High Jinx

by William F. Buckley

  ‘And the man who signed that directive was—my old friend from Spain!’

  His old friend was in the KGB, Mr. Mussolini explained. And once or twice a year he would hear from him, through channels now consolidated, channels the details of which ‘I would not tell to my father confessor, even though I tell him the most fearful things!’ Mr. Mussolini smiled.

  The Director thanked him for the background and said that he must be aware that in the trade the Director was engaged in, the counterintelligence people want ‘what we call “earnest money”’—did Mr. Mussolini know what that term meant?

  Again Mr. Mussolini smiled. Yes, he knew about ‘earnest money.’ He assumed that the Director wanted a scrap of valuable information to establish that Mr. Mussolini was on the level. ‘And incidentally, Mr. Director, speaking of “earnest money” reminds me of just plain money. There will have to be some of that. Not kings’ ransoms, but not pocket money, either. My friend needs to look out for the inevitable day when, if he is not shot, he will escape that dreadful country, in which event he would not wish to spend the rest of his life as a common labourer. And that day is not far off.’

  The Director replied without reference to the matter Mr. Mussolini had brought up. ‘Let’s begin with the earnest money,’ he said.

  Mr. Mussolini’s accents were now clipped, utilitarian. ‘At the last meeting of the Politburo, it was decided that the Foreign Minister should attack the American hegemony in Japan and propose a separate arrangement between the U.S.S.R. and Japan.’

  ‘You are telling me that Foreign Minister Molotov will make that public proposal soon? Or that it will be confided to Japan’s Prime Minister?’

  ‘The first. Something else. This is Tuesday. Before this week is out, Pravda will attack the British Labour leader Clement Attlee for the criticisms he has made of the People’s Republic of China since returning from his tour.

  ‘That, Mr. Director, is your earnest money.’

  When, the next day, the attack on Attlee appeared in Pravda and, on Saturday, Molotov delivered a speech on the subject of the iniquitously close relationship between the U.S. and Japan, Dulles probed his staff to ascertain whether there had been any advance tips anywhere respecting the two events. The answer was negative.

  From that moment on, the Director never hesitated to answer personally a call from Mr. Mussolini. These calls came irregularly, every two weeks or so, and each one of them cost the Director—this only after a little haggling—four thousand dollars in cash.

  ‘Today’—Mr. Mussolini, meeting with the Director in the designated safe house, was dressed in Austrian loden, positively gleaming in green and pigskin leather buttons and a huge belt—‘I have very important news from my friend.’

  The Director, a little deaf, removed his pipe from his mouth and leaned forward.

  ‘The Politburo is divided on how to react to the American plan to recognise West Germany. The section headed by Beria wants to retaliate by recognising East Germany’s independence and then having East Germany take over the government of Berlin. Yes, West Berlin. Take over, in other words, what you, the British, and the French now control. Malenkov opposes this. But Malenkov needs, as I have told you before, shoring up. There must be, my friend informs me, some sense that he is making progress in his negotiations with the Western powers, even if that progress is measured only in terms of sociopolitical recognition.’

  ‘You are not suggesting we give up our plans to recognise a West German government?’

  ‘Of course not. But Malenkov—and Bulganin, and Khrushchev—need a response that suggests you fully acknowledge Malenkov as the legitimate successor to Stalin—in the sense that no foreign country ever disputed that Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union.

  ‘And here, Mr. Director, is something else. And though I do not wish to be crude about it, for purposes of our calculations what follows will count as a separate communication; you understand my point?’

  ‘I understand that my agency will be paying twice for this visit.’

  ‘Exactly. Now: Comrade Beria is actively engaged in spying on Malenkov, by means not disclosed to me. But he is actually reading Malenkov’s cables. That would appear to me as though he were ready to strike.’

  ‘Is Malenkov aware of this?’

  ‘Certainly not. If he were aware of it, he would presumably strike first. No. Only you are aware of it.’ Mr. Mussolini smiled. ‘Ironic, no?’

  ‘Very ironic,’ said the Director, picking up his pipe. ‘In fact, quite incredible.’

