Illegal Action (4 page)

8

T
he plane was an hour late taking off from Charles de Gaulle. With security at the same high level on both sides of the Channel, Peggy knew she would have been better off on the Eurostar, right from the middle of Paris to Waterloo, just across the river from Thames House.

But there was something about the prospect of those fifteen minutes deep under the sea which put Peggy off. Even the thought of it brought her mild claustrophobia bubbling to the surface. She knew aeroplanes affected some people in the same way, but to her air travel seemed open—nothing around you except sky.

She didn’t know why she suffered from claustrophobia. She had had it mildly since she was a child, a shy, serious child with freckles and round spectacles, who was much happier with her head stuck in a book than out with friends or playing games. It had troubled her much more in her first year at Oxford, preventing her from going to crowded parties or even to concerts where she might be stuck in the middle of a row. But after she settled down at Oxford and began to be successful, it largely disappeared, only to return again in her first unsatisfactory job in a private library in Manchester, working with a middle-aged librarian who barely exchanged a word with her.

Peggy was not one to give in to weakness, which was how she regarded claustrophobia. She had fought against it, but she had learnt to win her battles in life bit by bit, opportunity by opportunity and very patiently. Since she had joined MI6 as a researcher and was seconded to MI5 to work with Liz on the mole investigation, it had gone away almost entirely. Avoiding the Channel Tunnel was, she hoped, its dying twitch.

Peggy felt tired now. She had spent a day and a half in a hot, airless room, in the basement of the headquarters of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire on rue Nélaton. Even in France, smoking was now forbidden inside government buildings, but she’d had the misfortune to sit next to Monsieur Drollot, the French official from the Renseignements Généraux, who at every coffee break rushed outside and chain-smoked Gitanes. Now, tilting her chair back as the seat-belt sign went off at last, the memory of the Frenchman’s stale aroma made her feel slightly sick.

She had seen nothing of Paris and would have regretted not adding a day off to her schedule—enough time anyway to see at least one museum, dawdle over coffee in one café—had she not felt she must get back to Thames House urgently. Because towards the end of the meeting, she’d learnt something startling.

She had not expected any surprises. The meeting had been an assembly of “friends,” security services from Western Europe with a long history of close cooperation, along with a Polish representative, the lone emissary from the old Iron Curtain countries. The Scandinavians had been there—a stereotypically gloomy man from Sweden and a reserved, soft-spoken woman from Norway known only as Miss Karlsson.

The delegates had convened round a large oval table in the basement meeting room. Peggy had felt a secret thrill, sitting for the very first time behind a card marked “United Kingdom” and a little Union Jack. She had looked around her, taking everything in. A team of interpreters sat in a glassed-in gallery, providing simultaneous translation to the twenty or so intelligence officers sitting below them, each putting on and taking off their headphones, depending on the language being used. Most people in the room knew each other, if not by appearance, at least by name, because they communicated from their head offices, sharing information regularly by secure phone and fax.

The interpreters too were part of the charmed circle of intelligence professionals. They spent their days, when they were not interpreting at conferences, listening to intercepted telephone calls in various languages or straining to hear what was said on concealed microphones in buildings all over Europe. They too knew most people in the room—and their linguistic foibles. The Spanish major, for example, who insisted on speaking French, with an accent so thick that he was almost incomprehensible, even though there was a very competent Spanish interpreter present, or Miss Karlsson, who spoke beautiful, almost unaccented English, but in a voice so quiet that the interpreters were continuously on edge to catch her words.

The discussion was wide-ranging. The breakdown of the old East-West divide had produced new players on the espionage scene and an ever increasing targeting of the advanced economies of Western Europe. A lively debate developed during the first morning session about espionage versus commercial secrets. Peggy found herself in an argument with her neighbour at the table, the smoky M. Drollot, when she said that companies must look after their own security. When the Spanish major chipped in to make a point in his fractured French, even M. Drollot looked confused and put on his headphones to pick up the English translation, only to hear the interpreter unprofessionally muttering, “At least I think that’s what he said.”

Peggy wasn’t used to public disagreement, though she held her end up with M. Drollot, and was glad when in the afternoon the discussion moved on to the less controversial theme of the activities of the intelligence officers in the Russian embassies in the capital cities of Europe. All agreed that they were back to something approaching their pre–Cold War strength.

When it was Peggy’s turn to speak, she listed the intelligence officers she had identified in London and their roles. Her mention of Vladimir Rykov, an SVR officer fairly recently posted from Germany to the Russian Trade Delegation in Highgate, produced a loud guffaw from Herr Beckendorf. “Well, you won’t have too much trouble with that one,” he announced. “He has two left feet. When he was in Dusseldorf we knew exactly what he was doing. I can’t think how they thought he was up to a posting to London.”

