The Ipcress File

by Len Deighton

  They sat inside the big plexiglass dome of the SE-3130 Alouette 2 like goldfish expecting food. Simon Painter sat on one side of the azoic Raven on the folding seats in the rear. Dalby sat in the front left side observer’s seat as he received the final few words of Adem’s short lecture on the use of the Decca navigation equipment. Adem’s face was more serious now as he fingered the joysticklike cyclic pitch control, and worried about how to bring this Alouette down on the temporary landing platform that wouldn’t be much bigger than the forward gun turret upon which it was being erected at that minute. On the bodywork I could read the notices: ‘Danger Rotors’ and a serial number, and inside the cabin a small plastic panel and engraved upon it the procedure in case of fire. The words shuddered as the motor started. Like a back-fire in Trafalgar Square it was followed by the sound of a thousand wings beating the air, clattering across the valley and echoing back to us again. The 400-horse-power Turbomeca power unit was alive, and above my head the thirty-foot rotor-blades shaved the face of the night. The controls reflected little pimples of yellow light into Adem’s spectacles, and our distinguished visitor waved a limp hand airily towards us in kingly fashion. ‘Farewell troublesome Raven,’ I thought.

  Adem’s left hand pulled the collective lever, twisting the throttle gently as he did so. The limp blades were flung horizontal by the centrifugal surge of the motor, and the rev counter moved slowly around the dial. The big rotors twisted in response to Adem’s movement of the ‘collective’, and hammered the heavy evening air down upon our ears. Like a clumsy Billy Bunter the machine heaved itself hand over hand into the sky. A touch of rudder had the tail rotor slip it sideways, and, silhouetted against the five-o’clock-shadowed chin of twilight, they hedge-hopped in 100 mph gallops towards the sea. Adem the horseman took the cedar tree jumps in fine form.

  Walking back towards the house, I decided to try DITHYRAMBE with a final E. This would make ten down EAT, not SAT or OAT. I really was getting it now.

  * * *

  *See Appendix: Indian Hemp, p. 328.

  Chapter 8

  [Aquarius (Jan 20-Feb 19) Keep an open mind. You will get to know an old friend better. Avoid business gatherings and concentrate on financial affairs. Above all don’t make impulsive decisions.]

  April is a hell of a month to be in London, and on the Tuesday I had to go to Sheffield to see some of our people there. It was a long meeting and little was settled about the co-relation of filing systems, but they would let us use their staff on our phone and cable lines. Thursday I was busy working back over a back-log of new information on the Jay operation, when Dalby came in. I hadn’t seen him since his helicopter trip. He was tanned and handsome looking, and was wearing the dark grey suit, white shirt and St Paul’s tie that was part of his equipment for dealing with Defence Ministers’ private secretaries. He asked me how things were. It was strictly rhetorical stuff, but I told him that I was still two months behind with pay and three with allowances, that I still hadn’t settled the business of dating my new substantive rank and a claim for £35 in overseas special pay is overdue by ten and a half months.

  ‘OK,’ said Dalby. ‘In lieu of all you claim I’ll take you for lunch.’

  Dalby didn’t fool around with expenses; we went into Wiltons and settled for the best of everything. The iced Israeli melon was sweet, tender and cold like the blonde waitress. Corrugated iron manufacturers and chinless advertising men shared the joys of our expense-account society with zombielike debs with Eton-tied uncles. It was a nice change from the sandwich bar in Charlotte Street, where I played a sort of rugby scrum each lunchtime with only two PhD’s, three physicists and a medical research specialist for company, standing up to toasted bacon sandwich and a cup of stuff that resembles coffee in no aspect but price.

  Over the lobster Dalby asked me how things were going in the work on Jay. I told him that it was going just great and I hope someone will tell me what I’m doing some day. I wouldn’t have remembered Thursday at all, apart from the fine lobster salad and carefully-made mayonnaise, if it hadn’t been for what Dalby then said. He poured me a little more champagne and crunching it back into the ice bucket, said, ‘You’re working with the same information that I am. Unless I’m wrong we are moving in from opposite ends to the same conclusion.’ Then he changed the subject.

