A Spy's Life

by Henry Porter

  ‘But the tracing of the phone?’

  ‘All part of the plan,’ said the Colonel decisively. ‘Luc realised that the whole thing had been a set-up. The phone was the lure that drew in Luc’s team.’

  ‘But surely they didn’t suspect that the Americans were in on this.’

  ‘Who knows, Monsieur, who collaborated with whom? It could be that they were really hearing Lipnik’s voice on that phone and they had been genuinely fooled like we were.’ He stopped and put his hand down to a tortoiseshell cat that had wandered in from the garden and was twirling round an oxygen cylinder propped against his chair. ‘Or it might equally be the case that the whole thing had been American-inspired right from the start. Luc said there was no way of telling. About four weeks ago he was down here for some hunting and he asked my advice. I said if you feel strongly that you are right about this man and he has got away with something, then you should go to the War Crimes Tribunal. Let them handle it. This is how he met your friend Mr Griswald. And this is why he’s dead.’

  Harland was silent for a moment. ‘To be frank, sir, I can’t see why Griswald took your son along with him. He had all the information he needed. There was no reason why he shouldn’t pursue his lead alone.’

  ‘That might be correct if the Tribunal was immune to pressure from the United States and Britain and France. Apparently Monsieur Griswald did believe that. He felt Luc could persuade them of the importance of pursuing this matter.’

  ‘Can I ask you again who Lipnik is?’

  ‘Having heard the beginning of the story, I asked Luc to keep me up to date with developments. I was interested and it gave me something to think about sitting in this damned chair. Monsieur Griswald believed that Lipnik was not his real name from the start. It was a nom de guerre, used during his time dealing with the Serbs at the time of the war. He smuggled arms and ammunition and traded secrets with them and he acquired an identity to do that.’

  ‘Did your son know what nationality he was? Did Griswald have any idea?’

  ‘They thought he was Russian. That was their belief, but I cannot tell you why. They knew they were dealing with someone comme Protée.’ Harland asked what he meant. The Colonel said someone who could assume different forms like the sea god Proteus. ‘They believed he had several different identities – and lives to go with them.’

  ‘Even so, supplying arms and selling secrets is not an indictable offence,’ said Harland, now certain that he had been right about Griswald’s purpose in gathering together the witness statements from 1995.

  ‘The point is that they knew from other sources that Lipnik was involved with the implementation of the massacre. They knew that way back and they knew what he looked like. Otherwise they would not have sent Luc’s team in. The question is, was Luc being used? He suspected that he had been. That’s all I can say.’

  Harland could see the Colonel was getting tired, and he said that he ought to leave. But before he could get up, Madame Clergues brought the phone to the Colonel and asked if he was up to talking to a person from the United Nations in New York about arrangements for the shipping of Luc Bézier’s remains. He looked at Harland with an expression of great sadness, then shook his head.

  ‘Will you deal with this please, Béatrice,’ he said.

  His voice had grown weak and his eyes were closing for longer periods each time he blinked. Harland rose and touched his hand.

  ‘Thank you, Colonel. I think I should leave now.’ He had planned to say something encouraging about continuing the investigation, but words failed him. He wished the Colonel well and thanked him for his time.

  At that moment the Colonel propelled himself forward and clutched Harland’s hand.

  ‘As you can see, Monsieur, I will not live long. I am the last of the Bézier family now. We have served France for two hundred years and we have lived on this land for generations. All that was extinguished when my son was killed. If you can do anything to avenge his death and set things right, please remember that, Monsieur Harland.’

  11

  THE CRÈCHE

  By the time he reached Heathrow, Harland was exhausted. He had taken a short nap on the plane from Toulouse but it had only made him feel worse. As he waited in a line of jaded businessmen on their way home for Christmas, he switched on his phone and called Harriet to let her know that he would be with her by nine. She told him that Robin was hosting his office party and he wouldn’t be there until late.

