Then we were at a junction with a larger road, brightly lit. Without dropping his speed, R spun to our left. I looked behind again. There was nothing but a pair of red tail-lights disappearing rapidly in the opposite direction. R drove back to the hotel in silence, his hand squeezing mine. Nobody followed. It was only when we’d let ourselves in, and he had poured us both large brandies that he carried up to our room, that he spoke. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, and when I nodded, he sat down. ‘We had better talk,’ he said. I agreed, glancing at the door which led directly outside.
‘No need to worry now. That little performance was designed to shake us,’ he said, getting up in any case to check the door was locked. ‘It was also a message. We need to take extra care. Tanner’s told you that Boris is back on the loose?’ I looked up, surprised. I didn’t know that R and Bill had been in contact. He guessed what I was thinking. ‘We’ve spoken on a couple of occasions, about business. Well, mostly as it concerns you and our friend Boris. Your outfit and mine have, together, been keeping tabs on him. It’s not been easy, as he’s kept a low profile since returning to Moscow, mostly burrowed away in the depths of the Lubyanka.5
‘Last week, we received transcripts of more conversations recorded by GCHQ between the Soviet Embassy and Moscow KGB. This, in itself, was not unusual. We monitor their signals and they know we do. They send their private stuff by scrambler and whatever new means they have come up with – but leave a certain amount for us to “intercept”, so that we don’t search too hard for the rest. We know this and, since it is, at least partly, designed for our consumption, most of the traffic is fairly worthless. However, it is routinely translated and analysed. Last week’s exchange included details of your and my identities and locations. The recipient was designated “Colonel Boris”.’
I frowned.
‘Yes, I think we can safely take that as a warning. It looks as if Boris wants to scare us. He was humiliated by what happened here last year: getting shot and then failing to kill me was a disgrace. Having to be rescued from British detention puts him very much in his organisation’s debt. In normal circumstances, he would’ve been sent to a punishment camp, at best. I don’t know how he’s managed to escape that, but I would hazard a guess that he’s been given a last chance to rehabilitate his career, and that this chance somehow involves you and me.’
I felt the beginnings of a chill climbing up my back. ‘What must we do?’ I asked.
‘That’s what I was talking to Tanner about. We believe that on a day-to-day level you have little to fear. As long as you follow your usual routine and don’t impinge on his business, you should be left alone.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t leave him be. Boris is obviously a weak link. He was operating here as an illegal;6 but he took matters into his own hands. Now he’s gone back on some sort of probation, I imagine. To be honest, this isn’t the first time I’ve been harried like that. Remember the hospital? We now think that was an attempt, if not to kill me, then to put the frighteners on. I’m followed most of the time I’m in this country, and frankly I’m not prepared to take it any more. We won’t be able to relax fully until he’s somehow been put out of operation.’
‘But do you have to …’
He cut in before I had a chance to finish my question. ‘Yes, Jane. It has to be me. I can’t let it go. Just think,’ he looked into my eyes – ‘once it’s over, it will be truly over. No more looking over our shoulders. We’ll be able to see each other more freely.’
‘Do you mean …’
He stopped me again. ‘I’m afraid that, together, we’re too much of a target. My identity was compromised last year. You’re not perceived to be any kind of threat, which is why you shouldn’t be unduly perturbed, but if you’re seen with me, that puts you at increased risk. I’m afraid I’m going to have to go away again for a while. I hope it won’t be for long.’
He reached forward to take me in his arms. I didn’t ask where he was going, but I suspect he’ll be heading towards the morning sun, rather than away from it.
I have a dreadful premonition that this is going to end horribly.
Monday, 23rd September
I collared Bill at Franco’s this morning. We sat at our usual little table at the back. ‘I suppose you’ve talked to Hamilton?’ he said. ‘I thought it would be better if it came from him. We’ll be keeping an eye on your place, but I think – and M agrees – that you’re not in imminent danger. You proved you weren’t a soft target last year and, since you’re not a threat, they shouldn’t come after you. The possible side-effects of being seen to threaten a member of the administrative staff …’
I cut in: ‘You mean a woman?’
