by Daniel Kemp
I had wanted to tell Fraser of it from the moment I made the discovery, but other considerations arose before any indulgence in self-congratulations seemed appropriate. The old saying of pride goes before a fall, has haunted me since schooldays, be they primary days or university ones. Too many times have I tripped over my self-pride to allow it now to be of significance.
Despite any feeling of importance, there was nobody left alive who could categorically say that Dickie's magical, sleight-of-hand illusion was meant to be found by anyone, least of all me. Nevertheless, the coincidence of the names of Jack and Jacqueline Price, alongside the handwritten note found at St Michael's Church, were names and places known by both Fraser Ughert and me, but the message contained in the anagram of NOMITE was something only I knew and would have taken note of. Putting aside my friendship with Fraser, built over more years than I care to remember, the two people who were most influential in my formative time in the intelligence service were Jack Price and Dickie Blythe-Smith. Both were precise and thorough men. Men who believed that clarity, although most often disguised as a necessity in our way of life, was essential for the full comprehension of any procedure. They preached and sought the ability to look beyond the obvious.
It was the privilege to be able to look behind the personal clues that compelled me to dig further than someone outside would have and, in following those directional hints, I found the misinformation that Dickie was renowned for in the signal that was sent in his retirement years about an unknown Soviet 'defector.' Not the one they knew of in 1981.
This was the one-worded Ryan communication in the vaults hidden under the file name of Cilicia. A name unknown to any other chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee until Fraser and I found an obtuse reference to it five years ago at Hannah's and my wedding. Had Cilicia's grandfather not come here, then in all probability I would never have looked and Dickie's masterstroke would never have been discovered.
It was a secret that perhaps had to die, to enable a false sense of stability to fall upon the person Dickie had in his pocket to be resurrected whenever circumstances dictated. I had to wait until Moscow had been concluded before I could pull back the curtains and reveal the Blythe-Smith trickery to the world.
* * *
By 07:28 UK time, Cilicia Kudashov was in the air on board a Norwegian flight bound to Oslo from Moscow, sitting beside Christopher Irons. From there she was due to board a British Airways flight to London, arriving mid-afternoon our time. The rest of our 'rescue' group had their own unhindered ways home. Everything had gone to plan.
The need for the appearance of it being an abduction had disappeared when I'd spoken to Trubnikov in India, where he'd told me of the conversation he had with his former KGB personnel. When Trubnikov told me that Anatoly Vladimirovich Malikova had put forward the idea that he could construct a false defection to America for Cilicia, and then 'handle' her from either inside Moscow Centre, or better still, he said, 'If I were to travel after her.' That was an offer that no doubt caused some deliberations within the equivalent of the KGB First Directorate. I appropriated that idea of his to attribute Cilicia's disappearance to his well-constructed plan. In that way, I figured he would be the centre of any investigations and nobody would look for her until it was far too late.
On my instructions, Christopher had given Cilicia a sedative to put in any drink Anatoly might have the night preceding her 'defection.' With Liam Catlin working miracles on a copy of a computer-generated scenario, we provided error-free details of Cilicia's adopted American identity with such things as a driving licence number, details of a fictional bank account, medical insurance, and an address of residence in New York State. This we left in Cilicia's apartment on open view, to be found when her absence was noticed. Catlin and his helpers were able to install a copy of the scheme onto the hard drive of Anatoly's computer at the Eighth Chief Directorate. As an additional form of satisfaction for Nikita Kudashov, he agreed to reimburse the small sum of money that purchased the single air ticket to New York in Anatoly Vladimirovich Malikova's name that Cilicia had managed to conceal in Anatoly's desk. When Anatoly found her gone, he had two choices, from neither of which could he escape the charge of incompetence. At best, his career was ruined and at worse he was locked up as a traitor.
