Young Philby

by Robert Littell

  “The wine?”

  “The scene.”

  “I hope I never get to see it,” Sonny said. “It would mean my cover had been blown and I’d run for it.”

  “It will not come to that if we are all careful,” I said.

  Sonny took a swig from a flask. Wiping the mouthpiece on his palm, he offered me a drink. I sniffed at it before I pushed away his hand. “Smells like real whiskey,” I remarked.

  “Whiskey it is,” he confirmed. “The good stuff. B-bonded. Aged in wood kegs for ten years, so they allege on the label.”

  “Where do you get it? At the Soviet Embassy all we have is Russian vodka.”

  “State secret,” he said with a humorless laugh.

  “You should be careful about your consumption of alcohol,” I said.

  “I told you last time you raised the subject, I need my ration. Steadies my nerves. Everyone at Caxton House stashes a b-bottle in the b-bottom drawer of his desk. Nobody notices whiskey on your breath because they have whiskey on their breath. I should think they would notice if I didn’t drink.”

  “Black market whiskey is expensive. Surely you have trouble making ends meet if you’re drinking most of your salary.”

  “My sainted father, who has taken up residence in Great Britain for the duration despite the everlasting rain that affects his gout, slips me a hundred quid every so often.”

  “Might I suggest you switch to vodka? It’s cheaper. And it can’t be detected on your breath.”

  “You do take a personal interest in your agents. Can you suggest a diet to help me lose a bit of the inner tube round my waist?” Turning toward me, Sonny smirked in embarrassment. “Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate your concern, not to mention your tradecraft. Tell me something, Anatoly, is Gorsky really your name? Guy Burgess supposed it to be a pseudonym.”

  “State secret,” I said. “But I will share it with you. Gorsky was my grandfather’s family name, but not my father’s and not mine. Under the tsars, the second son was always conscripted into the army, so families with a second son farmed him out to a family without sons and the name was changed. That’s how grandfather Gorsky avoided military service under the Tsar Alexander Three.”

  The blade of one of the skaters broke through thin ice and his left foot sank into water up to his ankle, eliciting a howl of laughter from the other skaters. In the bare branches over our heads jackdaws cawed as if in derision. I studied Sonny as he took another swig of whiskey. At twenty-nine, he cut a fine figure—lean despite his claim to have an inner tube round his waist, suntanned even in winter, the livid trace of a war wound on his forehead immediately above his sunglasses. “What are you reading?” I asked, nodding at the book in his lap.

  “Turgenev’s A Nest of Gentlefolk in the Garnett translation,” he said.

  “I know his Otzi i Deti. You don’t speak Russian, do you? You should learn. It’s a rich language. Otzi i Deti means Fathers and Sons. Turgenev invented the term nihilism in that novel. I fail to comprehend how someone who believes in nothing can look himself in the mirror when he shaves. I understand a Fascist better than I understand a nihilist—at least a Fascist believes in something.”

  “I was told you’d been b-back to Moscow.”

  “Whoever told you that should have minded his tongue. I was visiting family.”

  “Didn’t know you had one.”

  “Many things you don’t know. Better that way. Compartmentalization.”

  “When you were in Moscow, did you see Otto?”

  “No. Our paths didn’t cross.”

  “What happened to Otto? Why was he suddenly recalled to Moscow?”

  “Nothing happened to Otto. I heard he’d been promoted to captain and posted to the Second Chief Directorate. It’s what Rezidenti dream about. Someone mentioned he was living in a village near Moscow and commuting.”

  “So he’s in good health?”

  I nodded. “Why wouldn’t he be in good health?”

  “I liked Otto.”

  “He liked you.” I cleared my throat. “What do you have for me today?”

  “Something quite important, I should think. The date of the German invasion of Soviet Russia. It’s scheduled for dawn on the twenty-second of June.”

  I always made it a point not to react when I debriefed agents. But I am afraid in this instance a whistle seeped from my lips. “Twenty-two June! That’s an incredible nugget. How do you know it?”

  “Guy Burgess got it from a chap who works with the code breakers at Bletchley Park. They are reading Germany’s top-secret Ultra traffic.”

