Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  ‘I have given you our best industrial and technical resources, scientists, technicians. We have sown our people like seeds in the American laboratories and those seeds have ripened. Our spies have brought us secrets from the West, samples of uranium 235, drawings, calculations. But still there is no bomb, no explosion.’

  Andropov is pacing around the room. She does not follow his movements. She looks down at her hands (she clasps them tightly together in her lap) or straight ahead at his empty chair. Andropov reaches past her to put out one cigarette and light another.

  ‘The words of Comrade Stalin.’

  Comrade Stalin? Does he have any idea of the enormous technical problems they have to resolve, of the vast industrial resources such an ambitious project will absorb, of the months and years of intense, painstaking work that must be dedicated to their task?

  ‘The Soviet Union must defend itself against its enemies by exceeding the nuclear successes of the West. At this moment, we have no more important task, but we are not moving fast enough.’

  Beria has been appointed Chairman of the Special Committee on Atomic Energy, he tells her, and discussions have taken place recently on how the Soviet nuclear programme can be speeded up. Without a nuclear capability, Soviet foreign policy is at risk. She already knows that because Miskin sits on the Committee representing the Director of the Institute and, though he tells her little, he has described how intense is the pressure on the Institute. Miskin has never mentioned Andropov to her but that is not surprising. Probably Andropov would only attend by special invitation, and Miskin has no head for people. Any issue that Andropov might raise would not catch his interest. Miskin has mastered the art of being present while his mind is far away.

  She lets her own mind wander as Andropov talks. She imagines the room. High windows, dim lights, a wide table strewn with papers, too many people. There are always too many people at meetings in the Soviet Union: the watchers watch each other. There is too much smoke. And endless talk.

  She hears the discussion. Like all committee discussions, it is circular, political, ragged with bad temper, posturing and self-justification (she has attended too many meetings herself not to know that, whatever their purpose, the attitudes are always the same, only the papers are different). The impatience of the Central Committee and the presence of Beria produce an unusual nervousness.

  ‘We must steal more secrets from the West,’ the administrators on the Committee will have said (that is what they always say), as if by voicing their thoughts the act is done. ‘We must copy the American design. Then we will have our Soviet bomb.’

  Because the design is American, they are saying without using the words, it is automatically superior, more practical, more liable to work than any Russian design.

  But how? How are they to steal more American secrets? Here the representatives of Military Intelligence who have been seconded to Department S will have interrupted, to remind the meeting that contacts with secret Soviet sources in America have been shut down since Gouzenko’s defection because of fears that the FBI is close to uncovering their agents. America and its nuclear research is presently out of bounds and it will be some time before either can be reactivated. The plain fact the Committee must face is that the supply of stolen nuclear secrets has dried up because the American project is now heavily guarded.

  (Will anyone have the courage to inform Comrade Stalin? Foolish question).

  She is secretly pleased that American secrets are closed to them because it may at last allow the Institute a chance to prove it can match anything the Americans may do, but she is wise enough to keep such ideas to herself.

  ‘Then we must explore other avenues,’ the chairman will have said; that is the kind of remark he was appointed to make.

  ‘We should approach Western scientists who are known to be open to the idea of sharing atomic secrets,’ the political administrators will have suggested. ‘What we cannot take secretly, let us ask for openly.’

  At moments like these, the same names are wheeled out, Oppenheimer, Nils Bohr, Fermi, Szilard; the same accounts of secret meetings are rehearsed, the same conclusions are drawn. There exists in the West (so the argument goes) a group of pioneer researchers who are believed to be willing to give away their nuclear secrets in support of their ethical belief that no nation should possess a monopoly of nuclear knowledge. Now it is their turn to be the saviours of the Soviet nuclear programme, stepping in valiantly to rescue Stalin’s political programme. That this idea is once more being floated is, she knows, a sign of the Committee’s desperation in its search for a solution. This group may exist: she has her doubts, but she has never heard that it has ever given away a single secret.