  Mr. Mussolini drew his head back coldly on hearing the word ‘incredible’.

  ‘Now, now, Mr. Mussolini, I hope you don’t mean me to take what you just said literally? I meant “incredible” in the sense of something very difficult to believe. But that does not mean that I don’t believe it: merely that it is objectively difficult to believe. You understand the difference?’

  Mr. Mussolini said he did understand the difference.

  The Director pursued his point. ‘You have told me on several occasions that Malenkov needs shoring up, and we have taken steps to attempt to do this, though public announcements have not been made. But you are telling me now something very concrete and very dangerous, namely that Beria may be planning a coup against Malenkov, and that if he took power he would proceed to communise Berlin and resist by force of arms any attempt by the West to keep this from happening?’

  ‘That is how I read the message from my friend.’

  Allen Dulles rose. ‘The money will be deposited as usual. Meanwhile, let me know instantly when you hear again from your friend.’

  Mr. Mussolini bowed, his breezy smile dissolving any suggestion of servile deference.

  This was the fifth visit in which the Director had met face to face with his informer. And he had made plans this time: to have his valuable friend tracked. Accordingly, when he left the safe house, Mr. Mussolini was followed discreetly by two agents of the Director. Mr. Mussolini walked circuitously, but soon entered nonchalantly 1601 Fuller Street. The Italian Embassy.

  It did not take long, in the CIA Laboratory’s file of pictures of registered diplomats, to establish that Mr. Mussolini was in fact Giuseppe Angelo, deputy chief of mission of the Italian Embassy.

  ‘And that,’ Allen Dulles said to his brother later that evening after divulging his news, ‘settles exactly nothing. If Mr. Mussolini-Angelo’s game has been to tip us off to interesting but hardly earthshaking advance information (‘PRAVDA ATTACKS ATTLEE’—I mean, so what?) in order to establish his credibility for the purpose of misleading us concerning a serious matter, then he has made just the right gestures. If Mussolini is a direct agent of Beria, then friendly gestures by us to Malenkov will hurt Malenkov rather than help him.’

  ‘That might have been so under Stalin,’ his brother, the Secretary of State, said. ‘Sounds too farfetched to me to suppose it’s true this time around. I would guess the best interests of the United States clearly lie in helping to torpedo Comrade Beria.’

  ‘I agree. But how’re we going to persuade the President to make up his mind?’

  ‘Nothing to it, Foster. All we need to do is get Joe McCarthy censured. Then Ike will let you go to Moscow to romance Malenkov.’

  That was a wisecrack, but it happened that the following morning the Senate, by a vote of 67–22, censured Joe McCarthy. That afternoon President Dwight David Eisenhower authorised Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to announce that he would travel the following week to Moscow to confer with Premier Georgi Malenkov respecting West Germany and other matters.

  Moreover, the President telephoned to Prime Minister Anthony Brogan, told him what he had agreed to do on the recommendaton of his Secretary of State, and got assurances that under the circumstances the British would proceed forthwith to invite Mr. Malenkov to address Parliament, and that in due course it would be discreetly revealed that, while in Great Britain, Premier Georgi Maximilianovich Malenkov would be received by the Queen.

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sp; 23

  The meeting that afternoon had been exciting: progress was in the air, the feel of the chase. The pictorial bombardment by Jimmy Moser was judged, however early (the enlargements were not yet ready), to have been a smashing success: seventy (‘seven zero!’ Jimmy Moser exclaimed) negatives had been got from the flashlight-camera, and these were viewed on a small screen by six spectators: the three Americans, Rufus, Anthony, Blackford; Sir Gene (as they now called him, at his urging) and Superintendent Roberts; plus a photographic technician with MI5.

  More, the technician three times said, might be discerned on the following day, after enlargement of the negatives was arranged. But in the meantime one finding was conclusive: after hungrily examining the pictures of the silent co-resident, Blackford pronounced, in accents that didn’t invite contradiction, that the other man in apartment 516 was indeed ‘Henry,’ Bertram Oliver Heath. The other finding of interest made by the photographic technician was to the effect that he knew of no photographic assembly remotely like that which he now examined. He was eager, he said, for the session the next morning, with the negatives enlarged.

