A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

“Were you included in the selection of the personnel for Operation Donor in any way, John?”

  “No, and those insecurities are on show once again, Patrick. Having now genned up a bit on it all, it was Dickie who signed you up for it, if that's what you're asking. He sent it downstairs, listing his needs of a professional and you, he wrote, were the best. In the margins he added the postscript of—best since Jack Price. He also posted Glenister to replace Grant. Musical chairs for the VIP big players.”

  “That was kind of him. I'm flattered. Useful to know, but I want to discuss the Geoffrey Prime message and how might the Americans have known of him, John? Is there still something that you're not telling me?”

  He emptied what was left of the wine carefully into our glasses before he exposed a little more of himself. “If I was a betting man, which I'm not, I'd bet my life savings on you knowing nothing about Prime. Can you remember the precise words Dalek Kava said about the man, Patrick? No, well I do because I read it this morning in the case file. He told you Prime was to stand trial in November. There was no date set for a trial and, as of May that year, it was undecided exactly what to do with Prime. Jana had told her brother what her Control had told her. But what was her Control telling us? Dickie set a ball rolling in 1982, but I've no idea in which direction it went, or if it stopped. When Prime's name was mentioned, Dickie initiated a covert inquiry into a number of names Prime had listed as possible future blackmail targets who were still working at GCHQ. That list led to five employees being demoted and losing their security clearances. I'm now wondering if one was missed or deliberately left in situ.

  “I was Director General on my floor when the GCHQ thing went live. Dickie had retired and telephoned to arrange a meet in a café near Holborn Station. All bloody Beaulieu tradecraft, smoke and mirrors, and what have you. We met and he instructed me to write up a report as none of those five names, or anyone else in GCHQ, were under pressure from the Soviets. However, from the conversation we had, I think there was another file which he wrote himself and placed under a hundred-year seal. He would often write files himself when he was in one of his famous uncommunicative moods.

  “Obviously, I was never shown that file and I still haven't seen it, but in it I believe is the name of another spy of perhaps even greater importance than Geoffrey Prime, and who had a much wider access within GCHQ's remit. This of course may be one of those serendipitous moments that happen in life, but the Director General of GCHQ disappeared whilst holidaying alone in the Pearl Bay region of the Everglades in Florida, round about the same time. The signals of his overdue return home flashed red on everyone's console. A day or so later, there were signals bouncing around saying he could have been murdered and his body washed away from something called a stilt house, where he was staying in Florida. The things are called 'Chickee' huts apparently. Very eloquent name. I can't wait to go,” sarcastically he added. “You can watch the alligators swimming past underneath whilst sinking a pink gin as the sun goes down. I can't imagine anywhere worse, but luckily there's no accounting for taste, is there? Whatever happened, I think it was late February 1983 when he disappeared.”

  “If it was more recent, we would have to investigate, but I think we have more pressing concerns, John. One would be the name of Jana Kava's Control in Poland. Did Dickie let anything slip on that at all?”

  “Dickie never let anything slip, unless he wanted to mislead someone. I don't believe he would divulge a thing he never wanted to, even if he was burnt at the stake. In those bygone days, when the scribble pads next to the telephones had 'Top Secret' embossed in them, there was only one person Dickie Blyth-Smith trusted and I think you know who that is, Patrick.”

  Chapter after Twelve: Salmon Fishing In Norway

  “Nobody from GCHQ was swallowed by an alligator in Florida that I know of, Patrick. There was none cleverer than Dickie Blyth-Smith in the misinformation game. You're right. There was a Russian mole with access to sensitive sections in GCHQ who was further up the food chain than Prime, but it wasn't the Director General, Bernard Nicholls, who was as loyal as they came. Let me tell you a story involving the greatest man I ever came across in this business of ours.”

  Fraser was in his element of storytelling of past victories of his greatest friend and long-term incumbent of the chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee being made a peerage on his retirement. According to Fraser, Dickie Blythe-Smith was to the intelligence service what Robinson Crusoe was to shipwrecks: inseparable.

