Last Call for Blackford Oakes

by Buckley, William F. ;

  But suspicions lingered, and in 1955 a Labour Member of Parliament openly accused Philby of being the “third man.” Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan called for a white paper on the subject, and when it was completed, Macmillan, the leading Conservative voice in England, uttered the most famous exoneration in the postwar history of espionage, advising his colleagues in Parliament that there was “no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country.”

  Even so, there was a lot of smoke left swirling about the corridors of MI5 and MI6, and when Philby, who had already left govenment service, announced that he was going to practice journalism in Beirut, a part of the world where he had lived and worked in the 1930s, there was a general sense of relief in security circles. Philby wrote for The Economist, The Observer, and The New Republic from Lebanon, and spent time with his third wife traveling in the Middle East, which he knew so well from earlier days.

  But then George Blake was caught, with his hands very very deep in Soviet espionage. He was tried and convicted (but escaped from prison). Information gathered from the Blake experience led directly and unmistakably to Harold Adrian Russell Philby, and this time MI6 was not going to let him go. Philby sensed that his time was up and one day disappeared from sight in Beirut, leaving, among others, a thoroughly perplexed wife. A few weeks later he surfaced in Moscow, where the Kremlin announced exultantly that he had been given political asylum. His life in Moscow began with, no less, a three-year-long debriefing by Soviet intelligence.

  The Soviet Union conferred honors on him, including the Red Banner Order. But his life was tightly restricted. Successive case officers would meet with him, day after day. He was not officially permitted outside his apartment building without an escort. His quarters were bugged (he simply took this for granted, and his suspicions were later verified), his mail, incoming and outgoing, surveilled.

  There was irony in the whole business, Philby later confessed to a friend. “The fact of the matter is,” he said with something bordering on amusement, “the Soviets aren’t one hundred percent certain that I am faithful!” Perhaps he was a double agent, dispatched by MI6 to penetrate the innermost Soviet circles. If that had been so, the ironic poetry would have been unmatched.

  The Kremlin’s edgy suspiciousness continued, Philby would report in his uproariously successful memoirs, My Silent War. The book was published in Great Britain and America in 1968. As evidence of the Kremlin’s suspicions, the memoirs were not published in the Russian language until 1980. The KGB was still harboring that little sliver of doubt.

  Philby had decided to confront it head on. He wrote in My Silent War, “In early manhood I became an accredited member of the Soviet intelligence service. I can therefore claim to have been a Soviet intelligence officer for some thirty-odd years, and will no doubt remain one until death or senile decay forces my retirement.”

  There was a madcap aspect to Philby’s memoirs. A Cambridge boy is recruited for British intelligence. He is actually a secret Soviet agent. He goes to Washington to help detect and counteract Soviet espionage. In Washington he is made head man in coordinating activity with the FBI and the CIA. There are questions raised about his loyalties. He is formally exonerated by Harold Macmillan.

  For a while, after the book appeared, there were calls from journalists wanting to interview Philby in Moscow. But he granted no interviews. He would not have been permitted to give any even if he had wished to do so.

  So he lived quietly, reading and writing. Eventually he was given his senior seminar to teach. And every now and then the KGB called on him to give his opinion on one or another ongoing investigation. The government stipend was adequate, and occasionally it was even increased. Little ironies continued. Royalties from his book, published in seven languages, in ten countries, were remitted to him, with the quiet approval of Soviet authorities. But not in Moscow. That would have been recidivist capitalist practice. He picked them up in Vienna. Philby would travel there, from time to time, and live grandly for a week or so.

  The reviewers of his book were not all of them indulgent. It had been an inconceivable stroke of luck for his publishers that the influential man of letters Graham Greene should have consented to write an introduction to the memoirs. Greene had been a personal friend of the spy—and technically, during the war, a subordinate of Philby’s in MI6. Several other factors prompted Graham Greene’s patronage. The memoirs were captivatingly written. That appealed to Greene. And they made mordant comments on American icons. Writing the introduction was, for Greene, one more chapter in the lifelong book in which he tried to find a philosophical star fixed enough to warrant full-time servitude. Philby had found his own star, and lived on, reading and writing, teaching, and, occasionally, serving his ideals yet again.