  But, she also knows, the West is alert to this tactic too. The representatives of Military Intelligence will have made it clear at this meeting, and probably at many others too, that all the avenues for gathering secret information from these sources are being closed off. The West has woken up to the risks. These scientists are quarantined in security, their secrets increasingly unreachable.

  Where is Andropov in all this? Is he the thin, pale-faced figure, silently awaiting his moment in the company of his bull-necked, square-headed superiors whose backsides have warmed the chairs they sit in for too long, men who will agree to any course of action in order to secure the privileges they can no longer live without: their large apartments, sable coats for their wives, official cars, holiday villas on the Black Sea?

  But the reality of Andropov’s voice interrupts her imagined meeting, and she is brought back to full attention. She warns herself that she must concentrate on what he is saying. She has already paid the price of letting her mind wander once. She must not let that happen again.

  ‘An intelligence officer from the Second Bureau makes a contribution to the discussion at this point.’

  (Why can’t he tell her that he made the suggestion?)

  ‘If we are denied all access to Western secrets,’ he says, ‘perhaps we should look for other ways of getting their scientists to work for us.’

  She looks at him and fear flutters in her heart.

  ‘The immediate response to this suggestion is laughter,’ Andropov tells her.

  ‘The British and Americans are hardly likely to accept an invitation to come to Moscow,’ a senior Politburo member says.

  She imagines Andropov sitting at the table, lips drawn tight, hands clenched, waiting for the mirth to subside, his cold demeanour slowly commanding attention. The laughter dies away and the room falls silent.

  ‘Perhaps if the approach were different, they might be persuaded to help us,’ she hears him saying.

  The meeting waits in anticipation.

  ‘You have a proposal, Comrade Andropov?’

  ‘We know,’ he says, ‘that there is a fundamental disagreement in the West about the development of the atom bomb. Some of their most influential scientists believe that the military use of nuclear power should be banned, no single state should have a military advantage over another, that nuclear secrets should be shared, the nuclear industry managed under the control of the international scientific community.’

  Here he pauses and looks around the table at the faces watching him, waiting for the denouement that will get them all off the hook on which at this moment their future is dangling.

  ‘It would be interesting to see what effect our support for such a campaign might have on the progress of the West’s nuclear programme.’

  There is now complete silence around the committee table. They know that this is not all his plan but as much as he will choose to reveal now.

  If you cannot buy secrets, buy time, he says. It is a risky idea, but they are desperate men. Sow doubt and confusion in the suggestible minds of the West; create a sufficient interruption in their development programme by manipulating the weakness of democracy, its use of debate in the search for consensus, to allow Soviet scientists time to complete their work.

  At first Andropov is not under
stood. Why should there be any debate in the West? Why should this plan affect the development of their research?

  Andropov smiles briefly. He introduces to the Committee the idea of free speech. There is general puzzlement. How can a society work where anyone may voice his opinion? It is a recipe for chaos and unhappiness.

  Andropov argues that by infiltrating the Western mind in this way, by encouraging its powerful leaders to express their doubts, he will provoke a furious and fevered debate on the morality of nuclear energy, slowing progress on their bomb. The outcome will be a paralysing internecine war of words, unresolved and unresolvable, on which the West will choke itself, allowing the innate superiority of the Soviet system to prove itself and passing nuclear leadership to the Soviet Union.

  A small bald-headed man gets to his feet. He has the chest of a miner, with short powerful arms. He bangs the table with the flat of his hand.

  ‘We will spread a poison of self-doubt into the West,’ he shouts. ‘We will confuse our enemies, lead them astray, we will watch them destroy themselves in the agonies of useless debate. Only then will the victory of Marxist-Leninism be complete.’

  There have been whispered comments behind his back, while he is speaking, between the chairman and the secretary of the Committee. Now the chairman thanks him for his useful contribution, reminding all present that the purpose of all their actions, especially those under discussion today, is the ultimate defeat of their enemies in the West who threaten the Soviet Union.