But it was something else Herr Beckendorf said, on the second day, that riveted Peggy. It emerged at the very end of the morning from a joint presentation by Beckendorf and Miss Karlsson. Beckendorf, a grey-haired veteran of the old West German security service, was a tall, dour man, who wore a sleeveless jumper under his jacket and comfortable shoes. Like Brian Ackers, he had spent his career combating the efforts of Iron Curtain spies, and he seemed just as sceptical that anything had changed. This would be the last presentation of the meeting before they broke up after lunch, and as Beckendorf began to speak, several delegates were looking bored and struggling to suppress yawns. But as he got into his stride, there was a stirring of interest.

“The new world of espionage we have been hearing so much about is undoubtedly very exciting,” Herr Beckendorf began, and listening to the voice of the interpreter, it took Peggy a moment to grasp the sarcastic edge to his words. “But I would like to raise the renewed presence of an old kind of threat. Miss Karlsson and I have observed activity which we believe indicates the Russian SVR is once again actively planting
Illegale
.”

There was a pause in the translation and the interpreter said tentatively, “Illegals.”

Most of the audience were long-time intelligence officers who understood, but Signor Scusi, a young Italian army officer, new to his service, asked in broken English, “Illegals? What are they?”

“Ah,” said Beckendorf. “For those of you new to the phenomenon, Illegals are officers of an intelligence service who live outside the embassy. They assume a false nationality and identity to cover their presence.”

Beckendorf was warming to his theme. “The Russians long ago recognised that for the most secret work an intelligence officer under a completely false identity was much more likely to escape the attentions of the security service in the country where he was living, than an intelligence officer inside the embassy. As you all know the intelligence component of the embassy is called the ‘Legal Residency.’ So those outside it are ‘Illegals.’

“An Illegal is supported by an officer in the embassy but he is not supposed to have any direct contact with him, except in an extreme emergency. He gets his instructions by direct communication with his controllers at home. But an Illegal is never documented as a national of the country he is infiltrating. They are carefully trained to pose as foreigners. Obviously if they wanted to infiltrate the United States, it would be far too risky for their officer to pretend to be American: such an impersonation would be virtually impossible to sustain. So instead he would present himself as something different altogether—as a Brazilian, say, who has come to live in the U.S. This ‘third nationality’ has always made Illegals extremely hard to detect. And the damage they have caused in the past has been proved to be immense.”

“One of the most famous cases,” chipped in Peggy—in her usual thorough way she had researched the recent history of Russian espionage—“was in England. There were two spies at the Admiralty in the fifties, called Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee, and they were controlled by Colonel Molody of the KGB, who was documented as a Canadian businessman called Gordon Lonsdale.” Peggy stopped abruptly, realising that she had stolen some of Herr Beckendorf’s thunder.

“Quite,” said Beckendorf, taking back the initiative. “Some people,” he said, making clear this did not include himself, “have gone so far as to think that this phenomenon has disappeared altogether. But they are wrong. It is with us again.”

By now he had his audience’s full attention. Peggy herself found the history of Illegals intriguing, but it had always seemed to her just that—history. Another aspect of the Cold War passed and gone. Surprised by the dramatic start to Beckendorf’s talk, she began taking careful notes.

“For the last three years the BfV has been keeping an eye on Igor Ivanov, an economic attaché at the Russian Embassy in Berlin. We learnt some time ago from a defector to a friendly country”—America, thought most of the delegates—“that he is an Illegal support officer. He travels frequently in Germany, which is understandable, given his official duties. What has interested us very much are his regular trips to Norway. It seemed curious. After all, there is a Russian Embassy in Oslo, with a good number of SVR officers in it.”

“Twelve,” interjected Miss Karlsson quietly.

“After his third trip, I asked Miss Karlsson and her colleagues if, on the next occasion Ivanov travelled to Norway, they would keep an eye on him.”

The Norwegian woman flicked the switch on the microphone on her desk. “After arriving in Oslo, Ivanov took a train the next day to Bergen, then returned the following afternoon and went back to Germany. Six weeks later, he visited Norway again, and this time we followed him to Bergen. His anti-surveillance measures are excellent and unfortunately, once there he managed to lose our surveillance. He went to extraordinary pains to do so, though we do not think he knew we were there.”

Beckendorf resumed. “We thought perhaps Ivanov had personal business in Bergen. Possibly even a mistress.” He allowed himself a fleeting smile. “But then why not fly direct to Bergen? Why take a slow train, unless you were trying to cover your tracks even more carefully than a straying husband? And why leave the hotel in Bergen? Is it not hotels where these sorts of assignments are conducted?” he asked rhetorically.