  However, my complaint about working in the dark must have had some effect, for on Friday they started to tell me things.

  That Friday morning my post brought me an electricity bill for over £12, and a snotty printed form that said it is understood that the abovenamed article of War Department property has been retained by you contrary to section something or other of the Army Act. It should be returned to officer i.c. special issue room—War Office, London. The word ‘returned’ was crossed through and ‘delivered personally’ written instead; across the top there was scrawled ‘officer’s sidearm Colt .45 pistol’. The message ended, ‘You will be informed in due course whether further action will be taken.’ I carefully posted that into the garbage bin under the sink and poured a strong clear bowl of Blue Mountain coffee. I stood there on that cold April morning, hot coffee-bowl cupped between my hands, and gazed blankly out across the chimneys, crippled and hump-backed, the shiny sloping roofs, backyards of burgeoning trees and flowering sheets and shirts. I weighed the desirability of pulling the still-warm bedding over my still-unawakened body. Reluctantly I turned on the shower.

  About eleven A.M. Alice entered my office with a rose-decorated cracked cup of Nescafé, a basilisk look and a new green-laced file. She gave me all three, picked up the fountain pen I had borrowed the week before, and marched out. I put aside the paper-clip chain I was working on, and started flipping through the file. It had the usual employment bureau rubber stamp and 14143/6/C written in large flomaster lettering. Typewritten on lightgreen paper, it was yet another file on the man we called Jay. I had never seen a green file before but it had a much higher security clearance than the ordinary white ones. I read of his university progress and his training in Jungian psychology (discontinued after two years) and his unsuccessful excursion into the timber business. It had the usual outline of Jay’s career up to June 1942, then instead of the gap in the story I read of Jay, then Christian Stakowski, being recruited into Polish Army Intelligence based in London. He made two very hazardous trips into southern Poland, the second time his air pick-up failing to contact. His next emergence from the unknown was when he appeared in Cairo reporting back to the Polish Army, who gave him the VM,* in December ’42. He was sent back to England and did the eightmonth course at the place they had in Horsham. By this time the chain of cells he worked with in Poland had been decimated and a photostat in the file shows that Polish Army counter-intelligence had the possibility that he had done a deal with the Germans added to his papers. Another letter dated May ’43 points this possibility up by showing that the arrests along his chain were all by the same department of German Investigation.

  The Polish Underground had many different political origins—Jay, finding himself a member of the National Armed Forces (a Right-wing extremist group), probably did a deal with the German Abwehr. In so doing he was regarded as a hero by the Communist-dominated AL (or people’s army) for reducing fascist power. A massive treble-cross!

  There is a gap then, and next in September ’45, Stakowski, now with the papers of a Polish sergeant WOWC is filtered back into Poland among soldiers released from German POW camps. In Warsaw he obtains a lowly secretarial job with the new Communist Government, and reports back to an Intelligence outfit financed by the Board of Trade of all people! His reports concern industrial espionage especially the movement of German reparation production into Russia. In 1947 his reporting languishes and a note says that he was probably working for the US Central Intelligence Agency, who recruited a lot of agents in Europe at that time on the ‘8 year system’, an offer whereby agents after eight years in the field would be paid a small pension, shipped to the US and settle down to listen
to the grass grow. It was received enthusiastically in the US-oriented Europe of ’47, although there is no record from 1955 onwards of any pay-offs. In 1950, WOWC, with little or no promotion in his Government job, tenth secretary in a timber bureau, on the pretext of being under suspicion flees to England on a passport that his job enabled him to wangle. In England he sinks as happily into the Right-wing Polish community as he had into the Communist Government.

