And Is There Honey Still For Tea? (22 page)

35

‘Sabotage, my dear,' Guy announced cheerfully, as he waved me into a seat opposite him at the small table. ‘That's what Section D does – sabotage.'

On arriving at Southampton I said goodbye to my fellow team members with feelings of sadness. The tournament had brought us together and made us friends. But when we would get the chance to play chess again we had no way of knowing. My contact whisked me through customs without their giving me a second glance and, after collecting my luggage, took me to a small café, from where I called Bridget, to make sure she knew I was safe. I asked her to let my clerk know that I was back. My contact, who used the name Dave, and said nothing further about himself at all, instructed me that I was to be at St Ermin's Hotel in Caxton Street SW1 in time for lunch the next day. I would be given further details of my proposed assignment at that time. I signed another form. We shook hands. He asked me to remain in the café for another ten minutes, after which I would be free to make my way to the station and take a train home to London. Bridget was very pleased to see me. We went out for dinner and afterwards made love very affectionately. I told her that it had been thought best that the team should return home immediately, but not why. I suppose that was partly because of the forms I had signed, but I have talked to Bridget about such things many times since, and the main reason was that I still did not know the answer to that question myself. Fortunately, it was the legal vacation, and my clerk had no plans for me the next day, so just after midday I had made my way to St James's Park tube station and around the corner from Broadway into Caxton Street.

‘Sabotage?' I asked incredulously. ‘You?'

Guy was taking the first drag of a cigarette. He expelled the mouthful of smoke quickly and waved the cigarette in the air, laughing uproariously.

‘Yes, I know, I know. It's too outrageous.'

‘It certainly is,' I agreed.

‘Believe me, I know. The only bad part, my dear, is that the training centre is going to be miles away from London, so God knows how I will meet any beautiful boys. I suppose I will have to sneak away and get on a train when they are not looking. You're not supposed to know that; it's all very hush-hush, so forget I told you. If you tell anyone they will take you to the Tower and have you beheaded.'

‘I am sure you have a form ready for me to sign,' I said.

‘But of course, my dear.'

Whenever I had seen him at the Reform after he joined the BBC, Guy had looked far more respectable than when I had known him at Cambridge, and he had maintained the improvement now that he worked for MI6; but there was still always something dishevelled about him – the suit or the tie always a bit crumpled, the hair always rather wayward, the shoes always a bit scuffed. Today was no exception, and I suspected that the dry martini he had in front of him was not his first of the day. I ordered coffee. But he had chosen the table well, in a corner of the mezzanine lobby where he commanded a view both of that floor and of the entrance hall on the ground floor below us. And I sensed a new focus, a seriousness and deliberation behind the usual flippancy. Something about Guy was very different.

‘What kind of sabotage?' I asked. ‘If you're allowed to tell me.'

‘Oh, just your common or garden variety, blowing up bridges and pipelines, disrupting supply lines, generally buggering about with the enemy and making his life difficult. This all happens abroad, of course. I don't get involved with any of that. My job is to take charge of people who can do things like that and recruit people who can train them. The armed forces actually find these people, of course. All I do is act as administrator, but it is all quite complicated in terms of supplies and equipment.'

I looked at him for some time, sipping my coffee.

‘And how exactly do I fit in with this?' I asked. ‘I don't know anything about sabotage.'

‘Nor should you, my dear,' he replied, lighting another cigarette. ‘Nor should you. We would all be better off if left in ignorance of it, I daresay.'

He suddenly leaned forward and his focus showed itself again.

‘Actually, James, you will not be involved with Section D directly. But the SIS does need your services, and Section D may very well be one of the beneficiaries. I was asked to recruit you because we knew each other at Cambridge, but you will be working with a number of people in other Sections as well.'

‘Doing what?' I asked, still genuinely puzzled.

‘Interrogations and translations,' he replied.

I must have looked blank.

‘There will be many occasions when we need to question people who speak German, or have documents translated from German into English,' he continued, ‘and when we do, it will always be urgent, and the product will always be extremely sensitive. To take my department, for example, we may have all kinds of ne'er-do-wells and reprobates sent to us by the military because they have an ability to blow things up, or know ten ways to kill a man instantaneously. In many cases, no one will have given much thought to checking into their backgrounds and asking whether we can actually trust them, whether they are actually on our side – basic things like that. There is not likely to be much in the way of records, so it is up to us to gather information by asking the right questions. Many of these people will speak German. That's where you come in.'

I nodded. ‘Yes, I see.'