‘Yes, that too … are hugely embarrassing. Even Redland will not stoop to that.’
‘This Boris: is he a serious danger?’ I asked.
‘We’ve got Moscow station working on his true identity. He’s obviously got powerful protection within the KGB.’
His words failed to comfort me. I feel suddenly terribly vulnerable.
I wish R wasn’t going.
Tuesday, 24th September
Eleanor telephoned me last night and sounded in such a state that I offered to leave work early to be with her. We arranged to meet at The Fountain in Fortnum’s at five. I couldn’t help but glance around me as I went, but I saw no obvious sign of a tail. She arrived clutching large Harrods bags. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glittering. When she kissed me hello, I caught the unmistakable whiff of brandy. She sat down and immediately lit a cigarette. ‘I’ve been shopping,’ she said. ‘Winter’s coming and I need a new coat. I had no use for one in Beirut, though, when the storms came, it could pour with rain for days. Look!’ She pulled a handsome camel-hair coat out of her bag, put it on and twirled around. The restaurant was full of ladies taking tea and they all turned to look. ‘I also got this hat, some boots, some gloves and sweaters …’ They all came tumbling out. I thought – though I couldn’t be sure – that along with her fur-lined gloves, I saw a larger men’s pair.
For the next hour, she talked and smoked. She was clearly in an excited state. If she didn’t have a cigarette in her hand, she fiddled with the sugar, or stirred her tea. Only once did she stop twitching. She looked at me and then said, ‘I’m going, Jane. Don’t tell them, I beg you. I just needed to tell someone. I’m going to join Kim in Moscow. I know Alexander has warned me against it, but I must be with him. I don’t want it to be in Moscow any more than you do, but he needs me. I will do what Alexander asks, however: if your outfit is serious about the immunity offer, then I’ll do everything in my power to persuade him to come back to London.’
I reacted instinctively. I gave her a huge hug and wished her luck. I told her that if she needed serious help, she could write to me care of Helena and include the sentence ‘I hope your sister is well.’ It was the first thing I could think of, in the circumstances. She repeated the phrase and nodded. ‘Please promise that you won’t tell your Chief until tomorrow morning. Please, Jane.’ I saw the desperation in her eyes, and gave her my word. When it was time to leave, she hugged me hard and thanked me over and over.
‘We’ll see each other again real soon. Promise?’ she asked. I nodded. ‘I hope so,’ I told her. ‘Go safely.’ When we parted, both of us had tears in our eyes.
Thursday, 26th September
Eleanor has gone. I lay awake most of the night, torn apart by conflicting loyalties, questioning whether I should break my promise and alert the Office about her impending departure. Then I thought of her happy shining face and I couldn’t. I even considered not admitting to M that she’d warned me – out of fear of his displeasure. In the end, however, I went in at my usual time and told him as soon as he got in. To my surprise and relief, he seemed fairly sanguine about it. Instead of the slap on the wrist that I’d expected, he praised me for proposing a channel of communication. ‘We’ll make an agent out of you someday, Miss Moneypenny. I haven�
��t forgotten our conversation last year. I’ll get Chief of Staff to look into some training courses. Let’s give your Mrs Philby until lunchtime and then please alert CME to check on whether she’s gone. I expect that we’ll hear from her before the year is out.’
I walked out of his office in a slight daze. It was as if M had expected her to go – the grand master always a few steps ahead of the game. I am truly pleased for Eleanor, if a little apprehensive. If she hadn’t joined Kim, she would have lived with regret for the rest of her life. Right now, he is her centre, her reason to be. I hope Moscow isn’t too much of a shock for her. I hope he doesn’t let her down.
