by Ted Allbeury
‘The fact is that either your people didn’t know what was going on, or somebody in MI6 was covering for him.’
‘You mean Philby?’
‘No. It wasn’t Kim. I can tell you that.’
‘Do you know more?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘So tell me. Why play games?’
‘I’m not playing games, tovarich. I’m making sure I stay alive. Making sure you protect me because of what you want to know.’
‘You don’t trust me?’
Petrov laughed softly. ‘I don’t trust anybody.’
‘Can you give me any more clues?’
‘Just one.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your people assumed that Blake was turned while he was with the North Koreans, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, read the files again, but this time read them knowing that he always was working for the Soviets.’
‘From when?’
‘From when he was the courier in Holland before he came to England.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely sure.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Work it out, my friend. Work it out.’
14
BERLIN 1956
The people in the block of flats at Platanen Allee were all British officers and officials and their families. All except one. The exception was a man who lived alone. There were people in the block who had never seen him and were not even aware of his existence.
He was seldom seen out and never alone. Rumour said that he was recovering from a nervous breakdown, and the young men who walked with him were doctors or psychiatrists. There was no name on his door panel. Although they were not obvious there were steel shutters at his windows, high-security locks on his doors both inside and outside, and a special alarm system connected to an office in the Olympic Stadium that was manned twenty-four hours a day. And his constant companion was a German Shepherd dog that had been trained by RAF dog handlers.
The British Commandant, General Sir William Oliver, KCB, had given the security instructions himself. Only seven senior men knew the mans real identity.
‘Twenty Gauloise. ’
The girl looked up quickly.
‘We don’t stock Gauloise. I’m sorry. ’
‘What do you recommend?’
She opened a drawer and put a packet of cigarettes on the counter. He saw the figure seven in red ink on the corner of the packet and looked back at the girl.
‘I think Til try somewhere else. ’
She nodded and slid the packet back in the drawer as Blake left the shop. It was inconvenient and unreasonable, but the red ink meant that it was an emergency. And ‘treffpunkt’ seven meant the S-bahn station at Pankow.
Petrov was already there when he arrived. The girl must have phoned him. The Russian ignored him as he walked past and then went back into the area by the ticket office, through a door marked ‘Privat’.
Petrov was sitting on the battered old desk, one leg swinging casually as Blake walked in.
‘I’m due at a meeting in forty minutes, Tolya, what is it?’
It’s Bialek. Moscow insist that we pick him up as soon as possible. ‘
‘But he’s been over there for nearly three years. He will have already told them everything he knows.’
‘Those are Moscow’s orders.’
‘When are you going to do it?’
‘I’m putting three two-man teams in there with different cars. Round the clock. Every day until we’ve got him. ’
‘I can’t help you. I’m never there.’
‘Does he know you? Would he recognize you?’
‘Yes. I check with him most days.’
‘At particular times?’
‘No. When it happens to suit me.’
‘What do you do when you visit him?’
‘I check the rooms to see that he’s not under duress, and that’s about it. We exchange a few words about the weather. He’s in a constant state of fear for his life.’
‘I’ve worked out a plan but I need your co-operation.’
‘Tell me what it is.’
The man’s grey eyes looked at him for a moment without recognition, unfocused and unseeing. Then, as the dog growled he said, ‘Ah yes. Come inside.’
‘I’ll come in after you’ve been for your walk. Mr Leavis says it is OK for you to take a short walk provided you take the dog with you. He’s been delayed but he’ll be along later.’
The man nodded. ‘I’ll get my coat.’
‘I’ll call in later this evening,’ Blake said, and walked slowly along the corridor and up the stairs to his flat.
He took off his jacket as he walked into the bedroom, across to the windows. But it was already too dark to see anything much in the street. It was almost an hour before the telephone rang and the girl’s voice told him that the interview had gone well. Fifteen minutes later the phone rang again. The duty officer s compliments and he should report immediately to the General’s HQ and ask for Colonel Squires.
General Sir William Oliver, KCB, had presided over the meeting himself. He made no attempt to hide his anger. There were only five others there, and they were informed that Robert Bialek had been attacked by two men and bundled into a car as he turned the corner from Platanen Allee into Leistikow Strasse. An investigation had already started. The West Berlin authorities and the press would not be informed, and the men at the meeting were warned that they themselves would be interviewed.
Robert Bialek had been better known as Lieutenant-General Bialek, Inspector-General of the East German Volkspolizei. He had defected to the West in 1953. Previously in charge of the SSD, the State Security Service of the East German government, he was the most important non-Russian defector who had ever come over to the West.
The British government and their Commandant in Berlin lodged protest after protest with the Soviet authorities who blandly denied all knowledge of Bialek’s whereabouts. After prolonged and violent interrogations in the headquarters of his old command he had been put to death.
BERLIN 1956
Ivan Serov was its first General when the MVD became the KGB in 1954, and his visits to East Berlin became more frequent during the next year. East Berlin had become both a prime source of incoming intelligence and one of the principal launching posts for Soviet agents being filtered into the NATO countries. There was also an eighteen-year-old girl who lived in an elegant flat near Karl Marx Platz who, although she never visited the SSD headquarters on Normannenstrasse, was on its payroll as a senior secretary.