Nikita Kudashov loved the proposal I put to him, greedily accepting it, pledging his undying support of GB for eternity. He was even more pleased when I told him that it would be impossible for Cilicia to be traced once she was clear of her apartment. We had supplied a wig with hair extensions that exactly fitted the photograph on her new passport she carried, along with stacked-heeled shoes that made her two inches taller than her real height. Films from the cameras at Moscow airport would not show a Cilicia Kudashov, nor would boarding control. All that was seen was a tall, black-haired woman named Georgia Wallis, an American from Syracuse, New York, returning home from a short holiday in Russia. Nikita's granddaughter was safe from harm. At least as far as the Russians were concerned.
* * *
Part of the jubilation we all felt was shared by the Prime Minister when we met as part of my duties on Monday morning. I confirmed Klaus Mecklenburg's decision to move the headquarters of his family's specialist military signalling engineering company from France to Swansea in South Wales and his computer terminal block manufacture from Germany to Coventry in the Midlands of England. He was, I told the PM, contemplating signing a contract worth billions of pounds sterling and providing thousands of jobs in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to build oceangoing yachts for sale. If he had the right incentives, he told me, he would resettle the family's small but highly profitable ship-building industry to Belfast. The Prime Minister was speaking on the telephone to the Minister for Trade as I left his office with a huge smile across my face.
The weekly intelligence sharing meeting of the Defence Chiefs was completed without any mention of Zaragoza or Moscow, finishing in sufficient time for me to explain to Molly Ughert why I hadn't fulfilled my promise of sending her husband home on time. She accepted my explanation and my offer of the ministerial car with an overnight stay at the Foreign and Commonwealth guest suite before the solemnity of Hannah's interment at the Hesse family home in the New Forest at Brockenhurst. Not a day I looked forward to, I told her, adding that I needed her close to me to get through it all without blubbering too much. In the meantime, I had Fraser to myself and closure to Dickie's Byzantine mystery ready to explain. I chose my club for the exposition.
* * *
“Do you remember telling me, Fraser, of Bernard Nicholls and his great invention that identified Soviet subs entering international waters, and how you and Dickie travelled out to Langley to sell the idea to the Americans? Well, it wasn't only there that Dickie went, was it?”
“No, it wasn't. Dickie left me one day to enjoy that hospitality I seem to remember mentioning. They certainly do know how to entertain all right. To tell you the truth, I can't remember how they got me back to the hotel.”
I laughed with him as I could imagine that happening to either of us.
“I bet you can't! Maybe we can have one or two out there at the expense of the CIA when this is all over. But, for now, I want to take you back to when Dickie left you and went to see the ex-husband of Patricia Jacobson. Do you recall who that was?”
“I'm not quite senile, laddie. I wasn't aware they divorced, but her husband was the physicist Joseph Cavershall, who worked on the Manhattan Project. The one they pinched from us and then wouldn't share.”
“I won't get into politics, Fraser, but, yes, that's him. Joe Joseph Cavershall, to give him his full name. They divorced after only three years of marriage because of his adultery, and that wasn't declared through a sense of chivalry on his part to spare his wife's blushes.
“The woman Joe committed adultery with bore him a son, born the year after the war was finished by the bombs he and others worked on. Whether it was because of the horrors the first detonating nuclear bomb unleashed upo
n the world, or whether it was the guilt he felt because of his ex-wife's treachery with John Caincross, I cannot be sure, but Joe changed his name from Cavershall to Elliot, never insisting or suggesting his first son Randall should do the same. But Randall did. He became Randall Ryan Elliot the same day his father became Joe Joseph Elliot. It was with Joe that Dickie met, near where he and his wife lived in Baltimore, not far from your hotel in Washington.
“Dickie held nothing back. He forced Joe to acquiesce to all his demands by threatening him with public exposure because of his ex-wife's treachery that we know of. Dickie was after Joe Joseph Elliot's second son, Bradley Scott Elliot. He was roughly thirty-five when he became crucial to all of this.
“Bradley had followed in his father's footsteps somewhat by working for the American government. Only his choice was not to become a physicist. He trained in the technology of computers and the understanding of their nuances. He was one of three departmental heads of the complex known as the Asian desk, inside the National Security Agency Headquarters in Maryland. Bradley was virginal. No outside agency hands had touched him. He had no background away from the NSA headquarters. He could supply what Ryan could not. Bradley had his feet in American intelligence and Dickie wanted him to grow.