October
My aunt may have confided most things to her diary, but she was circumspect when it came to describing her personal relationships. There are references to men dotted through the volumes, and she undoubtedly had relationships with some of them. But she was never one to parade her intimacies. She kept her work, her private life and her family life strictly compartmentalised. In my memory, she never brought a boyfriend to stay with us in Cambridge. I asked her once why she had never married. She just shrugged and, with a smile, said that there had never been a right person at the right time. As far as I know, Bill Tanner was the only work friend she ever introduced to my mother.
My mother liked Tanner, and I overheard her once speculating to my father about the nature of his relationship with my aunt. But, if she pressed her sister for details, we never heard the response.
The romantic content of Miss Moneypenny’s entanglement with James Bond has been more widely debated. Certainly they were close friends, and undoubtedly there was an element of mutual attraction. The first time she saw him, in the lift shortly after joining SIS in 1953, she described him as ‘coldly, darkly handsome, with a hint of reserve that makes one want to discover more’. But, from reading her diaries closely, I believe their relationship was more complex.
Aunt Jane was seemingly the one woman who did not melt in a pool of desire at Bond’s feet. Their flirtation, at first anyway, was conducted within the safe confines of the Office. He would stop by her desk on his way into and out of M’s office, always armed with a witticism or a seductive barb, which she would bat back with equal verbal dexterity. It was when he was in hospital, fighting for his life following his poisoning in a Paris hotel room by the Russian KGB queen Rosa Klebb, after escaping from Istanbul on the Orient Express, that their relationship changed gear. Jane was at his bedside every evening, initially sitting quietly, holding his hand, and then, when he began to regain consciousness, reading to him for hours on end. Although he favoured adventure yarns, she couldn’t help but choose books that he would never have picked. She read him Middlemarch, and to his surprise he enjoyed it. There was something soothing and comforting in its essential Englishness.
When he recovered sufficiently to move back home, they continued to see each other outside the Office for a while: quiet dinners at Bond’s King’s Road home or at her flat in Ennismore Gardens, maybe a film or a walk in the park on the weekends. There was little in the way of flirtation then – even he was still too weak for that – and once he was back to fighting fitness he was sent on his next assignment, to Jamaica and Honeychile Rider. When he returned, he was his old self again: the extra closeness conferred by his weakness had faded.
Jane accepted this. Bond was not the kind of man she wanted to share her life with – as she once wrote, ‘He is about as cerebral as a football.’ His pleasures were more sensual: he liked fine wine, food, fast cars and beautiful women, the thrills of speed and danger. And yet, as she confided to her diary, she couldn’t help but feel flattered by his regard. He was by no means exclusive in his attentions – his secretaries were always in love with him, and he did little to dissuade them – but it still felt as if he and my aunt had a special bond. She knew he felt he could trust her and talk to her; he did so at length after his wife, Tracy, died on their wedding day. Jane was the only person that he confided in then. Perhaps, she thought, it was because they were both orphans. Or did he see her as some kind of mother figure? She was a decade younger than him, yet he brought out her nurturing instincts, as well as setting her senses tingling. Or was it her proximity to M, the man she knew he revered and respected above all others?
Bond exasperated her too. She loathed his view of women as the ‘weaker race’; he saw them as adornments, partners only in the bedroom. But, at the same time that excited her. She couldn’t help but feel a thrill in his presence. The men she tended to go out with respected her originality and independence in a way that Bond would never dream of doing.
She found ‘R’ instantly appealing in a completely different way. They had met in Barcelona in October 1961. She had gone for a week’s holiday on her own, armed with guidebooks, novels and a comfortable pair of shoes. She was looking around the building site of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia when the rain started. She ran under a parapet, which chose that moment to flood, sending water gushing on to her head. A man rushed up with an umbrella and ran with her to a nearby café, where he insisted on buying her a cup of hot chocolate. Tall and wiry, with thick dark hair and blue eyes framed by spectacles, he turned out to be English. He introduced himself as Richard Hamilton, and told her he was an architect.
