by John Gardner
Of his whole network, only the Birkemanns and Moritz Zeich got away. Luzia Gabell went missing. When he got to Zeich, there was news of Emil Habicht. He had been shot down in the street. Herbie remembered being shaken, because it had happened near the safe house, close to the Alexanderplatz. The story said Emil was stopped by a policeman: asked for his papers. He appeared to be loitering, but the policeman let it pass—one of the ubiquitous Vopos. A car had come up. Emil approached, then suddenly changed his mind. They had shot him from the car.
“Habicht?” Herbie asked Mistochenkov, wanting to get the truth about Emil’s death.
Pavel grimaced. “The Old Man thought Habicht was the reason you didn’t come to the Thaelmann Platz. Our people had orders to pick him up. You knew he was sensitive?”
This was news to Herbie.
“Having an affair with one of our girls. A German. Only a secretary, but she worked in Vascovsky’s department. No access to confidential material. It was a threat, though. We had a couple of men watching for him. They moved too soon. The Old Man was furious: thought the business would scare you off.”
“He really believed I would meet him?”
Pavel said he did not know. There were contingency plans. “We had surveillance on you. You lost them.”
There was a faint trace of Herbie’s old grin. “I know.”
He went back over the ground again, scraping the barrel of Pavel’s memory; asking about Vascovsky’s informer within the original Schnitzer Group. Pavel maintained he did not know who it was, any more than he knew either the true name, or the informant, from within the Telegraph Boys.
“The one from my people?” Herbie finally asked. “What happened? Did Vascovsky get him out? Or deal with him in Berlin?”
“Or her,” Pavel looked tired. “Or her,” he repeated. No, he did not think whoever it was got out. He thought Vascovsky took care of the informant.
Treading on glass, Herbie asked if Pavel could remember the work names, and real names, of the Schnitzer Group. The Russian started to tick them off on his fingers. Herbie repeated the process. Then again, until he was satisfied. “You’re certain there wasn’t another?”
They were all Pavel could remember, so Herbie gave him the missing name—“Theodor?”
No, there was no Theodor on the list.
“Vascovsky was playing it close to his chest as well, Pavel.” Herbie now knew who his traitor had been in the sixties. He also had a fair idea of the inducement. Classic. Easily checked. “And you failed to make contact, Pavel. You were both locked behind the Wall, with no safe key out; and with treason on your dossiers.”
Mistochenkov said that was about the way of things. Fifteen years was a long time. Neither Vascovsky nor Pavel had made a report about the half-dozen Telegraph Boys. They were just left to function for fifteen years. Herbie once more probed Pavel’s knowledge concerning the six names.
“Only the ciphers. That was all I knew; except what the Old Man told me, one evening, about you—you and Electra.”
Herbie let it pass. The shock had gone. “You’re telling me the truth, Pavel? You don’t even know which of the six was keeping your boss informed?”
“You have it all.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “All except how it came to an end.”
“I can guess. Vascovsky’s agent from within the Telegraph Boys found a new handler? Right?”
Mistochenkov said it was near enough. The Old Man was getting very tired. About five weeks earlier he had given Pavel the documents and cover to get out; intimating that he would probably go as well. “He was still frightened of leaving cold. Past his prime, but a proud man. He still thought you might send him back. It worried him.”
Did Pavel know why Vascovsky suddenly reopened the idea of leaving for the West? He did. Some top brass had been down from Dzerzhinsky Square. There was talk about the Colonel-General being given a desk job in Moscow. The informant from the Telegraph Boys got to hear about it. “Maybe the Old Man said something. Whoever it is—Priam, Gemini, whoever—threatened to find a new handler in our Service. The Old Man, as I said, was tired. He had a relationship with the Telegraph Boy. There was no question of death. Of murder. Whoever it is has been a convinced Party Member from a long time back. Had trusted Vascovsky. Thought he, or she, was doing a service to Party and country.”
Herbie filled in the rest. The mud would fly. Moscow would want blood.
“So would the Telegraph Boy.” Pavel’s misery appeared more acute than ever. Soon, he supposed, the one informant among the Telegraph Boys would talk to somebody in Moscow: from the Centre.
“Didn’t Vascovsky make any contingency plans at all? He thought of going to the West. You agreed—”
“We were trapped. He told me to go if they got to him first.”
“Then he chickened out, and got to himself.”
“He did say he had instructed the Telegraph Boy?”
“In what way?”
They had been making provisional preparations for the flight West. Vascovsky went through each step twice—once for if they were to go together; then once if Pavel was forced to run by himself. Pavel asked him about the source among the Telegraph Boys.
“I’ve told the asset there is danger,” Vascovsky replied—the asset was the Telegraph Boy the Colonel-General had in his pocket. “The asset thinks there’s been some kind of penetration. The instructions are that new contact will be made if anything happens to me. I’ve even given a word cipher.”
Herbie sat up, shifting his bulk quickly from the slumped position he had adopted. Vascovsky had told Pavel the words. Any new handler appointed by Vascovsky’s friends would slip a quotation into the conversation. Gorky. From The Lower Depths. “A man can teach another man to do good—believe me.”
“Pavel,” Herbie creased his brow. “The Old Man told you to come to me, yes?”
Mistochenkov acknowledged it.
“He was sending me a message, Pavel; and you have wasted a lot of time. Why do you think Vascovsky’s asset would spill it all out to someone in Moscow?”
The Russian said that it was his experience with stranded assets. “They do not hold out for long. There will be a lot of fuss. Why, the Old Man’s death must be spread all over the newspapers; and my defection, also.”
Herbie gave a small, frustrated, sigh. “The Telegraph Boys held out for fifteen years. You seek glory; Pavel? You have lived in our world for a long time, yet you do not seem to have grasped the rudiments. Vascovsky’s death did not make much of a ripple, a small column in Pravda. A tiny mention in Neues Deutschland. Twenty-eight words in a Tass report. As for you, Pavel Mistochenkov, would it surprise you to hear your Service thinks so highly of you that it hasn’t even asked to have you back? Nobody has mentioned you.”
He lowered the window, beckoning to Charles, who came at a run over the soggy turf.
On the way back to the house in Charlton, Herbie threw various names and phrases at Mistochenkov: asking if he had heard them used, or was conversant with any. The Russian replied with negatives to each one. He seemed genuine enough, three times asking for a word to be repeated. Most of the words, names and phrases were meaningless. Into the middle of the group, Herbie Kruger threw ‘Quartet’.
Pavel Mistochenkov did not even ask for it to be repeated. Odds on that they at least had gone undetected.
The afternoon’s interrogation was over; Herbie’s next business was in London.
Ambrose Hill, the Head of Registry, must have been well past retirement age, but nobody asked him to go: even under the strict rules of the Civil Service.
It was known that he had, for three years now, been training two of his admirable, younger assistants. But Ambrose Hill had been with the Service for a long time, the possessor of an encyclopaedic memory. At the top, they knew it would be a bad day when the Head of Registry walked through the door, set the time lock, then went into retirement.
Herbie Kruger was one of Ambrose Hill’s special favourites: a man after his own
heart, who had given the whole of his active life to the Service. When Herbie caught him that evening, just as he was leaving, Ambrose was only too willing to pull out all the Schnitzer network files.
Herbie leafed through them, his eyes creasing with pain at some of the remembered faces. He finally selected one dossier, signed it out and took it down to Pix, where he stood over Bob Perry—‘Mr. Pix’, as they called him—while a copy of the photograph from the dossier was made.
Then Herbie, carrying his briefcase, and stepping with a sprightliness unusual for a man of his size and bulk, walked over to the main building and demanded to see the Director.