  “Be sure to convey our appreciation to Mr. Burgess. This will be enciphered and sent to Moscow before the day is out. I expect it will be brought to Comrade Stalin’s attention immediately.”

  “There’s more. They circulated an eyes-only memorandum to department heads at Caxton House. Mine let me see it. It confirmed the June date that Guy passed on to me. It mentioned the German order of battle: 4.5 million troops from the several Axis powers, 600,000 motorized vehicles and 750,000 horses are being massed along a 2,900-kilometer front for the invasion.”

  “Did it list the divisions by name? Did it say which were armored?”

  “I’m afraid it did, but I had all to do to memorize the numbers I gave you without the division names. I do remember the Das Reich division, if that’s any help.”

  “If you had had that Minox camera I offered, you might have been able to photograph the page.”

  “I absolutely refuse to carry a spy camera into Caxton House. I won’t take the risk. I don’t intend to wind up watching ice-skaters in Gorky Park. Look, the security people do random body searches on p-people entering and leaving. They found one of the aerial photo analysts carrying a rolled-up nudist camp magazine the other day, the ones where the genitals are airbrushed out. The colonels who run His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service are rather puritanical and their attitude filters down—the nudist magazine was shredded into a burn bag and the poor bastard was p-packed off to a photo recon unit in Iceland, so I heard.”

  “With or without the division names, this is vital information. You and your friends will have the satisfaction of knowing you are contributing to the defeat of Hitlerism in Europe.”

  “Will Hitler be defeated in Europe? Will the Soviet Union survive the German blitzkrieg, or will Russia get knocked off the way Belgium and France and Holland got knocked off?”

  I couldn’t believe he was asking the question. “Kim, Kim, we will do more than survive. We will gather our strength—the masses of tanks and planes being produced, the hordes of soldiers being prepared for battle behind the Ural Mountains. We will unleash a withering attack that will sweep the Nazi invaders back to Berlin. We will capture Hitler and parade him in chains through Red Square.”

  “As my dear mother would say, from your lips to God’s ear.”

  I was rather taken aback. “I don’t believe in God,” I snapped. “I believe in the Red Army. I believe in Stalin.”

  “I have another nugget,” he said. “Remember that American I told you about? The one OSS sent round to learn the ropes from us?”

  “Angleton?”

  “That’s the one. Jim Angleton. Rather charmless chap, actually. But to give him his due, not born yesterday. Fast learner. Wouldn’t surprise me to see him running their OSS in twenty years. We have become chums. We’ve taken to climbing to the roof to watch the German b-bombers attacking London. It’s one hell of a show. Our giant search beams crisscross the night sky. Every now and then one of them p-pins a German moth to the underside of a cloud. Then our ack-ack goes to work. Small explosions, each blazing with the intensity of an igniting match head, walk their way up the beam until one bursts immediately under the fuselage. A wing snaps off, the moth tilts clumsily onto its side and slips out of the spotlight. I don’t like the Hun, but all the same I couldn’t help imagining desperate men clawing their way to hatches to escape the hull falling deadweight like a shot bird.”
>
  “Your sympathies are misplaced.”

  “Quite. Curiously, that’s what Angleton said. He and I got to talking about the war. I told him I thought it would last ten years. He said no way. He said it would end in forty-four, forty-five at the latest. I asked what made him think so. When he didn’t answer, I could see he wasn’t going to tell me anything unless he thought I already knew it, so I took a stab in the dark—I asked him if he was talking about that new atomic d-device.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Angleton looked at me sharply. ‘How do you know about that?’ he demanded. I told him it was common knowledge in my shop that our scientists had been seconded to the Americans to help them construct an atomic bomb.”

  “And?” I insisted.

  Sonny shrugged. “Angleton appeared surprised to discover I was party to that information. He said the Germans were working on one, too. He said something about a race to use uranium-235 to trigger a chain reaction. He said the Americans were on the case and would get there first. He said they already had people identifying targets. He said the war would be over the day after the first bomb was dropped. He said the atomic bomb would give Joe Stalin second thoughts about conquering Italy and France after the European war ended.”