Their conversation, as often happens with countrymen drawn together in a strange place, moved rapidly from the general to the personal. He invited her to dinner, and she accepted. That evening, in a small fish restaurant in the medieval quarter, he told her that he had been married once, but that his wife had run off with his best friend soon afterwards. Now thirty-five, he had spent five years mostly alone, working hard, frequently abroad. After dinner, they went to a bar for late-night whiskies, and when he walked her back to her hotel he kissed her goodnight. ‘It felt like the most natural thing in the world,’ she related to her diary. ‘I knew then that this was going to be no passing flirtation.’ They spent the next five days together, acting like a young couple in love, picnicking in the park, taking long midnight walks along the beach, eating late in small restaurants in the artists’ quarter.
When he left, the day before her, she found herself missing him, but enjoying the solitude. It had been years since she had spent that much time intensely with another person. ‘I don’t want to think about how this relationship will unfold,’ she wrote. ‘I wish, for once, it could be straightforward; I wish I could tell him everything.’ But she didn’t, and for a while it didn’t seem to matter. R appeared to be as independent and unquestioning as she was, as bound up in and consumed by his work.
They started seeing each other on a regular basis – maybe one night in the week, and most weekends. They went cycling together. He stayed at her flat near the Albert Hall, and she stayed at his in Marylebone. They spent a long winter weekend together in Norfolk, walking the beaches, reading in front of log fires. She felt, so she wrote, ‘remarkably happy and at ease with him’.
But then, in early 1962, he started talking about the future and asking questions about her work. Despite her deep affection for him and her secret internal debates about whether she could give up her work for him, she froze. The walls started building themselves around her, and she could do nothing to stop them. Her secret work for the Office drove a wedge between them until it had cleaved them apart. He took a job abroad. She missed him.
By returning when he did, in December 1962, when she was being held captive in her own bedroom by Boris, he probably saved her life. In revealing that he worked for the Security Service and knew what it was that she did, he opened another door of possibility on to the relationship. I cannot believe it is a coincidence that, when she left the service, she went to live on North Uist, the small Hebridean island he had introduced her to. Certainly, after their visit there together and their weekend in Dorset, she appeared to be once more considering a future with him.
Sunday, 6th October
Dinner with James last night. He was released from The Park a week ago. Bill went out there to pic
k him up. M has decreed that he is not, at present anyway, permitted to return to the Office – said it would be bad for morale. What happened with M was meant to be hushed up, but inevitably it leaked out somehow. The Powder Vine had it the very next day, though they were shaky on details and not best pleased when I refused to illuminate them.
Instead, James has been put on an intensive programme of physical rehabilitation. He spent this week down at the Fort, being assessed by the instructors. Nobody knew to what extent he had forgotten basic trade-craft, but according to Bill, who spoke to the boss on Friday afternoon, the skills are still there, though he’s out of practice and still physically weak. The good news is that he hasn’t suffered any permanent brain damage from the drugs.
It looks as if the angel-faced Missy Kissy Suzuki is in trouble. The evidence suggests that she used some sort of memory-depletion drug on him and, contrary to first suspicions, it wasn’t supplied by the Japanese. Our American office has been digging and yesterday sent us an interesting snippet: when Kissy was in Hollywood seven years ago, acting in a film about a Japanese pearl diver, she came into close contact with an acrobat who has subsequently been exposed as a Russian agent. Did he recruit her? Was it pure chance that 007 landed on her island? Or was there a longer game, involving an alliance between Tanaka of the Japanese Secret Service and the KGB? The analysts are going to have a fine time unpicking this one.
Whatever the machinations, James was clearly caught up in a horrible situation, from which he was lucky to escape. He went through hell on earth at Blofeld’s lair and afterwards (despite the succour offered by Kissy) and is obviously now racked with guilt over what he did – or attempted to do – on his return. I’m just delighted that he’s alive and on his way to full recovery.
Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant Page 8
