The Cambridge Theorem (27 page)

“So that's what you wanted to talk about. Skeletons in the closet? Spies recruited in the thirties still roaming around? Right?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Smailes, feeling a little sheepish.

Iain took a slow swallow of beer and wiped foam from his top lip with the back of his hand.

“Unlikely. You see after Blunt finally confessed in sixty-four, and they shook a lot of names out of him, the services finally realized that they had better clean under that rug once and for all. Up till then there was continuing disbelief that there could still be rotten apples in the barrel. You know, Burgess, Maclean and Philby were just aberrations, traitors to their class. But Blunt, a servant of the Royal Family no less? Some of the newer officers, the young Turks, insisted that they had to go back and examine every file since before the war, that no one should be above suspicion. Five and Six tore themselves apart for the best part of fifteen years, and anyone with a Cambridge background was particularly suspect. I can't think any stones were left unturned. But there has always been the suspicion about a Fifth Man…”

“What?” asked Smailes.

“A number of defectors in the sixties confirmed that the Kremlin had operated a spy ring in Britain known as the Ring of Five, that all five were recruited at Cambridge and had penetrated the British Establishment. Philby was finally identified as the third man when he defected, and Blunt made four, but no one as important as the first four has ever been revealed since.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. For a long time, the Turks thought it was one of the old guard at the head of Five, and there were all kinds of morale-damaging mole hunts, but nothing was ever proved. Of course, all this has only come out lately, because the Turks took out their frustrations with leaks to the press right, left and center. You see, both services are almost pathological about secrecy. In fact, it's not even officially recognized that Britain has domestic or overseas intelligence services. And after the Burgess and Maclean fiasco, then Philby slipping through their fingers like that, you can see why the old guard wanted to keep the Blunt business secret, can't you? Every scandal made them look more incompetent, and put more pressure on their relations with the Cousins.”

“Who?”

“The Americans. They were furious about the whole business because through Philby and Maclean a lot of U.S. operations had been compromised. Then, when the British are trying to make out that they've cleaned house, another high-ranking agent is exposed, and the Yanks get apopleptic. Believe me, British intelligence is now completely dependent on American signals surveillance, American funding, and American cooperation. They just can't afford to look compromised or second-rate any more. But the Blunt affair would never have seen the light had not there been some serious leaks in high places.”

“But why did the Fifth Man have to be someone still active, someone at MI5?” asked Smailes.

“Partly because of a string of embarrassing counter-intelligence flops, and partly because the defectors dried up, which indicated that no one would risk defecting to Britain because there was still a high-ranking Soviet mole in counter-espionage. Get it?”

“I suppose,” said Smailes, pausing over his next question. “Why the hell did they do it, Iain?”

Mack grinned and stretched before beginning his answer. This was the kind of question he liked.

“You can't understand because you didn't go to public school, old man.”

“Neither did you.”

“No, but I've studied the phenomenon. Firstly, you have to understand the political climate of the thirties. Parliamentary socialism had been discredited by the capitulation of Ramsay MacDonald's government, the failure to prevent the great Depression. Fascism was on the rise everywhere in Europe, while millions were unemployed at home. For a lot of people, the Soviet Union looked like a beacon of hope for the future. So the center fell apart, and increasingly, you were one or the other, communist or fascist. But that doesn't really explain it, does it?

“You see, spying for Russia appealed to two powerful elements in the psyche of the ruling class—puritanism and snobbery. If the patient was sick, damn it, he needed stiff medicine. Only a generation raised on castor oil and cold showers could see things quite as simply as that. Then the Soviet recruiters played up the KGB as an elite force, like a sort of international Apostles Society—have you heard of them?”

Smailes explained that he had, and told him something of Bowles research papers that he had been reading.

