Spy Out the Land

by Jeremy Duns

  ‘What intelligence did Gadlow provide about this, exactly?’

  ‘He informed us that he had been recruited into this faction when he worked in the Far East after the war.’

  ‘In Malaya,’ she said dully, fearing she knew what was coming next.

  ‘Yes. Gadlow had been in Singapore during the war, with your military intelligence. A “stay-behind” group, as they were known. But the Japanese invaded before they were ready and he was stranded in the jungle with his cell until 1945, when they were all taken out by submarine. That was when it happened, in the jungle. He was working alongside Malayan Communists against the Japanese and he became very close to them. By the time the war had come to an end he was a committed Communist, and when he returned to London he approached us, through an attaché at the embassy. Then in 1948 you will remember that the Malays turned against the British. The same guerrillas Gadlow had trained and befriended in the war had now become the enemy. After your High Commissioner was assassinated, he and several other British operatives were sent back into the jungle to fight them, now helped by . . . the Senoi Praaq.’

  He said the last words as though he were pulling a rabbit from a hat. She looked at him, perplexed.

  ‘Safe Conduct,’ he prompted her with a smile. ‘Harmigan’s memoir. You’ve read it, I presume.’

  She felt her neck muscles tensing. ‘Yes, a few years ago. What of it?’

  ‘Perhaps you remember that the last chapter but one is about his work alongside the Senoi Praaq.’

  She looked at him blankly. Proshin straightened his shoulders as he took this in.

  ‘I see. It was published with a lot of restrictions, of course, but for us it has been an extremely valuable text for many years. The Senoi Praaq were an anti-Communist resistance army made up of native Malay tribesmen. The British had to remain in camps in the jungle because of their conspicuous appearance, while the Senoi Praaq went into the villages to buy food and supplies and to gather intelligence.’

  Rachel nodded. It rang a vague bell. She felt something give way in her stomach, and a sense of shame and anger at herself for having missed part of the puzzle. Details of Sandy’s secret life had been hidden in plain sight all this time and she hadn’t even considered it. It’s hardly a secret . . . It’s been public knowledge since that book was published in 1961. Of course the Soviets would have pored over every word of his memoir! Had she not looked more closely for fear of what she might find? If only she’d taken the blasted thing when she’d had the chance, instead of returning it to the bookshelf. She wondered for a moment if there might be a copy somewhere in the safe house, but decided she didn’t have time to search for it.

  She turned back to Proshin. ‘How well do you remember that book?’

  He scratched at an eyebrow. ‘Very well, I would say. In our directorate, all new officers are examined on its contents within their first six months, and I often write the questions for this test. We provide them with a specially prepared Russian version, but I have read it in English several times.’

  ‘There’s a photograph in it. It shows Harmigan and a couple of other men in some sort of training establishment in Malaya. One man is Gadlow, the other is an Asian, I suppose one of these Senoi . . .’

  ‘Praaq.’

  ‘Yes. Do you know who that man is?’

  Proshin shook his head, but Rachel realised the moment the words had left her lips that she had answered her own question.

  The waiter.

  Of course, the bloody waiter from the party in Kuala Lumpur, walking past her on the grass like butter wouldn’t melt. He was the man in the photograph with Sandy. She thought of the photograph again, and recalibrated. No, the waiter was too young, but the resemblance was too close. He must be related to the man in the photograph in some way. Had Gadlow recognised him, perhaps, the man who had come to deliver his death? Or perhaps in the darkness, in a very different environment years later, and in his own desperation to escape, he hadn’t.

  ‘What do the Senoi Praaq have to do with fascists? What’s the connection?’

  ‘Not the Senoi Praaq, but the British who trained them. Gadlow was among them, but most were of course extreme anti-Communists. This was a difficult time for him, especially as we lost contact for several months. But soon he discovered that there was a secret group within the British force. He gradually earned their trust, and they invited him to join. Over the years, the group expanded and became more influential.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The members assist each other in their careers, like the Freemasons, or Etonians or other groups. This was how Gadlow was appointed Head of Station, for example. But the main purpose is to protect their own fascistic interests.’