  Rufus suggested, in an aside to Blackford, that the American party might dine informally together for professional purposes, and Blackford, in a telephone call to James Street, arranged for cold beef and chicken, red wine and cheese, fruit and coffee. They sat around the living room outside Blackford’s Op-Ox study. The strain of the afternoon’s proceedings—the quiet but tense disagreement with the two Englishmen on how to proceed—almost required that during dinner, the compressed ensemble should give over a relaxing half hour to irrelevancies. And so Blackford reminisced about his first meeting with Anthony Trust (‘He was a seventeen-year-old prefect at Greyburn, Rufus, and we were all supposed to be frightened of prefects, but it took me a while to catch on’). Trust began to recount the awe he felt on first meeting Rufus, and was joyously embarked on the intimidating briefing given him by his CIA training officer on the subject of what was all right and what was not all right in the company of Rufus, and about Rufus’s spectacular achievements during the war, when Rufus interrupted: a raised hand, the shy but authoritative smile: ‘No need to go into my background, Anthony.’ That much from Rufus was definitive; on to the next subject.

  Was there a subject contiguous to Rufus’s mystique? Blackford elided into eccentricity as a universal phenomenon. They laughed together over some of the mannerisms of their British colleagues. Blackford: ‘Sir Gene, have you noticed? A nose-picker, but he seems to think nose-picking becomes invisible’ (Blackford, contorting himself, gave a demonstration) ‘if he bends his right arm behind his head to pick at his left nostril; and then, later, his left arm behind his head to pick at his right nostril. He figures this makes the whole manoeuvre socially invisible.’ Anthony laughed heartily. Rufus smiled; he enjoyed the banter, but left it to his young colleagues to practice it.

  Inevitably the discussion turned serious. Professional agents of counterintelligence don’t usually ask wide-eyed questions on the order of ‘How do you suppose Bertram Heath became what he is?’ But, in a reflective frame of mind, Blackford now asked Rufus if he had gained anything of universal application from his knowledge of the literature of communist apostates? ‘I mean, learned anything from the defectors beyond what we all know from reading their books, what I call The God That Failed books?’ Rufus said that however perverse, it was still a form of idealism that kept many communists in the system. He cited the comment made by an Englishman within the KGB to a British mole who had given his colleague to read an account of what the communists had done to destroy Warsaw. ‘After reading the book,’ Rufus related, ‘he said words to this effect, that there were two alternatives facing Western communists. The first is to say, we were wrong! we’ll chuck it all! and go back to the bourgeois world even though we know they haven’t changed. The other is to acknowledge that human nature affects also the leadership of the communist movement, and that there will be purge trials and Nazi-Soviet pacts and Warsaw uprisings: but that also one day there will be a dream realised. He said he was choosing the second alternative. With that kind of thinking, one doesn’t argue.’

  ‘What do you do? Blackford asked.

  ‘You wait. You fight.’ Rufus paused. And added quietly, ‘and you pray.’ Rufus stood up and walked toward the coffeepot. ‘Meanwhile we have the problem of the Brits.’

  That problem, which had been discussed endlessly during the afternoon, had to do with how to proceed on the matter of apartment 516. Sir Gene and Roberts were emphatic in recommending instant penetration with search and arrest warrants. Rufus had argued for a delay. His problem was in making his case for the delay without divulging his most valuable secret, namely the mole within the walls of the Kremlin now relaying vital information via Mr. Mussolini. Mussolini’s bulletins might prompt action by Washington, the success of which would depend on Washington-London communications’ being regularly intercepted by Moscow. Rufus had told neither Trust nor Blackford about Mr. Mussolini, and would not do so unless it proved necessary, so his arguments against immediate entry into apartment 516 were hard to sustain whether talking with the British or with his own colleagues. But at least with the latter he could say some things he couldn’t to his British counterparts. And now he did so:

  ‘I was not able, with the British, to go as far as I’d have liked in explaining why we want to consult other factors in deciding when to abort apartment 516. They would ask, “What other factors?” I would be put in the position of saying, “Other factors we elect not to tell you about at this point.” To you I can say merely that there are other factors you do not know about.’