‘As the war goes on, there will also be suspected German spies, agents, saboteurs, what have you, from whom we need to obtain information. The Service has used barristers for this kind of thing in the past. It seems an obvious place to find good interrogators. But they are often hampered by having to rely on interpreters, and some of them understand interrogation to mean trying to intimidate people by shouting at them. That doesn't work. The Director feels that we need to take a different tack – find someone with a quiet, low-key, but systematic approach to cross-examination, such as you chaps use in the elegant surroundings of the Chancery Division.'

I laughed. But I was impressed. Guy – or someone – had been thinking about this.

‘And unlike those we have used in the past, you have the advantage that you probably won't need the interpreter,' Guy added. ‘You will pick up some nuances that someone with only a basic command of German, or none at all, would miss completely; though that will be our secret, and you will always have an interpreter so that you don't have to give away the fact that you understand every word they are saying.'

‘Yes, I can see that', I said.

‘So we want you to stay in place in your chambers,' he said, ‘and continue with your practice. But we expect you to be at our beck and call, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We will give you some leave, of course, and we will compensate you for your time, though not at the rate you would expect for a juicy probate case.'

I nodded. Guy did not rush me.

‘What if I'm in court?' I asked. ‘I couldn't just …'

‘You just need to let us know,' he replied. ‘We will send someone to explain the position to the judge. You needn't worry about it.'

Guy ordered another martini and some more coffee for me.

‘You will receive details of each assignment from a contact,' he said. ‘I am not sure who it will be yet, but he or she will let you know where and when and what sort of character or document you will be dealing with, and so on.'

He lit another cigarette.

‘We recommend that you make up some good story about why you will not be called up for active service. Something you can talk about in chambers without looking foolish. Whatever it is, the Service will supply you with any documentation you may need to back it up. And I understand that those barristers who remain in practice will be covering for those who are away on war duty, doing work for them, passing on the fees, that kind of thing. Make sure you do that, won't you? We don't want you to draw attention to yourself.'

‘What do I tell Bridget?' I asked. I truly had no desire to lie to her, and I did not see how it would be possible to keep it from her anyway.

‘Tell her the truth,' Guy replied immediately. ‘We have already vetted her, and she comes up white as snow. Just get her to sign the form.'

‘The same one you are about to get me to sign?' I asked.

‘You are a prophet, my dear,' Guy replied. ‘A veritable prophet.'

36

My wartime duties started slowly. But they seemed to escalate with the onset of the Blitz in September 1940. Several hundred people in London were killed on the first night of the Blitz alone, 7th September, and it soon became clear that my mission of staying in place to be available to MI6 was not a soft option either at work or at home. Chelsea was not a safe area, and the Luftwaffe inflicted heavy damage on the Inns of Court, the worst, which included the almost total destruction of the Temple Church, towards the end of the Blitz in May 1941.

Not long after the Blitz started, I evacuated Bridget to the Manor. She did not want to go, but it was the only thing that made sense. There was no reason for both of us to remain in London and, as travel became more difficult and my work increased, it became obvious that I would not be able to devote any attention to the running of the estate. If there were to be food shortages, as was being predicted, the Manor could play an important part locally in growing fruit and vegetables on a larger scale than before, and there were plans for some of the tenants to introduce livestock. Mr Bevan was getting on in years, and there was a need for someone younger to take over active management of the land. Besides, my mother was slipping further and further into her isolation, and it was only right that someone should be with her, even if she was rarely fully aware of their presence. It seemed only a matter of time before she slipped away altogether, and indeed she did, early in 1942. So we agreed that Bridget would live there for the time being and I would join her whenever I had some leave and travel was possible.

The frequency of interrogations increased rapidly from the autumn of 1940. For the most part the men and women I talked to were wholly innocent, people with German family or connections who seemed threatening to the authorities as more and more bombs rained down on London and the war suddenly became real. After an hour or two it usually became obvious to me that they had no hostile agendas, but rather were genuinely distressed about the position in which they found themselves, and we released them with our thanks for their time. But there were one or two very different cases. One man I interrogated, who had German family on his mother's side, had been found with a wireless transmitter in his room on the top floor of a boarding house in Chiswick. Those old-fashioned radio sets weighed a ton, and the police said it was a miracle he had not brought the ceiling crashing down into the flat below. It turned out that he had no particular feelings for Germany, but was bitter towards the Government because of a long period of unemployment. He had a keen mind, and he had put his free time to good use, learning to operate the radio, becoming fluent in Morse code, and teaching himself the basics of cryptography. Once I had clearly established that history, MI5 took him over, turned him, and put him to work for them under closely supervised conditions. They would not tell me any more than that. He was lucky. Later in the war he might have been tried for high treason and hanged. Another man, whose native language was German, was unmasked as a spy and took little trouble to conceal the fact. He was dealt with accordingly.