  “He actually said the bomb would give Joe Stalin second thoughts?” After a moment I murmured, “This ought to convince the doubters—”

  “What doubters?”

  I had spoken out of turn. When I didn’t respond Sonny repeated the question. “What doubters are we talking about?”

  “There are a very few comrades in Moscow who think you are too good to be true. They worry whether you are a sincere Communist and a loyal agent of the Centre. Are you, Kim? Loyal to Moscow, to Stalin, to Communism?”

  “That’s the last thing I expected to hear from you, Anatoly. Not after the risks I’ve taken. Not after all the information I’ve passed along to Otto and now to you.”

  “What made you become a Communist?”

  “I read Marx. Any reading of Marx leads one to Socialism. Socialism is half the hog. I turned to Communism because it was whole hog. It armed me for the struggle against the inequalities which have always revolted me.”

  “Sorry we went down this road. I don’t doubt your loyalty. Others…”

  Sonny was clearly annoyed. “I don’t have to prove anything to anybody,” he announced. He laughed to himself. “Except my sainted father, of course.”

  I laughed, too. “St John Philby. Of course.”

  A young man in a faded yellow duffle coat approached us. He carried a skate by its blade in one hand and an unlighted cigarette in the other. “Trouble one of you gents for a light?”

  “What happened to the other skate?” Sonny asked.

  “Only have one skate,” he said. He looked from one to the other. Both Sonny and I were smoking. “Match?”

  “Only had one match,” I said.

  “Beg pardon? Are you gents refusing to give a bloke a light?”

  “We are,” I said.

  “Well, not to overegg the pudding but fuck the both of you,” the young man said. He walked off shaking his head. I could see him leaning toward a lighted match held by a skater standing on dry land.

  “Why did you do that?” Sonny asked.

  “He works for me,” I said. “He was holding one skate, and not two, to let me know he hadn’t spotted anyone suspicious at the pond. He was telling me the coast was clear.”

  “B-bloody hell!” Sonny said. “You really are a spy, Anatoly!”

  “What did you think this was, a game?”

  “A game. Yes, I suppose I did.”

  14: MOSCOW, JULY 1941

  Where Former Junior Lieutenant, Now Senior Lieutenant, Y. Modinskaya Visits the Near Dacha

  So: It’s me, Yelena Modinskaya, the intelligence analyst who interviewed London Rezident Teodor Stepanovich Maly moments before his execution. That was in 1938. I haven’t forgotten the episode. For me, it’s as if it happened yesterday. I had been assigned the Englishman’s case file No. 5581 at the time and, under the supervision of my section chief in the fifth department of the second chief directorate, then Senior Lieutenant (now Captain) Gusakov, I have been working on it since. I myself was promoted to senior lieutenant last year, which made me the highest-ranking female in the second chief directorate. My maternal grandmother, who was one of the first female commissars in the glorious Red Army at the time of the revolution, would have been proud of me were she still alive.

  Weather permitting, I usually walk from the flat I share with my father in a communal apartment near Mayakovskaya Metro Station, with its remarkable fish-eye mosaics on the ceiling, down Gorky Street to my office in the Lubyanka prison. If it has snowed or it is particularly cold, say minus ten or below, I take the metro. Very occasionally I and several girlfriends have splurged on a taxi to GUM department store or the Moscow State Circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard (which was bombed by the vile Germans on the opening day of the war, a month ago today, though our circus comrades never missed a performance). But this evening marked the first time in my life I have ever been in a Zil limousine. The two members of the Lubyanka security detachment sitting up front were topping on the cake, as the saying has it. I was in back between Captain Gusakov and his immediate superior, director of the fifth department of the second chief directorate, Senior Colonel P. Sudoplatov. I know it defies belief but, apart from the fact we were heading west on the Moscow Highway, none of us had any idea where we were going until we heard one of the security people mention the Near Dacha. “The Near Dacha at Kuntsevo is where Comrade Stalin spends weekends,” Captain Gusakov whispered in my ear. “Whatever you do,” Senior Colonel Sudoplatov told me, “don’t yield to nervousness if you should find yourself in the presence of Comrade Stalin. Nervous people are known to make him nervous, inasmuch as he fears they may have something to be nervous about. The chief of our NKVD, Comrade Beria, is likely to be there, along with several members of the Politburo. Ignore everyone except Comrade Stalin. Look him in the eye, speak to him directly, make your case exactly as you made it to us in the Lubyanka.”