  ‘I would like the permission of this meeting to present a plan for consideration in seven days.’ That is Andropov’s request.

  Ruth imagines the glances exchanged, the whispered murmurings, head bent to head, the nods, the hierarchical process of agreement where underlings wait for their seniors to declare their opinion before nodding furiously themselves.

  ‘Four days, Comrade Andropov. The Committee will hear your plan at a special meeting in four days’ time.’

  Four days later, Andropov will have submitted his plan and the same absurd process of evaluation and discussion will have occupied another day in the glorious history of the Soviet Union, at the end of which the chairman will have turned to Andropov and nodded his assent.

  And because of that nod she is sitting here now in this room in the Lubyanka, listening to Andropov resurrect her affair with Stevens all those years ago.

  Sixteen years. They have waited sixteen years and now she will be made to pay for this single indiscretion of her life.

  Andropov waits for a sign that she has understood fully what he is telling her.

  ‘I am your target,’ she says.

  ‘No, Comrade Marchenko. You are my instrument. Professor Stevens is my target.’

  4

  MONTY

  Corless takes his seat in the only armchair in the room. Cups of tea are hastily drained and pushed into the centre of the table. Crumbs from Rich Tea biscuits are surreptitiously swept on to the floor. We stop talking.

  ‘All present and correct, Arthur?’

  ‘All present and correct, Rupert. Yes.’

  Arthur Gurney looks round the table to double-check. The weekly ritual has begun.

  ‘Shall we take the minutes then?’

  The minutes of the last meeting are solemnly read in silence to ensure they are a true record of a meeting none of us can be bothered to remember. Arthur Gurney hands the top copy to Corless who asks, ‘May I sign?’ To which none of us ever answers, so Corless signs, Arthur dates and then blots ostentatiously as if his life depended upon it.

  ‘Any matters arising not covered?’

  No one says anything as Corless knows they won’t, and so on we go to what Corless cheerfully describes as ‘the work of the morning’. He glances down at the agenda that he has set himself and feigns surprise. ‘Three items, I see.’

  None of us is ever taken in by this element in the ritual. The agenda seldom changes. It would be a shock if it did.

  ‘Sweet, but not, I suspect, short.’

  That is the signal for the business to begin.

  Colin Maitland hands Corless the Peter file. There has been a bitter scrap over this, Arthur Gurney demanding the right of first access to what he insists on calling ‘source Peter’ but Maitland, an old hand at departmental politics, has got to Corless first and put Gurney’s nose seriously out of joint. Maitland is the guardian of the Peter file. Dislike seethes between them like electric static between two poles.

  ‘The decrypt of the latest message from Peter was only completed at six this morning,’ he informs us (‘A problem with the teleprinter from Moscow,’ we are told), so none of us has seen it yet.

  Whatever attitude we may adopt, each of us is secretly excited by every new piece of intelligence from Peter. There is nothing like an association with a major secret to give you an enhanced sense of your own importance.

  ‘You’ll receive your copies in the usual way after the meeting. Will you summarize its contents, Colin?’

  This request underlines Maitland’s role as Rupert’s deputy. He, alone of all of us, has already seen the decrypt, a privilege that separates him from his rivals in the room. He opens the folder slowly and surveys the papers, making the most of the moment.

  ‘We are the target of renewed subversive activity by the Soviets,’ Maitland says. (‘So what’s new?’ Adrian Gardner whispers in my ear.) ‘Peter tells us that Soviet connections in this country have identified a leading British nuclear scientist in Cambridge from whom they are confident (Peter’s words) that they will receive secret information.’

  There is a stunned silence around the table.

  ‘If Peter is correct, gentlemen, and we must assume he is until proven otherwise, then there is only one possible interpretation. Within our academic community we harbour a man or woman who either is already working with the Soviets or intends very soon to do so. Put more simply, it would seem that we have a traitor in our midst.’

