The Fatal Englishman (45 page)

Then she showed me the death certificate and the autopsy report. The Coroner’s Office pathology report showed a blood/alcohol level of 0.06 per cent. This is not in itself remarkable (the
breathalyser limit is 0.08), but for a reading taken perhaps thirty-six hours after he had had a drink it is very high. The autopsy was done at 1 pm on 28 December. He was six feet tall and 135 pounds; the pronounced time of death was 11.55 pm on 27 December 1965. The report read:

Police report is not available at this time. The physician who had been treating the patient called to state that during the short hospitalisation before death the patient had a carbon dioxide combining power of 0 and that to his knowledge the patient had not had massive gastrointestinal bleeding.

Anatomical diagnoses:

1. Fatty liver
   

2. Ruptured esophogeal varices with haemorrhage from the nose and mouth
   

3. Apneumatosis of left lung
   

4. Bilateral pulmonary congestion and pulmonary edema of right lung
   

5. Chronic fibrosing and calcific pancreatitis.
   

Numbers three and four are normal post-mortem changes. Numbers one, two and five are consistent with chronic alcohol abuse and death from liver failure.

A more detailed narrative reported:

The sclera are moderately jaundiced but no jaundice is seen on the skin. There is no evidence of trauma on the scalp, face, trunk, or extremities. The oral cavity does not show any evidence of injury … The cut surfaces of the lungs show marked congestion and edema in the right lung and the left lung is almost completely airless and has a dark purplish congested appearance. There is no evidence of consolidation, pulmonary embolism or aspirated material.

The liver is enlarged to six finger breadths below the right costal margin and the edges are rounded. The liver has a bright yellow colour and appeared to be extremely fatty. Cut surfaces of the liver show a yellow fatty appearance … The pancreas is extremely firm and throughout shows small focal areas of scarring and cut with a gritty sensation, indicating focal calcification. The kidneys are pale, suggestive of haemorrhage.

CAUSE OF DEATH: Fatty liver.

It was signed by Dr Marion Mann, Mr Compton attending.

These are a classic set of symptoms for death from excessive alcohol consumption. The pancreatitis was typical, so was the liver damage and the ruptured esophogeal varices, which are like burst varicose veins in the abdomen caused by blood being unable to go on its normal course through the liver.

Unless I was being defrauded on a magnificent scale it appeared that, at the astonishing age of thirty-one, the most brilliant Englishman of his generation had drunk himself to death.

Everyone in the Chisholm household had been involved in spying: even the children had been given boxes of sweets by Penkovsky in the park. What about Martina Browne? How come she was so handy at prising open doors with a bottle-opener?

SIS did not usually busy itself recruiting among working-class fifteen-year-old school leavers; nor was an advertisement on the noticeboard of a Catholic social club a promising manoeuvre. Martina herself denied being an SIS officer, though she made ambiguous remarks about her role. She had dinner with Greville Wynne and formed the impression that he was too nervy to take the pressure. She once referred to her own job as ‘looking through keyholes’, but told me that that was just a ‘throwaway remark’. Even if she was not telling the truth, it did not seem important as far as Jeremy Wolfenden was concerned. What mattered in his life was whether the marriage had been a fake, a security front; and his surviving letters to her – ‘Darling Mina-Wife’ – proved that it had been based on love.

Martina Browne was known to Jeremy Wolfenden’s friends as a romancer. When she arrived in London after his death her Greenford accent had become ‘pure Sloane Square’. She would invent stories about her childhood and her past; the one she told you in the evening contradicted in several respects the one with which she had enthralled you at lunch.

It is possible that Martina felt humiliated by the fact that all this activity was going on in the Chisholm flat without her being involved. The West was saved by information carried out by Janet and Ruari – even little Ali-boy was said to have helped; and she had just peeled the potatoes from O.Y. Stockmann and
washed the children’s faces. It is possible that, far from concealing anything, Martina Browne had actually exaggerated her involvement.

Everyone who saw her in the days following Jeremy’s death was struck by the depth of her grief and the dignity of her self-control. This was more than could be said for Jeremy’s father.

Jack Wolfenden made a dreadful impression on Jeremy’s friends and colleagues when he and his wife arrived in Washington for the funeral. ‘How are you?’ he had written in a postcard to his son a few months earlier. ‘And how behaving?’ His line was that he would not visit Jeremy in America unless he could make it fit in with a lecture tour or some more serious purpose. The Wolfendens were shown around by Jeremy’s
Telegraph
colleague Stephen Barber and his wife Deirdre. The funeral was in Washington Cathedral. Eileen Wolfenden did not cry; she felt it was a question of somehow enduring it. Martina was distraught but brave. Afterwards, they all went out to dinner. Martina sat slumped and stunned at the table while Jack Wolfenden made the others play word games. No one who knew him doubted that at a deep level his love for Jeremy remained intact, but at times he seemed more concerned to make sure everything was done properly than to inquire how his first-born and prodigious son came to be dead at the age of thirty-one.

Eileen Wolfenden thought they should at least see the doctor who had treated Jeremy in hospital, but he was away for the New Year holiday. Stephen Barber told her that everything possible had been done, and after a while, Eileen Wolfenden felt she had better accept it. Her husband’s attitude was the Evangelical ‘Where they fall…’He felt that his son had been given a chance, a great chance, and that now there was no more to be said. He was not what his wife called a pry-er; he was a man who knew better than most how to take a tip over brandy in a Pall Mall club, and if SIS had wanted to warn him not to ask too many questions he would have known how to read between their lines. Eileen Wolfenden meanwhile had to face the bitter fact that never again in her life would she know the sense of wonder and possibility that Jeremy had given her.