  Some ten or twelve minutes beyond the last of the new brick apartment buildings rising in the farm fields around Moscow, the Zil turned off onto an unmarked road that immediately plunged into a thick forest of white pines. Rounding the first bend we reached a guardhouse manned by NKVD border troops armed with automatic weapons. The driver rolled down his window and exchanged a few words with the officer, who checked a clipboard and waved us through. We passed a double-perimeter chain-link fence and I thought I heard the yelping of dogs patrolling between the two fences. We passed two perfectly round clearings in the woods, each with a battery of antiaircraft guns. The soldiers manning them had taken off their shirts and were lazing on the sandbags around the guns. Moments later we reached an oval driveway and stopped in front of a one-story green-painted dacha with unpainted wooden windows flung open as if to air out the rooms. Bedding and pillows were spread across several sills. You can laugh, no matter, but it made my heart beat more rapidly to think I was looking at the sheets on which Comrade Stalin slept. A captain of the guard opened the Zil’s rear door and escorted the three of us into the dacha and through a series of large half-empty rooms, each with a great Russian ceramic tile stove in the center. All of the rooms had walls of unpainted wood. For Comrade Stalin’s sake I was glad to see this, since wood vapors are known to improve the quality of the air we breathe. We reached a double door at the end of a narrow corridor that opened onto the conference room. It was furnished with a large and thick rectangular table filled with bottles of Borjomi mineral water and plain kitchen tumblers. Comrade Beria, a small man wearing an NKVD tunic and a monocle in one eye, presided from the far end. He motioned us to the three empty seats opposite him. Several important-looking comrades sat at the sides of the table. The only one I recognized was the Ukrainian N. Khrushchev, whose photograph had appeared in Pravda each time the city authorities inaug
urated a new subway station.

  A small door I had not even noticed opened in the wall behind Comrade Beria and a man appeared. He settled heavily into a seat to the left of Comrade Beria. It took a moment before the identity of the last arrival dawned on me. It was, of course, Comrade Stalin himself, though he didn’t look at all like the Stalin in the photographs or paintings that hung in every office of the Lubyanka. He was wearing a military tunic that didn’t conceal the stomach straining against the gold buttons of the uniform jacket. His face was pockmarked, as if from smallpox, his skin the color of wax. His left arm, partially crippled from his revolutionist activities before 1917 (so it was generally believed), hung limply from the shoulder socket, his left hand buried inside a tunic pocket. His famous mustache had gone ash gray. His shoulders sagged with worry and I could only imagine the strain he was under dealing with the barbarous German invasion of our motherland, with tens of thousands of lives hanging on each decision. (The hourly bulletins on the radio spoke of our courageous soldiers standing their ground on the Western Front, even driving back the invaders in several sectors, but the long faces at the Lubyanka, where our comrades were better informed than the general public, told a grimmer story. There was even talk of evacuating the capital from Moscow to a city farther east, but I couldn’t believe it would come to that.)

  Comrade Stalin nodded impatiently at Comrade Beria, who said: “Senior Colonel Sudoplatov, you initialed, Captain Gusakov, you countersigned the conclusions of Senior Lieutenant Modinskaya concerning the Englishman who was first recruited by the NKVD in 1934. Comrade Stalin is personally interested in this case file and wants to hear Senior Lieutenant Modinskaya’s conclusions from the horse’s mouth, as the peasants say.”

  Senior Colonel Sudoplatov elbowed me in the ribs. I rose to my feet and looked Comrade Stalin in the eye. “Respected Josef Vissarionovich,” I began. (I had read an article in Pravda reporting that Comrade Stalin’s collaborators were expected to address him with this more collegial title. I thought it would make a good impression if I did this without being invited.) “The Englishman is certainly an agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service, part of a diabolic scheme to penetrate Moscow Centre and feed us disinformation to distort our worldview and impede our ability to combat the enemies of the Soviet state.”