It was on one of these visits early in 1956 that Serov took the opportunity of informing Petrov of his promotion. He stood up behind his desk and leant over to shake the young man’s hand. It was only the third time he had actually met Petrov but he was familiar with his name and his successes.
‘Sit down, Captain.’ And Serov pointed to the chair in front of the desk. When Petrov was seated Serov took a small cardboard box from his briefcase. He smiled as he pushed it across the desk. Printed on the lid were the words ‘Starshi Komandnyi Sostav’. When Petrov hesitated Serov said amiably, ‘Open it. ‘
As Petrov took off the lid he saw the pair of shoulder-bands. Gold braid and a five-pointed star between two red stripes. The insignia of a major. When he looked back at Serov the General was smiling.
A present from Moscow. Congratulations. ‘
‘Thank you, Comrade General, I . . .’
Serov held up his hand. ‘It is effective back-dated to January 6. But to business. Tell me about your SIS man. How reliable is he?’
‘Completely, Comrade General. He is providing us with top-grade material. ‘
‘You said in your report that you were concerned that he would be working with the man Eitner. Why?’
‘Eitner has changed sides so many times. He worked for Gehlen, then the British, and now he works for us and the British. I don’t like two double agents coming togeth
er. Especially when neither of them knows that the other is working for us. It makes life too complicated. And between them they know too much.’
‘Do you think there is some trap being set by the British?’
‘I don’t think so, Comrade General. The information they give to Blake to pass on to us still comes through. It would be enough to satisfy us in continuing the game. But what Blake provides himself is invaluable. He’s on our side. I trust him implicitly. He is a dedicated Party man.’
‘Well. We can only leave it to your judgement. But keep to the rules, young man. They may be tedious but they are for your protection as well as ours.’
Petrov stood to attention before he turned and left the room.
The West Berlin suburb of Rudow lays no claim to either fame or beauty. It lies along the border with East Berlin and is heavily built up with workers apartment blocks. It is in the US-controlled sector of Berlin, and the US Air Force had built a forward radar station close to the border, behind the barbed wire entanglement erected by the East Germans. The radar installation faced directly across the border and only Rudow cemetery and the broad expanse of Schonefelder Chaussee separated the Americans from the Soviets.
When an additional building was to be erected on the radar site it was US Army engineers who carried out the work. The foundations obviously provided special problems, for there were large numbers of men employed on the site for several months. Fortunately it was summer, and the summer of 1955 was a typical Berlin summer. Dry and sunny. The new building was completed by July and was in use by the middle of the month.
It was in January 1956 that Blake was escorted to the radar station by a major from US Counter-intelligence. The warm air as they went down the steps inside the new building was tainted with the smell of oil and electrically induced ozone, but once they were inside the security doors of the tunnel itself the air-conditioning took over.
The tunnel was almost nine metres underground and 600 metres long. The US major found his British colleague rather subdued as he pointed out the technical niceties of the operation. The operation was code-named ‘Operation Gold’ and it tapped all telephones used by the Soviets and East Germans. Not only those covering Berlin, but the cables linking East Berlin with all other East German cities, with Warsaw, Moscow and Red Army headquarters at Zossen. Tape-recorders, telexes and printers lined the tunnel, cut off in lengthy modules and guarded by security doors and locks, and US marines.
The US major was used to conducting VIPs around the installation and was used to their amazement and enthusiasm for its sheer effrontery and technical ingenuity. After ally beyond the half-way point you were actually in the Soviet Zoney and way back in Dahlem hundreds of typists and translators were handling the mass of information that flooded in daily from ‘Operation Gold’. But his British colleague was silent for most of the inspection. He asked a few very shrewd questions but was light on praise and admiration. He seemed to take it all for granted. But the Texan major took the coolness in his stride. It was obviously an example of British phlegm.
Horst Eitner was the same age as George Blake but that was virtually their only similarity. Horst Eitner was a born opportunist. Once a small-time Nazi, he regarded himself now as a ‘good German ‘, on the side of the angels, a born-again democrat who merely cashed in on the West’s need for information. He was a man who saw himself as a bon-viveur but who, in fact, merely wanted Berlin night-clubs, bottles of champagne and lots of pretty girl-friends. Oddly enough the puritanical Blake and the extrovert Eitner got on well. Blake was amused by the man’s vulgarity, and vaguely envious of his happy-go-lucky outlook on life. And Eitner saw Blake as the cool operator who knew exactly what he was doing and was never diverted by anything. Instinct told him that Blake was a man who knew all the tricks and would stand for no nonsense. Unlike Eitner, he wasn’t just in it for the money and excitement. Blake was never excited.