“Well, so you can understand how the whole secrecy thing appealed to them all. Then of course, there's the quasi-religious aspect of communism, the mythopoetic aspect. A lot of people turned in their party cards after the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact in thirty-nine, but those that didn't literally kept the faith. For them, nothing Stalin did could be wrong, because Stalin was infallible, like the Pope.”

“I still don't understand how they were able to nail down their jobs in Whitehall and then proceed up the ladder. Didn't anyone realize they were security risks?” asked Smailes.

“You're complaining with hindsight, old man. See, one of the Kremlin's cleverest moves was to tell them all to renounce their beliefs, and then move along into government with exaggerated contrition. So they staged various nervous breakdowns, theatrical crises of faith and the like, and enrolled in right-wing groups. Burgess and Philby joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, of all things. So it was relatively easy to convince recruiters that their student beliefs had been merely the folly of youth. They all came from such good backgrounds, you see. A lot of the old guard found it impossible to believe that any of them were traitors, even when the evidence was undeniable. Gentlemen just didn't behave that way, after all.” There was a wicked gleam in Iain Mack's eye as he warmed to his theme.

“Iain, what would ‘Who flagged the files from Bletchley?' mean?”

“No idea. Why d'you ask?”

Smailes explained about the note he had found in Bowles' wallet, and his subsequent research into the codebreaking operation. He found himself unable to mention his suspicions of theft from Bowles' files, because to do so would involve a admission of his own negligence. He did confess guiltily that he had thought at first that the Bletchley reference was to the race course. Mack guffawed at this.

“Ah, Bletchley. The British at their best.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just love the whole story of how that came about, the codebreaking thing. When war broke out, the Code and Cipher School occupied one room somewhere in the Admiralty. Then they got hold of a captured Enigma machine and decided they needed to draft some brain power to crack the bloody thing. So they just put out the call.”

“To whom?”

“To just about anybody they could think of. Just about the whole maths faculty and many of the brightest under-graduates from here, for a start, as you seem to know. Then the entire British chess team. Then the top crossword puzzle fanatics. Any loony British eccentric who might have some notion how to crack a code got a job at Bletchley. I can't think of any other culture that could have thrown up such a bizarre institution that worked so brilliantly. You know, the deference to the empassioned amateur, the tolerance of oddity, it's so British. Bletchley was like Sherlock Holmes story come to life. And they kept it secret for so long, that's the amazing thing. Not that that really mattered to the Kremlin, they got the information anyway.”

“Really? I read that everyone was so proud that Bletchley wasn't penetrated.”

“It wasn't. Churchill called them ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.' But Churchill himself deliberately fed the Russians the information until the tide of the war turned in the East. Then he dried it up—he didn't want the Russians barreling towards Berlin and taking over Eastern Europe until the Second Front had broken through and the Allies were almost there themselves. But that's not what happened, as we know.” Iain Mack paused here for effect. He finished his beer slowly and suggested Smailes fetch more. Smailes said he would, after Iain finished his story.

“Well, you see, the funny thing was, Stalin wouldn't believe Churchill was telling him the truth about the German plans to invade. After all, Ribbentrop and Molotov had signed the Nonaggression Pact and Stalin was so paranoid about Churchill that he dismissed the warnings as disinformation. So the British decided to feed Stalin the information through a double agent in Switzerland, so that it would look like the information was being uncovered by Stalin's own spies listening to German radio traffic. Then he believed it. But it was almost too late. When the Germans invaded, Stalin panicked, and at first his conduct of the Russian defense was appalling. The Swiss spy ring kept feeding information from Bletchley and gradually the Russian generals began to recover the initiative. Then Churchill had the Swiss spies rounded up, because he wanted the Russian and German forces to remain stalemated on the Eastern Front so the Allies could break the Germans in the West and then end up as the occupying force in Eastern Europe as the German army in the East was surrounded. But it didn't happen. Either Stalin suddenly became a brilliant commander, or he was still getting access to Ultra, because the Russian tank regiments were able to outmaneuver the retreating Germans at every crucial battle. So when the Big Three met at Yalta, the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe was a fait accompli. Hell, Monty was barely able to break through to the Baltic in time to prevent the Russians getting Denmark.

