I, Said the Spy

by Derek Lambert

  Standing at the window, gazing at the mountains, their peaks now wreathed with cloud, he wondered, as he had wondered over the past three decades, how his readers would react if they knew the identity of his real masters.

  He telephoned Hildegard Metz. When she came in she placed his correspondence on the table where he had been typing; on top was a carbon copy of his acknowledgment to Bilderberg together with the details.

  ‘Will there be anything else, Monsieur Brossard?’

  A steak as thick as a fist!

  ‘Nothing more, Fraulein Metz. You can go and besport yourself in the fleshpots of the village.’

  Would she? Could she? Dark hair contained so severely by tortoiseshell combs, waisted grey costume, spectacles ….

  ‘I think I’ll take a walk, Monsieur Brossard. There’s a beautiful little church in the valley that I want to see.’

  ‘Very well. Send this to Paris,’ handing her the typewritten pages, ‘and take the rest of the day off.’

  She thanked him and went out of the room, closing the door softly behind her.

  He picked up the typewritten statement from the Bilderberg Secretariat and absent-mindedly turned it over in his hand.

  He froze.

  On the back, printed in purple letters – the sort of lettering contained in a children’s printing set – was a date.

  March 21st, 1942.

  Coldness swept up through his body to his brain.

  His legs began to give way and he sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed and lowered his head between his knees.

  The faintness passed.

  He lay back on the bed trembling.

  At 9.30 on that March morning the French Resistance had blown up a German ammunition dump fifty miles northwest of Paris. Fortuitously a posse of German officers, including two generals, had been inspecting the dump at the time and had been blown a hundred feet or more into the air during a series of explosions which were likened by the local population, both ecstatic and fearful, unto a volcano erupting.

  Immediately the area was sealed off by SS and regular Wehrmacht troops, while plain-clothes Gestapo interrogated suspects in the town and the surrounding villages.

  Pierre Brossard, aged twenty-two, son of a property developer, already known before the German invasion for his keen business instincts and his appreciation of life’s luxuries – complicated by his reluctance to spend money on them – relaxed while the Germans went about their business. He was a member of the Maquis but he assumed he was above suspicion; his father was a collaborator – like father like son.

  Pierre, slim with aloof good looks, assumed too much. Seeking a little additional charisma with the daughter of a Parisien businessman, he had hinted that he was engaged in clandestine activities against the Germans; unbeknown to him the girl was also sleeping with an SS major.

  The Gestapo called for him while he was drinking a glass of Chablis in the lounge of his father’s house, watching the rain streaming down the windows and re-living the almost orgiastic pleasure he had experienced when the explosion had occurred.

  They dragged him out of the house, bundled him into a Mercedes truck and drove him to an improvised interrogation centre in the village school.

  When the truck stopped outside the school, he could hear the screams of men being interrogated.

  His own interrogation, conducted in a class-room adorned with children’s paintings of soldiers in field-grey, didn’t last long.

  There were two Gestapo officers in the room. They both wore leather coats. One was tall and smooth-cheeked with pale, almost colourless hair; the other, his subordinate, was squat with powerful shoulders and pock marks on the back of his neck.

  The officer in charge said: ‘It would save us a lot of trouble if you collaborated with us – like your father.’ He spoke perfect Parisien French.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Come now, an ammunition dump is blown sky high and two generals with it, and you don’t know what we’re talking about?’

  ‘I heard the explosion of course,’ Pierre said. Fear knotted inside him.

  ‘You not only heard it, you helped to arrange it.’ The officer rested his elbows on the teacher’s desk and stared at Brossard. ‘You see you’ve been under surveillance for a long time. We hoped you would lead us to the ring-leaders. Unfortunately they struck first.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with it, I promise you.’ Belonging to the resistance movement had brought a new swagger to Pierre’s life; but he had never anticipated anything like this. Please God, don’t let them hurt me.

  ‘Let’s not waste any more time,’ the officer said. ‘What we want from you, my young hero, are the names of all the Resistance agents in this area.’

  ‘I don’t know them, I swear it.’

  The officer picked up a piece of chalk and snapped it between his fingers. He said to his assistant: ‘Show him, Schapper.’

  Schapper opened the door leading to another room. Pierre saw a young man with whom he had been to school lying naked on a trestle table. Blood dripped from the wounds where his fingernails had been; electrodes were attached to his genitals. He was unconscious.

  Schapper said: ‘A temporary respite. When he comes to they’ll start again.’ He shut the door.

  Pierre swayed, steadied himself against a desk.

  The officer said: ‘You want to go through all that?’

  ‘But I don’t know the names.’

  ‘Schapper, the box.’

  Schapper opened a black metal box and took out a pair of pincers. ‘Your hand please.’ His voice was thick with pleasurable anticipation.

  ‘No! Oh Christ no!’

  ‘The names!’

  ‘I don’t know them.’

  Schapper said: ‘I asked for your hand.’ He reached out and grasped Pierre’s wrist with his left hand. In his right hand the pincers, their jaws open.

  From the room next door a scream. From hell.

  Pierre felt the cold of the steel of the pincers on one finger.

  ‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. For God’s sake put those things away.’

  Reluctantly Schapper let go of his wrist.

  ‘That’s better,’ the officer leaning on the desk said. ‘Much better.’ He picked up a document and read from it. ‘Low resistance to pain. How accurate. Really, our intelligence is getting better and better. Now the names please,’ as the man on the trestle table began to scream again.

  One hour later the twenty-two men named by Pierre Brossard were herded into a barn. Two gunners opened up with 7.92 mm MG 34’s, lazily swinging the barrels of the machine-guns as the bullets tore through the wattle and plaster. Then they set fire to the barn.

  Pierre was forced to watch.

  And I didn’t even lose a fingernail, he thought later, as he sat in the classroom listening to the senior Gestapo officer.

  Would he care to act as an agent provocateur in the future? If not he could fill in the next hour or so helping to dig a mass grave for the charred bones of the executed traitors; he would then, of course, be consigned to the grave himself. Alive.

  Pierre closed his eyes and whispered: ‘You already know the answer.’

  ‘I must congratulate you on your foresight. The Third Reich does not forget those who serve it well.’

  Between March 21st, 1942, and the German surrender Pierre Brossard betrayed 113 members of the Resistance, most of whom were tortured and executed. And so expertly was his dual role concealed that he believed that, apart from one or two Nazis who had no desire to reveal their own role in such deceptions to the Allied inquisitors, no-one knew his secret.

  And continued to believe it until 1950 when Soviet Intelligence enrolled him as their banker and spymaster in West Europe. The Gestapo officer who had enrolled Brossard had been uncovered in East Berlin masquerading as a taxi-driver.

  During interrogation, when he exhibited a low resistance to pain, the former Nazi had reveal
ed the names of all the agents and double-agents under his control during the war. Among them Pierre Brossard! The Russians were astonished and delighted: fat cats were not often delivered to them in their baskets.

  Brossard, emerging as one of the principal re-builders of war-shattered Europe, was visited in his offices in Paris by two members of a Russian trade delegation, ostensibly to import Brossard technology into the Soviet Union.

  They told him that if he didn’t co-operate with the KGB then his role as traitor would be revealed ‘to the appropriate authorities’—bureaucratic phraseology slipping precisely off their lips – and he would then be tried and executed unless, of course, the families of the men he had sent to their deaths got to him first.

  There was no alternative. He had been a traitor once, why not again? But this time he would at least have style. Wealth, position and power. Brossard made it quite clear to the KGB that they would have to contribute to his coffers.

  The Russians agreed, and for the next thirty years Pierre Brossard acted as banker and spy in an espionage network at levels of power and prestige within the Western Establishment to which not even Kim Philby had aspired.

  But who had printed the date on the back of the sheet of paper? And why?

  Pierre Brossard, travelling tourist class on Swissair Flight 704 from Zurich to Paris, stared down at the green and gold French countryside and once again tried to work it out.

  All the Frenchmen who knew that he worked for the Resistance had been shot and burned on that terrible day that had changed his life. As far as he knew, any Nazis who knew about his dual role were by now dead. (The Gestapo officer who had interrogated him had long since died, broken by the Russians.)

  Which left the Russians themselves. But what could the KGB’s purpose be in resurrecting the date? A reminder, perhaps, that he was embarking on his last operation? All espionage organisations enjoyed a flourish of melodrama.

  Brossard who had regained some self-composure since the first shocked reaction in the bedroom of the health farm, decided that the Russians must be the culprits.

  He turned to Hildegard Metz. ‘Would you care for a drink?’

  ‘A beer would be nice.’

  Brossard pressed the button above him and the stewardess took the order for a beer and a coffee.

  ‘Tell me,’ Brossard said as she sipped her beer, ‘did you take a close look at the details about the Château Saint-Pierre when they arrived?’

  ‘Bilderberg? I glanced at them. Why?’

  ‘Did you notice anything on the back?’

  ‘There was a date printed there, I think.’

  ‘Do you remember what it was?’

  Hildegard Metz looked surprised. ‘No, but if you wish ….’

  ‘No, it doesn’t matter,’ said Brossard who had the sheet of paper in his briefcase.

  Mayard was waiting for them at Orly in his ’79 sage-green Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, an unwarranted expenditure in Brossard’s opinion; but, with Mayard at the wheel, it enabled him to be chauffeured in the manner expected of him.

  Mayard had been editor of the paper for nine years and he was all things that a financial journalist should be: astute, correct and uninterested in speculative ventures. He was paid a handsome salary and this Brossard did not resent paying; he never questioned the need for expenditure in business. Mayard owned a magnificent town house in Neuilly, a château on the Loire, a yacht moored in Cannes – and the Rolls.

  Ostentatious. But forgivable, Brossard conceded, if you were short, stout and somewhat lacking in presence.

  ‘Thank you for forwarding the mail,’ Brossard said as they glided through the suburbs of Paris.

  Mayard stroked his neat moustache. ‘It was nothing,’ sounding surprised at the compliment. ‘My secretary took care of it.’

  ‘Fraulein Metz replied to the Bilderberg correspondence.’ ‘Bilderberg?’ Mayard allowed the driver of a small Citroen the pleasure of overtaking a Rolls. ‘When is the next meeting?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ and when Mayard said: ‘I hope you don’t think I’ve been reading your personal mail,’ Brossard said hurriedly: ‘I have been thinking about referring to Bilderberg in my column.’

  Both Mayard and Hildegard Metz, who was sitting beside Brossard in the back of the Rolls, exclaimed in astonishment.

  Mayard said: ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. You would upset a lot of good contacts.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Brossard said in a conciliatory tone.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mayard remarked, ‘I liked your column this week. Not red meat this time. Not steak tartare. But a souffle is acceptable from time to time, eh?’ He braked gently at an intersection. ‘Where to first, Pierre – home, office or newspaper?’

  Brossard didn’t particularly want to go to any of them. He had more exhilarating activities in mind. But for the sake of convention, he said: ‘Newspaper first, then the office.’ They dropped Hildegard Metz who made her way to the offices, the hub of the Brossard empire, near the headquarters of Radio France. Brossard and Mayard entered the undistinguished post-war block off the Place d’Italie that housed the newspaper.

  Mayard’s office was for him austere, although touches of self-indulgence were visible – the hinged bookshelves ajar to reveal bottles of Chivas Regal whisky and the Beefeater gin, a silver box containing Havana cigars on the desk.

  Brossard, wearing an off-the-peg blue suit, and Mayard dressed in a grey three-piece which must have cost 4,000 francs, faced each other across the desk.

  Brossard picked up a proof of the front page. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how’s the dollar holding up?’