  “During his first term in office, President Reagan authorised the US navy and air force to lay underwater tracking beacons stretching from Greenland to Norway in order to detect Soviet submarines leaving the major northern Russian ports. It worked, but not for long. The Russian navy plotted them on their maps and then whenever they needed inaudible passage from ports such as Murmansk, decommissioned the beacons by sending a constant sonic microwave signal that, put quite simply, knocked them out. The Director General at GCHQ, this Bernard Nicholls, the same one who Dickie subsequently told everyone had been turned into alligator belts, bags, and boots, came up with a better idea—a line of three signal delineated beacons from the north of Norway across the Barents Sea to the island of Svalbard and onto the northernmost inhabited place in the world at Alert, in Nunavut, Canada. The important difference between this and the submerged beacons was his idea was above ground and, apart from three signal masts that could pose as anything from a clothes pole to a television receiver, there was nothing tangible to interfere with. However, there was one weakness; if one transmitter was tampered with, the other two could not hold the system in place.

  “Don't ask me the intricate parts to how it functioned because I haven't got a clue, Patrick. But work it did. Dickie and Bernard aired the idea with the Defence Intelligence Service who weighed it up and, when satisfied, presented it to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as their own idea. The Foreign Minister summoned his head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Dickie Blyth-Smith, and he said he'd sound out likely partners.

  “That one weakness to the system was ironed out when events turned everything better over a quiet drink and dinner at Dickie's London club. Bernard Nicholls declared a passion for a hobby Dickie indulged in: salmon fishing. It just so happens that in the River Alta, in Norway, one finds some of the best salmon fishing in the world and if Bernard Nicholls were ever to move to the stunning-all-year-round landscape, with the magnificent skiing in winter, and he got bored with that river, then there was plenty more all around, along with the sea. As the wine flowed and the conversation was only interspersed with the scented inhalations from cigars, Dickie put a proposition to his guest—become one of the most important men in the Cold War.

  “The Norwegians, although allies of ours, have to consider their near neighbours the Russians. The two countries have always had a hostile relationship, with the Soviets regularly flexing their muscles along the one-hundred-mile border, and as I've already described to you, we're not averse to the occasional trespass onto their territory. Dickie and I travelled together to Oslo and met with heads of the Norwegian intelligence and heads of their defence staff. Everyone jumped at this new proposal of Bernard Nicholls with one proviso: the number of people who knew of it was to be kept to the absolute minimum. As I've said, there needed to be three transmissible points with all three being erected in places of negligible habitation, thereby minimising local interest, but the call for clothes poles being erected in areas where hardly anyone lives could cause some concern elsewhere. Permission for the first two, Alta and Barentsburg, were no problem being Norwegian territory. Alert in Canada would not, according to Dickie, present any difficulty, but to keep secret the purpose of all three, might.

  “This project was far too sensitive for politicians to be mentored into its serviceability; that precept applied to Americans or Canadians, as well as ours. Dickie saw a possible opening into the new Strategic Defence Initiative Organisation that was being mooted in American circles. Bernard Nich
olls could, he told Dickie, use their proposed space programme capabilities to safeguard what he had invented. The initial concept he'd had, this Delineated Signal Intelligence Gathering or DISIG, to use its acronym, required a feet-on-the ground base to analyse the data produced from the signal encrypted delineation, but if satellites could be utilised, then the analysis could be done in a detached location anywhere in the world. All that was needed was a building on top of which could be placed something that could easily pass as a simple television receiver. Hey presto, no one's cage rattled and a network capable of imagery detection way ahead of the game went on stream.”

  Fraser was positively drooling with pride as he resumed after a satisfying taste of his whisky and pipe. “Again, I found myself as Dickie's chosen travelling companion, only this time our destination was that part of America we are all familiar with: the revered George Bush Centre for Intelligence in Langley, Northern Virginia.”