Within hours of Wolfenden’s death, John Sparrow, the
warden of All Souls, asked Jack Wolfenden if the service of commemoration could be held at the college. He agreed, and the memorial service took place at All Souls on 5 February 1966. The
Telegraph
was disappointed that the service was not in Fleet Street, that the soul of Jeremy Wolfenden was finally claimed by the world of scholarship, not journalism; but the paper had done little to deserve the honour.

It was a dismal day. A train arrived from Paddington bearing many of the young men and women who had been inspired by the hope and ambition that Jeremy Wolfenden had given them. Their sense of what was possible in their own lives contracted with his death. Some say that they never recovered it.

John Sparrow gave an address in which he compared Wolfenden to a comet with a long orbit.

‘Two words recur insistently when I think about him,’ said Sparrow:’ “brilliant” and “lovable”. Brilliant he certainly was. He came here with a fine record as a scholar of Eton and then Magdalen; he got his First with an alpha in every paper; had he wanted an academic career, the way lay open to him. But he was a dedicated professional, and the call of Fleet Street was strong. He wanted above all to be a foreign correspondent – “to roam the world with that wild brotherhood” – and that meant that “he came to Oxford with his friends no more”. Those who knew tell me that he would have risen to the very top of his chosen profession, and I do not doubt it.

‘But in that unfulfilled promise lies less than half the tragedy of his early death. That was his loss, and his profession’s.

‘The real tragedy is our loss. For if he was brilliant, he was lovable too. He had a gay manner, a lively mind, an affectionate nature, and an open heart. Those who knew him have lost a friend, and those to whom he was closest have lost much more than that.

‘I should say too that until recently he was a wayward and a restless spirit; then, a year or so before his death, he seemed to find himself; and he found himself in the best way – by finding someone else. In one of his last letters he told me without sentimentality how happy his marriage had made him. He was not fated to enjoy that good fortune for long. If that adds poignancy to our sorrow, let us at least be thankful that before he died he knew what it was to give such happiness and to receive it.’

Jeremy Wolfenden’s ashes were scattered beneath the trees of Addison’s Walk in Magdalen, but his friends still mourned him.

That was the end of Jeremy Wolfenden’s life, but there is a sense in which his story is likely to remain incomplete. In spring 1966 SIS officers visited All Souls and Magdalen. They were unhappy about his death, but if they found out anything from his former colleagues they kept it to themselves.

The end of the Cold War has meant that intelligence services admit their own existence and provide press officers. This is a significant development. What has not changed is this: they still reveal nothing. It is not so much that, in the dispiriting phrase of James Jesus Angleton, we are in a wilderness of mirrors; it is more that we are through the looking-glass.

One person who is occasionally helpful to writers is a man called Gervase Cowell, who has the tide ‘Advisor to the S.O.E. Archive’, He was, funnily enough, Ruari Chisholm’s successor at the embassy in Moscow and his expulsion by the Russians, for spying, was reported by Jeremy Wolfenden in the
Daily Telegraph
on 14 May 1963.

Anyone can ring Gervase Cowell and ask for his help. Unfortunately, he told me, he was not allowed to reveal anything at all about British citizens. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you are entitled by the Citizen’s Charter to write to MI5 if you think he was also involved in security work. I can give you their address.’

There are always the tactics of the side-door. Friends of friends can make discreet inquiries of retired officers and they in turn … One such man replied that indeed Wolfenden’s name rang a bell, but he didn’t hold out much chance of anything coming to light: it was all a bit recent. Something pre-War would stand a better chance of an answer.

From Yuri Kobaladze, chief of the Press Bureau of the Russian Intelligence Service (KGB), came this fax:

There are two aspects to your request which have to be explained. First, the Russian Intelligence Service is responsible only for foreign operations ie outside the territory of Russia (the Soviet Union in the past). And second, irrespective of the person in question it is to be borne in mind that the existing law prohibits to reveal operational information. So we keep to the rule adopted by secret services throughout the world not to comment on the questions of attribution of any person to Soviet/Russian Intelligence Service.

Give or take a verbal construction, this could have been written by Gervase Cowell himself.

The Soviet double-agent Oleg Gordievsky confirmed that the seduction and blackmail of Wolfenden would have been a routine job for the Second Chief Directorate, or Counter-intelligence Service. ‘But,’ he said, ‘it is almost impossible to get anything from the domestic service.’ Many weeks later a reply finally emerged from its office in Moscow:

I regret to inform you that no record of the Counter-intelligence Service concerning the dealings with Jeremy Wolfenden was found in our archives. In addition to this I must certify that Mr Wolfenden is unknown to the Service. As a result of the matter I can’t give any documentary evidence of the case to you.

Yours sincerely Alexander Mikhailov.

Vladimir Pozner, Wolfenden’s link to the Russian establishment, who now lives in New York, made no reply to a request for information. Both the FBI and the CIA, however, are bound to answer questions under the American Freedom of Information Act. The FBI said that the large number of applications meant that there would be a delay of up to two years in dealing with new inquiries.

The CIA wrote as follows:

I must advise you that in all requests such as yours, the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or the non-existence of any CIA records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or non-existence of records containing such information – unless, of course, it has been officially acknowledged – would be classified for reasons of national security under sections 1.3 (a) (4) [intelligence sources and methods] and 1.3 (a) (5) [foreign relations] of Executive Order 12356. Further, the Director of Central Intelligence has the responsibility and authority to protect such information from unauthorized disclosure in accordance with Subsection 102 (d) (3) of the National Security Act of 1947 and Section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949.

Accordingly your request is denied on the basis of FOIA exemptions (b) (1) and (b) (3). By this action, we are neither confirming nor denying the existence or non-existence of such records. An explanation of the FOIA exemptions cited above is enclosed.

The letter was signed by John H. Wright, Information and Privacy Co-Ordinator. The attached explanation of exemptions included the two relevant paragraphs: