The Secret Houses

by John Gardner

  Herbie slowly nodded his large head. ‘Okay. I only hope she give a lot of Ivans this uncleanness. I give her bloody nose when I see again.’

  They had to break it up at that point. Caspar wanted to get on with the serious work.

  It was not so much an interrogation to begin with, for Caspar contributed little to his brother’s monologue. Ramillies began with his infiltration into Russia in 1918 and a meeting with the now infamous Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky – the founder of what was to become the very engine of Soviet Power. It was as though Ramillies was obsessed by the man. ‘He was the High Priest of the Revolution,’ he said. ‘You see, he understood Revolutionary power like no one before him and nobody since. The Vecheka, which was the father of NKVD, became the power base and the bullet fired by the Revolution. Everyone realised the dangers of “counterrevolutionaries.” Only Felix understood that there was only one way to contain them.’

  ‘And what part did you play, Ram?’

  ‘Me? You’ll laugh. I was the diplomat as far as the family was concerned. The military wasn’t for me. Oh, no. But Felix Dzerzhinsky made me a soldier. I went into the Army.’

  Ramillies had been a Political Commissar urging the Army to march to the beat of the Party drum. The Civil War was in full horror, and in battle the commissars urged men forward with pistols, not held towards the enemies of the people, but aimed at the backs of Red Army troops who lagged behind. His baptism of fire had been to act as immediate judge, jury, and executioner on the field of battle.

  ‘It made a man of me, and a zealot, Caspar. Oh, yes, one zealous enough to be sent later into a different sort of field.’

  When the powerful émigrés fled from Russia, both Lenin and Dzerzhinsky saw them as dangerous elements, strong enough to seduce Russian emigrants to turn, form power bases in the West, and launch counterattacks on the Bolsheviks, who now held the country in thrall. Ramillies – mainly because of his knowledge of the West and his fluency in languages – was sent into the Counterespionage Department, the KRO, the Kontrarazvedyvatelnyi Otdel.

  ‘Nowadays you would say we ran surveillance on important émigrés in the West. But to begin with our job was to try and persuade the princes, generals, former men of influence, to return home. “Come back to Mother Russia, she needs you as she has never needed you,” we would say. To get them back would mean they could be disposed of in private. Only when that failed did we do the job on foreign soil.’

  ‘You killed for the KRO, Ram?’

  He nodded. ‘Three times. In Paris all of them.’ He gave the names, dates, and method. Caspar sent the information back to London. It was all accurate. Now they could trust Ramillies a little more. He was baring his soul, for the KRO eventually became the network of foreign surveillance – the nest of agents in the field, ready to further the Revolution throughout the world when the moment came.

  They were over a month into the interrogation before they got to Ramillies’ visits to England in the late 1930s.

  ‘I did some auditions in Oxford and Cambridge. But I was not alone, there were many who went out as apostles, and we gathered a good crop. Caspar, do you realise how deeply we’ve eaten into the upper echelons of your society? We have agents everywhere, in your Foreign Office, even in your own Service.’ He could give no names, for he knew none – or claimed that he knew none.

  What Caspar did get out of that long, rambling, often anguished, always self-serving story which gushed from Ramillies was a two-hundred-page manual on the history and activities of the Soviet Intelligence Service. This was distributed in 1949 as classified material within his own Service and the CIA.

  Later, when everything was over, Naldo said, ‘At least Ramillies made Caspar a hero by giving him the facts with which to write one version of secret history.’

  But Caspar wanted more – not just the bare bones of organisation, the bloodletting and internal squabbles, or the personalities and tradecraft of the NKVD, so soon to become the more universally known KGB. Caspar required three nuggets of truth which he thought were buried within the day-to-day dealings of the Russian Intelligence community. So he plodded on, allowing Ramillies his moment of ironic triumph – for by now his brother was carried forward by his desire for immortality within his old family. He wanted to show them what he had accomplished, and the means with which he had written the pages in blood, stealth, and deception.

  The next incident came after three months. With little warning they were suddenly moved.

  The team never learned where the tipoff came from, but there was no doubt that the Soviets had tracked them down. Orders came through, in a Flash cable, in cipher, one Friday night. They were to be ready at four o’clock on Saturday morning. Five cars collected them and they were driven, by long and devious routes, to another well-equipped safe house ten kilometres west of Frankfurt. By chance Naldo heard later that on Saturday night three men – all of them German – were killed while attempting to breach the security of the Munich house. When Caspar was told he said, ‘Then we might be running out of time.’

  He still had a long haul ahead, but at least he could see the dim light of Klaubert and the girls at the end of the maze which was Ramillies’ evidence.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The house near Frankfurt was not as large as the Munich place, but it stood on rising ground, with a good commanding view. Somehow C had managed to have a squad of hoods there, ready to guard it day and night.

  The only problem which first seemed to face the team was the interrogation room. It was large with a great solid glass window – rare in Europe in those days. There was only one set of recording equipment, and that was linked by a complex series of cables embedded in the walls to this one room.

  ‘After what’s happened in Munich you’re wide open.’ Naldo stood with Caspar, looking at the great view from the interrogation room’s window. Lawns went down in terraced steps – orderly as a battalion on parade. Below the lawns were clumps of bushes, then a half circle of trees which marked the boundary with the road. Even the paving stones on the straight drive up from the road appeared to be set at identical intervals. The flowers obeyed some order to bloom. Caspar said it was all prick-neat, which Naldo took to mean piss-elegant.

  ‘Put one good man down there with a sniper’s rifle and you’re dead meat.’

  Caspar gave his nephew what used to be called an ‘old-fashioned’ look. ‘Nip outside, Nald – take a peek at it from the terraces.’

  Naldo did as he asked. The window was invisible, like a great black shield. When he returned, Caspar was still in the room, but he had somehow got hold of a very heavy hammer. He walked over to the window and gave it a ferocious blow, using all his strength. The hammer simply bounced back, not even leaving a chip in the glass. ‘It’s bulletproof, one-way, and all that. This’ll be safe enough.’

  Caspar did another three weeks of finely tuned interrogation before he struck the first oil.

  It happened on a Wednesday afternoon. As is the way of these things, the morning’s work had been almost barren. He was coaxing Ramillies to the moment when the demon king of Russian Intelligence first came on the scene – Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria. Beria, the man who still stood at the head of Stalin’s Intelligence and Security agencies now, in 1947.

  ‘Stalin brought in Beria as Yezhov’s assistant, and soon Comrade Yezhov was pronounced insane and carted off in the dead of night – the old knock on the door, Caspar – and taken to the Serbskii Institute, where he promptly hanged himself. He was in a straitjacket, but he hanged himself and nobody asked questions.

  ‘So we had Beria, the magician who made almost all of the old guard disappear and weeded out my own department, the KRO.’

  ‘But not you, Ramillies. Not you.’

  No, Ramillies said, not him, for he was too useful. ‘And I also agreed with all things Comrade Beria said. Yes, Comrade Beria; no, Comrade Beria; lick your arse, Comrade Beria.’

  Ramillies was especially useful because of his great knowl
edge of languages, and experience in the West. For Beria’s first great reform – apart from disposing of hundreds of officers – was the institution of the so-called Spy Academy at Bykovo, forty miles from Moscow.

  Ramillies was there as an instructor for three and a half years, and it was from his description of Bykovo that Caspar took the bulk of his chapters on tradecraft when he came to write the Classified Manual for the SIS.

  The description of training at Bykovo was long and full of picturesque detail. Ramillies’ eyes blazed with the fervour and joy of it all as he spoke about it – the training in surveillance, ciphers, combat, silent killing, radio, contacts in the field. They were meat and drink to him, but only an hors d’oeuvre to the main course in which he participated – ‘legends and linguistics,’ he called them, which in plain language meant turning intelligent Russians into foreigners – ‘illegals’ to work in the field and become, in all senses, another person, born and bred in the country chosen for him. Their long, faked lives – documented and finely engraved – were their ‘legends.’ The language part was almost as complicated.

  Not only did they have to master the language of their target country, but also the true vernacular – accents, slang and, hardest of all, the kinetics – so they could, with ease, imitate the body language and facial expressions which were part of the people’s heritage in that country.

  ‘You know we even have a whole town in Bykovo, built as an American small town – “Little Chicago” they call it. Incredible, but it’s true. Trainees live there for weeks, just going about the routine of a small American town. At Bykovo our agents learned like actors. They learned to play roles; to live new lives. Stanislavsky would have been proud of them. That is how we were able to send so many convincing people abroad.’ For the first time since it had begun, Ramillies laughed with a little pleasure. ‘Can you believe we had agents learning to jitterbug, and listen to the radio serials, on which we tested them. I personally prepared a test for “The Lone Ranger.” This is true, Caspar. We made them into Americans, Italians, French, Belgians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, good Nazi Party members as Germans. And they were all – to a man and woman – great Stalinists.’

  ‘And what did you do in the war, Ramillies, apart from train your super “illegals”?’ Caspar felt a twinge, a sudden clarity – he knew that he was nearing the real killing ground.

  ‘Me?’ The cold smile returned. ‘Me? I ran illegals, Caspar. I ran three in the United States at long range; and six in Germany and Austria.’

  Often, Caspar had taught in his lectures at Warminster, there are moments when instinct must rule. He had reached an instinctive moment now, and he plunged in. ‘You ever come up against an SS officer called Klaubert?’ He realised that he could hear his own heart beating. ‘Hans-Dieter Klaubert – SS-Standartenführer.’

  In slow motion he saw Ramillies nod. ‘Of course. I helped train him – you know my German is good, and I’d visited Germany a great deal. He was never at Bykovo, of course. Klaubert was German born; tried to defect to us, for his political beliefs, in the late 1930s – ’37 or ’38, I think. He was persauded to remain in place; in Germany. To be a good Nazi in order to remain an even better Stalinist. I did on-the-ground-training with him. A very good agent. Yes, of course, Hans-Dieter Klaubert was one of mine. Orléans, wasn’t it?’

  Within himself, Caspar let out a long and relieved sigh. Somewhere in the back of his head he could hear his own voice saying, ‘Got you!’

  And from far away there came a sudden and sad sound. It was like the prolonged snapping of a string.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  By the time Caspar reached the most sensitive part of Ramillies’ interrogation in Germany, so Otto Buelow, miles away in Washington, was beginning to collaborate with the Agency.

  The deal was that in return for the use of the safe house in the American zone of Berlin the Agency would be allowed full access to Buelow in prison. Two skilled inquisitors – with FBI backgrounds – came to London, did an on-the-spot analysis, talked with other people on the ground who had a good knowledge of the Tarot Enquiry, and decided that ‘the Otter’ – as he was known in Railton circles – should return to Washington with them.

  For the first two and half weeks Buelow went through what they called the fattening-up process. He was given a pleasant apartment, allowed certain freedom, though watched over by Agency bodyguards, and generally treated well. He had good food, entertainment, and sightseeing. He was even offered female companionship, which he turned down. It was felt that Buelow should be at ease before they went through his Tarot Enquiry evidence in detail, and allowed him to look at Dollhiem – the man he had fingered as Klaubert’s contact Triangle – in the flesh. Generally, for security reasons, they still talked of Dollhiem as Screwtape; just as Tert Newton was Screwdriver.

  The two Agency men took Otto out to restaurants, wined and dined him; went with him to stores where he marvelled at the comparative luxury, and dug deep into the money allotted to them, having him measured for new suits, buying shirts, ties, shoes, and other delights.

  By the third week Otto Buelow looked a different man. He regained weight and color, was well-dressed and relaxed, and appeared at peace with his surroundings. There was even talk of his being allowed to settle in the United States – heaven knew there were plenty of former Nazis with truly evil pasts being quietly infiltrated into the United States with the covert assistance of Military Intelligence, the Agency, and State. Most of these had their papers sanitised so they could bring their knowledge and experience – of rocketry, atomic, and connected subjects – to bear on the various military programs designed to put the United States in the global lead as far as missile and atomic weaponry was concerned.

  Otto Buelow knew nothing of this, so did not question the reasons for his newfound American friends showing such openhandedness toward him. In the middle of the third week they began the interrogation – a calm, slow business conducted mainly in a beautiful little house on O Street which had been in one of the Agency men’s family for years.

  There were three interrogators and no tricks. It would be better, it had been decided, to go through things with Otto in a straightforward manner. So the trio, usually together, began a normal question-and-answer routine.

  They took Otto back through the early ground covered in his Tarot evidence – his return to Germany, marriage, the years of unrest followed by his own admission that he had joined the Nazi Party ‘out of necessity, not conviction.’ They were all impressed with their subject’s attitude. He added little to what they already knew about the Nazi Intelligence Service and the part Heydrich had played in its formation, but his refusal to dodge the main issues of responsibility had a refreshing candour about it. Like the Tarot Board of Enquiry they warmed to this uncomplicated German who admitted his own knowledge of atrocities just as he had done during the original hearing. They had all done service in Germany and were used to former Nazis using the most common of excuses: ‘I did these things under orders.’ – ‘I was only obeying orders.’

  ‘I knew what was happening. How could I not know, during the time with Heydrich? It is to my shame that I did nothing about it. A man should have the intelligence and courage to disobey orders when he knows them to be outrageous or unjust. I had the intelligence, but, alas, not the courage.’

  Slowly they moved on to his posting to Orléans and relationship with Klaubert. Finally, after some weeks, they came to the OSS operation known as Romarin, the breaking of Tarot and his identification of Klaubert’s informant known as Dreieck – Triangle.

  ‘You say the man came to the Rue de Bourgogne headquarters many times?’ they asked him.

  ‘I think two or three times a week.’

  ‘And not until after the raid by parachutists?’

  ‘After that. Also after the réseau known as Tarot had been rolled up and liquidated.’

  ‘Can you remember the very first time you saw the man – this Triangle?’

&nbs
p; Buelow’s brow creased. ‘I told them in London that it was at headquarters. I have given this much thought, and I might have been wrong. It is possible – just possible – I saw him before that first visit to the headquarters on the Rue de Bourgogne.’

  Mentally the three interrogators sat up and took notice. Was Buelow about to change his story? Gently, they urged him on. ‘You saw him before the parachutists, or before Klaubert ordered members of Tarot to be called in?’

  ‘No,’ Buelow said firmly. ‘I should have kept a diary. Made notes. No, it was certainly after July 5 – the parachutists were taken in the early hours of that day. The bodies were disposed of on the sixth. I am certain of that. You see, July 6 is the anniversary of my marriage. I always spend a few moments thinking about Mary Anne on that day, and have done ever since she died. So I do know what happened on July 6, and I do know that I had not set eyes on the man Klaubert called Triangle before then. But we all got used to seeing him regularly after that – certainly after the members of Tarot were arrested and killed.’

  ‘But you might have seen him before the day you took Tarot apart?’

  ‘Yes.’ Confident now. ‘Yes, I think so, and it would have been a couple of days before the Tarot arrests, only I cannot remember the complete circumstances.’

  ‘Try, Otto. Please try. It’s very important.’

  On the following day, during the afternoon session, Buelow volunteered that, if he had seen Triangle earlier, it was in a small bistro used almost exclusively by German officers. ‘You see, I have this memory that shortly before the hideous business with the Tarot people, I saw Klaubert in this place. It was called La Vache Grise, the Grey Cow, a silly name but very popular among the officers.’

  ‘And you think you saw the man Triangle there with Klaubert?’

  Buelow hesitated. ‘I saw Klaubert there. Once. Once only, after July 6…’

  ‘And before Tarot? You’re certain?’