From that time on, there was a steady stream of work, both in interrogations and translations of captured documents, but it was not enough to prevent me from maintaining my cover as a practising barrister who spent some time taking on work for those who had gone abroad on war service. There were two other barristers who worked for MI6 in the same way. We were not supposed to know who the others were, but the Bar is a small, close-knit profession. My social life, in the evenings and at weekends when MI6 did not need me, was rather surreal. The Reform was open, but it still reminded me too much of Roger, and I found myself more and more drawn to the house at number 5 Bentinck Street. Bentinck Street is a short distance north of Oxford Street and just east of Portman Square, so it was not too far from my home. Anthony and Guy occupied one floor, and another was occupied by Tess Mayor and Pat Rawdon-Smith, two delightful ladies known for their beauty, charm, and wit, who had been the
Grandes Dames
of Cambridge Society in Anthony's day and were now charming wartime London. I had an open invitation as, it sometimes seemed, did every young man within striking distance. Life at number 5 seemed to be one long party; in retrospect, that was probably mainly because of Guy, for whom life generally was one long party. In fairness, though, we all entered into the spirit. We were loud, drunken and boisterous, and sometimes reckless about black-out regulations; I am sure that, at least subconsciously, it was an act of defiance directed against Hitler, the Luftwaffe, and everyone who threatened our way of life. It was as if we were daring them to do their worst and be damned. They tried; bombs did fall pretty close from time to time, but number 5 Bentinck Street, and its hedonistic occupants, lived to tell the tale.

It was during this period that I lost my naïveté and saw clearly what I should have seen long before. Guy was still with MI6, and I saw him from time to time in connection with work. Donald had been promoted to Second Secretary at the Foreign Office in the wake of his heroic role in the evacuation of the staff of the British Embassy in Paris just before the city fell to the Germans. To my amazement, Anthony had been recruited to MI5. Kim Philby had returned to London after a long period abroad as a war correspondent, during which time he had covered the Spanish war from the Nationalist side; had been awarded the Red Cross of Military Merit by Franco personally; had been based at Arras until the Allied forces had been compelled to evacuate; and had now joined MI6, working under Guy in Section D. Finally, the light dawned. I knew all these men to be committed to socialism on some level or other. But each of them had pursued career paths which gave them solid establishment credentials. They all had the perfect cover. As did I.

* * *

Once I had lost my naïveté, I saw all too clearly that it was only a matter of time. I was waiting for it; and at the end of June 1941 it happened. Anthony and Kim took me aside one evening at number 5. They led me to a quiet room upstairs where we could be well away from the party that was going on at full tilt on the ground floor. Kim had brought a bottle of whisky and three glasses. He closed the door.

‘Your reports, and the transcripts of your interrogations have been attracting some attention within the Service, James,' he said, having opened the bottle and dispensed the first round. ‘I have spoken to a number of high-ranking officers in various departments. The general feeling is that they are of unusually high quality. Your fluency in German gives you an insight which other interrogators lack. They have been found to be useful right across the Service, and some have been passed to the High Command.'

I felt a flush of pleasure as he spoke. I did take my work very seriously, and my intense involvement with German now had more than made up for my lack of use of the language after coming down from Cambridge. Whoever had thought of using me had been right. I found that I could gain considerable insight from listening, not only to the subject, but also to the often unguarded exchanges between the subject and the interpreter.

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘I am pleased to hear that.'

There was silence for a few moments.

‘Anthony and I would like to make your work available more widely,' Kim said eventually. I sensed that he was feeling his way gingerly. That was unusual for Kim, whose conversation was always brisk and to the point. He was building up to something. I fancied I knew what it was, but I was nervous and felt no inclination to intervene; not just yet, anyway.

‘You know, of course, that Hitler has invaded Russia within the last few days?'

‘Yes.'

‘That makes an enormous difference.'

‘Of course.'

‘Of course. The Soviet Union is now an ally.'

I nodded. Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in August 1939, to the general dismay and confusion of all of us who had admired the Soviet Union's support of the Republican forces in Spain, and its general opposition to fascism. Coming in the wake of Stalin's purges and the recall of many Soviet agents to Moscow to face show trials and summary executions, the Pact had cost the Soviet Union a good deal of the support it had among left-leaning intellectuals in Great Britain. Many were no longer able to turn a blind eye and assume that the Revolution was just going through a few growing pains. But on 22nd June, in what was widely seen as an act of sheer madness, one which ignored all the lessons of history and summoned up the ghost of Napoleon, Hitler had torn the Pact up and sent his forces hurtling across the tundra towards Moscow. The Pact was dead, and the Soviet Union was indeed an ally; but whether that meant that Stalin could be trusted was a matter which I, along with many others, seriously doubted. I could feel Kim reading my mind.