  She sighed. ‘And you actually believe this?’

  Proshin nodded. ‘Yes, I do. Four agents told us about it, and I have reviewed all the intelligence. First, Philby, who I admit may have been joking, as you suggest. But sometimes the truth is revealed in jest. Then Gadlow, as I have just explained. Then our agent Pritchard, who managed to infiltrate the group in the early sixties. Then Paul Dark, who found evidence that some of the most senior members of your service were working in this way, alongside similar groups in other countries. Finally, Gadlow’s own fate sealed it.’

  ‘Gadlow’s fate?’

  ‘Yes. He felt that his knowledge of this faction would protect him. He called it his insurance policy. “If they ever come for me, Sasha, I have my insurance.” This is what he used to say to me.’

  Rachel looked at him with horror, as the impression of Gadlow, even with the tinge of a Russian accent, was striking. He had to at least have met the man.

  ‘He often spoke of it,’ Proshin went on. ‘He was convinced that if he were ever exposed as working for us, his information about this group’s members and activities would be a very strong bargaining tool.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Now Gadlow’s insurance policy has become mine. He never received the opportunity to test it, of course, because someone made sure that he was killed before he returned to London to tell anyone.’

  She stood again, partly so he couldn’t see the expression on her face, and circled around the chair, tempering her breathing as she thought through what he was saying. She turned back to face him, leaning over the chair.

  ‘How do you know I’m not part of this faction?’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But I am taking an educated guess.’ He reached into his jacket and she froze for a moment, trying to remember how thoroughly she’d frisked him and wondering if she could have missed a gun or some other weapon. But instead he brought out what looked to be a cigarette, which he passed to her.

  As she took it, she realised it was a piece of paper that had been rolled tightly into a narrow tube and secured with a strip of tape. She tore off the tape and it uncoiled, nearly leaping from her fingers. It was two pieces of paper, in fact. The first was a copy of a message typed in Russian, the second was in English. She read the latter:

  ‘THE SPEAR’, AS IT IS KNOWN TO ITS MEMBERS, IS A GROUP OF WELL-CONNECTED FIGURES IN THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT WITH FAR-RIGHT SYMPATHIES. AMONG THEM ARE POLITICIANS, JOURNALISTS AND INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS. MOST MEMBERS HAVE LIVED IN THE COLONIES, MAINLY AFRICA AND THE FAR EAST, AND HAVE WORKED IN INTELLIGENCE OR SPECIAL FORCES. AS PREVIOUSLY DISCUSSED, I WAS INVITED TO JOIN IN MARCH 1954 WHILE IN MALAYA, AND I ACCEPTED WITH YOUR APPROVAL.

  THE LEADER OF THE GROUP IS DAVID MEREDITH, WHO IS ALSO ITS MAIN FINANCIER THROUGH HIS AFRICAN MINING CONCERNS. HE IS ASSISTED BY HIS WIFE, WHO IS AS FANATICAL AS THE REST OF THEM. THESE ARE ALL THE CURRENT MEMBERS THAT I KNOW OF.

  A list of around thirty names followed. Rachel barely took them in, her eyes swimming. She looked up at Proshin.

  ‘When did Gadlow give you this?’

  ‘He passed it to his case officer in Bangkok in February 1958, through a dead drop. The original message was of course encrypted using a one-time pad. This is the decrypt and the Russian translation of it, both copied down by me direct
ly from his file, which I had access to when I was running him from the GRU station in Kuala Lumpur in late 1969.’

  ‘But you could simply have fabricated this,’ she said. ‘Typed it out at your desk in Moscow.’

  Proshin unclasped his hands. ‘That is true, of course. But I have not. Listen to what I have said, read what is written, and judge for yourself. It is genuine.’