“Randall knew nothing of this of course and nor did Dickie want him to know. He swore Joe to secrecy, threatening him again, this time using his eldest son as leverage. Dickie held every card in the pack and Joe had no option but to submit. To sweeten the pill, he gave Joe some reasonably toxic intelligence to do with the Soviet fleet anchored in the Baltic Sea off Tallinn, in Estonia. It concerned the conduct of the captain of the Russian small missile ship, the Passat. This was a type of boat popular in the Soviet navy around that time because of its low radar profile carrying a hostile threat way above its size. It was a boat the West knew little about, but envied. Joe passed this intelligence on to his son when the two met at Joe's home on the weekend following yours and Dickie's departure. Joe's conversion of his son is one we can only speculate on of course, but whatever approach he made, it worked.
“The name on Ryan's only ever signal carrying one was Key Fitzgerald. If Randall made any connection to Scott, the middle name of his stepbrother, it was meaningless without knowing that Dickie had him on a leash.
“When Bradley told his superiors of the captain of the Russian ship Passat's indiscretion, it caused a slight panic inside the NSA until they spoke to the CIA, who metaphorically rubbed their hands together whilst adding Bradley's signature to their books and begging him to carry on. Dickie passed relatively small snippets of intelligence to Bradley throughout his retirement years, stuff that was just enough to keep his American mole burrowing away in Langley, supplying Dickie directly with intelligence the CIA were gathering throughout the world and using the NSA transmitters to carry it on.
“We came to know about the improvements that were made to the Frosting programme this way. Bradley was also able to supply the technical breakdown on the guidance system used by the Space Shuttle, which was later adapted to several satellite launches. Bradley was invaluable to the secret intelligence service of this country and it didn't stop with guidance systems.”
Fraser interrupted me. “What happened to Bradley's intelligence when Dickie passed away, Patrick? Did it just dry up?”
“It did. And that, I believe, was one of the reasons it was left to be found. By my calculations, Bradley is sixty going on sixty-one. We tracked him down to a part of the secret service called the Presidential Central Security. Amongst other things he's director of the White House signal intelligence, Fraser.”
“Are you going to leave him alone?”
“I don't think so, no. I've given Sir John Scarlett what details I can, without exposing any of Dickie's original operative. Just enough so he can twist Bradley's memory a bit if needed. Michael is doing some family background checks as we speak.”
Fraser fell silent. Perhaps he was wondering why his old boss hadn't shared Bradley with him when they met in Dickie's retirement years, or maybe he was contemplating what to add, if anything, to his eulogy for Hannah's burial tomorrow. I chased the demons in my head away and turned back to whisky, cigarettes, and work.
“The real sting to Dickie Blythe-Smith's operation came in 1991 after he and Trubnikov met in Berlin. Dickie passed a portion of the intel that Trubnikov gave him about Putin on to Bradley, with precise instructions of how he and Trubnikov were to use it. The part of the information on Putin that Dickie kept exclusively for GB use only was not given over to anyone inside the SIS or inside the Foreign Office, or any other part of HM government.
“There were, as I said, two parts to the last message Dickie sent to himself using Ryan as its preface. The part about Stoneman's connection we have already covered. It's the second part that holds the answers you wanted, Fraser. Dickie's signal was coded using the letters of NOMITE to represent numbers on a periodic table of elements, as issued by the Royal Society of Chemistry. I managed to decode it.
“I have always suspected Dickie offered me a position in the service because I'd got a degree as a qualified chemical analyst. It would certainly prove my theory of why I got Operation Donor and why NOMITE was used twice to conceal Dickie's workings. Sorry, Fraser, I've wandered slightly from disclosing who Dickie gave Vladimir Putin's secrets to. It's the reason why we were both reprimanded by Palace officials. He gave it to the man who in the year 1991 headed up the Court of St James's security, Viscount Richard Temple, Sir Richard Blythe-Smith's sponsor and relation dating as far back as King Richard I days—one God, one King, one Country.