  The file ends with about twenty intercepted US Embassy phone calls to him concerned mostly with the activities of London merchant banks. The Embassy are especially interested in the finances of the Common Market. I sipped my coffee and came to the most interesting part of all. The last item is on notepaper with a discreet coat of arms. It is headed Combined Services Information Clearing House C-SICH, through which all information available in Great Britain is shared to appropriate branches. The many large commercial concerns, which have industrial espionage teams spying on competitors, must submit monthly reports to C-SICH. It is one of these that is quoted as saying that WOWC or Jay is positively not in receipt of regular sums of money from the Russian Government. His income is ‘very large but from diverse sources and irregular amounts’. Alice thoughtread me ending the file, came in, took the closed file out of my hands, checked the binding for tears and riffled quickly through the page corners, her eagle eye checking the page numbers for omission. Satisfied, she straightened up my blotter and brushed an eyebrow with her moistened little finger, and collected my empty rose coffee-cup. In hasty little pinched steps she walked across the narrow room.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Alice,’ I said. She turned and watched me blankly. She paused a moment, then raised an eyebrow. She had her tight-fitting tweed two-piece on today, and her hair had been slightly intimidated in a high-class coiffeur joint.

  ‘Your seams are crooked.’

  If I thought I’d make her angry or happy I couldn’t have been more wrong. She nodded her head deferentially like a Chinese mandarin and went on her way.

  * * *

  *VIRTUTI MILITARI, The Polish VC.

  Chapter 9

  Dalby had buzzed me for a meeting at three o’clock. It was in the board-room downstairs. The large red-brown shiny oval table reflected the grey windows with the rain dribbling downward. The electric light shone from a gaunt chandelier-type thing of thin poor-quality glass. Dalby stood with his Bedford-cord behind in front of a puny, onebar electric fire that looked and felt diminutive in the large Victorian fire-place in which the brass shovel and poker were kept polished. Above his head a vast portrait of a man in frock-coat and beard had almost entirely relapsed into the brown gloom of the coach varnish. Uncomfortable upright chairs unused by dint of their discomfort stood at attention like family retainers along the deadflower-print wallpaper. High up on the wall above the picture rail a large clock tick-tocked away the sparse daylight hours. A minute or so before three, Painter, the doctor, came in. Dalby continued screening his face with the Guardian, so we nodded to each other. Chico was sitting down already. I had no particular reason to speak to Chico. He was in one of those moods where he kept saying things like, ‘What about old Davenport then—do you know old “Coca-Cola” Davenport?’ Then if not stopped immediately he’d tell me how he got his nickname. ‘You must know “Bumble-bee” Tracy then…’ No, no more, Chico for the present.

  I sat down in one of the large chairs and began, while looking official, thinking of dates at random and trying to remember what happened. ‘1200—fifteen years before Mongols’ I wrote, ‘end of Romanesque arch. Four years before fourth Crusade. Battle of Hattin means Europe is defeated in East.’ I was really getting into it now. ‘Magna Carta…’

  ‘D’you mind?’ It was Dalby. Everyone was seated and ready to go. Dalby hated me concentrating. ‘Going into one of your trances,’ he called it. Dalby began now. I looked around. Painter, about forty, a thin rat-faced character, was on my right. He was wearing a good-quality blue blazer, white shirt, soft collar, and a plain dark crimson tie. From his cuffs his links shone dull genuine gold, and a handkerchief peeped coyly. His hands were long and supple and had the dry whiteness that doctors’ hands get from being washed too much.

  Opposite me across the table was an army type. Gentle in disposition, his gold spectacle frames glinted among hair whitened by Indian sun. He wore a cheap, dark ready-made suit with a regimental tie. I guessed him to be a Captain or a Major of fifty-three, past any chance of further promotion. His eyes were grey and moved slowly, taking in his surroundings with care and awe. His large hairy hands held on to his brief-case before him on the table, as though even here there was a danger of it being stolen before he could reveal his strange mysteries. Captain Carswell, for so I discovered was his name, had come from H.38 to us with some interesting statistics, Dalby was saying.

  The clock tick-tocked on, adding a second or so to its seventy years of tick.

  ‘If you are in H.38 you must know “Rice-Mould” Billingsby,’ Chico was saying to Carswell, who looked at him, almost surprised to find an imbecile in the room.

  ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. His voice had a clear firm ring of outdoor authority. ‘There is a Major-General Billingsby in the department.’

  ‘Yes, uncle of a fren,’ said Chico brightly, rather like he might have said, ‘Checkmate’ at the Moscow World Chess Championships.