  She looked down at the note again, taking the names in one by one. In the intervening years, several had become Service old hands, one of them even briefly serving as Chief. He and a couple of the others were now dead. She recognised one name as that of a journalist at the Daily Telegraph, another from The Times. Three were backbench Conservative politicians who she knew held hard-right views. But could Moscow know that, too? Easily enough, surely. And if so, they could use it. The Soviets were avid propagators of precisely this sort of disinformation, and Proshin could be part of an operation to discredit all these people, either wittingly or unwittingly.

  But she didn’t think so, in her bones. Something deep within her told her it was just as he said, and that one night in 1958 Tom Gadlow had written this down and placed it in a dead drop in Bangkok. It was partly because she knew of previous groups along these lines. In the thirties, there had been The Nordic League and The White Knights of Britain and Mosley’s ‘dining society’, The January Club. Groups with a similar bent had appeared sporadically since the war, most recently fuelled by fears that the Labour Party was penetrated by Communist agents and would lead Britain into anarchy. Rachel was only an occasional visitor to the notoriously macho basement bar of Century House, but even so it had been impossible to miss in the last few years that many of the older officers had very right-wing views, and on several occasions she’d sat through whisky-fumed rants bemoaning the loss of the colonies or advocating the need for a military reserve in the event of society breaking down.

  So the existence of such a group wasn’t implausible. Proshin’s claim that it controlled the Service had seemed absurd to her, but even that now didn’t seem as unlikely as it had done a few minutes earlier. This was because one name on Gadlow’s list appeared to her eyes to be written in bolder ink than the others: Sandy Harmigan. As Chief of the Service he was an obvious candidate for such a smear, but could he be a fascist? He was right wing, of course, a Conservative through and through, but nothing more sinister than that as far as she knew. And yet it made sense. Snatches of conversation over the years came back to her, the way he had rolled his eyes at certain remarks, or let others pass . . .

  And then there was Celia’s inclusion. David Meredith had been her first husband, and she had inherited his mining fortune after his death in a car crash. Rachel had a sudden vision of Celia standing at the door of the house in Mayfair, the slash of red at her mouth and the silver necklace flashing around her throat. At the time, the tip of the pendant she had worn had reminded her of the nib of a pen, but it had been thicker than that. The front section of her scalp tingled as she realised that it much more closely resembled the head of a spear.

  It was an Auntie Hannah moment, but she took no pleasure from it. And it immediately raised new questions in her mind. Was the pendant a talisman of some sort, perhaps a private signal used to identify her to other members of the group? Or a brandishing of status? Perhaps Celia had taken over her husband’s role as leader of the group. If so, that might be why she had been present at the meeting with Harry Bradley. She hadn’t been acting as Sandy’s aide or errand girl – she ran the whole bloody show. And perhaps her former husband’s financial interests in Africa still needed protecting.

  The thought reminded her of something else in the message and she glanced back up at Proshin. ‘What do they need financing for? What are they spending it on?’

  ‘Operations. Unofficial ones that serve their political purposes, and which they execute through deniable partners. They have framed us or our allies for several terrorist atrocities in Western Europe, for example. A few years ago, they tried to make it appear that Paul Dark wanted to kill your prime minister. Perhaps you know of this already.’

  She nodded dully. That supposed assassination attempt in Nigeria. She guessed that Sandy had held back the information on that from her for the same reason he had held it from Wilson: any mention of it in its immediate aftermath would have led to it being thoroughly investigated, with potentially dire consequences for the conspirators. But six years later, it was a fair bet that while Wilson would be momentarily furious to learn he had been in danger, his anger wouldn’t burn intensely enough to set up an inquiry into such ancient history, especially with the culprit apparently a traitor on the run. Presumably, the file Sandy had given Wilson to read had been doctored to blame it on Dark.

  She closed her eyes, blocking out the room and Proshin and urging herself to think of an alternative explanation. Start again, she thought. Let’s say it’s true, all of it. Does it hold together? Gadlow joined this group as a Soviet agent, and planned to cash in his ‘insurance policy’ if exposed. That held, she thought. Facing a life sentence for treason, it was plausible he would have tried to bargain by dropping the bombshell that a far-right faction was working in the upper reaches of the Service, and that Sandy was its leader. But how would Sandy have reacted? The moment she had shown him the documents proving Gadlow was a Soviet agent, he would have realised the problem. She tried to imagine what his thought processes must have been. First, horror that his group had been penetrated in this way, which meant that Moscow knew all about it. But that must have paled into insignificance at the thought of what could happen if Gadlow managed to tell anyone important about it. Anyone not in the group, that was.