  A few seconds after he had hung up, his phone rang. He put his bags down and answered. It was Tomas.

  ‘Mr Harland? Where are you?’ He was shouting against the noise of traffic.

  ‘I’m in London. Where are you?’

  ‘In London too. I need to speak with you. It’s very important. Something has happened.’

  ‘Look, I’ve just arrived at the airport. It’s a bit difficult now. Let’s talk later.’

  Tomas wasn’t listening. ‘My friend has been killed. She has been killed – murdered.’

  Harland stepped out of earshot of the queue. ‘Murdered? What are you talking about, for Christ’s sake? Who’s been murdered? Which friend?’

  ‘Felicity – Flick. She has been killed … She was in the apartment when I got back. They shot her and tortured her.’

  ‘Have you told the police?’

  ‘No, I cannot. I left her there.’

  Harland gave him Harriet’s address in St John’s Wood and told him to go there immediately. He made him repeat the address then phoned Harriet to explain that a young man was about to arrive and that he would be in some distress. He’d explain when he got there.

  He had missed his place in the queue and other passengers from another flight were now in front of him. Furiously wondering what the hell Tomas’s call meant, he rejoined the line and moved slowly forward to the immigration desk where an official in an ill-fitting blazer was taking rather longer than usual to inspect the passports. Two men were looking over his shoulder and glancing along the queue. One of them appeared to focus on Harland and said something to his companion. As he approached the desk, one of them came forward, a thickset man with wiry black hair and ruddy Celtic cheeks.

  ‘Mr Harland,’ he said, ‘my name is Griffiths.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harland said crossly. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Would you come with us, sir? Mr Vigo wants a word. There’s a car waiting outside. We’ll have your luggage brought on, if you’ll give my colleague here the baggage receipts.’ A third man had appeared from nowhere and put out his hand.

  ‘But what does Vigo want?’

  ‘I’d rather not discuss it here, if you wouldn’t mind. Mr Vigo wanted to talk to you this evening. It’s nothing to worry about. He says it won’t take long.’

  Harland wondered how they knew to meet the flight from Toulouse, then realised that SIS would have had no difficulty in finding out about his departure from the US and would have then contacted the airline to alert them when he was on the London-bound plane. There seemed nothing else for it because he knew perfectly well that they could force him to go with them. He put the baggage receipt into the man’s hand.

  He was driven to a four-storey office block in West London, somewhere between Hammersmith and Earls Court. The car turned into a side street and passed a sign which announced FM AGRO PRODUCTS: NO DELIVERIES and then into a garage area where several cars were parked. A door closed automatically behind them.

  Harland realised he was in The Crèche, an almost mythical establishment among MI6 staff, which periodically changed location but always served the same purpose. It was where MI6 conducted its initial interrogations and where various suspects and defectors were placed on ice in conditions of quasi-arrest. He had taken it for granted that all the dreary outposts of the service had been subsumed into the spanking new headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. Plainly not. This one still possessed the atmosphere of the Secret Intelligence Service that he had joined – the down-at-heel drudgery and suspicion of the Cold War. T
here was a feeling of impermanence about the building, as if its occupants were prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.

  He was led into a room where there was a small conference table, several chairs and a functional sofa at each end of the room. They asked him to sit down and told him he wouldn’t have long to wait. Then they left, closing and locking the door behind them. He could hear voices recede in the corridor. He reckoned he had a very short time. He took out his cellphone and pressed redial. Harriet answered.

  ‘Bobby, where the hell are you?’

  ‘Listen, I want you to call the UN in New York. Get on to the Secretary-General’s office. Make it clear that you are phoning on my behalf. Tell them that the British government is attempting to hold me without charges. It’s got something to do with the affair that the Secretary-General has asked me to look into.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in a building belonging to SIS – in West London somewhere. A former colleague – Walter Vigo – had me picked up at the airport just after we spoke. Get the Secretary-General’s people to phone the duty desk at the Foreign Office and kick up a stink. Tell whoever you speak to that I’m working on the Secretary-General’s personal instructions. Got that? Good.’