“Viscounts don't have a retirement date set in stone. They tend to go on until they fall. However, Richard Temple did retire in the same year as Dickie passed away. At that date, Vladimir Putin's history became the property to the new Master of The Royal Household and so, presumably, it will be transferred in perpetuity.
“The Royal House of Windsor have had a controlling influence over many international events since changing their name from its Germanic heritage. However, the connection to other Royal houses through the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha line continues to this day, encompassing my wife's Landgft surname, within the European House of Hesse, and onwards to the last Tsars of Russia.
“Although Putin could never be called a Royalist, his commitments to Communism had not always been the paramount thoughts behind his actions. In the first ZAPAD exercises of May 1977, mentioned by Ryan in a leaked signal from Trubnikov, the twenty-five-year-old Vladimir Putin was assigned to the General Staff of the Soviet Defence Ministry, stationed in the German Democratic Republic in Schwerin, the capital of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. By chance, he met Anna, wife of Klaus Mecklenburg. The Mecklenburgs had a palatial home there. Anna and Vladimir had a passionate, all consuming affair inside and outside that home, without Klaus's knowledge.
“But according to Trubnikov, Putin told his friend, who was serving in the USSR during this ZAPAD operation, that he knew Anna Mecklenburg was related to the Romanovs, not only because she'd told him, but she secretly showed him some Romanov jewellery she'd kept with some family photographs of the Tsar and Tsarina that included her. Trubnikov gave Dickie the original transcript of those messages from Putin, declaring his involvement with a Romanov. Putin never reported her to his superiors. He also complicated his life by visiting her whenever he could when the military manoeuvres finished in the GDR.
“I can only surmise some parts of this story, but Jana Kava told me that Anna Kudashov had a secret and Jana believed she had a child somewhere that was never spoken of. Jana saw Nikita Kudashov on the day she believed he killed his wife. He was acutely angry, mouthing the name Schwerin over and over again whilst punching his hands together as he made his way past Jana on his way home. Dickie did not know of that and I only remembered it as I was listening to Trubnikov's story, and remember Dickie had a head start by at least sixteen years, but I got a signal off to Michael Simmons about Schwerin, asking him to l
ook into records of illegitimate births registered around February1978. And guess what, Fraser? He found the one Dickie gave to our Royal Family's equerry. An illegitimate Romanov son born to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin on the twenty-six of February 1978! He actually signed the hospital's register and it hasn't been destroyed. How's that for arrogance?
“I checked with the present Master of The Royal Household, Lord Tennyson Gravel, before attending the Defence meeting this morning. He was reticent as first, as you can imagine, but I was right. As far as he is aware, the young man in question is the only Romanov connection alive today. Lord Gravel asked me to meet with him and the Prince of Wales on Wednesday. When I'm there, I will ask if our knowledge of this birth has been used in any way to impact on Vladimir Putin's world decisions. I said it would be nice to know.
“As far as I'm concerned, if Dickie Blythe-Smith was happy handing this revelation over to the Queen's equerry, then so am I, Fraser.”
There was an additional part to Lord Gravel's conversation that I never mentioned, but by the canny look in his eyes, I would not have been surprised if he had already guessed. As we finished our arrangements to meet, not only he, but as he put it his boss, he apologised for the terse letter the British Ambassador to India was forced to read to me, and also the heavy-handed visit to Fraser and Molly's home.
He then added, “The man in question has always had someone looking out for him, and that will always be the case.” Without a sense of intimidation, but with an unnerving edge to his voice, he added, “The Firm always looks after their own, Mr West, and they now include you amongst their number. The Prince of Wales sends his sincerest regrets for the loss of your wife, Mrs Hannah Landgft-West, but hopes you will keep the house at Hassocks in Sussex, enjoying all it offers. There was just one thing his Royal Highness requested and that was for you to have an open mind when the two of you meet on Wednesday.”
