by Chris Ryan
Slowly, he readdressed the photograph. The face was Ridley’s. A younger Ridley, a Ridley without the moustache, a Ridley he would not have recognised if he hadn’t been looking for him – but the face was also Dietrich Wegner’s.
His heart pounding, Slater went from wall to wall, examining the photographs. He found three more of Ridley as an adult – among a group in evening dress at a reception, standing with several other men in tweeds on a grouse-moor, sharing a picnic from the boot of a Range Rover at a race meeting – but as he had subconsciously noted earlier, none of Ridley as a child or teenager. No family groups. No tottering first steps across a lawn, no buckets and spades on the beach, no sports days or tree-climbing or messing about in boats.
Lifting the framed photograph of the cricket team from the wall, unwilling to believe the evidence of his eyes but knowing deep down that he was right, Slater carried it to the window. No wonder Ridley – or should he say Wegner – had wanted the disc returned. No wonder it been so imperative that it be kept from the hands of the Serbs. Did the Ondine system even exist, or had the sole purpose of Firewall been to suppress the truth about the old spymaster’s identity?
When Ridley came out of his office Slater was staring out of the window with the framed photograph in his lap.
Looking the younger man in the eye, Ridley smiled philosophically and slowly nodded. Behind him was Eve, expressionless.
‘You’re a good man, Neil. A clever man. We’re lucky to have you.’
Slater placed the photograph and the magnifying glass on the side table.
‘Where did you go to school, Mr Ridley?’
Ridley laughed. ‘Dogs sniff each other’s bottoms. Englishmen ask each other where they went to school. Congratulations, Neil.’
Slater nodded at Eve. ‘She told you I saw the pictures?’
‘She told me.’
‘And you admit that you’re Dietrich Wegner?’
‘I concede that many lifetimes ago I was a man named Dietrich Wegner. But we reinvent ourselves, Neil. We reinvent ourselves.’
‘So everyone keeps telling me. Yesterday I was talking to a woman who said that when she was a seven-year-old concentration camp prisoner your Ustashe friends cut her ears off. Not much chance of her reinventing herself, I’d have said.’
‘Needs must, Neil. There is reason and logic to the life I have led.’
Slater felt a cold rage expanding within him. ‘Forgetting for the moment that the five of us who were here today have risked our lives for a lie, and that a fortnight ago a brave soldier died for that lie, can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t go straight to the newspapers and tell them that there is an ex-Nazi at the heart of British Intelligence?’
Ridley looked him straight in the eye. ‘Yes. The short answer is that I can. Give me an hour, and if at the end of that I haven’t convinced you then you are welcome to walk out of here and tell whomsoever you please. If you want money, you can go to Max Clifford. If you want revenge, I’d recommend Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian. I’ve got both of their home numbers.’
Slater stared back at him, speechless at the man’s nerve.
‘Well, what about it?’
Slowly, Slater nodded. ‘OK, you’re on. Sixty minutes.’ Undoing his watch, he placed it on the table next to the photograph.
‘Eve, my dear,’ said Ridley, his eyes still on Slater. ‘Would it be very un-PC to ask you to go into the kitchen and make us all a pot of tea? The Lapsang would be nice.’
‘I joined the SS in 1939 when I was eighteen. I came from Gotha, in the Thüringer Wald. And believe me, Neil, if you had been that age, and in that place at that time, you would have done the same. What did Wordsworth say? “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven”!
‘At the time of the invasion of France I was attached to an SS Panzer division in the Ardennes – the Totenkopf. Real soldiering, Neil, against a determined and honourable enemy – I remember an engagement against the Algerian Dismounted Light Cavalry which . . . Anyway, having been wounded in the arm and briefly hospitalised – my left arm, you’ll be glad to hear, rather than my fly-casting arm – I was recalled to Berlin late in 1940 and sent on an intelligence course. Speaking good French as I did, I had had some success with the interrogation of prisoners – a complicit smile, I found, tended to accomplish more than a Schmeisser butt to the base of the skull – and the fact had been noticed.