  CHAPTER 22

  Ursina didn’t dwell at any length on the wedding or its celebrants. She felt pressed to be on time for the ballet at the Bolshoi Theater. She led Blackford deftly to the metro station, where he admired yet again the famous mosaics. One stop later they were within two blocks of the theater. Hand in hand they walked up the stairs and gave up their coats to the clerk in the hallway. The great stage was soon alive with the lithe figures of a Russia which, thought Blackford, had been mostly allowed to sleep through the whole Communist enterprise, though of course three of the country’s major stars and several lesser ones had defected to the West.

  His thoughts went astray and Tchaikovsky could not engage him completely. Kim Philby! Well, why not? Everybody knew that Philby lived in Moscow. He had to live somewhere. That he was now married to Ursina’s closest friend was a coincidence, hardly affecting national policy. Whatever Blackford’s enchantment with Ursina, sitting beside him, her face rapt in the music, there was no reason to break the rule of his profession, which was: Do not tell anybody anything that touches on security if it is possible to stay silent. This was not easy to do, to remain silent about the man whose cigarette he had lit a couple of hours earlier. Philby, Soviet agent, had pretty well completed his assignments, Blackford thought it safe to assume. But Philby had become, in publishing his memoirs and scorning the West, an aggressor on another front, a public front. Lines written by Lord Birkenhead in his review of Philby’s book for the Daily Telegraph were permanently in Blackford’s memory. “We shall never know how many agents were killed or tortured as a result of Philby’s work as a double agent and how many operations failed. He is now safe in Russia and we must, alas, abandon any wistful dream of seeing this little carrion gibbeted.”

  Might he himself have been identified by Philby? Inconceivable. Except for a few snapshots by intimate friends, Blackford Oakes’s photograph had not been taken, so far as he knew, since his wedding, twenty years earlier. Yet it might have been snapped by Soviet security agents at any of a half dozen encounters he had had in thirty years’ work. It was therefore not absolutely inconceivable that Philby might have suspicions about “Harry Doubleday” of the USIA. He needed to talk it over with Gus.

  He did this the following morning. They met at a café near the embassy, the Café Atelier, where they had twice before conferred.

  “Does our gang know where Kim Philby lives?” Blackford opened the conversation. “Because I do.”

  “He moves around a lot. But I think we have it. In case we don’t, write his address out here.”

  “Gus, I am a product of the old school. I don’t write out such things. I speak them. He lives at Uspensky 78. You can memorize that.”

  Gus nodded and went on. “On our own front, I’ve got big news. Dmitriev. He was arrested yesterday morning at his dacha, Kuntsevo. It’s a pretty dry report, what they’ve released.” He took the copy of Pravda from his briefcase and read aloud: “‘Politburo Vice Chairman Nikolai Dmitriev was brought to the Lubyanka on January 10 for questioning. His duties have devolved to the Assistant Deputy Minister.’ That’s all.”

  “Gus, I assume you’ve been able to get more about him than just that?”
r />   “Yes. Dmitriev was weekending, as usual, at his dacha. His house guest was General Leonid Baranov.”

  “Oh my God. It’s like old times.”

  “I’m thinking, Dad. I wonder if you shouldn’t get the hell out of here.”

  They talked.

  This would be a high moment of danger, if a plot was actually being contemplated by those two Soviet figures. The need to depose Gorbachev, in the eyes of the general, would surely be heightened by this move against his pal Dmitriev, yes. On the other hand, any conspiracy’s prospects for success were surely reduced by the arrest of the principal political rival of Gorbachev.