  While he was speaking he used his free hand to transfer the interview transcripts, which had been uncomfortably rolled up in his breast pocket, to the front of his trousers. The moment he hung up, he slid the phone’s battery off, extracted the SIM card and placed it into the fold of material on the underside of his shirt collar. Then he opened his wallet and removed the bits of paper, on which he had written various numbers, and tucked them into the slit of a little coin pocket just beneath his waistband. None of these measures would be remotely effective if he was searched, but he hoped they weren’t going to take things that far.

  There was a murmur outside the door. Griffiths entered with two other men. They did not introduce themselves, neither did they smile or give any other sign of greeting.

  As they sat down opposite him, he leaned forward, placed his hands on the table and said, ‘Where’s Vigo?’

  ‘Mr Vigo will be along at some stage, I expect,’ one of them said. He was in his fifties, dapperly dressed in a Windsor check suit, a cream shirt and a red tie which was embroidered with tiny fishing flies. Old MI5, thought Harland, no doubt brought up from some Home Counties village for the occasion.

  ‘He’d better be. As far as I’m concerned, I’m here to talk to Vigo. I make it plain now that when I wish to leave, I will. If you attempt to prevent me from doing so, you will be breaking the law and, furthermore, you will find yourselves explaining your actions to the Foreign Secretary and the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the man quietly. ‘We’ll see how things go, shall we?’

  The other man was vaguely familiar to Harland. He was heavier than his companion and wore large square-framed spectacles, behind which lay rather dead eyes. His mouth closed in an unattractive pout and he was less fastidious in his appearance – a sagging charcoal grey suit, a coffee stain on the cuff of his white shirt and a tie which showed its lining. Harland took him for a bit of a thug, an observation which helped him to remember his name. It was Blanchard – Derek Blanchard – and he had seen him in the eighties at meetings about the Soviet efforts to infiltrate the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Blanchard was also MI5. Not top flight by any means and within five or six years of retirement, Harland guessed.

  ‘I know your name,’ he said to Blanchard, then looked at the other man. ‘But what’s yours?’

  ‘Rivers,’ he said. ‘Anthony Rivers. Shall we proceed? This is not what I would call a normal interview, Mr Harland. We find we have very little to ask you, except in order to satisfy our curiosity about your motives. So I will come straight to the point. We know categorically that you have betrayed your country and are in contravention of the Official Secrets Act. Between 1975 and 1990 you worked under the code name Lamplighter for the StB, which I don’t have to tell you was the Czechoslovak Security and Intelligence Service.’

  Harland said nothing. He had been prepared for this moment and knew exactly how he was going to handle it. But why had it come now? And why had these two time-servers been fielded for the interrogation? He had the impression that this operation did not have the full weight of SIS behind it. There was something cobbled together about the whole thing.

  Rivers produced a file from the chair beside him and opened it.

  ‘You are Robert Cope Harland. After standard interviews and enhanced positive vetting procedures you were accepted as a trainee for SIS. At your first interview you were required to read and sign the Official Secrets Act.’ Without looking up he flashed some papers, each of which bore Harland’s signature, and continued speaking. ‘Having completed your initial training in London and Portsmouth you were sent in 1974 for your first operational experience. This was intended as a purely observational role, a period of learning at the front, if you like. In those days it was customary to throw people in at the deep end a little earlier than we do today. You performed your duties with moderate flare and became involved in the operation to determine the extent of Eastern Bloc influence in a number of international institutions. We were also at that time concerned with the communist action against dissident groups that were based in Rome, principally those involved in the dissemination of anti-Czechoslovak propaganda following the Prague Spring. Is this all correct?’

  Harland nodded wearily.