  He gave me one of those condescending 'have you been there' looks—the ones where his bushy eyebrows almost touched his greying hairline and his hazel eyes took on the size and stare that could make a stranger believe him to be mad.

  I shook my head to answer the unspoken question and he ploughed on. “Of course there was nowhere near Langley that could shine a torch to the powerfully majestic beauty of Norway; however, we could not find the powerhouse we needed in mountain-lined fjords. We hoped we could find it in the CIA funding. We were showered with grand hospitality and congenial acquiescence for all the proposals hallowed Dickie put forward. They loved it so much they paid for its installation in a purpose home for Bernard.

  “The widower Bernard Nicholls had overall control from a nondescript timber-framed house built on the outskirts of the small town of Alta. There were no wires leading to or from his house, or aerials of weird construction mounted on it or nearby. Nor was there any discernible difference to the small television reception boosting satellite dish on the roof of his house to his few neighbours' houses. He told his friendly Norwegian neighbours, whose language he spoke enough to be understood, that he was a retired travelling salesman from Scotland who loved the outdoor life Alta offered him, with the salmon fishing and skiing being his two favourite pastimes. Everything fitted and worked perfectly.

  “It was during the NATO exercise of '83 that Dickie's little baby paid off big-time. The Soviets knew nothing of Bernard Nicholls and his undulation detection proficiency. Thinking the seabed beacons were easily decommissioned, twelve nuclear submarines in two staggered groups of six, sailed through the Barents Sea, heading east towards America and the same number sailed south towards the UK and French ports. As soon as Bernard's detection project noted all the submarines, a rebounding signal was transmitted via satellite to NATO Command Headquarters in Brussels. Immediately, two UK Nimrod aircrafts and three USA P-3 Orions, all of which were in the air, were notified from a special incident room inside the American Pentagon. All five altered course, set to intercept. As the Soviet subs passed from Russian waters into international ones, each aircraft dropped predetermined patterns of sonar buoys around their individual targeted submarines or, in one case, a congested pack of three. As soon as the buoys hit the water and 'pinged' the targets, the captains of each boat opened radio contact, broadcasting on acknowledged Soviet distress wavebands contacting the Northern Naval Base Headquarters at Severomorsk on the coast of the Barents Sea, north of Murmansk. Without ceremony, each boat was immediately ordered to return to Russian waters.

  “Bernard's design worked on the same principle as the beacons laid by President Reagan. They both picked up the noise that submarines made as they stealthily moved into the open sea and towards their target. Having no visible 'beacon' it was indestructible and impossible to disable, even if Bernard Nicholls' home had been discovered. Where he lived was merely a place he could view his invention in action by a series of blue dots that would appear on his adapted television screen whenever he was alerted by a prearranged code from the Pentagon sent over the telephone line.

  “However, the Soviets attempted to quieten their submarine acoustic emissions based on knowledge an American navel warrant officer, by the name of John Anthony Walker, gave to the Russians for what he called ideological reasons. It took a fair amount of time for the Soviet navy to implement all of the intelligence Walker gave away, but eventually the noise was significantly reduced. Because Walker was persuaded to tell his interrogators the full extent of what he betrayed to his Russian masters, Bernard Nicholls' procedural structure was capable of absorbing the necessary changes to its propulsion recognition, and it's still in operation as we speak. Today, we are now able to detect each and every Soviet submarine's incursion from Russian waters through an improved twenty-mile response area from a dedicated satellite that supplements his Delineated Signal Intelligence Gathering. I've no idea how long we will be one step ahead, but I do know that without the foresight of men like Dickie Blythe-Smith and Bernard Nicholls, the Soviet Union would still be hammering at our front door.”

  Fraser had travelled down to London that Thursday night to stay and keep my mind working. Really it was his lame excuse to smoke his pipe and drink more than he should. When I suggested that as the motive, he replied, “Nonsense! I'm coming to keep that mind of yours moving along in the right direction.” But nothing about direction was included in the first words he said when I opened the apartment door to him.