He must have said “assignations,” thought Peggy, amused by the first slip in the translator’s otherwise flawless English.

“Excuse me,” interjected Scusi, speaking in his heavily accented English and looking confused. “You say he
wasn’t
assigning anyone?”

“On the contrary,” said Beckendorf, sticking to German. “I am certain he was. But not a lover. I think it was an altogether different type of person. An Illegal. As I have said, a support officer hardly ever actually meets with the Illegal—it’s far too risky because he himself will most likely be known to the security agencies. He may just have been leaving something the Illegal needed. But in my view they met; that would explain why Ivanov travelled so far and went to such trouble to be unobserved.”

“We decided to mount full-scale surveillance on Ivanov if he returned to Bergen,” said Miss Karlsson. “With any luck, we would discover who he was meeting; then we would investigate this person.”

Peggy and the others waited, caught up in the chase. Beckendorf gave a shrug, and said, “It never happened. He did not go to Norway again.” Peggy noticed with a start that Miss Karlsson and Herr Beckendorf seemed to be looking at her.

“But,” said Beckendorf, “we have just learnt that he is intending to visit London. We believe that may mean the Illegal has moved to London.”

9

J
ust before three the same day, as Peggy was waiting impatiently at Charles de Gaulle airport, Geoffrey Fane was stalking confidently along the corridors of the Foreign Office on his way to see Henry Pennington, head of Eastern Department.

Fane regarded Pennington with scorn. The two men had known each other for years and much earlier in their careers; when they were young men, they had served together in the British High Commission in New Delhi, Pennington as a second secretary and Fane undercover as a press attaché. They had never got on. Pennington thought Fane was deeply unreliable and Fane regarded Pennington as a panicker, with a tendency to paralysis in a crisis. Even if events hadn’t amply demonstrated this, it would, Fane secretly thought, have been evident enough from his peaked face with its large nose and his jerky hand movements. He would rather have been dealing with almost anyone else in the Foreign Office than Henry Pennington, but the man was responsible for relations with Russia, so it was with him Fane had to share what Victor Adler had related.

The nose hasn’t got any smaller, thought Fane, as Pennington rose from behind a massive mahogany desk. The room had a high ceiling with an elaborate white cornice, a marble fireplace and windows overlooking St. James’s Park. Propped upright beside the fireplace was a violin, its presence proclaiming that this was the office of a highly cultured man. Fane thought the conceit pathetic.

Without much more than the briefest of courtesies, Fane recounted his conversation with Victor Adler the night before. He watched as Pennington’s expression moved gradually from cautious curiosity to anxiety and his hands began to clutch each other jerkily, suggesting, to Fane’s experienced eye, the beginnings of panic.

“Didn’t Adler have any idea
who
they might target?” asked Pennington plaintively.

“No. He had the impression that there has been a decision, but who and how may not have been settled yet.”

“Why should we think they’ll do it in the UK?”

“Most of the oligarchs live here,” said Fane mildly, “so London seems rather more likely than, say, Peru.”

“Christ!” Pennington exclaimed. “This is the last thing we need. We’ve got the PM due to go to Moscow, the counter-terrorist liaison is rocky and the press will go mad if there’s another Litvinenko.”

“Quite,” said Fane, trying to look sympathetic.

“Well, what can we do to prevent it?”

“I’ve spoken to Head of Station in Moscow, and we’ll try and talk to Tarkov. But frankly, I think this was a bit of a fluke. Even if Tarkov’s willing to help, I’m not sure he’s well placed to find out anything more. We’ll try other contacts, of course, but I can’t promise anything. We’ll have to bring in MI5, but I thought I’d tell you about it first.”

“Bloody Brian Ackers,” said Pennington with undisguised bitterness. “That will only make things worse. And right before the PM’s trip to Moscow.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Fane easily. “Brian’s no fool. He’s been around. He knows a thing or two about the Russians.”

Pennington shook his head. “
Cha!
He’s just another spook who can’t accept the Cold War’s over and we have to get on with the Russians,” he declared, seeming to forget his listener’s own vocation. “He’s always wanting to take action.”

Fane decided not even to pretend to take offence. “I tell you what,” he said brightly. “I know the Thames House people pretty well, so why don’t I talk things over with some of them informally? We’re going to have to work in tandem on this one in any case. Let me have a word before you speak to Brian Ackers.”

“Would you?” asked Pennington, looking grateful.

“Happy to,” said Fane shortly, and stood up. “If the Russians are still in the planning stage, we’ve got a little time. Leave it to me for now.”