  On the other hand, she thought, why would he panic? If Gadlow made this claim, he could simply deny it. Why should anyone believe a Sov agent about such a thing? But Sandy knew that Gadlow would be convincing. He had been in Malaya with him and several of the others, some of whom would be shown to have far-right links if investigated. Gadlow would also presumably have been able to give details of their meetings and plans. So Sandy would have soon realised that he had no choice: he had to make sure that Gadlow never spoke of it to anyone in the upper ranks of the Service. That he never reached London at all. But he also had to stay at one remove from it. If he had flown out to Kuala Lumpur to fetch Gadlow and the man had died within hours of his arrival, suspicion would fall on him – as indeed it had on her. She had been cleared of any involvement partly because she was young and inexperienced, with no links to Gadlow and no motive for wanting him dead, but also because Sandy had argued that case for her.

  She steadied herself against the table. He had sent her out there to take the fall. It wasn’t the Russians who had arranged for the waiter to kill Gadlow – it was Sandy. It took her a few seconds to order it in her mind, but she had no doubt she was right. Her feminine intuition, she thought bitterly.

  Proshin was peering at her. She knew she should be believing Sandy more than this strange Russian she had never even met before tonight, but try as she might she couldn’t. The scales had fallen, and she tried to absorb her dismay. As well as the personal betrayal, she realised she had been seduced by a false image. Sandy had seemed grand and irreproachable to her, an ideal figure, a statue. She had foolishly confused him with the noble version of him played by Dirk Bogarde – the famous scene in the film in which he stalked the streets of Saint-Nazaire with his pistol at his side, his eyes glinting in the darkness, like a modern Knight of the Round Table. She’d fallen for the idea of him as a leader and a man of integrity simply because he was in that position, because he looked the part and, she supposed, because she had wanted such a figure to look up to.

  But he wasn’t a knight. Nothing like. He was just a shabby little fascist playing games with people’s lives. And he had lied to her, all down the line.

  Proshin was right. She had to take the necessary steps, and she had to take them now. She turned to him, her jaw set.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said, and w
alked to the door. She took the passage to the back of the flat and pushed open the door to the bedroom. Manning was asleep beneath a pink duvet cover, snoring. She turned the light on and walked over to him. He rubbed his eyes and stared at her.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re right about the Service,’ she said. ‘It’s corrupt to its core. I need you to help me fix it.’

  Chapter 60

  Without warning, a sea eagle plummeted from its perch three hundred feet above the Zambezi River to snatch a fish in its talons, its strange laughing cry echoing across the still air as it swooped back up with its prize. It was just before sunrise at Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘The Smoke That Thunders’ – Victoria Falls – and the greatest spectacle in Africa was rapidly revealing itself, the spray from the waterfall pluming into the air in a constant cloud.

  On the 650-foot-long steel bridge spanning the second gorge, a South African Railways diesel engine inched five carriages towards the white line painted across the midpoint of the tracks. The central carriage of the five, Car 49, had an ivory and gold exterior. It had been built and fitted in England, and apart from a few small repairs looked the same as it had done in 1947, when it had been part of the ‘White Train’ used by the British royal family on their visit to South Africa. Inside, it was air-conditioned, with beige carpets and walnut and chestnut panelling. A long polished stinkwood table had been set with carafes of water and vases of fresh flowers placed at both ends of the carriage. Lunch would be crayfish, specially imported for the occasion.

  On the veranda of his suite at the Elephant Hills Hotel just above the Falls, Ian Smith sat in his dressing gown and looked out at the view, his heart rising with the beauty of it. He glanced down at the golf course directly below his room and smiled as a warthog emerged from the undergrowth to run across one of the Gary Player-designed fairways.