‘In the summer of the next year I was reassigned to Army Group E, stationed in the Balkans. My task, I was told, was to secure intelligence concerning the activities of partisans.
‘The counter-partisan system I found in place was draconian. Reprisals for attacks on German troops and property were immediate, with a hundred Yugoslav males rounded up and machine-gunned for every German killed.
‘Up to a point this policy was working. The main thorns in our side were a Serbian royalist named Dreza Mihailovic, whose followers were called Chetniks, and a half-Slovene, half-Croatian communist called Josip Broz. Mihailovic, who realised that public opinion would turn against him if his Chetniks’ exploits caused the execution of thousands of civilians, decided to wind down his resistance activities and wait for the Allies to invade. Effectively, he was brought to heel by the reprisals policy, and by 1943 many of his Chetniks were openly collaborating with their German hosts.
‘Broz, who used the alias Tito, was a different proposition altogether. Rightly or wrongly he considered that the reprisals policy would simply make loyal Yugoslavs hate the Germans even more. He resisted, and resisted hard. His orders came from Stalin, and his followers – quarter of a million strong by the end – came from all sections of Yugoslav society. He was a much tougher nut than Mihailovic, and ultimately we never cracked him.
‘But we tried. We tried very hard indeed. I was attached to a unit simply known as 1c, based at a place named Kostajnica, and my brief ultimately contracted to one essential task: I had to insert Yugoslavian informers into Tito’s partisan army. We had to know what his intentions were because, to be frank, he was getting the better of us. By 1942 it was clear that the reprisals policy, while discouraging Mihailovic, had failed. We were imprisoning the partisans, we were shooting them, there were corpses hanging at every roadside . . . It was a nightmare, frankly, and a very unpleasant atmosphere in which to work. Ah, this looks like our tea. And crumpets! Eve, you’re a miracle-worker. Shall I be mother?’
‘Now, where was I?’ he asked two minutes later. ‘Yes, in Kostajnica, where I had an inspired idea. An idea which became Operation Senfsamen, or Mustard-Seed. A few miles down the road was the Ustashe-run concentration camp of Jasenovac. It was a disgrace, frankly – a complete butcher’s shop – and we and the Italians complained about it constantly. Having said that, there was an element of real-politik. The Ustashe were animals, but they were our animals, and we couldn’t afford to be too choosy about whom we used.
‘I took to visiting Jasenovac, ostensibly for observation purposes. The place was run by a series of maniacal sadists and psychopaths — the most extreme being a Catholic priest named Filipovic. Now I . . . “befriended” is not the right word, but I made a point of getting to know Filipovic and his successor, whose name was Sakic. They were both terrifyingly unbalanced and clearly took a deep pleasure in the pain and suffering that they caused, but for my plan to work I had to have them on my side.
‘I got them there, basically, by pretending to be like them. I visited that hell-on-earth with a regularity that implied I couldn’t keep away. And after a time no one took any notice of me.
‘Now the camp was on a river – the Sava river – and opposite was a place called Gradina. Gradina was where the executions were carried out. Not the random killings that were a feature of everyday life at Jasenovac but the planned, systematic shootings and throat-cuttings which were carried out in groups.
‘What I used to do was to monitor the execution parties when they were led off the ferry that had brought them over the
river to Gradina. If I thought that any of the condemned men might pass muster as a soldier and a partisan – and not many did, most had the dull-eyed look of men who have given up all hope — I had him unchained and brought over to me. Was he prepared to spit on the face of Tito, I asked him? Was he, in return for his life, prepared to throw in his lot with the conquering armies of the Fatherland?
‘Well, sometimes he was and sometimes he wasn’t, and to this day I am amazed by the courage shown by those who refused. They knew why they had been brought across the river and as often as not they could hear the shots from the execution field. But still they said no, and I informed them that I considered them to be brave men and returned them to the guards.
‘Others, for a combination of reasons, said yes. They were Chetniks, they hated Tito, they hated communists, they thought that Germany would win the war – I heard every possible reason. But mostly they were frightened for their lives and would have said anything to be allowed to leave that grim procession.