  “Look here, Patrick, nobody will blame you in the slightest if you ease back on all that's on your desk. Delegate those that are important and put the others on hold. Move Kudashov to one side and let the police do their job in Sussex, old son. Take some time to grieve, but not tonight. After I've gone try not to be on your own too much.”

  Sagacious advice perhaps but, in general terms, I was not a very sociable person, which Fraser was aware of, leaving me confused as to what to do with his advice. Work and Hannah were the cornerstones of my life. Alone. Perhaps that was where I was meant to be. Without my wife, only work remained to sustain me.

  I was delighted to see Fraser and revelled in his story telling, but his fixation on the Rothschild family entered our conversation too soon for my liking. The name reminded me of Hannah and I did not want to think of her or who might have killed her. It wasn't a case of refusal to accept her death, or ignoring facts. Call it what you like, but I just did not want to think about not being with her. What I wanted to do was to confirm my suspicions over who handled Jana Kava when she was in Poland before I was needlessly sent out there. It could only be one person—Kudashov—and if my suspicion was right, then Jana Kava was indeed Petr Tomsa as Fraser first suggested, but where was the point to that? It was as I was opening yet another bottle of my favourite tipple, a forty-year-old Jura single malt from the generous stock someone in the civil service had signed off on, that Michael Simmons entered.

  * * *

  He carried good and bad news. Francis Henry Grant, the Director General of MI6 at the time of Operation Donor, had died shortly after his promotion to the chair at the JIC. There was nothing suspicious, Michael added, as though that was about to be a question from either me or Fraser. When neither of us asked, he added in a conspiratorial voice, “There was no autopsy report in the file. The cause of death was recorded as heart failure due to atrial fibrillation. According to the death certificate, he could have had an irregular heartbeat for some time and not have attributed the symptoms to anything serious.”

  I had asked Michael to conduct his inquiries away from any intelligence department's cybernetic signals and communications. Keeping it as secret as we could. It worked. At last, he had good news to impart.

  Hugo Glenister was alive! Something as simple as a search through the Ministry of Defence superannuation payment accounts revealed the whereabouts of his bank, along with his home address in Farnham, Surrey, ten or so miles from Jack Price's nemeses of Guildford, where according to the cynical old Jack P, all the wankers in the service lived. With Dickie Blyth-Smith cold in the g
round, along with John Scarlett's ex-Director General, Hugo was all I had left. I hoped that at the age of seventy-eight he remained in as good health as Fraser, who was one year his junior.

  Chapter Fourteen: Hugo's Conservatory

  The waking hours of morning brought no respite from pity. Shared coffee, shared conversation. Shared schedules, shared objectives—shared love, all sharing was missing. Tears were uppermost on my schedule that Friday and I vowed not to shed any. That vow lasted until I was in the bathroom amongst Hannah's toiletries and the scent of her. I'm sure this will sound harsh, but as I saw those things, I had no choice. I phoned housekeeping and asked for all of her clothes and accessories to be boxed and moved to The Lodge, which was still condoned off with teams from forensics crawling all over and around the place.

  Friday was to be the first day of my being a widower. Fraser Ughert and I had stayed awake until past one in the morning, going over and over and over again what we knew and what we didn't. However, not even we could delay the inescapable movement of time. I had politely refused to bury my head away from the real world and leave others to do what I should contribute to. Every government minister or head of the various departments I had regular dealings with, shared the same thoughts as Fraser when they were in contact with my office—take time out. I thanked them, saying I would consider it. The Prime Minister had called during Thursday evening, offering for the second time his condolences with the advice I was bored with hearing. The Cabinet Secretary was tactful and gracious in his offer of sympathy; however, being a matter-of-fact civil servant, he was the only person who never advised me to take time away from my post.

  * * *

  The one thing that stood out more than anything else in Fraser and my exploration of the facts was there were more of what we didn't know than what we did. If only the great Dickie Blythe-Smith had left a time capsule somewhere obvious for me to find, or Jack Price was still alive with his intuitive sense of the iniquitous, or my old soldier friend Job, from Group.