  Blackford decided to stay in Russia at least until they had Galina’s promised report. She expected a visit from Ivan, her client and informant, brother of the executed conspirator, Viktor. He could avenge Viktor only by carrying through the plot in which Viktor had failed. “He is certain to come by in the next few days,” Galina had assured Gus.

  When Blackford joined Ursina it was late in the evening. She had been called to a surgical operation, canceling by message their dinner date. “Come to Pozharsky Street at 2100. I will certainly be back, and will serve you some soup and wine.” It was signed, on her stationery from the Department of Urology, “The ballbreaker.”

  She was not there when he rang, so he ferreted out the key from its hiding place near the bathroom at the east end of the hall. He entered and sat down to read the paperback book he carried. Moments later Ursina came through the door. They kissed, holding each other tightly. He thought her pale in complexion. She removed her babushka and shook out her hair. “The operation was long. And not successful.”

  She would give him more details, he knew, if she felt like it. He would not ask for them.

  She didn’t. She pulled a bottle from the closet and handed it over to Blackford to open. “It’s sherry. It’s not cold. One day when they promote me to president of the university they will give me a refrigerator. Harry, is it so that in America everybody has a refrigerator?”

  “Yes. Almost everybody.”

  “You mean, convicts are not allowed their own refrigerators?”

  Blackford laughed. “Put it this way, that’s roughly it. Only convicts are excluded.”

  She took her glass and went to the stove. She pulled out a kettle and opened a can of soup.

  “Harry, you have heard about Comrade Dmitriev?”

  “Yes. He was pulled in, I read.”

  She paused. “Harry, what exactly does ‘pulled in’ mean?”

  “That’s the first time you’ve ever asked for any leads in English.” He explained the meaning of the expression.

  She listened. “Here you do not ‘pull in’ Politburo members if you have any intention of restoring them to their former offices. Taking Dmitriev to the Lubyanka! The word goes out immediately. That word is that the general secretary will not tolerate any serious political opposition.”

  Blackford proceeded cautiously. “Why is that surprising, Ursina? The general secretary’s predecessor did not permit serious opposition. Nor did his—going back to—”

  “You are going to say, going back to the beginning of the Revolution?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to say it in just that way. But yes, darling. Going back to Lenin.”

  “Your system is different.”

  “Yes. It is very different. We don’t … we don’t pull in political opponents.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that this apartment might be bugged?”

  It had in fact occurred to Blackford. What he did not tell her was that he was professionally equipped to detect hidden microphones, and that he had swept the apartment when helping Rufina move out.

  “I think that where I live and work, at the Metropol, there is most likely surveillance. But I don’t think there is any here. Did you see that President Reagan protested the number of bugs found in the American Embassy?”

  “Yes. Harry, I have to suppose that your people bug us. What insanity.”

  “Yes. But Lenin, who started it, was yours, not ours. The secretary of the army in the United States was quoted in the thirties, when listening devices were proposed, as saying, ‘Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.’” That brought laughter, which was welcome.

  She let him pour her another glass and then went back to the stove. From the breadbox alongside she took a loaf of bread and cut off a few slices, putting them on the table. She brought out ham and cheese and eating utensils. “Sit down there, I’ll bring the soup.”

  Instead, she dimmed the light and kissed him avidly, working a hand under his belt. Between kisses she said it was reassuring that she would … never … need to operate on … Harry, “my Harry.”

  A half hour later the soup was reheated. Ursina said she was now hungry.

  “Did the exercise stimulate your appetite?” he asked, his face resolutely serious.

  “Harry,” she said. “You must know something.” She poured the soup with one hand, holding the other hand to his. “I am pregnant.”

  Blackford rose to his feet, backing up against the wall. What question could he put to her? What biological doubts could possibly exist, in the mind of a medical doctor?

  He said only, “This is what you must have wanted, dear, dear Ursina.”

  She nodded, and then there were tears.