One did not usually demand to see the Director, but Herbie was in no mood for hanging around. He was worried, concerned, not only for his people in the field but also for the first line of defence. Source Six had become a major contribution. Even a NATO General had remarked on it at a meeting of the JIC, to which that particular General had been an honoured guest.
There was no time for haggling. He came straight to the point, told the Director the facts as he saw them, then submitted what he felt was the only possible solution.
The Director was concerned, both with what Herbie had cleaned out from Tapeworm and the proposals the German now made.
“It’s too bloody dangerous, Herbie. I can’t authorise it alone, you know that. It’ll take at least a full session of the Foreign Office Intelligence Committee, and you also know what that means—the Treasury’ll be in on it. They’d never let you go in.”
“Over the hill?” Herbie mused.
“You’re blown.”
“Then I’ll spin myself.”
“For real?” The Director looked pained.
“Of course not for real. But they might just fall for it.”
“No time to set you up.”
“I can walk in. We can arrange some sort of story.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Then what do you suggest? Close down my people? Get them out? Pull the shutters on the Telegraph Boys?”
“Well, there are others …”
“Not with the same yield. You know it, I know it, the Joint Intelligence Committee knows it, and, if they use their brains, an FOIC will realise it.”
The Director tapped his desk. “Herbie, someone else can go in.”
“Nobody else has real access. They’re my people. Besides …” He paused, his shoulders drooping. “Besides, it’s my fault. I have a right to correct my own errors.”
“It’s old history, Herbie. No one’s going to—”
“Hold me responsible? You joke. Of course, if it comes out, I’ll be responsible. I personally chose the Telegraph Boys in East Berlin. I …” He thumped his chest. “I made the decisions; I took the responsibility. It’s still my responsibility.”
“And you can still deal with it. Long range.”
Herbie looked bigger than ever, like some animal with the ability to swell in a courting or fighting ritual. “When I kill, I like to do it at close range.”
“Now that kind of talk …” The Director paled, clutching the corners of his desk.
“I am only joking. Please, Chief: fix the Foreign Office Intelligence Committee for me. I’m pleading. I need to deal with it myself; and if you think I like the idea you must be a fool.”
People did not usually speak to the Director like this; but the senior man knew well enough what it meant to Herbie, who steered clear of Berlin at the best of times. The confessing of Tapeworm had certainly produced a change in Herbie Kruger.
“I’ll do what I can,” the Director promised.
Herbie did not believe him. On the way back to Charlton, with Worboys driving as smoothly as he ever did (which to Herbie meant, “Like a demented tractor driver”), it crossed Herbie’s mind that a refusal to let him clean up his own, long-standing error would absolve him from responsibility. The thought was tempting, but did not salve his already blistered conscience.
Mistochenkov was getting ready for bed, Max said, when they got back to Charlton. “Then get him out, and down here; fast,” snapped Herbie, clicking open his briefcase.
Pavel was brought down in dressing gown and slippers. The dressing gown was of heavy wool, and a size too large for him. He had turned up the cuffs.
Herbie made him sit, then placed the photograph in front of the defector. It was the one from the Schnitzer Group dossier.
“Okay, Pavel. Who’s that?” he asked.
“She looks a lot younger there …” the Russian started.
“Who is it, though? You know her, don’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course I know her. It’s Lotte Krug, the Old Man’s bit of skirt.”
“Wrong.” You could almost see the bitterness flowing with the words from Herbie Kruger’s mouth. “That is a photograph of one of the Schnitzer Group. Work name Theodor. Her real name was, I thought, Luzia Gabell.”
Under his breath, in Russian, Pavel breathed, “The clever old bastard.”
Herbie turned away, moving with that quaking agility which always amazed people like Worboys. As he reached the door, ripping it open, he turned his huge head. “And I am a stupid old bastard,” he said, the venom spraying from his lips, his spittle caught in the ring of light from one of the military lamps.
10
MAX AND CHARLES LEFT with Mistochenkov early the following morning. He was to be worked on, in due course, by the Warminster people. The order came straight from the Director.