“The jury is officially still out on whether Uncle Joe had become a great, battle-hardened tactician, or whether he was still reading the opposition's hand. But the likelihood is that by the time the tide turned in the East, the Ring of Five were sufficiently advanced in their wartime agencies to have access to Ultra material. Blunt at MI5 probably was, and Philby at MI6 definitely was, and by 1944 he was promoted to the head of section nine, the bloody Soviet counterespionage division. In fact, the British government didn't authorize an official version of the Bletchley operation until the KGB announced Philby was going to publish his memoirs in Moscow—so they obviously thought he knew the whole story, didn't they? No, it's a tragedy really, but the fact that the British weren't able to plug Ultra when they wanted to was probably the single most decisive factor in the political division of Europe today. Makes you think, doesn't it? Don't believe the stories you read about espionage just being a game, that it doesn't affect the big political issues. It certainly does.”

“Maybe Bowles thought the Fifth Man was someone at Bletchley,” said Smailes tentatively.

“Maybe, maybe,” said Mack. “But that's one place that has been pretty thoroughly checked out, and the official word is still that there was no leak at Bletchley itself. The boffins might have been weird, but, disloyal they weren't. Patriots to a man. Now what about those beers?”

Smailes got reluctantly to his feet, shaking his head in disbelief at Iain's story, at the whole, sordid affair. He resolved to delve again into Bowles' research, to see if there was anything he had missed, any obvious leads untraced. He felt a curious sense of obligation to the dead student, and the more he learned, the stronger it became.

M
ARTIN GORHAM-LEACH
drew the blinds on the bay windows of the study carefully before turning on his desk lamp. He moved slowly to the electric fire set into the hearth, released the catch underneath the bottom front right of the grille, and swung the fire open on its hinge. Moving mechanically and without haste, he reached up into the ledge of the flue, and removed the parcel of equipment in its worn cloth wrapping. Kneeling on the hearth rug he unwrapped the outer layer and uncovered the thick rubber pouch inside. This he carried over to his typing table and set beside the battered typewriter. Then he moved the typewriter onto the floor beside the desk. Only then did he permit himself to sit down in the revolving chair.

His fingers performed the methodical task of unzipping the document camera and erecting it on its stand with the familiarity that came from countless repetitions. He focussed the machine approximately and bent to reach his briefcase. He unbuckled the flap and removed the sheaf of documents, smiling as he did so. This should keep us busy for a while, he thought to himself. His work on the miniaturization of the laser resonator was now almost complete. It really was a much more satisfactory way of intensifying a beam than the bomb-pumped X-ray. He did not care that the broad outline of the physics involved might also be conveyed to the scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. He felt he had mounted a vigorous argument with Sir Keith, the government's science adviser, and thought his arguments might even fly in the xenophobic climate of Whitehall. Still, he reflected, the Germans in California were probably only a matter of months behind in the refinement of the same process. All that mattered was that we keep pace, he reminded himself.

He loaded the tiny Minox camera and carefully fed the documents across the brightly illuminated plate, snapping once with the cable release for each page. Then he re-wound the film, unloaded it and set the tiny spool on the desk. He had one more task to complete before he and Winston took their nightly walk. He reached inside the pouch and produced the pad, tearing off the top page with its bunched rows of Cyrillic characters. He withdrew from his desk drawer a foolscap pad and began the slow process of encipherment.

When he had finished, he folded the page again and again, and then wrapped it around the film spool. The whole parcel fit neatly inside a standard plastic film canister, which he produced from the bottom drawer of the desk. He still felt little cause for alarm, but given the delicate status of his research and the persistence of this obtuse policeman, it was probably wise to be cautious. His identity need not be compromised, he felt sure, and it was prudent to leave the decision to the chairman himself.