  *

  Rupert Corless’s relationship with Peter the Great was one of intimacy though the two had never met. We all knew the importance of each to the other. Without Peter, Corless’s career would never have risen above the mundane level he had achieved before Martineau’s gift fell into his lap. To be fair, he understood Peter’s importance and his good fortune the moment it arrived. Without Corless’s persistence against the shameful doubts and rejection of the early Peter intelligence by his superiors, the information we had from inside the Soviet Union might never have attained its present level of importance.

  Corless’s second coming was due to an extraordinary piece of luck. Intelligence about Soviet intentions, always light on the ground, was at a premium in the last months of the war when some of us began to fear the consequences if the Soviets increased their sphere of influence in the post-war world at the expense of their allies. If getting our own people to understand this possibility was difficult, getting the Americans to change their view of how this last campaign should be conducted was impossible. The Soviets were our allies, Zhukov a trusted comrade; we would all meet up soon in Germany, wouldn’t we?

  The difficulty was, we had no hard evidence to support our fears that Zhukov was working against us, only deductions, opinion, surmise. It is hard to believe how little we knew about the Soviet Union in the last months of the war. The Soviets put the lid on everything and screwed it down tight. Hard fact, naturally, was what the Americans wanted before they’d listen to our concerns, in the certain knowledge that we couldn’t lay our hands on any Soviet intelligence worth twopence.

  Then, one morning in February 1945, Corless got a coded message from Bobby Martineau, an SIS man in Moscow. He had been approached by, and was now running (bona fides, such as they are in our business, having been established), a major source of Soviet intelligence, code-named Peter the Great. Its importance was such that he wanted (in Bobby’s version he ‘demanded’, but opinion is divided as to the veracity of a number of points in Bobby’s account) Peter intelligence to be g
iven the highest level of secrecy, and that in Moscow he alone was to run Peter.

  A morning’s work on the samples he sent us was enough to convince even the cynics in Horseferry Road (by this time Adrian Gardner was already well established as faction leader) that Peter was an impeccable source within the military planning section of Soviet High Command. We were now able to read Zhukov’s mind. It was an astonishing reversal. We knew what the Russians were going to do because Peter told us their plans, and what we learned confirmed our deepest fears. The Russians planned to get to Berlin before the Americans and the British, and to use their arrival for their own political ends. We took the evidence to our military, only to have it rebuffed.

  ‘Won’t wash, old boy. Boris and Ivan are good eggs, they’re sticking it to Jerry like nobody’s business, and we’ve all got a date under the Brandenberg Gate before long. What a night we’ll have then, what a party!’

  That was when Corless’s hard training in adversity, his ability to absorb knocks and carry on fighting, came into its own. He refused to be brushed aside, refused, as he put it, to break faith with Peter’s courage.

  ‘If Peter risks his life for what he believes is right,’ he said, ‘then we have to fight his corner with him.’

  What Peter told us of the Red Army’s plans proved startlingly accurate. By the time Corless’s advocacy of the Peter intelligence was taken seriously the Russians were in the outskirts of Berlin. It was then too late to make use of what we’d learned, but Corless had won his own personal battle. The final score sheet showed a walkover for Corless and a whitewash for his and Peter’s detractors, from which we doubted they would ever recover. Corless’s star was in the ascendant. From then on it was a brave man who challenged Peter’s authority, and after VE Day no one sought the accolade.

  Then, within a few weeks of the end of the war, there came the fallow period of ‘Peter’s silence’, the immediate post-war months when no intelligence came out of Moscow and Corless’s reputation as wunderkind began to suffer. ‘Source’ Peter dried up. A number of theories were swapped in the corridors and committee rooms of Horseferry Road. Peter had been betrayed and shot; he had been seriously injured in the race to Berlin; he was languishing in prison. All guesswork, because none of us, Corless included, had any idea who Peter the Great actually was and Martineau couldn’t or wouldn’t help. All we had was the past evidence of his secret messages and the proof of their accuracy, just as we now had his silence.