Herbie, with Worboys again at the wheel, drove away from the Charlton house a little after eight. They could not start any work at Warminster until he delivered his full report. To Herbie the report itself was second in priority. He wanted action on the facts.
He was angry, mainly with himself; the legend he had created, as a cold warrior of great ingenuity, lay shattered. He recalled, in exact detail, how he went about the recruitment of the attractive young blonde student who called herself Luzia Gabell.
Until the early sixties, when the Berlin crisis finally bit hard into the lives of Berliners—in both the Eastern and Western Zones—it had been comparatively easy for a man like himself to retain deep cover. For a time at least, during the formation and early years of the Schnitzer Group, Herbie was looked upon as a staunch supporter of the Communist regime. There were those in Pankow who even avoided him because of it. Walter Ulbricht—the Spitzbart (Goatee), as he was derisively called—led a ruling party detested by many.
In those days even card-carrying supporters were not stopped or dissuaded from working in the Western Zones. Except for the anti-Party riots in 1953, it was not until the end of the decade and the final two summers—’60 and ’61—that the going got rough. For at least three years Herbie Kruger took on the role of a Grenzgänger—a Border Crosser, living in the East, working in the West.
The fact that his ‘job’ in the West was manufactured by the Service never came to light. These were crucial years, when Herbie spent days and nights co-ordinating, arranging lines of communication, recruiting and training members of the Schnitzer Group.
They were almost happy years. The American agencies were in the ascendant, and some of his own British Service people seemed to imagine they were playing a polite game of tennis. In the decade and a half following World War Two the Service appeared to contain more enthusiastic amateurs than good, solid professionals. A fact they lived to regret. Herbie was later to watch cells and networks being blown—from East Berlin to Dresden, from Weimar to Rostock—because of careless recruiting and poor handling.
Agents, working under deep cover—often of German descent—sometimes appeared to recruit at random. In those days clandestine recruitment was based on information from tipsters, who pointed you in the direction of possible, quickwitted intelligent men and women who were potential material. You made some kind of contact, sniffed out the land, then passed the whole thing on to the scrutineers who worked in what was jokingly called ‘the Rummage Department’.
The scrutineers were s
upposed to do a deep survey—an all-embracing examination of the prospective recruit’s background, true political stability, ability and weaknesses. The job meant turning over every stone; following each twisted lead.
Quite early in the recruitment stage of the Schnitzer Group Herbie discovered that scrutiny was lax in the West Berlin department. Compared to the United States, they were under strength. Corner-cutting, the desire to please London by producing impressive payrolls, became the order of the day.
The Americans were more thorough, so Herbie, taking his lead from them, performed most of the scrutinies himself: making certain that he was not being sold a dud, long before he passed names on to official hands.
Until now Herbie believed this attention to detail had been one of the solid reasons for the Schnitzer Group’s consistent success in the DDR. Pride, he now thought, using the old cliche, comes before the fall. The Schnitzer Group remained intact and working until 1965. It was his doing. Now, Pavel Mistochenkov had shattered the myth. The pretty blonde Luzia Gabell had been spun, to become Vascovsky’s mistress, Lotte Krug. So the Schnitzer Group, held up to Service trainees as the ideal network, was shown to have been monitored by at least two KGB bigwigs for the bulk of its active life.
Herbie took more than normal care in the recruitment of women. Special care with Luzia. Yet she had fooled him. The bone stuck hard in his throat, even after so many years. Herbie Kruger’s operational marvels within the DDR had been achieved only by kind permission of the KGB.
As they arrived at the Whitehall Annexe, Herbie looked back on his East German career. If the past was poisoned the way ahead appeared to be blocked by a similar contagion. Now—and he had no doubt about Pavel’s information—there could be no true reliance on the Telegraph Boys. He even began to reflect on the personal choices made for the Quartet, operating at this moment within the DDR.
It was in this commixture of icy frustration and personal rage that Herbie arrived at his office, to find the IN tray piled high.