Eitner knew Blake only as Max van Vries, a Dutchman working for the British. He knew nothing of Blake’s background, not even that he was married. He assumed that Blake’s only home was the separate room that he rented in one of the side streets off Bismarkstrasse. Eitner had a small flat in Wieland Strasse in Charlottenburg, not far from Blake’s real home. He lived there with his pretty young wife Brigitte, and Blake was a frequent and welcome visitor to their home. Eitner had no suspicion that Blake worked for any intelligence organization apart from the British, and Blake had no idea that Eitner had any contact with the Russians.
Blake used Eitner to ferret out low-level acts of espionage by West Germans in the pay of the Russians. Telephone operators who passed on lists of military phone numbers, middle-aged women who smuggled out classified documents for a few dollars and a little loving by some KGB leg-man. Blake himself was occupied with much bigger game.
In mid-April 1956, Bulganin and Khrushchev paid an official visit to Britain that ended in disaster for MI6. The massive Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze brought them to Portsmouth Harbour. The Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, set much store by the visit and the opportunity it presented of moderating the cold war. Two months earlier Khrushchev had denounced the policies of Josef Stalin. Both Britain and the US had hopes of easing the mounting tension with the Soviets.
It would have been difficult to plan an action that could do more damage to the political talks than the action planned by a small group in MI6. Even if it had succeeded the prize would have been barely worth having.
It was rumoured that the Ordzhonikidze had a hatch in its hull for laying nuclear mines, and a hurried and totally inefficient operation was put together in a matter of hours for a frogman to surreptitiously examine the cruiser s underwater hull. The very nature of the plan excluded using a Royal Navy diver, and to the political insensitivity was added the stupidity of calling on the expertise of a swashbuckling, middle-aged frogman who had been used for similar risky enterprises in the past. Lieutenant-Commander Lionel Crabb was a brave but reckless man whose taste for adventure frequently over-rode his good judgement. The night before the operation, with amazing indifference to even elementary security precautions, he booked into a Portsmouth hotel, giving his true name and address in the visitors’ book, and stayed there for the night.
The next day he slid into the cold waters of Portsmouth Harbour and was never seen again alive except by the Red Navy look-out who spotted him a hundred yards from the cruiser.
When, twenty-four hours later, Crabb had not returned, the conspirators feared the worst. But their fears had not imagined just how bad the worst would be. The Russians’ delight at foiling the attempt was matched only by their anger at the crude abuse of hospitality and diplomacy. They carried out similar operations themselves on foreign warships in their harbours, but even they were not inept enough to indulge in such exercises when top-level inter-government talks were involved.
The British newspapers headlined the Soviet protests, and the roar of the Prime Ministers anger echoed through Whitehall for months. The Portsmouth police hastily tore out the offending page of the hotels register only hours before the first astute journalist came looking for it. The fact that it was missing was almost as conclusive evidence as if the page had been left. It also excluded any possibility of a cover story being contrived to suggest that it was a piece of private enterprise or a practical joke. It is illegal to remove a page, or delete an entry, from a hotel register, and the police were not likely to provide cover for mere practical jokers or gung-ho ex-Royal Navy officers. The Prime Minister took his revenge on MI6 a few months later when he made the head of MI5 the new boss of its old rival, MI6.
On the day the Soviet leaders returned to Moscow Blake contacted Petrov and arranged a meeting for that afternoon.
They stopped talking, and Blake stood up slowly and hesitantly as the black horses with plumes on their heads crunched majestically down the gravel path pulling the hearse behind them. A couple of old black Mercedes limousines carried the mourners towards the far corner of the cemetery. Petr
ov had stayed sitting on the bench, impatient and irritated. As Blake sat down Petrov turned to look at him.
‘How can I promise what others will do when I don’t know what it is all about?’
‘All I’m saying is that it’s dangerous to tell you, and it’s only worth the danger if they use it quickly. ‘
‘That’s for Moscow to decide. You know that.’
‘Will you put it direct to Moscow, not through Karlshorst?’
‘Why, Georgi? Those are my channels. I can t go behind their backs. Why should you want me to?’
‘Because Karlshorst will look fools. They might just cover it up. ‘
Petrov sighed heavily. ‘I cant help that, my friend. I’ve got my orders, and they apply to you too.’
Blake looked at the lean handsome face, then closed his eyes to concentrate on his dilemma. When he opened them Petrov’s eyes were still on his face.
‘There’s a tunnel under the zone border in Rudow. From the radar station. It’s nearly 600 metres long. They have been tapping all the Soviet and East German telephone traffic night and day for nearly seven months.’
‘The zone frontiers are mined, Georgi.’
‘The tunnel is almost nine metres underground.’
‘Is the source reliable?’
‘The source is me. I’ve seen it.’
Petrov stared at him silently, absorbing the information. It was several minutes before he spoke. ‘My God. You re right. Heads will roll at Karlshorst. I see what you mean.’
‘After the frogman thing last week this could be a fantastic exposure. Actually in the Soviet Zone.’
‘Where does it finish in our Zone?’
‘In Alt-Glieneke opposite the Rudow cemetery.’
‘How many people have seen it?’
‘Quite a number, but they were all top brass. They wouldn’t be suspect because of their rank. It would be taken for granted that they wouldn’t even have the opportunity to contact your people. Or the know-how. ’