‘I took them back to Kostajnica, trained them in espionage procedures and fieldcraft, and turned them loose. Some of my mustard-seeds fell on stony ground, and I never heard from them again. Some were identified as spies by the partisans and killed. But others had their cover-stories accepted and were integrated into Tito’s organisation – they took root, you might say — and slowly the network grew to the point where an entire 1c department was devoted to the collating and assessment of “Mustard-Seed” data. It was, if I say so myself, an operation of some elegance.
‘Unfortunately, despite some spectacular intelligence coups, it did not win us the battle for Yugoslavia, let alone the war, but by 1945 the ground was already being cleared for a much more important struggle – the struggle of the free world against communism.
‘By the end of the war I was no longer the idealistic young SS lieutenant who had marched into France with the Totenkopf division. I was twenty-four years old, but I felt twice that age. For more than three years I had quite literally walked in the Valley of Death, and I had played a key role in one of the most savage and brutal guerrilla campaigns ever waged. When Army Group E was finally forced to retreat from Yugoslavia – the alternative being to surrender to the communists – a colleague and I were sent to contact the British Army, which was on the outskirts of Trieste. We both spoke reasonable Serbo-Croat, so it was thought that we had a good chance of getting through.
‘I got through. It was a nightmare journey, and I was almost starving by the time I reached the British lines. My colleague didn’t make it, and ended up in Klagenfurt in southern Austria, which by then had been appropriated by Tito.
‘At Trieste, after being badly beaten by the patrol to which I had given myself up, I had the great good fortune to be interrogated by a British Field Security officer who immediately saw the value of the names and the knowledge that I carried in my head, and sent me on to the Intelligence Corps HQ at Bad Sulzuflen, outside Iserlohn. There, I met the man who was to be the instrument of my renaissance. His name was Captain Robert Maxwell, MC.
‘Maxwell, who was born in Czechoslovakia and spoke perfect German as well as Russian and half a dozen other languages, debriefed me over the course of several days in November 1945. In May, six months earlier, the CROWCASS list had been published. This was the Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects – and I, along with several of my colleagues from 1c, was on it. My crime, or my so-called crime, was murder of partisans – an accusation relating to my having ordered the execution of Yugoslavian citizens. This was not in fact strictly accurate. My responsibility as an intelligence officer had been to identify and arrest partisans, and it fell to others to process those found guilty. That said, of course, history is always written by the victors, and the victors in this case were Tito’s communists.
‘Maxwell and I spent several days together, and without naming names I told him about Operation Mustard-Seed. I had a dozen agents within Tito’s organisation, I told him, and a couple in his inner circle. These agents, I continued, could be persuaded into providing information on the regime almost indefinitely by the threat of exposure as former Nazi informers.
‘Like all sensible men at that time, Maxwell was looking forwards rather than backwards. In common with the rest of his colleagues in the intelligence services, he was convinced that Europe should be bracing itself against communist invasion, and that Yugoslavia was Stalin’s probable launch-pad into Europe. The offer of raw intelligence from a source as sensitive as the “Mustard-Seed” network was too good to pass up.
‘And of course he was also looking forwards at his own future. He was already planning the publishing empire that would make him a vast fortune, but he needed a helping hand, both financially and in terms of contacts. A major catch such as I represented at the time would strongly predispose MI6 to come to his aid. As indeed they did. And I . . . let’s just say that I was in a position to point him towards some sources of funds too.
‘Robert and I understood each other perfectly. By the end of that week there was an unspoken agreement between us that we would, let us say, keep an eye on each other’s careers.’
‘And you did,’ said Slater.
‘And we did,’ agreed Ridley. ‘Although it would be some years before we saw each other again. I was officially arrested as a CROWCASS suspect, then sent to a military hospital at Magdeburg, where I was admitted as an isolation patient before “dying” of tuberculosis. I was certified dead, carried out feet first beneath a sheet, and driven to Berlin, from where I was flown to Croydon Airport.