  Trust said, ‘This is their country, Rufus. And British laws have been broken. It’s their call, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes it is. But we have leverage, and we will use it. The two big actors in this episode are both British. The damage was done primarily to Americans. Something can be got out of that. And they need our technical information. But it is getting late,’ Rufus said, picking up his hat and umbrella. ‘And we have an engagement tomorrow.’ He walked to the door. ‘Good night, gentlemen.’

  Blackford brought out a bottle of scotch, Anthony leaned back in his chair and said, ‘I got to admit it, Black, my instincts are for a quick kill. Get in there, put an end to the business. Haul ’em in. Examine The Spook. What do you think?’

  ‘My instincts,’ Blackford said, standing now in his shirtsleeves, his back to the gas fire, and speaking with unwonted solemnity, ‘are to apply pressure through Henry. Henry: Bertram Oliver Heath. The young sadist of Winchester. Heath, the sycophantic lover of Fleetwood. Granted, we don’t know whether their relations went in that direction. We know that kind of thing hasn’t been exactly uncommon in Cambridge in the set that considers itself emancipated. Heath the mistress-beater. Heath, the man who led the forty-one commandos with whom he trained, who trusted him, to the gallows, then faked pictures of his own martyrdom. I’d like to go after him. But I confess that’s in part because I don’t much care what would happen to him if he didn’t yield his secrets.’

  Anthony Trust recognised in his old friend the uncompromising determination that he had experienced in Blackford once before. He contented himself with saying, in accents studiedly unpatronising, ‘Black, we’re involved in a joint venture. Remember, what you feel about Heath can’t govern the thinking behind that operation.’

  Finishing his highball, Trust said, ‘Did you see the Daily Mail today? About Queen Caroline at the Covent Garden opening? An American reporter leaned over into the royal box and said, “Ma’am, is it true there might be a summit conference? And if so, would you be willing to greet Premier Malenkov?” Well of course normally the Queen simply doesn’t answer questions shouted out at her that way, but she turned in his direction—can you see it, Black?—and said, “I would greet my horse Steadfast if he won the Derby. Should I do less for Soviet leaders?” Bloody joy, that woman. But you know that, from 1951.’

  ‘Yes,’
Blackford said. ‘She is certainly something.’

  24

  At three-fifteen that afternoon there was a knock on the door of Fleetwood’s hotel suite. Hastily he donned his beard and went over to open the door. He was confronted by a stout woman of businesslike manner followed by a young man carrying, or attempting to do so—the object was half-lifted, half-pushed into the hotel room—a large suitcase.

  ‘You are Mr. Bjorn Henningsen,’ she stated in declaratory English.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I am Nadya Balenkov, assistant librarian, University of Moscow, at your service.’

  She did not introduce her young man. She simply motioned him to lug the suitcase into the living room.

  ‘Where would you like it?’

  Alistair Fleetwood, for the moment confused, pointed vaguely at a corner of the room. Thither the porter went.

  ‘I hope, Mr. Henningsen, that these titles are to your liking.’ Comrade Balenkov approached the heavy cardboard suitcase, opened her handbag, and took out a key. She opened it, kneeling down on the floor. Inside the suitcase were about fifty books. Fleetwood approached it, took up one of them, Jane Austen’s Emma. And another: Moby Dick. A third: For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  He turned to Comrade Balenkov. ‘That is most kind of you to look after me. I shall take good care of these books, and of course you will have them back. How—do I—arrange to call you?’

  Comrade Balenkov pulled a card from her handbag, gave it to Fleetwood and said, ‘When you are ready for us to come to take the books back, you will simply inform the concierge on your floor and she will notify us.’

  Alistair Fleetwood bowed. And without further ado, motioning to the young man to follow her, Comrade Balenkov walked to the door, opened it, and left.