  ‘At some point in your tour of duty in Rome – we believe it to be September or October of 1974 – you were introduced to a woman whom you discovered was an agent working for the StB. She was living in Rome under the name of Eva Houresh and her code name was Lapis. You initiated an affair with Lapis, knowing that she was a member of a hostile foreign intelligence service. Is that correct?’

  Harland did not react. Rivers waited a second or two longer and pursed his lips, as if to indicate that he had had the misfortune to face many liars across an official table and Harland was no different.

  ‘You returned to London and took up a number of posts, working in East European Controllerate. You joined the Intelligence Branch and worked in Berlin, Vienna and – briefly – in the embassy in the Soviet Union. You also spent short periods in the Middle East – the Lebanon and Turkey. I do not need to rehearse the details of your career; we all know it well enough. Suffice to say that you were approached by a man named Josef Kapek, an agent for the StB who was attached to the trade mission in London. He showed you a photograph of yourself in bed with Lapis which was taken in 1975. This we believe was in 1980, by which time you were regarded by your colleagues as reliable, even promising material.’ He unclipped a photograph of Kapek taken in the street and showed it to Harland. This time he searched Harland’s face for reaction. When he got none he gave a bleak, knowing smile and returned it to the file.

  ‘Kapek threatened to send this item to the head of your department, together with details of the woman’s background. In consequence you agreed to his request to supply biographical sketches of the people you worked with in Century House and various embassies. He also revealed that there was a tape recording in existence. He told you that Eva Houresh is heard admitting to you her role in the StB and that you in turn reveal your own status in SIS.’

  He paused. Rivers held up a cellophane envelope and withdrew a photograph with some flourish. It showed Harland and Eva making love, well, at least lying in bed together. Both faces were clearly visible. Harland didn’t look at the picture closely. He remembered the image well enough, although he’d never been sure exactly where it was taken. He did notice, however, that the print was new, which was interesting because it might indicate that Rivers’s dossier had only recently been assembled. He wondered whether they would produce even newer pictures of him speaking to Tomas Rath in New York. Was the boy part of this too? Was he an attempt to ascertain for certain his relationship with Eva Houresh? If that was so, wha
t could possibly explain his call an hour before? Harland found no answers, but deep down he was convinced that Rivers and Blanchard were, despite their self-assuredness, somehow uncertain of what they were doing. He returned to focus on Rivers.

  ‘Over the ten years between 1980 and 1990 you are known to have cooperated with Kapek and his associate Milos Hense, a diplomat working in the Czechoslovak embassy in Vienna. Contacts in this period between you and Kapek and his intermediary were frequent and helped to build incremental understanding in the StB of Western signals and human intelligence. There is every reason to conclude that in your role as Lamplighter you served the KGB in the same way.

  ‘In May 1981, for example, you reported to Hense on your part in Operation Stormdrain, an exercise in feeding the KGB a number of false impressions about the defence capabilities of Britain and her allies. Two years later you confirmed the identities of foreign journalists in Poland who were members of Western intelligence agencies. There are numerous documented examples of your disclosure of Western efforts to penetrate political institutions among Warsaw Pact member states. One particular instance that catches the eye is your contact with Kapek in Ankara, Turkey in 1987 during which you alerted the Czechs to the presence of a woman named Ana Tollund in the Secretariat of the Praesidium. Ana Tollund was subsequently tried and executed as an American agent. I do not have to explain to you that her death was the direct result of the information you gave Kapek.’

  For several minutes longer, Rivers continued to read out a litany of betrayal. Harland sat back in his chair taking care to cover the slight bulge in his trousers with his jacket. He remembered a word that Griswald used when confronted with weak material. ‘Scuttlebuck,’ he would say. ‘It’s all damn scuttlebuck, Bob.’ The dossier was exactly what Harland would expect from an investigation that drew on secondary sources, not his original file in the StB archives. And they could never get hold of that because Alan Griswald had burned it in front of him in 1990 – a late Christmas present, he called it.