‘The rest, if you like, is history. I spent nine months being debriefed at a service safe-house in Hertfordshire, where a “legend” was prepared for me and I assumed my new identity as John Ridley. I have the advantage of a near-perfect photographic memory, and was able to reproduce intact every detail of the “Mustard-Seed” files I kept at Kostajnica. The information was relayed to the MI6 station in Vienna, and used to mount a major intelligence operation against Tito. It was superbly effective. MI6 was warned in advance about Tito’s break from Stalin, and was able to take advantage of this knowledge to help lever Austria into declaring its support for the West.’
Ridley smiled. ‘And that’s about it, really. The rest of my career is a matter of service record. The bare bones of it are that I served in Hong Kong, Oslo, Sofia and Moscow, came home to the Russia desk, and set up the Cadre. Rather than marry – a security risk I could not afford – I have dedicated my life to the service. In short, I have been a loyal and tireless servant of my adopted country.’
He spread his hands and reached for Slater’s wristwatch. ‘And that’s about it. I’ve been talking to you for forty-five minutes. Do I have a stay of execution?’
Slowly, a little uncomfortably, Slater nodded.
‘As I said, Neil, you are an intelligent man, and intelligent men ask searching questions. I would expect no less of you.’
Standing, Slater returned the photograph of the cricket team to its place beside the fire.
‘I know that there are questions that I haven’t answered,’ said Ridley. ‘Might I suggest that I do so while we enjoy the last of this sunshine?’
The rain, Slater saw, had stopped.
The landscape shone.
‘Wellingtons, if you need them, by the front door,’ said Ridley.
‘Maxwell and I met from time to time over the years,’ he continued, as they crossed the field to the river, leaving dark tracks behind them in the wet grass. ‘Lunch at the Travellers’ Club, the odd Foreign Office dinner, that sort of thing. There were small favours I was able to do for him and for his newspapers, and vice-versa. We were both, in different ways, aliens at the heart of the British establishment, and the fact amused us.
‘By the end of the eighties, however, we had more or less lost contact. I had officially retired, while he had been swallowed up with the day-to-day concerns of the Mirror Group. I was aware, however — as most of us in the intelligence community were — tha
t things were not well in his world, and by 1991 it was obvious that his empire was unravelling in front of his eyes. In October of that year he played one last desperate card. He contacted an associate of his whom he knew the service did business with — an arms-dealer and general fixer named Antoine Fanon-Khayat.
‘A Serbian pressure group, he said, had contacted him with a view to publicising Ustashe atrocities committed during World War Two. They had photographs showing murders of civilians and Orthodox priests and scenes from Jasenovac, Stara Gradiska, Jadovna and other sites. He had viewed the material and noted that half a dozen of the photographs showed the man whom he had helped to become a British citizen, namely myself.
‘In the first instance, I think, his motives in buying up the pictures were purely those of hiding his own part in my rebirth. If it was discovered that he had facilitated the integration of an ex-Nazi into the British civil service his rivals would have slaughtered him. But buy them up he did – every print, every negative. It probably cost the Mirror Group a hundred thousand pounds, for which I’m sure Serbia was duly grateful.
‘I honestly believe that it was only when he was really on the skids that he decided to try and blackmail MI6 into bailing him out, and by then his judgement was all over the place. He basically paid Fanon-Khayat to broker the deal. In return for the pictures incriminating me and tarring MI6 with the Nazi brush, he wanted to be paid tens of millions of dollars in cash, bonds and bullion. Really crazy stuff.
‘Fanon-Khayat, at that time very much MI6’s man, presented Maxwell’s case to Manderson, who handled him at the time, and then immediately disassociated himself from it. He claimed he merely wanted to warn the service of the existence of the pictures, and handed over the photocopies, which Manderson destroyed.
‘So what still existed, Manderson asked? What did Fanon-Khayat still have?
‘One set of prints, said Fanon-Khayat. The negatives had long since disappeared. The prints travelled with Maxwell, from safe to safe.