  CHAPTER 23

  Galina agreed to report to Ivan Pletnev that she was in touch with the “appropriate link.”

  Gus had told her: “Tell him right away that you have somebody who can listen to his story, but can under no circumstances provide American help for any plots against the government.”

  “Then why would he want to see you, my little Gus?” Galina raised her shapely legs and touched her toes down on the mirror that reflected her voluptuous figure.

  Gus took a minute to think. Blackford’s instructions were that Gus should press for a personal interview with Pletnev. But he had to give a reason for needing to see him, since Pletnev was being told that any prospect of U.S. cooperation was excluded. Galina relieved him of the quandary by whispering, “He is in fact coming tonight. Now, we must play by some rules. Even we have some rules. He will come, he will talk with me, perhaps we will make love together. Then, only then, can I tell him someone is waiting for him at the Rialto.”

  It was at the Rialto that Galina sometimes dined with her clients. It was essentially a bar-buffet. There was always something there to grab and eat, and the bar was never dry.

  “What time is he coming?”

  “He comes late. Let’s say he gets to you at a quarter to midnight. Put the front page of Pravda by you, as an identification. Where it can be seen.”

  “If he doesn’t show up?”

  “If he is not there by a quarter after the hour, come to me, and I will help you to drown your sorrows.”

  Gus conferred once again with Blackford at the Café Atelier. Blackford asked if there was more on the fate of Dmitriev. The answer was no. “All the spookier, not a single mention of him in Pravda since last Monday. It begins to look like one of the Stalin routine eliminations, though I doubt they’d execute Dmitriev.”

  “Unless he was cahooting with the Pletnev kid.”

  “That’s true. In that case, we’d wonder how long before they bring in General Baranov.”

  “The general has a fervent following in the armed services, doesn’t he?”

  Gus nodded. “And if I ever get to lay eyes on the Pletnev brother, it will be tonight.” He raised his hand in response to the raised hand of Blackford. “I told her, I told her. Told her to lay it right out to Pletnev: zero U.S. complicity. And she isn’t sure that Ivan Pletnev will agree to see me.”

  “We have one final way to deal with this mess.”

  “What you were prepared to do with the people a year ago?”

  Blackford nodded his head.

  “I know what you went through then, Dad. Betraying folks who’ve leaned on us is bad stuff, bad stuff. But”—he reache
d for a break in the clouds—“back then we were dealing with four young idealists who were anti-Communist, yes, but who could have touched off a national convulsion. This time, if we’re dealing with anybody at all, it seems to be an insiders’ fight, a jilted vice chairman and an ambitious general.”

  “With considerable implications, if we can guess what General Baranov is exercised about. Like the future of the reforms Gorbachev has started.”

  They arranged to meet the next day, after what Gus hoped would be a productive visit with Ivan.

  At the Rialto, Gus, his red-blond hair tousled over his forehead, gave the impression that he was smoking, drinking, and reading simultaneously. The beer was at his right, the morning’s Pravda alongside, the lit cigarette, from which he drew absentmindedly, in his left hand. A phonograph was playing accordion music, and customers were filing by the buffet and returning to chairs and tables in the larger room. A few minutes after midnight, Gus heard the words, “I am Ivan.”

  His visitor was tall, thin, bearded. He wore glasses and a heavy overcoat that could instantly be recognized as standard issue for Russian soldiers. Gus motioned him to sit opposite.

  “I am Eric. Do you want to go to the buffet, or will you want only … drink?”

  “Yes, I will go to the buffet. And I’ll take vodka.”

  When Ivan came back with his tray, Gus said to him, “Galina has told me that you were … badly treated.”

  “At least I can walk. My brother also was tortured. And when they got tired of that, they shot him. They had him in a cell at the Lubyanka and brought me there, after the torture. They—I say ‘they.’ My handling was done always by Captain Lukin. In the many hours we spent together, I was able to piece together what it was all about, and what they were looking for.”