‘I share your reservations about Stalin,' Kim said, with a glance at Anthony, who nodded but said nothing. ‘We all do. Even before the Pact, there were the purges, the summary executions, the show trials …'

‘The mass murders,' I added.

‘Yes,' Kim agreed. ‘There was all of that. But, for better or for worse, we have to live and work with him for the time being. The Revolution is young, and it is being managed by human beings, some of them flawed. I believe very strongly that the Russian people will find their equilibrium in due course, and that they will establish a form of government consistent with the aims of the Revolution, but a government which attaches high importance to the welfare of the people, the cultural life of the State, the propagation of socialism. But at present, they are facing a crisis of life and death, and we have a common enemy, whom we must defeat at all costs.'

He poured more whisky for all of us.

‘James, the fact of the matter is this. Your reports and transcripts would be of enormous value to Russia, not only in terms of information, but in terms of insight into the mind of the Nazi regime. I don't want to overstate their importance. You can only report on the people you interrogate, whose knowledge may be limited, and whose insight may be deficient. But this is a war in which information is vital, and you never know what value a particular piece of information may have.'

I took a long drink. Kim refilled my glass immediately.

‘If that's the case,' I pointed out, ‘surely the Government could send the reports to Moscow directly. That would give them the chance to censor anything they didn't want the Russians to know.'

‘In the first place,' Kim replied, ‘I doubt that would ever happen. The Government has as little trust in Stalin as most people in the West, and even if they did choose to send some information to Moscow, as you say, it would be censored. It would have to go through so many departments, so many vetting committees, that it would probably be whittled away to almost nothing by the time it arrived.'

I shrugged. ‘That may well be so,' I agreed. ‘But we have to leave that to the Government to decide, don't we? The longer the war goes on, the more closely we work with Russia, the more contact will open up. The Russians may ask us to share intelligence with them, and I daresay we would, in return for whatever they may have to offer.'

I paused. I knew where we were going now. The time had come to get to the point.

‘In any case, I sign the form every time I hand in a report and a transcript. I can't …'

‘I know what we are asking you to do,' Kim said. ‘Technically, it is illegal.'

‘Technically?' I blurted out. ‘There is nothing technical about it, Kim. If I were to be caught doing something like that …'

‘You would land in trouble,' he replied. ‘Yes. The fact that you were helping an ally would be some mitigation, but you would still be in serious trouble. Yes, I know that. No one can make you do anything you don't want to. You are free to say no and walk away now. I suppose, ultimately, it's a question of where your real loyalties lie.'

I turned my head away.

‘But loyalty is not a simple matter, in my experience,' he said, ‘whether it is loyalty to a woman, a cause, or a country. There are so many factors that influence it and, contrary to popular belief, it may change, legitimately in my view, according to circumstances. Loyalty is not an absolute value, James. Isn't that what we learn by living our lives? We may grow up believing in something – religion, King and Country, the British way of life, whatever it may be; and then something happens to make us shift our loyalty. In some ways it is not even a matter of choice. Sometimes, things happen, and we are compelled to change our allegiance. I think you understand that without my telling you, but it may help to know you are not the only one walking along that path. Some of us have been there before you, and many more will follow after. All you can do is be true to your conscience at any given time.'

I stared into my glass. I wondered what Anthony thought about all this. He had said not a word. But I felt his eyes on me, and they were speaking more loudly and conveying a message more clear than any words he could have uttered. We are Apostolic brethren, they were saying; we believe in the Revolution, we believe in socialism; we have seen the evils of fascism and the misery of capitalism; we want to end it; the Russians are the only ones who have lifted a finger to help us; they tried to help in Spain; they tried to come to Roger's aid, they tried to save him; and now the fascists want to destroy them, they are fighting for their lives; surely we owe them something?

So we did. But it was also more personal. We were Apostolic brothers. He had shared the first horror of Roger's death with me; he had held me until the horror melted away into oblivion; he had brought Bridget to care for me; and he had sent a wreath to Roger's memorial service. And that, in the end, was what mattered. It is an ironic truth about human decisions that even those which have the most far-reaching consequences often seem to be made in the blink of an eye, and for reasons that are not altogether logical. The reality may be that the decision-making process has taken years – years of inner change and reflection informed by many events, many ideas, many people – and the emerging decision may have escaped our conscious observation. But by the time the truth finally floods unchecked into the conscious mind, the decision has been made, and there is no turning back. And so, in that moment, with Anthony's eyes on me, I knew my life had changed. I still had a fig leaf: I was not betraying my country, simply helping an ally in a time of desperate need. I did not consider that what I was about to do was spying, and I do not regard it as such today. But the issue of principle had been decided. The only question that remained was ways and means.