provided the evidence to prove those photos were false; afterwards, I was thankful to the man Dickie had mentioned, a certain Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov, code-named Ivy, because he not only saved me from a huge rollicking, but saved what could have been an international disaster.”

  “What evidence did this Ivy have that saved the world from going to war, Fraser? It must have been bloody good.”

  “The photos that were printed showed soldiers wearing Finish uniforms and nowhere near the border. COB, whoever he was, never had any photos after Kudashov paid him a visit. They were burnt in the incinerator at Century House, Patrick.”

  “So Kudashov was in London in 1982?”

  “Seems as though he was, yes.”

  “But what do you know of his other code name, this Petr Tomsa, and going back to my question; why did London want the separation? Where is the benefit of having two code names for the same individual whilst overseas and another here on British soil? All I can see is chaos ensuing.”

  “Precisely, Patrick! Perhaps whoever was behind it wanted chaos. Perhaps whoever designed this chaotic system wants to throw anyone who looks, off the scent. But what's the prize, eh? He, or they, carefully wrote the files so they didn't match. Drafted the operations in such a way they did not overlap. I've read a thesis a long while ago wanting to prove that within chaos there is a degree of order.

  “I can't remember if the paper did or did not prove there is, but our job will be to find that order and if what's happened down the years is to the detriment of this country, then we must bring it before the government, no matter who is involved. Let's shelve the mystery into The Home of Cilicia, along with Kudashov's granddaughter for now, and start at the beginning. Tell me about Operation Donor and why you dealt with Dalek Kava the way you did.”

  And so it was that I repeated the story I had told Hannah the previous day. I expanded on some of it that I had hidden from my wife, telling him of the affair Jana and I found ourselves in, and how her brother disparaged and sneered at her, in bed with the British spy. His insults were becoming more and more personal, and more threatening. He told me how his father the general, when in charge of the StB, had recruited his son into the junior branch of the security service so he could hide his son's indiscretions and disrespect of the Communist Party. He went on to emphatically tell me, in no uncertain words, that Jana was behind their father's death, stoking his resentment when she knew it was Khrushchev who was visiting Prague. He made fun of his sister and threatened to expose her guilt. When I confronted Jana, it was all she could do to refrain from killing her brother herself. That's what led me into killing Dalek. If I hadn't killed him, there's no doubt in my mind he would have put his sister and the operation at risk.

  “He was drunk from earlier on that Friday and as the night progressed, so his drunken state worsened, but only into his usual boring anti-Russian rhetoric. There was nothing really unusual in that. But without any warning that I was aware of, he suddenly blurted out some incoherent language, lambasting the Polish government who he said I was helping to keep in power … then he litera
lly threw himself at me.

  “Physically he was strong, but he didn't rely on just that. Luckily, I had withdrawn the gun from the armoury in the Embassy the weekend before, as he was particularly abusive on that occasion, but although he quietened down during the week, I'd kept hold of it. Dalek had a handgun, which looked like an old WWII German Luger. He pulled it out from behind, where it must have been tucked in his belt and pointed it at Jana, telling me to back off. I shot him in the head without waiting to see what he was going to do. It was just past midnight and, being the start of the weekend, there was a lot of noise outside when I shot him. Jana and I cleaned the mess, waited until around three a.m. and then I got one of the boats moored about fifty yards from their riverside home. I rowed out to where the River Vltava widens near Wenceslas Square, about half a mile up stream; it was cold and cloudy that early morning and nobody was silly enough to be out to see me. I didn't feel the need to tell Hannah about my intimacy with Jana but, if she guessed, she never said. The other thing I'll say to you about Jana Kava is we must find out if she was in the Czech secret police, the StB. I told my debriefing everything I knew and I never pointed a finger at Jana, but it would be very odd if her father never signed her up.”

  “Maybe that was the real reason for London's interest, Patrick, but let's put that aside for a while. How far was it from Jana's home to where Dalek and Radoslav lived?” he asked with that avuncular expression I had come to know so well. I could hear the gears in his brain churning over as I savoured his smile with pleasure—I know where I'm going with this, laddie, and you have no idea do you? But I did know.