  Then Carswell began his story with a lot of officialese like he was compiling a report, but soon got into the swing of it. After the Burgess and Maclean affair his department had been given the job of doing a statistical analysis in conjunction with the registry of missing persons at the Yard. Carswell had asked permission to process the figures first then to look for patterns afterwards, instead of looking for anything in particular. He then started to do breakdowns just anyway it occurred to him. He gave a lot of credit to the sergeant clerk he worked with, but I think it was Carswell who found in the job a sort of musical freedom working in purely abstract terms. Anyway, whoever is to be credited, some very interesting patterns grew out of it. Finding some strange characteristics, they left the ‘missing persons figures’ in favour of any combinations among the topgrade security clearances. With no particular purpose they fired cards through sorting machines to look for any common feature.

  He explained, ‘Although there were few resemblances in any one group from an occupational or geographical point of view, there were resemblances across those groups. For instance…’

  It was a long explanation that Carswell gave us and he loved every tedious minute of it. It was a long time later that I understood how important was the work he was doing.

  He produced his delicately drawn graphs and talked of S.1’s (Security Grade Ones)—important chemists, physicists, electronics engineers, political advisers, etc, people essential to the running of the country. Carswell had noticed that groups of these S.1’s were found together in certain parts of England which were neither holiday centres nor conference places.

  The kidnapping of an S.1 (if he was valuable) was easy to understand. Raven was an important S.1 and Jay had kidnapped him and come within an ace of delivering him over the border before we had grabbed him back, with our pocket-sized commando attack. But, so far, there had been no more kidnappings, and these meetings in Britain were different; something none of us understood.

  Chapter 10

  [Aquarius (Jan 20-Feb 19) Once again you will need tact and discretion, but persistence and hard work will bear fruit in the long run. An old friend will smooth out a difficulty.]

  Dalby seconded Carswell to work with me. I got him a little private office just big enough for him and the sergeant—Murray—to work in, a promotion to temporary Major and a suit that fitted him. I took him round to my tailor and we decided that a dull grey-green soft tweed, with dark brown waistcoat, gave him the country squire look right for an unemployed officer. Sgt Murray went for a check jacket with grey flannels. They worked each day diligently from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M., then returned to their wives in Fulham and
Bromley. I had my own work to do but I dropped into Carswell now and again. By now he was concentrating on the S.1’s (S.2’s being too numerous and g-k’s (cabinet ministers, etc) being too few to get conclusive results from. Carswell was a statistician but even to him it was evident that unless other common factors could be found the concentrations were meaningless. Carswell and Murray turned up common factors like owning two cars, long holidays, visits to America, holidays in North Africa, etc, but then, of course, these things were bound to form patterns in a group where age-groups, income and education were markedly similar. Other behaviour patterns were less easy to explain. Among the groups concentrating at one place (which Carswell called the ‘concens’), among the ‘concens’ there was an above-average number who had been members of a political or quasi-political group, all but one having Right-wing aims. I asked Carswell to write a description of a concen and a description of an S.1 from the figures he had.

  Quite a few had had a serious illness within the last five years, many being fevers, none of the concens were left-handed, they had a great number of bachelors, and a slightly greater number of decorations for valour. Public schools and divorced parents were absolutely at average level. I wrote all this down on a sheet of 10in by 8in writing paper and pinned it above my table. I was still looking at it when Dalby came in. He was affecting a silver-topped umbrella of late. He followed his usual debating tactics, waving a sheet of paper covered with my writing.

  ‘Look here—I’ll be damned if I’m passing this. Damned if I will.’ Dalby moved one half-eaten egg and anchovy sandwich, toasted. A speciality of Wally’s delicatessen downstairs in Charlotte Street. He then moved the SARS to SORC volume of the Britannica and Barnes’ History of the Regiments, a Leica 3 with the 13.5 cm and a bottle of Carbon Tetrachloride, and was able to sit down on the desk. He waved the sheet of paper under my nose, still cursing away. He read, ‘Eight poplin shirts, white, for Sgt Murray; two dozen Irish linen handkerchiefs for Major Carswell; four pairs of hand-stitched hide shoes, including cost of last.’