  Mayard jabbed downwards with his thumb. ‘The President will have to get even tougher because, believe me, the Arabs are going to. And God knows what’s going to happen in Iran …. American intelligence was very badly informed there. It was almost as if they were deliberately misinformed.’ Mayard pulled at his small moustache. ‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘what an opportunity Bilderberg presents for spreading misinformation? It is so strong and yet so vulnerable ….’

  Brossard said nothing.

  Mayard went on: ‘Gold is poised once again to hit the ceiling – if such a ceiling exists.’ Mayard unbuttoned the jacket of his suit; the tailoring of the waistcoat was consummate but, Brossard observed, it still failed to hide the bulge of Mayard’s little pot belly. ‘The trouble with the once-almighty dollar,’ Mayard said, ‘is that they printed too many of them. Multiply any commodity and you dissipate its value. What would happen if the Russians released all their diamonds?’ He smiled. ‘Tiffanys would go bust and so would de Beers. And, of course, Monsieur Kingdon.’

  ‘Which reminds me,’ Brossard said, ‘I forgot to telephone Kingdon in Switzerland.’ He had forgotten most of his business calls the day he had seen the date on the back of the Bilderberg details.

  ‘I think Monsieur Kingdon got rich a little too quick,’ Mayard remarked.

  ‘You think he’s suspect?’ Brossard, who relied on Mayard to provide much of the background to the Affluent Society, looked interested.

  ‘He’s always been suspect,’ Mayard said. ‘You know that. Now I hear rumours of a revolution within his court. Crazy speculations – with the investors’ money of course. And reports that he’s been sanction busting in Rhodesia.’

  ‘Who hasn’t,’ Brossard remarked. ‘In any case that will shortly become academic.’

  ‘Just the same he’s displaying classic symptoms of desperation in financial straits.’

  ‘But Kingdon will never starve,’ Brossard said. ‘He’s put his own money into diamonds.’

  ‘As I just said—’

  ‘The Russians will never flood the market,’ Brossard interrupted impatiently. ‘They would be cutting their own throats.’

  Mayard shrugged, took a cigar from the box. ‘Do you mind?’

  Brossard grimaced. ‘Go ahead, it’s your
office.’

  Mayard made a performance of lighting the cigar, blew out a jet of smoke and said: ‘Maybe he has got diamonds. They won’t do him much good in prison.’

  ‘As bad as that?’

  Mayard shrugged. ‘Possibly.’

  Brossard said carefully: ‘I don’t think we want to publish anything just yet.’

  ‘As you wish. In any case I haven’t got enough facts.’ ‘But I do want you to up-date our file on Kingdon.’

  ‘It shall be done.’ Mayard examined the smouldering tip of his cigar. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you were saying in the car.’

  Brossard looked puzzled.

  ‘About referring to Bilderberg in your column.’

  ‘I think you were right,’ Brossard said. ‘It would upset too many of our contacts. In any case we have touched on it in the past.’

  ‘Only a few innocuous paragraphs – like every other paper. I mean the real story. What a scoop!’ Mayard drew strongly on his cigar and a segment of ash fell onto his desk.

  Brossard leaned across the desk, flicked aside the ash and said: ‘I would never break any confidences.’

  ‘Why not? They’re like rules, meant to be broken.’

  ‘Not at Bilderberg.’ The lack of deference displayed by the tubby little editor with the postage-stamp moustache always irritated Brossard; but he couldn’t afford to lose him so he remained silent.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mayard said carefully, ‘if you leaked a story to your editor ….’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ Brossard had never considered Mayard to be naive. ‘Everyone at Bilderberg – everyone in the world, for that matter – would know the source of the information.’ Mayard said: ‘I was thinking ahead.’

  ‘How far ahead?’

  ‘To when you retire. You’re not getting any younger, Pierre. What a way to sign off – with the exclusive to end all exclusives.’

  Brossard, who intended to retire in six months time, said: ‘I’ve got a few years to go yet.’

  Mayard stared at him impassively.